Category: The Ontology Project

Acquired self as digital signal processing algorithm

by PF

“Being, in order to be true, has to be spontaneous.” - GW

Imagine there is an analog signal that contains frequencies between 100,000 Hz and 25,000 Hz. In this analogy this is our Being.  Practical metaphysics aims at an experience of this wave, and ontological philosophy aims at the intellectualization of it.

However each organ of human perception has a sampling rate below these frequencies. The body might have a sampling rate of 20,000 Hz, in this example. The emotions might have a sampling rate of 10,000 Hz. The mind, which operates by habituation most of the time, has a sampling rate of 5,000 Hz.

The original signal has to be reconstructed from what is picked up by these organs of perception. Needless to say its impossible for a 100,000 Hz wave to be reconstructed from samples taken at 5,000 Hz

However what is not impossible is that, if this device (the brain) continues to grow in size and complexity, and remains obsessively focused during its evolutionary history on a few survival-relevant facets of reality, it will become useful as a feature-detector and pattern-detector for processing this 100 kiloHerz wave.

In order to do this, it will focus primarily on external things, which register merely as impressions on the eye and models in the memory. We could say that these are very low frequency, very superficial modulations in the high frequency carrier wave that is our Being … things like social appearances, the meaning of words, the possible ramifications of an action for self and group, who is mating with whom, threats from outside, possible sources of food and shelter, and ways of keeping oneself alive. Not because these things are important in any deeper sense, but they lead to survival.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, September 6, 2010 at 11:01 PM in The Ontology Project
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Announcing a New Series: The Ontology of Mind

“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” - T. H. Key

The ontology of the human mind is an important subject because it concerns that aspect of our being that distinguishes mankind from all other forms of life.  How we choose to understand the human mind and its products must inform our politics, metaphysics, worldview, and identity.

(Warning: This series will be of a slightly technical nature so gather your philosophical bearings before you continue below the fold)

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Posted by Notus Wind on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 10:23 PM in The Ontology Project
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Mental models and the historical narrative

by PF

Reality, it turns out, is multi-dimensional. For now that term should be understood loosely, without regard to the precise delineation or number of these ‘dimensions’. As quickly as we can generate tools, thinking, and mental hardware to analyze reality, its observable facets and ‘dimensions’ appear to multiply in front of us: with each newly ground lens we discover that there is more to be discovered.

As human beings, we used to be quite content with the assembling of historical narratives which described a progression of facts: (1) Caesar crossed the Rubicon, (2) this initiated a civil war, (3) in which Caesar was ultimately victorious, until (4) he was assassinated. In creating these narratives it was possible, utilizing a method of ratiocination which Thucydides elucidated, to arrive at a physical description of facts which had incontestably happened. This is still possible.

However as we refine the lens through which we view our lives, more dimensions of experience emerge into view, for which it is not nearly so easy to arrive at any kind of overarching consensus. These include the emotional and probabilistic aspects of reality, which are in some sense even more important to the internal experience of reality than observable facts, yet which we cannot reach a discursive consensus on because our description of these areas cannot approximate the complexity of the things we wish to describe.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 08:05 PM in The Ontology Project
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‘Is’, ‘Am’ and ‘Should’ Modalities

by PF

This is the first part of a primer on PFian perspectivism and theory of mind. Thanks to Rod who provided the impetus to clarify these ideas.

Modality is a fancy word for mood, and it aims to describe the emotional constellation that is attached to specific things. A verb can have different modalities: ‘could’ and ‘should’ and ‘would’ each represent a different mood-relation of the actor to the action. Not limited entirely to emotion, modality also bleeds over into probabilistic concepts: how likely is something? For us, modalities can be seen as representing states of the human nervous system as it reasons - minds frozen in a moment of time. Was he contemplating the future and what is possible? Then he ‘could’ dance the flamenco. Was he contemplating his duties and obligations to others? Then he ‘should’ dance the flamenco. etc. etc. Incidentally modality is also a musical term, and the different scales it refers to also bring forth or convey different moods.

Man’s intellectual efforts are roughly divisible into three ‘modalities’: ‘is’, ‘am’ and ‘should’. These correspond to the state of his mind as he completes whatever mental task he is working at. Most importantly they describe the mood-relation (emotional tenor?), probabilistic aspect, and the method of verification which the process is subject to. The probabilistic aspect is how much imaginative conjecture is required by the thought process.

There are two methods of verification which human beings have access to, and the modalities divide among them. What has become the default position is social verification. This is the verification which takes place in our minds when our symbol system appreciates a consonance between its read-out and observed reality, thus ‘verifying’ the truth content of whatever symbol set is being looked at. At first glance it seems surprising to call this verification method ‘social verification’, but not when one considers that the mind evolved essentially as a social phenomenon and remains that way in spite of its internalization within the individual. In other words, the thought process as it first evolved, was naturally a ‘distributed system’, in terms of control theory. People learned things, and verbally became able to compare notes. The man who is able to synthesize perspectives inside his own mind, and thus carry out this process internally, is performing in his own mind what would have heretofore been the work of all our ancestors sitting together around a fire.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 09:52 PM in The Ontology Project
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You my Heidegger: Dasein vs. The World of They

by PF

The following are quotes from the 1998 Harvard edition of Rüdiger Safranski’s intellectual biographical work, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, originally published in German in 1994.

We already know one moment when “disguises” break up and authentic Being discloses itself - the moment of anxiety. The world loses its significance, it appears as a naked “that” against the background of nothingness, and Dasein experiences itself as homeless, unguarded and unguided by any objective Being.

The breakthrough to authentic Being thus takes place as a contingency shock, as the experience of “there is nothing behind it.” Even more clearly than in Being and Time, Heidegger formulated this initiation experience for a philosophy of authenticity in his Frieburg inaugural lecture of 1929. Philosophy, he then said, only begins when we have the courage to “let nothingness encounter us.” Eye to eye with nothing, we then observe not only that we are “something” real, but also that we are creative creatures, capable of letting something emerge from nothing. The decisive point is that man can experience himself as the place where nothing becomes something and something becomes nothing. Anxiety leads us to this turning point. It confronts us with the “being possible” that we are ourselves.

Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety expressly does not have fear of death as its subject. It would be more correct to say that its subject is fear of life, of a life that one suddenly becomes aware of in its whole contingency. Anxiety reveals that everyday life is fleeing from its contigency. That is the meaning of all attempts to firmly root oneself in life.

One might assume that ‘They’ are only Everyman, [had previously spoken of the fact of self-loss into the ‘World of They’], but ‘They’ are also the philosophers. Because these, as Heidegger remarks critically, firmly root themselves in their grand constructs, their worlds of values and metaphysical backworlds. Philosophy, too, is for the most part busy removing the contingency shock or, better still, not admitting it in the first place.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 11:22 AM in The Ontology Project
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An email to a friend in New Zealand

Ever since this blog launched I seem to have become a serial conversationist.  At present, one of my on-going conversations is with a writer and friend in New Zealand, Rod Cameron.  Rod is talking to me about his ideas and I am talking back, a little unfairly, about mine.  I suppose we shall eventually discover all our areas of agreement and difference.  I know these latter include Jungianism, of which Rod is an advocate.  But they seem also to include the question of an ontological nationalism.  This post is actually a reply to a long email from Rod which arrived yesterday morning, and which was itself a response to a much longer exchange over Skype Chat.

I apologise to everyone who is already tiring fast of angels and pinheads.  But I think this stuff is quite important.

Rod,

Obviously, there are scores of very fine commentaries on Heidegger on the net. They will tell you much more than I can about the man and his thought, and I urge you to search them out if you are seriously intending to incorporate even a passing reference to “the existential” in Chapter Five.  What I will do here is to reply to two issues you raised about my own very callow observations on same in the (possibly forlorn) hope that we can move towards a shared understanding.

You quoted my observation that “Everything begins with being. There is nothing prior, and only diffusion of thought after.” You ask, “Can I take this as an Absolute statement?”

Yes, if you recognise that being is a practical experience, a state in Nature we are capable of achieving - indeed, equipped by Nature to achieve.  It is not simple this thing called Life, or some particular way of looking at our general experience of living.  Being is not general.  It is particular.  It is the existential exclusive.  It is a state that is difficult to reach and hard to hold on to, and like all things that take hard human endeavour, it has a high psychological value.

Nevertheless, everything really solid that we can talk about as students of the human begins with it, yes.  All the rest, all that we generally know and understand, and think, feel and do, and all that we are, suffers by comparison to the extent that it might be called unreal or a form of absence or exile.  Or, in the context of our collective European life, it might be called the postmodern life or simply our collective estrangement from ourselves and from one another.

The individual experience in being differs from the collective qualitatively only because of the scale on which the individual life differs from that of the collective.  The alcohol has a higher proof, for sure.  But they are not different in the moment that they reveal.  Being is unity in temporality.

Then you write:

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 01:00 AM in The Ontology Project
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Suggestibility and not-being in modernity

According to a Telegraph article today there is a suicide cluster at the vast Shenzhen plant of electronics sub-contractor, Foxconn:

There was another death at Foxconn yesterday. A 21-year-old man with “several” knife cuts fell out of the seventh-floor window of one of Foxconn’s dormitories in Shenzhen.

Foxconn is the Taiwanese company, also known as Honhai, which manufactures Apple’s iPhone and iPod, as well as goods for just about every major technology company, including Sony, Nintendo, HP and so on.

However, the company has been plagued by a series of suicides at its plants, particularly at the enormous Longhua plant where over 400,000 people work.

... the company says it has prevented a further 30 people from trying to kill themselves in the past three weeks alone. Clearly, something out of the ordinary is going on.

What is happening in Shenzhen has the hallmarks of a “suicide cluster”, when the notion of suicide spreads rapidly through a group of people, often teenagers or young adults. Foxconn says it is at its wits’ end as to how to tackle the problem, and has even drafted in a Buddhist monk to try to purge its factories of evil spirits.

Others have said the current generation of migrant workers, who have opted to move from other parts of China to seek their fortunes in the country’s coastal factories, are not as tough as their forbears.

Usually better educated than their parents, they are prone to existential angst when confronted with seven-day weeks and 15-hour days of repetitive manufacturing. The nine Foxconn workers involved in suicide leaps this year were all aged under 25 and had worked for the company for less than six months.

The journalist goes to the trouble of quoting Marx on alienation.  But the existence of a cluster suggests memetic activity, not the individually-driven rationalisations of the depressed and damaged.

There are three ways the will to suicide, as a group-confined memetic, can be internalised by susceptible individuals, one for each general type of human mind.  The mind in which physicality and sensation predominate requires some pretty blunt instruction.  “Go jump, loser!” would do it, providing the psychological state was one of sufficiently profound absence of the subject.  That is quite conceivable, given a fifteen hour day of the narrow-range, physically repetitive motions of station activity in Far East electronics production.

In quoting an intern who went undercover at Foxconn, the Telegraph journalist describes an employee of just this type:-

“One worker impressed me a great deal,” he wrote. “His name was Wang Kezhu and he often climbed to the highest places to check the storage, or ran the fastest to get the new cargo. He would yell or shout or sing to release the pressure building up in him. He told me that people got promoted if they had skills, and that he was hoping to learn useful skills. He once applied for a job at an education institute, but when they called he could not understand what they were saying.”

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Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 10:46 PM in The Ontology Project
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Slaves to illusion

by Grimoire

MORPHEUS: At last. Welcome, Neo. As you no doubt have guessed, I am Morpheus.

NEO: It’s an honor to meet you.

MORPHEUS: No. The honor is mine. Please come sit down. I imagine that right now you are feeling a bit like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

NEO: You could say that.

MORPHEUS: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees, because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?

NEO: No.

MORPHEUS: Why not?

NEO: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.

MORPHEUS: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

NEO: The matrix ...

MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is? The matrix is everywhere; it is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

NEO: What truth?

MORPHEUS: That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.

The movie premiered eleven years ago, and most of us will have seen it. Many remember our thoughts as we sat to the end and then walked out onto the street and had a minute to think. What made this movie so intriguing was the idea that the oppression imposed by the matrix … ‘The Powers That Be’ … was so enormous, so persuasive, so seamless, that for most people the oppression, the matrix of lies, had become as invisible and unnoticed as the air we breathe.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 11:35 AM in The Ontology Project
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The End of Teleology

by Potential Frolic

Teleology is the attempt to become an image of greatness, or perfection, or fruition.

Previously, we looked at reasons why Palingenesis has negative aspects attaching to its political program, and how these negative aspects mar its positive aspect, which is unification of a people.

In moving from a discussion of Palingenesis to a discussion of Teleology, we’re moving from the social level to the individual level. Palingenesis regulates how social entities relate to each other, using politics and philosophy as means. Teleology regulates the relation of men to themselves, within the confines of their own minds, using images and rationalization as means. It is thus more intimate, and much more interesting.

Teleology precedes palingenesis. This is because the ideological underpinnings of palingenesis were conceived for the purpose of realizing teleological striving. For example, it was the struggle of individuals to reconnect to historical precedents, a connection to which is only possible in imagination, which begot the political manifestation of same. It was the intelligent individual’s realization of his smallness on the historical stage, and his desire to draw to himself more weight and meaning, that forged the rhetorical connections to ancient Germania and Hellas in germans of the 19th century. This can be seen, for example, in the philological posturing of Friedrich Nietzsche, alledging a special connection to ancient Hellas, discovered uniquely by him in his readings. The actual accuracy of his assertions in The Birth of Tragedy - assertions not less sweeping than those he would make in later books - were demolished in a point-by-point critique by Wilamowitz. Not that this detracts from the philosophical content of his writings. It can be seen however, that the appeal to ancient greek authority is important in 19th century literary personality combat. One finds similar idea content in Evola.

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Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, February 26, 2010 at 01:27 AM in The Ontology Project
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Heidegger and the Nazis, the concrete and the spirit

This essay is a wee bit outside of my usual stamping ground, but it is in the nature of lighting the blue touch-paper - just in case anyone wants to address this subject properly!  I’m going to begin with a quote from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, division 2, section 75 (Blackwell translation), published in 1927:

Everyday Dasein has been dispersed into many kinds of things which daily “come to pass”.  The opportunities and circumstances which concern keeps “tactically” awaiting in advance, have “fate” as their out-come.  In terms of that with which inauthentically existing Dasien concerns itself, it first computes its history.  In so doing, it is driven about by its “affairs”.  So if it wants to come to itself, it must first pull itself together from the dispersion and disconnectedness of the very things that have “come to pass”, and because of this, it is only that there at last arises from the horizon of the understanding which belongs to inauthentic historicality, the question of how one is to establish a connectedness of Dasein if one does so in the “Experience” of a subject - Experiences which are “also” present-at-hand.

To my mind, this short passage describes, in Heidegger’s difficult and relentlessly particular terminology, the fractured and scattered state of our ordinary inner life, a scattering effected through the tendency of ordinary waking consciousness to elide into and attach itself to externalities, psychologically speaking.  The nett result is a profound absence which many reading this will recognise in their own experience.  We still ascribe qualities of self-hood to it, of course.  We can never cease doing that.  But it is a self-hood with a history rather than a presence in the moment (though that takes us further towards the metaphysical than Heidegger intended - all Dasein is historical in his formulation).

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 12:54 AM in The Ontology Project
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What it is to be human, part 2

Now I am returning to the issue of consciousness and the absence of self with which I began Part 1 of this post.  It is only my own view, and it isn’t original.  It is also entirely open to challenge by anybody who understands these matters better than I do - and there must be many.

It is usual in Western thought for the question of the self to be treated as an epistemological issue.  But what I am really setting out to do in this series is to recover from the sloppy psychological models of the past - all that couch-talk about the unconscious, the subconscious, the collective unconscious, and so on, for those workings of the mind which proceed in us quite without our assistance, and over which we presume sovereignty.  I’ll begin with a thumbnail sketch of the hardware, so to speak, of the mind.  Some observations about the much more interesting and altogether too, too fallible software will follow in the next post.

Neurologically, all sentient organisms have one or more systems which project the consciousness of self, insomuch as that hologrammatic thing can be said to exist.  These are not coterminous with the divisions in the human brain and nervous systems but, largely excepting thought it seems, are distributed across them.  They activate different areas of the brain.  They are separate from the visceral nervous system.  I contend that they have evolved out of the most nascent awareness of sexual division, selection and self-maintenance.  In other words, the survival strategy of sensing, to borrow the old German Idealist term, “the thing that is” beyond the organism itself is the only reason for human self-awareness and self-interest.

The “hardware”

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Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 11:58 PM in The Ontology Project
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What it is to be human, part 1

OK, I said I wouldn’t do this.  But, well … you know.  This is the first of two posts on an alternative to the politics of spiritual regeneration - always assuming that the reader understands (a) that some systemic replacement for liberalism is necessary, and (b) that the current American empirical offerings lack motive power.

The second part will carry forward some of the arguments here and sketch out a model of Mind as a contribution, I hope, to the search for a new and syncretic founding theory.

Instead of the old metaphor of individuals as discrete entities like billiard balls, we need to think instead of them as nodes in a relationship network.

With these words Madeleine Bunting, the occasionally sensible but mostly Moslem-mad Guardian Woman, signposts the left’s remaining recourse in a world made hostile by neuroscience.

Moslem Maddie’s problem, you see, is that she has heard the rumours that the eponymous self of liberal self-authorship fame does not, in fact, exist.  “This”, she says, “is the kind of stuff which challenges almost everything you’re used to thinking about yourself.” And about your politics, if you are a radical individualist as she is.

She writes:

… the point about this new explosion of interest in research into our brains is that it exposes as illusions much of these guiding principles of what it is to be a mature adult. They are a profound misunderstanding of how we think, and how our brains work. They are fairytales, about as fanciful and as implausible as goblins.

That’s a rather dramatic way of putting it, of course.  The constant flow of affirmations of self are wholly legitimate from an evolutionary standpoint.  The illusion of self exists even if self does not, and it is no less a product of evolution for that.  Genes for “self-ishness” and self-preservation are privileged for the fitness gain they offer.

So, what now for the left?  Cue the decampment, perhaps, from the half of the liberal project that pursues the unfettered will into the egalitarian and social democratic half?  Well, that may not be necessary.  A strange and unnerving synthesis of the two halves, of a self-authorship and a state-mandated compassion that were never entirely reconciled in the past, may just be coming down the turnpike:

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, August 28, 2009 at 08:54 PM in The Ontology Project
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Susan Blackmore on the myth of free will

It appears to be the season for lecture series.  BBC Radio 3 has been hosting its Free Thinking 2008 series, involving approximations to wisdom and originality by a colourful variety of folk.  One of these is the smooth-mover of the MultiCult, Trevor Phillips, who has discerned six questions, no less, which liberal democracy cannot answer.  Sadly, when he last had a proper job is unlikely to be one of them.  The BBC has a 7-day storage system for its radio output.  So I will listen to Trevor tomorrow and, if he is remotely interesting, I will post accordingly.

But now I want to focus on last night’s speech by the only slightly wierd writer, broadcaster and lecturer in psychology, Susan Blackmore.  Her subject was one close to my own heart: The myth of Free Will.

In my last post on it I explained the significance of an absence of free will in humans thus:-

Now, there is no small difference between the self equipped with free will and the self bereft of it.  It is the difference between consciousness and mechanicity, between “I” and “it”.  What emerges from John-Dylan Haynes study is a model of Man in whom Mind, in its ordinary waking state at least, weaves the story of a decisive self over the endless blizzard of electro-chemical impulses in the brain?

And from that, if we are honest, there emerge only questions for which we never have more than an inadequate answer.

For example, if “I” am only a dream of self, a piece of artifice made in the moment and remade in another, is there really any sense in which “I” can be said to exist at all?  In a mechanistic sense only, perhaps.  If one is prepared to dispense with the usual dignifications, the mechanicity of Man is not so great an affront.  It is what it is, and there are a fair number of reflective people who have always known it.  None of them are radical liberals, of course.  The notion of the “fully-human” director of a free and unfettered will absolutely does not fly.  It never could.  Liberal political philosophy is a flightless bird.

Susan Blackmore is a lot closer to the action than I am, and these are the significant passages from her lecture:-

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 12:02 AM in The Ontology Project
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