Part V. Elevated Experience

Henry Flynt

(c) 1993 Henry A. Flynt, Jr.

CONTENTS

Introduction

A. Reductionist Half-Fantasies

B. Language as Miraculous

C. The Smallest Unit of Cognition

D. Is Radicalism Confined to the Adoption of Vantage-Points?

E. New Languages or Cultural Media

F. A Language on the Person-World

G. Escape to an Outside or to an Above?

H. Withdrawal to Esthetic Gratification?

I. Meta-Technology in the Person-World

J. Meta-Technology and the Self

Introduction

My analysis of the person-world has insistently noted that the phenomenon analyzed is objectifying personhood: in other words, a superstitious totality. The idly curious might expect personhood theory to take objectifying personhood as real and "good." But I have said clearly that I hold objectifying personhood to be unreal and "bad." So one must speak of the possibility of dissolving this personhood, or of departing from it. That is where the subject of consecration comes in. Part Five was my only projected manuscript on the departure from objectifying personhood to a preferred condition of consciousness/action. I did not pass from my holograph notes to a typescript in 1981 because I found the subject-matter unmanageable then.

The topic is departure from modern (naturalist-rationalist) reality or ordinary personhood in an exalted direction. This involves

- the overcoming of the imputed "reality"

- the concomitant metamorphosis of the proximate totality , i.e. the person-world

- change in the constitution of self (as a zone of the person-world).

There were no relevant candidates before the second half of the twentieth century. The reader may immediately think of Eastern religion. I am willing to discuss Eastern religion; and in 1981 I reviewed it in several reflections. To summarize as simply as possible, though, I am interested in outlooks which postdate natural science, having assimilated the scientific revolution--not in outlooks which antedate science.

The stance which elicited the discussion that follows was that of Christer Hennix. I construed Hennix's work of the late Seventies as a challenge which I chose to accept. Let me admit that I may be writing only about a posture which I chose to see--which, if present in Hennix's work, was present only as a hortatory and esthetic gesture.[1]

Hennix seemed to be saying that formalist scientism could be reinterpreted and elevated so that its promise of stable affirmative truth could be truly fulfilled. (As if by a god.) Moreover, the result could be a grammar not for the prosaic world but for ecstatic experience. Ecstatic experience was achieved by starting with uncontaminated elements and combining them by reliable principles. Stable affirmative knowledge was indispensable just because it was needed for this purpose.

Even though it may only have been hortatory and esthetic, Hennix's work conveyed the challenge that a god (or someone with an overwhelming advantage of us) could leap over not only our shortcomings, but the negative results on cognition characterizing my approach (my confinement of the knower to the immanent).

What anybody but me would consider Hennix's mad ambitiousness was precisely what recommended the proposal to me--together with Hennix's provision of fairly specific hints of the approach.

My philosophy provides the insight that non-immediate or transcendent standpoints are nonsensical. Should that induce us to rule out the quest for a preferred existence outside mundane life?

I construed Hennix's project an extremely powerful object-lesson or archetype. An account of my perspective (and direction and methods) is enhanced by an extended response to this approach.

I may encounter a fellow human who is more advantaged than me generally or has the advantage of me. As a thought-experiment, what if I had an analogous encounter with a sentient non-human? The discussion may be viewed as an abstract and visionary reflection on the limits of propositional thought and stable affirmative knowledge--"even for a god" or a creature from Andromeda. What my speculations cannot do is to predict the extent of the god's powers.

So the area of discussion formed itself. It was approximately a comparison of Christer Hennix's view of freedom of consciousness, pristine consciousness, a preferred medium of thought, with my radical unbelief, meta-technology,[2] and (after the inception of personhood theory) reciprocity of personhood. (This latter was my position that meta-technology could not be realized comprehensively in a collectivity in which a privileged class lived off of goods and services provided by a servile class.) When I proposed meta-technology at my Stockholm talk of October 10, 1979, I said that we must learn to swim in the ocean of chaos. However, this was terribly misunderstood--partly because "chaos" became one of the scientistic, debased fads--and I dropped the slogan.

We have two proposals for dissolving objectifying personhood or departing from it. Their divergence invited intense reflection in 1981. This inquiry, then, has to be a culmination of personhood theory. In 1981, I picked the word consecration for the topic. Available words from which I had to choose were ecstatic, hallowed, exalted, wondrous, enchanted. Rather than accepting any of the latter words, I chose to bend the received meaning of consecration.

A. Reductionist Half-Fantasies

There is an early twentieth-century Zeitgeist which reduces language to mathematical form and physical token--without thought, without motivation, without meaning except for "formal semantics." I call this tendency formalist scientism.[3]

Science, by making a privative projection (from the person-world) of thing-to-thing relationships, and by massively elaborating this projection, can fool us into thinking that thing-to-thing relationships have obviated the person-world.

Formalistic scientism's program of demythologization posits a cosmos consisting solely of physical objects and machines. Language consists of machines "exchanging" physical "signs" (tokens). According to science, all entities besides these are obsolete superstition. Call this cosmos the science-cosmos.

When one proposes to dismiss large blocks of doctrine (everything called philosophical anthropology) and to replace them with some narrow or meager (minimalist) "knowledge" or intellectual modality, it becomes a question whether the proposed combination of rejection and retention is cogent. Whether the new ontology requires phenomena beyond its scope to subtend it. Whether the streamlined new knowledge, purporting to comprehend everything that can and should be comprehended, is a half-fantasy.

The science-cosmos is conceptually not tenable. It posits too little or too much. The science-cosmos cannot exist self-sufficiently or be self-constituted. If the elements of the science-cosmos are real, they are not enough; there must be something more which acts to subtend them but which is not included among them. I will argue the point in the next section with respect to language.

Less can be more, but only when it is a self-contained or self-subsistent less--when it does not treat, as expendable, entities which are required (more or less by definition) to subtend it.

The science-cosmos is a reductionism. If the science-cosmos is a fiction, then it is not a completed fiction. It is a half-fantasy: there must be something more in order for there to be that much.

Moreover, the scientistic ideology has no modesty. It reserves no "guest room" to compensate for its insufficiency.

As an example, there would not be a consciousness which did set theory and nothing else.

1) Without care and temporality--ahead of myself, already in the world, as being alongside entities within the world--nothing happens. (Contemporary cyberneticists might phrase it, the experience of consciousness does not happen.)

2) Set theory is believed for reasons of expediency in a specific social context, namely twentieth-century Western scientism. Outside this context of scientific-academic careerism, nobody would believe it. Set theory is not viable as a mode of life. Outside the social imperatives of the Mandarinate, there is no motive to do it.

3) Where has formalist scientism provided for actual existence among abstract entities?

When meta-technology is less credulous than common-sense, less extravagant in imputing contexts of objectivity, that may be desirable. But insofar as mathematics says less than common sense, that is because mathematics is etiolated and incomplete. Less is more? The choice of the "less" reveals whether the perspective being offered is a reductionist fantasy.

Hennix developed a unique interpretation of formalist scientism. Accepting that formalist scientism achieves a medium of thought superior to mundane thought by dismissing mundane thought and replacing it with artificially precise and counter-intuitive thought-media, Hennix went on to view these methods as having the goal or the result of consecration. They could be applied to reach sustainable preferred states of consciousness. Formalist scientism was viewed as a thought-medium of the gods, so to speak. Through formalist scientism, we could dispense with mundane consciousness and accede to a flawless thought-medium: like having a race of gods teach us a new science. In e.g. Toposes & Adjoints Hennix formalized the subject algebraically or algorithmically.

Despite Hennix's dedication to ecstatic experience, Hennix's words allow the posited "consciousness" to be a computer.[4]

[Note on usage. In the past I have expressed my impression of algebraically formalized theories by vernacularly using the word "mechanical." What I am getting at, perhaps, is a feature which mathematical logic does not speak about: the metaphysics to which one commits by using algebraic notation. Impersonal, qualitatively homogeneous, discrete, permanently self-identical, rankable elements; and decidable operations thereupon. It would be professionally less objectionable to say algebraic or algorithmic. Or: the lexicon is mechanical.

The professional sees a different picture. The "games" which are codified with mechanical lexicons are "mysterious" as often as not. Hilbert wanted to prove that infinity is merely a manner of speaking; already this program crashes on the question of whether an infinite lexicon is needed to establish that infinity is merely a manner of speaking.[5] When using the word "mechanical," I am contrasting mathematical logic with the inventions in my "a priori neurocybernetics." But the lesson is equally important that the tidiest-seeming mathematics is already an unfathomable casuistry.]

Let me consider Hennix's vision of the generation of all desired messages from meager "algebraically characterizable" elements, considered relative to formalist scientism's view of language.

I agree that there could be a different or simpler state of consciousness, e.g. radical unbelief, altered personhood, (morning amnesia from Part III). Radical unbelief [admitting that to write about it is (astute) hypocracy] is "self-contained" and is a feasible state for consciousness. But Hennix's formulation, the pristine consciousness which mimics formalist scientism, is a reductionist half-fantasy.

Hennix would say: The only perception which trivially satisfies the requirement that appearance and reality be identical is the void event. We have the act of ostension devoid of any classificatory significance: the void indication. So let there be a language consisting solely of this element. Hennix fantasizes some such phenomenon as a purely logical consciousness which is irreproachable because it posits the empty set and little else.

But to anticipate SSB, it makes more sense to proclaim dogmatically that there is no language than it does to proclaim that there is a language (minimal formal language) consisting just of zero--or the empty set. To have the machinery to posit abstract-mathematical principles is a highly structured and derivative state of affairs; and to then use that machinery to posit collapsed cases like the empty set or the infinitude of the number two is even more structured and derivative. The fantasy of a "creative subject" who posits a stable affirmative knowledge consisting solely of a semigroup of order 3 is a nonsensical fantasy.[6]

Hennix supposes that an awareness deprived of a prosaic world, prosaic entities, past, future, cathexis, community etc. would still try to found itself by repeating a credo invented by the academic careerists of a matter-manipulating civilization. Hennix has been mesmerized by the logicians' myth that their science has priority over any other activity. Without the context of academic careerism in a matter-manipulating civilization, "salvation through mathematical logic" would not be plausible or even meaningful.

Hennix mistakes a privative extrapolation from the person-world for an immaculate science above the person-world's incoherences.

There is a Zeitgeist: all phases of linguistic activity have been made algorithmic. [See the above note on usage.] This conquest is the basis of today's technology. But that is the point: we will have to understand that this approach is illegitimate in principle before we will pass beyond today's technology.

The question of a module of conceptualization which is ontologically self-contained. A non-reductionist perspective of a totality. Let me speak of a non-reductionist "module" (perspective of a totality). (NRM) Is an NRM a cogent goal? To progressively strip away superstition without falling into reductionism (without positing a half-fantasy) cannot be a mere act of stripping inherited thought. Inherited thought is not presented in nested modules with non-reductionist modules in the interior. If it is cogent to conceive the person-world framework as an NRM, then it is not computed mechanically from previous theories.[7] Nor is it the transcription of an externally pre-established Truth. An NRM would have to be created insightfully, by making explicit enabling aspects which doctrine suppressed. E.g. ideation as an enabling aspect of speech.

If an NRM is a cogent goal, do NRM's have to be nested? Or can they overlap without without one including the other?

Meta-technology does not try to provide a comprehensive creed. One might ask if the cumulation of all meta-technological investigations could be codified so as to suppress connections to the belief-systems which meta-technology reacted to. In turn, one might ask whether this codification would be non-reductionist. My snap response is that meta-technology deliberately does not ask who the knower/doer is, how the doer comes to be in a world, what the doer's motives are.

Personhood theory can pass (as in Part IV) from everyday existence to radical unbelief. The path is based on acknowledging the myth of the person-world. ?--Conceivably one might formulate a series of modular, non-reductionist accounts in order of decreasing mythification or credulity. Yet personhood theory cannot be the only way from everyday existence to radical unbelief. There must be other ways which are just as creditable intellectually: ways which do not examine the motivated doer in a world.

Any approach which I endorse must foster instrumental solutions which overmaster received science. [This adds another "dimension."] That would mean that a non-reductionism would have to be non-passive. (Cf. SSH below.) Neither Eastern religion nor Hennix nor twentieth-century European philosophy proposes that we use the "miracle" of personhood to destabilize and transform the mundane. I say that it is not enough to paste the compensation of "a beyond" to the disgrace of the mundane. Why does transcending the mundane have to mean withdrawing into a passive, esthetic sensibility--rather than acceding to a new, interpersonally palpable instrumental modality or action-system? Why is exaltation sought through withdrawn passivity rather than through action that destabilizes mundane reality?

Be an autonomous doer in the world, and accept the challenge of mundane existence without being dominated by inauthentic consciousness. Pierce the fads to discern the culture's substantial alternatives and conflicts--while holding fast to your insight and cultivating independent self-respect. Thereby you may resume advancing your insight with the versatility that comes from being steeled.

Of course, this may be terribly arduous. It may require not only isolation, but completely detaching from other people's judgments of you. John Alten would consider it maximizing the length of life in Hell. Alten's counsel was suicide. (To date, he has not taken his own advice.)

B. Language as Miraculous

Ancient mystical writings, superstitious as they were, had a point when they said that language is miraculous. To utter a word is either more than a '"physical event," or else it is not a word. The mystic has a point, that a declaration is already a miracle. Not the particular message, but being uttered at all.

To utter any linguistic expression is a miracle in the sense that language, the human natural languages, require a richer ontology for their possibility than natural science can ever explicitly comprehend. In other words, a self/world process with multiple incoherences, especially those relating to intersubjectivity, and motivation related to intersubjectivity. There is no artificial language. If language were as thin and sterile as modern scientistic formalisms make it, it couldn't exist.

All formal language theories are profoundly alienating in that they suggest that their pictures of a language being built up from recursively specifiable primitives--atomic elements and formation rules--can also serve as models of the conceptual genesis of language. But this is a nonsensical fantasy. Language as the medium of human thought does not and cannot arise by positing a few atomic notation-tokens, then positing a few primitive formation rules, etc. And all the more if the "actor" who is to posit is a machine, and language is to be an exchange of signals between machines, or a set of machine processes. Indeed, the notion is insanely alienated.

It makes more sense to say "Language does not exist" than to say that language can exist in the way the reductionists claim. That is, even though it is self-defeating to say "Language does not exist," this insolubilium is less foolish than claiming the existence of language on a reductionist basis. Insofar as language expresses any avowed, communicated thought whatever, language requires too much to be real. Or to turn it around, the existence of language requires conditions which are so strong that they can't obtain.

Nobody "indicates the empty event" or makes the void indication as first or only act of language. How can anybody convince him- or herself that "we" can posit ø, or stipulate the identity of 'a' and 'a', as our first act of consciousness? If that were all there were to language, if the twentieth-century positivist-formalist accounts of language exhausted language, then there wouldn't be any language. Not only is a massive assemblage of beliefs required before one can abstractly isolate an entity such as 'a'; a long evolution of motivations is required before computations with zero or the empty set are entertained and indulged. As a hypothetical first act of consciousness, thinking the empty set, or stipulating the identity of alphabetic signs, would have no motive. Sterility and sterilization are not beginnings; they are deaths, defeats.

If, to a contemporary person, scientism seems plausible, then the "contemporary person's" view of self is deluded and dishonest.

Hennix would say: The only perception which trivially satisfies the requirement that appearance and reality be identical is the void event. We have the act of ostension devoid of any classificatory significance: the void indication. So let there be a language consisting solely of this element.

But on the contrary. To isolate and posit 'a' as an entity presupposes massive, complex indoctrination. To know what it is to stipulate, as applied to an alphabetic sign, is derivative and perversely sophisticated. The intellectual act of isolating 'a' as an entity is high-order magic: presupposing an ontology more high-flown than Plato's Forms. Even to utter the letter 'a' in the knowledge that it is a phoneme (grapheme) abstracted from a natural language is already a procedure which cannot be explained by formalist scientism. Thus all twentieth-century positivist formalism--with its claims to arrive at a conundrum-free conceptual system through artificial logical constructions, and to account for language as a purely combinatorial phenomenon--must not only be wrong but demented.

The law 'a' = 'a' requires a vast structure of beliefs to undergird it semantically as well as a vast psychology to undergird it motivationally. That a tautology exists in the universe, or that a person understands a tautology, is not a tautology.

The isolated graphemic alphabetic 'a', zero, ø are artificial, anti-intuitive notions. Zero: the place before the earliest place, the non-amount amount, the collection which is an exactly demarcated collection of nothing. For science to suppose that a being who posits would come to these symbols first, and stop with them, shows the degree to which contemporary civilization misrepresents itself to itself. We don't even have to invoke the cognitive absurdity of positing zero in a vacuum; the motivational absurdity is enough. What would the motive be for pronouncing and stipulating ø, and nothing else?

"Positing ø" is an extremely sophisticated and reductionist abstraction which can only arise in a rich and alienated person-world. In order for a sentient creature to "posit the empty set," the "creature" could not be mere awareness, but would have to be a personal situation. Care, temporality--ahead of myself, already in the world, as being alongside entities within the world. Indeed, awareness alone cannot be lived experience. Awareness is tied to a world-apparition dimensioned by imputing contexts of objectivity. See SSF below, etc.

Hennix evidently wants a language, a medium of affirmative and indubitable proclamation, which consists solely of positing zero, of positing the identity of A and A ('A' and 'A')--and a few other axioms of this sort. Even more meager or pure would be an artificial language which consisted solely in positing zero. Discard the natural languages; replace them with this artificial language; and you can say everything that should be said, with the assurance of indubitability.

But this is a half-fantasy. The notion that language could be constituted by a machine which physically posits the empty set, and no more than that, is a nonsensical fantasy. The notion that a being who posits (whether a consciousness or a talking machine) would make the void indication only--because that is the minimum affirmative content or irreducible atom--is a nonsensical fantasy. To posit a single letter 'A', with the understanding that it is not a chicken-scratch but a graphemic alphabetic sub-object, identified in diverse occurrences, of speech: this is an act which, if it occurs at all, already transcends the outer boundaries of natural science. It requires an entire realm beyond science to subtend it.

A "creative subject"[8] which had nothing to posit but the empty set would instead posit nothing at all. Or: to pronounce zero, or the equality of a and a, presupposes not only the natural language, but also a cultural history in which natural language comes first and then is depersonalized by scientism.

The proposal that all language can be replaced by an artificial language consisting of a semigroup of order 3 is a culmination of formalist scientism. Nobody posits a semigroup of order 3 as second act of language.

Evidently Hennix supposes that we can have

languages,

lawlike objects and processes (i.e. with stratified structure),

rules

and yet eschew "metaphysical" avowals of objective identity over time, etc.

Compare Hennix's dicta with the way expositions of ultra-intuitionism unfold. Toposes & Adjoints is dense with equivocation and paradox. Another example: Yessenin-Volpin requires a shell game which has to be perpetually emended and never reaches closure.[9]

C. The Smallest Unit of Cognition

In personhood theory (a journalism of the person-world) constituents of cognitive thought have to be depicted in their personalistic wholeness. I began to make this point in Personhood II, SSD. In this perspective, the initial unit of (naive) conceptual thinking [the unit for philosophical criticism] is a "belief."

I utilize the English word "belief," which combines different yet correlated notions:

i) primarily an assertion, secondarily the mental act of espousing that assertion;

ii) primarily a thought, secondarily an assertion as embodiment of that thought.

Or: The initial unit of naive conceptual thinking is the relation of a given espoused belief to whatever it may address in immediate experience (if anything). (As when I believe that a seen table is solid.) Or: The initial unit of naive conceptual thinking is the espousing self relative to a given belief.

(The point is to choose a unit which does not require the person-world and yet deny it.)

The notion that an artificial primitive can be the smallest unit of cognitive thought is an aberration of the positivistic formalism of twentieth-century scientific culture. The words or letters which are concatenated to construct printed beliefs are not more elemental, primitive, or atomic than the beliefs themselves. Sub-sentential elements or formation algorithms/rules/procedures are discerned only in alienated retrospection.

The verbalized belief or quasi-sentence is the elemental unit of language in the genesis of communicative conceptual capacity. The analysis of the sentence into sub-sentential operators, variables, etc. is a later, sophisticated, and above all alienated exercise. Expressing the logical purist's position in rough-hewn lay terms, "letters precede words, words precede phrases, and phrases precede complete thoughts." But not in the person-world.

So the notion that

to make the void indication, or

to stipulate the identity of 'a' and 'a',

could logically precede belief is an aberration of formalist scientism. Also, the notion that we can have

languages,

lawlike objects and processes (i.e. with stratified structure),

rules

and yet eschew "metaphysical" avowals of objective identity over time, etc., is an aberration of formalist scientism. It is not just that the positing of an abstract nullity is derivative and artificial. Where would there be a motive for a sentient creature to posit ø, or 'a' = 'a', as its only act of "cognition"?

[An analogy is the division of zero by zero. Zero may seem elemental or primitive to the prevailing, inverted perspective; but actually nobody divides zero by zero as a first act of consciousness.]

[A different treatment is found in my 1961 Philosophy Proper, Chapter 2, where I intimate that a name ('table' as an appellative expression) can be elemental. That exercise was devoted to rudimentary objective requirements for a factual statement to exist objectively. I wanted to force into the open the relation of language to the actual world--so that a true assertion would be one warranted by conditions in the world. Assertions became ostensions of the second order. For a word to be a name, it has to be determinate to which, of all things, application of the word is true; and I didn't say how that determination got established. The result was to show that even this rudimentary exercise in laying open the relation of language to the actual world was indefensible. The point is that my invocation of names as elemental in Philosophy Proper is not in competition with the treatment of language in personhood theory. The two approaches converged in Part IV of this manuscript.]

D. Is Radicalism Confined to the Adoption of Vantage-Points?

Hennix proposes to give us the possibility of using a meager inventory of elements ad lib. So the "radical" results achieved come as the consequence of gratuitous stipulations. The only legitimate intervention of consciousness in the machinery is freedom of stipulation, freedom to impose stipulation on an inert objectivity. Epistemological liberation consists in the freedom to adopt one or another vantage-point gratuitously.[10]

Given a circle with a horizontal diameter, you may choose to see a screwhead or a globe or a porthole or all three at the same time. It is a choice with no problem of truth, and more important, no problem of consistency. The class of vantage-points and projected completions is treated in such a way that the question of whether they are true or consistent (as if they made assertions) is avoided. There is no issue of truth or self-consistency or consistency with each other. Adoption of a vantage-point, the Zeitgeist says, is a choice, a choice without truth-risk. Cognitive freedom consists in the gratuitous varying of vantage-points or varying of projected completions. Since the vantage-points are not admitted to express assertions, there is no problem of truth or consistency in adopting many vantage-points at the same time. So adoption of a vantage-point is comparable to a gratuitous stipulation.

More pointedly, consistency is axiomatic. This leaves as the only mode of interaction of awareness and object--and as the only source of innovation--freedom of choice or flexibility.

But the result is that the firmest part of reality is no more than the adoption of a sensibility. A vantage-point is a choice, and the only consequences of the choice are esthetic. The trouble with whimsy is that it cannot compel anyone who will not indulge you. Only by opening a road running from one's present location can you compel anyone intellectually. Hennix's road does not intersect our present location at any level except that of symbolic machinery.

Hennix doesn't consider: How does the language in which stipulations are declared get established?

And: Why can't the ego which does the stipulating and the object on which the stipulation is imposed be reciprocally influential? Meta-technology seizes on noncontingent paradoxes or other cognitive fault-lines or slippages in the phenomenal realm. I then have undeniable instabilities which can be combined to force the way to alternate world-determinations. These outcomes cannot be belittled as mere esthetic postures.

E. New Languages or Cultural Media

Personhood theory has turned up aspects of "consciousness," the "ego," etc. which strict meta-technology overlooked, but which overlap with and affect meta-technological elements. We have the following family of languages to consider.

1. episodic memory

2. Rorschach blots

3. sound environments (ISEs)

4. person-world patterns

1. An experiential or episodic memory can itself be considered a proposition: you have a fantasized past (content) plus an attitude which attributes realism to that fantasy (a truth-claim).

This approach "eliminates" all experiential memories by co-opting them to language. They are co-opted, re-construed as a private language. Like eliminating "paper-defaced-with-ink-stains" by co-opting it as "writing."

The problem of a purely private "wordless" language has been solved: pictorial or episodic memories form the assertions in such a language. ["This happened."] But this language has the texture of life, not of formalist scientism. (But even here, the "attitude of avowal" is self-deceiving as per "The Flaws Underlying Beliefs" in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization.)

A language of experiential memories in dreams. In the realms such that "the personal past changes to correspond to what you think it is," such a memory-proposition would be self-fulfillingly true.

2. A language whose words are Rorschach ink-blots. This comes from Hennix's idea that the only legitimate intervention of consciousness is freedom of stipulation, freedom to impose arbitrary stipulation on an inert objectivity. I reviewed that in SSD.

3. See my and Hennix's 1979 documents on ISEs.

4. The person-world itself as a notation, or situation in which notation and meaning can be identified (?) [delimited?]. The person-world is a "pattern." But not a pattern of external inert things. It is a pattern of meanings (?incipiently semantic consciousness-events) which comprise the precondition, the constituents, of lived experience.

A decomposable language vs. an indecomposable language. States of the person-world as language: formalist scientism cannot misrepresent this language as the notation-side only. One cannot pretend that subjective mentation is not involved. The next section elaborates.

F. A Language on the Person-World

Two profound questions have turned up on the edge between my "literal empiricism" and the person-world approach. One is the question of unexpressed or unverbalized beliefs.

The other is the question of differentiating possibly false beliefs from whatever "self of the present" can espouse beliefs or detach from them. This latter question is "paradoxical" because the self itself may be inflated by beliefs. It is an imminent[11] self which is a puzzle. The longitudinally unified self, with its social-thematic identity, is easily ascribed to belief.

My treatment of these topics in not uniform in all my writings, because sometimes I am addressing ultimate issues and sometimes I am being a principled hypocrite (manipulating plausibility).

[This discussion is referenced to "Studies in the Person-World," written in 1985, well after the notes for this manuscript were begun. All italicized outline numbers refer to "Studies." Supplementary references are Part IV above; "The Immediate Sense of Self" (July 1982); my original treatment of belief/believer differentiation in Blueprint, pp. 54-60.]

An unverbalized expectation, as of a person playing "catch," that the ball is about to be thrown at him or her, installs a mirage-like depth[12] in the personal totality: the future is imaginatively projected even though belief in the future may be philosophically flawed. The expectation in question can be re-conceived as an "assertion" of the reality of the future, inasmuch as it imaginatively projects a future, and also gives credence to it (attribution of realism to the future).

Consider that in a dream you experience a complete world with past, future, material objects, other people, and even a specific past for yourself which, upon awaking, you dismiss as a mirage. Is my fear in a dream a genuine fear?--is my self in a dream a genuine self? Given the judgment that the entire dream is a private subjective "mirage." Awaking from a dream in a dream. What is the reality-type of a dream in a dream?

I now refer to "Studies," C.5.a through C.5.c; to Part IV above; and to "The Immediate Sense of Self." My point about unverbalized expectation can be broadened to the entire person-world. The entire person-world has a mirage-like depth that comes from acts of recognition, memories, expectations, perceptions of deficits, etc.--which may be unverbalized. The "depth" of the person-world is a mirage installed by believing or by imputing contexts of objectivity. (Part IV, I.B.1.)

What obtains when this depth is not projected? Radical unbelief.[13] (Compare the end of "Studies," A.3.b; and A.3.c.) There is no explicit recognition or memory because neither the surroundings nor your mind disturbs you. Tranquility serves as absence of anything in particular. There is the occasion here for a profound analysis of the edge between "literal empiricism" and the person-world. But such an analysis of wordlessness would be (principled) hypocracy. (Again, A.3.c.)

If "depth" is meant as a literal reference to space, used as a simile--and not as a term assimilated to "psychology"--then the analogy may be inappropriate. The seen field has perspective. Belief takes this as radial distance. Flat totality vs. dimensioned totality: is there a cogent parallel? [No. Suspension of belief is as if one could turn perspective off.]

Moving to the present proposal, it is to re-conceive the person-world as a wordless global assertion, which imaginatively projects the entire unverbalized self/world-depth and at the same time gives credence to it (attribution of realism). This proposal does not improve my philosophical analysis, but it is not meant to. It creates a linguistic entity of an unexpected sort. Here is an "assertion" such that neither the notation-token nor the pattern of notation nor a meaning is objectifiable. Hence, a counter-example to formalist scientism.

In other words, here is a way of asserting, without words, "my past, my future, familiar objects spatially spread out, etc." (Radical unbelief doesn't assert, of course.)

What is unusual is that instead of using fantasy, visualization, etc., I'm using perception. "Studies," C.2 notwithstanding, perception is usually taken as self-validating. If you see a table, a table is there.

Is it worthwhile, valuable to have a nonobjectified linguistic expression if that expression is just "inert"?

Don't incipiently semantic consciousness-events have to have natural-language formulations? How can they comprise a language of wordless assertions?

But the person-world is composite; its organization could be conceived as a syntax.

Use the person-world to do proof-theoretic tree-structures. A implies B means that A and B are modes of existence and there is more centered activation (of self) in B. (Fever "implies" alert waking?)

G. Escape to an Outside or to an Above?

Hennix held the following. "Humans whose native language is a natural language cannot make mathematical logic work or consistently conceive that-which-is. Yet, a superior sentience with a flawless language can make mathematical logic work, and conceive that-which-is consistently." The superior medium of thought of the superior sentience is an extension of the approach of formalist scientism, except that it is has no faults, no junctures of embarrassment. Even if mundane thought can't make formalist scientism work, a superior sentience could. A system of stable affirmative truth (or certainty) analogous to, or extrapolating, formalist scientism could be made to work without contradiction and without faith, by a superior being possessing a pristine, flawless artificial medium of thought.

Carnap asked, can a god teach us metaphysical knowledge (i.e. that "idealism is true as opposed to materialism"). I ask, can a god teach us any affirmative truth which is flawless? Isn't the latter notion like an autosuggestive delusion in the person-world?

What does my "Is there language?" trap say about the superior sentience's chances to consistently conceive that-which-is? The claim that a superior sentience could do mathematics without the errors which mundane thought cannot avoid is a nonsensical fantasy.

Hennix never accepted my "Co-optation of Failure Theorems as the Sustaining Strategy of Mathematics" (from Anti-Mathematics). Hennix claimed that mathematics is something more perfect than a politically adjusted superstition.[14]

Hennix cannot admit that the richness of the doctrine derives from "allowed" paradoxes. Indeed, consistency is posited as a foremost test of the non-negligibility of an activity. (The most important problem in mathematics is the consistency of set theory.) And Hennix's system is claimed to be more true than others because it is uniquely contradiction-free. Yet Hennix's results involve the re-conceiving of what classically were obvious contradictions so that they are now seen as contradiction-free novelties. (One example: Hennix extends Yessenin-Volpin's thesis that 2 can be an infinite number.) What this amounts to is a hypnotic deformation of our logical perceptions. The reason why this feat is possible is that the subject-matter of mathematics already, always consisted of disguised, "allowed" contradictions.

We are asked to consider a superior sentience which is outside natural-language enculturation and outside the mundane world. For us to discuss such a being requires us to be beyond our own conceptual boundaries. This is a direct inconsistency or incoherence discussed in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization ("Philosophical Reflections"). The proposal takes one or another purported objectivity as self-subsistent and not subject to doubt; and then castigates us for being too imperfect to be able to make the objectivist belief work, to be able to vindicate it. Rather than asking whether the objectivity is a hoax.

Hennix's notion of how you escape. "Ordinary language is an evil which is transcended by formalist scientism; further, if there are difficulties in formalist scientism, then a higher mind can solve them even if you can't." This is ill-conceived. It starts from the mythology of twentieth-century science, then goes to a less tenable position to defend the myth. The slogan of a logically perfect science is twentieth-century misdirection, insincerity. It is strategically an ill-advised ground for a critique of the inherited culture to stand on, because it perpetuates one of the principal components of depersonalization. If you really were superior, you wouldn't view formalist scientism as the corrective to mundane existence. The dream that somewhere outside the mundane world there are superior beings with a logically perfect version of twentieth-century science is a nonsensical fantasy.

It is a miscalculation to suppose that the way to escape the ordinary or everyday world is to get outside it. The ordinary or everyday world, which was enthroned as the only real world by Kant and by the phenomenologists, is an "outside." The goal of getting outside of the ordinary world--the notion that philosophical quibbles, which arise because of the limitations of our intellects, would all be solved for a superior sentence/being which would apprehend the entire universe as immediate experience, and think in a higher, problem-free artificial (formal) language--is a fantasy which multiplies the nonsensical fantasies of scientific cosmology. To repeat, there is a profound miscalculation here.

The way beyond the ordinary world is an immanent way which is reached by exploiting the instabilities in the ordinary world and by withholding conventional credulity.

Let me characterize the perspective of plasticizing reality, presented in Blueprint, as it reflects on personhood. (I had not coined the term "meta-technology" at the time of Blueprint.) Start from an immanent[15] posture of radical unbelief. Blueprint promises the power to rotate reality--through a combination of principled hypocracy (selecting your arenas of engagement), and destabilization. Meta-technology: immanent destabilization of the ambient medium of thought, of "mundane consciousness." Then you engage the mundane world in order to press the consequences of its incoherences.

[Meta-technology does not defend the social-thematic ego. It proceeds directly from cognitive nihilism through radical empiricism to the unstable structures of an advanced civilization--and starts acting to metamorphose the determination of reality. All the while, it has an unexamined commitment to a self-respecting, energized, persistent self. Then the meta-technological rotation--the new interdependencies or mental abilities--transform the unexamined self.]

Hennix proposes to confront mundane consciousness with a higher, outside experience-world assembled from pristine elements. The avenues: sound environments; psychedelics. It is only with regard to sound environments; psychedelic experience; [being confronted by a person who is more advantaged than me?] that "getting outside" the mundane experience-world has plausibility (to me). Even conceding that, my points remain:

a. We must have handholds for change.

b. Everyday life understands itself as a realm of coherent fact. That understanding is a myth to be exploded.

My view is that anything that can function as a "natural" cultural vehicle and communal means of communication (common sense) will have incoherences. Thus, an instrumental modality must be composed of the incoherences. You shouldn't want to escape to a linguistically embodied stable affirmative doctrine. One would have to fantasize nonhumans as agents of Hennix's vision; and the wait for these nonhumans would be a cargo cult.

Hennix wants to escape the mundane world in a direction which exists only in the mythology of formalist scientism. The consequence is that the ecstatic states must have an autosuggestive delusive component which Hennix cannot acknowledge.

My meta-technological perspective is that one maneuvers through the contradictions; they are never resolved. (At least not for thought which insists on being recognizable as logic/mathematics.) If the communal culture is an action-system of awareness/objectivity interdependencies, then subjective immediacy and the grandiose other, instead of being counterposed, become continuous. Out of subjective immediacy grows a power over scientific objectivity. I view consecration as exaltation deriving from escape from mundane credulity, and from achieving manipulative power over the determination of reality. Engage the mundane in order to destabilize it. Fragment it and use the fragments as raw material for alternate reality.

The method which Hennix evidently follows is motivated by the emotional unacceptability of such an orientation as "swimming in chaos." "Surely there must somewhere be the affirmative certainty which we presume but don't have--and a world whose perfection shames the mundane world. Surely the way to such a paradise is to divide thinking so finely that no space is left for error." Hennix links a claim to confront the mundane world from a god-like standpoint with a claim to propound an immaculate system of logic. Hennix mistakes a privative extrapolation from the person-world for an immaculate science above the person-world's incoherences. I don't deny that this approach may inspire awesome feats. But it is not compatible with the widest powers to plasticize reality.--And those powers are what I want.

If Hennix delivered technological feats, they would be based on a world-conception which is a massive category error. To the extent that Hennix's instrumental knowledge was a sort of meta-technology, it would still contain traditionally rationalist errors of principle which would constrict the feats eventually.

My meta-technology devises avenues of escape from the mundane experience-world. But it does not accomplish this by purporting to start from an artificial, immaculate world of logical consistency and certainty. Indeed: The "Is there language?" trap guarantees that the fantasy of an immaculate logic is nonsense. Rather than trying to start from an immaculate world, meta-technology engages the mundane world so astutely and so completely that the world falls to pieces--thereby meta-technology gains a degree of freedom as to how to re-integrate it.

My approach draws the following objections from logical purists. Contradictions are untrustworthy sources of knowledge; they are cognitive garbage. Further, ordinary thought as expressed by natural language is widely agreed to be cognitively contaminated. Thus, my approach avows at the start that its medium is cognitive garbage or cognitive contamination. All I am doing is moving the contaminants around, stirring up the contaminants, showing how to tunnel from one contaminant to another. To avowedly base a theory in contamination is hopeless; it will never yield any progress.

My opponents would say that it is necessary to start from knowledge-atoms which are pristine and flawless, which transcend the vicissitudes of the world, which are unaffected by the processes of personhood. And then, proceeding by incontestable, radiantly self-evident laws of thought, to accumulate or construct a "paradise" of certainty and codified stipulations. In contrast, what I call my studies of logic give endings without beginnings--and that doesn't make sense.

My position must be that any plausibility these objections have is spurious; and that the spurious plausibility is produced by a long and tangled sequence of bad judgments. Logical purism is an accumulation of acute miscalculations.

If we are talking about the quest for certainties, laws of thought, codified stipulations, or codified rules, in any shared, remotely recognizable sense of those phrases, then that quest has been annulled by the "Is there language?" trap.

Meta-technology, then, is willing to engage the established shared medium of thought (which includes natural language). As opposed to the dehumanizing subversion of the natural language by technification, I spotlight anomalies which subvert or undermine the medium of thought to break the framework of objectivity. (I spotlight the interaction of logics with personhood.) I seek to potentiate the anomalies to make a path, out of the established medium, which other people can traverse.

H. Withdrawal to Esthetic Gratification?

The purist (e.g. L.E.J. Brouwer) may rarify his position to the point of announcing that the system was never intended as anything but a purely private gratification; that it is not supposed to be accessible to other people. "The talk of 'certainties' etc. is meant in no shared or remotely recognizable sense." It is precisely a tactic of avoidance such as this one that must not be given the benefit of the doubt. If one means that one possesses intrinsically communicable ideas which others are not ready for, that is what one must say. On the other hand, an essentially nontransferrable gratification would not have been trumpeted to other people in the first place.

If one claims that there is something which deserves to be called truth which begins in a shared lore (arithmetic) and yet is not transferrable from one person to another, then just that claim is the most unexpected and the most controversial. (It denies the unity of the human species.) Its substantiation would become the entire content of foundations of mathematics. To put the claim at the end of foundations of mathematics as a throwaway line is merely silly.

An extreme discrepancy in Hennix's stance in the Seventies: Hennix was not a recluse, yet urged an encapsulated salvation. Is the mundane collectivity to remain unchanged, while alternate reality is built in one person? The unlikelihood of "ecstasy in one person" while all the surrounding society (collectivity) stays the same. This is one reason why it is implausible to achieve consecration by starting inside a superior medium which does not touch other people.

My position is that the new culture must in principle be applicable to a collectivity, even if it is slow to spread. You can "escape" by withdrawing psychologically and interacting with others only via pretense. But that is not enough.

Be an autonomous doer in the world, and accept the challenge of mundane existence without being dominated by inauthentic consciousness. Pierce the fads to discern the culture's substantial alternatives and conflicts--while holding fast to your insight and cultivating independent self-respect. Thereby you may resume advancing your insight with the versatility that comes from being steeled.

Of course, this may be terribly arduous. It may require not only isolation, but completely detaching from other people's judgments of you.

By the time of Blueprint, my perspective had become one of a higher civilization, or the supersession of scientific culture. This involves principled hypocracy: an egressive process anchored in the inherited culture. I envision meta-technology as a panoramic program of new sciences.

Meta-technology cannot be realized to a significant degree as long as it is confined to the minds of a few outcasts. It cannot be realized in a society in which the majority has a menial role and needs to be kept in the dark, and so endures a pedestrian existence. These conclusions would ultimately conflict with a division of society into castes, especially if the mentally creative cadres remained a small, atypical group. A future classless utopia (nothing like formerly existing socialism) is required.

A higher civilization cannot be complete in one individual. A transformation of a culture cannot be complete in one mind. Having a way of overmastering scientific technology (of neutralizing atomic bombs, of making bridges fall down by logical arguments) could not be confined in one individual's mind. I don't try to build a higher civilization in one mind for the same reason I don't try to establish an economic system in one mind. Economic systems are relations of inter-personhood. Inter-personhood is the only arena in which higher civilizations and cultural transformations and the neutralizing of atomic bombs might occur. To imagine that a higher civilization could be confined to one mind is to shrink higher civilization to the level of private gratification.

In this context, the inherited shared language, already problematic for us, is upstaged by the issue of acceding to a superior vehicle for the transmission of cultural values. Then a superior vehicle for the transmission of cultural values inside one mind would be a collapsed case (a mnemonic). Cultural vehicles are relations among people, relations of inter-personhood. The relationships constitute the realm where cultural vehicles subsist.

This is not to fall into sociology's religion of Society. "Society" is an objectification which the enchanted community would supersede, ideally. And people are backward. But I don't take this as an occasion for congratulating myself. The backward people are very much one of the limits of the illumination possible to me. They are a major unsolved problem. They occupy the territory where cultural vehicles subsist. I am not dogmatic about what I am going to do about backward people; but to announce as a principle that I am going to do nothing about them is hopeless.

It isn't accidental that I make my later ideas out of steps which can be retraced by other people. I require that my ideas be made out of steps which can be retraced by other people. If realized, my program won't accidentally be a technology, it won't accidentally have consequences in the interpersonal realm, it won't accidentally impact upon people who don't welcome it.--My research program is organized around the demand that this should happen.

I. Meta-Technology in the Person-World

How do a few of the primitive elements and tactics of meta-technology appear in the person-world framework?

Objectifying personhood is maintained by "mechanical skills" analogous to arithmetical calculation. Conventional collation of sensations; following verbal commands like a trained animal.

The Necker cube, the waterfall illusion, ringing in the ears already are outside the realm of stable object-gestalts.

If people should take their nonreplicable experiences seriously and verbalize about them without hyperbole, that be unobjectionable, and yet would erode consensus reality.

Personhood theory mentions the paradoxes of common sense perfunctorily. Only certain large incoherences are spelled out analytically.

Intersensory discorrelation: the possibility of collating sensations according to a different rationale which abolishes the object-gestalt.

The Necker cube: a two-dimensional image is perceived as three-dimensional, having two potential orientations which can be realized voluntarily or involuntarily. Multistability?:

Try not to think about whether you are

voluntarily thinking about what you are

thinking about.

Intricate ideologies are concocted to hide from people that language is more than a computational algorithm. My Necker-cube stroke-numerals set up diffraction effects among comprehended meaning, notation-tokens, volition, perception-as-illusion. This technique already is a departure from ordinary personhood.

Strict meta-technology takes aim at the "mechanical skills." [Which early personhood theory portrays superficially.] Meta-technology shows paths which go outside objectifying personhood.

But: If the mechanical skills maintain objectifying personhood, personhood theory tells you what maintains the mechanical skills. The overall situation in which loyalty to mechanical skills and conventional paths is accounted for. Scrambled causation.

Next: invent meta-technological procedures using personalistic subjectivities.

The person-world constituents of my process of innovation (which would include formation of a non-reductionist module). There is an integral (integrated?) leap of (insight) inspiration: this supplies the import, the thematic axis, the hint which solves some large problem. The remaining detail is a matter of arranging a delicately balanced compromise. The integrated, eclectic solution which "tunes" heterogeneous elements.

J. Meta-Technology and the Self

The word dignity was introduced in the discussion by Hennix in 17 Points on Intensional Logics.[16] Setting aside the search for a definition of the word by Hennix, and inferring from the available writings by Hennix from that period, we arrive at a liaison between several related meanings. Namely

1) Freedom of one's personal and worthy activities (and composure and fragile sensibility) from the harassment of other people's sick thoughts and mundane demands.

2) A state of composure and delicate sensibility.

3) The achievement of a preferred, extra-mundane state of being or action. (A state for which I prefer the word "consecration.")

I subsequently took up the word dignity with a different motivation. As I have remarked at length, the attempt to convey the post-scientific program was stymied by a prevalent self-abasement specific to contemporary civilization. The question became, what constituents must the personal totality encompass for this phenomenon of self-abasement to arise? Also: lack of dignity in the sense that people are helpless in the face of a culture which degrades them.

I thoroughly explored that approach to dignity in Part II, SSH. There, I noted that dignity may be bound up with thematic personal identity. Or: at a decreased level of credulity, constituents of dignity may be exposed as mirage-like.

At the same time, I noted that there may be aspects of dignity--in my perspective--which are not bound up with one's thematic identity.

1) Escape from the framework of objectivity.

2) Freedom from credulity. Radical unbelief. Consecration. (The latter are not coextensive. That is the topic of this Part.)

Let me conclude by appraising meta-technology's bypassing of the question of dignity.

Again summarizing the venture of plasticizing reality, "radical empiricism" is the vantage-point. One is enabled to rotate the determination of reality--through a combination of principled hypocracy (selecting one's arenas of engagement), and destabilization. Meta-technology: immanent destabilization of the ambient medium of thought, of "mundane consciousness." Then you engage the mundane world in order to press the consequences of its incoherences. Accommodate, or engage, the delusion in order to destabilize and metamorphose it. To move from one determination of reality to another. Intervene in the ordinary world to undermine and transform it.

But who and what is the doer? Meta-technology has no commitment to the social-thematic ego. But that does not settle the issue. Engaging the mundane world in order to rotate the determination of reality presupposes centered activation

- which is self-respecting and inwardly assured

- which admits "skeptical detachment"

- which is energized

- which is analytical

- which is persistent.

This self goes unexamined in meta-technology (which does not try to provide a comprehensive creed).

Engaged in meta-technology, you plasticize, metamorphose "reality." You gain access to what is beyond ordinary personhood by actively metamorphosing the ostensible world or ordinary person-world. You dissociate to plasticize/mutate; and then to eliminate the subject-object interface.--Always within the palpable (not necessarily the ostensible). You get rid of ordinary personhood to swim in uncanniness.

I view consecration as exaltation deriving from escape from mundane credulity, and from achieving manipulative power over the determination of reality. Engage the mundane in order to destabilize it. Fragment it and use the fragments as raw material for alternate reality.

Whoever has the capacity to "rotate" the ostensible world or cultural determination of reality is in a position to make him/herself disappear to him/herself--without reductionist half-fantasies.

From the vantage point of radical empiricism, your longitudinal identity would have to be a catalyst which would be discarded. You make yourself disappear to yourself in a non-depersonalizing way. This is visionary, of course.

Let me contrast with older notions of "manifesting enlightenment" and "ecstasy." Meta-technology is not an enterprise of getting rid of matter, and then ego. You do not dissociate to escape to mind, and then to mind-beyond-mind. Rather, one accedes to a world and a technology (praxis) which are not things.

Condensed References

Henry Flynt:

Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan, 1975)

"Proposal for a Geniuses' Liberation Project" (1975); cf. Ausgabe Nr. 1, Berlin, May 1976

"The Radicalism of Unbelief," in Ikon magazine (Fall-Winter 1982-3)

"The Apprehension of Plurality," in Io #41: Being = Space X Action (l989)

Christer Hennix:

Ultra-Recursion, the Theory of Methods, and the Splitting of the Notion of Effectiveness (1981)

17 Points on Intensional Logics for Intransitive Experiences, in HESE LOGIC & INTENSIONAL LOGICS, pamphlet, New York, Feb. 7, 1979

L.E.J. Brouwer, "Mathematik, Wissenschaft und Sprache" (publ. 1929)

in Collected Works, Vol. 1, ed. A. Heyting

Rudolf Carnap, "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache," Erkenntnis 2 (1931). Cf. "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language," in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer.

Algebraic Theory of Machines, Languages, and Semi-Groups, ed. Michael A. Arbib (1968)

A. S. Yessenin-Volpin, "About Infinity, Finiteness, and Finitization," in Constructive Mathematics, ed. Fred Richman (1981)

[1]Because my reading of Hennix's views may only be a personal impression, I have separated my account of these views from this manuscript.

[2]This manuscript was not meant to have an exposition of meta-technology. That is found in other of my writings.

[3]E.g. Frege, Brouwer, early Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, Markov, Skinner, Shannon-Weaver, Chomsky, Montague, Michael Arbib.

[4]Cf. Christer Hennix, "Ultra-Recursion, The Theory of Methods, and the Splitting of the Notion of Effectiveness" (1981).

[5]For a submission on this very point, see Alfred Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics (1956), p. 174.

[6]Specifically, the concatenation semigroup with unit (of order 3). Hennix's black-and-white algebra.

[7]There is an integral (integrated?) leap of (insight) inspiration: this supplies the import, the thematic axis, the hint which solves some large problem. The remaining detail is a matter of arranging a delicately balanced compromise. The integrated, eclectic solution which "tunes" heterogeneous elements.

[8]Brouwer, Hennix.

[9]"Philosophically, there might be some limits to this program of justifications but I don't consider that a reason for not pursuing it as far as possible. ... creative critical thought should not be curtailed even if new questions continue to arise indefinitely." From A. S. Yessenin-Volpin, "About Infinity, Finiteness, and Finitization."

[10]This view, which has a precedent in Yessenin-Volpin, must manifest some twentieth-century Zeitgeist--since it recapitulates Husserl's notion of freedom of thought, a notion which also appears in Merleau-Ponty.

[11]"Imminent" seems better here than "immanent." Cf. "Personhood II."

[12]Possibly in a different sense from "Studies," C.2. Also, see below on the appropriateness of the parallel between visual-field vs. space and flat totality vs. dimensioned totality.

[13]Cf. "Is Incredulity Self-Defeating?" (1980 and after).

[14]But in the mid-Eighties, Hennix began to tell me that key junctures in twentieth-century mathematics were co-opted failures: Löwenheim-Skolem; nonstandard integers; [omega]-inconsistency; Church (1936)--recursive sets which are not intuitively decidable; Feferman (1960); Visser (1982). I started to write about this, as "On the Scientificity of Mathematics" (not finished).

[15]Thus; not "imminent."