There has been a basic misunderstanding of the relation of theory to practice in Buddhism, due to how it was introduced into the USA from the 1960s on, and due to cultural proclivities that lured us toward it.

If we look back on the history of Buddhism we can see that theory and practice always went together hand in hand, as we might expect from something that claims to follow the middle way. In other words nothing is to be rejected, not even thought, reasoning, conceptualization. And these are only satisfied if the mediator and the philosopher work together to define the new states of consciousness that are discovered in the meditation laboratory. And that is precisely what has happened in the history of Buddhism, the Buddha has been saying more and more interesting things throughout the ages. But of course we know that it was different schools defining each other against the others and competing for adherents. It is in this way that Buddhist Philosophy became so subtle. It started off pointing at nonduality from the illusory structure of the Indo-European worldview. But as time went on it refined this idea of nonduality a lot, so later versions of Buddhism were extremely sophisticated. The pinnacle of this development in my opinion is Hua Yen of Fa Tsang. This becomes one of the main theoretical foundations of Chan/Zen. And so when Chan/Zen was introduced it was based on this very developed form, which was said to reject all the sutras, which appealed to us, but was in fact wrong. One was not just one in one school of Buddhism but one could at the same time draw from several. For instance Zen and Pure Land seem so different but they were practiced together. And one of the sutra schools would be chosen as the theoretical background for that practice. It was not that Reason,and Theory was left out of account, but rather that these had developed to such a subtle and sophisticated level that no one saw how they could be improved. So they just became the assumed background. In Soto tradition there was more of this theorizing, than in Renzai, but still both drew their inspiration from these sutras, for instance the Platform Sutra of Hui Neng is very sophisticated even though it appears to be rustic.

Let us just think for a moment. If you don’t have a any concept of what you are doing, how are you going to do it? From a Phenomenological point of view, noesis and noema always combine meaning and sensory content. There is no such thing as stopping the mind from operating. It is as Dzong Ka Pa said, reason plays a specific role in enlightenment process. The Lankavatra suttra pushed by Bodhi Dharma which talks about Mind Only but which has the practice of stopping cognition is a Buddhist heresy because it departs from the middle way. The Buddha describes his own enlightenment journey in terms of words, and that meant it was intelligible to him, and could be expressed in words that indicated concepts.

Meditation in Hinayana entailed things like sitting around and watching corpses decompose in order to understand ones own mortality. Mahayana transformed the meaning of meditation though various more sophisticated theories that sought consistency in the doctrine of Buddhism. One of the things that assures us that we know what the Buddha really said is the inconsistency in it.
Abidharma  analyzes all the sutras and attempts to work out the consistency of the Buddhas teaching at a superficial level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhidharma

But it was the philosophers who worked to give it deeper consistency, and to do that they had to go more deeply into the phenomena, there they discovered deeper states of consciousness, which in turn led to more sophisticated theories, and so on until we get to probably the most subtle way of looking at existence in the world, because of its refinement from the time of the Buddha right up until the present, since it was kept alive by the Tibetans, who developed a kind of Anti-zen, in which meditation is given up all together. Saying that you are to be mindful all the time is a step in that direction. In DzogChen there is no difference between Meditation and Non-Meditation, no difference between emptiness and form, no difference between the two truths.

But we have come to a turning point where we need to go beyond the fourth turning of the Wheel to a fifth turning, that is in consonance with the return of Buddhism to the other Indo-European branch which as rejected Non-Duality so vehemently. That new turning needs to take the Homeward path back to the nondual core of the Western worldview that appears when we realize that Zen/Chan and DzogChen as duals point to a deeper nondual beyond Emptiness and Void. There is no meditation at that more profound level, both Zen/Chan and DzogChen have gotten beyond that each in their own way, when they accomodated themselves to Taoism/Bon/Shintoism.

http://bit.ly/xmfgob

http://www.quora.com/How-important-is-meditation-to-Buddhism

See other references on self-reference. Each of their covers indicate the book itself which is about self-reference. And each book has a title printed on it that indicates what book it is. Thus the title on a book is a self-reference, and it only becomes an other reference in a citation, or catalogue, in some media outside the book itself. Many novels include their own titles within themselves as part of the text not just the title of the book. An example of this is the The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Wind

================ Other works on Self-Reference ==================

Self-reference

I up voted those who said reading. I have always been addicted to reading. But there is no 12 step program for readers. It is considered laudable, and and there is no help for those for whom it has gotten out of hand. What goes with that is the addiction to buying books. And what also goes with that is writing copiously thinking you have something unique to contribute but the results of which no one is interested in but oneself. And what goes with that is intellectual loneliness, if one happens to live in an anti-intellectual society, and are not part of academia. And what goes with that is a consequent addiction to social media. And what goes with that is neglect of other things that one should be doing in life.

There is a viscous cycle with regard to this addiction. First, one reads a good book, concerning a subject one is fascinated with. Then you get all excited, and you read another book referenced in the first book that looked interesting. One thing leads to another and you have read all the available books about that subject. So now you know a whole lot about something no one cares about but yourself. But while you were reading about that subject you managed to get side tracked in other subjects, and so having exhausted everything written about the first subject you then get lost in the second subject, and so it goes from subject to subject in this never ending cycle, because no more is it possible to read everything about everything. 

But there is a problem which is that most of the books or articles on a given subject are not worth reading. So finding something that is actually worth spending your time reading is difficult. This leads to endless searching for the right book, on a given subject, or the best article. And so before you know it you are spending more time searching than actually reading.

But then a strange phenomena occurs that was noted by Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature which is that one starts to actually pursue two subjects simultaneously, because the subjects worth reading about are piling up faster than they can be absorbed, and you notice the phenomena that Bateson noticed which is you get better information about two subjects by studying them simultaneously. And so you start to have ideas about interesting connections between subjects that no one noticed before. And this is very problematic because one starts to think that one should capture these insights. So one gets a notebook and writes them down, and then another notebook, and so on until you have stacks of notebooks full of little known ideas, that no one cares about but you. And that is because the others are not reading significant works.

So you get an idea that you would like to write down these ideas that are stacking up, and starting to reinforce each other, and taking on a life of their own. So one day you put pen to paper and the flood gates open, and you write and write and you realize you are not just addicted to reading but also writing, but you have no audience, because no one knows what you are talking about. But what you learn is that writing itself is a source of even more ideas. In fact, the flood gates of writing causes a deluge of new ideas that you would never have had if you had not started writing, and so you realize that when ever you have an idea you need to try to write a short working paper on it. But those papers get longer and longer until you have a few thousand page books that you don’t know anyone who is interested in reading. So you put them on the internet, people download them, but very few comment about what they have read, so you don’t get any feedback.

But then the worst thing happens, you actually discover something significant. This is where a run of the mill out of control addiction becomes a real horror story. Since you think you have something to say of significance, after years of ideas that were interesting but not “significant” then you start going to conferences and publishing papers and giving talks. Of course, everyone at those conferences has their own ideas, and so they are not really interested in your significant idea, so you continue to publish and go to conferences, but really all you can do is to continue to research your significant idea, and it becomes more and more significant, and connects to more and more things, until you believe that it is the best thing since sliced bread. Once you think that your “significant”idea has become the center of the universe and the key to understanding everything, then one starts to be seen as a crackpot. Because like the rhyme of the ancient mariner one is going around and grabbing wedding guests and sitting them down and letting them know about this idea that you have that is going to change the world. Of course, wedding guests that will sit transfixed while you tell your story are rare, and people start avoiding you so they do not get harangued, and slowly but surely one enters ones own world, which is different from everyone else’s world, because it is a world in which things make sense to oneself, which do not make sense to anyone else. It is at this point that one starts to see scenes in movies where there is a wall with bits of paper glued to it of every sort that makes a mess, but which to you makes perfect sense. And you realize that you have entered the twilight zone of the Perfect Mind like John Nash and others before you have entered, and found it difficult to leave.

And there are others in this world whom you can talk to and who become your friends. People who also had “significant” even “crucial” ideas but who were socially accepted, at least after their deaths, and a few during their lifetimes, and who were rehabilitated by the tradition and become part of the Canon. These others have names like Plato, or Kant, or Hegel, or Heidegger, or Husserl, or Merleau-Ponty, or Sartre, or Bataille, or Badiou, or Zizek and others too numerous to recount. They become more real than the people around you because they actually had something significant to say too, but everyone thinks they were significant, but no one things that what ever you have to say is significant. But secretly you know that what ever idea you have had is just as significant as theirs, in fact it explains what their ideas really mean.

If one had only listend to all those skeptical souls who said it was better to go to the beach, one might have avoided this state of affairs. One could have avoided walking down the street and seing Kant, or Descartes in the coffeeshop. Or Heidegger cleaning windows outside the bookstore one has taken refuge in. One looks around at the customers that are there with you in the last bookstore on earth, all seeming to have a similar desperation, as they search though the bookshelves looking for something to read. But you don’t find any self-help books on reading addictions, or the horror of becoming a crackpot, or how to market your idea within the market place of attention, because all the books are about how to crate a business that sells something tangible, like sliced bread.

But then one day one realizes that the fact that everyone is walking around like zombies in a perpetual daze, not seeing the world that is right before their eyes, is not ones own problem. One did not make them blind and ignorant of their own worldview, one was just as ignorant as they are at some point. And one realizes that the world is unlikely to change, not matter how good one’s “significant” idea is, and one stops caring whether anyone gets it or not. It has been published on the web, it is there written down for those who are interested to pursue if they desires, and so one can return to one’s quest for more knowledge, and deeper understanding of the nature of the worldview. And so the cycle begins again. One returns to ones friends, the ones who understood, their worldview, the ones that have said something significant and others realized it mostly after their deaths. And that makes one wonder about ones own death, and this causes a bad case of authenticity which is hard to shake, but eventually that too passes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJhU3peN780B9Z5aLTVAY-vEAKm1oJ8foJp5WCIxxEc/edit

http://bit.ly/y2iTV5

http://morrowdim.tripod.com/maps.html

Map of Middle Earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth

See also . . .

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-famous-uses-of-maps

http://bit.ly/zoRE0v
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-famous-uses-of-maps

Harold Bloom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Especially for . . .

A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_tradition

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence

http://bit.ly/wN0kkF

Skepticism is the old strawman and Nihilism is the new strawman. The strawman is the thing that everyone attacks but does not really take seriously. It used to be almost every philosophy book would start out by attacking skepticism. But then David Hume came along and Kant took him seriously and Philosophy got a lot more complicated as a result and took an Idealistic spin in order to solve the problems raised by Hume, and suddenly Skepticism was no longer the strawman because it was realized that the overcoming of Skepticism could actually boost philosophy into a new level, and so skeptics were taken seriously. Besides that Hegel based this modern dialectics on the work of Sextus Empiricus (a classical skeptic) as a way of understanding ancient dialectics. Nihilism appeared as the new scape goat, but of course is worse that skepticism. Gorgias becomes the new key figure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgias) which is the closest thing to a nihilist in the ancient world. People like Gorgias who deny everything are called Academics in Skepticism. They are seen as the opposite of Dogmatics who affirm something about invisibles like Parmenides for instance. Because Nihilists appear in Skepticism it is possible to draw a distinction between them. For Plato, these various characters appear in Dialogues. In many of these Socrates becomes the main voice to which others merely agree. But in some poems other characters take the lead, like the Sophist, Parmenides, and the Laws. In these dialogues the Author and Narrator are hidden behind a veil, and we feel as if we are listening to a conversation between the characters, with Socrates being the hero of the piece. We are just so lucky to have these works whose meanings we are still plumbing. Of all these characters it is Gorgias who comes the closest to being a real nihilist. He like Nagarjuna negates everything. But Gorgias does so just to show off his powers of rhetoric, whereas Najarguna has the purpose of pointing at emptiness. Gorgias makes the radical claim:

The argument has largely been seen as an ironic refutation of Parmenides’ thesis on Being. Gorgias set out to prove that it is as easy to demonstrate that being is one, unchanging and timeless as it is to prove that being has no existence at all.”

“Gorgias begins his argument by presenting a logical contradiction, “if the nonexistent exists, it will both exist and not exist at the same time” (B3.67) (a violation of the principle of non-contradiction). He then denies that existence (to on) itself exists, for if it exists, it is either eternal or generated. If it is eternal, it has no beginning, and is therefore without limit. If it is without limit, it is “nowhere” (B3.69), and hence does not exist. And if existence is generated, it must come from something, and that something is existence, which is another contradiction. Likewise, nonexistence (to mê on) cannot produce anything (B3.71). The sophist then explains that existence can neither be “one” (hen) or “many” (polla), since if it were one, it would be divisible, and therefore not one. If it were many, it would be a “composite of separate entities” (B3.74) and no longer the thing known as existence.” http://www.iep.utm.edu/gorgias/

We know that Parmenides, as has been said in other answers, has three ways: Being, Appearance and Non-Being (existence). Parmenides denies all the other ways than Being. And Zeno develops arguments that show that if there is motion then there is argument. Gorgias used Paradox actively in his arguments, and appealed to Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction to prove his points. We have shown tentatively that these three ways line up with the Existentiels of Heidegger which are Rede (Chatter, Opinion, Appearance), Befindlichkeit (Existence, what is found), and Verstehen (intelligibility equals Being for Parmenides). Now when we look at the denial of Gorgias we see:

to me on (non-being) as a statement and this is the same as existence. (befindlichkeit)

The next denial is concerning knowledge which relates to verstehen and intellligibility which is the identification of thought with Being. He is denying intelligibly a basis characteristic of Being. Since knowledge is the most stable of anything in our experience, this is a big denial. It is also a denial of learning the process of attaining knowledge. (verstehen)

Next he denies communicability of knowledge, even if it existed. Communication as it was known in the Ancient world was talk (Rede).

Finally Gorgias denies the incentive to communicate. This seems to go beyond the three Existentiels. But we must remember that the mysterious Goddess that is teaching Parmenides is probably Persuasion. Persuasion is based on Rhetoric, and it is precisely the attempt to plant an incentive in the hearer.

Heidegger says that the core of the Existentiels is Care. To have care is to have incentive, to have within oneself rather than to be persuaded. Thus Dasein is authentic to the extent that he extracts himself from the They (mitsein) to concentrate on its own cares in the face of death.

So where Gorgias exceeds the ways of Parmenides gives us more information about the Existentiels that we would have otherwise, and makes us remember the Door which at which Parmenides meets the Goddess, whom some have said is probably Persuasion. In Persuasion you care what others do and you want to give them incentives to act the way you think they should act. Basically you care enough to make an argument attempting to persuade them.

Now lets look at these four ways, and see if they are not like the four ways that Plato discusses in his Timaeus and the Sophist.

In each beginning of the Timaeus there is a different kind of Being that is indicated. In the beginning the contrast is between Parmenidian stasis and Heraclitian flux. But when Plato begins again he talks about a third kind of Being which is synonymous with Hyper Being or Difference of Derrida, or -B-e-i-n-g- crossed out of Heidegger. When Plato begins again he does not talk about a fourth kind of Being but he is talking about nature and if read carefully we can see in it hints of the fourth kind of Being in the text when we contrast it to the other beginnings.

Notice that we might compose an interleaving as follows:

beings, men of earth
befindlichkeit, existence, to me on, Defense of Palamedes, means did not exist to do permit treason, System of things.
Pure Being, Parmenidian Stasis, greater mystery
verstehen, intelligibility, thought, knowledge as process of learning (dissipative ordering SS)
Process Being, Heraclitian Flux, lesser mysteries
rede, communication, chatter, nihilism, inauthenticity (autopoietic SS, cf Luhmann)
Hyper Being, Differance, -B-e-i-n-g- crossed out
incentive, persuasion, inclination, tendency, Care dispoistion (reflexive social SS)
Wild Being, Hierophant who initiates
Goddess at Gate, door to meta-system (DUAT). Helen child of Zeus and Leda (defended, we are persuaded of her innocence in the Encomium)
Ultra Being, God of the cult being initiated into.

So what we are seeing here when we compare Gorgias, Parmenides and the Existentiels of Heidegger is the correspondance with the Special Systems.

This is quite unexpected.

Gorgias brings the Antimony to Parmenides and in that preserves the structure of his own argument, and allows us to undersand more than we would have otherwise. His Academic nihilism is merely the inversion and negation of the the positive argument of Parmenides the Dogmatist. To this Sextus Empiricus introduces a third way which is similar to Buddhism in many ways. Basically the skeptic wants to keep the dialectic going at all costs and will even say things he does not really believe to keep the argument going. The skeptic is content in the process of the argument of the dialectic continuing. The Skeptic is the one who like Kant is critical of the Dogmatist and the Academic both. But since he will say what he does not really believe to keep the argument going he is seen as a threat to serious philosophical argumentation.

In general the Skeptic is the one whose words cannot be believed, and so you never know what he believes because he will keep the dialectic going at all costs, and he finds peace in that exploitative process, as long as it continues. He does not believe it will reach a conclusion, but is satisfied that the participants are trying.

The Nihilist on the other hand is one who is an academic and so will deny anything like Gorgias just for the heck of it. He is the one who has lost all meaning in his world, ultimately. Nihilism ends up with Alienation, Anomie or Madness. For instance, the obsession with Nihilism in Will to Power eventually drove Nietzsche insane. Achilles on the other hand loses meaning when he sees that the Acheans are no better than the Trojans (both steal women), and his response is doing nothing in the midst  of war (alienation from his comrades), and then Berzerker Mode once his friend Patroclus is killed (Madness). Alienation sometimes results in serial killings, suicides that take others with them, because the blame is projected outside the individual and exists in society.

Deleuze and Guattari deal with socially induced madness in Capitolism and Schizophrenia trying to understand it and create a philosophy at the level of Wild Being.

Badiou (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badiou) [Being and Event, transl. by Oliver Feltham; (New York: Continuum, 2005)] and Zizek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizek) in their own ways are going beyond this to try to understand Ultra Being. In Badiou the ultra-one is the ONE which appears out of the Multiple, and produces the countable ones. The Multiple is the absoute heterogeneity that Deleuze did not attain for all his talk of difference [Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, transl. by Louise Burchill; (Minnesota University Press, 1999)]. Zizek on the other hand uses Lacans (http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan) idea of jousissance and other tropes to describe singularities within the field psyche expressed by the registers Imaginary Symbolic and Real that form a Borromean Ring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borromean_rings).

http://roomthily.tumblr.com/post/219600589/trompe-le-monde-slavoj-zizek-on-hipsters-a

http://bit.ly/z7NPFg

I went to a world renowned university that no one knows about here in the USA.

It is called University of London. But because it is broken up into a number of Colleges all over London, no one quite notices that it is there. And certainly few in the US know it exists, because somehow they think that there is only Oxford and Cambridge that are “world renowned”.

For instance in this list it is broken up http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010-2011/top-200.html

But actually it is just one big institution http://www.london.ac.uk/colleges_institutes.html

“The University of London is a federal University and is one of the oldest, largest and most diverse universities in the UK. The teaching is carried by the 19 Colleges and Institutes that comprise the University.  When studying with the University you belong to a particular College as well as the University of London itself.” 

“Between the Colleges and Institutes we have over 120,000 students studying over 3700 courses. Not all of our students are actually located in London either: some study at the University of London Institute in Paris or in the Marine Biological station in Millport, Scotland and we have over 50,000 students studying by distance and flexible learning in 180 countries with the University of London International Programmes.”

So hopefully this will establish the University of London as world renowned, well except for those who live in the USA.

Of the schools that make up the University of London I attended the London School of Economics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_School_of_Economics
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/home.aspx

The Fulbright Commission states that “The London School of Economics and Political Science is the leading social science institution in the world”

These rankings would be higher I am sure if the various colleges were aggregated. We do not talk about individual colleges in Oxford or Cambridge.

Anyway, what was it like from1973 to 1982?

First of all it is in London which is the Culture capital of the world. So there are lots of cultural things to do there. But the flip side of that is that there is no student life. You only see other students in class. So the real draw of the University of London is in fact the cultural life of London. The school has become much bigger than I was there, but at that time it was almost invisible down an alley way, with fairly old buildings, but famous faculty. The most famous professor I actually had was Gellner who sent his time making fun of Wittgenstein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner).

If you are a student at one School you can take classes at any of the schools of the University of London so I audited classes at Kings College about Philosophy of Science, the schools speciality when I was there. I arrived just after Lakatos had Feyerabend teaching at the school. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos; He died the year I arrived.) It was very popular at the school at that time so I oriented my research toward Philosophy of Science even though I was in Sociology, and that was allowed at the school at that time. Basically once you got in you could follow where ever your research took you. I was rare at that time because I was interested in Continental Philosophy and trying to apply it to understand philosophy of science problems. My dissertation was called The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence. (http://archonic.net/disab.html)

Also you could use the libraries at Senate House, University College London, whose philosophy library is incredible. Basically they buy everything published in Philosophy within the commonwealth I believe. And across the street is the British Museum. So I would check philosophy books out of the Senate House library and then go across the street to read them in the British Museum Library, and anything they did not have was available in the British Museum Library. So basically any book was available, and so I dedicated myself to reading what ever fascinated me. Then when I was tired of reading I would go to movies. For instance you could walk across the Waterloo Bridge and go to the National Film Theater across the Thames. And there were myriad other cinemas, playhouses etc that one could pass the time with, and if you were not doing that then there were teashops, and pubs to visit. And just walking though London itself was a fascinating experience because there were people there from all over the world, and the architecture in every part of town was different based on when it was built. At that time there were lots of interesting bookstores and books were fairly cheap, even though they were dear on a students budget. I especially liked going to the various museums over and over to see the new exhibits, but also the permanent displays. In those days you could live in a bedsit for 10 pounds a week. So there was enough money to eat out every night at the myriad restaurants with foods from all over the world and to buy books. I got there before they raised the fees on International students and so I think my tuition was about about 250 pounds per semester, and after three or four years that went down to 10 pounds per semester continuation fees. My fees did not go up even though they raised them on new students so I lucked out on that score.

I went to do a masters. But when I went to my courses they handed out bibliographies of about 300 books for each of four classes. I asked my advisor how I could read 1200 books in a year, and he said that the other students had spent 3 years reading those books, and they were just suppose to brush up and read those that they had not read already. So when I asked how I could do that with only 24 units of Sociology before arriving, my advisor said one path was to try to get into the Ph.D. program because the masters was for those who did not want to go on to a Ph.D. So I transfered to M.Phil, and then to Ph.D. after I produced some papers that was the equivalent to writing a masters, but was just a rite of passage and not a degree. So I went on to do the Ph.D. I made the mistake of not writing anything until the end. And then I wrote too much and had trouble condensing it. Eventually I had to write on a subject that I did not know as well so that I would be limited in what I could write. I had written 1000 pages of working papers when I finally decided I had read enough, and then they asked me to summarize the argument in that, and that was a fairly long outline, and then I was asked to define my terms and I was in the letter C when I realized I would never graduate at this rate, so I picked another subject and wrote my dissertation on that and it passed, not without drama. And then I was done once the External had decided based on my orals that I actually knew what I was talking about. The orals went all over the place, and lasted a long time, several hours, and I was questioned about all kinds of things not even related to my dissertation. I was glad I had spent so much time reading irrelevant material because it allowed me to pass that exam. But when I was finished I asked my main advisor whether it had taken me too long to finish and he said I was about average. I think they had 15 years as the limit at that time and I came in at nine years. After the orals he said now I had a General Education and I could get on with my real studies. I was shocked at that because I thought I had specialized, but rather he saw that as laying the ground work for future research rather than an end point. And it is true I have gone on to do lots more research over the years in many subjects. I had picked a subject that fascinated me. When I read a book I read the things mentioned in that book that fascinated me. So I was always interested in what I was reading, and it took me all over the map in terms of subjects, but that was good because I knew about a lot of different subjects when it came to the wide ranging questions in the orals. Everything was based on the final Dissertation that had been written. No courses were necessary. Mastery of ones field was what was expected.

How to survive a thesis defence
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jw/viva.html
Survive your viva http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/sep/16/highereducation.postgraduate

Preparing for the PhD Viva
http://www.eeng.nuim.ie/~tward/documents/phdviva.pdf

When I was there I called up Ph.Ds from the USA from interlibrary loan and compared them to the ones I was reading at University of London. There was no comparison. This was extremely sobering to realize the difference between education in the UK and education in America. And I believe that the same kind of disparity exists between Germany and the UK. Defenses are public in Germany. In the UK it is by someone from another University. There is no departmental committee that one has to please. One  never knows who one’s external is going to be.

I did a PhD and did NOT go mad http://public.randomnotes.org/richard/PhDtalk.html
Actually I did go Mad.

How not to get a PhD .. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/nov/08/highereducation.books
I overestimated what it would take and did way more than was necessary in terms of writing, but in terms of the Oral exams I was glad I studied lots of irrelevant subjects.

Chances of getting a PH.D. — PhD ‘failure’ rates revealed

“At LSE, a 45 per cent qualification rate compares to the 67 per cent benchmark.”

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=310709

Ph.D. Comic
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

http://bit.ly/wRLO80

Emergent Design
Explorations in Systems Phenomenology in relation to Ontology, Hermeneutics and the Meta-dialectics of Design
http://about.me/emergentdesign

Schemitization is the projection of an a priori ordering before experience which is a posteriori. Kant thought that we projected Space and Time and the Categories prior to all experience and that is why we thought causality for instance was out there in nature. Causality is a concept we need in order to define Freedom, which we imagine as a-causal. Anyway General Schemas Theory looks at science and art and tries to ferret out all the projected patterns that are a priori. Evidently no one has had this idea before in our tradition. Not sure why. Anyway in my Dissertation I try to use the fact we are schematizing in REM Dreams, Fantasy, Mundane Consciousness, and Hypnogogic Dreams, but in each differently to anchor four points of view that appear in Meta-novels like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit/Ghost/Mind which are Author, Reader, Character, Narrator, and these four are the fundamental viewpoints on any design which is just a prior schematization of something artificial we might seed to create with emergent properties. This is a quick summary. My point above is that it is vision and sound that we use for this at a distance orientation, and that touch, smell and taste are not at a distance in the same way. Smell operates at a distance but it is not orienting. But sound and vision are orienting. Touch is orienting only to the immediate connected environment directly adjacent to the person. Taste is not orienting at all. So if we were to rank the senses in terms of orienting as a characteristic we would see them as follows:

Vision most orienting
Sound
Touch ———– only directly adjacent things
Smell
Taste least orienting

Normal REM like dreams are odd because we feel touch in them, but we are also normally outside our bodies looking on in dreams, and so although we are touching in dreams we are distanced from it. In Hypnogogic Dreams on the other hand we are inside our bodies usually trapped with the vision coming toward us, when we cannot move, and we directly feel the tension between the space we are in and that of the Hypnogogic vision. So in Hypnogogic dreams orientation is very strong, but what comes at us in the vision normally does not actually reach us before we wake up.

In normal consciousness we are engaged in the world completely immersed in it and relating and orienting to actual concrete objects, usually at a distance. In Fantasy, Imagination, we are withdrawn from the world in trance (Objectivity is the inverse of this state, also a fantasy, but that there is a viewpoint on the objects that is absolute, i.e. from the objects themselves.) In fantasy we are focused inwardly, in trance, but schematizing that which we imagine, and disengaged from the objects around us in the mundane world.

In all of these states of consciousness we are schematizing, but from different points of view that show up in the meta-novel as Author, Reader, Character, and Narrator. My argument is that schematization is very deep and consciousness naturally gives us at least four point of view on it as ways we relate to the schematization, and we draw on all four of those in the process of Design, and I call that cooperative borrowing on phenomenological viewpoints a Quadralectic, basing it on the ideas of Hegel from Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit which also has those points of view implicitly within it but where he explicitly develops Dialectics and Trialectics (Work). Peirce develops Hegels ideas of Trialectics into his principles First, Second, Third which is in his philosophy and is the basis for understanding semiotics.

See http://www.quora.com/Why-arent-there-smells-in-dreams/answer/Laszlo-B.-Tamas/comment/579127?__snids__=27394737#comment579270

http://bit.ly/y9GWjs

I to am amazed at what it takes to produce the synthesis that on the surface allows us some affordance, like asking and answering questions on Quora, and that it is made up of a lot of ascii nonsense, that makes making sense possible.

But there is indeed a post-programming age but it is going to be worse. Software Engineering basically deals with the tame aspects of Software, which we try to use to do practical things in this new medium which is the first world wide interactive hyper medium, because it is made up of many other media.
The reason that software is so strange is that it is the only cultural artifact that embodies what Plato called the Third Kind of Being and Derrida called DifferAnce (differing and deferring). Thus it embodies Hyper Being. See my electronic book called Wild Software Meta-systems for more details. So the next thing will be something at the next higher meta-level which is Wild Being discovered by Merleau-Ponty. And I think that has to do with Artificial Life, Consciousness and Sociality. It is the artificial intelligence programming techniques like self-rewriting code, expert systems, genetic programming, neural nets, etc. that is wild instead of tame but still it is software. It is automatic writing, in the sense that it is automated writing. And when the automatic is automated to produce itself, reference itself, organize itself, design itself, etc then things get really strange and it goes beyond our understanding, it seems opaque to us. And what is happening now is that multiple opaque techniques are being combined. Kurzeweil says that the moment that the machines are more intelligent than we are is the singularity. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity).

But this is not half of the story. The real story is that we are climbing the stairway to nowhere, i.e. up through the meta-levels of Being. And we have unleashed an artifact called software which will transform everything in our culture as it already has in many ways. But we have not really entered the realm of Wild Being yet. Deleuze with Guattari tried to build a philosophy there in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. But it is even more difficult to think than DifferAnce. Each meta-level is exponentially more difficult to think. But as we combine multiple AI techniques, which depends on the reflexivity of software code itself, then things will start to get really strange. But the singularity is beyond that where we enter Ultra Being. The fact that multi-technique AI devices are smarter than us means little. We will adapt to them as assistants. They will be data slaves that know their place. They will be the automated equivalent of the Mechanical Turk. But when we get to Ultra Being then we will have real problems because that really is a singularity, and a singularity really is incomprehensible. The very fact that Vinge or Kurzweil can define what their singularity is means it is not really a singularity, but merely a threshold, that like other thresholds we will adapt to it and it will adapt to us.

It is not the speeding up of technology that is the problem, it is the qualitative shifts that occur when we have cultural artifacts that embody kinds of Being, that have always been implicit in the worldview and are now becoming explicit. So we will slowly get used to real AI devices that are opaque to our understanding helping us understand more and better. And we will adapt to our whole environment becoming not just smart but actually artificially intelligent, living and social. But what we will not be able to adapt to is what comes after that when the real singularity of Ultra Being is embodied. In myth it is called the Beast of Earth, the Anti-Christ, the Dajal, etc. We don’t know what it is, and when it arises we won’t know how to comprehend it. The true singularity is what is scary, not the pseudo-singularity of intelligent machines which is just the passage into Wild Being.

What we do know about it is that it is what Being looks like from the point of view of existence, and it is the difference that makes a difference like a domain wall between emptiness and Void, two dual nonduals. It is already with us, and has been with us from the beginning of the Indo-European worldivew. But it has always been implicit, part of the implicate order of the worldivew, but when it becomes explicitly embodied somehow that is going to be a true transformation of our culture and society. Speculating on what that might be is really worth while. But I have not got a clue. It is an emergent event that is off the scale. Kurzeweil is right to be worried but not about machines more intelligent than we are. What is coming from within ourselves is the truly Alien. The Alien does not come from Out There, but what is truly alien comes from deep within us, from the worldview itself.

Now my own speculation is that it is the end of the Metaphysical era, when the Heterochronic Era begins. And now that I have named it, and invoked it then it has probably begun. We have been trying to end the Metaphysical Era for almost a century. But everything we say is the end is just the post-post-post-modern, and just another intensification of the nihilism of the metaphysical that started with Thales. But I think it really started with Dunne in the 1920s who postulated multidimensional time, which was explored by Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, the most popular book ever written (And for once the Movie was good too.) But the real turning point came when we hit F-Theory, which is the next dimension up from M-theory, which resolves the differences between the various string theories. F-Theory says that there are two orthogonal timelines in the 12th dimension, and three in the 14th dimension, and I am postulating that there are four in the 16th dimension. Orthogonal Timelines is exactly what we need to make Multiple worlds theory comprehensible.

So my hypothesis is that the singularity of Ultra Being is when we have the emergent event of the appearance of something that embodies the splitting of timelines that are orthogonal. Something directly connected with the Multiverse. We may already be seeing that with Blackholes, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and the acceleration of the expansion of our universe. What are we expanding into increasingly fast and where is the non-conserved energy coming from that makes the acceleration occur?

The multiverse as the meta-system of the universe, i.e. the operating system that gives it resources, such as room to expand into, and the energy fueling its expansion, and a place for the rule of physics to break down in black holes, and what is there before the Big Bang or Bounce as the case may be. I call that the Pluriverse in General Schemas Theory. It has to have orthogonal time in order to house the other universes side by side without interfering too much with each other, except via quantum phenomena as David Deutsch says.

I say we began to enter the Heterochronic Era with Dunne in the Twenties, and the Philosophy of that transition is in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: From Ereignis, where he identifies the difference between Sein (Being) and Seyn (Beyng) which was shortly there after. And this was brought to the consciousness of the public though Tolkein’s playing with Dunne’s idea in Lord of the Rings. And the last piece of the puzzle fell into place with F-theory appearing that had to have orthogonal timelines.

If that is true then the singularity of Ultra Being probably also already is manifest. But what it is we do not know yet. But I opine that it is something past AI, Alife, Asocial that embodies multiple orthogonal time streams, something that takes us into the Meta-system fully from our restricted economy of Being and brings us to understand the existence underlying Being. What ever it is we can be assured that it is an indicator of the Homeward path, i.e. the path to the nondual core of the Western worldview.

http://bit.ly/A4rilb

The number of people who died in the last century and the first part of this century by Wars that were the aftermath of Colonialism and due to Ideological struggle between Fascism, Communism, and Capitalism, and the  number which will probably die in this century still to come. All of human history is fought with violence. But modern violence is on such a massive scale that it dwarfs other conflicts in history.

Another really sad thing is that we are destroying our planet, and other species at such an alarming rate, far faster than human destruction of nature has ever been able to go previously.

Another sad thing is that now that capitalism is unleashed on the planet via globalization in an unconstrained fashion the destruction, death only are accelerating.

I track all this back to the relation between Being and Existence in the Western worldview, which is unique in our worldview, and underpins the development of technology, which is underpinned by the nihilism in the worldview, which is unique to this particular worldview, that has become dominant and has destroyed countless others though colonization and world conquest.

Ours is a beautiful planet, and it is very unfortunate that no only will our kids probably be less well off because of the debt we have heaped on their shoulders, but also they will have a worse environment, and have to deal with the fall out of our hubris, neglect, destructiveness, over expansion of the economy, globalization of the world, and generally increasing world wide conflict.

The only way out of this dilemma is through the radical transformation of our society for the better, and that looks very unlikely. To have had such excess and wealth and to have squandered it and the opportunities we had is extremely unfortunate.

http://bit.ly/zAsQXy