Aristotle’s
Toys
aristotlian
Logics (AL) are the foundation of all our common games of meaning-assembly,
valuing and comparison. They are elaborations on the treatises collected
in the volume he titled Organon
(tool).
The primary rational vehicle of modern aristotlian
logic is the syllogism,
which is a semantic toy of sensing (or testing) ‘truth’.
His developments in Logic had precursors and competitors of many
different stripes — but his peculiar progeny would become
the basis of the scientific method due perhaps to the unique and
novel substitution of variables for comparison elements.
This ‘reducibility’ was actually generalization —
a ‘likeness with logic itself’ — and the coupling
of toy and purpose was practically magical in comparison to the
exploration of logic without it. It was seductive enough to survive
and aggressive enough to replace most of the other options rapidly
— and keep them replaced.
The source of our modern logics is metaphysical, and
we have discarded this irreplaceable progenitor in favor of abstraction,
because this purports to empower us over certain pitfalls of subjectivity.
The problem is that objectivity is a lie, in general — and
subjective is what organisms are: it’s the simple
outcome of local perspective, and every organism is in
general accord with this except those who have a contrary ideological
system.
During our cognitive evolution as a species we experienced
something like tidal cycles of explosively complexifying reflectivity.
Eventually this resulted in our ability to form and vaguely retain
reflective ‘metaphors’ of circumstance, relation and
experience. Organizing these into classes and functions we at first
applied an organismal logic which was entirely informal. Relating
these metaphors by connecting them with time, possession, and character
became the fundamental activity of the part of our consciousness
we now consider to be ‘the main part that makes us different
from animals’.
Over time, this activity grew continuously more formalized
— first in ways that accorded with experience and metaphysical
traditions — and later in ways that discarded those gardens
in favor of abstraction and structuralism. But abstraction is the
wrong toy to enthrone above the others — just as we would
not be likely to trade a single fork for every instance of any other
kind of tool, we should never be convinced that abstraction and
formality are the best or only road to understanding, learning,
expression, or problem-solving.
In the same way one prefers a living child to a photograph,
we must re-learn to prefer direct experiential contact over tokens
of representation and our common systems of assembling these tokens
are our logics — formal and informal. Mastery of the scale
at which logics are assembled and credentialed is the only real
protection from the deadly perils which emerge from our intimacy
with and enaction of their progeny.
o:O:o
Aristotle’s Three Laws of Identity:
A is A: identity
(That dog is a dog)
A cannot be not-A: contradiction
(Being a dog, it cannot be ‘not-dog’ to a greater degree
than it is a dog)
A must be either A or not-A: excluded middle
(It must be a dog or not. It cannot be dog and not-dog)
o:O:o
These simple laws are not representative of the sophistication
that is the basis of a complex understanding of AL — but they
do comprise the basic elements we are taught to emulate.
They are as familiar to most of us as breathing is, yet we are not
aware of our relations with them — only the outcomes. Many
of us erroneously suppose ourselves to be rebellious or even openly
revolutionary in our thinking and perspective, yet almost none of
us can do much more than flop about helplessly in an nearly dry
Aritstolean pond — even when we are certain something else
is going on. Our certainty rests on aristotlian methods...and
this fact of our modern enlanguaging and enculturation is not likely
to grant us a means of escape.
There is a hidden cache of predatory gremlins in these
aristotlian seeds — most of whom have their genesis in the
structural schema of the rules themselves. Their overt purpose is
to bind us to a given scale and charactered position in domains
which are neither discussed nor admitted — and the products
thus rendered are ‘born false’ from many other accessible
and rational perspectives. Naming is a logic of its own, and has
its own rhetoric
— one whose precedence vastly exceeds anything we may arrive
at with Aristotle’s toys. His insistences would have us commit
to implicit bindings for temporal and nominal (label-based) identity
when this is antithetical to the purpose of logics —
and is the more rightful role of semantics.
For example, a dog can be more animal than dog, or
more of a biocognitive hyperstructure than an animal — and
in any case the dog neither contains nor expresses these likenesses,
because they are semantic outcomes of the lenses we assemble
and apply in separating, re-linking, naming, valuing, parsing and
comparing. In our reductive travel from ‘everything’
to ‘dog’ we find in hindsight that we have been trained
to assemble knowledge by absurd and arbitrary exclusions which are
nothing more than culturally cached tyrannies of spuriously founded
‘fact’. The ‘fact’ we must become actively
concerned with is the return to common access and awareness of our
real natures and potentials, for in this single ‘dogma’
will we be empowered to rediscover what our long servitude to fatuous
modes of knowledge-assembly have robbed us of.
This discovery will mark the beginning of cognitive
liberty for our people and planet, and it must come before the results
of our habituation to its opposite permanently deny us this opportunity.
o:O:o
AL is in reality a lowly particle in a vastly
more adaptive and universal system of logics, many of which are
generally recombinant rather than self-aggrandizing. The observably
flawed systems of truth-testing intrinsic to aristotlian Logics
give us clear evidence of why it is catastrophic when they are enacted
as the only or most significant option. Their nature is
to reduce the cognitive terrain of our species to a gladiatorial
spectacle in which incomplete children of themselves compete for
the rights of primacy and terrain control in human activity and
civilization. During this prodigiously gory and arrogant masquerade
the ‘spectators’ (who are actually the victims) are
charged every possible price to participate.
So part of our problem with this mode is that it we
have an element pretending to be a system, and another part is our
traditionally ingrained misunderstanding of the comparatively simple
nature of its exceptions. AL gives precedence to arbitrary distinctions
based in traditional agreements about temporal and metaphoric identity
— which violates the elemental function of a logic. ###The
outcome of laws based upon such skewed recapitulations is nearly
always atrocity, for their abstractive momentum denies meaning and
content, and too generally supports arbitrarily-arrived-at structure
in precedence to experientially available contact with events and
participants. I ask that we bear in mind that structure
requires sustained dominance of formal terrain, real or cognitive.
This terrain loses its organismal flexibility, and when the terrain
is cognitive, this results in the profound occlusion of our own
potentials of intelligence, unification, and liberty in every possible
dimension.
The real garden of logic includes the vast forest
of rhetoric,
which is the catalogue of common and esoteric ways of assembling
appeals to mind, justice, formality, heart, memory, &c. Distinct
species of logic will favor and invent their likeness in the rhetorics
emergent from them, and AL is no exception — it is in fact
the sole foundation of rhetoric as we know it today . I believe
that these modes of appeal and discourse are the abstracted translations
of of their primordial parents, originally assembled for the purpose
of appealing to human sovereigns, gods, ‘god’, or celestial
agents.
o:O:o
Nominalism
& Uncertainty...
To know what an object is, or what the potential values
of relation are, we must have pre-extant experience with its possible
labels, classes, etc — these are founded in agreement and
rely upon memory and language rather than being intrinsic to circumstances
in question. The primary question being examined is whether or not
experiential circumstances can be accurately conveyed in terms,
and part of the answer is that terms are far too reductive when
employed alone. Many aspects of formal rationality require
the inclusion of informal transports or information which are overtly
or implicitly denied in the system itself, and this dichotomy is
the source of endless confusion as well as erroneously inspired
(or justified) activity.
Aristotle’s arduously defended realism was challenged
by nominalism in the Middle Ages, which maintains that the symmetries
emergent in logic and languages are primarily matters of scripting,
habit and agreement (mind) — and thus bear little ‘true’
relation to reality, being instead locally charactered vehicles
for reflective relation. In the 1600’s Francis Bacon responded
to many obvious problems inherent in Aristotle’s work in his
own book, The
New Organon in which “He argued that Aristotle needlessly
complicated nature by his ‘dialectics’ and distinctions;
Aristotelian terminology was more concerned with defending a position
in a subtle way than with discovering the truth.”
In the 19th century John Stuart Mill amongst others
became aware that the goal of the researcher was not so much to
cultivate specificity (deduction/reduction) as it was to achieve
increasingly accurate and inclusive (inductive) general
understanding. The resulting progeny, known as Inductive Logic,
was never formally validated according to my cursory readings on
this subject. It is likely that the development of symbolic logic
in the same century by G. Boole and A. De Morgan superceded any
interest in Mill’s work at formalizing the complete rules
of induction. The abstract symmetry of formulaic expression was
and remains enticing, and it is important to notice that formalists
soon came to entirely reject external interpretation (meaning and
language) in exchange for dependable structure (formalism in abstract
terms). This move began the modern process of defining logic in
terms of computation; where the valid application or elaboration
of the system is based only upon accurate use of abstract symbols
which in themselves have only co-mechanical dimensions of ‘relationalness’
or meaning.
The essential authority of systematic logics in general
was drawn into open question by the work of Kurt Gödel in the
1930’s. His propositions on the essential incompleteness of
systems radically altered our understanding of formal ‘truth’.
The outcome is an assertion that an infinite quantity of propositions
which cannot be derived from the axioms of a system are
nonetheless true within that system. This is due in part
to the elemental reductionism (to names and relations) which common
logics use as a lens to gain focus. In this act of focusing many
often more significant dimensions must be lost or purposefully excluded.
I believe it was Gödel’s intention to change
the history of human understanding entirely, and that his explicit
theories serve only to inspire us to seek common experience and
expression of their value. Simply stated, they comprise a doorway
to an impossibility device. A way to solve any possible problem,
posed in any language, instantly. We must not mistake the trees
of his texts for the forest of his meaning. He was and is attempting
to show us something accessible — an alien universe of learning
modes lying right here at hand.
o:O:o
Throughout the development of abstract logics, a
nagging afterthought kept rising occasionally to the surface —
and Gödel nailed it clearly enough for us to begin to understand
that there was a vast and seemingly unsurpassable gulf between our
ways and vehicles of knowing and what they provided knowledge
of.
##Though this matter had almost certainly once been
apparent, it was and is still lost knowledge that a term is not
what it refers to — but is instead a reflective and invariably
reductive sign. The sign dictates various aspects
of implicit significance before any contact with the referent
is established, and this creates a crisis in which ‘there
can be no objectivity’ because the human experience of
signification is primordially subjective. Objectivity is thus
revealed as a simulated position (and probably emerges
at the behest of a misconstrued memory of a position of non-embodied
sentience). Much of the history of philosophy is deeply concerned
with recapitulative exploration of this particular matter.
So reality violates Aristotle’s laws immediately;
to wit: Things, being discrete, are simultaneously unified —
and logical precedence lies with their unity, rendering
them primarily unThingLike. The truest thing
about a formal system is that it is false by nature
(because its purpose and action is to avoid, reduce or limit with
direct sensing). Yes, A is equal to A, but we then return to
the set A belongs to (and perhaps the set this element belongs to)
and discover that is is unified with ‘things’ that appear
non-A, such as relations, precursors and lineages. Going back ‘before
A’ we find A emerging from decidedly non-A dimensions and
activities. A is no longer A, unless we first bind ourselves to
a whole circus of interested fallacies. It is the front of a waveForm
of streams, viewed as an entity — with the waveCharacter subtractively
denied. Yet here in our reality A is still agreed to be A. We will
still agree that a table is called a table, and a map is a map.
The problem is that what we mean and enact by our terms
and evaluations is entirely different when we are logically aware
of these waveMatters with equivalent credentialing-precedence to
our awareness of their ‘particle’ features and properties.
For these and other reasons, recombinantly informal
systems must have ordinal precedence over any single polarity-partner
in order to be adequately ‘alike with reality’ to
qualify as intelligent. This is especially true if organisms
are the basis of our idea of what ‘reality’ is, rather
than nominal or index-comparative abstractions about things and
transports.
Precedence belongs with unity: the evidence is a living
planet — take away the living atmosphere of Earth, and logics
evaporate like the wonders of stage-magic when their mechanics are
revealed.
o:O:o
The
Father of General Semantics
Alfred
Korzybksi began working on a model of these and similar concerns
in the 1920’s and emerged some 15 years later with his propositions
toward a generalized semantics (Null-A); an inductive system that
would unbind time, ordinality and identity from their positions
as hidden threats to rational problem-solving. He found that given
even a moment’s relief from the common gremlins of aristotlian
caching strategies our natural prodigy emerges with transhuman prowess
and proceeds to re-establish the correct precedence-relation between
tokens and ways of assembling them. The correct
precedence lies with mastery over the invention and application
of ways, rather than of the manipulation of given tokens according
to extant abstract systems.
His own experience of this understanding almost certainly
led Korzybski to believe he’d located and successfully retrieved
the Holy Grail of logic and cognition —
a sort of impossibility-device which held the deliverable promise
of solving any problem it might be applied to more
rapidly each time it was activated. He knew he had discovered
a toyBox that pointed directly at the anciently occluded source
of human atrocity, while simultaneously revealing a free and self-perpetuating
answer those problems without itself becoming dogmatic or tyrannical.
This ‘game of recombinant logics’ could attenuate its
own character and accuracy exponentially, and the result was a way
of knowing with inductive powers beyond anything we have more than
fictions about even 40 years later.
I believe that Korzybksi was very near the truth of
the matter in his hyperbolic enthusiasms over these new universes
of unimagined cognitive potentials. He had indeed set foot upon
an alien frontier, and by doing so proved it accessible and near
at hand. But translating that truth into reality for others was
to prove nearly impossible for a variety of unexpected reasons.
One problem Null-A’s father would struggle with
is shared by every person and animal on Earth face in the Age of
Machines: how does a new organism establish itself when all available
niches are filled and well defended? The second problem was one
of translation, and Korzybski was not particularly skilled in this
domain. Frustrated by the ongoing combat required to reveal an impossible
gift to a world in dire need of its powers, he eventually produced
a toy in the form of a moveable diagram — which he could use
to directly visually demonstrate the different scales and
connectivities in a non-solid way that led to experience of
the process instead of mere understanding of the terms.
With this toy he could guide people through a multiordinal
navigation event — a model of various ‘levels’
of abstraction and parsing they unconsciously applied (by rules
they had no contact with) in order to assemble knowledge and valuation
of experience. The results were, in general, earth-shattering, because
it granted those successfully exposed direct experience of nonlinear
cognition — a key precursor to active semantic generalism.
The Structural Differential is an interactive representation
of an important aspect of an alien teaching modality, but
it’s uptake generally requires a Teacher, and it is far too
strange and abstract to find its way into common use. Unlike modern
toys, it simply wasn’t sexy enough to require us to endlessly
copy, embellish and distribute it. To this day it remains the
anomalous invention of one of cognitive activism’s unsung
pioneers.
.
As a species we have long been fascinated by speculations
about highly advanced intelligences such as those we believe may
exist on other worlds. Before the arrival of the idea of worlds
and species the model of ‘advanced intelligence’ was
transubstantial, and referred to teachers sent to Earth
from a celestial kingdom. In general, this would correspond to something
like a ‘teaching angel’ — an entity from another
dimension, rather than another planet.
In our time this model is replaced by advanced technological
devices or civilizations, and various improvisations on this theme
are the common parlance of the branch of prophetic writing we call
science-fiction. A.E. Van Vogt was an early believer in the idea
that ways of knowing were the ultimate technology, and that the
seeming powers of hard technology comprised a hypnotically
attractive red herring in comparison.
Gilbert Gosseyn (go-sane), a character in one of his
novels — is a Null-A trained detective capable of
solving impossibly complex problems, such as a crime that took place
simultaneously in multiple locations throughout time. His ‘fictional’
prowess is superhuman in terms of integrating apparently unrelated
elements to produce prodigious feats of inductive observation and
reasoning. In the story his skills would be sufficient to rapidly
alter an entire planet.
The idea that training in something like alien logics
could lead to an improvisational form of genius that far surpassed
anything we could achieve with the toys at hand lit a candle in
my mind that grew brighter with the passage of time. My encounter
with this fictional hero led to my initial exposure to General Semantics
around 1981. A few years later I found a library copy of Science
and Sanity, and though I read and re-read it I was unable to
garner more than a superficial understanding of its contents, and
perhaps a moderate understanding of its goals. I understood a
few of the implications, and beyond that it seemed my only
hope of learning such a discipline was with finding someone who
could teach it — a prospect that seemed unlikely.
A.E. Van Vogt found a way to get the idea of something
like General Semantics into the common experience and thoughts
of readers — and though he was neither the first nor alone
in this concern some of his ‘fictions’ struck a profound
chord of recognition in many of those he reached. His fictions gave
us new metaphors, and inspired us to believe that what he spoke
about was achievable; if not by the means explored in his stories,
then by some similar and discoverable means. His Null-A stories
proclaim that ways of knowing are not created equal, and the ones
we are stuck with are not only primitive but structurally inhibitive
of the very intelligence they purport to largely comprise.
o:O:o
What
is General Semantics?
If the character of our intellectual and rhetorical
motion in thought, theory or exposition is primarily reductive we
end up with a form of ‘travel’ that results in an exponential
magnification of the distance between us and our goal. Effectively
this is worse than running away from our goal. The reason is that
we are ‘moving this way’ by cultivating distinction
and specificity — and this process is exponentially generative
of reflective children of itself, each of which beg exploration
and further reproduction in the wake of their genesis.
Each ’step’ in this direction results
in a unique duplicate of the entire universe — from the perspective
of that step. If we stop to explore these reflections, each step
in that direction accomplishes the same thing. While it
would seem nearly impossible to solve problems or establish ‘truth’
this way, there’s a hidden feature of this game that allows
us to overcome it, usually very slowly and at absurd cost.
The answers are present and accessible in the
first tree, and making extra trees is rarely necessary or useful.
In fact, one can give precedence to non-treeMaking moves —
induction — and then refer back to specificity only as a way
to examine whether or not the general progress made is verifiable
from perspectives of distinction and comparison.
This is difficult to communicate without a visual
analogy. Let us imagine we are upon the pole of a special kind of
broom. Standing where the brushTop meets the pole, as we step onto
a brushStrand, we find a whole ‘new’ brushTop before
us, belonging to what appears to be a whole new and unique broom
— which we are again on the pole of. To us it appears that
we have only traveled a short distance on the original broom, when
in fact we are in a reflected universe built upon the distinct characters
of the first strand we chose.
The strands aren’t really single strands at
all — each one is a complete broom, and the strands on those
are similar. As we step onto any strand our choice of strand is
the source of any ‘differences’ we may find there —
such that our new position is a lensing and filtering of our starting
position, which inherits character according to the character of
our own choices and movement.
If we should travel to a strand in any ‘new’
broom, the process will repeat itself with every step. We may take
as many steps ‘into the brush’ as we desire, but no
such step is necessary because the entire top of the brush —
including the transports and elements that must be linked to form
an ‘answer’ — is already before us — before
we start making reflective reductions of it.
Noticing this is the beginning of general semantics,
which implies that our mode of framing and delineating relation
generates the character and prowess of our formulations. When our
momentum is cached into myriad tree-steps, we are disempowered by
the need to sustain all of this seeming ‘progress’ as
we attempt to solve or parse toward resolution. What we are really
doing is magnifying the terrain we must explore by reducing the
unity of members and then re-establishing unities according to the
modes we are scripted to follow. This is not thinking, and in fact
does not resemble it — it is the mechanical mimicry of
a given assembly mode. A recapitulation, with inordinate embellishments,
of previously cached experience. Thinking is mastery over
the modes of assembly, and is not tied to manipulating pre-extant
tokens in scripted ways.
[text in process]
o:O:o
o:O:o
Silencing
the Lambs
A blessing and a curse awaits anyone who has ever
followed these matters into actual experiential understanding. The
result is a form of active enlightenment as this relates
to assembling knowledge, and meaning — a result is often accompanied
by preternatural relational awareness. The experience is one of
sudden synergistic prodigy — but the result of this prodigy
on the personal and social circumstances of the experiencer is often
shockingly malign. When someone discovers a way of learning, assembling
knowledge or enacting understanding that dramatically differs from
established norms of their cultures, the basic character of their
life turns from one of inventive exploration to defense in the face
of nearly absolute opposition. Too often the forced result
of this is the need to formalize a system in concrete terms,
rather than active exploration or proactive embodiment of the newly
accessible potentials or paradigms. In this way the initially explosive
momentums of the onset of understanding is rapidly sacrificed by
being cached into formalities of language or argument.
By these and similar circumstances the majority of
innovators are silenced, and thus the common person will have no
access to understanding that there are multiple opportunities in
the realm of assembling awareness and knowledge, and most will never
get even a general glimpse of the terrains hidden by our common
agreements. As individuals, cultures and societies of every scale,
we will assemble and agree upon ‘truths’ without the
slightest gesture of actual exploration — basing our ideas
and enaction upon poorly-founded models whose function is to support
themselves against all opposition, rather than to lead us to understanding.
All of this seems moderately academic, but it isn’t,
because every human child comes to life empurposed with the embodiment
and expression of unique potentials and abilities. We’re
not merely talking about logicians and researchers here —
we’re talking about how we become obliged to serve systems
of knowing which abhor or rule arbitrarily over our lives and human
relations to such a degree that we might as well be living in a
spacecraft assembled by aliens in order to watch what happens when
we credential language above our own experience and beliefs.
What it comes down to in many ways is that we cannot
learn and sustain new ways of knowing until there is overwhelming
environmental agreement and tolerance toward these domains. In order
to allow these things to find common nurturence such that they may
be directly celebrated and explored. If we reach for seemingly alien
or uncommon paradigms without this intrinsic support (or at least
a lack of common persecution) we will find ourselves unable to establish
and sustain new positions of perspective or activity. The prevailing
habits and circumstances of social existence will require we at
least adeptly emulate the characters of the waters we are immersed
in and depend upon, and this requirement of constant congruence
caches the momentum we need to reach and sustain ‘escape velocity’
relative to the establishment of new habits of learning, knowing
and experiencing.
o:O:o
Institute of General Semantics Tutorials Page: IGS
European Society for General Semantics: ESGS
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