What blew the mind of the Westerners was when they discovered that Sanskrit was related to European languages and that the Hindu Tradition appeared to be older than the Greek tradition. It was the subject of Philology that discovered these facts about the history of the Indo-European tradition. Philology has turned into linguistics as it goes on to other problems beyond the Indo-European linguistic legacy.

Since this answer is fairly popular I will elaborate. What I said above is something very well known in almost all academic circles which know anything about the romance of philology and the discovery of the kinship between European languages and Sanskrit.

In Sanskrit the term for Being is Sat. In the Bhagavad Gita which is part of the Mahabharata the Indian Epic the goals of spirituality were Sat Cit Ananda. Being, Knowledge, Bliss I believe is the translation if memory serves. Only Indo-European languages have Being in them, it is a linguistic anomaly which seems pretty standard only because Indo-Europeans have taken over the known world multiple times spreading their language to cover 60% of the world population. Hinduism has a very interesting mythic tradition somewhat preserved in the Praise poems of the Vedas which is then enhanced by a philosophical tradition that appears first in the Upanishads. it is a rich tradition not studied enough by Westerners, but which went into decline with colonialization both by Muslims then the English. To me the most interesting episode in that tradition was the generation of the Buddhist nondual heresy, which basically said we should forget Being and return to Existence under the rubric of Emptiness. This was later incorporated back into the Hindu tradition by making Buddha an avatar of Vishnu, and through the works of Shankara that founded Advita Vedanta, which interpreted Being as Emptiness, and thus reconciled the Upanishads with each other via this semantic shift. This was the outcome of the work of Nagarjuna who pointed out that Emptiness is endemic to logic, being the discontinuities between the logical operators nand, nor, and, or. Emptiness is what stands at the heart of this conceptual minimal system that makes a tetrahedral structure. Associated with Sanskrit was a mass like pervasion logic that was adopted by Buddhism. This is in contrast to the set-like logic of the Syllogism that was popular in the West from the time of Aristotle. Mass logics are much better for dealing with nondual concepts such as Emptiness because we can say that the Emptiness pervades things, without reifying it into a thing. Set based Logics tend to reify characteristics into things causing cognitive fallacies galore. The differentiation of the Buddhist existential heresy within the Indo-European worldview and then its reabsorption into Advita Vedanta is very interesting when you contrast that with the Dualism of the Western worldview and its steadfast rejection of all nondual heresies, including the one it could not crush which was Islam. When Muslims conquered India they more or less left it intact from a religious point of view but there were many interesting encounters between Sufis and Hindu practitioners in India which caused Sufism to spread in India and let to the conversion of quite a few Hindu’s to Islam. Thus India was also receptive to a certain extent to the Islamic nondual heresy which came much later than Buddhism. The West which has a history of killing off all nondual challengers to its dualistic proclivity has a lot to learn from the Hindu tradition which seems to cope with Heresy much better than the Western tradition. This makes the Hindu tradition a great test case to compare to the Western tradition and to think what a more tolerant Western tradition might be like.

The point is that in Hinduism there was a technological development also but that was inner technology rather than the outer technology that has been developed in the West. But now that the West is up against the limits it is about time that the West starts learning from its Indo-European counterpart about the importance of inner technology, like meditation etc. Religion founded on spiritual experience rather than unfounded belief is a big step up in terms of sophistication compared to Western religions. However, although there has been various migrations of Guru’s from India to the West over the years much of that has been considered culturally too foreign and thus has not had much of an impact compared to the impact of first Zen Buddhism and then Tibetan Buddhism. On the discovery of the kinship between the obviously older and more sophisticated Indo-European cultural tradition in India and that of the Barbaric Westerners who colonized it, the west was open to this spiritual influence and Theosophy was the result. That was an Orientalization of Hinduism and Buddhism which were considered to be basically the same thing at that time. Later it was realized that Buddhism was really different and therefore it had a separate impact after WWII during the 60s and 70s through the discovery by the west of the Chinese and Japanese brands of Buddhism and the seemingly religiously neutral Zen sects. So the focus shifted from India to other countries as a source of spiritual inspiration of Westerners who found nondual approaches congenial.

What Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism share is the seemingly endless variety of the forms of worship and spiritual dimensions of practice. Among the Tibetan Buddhist offerings the most interesting is DzogChen which seems to be their indigenous answer to the rejection of Chinese Zen. Buddhism died out in India but lived on in Tibet producing at least two of the most outstanding intellects of all time Dzog Ka Pa and Mipham who took opposite sides in the debate over whether consciousness was reflexive or not within the arcane debates of Buddhist Philosophy in Tibet.

But when you think that all this came from Hinduism, as its heresies spread around the world, heresies that it reabsorbed within itself, then it gives you some idea of the vibrancy of the Hindu Tradition. Hinduism from India has a lot to contribute to our cultural and social maturity in the West if we but knew, much more than a string of Gurus and Transcendental Meditation. But the active intellectual development that would make that tradition relevant to the transformation of the Western culture and civilization does not seem to be present. Seems that folks in India are still playing the Colonizer/Colonized game. Why they are not challenging the Western tradition more with their older and more sophisticated tradition is unclear.

Hinduism has shown resilience standing up to two onslaughts of nonduality first from Buddhism and then from Sufism reabsorbing many of these elements into their own tradition. Hinduism developed Advita Vedanta which was a reinterpretation of their own tradition based on nondual insights by Shankara. But it seems that these advances easily became reified and did not produce movements like Buddhism was as a departure from Hinduism. Hindus are famously very proficient in Math and Logic. So you would think that there would be a whole tradition in the application of nonduality to Math and Logic that they could leverage to challenge Western Philosophy and its dominance. Maybe this has occurred and I am just not aware of it. And you would think that there would be a critique of outward technology from the perspective of inward meditative technology. Hinduism is rich in cultural resources, in spiritual transformations, and in its deep Indo-European history but it does not seem to exploit these to show its superiority over the dualisms of the West, and their very narrow technical philosophy which is not motivated by spiritual insights.

We hope for more from the venerable Hindu tradition in the future. The tradition needs to be rethought. Much of my own work is motivated by this kind of Rethinking. I discovered the Meta-levels of Being in my research for my dissertation at London School of Economics called The Structure of Theoretical Systems in Relation to Emergence [See http://archonic.net]. Then I went on to become a Software and Systems Engineer. But I continued my studies, and eventually worked my way back to the study of the Vedas, via Dumazil, and discovered that the differences between the Hindu Gods in the Vedas were the same as the Kinds of Being discovered in Modern European Continental Philosophy and this caused me to write the book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void [See http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer] What I realized is that Continental Philosophy had rediscovered something always already known in the Western tradition previously and that was encoded into Myth. I developed the technique of Ontomythology to read back into the mythology the kinds of Being, and thus discovered a whole world within the Indo-European worldview previously unknown. This same tactic could I am sure be taken further if one actually knew more about the Indian materials than I do. But where I tried to push the envelope was in the relations between the Mahabharata and the Greek Epics. I think I have commented on that elsewhere in another post here on Quora to some question about the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata as one of Dumazil’s students is the lost mythology of the Titomachia brought down to the human plane. We have lost the epic of the Titomachia in the Greek materials too. But the Greek Epics we have repeats that on the human plane in a war between humans over Helen of Troy. And the struggle over Draupurdi in the Mahabharata is the same story. The trick is to understand that the heroes of the Mahabharata are the Trojans and the men of earth they fight are the Achaeans. Once you realize this and that the battle at the end of the Mahabharata is the killing of the Suitors in the Odyssey, then you can track back to discover the 13 common scenes that the two Epics share but which are utterly transformed in relation to each other. But that gives us some insight into what the proto-epic of the Titomachia might have been like. But when we apply ontomythology to these two Epics we see that they both give a rich picture of what it is like to live in a Worldview which has not only the linguistic anomaly of Being but also meta-levels of Being each level of which is emergent and qualitatively different transforming the aspects of Truth, Reality, Identity, and Presence at each meta-level. This gives us a much richer view of the structure of the Western Worldview through the lens of the comparison with the Indian counterparts to the Greek tradition. They were not just in Philosophy but also in mythology as well. More of this kind of research needs to be done comparing the roots of the two traditions to try to get a better picture of their common origin, and thus a better idea of the nature of the Western worldview in general.

I was further asked to elaborate what I meant by saying that Being is a linguistic anomaly. I have italicized the statement above where that has been mentioned.

If you go back in my various answers to posts on various questions I emphasize this over and over again, because it seem to me one of the most important points about the Indo-European worldview. Only Indo-European language have the concept of Being. All other languages have some form of existential but not Being. For instance they might have copula alone as with the Sumerian Me. Or they might have an existential like wajud in Arabic. But they do not have Being which is an artificial construct in Indo-European languages which we can see by the fact that the roots for Being and Having are the most fragmented in the Indo-European languages. There are multiple roots glued together to give us the concept of Being. For instance in Old English there are the roots Es/Er//Bheu/Wes/Wer. So what does this mean. It means that when Indo-Europeans say “Being” they are talking about something special that is not a concept in other languages. Other languages have to do extra work to say something like Being. But it means we project Being onto other worlds other than our own. We assume everyone has Being and knows what it means. But they don’t unless they know an Indo-European language. But since Indo-Europeans have been very successful via war machines like chariots and horses in taking over the known world there is a good chance that you will know an Indo-European language. And of course Sanskrit is one of the most venerable of these languages. However it seems that Hittite in terms of vocabulary is the oldest of the languages. There is a good chance that proto-Indo-European had a very different grammar than later Indo-European. So Sanskrit is a high point in grammar development. It is not clear how Being was developed in the proto-Indo-European language but it had something to do with the caste structure and something to do with the differentiation of the gods associated with caste. To me the key point was the discovery that the meta-levels of Being existed between the gods in the Vedas our oldest book. Thus the distinctions between the roots of Being, the Castes, the Gods all are differentiated out by the meta-levels of Being, which meant that our ancestors knew about those meta-levels and organized society, the language, and the sacred based on that knowledge. Probably the meta-levels of Being described many times in other answers were discovered and lost many times in the Hindu tradition. But ultimately Buddhism as a heresy rejected Being for existence in the form of emptiness (sunyata). However, once Shankara accepted Nagarjuna’s proof that logic contained emptiness then he wrote commentaries which basically interpreted Being as Emptiness, i.e. as nondual, and that allowed the Buddhist heresy to be absorbed back into Hinduism and Buddha became an avatar of Vishnu. Hinduism is a very sophisticated religion especially after the reabsorption of Buddhism, because now there was an internal check on Being where the meta-levels of Being are realized to stop with Ultra Being as a form of Existence.

I listened to the first weeks lecture and although I had studied Scala before I had obviously not understood properly how it worked from the Functional Programming side. It kinda blew my mind when I realized how the Functional programming side worked. He does an excellent job of explaining it in such a basic way that one is able to absorb it better than all the other things I have read on Functional Programming. I recommend the course and am looking forward to the rest of it.

It is amazing how ones whole way of thinking about programming is based on the languages one has used, and it is difficult to grasp this functional programming change when one has been working and designing the other way for so long. However, listening to Odersky explain it in such a basic and simple way made a lot of sense, and one could see the power of that way of thinking more directly than all of the books I have tried to read on the subject. It is amazing what a difference good teaching makes for the understanding of things. What was good was that he did not skip any steps, he took a very basic idea and presented it fully so that one did not have to fill in any jumps from one idea to the next, as is the case with so many explanations of experts in a field. For me it was just what I needed to get me over the hump of understanding what is really different about functional programming and where its power comes from and how it differs from imperative programming in fundamental ways. I guess I became obsessed with monads and was distracted from the fundamental paradigm shift of functional programming which I did not really grasp completely until I saw his explanation.

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I am still taking the class and am on week 4 which means I am behind but it is still going on in the same vein as my post says. Odersky is an excellent teacher taking things very slowly and with a through exposition. I am still learning a lot about Scala, and have also started to learn about Lift the Ajax/Comet web environment. It is very interesting as well in its own way.

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I finished this class. It was excellent.

Don’t.

To open someone else’s mind is aggressive, and violent, and should not be done.

Open your own mind and be an example. Forget about opening the minds of others.

First it is impossible.

Second it is barbaric as it is no different from brainwashing.

Third it assumes you know something, and they don’t which is arrogant and probably not true.

Open your own mind, be an example. And leave well enough alone, because the first principle in medicine, which we have not learned well enough is do no harm.

Hegel said you can only have self-consciousness via the Other. They are a mirror to you. If you find them ignorant, then see ignorance in yourself and replace it with knowledge.

Whether others appreciate that knowledge or not is our business. It is not our business to foist our knowledge on them, this shows a lack of wisdom.

Wisdom as Socrates embodied it is the realization of your own ignorance.

Until we have dealt with our own ignorance, we should not be concerned with opening up someone else’s mind to whatever we think is knowledge. For Plato this was the way of sophistry.

If along the way you find someone seeking knowledge from you, give it to them freely, but do not invest in whether they got it, or whether they think as you do, or whether you have opened their minds to new possibilities.

Practice Deep Ecology of the Spirit, and leave each soul closed which you are tempted to open up.

This is the Tao of Lao Tzu. There is wisdom in it. It places ignorance where it belongs in oneself.

Truth is an aspect of Being. Being has five meta-levels. At each meta-level truth has a different structure and significance. So there is no one thing called Truth, but multiple things at different meta-levels of Being. So what is true at one meta-level is not necessarily true at another meta-level, and we are playing with these differences between kinds of truth all the time, but we seldom admit it, it is our form of social camouflage. Same is evident with the other aspects of Being which are Reality, Presence and Identity.

Gadamer took what Heidegger said in Being and Time and expanded on it in Truth and Method his major work. Heidegger put Hermeneutics on the philosophical map and Gadamer explored the territory opened up by Heidegger.

Key point is that this “flow” occurs in the face of discontinuous emergent change. Thus if you read philosophy of science you see that the scientific discovery and then subsequent use of ideas is very complicated, and we really do not yet understand it. But just like we found with evolution, it is punctuated, there are discontinuities in its development. These discontinuities were called by G.H. Mead Emergent Events. See his Philosophy of the Future. I did my first Ph.D. in England on this which was called The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence. There are different scopes of intelligibility like fact, theory, paradigm, episteme, ontos, existence, absolute. Emergent events, like black swans, occur at any of these levels at any time. These emergent events are disruptive. For instance mobile phones, or the world wide web, they actually change the way we do things and thus cause real changes in our world that are disruptive. Flow only occurs in what Kuhn called normal science. Revolutionary science, i.e. science based on an emergent event either coming from inside or outside does not flow, but produces disruption in flow of ideas from normal science into engineering and production of products. Rather old ways of doing things are persuaded all of a sudden and new ways of doing things take over quickly and organizations perish like Kodak, and others become seemingly overnight behemoths like Google, Microsoft, & Apple. We are living in a time when we are getting multiple disruptive emergent events occurring at the same time. Things like smart phones come out and change the nature of everything we do and we are trying to catch up to the possibilities that are opened up.

This is an opportunity to rehearse what I have said previously on many occasions in these answers which is that questions are not primary. Questions come out of problematics, If you do not have a problematic then the questions have no context and really lack any integral meaning. Problematic are what are worked on by what Kuhn calls normal science; they are based on assumptions that are not stated that are the basis of a certain paradigm. So within a paradigm with a set of presuppositions and assumptions your formulate a problematic, and out of that problematic you generate questions. Normally this is done by having a theory about some phenomena, and the questions are about how the phenomena would occur if the theory were true. Science is based on operationalizing those questions into experiments and then performing the experiments to get concrete answers to the questions posed to nature by the experiment. With regard to the theory, it makes distinctions, and those distinctions are refined through dialectics, question and answer about the possible theories and the various sources of evidence.

Strictly speaking it is usually not a question that drives the founding of a new discipline. It is normally some change at either the paradigm, episteme, ontological, existential or absolute level of intelligibility.

So let me give you an example from my own work. I was worried that everything was being called a System and that the term no longer meant anything. So I asked myself what was the next level up from systems theory, where there were things different from systems to which we could compare systems because it is obvious that everything is not a system. Well as far as I can find no one asked this question before because General Schemas Theory, which is what I call the next higher discipline from Systems Science has not been invented in our tradition previously, as a separate discipline. So it seems that the discipline is generated from my question about the nihilism of everything being a “system”. But in fact it really came from something else which was the realization that Systems have inverse duals I call Meta-systems. Meta-systems are schemas but they are not immediately obvious within our culture and our tradition. This is really an ontological change because schemas are projections in the sense of the synthetic a prioiri of Kant. Once I realized that systems had inverse duals, i.e. that they were not from a category theory perspective self-duals, then I started to hunt for other examples of “Schemas” such as Umberto Eco described in Kant and the Platypus. It was the change in understanding the synthetic a priori that resulted in the emergence of this postulated new discipline even more abstract than systems theory. First I had to have the problematic which had to do with what is the foundation of Systems Engineering. The ready answer was Systems Science. But this generated all kinds of questions which eventually led to the viability of Systems Science supporting Systems Engineering. What was discovered was that Systems Science is not enough, but there needs to be something like Schemas Science to support Schemas Engineering instead. Systems Science is just a small slice of what is needed to support that actual work of Systems Engineering. Systems Engineering is wider than the name implies, it encompasses more types of schemas than just the system, for instance meta-systems, patterns, forms, etc. To kick off General Schemas theory I formulated a hypothesis which was that there are exactly ten schema and there is a rule that there is one schema per dimension and one dimension per schema. Once this hypothesis existed then it was possible to test it by generating all sorts of questions about it and to try to poke holes in the hypothesis. Only these schemas exist: facet, monad, pattern, form, system, meta-system, domain, world, kosmos, pluriverse. They stretch from negative first dimension through the zeroth dimension up to the ninth dimension. Once we have this hypothesis we can test it by looking at the various things in the world to see if there are any gaps in this set of schemas, or if there are things that do not fall under these various schemas. Questions abound once we have the hypothesis and as Popper says we try to disprove it. I have not been able to disprove it yet. I have not found any phenomena that do not fall into one of those schemas. I have not found any violations of the rule of two schemas per dimension and two dimensions per schema. But I keep searching from an anomaly that cannot be explained by the hypothesis. I have also tried more complex hypotheses, such as three schemas per dimension and three dimensions per schema. But they add a lot of complexity which does not seem necessary if the simpler rule works. The rule connects the logos of the physus to the nomos. The physus of the logos is logic, so that means that schemas are the dual of logic, i.e. they are the means of intelligibility of the things that are specified in our logical statements.

Spawning disciplines are not usually from asking questions, rather they usually come from shifts in paradigms, epistemes, ontoi, or other levels of intelligibility. Normally once the problematic is opened up as a horizon the discipline comes in to make sense of the normal science that studies the horizon of a given kind of phenomena. Theories are generated within the discipline, and hypotheses tried based on theories. Experiments are run, and normal science goes about its business until the next emergent change occurs at a given level of intelligibility.

As Heidegger says what we have to realize is that our own death is a reality and everything else pales before that reality, which we are last to focus on. He talks about how dasein becomes authentic by facing its own demise, and with that the loss of its world, and by extension the loss of everything in ones world. Dealing with losses of others, or of things is of less concern in most cases when one is alone facing ones own death. But as I have said the ultimate in loss is the loss of ones children because one would rather die oneself than to have them die. So beyond what Heidegger says there is something greater, deeper, more profound which is the loss of a child of ones own. That is why genuineness, and sincerity is deeper than authenticity. There are losses deeper than the loss of oneself, or even ones spouse. And this very fact that the loss of the other from oneself is deeper than the loss of oneself, or one’s partner and spouse is enough to give us hope. Because ultimate loss is outside ourselves.

The hard truth is that you do not move on from that, It is an open wound always with you, that you never overcome. You do not deal with that. You do not handle it. It is the greatest weight in existence and you have to bear it, and bearing it makes us human in the highest degree. This is because we know we will die and we place our hope in our children. But when the children die before we do then some part of that hope is crushed and there is nothing that can replace it, even if you have other children who live. But of course the worst is if you have only one child and it dies or all your children die as often happens in war. The suffering of mothers that have lost all their children is unthinkable. But it happens and the mothers live, but never recover. And the fathers too suffer deeply. It is our capacity for suffering that makes us human.

The fact that we are guaranteed the pursuit of happiness does not mean we actually obtain it, except perhaps briefly, fleetingly, and then everything is gone, but worse than everything and everyone we know being gone is if our children are suddenly gone either though illness, or accident, or violence and war. We live with that suffering, and it never leaves our consciousness, and we are all the more human for it, because we could love that much that we would place another’s life before ourselves if we had the chance.

Nietzsche showed us how to make our suffering the path to our humanity.

Epistemology is the study of Knowledge.

Metaphysics is the study of what there is to know.

There are four disciplines that I think are crucial in Philosophy these days:

• Phenomenology — Phenomena within Consciousness as it appears
• Hermeneutics — Meaning and Interpretation of things appearing
• Dialectics — How thought works it self out in time
• Ontology — The ISness of IS, What is IS?

Heidegger talks about Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Ontology in Being and Time but does not really deal with dialectics. Gadamer in Truth and Method expands on Heidegger’s bringing into play Hermeneutics. If we are going to look at the meaning of Being, then we are engaging in Hermeneutics. Heidegger wants to look at the phenomena not as Husserl does directly following Kant by assuming the subject/object dichotomy, but prior to the split between Subject/Object when all there is that is projecting Being is Dasein, being there, being-in-the-world. Heidegger gets the idea of using the World as horizon from the late Husserl in works that were never published. Phenomenology becomes the relation to the phenomena within the world by the unique type of Being that projects its own world, i.e. Dasein which it finds itself within. This is the essence of the Kantian Synthetic a priori focused in on and without all the dualisms that cloud the issue that we see in Kant and Husserl. But for Heidegger the real question is not about Being qua Being, but about the Meaning of Being, hence Hermeneutics becomes important. It is one thing to as what IS is, but another deeper question to ask what it means to have an IS, which is a uniquely Indo-European question because it is unique in having IS as an idea in the language. But as soon as we are making distinctions then dialectics comes into play, because there is movement of thought with respect to the making of distinctions. And if Heidegger is right the highest distinction we can make is between modes of Being which Heidegger makes between present-at-hand (Pure Being) and ready-to-hand (Process Being). But as soon as this distinction, which is the highest because it is a distinction in Being is made, then we realize that there must be a difference that makes a difference between Pure and Process Being, so what is that? Later Heidegger calls this Being crossed out. Derrida calls it Differance (differing and deferring), and now we have three kinds of Being when we only set out to have two, to resolve the relation between our goals and means, thinking and doing, etc. within the world. Merleau-Ponty then writes Phenomenology of Perception to show that present-at-hand is really pointing and ready-to-hand is really grasping psychologically, and then he mentions toward the end the possibility of the expansion of Being in the world, say as we learn to use a musical instrument until it becomes part of our being-in-the-world, like the case with a blindman and his stick. Suddenly we have a concrete idea of what the third kind of Being might be, and later we find that Plato recognizes it in the Timaeus.

Probably the most interesting book in Continental Philosophy is the unfinished one that Merleau-Ponty was working on before he was killed in a car accident. It is the Visible and the Invisible where he defines a kind of Being beyond Hyper Being of Differance which he called Wild being, i.e. the contraction of being-in-the-world which is the complement of Hyper Being. Delueze goes on to explore that and to try to build a philosophy based on it. Now we have four kinds of being and for years I thought that was the limit that was possible until I discovered how Ultra Being could exist, and it turns out that Badiou and Zizek are attempting to build philosophies on the basis of that singularity, which Badiou calls the ultra-one, i.e. the one which first arises from multiplicity, pure heterogeneity to make plurality possible in Being and Event.

So we have meta-levels of being produced as the dialectic of the distinctions between the kinds of Being plays itself out in Continental Philosophy in the last century after the second war, and it is still playing out. Ontology once we assume as Heidegger did that there is Ontological difference between Being and beings becomes complex following out the higher logical types of Russell.

But here is the strange thing. In our tradition Ontology studies Being which is supposed to perdure, i.e. to last. But in actuality Being is an illusion and it only exists as an anomaly in Indo-European languages, and it is actually Knowledge that perdures. So this whole movement of thought thinking Being is what Zizek calls an ideology, it is an illusion. What is significant is Knowledge and Foucault realizes that and translates the ideas of Being and Time into a way to think about the relation of Knowledge and Power. The place where he discusses this is The Order of Things, which is required reading for those who want to understand the evolution of Knowledge though the various epsitemes of the Western worldview. Foucault goes back and uses the genealogical method of Nietzsche as a way of unearthing the meaning of things like the Clinic, the Madhouse, Sexuality, etc. within our worldview. The idea is that we know though institutions and those institutions create power relations that control us as individuals within society. Cornelius Castoriadis calls this The Imaginary Institution of Society. Suddenly the tables are turning and we are realizing that Epistemology is deeper than Ontology. Ontology pretends to talk about universals, but the concept by which it talks about the universal is itself singular and not universal so there is a fundamental contradiction in Ontology that is unresolved, while Epistemology has no such problem, Knowledge is universal in itself and it perdures, as Being is supposed to but doesn’t. Try unknowing something you know! And how do we know, though representations that aim at concepts.

I came up with this formulation the other day:

Knowledge is a representation formulated as a judgment that bears repeating in an appropriate situation that continues to yield meaning, significance and relevance.

Wisdom is knowing when the appropriate situation for repeating the representation is, and when it is not appropriate because would not generate meaning.

Phenomenology is what we experience in consciousness as we pursue data, information, knowledge, wisdom, insight, and realization.

What we experience is that knowledge is not graspable, yet it comes when we need it, although we do not know what it is. We seek to acquire it but it eludes us, yet it is there as the foundation for our lives because it is the only thing that perdures in experience.

We know knowledge though the emergent scopes within our tradition such as given, fact, theory, paradigm, epsiteme, ontos, existence, absolute. There can be emergent change at all these scopes of concern.

Knowledge is socially constructed and is solid yet constantly changing as we learn more. And Bateson captured it well in his meta-levels of learning. Knowledge is what we learn at the various meta-levels of learning which gives our tradition its meta-stability in the face of emergent change in relation to the nihilistic background that our tradition generates.

There are hundreds of thousands of papers that are produced every year, perhaps millions. But how many of those have knowledge related to the cutting edge of our tradition, so they are really relevant, significant and meaningful. We can cull though the whole lot and perhaps just find a few papers that give us real knowledge, by actually going beyond what we knew before. Most of the material that is good is rehash of what is already known, learning it again, by others. The rest is just what you have to do to make sure you keep your academic job and really has nothing to do with pushing the tradition along to the next level of the comprehension of our place in the world, or the nature of the world itself. We have myriad experts but to find someone with a comprehensive knowledge  is rare. Finding someone who is pressing on to understand things more deeply and thus gain a more profound knowledge of themselves and the nature of the world is even rarer.

Knowing things about the world is Pure Knowledge.

Apollo suggested Know Thyself as a maxim.

Hegel would amend that to say Know thyself though the Other.

Knowing Knowledge (Process Knowledge) which is dwelling in the only thing that perdures and what our culture is based upon is extremely difficult.

But knowing Knowledge knowing  itself and other (Hyper Knowledge) is what Hegel called Spirit. It is what guides reason out of the valley of death by nihilism.

Yet knowing knowledge knowing the known (Wild Knowledge) is purely reflexive knowledge of self/other knowing themselves though each other.

Beyond that is only the singularity of Ultra Knowledge.

Like Being there are meta-levels of Knowledge, but they have yet to be explored in our tradition. There is a mountain to climb, don’t wait, climb it beyond yourself into your self in order to truly follow Apollo’s advice. Nietzsche tried to scale that mountain as Zarathustra. Those who scale it become “knowers” in the true sense of the word in all its possible depth. They are few indeed.

The exact answer to this question I do not know, but would like to know as well. But what I do know is that hyperspheres get larger and then smaller again as you go up the ladder of dimensions. They peak out between five and seven dimensions in terms of surface area and size. Then they get smaller and smaller the higher you go. Right now M theory is 11 dimensional. F Theory is 12 and 14 dimensional. To my mind we could interpret this fall of in the size of hyperspheres as gathering things in the universe closer together because each higher hypersphere contains the lower hyperspheres. And one speculation is that the nth degree of dimension, i.e. the highest whatever that is or perhaps even infinite degree occurred at the Big Bang. Under that assumption we could see what is happening as the Universe cools as producing lower and lower dimensional asymmetries. It seems to be if that were true then it could be that at the highest dimension that the universe could be at the Big Bang still gathers the entire universe in a very compact space in that dimension, and expansion in some sense comes from the unraveling of dimensionality down to the place where it widens out below the level of M theory. Not sure whether physus take this expansion of the size of hyperspheres as we come from an arbitrarily high dimensions down to a lower dimension into account. I think they are assuming that the universe has a set dimension. But it seems the truth of unification of theory and perhaps the multiverse theory as well might be something like this:

In the Multivese which is a very high dimensional plasma and thus with hyper sphere radii that are very small and thus it is very compact, probably less than Planck length by a lot, some asymmetry occurs which causes the dimensionalities within these high dimensional hyperspheres to start to unravel, and perhaps it is at the barrier of Planck length that the actual big bang occurs, but regardless during the Big Bang this unfurling is still happening until we get down to dimensions at which the size of the hyperspheres get much larger, and this itself could account for the expansion of the universe and dark energy. In other words in this speculation dark energy is really the expansion of hyperspheres that occurs at lower dimensions eventually we hit the F theory and then the M theory levels, and the unraveling continues until the universe hits the fourth dimension, and at that point a phase change occurs because the fourth dimension has no set topology and thus that is where our physics is rooted with its set constants for the universe, but then a further symmetry breaking produces three dimensionality and the asymmetry between spacetime or timespace and that the realm we experience, but the actual universe itself is four dimensional and that is inscribed in relativity and quantum mechanics and their use of imaginary numbers in their formulation.

If this picture were true it would explain a lot. It would explain dark energy as merely the continued unfolding of the higher small dimensions into the larger big dimensions which then produces an expanding universe. In this theory the universe is expanding because it is unraveling into lower dimensions and they are bigger than the containing dimensions. If lower dimensions are bigger than the containing dimensions that is going to produce an inflationary pressure. If that unraveling is continual rather than just something that happens once and then is set, then that is a constant inflationary pressure. But to your question, we are still nested in these very small hypespherical high dimensions at the same time we are in the lower ones that are bigger and so in this sense we are right on top and gathered to everything in the universe all the time at these higher dimensions. But whether as three dimensional creatures we could travel in them is another question, and that is to my mind doubtful. But another consequence of this idea is that it might explain some of the structure of the universe in as much as there is a concentration of mass in the universe. These hyperspheres get larger until they get to around the fifth or seventh dimension in terms of size and volume but then they get smaller until they get to the fourth and third dimensions. In the fourth dimension there is no set topology so that is like reaching a point that is fully freeform and where there is perfect movement which is like an Bose-Einstein condensate. I think that the paradoxes at the Planck scale may be resolved by this topological anomaly. But then the symmetry breaking out of that produces spacetime/timespace out of the matrix of four dimensional time or four dimensional space, which together is eight dimensional. These eight dimensions occur within the fourth dimension as the double covering of that space by the Octonion. So with respect to the Octonion it is as if four dimensional space were folded back on itself and that folding is the difference between four dimensional space and four dimensional time and all possible symmetry breaking between time and space between. The fact that there is perfect motion within the fourth dimension, and the fact that spacetime/timespace is folded in that dimension though the octonion suggests that it might be possible to slip through if we were able to actualize ourselves at that level because there should be no topological constraints and the folding in the Octionin suggests that there is some sort of reflexive superpositioning of the  matrix on itself.

If it is true that we are nested in higher dimensional hyperspheres of some arbitrary high dimension then actually everything that is spread out as spacetime or timespace is literally interprenetrated, and we know that effect physically as entanglement under Bells Theorem which has proved to be correct. Since all matter in the universe was together at the big bang that means everything in the universe is entangled with everything else. So this leads to a second argument for interpenetration of everything which is the Mahayana position of Fa Tsang and other nondual philosophies in other traditions as well.