Alpha Male in Mammals for the most part has a territory he defends and perhaps a harem of Females that he tries to keep herded in that territory, and the Beta Males are usually younger Males that try to take the territory and the harem away from the Alpha male, usually in violent struggles, but sometimes merely by shows of force with little violence.

There are also Gamma Males which have given up on ever being the Alpha mail and essentially roam around outside of any Alpha Male’s territory.

There are also basically two types of females, those in the harem of the Alpha male and those like the Gamma males that roam on their own.

Point is some studies I read long ago shows the population is bimodal, with the Alpha-Beta-harem mode and the occasional pairings of Gama and escaped or outcast females.

What is rarely mentioned is that these two modes are Matriarchal and Patriarchal, the Matriarchal mode is where the female in the harem stays with the father and is visited by the outside male, and here brother raises the kids in human society.

It is not an ideal world where at some time women ruled the men as many have fantasized.

The Patriarchal mode is where there are exchanges of females between families in humans and the wife goes to live with the husbands family. In this case there is a contract between the wife and the husband because they are free agents in the other mode of the population.

The Alpha-Beta-Harem mode comes into play when fertility is a sparse resource. When fertility is not such a scarce resource then it is possible to have an economy trading women which is good for genetic variety. Genetic variety in the case of Matriarchy is when husbands are brought in on a temporary basis and visit their wives at the fathers home.

These are two different kinship systems that are based on the bimodal population of mammals in general.

Anyway this is what I remember from a series of articles I read in Science a long time ago. Maybe there is more up to date information available on this Mammalian basis for the distinction between Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Pharmacon (Doubly outcast) males within primitive social structures.

http://bit.ly/wPJzUU

Quora answer: Does God Exist?
How do I confirm that God Exists?
Kent Palmer http://kdp.me Copyright 2011
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DCBsH5nzWjukfCvqiTVZ1uiGtoXDbAOZhDHH7OxlZmc/edit?hl=en_US

By the author.
Figure 1: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1l7XTVod_z02S0QFrVwWlofuI-JYfVXMHF71NF0EAnAQ/edit?hl=en_US

Answer: God does not Exist, nor does He have Being, He is too exalted for that.

God does not have the standing of either Existence (creation) or Being (illusion) but a different standing called Manifestation. God manifests He is not a being or an existent.

The term Manifestation is taken from The Essence of Manifestation by M. Henry who uses it for the way Meister Eckhart describes the nature of God.

Trying to confirm that God Exists or has Being is like trying to make something impossible necessary or sufficient.

If something is absolute then it can have no contingency associated with it.

So let us consider the nature of Being.

If God had Being then he would only be possible in relation to the Indo-european languages and its speakers.

Being only exists in Indo-European languages, and so only Indo-European speakers could appreciate His nature, and that is a contingency, that there is a singular language group among all the others that used to exist on the planet that has Being in it as a concept and a grammatical structure. Also that grammatical structure is broken, and so Being (and Having) is evidently a construction from many roots, and therefore even in Indo-European it is not part of the original design of the language, but something that seems to have emerged at some point by putting together many different roots to get across this artificial concept of Being.

If God as Universal or an Absolute then this contingency prevents His being thought of as having Being. (Having is just a broken up in Indo-European grammars.) This is particularly true since our notion of God comes from a blending of the philosophical notions of Aristotle, and the and Semitic sources. The Hebrews had not idea of Being, because it is not in their language. In Aristotle and Plato God (as distinct from the gods) is basically an abstraction that solves the problem of the inconsistencies in Polytheism from a philosophical point of view.

Therefore, God, if Absolute, cannot have Being because Being is a contingency since it is associated only with one language group and no others. If God is not Absolute then He is not the God worshiped by the Monotheistic religions.Permission Granted by Publisher

http://books.google.com/books/about/God_without_being.html?id=FcUIg8jOXqUC ———————————————————————————————-

In the appendix is a collection of references where I was trying to determine the roots for Existence in Hebrew and then cross correlate that with what the same root means in the other language. This turned out to be way more difficult than I imagined. One should be aware that when ever they use Being as the definition of what the Hebrew or Arabic terms mean above then that is spurious because there is only existence in Semitic languages due to its uniqueness to Indo-European languages.

Now my own feeling is that Egyptian is the oldest language, then because of structural purity Arabic comes next and then Hebrew and Aramaic come after that. And as I remember Egyptian has two roots for existence wnn and iw, and I believe they correlate roughly with the meaning difference between HYH (iw) in Hebrew and WJD (wnn?) in Arabic. So I offer as a hypothesis that one of these languages later languages focused on one kind of existence and the other focused on the other kind of existence in Egyptian. This needs to be a point of further research. See the end of this post for more information on Egyptians types of existence. I have a reference that says that HYH is related to iw. But for the relation of WJD to wnn, or wnt that is still up in the air. That is because wnn seems to be related to change, while iw is related to life, and breath, while WJD is related to ‘what is found’ and ecstasy. HYH in Arabic seems to mean to blow or to shoo, and is associated with breath, which is one of the meanings of HYH in Hebrew, but the root meaning in Hebrew for HYH seems to Fall or Occur but it also means breath. A related word in Arabic is Hayy which means to live. WJD in Arabic on the other hand means what is found. So there is no clear relation of one with the other in the three languages that is obvious.

This recalls the distinction in Arabic between Ruh and Nafs, which is like the difference between Soul and Spirit in English. Ruh means breathing, and Nafs means what is breathed, i.e. the air. Soul comes from a word that means the sea, which has waves like breath, and Spirit means something more like the air being breathed. Of course, the two are two sides of the same coin.

Similarly it could be that WJD and HYH seem to be two sides of the same coin, and may be related to the two kinds of existence in Egyptian. I could not determine what the WJD root means in Hebrew so that will have to be a subject of further study.

However, I think we know enough to continue our argument concerning the confirmation of the Existence of God now that we have determined that He has no Being. The next thing we want to do is to try to show He has no existence either. And the argument is that if God is Absolute then if there is any contingency involved that then it cannot be a description of God. Now in Arabic God (Allah) has the attribute of Life. But interestingly does not have the attribute of Existence. Now Muslims get around this by saying that Allah has Inherent Existence and is the only matter to have this standing (http://aa.trinimuslims.com/f47/the-attribute-of-al-wujud-existance-9689/) gives a good rendition of the standard argument. However, personally I think this lack of existence in the names of God in Islam is important and that the idea of splitting existence is the wrong approach to the problem. However, it is understandable that the Arabs did that because WJD was the only standing that they had in their language, and it is ridiculous to think that things found in creation have standing but God doesn’t. But I think they missed a significant hint that God might have a standing more exalted than we can attribute to things. The Quran makes clear that Allah is not associated with any thing. And so Muslims have gone wrong in their theology giving God the same standing as things, just because they did not have any further standing in their language. On the other hand God does have the attribute of Living in Islam, and so it is easier to say that HYH is an attribute of God as the giver of life and the Living himself. Yet in Islam it appears that although He has the name the one who gives existence, He does not have the attribute of existence Himself. So there is an asymmetry here, and that asymmetry to me is significant.

So what I want to argue is that God (Allah) does not exist, and does not have inherent existence. However just as Existence is broader than Being what ever standing that God has is broader than the standing of existence and encompasses existence. So in a narrow sense God has existence and being to the extent that He has a standing that is a higher logical type than that of Existence or Being. But this is a contradiction if the levels of Being, Existence and Manifestation are meta-levels because meta-levels and higher logical types are duals of each other. But for the sake of argument what I would like to propose is that God has the standing beyond Existence called Manifestation. I want to suggest that the reason there are two roots of existence in Egyptian is because the interspace (barzak) between them is manifestation. Arabic and Hebrew seems to have each concentrated on one of those kinds of Existence, i.e. Arabic took the one related to change (wnn), and the Hebrew took the one (iw) related to life and breath. The rationale here is that what changes in existence is what is found. And this is like Nafs or Spirit. On the other hand the breathing Ruh is like the iw and HYH. If you are not breathing then you are not going to find anything. They also chose different roots to pin these concepts to and only HYH and iw are directly related. But essentially what we seen in the Egyptian is that the difference or gap between the two kinds of existence indicates a deeper standing than the two types of existence. Further we know that there are two interpretations of existence in nondual terms which are emptiness and void. So Emptiness is the one associated with breath or life and thus the possibility of the inward and Void is the one associated with becoming and flux of change in the outward. If we posit that the Egyptian twin types of existence are the most primordial and we see the Arabic and the Hebrew each concentrating on one of those as their key term then it is possible to see the gap between these pair of existences and this pair of interpretations of existence as indicating that there is a deeper nondual, which I call manifestation. In Egyptian there is a third kind of existence that fulfills this middle role which is xpr which indicates creation. So in effect the gap between the dual nonduals emptiness and void leads to the deeper nondual of manifestation, and the gap from the point of view of existence itself is related to the xpr whose sign is the dung beetle, which rolls a little ball of dung before it. The Egyptians saw that as an analogy of God creating the world and keeping it turning. Also it is interesting that the Dung beetle does that to build a cocoon for its young, and so we also get an image of the “men of earth” i.e. those coming out of the dung ball when they are born as creatures come  out of and then return to the earth.

It should be noted that like Hinduism behind the polytheism of Egypt was the concept of God as singular, so that other gods became his attributes. This God was a trinity with three names Amun, Ra, and Atun. Atun was the disc of the sun, Ra the manifestation of things by the light of the sun, and Amun, the hidden God. Moses could be seen as a Heretic who picked the hidden God as his Lord, just like Akhenaten picked Atun as the one God. The one reference to someone like Moses in Egyptian history seems to relate him to Akhenaten by accusing him of the same heresy that resulted in Akhenaten being erased from Egyptian history. Some say that Akhenaten and Moses are the same but now we know that Akhenaten selected Atun as his one god, which was an error because that is just one of the trinitarian aspects of Amun Ra Atun. Notice that Ra, or manifestation is the middle element between Amun and Atun, the hidden and the manifest sides of God. Many thing that Christian trinitarianism came from Egyptian trinitarianism. The Horus/Osiris myth is about an attempted resurrection. God the Father might be thought of as the Hidden God, the Sun could be thought of as like the outward manifestation of God in the world, such as in the Son. And the Ra could be associated with the Holy Ghost which is the way that the outward aspect of god manifests the world which is brought out of hiding by being created. Personally I think this might be too simplistic an analogy.

But, to return to the argument at hand, then what we want to say is that because there are two kinds of existence, this introduces contingency into existence because there cannot be two kinds of absolute. And so the standing of Existence does not apply to God (Allah, Yhwh, El) because it applies to created things. In the Egyptian one root has to do with creation xpr, and the other two with becoming flux of creation, and life/breath. Things in existence, i.e. things we find are creations (xpr) of God who gives existence to them, but God since He is not like a thing cannot have the same standing as the things he created. To say so is in Islam called Shirk. And Inherent Existence is still existence. It is connecting Existence with Necessity, and saying that all other things are not necessary existences. In effect the standard theological argument splits existence too, but gives God one part of it and says that the other part of it concrete things found in the world are somehow unreal because of the other kind of existence god has is more real somehow. This converts the existence of things into an illusion, and has the same effect as projecting Being on them which is the Indo-European ruse.

But even so by splitting existence between God and things one is introducing contingency and basically doing what Christian Theology does which is to say God is the supreme Being producing OntoTheological Metaphysics. Muslim Theologians have followed suit and produced a similar conundrum with the idea of ‘inherent necessary existence’ as opposed to the ‘accidental unnecessary existence’ of things. But Quran is quite clear that God does not share the same standing with things He created. And makes this point explicit by not making Existing an attribute of God.

So in effect although God does not have Being or Exist we can say He manifests, and this process in Sufism is called Tajalliyat of His attributes or Sifat. Thus the standing of God is that of his Sifat, or attributes, and that is called Tajalliat, unfolding, and I propose that this different standing of manifestation is doubly nondual, in that it has no other dual to it, like the duality between the nonduals emptiness and void.

So God Manifests and to us that is an epiphany, but He does not Exist nor does He have Being, and that Manifestation is perfectly nondual and unique in its deep nonduality. Manifestation is the opposite of xpr which is the created aspect of existence which is another way to fill the gap between the other two types of existence.

So you cannot confirm the existence of God nor His Being, because each of those standings have some sort of contingency to them. One is the contingency of illusion produced in only one family of languages. The other is the contingency of the splitting of existence and its interpretations. God is Absolute then he has to be one and unique, and that is the nature of the next deeper standing that is seen in the Tajalliyat, or unfolding, of His Manifestation in Hs attributes. He is too exalted to either exist like things, or have being like illusions. Some forms of Buddhism like DzogChen and Hua Yen, or Tien Tai approach the indication of this deeper nondual state which is the fourth turning of the Wheel of Dharma. But I think it is only in Sufism that it is made explicit. A good place to see this indication is in the Precious Pearl of Jami where he talks about the differences between the Philosophers, Theologians and Sufis in their interpretation of God. However, the way it is stated in Jami is very subtle because he did not want to get himself into too much trouble by saying God does not exist.Permission Given by Publisher http://www.sunypress.edu/p-1622-the-precious-pearl.aspx
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_precious_pearl.html?id=Xq1rm85Qzz8C

The basic argument here is that you cannot confirm of God anything that has any contingency what so ever if God is Absolute, and both Being and Existence have contingency so the standing that God has different from illusion of projections of being or existing things must be something different, and that something different is indicated by the interspace or gap between the two types of existence that are in the Egyptian language but are each taken up singularly in either Arabic or Hebrew. This duality between the types of existence that creates a discontinuity (between inward and outward) or gap is indicated by xpr which is the term  for created existence that is kept moving by God. And the dual of this created existence xpr is the difference between the nondual interpretations of Being as emptiness and void. So you can get to created existence by realizing that Existence is ultimately split or dual, or by the difference in the two nondual interpretations which allows you to look beyond creation to the creator which does not have existence or being, but manifests His Sifat as a completely independent standing.

So there is an existential structure here, that has always existed, but no one every bothered to compare the different kinds of existence in the different languages before including me. The only chink in the argument is the transformation of the flux of wnn into WJD. We say that what we find is the flux of existence. But WJD also has the meaning of ecstasy which was taken over into the Latin. Heidegger seizes on this meaning to say that is the projection of the a priori synthetic manifolds that we then intuit. Thus the wnn is the flux of Heraclitus or the Buddhists but the WJD gives us a perspective on it which is phenomenological, it is what We find that is always already there. So there are three moments to this, one is the ecstasy of projection of apriori synthetic manifolds, the other is the intuiting of them and thus finding them, and the third is the flux itself as something objective. All this is merged together in the WJD, while the original Egyptian root has no perspective in it but only talks about the flowing. So in a sense WJD adds the kind of structure we see in Kant and Heidegger which idealizes and subjectives existence. So WJD adds more structure to the Egyptian root while HYH sticks with the given structure in Egyptian root.

However, what is fascinating is how there is a split between iw and wnn which is perhaps comes to structure the difference between HYH and WJD, but which shows that existence was split orginally, and this split is isomorphic in the Egyptian to the interpretations of Existence as emptiness (iw) and void (wnn). xpr fills the gap by creation, and manifestation as the deeper nondual, or the nondual nondual fills it with nonduality. That standing for God is beyond existence but neither Transcendent nor Immanent. Rather God manifests his Sifat in this nondual stage before the creation of existence. It is neither in-time no out-of-time. All the transcendental and immanent projections of these attributes of God refer to our seeing God in relation to the world that has the structure of Heaven/Earth//Mortal/Immortal (i.e. God). When we project God as the Supreme Being or the Inherent Necessity we are merely introducing a contingency (ourselves) which cannot be associated with the absolute. God as absolute can neither Be nor Exist, but manifests via Tajalliat or unfolding and we come to experience and know that as an epiphany.

“Phenomenal being is utter and total darkness.
It is only the manifestation of the Real in it that gives it light.” Ibn Atallah

“Phenomenal being is what is formed by power and manifested to eye-witnessing. Darkness is the opposite of light and is not in existence. The light of existence is illuminated i.e. becomes light, and the manifestation of the Real is His tajalli.” Ibn ‘Ajiba

WAKENING ASPIRATION (Iqâdh Al-Himam): COMMENTARY ON THE HIKAM of IIbn Atallah  by Ibn ‘Ajiba See http://bewley.virtualave.net/hikcom1.html

Note: This argument self destructs because it posits that what is a standing at a meta-level (six) is also a higher logical type which is a paradox even perhaps an absurdity. This is because the intellect cannot reach to this level of nonduality because any level of nonduality is aconceputal and aexperiential, but the deeper you go into nonduality the more opaque to the mind yet transparent to the heart it becomes.

For more background information see appendix at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DCBsH5nzWjukfCvqiTVZ1uiGtoXDbAOZhDHH7OxlZmc/edit?hl=en_US This includes the letters seeking permission to use these book covers here.

http://bit.ly/As8mWj

I really don’t know about this band. But I was asked to answer so I watched the video and read the lyrics. The lyrics are more nihilistic than existentialist. Strange to say but Existentialism is about hope, at least Sartre’s version of it because it contends that each of us has absolute freedom to be who we are in a world without meaning. Nihilism is on the other hand about the loss of meaning. So Existentialism is a reaction to the nihilism inherent in the Western worldview.

Since the question has been brought up this is a good time to consider this duality between existentialism and nihilism. Nihilism results in alienation and anomie. This is because the world that we are caught up in, find ourselves sooner or later is realized to be inauthentic and a sham. This is especially true of youth when they realize the conventions of ordinary middle class society is not what they thought it was when they look under the surface. I tend to go back to the first use of the term which was in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathers_and_Sons) where there is a young man who believes in Science and does not believe in the traditional mores of society. This is seen as very destructive of society by the older characters. But eventually this was radicalized by Nietzsche in to the idea that all truth is merely a lie. The basic problem was eventually seen to be with Being itself, and Existence was a concept that was not overloaded so it became the center of attention for authors like Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Heidegger and other modern philosophers especially after World War II when after two World wars there was disillusionment with our claims of civilization. Given the number of wars worldwide since then and the threat of nuclear holocaust and the Cold War this view has only continued to intensify. Each generation discovers this anew for themselves as nihilism increases.

But Existentialism at least as seen by Sartre was thought to be an antidote for this. In other words if you realize that everything is meaningless and that alienation is the rule, then there is nothing to tie you to a given interpretation of the world, and therefore you are free to remake yourself as you see fit and manufacture meaning in your own life. Since Nihilism is directly related to Being, it is felt that by stepping outside of the influence of Being it might be possible to reverse the essence precedes existence orientation and instead realize that existence precedes essence. It merely says that you have to exist before you can be something. It recognizes that existence is more basic than Being. I have recounted the relation between Being and Existence in other posts. So I won’g recount that again here.

It is easy for youth to feel hopeless once they realize that the world they are in is inauthentic and conventional, and there seems to be no way out. However, this is extremely unfortunate for them and for society, and this feeling is picked up and amplified by the media, and songs like this.

So what is the answer. It is unfortunate that rebellion of youth is almost always negative and self destructive. It is possible also to rebel positively, i.e. by tenaciously and with perseverance doing what you can to change your world, even though that is for most of us close to impossible. Yet the valiant attempt produces a life worth living and meaning in ones life, and virtue, i.e. the opposite of Nihilism. Early on Nietzsche called these people Free Spirits, that is people who create their own values. There are people who do this and they are usually called Activists.  And of course these activists, like Greg Mortinson (http://www.threecupsoftea.com/) for instance, all pick something different to change in the world, and set about it single handedly and dedicate their lives to the effort. So the variety of the attempts to change things is bewildering, and most fail to change anything at all, but their cause, what ever it is keeps them going in the face of the disaster that is the world and also generates meaning for others in the face of nihilism.

But how do we get youth to rebel in a positive way rather than a negative way, when each person is isolated in their own world with family, school, friends and where what society is pushing is alcohol, drugs, mindless entertainment, negative messages in music and pop culture about the meaninglessness of life, and how suicide is the only out like the example given here in this question. Occupy Wallstreet seems to be an answer. It was just an idea that came out of nowhere and caught on. Perhaps we can move on from occupying the empty places in our society adjacent to the centers of power and injustice, to actually dwelling in the world in a way that transforms it. This thing normally fizzles out, but it is almost enough to give us hope that the transformative power of youth rebellion might be brought to bear on our most pressing problems, and at the same time generate meaning to counter the pervasive nihilism in youth culture.

TS Eliot said it all in the Wasteland concerning the nihilism we are experiencing in the world. But then he wrote Four Quartets that searches for an answer to that despair. We all need to write our own Four Quartets, where we reach back into our own history for the resources to go on in the face of the pervasive nihilism we experience to create our own meaning as free spirits and to weave that together with the meaning created by others until the fabric gives us a world worth living in so that dreams of suicide are not our best moments.

http://bit.ly/x5tkvr

Who said Wittgenstein is all that great. Putting him between Kant and Nietzsche is a sacrilege from the view point of Continental Philosophy, Hegel belongs there. Wittgenstein is just the nihilistic opposite of Heidegger according to Stanley Rosen in Nihilism. My view is that all Western Philosophers are Sophists in Plato’s sense of the word, even Plato with the puppet he manipulates called Socrates on his hand. In the end you cannot distinguish between Socrates and the Sophists which he is at war with. It is ultimately impossible to make a non-nihilistic distinction here because saying they are foreign and take money to talk to you like modern psychotherapists just begs the question. If their ideas seem simple to you I suggest you try Hegel on for size. Hegel who was misplaced in your series. (Cf. Deleuze The Logic of Sense) Hegel understood everything about the Western worldview, and Blake saw it in a Vision. Nietzsche is just cleaning up after the master sculpture has done his work. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are setting on the side lines watching. While Kant is desperately trying to save the paradise of Reason in the Enlightenment which has not broken down into the Terror that Hegel will see as yet. Nietzsche merely sums up and shows us that madness is coming, called the Twentieth Century with Three World Wars, two hot and one cold.

http://bit.ly/ywe0hb

I want to thank Ali McMillan for his very lucid answer. Mine won’t be so lucid I am afraid.

I had a year long course on Nietzsche where we read about everything he wrote, and I just listened to the Course of Bernstein (http://bernsteintapes.com/) on Kant that is on tape available on the Internet. So of course I am no expert, but I have looked into the matter. Key here is Bernstein’s even more amazing lecture series on Hegel. I really just listened to the course on Kant to make sure I had not gotten anything wrong in my own studies. What I learned from the Regressive reading of Kant done by Bernstein is that he is a much deeper  philosopher than I thought. I was caught up in the architecture of his thought, and had missed a lot of details. On the other hand Hegel was someone I had failed to understand over and over, and it was only because of Bernstein I could get any handle on him at all, and that has only been recently. He was always a mystery to me. But between Bernstein and Zizek I think I am starting to get some idea, but it is going to take a lot more work to feel comfortable with him. But the fact that I got through the Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit and lived to tell the tale is definitely a big step forward. Bernstein says flat our that all Continental Philosophers are merely doing rifts on different aspects Hegel’s thought and he describes Nietzsche is just a good Hegelian, which I found a bit shocking. Bernstein does a deflationary reading of Hegel, i.e. reading as little into his high sounding language as possible. Previously, I had read almost every book on Dialectics. What I was most surprised by is the fact than none of those books that I remember, mention the fact that Hegel has not just Dialectics but also with respect to Work developed Trialectics as well right at the point on of before the transition to spirit. Can’t believe that no one noticed that before. So that is the value of reading original texts  for yourself. Sometimes there is something in there that no one noticed before. I use that as a basis to develop Quadralectics in my Dissertation http://about.me/emergentdesign. I could only find one other person who had used that term prior to me, and he meant something completely different by it than I meant, or at least that is my interpretation. Odd that I could not find anyone who had made a serious attempt to build on Hegel’s insight before. So there is gold in them thar hills if you can find it. Just like I could not find anyone who had developed General Schemas Theory previously. So it is possible to have new thoughts, but unfortunately that means having to read a lot of very big books and to understand them, and then see some chink that has been missed which might prove interesting if explored. Hegel is this odd person who seems to have understood everything about the Western Tradition. All the things that I had discovered over the years about the Western worldview and more were in there, somewhere in his Phenomenology of Spirit/Ghost/Mind. He even gets the relation with Buddhism’s emptiness right in his Logic. So right now I am thinking he is the ultimate Western Philosopher, and of course wouldn’t you know it, he also wrote the hardest book to understand that I know of. While Kant has interpreters that bend and twist his thought. Most people who confront Hegel just get a little piece of his whole edifice of thought. We call those people Continental Philosophers. Those people who could not handle Hegel at all and stuck with Kant we call Analytical Philosophers. Those people who think they understand Nietzsche we call post-modernists.

Personally I believe that most philosophers are not understood at all in our tradition, especially by the specialized academics that make it their life’s  work to understand them. One reason for this is that these guys were not specialists they were taking in everything, and Hegel seems to take in more of “everything” than anyone one else as far as I can see. These source Continental Philosophers are not specialists they are doing their best to actually take in everything at once and make sense of it. For Hegel it all revolves around the myth of Antigone and Creon and the confrontation between family and state allegiances (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone). Something strangely beautiful about that mythological anchor.

Anyway, all this being said it is not possible for me to look at Nietzsche outside the context of the relation between Hegel and Kant. Now fortunately Zizek not only explains the famously obscure Lacan, but also reduces Lacan and everything else to the relation between Hegel and Kant. So if you can stand to read his work, that gives a pretty good basis for reading the relation between Kant and Hegel as the basis for understanding Nietzsche. Unfortunately Zizek does not really deal with Nietzsche in what I have read so we do not get a complete triangulation.

Now my reading of Nietzsche is through Deleuze, not Heidegger. Zizek does his  best to put down Deleuze and Derrida. But actually Deleuze is a much deeper philosopher than Zizek. So you cannot trust everything you hear from Zizek or his compatriot Badiou for that matter.

So in the end there is still a gap, that I have not completely plumbed. But having had a year long course on Nietzsche where we basically read everything, helped a lot. Nietzsche basically tried to reverse everyone. Schopenhauer is a pessimist Nietzsche is an optimist. All philosophers worship truth, Nietzsche says truth is a lie. Hegel says that only slaves (the Greeks) can have self-consciousness and develop philosophies and conquerors who have slaves cannot (Romans for instance). So Nietzsche sees himself of developing the philosophy of the Nobels, or the Blond Beast as he puts it. Basically Nietzsche says his greatest discovery was the question of the Value of Values. So it is not so strange that Heidegger misinterprets Will to Power as Will to Will. Heidegger is just trying to extend Nietzsche’s own thought in a way that he can take advantage of, but Nietzsche just was not that systematic a philosopher, so not everything in Nietzsche revolves around meta-levels. Nietzsche ultimately comes up with the idea based on evolutionary thinking that the value of values is to support life as living, and thus what ever supports any kind of life can be a value, even extremely strange and perplexing ones like Christianity, just to pick a random example. Basically turn to any page and randomly it will have a denunciation of Christianity, so this is a true random sample. Nietzsche calls it the moral values of Slaves, and sees it as ignoble. Of course, Jesus he does not include in this, just everyone from Paul onward. Basically, Nietzsche hates at least two things, Germans and Paulists, and for him the worse possible thing is the combination of the two, say in the Holy Roman Empire which was German. As a German he hates Germans much more than Jews, who he will occasionally praise. And as a European completely accepting responsibility for things like the Inquisition, all the Wars, like the 30 years war that killed two thirds of the German population, in the fighting between the protestants and catholics, and worse yet colonialism, Nietzsche (the Good European as he has been called), he accepts his part in that whole mess and hates Paulism on account of the atrocities that it has perpetrated on the human race in the name of that odd and slightly questionable faith. Nietzsche hates Christianity only as someone from a completely Christian background can hate it, recognizing itself in himself and wanting to tear it out but cannot. The image he has is someone who has been bitten by a snake inside their throat. If he had not opened his mouth how could he have been bitten. Like Jesus in some odd way he accepts all the wrongs, all the evil, all the ignorance all the violence of Pauism onto himself and calls himself the Anti-christ, which I think we should take seriously, because he is the first to claim it. His is not a rejection or an atheism from the outside, from some safe place, what he calls a headland above the world, but his is a hatred and rejection from the inside, as deeply as he could go inside, is where it wells up from as a great disgust. To him Islam looks good compared to Paulism which is quite something for a European to say, he says that at least the Muslims are men, not slaves or slaves of slaves. And I think that has a lot to do with what was being revealed in his time about the way that the natives were treated by the Colonists in his time, for instance in the slave trade, and the working of slaves to death in the Caribbean, and other atrocities all over the world that were being perpetrated in the name of Europe by the various colonial powers in Europe. Basically Nietzsche has nothing good to say about these colonial powers and can’t decide if he hates the Germans worse than the British or not, for of course we have the British to thank for the Opium War that destroyed China. It is incredible that Nietzsche thinks of himself as a bearer of his tradition to the extent that he is not separate from the horrific things that had been done in that tradition. And it is strange how he takes on that guilt himself, as if he thought he could purify it all by accepting responsibility for all the evil things that were done and that based on that European Civilization could be redeemed, and achieve its potentials for greatness. Of course, we don’t want to push this comparison between Nietzsche and Jesus too far, but in a sense he thought that by becoming the anti-christ he could put to rest all the evils that had occurred between the time of Jesus (the only true christian) and himself in the name of Christianity. He wanted to find a basis for reclaiming our nobility. Unfortunately his sacrifice of his sanity was not enough. He became insane at the moment that he tried to stop the owner of a horse from beating the horse in the street. I think that was the primal scene for Nietzsche, he wanted to put an end to the chaos and destruction being wrought by the colonial powers. He saw that summed up in the beating of that horse, and the fact that he could not stop the owner from beating the horse sent him right over the edge into the arms of Dionysus who was waiting for him, to embrace him.

Hegel was in a similar position with Kant. He realized that Kant’s philosophy was the precursor of the Terror of the French Revolution. Reason when it takes over goes straight for genocide. And the whole of the Phenomenology of the Mind/Ghost/Spirit is attempting to understand what went wrong to produce that effect from the tyranny of reason brought about by the enlightenment. Of course, all we have to do is turn to Blake to get a real picture of this nightmare that comes from the dominance of Urizen in the four Zoas. Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) and Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831). Hegel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel) and Blake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake). Hegel tries to work it out, how did our Reason become our greatest enemy for ourselves? All Continental Philosophy is still struggling with this question. Analytical Philosophers are still in that paradise where the enlightenment did not end. They are in denial. For instance Pol Pot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot) was a student of Philosophy in Paris before he went home to foment the ultimate revolution, to do what Plato said at the end of the Republic which was the only way to start over was to kill everyone except the children. The intellectual decides in his own land all the Intellectuals, and even the pseudo-intellectuals (someone just wearing glasses for instance) must go. The best modern rendition of this is that by Levi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard-Henri_L%C3%A9vy) who is seen on stage with Zizek occasionally. So this question that Hegel struggled with about how reason turns against humanity, and destroys itself and others bodies in masses irrationally is still very much with us. It was in the period between Hegel and Nietzsche that Europe learned the most about the rest of the world it had colonized, and learned about itself in the reports from the colonies for instance say in “The Heart of Darkness” or “Lord Jim” by J. Conrad (3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_darkness; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Jim). If you think about the First World War as Europe turning in on itself when it had nothing else to colonize, then you can think of the the 1800s from Hegel to Nietzsche as the period of the Beginning of the End. The Beginning we see in Shakespeare’s Tempest. The end we see in the 20th centuries ideological struggles that led to the second world war and the cold war and of course the threat of Nuclear Holocaust as M. Berman explains in Coming to our Senses.

In a way we are still trying to work this all out, how things went so wrong when the Enlightenment freed use from Religious superstition only to prepare us for something worse, i.e. the rule of reason that leads to genocide and far worse atrocities than people in the middle ages with all its wars could manage, basically because of the rise of technology at an unprecedented rate. Kant still thinks that there is a chance that reason can be tamed and does his best to reign it in by demanding it be connected to experience in order to have understanding, and not just spin its wheels in dogmatism (read ideologies). Hegel realizes that there is no chance of that, and so searches for something deeper by trying to go beyond Romanticism’s worship of the sublime in nature, to something deeper that can transform Christianity from the inside, which is turning to spirit, the part of the trinity normally forgotten. Recently also appealed to by Zizek in his speech to the Occupy Wallstreet Protesters. “We are only communists in the sense that we want to protect the commons.” Zizek also writes great books attacking Christianity, but as a sublime joke, which because it is totally insane, is not even funny anymore. He thinks of Chesterton as the most worthy theologian because Chesterton admits it is insane. Blake too thought he could purify Christianity. What Blake and Hegel had in common was a hearkening back to Jakob Bohme a German mystic with decidedly strange ideas. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_B%C3%B6hme). Bohme is the key linking these two visions of terror (from a radically different Christian perspective) as the result of the enlightenment’s over emphasis on reason, leading of course to science, leading of course to technology, leading of course to modern weapons of the west developed into tools of mass destruction their time that allowed Europeans to take over the world. Of course, the best book on this is Dialectic of the Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment). Enlightenment of course here is not Buddhist Spiritual Enlightenment, but the historical period called the Enlightenment started by Descartes, Leibniz and especially Spinoza, who other than Hume are the direct precursors of Kant.

So as a good Hegelian as Bernstein said, what does Nietzsche at the end of the 1800s think about Kant. He thinks the Horror continues that Hegel pointed out. And as far as I can see it still continues, until someone finds a way to kill off the Metaphysical era, and then it will just get worse still, in the same way that post-modernism just increases the nihilism of Modernism. When Krutz dies in the Heart of Darkness he says “The horror! The horror!”. Marlow relates the dying words of Krutz to this fiance as instead her name. It is precisely this gap between what we do and what we think we are doing that Zizek via Lacan focus upon, so Zizek tells the young protesters on Wall Street “do not let anyone tell you that your desires are wrong. They are your desires” or words to that effect. Lacan’s Jouissance is desire beyond desire, or desire for desire, the hubris of desire desiring itself beyond all possibility of fulfillment. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jouissance). The Horror is the nihilistic opposite of the satisfaction of the desires of the Colonial powers by the suffering and disgrace and looting of the rest of the world not to mention the destruction of the planet and most of its species, probably eventually including ourselves.

http://bit.ly/wjw4KG

I write long complex answers tending toward incomprehensibility on purpose. I put a graphic of the words I am using before them so people can get a general idea what they are getting into using Worldle.net. Some people like long complex intricate writings that are decidedly esoteric. I am writing for them. But mostly for myself, because I use the question as an opportunity to learn something through the writing not just to regurgitate what I already know. That is the wonder of writing, you can actually learn things doing it. Normally I write articles or working papers and just put them on my website without regard to who might see them or what they might think. Occasionally here I get some feedback, and that is great whenever it occurs. Because like all so called ‘experts’ I am just making things up, waiting for someone to way wait a minute, why are you saying that? That makes it interesting. And sometimes it makes me realize what I was saying was not so great, and I get to improve my thinking a little.

For instance, Zizek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek) spoke at the Occupy Wallstreet gathering (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/videos/occupy-wall-street/). Probably no one there knew what he was talking about. I just happened to spend a year reading most of his books on Lacan, and he was basically saying what he does in his books. Best part of his books is always the old communist jokes he uses to make a point or two. Zizek (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/biography/) really does not care if anyone understands him. But he will go on for hours at the drop of a hat, because he has something to say, and it is normally provacative, or funny, so people like to listen. But he is not talking really to his audience, but his true interloquters, the philosophers he has read, and the living ones he knows like Badiou (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/biography/).
Zizek with Badiou listening. What else can he do?

I have come to more or less agree with Deleuze (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze), that conversations are useless and attempting to communicate with others is probably a waste of time. Here is the reason. Education in this country is not so great to start with. And most people have an anti-intellectual bent here. And even if you find someone who has read a few books there is little common ground on which to base communication that is really significant. And so everyone ends up talking past each other, and the conversations go nowhere ultimately.

Nietzsche in his books was mostly talking to himself. He sold just a few copies of his books while he was alive. But if he had not continued to talk to himself up to his madness we would have been culturally must poorer, and postmodernists would really have nothing to talk about.

For instance, if you read Kant commentaries you realize that almost no one understandings what he is saying so they try to make something out of it for themselves, in order to back up their own ideas. The commentaries on Kant are almost universally poor, the best being Patton who is the only one I know who is actually trying to figure out what Kant is saying, sentence by sentence. But on the other hand commentaries on Plato are great. They really shed new light on his thought and for the most part have something to add to our understanding of what he is saying.

But when you come right down to it how many people are going to spend years reading philosophy. I spent almost ten years sitting in the British Museum near where Marx sat and wrote Capital and just read and read and read. And since returning to the USA long ago I have about quadrupled my bibliography. The number of books I have put in the bibliography of my dissertation is about a quarter of my real bibliography. But then I marvel at Zizek who seems to have read everything, twice.

So all the years I have spent reading, and writing is nothing to his output. And because he is interpreting Lacan who is impossible to understand in the light of Hegel with reference to Kant, and making sene of it, he is really writing some very complex works that go way past what most scholars are churning out. Think of it 99 percent of what is produced in the publish or perish world of academia is worthless, and ultimately there are only a few books really worth reading and they are normally the ones in the Canon, most other secondary works are mildly interesting but that is all. So I figure that if I spew out some incomprehensible gibberish that attempts to posit what i think I have learned from a life of reading philosophy, then perhaps someone who really knows something will come along and see my answers and decide to set the record straight. For instance, if Zizek was on Quora and he got going he would produce much more esoteric bullshit than I ever could. He is just far more intelligent than I am and he also has a much greater reading capacity, and he understands lots of things like Lacan and Hegel that I never really understood too well. And the fact he can relate that to Hitchcock movies just makes it all so much more fun.

But take heart, there are really much more boring and esoteric writers than I am, for instance Michel Henry who wrote Essence of Manifestation, which I read must be the most boring writer that I have ever read. And Badiou is right up there with him. But despite not being very exciting you have to hand it to them they do have something worth while to say. And even though it is very painful it is worth while reading them because they can change he way you look at things fundamentally.

There are certain books I would say are a must for those who want to stretch their imaginations concerning what is thinkable. One I like better than most is Bateson’s Steps to the Ecology of the Mind. Now there is a really great book full of ideas, and seemingly inexhaustible as a source of inspiration. It always helps to read just a little of the Canon just to make sure that you can still understand complex things, occasionally. I suggest Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, or Deleuze. But if you are not up to that perhaps you will like a grand tour like the ones I provide that start on one side of the universe of discourse and end up on the other, somehow, almost magically . . . I really don’t know how it happens, suddenly we have arrived somewhere we did not intend to go, and we see things in a different way, all of a sudden. And then we have to remember what the question was that sent us there.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v4Vyylkmfsw4A94YqIk0ZYP4-9WWsGo4KgryMHVJLB4/edit?hl=en_US

In Buddhism unlike many other paths philosophy has gone hand in hand with meditation, with some emphasizing one and others emphasizing the other in their practice. This is fairly unusual it seems. For instance in the West there is no practice and mundane consciousness in the world is the focus. On the other side Buddhist philosophical statements that build on other Buddhist philosophies can be extremely abstruse and it will be hard to tell how that relates to everyday life.

Next point is that by arriving at the Fourth Turning which in some ways seems Pathless we have already traveled quite far in the development of our understanding. In truth any level of Buddhist enlightenment would be enough. It is illusion that is layered not Existence seen as empty, or Void, or Manifest.

But there is clearly no method once one gets this far, method is meta-hodos means the way after. Once you get there then you try to produce a method by which others can follow you, and that is what Buddhism is for the most part, practice and theory about higher states of consciousness in light of the nondual. But I like what StoneHouse says at one point is that eventually you just have to go off on your own and figure out what enlightenement means for you, and then go for it. Enlightenment and endarkenment are as unique as we are. So I am not sure there is any Principle lying behind the finding of the deeper nonduality. In effect if something is not there, like ourselves, then it is also doubtful that there is a principle, because who would preceive it.

Rather it seems to me that what we need to do is try to be as clear as possible what the stages are as far as we can ascertain them, and then keep trying to find ways of realizing them in ourselves.

One might say that there is Principle in the sense of a patterning principle Li that unfolds with Chi into actualized patterns. This is because each level has its own nature as discovered by Continental Philosophy or Plato.

But in terms of having a Principle that will allow you to discover these states your self, I don’t think this is so. I myself am a big believer in transmission. And the fact that these fourth Turning paths seem to transcend any one path does not mean you can get to them without following some path. I would say that the path is even more essential the more rarefied the realm of tracelessness.

In no way am I hoping to be taken as saying that the Fourth and Fifth Turning are achievable without traveling though the other layers one way or another. If it was not you then perhaps someone else who is transmitting to you to make your path seemingly shorter. Also I am not making any claims about getting there or being there myself. Claims themselves can be delusional just by the fact of uttering them what ever you thought you had can be lost.

Rather I am saying that Buddhists need to take their philosophy into the Western worldview, rather than allowing the Orientalists to classify and categorize us. Rather in fact we need to be Occidentalists and understand the philosophy of the mundane that is Western Philosophy in such a way that it does not taint our understanding of Nonduality from our tradition. In a sense there is the same thing happening to the West as happened to the Romans by the Greeks, Romans enslaved the Greeks but the Greeks making all Western Civilization Greek at its roots overcoming the Romans and ultimately won the struggle of civilizations snatching victory from defeat.

Something similar is happening with Buddhism and Western civilization. Because the Western Worldview has a nondual core deeply suppressed it will find Buddhism irresistible ultimately. In my view all the various nondual paths need to cooperate in this adventure of the homecoming of Buddhism, and the Islamic heresy in the form of Sufism. Buddhism is the Heresy of Hinduism, and Islamic Sufism is the heresy of the Western Worldview and these two together are returning to their origins within the Indo–European tradition. This return to the Deeper Indo-European tradition needs to be a combined effort. In it philosophers and mediators, and other practitioners need to cooperate together, and this seems far more possible if we understand the intrinsic pathlessness of the fourth turning that goes beyond what ever path we are considering as our nondual basis. What needs to be universally understood is the fact that the West is not purely dualistic, but rather is fragmented with a nondual kernel beyond the nihilism production at the core. Dualism is a surface phenomena of the Western worldview. Just knowing that there is a homeward path is a tremendous advantage because it means that one is appealing directly to the nondual kernel when we are approaching those who have not realized the wonder of the nondual as yet. But of course there will be many false claims in this realm of endeavor and the road is not clear at this time how various nondual paths could cooperate, but at least they should be talking to each other. In all this philosophy is essential in order to make clear what is at stake and how we can relate to the Western worldview’s structure.

Here is a good place to talk about intensification of nihilism. This is because software is a very unique cultural artifact in as much as it is the only cultural artifact to directly embody what Plato calls the Third Kind of Being in the Timaeus, and what I following Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible call Hyper Being and what Heidegger calls -B-e-i-n-g- crossed out and Derrida calls DifferAnce (differing and deferring). This is to say that Software as far as I know is a Singular Entity that directly embodies a particular (third) meta-level of Being. We can analytically recognizes phenomena as having Hyper Being as a source, but only with software can we see a cultural artifact that wholly embodies the characteristics of this kind of Being.

As software is transforming world culture, it would be good to understand the ontological nature of software and its impact. The basic quality of Hyper Being is what Paul Simon calls slip-sliding away. Strangely, the lower meta-levels of Being exist in Hardware as the index (Pure Being – pointing) and accumulator (Process Being – grasping). This is explained further in Wild Software Meta-systems at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer. There are five meta-levels of Being which are higher logical types (Russell) and software is the only cultural artifact that directly embodies Hyper Being. So in a sense with the advent of Software with Lady Lovelace as the first programmer of Babbages Difference Engine (which never was actually completed). In other words the first mechanical computer had programs that were waiting for the hardware to be built to be run, just like today with Quantum computing. (cf. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality)

What happens with the intensification of nihilism (and idea we owe to Jose Argulles from Transformational Vision) is that something new arises and we think it is going to solve all our problems, but then it ultimately just makes things worse. So with the Web we thought all our problems would be solved, there was boom then bust now boom again, but now we have privacy concerns, pornography and children concerns, most of the traffic is spam, there are worms and trojans, and hackers, our data is stolen, our identities are stolen, we don’t know how to or if we should tax or control the internet. The list of ills goes on and on. Same thing with other equipment with software in it. Basically machines don’t work anymore unless their software is running because most are not purely mechanical anymore. Our Cars have myriad computers in them all running real time software doing who knows what, but that means they cannot be fixed by just anyone any more and the cost of fixing them has gone up substantially. Businesses cannot operate if their computers go down, so that means if electricity stops almost everything else stops. Anyway you get the idea. There are Ills associated directly with the computer and its software that just did not exist previously. We can do things we could never do before, but we have wicked problems we never had to deal with before, like “Social” relationships with people we don’t really know and who could be hiding their true identity, and mean us harm that we would not be open to if it were not for the allure of social networks. People can find marriage partners that they could not find before, but on the other hand we are opened up to many scams, and unscrupulous if not dangerous people who we would have never met before. In intensification of nihilism what at first seems like it will turn everything into a Utopia turns out to be a Kakatopia (Hell on Earth) which is worse than what previously existed before the new great white hope arose.

Now with Software all this becomes much worse, because we are suddenly operating with something that embodies a kind of Being we normally do not have to deal with, which is Hyper Being which makes everything slippery. It is hard to categorize software in our traditional categories, and it is hard to control and deal with it. For instance in the control of intellectual property rights. Copying is just so easy, and control is very difficult. The movement to Social Media sites is really an attempt to solve this problem by tying applications to hardware that we access across the net. This is because software as traditionally conceived as applications that run on ones own computer are just too hard to control and thus to make money from. What is the value of Software is always a problem. And many expect it to be free, in spite of the hours and hours needed to create it. But many are willing to give away their software for free, and that makes it so that people cannot sell into those markets unless they have something special to offer that the free programs do not have. These sorts of examples, like the craziness of software patents, can be multiplied almost endlessly. Take BITCOIN for example. It is a purely computational currency, but it was hacked and bitcoins were stolen causing their value to plummet. Or take the arising of Anonymous as the anti-corporate force, which brings up how much corporations are dependent on control of identity, yet Anonymous are the stockholders, employees, or customers, or just interested bystanders that attacks the corporation by making its secrets available to the public and thus giving some accountability that otherwise would not exist for instance with HP Gary.

I shan’t belabor the point. The key is that software is both getting better and getting worse at the same time. It makes things possible that would otherwise be impossible, like Smart Phones, but it also makes it possible for us to be tracked without out knowing it by the government, or others. On every issue there are nihilistic dual threats and capabilities that would not exist otherwise, and we have entered into this bewildering world unprepared in which Hyper Being plays a significant role and transforms everything for the better and worse at the same time but at a faster rate, and in a more intense fashion than has been the case in the past. It breaks down barriers that we want to do away with, but it also breaks down barriers that we do not want to have broken down. For instance, kids put pictures of themselves that are sexually explicit on the internet, or other kids do it to their friends/enemies and we do not know if this is pornography or not, but kids commit suicide because of it, and other schemes of cyberbullying. There are intense positives and negatives and they get worse with the spread of software. It allows us to put rovers on mars or fly by Jupiter and Saturn or Mercury, but it also allows money laundering, or makes all our countries less safe, by allowing secrets to be hacked from Government computers.

We need to realize the specific uniqueness of the ontology of software and how that is affecting our society, culture, and families as well as ourselves as individuals. Effectively we are living in a world of global presence to those who are absent, and effectively everyone in the world. Software makes that possible, which can have extremely good (sharing knowledge and advances in science spreading faster) and extremely bad (scams, cyberterrorism, cyberwar, etc) results. The quicker we understand the nature of DifferAnce, the better we will be able to understand this new and bewildering world made possible by software.

Along with all these cultural and social as well as individual changes there is the change in the Software Industry itself. Here too things are getting worse and better at the same time in extremes. For instance the proliferation of software languages means we are exploring more possibilities of how to write programs, but at the same time there is such a bewildering array of them it is difficult to keep up. We can say something similar for all parts of the software world. So many open source projects, so many software applications, so many social websites, so many services offered on the internet, so many resources offered in cloud computing. Yet on the other hand so difficult to absorb everything that is happening and make sense of it and apply it.

For instance we have Agile and now Lean software development which are bringing new paradigms to software development. These were aimed at freeing the programmer from process, but with new ALM software systems controlling production it is not clear that these initiatives that sought freedom from process are not just going to make things worse in terms of creating more red tape in the software creation process. What was designed to bring back creativity in software production as Agile was described seeking hyper-productivity, may actually hamstring the developer as they are immeshed in ALM systems that block progress due to enforced processes that are called Agile or Lean but actually make it harder to write good software. This is still an open question. But it is in keeping with the general tenor of changes brought about by software is that there is a radical intensification of nihilism. For instance we write programs but it is nearly impossible to reuse anything because the infrastructure is changing so rapidly, so lots of this work becomes wasted by just small infrastructural changes. So we are constantly having to start over, yet at the same time we cannot abandon legacy code due to the cost, so we have to both abandon and keep running old code. Cobol is still being written and maintained despite the fact that it is completely outmoded. We have to connect all kinds of legacy systems to each other and incorporate them into our new development, so we are constantly having maintenance issues along with development issues.

Software produces in society and culture intensification of nihilism and it is not immune to these same sorts of effects itself. Software evolution is becoming more and more intense yet our ability to absorb, incorporate, and use these evolutionary advances becomes more and more limited because of information overload, knowledge obsolescence, and generally a lack of wisdom in how to develop these capabilities so that they can stay in better synchronization with each other so that the infrastructure is not so disruptive to our own use of it to accomplish things that people want, but which shortly will be obsoleted, or worse will live on a kind of Zombified existence as the program that never dies because it is crucial and it costs too much to replace it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrida
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance
Wild Software Meta-systems http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRlrLsS6KmdUiFAkCvumzI9LBshndPlW0_WkR4lH1PM/edit?hl=en_US

I will tell you something that shocked me as I started getting into Tibetan Buddhist literature. I really liked Dzong Ka Pa because he says something I believed for a long time which was that reason has a role to play in enlightenment. And I really think his masterpiece the essence of eloquence is extremely interesting. But as I went on I learned that he supported a position that said that awareness was not inherently reflexive. I could not understand that but have to side with Mipham on that one. There is a book on the subject by Paul WilliamsThe Reflexive Nature of Awareness: A Tibetan Madhyamaka Defence.

http://www.wisdom-books.com/ProductExtract.asp?PID=7248
See also 

The Conventional Status of Reflexive Awareness:
What’s at Stake in a Tibetan Debate?
*
Jay L Garfield
Department of Philosophy
Smith College
Department of Philosophy
University of Melbourne
Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies
http://www.smith.edu/philosophy/ReflexiveAwareness.pdf

“In his commentary to Candrakirti’s Madhyamakåvatåra, Mi pham argues that Tsong khapa is wrong to take Candrak¥rti’s rejection of the reflexive character of consciousness to be a rejection of the conventional existence of reflexive awareness. Instead, he argues, Candrak¥rti only intends to reject the reflexivity of awareness ultimately, and, indeed, Mipham argues, it is simply obvious that conventionally, consciousness is reflexive.”

For me as a reflexive theorist the reflexivity of awareness is a crucial question, and I agree with Mipham that anyone can verify that awareness is reflexive by introspection, so what would lead a great thinker like Dzong Ka Pa to abandon his own intuitions for a statement of a prior theorist that is manifestly untrue. And I think that is because the tradition has become more important than the evidence of ones own experience, which is always a bad sign. This made me trust Mipham’s interpretation of DzogChen more.

Normally Phenomenology talks about Consciousness which Husserl understands as wholly intentional. It is Gurewitsch who introduces awarness into phenomenology and recognizes it as important. Awarness is non-intentional in some sense. But the question is whether reflexivity is in consciousness or awareness. I place it in both as something deeper than either consciousness or awareness as such and that can be seen to be based on the ideas of Demasio that you have to have a sense of self to have any experience what so ever. I really like Demasio’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Dam%C3%A1sio) treatment of this issue in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt, 1999 He also has a new book called Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Pantheon, 2010 which I have not read yet. But he takes into account all the latest neurological information in his forulation of the problem of reflexivity, i.e. the fact that the self is there with every experience.

In my opinion this meaning of the Self is not disturbed by the idea of emptiness f the self. This self he is talking about is on the neurological level and is necessary for any experience what so ever, even those where phneomena are seen as empty. This notion of self is more like a reference point against which the flow in a stream of experience is necessary to gauge the flow. Another view of Self is that of Atman (beyond the individual self) or Jungian Self that expresses the collective unconsciousness. Buddhism is denying the empirical and transcendental self as supported by Being. But I think Buddhism especially tantric Buddhism is fully engaged with what Jung calls archetypes. Self as totality of experience seems to me does not contradict the spirit of Buddhism. It is self as unity instead of aggregate that seems to be what is denied with the idea of Anatman.

There are a lot of different selves, and which are specifically denied by any one school of Buddhism is sometimes difficult to determine.But anything that cannot stand being seen as empty is definitely excluded. Demasio’s sense of self as reference point for experience seems to me stands up to this test. Jung’s Self as totality of phenomena related to the self, does not seem to be affected either as it connects to archetypes. But Empirical and Transcendental Ego and Atman are definitely destroyed. Buddhist psychology is quite different from Western psychology and so that has to be factored in. However, if we deny the Demasio form of self as reference point then reflexivity definitely vanishes as a possibility. Reflexivity is a kind of recoil into ones own experience that is the same as having an expeirence itself. It is not reflection as in a mirror. Reflexivity is more of an action and less of a vision, such as Lacan has with the mirror stage of infants where they recognize themselves in a mirror. Reflexivity is more like the recoil of expeirence on itself so that we know it is our own experience at all times.

For my self I relate consciousness to Being and I related awareness to Existence. I would take awareness as emptiness as different from awareness as void as dual forms of non-duality separated by a Domain wall. I take awareness of manifestation as different still which is wholly nondual. I don’t know of a word for awareness of manifestation, but epiphany might due.