What is the difference between the reflexive social level and the autopoietic symbiotic level in the Special Systems Theory?

Oct 18 2014

I thought you would never ask . . .

For Special Systems Theory see Page on mediafire.com

The key is that Dissipative Ordering Special Systems are intertwined to create Autopoietic Symbiotic Special Systems, which are then intertwined, or conjuncted, or juxtaposed to create Reflexive Social Special Systems. But also the Reflexive Social Special Systems are the same time are the juxtaposition of two Autopoietic Symbiotic Special Systems. The real difference is the difference between emergent levels that can be seen as the difference between the Quaternion and the Octonion, between the Breather Soliton and the Super-Breather, between the Klienian Bottle and the Hyper Kleinian Bottle, between the Perfect or Amicable Number and the Sociable Numbers. In other words the emergent difference is inscribed in anomalies in mathematics. So for instance the Dissipative Ordering Special System is equivalent to two mirrors facing each other, and the Autopoietic Symbiotic Special System is equivalent to Three mirrors facing each other, and the Reflexive Social Special System is equivalent to four mirrors facing each other making up an inwardly mirrored tetrahedron. The reflexive social special system is the basis for social experience, and the Autopoietic Symboitic Special System is the basis for Life while the Dissipative Ordering special system is responsible for the ordering of Consciousness.

See Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature which is an introduction to the relation between life and consciousness but consciousness is dependent on the social to fulfill its potential. In works on Autopoiesis and Consciousness there is normally a forgetting of the social context for these Emergent Properties of living things. Reflexive Social Special Systems Theory sees the Social as intrinsic to understanding our own life and consciousness. And it uses the theories of John O’Malley, Barry Sandywell, and Alan Blum and others from the Reflexive Sociology to augment the theories of Life and Consciousness, as well as using anomalous mathematical entities to organize our understanding of these phenomena and their emergent differences from each other. The theory of Autopoieisis from this mathematical point of view is incorrect and so we correct the theory of Maturana and Varella based on the mathematics and thus we call these systems Autopoietic Symbiotic rather than merely Autopoietic.

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Quora Answer: Why does a number raised to the zeroth power equal one?

Oct 18 2014

Again here as in the question of the why the factorial of zero is one there is no real explanation of Why. What we are offered is a reason based on the mathematical systems definition. But does this really tell us why. Again I offer the book Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent: Alberto A. Martínez: 9780691123097: Amazon.com: Books which talks about alternative mathematical systems that we could have chosen, and how they may be in better alignment with the world but not as systematic, and so we chose a mathematical system that was as systematic as possible given the nature of numbers rather than one that fits what we experience in the world and this means we are always having to bridge the gap between what math tells us and what we experience. The fact that we chose a mathematics that does not fit the world completely because we wanted it to be as systematic as possible is why we call our mathematics Platonic. It also explains probably why it took so long for our mathematics to reach maturity. There was resistance all the way to Zero, to Irrational Numbers, to Imaginary Numbers, etc. to all the things that were counter intuitive about the system of mathematics.

So I propose that the real reason why is that we choose a mathematics that was as systematic as possible given the nature of numbers, and that the fact that Factorial of Zero is One, and Zeroth Power of any Number is One are two outcomes of this systematicity of the system of Mathematics that we chose. Another outcome is that n/0 is undefined. Another is that -1 = e^pi*i and the number series equals -1/12th. In other words there are anomalies in the system of mathematics we chose which are inexplicable.

This is why we can say that Mathematics is scientific. It accommodates itself to the nature of number systems and their systematicity in themselves more than it accommodates itself to us. It discovers anomalous characteristics in numbers and other types of orderings that mathematics deals with that changes our view of what number  or order is fundamentally. But this means we continually have to translate back and forth between the realm of number to our everyday experience of the world. And the reason it took so long to develop modern mathematics is that we had to learn to put ourselves aside and give the phenomena of number the last say on its own nature as something other than we might presuppose. So we get paradigm shifts and episteme shifts in the history of mathematics just like any other science, and just like any other science it changes the way we see the world when we allow the phenomena to be itself beyond our projections on it.

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Quora Answer: What is the origin and meaning of the term tetralemma?

Oct 18 2014

Tetralemma means A, ~A, both neither.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics was written to refute the very idea of it.

It is the way that Nagarjuna and perhaps the Buddha as well-defined emptiness.

It exhaust all logical possibilities and points to and impossible necessary possibility that we call emptiness that is non-cardinal, i.e. Not One! Not Two! Not Three! Not Many!.

Emptiness is seen as the ultimate nature of the mind and though that everything else that we know through the mind including the void of nature that is like empty space.

Emptiness is non conceptualizable and non-experiential because it falls outside the realm of logical possibilities.

Emptiness is not the Tetralemma, but is what is indicated by the Tetralemma as Other than it.

It turns out that this is a way of defining the Absolute. The absolute can be thought of as what falls outside the Tetralemma.

One way to interpret that is to say that Buddhism does not hold anything absolute, and is absolute about that stance against absolutes.

Another way to think about it is that everything is basically in a state of flux in which even change continually changes but not in a way that is itself continuous, rather in a way in which everything is discontinuous, i.e. is aggregates in flux such that the flux is also in flux. This type of change of change leaves no reference point we can rely on to even measure the change. And in that sense it is an absolute that is against all permanent, and unchanging absolutes. It is an absolute that destroys all other absolutes.

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Protected: Quora Answer: What are the teachings of nondual Sufism?

Oct 18 2014

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Quora Answer: What’s the difference between conceptualizing nonduality and directly experiencing nonduality?

Oct 18 2014

I would like to note that I am answering this question based on my reading of Dogen Kaigen’s Shobogenzo. It could be answered from may nondual perspectives with different answers.

Basically the presumption of the question is that we can conceive of Nonduality and that we can experience it. My answer to this question’s presuppositions is that emptiness cannot be experienced or conceived. Nondual means to me Not One. Not Two. Not Three. Not Many., i.e. non-cardinality. Zero is non-cardinal, and all basic approaches to nonduality start from ground zero. But Zero of Existence can be interpreted two ways, as Emptiness of Buddhism and Void (Wu Ji) of Taoism. The void of Taoism is empty space of nature, and that can be experienced indirectly as things that are physically missing leaving space itself there. But emptiness is within the mind, and cannot be experienced directly nor conceptualized properly. If we take that position that Emptiness cannot be either represented conceptually, i.e. it is non-representational and also it cannot be experienced because experience is always of something, then we need ways of approaching emptiness that are different from what we might have expected, which was an answer that we cannot conceptualize it except abstractly but we can experience it in mystical or spiritual states. If in effect we deny experience of emptiness then we suddenly step into a whole new realm of explanation. It is in this direction that we will be following Nagarjuna who defines Emptiness with the tetralemma (A, ~A, Both, Neither) as something different from any of those logical possibilities. Since all experience falls also within the logical possibilities then we must exclude emptiness from not just conceptualization but also experienceability. In order to do this we must develop a nondual way of thinking about things and this is what Dogen does in the Shobogenzo. it is the most accessible form of nondual thought for us moderns that I know of. Even though he lived in the 13th century his thought seems today still very contemporary, if not postmodern.

If we take the point that we cannot experience nor conceptualize emptiness then there is in fact no difference between conceptualization of Emptiness and experience of emptiness because they are both impossible. But why orient toward an impossibility as a criteria for understanding experience? Well that is a way to orient toward the absolute. Enlightenment is the embodiment of an absolute. It is a strange absolute because it is utterly relative it is the fact of change changing everything at all times. Buddhist orient toward that change changing itself in every moment. We experience change only if we take a reference point and then see the flow in relation to the reference point. But if there is no reference point, then there is nothing to hold on to to even see the changes. If there is only change changing itself then there is no concepts we can hold onto from moment to moment just as there is nothing in experience we can hold onto except knowledge. Knowledge is the only stable thing in experience, but knowledge of knowledge is very unstable because that depends on reflexivity and thus ultimately knowledge thought it seems to be stable has the same problem as Change, because knowledge that knows itself (Prajna) which is wisdom is inherently unknowable and unstable as well.

In Buddhism everything is pure flux within aggregates. It is actually more radical in its view of change than Heraclitus who notes that we cannot step into the same river twice. Buddhism believes that we cannot step into it even once. In other words between the changes in the river streams and the river flowing though us of life, we cannot hope to have a unified and stable experience of stepping into the river, and when we realize  that then we are suddenly free of many of the causes of suffering in this world which comes from clinging to things like concepts and experiences and relating them to an imagined self.

One of the corollaries of this radical interpretation of Buddhist emptiness as non-conceptual and non-experiential is that enlightenment itself is a kind of an illusion too. Enlightenment is an ideal that we set before ourselves. We put everything into trying to achieve it. But at some point we realize that it does not exist, and at that point we become enlightened because the self itself which was wrapped up in that idea is deconstructed by this disillusionment. This interpretation sees enlightenment as an interesting kind of ruse which actually does transform consciousness pragmatically. In this way Buddhism uses the nihilism of the Indo-European tradition against itself. From this point of view we cannot conceptualize enlightenment nor experience it because it does not exist. But neither did the illusions of our self that we are caught up in. Thus when we entangle our illusions that don’t exist with an ideal of enlightenment that does not exist then that has the practical effect of dispensing with our illusions.

Really when things get interesting, is when as in China with Fa Tsang of Hua Yen Buddhism and with Mipham and Manjushrimitra in Tibet with respect to Dzogchen the tradition starts to realize that in fact there is a difference between emptiness of Buddhism and Void (Wu Ji) of Bon and Taoism, and that they are in fact dual nonduals, and based on that they begin to point toward deeper utterly nondual matters beyond these entry-level concepts of nonduality. DzogChen is a heresy of Buddhism that rejects the two truths and sees them as extremes. DzogChen basically applies the logic of Nagarjuna to Buddhism itself and ultimately says that there is a higher state where we can distinguish between emptiness and void but that they themselves point to a deeper nondual state. In China this was discovered by Fa Tsang who recognized that deeper nondual state as interpenetration. In Dogen Kaigen we get talk of states beyond enlightenment or non-enlightenment.

From this point of view if we see the difference between conceptualization and experience as a duality, and we see both as empty and then we compare that to our direct experience of spacetime in the external universe so that we see that the two experiences are basically the same, then we suddenly see that there must be a state beyond conceptualization and beyond experience that is utterly nondual. I call that manifestation. It is a state where everything interpenetrates and intrafuses including ourselves where we are empty and external reality is just spacetime that is void (Wu Ji). Our bodies are what is in the barzak (Interspace, note Arabic term) between these two realities in which we find ourselves dwelling. And Dogen emphasizes the role of the body, just sitting in Shikantiza (meditation). Dogen is very rigorous in his way of thinking in a nondual manner that is to say suprarationally. And there is enough of the Shobogenzo that we can get the idea from reading his lectures. There is also the Extensive Record. So there is a lot of material to immerse ourselves into to try to learn how to think nondually about things like the difference between conceptualization and experience, or as Dogen calls it body-and-mind that engages in practice-and-experience by just sitting but with dignity in the way that the Buddhas and Patriarchs sat.

If you sit in Shikantiza, i.e. methodless meditation, then your body-and-mind will eventually forget idea that emptiness is something that you can conceptualize or that you can experience. Dogen scholars dispute the fact that Dogen’s own enlightenment was sudden and that it came from an experience associated with the “dropping off of Body and Mind”. Evidently this only appears in a biography. But the reason for disputing this is that it suggests that emptiness is an experience, and it suggests that it is achieved by a conceptualization that goes with the phrase “dropping off of body and mind”. This creates a false impression that the student too can learn to conceptualize nondually and experience enlightenment. But if both of these are impossible then that impression actually blocks our actually achieving enlightenment. Dogen suggests that we need to be very rigorous in our commitment to researching and studying what the Buddhas and Patriarchs have said and done and to emulate them. Only by breathing new life and meaning into the tradition that we make for ourselves can we make it our own and achieve our own enlightenment. He suggests that the best way forward toward that goal is methodless meditation on a regular basis and adherence to the principles of Buddhism which is what puts you in the nondual stream within which the lotus may then flower.

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Quora Answer: Slavoj Žižek: Was Lacan really just spouting warmed over Hegalianism?

Oct 18 2014

No. But unfortunately Zizek is the only one who has made Lacan understandable and his project is to reduce Lacan to Hegel and at the same time reduce Hegel to Lacan. He is hoping that if this mutual reduction succeeds the real Zizek will shine through. This however is unlikely. A better way to look at Hegel is through the lens of Plotnitsk who wrote In the Shadow of Hegel which questions the systemically of Hegel’s philosophy. If we see the unconscious in society through the lens of Bataile’s Accursed Share and realize that it is a general economy rather than a restricted economy which Plotnitsky explains in his work Complentarity then we start to see the arena in which Zizek is playing. Lacan’s semiotic and structural unconscious is that playground. One of the first philosophers to start exploring in this direction was Baudrillard in his Towards a Critique of the Economy of the Sign in which Value and Sign are seen as being chiasmicly related due to the complementarities of the General Economy. Zizek has taken this argument to the limit and applied it to everything under the sun.

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Quora Answer: What have been Slavoj Zizek’s great insights?

Oct 18 2014

Zizek and Badioiu are a pair. Zizek used to defer to Badiou all the time now he is trying to define himself against Badiou. In my opinion Zizek is the deeper philosopher. But if you consider Zizek without Badiou in the background I don’t think it is possible to understand him. They are both Lacanian Analysts thus they are both grounding their philosophies in very different ways. Badiou is the philosopher of the Event of the Arising of the Ultra One out of the Multiple into the Set. For Badiou the Set is the basis for Ontology, and he prides himself on actually understanding Set Theory. Unfortunately his theory that Sets are the basis of Ontology is wrong because there are multiple possible foundations for Mathematics rather than just one. Ultra one i.e. the first particular to arise from the multiple that is one. The multiple is pure heterogeneity, pure difference, pure incommensurability. Sounds a bit like the Unconscious, No? Zizek takes a more direct route to the unconscious by interpreting Lacan via Hegel, and Hegel via Lacan. His insight is that Ideology works like the unconscious as it shapes our ideas and thoughts. Ideology is the social unconscious. And when we think we are living in a non-ideological age after the many wars over ideology in the last century, where capitalism seems to have won in the end, this is the most ideological time, not non-ideological. The reason to reduce Lacan to Hegel is that Hegel had the idea of the Social as Spirit and so in that context we can blow up the ideas of Lacan about the Structural and Semiotic unconscious to be a theory about society and its unconscious, its blindspots. For instance the idea that when we buy a cup of Coffee at Starbucks we are being sold an ecological story with it, and we buy that. In other words ecological sensitivity has become a way of selling commodities and we do not question that when we hear it from corporations. Zizek is good at turing all our ideas upside down and making their opposites make sense. This is a way of making us question our presuppositions which cannot be all bad.

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Quora Answer: Is anyone sketching a philosophical bridge between Foucault and Nondualism, Buddhist, Taoist or other “eastern” philosophies?

Oct 18 2014

I am writing a paper on Zizek and Dogen which is a defense of Buddhism and other nondual ways like Islamic Sufism. Foucault and other Continental Philosophers figure into that defense in as much as you have to understand the relation of these various continental philosophers to each other. Basically the question should be What is the relation between non-dual philosophy to the Western worldview overall, and then within that context we can see various levels of attempts to solve problems created by dualism established by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. But in fact none of these western philosophers come close to articulating a real nondual position like that of Dogen, for instance.  You really have to compare a concrete instance of nondual thought within that tradition of Taoism, Buddhism, DzogChen, etc and show its relation to the dualist Western worldview as a whole, and then work your way down to individual philosophers and how they have tried to solve problems caused by duality within the western worldview. Otherwise it is easy to fall into Orientalism as so many do.

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Quora Answer: Do mathematical scholars agree with Kant’s view that math is synthetic a priori?

Oct 18 2014

It is not mathematics in general that is the Synthetic a priori as far as I know but Geometry which synthesizes space. Time is an Analytical a priori and related to Arithmetic for Kant. The the categories which are also synthetic a priori are schematized and thus connected to the series in time. The series in time is discontinuous so that the connection via the schematization and the categories gives a connection between the continuous and the discontinuous. The status of time is up in the air in Kant as we can see by Heidegger’s interoperation of Kant. Mathematical Categories like groups, rings, topologies are obviously synthetic, but it is unclear if they are a priori or a posteriori, i.e. platonic source forms or something we construct after the fact. What seems to like time and number is the series. But moments of time are not continuous in the same sense that geometrical objects in space are continuous. There is one school of thought on time that only the Now moment actually has Being which we ascribe to Zeno and Parmenides. There is another school of thought that time is continuous in its flowing like a river which is attributed to Heraclitus. But unlike the continuity of time we do not have access to the prior moment once it is gone in time the same way we have access to a point on a surface that we have moved away from and then can move back to. Some therefore say that each moment of time is itself discontinuous from the other moments of time like Heidegger which attributes different existentials to the different temporal ecstasies. When we consider a group as a table then it appears Parmenidian. But if we consider it as rotations that take the same thing back to the same position again at the end of each group operation then it appears discontinuous oscillating between the sameness of the outcome and the operations that give the group structure. But which group operation we execute seems arbitrary even though the group itself is well-ordered, so that makes it appear as if the group operations are discontinuous with each other. So the question of time in mathematics is problematic and up in the air and it is unclear whether time is a synthetic a priori or analytic a priori or synthetic a posteriori. When given a mathematical structure we analyze it then that is analytic a posteriori. But the givenness of math categories themselves is where the problem arises and there are different philosophical positions on that which it is difficult to decide between.

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Quora Answer: What is Buddhism in layman’s terms?

Oct 18 2014

Buddhism is a heresy of the Indo-European worldview as expressed in Hinduism in India. In India Indo-European invaders ran into non-indo-european natives in an interesting clash of cultures which is ultimately summarized by the three gods Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahman summarized the ideas of God of the invaders, and Shiva summarized the idea of God of the indigenous Indians especially the Tamil’s. Vishnu was an attempt to work out a nondual compromise between the two extremely different worldviews.

Only Indo-european languages have Being (Sat). The buddhist revolt was to deny being to the Self (anatman). Interestingly it flourished at the same time as another similar heresy called Jainism. I have a theory that Mahayana Buddhism is basically a combination of Buddhism and Jainism. But this is not established. Anyway it shows that there was a time when Hinduism went through a crisis in which there were many breakaway religions that formed in response to Hinduism that was founded on the idea of Being (Sat Citta Ananda) and Buddhism was the most radical of these.

Interestingly Buddhism takes many themes and motifs from the Indo-european sources of Hinduism and transforms them giving them a new life within the buddhist worldview which is a worldview without Being. Since, buddhism had the sophistication of Hinduism but without its metaphysical baggage it was accepted in many non-indoeuropean cultures where it survived while in India it was reabsorbed into Hinduism based on the work of Nagarjuna who showed that Emptiness was at the heart of Logic. This gave rise to a transformation in Hinduism itself which was inaugurated by Shankara who basically interpreted Being as emptiness and was thereby able to create a unification of the various doctrines in the Upanishads by going up a meta-level. The concept of Nirguna Brahman was ultimately a concept of an empty Godhead. Similar to the ideas of Meister Eckhart in Europe.

Buddhism for all its sophistication was eventually found to be dualistic itself because of its idea of the dichotomy between the two truths and Dzogchen attempted to rectify that and further developed the already sophisticated theory of Emptiness. In china also there were attempts to come up with a synthesis between Taoism and Buddhism which is seen in Hau Yen Buddhism and also in Tien Tai Buddhism and the southern school of Zen.

Buddhism is very deep from a philosophical point of view, especially with respect to the critique of the concept of Being which is rampant in the Indo-european worldview, It is still relevant for us today as a critique of our concept of Being. And because it leads to nondual ways of looking at things which is foreign to our overly dualistic worldview. Also Buddhism is based on meditation and thus has an experiential content which makes it an extremely powerful antidote to the production of illusion rampant in the Western Worldview.

Another nondual heresy specially of the European Western worldview is Islam and within it Sufism. It is extremely interesting to compare the heresy of Hinduism, i.e. Buddhism, to Islam as the heresy of European Dualism. By comparing Taosim, the nondual heresy of Confucianism, and Buddhism, the nondual heresy of Hinduism, and Islam, the nondual heresy of European Western dualism to each other we get a synoptic overview of nonduality. Basically what we see in that comparison is that all worldviews start off with a series of dichotomies which they explore the permutations of working out the structural possibilities in those founding dichotomies. But at some point the occurs to someone the idea that there is a nondual alternative to all the other alternatives that is outside the permutational set, and this fundamentally transforms the dialogue between the different positions that are possible within the worldview. Taoism did that for China, Buddhism did that for Hinduism, and Islamic Sufism does that for the dominant European Western worldview. But what is most interesting is where these different nondual approaches have interacted and influenced each other. An example of that is DzogChen which attempted a critique of Emptiness in terms of the idea of Void from Taoism and Bon. Ultimately the idea of Emptiness is itself Empty and thus it turns back into the Void. Islam and Sufism on the other hand start from a completely different source to provide a deeper view of nonduality. But one cannot really understand Sufism without some prior understanding of other nondual ways.

The Buddhist Heresy basically says that Being does not exist, is an illusion, and what does exist is emptiness which is a nondual non-concept non-experience which is the background on which we see everything that does exist. Buddhism proves its case via meditational techniques which take one into alternate states of consciousness in which Being vanishes and other ways of looking at things that are nondual are seen to be a more basic way of looking at the things of this world and our place in it. The heresy of Buddhism is DzogChen which negates the difference between the two truths as a kind of meta-dualism returning emptiness to the void of Taoism and Bon.

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