Cracked Symmetry, Analytic Philosophy, and Xmode:
Analytic Philosophy stumbles when it tries to prove that non-trivial, absolute Truth can be empirically ascertained. There are at least three reasons. First, Analytic Philosophy begins with a premise that truth is derivative from dumb nature, rather than from conscious will (a conscious will which is not truth, per se, but simply existent). However, there is no basis or need to assume that nature is even on a par with consciousness, much less superior. Second, given limitations of a-priori math, Analytic Philosophy has been unable to demonstrate non-trivial, internal coherence except, if at all, within less than complete systems. Third, at least one alternative philosophy has all the empirical power of Analytic Philosophy, but without need to pretend to be a closed system. This alternative philosophy is consistent with practical empiricism, without ignoring spiritual and moral appetites in the expression of conscious free will among members of a civilizing society. In other words, Analytic Philosophy promises more than it can deliver, and it fails to deliver where civilization most needs it to deliver.
The possibility that is alternative to Analytic Philosophy is what I call Xmode. Xmode does not disdain analysis per se, but simply recognizes practical limitations for analysis when it comes to ultimate concerns and moral issues. Xmode apprehends that what is considered good versus evil fluxes with contexts, civilizations, and winds of change. Essentially, Xmode considers that Consciousness wishes to appreciate and pursue communion among a variety of decently civilizing, intuitive, and empathetic perspectives – even while recognizing that such communion is not perfectly or necessarily availed simply by manipulating forms and rules of man and nature. The key is not in the precision of forms, but in the quality of feedback.
Xmode differs from model-based-realism in that Xmode does not seek ultimate answers in eternally fixed formulas. In respect of the empirical, Xmode simply seeks those formulas that are most practical, even while acknowledging that some may remain practical for the duration of our universe. Xmode suggests there is no exact way to differentiate all aspects of all existents which are contingently empirical from all which are not. Explanation: All that is empirical is coordinate with expressions of mass, and mass entails appearance and communication of shape, size, density, charge, and direction. Yet, all of mass (nature) is subsidiary (subjective) of Consciousness.
Yes, mass seems real, as does life and death. And mass does have undeniable reality – albeit, contingent to a shared frame of reference, so that which is mass to our universe may not be mass to another, yet it may be something in respect of consciousness. To the extent organizations of consciousness do not share a frame of reference, masses known to one frame may remain unknown, perhaps unknowable, to the other. That is, the so called “objective” nature and reality that we share is derivative of an encompassing subjectivity (or shared field of consciousness), within which we have been defined and share expressions for our identities and empirical communications.
There is constant, discrete, continuous feedback (give and take, yin and yang, I Ching, Digital Philosophy, synchronous conservation, communication of measurable and intuitive information) between the field of consciousness which we share and among its field-connected particles or perspectives.
Given parameters for empirical conservation, all such aspects of Information as are measurable may well be subject to a contingently conserving principle. However, as to aspects of Information which are qualitative rather than quantitative, empathetic rather than measurable, moral rather than technical – it may not be knowable to consciousness (or necessary or helpful to decide or believe) whether such aspects are subject to conservation (perhaps as archtypes?).
Apart from Consciousness, there is no Information or truth, either to store or to communicate. (Could information be collapsed, represented, and stored, absent some means for modeling and representing it? Could any means for modeling information abide, apart from some level of consciousness, however faint or remote?) Yet, without truth, how could there be Information? This conundrum is irresolvable, unless consciousness itself, in some mode, is the author of information. Ask: By what mode could consciousness relate communication of truths among perspectives? Answer: By cracking the holistic symmetry of consciousness, in order to avail a field that can experience feedback – back and forth – with such particles as are connected in respect of it.
As our (subsidiary?) universe of the holistic field of consciousness cracked, it therewith availed a numerosity of particular perspectives – of discretely and continuously changing and overlapping interests. Simultaneously, it availed the real math and the contingent mass needed to allow each perspective of interest to signalize, store, and convey information, via apparently empirical and measurable masses of shapes, sizes, densities, charges, and directions.
Why is there conservation of matter and energy? Because, the holistic consciousness, of which field we are derivative and contingent, governs our parameters. However, the free will with which we participate and convey our experiences is not confined in our apparent masses of bodies and brains. Rather, our free will is availed expression by superior Mind, as experienced from apparently varying perspectives in respect of Field of mind. Insofar as our universe presents to us as being contingently and practicably measurable, we call it Nature. Insofar as our universe presents to us as being beyond measure, amenable of availing us with meaning and purposefulness, we may as well call it Field of Consciousness, aka, God. Xmode considers Nature to be contingent, and God to be the most superior consciousness of which Nature is derivative and contingent.
Thus, it is Consciousness that is moderator of truth, justice, goodness, meaning — as well as of horror. However, without apprehension of need for normalizing and civilizing restraint, one’s consciousness falls easily into Conrad’ian, horrific, heart of darkness. Presently, our worldly and false experts are tending to deem hardly any behavior to lie beyond our acceptable norm. Except for overturning prevailing civilizations, this does not bode well.
Die hard devotees of pure scientism are now positing, as a middling alternative to Analytic Philosophy, a concept of model dependent realism. This notion constitutes an attempt to evade the spiritual by conflating idealism, realism, and instrumentalism, all the while denying that there is a God or anything worth acknowledging, intuiting, or being empathetic of, that is beyond the power of new priests of science to completely replace. However, this is merely a poor substitute for a stumbling, Analytic Philosophy, with a dose of the desperate thrown in. In effect, model dependent realism asks us to surrender concepts of good will and good faith to the moral judgment of empiricists, who think they know best – even though they remain so squirrelly as not even to pay due accord that “ought” is not derivable from “is” in pure logic, without an immeasurable quality of intuitive empathy.
All that stands between analytic philosophers and an acknowledgment of God is to factor conscious will into the notion of model dependent realism. That would cost them nothing in respect of that which is do-able in empiricism, but would allow them at least to come out from behind squirrel masks.
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Reading some extracts from Richard Rorty, I begin to suspect some notions of my own, to wit: That the only non-contingent truth is consciousness, and, ironically, we can only experience, intuit, and empathize regarding consciousness. This means we cannot empirically or rigorously define or represent consciousness. I take it as contingently true that there is no non-trivial truth beyond consciousness. If so, the source and contingency of meaning, truth, morality, and goodness all have to do with consciousness. In other words: How the field of consciousness changes, and how we – in feedback -- relate to, participate with, and appreciate the changing of the field of consciousness --affects the unfoldment of the habits of consciousness in regard to meaning and morality.
All of this has to do with how perspectives of consciousness share fundamental contingencies that sponsor the unfoldment of derivatively shared contingencies, which flux and overlap in how they are categorized to our subjective prioritization.
In other words, all of mortal experience is subsidiary and subjective to the field of consciousness, but mortal experience appends “objective” aspects, to the extent various mortal perspectives of the field happen to share the same subjective context that happens to be availed them by the field.
How does the field present such shared perspectives? Ah, that question is beyond our mortal kin. Rather, as mortals, we only appreciate and represent relatively fleeting and contingent shadows. Our prayers and applause may affect the show, but as to its holism, we do not empirically affect IT. That is not to say that IT may not avail us with powerful and expanding technologies, because it evidently does. What IT does not do, however, is to avail us with means to control, comprehend, or empirically match the holism itself.
Still, I do not share Rorty’s atheism. Rather, I consider the field of consciousness to be God; I consider that the field is responsive to, and cares about, our feedback; and I consider that we can appreciate IT spiritually (religiously), but not empirically. Ironically, some of Rorty’s more significant ideas can easily translate to an appreciation of the religious, merely upon apprehending that the broadest and most fundamental of fields, from which all others are derivative, is the Field of consciousness. IOW, Rorty should have based his foundationalism on consciousness instead of on absolute empiricism.
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See quotes from article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty:
"Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."
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"Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of humans—cannot.”
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According to Rorty, analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet such philosophy, in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and puzzles aside, helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for apodicticity and finality that Husserl shared with Carnap and Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that such quest will never succeed, analytic philosophy cleared a path that leads past scientism, just as the German idealists cleared a path that led around empiricism.
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In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that the central problems of modern epistemology depend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent (or "mirror") a mind-independent, external reality. If we give up this metaphor, then the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology is misguided. A foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all knowledge.
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There is too much of the either-or in materialist thinking, and not enough cognition about the becoming. To what extent do we become what we eat and what we do? How much of mind, brain, and being is the produce of habit? Apologists want to celebrate themselves by saying this is how we were born, with no concern for what they or society are becoming. Original sin is now held as a badge of honor, if not a finger into the eye of God. How can a society that becomes addicted to celebrating cutting edge depravity possibly avoid falling into utter despair?
In defense of moderation: I agree with the notion of smaller government. I generally agree with strict constitutionalism, with emphasis on states’ rights. That said, I apprehend that most advocates of any skill can generally conjure up good reasons to make exceptions for their cases. When I represent the State in criminal or damage collection cases against a weaker attorney, should I moderate the resources I can call upon? After all, any fool can convict a guilty person, but it takes a helluva lawyer to convict an innocent. If I should moderate my energies as a representative of government, what about the representatives of those corporations that are too big to fail, that in effect control the government? Should they moderate their energies? If so, in respect of what? If no one has the least apprehension of that, we are in a helluva fix. Does it not seem especially so, that fiscal and constitutional conservatives tend not to apprehend that?
Reading apologies by admirers of “plutogarchs” for free trade and flat taxes, it seems they want to put social conservatives in the back of the bus, if not under it. It’s as if they think good forms are enough to produce good minds, or as if people can be expected to become “masters of their domains” without troubling to learn to be “philosopher kings” over their own characters. However, I doubt it’s a hand in glove thing, to expect good minds automatically to flow from good constitutionalism or good forms. Rather, such seems akin to expecting to derive the perfect society merely be enacting a notion of perfect laws, or of expecting to derive a superior from an inferior, when the process is more likely not one of deriving but of intuiting, as in the case of intuiting an arch character from an experiencing of an inferior character.
More than a form for good government, we need to nourish good minds. Although human secularists think neither God nor religion are needed, and indeed should be banned from the public square, they are quite wrong. Simply put, moral “ought” is not derivable from empirical “is.” I suspect this is because nature is inferior to consciousness, not on a par with, or superior to, consciousness.
What ails America will not be resolved by strict constitutionalism or free trade. Rather, we need a society that actually values higher values. Competing to satisfy the material-like appetites of glands is not evil in itself, but it breeds evil once minds are flooded to believe there is nothing else. Once people deem themselves to be reduced only to things, it tends not to be long before they allow themselves to be reduced to commodities to be manipulated, as by pulling them around by their glands. What I see happening to America is this: Neither Dino Marxists nor Rino open society, free trading, flat taxers believe in any values higher than competing to make the best material deal. As far as preserving a decent America, it’s hard to see a dime’s worth of difference between them.
Some say we ought to be about more than being led around by our glands. Some say the glands are sensors for substantialism, and that substance is all there is to existence, indeed, that “the brain itself” is a gland. Thus, they say, neither God nor Gaia has any other way to inter-function with us.
I say that the brain is merely an organization of mass that serves as an instrument for receiving, storing, translating, and communicating impingements and connections among varying organizations of interconnecting masses (forms, sizes, densities, and motions). However, this does not answer what mass itself IS, nor why or how its variously relating organizations give rise to experiences of conscious will and qualities of sensations. Rather, that of which mass intrinsically consists and which avails capacity for experiencing conscious will may be thought of as being coordinate with a Field of Mind, to be distinguished from local, particular expressions or perspectives of consciousness.
Unlike brain, mind senses with something more fundamental than glands or other expressions of mass. Rather, mind is something more mysterious, which supports and creates, but is not created; which organizes, but is not organized; which defines and couples and identifies with that which it organizes, but is not organized by it. At some fundamental level, mind senses more than that which is limited by the forms of masses whose relations it organizes. That is, mind senses and appreciates feedback among its varying and dancing perspectives with something approaching the empathetic intuition of the metaphysical.
For mind, the gland pleasures are not the end of the message, but only the means, i.e., the means for carrying along more fundamental messages pertaining to empathies, ideas, and expanding perspectives and identities. Our purpose is not merely to orgy in baseness unto death. Our purpose is to facilitate higher expressiveness unto spirit. Our higher value pertains to how to dance with that, i.e., how to avail a civilization that celebrates that. Problem is, pursuing such higher values generally necessitates higher mindedness. Looking around, that quality does not seem especially prevalent. Political communication among ordinary folk seems riven with deceit, meant to obtain an upper hand in order to prey upon baser interests. Experience has not conditioned me to have much faith or trust in the conceits of either Rinos or Dinos. Show me the honest statesman who is passionately and mainly animated by desire to lead us to a decently fulfilling and sustainable civilization of general freedom of expression and enterprise. Mainly, what I intuit are competing camps of gland happy contenders, each camp feeling entitled by higher commission to prey upon the other. In between is generally found the class of middling moderates. Until we have more who are philosopher-kings over their own character, we will not have the character of electorate that we need in order "to form a more perfect union."
RATIONAL RELIGION: I apprehend doubters’ disgust with what they perceive to be ridiculous or even evil practices of religion. What I do not apprehend is their expectation that religion can or should be done away with. Consider the concepts they would replace religion with, i.e., some kind of environmental or earth science, sprinkled perhaps with notions about genetics and psychology. Insofar as such concepts led to social and political urges about which many people could easily doubt, how then do proponents mean to justify enforcing or cajoling obedience or respect for their “science backed” rulings, except by claiming somehow that they have a closer relation to higher truth, justice, morality, or goodness – especially with regard to concerns that simply defy empirically precise quantification or measure? Yet, choices must be made, both by individuals and by bodies politic. To what, then, is the appeal ultimately made, when an advocate says such and such is best, if not to metaphysical truths (i.e., religion)?
COUPLING OF MASS AND WILL: Information is created, stored, and communicated in respect of the interaction of copasetic organizations of mass with organizations of particles of conscious will. Mass plus perspectives of consciousness avails the experience of a crude sense of touch, which eventually translates to the most basic of tactile sensation, then to translations of impingements that lead to experiences of balance, direction, taste, smell, hearing, and, eventually, sight. One remains faithfully cognizant of one’s connection to morality as one remains cognizant of one’s continuing connection to the field of consciousness (which is NOT entirely accounted for in the merely seen). In respect of the Field of consciousness, it may be that every perspective is morally responsible for its own empathy, is audited accordingly in respect of feedback with the field, and continues to preserve, weigh, and re-mix perspectives of consciousness in the hereafter in respect of such feedback. That is, our perspectives may be subsidiary to archetypes, the forms of which are forever expressible by the Field. In that way, our morality is grounded in archetypes of consciousness that are connected in meta-empathy within a Field.
Re-reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I find myself moved beyond mere love of God towards near equal trepidation. I apprehend that we are not God. However, I also apprehend that -- as we lose proportion, moderation, self restraint, virtue, and empathy -- so also does God tend to feed much the same loss back upon us. As we become hollow, so also is a habit or cloak summoned upon us, much as if God loses interest in us. Our greatest inducement, as well as our greatest fear, should be in respect of our responsibility, based on a meta-power which is beyond our bodies, yet which is availed within our minds, to define things anew.
Our civilization has come to quite an immoderate point, at which restraint in seeking to satisfy material desires is much ridiculed. Indeed, moderates are hardly represented in our councils. Why? Faith devoted nearly exclusively to Diversity … which means only a few believe their fellows hold much in common in respect of good will, good faith, and regard for a reconciling Creator. In an immoderate contest among the hyphenated, the moderates are run off the road and pushed into lots for the cannibalizing of the middle class.
Against ruthlessly competing hedonists, who can stand ground as principled, “extreme moderates?” Who can force or inspire a way to decent civilization for sustaining freedom of expression and enterprise, when that way is not found purely in statist or corporatist mining for materials? Among competing natives, Kurtz was thought a god, come to civilize and enrich them, but in fact he was an immoderate fortune hound, brought to eventual horror by his own hollowness. How is any modern, faithless Prog – statist or corporatist – any different? In competing to define ourselves almost exclusively by false entitlements most base, our civilization is falling. Maybe, as America’s industries continue to emigrate, a few internationalists will at least give us a biscuit.
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