VULNERABILITIES FOR UPWARD DISPLACEMENT:
EXPLANATION
Henry Flynt
November 2024
PREFACE
The present text is an explanation of my early 2010 UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart. That chart makes a pair with my 2010 META-TECHNOLOGY chart; there is an overlap in topics invoked and cases cited.
Here I shall explain in some depth what is behind the labels on the UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart. But first I have to address the title. In February 1981, I called the undertaking in question subversion. (Personness and Subversion.) Later that year, I changed the label to the less lurid destabilization. But in 2020, I realize that the connotations of these labels tilt too much toward smashing. If I want a title with informative connotations, I have to change it, as I have done, to something like UPWARD DISPLACEMENT. That is why I changed the title of the holograph 2010 chart when I typeset it.
More explanation is called for. Why not ELEVATION or ASCENSION? Because the called-for shift is not just an elevation. It is a dislocation. In fact, this explanation is largely about the dislocation. The elevation must be correlative to a shattering of the obtaining ideology.
The whole of the ideology—not just one of the incongruous sections which comprise it. Not just ancient religion in today’s typical personal reality-picture (“ancient religion plus modern science”).
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If I wish to speak about where the chart came from, I still need the title on the holograph. I plan to say DESTABILIZATION when the point is the chart’s provenance. Otherwise, UPWARD DISPLACEMENT.
It seems well to note dates in the crystallization of this undertaking up through 2010. Some of this information appeared also in
META-TECHNOLOGY: the early 2010 chart
COMMENTS 2021
In 1978, in “The Crisis in Physics and the Question of a New Science” (presented to a nonspecialized audience at Anthology Film Archives when it was on Wooster Street), I envisioned that I could cross-potentiate modalities in logic and epistemology that I had invented. (“Logic and epistemology”—that is what conventional thought would call them). In October 1979, I consummated that proposal by announcing meta-technology to a general audience in Stockholm.
I announced “personhood theory” in 1980 in a circulated manuscript. Clearly “personhood theory” was more discursive and more of an improvisation than meta-technology.
At this point, further explanations of terminology are needed. At the outset, my labels in the “humanistic” sphere were ‘personhood’ and ‘personhood theory’. I hated those labels, but decades went by before I was ready to ring in better labels. By 2010, as is seen from the chart, I had moved to ‘personness’ and ‘personalysis’. I use them now; that includes switching them into old texts. I revert to the old labels only when a historical title has to be preserved. (When something was published, for example.) On my web site, the labels have been changed in the table of contents, but not in individual texts.
As soon as I announced (what I now call) personalysis, I felt challenged to show that it was more than a mere interpretation that left every operative thing unaffected. (An objection that is legitimately made to idealism and materialism, and for that matter, to Husserlianism.)
As a early sketch of how personalysis might have operative consequences, I wrote “Personness and Subversion” in 1981. ‘subversion’ says something I still like. But because the word is slightly lurid, I subsequently opted to ring in in the milder ‘destabilization’. (That is what gets on my web site.) And as said, I have replaced ‘destabilization’ with ‘upward displacement’. The change of labels goes to substance, and I will have more to say about it.
• •
AIMS
The present text wants to accomplish (A) – (C), for example.
(A) To show that personalysis can suggest meta-technological junctures to a meta-technologist.
That means that what personalysis calls
longitudinal thematic personal identity
self-regard (esteem)
morale
interpersonal validation
commitment
can be interdependent with the espoused reality-picture—when that reality-picture does not explicitly concern the personalistic.
It occurs to me to expand on this. In the transition from alchemy to chemistry, what was wanted in a scientist’s individual interiority changed. Similarly in the transition from astrology to astronomy.
There are plenty of religious scientists—e.g. Allan Sandage, Sarah Salviander. They have to have it two ways: two screamingly incongruous ways.
Let me skip from the everyday work of science to the
realm which concerns me. There are questions at the boundary of physics as a
project. “Where were the laws of nature when there was nothing at all?” “What
of the claim that the laws of nature are laws of pure mathematics?” (Noether.)
“How can the initial microspeck have had a mass equal to that of the
present-day universe? Why wouldn’t the speck collapse gravitationally rather
than inflate?”
Given a boundary question, science waits for somebody to give an answer that can become the rote answer. Once a runaround is at hand, the profession honors it as a bluff.
Speaking of science’s boundary, assume that I can offer a legitimate intervention regarding a boundary question. (Where were the laws of nature when there was nothing at all?) Scientists don’t want to hear such a remark. They have invested their lives in an expert profession. They know everything, and don’t need anything else—except ancient religion—and morality—and the social analysis implicit in their political posture—etc.
What of the obtaining reality-picture? It is not nailed down; if it were, the union of science and ancient religion would not be possible. Chomsky would not be able to get away with silence about his religion.
As for the modern, scientific picture, how does it come to an individual? It is supplied from public doctrine and is instilled in the individual in the classroom. (“Ninth-grade education.”)
As an aside, personalysis is not a sociology, and does not view accession to the reality-picture as if it were the imprint of a stamping machine where the machine is social externality.
Personalysis focuses on the coalescence of a reality-picture in individual interiority. (The reality-picture is an intricate thought. I often say, a model.)
I won’t be launching into an exposition of personalysis here. That explanation is in the unfinished Personness IV and various scattered postscripts.
•
(B) To expose mental templates, specific to civilizations, that make a denizen of the civilization blind to something operative and important. I prefer labels that are more graphic than inhibition. Template blindness. Even more pointed, template stigmatization.
A quick example? To a classically trained musician, all music (all legitimate music) can be transcribed for piano. The use of a glissando as a melody note is denied in perception, or apprehended as ridiculous. Plenty of Westerners, on hearing Hindustani music, have had the reaction “tortured cats.” I am not trying to be funny. Their consciousness registers the audio in that factually erroneous way. Like hearing spoken Chinese as mewing. It is like a person who looks at a tree and sees a refrigerator. There is nothing funny about the imposition of a factually erroneous template on sensory input—especially when the input is linguistic. (Collective musical practices are linguistic.)
You are encultured to preconsciously reconstitute sensation. You are deliberately disabled. One has learned a mental template which allows one to distinguish the pertinent and the extraneous. (It identifies useful information and blocks extraneous information.)
Template blindness surfaces when a denizen of a civilization dismisses a “cultural device” outside the civilization’s “language” even as it is intellectually defensible and capable of potentiation—and potentially could outcompete the denizen’s culture.
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We may imagine that Aristotle would have dismissed Boole’s algebra if Boole could somehow have conveyed to Aristotle that he wanted to translate Aristotle’s logic into algebra. In fact, for Boole to explain himself to Aristotle might have been conceptually impossible. For Aristotle, the positive integers began with 2. (“1” was not a number. It meant “the totality.” A number had to be the name of a multiple.) There was no number for “nothing to count.” The invention of zero and Arabic numerals and algebra and Leibniz and De Morgan separated Boole from Aristotle.
“We have long known that zero is a number with its own peculiar arithmetic.” (It needs its own axiom. Without that axiom, proof that 1 = 2 is trivial.)
But not so fast. What about Markov’s L, the empty word, the symbol for no symbol here?
The empty abstract word has no letters. ...
This will allow us to consider ... the empty alphabet, having no letters at all. ... It is expedient to consider every alphabet as an extension of the alphabet { }.
... every word begins in the empty word and ends in it. Every word begins and ends in itself. The empty word begins (ends) only in itself.
Theory of Algorithms, emphasis added
Resuming with Aristotle and Boole, we could imagine the former saying to the latter “What you are doing is not logic—it is worthless.” Did somebody say that when Boole published?
°
There is a risk when I refer to cases in the history of post-Grecian science to explain myself. As I say in the COMMENTS on the META-TECHNOLOGY chart, strictly, I should not compare Boole and myself. I reach for the case of Boole because it may be familiar to the reader: as a case of a vindicated innovation which, to Aristotle, would have been nonsense. It could suggest how different civilizations might differ in their mathematics. (Spengler wanted such examples.) It matters to us when the later method proved technologically superior to the earlier.
Let me return to Chinese tones. Nothing can be concocted with English phonemes that will prepare one to speak Chinese or understand spoken Chinese. English does not have tones. As long as you insist that tones are “just mewing”—as long as you cannot recognize tones as phonemic—you won’t be able to recognize Chinese as a legitimate language and you won’t be able to do anything with the Chinese language.
That being said, another lesson offers itself here which is more grating. As a result of combined national power, the Roman alphabet became a world standard. There came a point when it was decided that the Chinese script needs to be Romanized. But the Roman alphabet can’t reflect the tones as tones. It is a tortured expedient. A collision of civilizations has brought us to this point. Somebody has forced their way through the transcription mismatch to accommodate combined national power.
Something analytical can be overwhelmed by something social. (Not that that is where I am going here—but it is worth noting.)
As a musician, I immediately think of all the transcriptions of non-classical music in European notation.
To be precise, what “classical music” means is German art music. Abhorrent transcriptions of non-classical music abound in the Grove Dictionary.
I expect that anyone who knows the Grove Dictionary will dismiss me out of hand at this point. How dare I find fault with the Grove Dictionary! If you are smart enough to have heard of the Grove Dictionary, you are smart enough to revere it.
You think?
“We classical musicologists have already taken care of everything.”
Very well, my reaction is: what you, the classical musician, are good at is worthless.
It doesn’t matter to me that my objection to their knowledge assails the purpose of their life.—But: it assails the purpose of their life.
In the interests of full disclosure, I was classically trained. I ended by having a quasi-Cage composition performed at Harvard in 1959. I even have a classical performance on You Tube. (With mistakes that were very correctable; circumstances prevented me from doing anything about it.) The point is that for me, classical training was a preparation that enabled me to dismantle it and exit it for the music I endorse.
°
In what follows, I will include some defensive disclaimers. I hate to make such disclaimers, but there is a steady deterioration everywhere in public discourse in contemporary civilization. I feel that it would be affected, perhaps cavalier, for me to write as if that deterioration didn’t menace what I want to do.
Template blindness is not a new insult to be hurled at anyone who doesn’t agree with you. If you want 2 + 2 to equal 5, and the person you are talking to says 2 + 2 equals 4, template blindness is not a new insult for you to hurl at them. Template blindness is not why they don’t defer to you.
To delineate the accelerating intellectual deterioration today would be a large and dreary project. In fact, what I feel it suitable to say requires more space that I would like to devote to it—but there is no help for that.
What have been popular, and are becoming more popular, are objections to highbrow thought which are regressive, or which ring in sophistry to gain the result the proponent wants. The right word for all of that is obscurantism. But it is the Left that wants such outcomes. We are told something along the lines of: “2 + 2 = 4 is a racist, sexist lie.” That makes it morally impossible to assert 2 + 2 = 4. If you don’t agree that 2 + 2 = 5, you will be branded an oppressor.
The notion that there is a politically correct, obscurantist knowledge reserved for victims goes back to Lysenko.
Î may offer some junctures in this history.
—Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals:
Are there mathematical lunacies and madmen who believe that two and two make three? In other words, can hallucination invade the realms of pure reason—if the words do not cry out (at being joined together)?
(Apologies for the questionable translation.) This does not directly pertain to victimhood; it is about the artist as a misbehaving child.
How 2 + 2 might equal 3 has a lucid answer which has more than one facet. (A civilization-shattering answer.) Beaudelaire was posturing as a brat. He would not have been interested that his question has a real answer; he would have had no time for it.
—Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a return to a native land:
And you know the rest
That 2 and 2 are five
—Sandra Harding’s rejection of Copernicus in favor of Ptolemy. (The Science Question in Feminism.) To paraphrase, Copernicus makes earth, which is woman, go around man, which is sun. Feminism demands that heliocentrism be rejected and that man be made go around woman. We have not seen such insistence that the purpose of the real is to symbolize something else since the Bible.
It is dizzying that I not only have Hilbert or Einstein to contend with. The same civilization demands acquiescence to obscurantism.—And you can’t disagree, because it is said by victims, and to disagree would add to their victimization. It would make you politically incorrect.
Another chapter was added to victim-driven obscurantism when deconstruction gave us “everything is anything, anything is nothing, nothing means anything.” That was supposed to make the opponent dizzy—in the ensuing disorder, Derrida could proclaim victims’ pronouncements as truths and get away with it.
Why do I make this considerable excursion in the non-operative side of contemporary academic history? In the first place, it is false to say “science has enlightened us all.” (It hasn’t even kept the scientists out of the chapels.)
More directly, I don’t want “victim’s truth” to be muddled or confounded with what I offer. To say it the other way around, I don’t want upward displacement to be confounded with obscurantism—in particular, an obscurantism that presents itself as the latest thing and as a recompense for the oppressed.
I respect the mental ingenuity and technological effectiveness of accredited science (as far as it goes). (In my perspective, accredited science is the lowest level of compromised positioning.) I am more willing to indulge accredited science than I am to indulge classical music.
That said, I stopped reading Scientific American decades ago. What is it?—but Platonism married to robotics. A waste of my time.
Another way to characterize the contemporary prestige reality-picture: Digital materialism and edge graphs. Digital fetishism.
Insofar as I say that there is every reason to pivot out of accredited science, I want to deliver us to a civilization that is more alert and aware, not less.
And as for the other obscurantism. Meta-technology (for example) will not give us the reality-picture that the top scientists actually harbor: mechanistic materialism pasted to ancient religion.
°
There is another ideological incongruity in plain view. The religious adherents typical of the Eurosphere have the Bible as their scripture. They instruct the faithful to be familiar with it, to read it cover to cover. And yet, much of the Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament, for example) is appalling—barbaric—by the evolved moral standards of the contemporary Eurosphere. (Anthropologically, that is not strange. The Bible reflects the era in which it was written. Also, it innovated moral norms which are disavowed now but which played a part in getting us to modernity.) I am far from the first person to have noticed this.
I have lectured on the Bible, and I find that those in my audiences have no idea what it says. Perhaps they are too secular to care. But one would think that they would have noticed that the Bible is important in the societal ideology.
The objectionable passages in the Bible that are difficult to overlook are mitigated by the commentators by way of idiotic casuistry. Simply, “the Bible does not mean what it says; it means what I declare.” Inconvenient passages are not taken as topics in sermons.
But there is a much deeper mitigation that belongs here. Believers have perfected the art of reading the Bible without noticing it. We can conclude: it is necessary to read the Bible without noticing it.
COMPENSATION BY HALLUCINATION.
•
(C) To expose junctures or devices which template blindness may hide. With the expectation that these junctures or devices could upwardly displace the civilization.
• •
I do not stray when I speak of conceptual devices which could crash or wreck the civilization. I do not stray when I speak of undermining the civilization. I can be more candid. I could not do the work consolidated in these charts (for example) if I did not detest the prevailing civilization for its psychephobia and discrete-fetishism and (specific) template-blindnesses.
What I want cannot flourish unless what obtains is smashed.
But to repeat, “smashing” does not have the best connotation, especially under present conditions. Yes, we can say that Boole’s logic outcompeted Aristotle’s logic as regards its machinery. Boole’s development was a gateway to a non-discursive development of logic Aristotle could not have dreamed of.
In fact, a confrontation between Aristotle and Boole under ancient Grecian conditions would have been impossible. Many centuries of development were needed before Boole’s methods could be urgently useful. That there can be that much difference in the way civilizations see the same problem is a needed lesson here.
Again and again, what I need, not to mislead my readers, is a rhetoric of elevation. All the while, there is a complication from the other side. If I say ‘supersede’, for example, the blandness of the word is a problem. We do not get from a civilization to a more elevated civilization by embellishing the conceptions and practices of the former. It is necessary to shatter the former. As I said, I detest the prevailing civilization for its psychephobia and discrete-fetishism and (specific) template-blindnesses.
I do not propose to add a new wrinkle to the prevailing civilization’s natural science. That is already being done—frantically. And as long as mechanistic materialism can come up with new tricks, its lease on life remains in force.
An aside that might matter only to me. For historical cases of an attempt to make a new theory palatable by recasting it as a wrinkle on a respectable theory, we could look to economics. The way Shigeto Tsuru tried to make Marx academically palatable by assimilating him to Keynesianism. For that matter, Béla Csikós-Nagy, speaking for “Communist” Hungary in c. 1978, wanted to assimilate Marx to Keynesianism. Very well, a Marxism folded into the conventional wisdom has lost anything that is worth reading. (What Marx wanted is worth looking at. His notion of how the higher economic order would come about has proved to be crackpot. It is a failure like the mechanical wings that were supposed to enable humans to fly.)
There is one large problem with my proposal. Exponents of the conventional wisdom who want to be proved wrong—because that will drive them from the conventional wisdom into unknown territory—are rare.
Historians find that a new scientific idea (for example) was discovered thousands of years ago. John Philoponus, in Byzantine Greece. Nobody wanted it. It is remarkable that a trace of it survived.
For me, it was more than leaving the conventional wisdom. When I had a given insight, my reaction was to extend the new direction.
Given a manifestation announced by someone else, to enhance it in ways the discoverer hadn’t thought of.
°
I have hardly finished these prefatory remarks. That said, it seems suitable to begin with the affirmative exposition.
I don’t necessarily identify a civilization with its edifices and machines, or its assemblies of people. I identify a civilization with the normative regimentation of individual consciousnesses on behalf of this or that thought-consensus. (The collective equilibrium in the noosphere, if I may borrow that word.)
As I intimated, what is of interest here is a generic look at individual interiority. I far prefer my label personness. (Again, this is not the place to expound personalysis.) The realm in which a reality-picture is assembled is individual thought.
°
Meta-technology recognizes that
the ideal entities of science (roughly, mathematical entities) must have experience-world mediations
(Notations and diagrams have to be seen. External objects become object-gestalts; in turn, these perceptions may well be intermodal correlations. Etc.)
To continue, speaking of a mass psychology, civilizations require high levels of credulity. At such a high level, personalistic subjectivities such as
longitudinal thematic personal identity
self-regard (esteem)
morale
interpersonal validation
commitment
are far more urgent than
the dependence of the ideal entities of science on experience-world mediations.
I approve of this line of thought or I wouldn’t say it. On the other hand, it would be rash to say that personalysis trumps a branch of meta-technology such as the epistemic calculus. If one has no tool-kit, one only has interpretations of the world.
When intellectual anomalies threaten personalistic subjectivities, the challenged individual is threatened to the core by an anomaly that has erupted in their personal realm. Something has erupted that shows that their achievements are worthless and that they have been running as fast as possible in the wrong direction. When I was confronted with that lesson, I welcomed the opportunity to change course.
Have I ever met anyone who was grateful to be told that the institution they were trying to qualify in was no good? Of course, a major consideration for me was that I was already deeply uncomfortable in the institution in which I was trying to excel. And that I did not object to the work of innovation. I was waiting for a new purpose.
“It” is not exactly about: what is true? Just as important, or far more important: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE TRUE?
°
—As to whether the earth is flat, it was pointed out that when a ship sails away on the ocean, its mast disappears to sight by sinking. Why was that difficult?
—Simon Stevin’s late 16th century experiment, which dropped two markedly different weights from a height, smashed Aristotle’s mechanics. It waited for two thousand years for Stevin to try it—and although Aristotle was instantly refuted, it took time for it to be accepted that the master was stupidly wrong.
These were old cases which—along with my imaginary confrontation of Aristotle and Boole—might convey the flavor of a civilization-wide “cognition” gap.
Somewhere, I read that Galileo tried dropping weights in Pisa in the presence of Aristotelian referees. I read that the referees refused to concede anything upon seeing the demonstration. The account I read was offered as history of science. Viviani, Galileo’s first biographer, said that Galileo performed the experiment (many times); for Viviani to say it amounted to personal testimony. Only lately have I learned that contemporary historians reject that Galileo tried it. He only plagiarized what Stevin did.
I don’t want to get sidetracked on Galileo, Stevin, and Viviani. Let us call the fictive story a parable. The parable can be good psychological preparation for you. What the story I read has is the referees bailing Aristotle out. There was a split second between the impacts of the two weights—and the referees said that that vindicated Aristotle.
The parable offers a consideration deeper than a turning-point in physics. What was going on with the referees was more important than the cancellation of two millennia of scientific dogma. Did the referees see what there was to see? Evidently yes; their reaction implies that they saw something they had to mitigate. How did they silently process the instant defeat of their reality-picture? Did all of them arrive at the same mitigation at the same time—and confront Galileo unanimously? Were they able to hold the line for Aristotle? For even a few minutes? Until Galileo died?
What is not fiction is that Galileo was convicted of heresy for heliocentrism, and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. (Vanini was burned at the stake for saying that he wanted to study nature.)
The foregoing considerations are the sort of thing upward displacement is concerned with. That said, another reservation I made remains in force. It is not ideal for me to explain myself by citing triumphs of modern science. Referring to modern science has the advantage of invoking names familiar to a reader with a certain education. But my charts do not pertain to a contest involving modern science which the latter can win. The successes of modern science are not the touchstone here. Something previously unheard-of should win.
I wrote WHERE “SOCIETY” IS GOING (JULY 2023) to add a little more detail to these observations.
If I wanted to be rigorous, and eschew trying to “talk the reader’s language,” I could define my undertaking without any appeal to the way science has unfolded since the Egyptians. And—as we will see throughout—that would be the way to avoid hobbling compromises.
°
Let me resume with my path from the 1981 “Personhood and Subversion” to the present. In 2001, I drafted a new version of what was now “Personhood and Destabilization.” “Personness and Destabilizing Efficacy: Transforming the Person-World by Conscious Action.”
It is on my web site; that means that what I consider one of my most forceful contributions has been available to the public for twenty years. (It has received no response.)
In fact, what got on the site omitted three Supplements that go with the body text. That’s not a complaint. Two of the Supplements are referred to many times in the body text. It seems that the absence of the Supplements was never noticed—no doubt because of the public’s obliviousness to the body text.
That 2001 effort is in force today. All the same, it is an overview. It does not have the form of a manual—marshaling vulnerabilities and techniques.
In early 2010, I consolidated what I had of meta-technology in a chart—and at the same time, I prepared a DESTABILIZATION chart. The just-now renamed chart does not intend to chart personness. It is a tableau of, again, devices and junctures. It allows that
longitudinal thematic personal identity
self-regard (esteem)
morale
interpersonal validation
commitment
can have everything to do with the reality-picture one espouses. It conceives upward displacement as a family of vulnerabilities and techniques that can mesh with meta-technology.
Perhaps a reader would say that these devices are nothing, merely skimpy ideas and confined perceptions. Again, I dilute myself by reaching for analogies in the past of science—this time for small ideas. What about the number zero? What about Boole’s algebra before it was called symbolic logic and mathematical logic, and entered pure mathematics? (And became the name of computer code?) And the experiment of dropping weights? (Actual when performed by Simon Stevin.) It was utterly simple. It could have been performed hundreds, thousands of year earlier.
As between the two 2010 charts, the difference is the strategic intents. META-TECHNOLOGY surveys the instrumental devices. UPWARD DISPLACEMENT contemplates using the devices in the light of the personalistic affections to dislocate civilizations.
Elsewhere, I have mentioned the waterfall illusion, and Tim Crane’s paper on it (Analysis, 1988). It is a case beyond template stigmatization. As I remember, Crane sees what is “outside the universe.” (What is logically impossible.)
Many other viewers don’t see the anomaly when perceptual psychology says they should. That’s template stigmatization.
Crane can’t stand what he sees. The circumstance that one perception clashes with his reality-picture makes him hate being sentient. (I will return to Crane below.)
That was not the Aristotelian referees’ reaction in the Leaning Tower parable. They pivoted immediately to to an inane mitigation. All this is what upward displacement is about.
°
Let me conclude my defensive disclaimers. I have tried to keep my remarks on the contemporary obscurantism brief. This text should not be preoccupied with an exposé of a current enthusiasm.
But one defensive disclaimer may need added emphasis. Over the decades, my offerings (in particular) have been luridly hijacked for inferior agendas. Concept art became conceptual art. The number who know that the one is not the other, not remotely, is less than the fingers on one hand (as far as I know).
When deconstruction was all the rage, I met any number of people who, upon being told of my “cognitive nihilism,” told me that the deconstructionists had already said it. (And had received lucrative jobs as rewards.) In one case, the fellow construed “nihilism” as permission to be a swindler in academia. (Well—that’s what deconstruction is. Never mind where what is called deconstruction came from in the first place.) Such is the default attitude. Well, for those of the old school, there is sound education and then there are the whippersnappers who are merely charlatans. Generally, I find that people do not want to know that an alternative to “sound education” is on offer that is not charlatanism.
°
Another case where there might be a temptation to misrepresent what I am doing. Again and again, I propose to use instrumental devices in the light of
longitudinal thematic personal identity
self-regard (esteem)
morale
interpersonal validation
commitment
And I attach much importance to template stigmatization.
Am I at risk that my route of assessment of a cognitive judgment deemed to be erroneous will be called an ad hominem argument? That is not what an ad hominem argument is. An ad hominem argument is an attempt to slap down a statement deemed true on merit by way of personal disparagement of the one who states it.
As a footnote, any quick proof of 0 = 1, or 1 = 2, that I offer will have no references to the person of the addressee.
I may have to say something about the person of the addressee when that juncture is crucial. I may have to say that many people are defended against the threatening juncture by not seeing what perceptual psychology says you should see. (More precisely, by not sensing what perceptual psychology says you should sense. Strictly speaking, that is template stigmatization in the absence of cultural approval for template stigmatization. It has everything to do with upward displacement.)
• • •
Part I. How personalysis might foster upward displacement
What I offer on this chart is a portfolio of vulnerabilities and techniques in aid of upward displacement.
Why is this undertaking more personalysis than meta-technology? That bears on why the language of destruction was attractive to me.
As to the dropped weights experiment (e.g. Simon Stevin’s experiment, which is not contested), I am tempted to say that when the two weights hit the ground, it shattered Aristotelian physics. All the same, one does not have to use the language of destruction. As suggested, I will use the now-denied Galileo version as a parable. One could say that Galileo offered the referees a scientific ascent, or achieved an ascent. As it happened, the experts in the story didn’t want the ascent. (What expert reception did Stevin and Galileo receive in fact?)?)
As to the parable, the reason the language of destruction occurs to me is obvious. The certainty and the self-importance of the experts was shattered. Their reaction: observer nullification. Such receptions are very familiar to me. (The way classical musicologists appraise, or did appraise, Hindustani music.)
Why are we in the realm of personalysis? What is the first consideration in personalysis? How to delineate the personal realm I encounter. The knockabout “world” specific to me. What I am conscious of, including my body and what I count as external objectivity.
One doesn’t only “register”; one rounds out one’s “sense-impressions” with instilled models and theories. (They abide in one’s imagination in the first instance.) And one’s instilled models and theories shape what one registers.
Let me offer a few cases in point. I cannot take it for granted: that people will see what I want them to see when I present my Martian cube. Or that what a given individual sees in this image will persist over a lifetime.
Person-World Theory, 1995 Tutorial, Appendix
is graphic on this point.
You apprehend object-gestalts by feeding cues into a learned conceptualization.
One arrives at any perception (not sense-apparition) harboring a fully pre-conceived reality-picture.
An apparition is typically perceived as an object-zone entity. One sees the façade of a house and mentally supplies radial extension to the visual apparition, so that one reports perceiving a house, not registering a façade.
One’s enhancement of a visual apparition with the imaginative model is preconscious. (And spontaneous. So: preconscious enhancement.) But something more than a cliché is to be gained here. You see ice and “read” it as water turned into a solid by lowered temperature. That is not mere registration of an apparition. Occurrences you remember come into it.
Your perception is implicitly intertemporal. In perceiving the ice, you enhance it with a mental construct. (If you have studied physics, you have a conception of what happens to the water molecules. That said, many laypeople encounter ice without “appreciating what happens to the water molecules.”)
It could be disconcerting to be told that I should see the apparition only—better, that I should stop imputing models as depth in my sense-impressions. The very verbiage I am forced to use is unsuitable and has to be qualified or redefined at every point. My experience has been as follows. In perception (the snap appraisal of what presents), I supply a great deal, such as depth to what is strictly the façade of a house. I may see ice and implicitly think: chilled water. What is wrong with that? Intertemporality. You supply the past and future even though they don’t exist. (Don’t exist at that moment—do I have to say it?)
An associate of mine showed Galileo’s paradox re the positive integers (presumably this attribution to Galileo is uncontested) to a woman acquaintance of his. She didn’t know that it is in every textbook. She thought it was something he had made up. She accused my associate of stealing her arithmetic from her.
The anger at this paradox of infinity is a tempestuous, but not unwarranted, exhibition of personness under threat. If that’s the attitude you want to have, I indeed want to steal your reality from you.
Maybe I should repeat what I said about ice. A subject might say “I know ice is disguised water because I once saw ice melt.” That appraisal is intertemporal correlation. A conventional philosophy that wants to defend everyday judgments will find nothing harder to defend than intertemporal correlation.
—The appeal to the remembered as what?—real in perpetuity? Even as it immediately ceased to exist?
—The appeal to expectation as vindication. Another appeal to what does not now exist. And an invocation of determinacy.
Again and again, I may need disclaimers I would rather not make. First, “you should see no more than what you see.” Proposed as a momentary experiment. There is no suggestion that you should live that way. (Hence personalysis.) Next, there is a problem with almost every word I want to use. I just said live (the verb). That is a word that deserves to be assailed (and I often do so). It subsumes humans in biology, and offers no recognition of what I call the person-world. (Max Scheler was the first to make this observation, in his own way. He went nowhere with it.) As an expedient, I sometimes say that humans exist. (But that is not an ideal locution. Strictly, exist is far more indiscriminate than live.)
Secondly, there is a problem with ‘sense-impression’. It was the flattest label for experiencing that the empiricists came up with. But it harbors an undesirable implication. ‘impression’ means, in the first place, what happens to a target of something’s impact. Then something out there in the real world is causing your perceptual apparatus to register it. That means that ‘sense-impression’ presupposes the autonomous real world as much as ‘perception’ does.
Better would be ‘sense-apparition’. But I have the same problem anyone has who needs to cast off the connotations of conventional language. If I switch in too much that is new, I sound eccentric. So this text will be a compromise, as all of my texts are.
To repeat: The phrase ‘sense-impression’ is a problem. It was (German) empiricism’s label for the “raw stuff”—logically/epistemologically? separable from one’s habituated crystallization of a perception by imputation of dimensionality. “Raw stuff”: apparition in one sensory modality in the moment. But again, impression harbors the assumption I don’t want. That some external object imprints one of your avenues of detection. The hidden assumption glares in the terminology meant to eschew it.
I want ‘impression’ to mean ‘apparition’—leaving off the assumption that an outside object has rubber-stamped your neural apparatus and consciouness. For more, see
META-TECHNOLOGY: the early 2010 chart
ANNEX ONE: WARP CONTRADICTIONS AND BLOCKING LOGICS
My label ‘sense-apparition’ is not already in the philosophical lexicon. That is a disadvantage. But in this case, I think I must insist on the novelty.
Above, I spoke of preconscious enhancement. Does preconscious enhancement imply neural mechanisms? I may or may not say something about that. What matters here is that one can appreciate that one is mentally enriching the sense-apparition. One can momentarily stop doing it. As one does when one proves to have been fooled by a radial extension illusion, for example.
There was a sensational radial extension illusion: a decal on the window of Brooklyn Industries, Lafayette St. and Jersey St., Manhattan,
December 2012. I have cited it repeatedly even though it is not one of my bespoke illusions.
Illustration
From a distance, you saw the cubes as 3D and suspended. The closer you walked, the shallower they got, until they became mere images on the window when you reached the window. Your judgment that you were seeing objective radial distance shrunk to vanishing.
I call that flatness shock.
°
Counting things
Reuben Goodstein had something to offer in Constructive Mathematics (1951), page 70, which is germane here.
A world in which objects appeared and disappeared spontaneously would be a world in which our common arithmetic would find no application …
our language would find no part to play in a world which disrupted the familiar coincidences of visual, audile and tactile experiences.
Goodstein showed that he knew what the trapdoors would look like. Very well, it is encouraging that one other person (in the history of the world) saw the trapdoors. That said, Goodstein had no motive to ask how this understanding might be elevated to significance. In effect: we are blessed; we learned the coincidences and we can rely on them. (Intermodal organization of the object-gestalt.)
As to my Counting Stands—which invite a meditation on plurality—they offer a situation in which apparitions (rods), to which perception imputes materiality, can momentarily appear and disappear—to some extent in response to the intent of the viewer. Allow me to go a little farther in this direction than Goodstein chose to go.
Shall we propose an arithmetic (or non-arithmetic) for sets of things-in-the-world which appear and vanish—interactively with awareness, but without being fantasized or hallucinated? We assume that the phenomenon is constrained. (The number of objects seen at a locale will be between one and four.)
A mainstream mathematics aficionado would say: it is not fair to codify arithmetic so that it mimics things of experience. In other words, integers are eternal, changeless entities in Platonic heaven. That is what we need them to be.
That seems to cut Dag Prawitz (who claimed, perhaps carelessly, that exact-science knowledge is essentially social) right out of the picture.
All the while, children are taught arithmetic with blocks. Only if the child subsequently specializes in mathematics will they encounter a realm for which such instruction is misleading.
°
The objectivisms
Personalysis notes that there are several holistic world-pictures in play which are respected as modern (and scientific). The objectivisms:
—physico-mathematical objectivism
—bio-objectivism
—social objectivism
Each claims that it accounts for all of reality; that notions outside it are mere constructs.
Physico-mathematical objectivism: human society is a minute incident in the physical universe (which is ridiculously vast).
Bio-objectivism. In the neurophysiological version, the sun, moon, and stars on the one hand, and community, on the other, are there as they are because of the human brain.
Social-objectivism: the sun, moon, and stars are mere shared beliefs.
Do you think nobody would be foolish enough to proclaim this latter? Academia loves it. E.g.
Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966)
The Invented Reality, ed. Paul Watzlawick
Professor Park Doing pointed out to me that the academic anthropology of contemporary life is suffused with the just-mentioned social-objectivism (he didn’t use that label).
Let us consider two impressions of social-objectivism. The inherited religious cosmology knows a heaven consisting of horizontal layers. Deuteronomy 10. God holds court, from his throne, on one of the layers, 1 Kings 22. In fact, heaven is paved with sapphire, Exodus 24. YHWH flies down from heaven on two cherubs. (Does that mean that God rides standing with each foot on a different cherub?) The region in which God flies is windy, 2 Samuel 22.
We might assume that a modern person would concede that this cosmology is a social construct. (What it means to say that a customary belief is a social construct.)
But wait! As I emphasized at the outset, the scientists I know run to their ancient religion when they leave the office. (Not necessarily their childhood religion. They may be a convert.) Has anybody ever asked these scientists whether their religion is a social construct?
°
Let me bear down. The contemporary ideology expects oscillation between mechanistic materialism and ancient religion. (Again, Allan Sandage and as many others as you want.) It is intellectually so dishonest that it would demean my chart to show it. But what do we have? To belong to the elite means to espouse two incompatible belief-systems at the same time, jumping from one to another as the occasion warrants. You perform a switch-out of belief-systems every day—or many times a day—in your mind. All the while, up until recently, a scientist denied in their official life that they have a consciousness. For more, cf. Hubert Dreyfus, “The Misleading Mediation of the Mental.”
(Recently, there is talk in science about consciousness—as long as it is about localization of this or that mental ability in a brain. Do not expect an ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject. For some deep reason, science cannot harbor that.)
In the science-plus-religion landscape, contradiction is not a rare error (as David Hilbert imagined it to be). Social consciousness is saturated with dishonest thought. For the elite to have a forthright and uniform world-outlook is not the norm. It is normal for the elite to be insanely duplicitous.
Just this demand to espouse two incompatible belief-systems alerted me, decades, ago that both belief-systems are specious. So what is the higher standpoint that does not indulge either of them? Do you protest that science is instrumentally effective? You are carving out a region where scientific methods are seen to work. The higher standpoint has to account for that in an elevated frame of reference. (Correlative to what I call compromised positioning.) But to repeat myself, orthodoxy is not content with instrumental effectiveness; it has to add one or another ancient mythology. The mandatory composite is self-discrediting.
°
We also have the posited social relativism of truth wielded in support of discredited science. As mentioned, Sandra Harding’s denunciation of the Copernican solar system on the grounds that it is male chauvinist to make woman go around man.
When Harding published, academia praised her for her path-breaking step of abolishing modern astronomy because it is sexist.
Did Harding know that the ancient ideologies which incorporated geocentrism (which she supports) were not feminist? Ecclesiastes 7.28.
I said I would stop making defensive disclaimers, but I can’t convince myself that they aren’t needed. In the present climate, it might be easy to associate me with obscurantists who offer political excuses (having a psychological or social guise) to dismiss evidence that has more rigor and more utility than what the obscurantists want. I can’t police my readers. I have to hope that this text will reach someone who will welcome it for what it is.
The objectivisms noted above are not the worst of it. As I have mentioned, something beyond the objectivisms has become fashionable academically—a social relativism of truth. (Compensatory obscurantism.)
°
UPWARD DISPLACEMENT will need to consider where high-level personalistic subjectivities shape “reality.” Once again: how do personalistic subjectivities such as
longitudinal thematic personal identity
self-regard (esteem)
morale
interpersonal validation
commitment
subtend reality-pictures? Or to say it another way: How is the shared picture of the “objective environs” regimented by personalistic subjectivities?
At one point, I provided a text devoted to non-intellectual epistemology—for what it was worth. “Cognition and Denial,” 1999.
I may add “Delusion the Societal Norm,” begun 2019.
Additionally: what does it involve to deny an occurrence in one’s presence? (As the referees did in the Galileo parable.) Observer nullification. See Annex One of this series.
These questions focus on the individual—individual interiority: which has to be the arena for appreciation of what is perceived. To reiterate, upward displacement is about the bearing of personalysis on meta-technology.
All the while, social observations can be made about the management of replicable perceptions. Unwelcome evidence is simply discarded. (As many cases from the history of science as you want.) Before unwelcome evidence is accepted in the canon, it has to be backed by celebrity power, not to say institutional power.
I mentioned that there is a latter-day obscurantism which sees scientific propositions as nothing but metaphors, or emblems, for social stratification. (Sandra Harding.) It seeks an easy victory against “the Right,” “Conservatives,” or whatever one calls them: by rejecting scientific truths and scientific advances as victimizing symbols. As of 2024, in the U.S. Northwest, arithmetic is being unseated in public schools. (Lysenko was a forerunner? And Lonnie Shabazz?) As a matter of fact, with the new importance of transgender, DNA biology is increasingly being placed on the defensive. (As if it is insidious sabotage. But exactly what does DNA biology sabotage?)
Again, such relativism is a world away from what I offer here—but that does not guarantee that an unprincipled milieu would not associate me with “the social relativism of truth.”
Again and again, if I want to tell an uninitiated reader what I am up to, I may reach for historical upheavals in science, because they were defeats for the conventional wisdom. All the same, I can define my program without invoking historical cases, and ideally that is how it should be defined.
Let me add to the historical cases I have already mentioned. Many astronomical phenomena were denied by “professional astronomers” before they were recognized. Sunspots; novae. In particular, astronomers denied meteorites before 1803—when Biot confirmed them to the profession’s satisfaction.
It is more complicated if the question is what we should make of Marx’s contribution. I said something about Marx above. His contribution importantly challenged class society and mercenary society—but what he wanted could never have been brought about the way he thought it would be.
•
Let me proceed to a concept at the center of this study. Hypothetically, one person could be in a position to tell a civilization’s authorities something they would dismiss as foolishness. But that person could anticipate vindication in two ways.
(i) A segment of the public would come to accept the dispensation.
(ii) The dispensation would come to be ensconced as intellectually correct.
Actually, the vindications could be contrary to one another. Christianity’s human god who was killed, its Trinity, etc. became social orthodoxy in spite of their discord with rationalism. (That the hijacking of rationalism by theology could comprise a major chapter in thought shows what a despoiled past we have to contend with.) On the other hand, heliocentrism became social orthodoxy because scientists accepted it. (If the reader doesn’t know, since Einstein, it is considered as incorrect as geocentrism.)
It’s another example of the risk I take when I appeal to history to illustrate what I propose. History does not say that rational and evidence-based theses always won out.
Be that as it may, I will continue to find heuristic illustrations among the cases just now grouped as (ii). So what could we say in the case of Galileo or Copernicus, for example?
An aficionado of the history of science will know that Galileo was anticipated by a thousand years by the Byzantine Greek John Philoponus. John’s obscurity is instructive. Like the even more ancient scientific pioneers, John was too early. The corrected proposition waited for a celebrity to proclaim it.
Between the individual and the authorities, there can be
a civilization-wide comprehension gap.
A possible way of defining what UPWARD DISPLACEMENT investigates is to say: it studies civilization-wide comprehension gaps. That said, I am interested in one gap only: the gap between where public life is now and a possible ascension. (I don’t know that the latter will be realized. I don’t know that civilization will survive, given the weapons of war now on standby. I don’t know that humanity won’t be eliminated by a fleshless species that it invented.)
A gap can be as wide as a sequence of civilizations. Let me provide a real example of a bias or blindness in a sequence of civilizations. European civilization is profoundly psychephobic. (I don’t give non-European civilizations a clean bill of health in this regard.—But the nature of the damage is different from what it is in European civilization. The prestige doctrine of European civilization is a fanatical mysticism of depersonalization.)
I will return below to the psychephobia of European civilization, and call it an instance of consenting humiliation. Admittedly, this humiliation had and has pragmatic advantages—immense pragmatic advantages. (There were many social arrangements which late modernity reproaches which were expedient in their time.)
•
Why does the renamed UPWARD DISPLACEMENT include meta-technological topics? The meta-technological devices are not neutral. They reside in the blind spots of the civilization’s template. What is foremost here is that those blind spots are correlative to the normative make-up of the individual. So, as I review the UPWARD DISPLACEMENT chart, I should bring that out. Indeed I have mentioned the topics in other contexts; but here I invert the background and the foreground.
What I call UPWARD DISPLACEMENT does not lead directly to physical conquest. It exposes fault lines in the cognitive order and in the approved personal make-up, in interiority. A person who understands will instantly become a different person. (For example, a person who understands that mechanistic materialism and ancient religion cannot survive without being pasted together: it has to mean that both are wrong—not least because truth is discarded as a value.)
There is no going back. And if 2, 4, 8, 16, … people appreciate the same thing, it will be as if a crack (in a solid, to maintain the metaphor) branches and ends as cracks everywhere.
°
Again, I have alluded to early proposals on cosmology that are on record but that were disregarded for centuries. If it is worth it to spell that out, here is the information.
BCE
500. Adherents of Pythagoras posit that the earth is a sphere.
c. 350. The thesis that the earth rotates on its axis, making day and night. Heraclides of Pontus.
c. 257. Aristarchos of Samos propounds a heliocentric astronomy, makes proto-trigonometric calculations of distances of the heavenly bodies.
c. 235. Eratosthenes, chief librarian of Alexandria, accurately calculates the size of the spherical earth.
107. Hipparchos accurately calculates the distance of the moon from the earth.
CE
90-188. Ptolemy the astronomer.
Note that Ptolemy was famous for getting it “wrong” hundreds of years after Aristarchos got it “right.” (Einstein: there is no absolute rest. Heliocentrism is taught because is mathematically simpler.)
Again, I would note the little-known John Philoponus, who is credited as the first to dispute Aristotle’s mechanics. When the civilization was not ready to credit those we now consider right, I consider those whose proposals got on record very lucky.
In sixteenth century Europe, matters were different. Galileo ended his life under house arrest. That said, what Copernicus and Galileo said (and did) caught on. The public allowed their findings to metamorphose the hard sciences.
A civilization’s templates or filters are not a matter for good-natured banter, like the relative excellence of a baseball player. Civilizations rest on non-negotiable dogmas, in the first instance. (They also rest on personal appraisals that substantiate themselves via these dogmas.) If your civilization says that you should see a refrigerator when you look at a tree, then you had better see a refrigerator when you look at a tree.
If the heretic can be dismissed, they will be. If they can’t be dismissed, it is not amiable. It is a fighting matter. Those who denied miracles of the Christian religion risked horrible deaths. And it was distinctly dangerous to repudiate geocentrism at the end of the sixteenth century.
Again and again, I feel that the success, academic and otherwise, of the slogan that truth is socially relative forces me to make disavowals and clarifications which are not really worthy of my topic.
A contribution that issues from exponents of a lower caste can indeed be unfairly judged. To the extent that it is unfairly judged, it is very much part of my agenda to spell that out.
That would not be the same as advocating a proposal simply for its association with the social caste. “If victims believe that 2 + 2 = 5, because 2 + 2 = 4 is the slogan of the oppressor, then one serves justice by endorsing 2 + 2 = 5.”
Césaire said 2 + 2 = 5 when there was no political movement raising the slogan. It was an era in which artists were supposed to be irrational. (They are supposed to be irrational now.)
We have been hearing moral intimidation on behalf of 2 + 2 = 5 from U.S. educators for years. As ideological as China is, it does not proclaim 2 + 2 = 5. (What does China make of Lysenko?) Because China wants to win.
I had better note that some of my work is meant to present challenges to elementary arithmetic. The Counting Stands. It has nothing to do with moral intimidation. I find cracks in the conventional wisdom that are “outside the universe,” as far as conventional wisdom is concerned.
°
By way of keeping the discussion clinical, let me resume with the scientific examples. All the same, once again, I cannot appeal to the heroic insurgencies in science’s history without irony. It isn’t appropriate for me simply to congratulate modernity.
The topic is evidence, content, which those in charge in a civilization don’t want to hear. Again, we can mention the sinking of a ship’s mast when it sails away on the ocean. Or Stevin’s two-weights experiment. Or meteorites before 1803. It is that clear-cut.
I want to recur to that account of the Leaning Tower experiment as a parable to note what it offers that we might find in an undisputed case. As the story has it, the Aristotelian referees denied Galileo’s claim because the two balls did not arrive at the ground at exactly the same instant. Yes, that is a popular trick: you dismiss an assertion as false because it is microscopically off. It may take pages to explain why an insignificant inaccuracy—the reason for rejecting the assertion as false—is insignificant.
In the case of the Leaning Tower, it doesn’t take pages. The referees blinded themselves to the quantitative aspect of Aristotle’s prediction in order to “save” Aristotle’s thesis. The referees’ reaction was not hallucinatory replacement. It was a sophists’ device: an exactitude that was preposterous relative to Aristotle’s thesis.
As to heliocentrism, to repeat, it was condemned by the religiously orthodox. (Did the Ptolemaic model, then, give Bible-believers what they needed?) In any case, there was keen interest in the heavens. (For the benefit of astrology!) In the Muslim world also. But astronomy could not be an autonomous, self-judging profession. As mentioned, Vanini was put to death for saying that he wanted to study nature. Just that was intolerably secular (as we would say).
To pick up on what I said above. What mattered most was not that Copernicus and Galileo challenged or refuted orthodoxy. What mattered was that that something more effective could be switched in. To take advantage of the discovery, calculus needed to be invented. (It was invented twice, in different nations.)
The success of science has contributed to another orthodoxy, psychephobia. If we now challenge psychephobia and contend with it, far more is at stake than when Aristotle was disavowed. (If we contend with psychephodia by way of original offerings, of course. Do I have to keep saying it? I am not calling for a reversion to any persisting obscurantism.)
•
A. Upward displacement as disillusionment
Let me continue spelling out what the upward displacement project—this search for civilization-wide comprehension gaps—is about.
Upward displacement would hope to employ personalysis to crash entire civilizations from single points. Very well, here I revert to the rhetoric of dissolution.
From here on out, I will not try so hard to head off misunderstanding. I know what I mean when I picture upward displacement in terms of shattering the obtaining consensus. I will permit myself to say it—and reposition it later if it needs it.
°
Realistically, the dissolution happens in one percipient individual’s thought. We are not ready to say anything about any spread of such a dissolution through the population. (Better: a spread, among people, of an upward displacement: that pivots on a dissolution occurring in thought.)
The advent of a new idea may not suffice to displace the obtaining civilization upward. Far from it. I have probably given too much space to science’s victories. People do not even admit that a new idea is a new idea until a celebrity champions it.
I wish I wasn’t tempted to keep referring to the deteriorated situation of today. But I could ponder collective regression; I could have made a chart about how a collective is able to maintain a “false” idea under challenge. The first line of defense—which may be effective for thousands of years—is to deny that the challenge has said anything. (I could add that to “Delusion As a Societal Norm” as a delusion’s first line of defense.)
Suppose an individual detects a challenge to established wisdom. (Detection does not need to mean that the individual admits, “if that is important, then I am running as fast as possible in the wrong direction.”) The typical reaction is for the individual to wrestle their perceptions to the ground and beat them to a bloody pulp. Why do I say that? Because of Tim Crane’s paper on the waterfall illusion, which to me is an all-time classic. Crane is a professor of philosophy at Central European University. If we could place Crane in a world in which everyone but him “drew the necessary conclusions” from the waterfall illusion, he would explode.
Conventional individuals who are not as smart as Crane slap the waterfall illusion aside as a nothing because the milieu allows them to do so. That is why I wrote “Shall the logic of contradictions be forestalled by verbally neutralizing paradoxical perceptions?”
There is David Shwayder’s earlier paper (Analysis, March 1956). Should I drag it in as an example of the literature of disdain of dangerous junctures in collective thought?
°
It is possible for people socially defined as unimpaired to “hallucinate” in the alert waking state. When the hallucination is negative, it can be called “observer nullification.” (Importantly, that is not what happened with the Aristotelian referees in the Galileo parable. They must have seen what Galileo did. They dispelled the outcome with an inane mitigation.)
As for “observer nullification,” it is as drastic as standing in front of a tree, looking at the tree, and denying that the tree is there.
As to what the present enterprise has to contend with, I consider it deeper than inane mitigation and observer nullification (as such). My endeavors encounter people who don’t see the illusions that perceptual psychology says an unimpaired person should see. They beat back the unwelcome evidence by arriving at the situation with the relevant medical impairment.
Presumably the enculturation of the people I am contending with has extinguished their sensitivity. (The already-mentioned template stigmatization.) I can’t imagine that it is anything like a conscious choice. If it were, they would be blocking the evidence because it flew in the face of their “knowledge.”
Sometimes I refer to sleeping dreams. (They don’t have to be “incidents in the physical world” to prove something.) Then I meet people who say “I never dream.” (Actually, that could have an explanation. It is possible to have dreams immediately before awaking that are neither vivid nor memorable.)
•
Let me say a little about consenting humiliation. What is humiliation in general? Being put in an inferior place, shamed, insulted when you can’t retaliate.
What is the humiliation that concerns us here? You humiliate yourself: you embrace a doctrine which demeans you or degrades your faculties. (At this point, humiliation by a perceived adversary—so frequently alluded to in victimhood discourse—is not our topic.)
You resonate with, or are susceptible to, a peer group (if you will). “We” humiliate ourselves because “we” want to.
Maybe I shouldn’t get sidetracked into any physical humiliation, much less into religious physical humiliation. But when explaining, it is tempting to reach for obvious examples. The ashes at Easter in the Catholic religion.
That said, I coined the phrase for one feature of the contemporary reality-picture and social psychology. A bundle of cases comes to mind: anyone who returns to their childhood religion after being a freethinker in adolescence.
Going beyond the obvious, we may consider a thread of consenting humiliation going back to the Greeks.
Ancient Greece proclaimed a prestige ideology which I characterize as “fanatical mysticism of depersonalization.” The premier chapters of that ideology were the sciences (as we call them). It is embodied in Aristotle’s tract On the Soul. The work has a syllabus remarkably like modern psychology, including animal psychology. And Aristotle parallels another facet of modern psychology: he doesn’t appreciate interiority. (Psychology knows interiority as incidents substantiated by brain locations.)
There were byways in late classical thought (which the Muslim intelligentsia may have sustained). Neo-Platonism. But I am not talking about phenomena grouped as occult. The occult is conjecture—or worse.
Interiority is not a conjecture. In general, neo-Platonism and the like have not remotely been important enough to preclude the ascendancy of the Eurosphere’s prestige reality-picture.
Depersonalization becomes more thorough, and more militant, in modern European thought and in its science. But “even” the educated cannot be content with scientific materialism as a complete perspective.
And it is not only because they want a validation of what is emotionally important to them that they are dissatisfied. Science is intrinsically socially universalist. It intrinsically cancels tribalism.—And the public, including the educated, cannot accept that. Most people don’t want any part of social universalism. Most people demand a particularist identity, and the membership that goes with it, the sense of participation in a lineage that forms a stem in history.
As said repeatedly here: the individuals who pursue science espouse scientific materialism and ancient religion (and moral sententiousness). Religion endorses morality; science does not.
I have often cited something Marvin Minsky said in Society of Mind, page 307. To paraphrase, “we must consider human individuals responsible even though science does not allow for any such thing.”
From another angle, we can ask if B.F. Skinner believed himself to be a robot. (Or was robot status only for his inferiors?)
Postmodernism manages the moral branding of social segments in its own way. Postmodernism does not simply allow everyone to have their particularist identity. Postmodernism’s first move is the division of all people into victimizers and victims. It is superb for a victim to assert their particularist identity. For victimizers to assert their particularist identities is bigotry.
Postmodernism is “cosmopolitan” in that it purports to unite victims of every sort in a single constituency. At the same time, as just said, it uses guilt-bombing to underpin the particularism of victims. Not all people of color are victims in this order; the Chinese aren’t.
I have to add remarks about the sociologically actual Left. The sociologically actual Left has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. The label ‘Marxist’ is used for tendencies Marx never heard of—not to say never supported. Marijuana. Climate change. Islamic nationalism. Homosexuality. Transgender.
As a further aside, I never imagined that I would have to worry about the contempt for basic scholarship shown in the way the label ‘Marxism’ has been pasted on every social divergence that has come along.
•
SUDDEN DISILLUSIONMENT
Let me proceed with some scenarios involving humiliating world-pictures and sudden disillusionment. I am moving beyond the manifest consenting humiliation we saw above.
A. A group of people can engage in mental play-acting with respect to impersonal doctrine. My phrase for this is a shared pretense or consenting sham. Culturally supplied doctrines may often be appraised as consenting shams.
My easy example, always, is adherence to ancient religion in contemporary circumstances. The astrophysicist who believes that God is an anthropomorph in a white robe who sits on a chair on a cloud above a horizontal earth. And flies down toward earth riding two cherubs like a rodeo cowboy.
What we find is a sort of humiliation that compensates by blustering. The condition is culture-correlated; that is, it is imposed and fostered by the existing community. It is concomitant with shrunken comprehension and other fetters which prevent the individual from being "cognitively protean." Shame, the need to bluster, etc.: as constraints on cognition.
Where these culturally approved fantasies are concerned, the mere circumstance that a doctrine is manifestly false, or that an activity or enterprise is a manifest fraud, is not an objection to it. The manifest lie is accepted as a source of gratification. The individual lives amicably with the lie. The lie is sustained by non-"cognitive" motives.
We have reached the province of personalysis. People routinely believe what is incoherent (to an unsuborned observer): it is socially rewarded. Somehow, believers don’t notice the incoherence. Since the incoherence is at the surface, it should amaze us that it is not noticed.
Then to call attention to the incoherence may trigger a sudden dissolution of the “world.” That would be for one who is open to an exit but hasn’t seen it.
Evidently there are people who don’t care if their deepest commitments are self-discrediting. Because the commitments are socially honored?
As to sudden dissolution, in the first instance, it happens in one percipient individual’s thought. We could imagine that to supply a non-empty picture of 0 = 1 or 1 = 2 might do it. (Or an unexceptionable argument in favor of 0 = 1.)
But realistically, people are anchored to the inferior equilibrium. Even if the demonstration made a legitimate point, the overwhelming majority of people would not recognize that it did, not to say be unsettled. It cannot be a matter of a public’s reception at this point. The public may be worse than impenetrable. Its members may care only about being like the others.
It is when personalysis addresses the situation just outlined that it comes into its own. It is not just that people may fail to see what I want them to see when I present illusions in the Venetian cube series, for example.—Or when I show the counting stands. (That would be template stigmatization blocking new evidence that I offer.)
A well as being template stigmatized, people consent to (conformist) humiliation. No new demonstration is needed. Science has already made ancient cosmologies insupportable—but many scientists espouse both.
That convinced me in 1980 that an account of dignity is demanded. In other words, the word is an instructive pointer. In use, ‘dignity’ has multiple meanings. At least one of those meanings, having to do with one’s counsel with oneself, is relevant here.
In the first instance, personalysis calls for an ontology that can support the instructive meaning, or meanings, of dignity. My exposition of personalysis exposes much of “objective reality” as a matter of community-approved mental play-acting (consenting shams). By identifying these ploys in the culture (a very advanced task), and motivating you to distance yourself from them, personalysis can produce unprecedentedly massive disillusionment: suddenly and globally annulling the mundane world in the alert waking state.
Elsewhere I say, “people live in a movie called ‘your ideology.’” Again (I regret that I think I have to say it), this is not meant as a device that you can use to prop up anything your addressee finds outlandish. It is meant to interpret the dismissal that a legitimate insight can expect.
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B. Let me spell out a case of consenting participation (in a social aggregate) which is unstable. On a voluntary and consenting basis, I enter into a collaboration with other people which involves significant responsibilities among the collaborators. Read “I” as “someone.” This refers to a plurality much narrower than the whole society. It can be a partisan organization; the organization could even have a reputation as sectarian—so long as it was not a cult.
A cult is built on escape from responsibility. It demands extinction of your judgment.
Over a period of time, this collaboration produces an “objective” situation (e.g. the group’s public role) which is our joint responsibility. And which also makes demands on our responsibilities to each other. At the same time, as a result of the prolonged collaboration, I come to play a definite role in the group, a role which has the character of a habit. When I am with the group, I fall into my role and begin to perform the routine functions of my role by habit.
That’s consent. And how does humiliation come into it? I may secretly lose confidence in the group’s enterprise, and even wish to defy the group. Nevertheless, I continue to conform outwardly because I am isolated, and see no opportunity which will support my inclination. (That is social humiliation. Otherwise it is expedient pretense.)
Let us explore this last. I reach a point where I have one outlook in isolation and another when meeting with the group. I may question and repudiate my own past beliefs, choices, and deeds. I must be willing, when shocked by the shattering of an illusion, to admit in retrospect that I was partly responsible for creating that illusion. If I can admit a mistake in judgment, without equating that mistake with my whole self, then a path remains along which I can change.
The group has two holds on me. First, there are the habitual role and busy-work into which the group thrusts me. Secondly, there is my own past complicity, and the expectation by others that I can be relied on to support the group.
As I imagine the example, the person who opts out will not live in physical fear or go on the run. (In a real case, they may do both.) However, they will break with the “club.” They may leave a responsible job. Their former associates may not like it. The defector may have to find a new “situation.”
Whether there is a new milieu which will welcome one may be important in determining whether one will cease to be a follower.
• • •
B. A close-up on comprehension gaps
1. Templates/Filters
Civilizations instill templates (from infancy) in the consciousnesses of their inhabitants. They fit “raw evidence” (sense-apparitions, for example) into learned mental models. They also, as it turns out, filter out unwanted replicable evidence.
The templates are instilled systematically: everybody is supposed to have the same blind spots and to supply the same mental models. One could ask if the templates are hard-wired. What does that mean? Innate? On some evidence, they cannot be. They need to be instilled.
Is a template a habit? (Presumably, a habit is impressed in brain cells. But it need not be inescapable; it can be overwritten.) That is credible.
Let me be clear that I am compromising here—I am being an astute hypocrite. I am looking around for a scientific explanation of a personal pattern of apprehension. Obviously my premier enterprise is directed against science as a reality-picture. Science is the lowest level of compromised positioning that that my endeavors dip into.
It is conceivable that an individual could change their routine of spontaneous appraisal of the apparitional field. But there has to be an immense motivation to do so.
The templates of a population can change—if one wants to pursue the phenomenon that far. (Yes, they did so—sensationally—in the matter of the speeds with which heavy objects fall. But that assumes that people did not see what Stevin demonstrated until he demonstrated it. Very well, people did not see how a ship’s mast disappears until the notion that the earth is round was well-established.)
An initiative of the type of UPWARD DISPLACEMENT may propose to crash the obtaining template. (Here again, my inclination surfaces to see the replacement of the old with the new as dismantling. It is intuitive to me to say that what the Venice cube does is to crash logic and geometry. It would be more felicitous to say that it demands that you upgrade your logic and geometry beyond the “known” universe.)
We propose to crash the template without anything like a physical jolt to the nervous system. All you have to do is to see an image you have not seen before. Again, in the case of a given visual illusion, many nondescript viewers do not see the anomaly which psychology texts expect them to see. We have a legitimate reason for deviating from the scientific method codified by Francis Bacon. For him, a scientific demonstration must be replicable. It is not enough for it to be accessible only to those with rare abilities.
What I find that the intended effect of a demonstration which is immediate and vivid to me (and which the textbooks expect) is available to a minority only (or needs perceptual unlocking). (This was the case that spurred my notion of template stigmatization.)
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Identitarian logic
In this explanation, I have casually spoken of logic. Before I can proceed, we need more clarity about what logic is (in mathematical logic, for example, and here). What we need to clarify is the baseline: the (two-valued) logic of consistency—identitarian logic.
My experience has been that philosophy professors don’t understand what logic is. (Identitarian logic: it is the only version in consideration.) They think that logic is a science of true sentences. That if a logician thought a sentence failed to be true of the physical world, they would expel it from logic’s subject-matter. They think that the concern of logic is to announce what is true in the world (physically real).
That is what I have encountered personally.
By way of correcting this inferior understanding. Logic is concerned with, roughly, non-vacuous conceptions. (Or with whether a conception is vacuous.) It does not need to address the question whether those conceptions have “real” (physical) correlatives. It analyzes the commitments in conceptions—not whether the conceptions have physical referents. Ultimately, logic is a calculus of the consequence-relationship. If the Empire State Building were candy-striped, its surface would have slanted alternating red and white bands. That has nothing to do with whether the physical Empire State Building is candy-striped. Whether this last is so concerns what is physically real, and in this case, would be answered by observation, not logic. (Do the professors know that they are not the same thing?)
To continue with the professors I have met, they suppose that logic wants nothing to do with any proposition suspected of being physically false. (Such as the ‘candy-striped’ proposition.)
An expert who imagines that the only reason a proposition is posed is that you are being ordered to believe it is too insecure to handle the other half of the universe of propositions: the negations of truths. Are those negations to be expelled from language? Do they have no logical structure?
The reason why these considerations are so so important for my work is that my first question about a substantive will be whether it has meaning. Does the concept of the Empire State Building being candy-striped have consequences? That is logic. The example illustrates that logic is wanted so that the commitments made by false propositions can be discerned. Whether a nominal has a referent in the world is a second-stage issue for me.
For the reason why identitarian logic would deem a concept to be null, see Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, §6.3751, where he compares what a contradiction purports to this circumstance:
the simultaneous presence of two colors at the same place in the visual field
(As an aside, the passage is outstanding for the number of orthodox declarations it weaves together. That said, Wittgenstein meant distinct colors. He would have regarded it as outrageous to try to weasel out of the point by ringing in a mixed color. I get such weaseling all the time.) I must interject and say that my Counting Stands provides precisely what Wittgenstein excluded. Such achievements are the point of my undertaking.
Continuing the explanation, there is a distinction between “world-truths” and the letter T as a valence in a truth-table. Logic is not about how we gain world-truths. (The “how” of physical science is epistemology.) Logic doesn’t care about “truth” except as the letter T, concomitant with connectives and sets (set membership), for example.
“Proposition A is T” means, for example, “your premises commit you to A.”
Logic is about implication. Again, it begins not with what is world-true, but with what you commit to. Your premises. Logic is an instrument for diagnosing your premises. Sometimes the whole point of the diagnosis is to show that your premises imply world-falsehoods.
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Continuing with my manifestations
My offering in consideration is my Venice cube. (An isometric Necker cube. I have discovered that it works even better if the cube is slightly tall.) It is not that some physical solid fills two mutually exclusive volumes at the same time. It is that you can non-vacuously visualize a solid filling two mutually exclusive volumes at the same time.
In the logic of received geometry, that case is a contradiction. What is posited is empty.
Why do I class this result as a logical impossibility? Textbook geometry can only play out in Platonic heaven. Textbook geometry is an exact science.
I don’t claim that all viewers will see the mind-bending illusion.
Being well-lighted, e.g. sunlighted, helps.
You can be denied the chance to see it by having medically imperfect vision. Perhaps it is OK to have medically corrected vision, but it has to be corrected to perfect vision.
The effect doesn’t jump out for me today as it did forty years ago. The effect is age-dependent? That’s a new lesson.
My readily available demonstrations do not involve physical tampering with one’s brain. But they do not have to be the only avenue. Procedures that could be grouped as medical produce amazing visual effects without damaging the body.
—IV scopolamine. (Or if not that, then amobarbital.)
The best set-up of the waterfall illusion.
—Surgery on the lens of the eye. It can produce an abstract cinema of extraordinary vividness.
These cases tell us that there can be a repertoire of meta-technological experiences pursuant to surgical intervention.
How long will it take for this to become a legitimate line of research? Several existing professions would have to concede that there is something worth seeing here.
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Psychedelics
Psychedelic substances can provide “sudden dissolution.” But that is far from an ideal conduit to illumination. Arguably, the substance is literally a toxin. (I call it toxic if your vision continues to be streaky after the drug has “worn off.” Temporary brain damage.) An IV anesthetic isn’t toxic.
There can be unvarnished effects (effects not slotted into an interpretation) produced by the substance, the toxin. LSD hallucinations may rearrange the “furniture” of waking life—as dreams do. That would seem to be valuable for a “literal empiricism.” It depends on what one concludes from it.
But having known people who tripped, and having collected numerous written and audio-recorded reports from them, I am wary of tripping as an avenue. The indoctrinations the subjects have already endured—together with the personalities of the subjects—overwhelm whatever unvarnished effects the toxin produces.
The people who dropped acid had conformist agendas which they imposed on their trips and which dominated what they gleaned from the trips. To some trippers, the trip was nothing but a freak-out. Other trippers prepared to trip by studying ancient Eastern religious texts. Then they simply slotted whatever they experienced into one or another such doctrine. In fact, I should be sharper. The trippers didn’t hijack Buddhism for LSD. They hijacked LSD for Buddhism. The payoff was more Buddhism.
In the years when psychedelic adventures were highly publicized, indoctrination and conformity proved to be far more important than what the unvarnished hallucinations offered.
The tripper’s indoctrination—and “character”—shaped the result:
(i) The tripper lacked the astuteness that would enable them to focus and defend a novelty (not as a symbol but) as a discovery about “life-world structure.” (The same could be said in regard to sleeping dreams.)
(ii) The tripper presumed that they were merely entertaining themself, as if in a fun house.
(i)-(ii) are personalistic traits. Cognition proves to be “molded” by considerations to which this study is devoted.
An avenue which is understood as an enhancement of bohemian irrationalism—“hipness”—will not become a cognitive revolution. The psychedelic craze burned out: one no longer hears of it. That said, the craze belongs here as a case.
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When I say that usual perception is selectively blind
When I speak of being blind to what you “ought” to see, I mean failing to see what a scientific text says you ought to see.
Or—color blindness could be a case. In that case, the legitimate norm is established e.g. by medically unimpaired people. Deviation from the norm is correlated to organic impairment.
I have mentioned Tim Crane in Analysis. (Many times.) It is not that Crane doesn’t see something. It is that he has to mentally beat what he sees to the floor: to master it on behalf of civilization. (All civilizations. Aristotle knew of the waterfall illusion. Aristotle’s treatise on logic does not address the implications.)
Another view of issues in perception can be gained from what Robert Addams wrote in 1834 about the waterfall illusion after a visit to the waterfall of Foyers. (Reprinted in the perceptual psychology textbook Jeremy M. Wolfe et al., Sensation and Perception, 5th edition, 2018, page 237.)
Having steadfastly looked for a few seconds at a particular part of the cascade, admiring the confluence and decussation of the currents foaming the liquid drapery of waters, and then suddenly directing my eyes to the left, to observe the face of the somber age-worn forks immediately contiguous to the water-fall, I saw the rocky surface as if in motion upwards, and with an apparent velocity equal to that of the descending water, which the moment before had prepared my eyes to behold that singular deception.
Addams’ description is shockingly deficient. It is not as rich as what by now is the standard account. Addams describes a simple negative afterimage of the waterfall. That is not what we agree is gleaned. The “negative afterimage” is not the waterfall upside down. Rather, it is as if the each point of the surface is stationary and pulls upward at the same time. (Motion without displacement.) I have worked extensively with the illusion and I know that the effect can be produced with IV scopolamine. (Or if not that, then amobarbital.) And with nothing but views of moving patterns, one can gain, as negative afterimages, stationary expansion, stationary contraction, stationary chaotic motion. These are premier illustrations that we can experience the logically impossible when we suffer perceptual illusions.
Dismayingly, the text Sensation and Perception accepts what Addams says. It does not realize that what Addams saw must have been “corrected”—preconsciously corrected. In other words, the authors of Sensation and Perception are unaware that the waterfall illusion, as an anomaly, has been known for millennia. They are unaware of the considerable professional literature which cites the illusion as a perception of the logically impossible.
Let me refer to my parable of the Leaning Tower experiment. In my parable, the Aristotelian referees are not impressed by the plain result. That said, the referees must have seen what Galileo saw. Otherwise they could not have pivoted instantly to an inane mitigation. As noted, I read this account somewhere and assumed it was standard. Today’s historians don’t believe that such a confrontation happened. (Do they altogether reject Viviani?)
To refer back to the waterfall illusion, I could not ask for a more clear-cut example of preconsciously imposing what one prefers to see on what unsubjugated perception would deliver. (If one wants to be specific neuroanatomically, what the “finishing” of the retinal input in the visual cortex would deliver to unsubjugated consciousness.)
Corey Thuro has a history with my Martian cube that is significant. Outside the scope here.
As I intimated, the preconscious censorship is due to nurture (enculturation) correlated with a specific culture (e.g. a civilization). But I must say that there are people who simply do not see what I want them to see, even if they would like to. I have no basis to say that that is instilled censorship: it could be. If not, would it be a congenital perceptual difference? Then such differences must be widespread—without being recognized. (Color-blindness is recognized because it is socially more obtrusive.)
°
Let me cite a qualitatively unlike case. This case arises in conjunction with hearing melodic music whose language is not that of classical music. Whose defining instrument is not the piano. People trained in classical music can hear what Hindustani music calls a meend, and literally be unable to identify acoustically, relative to a scale of pitches, what they have heard. Because it’s not on the piano.
In fact, Hindustani plucked instruments (held across the chest) have large hoops as frets so that meends can be produced. I haven’t made the experiment, but I suspect that even upon seeing a sitar, a classical musician will be in denial as to the acoustic structure of a melody in genre played on the instrument. (As I remember, George Harrison used the sitar as if it were a version of the acoustic guitar, playing only pianistic lines on it. Pathetically theatrical—that is not the point here.)
The classical musician is indoctrinated with musical recognition that has the piano as template. A recognition that does not allow for such a thing as “a melody note that slides between pitches.” (The classically trained would say, a note between the notes!) Not to be confused with portamento. Not to be confused with siren glissando. Not to be confused with the early twentieth-century fad of quarter-tones.
If one wants to go deeper, one may consult what Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (1956) says about the blue note. Acoustically, Stearns’ explantion is gibberish, mystification. That is all that Sterns can deliver, and the most he can expect his Western-indoctrinated audience to comprehend.
The “deafness” as to the African-American musical language is not limited to the likes of Sterns. The description of the country blues in Blues People by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka dismissed the country blues for its “three-chord harmony.” (Baraka was a jazz aficionado? He played the trumpet?) Baraka was literally unaware that the language of the genre incorporated a physical manipulation of sound—as just noted—which made the country blues a far greater innovation than the jazz progressions of e.g. Charlie Christian and Bud Powell. (Were those of the latter roughly comparable to the harmonic practice of the French Impressionists?)
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INVENTORY OF TEMPLATES (FILTERS)
To resume with our generalized exposition. For us, the received template is often the hindrance. It “recitifies” anomalous evidence before it reaches consciousness: as it manifestly did for Addams. You don’t find out about the received template, much less overcome it, unless you are told about it and unless you prefer being awakened—that is, unless you become conscious in this regard.
Here we want an inventory of templates, that is, what for us are hindrances. Societally instilled preconscious filters of perceptual anomalies. (Again, given the accelerating intellectual deterioration, I have to say that I don’t want my observations to be pivoted to victimhood ideology. My topic is what is supposed to be clinical fact.)
Again, we infer that such a template protected Addams from the shock of seeing something his civilization says is impossible.
Let me mention again that as I use the word, a template both tells you what you see and filters out what unimpaired perception ought to see.
1. Templates exposed by:
replicable sense-apparitions (which are not the result of abuse of the subject) which knife into scientific orthodoxy or into the prestige world-picture. (The templates filter these sense-apparitions.)
2a. Templates exposed by: one’s self-understanding of consciousness (interiority). (The prestige reality-picture authoritatively filters it.) The present civilization is psychephobic. Mechanistic materialism is the only prestige reality-picture. When consciousness is alluded to inside science, it is brought in by the back door: as I spelled out in
HOW PHYSICS DOCTRINE MORPHS ON A TIME-SCALE OF DECADES (2005)
Today’s science (2024) may assume the posture that it wants to notice mentation. But mentation is always noticed in conjunction with the brain part that produces it (like sound and a radio). Somebody said: science tells you what you are. It does not tell you who you are.
2b. A taboo can be a template (filter). Science has to be appreciated in consciousness and articulated in language. But it is taboo to insist on just that. One result is to exclude, from the range of devices employed in science, confined interdependencies between subjectivity and the object-zone.
The anomalies of quantum physics involve a microworld. It would not get us any farther here to delineate and appraise it.
accessible only by long derivations supplemented by conjecture.
3. A revolving door in thought can be a template. The “human inadequacy” of mechanistic materialism is compensated for by sneaking ancient religion in through the back door. (Which religion? The childhood religions call each other false!)
At this point, it is conventional to play the fool. To switch between an antique and a modern world-picture as if one were in a revolving door.
4. The displacing of “personal” considerations to anachronistic interpretations, including ideologies, can be a template. As I noted, the hipsters treat “consciousness-expansion” as a lure for The Tibetan Book of the Dead. (Or: you must prepare for dropping acid by perusing The Tibetan Book of the Dead.)
If you want to talk about “soul,” it is conventional to say that ancient religion takes care of it. There are no new depictions. Because what might colloquially be called “soft” reality (interiority) is holy, ancient religious authority owns it. To discover something different or new would be heresy.
Psychoanalysis could confuse the issue for one who is not discriminating. Psychoanalysis finds individual concerns and intents, which could be described with the vocabulary of thought, which the individual’s waking consciousness cannot read off. Very well, compromised positioning finds that credible.
As for ancient religion, there are motives for adhering to it other than the atavistic way in which it acknowledges “humanness.”
Adherence to ancient religion places you in a social fraternity—typically one with an insistent worldly politics.
°
To sum up, (1)-(4) light up a purposive axis in the civilization. The throttle is open only for
i. The increasing manipulation of matter.
ii. The accumulation of pecuniary wealth, which is correlative to the increasing manipulation of matter.
iii. The referral of secular “soft” reality to brain parts.
iv. The assignment of sacred “soft” reality to religion.
As to (i), we have become accustomed to being gratified by technological advances. (Not to suggest that I am against them. I welcome such advances.)
°
DOES A TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE NEED INTELLECTUAL SOUNDNESS?
As for the relation between technological advances and intellectual soundness, that is an open question for my program of inquiry. Why did Euclidian geometry work during the thousands of years it harbored literal inconsistencies—which were only repaired by Moritz Pasch in 1882?
There is something wrong with the role assigned to consistency by Hilbert and his school. A single inconsistency in a theory is supposed to blow it up. But Euclidian geometry was provably inconsistent: and yet it was a success for thousands of years. It is as if all automobiles had wheels at three corners only, and nobody noticed the problem for two thousand years.
My logic of contradictions calls this juncture an absorbed contradiction.
I had better mention that you won’t learn what I just said from a contemporary history of mathematics. Today’s history covers for Euclid, writing around Pasch’s discovery that Euclidian geometry was inconsistent.
In the same vein, an elementary history of physics obscures that Galileo’s great discovery—the inertial path—was erroneous as he delineated it.
And an elementary history of physics soft-pedals that Newton’s force, perhaps the key term in classical physics, was/is occult. (The fact was well-known, but as I say, it was/is soft-pedaled.)
Is this what one expects? The history of science curves to hide what could be called missteps and embarrassments.
Another development has become more and more important in the last half-century. “Social” relativism or social priority. As said, what matters is victimhood. You have to find a victim to tell you whether a proposition should be believed. “2 + 2 = 4 is a white male lie.” The discovery and prioritization of the generic victim was the great achievement of humanistic scholarship in the late twentieth century. What matters now is not the ad hominem but the reverse ad hominem.
Not “your theory is false because you are an alcoholic.” “Your addition 2 + 2 = 5 is true because you are a victim.” (I can be specific about who says this, but it is beyond the scope here.)
°
As I write, I realize that I arrive at a picture in which the contemporary cultural landscape is divided into sectors which conduct their business as if walled off. Science, technology, finance are racing forward into more intricate exploits. As for science and technology, we expect them to be effective. When the megabillionaire Bezos went up in a private rocket in July 2021, he was supposed to have a safe landing—and he did. If it hadn’t worked, it would have been a failure his peers would have found unacceptable.
Let me remain with the delineated reality-picture for one more observation. At the point of cross-over between sides, rigor is forbidden. There is a deterioration of intellectual principle. (The recent popularity of social relativism of truth has deepened the deterioration.)
Allow me to return to the premier case in point. We find a two-sided reality-picture. One side grants that scientific materialism is the truth. (Cf. secular rationalism.) The other side pulls something called “soul” out of a hat, and grants ownership of it to religion. Materialism and “soul” are pasted together for a full-spectrum reality-picture.
Do I suggest that we find two sides that are obviously incomplete or inadequate, and that we need to brush both of them up? No—I say that the two-sided reality-picture discloses that truth is not a value for this public. In particular, it doesn’t matter that science works. It deserves to be called false. The civilization that walks on these crutches deserves to be left behind.
Today’s raging trends do not take directions (or the direction) I wish to pursue. If a direction I don’t pursue is a raging success, that does not prove that it is superior, or that I should defer to it.
To offer some personal remarks in the vein of personalysis, I want to win myself.
In my counsel with myself, my standards must be exemplary. Otherwise, I would be chronically bored (at best). (At worst, I would feel continuously abused.) In other words, I would be making an effort which would have no accomplishment other than to allow me to live another boring day (or another mangled day).
Just this bears on the sprawling quality of this explanation. As I say, I need to acknowledge the popular deterioration of intellectual principle by way of disavowing it. It would be affected for me to write as if the deterioration does not matter, does not “decrease my chances for a hearing.”
Nothing in what I have offered would enable us to shatter the present civilization as guns shattered the organization of pre-industrial populations. (Not until there is a future development of meta-technology.) But that is not as much of a concession as it might seem.
I have alluded to music and differing musical traditions several times. I am not finished; I will resume with the topic. Here I need to anticipate.
When a relatively open-minded Western-encultured person is shown a notation that actually reflects what Hindustani music does, their reaction is that the “Iittle stuff” needs to be cleaned out.
“There is no musical language outside of that of German art music, no musical language that cannot be articulated by the piano. To suggest otherwise is to murder God.”
“Murdering God”? A faithful notation of non-Western music crashes Western civilization if you allow yourself to notice it. That is one more example of crashing the civilization with one stroke.
A somewhat prominent musicologist proposed to typeset my scores (using a digital application). He said, “of course we will clean out all that little stuff you have.” (The digital application doesn’t provide for it. Why would it, given that German art music is the music of all musics?) What he wanted to do was like cleaning the tones out of the Chinese language.
I rejected his proposal.
To speak generally, personal esteem is invested in socially dictated inaccurate perceptions. People are highly accomplished at maintaining personal esteem that has socially approved inaccurate perceptions as its basis.
If they weren’t highly accomplished at maintaining personal esteem that has approved inaccurate perceptions as its basis, then the revelation that they suffer a conformist, hallucinatory-distorted perception would crash their civilization “in their comprehension.”
°
We imagine contemporary civilization as the target of the sort of intervention we want—as I keep saying, an intervention which is the opposite of regression or degradation. Indeed, existing structures are presumably needed as a springboard in rising above them. (Why I welcome scientific advances.)
Having identified the target civilization for this exposition, what we arrive at, again, is not guns. We identify gaps in the instilled perceptions (and conceptualizations). The gaps are vulnerabilities; that being said, the educational authorities are committed both to maintaining them and to keeping them beyond notice.
As a postscript, those gaps support, and are supported by, the personal make-up of the authorities. The authorities’ self-importance, their arrogance, their confidence that the road they took was the highest road. Their confidence that they did not devote their lives to service of something unworthy.
With reference to my mention of various “ethnic” musics as instances, we may note the self-congratulations of classical music (German art music). Issued by Schoenberg, Schenker, Adorno, Furtwängler. They implicitly disparage music outside that orbit. Their self-congratulations are a considerable topic. Academia does not want to label these gentlemen as bigots even though the self-congratulation is implacable.
•
2. Music
One might not expect that this text would launch into an extended consideration of music. I do so because the lessons I want to convey are localized and glaring for musical languages.
With respect to music, examples of willed insensibility can readily be identified. Instilled templates which are the property of societies are evident mechanically (the piano)—and symbolically (received musical notation).
I have found that if a listener who knows Western musicology is exposed to a music outside their orbit, they cannot describe the acoustic configuration they are hearing, and may overlay the incoming sound with a delineation that is glaringly false. There is no point demonstrating to them that they are wrong unless they want to learn that their perception has been ruined by indoctrination. So far, I have never met a classically educated musician who wants to learn any such thing. (The first thing classical music teaches is haughtiness.)
I have two treatments of this topic prepared. At this point, I am including both. (Leaving consolidation for later.)
a. Musical languages
The case that may make the point best, requiring the least preparation that is specific to me, is “appreciating musical languages.” The only new “technology” that enters here is my notation of non-European musics. Elsewhere I detail why my notation of Hindustani music is superior to two travesties that are in play:
—the staff notation in Grove Dictionary
—Hindustani music’s notation for itself.
Why is appreciation of musical languages a case study for destabilization? How could music be that important—isn’t it a mere matter of style? Surely music is not something you have to to appreciate in order to survive physically. Whereas guns were—for peoples that did not have them.
The answer to this question affords a better understanding of what is at issue in upward displacement. In the matter of musical appreciation, it is manifest—at least to me—that one’s civilization imposes a template and a filter on one’s perceptions. When the template is challenged, musicians of the prevailing civilization react with contempt and indignation, upholding their damaged perception via an imperial power-play and assertions of their expertise.
Hindustani music is called “tortured cats.” I am not trying to be funny. Speaking from personal encounters, that is what those inculcated with the European template hear. Or: continuous transitions between pitches are mere sloppiness. The savages slide to pitches because they don’t know where the correct pitches are. To offer my diagnosis, meends don’t communicate expressively to the Western hearers. A melody some of whose notes are glissandi is mere sloppiness. Perhaps I gain more from this case than other people do. To me it shows that smart people can be utterly insensible and arrogant. It is more intense for me, because I find (some) Hindustani music—and (some) African-American music—vastly preferable to classical music.
We may note what Malreaux said about Chinese opera in Anti-Memoir: that it amounts to mewings and shouts. Then there was the celebrated first performance of a Noh drama in Paris (after the Second World War). The culturati hated it.
What upward displacement wants to get at, in the first place, is not the possibility of military or pragmatic superiority conferred by instrumental knowledge. It wants to get at culture-wide factual blindnesses which issue not only from the way the culture has habituated your perception, but from your esteem and your morale.
As I keep repeating, musicology taught that European art music was the music of all musics.
Cf. Schoenberg, Harmonielehre, the dismissal of “folk music” late in the book. The passages have been cut in a recent, official German edition of the book. I know about the passages because the English translation was published before the recent German edition cut the political incorrectness.
It is not just that the European-trained were uninformed about devices in “non-Western music.” They were militantly opposed to acknowledging those devices. Indeed, if they “studied” non-Western music, their close analysis falsified it to the point of converting it to a rudimentary score cognate to a piano score. (A.M. Jones, Studies in African Music, especially Volume 2. The Grove Dictionary.)
Telling the musicologists that they had something to learn not only told them that their perceptions were factually misrepresenting the incoming sound—which they were. (Alternatively: in the case of Westerners who call Hindustani music “tortured cats,” they are factually aware of the glissandi, but deaf to their function as expressive communication. By the same token, they should deride the Chinese language as a non-language, as mewing.)
The musicologists felt insulted by me: I told them that European art music was not the music of all musics. I told them that Schoenberg and Adorno and Furtwängler had been “culture-bound” (as the expression is). The challenge was met with a simple power play. If only one person was telling them what they didn’t want to hear, and that person was marginal, they could dismiss them: “you aren’t saying anything.” A genuinely descriptive performance notation of a Hindustani gat (song) gets dismissed as worthless. Or as wasting space on insignificant information. Or as murdering God.
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There came a point when victimhood politics wanted recognition of non-Western music and of everything lumped together as pop music. But to see a proper musicological (and template) issue was over the head of victimhood politics. As we saw earlier, victimhood politics thinks it can win with obscurantist defiance. The cultural establishment honors obscurantism when victims articulate it.
So the victimhood account of non-Western music could only delineate it as social history. They could only say that if you didn’t like whatever musical offering was being pushed by the activist of the moment (political folk music?), you were adding to the victimization.
Public life has ruined itself. Successive youth cohorts have ruined themselves. They are beyond hope. If anyone wants to launch from what I offer, they will have to restart the civilization.
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b. Pitch
i. Tuning
Aside from octaves, fourths and fifths on the piano are out of tune. As for imperfect intervals, they are not from the harmonic series. It is called Western music and it was invented to make homophony symmetrical. The interval, aside from the octave, which is tuned “correctly” is the tritone: if it were tuned correctly, it would take forever for the composite wave form to cycle out.
Presumably most denizens of Western civilization know nothing of this. Is the dyad c/g on the piano a fifth? Western civilization: yes. Outside Western civilization: assuredly no. The piano pitches are not aligned with any music that is based on “dyadic tonic-pedal point harmony.”
That said, African-American music used the conventionally tuned piano and managed to blow past tempered tuning. Originality can blow past a technical obstacle. To do so would be out of the question for Hindustani music because for the latter, just intonation is part of the base of the expressive language.
As for myself, I follow what happened with African-American music. I compose for the conventionally tuned piano against tonic pedal-point. The music can overcome the slight mismatches.
“Lonesome Dreams.” as performed by Jeffrey Treviño, 2007.
ii. “Notes”
In Hindustani music and African-American music and country music (the pedal steel idiom), melody “notes” are glissandi. This must be sharply distinguished from “grace notes” or “portamenti.” (Strictly, a portamento connects two melody notes, constant tones, with a quick glissando, as opposed to a jump.) The Hindustani term for such a “note” is meend.
While this effect is ubiquitous in Hindustani and African-American music and country music (the pedal steel idiom), I have found it impenetrably baffling to those whose musical training is European (to use its proper name). In the first place, they hear the effect as a mistake: tortured cats. Or they manage to deny it: to deny, in their recognition or comprehension, pitch-variations presented to their ears. (In classical music, to approach a pitch by sliding is incompetent: it is not pianistic.) When I point out that their perceptions are deficient, the reaction is usually indignation.
When musicologists impose, on Hindustani music (or African-American music), the discrete pitch vocabulary they have learned as the sum total of real music, a shocking falsification results.
The entire population of a civilization can be arrogantly wrong about what their ears hear and what it means musically. (They can already be arrogantly wrong about the tempered fifth. That is another discussion.)
Conditioned misperception is found in more realms than music, but for me, the foregoing examples would be sufficient to establish that the population of a civilization can perceive pitches presented to their ears erroneously not because their audition is impaired, but because of their upbringing.
I must be quite different from other people. To other people, I am making a nuisance of myself by pointing this out. To me, it knocks a hole in what the civilization calls “reality.”
In what other realms can template stigmatization be demonstrated?
We are nowhere near saying all that can be learned from “glissandi as melody notes.” Of course all published Western notation of Hindustani music (Grove Dictionary) is worthless because of the adamant refusal to recognize what I say here. “Vernacular” African-American music and country music have evolved without notation (to their great advantage).
I know of only one claim to have notated blues guitar performances. The scores, published in a guitar magazine, have been allowed to go out of print and to become inaccessible.
Indian civilization is sophisticated. What does it make of meends? Not to say gamaks. (They are relevant to what the “blue note” is.) I found something I was not expecting. The Indian musicians have a problem with their own practice. They have the term meend, but in important respects they do not recognize it. They may think of it as an ornament, when that is simply false.
Hindustani music has a notation for itself which in effect assigns letters to that tones (with dots to indicate register). (A that. Approximately, a scale employed by the ragas of a scale-class. For example, Bilaval that is known in European music as the C major scale.) As if Hindustani music were step-function music like Western music.
Indians have an excuse for the way they notate gats. They say that they do not want to pre-empt ornamentation; they want to leave it open for improvisation. That is simply false. When one is studying as an apprentice, one sings the gat with exactly the same “ornaments” every time. (My teacher was Pandit Pran Nath.) Repetition is what Hindustani instruction is about. The “ornaments” are not ornaments.
That goes deep—perhaps deeper than my readers expected. A sophisticated civilization can systematically, heroically, lie to itself about the culture it originated and now offers—about matters at the level of perception and praxis. That is not even to mention debates over whether latter-day analytical devices introduced for Hindustani music in India are authentic. (The debate over that analysis.)
I may speculate about why Hindustani music has no account of itself on paper that is even minimally honest about what is going on. (This is not essential to my argument.) It is a scholarly cliché that ancient Greek notation was a failure because it wanted to notate singing the way poetry is written. (Solmisation?)
The turning point in the history of musical science was the invention of diagrammatic notation in Europe. (Setting aside the tempered scale, triadic harmony, and so forth.) Pitch-time graphs. For European music, that meant step functions. Of course, it was made usable for performers with the lines and spaces of the familiar staff. And the use of accidentals, which add a fine structure to the key, so to speak.
It is quite possible that diagrammatic notation was a hurdle Indian civilization was unable to vault. (It would not have been the same diagrammatic notation. It would have needed to look like my proprietary notation, with provisions for meends and gamaks.) But a second diagnosis is possible: that when it came to analysis and delineation, Indian civilization was as discrete-fetishist as European civilization was.
Again, there is a lesson here beyond cross-cultural filtering. A civilization can display self-filtering relative to segments of its culture. The music is a highly evolved praxis. A real teacher rebukes you if you don’t sing it correctly. And yet the collective elite of the civilization militantly refuses to recognize it at the level of written delineation. They have a written delineation which does not recognize it. They even have an excuse for not recognizing it.
Western modern composers were quite willing to recognize siren glissandos as possible devices in music. And yet so far as I know, I am the first ever in musicology to recognize that a glissando can be a melody note. (And, of course, to implement it, as a composer, throughout my compositions. To introduce a notation strictly for that device.) To acknowledge it in theory is a hurdle nobody but me, as far as I know, has vaulted. In fact, insofar as the others have been aware of it, their energy has gone into proving that you shouldn’t acknowledge it.
It well exemplifies issues in upward displacement.
°
There is more to be said about music. There are musics in the Western Hemisphere importantly outside German art music. African-American music. So far as I know, I am the first to recognize the way African-American music divides the beat. To play jazz, one has to know that the rhythm is not tick-tock. The second note of a duplet is shorter and weaker than the first. But what is the practice in this respect? In the first place, I encountered the same denial in favor of European musicology in this area as I did with pitch. I am the only one, as far as I know, who has declared that the (swing) duplet varies with tempo as to the duration differential and amplitude differential. But it can also be stylistic. Little Richard combines equal accented 8ths with a heavy back-beat. As another example, shuffle rhythm increases the duration differential until one has a legitimate quarter-and-eighth triplet.
I invented a way to indicate the unequal 8ths that could allow for the differential to decrease with tempo. At the same time, I discarded all the European expedients for this case, including especially 3:2 brackets (and so forth) such as fill the scores of serial composers.
I learned how the issue is dealt with in jazz band scores. There, the 8th-note duplet is defined as having unequal durations. You learn that you never play what the score says. (And if you never get outside of jazz bands, you may not learn that in the original context, you are supposed to play what is written.)
PEOPLE WILL GO TO ANY LENGTH TO AVOID TELLING THE TRUTH TO THEMSELVES ABOUT WHAT THEY DO.
It is one of the lessons upward displacement offers. Is upward displacement an obbligato that diverts our attention to inferior motives? To the cointrary. As I drill down to the cases that matter, I begin to think that upward displacement is more important than meta-technology.
I told a colleague that I did not want to use 3:2 brackets for the shuffle because I did not want to indicate that the effect was arithmomorphic. The colleague assailed me in defense of the 3:2 bracket. “What difference does it make how you represent something as long as it is arithmetically correct?” Actually, it would ruin someone as a jazz player to think arithmomorphically at that level: to approach jazz as if you were David Tudor playing Bo Nilsson. As for my colleague, he didn’t understand that my notation allows for the differential to vary with tempo. That would have been over his head. But I have to add that he was a proficient jazz horn player. He could deliver what was wanted and I am pleased to have him on my tracks. But a college education had steered him wrong at the level of mentally modeling what he was doing; it had made him defiant on behalf of a poisonous theory.
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c. Apprehension of music in general
We could expand the topic to the holistic apprension of music. Then the instances become more cloudy—but more outrageous. My June 1, 2019 concert was “reviewed” by a working musician, Franklin Bruno. He said that my opening melody seemed derived from Norwegian Wood. That is factually wrong. He was, as it were, looking at a tree and seeing a refrigerator. The whole point is that that can be socially approved. It does not get you removed to a mental institution.
I have reiterated that Hindustani music sounds like tortured cats to the unsympathetic. (Then the blues and country music should sound that way also. To some, they do.) Again, the meends do not communicate expressively, for the unsympathetic, as they are meant to do.
°
d. Existing regimentation
For the musical examples I have offered to have their evidentiary and instructional value, a consideration needs additional emphasis. The way that a culture’s music is apprehended, preparatory to delineating it, is not a topic for friendly banter. The false notation of Hindustani music is ensconced in innumerable treatises. There is no audience for a correction. Everyone loves misrepresenting to themselves and to others.
If you tell the untrained that something is out of whack, the technical dispute will be meaningless to them. If you point out to the cognoscenti that their self-understanding is in error, you can expect to be met with anger and contempt. (In the case of music: anger and contempt from those who dabble with Western notation—and from those who have learned the music by rote.) One can expect to be met with defiance on behalf of a poisonous theory.
Here I will move on from music. But again, for me, this evidence by itself would be enough to spur me to look for other areas where demanded perception is factually false, and where people have a learned practice which they insist on describing inappropriately and oppose describing appropriately.
The initiated denizens of a civilization are certain that they are superior. (Arrogance? Nobody is more arrogant than a high priest of a poisonous knowledge.) The representative person’s self-image is in play. Thematic personal identity is in play. If you point out that something in their culture is in error factually, you may find that everybody is against you. (If they aren’t actively against you, they ignore what you offer as insignificant.)
Again, as I drill down to the cases that matter, it occurs to me that upward displacement complements meta-technology. The worth of something is a matter of appreciation, of judgment. If we want to speak of a civilization, we have to consider collective judgment.
Let me revisit the parable I made of the Leaning Tower experiment. Galileo needed the demonstration to have something to be going on with—a reason to object to the received expertise—an anchor of a new physics.
The referees voted down what he demonstrated. They pivoted to the insignificant detail that the balls hit the ground a split second apart. That was not remotely what Aristotle had told you to expect. But they told themselves, with that justification, that Aristotle’s law was right and Galileo was wrong.
Slowly, painfully, those referees faded into oblivion. I’m not finished with them.
For me, the most interesting question is what was going on with the smartest men in the world when they pivoted to an inane mitigation.
What personalistic subjectivities formed their verdict? How was their rationalization situated personalistically? The questions have never been asked. It is as if history of science doesn’t want to know what the referees’ flaw was.
As for the discovery of something that should have been obvious thousands of years sooner (Stevin’s discovery, made famous by Galileo), to recognize and appreciate it spurred an upward displacement of European civilization.
• • •
Part II. The chart topics
In this Part, I give summaries of various topics on the chart.
Let me repeat something I said above. These topics are not especially the topics of personalysis. They are junctures such as turn up in meta-technology. But personness is inextricably involved at these junctures. To understand how it is—in each case—is the point here.
There are topics missing from this chart that seem as if they could well have been included. WARP CONTRADICTION. So I shall incorporate additions in this account in regard to one or two topics.
There are phrases which appear here without being explained. The explanations are arcane.
°
The chart’s headings. As to the left column, I take the liberty of paraphrasing.
LEFT COLUMN
notation-tokens where the notation-as-image has to be “resolved in perception” to be univocal.
Necker-cube stroke numerals (Markov semantics) •
magnitude arithmetic
CENTER COLUMN
subverting “commitment”
cf. Crane, Waterfall Illusion (1988) •
factual observation warping
• logical norm warping
consenting humiliation
the logician to prove their sanity
unmentionable presuppositions
physics: freedom, language, consciousness
(possibility of genuine assertion)
the exact sciences: the professional consensus [as the sole norm of soundness]. this could be called an unmentionable presupposition
• perceiving/appreciating musical languages
unclassifiable
believing 1 + 1 = 2
“Logic does not exist”
“Imagine that this sentence is a blank space.”
(Markov semantics) •
RIGHT COLUMN
Language-typing
Self-Validating Falsehoods
This sentence is in French.
The morning star is a star.
Reader’s hermeneutic •
Open Question
“Logic does not exist.”
•* try “The language-game has no inference-connections.”
sentence uttered by the last person on earth:
no addressees (merely thinking out loud)
•* all the logic that matters is vernacular
true sentences that cannot be known
self-reference
As to the marginal bullets,
—the right bullet means I have a note or notes of explanation elsewhere.
—the left bullet? I haven’t remembered what it means.
•
EXPLANATIONS AS TO THE FOREGOING
LEFT COLUMN
notation-tokens where the notation-as-display has to be “resolved in perception” to be apprehended.
Necker-cube stroke numerals
I propose notation-tokens where the notation-as-display has to be “resolved in perception” to be apprehended.
Another step is required to complete what I want to accomplish. As to my Necker-numerals, assigning the the meanings 1 and 2 is a wrong turn. What is more, assigning the meanings 0 and 1 is a wrong turn. (My device is not a new wrinkle in binary arithmetic.)
The assignment of meanings that proves to be productive is this:
one orientation: a counter that is a proxy for one. (Like Hilbert’s stroke. The system doesn’t have zero as an integer.)
the other orientation: “nothing written here”
To have an inscription that is to be seen as “nothing here” may be credited to Markov—his use of L. The underline in a URL (proxy for a blank) is comparable.
Markov’s explanation (A.A. Markov, Theory of Algorithms) is rare and crucial and needs to be reproduced.
The empty abstract word has no letters. ...
This will allow us to consider ... the empty alphabet, having no letters at all. ... It is expedient to consider every alphabet as an extension of the alphabet { }.
... every word begins in the empty word and ends in it. Every word begins and ends in itself. The empty word begins (ends) only in itself.
emphasis added
That’s mysticism!
I cannot resist offering an anecdote at this point. I spoke to a mathematician at my 2018 Los Angeles opening about my installation Nothing Written Here (2011), mentioning that the image is Markov’s lambda. He said, oh yes, the empty set.
No, not the empty set! With one misapprehension, he annulled the innovation I was offering him. Either out of ignorance or because it was far more comfortable to misunderstand. Comparable to a misunderstanding regarding acknowledging and notating meends. (as explained in B.2 above).
As an aside on Hilbert, it would seem that the only way his stroke-numerals could convey “zero” would be by the absence of strokes, by a blank. Evidently there is nothing in stroke-numerals corresponding to the role of zero in place notation. How did Hilbert want zero to be handled? Not as a place-keeper. As a degenerate number for which modern mathematics isists on having an arithmetic.
1 + 0 = 1.
1 x 0 = 0.
As for the question of binary notation, it does not come up here because binary notation is a “place notation”; stroke-numerals are not.
In the first instance, my Necker-cube stroke-numerals (for example) are devised to smoke out subjectivity. (The viewer has to resolve a multistable figure by intending: to gain a definite number.) Such an appeal to subjectivity is rigorously excluded by Western civilization. In fact, the notation-token in Western civilization finds its consummation when it can be “entered” in a Babbage machine and manipulated in the machine. When “completion by imputation” cannot be an issue.
That this is the route taken evinces the deep psychephobia of Western civilization. (But let us not just blame Western civilization. There are Asian civilizations I don’t think of as psychephobic. Even so, it never occurred to them to deliberately make the shape of a written character reader-dependent.)
Much can be done with this device. Let me jump to an extreme case. If the Venice cube is the stroke-numeral, you get an immediate proof of 0 = 1. (Would Nicholas Goodman—cf. “The Logic of Contradiction,” 1981—recognize it?) You get my Quantum Semantics of 2013, published in frieze in 2014. (I have the same example in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization as (4) on page 204. I had forgotten it.)
The device smokes out subjectivity. It gives the logically impossible a point of entry. Again, I have placed these triggers on public record, but no one has chosen to pull them. Again, if they were pulled, it would knife into psychephobia and into the received logic. If the consequences were pursued, it would shatter normative cognition as it currently prevails.
•
magnitude arithmetic
My text “The Apprehension of Plurality,” from Io #41, now available on my web site, has an exposition of magnitude arithmetic.
•
CENTER COLUMN
subverting “commitment”
In the chart as I drafted it, I gave this label specificity by announcing Tim Crane, “The Waterfall Illusion,” Analysis, 1988, as the object-lesson. Below I will expand on this case.
At this point, I wish to spell out some background not indicated by the chart’s labels.
Experiences of the logically impossible in perceptual illusions
A small number are known in psychology: I have been insistent about the waterfall illusion. I increased the number of such illusions because I want to compile them. I offer these cases with more explanation in
The Logic of Admissible Contradictions Revisited (unpublished)
cases A1 – A5 (with subcases)
cases B1 – B2
so, seven classes of cases
Here I wish to add to my commentary on cases.
1. What I have learned to use ‘stationary motion’ as a generic label for.
a. the waterfall illusion, which needs to be called stationary translation.
b. stationary expansion and contraction, called Plateau’s spiral.
c. stationary chaotic motion.
the afterimage of the Dan Conrad “checkerboard” disc.
every cell remains stationary while pulling in a different direction.
2. The Necker cube that “goes both ways at the same time.”
a. I called the first version I came upon the “Venice cube.” (An isometric Necker cube.)
b. I created a variant with color, the “Martian cube.”
3. John Locke’s “three tanks” experiment. See the note below.
4. The crossed-fingers illusion. My version demonstrates 2 = 1.
5. My Counting Stands. Essay and photo on my web site.
COMMENTS
1a. As for the waterfall illusion, it is most powerfully produced when truth serum is given intravenously as a general anesthetic—prior to the subject’s loss of consciousness. Either
SCOPOLAMINE. [this is probably the one.]
or AMOBARBITAL.
Why haven’t the accredited and well-funded psychiatric researchers (or whatever) already explored all this? Because they have no intellectual context for logic-violating sense-apparitions. They don’t hate the prevailing civilization for its psychephobia and discrete-fetishism and instilled template-blindnesses. The latter are the staff of life to them.
3. Some experiences of the logically impossible afforded by illusions are graphic; they should be undeniable for a medically normal person. That said, I am in favor of keeping the bar high for a perception of the logically impossible, so that the realm is not compromised by lame evidence or badly analyzed evidence. As to Locke’s experiment with three tanks of water, cold, medium, very warm. You place your hands in the flanking tanks, then place both in the middle tank. You “perceive” the same body of water as hot and cold at the same time (in different places).
It may need some such premise as this: stationary communicating water in a uniform enclosure cannot be at different temperatures in different locations.
“Communicating water in a tank is at a uniform temperature unless the tank is rigged with an external heat source.” It is the learned gestalt-perception.
With that premise, which is common realism as well as thermodynamics, you experience something contradictory. (Why Locke mentioned the example.)
Is the result an illusion? Locke would have said so. Is it an experience of the logically impossible? It may have everything to do with object-gestalts. The incompatible temperatures are detected separately through parallel channels (hands). (As sight and audition are detected with pairs.) If palpable spatial separation would allow the temperatures to differ, they aren’t in contradiction. But what Locke, and we, are concerned with is the object-gestalt which devolves from your common-realist assumptions. (A tank of communicating water without differential heating of the water.) That object-gestalt is logically impossible.
If you felt the surface of a wood strip with hands at different points, and felt smooth with one hand and rough with the other, you would not consider that an experience of the logically impossible because your mental model (called the object-gestalt, a.k.a. the external object) does not demand a surface uniform along the length.
A tank of water as an object-gestalt we may sense with our two hands? Common sense expects both hands in a tank of water to feel the same temperature (as a witness to the object-gestalt).
°
With reference to (2a), my use of the Venice cube is expounded in a text on my web site. There is a photo of my first use of it in an installation, in Venice in 1990. I arranged a viewing of it for Graham Priest at Emily Harvey Gallery in the late 1990s; he was one of those in which the intended effect was not produced. Since then, the installation that aggregates Venice cubes has been shown many times. Not only that: my Martian cube was used to publicize my Kunstverein (2012) and Karlsruhe (2013) installations. It was shown at Archivio Emily Harvey in Venice in 2023.
I can remember only one case when a viewer, the cameraman hired to film my tour of my Kunstverein installation, realized that he was seeing something mind-bending. He found it painful and turned away in mental agony. May I say, in the strongest terms, that it is not necessary to be agonized by the intended perception? It can be the first taste of freedom (freedom “of consciousness”) you have had. But as I said earlier, we live in a civilization of psychephobia and discrete-fetishism and template-blindnesses. The sight of an escape route is dismissed, or plunges the viewer into agony. The enslavement to which people show the most loyalty is intellectual enslavement.
What do I conclude from the foregoing? My Venice cube, for example—something that it is medically normal to see as unusual—is, today, not often seen as unusual. That has to be a screaming example of civilization-instilled editing. My cube might as well be a meend in Hindustani music (for people who are so rigid they can’t even process that the pitch is changing continuously).
Let us recall Wittgenstein,
the simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field
Tractatus, 6.3751
Let me offer a little more as to how this aligns with my undertaking. First, as to what Wittgenstein was invoking: two distinct colors are present at the same place in the field subjectively. Wittgenstein is clear that that is what he is talking about: he says “visual field.” His verdict:
[it] is impossible, in fact logically impossible.
My Counting Stands delivered what Wittgenstein said can’t be delivered. In the first place, there is an illusory middle rod which, to sight, is vivid. SEEING HAD BETTER NOT BE BELIEVING. In the second place, the rod is of two colors that do not mix.
I had only one conversation with a viewer while the installation was up at Emily Harvey Gallery in 1993. He wanted to tell me that it is because we have binocular vision that we see the illusions associated with this display.
He wanted to talk about the nervous system as a detection machine, and about the machine’s (my) objective accuracy as regards how many rods are out there in the external world. He might as well have been explaining to me that if I knew anything, I would credit Ptolemy’s solar system.
It wasn’t clear that he had registered the logically impossible sense-apparition. His reaction was scientistic and beside the point.
(In fact, my visual illusions of the logically impossible don’t necessarily need binocular vision.)
To resume with Counting Stands, three rods are seen vividly where physically there are two. Literal empiricism encounters a conundrum here. You see three “good” rods and you can put your hand through one of them. The present civilization resolves the matter with a conceived model of what is happening. The mentally entertained model is massively derivative and cross-temporal: something I emphasize over and over.
I have given a demonstration regarding a sense-apparition that controverts Wittgenstein and received logic prima facie. By offering a logically impossible perception. (If your stroke-numeral is the Venice cube, one gets 0 = 1.)
As I have been saying, the viewer may not acknowledge that. Any more than the referees in the Leaning Tower of Pisa parable acknowledged that it upended Aristotle’s physics.
°
Earlier, in B.1, I offered a section on identitarian logic. Let me summarize the lessons.
i. Logic is not a science of what is physically real. It is a science of what is thinkable, conceivable—what has meaning. As just seen (from Wittgenstein), a contradiction is deemed to have no meaning, to be an empty idea.
ii. A digression that has to be underlined for clarity. I do not concede that Escher contributed anything to the subject at hand. I have a commentary on Escher (if anyone wants it). His trick with the way perspective codes radial distance is not profound and is not a case in this discussion.
In general, in a field in which veridical perception is essential to analysis, expertise can be a bluff.
I think of Marshall Stearns’ outrageous double-talk on the “blue note” in The Story of Jazz.
°
As I say, I have presented any number of demonstrations where people do not see what a medically normal person should see. Presumably because it shatters instilled logic. Because it shatters a mental order which is interwoven with morale and esteem. The Düsseldorf cameraman of 2012 who did see what the Venice cube offered, and was thrown into agony, importantly illustrates what filtering (template stigmatization) protects people from.
My demonstrations have often fallen flat. They subsist as triggers that have not been pulled. If a considerable number of people ever pull them—and do not find it necessary to explain them away fallaciously—then, again, the repercussions would shatter prevailing normative cognition.
◊
I cite Tim Crane’s paper on the waterfall illusion repeatedly because it is so telling and because I do not expect the reader to grasp its significance the first time I mention it. Crane’s attitude is the lesson:
cf. the Düsseldorf cameraman.
As an aside, the greatest lesson of the parable of the Leaning Tower is not that the balls hit the ground at almost the same time. It is the intransigence of the Aristotelian referees. Of course, without the successful experiment, there would have been nothing new to be going on with. But a civilization’s members will defend themselves via denial of the manifest (observer nullification). That is what upward displacement seizes on.
As for Crane, his reaction to the waterfall illusion was to wrestle his consciousness to the ground and beat it to a bloody pulp. Why? Because the illusion is a replicable sense-apparition that becomes a dagger in the heart of the exact sciences and of physico-mathematical science if you recognize it for what it is, a picture of a logical impossibility. (Do I need to repeat what I said in B.1? Not a demonstration of a logically impossible physical situation. As a matter of fact, for a logically impossible experience-world situation, in the first instance, one has to go to (rare) sleeping dreams. (Here we can bypass what it means to count sleeping dreams as evidence.)
And quantum indeterminacy? It is a waste of my time to comment analytically on what it is about. In brief, quantum physicists go out of their way to provide for “suspension between states” without leaving identitarian logic.
Not to say without offering a new logic for verbal propositions. Quantum physics is often explained as saying ‘A cat is alive and not alive’. That’s a spurious analogy. An assertion of quantum physics is not a contradiction and a truth in a new logic of verbal propositions. The physicists do not imagine any such thing. They wouldn’t want any such thing—to them, it would amount to murdering God.
As for perceptual psychologists, they are not unsettled by perceptual illusions. Academic logic is outside their profession, and they don’t care about protecting it. On the other hand, they don’t know what logic is. They don’t see the explosive implications if an inconsistent concept can be non-vacuous.
As with the referees in the Leaning Tower parable, what you will grant intellectually has everything to do with personal identity. (That includes an expert’s indifference to what a result means outside their profession.)
As I intimated above, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has material which serves as prime evidence re these considerations. 4.462. 5.4731. 6.3751.
Again and again: the waterfall illusion already is a dagger in the heart of Wittgenstein’s dispensation. As to my Counting Stands, I offer them with Wittgenstein in mind.
Again, the lesson is that decisive, “hands-on” evidence can be brushed aside in the absence of compelling social reasons to entertain it. In 2002, I happened to write “Shall the logic of contradictions be forestalled by belittling paradoxical perceptions?” [emphasis added] This memo does not go far enough into the personalistic to belong in the upward displacement discourse. But it begins to overlap the upward displacement discourse.
Logical positivism wanted to construct science from sense-experience, sense-apparitions. But we learn, broadly, that the positivist or naturalist consensus filters replicable sense-apparitions to match them to inherited scientific formulations. The consensus is template-stigmatized.
Replicable sense-apparitions? My evidence is narrowly identified and closely expounded. We don’t want replicable sense-apparitions achieved by stage magic. Presumably that had everything to do with the reports of confirmed alchemical transformations. That said, I have discovered that replicability need not be straightforward. A lot of people don’t see what I see and what I want them to see. And some people need an unlocking step before they see what I want them to see. (They only need the step once.)
•
factual observation warping
That would be observer nullification. As I have said repeatedly, the Aristotelian referees did not deny what they saw. They instantly offered an inane mitigation.
logical norm warping
This last subhead could have quite different meanings.
I have assumed I was referring to the chalk game. “The Chalk Game” intends to take a cue from the hangman paradox—to explicitly shift logical norms with the use of suggestion (informal hypnosis). So, hypnotic deformation of logical norms. It would be an epistemological demonstration.
It is a project I haven’t finished. So I haven’t had an opportunity to learn if deformation of a player’s logical norm seriously challenges their thematic personal identity.
◊
consenting humiliation
Consenting humiliation is very real. Does it belong here? Above I expounded it without raising that question. A example offered is the ashes of Ash Wednesday. Very well, that involves self-stigmatization in aid of superstitious beliefs.
Is there any suggestion that consenting humiliation has factual observation warping as a correlative? Again, the Tower of Pisa parable. Perhaps. (As I have it, logical norm warping could be considered consenting humiliation in the case of belief in the Trinity. Crucifixion of the intellect.)
In an earlier draft, I contemplated that the way Hindustani music notates itself is consenting humiliation. They look at a tree and see a hat-rack. (You have to know Hindustani gats and their sargam notation to appreciate this.) But they do not appreciate that they are mismatching. There is no Tertullian for Hindustani notation, telling you to love the mismatch.
The point that is made here is that people are remarkably willing to describe symbolic routines with an inculcated apparatus, even as the mismatch screams out. The depth of commitment to a failing solution is immense: it extends across multiple civilizations. That’s why I turned to upward displacement as an enterprise. The domination of matters of fact by inculcated templates is massive. (Another case: Aristotle and the number of ribs a woman has. More generally, ancient Greece did not take its stand on evidence-based knowledge.)
•
the logician to prove their sanity
The logician is required to prove ab ovo that they are sane. To ask a logician for such a proof is merely to bait them, since nothing in their repertoire would serve.
i. Question-begging would not serve.
ii. Dogmatic invocation of a Higher Authority would not serve.
iii. In particular, showing that your reasonings always reach socially accepted conclusions would not serve. (Is conformity sanity?)
That said, to raise the issue is not ridiculous. One who believes they have an irreproachable logic could be deluded.
Indeed, the much-used proof by contradiction proves a proposition by deriving a contradiction from its negation. If the negation crashes, that makes the proposition true.
Objections have been raised to this method. And yet some mathematicians prefer it. Evidently what is easiest is to find fault with the negation of the proposition to be proved. The popular proof of the infinity of primes.
Georg Cantor was in and out of mental institutions and eventually died in one. (It is a sensitive topic. Cantor’s mathematical ideas arguably became delusional. E.T. Bell? Even so, historians of mathematics who want to cover for the profession assert that there was no relation between Cantor’s mathematical ideas and his insanity.)
Nicholas Goodman said that a correct constructive proof of 0 = 1 would be a certificate of insanity of the human race. (As cited.) Is sanity, then, at risk?
As an aside, the question becomes far more acute when I ring in the devices of my logic of contradictions, and provide a proof of 0 = 1 (or 1 = 2). The topic is not trivial. See the Annex.
What I offer is not a formal derivation. That doesn’t mean that a formal derivation of the insane result is ruled out.
I should mention the German mathematician Eduard Wette, and “Refutation of Arithmetic.” I have to call him a fringe mathematician. Nobody satisfactorily explained his work or built on it. All the same, he published in various prestigious journals.
In Annexes to the 2010 META-TECHNOLOGY chart, I take up “the logician’s proof of their sanity” aggressively.
•
unmentionable presuppositions
Scientific materialism depends on presuppositions it doesn’t want mentioned.
(A) individual choice
consciousness
language (grammar, of course, but also semantics)
In prestige (modern) thought, individual choice, consciousness, conscious verdicts have no place.
Physics must make the presuppositions (A)—but it cannot recognize them.
If scientists have decided by 2024 that they must concede consciousness, they invariably correlate anything ascribed to consciousness with the brain part that gives rise to it. They are not going to offer an ontological analytic of the subjectivity of the subject—not to say an analytic of longitudinal thematic identity—to compete with early 20th-century German philosophy. I am going to proceed without further reference to any 2024 concession to consciousness.
As an aside, Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” 1959, has it that the mathematical physicist needs
(B) encouragement
reassurance
faith
The first two are social reinforcement. Wigner calls them emotionally necessary to the individual who is a mathematical physicist. Faith? He doesn’t define it. Wigner has arrived at weakly personalistic considerations. It doesn’t resolve what is to become of (A).
The personnel of the scientific professions consist of partisans who don’t want individual choice, consciousness, conscious verdicts to become topics. Cf. Wigner and Weinberg on the prospects of a scientific explanation of consciousness.
Marvin Minsky find that science must deny individual choice. (He rescues it by faith.) It follows that no experiment can legitimately be an experiment (an intentional act). It can be no more than registration of the given by an automaton.
Even a human who only looks at the sky chooses where and when to look. And looks with the intent of fitting the seen into a model harbored mentally (as I say over and over). Epicycles.
°
possibility of genuine assertion
An assertion entertained in thought would be a conscious verdict. Then freedom of choice, consciousness, and understood meaning would be preconditions for assertion.
That said, science would define an assertion as a string of letters satisfying syntactical rules. Meaning would be conceived (conceived!) as synonyms.
an ANNEX on irrationalism prepared for this juncture
•
the exact sciences: the professional consensus [as the sole norm of soundness]
The exact sciences: they would be an expert’s label for logic and mathematics and mathematical linguistics. Why do I light on the exact sciences? Because of cases in point which illustrate that logical truth and mathematical truth issue from a professional consensus. Evidently I considered that more weighty than to illustrate that truth issues from a professional consensus in empirical sciences.
◊ The three different answers called true for the sum of Grandi’s series. (Sometimes called Leibniz’s series.)
For the uninitiated, an infinite series is a sum of an infinite number of addends. The addends in Grandi’s series alternate: 1 and -1.
The partial sums of Grandi’s series alternate: 0 and 1. What is the end-result? The profession recognized both 0 and 1. (A possible example that 0 = 1.)
But the profession preferred the Cesàro sum as the answer: 1/2. 1 and -1 were true answers, but 1/2 was more true.
Aside: The fact that the preferred end-result is discretely different from any partial sum agrees with infinite series convention.
◊ David Hilbert’s pronouncement: we will not be driven from Cantor’s Paradise. (From the hierarchy of infinities.)
The only standard of soundness in the sciences is professional consensus. No norm outside that fraternal norm matters. One might sum it up as: mathematics is anything you can get away with inside the profession.
In some or many cases, mathematicians find a novelty compelling before they consider it fully rationalized. First there are irrational numbers and infinitesimals. Thses are followed by rationalizations. The Dedekind cut, the Souslin line, the 1968 proposal to revive infinitesimals as a topic unto itself, etc. Intermediate students learn mathematics backwards. They learn the latter-day rationalization, not how the device was presented initially.
All the same, professional consensus is an unmentioned consideration. (Wittgenstein’s Tractatus does not mention professional consensus as a canon.)
°
• perceiving/appreciating musical languages
Discussed at length earlier.
•
ANNEX on warp contradictions prepared for this juncture
c. 2019, I provided an extended account of what I had called warp contradictions. In Annex One of EARLY 2010 META-TECHNOLOGY CHART. Let me emphasize that this account is c. 2020, not 2010.
A person believes something—or says they do—that logic rules out. OK, the quick example is the Trinity in Christianity. They “believe” it in aid of a doctrine, or a perceptual organization, with which the subject’s self-esteem is deeply interdependent.
This route is taken all the time, but it has three immense pitfalls.
1. In academic logic, a contradiction is literally meaningless, vacuous. You can’t BELIEVE in a married bachelor, because there is nothing to believe. It is a semantic zero.
Was there a time when contradictions, like square circle, were considered to be meaningful? The notion was discarded in the twentieth century.
People who like the phrase married bachelor as figurative for a cheating husband? They are satisfied with being cute. They don’t see why it could be profound to hold a dispensation to the norms implicitly associated with it. Just this observation is a contribution to personalysis.
2. From a contradiction, every proposition in the language can be deduced.
The Explosion Principle. I took the trouble to work out the quickest proof.
We espouse both
A is T
¬A is T.
The gratuitous proposition is C. It can be
The Empire State building is in Albania.
A v C has to be T because we agree A is true.
But we also agree ¬A is T.
given A v C, which we agree is T,
and given ¬A is T,
that works only if C is T.
QED
I wish I had had somebody to show me this when I was 17!
3. There are proofs, other than the Explosion Proof, that a contradiction may have consequences you don’t want.
Christianity says 3 = 1.
Subtract 1 from both sides. Then 2 = 0.
And God and Jesus are nothing.
In recognition of (2) and (3), I have another concept. A blocking logic. A blocking logic places a barrier in front of every unwanted inference from a contradiction. Somehow, there has to be a network including every possible inference from the given contradiction. But we know that this network would include all propositions. That a vast number of inferences (or bundles of inferences) are blocked is perhaps trivial and we don’t have to make a point of it.
What we would really need, it would seem, would be a delineation of the scope of the inferences from a contradiction that the doctrine wishes to permit.
Let me offer this observation. Euclidian geometry and the Trinity are in the same boat in this respect. Euclidian geometry was as inconsistent as the Trinity.
So why didn’t Euclidian geometry explode? Incredibly or not incredibly, the contradiction was not derived (and the theory fixed) until 1882—by the above mentioned Moritz Pasch. So, not for many centuries. (The profession covers for the embarrassment by saying that readers previous to 1882 granted Euclid a blocking postulate that existed in Euclid’s mind that he omitted to write down. Mathematics is false until and unless you cover for it. Another view: a contradiction is not a problem as long as nobody pulls the trigger on explosion.)
The scientific Establishment posits Euclid’s mentally harbored qualifications, which vanished thousands of years ago (if one’s ontology entertains thoughts): when it needs those intangibles to bail itself out.
In any case, to find a professionally important path to a contradiction in an accepted theory is an expert task. (As it was for Hao Wang re Quine’s ML.)
As for the Trinity? Christians don’t want to bury the contradiction. It is the message. But Christians could not tolerate a contradiction as the message without an implicit prohibition of using it as a premise in miscellaneous deductions.
• • •
believing 1 + 1 = 2
What do I want here?
I find junctures that belie 1 + 1 = 2.
An interpretation of the Venice cube.
The crossed fingers illusion.
As cited, Goodstein and Hao Wang observe that arithmetic doesn’t work unless we have eternal changeless entities in a Platonic heaven.
Formally, 2 is the first iteration of 1. But that doesn’t give you the right to enumerate objects. (Soap bubbles?)
Does my heading want a look at the individual mental act of believing the truism? Perhaps. With the foregoing examples in consideration.
•
“Logic does not exist”
This topic also appears in the right column. It is in that connection that I should address it: see below.
•
“Imagine that this sentence is a blank space.”
“Markov semantics” is my title for this example. The sentence stretches out Markov’s symbol. An imperative which asks you to see a nothing where it is.
•
RIGHT COLUMN
There is an embracing title,
Language-typing
What follows involves language-levels?
Analytic or synthetic?
Under that, I have
Self-Validating Falsehoods
I give indented examples.
As to the “French” sentence in my 1987 Concept Art Journal, I found that Wittgenstein had published a less exigent version. On Certainty (1969)
§158. Is it possible for me to believe that this sentence [in German] is in English?
Wittgeinstein was able to think in both languages. It is perhaps possible for me to have such a misapprehension in a dream (hallucinatory distortion).
After working with me in Düsseldorf for days in 2012, H.-J. Hafner spoke to a clerk in a store in English—and was brought up short. He had been using English a lot.
°
Language-typing: self-validating falsehood
reader’s hermeneutic °
°
Under these, I write
Reader’s hermeneutic
with less indentation, and a right bullet. The right bullet means I have a note or notes of explanation elsewhere.
I would think that reader’s hermeneutic would mean subject-actuated. The reader has to supply a mental posture to gain a meaning. It can be spontaneous or intentional. Markov’s lambda: “see a blank here.”
To me, presently, it connotes my use of Necker cubes etc. I never gave a basic example of Necker-notation, and I should have.
The cat is ¨ black. [¨ needs a Necker cube.]
One sees one or the other proposition:
The cat is not black.
The cat is black.
I am returning to this material in 2024. I did not originally write down explanations for all of my labels and annotations. I need explanations; it’s not self-explanatory. In 2024, I don’t understand what Reader’s hermeneutic is doing under Self-Validating Falsehoods—which have just been clearly illustrated.
In fact, reader’s hermeneutic links to subject-actuated semantics.
•
Open Question
“Logic does not exist.”
What are marked on the chart are three interpretations of this proposal.
(A.1)
(A.2)
(B)
For those who still don’t know what logic is, logic is not limited to celebrating the truth of true sentences. I am not asking for the specimen declaration to be accepted as reasonable. I am asking: if you say this is false, exactly what is wrong with it?
Again and again, exact science does not only study assertions the speaker wants the hearer to credit. It also studies unjudged propositions, even falsehoods, to ask:
—What truth-status does the proposition have, if any?
—How so?
As a less abrupt and more analytical paraphrase of the sentence in question, I offer
(A.1)
“The language-game has no inference-connections.”
At face value, the claim is wildly false. Speech involves logical initiatives. Syntax and semantics incorporate logical structure. Not, and, or, only if, for all, for some.
Annex Two of the EARLY 2010 META-TECHNOLOGY CHART has a long exploratory commentary on (A.1).. This is not the place to repeat that commentary.
•
(A.2)
sentence uttered by the last person on earth:
no addressees (thinking out loud)
A sentence uttered by the last person on earth would indeed be thinking out loud. Articulation of a thought without communication.
It matters because Dag Prawitz (who has already been mentioned) said that exact-science knowledge is essentially social. The last person would not possess any logical or mathematical truth.
Then the epistemological status of
Mathematics exists.
depends on there being more than one human. (More than one in the loop of expert cognition.) If there were only one human, ‘Mathematics exists’ would not be true—for Prawitz. Would not be meaningful? (As opposed to conceding that the person might well continue to harbor the assertion mentally—or even to inscribe it, without an “outside” reader.)
As to “logic does not exist.” Would it be a truth (by Prawitz) if uttered by the last person on earth? Since it is a negation, logic has to be available for it to be an assertion.
•
(B)
all the logic that matters is vernacular
The logic that matters resides in the realm of cultural anthropology.
Very well, that seems to underrate the role of technical logic in technology today. So what was my point? The arena of natural language and vernacular logic is the only arena in which the question of the validity or soundness of logic can be asked without circularity. The only arena in which appreciation in consciousness can come into the picture.
Absurdity was a momentary topic in modern European belles-lettres. As mentioned, Baudelaire raised the case in Intimate Journals, placing it in the realm of madmen and hallucination. Césaire called 2 + 2 = 5 a certainty for an unspecified cohort. Orwell imagined in 1984 that a prisoner of a totalitarian regime is made to believe 2 + 2 = 5 by extreme brutalization. What does the prisoner “see” when he believes? Orwell imagined it as a blur of presented isolates. As I intimated, none of these litterateurs would have had any use for this as a serious topic.
At this point, I am narrowing the conclusion down to the one I just offered as (B). The logical devolves to the vernacular if the issue is appreciation in consciousness and if circular reasoning is not wanted.
I say more in Annex One and Annex Two of EARLY 2010 META-TECHNOLOGY CHART.
•
true sentences that cannot be known
self-reference
I have essays on these topics.
Sentences Which Are Rigorously Unknowable But True (2004)
Lecture on Jack (c. 1989)
[that would be Kripke’s Jack]
Diagonalization Lemma (January 1998)
DiagLemcrit (2 L)
DiagLemtechzero4 (2 L)
DiagLemtechone4 (2 L)
Diagonalization Lemma was part of an exchange that was never wrapped up. (There was a rejoinder from John Baez c. 1998 which I haven’t addressed.) The mention of the text here is provisional.
Today I see these topics as topics in philosophical logic. I think the texts ought to be able to gain academic publication: as offbeat observations which are within the premises of academic thought.
It shouldn’t require the texts to be forever irreproachable. Eternal irreproachability is not the criterion for publication in a journal, surely.
In any case, nothing I have done would be accepted in a journal. (I have submitted numerous times.)
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REFERENCES
Aristotle, On the Soul
Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones,] Blues People, 1963
Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals (1857), page 9
Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966)
George Boole, Laws of Thought, 1854
Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939, final ed. 1956
Tim Crane, “The Waterfall Illusion,” Analysis, 1988
Béla Csikós-Nagy, “New Horizons of Price Policy,” 1978
Hubert Dreyfus, “The Misleading Mediation of the Mental,” in Philosophical Dimensions of the Neuro-Medical Sciences
Nicholas Goodman, “The Logic of Contradiction,” in Zeitschr. f. math. Logik und Grundlagen d. Math., 1981
Reuben Goodstein, Constructive Mathematics, 1951, page 70
The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, last printed 2001, now online
Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, 1986
A.M. Jones, Studies in African Music, 1959
Saul Kripke, “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy, 1975
André Malreaux, Antimémoires, 1967
A.A. Markov, Theory of Algorithms, 1957
Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind, 1986
George Orwell, 1984, 1949
Moritz Pasch. Vorlesungen über neuere Geometrie, 1882
Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre, 1911
David Shwayder in Analysis, March 1956
Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, 1922
Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz, 1956
Shigeto Tsuru, Economic Theory and Capitalist Society, 1994
Vencenzo Viviani, On the Life of Galileo, 1654
Hao Wang, From Mathematics to Philosophy, 1974
Jeremy M. Wolfe et al., Sensation and Perception, 5th edition, 2018, page 237
Paul Watzlawick, ed., The Invented Reality, 1984
Eduard Wette, The Refutation of Number Theory I (Würzburg, 1975)
Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Feb. 1960
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969)
Jeremy M. Wolfe et al., Sensation and Perception, 5th edition, 2018, page 237.
A.S. Yessenin-Volpin, in Kino, Myhill and Vesley, Intuitionism and Proof Theory, 1970
°
Henry Flynt
Blueprint for a Higher Civilization, 1975
“The Apprehension of Plurality,” in Io #41, 1989
“Lonesome Dreams.” as performed by Jeffrey Treviño, 2007. You Tube.
Quantum Semantics, in frieze, 2014