JOURNEY IN BEING – ADDITIONAL MATERIAL | Home
CONTENTS
A New Outline for ‘Journey in Being-New World’
Journey in Being 04 remains useful | Concepts and ordering | External: List of articles | Other possibly useful documents: New Ideas '04 | History of thought and action | Quantum theory and Foundations | Origins of grammar and Pierce especially for the information on signs
Volume I. Journey in Being: Foundation
Introduction (brief; alternatively, refer to Volume II)
Being
Includes discussion of meaning; includes the metaphysics; may include mention of the role of integration of feeling and cognition in forming motivation and ambition
Mind
Object and value
Identity of being and object (?)
Value, ethics and objectivity
Logic and logos
Cosmology
Cosmology
Human being
Morals and society
Civilization and history
Faith
Importance of integration of psyche vs. detachment of cognition
A new meaning of faith
Volume II. Journey in Being: the Journey
Ambition
Narrative
Journey
Principles of thought
Understanding and transformation
Philosophy and metaphysics
Problems in metaphysics
A system of human knowledge
Transformation
Knowledge or understanding, body – whole being – identity
Theory: Traditions – a history of transformation, Theory of Being and implications
A map of experiments
Experiments
Epilogue
The future
After the journey
Ambition
Initially diffuse-feeling (dominated)
Later – the envelope of all knowledge and being
Narrative
A record useful in development
…and shows development and transition
Is later useful in sharing and drawing a response – conversation and criticism
Journey
Straddles two worlds
This world, the traditions
The ultimate world where the possible and the actual are identical
Nature and society
Mind and being
Realize and generate ambition
Development of the ideas and experience of world and tradition that though not logically necessary, inspire and make possible the core metaphysics, the logic, the cosmology and the secondary ideas that give flesh to the metaphysics
Development
Knowledge and understanding – the foundation in cognition-feeling or psyche
Experiments
Cognition-feeling include knowledge and understanding
Being (includes and interacts with cognition-feeling)
Phases III, IV
Share
Communicate, share
Converse: give and receive ideas and ‘criticism’
Apply
Home
Realization
Being
He or she who would say that humankind is and cannot be God harbors aspirations to divine status cloaked in humility
The rational party (this is not a good name even though it is a logical one) – of values, reason and empiricism
All the problems of any country and the world require some degree of mutual solution and include and involve
Population and sustainability
Engagement of psyche (i.e. include cognition or reason and feeling.) Includes the concept of problem and solution and understanding that at least in some conceptions the ‘reference’ of solution may be null. May involve ‘faith’ and, perhaps, ‘spirit’
The legal, law enforcement and prison system overhaul
Medical practice and insurance
The political system – no taxation or leadership remote without actual representation or involvement
What and who are they? We?
Don’t create
What’s the best approach?
It must be one that learns
Diplomacy before force
Multilateral
Economic (smiling)
Diffusion and disingenuity
Selection and training of agents, administrators and infiltrants
Citizens (truth)
Dream phenomenology
Repeat dreams
Themes
Dream space
Roles vs. beliefs regarding dreams
Psychic realism
Integration with waking states
Over interpretation
Interpretation as an approach to establishing a connection that is already there – in some ways
Dream and inspiration
Dream as connection
Dream and emotion (over mere cognition)
The significance of the apparent reality of dream states especially feeling
Dream and creativity
…the artistic character and content of some dreams, the cognitive content of others…
Dream and action
Direct action vs. interpretation ® action
Some aspects of human being and society. Motivation: I consider inner motivation as basic because external motivation works indirectly be affecting inner motivation. Motivation is the system of psychological ‘forces’ acting within a person that initiate and maintain behavior. Motives may be classed as primary or basic and secondary or learned. Basic motives are common to most animals and humans include hunger, thirst, pain avoidance. Learned motives may vary from individual to individual, human or animal, and, in humans, include achievement, drive to power… Intentionality: direction of fit (assertion, expression, commission, declaration, direction,) conditions of satisfaction, intentional causation. Language. Sign and symbol. Is propositional content + illocutionary force sufficient to cover the forms of expression? Is the subject-predicate form the form of assertion? Where do exclamation, question, statement, command, exhortation, order, promise, explanation fit in? What is perlocution? How to study language forms? Perhaps empirically – through grammar and theoretically through metaphysics and individual (mind) – world relations
Role of intellect in action, especially in politics. Irrelevant, epiphenomenal, instrumental, causal, or sea and sky? Values in politics. ‘Utopian values’ have been criticized due to various failures e.g. communism, participatory democracy but aren’t all values utopian? Nature of the problem. Values or concentration of power, destruction of old stabilizing institutions, mere opportunism and consequences. Is not the outcome of ‘status quo’ similar but ‘slower’ and therefore less noticed? Solution approaches. Distribution of power. Practical vision. Planning. Incremental and experimental change. Meta-rules (rules about rules)
Why is inference possible? Must inference be in words; can it be in terms of visual or other images? (Word descriptions lend to talking so it is necessary to not be led astray by this fact in talking of inferences in terms of images)
At least some forms of deductive inference are inherent in language and grammar (but this depends on ‘grammar’ – are the natural forms practical or necessary?)
General inference is, in a sense, not logic at all but the recognition-projection of patterns
Inference is possible because there are forms; when a form is satisfied perfectly, there may be deductive inference; however, that a form is satisfied is usually not deductive
…from Kinds of knowledge and other sources
Here are some logics and aspects of logics that may be useful in this essay
The propositional calculus formalizes the classical two-valued structure of implication (without reference to the forms of the propositions except that propositions may be joined to form compound propositions.) A Boolean Algebra is an algebraic structure that simultaneously captures essential properties of both set and logic operations
Models. Informally, model theory is the study of the representation of mathematical concepts in terms of set theory. From Wikipedia: Gödel's completeness theorem: a theory has a model if and only if it is consistent; this is the heart of model theory: it lets us answer questions about theories by looking at models and vice-versa. A complete theory (not to be confused with the completeness theorem) is a theory which contains every sentence or its negation. Importantly, one can find a complete consistent theory extending any consistent theory. However, as shown by Gödel's incompleteness theorems only in relatively simple cases, e.g. propositional calculus or algebra, will it be possible to have a complete consistent theory that is also recursive i.e. that can be described by a recursively enumerable set of axioms. In particular, the theory of natural numbers has no recursive complete and consistent theory. Non-recursive theories are of little practical use, since it is undecidable if a proposed axiom is indeed an axiom, making proof-checking practically impossible
Necessity of reference. What is the relation between formalization of the propositional calculus and the necessity of reference? Use the following example. The statement, ‘This sentence is true,’ is a second order statement (see below) since it refers to a (alleged) property of the statement i.e. its truth (value.) Probably, there is no model for statements that refer to properties of statements in a two-valued calculus – this is the likely source of the inconsistency of systems built of such ‘systems.’
Laws of classical logic. Here, until such structures are developed, rather than providing axiomatic systems, it will be useful to list some ‘laws of classical logic’ that are valid in propositional calculus and any Boolean Algebra
The significant laws for Theory of Being are (1) Transitivity of implication: if A Þ B and B Þ C, then A Þ C and, from the following, (2) Non-contradiction: p Ù ~p º F, ~(p Ù ~p) º T
In the following, p, q, r… are propositions; ~, Ù, Ú are the logical operators ‘not,’ ‘and,’ ‘or’ respectively; º is the relation, ‘logically equivalent to;’ and T and F are the values, ‘logically true’ and logically false’
Identity: p Ù T º p, p Ú F º p
Non-Contradiction: p Ù ~p º F, ~(p Ù ~p) º T
Excluded Middle: p Ú ~p º T, ~(p Ú ~p) º F
Commutativity: p Ú q º q Ú p, p Ù q º q Ù p
Associativity: p Ù (q Ù r) º (p Ù q) Ù r, p Ú (q Ú r) º (p Ú q) Ú r
Distributivity: p Ù (q Ú r) º (p Ù q) Ú (p Ù r), p Ú (q Ù r) º (p Ú q) Ù (p Ú r)
The foregoing are usually taken as axioms and the following derived; however some of the theorems could be made axiomatic and some of the former axioms could then be derived
Bivalency: ~ T º F, ~ F º T
Involution: ~~ p º p
Idempotency: p Ù p º p, p Ú p º p
Contraction: p Ù (p Ú q) º p, p Ú (p Ù q) º p
De Morgan’s: ~( p Ù q) º ~p Ú ~q, ~( p Ú q) º ~p Ù ~q
Predicate calculi. The predicate calculi formalize two-valued implication that employs the classic subject-predicate form of propositions e.g. ‘John is wise’ which could be written φ(x) where the subject or variable, x is John and φ is the predicate ‘is wise.’ The syllogism and immediate inference are predicate calculi for categorical propositions that are of the form ‘All / some A's are not B's’
Some disciplines, notably mathematics, employ concepts of existence ‘there is at least one x,’ and universality, ‘all x.’ These quantifiers, existential and universal, are written ‘∃’ and ‘∀,’ respectively. The constructions ∀x φ and ∃x φ, read ‘for all x, φ’ and ‘for some x, φ’
A lower or first order predicate calculus is one in which only individual variables (not predicates) occur in the quantifiers. A first order logic has sufficient expressive power for formalization of virtually all of mathematics. In a second order predicate calculus, quantification is permitted over individual and predicate variables
Theory of Being and modal logic have mutual implications.
Logics. It is a project to show that the variety of logics (standard and non-standard) are formalizations of contexts (models.) This may be useful in developing structures that are consistent with ‘Theory of Being.’