For me an amazing fact is that only the Indo-Europeans have the concept of Being in their language. And that both Being and Having are the most irregular verbs in Indo-European languages, and thus artificially produced by blending together other verbs. This means that Being (Sein, Sat) is an anomaly in language with all other languages having either existence or copula or some other concept rather than Being at their core.

This coupled with the fact that the Indo-European homeland was in Turkey and that Hittite is the oldest branch of the Indo-European family judged on the basis of vocabulary rather than grammar using genetic mutation analysis techniques. That the oldest megaliths in Turkey are 27,000 years or so old, showing that the Indo-Europeans probably had the oldest civilization, much older than China, Egypt or Sumeria. That in Turkey in ancient times there was a natural breadbasket with more overlapping kinds of grains present than any where on earth and that the Indo-europeans probably invented agriculture by just foraging for these grains. There are loan words in both Sumerian and Indo-European that showed that these people interacted. That the oldest sumerian epic Gilgamesh contains a fight with a monster that is probably the representative of the Indo-Europeans in the north of Sumeria. Sumeria has a completely unique language unrelated to any other known language, and it is probably the oldest civilization after the Indo-European civilization. Cities in Sumeria went from 120 people in villages to 25,000 over night with no fortifications or palaces in them but only temples showing that Plato was right that Men were created only to serve the Gods and that all other formations of civilization came later. That the Sumerians called the Indo-Europeans the Kur which meant also Hell to them, and that they probably drove the Indo-Europeans out into the Steppes where the Indo-europeans built Kurgens (Burial mounds). The Skythians who appeared out of the Stepps during Greek times were probably the result of a foray against the nomads in China a century earlier. Various tribes displaced each other in a domino effect until the Skythians popped out the other side, showing that the whole of the Steppes were populated with Indo-Europeans. The Greeks saw the Skythians as completely opposite of themselves in every way, even though the Skythians were also Indo-european,and probably truer to that tradition than the Greeks. When the Persians tried to attack the Skythians they merely taunted the Persians and said that they could only be forced to fight if the Persians took their burial mounds because they held no permanent property. On the Steppes they Indo-european precursors to the Skytians and Greeks realized a genetic possibility of the horse being big by breeding them to be larger. And when the horses became big enough to pull chariots the Indo-Europeans started taking over the world. Chariot warfare preceded warfare on horseback because the horses were still too small to ride when they could pull a chariot. The first waves of Indo-European world colonialization began in about 6,000 BC in which they took over the known world. Now as a result of this and later colonializations by the Indo-Europeans 60% of the worlds populations speak an Indo-European language. Thus the world dominance of English and other Indo-European languages today had its beginnings about Eight thousand years ago. The Indo-Europeans have achieved world domination through the development of war horses and other technologies. That the central epic concerns one such artificial technological war “horse”. That the Epics of the Illiad and Odessey are older than but related to the Mahabharata each have chariot scenes in battle as central motifs in the stories. That most technical inventions credited to the Indo-Europeans were first invented by the Chinese a thousand years earlier.

Therefore, when you put these factoids together it appears there is a correlation between the uniqueness of Indo-European languages through the fact that it has Being, and the ascent to world domination due to technological change and the roots of this conquest began long ago. Colonialization and now Globalization had a distant precursor when the Indo-Europeans struck out and conquered the world based on the power of horses when they could not yet ride them because they were not big enough yet. And that the Indo-Europeans and every other kind of human that existed outside the Africa has Neanderthal genetic factors due to passing through the Neanderthal homeland in the Middle East on the way out of Africa. There are people with that bloodline still in the Steppes today after 70 generations who eventually came into Europe as nomadic invaders.

These factoids which I connect here are not connected elsewhere to my knowledge and has led to my believing that Ontology is important to understanding our technological superiority. My hypothesis for how this is so is that Being because it creates an imaginary substrate for connecting things, allowing stronger than usual metaphors, allows us to integrate technologies that are discovered into a functioning whole rather than their merely being forgotten and needing to be invented again in isolation later as happened with the Chinese. The ability to create synergetic and integral technological products seems to be a unique Indo-european invention. But that invention also brings with it the core feature of the Western worldview which is the problem of nihilism, and this problem was recognized and dealt with at length in the Indo-european epics that have survived.

So we can construe this set of factoids to indicate that the dominance of the Indo-Europeans today was based on a series of accidents and special factors that coalesced to produce the world in which we live today. And this worldview we have today has a deep past that we do not really recognize properly. From archeological finds in Turkey we can say that the Indo-Europeans were probably the oldest civilization predating what has been considered as the oldest by more than twice its age. The Indo-Europeans just happened to live in a natural Bread basket and probably invented the agriculture that made the other later .civilizations possible. The Hittites had a god prior to Uranus in their pantheon called Ahlalu which was forgotten by the time of the Greeks. The Hittites took Mesopotamia and Egypt at certain points in history. And that the other key group also nomadic was the Semites that lived between Egypt and Mesopotamia and who are considered based on analysis of Ugritic literature to have had an original monotheism, which later came to dominate our thinking destroying the old polytheisms.

So the Western worldview which we call Judao-Christian is really a meta-worldview made up of four cultural components. Two based on sedentary Civilizations crystalized around rivers, i.e. Mesopotamia and Egypt. But there are two nomadic groups that are important, one with the uniqueness of having Being in its language, and the other that has the uniqueness of original monotheism. We completely lost access to the Mesopotamian and Egyptian portions of our tradition, but then regained them through the rosetta stone on the one hand and through clay tablets and vocabularies that linked Sumerian with other languages that were preserved on those tablets. So now we are in a much better position to see the contributions of Egypt and Sumeria to our tradition than any time before for the last several millennia. We should call our tradition Indo/Suero/Semitic/Egyptian. All this is very strange and shows the contingency of our worldview which is both very ancient and full of anomalies that became norms through successive accidents and improbabilities in that very long history.

To me the most amazing thing was when I realized that the differences between kinds of Being rediscovered in modern Continental Philosophy were there in the Vedic times as the differences between the Gods and thus between the Castes in the social structure. This idea that the Kinds of Being discovered by Continental Philosophy were really very ancient in our tradition and conserved within it despite our propensity toward rampant and powerfully transformative emergence was to me astounding, and when I realized that I wrote the book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void in which I perform what I all OntoMythology, i.e. reading myths through the lens of Ontology, i.e. the meta-levels of Being. This method allows us to discover how myths convey the conservative structure of the world view that lies beneath the many deep emergent transformations that break up our heritage into given, fact, theory, paradigm, episteme, ontos, existence, and absolute changes within our history. Here we are considering mind blowing facts. But these facts, even knowing them at all are dependent on the theories, paradigms, ontos, existence and absolutes that go though periodic total revision to produce eras within our tradition. When we have a paradigm or episteme or ontos change it changes what facts are significant, the affordances offered to us in the moment, it rewrites history, it gives a new mythos, and it opens up new possibilities for the future that might be realized. G.H. Mead first describes the emergent event in his Philosophy of the Present because he took as his life’s work reconciling evolution with relativity. In the process the discontinuous changes in the tradition came to the fore as the central phenomena in our tradition. But this emergent change randomly yet persistently, especially in technology, is based on deeper persistent structures that are called the Meta-levels of Being that were really discovered by Bertrand Russell and posited in Principia Mathematica as the solution to most paradoxes. Being is of course the most paradoxical of all concepts because it is the highest in the Western worldview being both less than empty because it is worse than meaningless because it is the origin of illusions and delusions, and also too full in the sense that it means something different to everyone. Thus when we apply the only solution to extreme paradox (higher logical type theory, see Copi for a good explanation of it) and the extreme paradox of Being that is an anomaly existing only in the Indo-European tradition, together then we get a static structure that underlies all emergence. That static structure both creates nihilism as the background on which emergence is seen, but the structure of the emergent events themselves. And so this feature of our worldview strikes me as extremely improbable, based on a series of blackswan events in our history that made it so we have at the same time radical change and amazing stability to world structures based on logical structures that constrain paradox and contradiction.

To me it is truly amazing that we can live within our worldview and not understand it, even though the ancients left us clues as to its structure and how to cope with living in such a worldview of nihilistic extremes. The fact that we have to deal with continual discontinuous cultural and social events as well as technological change, but at the same time subconsciously maintain the structure that causes this to happen though the preservation of the structures that produce nihilism in our tradition is amazing. We are obsessed with false mysteries like that dramatized by Dan Brown, but do not even recognize an even deeper mystery that involves everything we do together in our daily lives that was understood by the ancients who inhabited this worldview but is no longer understood by us. Thus we are traveling blindly within our own worldview rather than being illuminated by it because we illuminate it ourselves with our comprehension of it. In effect underlying all the amazing fact is something even more amazing that allows us to appreciate amazing facts, which is the structure of our worldview that produces emergence out of nihilism and that preserves the structure of the worldview in spite of continual radical transformations that make up the contingencies of our history, and threaten everything we know and want to hang on to at every moment of our lives. We are oriented toward the amazing, as philosophers say that philosophy comes out of wonder. But the most wondrous thing is the mechanism within our worldview that produces wonder itself. Other Peoples throughout human history were not as driven as we are by wonderment. And we have wonderment because we inadvertently produce it through the structure of our worldview. We produce rampant nihilism as a background so we can recognize Emergence when it happens. Our propensity toward wonderment is part of our necessity of being on the look out for the arising of emergent events out of the nihilistic background. And what we recognize in the end is that Emergence and Nihilism are themselves nihilistic opposites so nihilism as has been said by Nietzsche and Heidegger is essential to our understanding of our worldview, and also according to Heidegger essential to our understanding of the essence of technology which is nothing technological but is in fact nihilism. This link between technological progress, especially in warfare, and the dualism between emergence and nihilism at the heart of the worldview is also quite amazing because it permeates our entire culture without our recognizing it.

On Quora: http://qr.ae/EEmL

See also http://thinknet.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/quora-answer-what-are-some-of-the-most-mind-blowing-facts/

Mirror.me for Kent Palmer

Mirror.me is an unusual service among many unusual services related to Social Networking. It gives a wordle.net like tag cloud of roles and important aspects of ones online experience. If you look at it carefully the first thing you really want to do is eliminate irrelevant words that are large like Professor in my case. It seems that they have a standard list of words and they are given different sizes depending on how it reads one’s online activities. But the interesting thing I learned how to do on the site is to search for both philosophy and philosopher in order to find the hard core people who are into philosophy. Like wordle.net it treats these two versions of the same word as if they are different and thus people how overemphasize that aspect of themselves have both of  them writ large in the mirrors of their online selves.

Listen to my story!

http://www.telescopictext.org/text/iVhESUvRNIxPP

Listen to my story!

becomes transmogrified into

Please pay respect to the voices that scream in the remembered forms thatopen out beyond us only then to the finally loved and lost secrets of oblivion with the orphans of the that fastness just beyond the overtuning of the starsthat have sang at me of your signs and abase and remain blind if you will not behold our minute reflective beads of being running above the stolendarkness beyond the edgelessness of the pluriverse.

See this brilliant new art form and the modern equivalent of the sonnet.

Another example at http://www.telescopictext.com/ by Joe Davis

He says . . .

“TelescopicText.org has just gone live. It is an extension of telescopictext.com, and is primarily a set of tools for creating expanding texts in a similar way. The tools can be found by clicking Write in the navigation at the top. Texts will house an ongoing collection of selected texts. Resources provides help for using this website, and also any news, updates, guides, support and a Q&A. If you need further information or help, contact info@telescopictext.com. You can Register in order to save and publish texts, or Sign in if you already have an account. If you like what you find here and you want to help support it you can Donate.”

My strategy is to respond on sites and then post those responses on my blogs. http://thinknet….ress.com for quora posts and http://think.net for other sites like Namesake.com and others. The problem I have with blogs is that you seem to be speaking into the air, while if you respond on other sites then one is responding to a particular person to a particular question within a context and I find that much easier. Those blogposts then become tweets and thus slowly I begin to accrue followers. My main purpose is to draw attention to my academic research to advanced systems theory which has been languishing unnoticed for years. So there are copius references to my research work such as at http://about.me/…ntdesign and http://archonic.net, etc. Anyway that is my strategy to get some slight notice, but not sure it is working all that well, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

Namesake.com Conversation Site: http://bit.ly/mRMwK5

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-design-thinking-and-analytical-thinking

http://thinknet.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/quora-answer-what-is-the-difference-between-design-thinking-and-analytical-thinking/

The essence of the Engineer

http://thinknet.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/quora-answer-what-is-the-best-generalization-statement-about-engineers/

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-generalization-statement-about-engineers

Schemas are the Key to understanding how the imagination projects objects.

See http://thinknet.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/quora-answer-how-does-objectivity-relate-to-imagination/

or See http://www.quora.com/How-does-objectivity-relate-to-imagination

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of AI both in Academia within the AI community and also among the public. I discovered something about AI in the 90s that I think is relevant to this question. I was considering the ontological basis of Software, and I finally understood that it has the nature of Hyper Being, which Derrida calls DifferAnce (differing and deferring). Once that was clear, then it became clear that the nature of AI had to be Wild Being (nb. Merleau-Ponty) and actually explored by Deleuze among others. So to make this concrete we can say that if Software is the only artifact with the nature of Hyper Being (what Plato called the Third Kind of Being in the Timaeus, cf J. Sallis) then the entire purpose of Software Engineering is to contain, the unpredictability, non-representability of Hyper Being which from the beginning was recognized to be a problem and thus the Software Engineering Institute and other consortia were set up to try to come up with solutions to this problem. But if the software could not be tamed then it was driven off to the outback of AI research. And what I noticed about the various AI techniques was that they were all opaque to us, and so when they are combined they become even more intensely opaque to our understanding. This is directly opposite our own cognitive capacities which to us seem transparent, even if the actual functioning of the brain is opaque. So this means that when we say that AI systems are going to be self-aware then we are projecting our own ideas on them as to what intelligence is. It seems to me that if in us our consciousness is transparent and brain functioning that supports that is opaque, then perhaps since these machines are our inversion, then perhaps for them the unconscious, i.e. the code itself running is transparent, but the actual functioning of cognition is and will always remain  opaque. So that begs the question of how we are going to relate to opaque consciousness, or even recognize it? It is going to be something analogous to dark energy or dark matter, and our own unconscious. While the unconscious of the systems, i.e. the software running on the hardware is going to be transparent to us, because we will understand its code, and will actually be writing it, and monitoring it, etc. I think Autopoietic Systems Theory is valuable in trying to understand these kinds of systems, especially when it is combined with some kind of reflexive sociology. Anyway you can see the source of these musings at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer in my book Wild Software Meta-systems.

https://www.gogplus.com/Innovation/Discussion/How-far-has-artificial-intelligence-advanced-are-any-machines-close-to-being-self-aware

Gestalt/Flow//System/Process

It is pretty complex. But I suggest you search for the terms I mentioned, it is somewhere toward the front, and it has to do with gestalt/flow and the other permutations I mentioned. Basically it says that Ideas and Emotions are reifications of thoughts and feelings that can be transmitted culturally, and it gives a criteria for distinguish what you call sentiment from the memes. I don’t subscribe to the concept of Meme actually but that is another discussion. 

Ok. Here we go.y Hope you are prepared for some complexity in the argument. I will try to keep it as glib as possible. With these short posts it is going to be a challenge.

Trying to be as succinct as possible, and probably ending up being cryptic . . . Systems are Gestalts. Gestalts are made of figure and ground. The dual of the gestalt is the flow. A flow is made up of a reference and a stream. The duality of the figure and ground within the gestalt inverts the stream and the reference. So the figure is like the reference and the stream is like the background. Difference is that the stream flows in front of the reference and the figure is in front of the background. This duality is not generally recognized in the literature. I have only found one or two references to temporal gestalts in the literature. But the idea at least goes back to G.H. Mead and his idea that each thing has its own amount of time it takes to be what it is. This is the cycle time of the eventity.

Now, this is at the perceptual level, but at the conceptual level this difference is the difference between Process and System. Rescher has called for the revitalization of Process Philosophy, and its connection to Systems Theory, which has not happened in the literature as yet. J. Seibt his student has made a start on this project. I suggest this disconnect is a blindspot in our academic (logos) and industrial (physis) culture.

Gestalt=flow and system=process are duals at the percept and concept levels.

Once we understand this duality at the percept and concept levels then we can go to the next step which is to recognize that there is a further duality between the the System and the Meta-system (OpenScape) schemas. I have explained this in detail in various papers at my websites. But basically this is the difference between the Turing Machine and the Universal Turing Machine from the point of view of computability. There is the application and the operating (meta-)system. In other words the environment is not a plenum but has its own organization which is the reciprocal or inverse dual of the system. See my “Meta-system Primer” briefing for more details as to the nature of this organization. The way we talk about this duality is by using the term “proto” to signify the meta-system. Thus the opposite of the Gestalt is the proto-gestalt, and the opposite of the flow is the proto-flow. These correspond to the meta-system and the meta-process. Meta means beyond in the sense of outside of in this case not above or any of is other meanings.http://www.quora.com/What-does-it-say-about-us-as-human-animals-that-we-can-ask-What-is-the-coolest-looking-animal-on-earth-in-a-time-of-global-species-devastation-due-to-human-interventions-in-the-environment

Now that we have established this deeper duality which we will not explain here except to say that the reason it is called the proto-gestalt is that it is what controls the glance that forms a single gestalt. When we look around the square in a foreign city we take it all in with a glance which contains within it actual looks at various gestalts on within the scene. Thus gestalts always have the context of the glance which is constantly moving and has is own implicate order (Bohm) and tacit knowledge (Polanyi)  of the surroundings that it uses to gage the situation in the square as we step into it from a sides treet. This context or situation, or ecosystem, or environment, or media, etc (OpenScape) comes before the actual gestalt or flow. This is why we use the word proto-gestalt or proto-flow at the level of percepts to indicate the difference that at the conceptual level is between the Meta-system and the Meta-process.

Now we get to the crux of the matter. There is another determination that we need to explore, which is the relation between Gestalt and Flow to Diachronic and Synchronic. Diachronic means in the flow of time and Synchronic means a slice across time in a moment. A diachronic gestalt is a temporal gestalt as we have said, while a normal gestalt is taken in at a single moment. Of course a moment takes time as Wm. James points out in his argument about the Specious Present. So Gestalts can occur across time in a larger interval as we see in a piece of music which takes the entire time of hearing to get the whole picture of its “movements”. Now if there are temporal gestalts or diachronic as well as synchronic gestalts, then there must be synchronic flows that are the inverse dual of the diachronic gestalts. We are familiar with these from photography. They are the pictures where the water is flowing during a “timelapse” so we see all the water flowing as a whole mass, which looks blurry in the photograph. Synchronic Flows are like “stop motion” pictures where the individual raindrops are frozen in midair. A normal motion picture is the case of the temporal flow that is diachronic  So there is also the case also of the  synchronic flow, and a photograph is the analog of the gestalt. So our main media are photographs and videos these days digital. But there are the corner cases of diachronic gestalt (timelapse) and synchronic flow (stop-motion) that set the limits for the inversion of these two duals into each other.

These corner cases I now propose can be compared to what goes on in consciousness a opposed to what goes on in culture as a social construction. To we know that we have thoughts and feelings. I suggest that thoughts as concepts are like gestalts and that feelings are like flows. But when we attempt to see that the corner cases are I suggest that they are Ideas and Emotions. In other words Ideas are diachronic gestalts (illusory continuities) and Emotions are synchronic flows (frozen energies, stored up energies, i.e trauma). So the difference between our consciousness which is alive with all kinds of thoughts and feelings, and externalized culture (See Berger and Luckmann) is that it is made up of intersubjectively (Socially) transferable “MEMES” of Ideas and Emotions. And these are especially powerful when they are combined as they are in say Greek Drama or Comedy. The Spectacle of Ideas intertwined with Emotions in drama has held us spellbound from the beginnings of Western culture which we trace to Greece, forgetting about Egypt and Mesopotamia which is the deep background or meta-system beyond the Semite and Indo-European nomads and served as slaves for these older civilizations. In the creation of culture we are trying to produce from our fleeting and ephemeral thoughts (including concepts) and feelings (including sensations) both Ideas as Illusory Continuities (Abstractions) and Emotions as pent up and distorted feelings

that are normally distorted by trauma.

The ideas and emotions are externalizations that we use to produce culture, because thoughts and feelings are two ephemeral for that work. They are reifications, and limits of human reason and the very stuff of appearances that fit into Plato’s divided line.

Now we return to the question:

Do conversations inhibit meme propagation because they aggregate sentiment rather than catalyze it’s movement? Is that why there are so few cute cat photos shared on Namesake?

Now I am not sure what you mean by “aggregate sentiment” and “catalyze movement” but this reminded me of the difference between Emotion and feelings. Emotions are aggregated feelings, and feelings are catalyzed by portrayals of emotion say in drama.

As to the cute photos on Quora, and many other sites, see my Quora post which has been censored to the question

What does it say about us as human animals that we can ask “What is the coolest looking animal on earth?” in a time of global species devastation due to human interventions in the environment? http://www.quora.com/What-does-it-say-about-us-as-human-animals-that-we-can-ask-What-is-the-coolest-looking-animal-on-earth-in-a-time-of-global-species-devastation-due-to-human-interventions-in-the-environment where I make the case that our fascination with cute little animals or strange ones says more about us than it does about them. But we can say that each of us is trying one way or the other to portray ideas and emotions that reflect our thoughts and feelings to some level of fidelity unless we are sociopaths. Some are better than others at this process, and the best are novelists, playwrights, directors of film, painters, and other artists, i.e. manufacturers of culture.

Special Systems as Aliquot numbers are pithy.

Topicmarks.com summary: http://topicmarks.com/t/TzhzRHxJfDQ1NjIzfFV8NDU2MjN8T3NqfA

Not known for my pithy replies, I still have something to say on this subject. And that is that it is good to simplify as much as possible but not so much that what ever you are talking about is trivialized. Therefore the list of attributes of pithiness given in the first answer are not rules but depend on the circumstances.

Let me say that I have found that one normally start with a complex mess when ever one starts to deal with any subject, but it is key to allow that complex mess to simplify itself rather than forcing it to simplify by analytically reducing it to the lowest common denominator. And what I have found is that this actually occurs, sometimes after long struggle and searching, and failure to simplify on ones own part.

Let me give a good example which is my own Special Systems theory whose discovery is recounted in Autopoietic Reflexive Special Systems Theory at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer. That theory started out as an aside in my book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path beyond the Void. I was recounting the impact of the Primal Indo-European Scene on the advent of Western Philosophy among the Pre-socratics, and finally got to Plato. Since he has one book which is almost never read, i.e. the Laws, I decided to focus on that book in my commentary on how the Primal Scene was represented in Plato, and this led to a consideration of the relation between Aristophanes and Plato. In that work I discovered what I call the Negative Fourfold which is the opposite of the Positive Fourfold talked about by Heidegger, and taken from Socrates. The Negative Fourfold is a hidden metaphysical principle which reveals the dark side of the structure of the world and is in ancient Greece attributed to women. The negative fourfold appears in Aristophanes BIRDS and appears in his rework of the Theogony of Hesiod, in which there are four primal powers which are feminine which are Night, Chaos, Abyss, and Covering. It is interesting that covering is there, because for Heidegger Truth is discovered to be a process of uncovering. And this leads to the idea that the Positive Fourfold can be seen not just as Heaven/Earth//Mortals/Immortals but also as Light, Order, Grounding, and Uncovering (Aleithia). Once we understand the duality of the positive and negative fourfold we get a much clearer picture of the structure of the Western worldview as seen in Greek times at the beginning of the Metaphysical Era, while many are still within the Mythopoietic Era that ended with Thales.

From these negative fourfold of sources of everything arises Eros, and from Eros arises the birds and after the birds come the Gods of Greece. This is then related to the five characteristics of Aphrodite, and it is discovered that the attributes of Aphrodite form an autopoietic ring, i.e. a self-organizing, self-producing ring. The appearance of Eros out of the four negative sources reminds us of the Egyptian Memphis creation myth in which there are four-pairs of primordial gods out of which the Atun/Atum/Atom (i.e. monad) arises. It is of interest that the arising of the monad leads to a swarm of birds, i.e. a swarm of monads (In the Egyptian Myth the primal scene is the alighting of a bird on some bit of land sticking out of the flooded Nile).

With this in mind I started studying the Laws of Plato, and the commentaries I was reading on it compared it with the Republic/Ancient Athens, and Atlantis. I saw that this first Systems Theory, this first Social Theory, this first political theory, etc was organized in such a way that the emergent form was the polis in each case and that Plato was creating a caricature of cities. They all had very odd features. So I decided to study the three of them in detail and relate them to what I knew of Greek and Indo-European Myth. What i discovered is that the oddities of the Cities of Plato formed a pattern. For instance Atlantis is out at sea, the Republic/Ancient Athens is on the coast, and Magnesia of the Laws in inland sheltered from the sea. Also this is the order of increasing detail with which the cities are portrayed. I knew from J. Sallis in Being and Logos that the Republic was a journey to hell (Pyrus) and back, and Socrates was arrested on his way back from hell. So this meant that the fact that it is the only book read these days was to ignore the book where three elderly statesmen are paying a visit to the shelter of Zeus on the Isle of Crete. In other words we ignore the more detailed account of the positive journey which is the dual of the Republic.

Now we get to the interesting part, I was sifting through all these mappings of the cities to each other, and to what I knew of the primal scene of the Indo-Europeans, and the primal scene of the Egyptians, when I decided to take another tact and look for similar structures in math. Almost immediately I found similar structures in several different types of math, and I started putting those together. Eventually I realized that the math could be used to organize the data I had about Plato’s cities and connect it to the theory of Autopoiesis which I saw in the mythology. At that point Special Systems Theory was born, and then I started following the math where ever it led me, and it has been a wonderful intellectual adventure looking for the precursors of Special Systems Theory, and the physical and mathematical analogies. What I found when I came back and applied that mathematical theory to Plato is that he got his view of the Special Systems from Egypt, because they appear in the Egyptian Gods, and when ever he is being obscure he is probably giving some oblique reference to the Special Systems. For instance the speeches in the Symposium correspond to the order of the Special Systems. By having the imaginary cities of Plato as an analogy, along with the Mathematical analogies and physical analogies, one can begin to apply the theory to lots of phenomena, that are anomalous and therefore understand some things that have always appeared mysterious to normal science, but have roots in arcane traditional sciences like Acupuncture for instance, which is a perfect model of an Autopoietic system projected on the human body rather than the body of the city (Polos).

Eventually after much work I discovered a very simple way to describe the Special Systems. That is as follows:

There exist wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts = Systems

There exist wholes that are less than the sum of their parts and thus have holes in them = Meta-systems (like sponges for instance)

That means that there must be holes that are exactly equal to the sum of their parts, and it turns out that there are three such systems, which differ from each other only in their differing and deferring or DifferAnce (Derrida, what I call Hyper Being, identified by Plato, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) from each other, and also in their ultra-efficacy measured by hyper-effectivities and hyper-efficiencies born of their roots in negative entropy.

Now in Mathematics we have in number theory numbers that are more than the sum of their parts and numbers less than the sum of their parts that correspond to the Emergent System, and the De-emergent Meta-system (OpenScape). But there are also aliquot numbers, i.e. perfect, amicable and sociable numbers, See http://djm.cc/amicable.html. These special and relatively rare numbers, especially the perfect numbers of which we know I believe 43 at the present time. Perfect numbers are those that are directly the sum of their divisors, i.e. the perfect sum of the numbers parts. Amicable numbers also known from antiquity, are numbers that sum to each other rather than themselves. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicable_number. Sociable numbers are a ring of numbers where each adds up to the next in a ring. Such rings can be of order 4 or 5, or 6, or 8,, or 9, or 28. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociable_number.

Thus we can see how the negative fourfold can be a sociable ring, or the five attributes of Aphrodite. There is numerical support in the prime numbers for this anomaly, but also in other kinds of mathematics that is more complex. We can see these rings operating in Acupuncture Theory, and in hypercylcles discovered in biology See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercycle_(chemistry). For instance the Five Hsing in Acupuncture theory is a hypercycle.

So after years of work, the big mess that was discovered in Plato’s cities eventually became something that can be stated very simply by its most basic mathematical analogy from number theory. But getting to this fairly pithy result was not an obvious thing from the beginning, and in fact many of the connections of math to the Special Systems were discovered by serendipity, after following many futile and dead end paths until they were exhausted. But the theory, slowly simplified itself as it was better understood. Plato said we want to cut the meat at its joints not through the bone. In other words we need to make our distinctions where nature suggests they should be made, not at some arbitrary place. So I would suggest that much of the complexity of expositions and the lack of pithiness comes from a lack of full understanding of the subject matter, but that is OK, because if we do not express what we know as we know it then we cannot refine it. It is the refinement that is the art, where you strip away ones own projections to see the phenomena itself in a new light that comes from itself and reveals itself in its essential form many times after years of searching and researching.

After finishing my book on the structure of the Western Worldview called Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void, I immediately wrote the research working papers in Reflexive Autopoietic Systems Theory, and then I summarized that in a monograph called Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory. Each major retelling of this story usually comes with some kind of simplification that attempts to get closer to the quintessential characteristics of the Special System, and also the Emergent Meta-system which they compose along with the normal System to create an image of the Meta-system. These systems are mutually transforming, and they are the basis in my opinion of Consciousness, Life and the Social. But how we get to that conclusion is a long story. But the key to the whole set of Advanced Systems Schemas can be understood by this analogy to the Aliquot numbers, which all of us are capable of understanding once we appreciate the special nature of the Perfect Numbers. From there the theory goes on to study the analogies with more complex phenomena. But it only takes this one analogy to get across the central kernel of this meta-theory of the emergent levels that explain the oddities of things like Consciousness, Life and Sociality.

So I hope this illustration from my own intellectual adventure proves helpful in getting my central point which is that Pithiness is something we have to seek hard to find in many cases, unless we impose it artificially on our subject. And if we take the advice of Plato we will put up with complex representations of what we know, so we can understand what we don’t know by the very messiness of our exposition. Sometimes as we work through that complex representation of our knowledge we find that it leads us to things we did not know we did not know, as with the Special Systems that were forgotten in our tradition but were part of the ancient wisdom of the Egyptians and Chinese that Plato who is central to our tradition tried to pass on to us, but it got lost along the way, and now that it has been rediscovered it can serve to solve a lot of otherwise perplexing subjects that appear to be in the blindspot in the eye of modern science. All this comes from asking seriously how it is that traditional sciences like Acupuncture work, but we cannot understand how they work, and when we understand special systems theory then we see that they work because they are based on the ultra-efficacy of Special System that lift the veil of entropy locally ever so slightly. But that is enough to allow all the variety of life on earth to exist, with at its height its social consciousness.

http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-succinctly-distill-complicated-concepts-into-pithy-expressions#ans398035

http://thinknet.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/quora-answer-how-can-i-succinctly-distill-complicated-concepts-into-pithy-expressions/