Literally nothing.

It is a rune on a stone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes

Classically the purpose of education is to build character and to instill virtue and knowledge acquisition was seen as one means to this end. Our idea about what education was for has changed over time to emphasize knowledge acquisition. But actually as has been mentioned on Bloom’s scale acquisition of knowledge is just the beginning. One must be taught what to do with it once acquired, i.e. how to refine it. Unfortunately, academia does not bother to teach us as well how to make it useful in life, and that is why there is such a disconnect between the Logos (Academia) and the Physus (Industry). Many of us end up working in Industry for which we are ill prepared by an academic training. It seems that neither Academia nor Industry are interested in character or virtue. In fact, it appears that they are positively detrimental to “success” in either sphere.

My own take on it is that one must engage in education of oneself because one is not going to get what one needs in educational institutions these days for the most part. This self-education is often called now spirituality. They revolve around how to acquire not just knowledge but wisdom, insight and realization, and other higher qualities that serve to refine character and instill in oneself virtues. Since religion has failed in this regard due to unreasonable clinging to superstition and dogma which tends to undermine itself, what is left is spirituality as a way to appreciate how higher forms of self-refinement are possible and attainable.

Once you understand that knowledge serves wisdom and wisdom serves insight and insight serves realization and that these are emergent levels beyond knowledge, and that givens, data, and information are necessary prerequisites but not sufficient, then one begins to appreciate the magnitude of the problem one faces when one considers how one might educate oneself. In this education we learn about the building of the various socially constructed levels of understanding such as facts, theories, paradigms, epistemes, ontoi, existences and absolutes and this teaches us that knowledge itself and the ability to understand it transforms in our society and culture and its tradition. Knowledge is the most stable of all things in experience, and it is for this reason that it is emphasized in education. It is a stable foundation on which to base our further pursuit of character and virtue. But eventually on realizes that character and virtue are by-products and are not the goal itself. Very few ever realize what the goal is which is some wisdom, some insight into the nature of existence, some realization of how to embody one’s insights into ones own nature as a human being within ones social context and historical milieu. The problem is that even if one absorbs spiritual traditions one realizes that they cannot be taken as they are but transformed to be relevant to ones own life and the historical context in which one finds oneself. In effect one must really absorb multiple deep rooted spiritual traditions in order to compare and contrast them and to get a sense what the essence of spirituality itself is about beyond its manifestation in any given tradition, and really what one wants is that essence beyond all embodiments because that is what answers the fundamental human need and is applicable to all contexts and all historical periods or cultural and social milieus in which one might find oneself. It is that which gives nurture to the human spirit and buoys the soul in inevitable adversity. Here in line with the dual nature of the essence of the human being in most cultures and traditions there is the difference between what is breathed and the breathing itself. The spiritual tradition is what one breaths in, but the breathing process itself is what is within oneself that is dynamic in its seeking the nondual character of the foundations of life, consciousness, and the social.

Eventually one realizes that all the various foreign nondual spiritual traditions point back home and are only there so one can see that the kernel of ones own tradition, no mater how dualistic is fundamentally based on nonduality itself despite all the attempts to suppress it in every conceivable way in our own somewhat disconnected tradition. And this is perhaps the most surprising facticity of all. Because spirituality which I take to be synonymous with nonduality is ubiquitous, i.e. is literally everywhere and in everything at its core, it is also built in to the kernel of the Western Worldview despite all the attempts to rid the worldview of any vestiges of the nondual by continual violence over the centuries and ages. In fact all the major traditions have had their nondual moment of transformation and they dealt with it very differently. Confucianism had Taoism, Hinduism had Buddhism, and the West had Islam. The west fought nonduality to the death and attempted to kill it off within its borders in every way possible, but because nonduality is a feature of existence at its kernel it cannot be gotten rid of and is in fact only intensified by this act of superficial exclusion. By looking at China and India we can understand the transformative effects of realizing the nature of the nondual within a tradition, and we can catch on to what the West has missed so far but what is stored up for it even more powerfully when it is finally unleashed.

I call this unleashing of the transformative power of nonduality within the kernel of the Western tradition itself the Homeward Path, it is when everything comes back to roost which was avoided during the violent suppression of nonduality throughout its history. It is when the our dominant earth destroying worldview turns inside out. And this has very profound implications for education, especially self-education within our tradition. Self-education in our time in our place boils down to seeing the nondual everywhere within and underlying the duality and nihilism that plagues every aspect of our tradition, and thus gaining access to the meaning of things which everything bears within itself for us, including ourselves. I would venture to say that this is the heart of all education, especially self education in which as Bateson says one does not just learn, but learns to learn, and learns to learn to learn, and learns to learn to learn to learn etc. Learning is essentially to replace ignorance with knowledge, but also to replace folly with wisdom that flows from spirituality oriented toward the nondual, but also to replace obdurate and opaque darkness of the soul with insight, and finally to replace the chaos at the kernel of ones self with the realization of how to embody what one has learned concerning the ultimate nature of existence rooted in comprehension of ones own nondual nature.

Now this appears to be something difficult and complex and basically impossible but actually because existence is everywhere the bedrock underneath the veneer of Being, and because existence can always be seen nondual either as emptiness of Buddhism or void of Taoism, then it is merely a matter of seeing through the illusion of Being to the bedrock of existence that is necessary in every case. In Islam for instance, the nondual heresy of the Western tradition, this is called fitra. Instead of original sin every baby is born with an inner knowledge of nonduality which they embody purely and originally without any obscurities. So we know directly this from our always already lost origin in existence. In Buddhism that is called prajna. Getting back to that insight is what enlightenment is all about. Or from the point of view of Taosim we are already one with nature and if we realize the void within ourself that is the same as that within nature then we are purified completely as described by Lao Tzu. Knowing the difference between illusion and reality, between truth and fiction, between identity and difference, between presence and absence and acting on the understanding of those distinctions in every situation is the embodiment of this nonduality as the ability to make non-nihilistic distinctions. Knowing how to make non-nihilistic distinctions in life is what gives rise to character and virtue as a side effect of embodying nonduality. Of course, this is not easy. But it is possible for human beings to approximate, and to the extent we do approximate it we display in ourselves wisdom, insight and realization based on our knowledge.

Education is self-education and self-education is taking the homeward path to wisdom, insight and realization, which is making our own the resources embedded in our own tradition that give access to spirituality. This is the only way to transform ourselves and our dominant nihilistic worldview that is in the process of destroying the earth and ourselves, and all other species directly. To stop this process at its root, in ourselves, is character and is virtue in our time. But as Zizek says we are just so lost in ideology, because we think we have gotten beyond it, that all of this is obscured in every way possible. For what is most important we don’t even know how to frame the questions, less well have sources for the answers. So the true roots of self-education are lost, and for that reason education itself has gone completely astray as it merely enforces one side of the most fundamental dualism in the worldview which is that between logos and physus. What is nondual between these is the nomos (order). We cannot expect the enforcer of a duality to lead us to nonduality. And that is why we have to engage in self-education. Self-education means learning the traditions of spirituality so that character and virtue are motivated by something deeper. But when we get into that very depth we realize that it was all around us from the beginning and part of our nature as a birthright. All the dualism and violence of the West cannot suppress it no matter what lengths it goes to, even the destruction of the earth will not suppress it. As long as there are human beings it is possible for them to see though illusion into the inner nature of existence, their own existence and that of all things. And many people do glimpse this in their lives at special moments of insight that brings wisdom. But we are just so caught up in the dualistic illusions generated by our culture and society that generates the nihilism of our worldview. Ultimately, education itself must be educated as to what is profound and ultimate, and we do that in our self-education. And this transformation of education in ourselves is the real purpose of all education.

Personally I think that the Godel’s proof is very much like Irrational numbers. These numbers just cannot be handled by fractions. This caused a crisis in Greek Mathematics. Similarly diagonal coding reveals that very simple systems are not closed as we might expect and this produced a very similar crisis of anti-foundationalism in modern times. Hilbert’s program as well as that of Russell and Whitehead crashed. The fact that we cannot expect closure of systems has a big effect on how we view them. But it is precisely the lack of closure that opens things up for change and transformation, so the shape in question is the shape of things to come, i.e. new emergences that are made possible by that openness.

Processes and Systems are duals.

Systems and Meta-system schemas are inverse duals.

Godel Statements intervene to define the difference between inverse duals but do not intervene in the difference between duals.

If this is true, then that in itself is of some interest.

The difference between what I call the meta-system schema and the system schema formally is the difference between the Universal Turing Machine and the Turing Machine, which are isomorphic but which are still different in as much as Universal Turing machines are the operating systems for Turing Machines, and though they are identical in some respects they are very different in other respects, and one of those respects is that the Halting problem is no problem for Universal Turing Machines because as Operating Systems they are not expected to ever halt unless turned off. The Universal Turing Machine is the operating environment of the application turing machines it reads from its tape and runs. From a practical point of view Operating Systems are organized differently from the applications that they run, and they apply constraints to the applications that they run, and they impose protocols on them for them to communicate with each other, or with the Operating System. The operating system disposes resources to turing machines that it is running in parallel, or though task switching, or as single threads. So in effect the Meta-system and the System are in some sense the same yet in another sense very different and that is one of the reasons that meta-systems are invisible to us because we can treat them as merely ‘operating’ “systems” rather than recognizing the difference in their essence despite the sameness of their formalization. In effect the Turing Machine formalism is wider than just describing systems, it in effect describes two different schemas under the same umbrella, and because of this we have difficulty telling them apart. Another similar example is G. Spencer-Brown’s laws of form. It can be reduced to a Boolean algebra, but to say that it is nothing more than a Boolean algebra is a mistake, it ignores its emergent properties that overflow its minimal formal representation. Similarly the difference between the System and the Meta-system is that the System is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and the Meta-system is a whole less that the sum of its parts, i.e. a whole full of holes. And this impies the existence of the third case, which are wholes exactly equal to the sum of their parts, i.e. the special systems. The difference between a system and a meta-system is that systems are emergent because they include the Godel Statements (about which decidability is impossible) while meta-systems do not include the Godel Statements. So it is the Godel Statements themselves that decide whether something is a system or a meta-system. The holes in the meta-system are the niches for the systems to fit into within it. Both systems and meta-systems self-reflexively nest within themselves each separately but with respect to each other they interleave like Russian Dolls where the dolls are the systems, and the spaces between them are the meta-systems. This self-reflexive interleaving is what Aczel calls a non-wellfounded set, i.e. it violates the law of Russell that classes not be members of themselves, but with mediation. In other words systems can contain systems but only mediated by meta-systems, and meta-systems can contain meta-systems but only mediated by systems, so that hierarchies of sub-systems, systems, and supersystems (systems of systems) have implicit meta-systems separating them and making what Bateson’ calls differences that make a difference. There is then what G. Spencer Brown calls a “mark” that distinguishes the sub-system from the system and that is the meta-system, and vice versa. There are the laws of form, but there are also the anti-laws of form which is its dual and these cancel. The laws of form exist within the system just as the laws of the system exist in the meta-system. In effect the laws imposed on a lower level schema come from the upper level schema in the cascade of schemas that are part of General Schemas Theory S1 hypothesis. Laws of Nature that are imposed upon us come from the environment of nature that encompasses us. Laws always come from the next level up and the fact that they are laws is part of the difference between the encompassing and the encompassed schemas that are adjacent in the hierarchy of schemas that include: facet, monad, pattern, form, system, meta-system (openscape), domain, world, kosmos and pluriverse. The Kosmos (universe) operates to the laws imposed by the Pluriverse (multiverse) and this is true all the way down. Each higher schema is the operating system for the lower schema. There are in fact turtles all the way down, but the levels of ontological scoping are finite. There are only ten levels of schema that go from negative one to the ninth dimension, and even though dimensions are infinite, schemas are not. Schemas are part of our finitude, because they are the way that we project spacetime on ontic phenomena we encounter as Kant divined. Godel’s proof plays a key role in the distinction between the system and the meta-system, and in fact every higher schema from its adjacent lower schema. It is always by the inclusion or exclusion of Godel Statements (that are undecidable) that these levels are distinguished from each other.

Systems are the dual of Processes, just as a gestalt is  the duals of a flow. These are complementary to proto-gestalts and proto-flows at the Meta-system level, that correspond conceptually to meta-systems and meta-processes. This difference is a duality, while the difference between meta-system and system or meta-process and process is an inverse duality. The Godel Statements do not condition to the differences between duals but only inverse duals. So the difference between a process and a system is not related to the difference between a turing machine and a universal turing machine. Systems and Processes are two different turing machines images. In one the state machine is primary and the tape or stack is secondary, while in the other the tape or stack is primary and the state machine is secondary. They are merely two arrangements of the same thing. In a gestalt the figure is on the background, but in a flow the background comes to the fore and is against the reference point which is the figure pushed to be background. These distinctions are not undecidable but merely complementary arrangements of the same elements.

This was meant to clarify distinctions between processes and systems and their relation to Godel’s proof which relates more to the difference between these duals and the meta-processes and meta-systems.

Einstein was a thoughtful physicist. In those days there were many physicists who were not afraid to think more broadly, something they have lost the knack for these days. In those days physicist training included philosophy. So they really knew the tradition. Physicists today have more or less lost touch with the core of the Western tradition because they don’t know the tradition as they used to. And Analytic Philosophy did not help by seeing itself as the handmaiden of science, there fore abrogating the responsibility of physicists to know their own tradition. So basically we get a lot of bad metaphysics dressed up as physical theory as a result. If you cannot run tests to disprove something then it is metaphysics not physics no matter how much math you mix into it to dazzle others with your fancy footwork. But because Einstein thought hard about the physics experiments of his day via speculative “thought experiments” he managed to shift the paradigm of Physics as pointed out by Kuhn. But while creating a revolution himself in physics he could not accept the implications of Quantum Mechanics that was appearing from a different direction also in his own time.

The secret of the Iliad and the Odyssey lies in the Mahabharata, which though later shows that it is modeled on the titomachia, i.e. the war between the devas/asuras or olympians/titans translated to the human plane. But what is interesting is who the “good guys” were is switched between the Mahabharata and the Iliad/Odyssey. Basically the Trojans are the Pandavas and the Acheeans are the men of earth, i.e. Kauravas, i.e. those born from an Iron Ball, or in the case of the Achaeans born from the earth directly. This is why Hector is the real hero of the Iliad. The trojans were Indo-Europeans. The Greeks were sea peoples with Indo-European mixture but with mostly Semitic heritage like the Phoenicians. We can tell this because their gods are like the gods of Cannan from Ugarit, and the only real Indo-European god among the Olympians is Poseidon. Helen was a goddess of Fertility whose possession was in dispute. She is said to have had 5 lovers like Draupurdy had five husbands, but in the case of Helen these were spread across the two sides rather than being five husbands for one woman as in the Mahabharata. The reason for the war is that the Trojans, just like all Indo-Europeans believed in marriage by wifenapping. So the fact that Paris took Helen when he was a guest was no problem for the Trojans. He had been given her by Aphrodite because he gave here the prize of the Golden Apple from Eris at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. So even tough we feel we should identify with the Achaeans, the Romans at least knew that we should be identifying with the Trojans instead. So the Trojans are Us (as Indo-Europeans, i.e. Westerners). Greeks are sea peoples with some Indo-European mixture, but of mostly Semitic background as shown by their Gods. Turns out that the homeland of the Indo-Europeans were Anatolia as seen in the fact that the Hittites had the oldest Indo-European language.

A future digital archeologist will find references to something called Quora.

See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_0E5i_a7uVIvbaUUdccYj2Ek33Gl_Wum4de00uXsY00/edit

See Persig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on Quality

I believe that the real source of ideas about Quality in this popular book is not Plato but really . . .

PEPPER (Stephen).   Concept and Quality.   La Salle, Ill., Open Court, 1966.

See Stephen C. Pepper and Chinese Philosophy of Art http://www.thomehfang.com/suncrates6/Stephen%20C.%20Pepper%20and%20Chinese%20Philosophy%20of%20Art2.htm

http://archives.lib.siu.edu/index.php?p=collections/findingaid&id=2238&q=&rootcontentid=36591

I have already mentioned that this is I think a deep question.

I think first of all I would like to say why it is deep. For instance Mendeleev came up with the table of elements. But we do not really know the properties of any elements until we actually find that element or make it, just knowing the atomic numbers do not tell us the properties of the substance. Similarly, with molecules and even complex molecules that have interesting properties due to their folds that are generated in living things and now synthetically. We can predict in a general way their properties by seeing what family or what column in the periodic table they belong to, or what other complex molecules of the same type are like, but actually science has no way of telling us before hand what the properties of any given substance will be like for certain except after the fact. So the question has to do with the relation of science to the patterning of properties in nature of substances. Science is actually mute on this issue as far as I know. However, there are attempts to answer this question, and the theory of propensities is one way that an answer to this question has been attempted.

Joshua Engel has made the case for the structure of matter and believes that it is going to end up with a unified theory of everything. But actually I don’t think this is the crux of the question, at least in my interpretation. The crux of the question is where the variation comes from in the quality and emergent characteristics of these particles or these atoms, or these molecules. Quantitative characteristics we have down pretty much, and we have discovered after the fact a lot of the Qualitative characteristics, but we could not have predicted the qualitative characteristics from the quantitative characterizations. So for instance we believe that there is going to be a stable point at about element 114. Until we make that element we do not know that it really is stable and if it is stable we do not know what its characteristics will be except in some really general ways. We are hoping that there is an island of stability, but we just do not know it is really will exist or what it will be like if it does exist. And this fact that quantitatively exact physics does not know what it will find on the qualitative side in emergent phenomena that is really the Achilles heal of Science. In other words we do well predicting motions, or incidences, or probabilities with equations but we cannot predict emergent effects that appear as Qualitative characteristics except in a very vague way by analogy, for instance among elements in the same column of the periodic table.

Now my approach to this problem is based on propensities and there are many others that take this approach to this problem. In fact, I am not sure that there is really any other candidate answer. The propensity answer says that substances have dispositions that are deeper than their attributes and in fact that lead to their having certain attributes. Most of physics relates just to the primary attributes and ignore secondary attributes. But all attributes except enumeration of individuals are qualitative. Qualitative attributes can be measured and thus appear as secondary quantitative measures. Emergent properties are always appearing as qualities of one sort or another, which cannot be predicted based on looking at the components that go into the phenomena. So for instance, electrons, positrons, and neutrons all look identical to us. But when they are put together in Atoms there are various emergent qualities that appear unexpectedly at each atomic number level. Some of the properties are very special like for instance those of water that make life possible. Looking at other substances that have gas, liquid, and solid forms we would not predict the properties of water. Life uses the special properties of water to leverage itself into existence and to remain viable. And one answer to how all of this works is to take the qualities and explain them structurally by positing propensities that get combined to produce the attributes of substances like water (molecule) or oxygen (element). And as we get into the mechanisms in the cell we find many amazing little machines that do the work of life within the cell, or different specialized cells within the organism. Basically what propensity theory does is say that there is a substrate to all the characteristics of a substance of propensities and these are brought together to give a specific set of qualitative characteristics. Usually we think of the various attributes of a substance as separable from each other, but actually in each substance they are uniquely fitted together into a single emergent panoply of effects. Propensities or dispositions are used to explain the constituents of this panoply of qualitative characteristics. However, this is hard to do, and there are those who do not believe that propensities or dispositions exist. But basically those who do believe in them are just trying to do what worked to understand the quantitative structures of substance, by explaining the qualitative patterns as constructed of various combinations of propensities or dispositions or tendencies. However this is hard because often we do not see the dispositions that we are positing as separate, like Quarks they are never seen in isolation.

But I think that this approach is workable based on the idea of the meta-levels of Being which are Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra. There are kinds of mathematics associated with each kind of Being. So we can see that:

Pure = Determinate Functions as in Calculus
Process = Probabilities
Hyper = Rough, Fuzzy Possibilities (max and min across multiple worlds)
Wild = Propensities, Dispositions, Tendencies, etc.
Ultra = Singularities

Now the real point where propensities comes into their own is when we are trying to explain how it is that anything crosses over from potential to actual and the relation between possibility, or impossibility and necessity. It turns out that modal logic is really a mess, and no one actually knows how things come from the adjacent possible into actuality via potentiality either by necessity, or chance and how impossibilities are avoided in this transition. Propensities at least give us a way to think about this, which I treat in an unpublished chapter in my dissertation. I completely had written my dissertation when I discovered that no one actually knew how possibilities became actualities and the only good accounts I could find used propensities as a transition point. This works because attributes are actually mass-like. Therefore, we can posit the instances that make up those masses and hypothesize that these instances have propensities. It is the propensities of the instances that give the mass-like emergent characteristics that appear their qualitative manifestation. This more or less means that it is the propensities that mediate between the possibilities and the probabilities that approximate determinations.

What this suggests is that Science has really only done the easy part so far, which is figuring out the quantitative aspects of substance by smashing things together. The harder part which is far more subtle is understanding how the propensities and possibilities combine to make actualities, and how those possibilities become adjacent to actuality so they have the potential for being realized. How the line is crossed into actuality out of adjacent possibility via potentiality is extremely mysterious. There are few attempts I could find to explain exactly how that works.

It seems to me that this is the nub of the question at hand which I think has real depth. And if someone knows of a good explanation of this phenomena I would really like to know about it.

See also http://www.generativescience.org/books/pnb/pnb.html