A Pattern is a schema.

According to General Schemas Theory a Schema is a projected organization of spacetime as an a priroi synthesis that we intuit (speaking in Kantian terms) which serves as a template of understanding.

If you start with Systems Theory and ask what is the next threshold of abstraction up which includes Systems Theory but other similar but different theories, then you get General Schemas Theory. It is just like General Systems Theory but the next level of abstraction up. So at that level we can name several schemas that definitely exist within Science such as monad, pattern, form, system, etc.

It is interesting that no discipline of General Schemas Theory has been posited up til now that I can find. I especially expected to find it in Art Criticism or Architectural Criticism, but have not found it defined elsewhere beyond my own work.

The best work on Schemas in general within our tradition is Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus.

In this book he defines Mathematical and Geometric Schemas and that is what I mean by the term “Schema” with respect to General Schemas Theory.

Grenander is the only mathematician I know of who has created a mathematics of Pattern. http://www.dam.brown.edu/pattern/ug.html

I order to get General Schemas Theory off the ground as a discipline I devised a speculative hypothesis called Sprime. In Sprime we posit that there are ten schemas and that they form a nested hierarchy of scopes at different dimensional scales. Sprime also posits that there are two schemas per dimension and two dimensions per schema. Schemas start at the negative first dimension and go up to the ninth dimension. Thus the series of schemas from the point of view of the Sprime hypothesis is as follows:

F Theory 12
M Theory 11
String Theory 10
————————–
Pluriverse 8, 9
Kosmos 7, 8
World 6, 7
Domain 5, 6
OpenScape (aka meta-system) 4, 5
System 3, 4
Form 2, 3
Pattern 1, 2 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< as defined by Grenander
Monad 0, 1
Facet -1, 0
—————————
Unknown -2, -1

Now there are some interesting things about the nested hierarchy of organizations of different scope an scale. One is that Monads can either be dimensionless points or one dimensional strings, thus string theory is really a variation on monadology. Next Pattern has two dimensions in which it exists which is as a string with some contents that can form a pattern, like 1 and 0 of memory. But the most interesting patterns are two dimensional, for instance the patterns which form in the Game of Life, or are created in Fabrics, etc.

Notice also that we can consider the nesting in either direction, so we can consider that patterns form the content of forms either two or three dimensional, but also we can consider that there are Patterns of Forms, or Patterns of Systems etc. Patterns of Forms are the most prevalent and we call that after Alexander Pattern Languages which we now apply to Software design as a way of leveraging knowledge within the Software Engineering discipline. So Patterns are not trapped in their dimensions but instead can modify other schemas either of greater or lesser scope.

Schemas are of limited scope and of finite number. So they only go up to the 9th dimension. It is interesting that we do not seem to have schemas at the tenth dimension and higher where string theory plays out, and so string theory is difficult to understand, because we do not have any templates by which to understand it already available. The basic insight of Schemas theory is that spacetime as we project it as an a priori synthesis that is intuited according to Kant is striated and not unstriated, i.e. not a homogeneous plenum. In fact in Bernstein’s lectures on Critique of Pure reason that I read recently he criticizes Kant on this very point of not having different layered concepts of time but only one, and I think Schemas Theory points us to the fact that space also should be considered as striated, i.e. there are different ontological templates of understanding that are projected on it at different scopes and scales.

The other interesting thing is that our tradition was dominated by the Form Schema from its inception up until the beginning of the last century, at which time both System and Structure (pattern) became more overtly significant Schemas. Now we are becoming more interested in Patterns and Domains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulf_Grenander
http://www.siam.org/pdf/news/247.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_theory

http://wp.goertzel.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
http://www.dam.brown.edu/ptg/index.shtml
http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~cbj/patterns/

I have written about the Pattern Schema as part of the research for my dissertation at http://about.me/emergentdesign.

Here is a good place to mention something that is normally not thought about which is conversational memory.

We have an amazing capacity to remember everything we ever talked to someone about and to jump to the place we we at on a certain thread left off long ago and to continue from there. This conversational memory is different from both Long and Short term memory, and is almost always social, meaning we can only really remember where we left off conversation threads while we are in conversation with that person with whom we share a conversational memory.

Now what happens to me when I lose a thread of thought in a conversation is that I normally think of something else I want to say, and that knocks both of the threads out of my mind. I think Conversational Memory is conversation thread oriented, so if we try to jump to another thread while we have not yet articulated the one we are on we tend to get lost in the maze of conversational memory that we are keeping in mind as we talk. Notice it is the other person who normally knows what we have just said and they will remind us what thread we were on and then usually we can remember what we were going to say, and then say it. But in that instance we usually forget what we were going to say on the other thread of thought that was being woven into the conversation.

I am not sure why there are so few studies of conversational memory when it almost seems more important than the the other types of memory because it is what keeps us on track not just in our conversations but also perhaps in our lives.

SuperRational Non-duality

http://bit.ly/xJnzNr

I would say no, since Nazism was the epitome of a romantic movement and it was wiped out in the last century as the ideological opposite of Communism. It seems to me that we have voted down by force a place for romanticism in secular humanism. Secular humanism is the child of the French Revolution which is the working out in history of the philosophy of Kant. Hegel, the ultimate romantic, recognized this connection, but instead saw the absolute spirit at work in Napoleon. But Napoleon suffered defeat twice, once by nature in his march to Russia and once by the British at Waterloo, and he was also exiled twice. He was the ultimate romantic hero. He took his stand against the two most powerful forces in the universe at his time, Nature and the British and managed to snatch defeat from he jaws of victory when the Germans arrived. Hegel saw Absolute Spirit moving in history in Napoleon, i.e. the spirit of the nation embodied in its leader, which is very similar to the volk to which Nazism appealed. Hitler also took his army into Russia and was defeated by its winter, and Hitler was also defeated by the British, who had a card up its sleeve that still made it an unbeatable force, i.e. its former colonies, like the USA.

Heidegger was right that Nietzsche, the anti-romantic philosopher, was a bad choice as the philosophical representative of Nazism. Nietzsche had nothing but scorn for the Germans and their barbarity. Heidegger spent the war trying to prove that his philosophy really represented the essence of Nazism. But unfortunately when the Brown Shirts who believed in continual revolution were killed Heidegger lost his interest in the movement. It is just so Ironic that the Americans took as their Allies the French communist underground, who after the war became the intelligence in France who then based all their philosophical adventures on Heidegger’s Nazi philosophy. Strange Bedfellows regardless of Heidegger’s denouncement of Sartre’s existentialism.

Continental Philosophy is the outgrowth of this strange blend of ideologies that builds on the Nazi philosophy of Heidegger toward the utopianism of the French communists who were unhampered in their thinking by Soviet Dogma. The epitome of this is Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, the last ditch attempt to give dialectical materialism some respectability. In it Sartre describes the “fused group”, like the “pack” in Canetti’s Crowds and Power. In other words the move is to identify with the small group which has no hierarchical structure as yet, rather than the masses who were the focus of Fascist and Communist ideologies.

I have been listening to the Bernstein Tapes (bernsteintapes.com) which are lectures on Critique of Pure Reason after previously listening to his Hegelian lectures. His Hegelian lectures allowed me my first real access to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit for the first time. I have spent a lifetime stating and failing to finish that book. Bernstein says it is the most complex book in Western philosophy, and I just could not get through it myself on my own, even though I managed to do so with many other long complicated and abstruse philosophical classics previously. I figured if Bernstein could finally give me access to Hegel in a way that made sense to me, then he might also have some things to say about Kant that would help me understand Critique of Pure Reason. To me one of the most interesting parts of Western Philosophy is Heidegger’s attempt to appropriate Kant, to his philosophy. It is interesting that the key word for Heidegger is Ereignis which has one meaning that is Appropriation, because Heidegger is famous for appropriating other philosophers to his own thought, like Aristotle, the Pre-socratics, Husserl’s later work (where appropriation here is tantamount to stealing). So listening to these lectures on Kant gave me a new appreciation for his thought. I kept worrying that my understanding of Kant would be wrong, but in the end it was merely greatly enhanced. I had a good idea of the Architectonic of Kant’s philosophy, but I did not really understand how important the arguments were in the book until I listened to these lectures. And without command of the arguments then one’s understanding remains very superficial, whereas from reading other commentaries I had the idea that the arguments were not really very important. That is because most authors attribute to Kant what Bernstein calls a progressive reading, i.e. assuming that Kant is claiming more than he has a right to claim, and then blaming him for not succeeding, and then subsituting their own thought for that of Kant. So Kant just is a jumping off point for their own ideas, which normally are pretty strange, and there are few attempts to try a minimal reading that tries to stay close to what Kant himself really meant, assuming that he was not claiming more than he could deliver. Bernstein calls this the regressive reading.

My own approach to philosophy is to try to understand what the philosopher himself had in mind before placing my own projections on their philosophy. I think this is a minimal threshold of intellectual honesty. And then one should always differentiate ones own thought from those of the philosopher one is basing what one is saying upon. I like to try to use other philosophies as a whole without appropriating them to my own philosophy. Because my greatest interest is in the differences between philosophers rather than subsuming them to my philosophy, or one philosophers ideas to another. Of course, this is very hard because it is almost impossible not to misunderstand the precursors. We have this map of misreading as Bloom says. For instance how Marx misread Hegel for instance, perfect example of a dumbed down reading of Hegel which some people really want.

So from Bernstein’s presentation I learned that the arguments themselves have substance. When commentators over claim what Kant is trying to achieve, and then point out how he fails, then one tends to discount the arguments, and concentrate on the architecture of his thought, because that is not affected by the discounted arguments. But Bernstein concentrates on the arguments and brings out their substance and shows how they are still relevant in light of his regressive reading.

So from Bersteins view point the major idea in Kant is that the only way to be a Transcendental Realist is via Transcendental Idealism, and thus realism is dependent on idealism. And that is why our tradition turned toward idealism and away from either rationalism or empiricism. This essentially makes Kant primarily into a precursor to Husserl’s phenomenology. This for me was very good because what I have been saying for years is that Kantian transcendentalism is the basis for understanding Husserlian Phenomenology. However, this devalues the idea of transcendentals being headlands above the world as Nietzsche calls them. To the regressive reading Kant is critiquing these headlands and pulling the carpet out from under them rather than establishing them as the progressive reading would have us believe.

To me this is a very important issue. In Badiou for instance we see the use of Cohen’s approach to set theory that establishes the independence of the continuum hypothesis. Basically Badiou says that Set theory is metaphysics of Being, to which he adds the Event and Multiple to complete it and give a full fledged ontological meaning to set theory. But what I learned from Badiou’s use of Cohen is that if you have a transcendental, i.e. an invisible assumed ground over a domain of a certain size, and you expand the territory it covers, if it does not create a difference in the larger scoped territory, then it is essentially irrelevant and does not have to be taken into account in our metaphysics.

Now if we take this insight back to Kant, we see that Kant has three transcendentals The Subject, The Object, and God. God maintains the coherence between the transcendental subject and the noumena, i.e. the transcendental object. This is an invisible scaffolding around our worldview. The Copernican turn from dogmatism is to offer a critique of the necessary preconditions for possible experience. As I listened to this phrase over and over in Bernstein I thought about the Unnecessary Impossibility as its opposite. The transcendental subject as the source of Apriori Synthesis (space, time, categories, schemas) and the Noumena, what is there beyond the appearances are the Unnecessary Impossibilities. They are impossibilities because we cannot know them. And they are unnecessary because no matter how we expand the scope of our inquiry the scaffolding does not make any difference in experience that makes a difference (Bateson). Implicit in Kant’s argument is the opposite of necessary conditions of possibility, which is the unnecessary and insufficient reasons of impossibility of experience of the T. Subject or the T. Object, or God that which retains the coherence between these inaccessible invisibles which are beyond all experience. I have not heard of any commentator who points out this duality between necessary possibilities and unnecessary impossibilities. And this kind of reminds me of Zizek and his argument that Kant glossed the possibility of Ethical Evil, in other words he suppressed that possibility, thinking it impossible. This makes us think that this limit the unnecessary and insufficient impossible is really the core of Kant’s thinking that is unthought. We normally say that what is impossible is the same as the negation of necessity. However, like a priori synthesis there must open up a gap between necessity and its opposite impossibility. Necessity is aligned with Actuality, and Possibility aligned with the Arbitrary. But in order for something to cross over from possibility to actuality there needs to be another moment of potential. For something to be denied the ability to cross over from necessary to the arbitrary there must be the impossible as a barrier. And that means there must be a middle ground between actuality and possibility as well which we can call sufficiency.

Now if we take this conceptual structure as given as the background set of modalities that allow Kant to talk about the necessity that grounds the possibility of experience, then we can discuss the unnecessary lacks grounding for the impossible. In other words the impossible is unmotivated. It is truly spontaneous and the limit of spontaneity from which experience arises. We can read Kant as a meditation on modality, where he wishes to get from the necessary grounds of actual experience by means of positing the transcendentals as the impossible but sufficient lack of grounds for the unknowability of invisibles beyond experience. The spark that jumps this abyss is the intuition of a priori synthesis which gives us the potential for framing experience based on what is absolutely prior to it, in a logical sense.

Kant is always searching for the third moment that can link unreconcilable opposites. So for example he posits a priori synthesis in order to get beyond a priori analysis of reason, and the a posteriori synthesis and analysis within experience. Pure concept is connected to percepts by way of a third moment that connects them the projection of a priori synthesis that we intuit via the imagination. Heidegger seizes on his change in the status of the imagination between the first and second editions of the critique to interpret Kant as a pre-Heideggarian. Heidegger sees the more basic form of the imagination as equivalent to his idea of Dasein as the ability to project Being. Subsumed faculty of the imagination placed under another faculty is imagination tamed, and a step back from the abyss suggested by the free ranging imagination as an independent faculty.

So from all this I opine that the most basic and interesting concept in Kant is the one he does not articulate which is the unnecessary and arbitrary impossibility of the inexperience-able (i.e. the transcendentals) that gives rise to the potentiality to cross over into the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. This intermediate realm of potentiality allows the sufficient conditions for the actualization of experience.

As we know from Kubler’s Shape of Time actuality is a great mystery which is rooted in potentiality and sufficiency as a middle ground between impossibility and arbitrary on the one hand and necessity and possibility on the other. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Time:_Remarks_on_the_History_of_Things)

Kubler is the only one I know that has tried to delve into this area of how things become actual, i.e. cross over from possibility to actuality in any serious or deep way from the point of view of an Art Historian, i.e. one who is concerned with the shapes that well up from oblivion based on their first coming into Being as artifacts of a civilization, and then the subsequent loss of this civilization. He uses the metaphor of a light house, whose strobe lights up the darkness momentarily, so that we get a glimpse of what was lost in oblivion, through the relics that were preserved. We embed our experience of time within the things we shape, and we uncover the times of others so different from our own and glimpse other kinds of time when we dig up the artifacts from lost civilizations. Compressing our comprehension of time into shapes is a way to give others access to our own views of time from very different civilizations that have other embodied concepts of time that they embed into their artifacts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kubler
http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/kublerg.htm

See also
“Ultramoderne”: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in Sixties Art by Pamela M. Lee in Grey Room, No. 2. (Winter, 2001), pp. 46-77
http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/grey%20room/Ultramoderne%20Or%20How%20George%20Kubler%20Stole%20the%20Time%20in%20Sixties%20Art.pdf

But even as Bernstein in his critique of Kant, for not recognizing that there were many kinds of time, and Kubler who sees various civilizations experience of time embedded in their physical artifacts that we use to draw them back from the abyss of oblivion, there is little exploration of the exact mechanism by which things move over from possibility to actuality. I formulated an answer to this question as an addendum to my dissertation which is unpublished based on the work of Ian Thompson (http://www.ianthompson.org/philosophy_papers.htm) and the theory of dispositions. Design occurs in Hyper Being of possibilities, but for things to come into existence we need Wild Being of propensities. And the key concept that allows us to move between the extremes of Actuality and Possibility, or Arbitrary and Necessary is the ideas of Potential and Sufficiency. But this is based on understanding the Ultra Being of Unnecessary Impossibility as a limit. Kant skirts around this Impossible possibility and unnecessary adjunct (i.e. supplement) to his philosophy the same way he skirts around the idea of ethical evil as Zizek accuses him of doing. But it is from this hidden singularity in his thought that Hegel sees the French Revolution springing, the Irrational from the heart of critical reason. It is not a necessary condition for destructive chaos being unleashed by the French Revolution throwing off the oppression of sovereignty which ultimately only led back to Napoleonic sovereignty, i.e. from one nihilistic extreme to its opposite, and then back to the first, only with an intensification of nihilism. Hegel saw the advent of Napoleon as the dawning of a new age win which Absolute Spirit was embodied, but little did he imagine the death march of the troops into Russia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon)

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

[Note: E. Tufte’s lecture on this map accessed through Intelligence^2 is brilliant.]

The terrible defeat by nature of the army of Napoleon, his first exile, his escape and defeat at Waterloo, and then second exile show how irrepressible Absolute Spirit can be when embodied in a single man who is the motive force behind historical changes. His reassertion of Sovereignty shaped his times. In him Hegel saw Absolute Reason working itself out in History re-establishing the state which represented Absolute Spirit as embodied by Absolute Monarchy. And this is the fundamental shift after Kant to the recognition that the intersubjective cohort was a horizon on which the individuals humanity was achieved. Absolute Spirit can be seen as an embodiment of that unnecessary Impossibility as Absolute.

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

I have just listened to the tapes of the lectures of Bernstein (bernsteintapes.com) on Kant that are available on the internet. Bernstein attempts a regressive or minimal reading of Kant and he supports in that reading the idea that Kant thought he had given us a direct connection to reality. The Cartesian view has as it did in early Husserl (Cartesian Meditations) has the problem of solipsism. Husserl confronted this problem and solved it by moving from Bracketing to the seeing of objects on a world horizon. Heidegger took advantage of this in Being and Time according to Walton who has been studying the later works of Husserl and sees the innovations of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are in some sense just the exploitation of Husserls later generative phenomenology. But according to Bernstein in his lectures the innovation of Husserl is merely a return to the real meaning of Kant’s philosophy under the regressive reading. It is very difficult to see whether Bernsteins reading is an anachronism or whether that was the true meaning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason from the beginning. The regressive reason makes this case that Kant was really a phenomenologist at heart.

The basic idea is that we only know about anything real through perception and consciousness. So what ever reality IS is filtered though that medium and nothing escapes the filter, and so there is nothing to compare our appearances to to see them as purely epiphenomenalism. This means that realism that posits a transcendental object is just as idealistic as the positing of the transcendental subject who is the source of our A priori syntheses. So in a sense, Kant is just saying that Transcendental Idealism is precisely the same as Transcendental Subjectivity (Idealism), i.e. merely a nihilistic dualism. And because of that identity ultimately they are antinomies that cancel out and so all that is left is the epiphenomenon of appearances, in which we discern reality by the involuntary simultaneity of the time streams of objects as opposed to the the serial voluntary ways of apprehension. If the transcendental structure cancels out, then we need another way of thinking about the world that is immanent and that is what Heidegger tries to develop in Being and Time based on the insights of the Later Husserl and his generative phenomenology, i.e. the phenomenology of time.

http://bit.ly/wxFiVM

http://www.quora.com/Immanuel-Kant/Did-Kant-in-his-work-give-us-a-way-to-know-reality-not-know-reality-or-some-mix-of-the-two

I have just finished listening to the tapes of Bernstein on Kant’s Critique of Pure reason. (See www.bernsteintapes.com). So I feel like I am in a better position to answer this question now than I might have been earlier when I thought I knew something about Kant but had read it so long ago that it was hazy in my memory.

What Bernstein says is that for Kant Ontology is basically Epistemology. In other words the essence of the Copernican turn of Kant was to transform ontological questions into epidemiological ones about the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. That makes all ontological experiences filtered though the lens of the Transcendental Subject, i.e. the one who produces the Apriori Syntheses that the empirical ego experiences, and that the Analytical philosophers analyze after the fact. Bernstein does a regressive reading of Kant, i.e. does not over inflate the claims about what Kant is trying to achieve. So he is giving us a minimalist Kantian interpretation, so that gives us a criteria by which to judge the progressive readings, i.e. the readings that see Kant as claiming too much compared to what he can deliver.

What is strange is that there are almost as many commentaries on Kant as there are on Plato, yet the Kantian commentaries are extremely weird for the most part because they all try to put their own philosophies in the mouth of Kant, my favorite example is that of Heidegger, which Bernstein dismisses but which I still find enlightening. But I searched and searched for a commentary on Kant that I could understand and which did the minimal permissible projection onto Kant of strange ideas. And the only one that I found that fit this bill back in the 1970s was that of Patton. Bernstein mentions Patton in a positive light, but points to other more recent commentaries that he likes, which I hope to read someday. Bernstein says that Kant is Transcendental Idealist who believes that you can only be a Transcendental Realist through Transcendental Idealism. And of course this is because we only experience the world via our consciousness and so what ever the world might be out there, we cannot escape our filtering it by our consciousness and need to take that into account. Basically this means that there are Apriori syntheses produced by our unconscious that appear to us in consciousness as if effortlessly generated, and so we do not notice the fact that these experiences are generated by our complex biological structures because they appear as given immediately and spontaneously. In a way we can see Kant’s breakthrough as the first glimmers of our understanding of the role of the unconscious as the part of the iceberg below the surface of consciousness which is merely a very thin veneer on the top of some very complex and incomprehensible processing of information that gives us our world and allows us to act seemingly effortlessly within it, for the most part. There were many subtleties of the arguments of Kant that I did not appreciate prior to listening to Bernstein’s lectures.But one thing that I can say to answer the question at hand is that ontology is completely mixed up with if not identical to epistemology in Kant. His stance is much closer to Husserlian Phenomenology than I imagined, and I thought that they were almost identical to begin with. Kant still has a dogmatic streak in him, and so he states his critique of dogma dogmatically. Husserl instead says this is a territory to be explored and opens it up to exploration and interpretation, and thus carries on the spirit of the critique further than Kant was able to do, as he was still dogmatic in his break with dogma in philosophy, i.e. positing final statements about the status of objects of experience rather than delving deeper into the phenomenology of those experiences themselves. I really listened to Bernstein in order to reset my understanding of Kant so I could connect it to the deflationary reading of Hegel that he presents in his other lectures. Kant represents a point of sophistication in philosophy that we may never achieve again. All philosophy after Kant is moving in his orbit. He thought he could show that Epistemology IS Ontology. And his arguments are pretty deep even if ultimately they fail even in the regressive reading of Bernstein.

Husserl attempted to solve some of these problems by looking in a more detailed way into the structures and processes of consciousness itself. But ultimately he came up against the same wall, i.e. the noumena, i.e. bracketing. Bernstein says for Kant appearances were the reality, but he still reserved the noumena which he believed had no remainder. But most interpreters believe that there is a remainder, that is there even though we cannot know it. What I did not realize that Bernstein emphasizes is that that Kant only brought up the term in order to define it so he could say there was no remainder. Bracketing takes that remainder what ever it is that we can never know out of play. But that same bracketing produces solipsism and the problem of intersubjectivity (i.e. the social). But according to Walton, Husserl in his later work discovered the idea of replacing bracketing with the horizon of the world, which Heidegger used with great effect in Being and Time stealing some of Husserl’s thunder. Bernstein said that Heidegger basically misunderstood Kant’s philosophy of time. But the philosophy of time that Heidegger took from Husserl is that of Internal Time Consciousness which was the one book that Heidegger edited of Husserl’s. In fact Bernstein’s final critique of Kant is that he thought Kant applied too monolithic a notion of time to phenomena. And Husserl’s internal time consciousness diagram is precisely an expansion of our notion of time beyond “Objective Time”. Kant’s argument about time hinges on the difference between serial and parallel time. Objective time for Kant is simultaneity of the systematization of objects. This difference revolves around the distinction between Freedom and Causality, and that revolves around the reversibility or irreversibility of our own action (house verses river boat analogies). Husserl instead uses a sedimentation analogy that hearkens back to the Orlog (cf Well and Tree by Bauschatz) of Indo-European fame. It is a model in which time has depth and so there is an extra dimension to resolve the problem that exists in the schematization of objects in time that Kant’s argument in the analogies runs into and which Bernstein criticizes. It is a better answer than the one that Bernstein answers which is evolutionary time, because Internal time Consciousness is a subjective time, rather than an objective time that encompasses the species. So this suggests that Heidegger was not far wrong by emphasizing the analysis of time in Being and Time, and seeing the equiprimodiality of the moments of time as the place to start, but instead of emphasizing memory as Husserl had done, Heidegger emphasizes the future instead.

At any rate I recommend listening to Bernstein’s lectures on tape for a more complete answer to this question, and a far more authoritative one than I can give.

http://bit.ly/y4vcRH

http://www.quora.com/Immanuel-Kant/How-do-Kantian-metaphysics-and-Kantian-epistemology-relate-to-each-other

Mytho-logos . . . (obscure, esoteric, and fanciful answer)

Mythos is a story. Logos is language, and it core is the internal constraints that are necessary for language to make sense. This is the physus of the logos.

One of the things that we need to understand  is that truth is an aspect of Being. And Being has meta-levels, and so truth has meta-levels along with the other aspects which are Reality, Identity and Presence.

Another point is that we live in the metaphysical era after Thales. Prior to that was the mythopoietic era (cf Hatab). What happened when we fell into the metaphysical era was that there was a symmetry breaking in time, such that we lost a moment of time, the mythic moment. So when we look back at mythology there is a certain nostalgia for this missing moment of time. Time was originally four dimensional with past, future, present, and mythic (original). The mythic is genealogical time. It is the time in which the ancestors still live and influence our lives directly. It is the time of the generation of the immortals and their interaction with humans.

Past and Future are really the same. Together in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) was called Peterite, i.e. Complete. While the Present is incomplete. The mythic moment is the dual of the Present. It is the origin.

The meta-system has four parts (arena, source-sink, boundary,  originary template outside the arena, like the object template in object oriented programming prior to instantiation). The mythic is the originary moment, past and future are like source and sink, the present is what appears inside the horizon of the world within the arena. So the difference between present and mythic is what is inside or outside the horizonal boundary. The source is where the system enters the meta-system (is instantiated within the arena) always already lost in the past. The sink is where the system exists the arena always already lost in the future. But these are the two endpoints that confer completion on the worldline of the human as being-in-the-would (dasein). These two endpoints that signify completion collapse together as the peterite and this is understood via fate (wyrd). On the other hand there is what upwells within the world horizon and that which is beyond the world horizon. What was beyond the horizon was the universal genealogy, the always already lost origin of the community. What is within the horizon is the mitsein and the story, the mythos is the talk (rede) that is always there as a background, always referred to, always invoked. The befindlichkeit (discoveredness) is what is found within the world horizon, we find ourselves as part of a community within the arena of the world. And then the third existentiel is verstehan (understanding). Being is intelligibility. Thinking and Being are the Same as has been said by Parmenides.

Parmenides said there are three ways, two of which should not be taken. There is the Way of Non-Being which is Existence. There is the way of Appearance which is the appearing of what appears, i.e. what is present. And then there is the Way of Being, which is static and unchanging as the substance and substructure of all things that exist simultaneously.  As has been said elsewhere in answer to another question we can see that existence is what is found, and thus the basis of discoveredness (befindlichkeit). Appearance is also opinion as DOXA, and that is related to the rede or talk of the mitsein. That talk can be chatter, or it can be the always present stories that are the coin of wisdom and reference as the mythic. Thus we can see that Being is verstehen, i.e. intelligibility of things. So the Existentiels are there in the ways of Parmenides. For him intelligibility is the only way, the only way that is not impossible, because it is the only thing that lasts, like geometrical proofs of Euclid. Parmenides is taken up to the gate in the heavens and this is revealed to him by the mysterious goddess.

Once we understand that both existence and Being share the aspects, and that appearance is defined by three anti-aspects (difference, fiction, illusion) together with presence. So there is a symmetry breaking here. So lets think about the other symmetry breakings of the same kind:

presence [present, phenomenal]:: fiction [mythic, genealogy], illusion [past, memory], difference [future, change] => appearance (phenomena always already there seen serially by individual, befindlichkeit) (missing: grounds, reasons)

identity [future, unchanging]:: absence [present, noumenal], fiction [mythic, not genealogical], illusion [past, no memory] => ideos (apperception always already glossed, simultaneity seen by community, verstehen mutual intelligibility) (missing: order)

truth [mythic, not genealogical]:: difference [future, unchanging], absence [present, noumenal], illusion [past, not memory] => mythos (same stories always already told, mitsein rede) (missing: uncovering)

reality [past, remembered]:: difference [future, change], fiction [mythic, genealogy], absence [present, noumenal] => opinion (ungrounded chatter, useless talk, nihilism always already lost, individual rede) (missing: light)

—————————————–NONDUAL—————————————–

absence [not present, noumenal]:: identity, truth, reality => noematic nucleus, category theory (shadow: groundless abyss, oblivion)

difference [not future, change]:: truth, reality, presence => essence, set theory  (shadow: chaos, entropy, clearing)

fiction [not mythic, geneological]:: reality, presence, identity => arche, model theory (shadow: covering, opening)

illusion [not past, not remembered]:: presence, identity, truth => noesis, symbolic logic as formal system disconnected from reality (shadow: darkness, forgetfulness)

Each aspect stands against the other anti-aspects in a symmetry breaking, and vice versa. The asymmetries in time follow the same pattern.

order, light, ground, uncovering are the characteristics of the positive fourfold, otherwise known as the fourfold of heaven, earth, mortals and immortals that we learn from reversing the negative fourfold from the Birds of Aristophanes.

From this we see that the “strangely truthful logic of myth” comes out of the asymmetries of time and the aspects of Being and existence. Traditionally Plato defined myth as lies, perhaps cunning lies, perhaps based on metis. But fiction and truth are two sides of the same aspect. Mythos comes when truth confronts the other anti-aspects. the strangeness of this mythos comes from the meta-levels of Being. In other words there are different meta-levels of truth.

The first meta-level of truth beyond facticity is verification. Notice verification is a relation between truth and reality. Validation is a relation between presence and reality. Coherence is a relation between identity and reality. Meaning comes into model theory via the advent of reality to the formal system which only has presence, truth and identity as aspects. This is the kind of truth that we see in the Oedipus myth when the person comes to verify that Oedipus was a foundling and not the child of his adopted parents.

The second meta-level of truth beyond verification, is uncovering (Aleithia), that is a dynamic truth, truth as process (as becoming true). This is the meaning of truth Heidegger uncovers from the Greeks that we had forgotten. This is the kind of truth that appears when Oedipus realizes that he killed his father and married his mother just like the oracle had said he would and which he ended up doing by trying to avoid that fate.

This third meta-level of truth is related to Hyper Being, Differance and what Plato called the Third kind of Being beyond stasis (Parmenides) and flow (Heraclitus). It is the truth that the Demiurge creates the world as an insemination, much like the poet in the Mahabharata gives rise to his own main characters, the Pandavas through insemination of one of his own female characters. The poet brings meaning and creates through his own embodiment in his own story. In this there is confusion between the poet as author and the poet as character in his own work. At the level of Hyper Being all the distinctions we might make (differences that make a difference) keep slip sliding away. This is the truth that Oedipus himself is the cause of the plague that he is trying to find the cause of in his search for the truth of the community and its defilement.

The fourth meta-level is related to Wild Being. Wild Truth is where truth and falsehood are mixed up like in the Novel. Sometimes literature is more true than realistic documentaries and non-fiction works. Wild Being is like the Mandelbrot set where each point is iterated on to find its acceleration as a line of flight and on the basis of this the point is given a color and we see the overall pattern by the various colors that are assigned to various points due to their acceleration in iteration, i.e. each point has its own intensity, isolated from all other points. There is mixture but patterning in the mixture of intensities that form a rhizome. (cf Delueze). This is the truth that Oedipus sees when he puts out his own eyes. He wanders blindly and then eventually becomes a sage, and initiates the sons of Theseus. This is the truth that comes from the experience of the limits of the human condition.

Mythology as we know it from the Greeks in general is about exploring those limits of the human condition within the Indo-European worldview. And those limits are seen in the interplay between mortality and immortality between heaven and earth.

This strange truth when take to the level of Ultra Being, becomes Beyng (Seyn) (cf Heidegger Contributions to Philosophy: from Ereignis). At the impossible limits we see the strange, unique, onefold of Beyng which is the unstriated dual of Being which is striated by the meta-levels. To see Beyng we must jump over Ontological difference to realize another possibility, one in which we are oblivious to that is encompassing us, and not merely something receding that we have forgotten. This ultra truth is the truth of the Oracle itself. The oracle is a singularity at Delphi where a comet hit the earth, i.e. where heaven and earth come together. As Plato said it was a stone that was not on any boundary from which all the boundary stones were measured. There the fumes came up from the underworld that allot the Pythoness to chant what was revealed from the unseen. Cryptic sayings that had hidden truths for humans to discover for themselves. Orientation toward Beyng in the midst of Being is ereignis: event, happening, appropriation, discerning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Ereignis). All myth is measured from this impossibility at the core of possibility.

Logic is the core of the logos, the physus of the logos, i.e. the internal constraints of language itself that need to be respected for it to remain intelligible. There is also the logos of the physus, i.e. the schemas, i.e. the templates of organizatoin and understanding that we project on the noumena. The inner logic of myth that we find truthful at higher meta-levels of Being as we approach the impossible limits of Beyng is its strange, unique and onefold character that comes from the lost moment of mythic time. We are mortals trapped in our finitude looking at our own limits as archetypal projections of immortals. We are walking between Heaven and Earth standing upright. When we approach the nondual core of our worldview we see order, right, good, fate, source, root as the layers of our worldview and of ourselves. What tells us about the perils of living in a worldview like this, what shows us the nondual core by example, it is myth, the truthful lies or the lies of truth. As Nietzsche says truth is a lie we tell ourselves to maintain our viability and life within the world in which we find ourselves, immersed in nihilistic chatter, and it is what we cling to because of our non-understanding of that world. That limit is DOXA to which we oppose our RATIO in the divided line. The limits of the divided line are Paradox and the Supra-rational. But this boils down to what Kant called serial verses simultaneous time. Objects in the world are simultaneously in community, but we experience them serially based on our freedom to move. Causality is the flip side of freedom. Paradox grows out of contradiction and is mixture of contradictories and when intensified becomes absurdity. The supra-rational is when two opposite things are real, true, identical, present at the same time without interfering with each other. Thus the supra-rational comes from our comprehension of the parallel and simultaneous nature of time in nature, in the physus. But internally we mix up what we see serially and need to strive to keep it separate with logic and schemas. We use the aspects to attempt to situate ourselves within our Indo-European worldview. the aspects apply to both Existence (as emptiness or void) and Being but they are also the way we bring intelligibility to the world through our understanding. We play the aspects off of each other in relation to the other anti-aspects and this is the way we experience the equiprimordiality of time as a symmetry breaking with a lost moment, always already missing in the metaphysical era. We have our nostalgia for the mythopoietic era, and we yearn for the next era of heterochrony, when time becomes symmetrical and parallel again.

In Heterochrony, i.e. when there are separate orthogonal timelines as seen by Dunne originally in the twenties of the last century and which we recover in F-theory, we lose the present as well as the mythic in another symmetry breaking that gives us a new symmetry. This is the worldview where the pluriverse, multiverse, is taken for granted and we realize that they are on multiple orthogonal timelines. Those other universes are absent and never present except as dark matter  and dark energy, or what is beyond the big bang or black hole singularities. In a heterchronic worldview era we will be nostalgic for the present as well as mythos. The present was too incomplete and the the mythos too complete as to be fated, and wyrd. The completion of the peterite seen as the past or future will be al we have, as we see in relativity theory where there are four dimensional blocks to which our worldlines are pinned never changing. Future and past are the same, and the difference is meaningless in four dimensional timespace with lightcones. If we lose the assymetry of the present in relation to the peterite, then we lose track of time all together. Symmetrical time is timeless. And it is precisely the timeless that we lost when the symmetry breaking occured that took us from the mythopoietic to the metaphysical era. Again timelessness will appear in a multidimensional time of heterochrony, where both mythos and present are lost moments both nihilistic opposites of incomplete and too complete, and all we are left with is the complete either as past or future which are really the same distanåçce from ourselves in time and thus also nihilistic opposites. What is left according to Heidegger is Ereignis, happenings, appropriations, discernments by dasein as being-in-the-world who is suddenly encompassed by Beyng.

http://bit.ly/A0Ulgj

http://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-the-strangely-truthful-logic-of-myth

There is a mathematical reason that codons are four. The alphabet this code produces has 64 permutations. 64 is a special number, the lowest number which is 4^3 or 2^6 which means that it can be transformed from two dimensional to three dimensional and not lose any information. This is the minimum number for which this is true. Thus it is a mathematically singular point in the number series of information transformation efficiency.

In comments I have been asked to elaborate.

4x4x4 is a cube. (2x2x2)x(2x2x2)=8×8 is a flat matrix with 64 squares like a chess board.

4 codons ^ 3 places in the DNA string = 64 information units.

But the real secret here is the fact that this structure is reversible and substitutable without change and that is why there are 20 codons. If you reverse the codon sequences of three of if you substitute the two pairs of bases for each other then it does not change the fact that there are 20 sources 8×2 and 12×4. You get this by substituting yin for yang and reversing the hexagrams. This leads to 20 groups of hexagrams that are impervious to these changes. This makes DNA a code impervious to change based on direction and substitution and explains why there are exactly 20 amino acids. But because it is a code it has start and stop codons and so the mapping is not perfect between the reversable/substitutable case and the actual assignment of codons to amino acids but it is close. There are several codon mappings to the Amino Acids and to the start and stop codons and they have an interesting pattern and development. See the following for some of the most interesting research on Amino Acid to Codon mappings which finds that the mappings are not random as they have been previously portrayed.

1) Petoukhov S.V. & He M. Symmetrical Analysis Techniques for Genetic Systems and
Bioinformatics: Advanced Patterns and Applications. 2010, Hershey, USA: IGI Global. 271 p. (this book has a special section about I Ching and the genetic code!).
2)     He M., Petoukhov S.V. Mathematics of bioinformatics: theory, practice, and applications. USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 295 p. (I attach the cover of this book with symbols from I Ching!).

Articles on the site http://arxiv.org/ :
1.        Petoukhov S.V. (2008b) The degeneracy of the genetic code and Hadamard matrices. 1-8. Retrieved February 22, 2008, from http://arXiv:0802.3366
2.        Petoukhov S.V. (2008c) Matrix genetics, part 1: permutations of positions in triplets and
symmetries of genetic matrices. 1-12. Retrieved March 06, 2008, from http://arXiv:0803.0888. (версия 2 послана 29 марта 2010 года и находится на http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0888v2 )
3.        Petoukhov, S.V. (2008d). Matrix genetics, part 2: the degeneracy of the genetic code and the octave algebra with two quasi-real units (the “Yin-Yang octave algebra”). 1-23. Retrieved March 23, 2008, from http://arXiv:0803.3330.
4.        Petoukhov, S.V. (2008e). Matrix genetics, part 3: the evolution of the genetic code from the
viewpoint of the genetic octave Yin-Yang-algebra. 1-22. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from http:// arXiv:0805.4692
5.        Petoukhov, S.V. (2008f). Matrix genetics, part 4: cyclic changes of the genetic 8-dimensional Yin-Yang-algebras and the algebraic models of physiological cycles. 1-22. Retrieved September 17, 2008, from http://arXiv:0809.2714
6.        S.Petoukhov (2010). Matrix genetics, part 5: genetic projection operators and direct sums. May 18, 2010, from http://arXiv:1005.5101v1

One way to think about this is through the game of Chess. I believe that the Game of Chess is right at this boundary where there is efficient information transformation between dimensions. A Chess board is two dimensional with 64 squares 8×8. When I analyze the pieces in chess I get the same amount of information in the pieces that exist in the chess board. Thus each side contains differentiated forms of embodied information that completely map to the chess board. This is why there is conflict, both sides are complete mappings of the territory under contention.I will leave it as an exercise to the student to prove or disprove this claim. I don’t have my analysis anymore and so I would have to do it all over to prove that what I am saying is correct, and I don’t have time to do that right now. But if it is true as I claim, then a lot flows form this. The game gets is perfect form from its being right on the boundary between two and three dimensions and embodying the transform between them in the board and pieces. Because of this efficiency of transformation the minds of the two players when immersed in the game are interacting right at this threshold of efficiency and effectiveness of information transformation, and are thus able to communicate semiotic-ally within the game very effectively. This combination of efficiency and effectiveness I call efficacious. Chess is an extremely efficacious symbolic communication system.

Now the DNA and RNA of the cell is taking advantage of exactly the same mathematical singularity where there is transformation between dimensions without data loss. This is one of the reasons that replication in life is so efficient. In this case we are going from the coded strand to the three dimensional molecule via the copying mechanism in RNA. But the fact this dimensional transformation of the information can be done at this singularity of perfect transformation means that there is no re coding involved. We can see this in magic squares and cubes of order 64. The magic square to cube mapping by the numbers allows us to see how all the numbers are distributed in each with no gaps or re-categorization necessary

Another example of this structure at the social level is the I Ching and its place in Ancient China as a core text by which all changes were seen as part of a per-mutational system exactly at this threshold. It is fascinating to think that both the west and the east had cultural artifacts poised at this threshold of efficient communication. In one civilization it was a game and in the other an oracular system given philosophical significance.

http://bit.ly/we0Kui

http://www.quora.com/Why-does-life-use-a-quaternary-system-A-T-G-C-to-encode-information-instead-of-a-binary-system

The bible story concerning Adam is a primal scene about switch over from Matriarchy to Patriarchy. Matriarchy is not when women are in charge as some have thought, but rather when women stay in the house of their fathers, and their husbands come visiting, and their brothers act as fathers to the children, rather than the genetic father. This organization of society gave over to the Patriarchal system that we all know and love, well perhaps only some of us. Anyway, it is amazing how mythology hides its secrets. So in this Primal Scene of Adam and Eve in the bible, we see Adam at first alone, and then God creates woman second from his RIB. Then they are a pair, they have fun, then sin and get thrown out of the garden, etc. etc. But why that rib? The rib is the secret to the explanation of the primal scene. In mammalian social groups there is an Alpha Male, who has a harem, and which Beta males try to oust so to take over the territory and harem of the Alpha males and become Alpha males themselves. Now in that Harem the females are not distinguished. They have a pecking order, but the Alpha male more or less treats them just as his territory, as a group or mass, i.e. in a non-count manner.

By the way studies, which I have lost the reference to unfortunately, show that the mammalian social groups are bimodal. This is to say that the drama between the Alpha and Beta males over the territory and female herd is only half the story. The other half is about outcast males and females which are not part of the social hierarchy, but roam around on their own. Turns out females in some primate groups, which ones I cannot remember any more, seek out liaisons with outcast males so that they have somewhere to go if the Beta male wins and is about to kill her young. Probably there are also liaisons between the outcast females and the Beta males as well. The article that I am vaguely remembering did not talk about that. But the key is to understand that the Pharmakon is the one who is outcast even from the outcast group, and has to move out to find completely new territory because he is forced out, like Oedipus, and of course if he takes a few females with him then he is an Alpha male in any territory that is unclaimed that he finds. Thus mammalian population spread is a Dissipative Structure ala Prigogine. This whole scene of mammalian social structure makes a lot of things fall into place. First of all Matriarchy is dominant because it is hierarchical, as despots throughout history can attest. But the other mode is contractual between independent mammalian creatures. But Patriarchy in which there are marriage contracts and the females go off to live with their husbands rather than staying at home with their fathers is in the sub-dominant mode which is basically unorganized.

So Patriarchy is a mode that is successful when there is no fertility scarcity. When there is scarcity (Handmaidens Tale) then the resource of fertility is hoarded. But when there is abundance then the sub-dominant mode of Patriarchy becomes dominant because exchange of females is genetically favored. Of course females in Mammalian societies were the first currency, and that is why money is different in hoards rather than in circulation as well. All economics comes from this primal currency where humans were the token of exchange because when fertility is scarce it is the most precious thing to our species. Much of Indo-European myth is structured by these Mammalian social structures, this is basically the origin of the Caste system in Indo-European myth.

Thoth

• gaia (and Uranus)

Alpha Male (king, priest, Varuna/Mitra, Kronos) Osiris Alive

• harem female — faceless — mass-like Noncount

Beta Male (knights, warriors, Indra, Baal, Zeus) Horus

• unfaithful females that go between the harem and the outcast males Isis

The Twins (Helen’s brothers) (peasants)

• independent outcast females that fraternize with Beta males Nephthys

Gamma Male Outcast (merchants) Seth

• independent female — with face that counts — Set-like Count

Pharmakon Doubly Outcast (from the Outcasts) [Alpha Male in new Territory beyond the pale] [Eros] Osiris Dead

• feminine negative fourfold (Chaos, Covering, Night, Abyss)

Anubis

[see my book Fragmentation of Being and the Path beyond the Void for another version]

Now back to Adam and Eve who we left almost being thrown out of the garden. The key fact is that the rib can be seen as an individual thing within the body of Adam. We can count those ribs even though they are under the skin. And so the rib is the signifier of the woman within the harem of the Alpha male which he was when he was alone, because the alpha male is essentially alone looking after his territory and his herd of females against the world, i.e. all the Beta males out there. But when God creates Eve from Adam’s rib then he takes her out of him and makes her visible to him. At that point her face becomes important. We see the veil lifted in Greek marriage, and we are still doing it today because in patriarchy the face of the female matters, she is recognized as a particular female no longer part of the mass of the harem, she is a particular in a set rather than an instance in a mass. Thus Adam is no longer alone, but that can get him into trouble. His relation to Eve now freed from her father the Alpha male is one of contact. That is why Mitra is the god of contracts, and Varuna is the one who enforces the contracts with his magic. Contracts only make sense in a patriarchal world, because kinship is no longer the determiner of lineage but rather in the exchange of foreign females the name of the father becomes important (cf Lacan via Zizek). The contract is between the families who are sharing the precious resource of fertility.

So just as Abraham gives us a primal scene where human sacrifice gives way to animal sacrifice, the story of Adam gives us a marker of the emergent point when we tipped into the other mode of mammalian society, the outcast and contractual, i.e. non-hierarchical mode, the democratic mode. Now the Israelites were so keen on contracts they made contracts with their monotheistic god. That was a very bad idea because there was no way that they could fulfill that contract, and the Bible records in excruciating detail that failure. (See The Nine Commandments: Uncovering the Hidden Pattern of Crime and Punishment in the Hebrew Bible by David Noel Freedman) 

We are very lucky to have these primal scenes as part of our heritage, like the primal scene of the Well and the Tree which is the at the core of the Indo-European worldview. These primal scenes have deep meaning, as we can see by the fact that we never tire of interpreting them in myriad different ways, like this way for instance.

For more along these lines see Meaning and being in myth By Norman Austin

http://bit.ly/AaIZcP

http://www.quora.com/The-Bible/Why-did-God-create-Adam-first