COMMENTS 2019

META-TECHNOLOGY: the early 2010 chart

COMMENTS 2021

Henry Flynt

begun 2019; present draft 2021

Perhaps it is helpful to begin with a pre-history. It somewhat duplicates the beginning of my commentary on the 2010 UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart.

In 1978, in “The Crisis in Physics and the Question of a New Science” (presented to a nonspecialized audience at Anthology Film Archives in New York), I envisioned that I could cross-potentiate modalities in logic and epistemology that were original with me. (“Logic and epistemology”—that is what conventional thought would call them). So, “ new science.”

In 1979, I consummated that proposal by announcing meta-technology to a general audience in Stockholm. Now I said ‘technology’ rather than ‘science’ because I wanted to underline that the intent would be instrumental (in some sense), not merely interpretive. And it would be clinical, as instrumental procedures are. But instead of acting on matter, it would act on determinations of reality.

Even before I thought of the label, I imagined meta-technology to have three divisions:

—logic of contradictions

—a priori neurocybernetics

—evaluational processing of experience

Subsequently, I expanded this prospect as I could. In 1994, I was able to gain print publication, even though it went unnoticed, as it always has. An overview I had written, “Meta-Technology: An Analytical Sketch,” was published in Perforations 5. That meant that meta-technology was now on public record as something considerably beyond a hint. In March 1996, a wide-ranging web site for my work went online, hosted by John Berndt.

From the outset, I sought to deepen and cross-potentiate what I had of meta-technology. About thirty years after I had announced meta-technology, I consolidated what I had in a chart: which is the topic here. My first effort was a holograph, in colors. In 2020, we made a print document of it.

2010 is relatively “late” in the developing meta-technology. Since then, there have been additions which I regard as enhancing it considerably. (The “Martian cube,” for example.)

Admittedly, in the 2010-2020 decade, I have not given the priority to meta-technology and critical scrutiny of academic science that I gave them previously. On the one hand, there has been no motivation in particular, and no material support. The proposal of a meta-technology museum and laboratory received no response. On the other hand, it seemed that I might cut decisively into the obtaining civilization if I addressed dignity and spirituality as philosophical questions (with these keywords used as I define them!).

Indeed, in 2010, I made a companion chart to the Meta-Technology chart: VULNERABILITIES FOR UPWARD DISPLACEMENT. How considerations from the side of dignity and spirituality might cut into the impersonal, objectified project science imagines itself to be. Again and always, as I define the keywords.

As to this second chart, I went through two earlier labels for its subject matter, DESTABILIZATION, and before that, SUBVERSION. Those earlier labels have unhelpful connotations. “Crashing civilizations with personalysis.” That was the wrong thing to say. Degradation of a civilization is easy: all that is needed is a demoralization correlative to resentment and revenge.

That said, I had a reason to recur to labels that were a little lurid. I would not have embarked on these explorations if I did not hate the obtaining civilization for its psychephobia and discrete-fetishism and template-blindnesses. And for compensating for its reductionism with ancient religions, for example. What I want cannot flourish unless the obtaining pastiche is shattered.

As I write this, I realize that the words I string together could evoke New Age trash to the considerable audience for the latter. It is a communication problem which is not my fault. In the early 1960s, I coined new words for my endeavors precisely to avoid paying the price of using existing words. Unfortunately, that approach is less promising than using existing words. The public resists neologisms (except for those urged by pandering).

As to the META-TECHNOLOGY chart, I revised it during 2010, arriving at the final version in October. I spoke on the material at Normal’s, Baltimore, 31 October 2010, and offered the audience a hand-out. (And a black dowel, as I remember.)

In the October chart, I bundled the gist of the UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart into the META-TECHNOLOGY chart. But the separate UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart remains informative and provocative. I have just now made a print document of it and given it a separate review.

What are offered on the charts as labels or topics usually have extensive literatures which I authored. Some of it is on my web site. In this project of deciphering the early 2010 charts ten years later, I have also endeavored to fill out areas where I had not even made it clear what my label meant. Lately, it has not been immediately clear to me what the following were doing on the chart—or what they mean.

propaganda

parochial discourse

warp contradiction

I hope I have made some progress in recovering what I was trying to say in 2010. By way of expanding on these topics, I have supplied two long Annexes. I have also supplied an Appendix to explore the outlandish reaches of the Unity of Science movement.

Again, even though the early 2010 META-TECHNOLOGY chart was not the last draft in that year, it is provocative enough to justify being deciphered in every detail. Again, some of it was enigmatic to me on seeing it nine years later. Some of it still is. It is well worth it to get to the bottom of these enigmas. I learn things about my body of work that I had lost track of.

Just to take the right column of the chart, what does parochial refer to? Why is there an asterisk from parochial to warp contradiction and blocking logics? Why is warp contradiction colored green, underlined in blue? Why is blocking logics just green? Every bit of this is significant.

Also, the charts harbor a few considerable misjudgments which I have corrected in the course of aggressively deciphering the charts.

Reviewing my old texts, the most recent statement about warp contradictions I have found was in a 2012 essay on early Buddhism. Two years after the chart! (Would I find it in the first draft of my spiritualography of Buddhism c. 1981? I don’t have time to do an archive search of paper items.) The point is that I have no use whatever for suggestiveness and double-talk. I am committed to using language up to its potential for literalness and precision. Meta-technological devices are supposed to be crisp and replicable. (Replicable give or take the template-blindness problem, which is already severe in the case of my Venice cube.) These charts have not been deciphered until every allusion that remains is crisp and replicable.

• • •

Let me introduce the META-TECHNOLOGY chart with an indication of what the labels at the top center of the chart are about. In fact, two summaries are available, one prepared for the October 2010 chart—the other in a personalysis text on my web site.

Since there are no limitations of space, I will draw on both.

As to “cognitive nihilism.” This label slightly plays with the reader. It is slightly grim, to indicate that the vantage-point is indeed extreme. If that frightens the reader off, I didn’t want that reader anyway.

To expand, I propose incredulousness as the source of a higher civilization. I take literally the question of the existence of language at all. This question is the intersection of the problem of what is reality with the problem of the medium of assertion, description, and communication.

The outcome is my "Is there language?" trap. 'There is language' ought to be a substantive assertion. Yet 'There is language' must be true if it can be asserted: its possession of meaning would manifest the existence of language. The necessity to answer yes to the question whether there is language implicates the existence of language in a universal epistemological antinomy or reductio ad absurdum. The existence of language is not a contingent fact but rather self-validating gibberish. A text such as "The Flaws Underlying Beliefs" achieves a negative universal result on cognition—instead of affirming a trivially self-defeating “position.” The text short-circuits the medium of which the text is a sample; yielding a short-circuit of linguistically embodied cognitive thinking as such.

Discourse about the trap is a heuristic activity evoked by lack of insight. It cannot be expected to have safeguards against self-undermining formulations; and is far more compromised or hypocritical than the trap itself.

The cognitive short-circuit is paradigmatic in that its gambit can guide the selective subversion of belief-systems—or in other words, of inherited determinations of reality. The details of doing this may be difficult and circuitous. In 1980 (after I had coined the label meta-technology), I grouped all such ventures together as "astute hypocrisy."

The short-circuit decisively vitiates in principle the inherited world-views—spun as they have been from credulity and apologism. It decisively vitiates in principle all “new myths.” I promise technology—instrumental procedures—which belie the inherited reality; but now they are going to come not from increased gullibility, but from the decrease of credulity.

There is a second exercise correlative to the “Is there language?” trap (which in fact preceded the trap in the evolution of my thinking): namely “radical empiricism.” There is an analysis to define “experience” in a way stripped of “beliefs” (e.g. espoused propositions). As for ‘experience’, the word needs focusing. I supply that in the UPWARD DISPLACEMENT review. To make it easy, the conventional label for what I mean is “sense-impressions.” However, that label has an unacceptable presupposition bundled into it. Better would be “sense-apparitions.”

“Radical empiricism” is more problematic than the "Is there language?" trap. The naive dénoûement of this analysis, namely to announce that "only experience exists," is trivially self-defeating. Indeed, the genuine lesson is that there is an "Is there non-experience?" trap, which is correlative to (and “implies”) the “Is there language” trap. So radical empiricism does not hit the mark as directly as the “Is there language?” trap.

But although radical empiricism is problematic and off-the-target, it is also a valuable intuitive guide in the selective subversion of belief-systems—in other words, it is a means in astute hypocrisy.

If I may indulge in a little astute hypocrisy, and recur to the historical record, Hume notoriously precipitated a sceptical crisis in philosophy

[Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, §VII]

Centuries later, one science writer acknowledged that physicists commit to the common objective world not because they can “prove” it, but because it is a prerequisite for physics. Aram d’Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought (1927). To keep it short:

the common objective world, whether such a thing exists or is a mere convenient fiction, is indispensable to science … .

But that was not typical of where the philosophical tradition went after Hume. The luminaries took as their mission to mediate between credulity and intellectual integrity: to crush skepticism and to “prove objective reality.”

The goal was to find moments which somehow smash through subject-object estrangement. Each of the moments or devices which were proffered were discarded by the public after one generation: because they were mere gimmicks, mere casuistries.

Nevertheless, it is appropriate for me to include here two of my responses to moments claimed to smash through subject-object estrangement. (The issue is also germane to personalysis.)

1. The mere circumstance that “lived experience” has the dimensionality or texture of a self-world confrontation mediated by willing, doing, concern, etc. cannot prove that that ostensible “world” is objectively real or is the same for everybody. (And subjective temporality does not prove that everybody exists in the same objective time-stream.) The relative personal world which the self confronts has not been proved the same for everybody. I act, exercise will, etc. in dreams as well as in waking life. In general, dreamed experience fully possesses the dimensionality or texture which is claimed to prove objective reality. In short, philosophy has not distinguished worldhood from a mirage.

2. To be embroiled or mired in life, in activity, in such a way that you are cemented to your beliefs, which seem practically or pragmatically validated, does not prove that your beliefs are (uniquely) indispensable. A technical gimmick in metallurgy can be known for thousands of years, yet receive a different explanation (in terms of some invisible reality or organizing fiction) in a subsequent century.

As to grades of incredulity, my manuscripts on the topic are called “Uncompromising Positioning.” There is a ladder from cognitive nihilism that descends to more and more compromised thinking/discourses. And what is the point, or the worth, of this descent? See below.

So: “a ladder of compromises that descends to meta-technology, and below to standard science.”

We come to the enterprise to which the chart is devoted. As noted above, I announced it in 1979 in Stockholm. It might be more analytical to call it instrumental anti-logic (but as I reconsider that, I see that one has to be highly informed to appreciate that phrase).

The selective subversion of belief-systems leads to kaleidoscopic mutations of the experience-world and of scientific laws. A family of instrumental modalities is elaborated which act on inherited determinations of reality—"between self and world."

As an aside to friends, I called meta-technology the sorcery of chaos. “Reality is an ocean of chaos; the meta-technologist swims in it.” But that could be very misleading to a pop audience. As a noted above, some of my language could evoke New Age trash to the considerable audience for the latter. It is not just that keywords can be understood differently by different people. If something serious begins to gain attention, panderers will always be eager to hijack it.

As to how meta-technology proceeds. In one case, it selects already-recognized phenomena—interpersonally comparable subjective phenomena like the perceptual illusions, the fact of dreaming, etc.—and employs these phenomena in constructs which break the bonds of objective reality or of scientism.

Every meta-technological procedure has to be replicable by the generic “reader.” Meta-technology excludes hearsay and psychic brutalization (including the deceptive use of hypnosis).

As already said, meta-technology descends from a short-circuit of language. Again, why is the enterprise not trivially self-defeating? I have mentioned “Uncompromising Positioning”; but let me give a pinpoint answer.

Expositions of meta-technological procedures rely on apparitional meaning. The generic "reader" obtains meaning by imputing it. The conditions or junctures produced alter the boundary of the conceptually possible; so that a new mental ability is exhibited, and a claim of realism is superfluous.

In certain very general ways, meta-technology parallels the modern science which it proposes to displace. In some sense, it is impersonal knowledge. It does not aim to provide personal happiness. It is not a creed; to assent to it perfunctorily is meaningless. It is a family of specific results. It is required to be interpersonally replicable; or to employ interpersonally comparable subjective resources. What makes it different from science is that instead of endeavoring to manipulate matter, it acts on the determination of reality or on cognitive laws.

Again, I cannot be optimistic about what an audience wanting to be pandered to might make of this. It will be a rare reader who is not “attached” to an orthodoxy—and a rare reader who is impervious to the pseudo-scientific fads (if I must call them that) that flood the public arena. One person wanted cognitive nihilism to be a rogue’s “philosophy,” as in “take the money and run.”

Realistically, my web site, which has been online for twenty-five years, has not gained any notice to speak of. I prefer that to seeing it misused. Then, I don’t like defensive disclaimers. They imply misgivings about one’s audience. That said, it seems that I should make a disclaimer for the benefit of a hypothetical nondescript reader who opts to pay attention to my web site.

As I said, in 1978, I envisaged a “new science.” In 1979, I switched the label to meta-technology as a way of underlining—for any “humanistic esthete” who may come across this—that the enterprise is not a perfume for esthetes or fortune-tellers. The enterprise is not a mere interpretation. It has the clinical character of instrumental procedures. I want something that matters operatively. I would be delighted to meddle with atomic bombs if I could—but that may be many decades (centuries?) away for my approach.

By way of a little more chronology, studies prefiguring meta-technology were published in Blueprint before I proclaimed meta-technology. As noted, I announced meta-technology in print in Perforations in 1994. I cannot say that any of it got any traction. In fact, my very considerable presentation in Baltimore in October 2010 was dismissed as if it were blank paper by a couple of audience members who were trained in physics.

As I say over and over, I hate to make defensive disclaimers. They lower the tone. They imply misgivings about one’s audience. But they may be demanded. It might be irresponsible—it might shortchange me—not to make them.

Crackpot science and the occult comprise a vast, lucrative market. If a well-marketed publicist is wary of “science,” they are guaranteed to be sympathetic to ancient religion or crackpot science. (There wasn’t any other option: until I began speaking publicly and publishing. Just as there was no philosophical anthropology that did not defer to science as ultimate reality until I entered that arena. Just as there was no treatment of spirituality that was not a mere come-on for an institutional religion until I began writing about it.)

As suggestive as the word ‘technology’ is for my enterprise, the wretched public can misinterpret it too. My enterprise has nothing to do with the frauds promoted in “alternative” publicism that are dressed up like rudimentary laboratory science. Indeed: the word ‘technology’ should not lead the reader to expect some clanking device with gears, pistons and so forth. (Or to be more up-to-date, electronics and radiation.)

Again, why “technology”? Think about calling Euclidian geometry or Boolean algebra technology. These disciplines comprise abstract mentation, recorded in symbols and diagrams. But they enable known technology, which embodies them.

Not that I flatter myself by comparing myself to Boole. He is an icon and I am not.—And I wouldn’t want to be known for any such thing as he did. (Moreover, it could be many, many decades before meta-technology could encroach on today’s instrumental procedures; that remains to be seen. For that matter, Boole was many, many decades away from the role his contribution has come to have in what everyone agrees is technology.)

Meta-technology consists, will consist, in the first instance, of mental procedures, aided or codified with symbols. (It often has phenomena-in-the-world as a prop. Sometimes it is common-sensically meaningful to say material phenomena; sometimes it isn’t.) The reason I drag Boole in is to tell some hypothetical reader tha something that does not look like technology can be urgently relevant to technology.

Meta-technology would wish to turn technology around by changing the repertoire of thought. That said, what it offers is not especially an outgrowth of what is already established. That is why it has to be injected into the civilization as from without. It blindsides you.

Maddingly, another opportunity for misunderstanding and dismissal has arisen. Latter-day science has become quite cute. Quark chromodynamics was bad enough. Now we have decoherence, qubits, the God particle, multiple universes, dark energy. As a matter of fact, the explosive development of science (materialist, however informatics may qualify that) illustrates my principle of multistage intellectual transformation. The most recent scientific revolution that has swept the field will not be disavowed until all the surprises it can demonstrate and all its contributions to pragmatic efficacy have been exhausted.

But the enduring credibility of what is expedient becomes an obstacle to me. Science students tell me that “we don’t need you to make the revolution, we already made it. We already know everything you say.” They don’t know what they are talking about—they couldn’t be more wrong—but they don’t care.

As a matter of fact, I don’t see the reactions I get from scientists as personal arrogance. The civilization has imprisoned what they can imagine in its templates. That remark could introduce my UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart. As for the templates to which what scientists can think is confined, it is worth it to unveil them. Or conversely, to unveil what is phenomenally tangible that they have to be blind to in order to uphold their morale.

I can be specific here, although this is not the place to dwell on it. The Tim Crane paper on the waterfall illusion in Analysis (1988)—I have cited it so many times, but the lesson does not penetrate. So far as I know, nobody has ever looked up Crane’s paper at my recommendation. There is no occasion to ask if it provokes the insight I think it should.

Other specifics have been provided in personal encounters. I already alluded to viewer responses to my Venice cube. Ditto for my Counting Stands, my Martian cube, etc. (It may not have helped that the latter pieces were introduced to the public in art exhibitions. That was not because I pride myself on being an artist. It is because nothing has been done about establishing a meta-technology museum and laboratory.)

•

What is the aim of the chart? The discernment of meta-technological opportunities has proceeded slowly. As said, I thought originally that I had three branches to work with. As time went on and I was able to add more to the mix, I wanted not only to add more to individual topics, and not only to add supplementary chapters, but to cross-potentiate the branches.

The chart was supposed to be suggestive: not only in consolidating what I had, but in prompting me to think of effects involving more than one branch or chapter. All the same, that goal was ambitious. The individual branches needed far more development.

In some cases, they were only research programs. I didn’t have the sought-for results (and still don’t).

• • •

By way of deciphering the chart, let us focus on three of its features. First, the labels. Second, colors, bullets, and asterisks: which place the labels, topics, phenomena in categories. (Different codes, different categories; the same code, the same category, i.e. a link.) Thirdly, the red lines: linking appearances of the same meta-technological device or treatment in different contexts.

Looking at it after nine years, some of it was enigmatic to me. It left me to decipher what I was saying—which I have done in part. As to some of the labels, I have added bracketed notes in black to the original chart. In fact, let me adduce every one of these 2019 notes in context.

[note to me: I am revising what is on the chart where it clarifies. to be entered.]

social being: control theory [HF label]

Venice (Necker) cube

[wait! not used in Stroke-Numeral]

(Markov semantics) •

[written character means nothing written here]

descriptive logic [of contradictions]

believing 1 + 1 = 2

[to be closely scrutinized]

parochial* [any parochial discourse]

-----------

physics paradoxes [extensive study]

---------------------------

In particular, my first guess in 2019 as to what “parochial” meant was wrong. I guessed it meant discriminatory skepticism. (Prejudicial Elementarity Claims, 1986.) But NO. I was using ‘parochial’ in its generic sense—a sectarian culture. And the asterisk indicates that sectarian cultures harbor warp contradictions. I return to this below. But in fact, the subject-matter needs a full treatment. That treatment is Annex One.

•

Let me offer the best explanations I have of the color codes. Below, I will spell out some of the puzzles that remain in this connection.

•

center top colors

devolution from cognitive nihilism

through degrees of compromise

•

black (the primary use)

labels of branches

•

the enigma of the orange bullet

does the orange bullet mean “needs a verbal explanation, which I have provided”?

[does the right-side bullet indicate a more compressed explanation? NO.

does the left-side bullet indicate a topic already in play academically? NO.]

In 2010, I was too cavalier to make a key for myself. In mid-2021, I don’t want to bluff. Not only do I not see what the topics that get the orange bullet have in common. I don’t understand the distinction between the left and right orange bullets. Most importantly, I don’t understand why meta-technology gets a left orange bullet on the lower right, but no orange bullet at the top.

There is additional evidence. The orange bullets are used on the UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart. It only makes the problem more obscure.

Here is the summary.

Uncompromising Positioning •

mental counting, i.e. the practice/process of enumerating mentally •

social being: “propaganda” •

(Markov semantics) •

• perception-dissociation: break the consistency of the object-gestalt

• failure theorems: which mathematics co-opts

• Tritone monochord

• proto meta-technology

• meta-technology

And UPWARD DISPLACEMENT?

the subject-actuated stroke-numeral with Markov semantics •

subverting “commitment”

cf. Tim Crane, Waterfall Illusion (1988) •

(Markov semantics) •

Reader’s hermeneutic •

• logical norm warping

• appreciating musical languages

“Logic does not exist.”

•Ø try “The language-game is without inference-connections”

•Ø all the logic that matters is vernacular: it resides in the realm of cultural anthropology

Casually, subjectivity is critical in many cases. But assuredly not in all cases.

It can’t mean that the topic had not received a conclusive treatment. My point is clear in some of these cases.

It can’t mean “essentially subject-dependent.” That does not apply to all these cases.

•

red bullet

There is one instance:

—descriptive logic of contradictions

a prime meta-technological analysis. As yet, my studies only aspire to this analysis. I have the evidentiary cases; I haven’t abstracted a satisfactory machinery from them.

Does red mean orange, only more so? Remember that my guess was that orange means

an effect that presupposes a subject’s subjectivity or mind-set to realize

The descriptive logic of contradictions seems to me to be of the level of perception-dissociation—or for that matter, “Apprehension of Plurality.” I don’t see why I would need the red unless it says the inquiry is more exigent.

•

vermilion asterisk

the phenomenon in different contexts: unconstructed; constructed

•

blue type

in one case, logically impossible space, it is a heading.

otherwise, as of 2010, an effect, device, or subject-matter (discourse) which was already on record. in some cases, that underrates my contribution. that is, the material already existed, but only I found what I found in it. in general: some pre-existing effect admits an interpretation by which it breaks objectification.

•

forest green type

a meta-technological codification. so, a contribution specific to me. sometimes utilizes effects listed in blue.

•

green underlined in blue

what I extract from the pre-existing effect is very close to the pre-existing effect. (It should be legitimate scholarship!—but it isn’t. As my dissertation supervisor said to me, you swim in our stream, but with diabolical intentions.)

•

red line

its purpose is to make a link between appearances of the same phenomenon or theory in different branches.

•

green asterisk

used only once, in the right column, as explained below.

In addition, two of the topics under inside science are crossed out on the holograph with orange slashes. The reason is that I decided I was underrating myself to say that they can be inside science. Again, no academic forum would countenance them. Realistically, that is probably true of all the topics in the bottom row.

• • •

THE TOPICS AND THEIR LABELS

Arriving at the topics and labels, my first step in deciphering the chart is to marshal blurbs and references which I am sure are germane.

For convenience, I denominate the blocs on the chart. I think of the numbered blocs as columns. (What I call TWO and THREE are two columns under one head. I find it more convenient to label them separately.) I speak of three layers at the bottom of the chart.

TOP LEFT TOP CENTER

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX

LAYER ONE

LAYER TWO

LOWER RIGHT

In explaining the labels or topics, the name of the bloc, as above, is given in doubly underlined caps. The labels are given in underlined caps. The sublabels are given in caps.

Let me proceed with explanations of the labels and with references to my massive oeuvre. As for references, a few of my texts are noted below. The October 2010 chart had a considerable bibliography of texts of mine included in the hand-out. Beyond that, I could ask a reader who had my massive oeuvre in hand to find the germane reference.

When a topic is skipped, it means that I don’t have a ready-made summary of 2010 vintage. I may have written about it at length in other texts. The cited texts are italicized.

• • •

TOP CENTER

COGNITIVE NIHILISM

The Flaws Underlying Beliefs

GRADES OF INCREDULITY

Uncompromising Positioning

My manuscripts on grades of incredulity are called “Uncompromising Positioning,” but they could also be called “the ladder of compromises that descends to meta-technology, and below to standard science, and to common realism.” [I note now that it is an open question how standard science and common realism are positioned relative to each other on this ladder. It comes up in my 2019 text “Delusion the Societal Norm.”]

META-TECHNOLOGY

Meta-Technology: An Analytical Sketch

I gave an explanation above.

• •

TOP LEFT. REALITY-TYPING

Reality-typing: assigning a phenomenon its status in reality: traditionally, matter, mind, Platonic ideal.

When reality-typing gets out of hand, that is of meta-technological interest.

The Unity of Science movement

Unexpectedly, in 2019, this bloc in the chart deserves lengthy explanations as to the Unity of Science.

What TOP LEFT wants to list are endeavors whose reality-types make them obstacles to the Unity of Science program. Because the given “act of knowing” does not comport with positivism. Because the doctrine/theory does not comport with positivism. Because positivism cannot explain the endeavor. We of course exclude sham explanations of the endeavor—and sham explanations were given by positivists. See what we say about logical positivism and ethics.

Then what is called for, on background, is an explanation regarding the Unity of Science movement. Let me immediately be clear that the meta-technological program cannot issue from some historical narrative: specifically, from the history of an academic movement. The present text has outsized digressions because I am writing for my clarification.

Here I will provide a sketch of the Unity of Science movement. I will place the balance of my remarks on it in Appendix 1. (So this text has Appendices and Annexes.)

The movement appeared after 1930 as an offshoot of the Vienna Circle. Its director was Otto Neurath. Basically, it wished to oppose the sort of partitioning of the sciences (i.e. genuine knowledge) exemplified by the discredited doctrine of vitalism. As to vitalism, advancing science controverted it by showing that all life could be reduced to a physical machine.

All “synthetic” knowledge, then, including the social sciences, would be reduced to physics. The movement further wished to uphold a Humean distinction between i) “knowledge” which amounted to stipulation and ii) knowledge which was synthetic a posteriori.

Then all knowledge would fall either into the logical sciences, or into physics. The movement was intended, in other words, as a triumph of scientism.

I am well aware of the long-term successes of the mechanistic program, for example. Unity of Science has had great victories. Again, the defeat of vitalism. The reduction of chemistry to physics. The reduction of biology to chemistry. (Has morphogenesis been reduced to chemistry?) The (shaky?) unification of mechanics and thermodynamics. (Which only becomes defensible with quantum physics.)

Incidentally, when I invoked Unity of Science in the 2010 charts, I overlooked something which Unity of Science had not contended with. A “mechanistic” reality-type whose discovery was recognized in 1953. DNA. Metaphorically, DNA is a piano roll which is not contrived, but appears in nature alongside rocks. So: a blind process control algorithm abiding in nature. The genetic code isn’t aligned with Unity of Science because the code breaks the plane between nature and stipulation. It is intricately complicated computer coding as a natural object like a rock—of the same substance as the purpose-displaying entity it controls.

If we choose to take the dichotomy of nature and stipulation seriously, science has outrun it. i) DNA is a process control algorithm which abides in the process controlled. ii) Quantum computing is elaborated as a branch of pure mathematics. In quantum computing, physical implementation is treated as a separate and lower problem.

Unity of Science had founding publications. E.g. R. Carnap, The Unity of Science (1934). (Introduction by Max Black.) Carnap proposed to reduce all of the a posteriori sciences to physics. In aid of that, he wanted all scientific study of humanity to be reduced to biology. That allows for biology of individual organisms and biology of groups. Animals and humans are covered by the same discipline, since humans are animals.

But we quickly discover that it wasn’t that tidy. The dean of logical positivism was Moritz Schlick. And logical positivism evidently commenced when Schlick published a book on ethics in 1930, Fragen der ethik, tr. Problems of Ethics. There was something bizarre about logical positivism resting on ethics. Was scientific materialism going to issue from a values discipline? Actually, science must have an ethics: but isn’t that an embarrassment?

How could it be that the very objectivity that seemed to insulate science from the moral—the creed that takes the fact/value distinction as its motto—simultaneously lay claim to moral dignity of the highest order? … objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations, but no less a morality for that.

From Lorraine Daston, “Image of Objectivity,” Representation, 1992.

A morality of prohibitions? Cf. Charles Darwin to T.H. Huxley, 9 July 1857.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone.

Carnap tried to reconcile ethics with value-free science by saying that positivism could countenance a contingent ethics. But there are obvious difficulties. What of freedom and responsibility? Carnap cannot have what he wants inside physics. If animals are deterministic machines, they cannot be ethical subjects. Carnap was being shallow to the point of being silly. In the late 1950s, I eagerly read up on logical positivism. I may have known of Problems of Ethics. That said, Schlick’s work was so out of character with what I expected from logical positivism that I wouldn’t have perused it even if it were available.

The Unity of Science movement held major congresses in Europe. It began to publish The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. (A few of its documents can be found in research libraries today.) It could not avoid being in opposition to obscurantism: and to them that meant Nazism. (It never directly collided with Stalin’s obscurantism. I gather that it respected Marx’s laws of motion of history as a precursor of scientific sociology.) The movement was stymied by the outbreak of the Second World War. The death of Neurath in 1945 further diminished the movement. Even so, Unity of Science monographs continued to be published until 1961 at least. See below for Edel.

Even though it is a digression, I cannot resist reproducing a commendation of science published at the end of the twentieth century. I do not invite the reader to skim it casually. The first sentence deserves to be pondered. As do the other sentences. These are truisms that the reader could well find shocking.

Scientific knowledge stands as the supreme intellectual achievement of our society. Governments, private foundations, and businesses support scientific research although it is costly and does not always yield immediate practical benefits. Courses in science are a required part of curricula from grade school through university, and young people are encouraged to undergo the long apprenticeship of study and work that will transform them into scientists. Scientific accomplishments are honored at every level, from awards at local science fairs to Nobel prizes. Major museums in cities all over the western world document and display scientific achievements and inventions. …

from Marrilee Salmon et al., Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (1999).

Salmon did not remotely anticipate the condemnation of science (academic excellence) on racial grounds that would become pervasive in the U.S. in 2020-2021. In particular, she did not anticipate that scientific education would be condemned as “privilege” or “racism.” I do not want to dwell on this development here—but it is additionally notable that public commentators have not seen the devastating strategic implication if the development were to gain everything it says it wants.

Resuming with Unified Science, ever since I learned of it in the late 1950s, I have known that it proposed to reduce psychology and sociology, ultimately, to (logic and/or) physics. But it is only recently (2019?) that I have really grasped that it proposed to reframe ethics as a positive science. (As a branch of physics?)

Then I cannot avoid the cross-connection to Salmon. Would a scientific ethics call for abolition of science, again, on the grounds that it is “privilege” or “racism”?

Let me insist on bearing down on what the positivists had to say for themselves. Notwithstanding Carnap’s gesture to contingent ethics, I wanted to believe that positivists would have kept ethics at the periphery of their perspective of knowledge. Hume had no brief for ethics, and neither did the Tractatus . I didn’t realize until now (2019) that Unity of Science (i) demanded the inclusion of ethics in science; (ii) wanted ethics to reduce to physics.

As for the Unity of Science vision, it persisted into the early 1960s, at least. In the first place, ethics continued to preoccupy this tribute to scientism. By way of summarizing:

—Moritz Schlick, Fragen der ethik, 1930.

—J.C. Flugel published a book in 1945 which asked how elements of morality could be located in materialist science.

—Oppenheim and Putnam, “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis,” in Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem, 1958.

— Abraham Edel, Science and the Structure of Ethics, 1961. A late contribution to the Encyclopedia of Unified Science.

Unless we want to dismiss Unity of Science as a joke, we have to give some attention to Edel. He proposes to bring freedom, responsibility, and free will inside the unified science. (That has to mean inside physics.) Then he proclaims that a positivist ethics will emerge from further study.

Carnap was very much alive at that time. What was his verdict on Edel? He would had to have had a verdict if the school took itself at all seriously.

Now that I am aware of Edel, I feel that the present explanation of the meta-technology chart needs an appendix on Science and the Structure of Ethics. Why am I making so much of this juncture? Because there is a screaming incongruity in demanding mechanistic materialism and demanding ethics, and demanding that they be the same thing.

As for scientism as a movement, it may have come back in the second half of the twentieth century in a new incarnation and with a different agenda. The Santa Fe Institute.

In a wide-angle view, Unity of Science is a delusion whose cloistered credibility comes from science’s instrumental innovations and the transformative effects of those innovations. One has to wear blinders not to see that it is preposterous. In the first place, modernity counts physics, “political science,” and psychoanalysis as indispensable incompatible modern maps of reality.

Then, Edel smugly announced that supernaturalism has “now” (1961) been discarded. That is outrageously false to public life. Religion has not left the arena. Religious notions underlie the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example. As I have said over and over and over, the civilization is screamingly in bad faith in this regard.

Let me return to where I was before I digressed.

The TOP LEFT of the chart reacts against something. It offers impassable obstacles for the “Unity of Science” program. But these are obstacles a meta-technologist would see. They look inside science and find that its account of itself is irreparably reductionist.

If we wanted to see tenets the TOP LEFT is reacting against, I would have to abstract them from Unity of Science pronouncements and consolidate them. But I have not done that work yet. (Again, my program cannot base itself on a historical narrative.)

MENTAL COUNTING

See a new statement of mine: Mental Counting, Reality-Types, Unity of Science (2019). We force the issue in mental counting. That turns up clues for meta-technology.

PHYSICS

ILLICIT TENETS

Presumably I meant the presupposition of consciousness (personalistic interiority); language; free will (realized choice); and (cf. Lorraine Daston above) morality.

These are not only not in the ontology of physics; they are denied by physical reductionism.

Yet without these presuppositions, physics can’t happen.

Physical topics that presuppose consciousness

Various topics in physics have “implications for consciousness” without ever saying what consciousness is doing there at all. (Human temporality is consciousness crawling forward on a frozen world-line in space-time. Conscious observation collapses the wave function?)

What is natural language?

So far, there is no naturalist account of what natural language is—no analytical definition of natural language. (I have long known that, but I also heard Mikhail Gromov say it at a lecture on entropy at Courant Institute in Spring 2013. Evidently he is the only person besides myself who has noticed this.)

To elaborate, natural language-in-use is supplemented by grammar, which adds theories about how words are sequenced. Logic adds theories about the consequence-relations between articulated thoughts. Neurophysiology may identify a region of the brain on which linguistic competence depends. Information theory considers how many mechanical distinctions can be packed in a channel.

None of the above says what natural language is.

CONSCIOUSNESS

Without consciousness, observation is only the automatic production of a coded registration of some characteristic signal.

Free will

Without free will, there could be no genuine experiments, only passive observation of the given.

Free will and responsibility

Without free will and responsibility, it is impossible to make a genuine assertion (to know and care whether you are veridical). (As we saw, it is only possible to produce automatically a coded registration of some characteristic signal—and the registering device doesn’t know or care whether it is accurate.)

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus explicitly denies the soul and the subject. (5.5421; 5.631) And yet he says in the Preface that all of his assertions are unassailably true. In fact his scientific conclusions deny him the possibility of asserting anything. At the end, he calls the Tractatus meaningless. So far from bailing him out, that sinks his ship. See Annex One.

Morality

Science cannot do without a morality of prohibitions, as Daston told us, for example. We find logical positivism and Unity of Science undercutting ethics, and wanting it. Again, I provide an Appendix on the most concentrated effort to situate ethics in positivism.

SOCIAL BEING

Let me refer to work I did in the past. You may say that in the last analysis, a human community is an animal herd. I denied that social being can be understood that way. Social being is more about invention, imagination, fantasy than about overt acts. “The imaginary” cannot be reduced to a mechanism. See below.

CONTROL THEORY

As to the topic control theory. I propose a technology that would steer social relations: precisely to expose why it could not succeed mechanically. (That is not to say that intuitive methods of steering populations have not had successes.)

In more detail. Control theory would be a social technology which would allow scientists manipulative control of society’s future with the reliability of a satellite’s injection into orbit. (As opposed to what we have now, where the highest echelon of property-owners—the superrich—and their political servants—succeed in manipulating the short-term future to a considerable extent. Employing rules of thumb.)

Control theory was suggested by Isaac Asimov in the Foundation series. Project Camelot would have been a real-world pilot project. Jeff Goodwin’s No Other Way Out could be considered to be in this vein.

The social future does have a rough predictability. Otherwise one would not have a shock of recognition if one reads Bacon’s New Atlantis today. And scientists can have some influence on society’s trajectory: correlative to Bacon, the Royal Society.

That said, what proves to be important in my thought experiment is the “no-go” theorems for control theory. Occurrences blindside the social trajectory in ways that no mélange of physics and sociology could manage.

it is a corollary of my no-go theorems that social being is incomparable to the world found by physico-mathematical science.

PROPAGANDA

We find propaganda in the TOP LEFT bloc. To explain that, I have to say something about the standards here. Most of the entries in the bloc should be respected—either because they are cognitively basic, or because they are sophisticated. Perhaps they have not yet exhausted their potential. (Again my principle of multistage intellectual transformation.) The entries are junctures harboring configurations that are meta-technologically noticeable.

But propaganda is a fraud suitable for bullies and salespeople. It is not even ideology: it intentionally bamboozles the public. It does not demand intellectual respect any more than strong-arm robbery does. Again, the standards here need clarification. The bloc consolidates impassable obstacles for the Unity of Science program. The TOP LEFT bloc is not an inventory of ideas or methods welcome in meta-technology. There is no requirement of integrity on ideas or methods. Propaganda is here not because it is honorable, but because it is socially massive. And because it intentionally uses mass communication to deceive.

A ruling class may want its subjects to be human robots. (Some say, serfs.) But what about the inculcation of morality? Evidently the assumption is that the subjects can be disciplined like brutes. But there is also an intention to demand their deference and to inculcate them with guilt. Then that has it both ways, because a robot cannot be guilty.

The rulers presume precisely that their subjects have psyches. That means that it makes sense (is, for some rulers, imperative) to deform those psyches with propaganda. Propaganda is as real as a facet of social being as war is. And propaganda presupposes that its targets have psyches—otherwise, what is it deforming?

Propaganda is cognitive brutalization. That does not mean that it is feeble; it can sweep through society with massive effectiveness. (in fact, the smart set views manuals of propaganda as deliciously criminal. Cf. Bernays and the smart set’s admiration for him. Cf. the esteem in which Hans Domizlaff is held.) Propaganda is a pragmatic instrumentality, and a major one.

My point was that the effectiveness of privately-owned or government-owned mass media will never be credibly reduced to mechanistic materialism—any more than “free will” will be. [any more than hypnosis will be?] Propaganda does not have to be honorable to earn a place in this column. To belong here, propaganda only has to be a powerful instrumentality whose elements have no niches in physical science.

Propaganda manifests the mass psychology of modern society. Privately-owned or government-owned mass media and their relation to the collective consciousness of the “unthinking” majority. The delivery vehicle in every case is centrally manipulated mass communication.

So it is that propaganda belongs on a list of obstacles to the Unity of Science program. Again: not because it is false or deceptive. Because it is a manipulation in the realm of social being which Unity of Science cannot account for. My question for Unity of Science: what is your mechanistic account of propaganda’s deformation of the psyche of any one target? Unity of Science cannot answer. (

(Unless it recurs to a reductionist bluff. Something Edel does grandly in regard to ethics.)

On my October 2010 revision of this chart, I omitted propaganda. Today, I don’t see why I backed off.

TEMPORALITY

PHYSICAL TIME

CALENDRICAL TIME

The observation that physical time is not calendrical time had already been made. Very well, the two measured times do not square with each other and they do not square with temporality. To derive meta-technological demonstrations from that is unique to me.

“The Flynt Clock” (October 2010)

“Temporalities — Calendrical Time” (2014)

• • •

ONE. REALITY-FLATTENING

These cases devolve from withdrawal of belief from the imputed gestalt in perception.

DREAM REALITY: MEMORY—MANDATED PAST

Dreams and Reality; Determination of an Objectivity by Reciprocal Subjectivity

The Choice Chronology Project

More recently,

MEMO ON JUNCTURES IN MY PHILOSOPHICAL TRAJECTORY

2021 Notes on the Logic of Admissible Contradictions

What I cited for “dream reality” is “Dreams and Reality.” (Not the “Geniuses’ Liberation Project.”) However, the possibility of inconsistent world-states in dreams is mentioned in “The Logic of Contradictions.” Memories of dreams in dreams could provide epistemological anomalies in the remembered past.

EPISTEMIC CALCULUS

An Epistemic Calculus (most recent version)

PERCEPTION-DISSOCIATION

“perception-dissociation breaks the consistency of the object-gestalt.” does the blue indicate that this result is already known? is consistency the right word? the sensory correlation of the object-gestalt?

indeed the intersensory crossed fingers illusion: you see one dowel, feel it as two.

my variant: you feel a finger of the right hand as one in the right hand, as two in the left hand.

presumably I gain more from intersensory discorrelation than this. correlative to Epistemic Calculus.

Blue or not blue, the meta-technological elaboration of results in this field are due to me. disorganizing the object-gestalt intermodally.

Intersensory Discorrelation

CRITIQUE OF THE PROOF OF THE IRRATIONALITY OF √2

What did I have in mind? Was Greek Mathematics Crazy? (1987)?

FLYNT LEVER

Not a text. A fulcrum-lever exhibit. It violates the usual intersensory correlation to expose the habituated imputation of the object-gestalt. A length-illusion is printed on the lever, so that it looks as if a presumably uniform lever balances off-center.

• •

TWO. LOGIC OF CONTRADICTIONS: WAKING CONFINED CONTRADICTION-PICTURES

Introduction to the Logic of Contradictions

Confined contradiction-pictures in the waking state.

COUNTING STANDS

The Counting Stands

VISUAL

three versions of the waterfall illusion

DESCRIPTIVE LOGIC

The Logic of Admissible Contradictions

• •

THREE. LOGIC OF CONTRADICTIONS

Introduction to the Logic of Contradictions

as I peruse what I offered in this bloc in 2010, it seems that I conflated different phases of a device. I got ahead of myself by leading with the Venice cube, a specialized Necker cube. That is what I count as a picture of a logically impossible space.

as for the Necker cube, it has long been known. lower in the column, we find utilization of the Necker cube in Stroke-Numeral. that has nothing to do with a picture of logically impossible space.

Again, devices and the corresponding lessons are confused. I have made minimal adjustments. As to redrafting the chart, I already did that once, c. October 2010. But the early 2010 chart is stimulating in its own way and deserves to be preserved.

VENICE (NECKER) CUBE

That would be the isomorphic cubical frame (“cell”) utilized in Logically Impossible Space, first exhibited in Venice in 1990.

Very well, the Venice cube will have two roles in my project, the primary role mentioned in the heading, and a secondary role which obscurely turns up in FIVE. As for the primary role, the Venice cube is, again, a picture of a logically impossible space. (As an aside, Stroke-Numeral II had multistable cubes in the mirror world.) One has to be clear on epistemology to appreciate what happens here. Somebody could say, so what? You don’t give me a physical space that is logically impossible.

We need the Tractatus, §6.3751 here to quash that disparagement (although Wittgenstein does not quite close the circle). Possible situations can be pictured whether or not they exist. There is no picture of a contradictory situation. It cannot be thought. Any more than you can see two distinct colors (not merged colors, I shouldn’t even have to say that) “at the same point.” Very well, the Venice cube allows what Wittgenstein says cannot be. It pictures a logically impossible space, as if it were a possible situation. It allows illogical visualization.

As for doing with color precisely what Wittgenstein said cannot be done, my Counting Stands accomplishes that.

Let me underline the point. If I enable you to think “what cannot be thought” reliably, without deception, that is literally revolutionary. I don’t have to deliver a result beyond the one I offer. (Although I wish to cross-potentiate such results.)

I have to say, I showed the Counting Stands in 1993. I offered them to Hervé Fischer for an art and technology exhibition in Canada in the 1990s. (Fischer and I met at Emily Harvey Gallery.) Nobody has ever “gotten” the piece. Fischer said, “that’s very low-tech, Henry,” and rejected it. He wanted flashing lights and buzzers. (The way the Anton Zeilinger apparatus was shown at Documenta 13.)

STROKE-NUMERAL

Hilbert asked, where does a positive integer live? He was a formalist. The number does not live in heaven. Ignoring all difficulties, he reduced a number to a standard inscription, to a row of tokens, graphemes. (Indeed there was a turn to language in twentieth century ontology.) If you asked him, where does three exist, he would say there, in my row of tokens. Of course, it is so dependent on appraised equinumerousness that Hilbert did not even bother to fabricate standards—as there is in Paris for the standard meter. The nearest thing to it is the sample stroke-numerals in the Grundlagen.

Here is where I enter the picture. The existence of positive integers has been reduced to repetitions of a token, a grapheme.

(MARKOV SEMANTICS)

“Markov semantics.” Markov’s lambda. a symbol that means, “no symbol is here.” appears in URLs as the underline. in this context, the significance is vacant.

For the lengthy exposition of stroke-numeral, I refer the reader to The Apprehension of Plurality. That said, interpretations are so important I must mention them here. The cube offers two orientations. For Necker-cube stroke-numerals, the assigned meanings are stroke and vacant. vacants do not contribute to the notated number. That is especially my contribution. If you try the first interpretation that comes to mind for the orientations, like 1 and 2, it diverts you to results of very little interest.

Let us resume with the Venice cube. Two shapes in each other’s space, or however you want to say it. We can do what we assuredly did not do in the case of Stroke-Numeral. We can assign the meanings 1 and 2, for example. Now we get 1 = 2 at the level of seeing distinct numerals in the same place at the same time. (Remember that Hilbert’s ontology identified whole numbers with numerals.)

[would I be better served to say that you see stroke and vacant in the same place? open question.]

The device turns up explicitly in the last line of FIVE. The 2010 chart had a right leg of an arc between

b. 1 = 2 perceptual/notation

and

*warp contradiction

along with a left leg of the arc to stroke-numeral.

The line to stroke-numeral is understandable. There are two versions of the Necker cube with dual meaning assignments. In one case, stroke-numerals result. In the other case, two numerals for two numbers are present in the same “view.”

It now seems to me that the line to warp contradiction was a serious misjudgment. What was I thinking in 2010? One could say that the Venice cube makes you dizzy. And one might speculate that if you seriously tried to believe e.g. the Christian Trinity, it would make you dizzy. (Evidently the latter is an example of what I meant by a warp contradiction. Christian spokesmen have alluded to the dogma’s irrationality.) But there is no advantage whatever in drawing an analogy here. When I was trying to decipher the chart, the analogy misled me in trying to recall what a warp contradiction is. In the first instance, a warp contradiction is a ploy in verbal parochial thought which is essentially deceitful. (But we find that warp contradictions are not limited to manifestly parochial thought. The sort of fancy footwork found in the Christian Trinity also turns up in scientific thought.)

As for the Venice cube, it is an overlooked proximate actuality which is uncanny. As an apparition, it is what it is. You don’t have to believe the unbelievable.

In 2019, I deleted the right leg of the arc.

• •

FOUR. INCONSISTENT WORLD-STATES

DREAMS

Dreams and Reality

The Logic of Admissible Contradictions

DESCRIPTIVE LOGIC

Phenomenal Logic of Contradictions as an Outcome of Normative Everyday Logic; Regulating Inference from Authentically Descriptive Inconsistency

These studies may be far from being completed.

[yes. see 2021 Notes on the Logic of Admissible Contradictions.]

What I have done is to assemble utterly anomalous evidence that calls for a systematization. It is a problem if I never manage to complete the study, because if the topic was turned over to somebody like Nichols Goodman or Graham Priest, they would try to neutralize it so it could be drawn into some oddity of identitarian logic. Indoctrination has wired them for identitarian logic. They are not capable of shattering it.

• •

FIVE. INCONSISTENCY PROOFS

these topics are supported by texts, e.g.

Refutation of Arithmetic

That 1 = 2

Here is where I indicate, in the last line, with the red link to stroke-numeral in THREE, that the Venice cube can be rung in as a stroke-numeral to get 0 = 1 forthwith.

• •

SIX. ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSES

COMMON SENSE

Paradoxes of Common Sense and Blocking of Propositional Calculus (1994)

PAROCHIAL

As I said, this means “parochial discourses” generically. (Religious discourses in the first instance.) I have something specific to offer here; hence the asterisk to the labels at the bottom.

PHYSICS CONTRADICTION

Grades of Inconsistency in Physics (1986), with

Grades of Inconsistency in Physics: Notes for an expanded version (1993)

Perhaps I can be helpful here to the uninitiated. There is already a syllabus of paradoxes of physics. Obviously, the thermodynamic paradoxes. Asymptotic completeness in classical mechanics. The Einstein twins paradox. But physicists misuse the term ‘paradox’. The paradoxes are not necessarily real paradoxes. You don’t get a contradiction between two equally secure tenets. You get a contradiction between a new theory’s implication and a premise physicists have preferred to believe up to now. If the latter were discarded there would be no contradiction. For that matter, there was long a need for a reconciliation of relativity and quantum physics.

I surmised that meta-technology might learn something by sifting through this material carefully. The paper is unfinished; I never incorporated the quantum-physical resolutions (of e.g. the thermodynamic paradoxes) that Mallah imparted to me.

FAILURE THEOREMS

What gets on the chart seems to be shorthand. A failure theorem is, for example, a contradiction discovered in mathematics which is co-opted as an arcane new content. The history of mathematics is the history of contradictions co-opted; they are co-opted by moving the goal posts. Going back at least to irrationality of √2. (Not to say paradoxes of the infinite tail of the positive integers.)

Does the chart’s topic really intend to be that wide-ranging? It is likely that what I had in mind was “Failure Theorems at the Research Frontier,” my manuscript, not finalized, on failure theorems in play in the last quarter of the twentieth century. (A name like Georg Kreisel might come up in this connection, although Kreisel was a stalwart of orthodoxy in the turmoil.)

Also: “Anti-Mathematics.”

MATHEMATICAL PARADOXES

Paradoxes of Naïve Mathematics

There might be a blocking logic angle, but I don’t see it asserted on the charts.

WARP CONTRADICTION

BLOCKING LOGICS

As I said above, I may have introduced the notion of a warp contradiction in the first draft of my Buddhism essay, c. 1981. And blocking? I may have first used the word in the relevant sense in “Paradoxes of Common Sense and Blocking of Propositional Calculus” (1994 revision of a text began in 1984).

I find that I want to provide a new, consolidated explanation of these junctures. That is Annex One.

• • •

LAYER ONE. CONSTITUTIVE DISSOCIATION

Studies in Constitutive Dissociation

[what was the inaccessible utterance?]

• •

LAYER TWO. INSIDE SCIENCE

Perhaps this is the most suitable place to introduce a broad observation on what is going on throughout. Some part of meta-technology lifts effects, devices (secured results) from science pointwise, and makes something of them outside the scientists’ field of vision.

Then we have the blue in the LAYERS and the green underlined in blue in SIX. Part of meta-technology consists of studies of scientific content as such. As opposed to displacing individual effects to an outside context. (What would I call Tritone Monochord? Is it a pre-existing effect reconstructed in an unexpected context?) These studies should be legitimate scholarship!—but they aren’t. As my dissertation supervisor at the New School said to me, you swim in our stream, but with diabolical intentions.

With this said, LAYER TWO comprises results that turned up in my investigations that seem to me to be within the limits of academic science.

[If the Anthropic Principle is within the limits, for example.

If the Hawkings explanation of time relative to the creation of the universe is.]

But even if these studies are within the limits in principle, I was far too optimistic. The profession would never host them—any more than it would host Logically Impossible Space or Counting Stands. So I overrated the palatability of LAYER TWO. Again and again, “you swim in our stream, but with diabolical intentions.”

TRITONE MONOCHORD

many documents:

Anti-Mathematics

An Exposé of Foundations of Mathematics

Was Greek Mathematics Crazy?

TUNKNOWABLE TRUE SENTENCES

THE PSYCHO-LOGICAL PARADOXES: SELF-REFERENCE THAT ENGAGES THE READER’S MENTAL STATE 2004

When a self-reference sentence mentions somebody’s belief. 2004

SENTENCES WHICH ARE RIGOROUSLY UNKNOWABLE BUT TRUE 2004

TCRITIQUE OF THE DIAGONALIZATION LEMMA

CRITIQUE OF SELF-REFERENCE

Diagonalization Lemma: Sketches for an Attack

Lecture on Jack

As for self-reference, philosophical logic has a vast literature on self-reference. The Tractatus called it illicit. (3.332; 3.333) But Wittgenstein calls the Tractatus nonsense from inside the Tractatus (6.54). Today’s logicians find no difficulty with it. Kripke says explicitly that the name of a sentence can be the sentence’s noun phrase. (‘Jack’ is the name of ‘Jack is short.’) A sentence’s noun—noun phrase!—can be the name of that sentence. Then ‘Jack’ may be the name of ‘Jack being short’ (a noun phrase keying on ‘Jack’). If ‘Jack’ may be the name of a noun phrase keying on ‘Jack’, then ‘Jack’ may be its own name:

‘Jack’ equals ‘ ‘Jack’ ’.

That is not a legitimate idempotency, like 1 x 1 = 1. It cancels the use-mention distinction.

Meta-technology crisscrosses self-reference. I don’t have a definitive position, but the drift of my work is that self-reference is either a fault, as Wittgenstein said, or else it takes language somewhere more peculiar than has been acknowledged.

If the use-mention distinction is canceled, an interpreted Necker cube could name itself.

CRITIQUE OF THE COMPLETENESS THEOREM

Is the Gödel-Henkin Completeness Theorem (Adequacy Theorem) for pure predicate calculus a masterpiece of philosophy? (1999) [unfinished]

BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

The Biological Anthropic Principle (with J. Berndt)

SCHROEDINGER ROULETTE

Schroedinger Roulette

ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY: LAYER TWO

As noted, on the 2010 holograph, I struck out

Unknowable true sentences

and

critique of the Diagonalization Lemma/critique of self-reference

in orange. The strike-outs are information, but I left them off on the typeset because it tarnishes the look.

Why the strike-outs?

As said, apparently I judged that these studies only spar with philosophical logic. But that underrates them. As of 2019: I judge everything in the row as too lacerating to be entertained academically. These studies draw on junctures in science, but academic science wouldn’t host any of it.

Again, the orange strike-outs in LAYER TWO weren’t rigorous.

• • •

LOWER RIGHT

Evidently this bloc amounts to a footnote to explain the blue and green.

—blue: the effect that breaks objectification

—green: application of effects that break objectification.

But this distinction may not be sustained rigorously. It seems that there are many places where I could second-guess myself in this connection.

And why the left orange bullets when, again, META-TECHNOLOGY did not get a bullet at the top? (Whereas UNCOMPROMISING POSITIONING did.)