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.

I changed when I realized that humanity has not, they are just as gullible as ever, taken in by snake oil salesmen of every stripe, always ready to try another Apocalypse on for size after the last one fizzled out. I changed because I was saddened by this illness in the souls of so many, with no cure in sight. I felt pity. And that was a real change for me, because Nietzsche denigrates pity the most of all emotions. I saw the last man blinking, blinking . . . and I felt pity.

The Last men are those obsessed with the ending of everything, rather than beginnings . . .

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 what ever 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 over night 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.

I saw the film Umberto D tonight. It is about a man facing loss.

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.

What is OUR nature, i.e. the structure of the Western worldview we embody, that is driving us to planetary suicide?