A book in process:
Full text of “Holism And Evolution”
The Analysis Of Mind, Bertrand Russell
Mind and Time
Mind and Time
.
MIND standpoint: EGO SUM QUI SUM
First Chapter of Speculum mentis I: Self & MIND
.
KNOWLEDGE Perspectives
Second Chapter of Speculum mentis II: THE MAP KNOWLEDGE
.
ORIENTATION Frame of reference
Third Chapter 0f Speculum mentis III: GNOSIS
.
PROJECTION & VISION Future of Humanity
Fourth Chapter of Speculum mentis IV: TIME & MIND
“Ve alleme âdeme‘l–esmâe küllehâ”
Quran, Bakara/31
naming.
“God has conceded two sights to a man-
One of man’s whole work, time’s completed plan,
The other of the minute’s work, man’s first
Step to the plan’s completeness.”
from Browning’s Sordello
.
“in culpa est animus qui se non effugit unquam”
that mind is at fault which never escapes itself
Horace
.
“True wisdom is less presuming than folly.
The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind;
the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not;
he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.”
Akhenaton
.
. “What is necessarily determined in Space,
is contingent, in Time.”
A Turkish Mystic
.
Speculum mentis/ GUIDEMAP of “Ego sum qui sum”
.
.
|
8 |
All things are hard: man cannot explain them by word. The eye is not filled with seeing, neither is the ear filled with hearing. |
cunctae res difficiles non potest eas homo explicare sermone non saturatur oculus visu nec auris impletur auditu |
In order to expound my ‘speculum mentis’, the mirror of my mind, I will initiate by drawing a guiding map of the mind and the knowledge.
.
“per speculum videmus in aenigmate;
et ex parte cognoscimus,
et ex parte prophetamus.”
.
.
MIND my standpoint: EGO SUM QUI SUM
First Chapter of Speculum mentis I: Self & MIND
.
- Identity, Self-awareness, Self & Mind
We need guiding principles for an orientation which is the outcome of a special perspective. Hence, the standpoint is the most decisive factor of any historical research. If the standpoint is accepted as the personality of the man; then, the results he gets from his historical search are the natural outcomes of his choices. I can add that if you employ an ‘intensional logic’ to evaluate the predicates of propositions, your mind might be restricted by your value-added language too. But you have to see yourself from outside and go beyond your limitations; “in culpa est animus qui se non effugit unquam.”: The guilty party is the mind which never escapes itself.
Story of Moses as a metaphore of identity problem and self-identiy
In order to expound my ‘speculum mentis’, what I see in the mirror of my mind, I will draw your attention to a very strange and famous story which is about the life of Moses, as it was told in the book of Genesis. Because it seemed to me, as if, this story included the most illustrative metaphore which could be interpereted in such a way that would be a rich source for a critical discussion of consciousnes; there is a rich, resourceful cultural heritage about this story which illuminates the self-identity problem and the real identiy of absolute selfhood…
Verba sunt speculum mentis. ‘The words are the looking-glass of the heart,’ they show what is within.
Once, I was writing an article about “Man, Existence and Time”; and I was willing to stress the problem of ever changing body of human self, comparing it with the changeless self-identity of God. And naturally, I had chosen the famous phrase “ego sum qui sum” as the opening sentence of that article. And though I was not sure then, I felt that this phrase is spoken from such an altitude and has such a high magnitude and quality that it could be uttered only by God, and probably on Mount Sinai. And then, although I repeatedly looked at the Torah to find this phrase I had failed to locate it, so then I stated it reluctantly as “It is said that, God said to Moses: ‘I AM WHO AM’ at the Mount Sinai.”
. Here is the details of the story as it was told in Old Testament, Exodus 3:14:
|
1 |
Now Moses fed the sheep of Jethro, his father in law, the priest of Madian: and he drove the flock to the inner parts of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, Horeb. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 |
|
2 |
And the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he saw that the bush was on fire, and was not burnt. |
|
3 |
And Moses said: I will go, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. |
|
4 |
And when the Lord saw that he went forward to see, he called to him out of the midst of the bush. and said: Moses, Moses. And he answered: Here I am. |
|
5 |
And he said: Come not nigh hither, put off the shoes from thy feet; for the place, whereon thou standest, is holy ground. |
|
6 |
And he said: I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses hid his face: for he durst not look at God. |
|
7 |
And the Lord said to him: I have seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of the rigour of them that are over the works; |
|
8 |
And knowing their sorrow, I am come down to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land into a good and spacious land, into a land that floweth with milk and honey, to the places of the Chanaanite, and Hethite, and Amorrhite, and Pherezite, and Hevite, and Jebusite. |
|
9 |
For the cry of the children of Israel is come unto me: and I have seen their affliction, wherewith they are oppressed by the Egyptians. |
|
10 |
But come, and I will send thee to Pharao, that thou mayst bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. |
|
11 |
And Moses said to God: Who am I that I should go to Pharao, and should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? |
|
12 |
And he said to him: I will be with thee; and this thou shalt have for a sign that I have sent thee: When thou shalt have brought my people out of Egypt, thou shalt offer sacrifice to God upon this mountain. |
|
13 |
Moses said to God: Lo, I shall go to the children of Israel, and say to them: The God of your fathers hath sent me to you. If they shall say to me: What is his name? What shall I say to them? |
|
14 |
dixit Deus ad Mosen EGO SUM QUI SUM ait sic dices filiis Israhel qui est misit me ad vos. God said to Moses: I AM WHO I AM. He said: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, hath sent me to you. “I am has sent me to you.” |
|
15 |
And God said again to Moses: Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: The Lord God of your fathers the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob hath sent me to you; this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. |
“Ego sum qui sum”, (“ʼèhyè ʼăšèr ʼèhyè, אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה” in hebrew and translated into arabic
as أَهْيَهِ الَّذِي أَهْيَه ) ) translated as “I am who I am”, “I am what I am” or “I am what I will be”. Thus defined self-identity of God with this semantically self-referential name. This is an act of true “Naming” of the selfhood of God by Jahve himself. Name means identity, since we have to name something to identify it’s individual existence which differs from everything else. Aforementioned “naming” phrase is true by definition being an auto-logical and tautological statement (simply because of saying the same thing twice) “I am who I am”. From the semantical viewpoint, again, “Naming something” is an important act which is considered as a magical act which empowers you to control the thing implied by the name. “Naming” enables us to describe and distinguish the “identity” of an individualized entity. Here is the first naming of Yahve which could be interpreted almost as “who he is” (ya huve\ yâ hû: which turkish people use too much in daily language ) in arabic. “Ego sum qui sum” reminds me the famous dictum of Hallac: “Ene’l-Hak”: (I am truth, I exist absolutely forever without change). Again, when Caliph Ali hears the dictum that “Once there was God and nothing else besides him”, he replies that; “el-ân kemâ kâne”: “now is the same as before”. That is, nothing changed in this present time too, there is no real existence except God.
The word Ehyeh literally means “I will be”. This is a name given by God to identify himself in the Burning Bush, the importance of this phrase stems from the Hebrew conception of monotheism that God exists by himself for himself, and is the uncreated Creator who is independent of any concept, force, or entity; therefore “I am who I am” (ongoing, permanent).
existential Standpoint: cosmic consciousness: Ego sum qui sum: “Dixit Deus ad Mosen: ‘ego sum qui sum’, ait; ’sic dices filiis Israhel ‘qui est’ misit me ad vos’ .”:…
Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh
“God said to Moses, ‘Ehyeh asher ehyeh’ (I will be what I will be), and He said, “So shall you say to the children of Israel, ‘Ehyeh’ (I will be) has sent me to you.”
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh in Hebrew. This is a Divine Name (Shevuoth 35a), and it is therefore not translated by the Targum. It denotes that God has absolute existence (Moreh Nevukhim 1:63; cf. Septuagint), and that He is outside the realm of time (Sforno). According to the Kabbalists, this Name denotes the Crown (Kether) of creation, that is, the very first thought and impulse of Will that initiated the creative process. Hence it is ‘I will be,’ since at the time of that impulse, everything was in the future. This first thought is identified with the idea of Israel (Bereshith Rabbah 1:5; Berakhoth 6a; Tikkuney Zohar 17a; see God Man and Tefillin, p. 35 ff.). This name was revealed now that God was about to create the nation Israel.
Moreover it is semantically a self-referential identity which refers to its own existence as an absolute self which in turn indicates that instead of pronouncing a name it refers to an absolute, changeless self. That is, it implies an absolute self who can last forever without recurring any change in his self-identity. It implies that only God has this kind of absolute ego; a self-identity which can last forever permanently without any change whatsoever. Then only God can truly say “ego sum qui sum”: I will be what I will be, since only his identity can remain eternally. İt is not going to die or change in time. This is why, in our culture, customarily every gravestone has this inscription on it which states: “Huve’l-Baki”: He(God) is permanent forever. Self-identity of God – will remain eternally as the same identity if we recall what he says in Hebrew: “I will be what I will be”: The same meaning is expressed in Quran as:
هُوَ الْأَوَّلُ وَالْآخِرُ وَالظَّاهِرُ وَالْبَاطِنُ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ:
“He is the first and the last and he is the seen (open secret) of the observable existence and he is the hidden (immanent) truth of existence and he knows everything.”
This is not only a remarkable act of naming which is pronounced self-referentially by God himself; being so, this name should be the most definitive, and changeless identity of God; “Ego Sum Qui Sum” (I am what I am, I am who I am, I will be what I will be, I am identical to my self=identity) but also implies an unchanging self, an absolute existence everlasting without any change. This is why that phrase, “ego sum qui sum”, has often been interpreted with many philosophical, theological and mystical implications.
I have started to think with this example in mind, then I thought this phrase could be interpreted in such a way that this kind of self-reference to the existence and identity of any entity could be used to make an auto-logical description. Not only for the true identity and existence of selfhood but also physical existence of nature. Here lies the real essence of the self-ness; it is known by itself, it is what it is; intuitively felt but not observable by any physical means. Selfhood comes first and felt before everything else; it is known by self-awareness, by itself; then the identity of this self, in this sense, should include not only Mind and Body of an individuality, but also some other Personality attributes if they continue in time without change (e.g. though the parts of body changes in time, it goes on with the same DNA).
But according to some contemporary physicalists, the mind and the brain of a person is identical; selfhood might only be a construction of the Mind and there is nothing which transcends one’s brain, neither real selfhood nor soul.
According to the Gospel of Mary, Jesus himself articulates the essence of Nous:
“There where is the nous, lies the treasure.” Then I said to him: “Lord, when someone meets you in a Moment of Vision, is it through the soul [psuchē] that they see, or is it through the spirit [pneuma]?” The Teacher answered: “It is neither through the soul nor the spirit, but the nous between the two which sees the vision…”
—The Gospel of Mary, p. 10
I think there is a semantical confusion here. Selfhood (nephesh in Hebrew, nephes in Arabic) means Ego, identity of the nefs which owns the mind, but it also means a living (breathing) creature. Nefs means soul in Arabic, Aristotle means the same thing when he says “de anime”. These denotations of this semantical concepts could also be useful to investigate; but most of the problems related with mind and consciousness appears to come into existence because of the paradigm shifts in the modern mentality, rather than semantical confusions of the conceptions. Semantical concepts or paradigms which we use as tools of thinking may change the particular solutions and outcomes in accordance with their functionalities. This is why I began with recalling this story of Moses. Again, there is another interesting story of identity in the Old Testament: According to the narration, in the beginning, Moses did not even know his personal identity; he was brought up as an Egyptian Prince, the son of the Pharaoh’s sister, but later on accidentally learned that he was a Jew in fact.
I assume that, before the beginning of a quest for meaning, one must initiate to analyse the content of his own Mind and Soul, that is, the real nature of his selfhood. I have chosen this narration about the naming of God’s identity because it is an illuminative example to introduce the semantical meaning of selfhood. I have to choose a proper standpoint to view all this terra incognita of history, since it will determine my perspective. Perspective means both the content and understanding of a mind and the perspective of a Mind is also determined by its chosen standpoint. Perpective means to have special world, special to the perceiving mind constructed intentionally by that mind. This is why we should pay attention to our standpoint before beginning to explore the unknown territory. Thus, from my viewpoint this self-referential description of Ego (I, me-ness in latin) as “ego sum qui sum”: is a good beginning which illustrates the unmeasurable difficulties of the self-conception beginning instantly from the tautological definition of the word (ego) itself. From this point of view, I have come to this conclusion that I should primarily try to comprehend the nature of the identity of selfhood, (e.g., is it identical with brain or not) so I have to investigate the subject using as many diverse perspectives of different disciplines as possible. At first we should be aware of semantical difficulties of naming and identifying the subjects of our thought and abstraction levels of its conceptions. I feel there are logical and mathematical aspects of it too. To be sure a Philosophical analysis needs the information coming from scientific investigations. It is known that at present scientific knowledge and perspective we cannot fully explain human consciousness, especially, qualia, self-awareness, attention and self-reference as ego let alone free-will.
Needless to say History of the subject and a conspective view of philosophy of history would be illuminating and I think this subject needs to be reconsidered from the perspectives of art, theology and mystical experience also.
I am going to reiterate that, I have begun with this sacred name of God because I wanted to begin with the concept of Ego as my standpoint. This story is beautifully illustrates the importance of the chosen standpoint for a suitable perspective. Let us recall here again, according to this narration, how Moses sees the light and wishes to know what happens over there on the bush, what is the identity behind that event. That means a perspective should be framed beginning from this standpoint: id est “EGO”. Because knowledge also begins with the self-awareness of the mind which denotes to a “self” (ego) behind that mind. But can a person analyse its own Mind? We have to remember here that Descartes also begins to construct his philosophy with the famous motto, “cogito; ergo, sum”: I think therefore I am. It is usually translated as “I think; therefore, I exist”. I had once rephrased this dictum, in the context of an article which I wrote many years ago, that it should be understood as “I am aware of myself; therefore, I exist” (eş’uru izen ene mevcudün), because, here, the thinking mind (cogito) is self-aware and already grammatically referring to its own “ego” as “I” think… Ego sum, ego existo. I learned later on that Descartes himself also had already made this inference (in Meditation II): “… hoc pronuntiatum: ego sum, ego existo, quoties a me profertur, vel mente concipitur, necessario esse verum.” “… this proposition: I am, I exist, whenever it is uttered from me, or conceived by the mind, necessarily is true.” This statement sometimes given as “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”. He says “ it is certain that I /that is, my mind, by which I am what I am/, is entirely and truely distinct from my body, and may exist without it.” Discourse on method…What is this “res cogitans” (a thinking thing)? I think this might be the hardest question of knowledge both for science and philosophical analysis. I remember a dictum here by St Augustin: Si fallor, sum (“If I am mistaken, I am”). Naturally, Scientific and Philosophical elucidations of knowledge requires semantical, logical and mathematical analyses, but the problem of consciousness and selfhood comes first and demands artistical, historical, theological analyses including an analyses of intuitive and instinctive konowledge because of the nature of mystical experience and meditations. What is this self-consciousness? Every self-aware consciousness naturally ensures itself that it is aware of its own self-identity and conceives that its self-identity differs from everything else which is perceived by deciphering the impulses coming via the sensory organs. In short, my consciousness, self-awareness of my own Mind, makes me believe that “ego sum qui sum”: I am who I am, therefore I am conscious of my self-identity and my body; thus, I am different from whatever I perceive with my sensory organs which come from my surroundings. I also am aware that they are definitely different from my self-identity which conceives them. We are absolutely sure of this fact when we are consciously aware of ourselves, but how can anyone be sure that he is not in a dream-state or have some delusions like hallucinations. There is a hard question: Why neural activity of brain accompanied by an internal subjective experience? Why do we have some subjective feelings of pain which is called qualia? And here comes the hardest question of consciousness, why do we have this internal subjective experience as awareness, attention and self-reference as the experiencing self of this consciousness? Whatever felt or happens in our conscious state we experience it subjectively as I experience it; it is happening to a “me”
It also is my self-awareness which ensures me that “I am”, “me-ness, my identity”, truly exists and seems an uncompromising reality which I am not able to deny: ego sum, ego existo, since I am decisively conscious of my self-hood and whatever my consciousness conceives as long as I am aware of myself. This seems to me an undeniable fact because here the conceiver and the conceived become the same thing, since the mind refers to itself as the content of its consciousness. One cannot deny his self-awareness of the content of his own conscious. As a result, I cannot doubt my self-consciousness and what it conceives. I can simply state that “I am”, “I exist”, but is it true? If so, what does it mean to be exist as a self-aware ego? At this point I have recalled a thought experiment by Avicenna:
Thought experiment
While he was imprisoned in the castle of Fardajan near Hamadhan, Avicenna wrote his famous “Floating Man” -literally falling man- thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awarenessand the substantiality and immateriality of the soul. Avicenna believed his “Floating Man” thought experiment demonstrated that the soul is a substance, and claimed humans cannot doubt their own consciousness, even in a situation that prevents all sensory data input. The thought experiment told its readers to imagine themselves created all at once while suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argued that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. Because it is conceivable that a person, suspended in air while cut off from sense experience, would still be capable of determining his own existence, the thought experiment points to the conclusions that the soul is a perfection, independent of the body, and an immaterial substance. The conceivability of this “Floating Man” indicates that the soul is perceived intellectually, which entails the soul’s separateness from the body. Avicenna referred to the living human intelligence, particularly the active intellect, which he believed to be the hypostasis by which God communicates truth to the human mind and imparts order and intelligibility to nature. Following is an English translation of the argument:
One of us has to consider (yatawaham) that one has been just created in a stroke, and that one has been thus created fully developed and perfectly complete (kāmilan), yet [created] with one’s vision shrouded [or veiled] (hujiba baṣarahu) from watching [perceiving] (mushāhadāt) external entities created falling [floating] (yahwa) in the air on in empty space (al-khalāʾ) in a fall not buffeted by any felt air that buffets it [i.e. the Person in question]; its limbs separated and not in contact nor touching on another. Then let it contemplate (yataʾamal) whether it would affirm the existence of its own self. It would not then doubt the affirmation that its self is existent (mawjūda), yet not affirming the existence of any other limbs nor inner bowels, nor heart, nor brain, nor anything of the external things. Rather it was affirming the existence of its-self without affirming that it had length, breadth, or depth. And if it were possible for it, in such a state, to imagine (yatakhayal) a hand or any other limb, it would not then imagine it to be part of its-self nor to be condition of it [i.e. its-self existence]. And you know that what is affirmed is distinct from what is not affirmed, and what is implied is distinct from what is not implied. Therefore the nafs [self, soul], whose existence the person has affirmed, is its [the person’s] characteristic identity that is not identical to its body nor its limbs [whose existence] it did not affirm. Therefore, the attentive (al-mutanabih) [to this situation] has a means of realizing (yatanabah) that the affirmation of the existence of its-self (soul, al-nafs) is distinct from the body and something that is quite non-body [i.e. that the mind/soul (al-nafs) is distinct from the body (jism)]; this is known though self-consciousness and if one was distracted from it, one needs to knock one’s baton [as to be alerted to it].
—Ibn Sina, Kitab Al-Shifa, On the Soul[32]
The original Arabic text reads as follows: يجب أن يتوهم الواحد منا كأنه خلق دفعةً وخلق كاملاً لكنه حجب بصره عن مشاهدة الخارجات وخلق يهوى في هواء أو خلاء هوياً لا يصدمه فيه قوام الهواء صدماً ما يحوج إلى أن يحس وفرق بين أعضائه فلم تتلاق ولم تتماس ثم يتأمل هل أنه يثبت وجود ذاته ولا يشكك في إثباته لذاته موجوداً ولا يثبت مع ذلك طرفاً من أعضائه ولا باطناً من أحشائه ولا قلباً ولا دماغاً ولا شيئاً من الأشياء من خارج بل كان يثبت ذاته ولا يثبت لها طولاً ولا عرضاً ولا عمقاً ولو أنه أمكنه في تلك الحالة أن يتخيل يداً أو عضواً آخر لم يتخيله جزء من ذاته ولا شرطاً في ذاته وأنت تعلم أن المثبت غير الذي لم يثبت والمقربه غير الذي لم يقربه فإذن للذات التي أثبت وجودها خاصية على أنها هو بعينه غير جسمه وأعضائه التي لم تثبت فإذن المثبت له سبيل إلى أن يثبته على وجود النفس شيئاً غير الجسم بل غير جسم وأنه عارف به مستشعر له وإن كان ذاهلاً عنه يحتاج إلى أن يقرع عصاه.
—Ibn Sina, Kitab Al-Shifa, On the Soul
However, Avicenna posited the brain as the place where reason interacts with sensation. Sensation prepares the soul to receive rational concepts from the universal Agent Intellect. The first knowledge of the flying person would be “I am,” affirming his or her essence. That essence could not be the body, obviously, as the flying person has no sensation. Thus, the knowledge that “I am” is the core of a human being: the soul exists and is self-aware. Avicenna thus concluded that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. The body is unnecessary; in relation to it, the soul is its perfection. In itself, the soul is an immaterial substance.
All in all, Soul or Nefs (including ego) is a being pertaining to time not to space. As Bergson expresse at the very beginning of his “Time and Free Will”:
“WE necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space. That is to say, language requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects. This assimilation of thought to things is useful in practical life and necessary in most of the sciences. But it may be asked whether the insurmountable difficulties presented by certain – philosophical problems do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena whic do not occupy space, and whether, by merely getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting, we might not bring the fight to an end. When an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended, of quality into quantity, has introduced contradiction into the very heart of the question, contradiction must, of course, recur in the answer.”
This is a matter of difference between extensional and intensional things. Since consciousness, free will, qualia and similar matters about mind are intentional matters and ordinary logic pertains to space which is extensional, that is all about res extensa (extended things); then, logic and math are not suitable thinking tools to analize Mind.
Ego sum :“me-ness”
Dr. Francis Crick, beyni anlayabilmek için görme kabiliyeti üzerinde 50 senedir çalıştığını söylüyordu. Ölmeden önceki son eseri olan, “Astonishing Hypothesis” (Şaşırtıcı Hipotez) kitabında, ‘yalnızca beynin faaliyetlerinin ceman yekun (holistik) bir sonucu olarak, dış dünyanın bir görüntüsü gibi bir şuuru oluşturmakla beraber ve ayni zamanda kendi şuurunun farkında olmak şeklindeki, “düşündüğünün, hissettiğinin ve kendi mevcudiyetinin bile farkında olan bir benlik” duygusunun veya şuurunun nöronlar Arası iletişimin teşkil ettiği bir network sayesinde oluşabileceğini ve bunun nörofizyolojik münasebetler ile tasvir edilebileceğini’ iddia ediyordu İngiliz biyolog (professor of biology and director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at The Open University in the United Kingdom) Steven Rose diyor ki: “Bence, şu andaki büyük problemimiz şu ki, farklı ilim şubelerinden çok farklı seviyelerde çok fazla bilgi akışı var.Molekuler biyoloji, genetik, biyokimya, fizyoloji, hücre fizyolojisi ve bütün sistemin fizyolojisine dair çalışmaları inceliyoruz- ve positron emisyonu tomografisi, fMRI( fonksiyonel magnetk resonans imajı) veya benim kullandığım Magnetoencephaografi (MEG) gibi beynin iç yapısına açılan bütün bu hayranlık uyandırıcı fevkalade pencerelerden gelen imajlar… Sonra tabii, suni networkler ile (artificial networks)uğraşanlar ve diğerleri gibi teorisyenler var. Yani mesele pek çok yaklaşım tarzı ile ele alınıyor. Problem şu ki, bütün bu farklı yaklaşımlar arasındaki farklı seviyeleri hangi köprülerle birbirine bağlayacağımızı bilmiyoruz, yani bu nerdeyse kör adamlarla filin hikayesine benziyor- insanlar beynin nasıl çalıştığına dair çok küçük parçaları kavrıyorlar, fakat bu parçaların hepsini birleştirmeye muvaffak olamıyoruz. Bu sıralarda, Beyin Çağı’ndan -1990’lar- sonraki bu çağda (decade), acilen ve çok muhtâc olduğumuz bir şey varsa, o da daha fazla Beyin teorisi. Resimleme (imaging) ile molekuler seviye arasında gidebileceğimiz bir yol bulmaya ihtiyacımız var.”
Mesela Bertrand Russell, Analysis of Mind kitabında, zihnî (mental) dünya ile, objektif maddî dünyanın tefrîk edilmesini bile tenkid ediyor. Beş duyu vasıtasıyla algıladığımız dış dünyaya mahsus, “bu katı objektif madde” idrakinin (perception) dahi zihnimizin mantıkî bir inşası (logical construction) olduğunu söylüyor. Russell, ‘maddî dünyayı da zihnî dünyayı da inkâr etmediğini; ancak her ikisinin de bizim idrâk ettiğimizden daha primitive gerçeklikler olduğunu; gerek ‘şuur’ gerek “katı madde” hakkındaki idrâkimizin dahi, bu primitive aslî muhtevâlara göre, “soyutlanarak inşa edilmiş tasavvurlar” olduğunu’ söylüyor. Pekala, şimdilik kabul edelim ki bütün şuur hallerimiz, beynimizdeki nörofizyolojik faaliyetlerin –duyu organlarından gelen münferid verileri (sense datum) işleyerek ve inşa ederek holistik (bütünleştirici) bir tarzda tasvir ettiği- bir tasavvurdan ibaret olsun. Ne de olsa beynin dış dünya ile teması ancak duyu organlarımızın ilettiği bir takım “nöroşimik impulse”lardan (elektriki ve kimyevi veriler) ibaret. Bu durumda, bu verilerin de beyindeki nörofizyolojik faaliyetler sonucunda işlenerek inşa edilen bir tasavvur olması elbette kaçınılmaz.
Ancak biz dışımızdaki maddi nesneleri, doğrudan doğruya temas ederek değil, bunlara dair duyu organlarının ilettiği verileri işleyen beynimizin inşa ettiği bir tasavvur olarak görüyoruz elbette. Ama akleden bir benlik yoksa, bir nesneyi gören beynin bir tek hücresi olmadığına göre ve herhangi bir imaj pek çok beyin hücresi arasında bir ağ şebekesi halinde dağılmış olduğuna göre, herhangi bir nesneyi gören bu beynin bu hücreleri veya maddi yapısı veya neocortex dahi değil ise, onda sayısız nöronlar arasında yayılmış bir şebeke/network olarak teşekkül eden bu şuuru/tasavvuru kim idrak ediyor?
Zira, Eğer benliği beynin faaliyetlerinden ibaret ve onun bir emergent mahsulü sayarsak, beynin faaliyetleri sonucunda teşekkül eden tasavvuru idrak eden, beynimizde teşekkül eden görüntü tasavvurunun varlığını fark eden ve o görüntüyü gören çağdaş nörofizyolojideki tabir ile bir ‘homunculus’un ( beyindeki görüntüyü gören küçük adamın) daha varlığını farz etmemiz gerekecek. Çağdaş ilme göre şuur ve benlik bahsini tartışırken böyle bir homunculus farz etmek, hatta onun da arkasında başka bir benlik ve ilahiri homunculuslar şeklindeki, benliğin nasıl olup ta kendi şuurunun farkında olabildiği problemi ile ilerde yüzleşeceğiz. Beyinde şu anda mevcut olan bir şuur hali -ayni anda- bizzat kendisinin objesi olamaz. (No subjective state who is at present, could be its own object at the same time). Kendisini algılayan bir algı, kendini gören göz gibi, bizzat kendine referans veren bir şuur olur bu çünkü. Bu ancak olsa olsa hatırlama vasıtasıyla bir müddet sonra oluşan bir şuur olabilir. Biz işte bu şuurun, tasavvurun, ne gördüğümüzün de farkındayız ve bunu farkedenin ise benlik şuurumuz olduğunu biliyoruz
Acaba Benlik şuuru yalnızca beynin nöroşimik faaliyetleri ile ve her nasılsa oluşan holistik bir benlik tasavvuru neticesinde mi ortaya çıkıyor? Benliği yalnızca beynin faaliyeti diye anlayabilir miyiz? Nefsin ancak beynin nörofizyolojik faaliyetleri sayesinde kendi dışındaki dünyayı tasavvur ettiği ve şuurun dahi bu beynin faaliyetine bağlı olduğu âşikar. Lakin nesneleri gören gözümüz değil, hatta beynimiz de değil, beyindeki bir takım prosesler şeklinde oluşan bir şuur. Velhasıl bu kendi kendisine referans vererek anlaşılmaz hâle gelen, şuur, benlik ve beyin münasebetleri, felsefî muhakemeye veya reductionist (indirgemeci) ilmi metodolojiye indirgenemeyecek kadar kompleks görünüyor. Benlik Meselesi, ne eski felsefecilerin yaptığı gibi, beyin hakkında hiç bir ciddî bilgiye sahib olmadan, sadece mantık yürüterek ve ne de çağdaş ulemanın materialist ve reductionist (aşırı detaylara indirgemeci) tecrübi usulleri ile izah edilebilecek kadar basit değil. Reductionism (parçalara indirgemek ve tek tek parçaların/ detayların moleküler -hatta atomik seviyede- fonksiyonlarını anlamaya çalışmak) ise, zaten terkibî ve bütünleyici olan Holistik usulün tam zıt kutbunda yer alan bir usuldür. Hatta ilerde yeri gelince, bu bahsin geniş metafizik şerhler gerektiren marifet-i nefs yönünü dahi göreceğimizi söylemiştik, ki o da bir bahs-i diger.
Zaten self referans şekindeki hükümler mantıki paradokslara yolaçan bir şeydir.
Mamafih, benlik bahsi o kadar geniş şümulü olan bir bahis ki, bütün felsefi problemleri, identity, causality, space, time vs gibi bütün metafizik meselelerini yeniden ele almayı gerektirecek çapta dahi tartışılabilir: mesela Dainton’un yazdığı “Phenomenal Self” kitabı gibi.
Just what is “time”? Spengler declared that no one should be allowed to ask. The physicist Richard Feynman (1988) answered, “Don’t even ask me. It’s just too hard to think about.” Empirically as much as in theory, the laboratory is powerless to reveal the flow of time, since no instrument exists that can register its passage. But why do we have such a strong sense that time does pass, ineluctably and in one particular direction, if it really doesn’t? Why does this “illusion” have such a hold over us?
“All awareness,” wrote the poet Denise Levertov (1974), “is an awareness of time,”
Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.
Zamanın identity sembol inşası dil ve rakamlarla münasebeti
Perspective implies an intention
Intentio tua grata et accepta apud creatorem sed opera tua non sunt illi accepta
intendere arcum in/ intendere anima in
|
.) A context is |
|
The origins of the concepts of intentionality and Page 17 MIND 9 term for a concept or notion. We will not go far wrong if we think of an intentio as a concept. But it is useful to distinguish two senses of the word ‘concept’. In the logical sense a concept is thought of as an abstraction, an abstract entity. Concepts in the logical sense are what logical relations hold between. In the psychological sense, a concept is a component of a state of mind. (I don’t mean to imply that this was a distinction which was clearly drawn in the Middle Ages; it is one which we can draw now, looking back.) Many Scholastic philosophers were very interested in concepts in the logical sense; as they conceived it, in the abstract relations between intentiones or intentions. First intentions were con- cepts which applied to particular objects, whereas second intentions were concepts which applied to first intentions. Some Scholastic philosophers thought that second intentions were the subject-matter of logic. Others, notably St Thomas Aquinas, were interested in concepts in (what we can now call) the psychological sense. Aquinas developed Aristotle’s theory of sense-perception, according to which the mind takes on the ‘form’ of the perceived object, into an account of thinking in general. Aquinas’s view was that what makes your thought of a goat a thought of a goat was the very same thing that makes a goat a goat: namely, the occurrence of the form of a goat. But the form of goat is instantiated in your mind in a different way from the way it is instantiated in an actual goat: in an actual goat, the form has esse naturale (natural existence), while in the thought of a goat, the form has esse intentionale (intentional existence) In Leviathan, Hobbes scathingly dismissed the idea that the concept of intentionality is needed to give an account of the beginnings of language: and so by succession of time, so much language might be gotten, as [Adam] had found use for, though not so copious, as an orator or philosopher had need of. For I do not find anything in the Scripture, out of which, directly or by consequence can be gathered, that Adam was taught the names of all figures, numbers, measures, colours, sounds, fancies, relations; much less the names of words and speech, such as general, special, affirmative, negative, interrogative, optative, infinitive, all of which are useful; and least of all, of entity, intentionality, quiddity, and other insignificant words of the school. Logic, however, survived the demise of the terminology of intentionality; but logicians also introduced some terminology which is strikingly similar to that terminology, so similar that it might be confused with it. In the seventeenth- century Logic: or The Art of Thinking (the ‘Port Royal Logic’) a distinction was made between the extension and the comprehension of a term. The extension of a term is the set or class of things to which the term applies—we can think of it as the set of things over which the term ‘extends’. So the extension of the term ‘marsupial’ is the set of all marsupials: kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and so on. The comprehension of a term is, as the label suggests, what is understood by someone who grasps it. Thus the comprehension of the term ‘marsupial’ may be something like creature that suckles its young and keeps newborns in a pouch. Leibniz made use of this distinction, but introduced the term ‘intension’ as a variant of ‘comprehension’, thus providing an elegant counterpart for the term ‘extension’: When I say Every man is an animal I mean that all the men are included amongst all the animals; but at the same time I mean that the idea of animal is included in the idea of man. ‘Animal’ comprises more individuals than ‘man’ does, but ‘man’ comprises more ideas or more attributes: one has more instances, the other more degrees of reality; one has the greater extension, the other the greater intension.14 Leibniz puts the point vividly: the more is in the extension, the less is in the intension, and vice versa. In other words, the more general a term is—the larger its extension, or the set of things to which it applies—the less specific Page 19 MIND 11 the intension has to be; and the more specific the intension, the smaller the extension. The contrast made here between intension and extension survived into twentieth-century logic, although it is not formulated in the way Leibniz did. These days the terms ‘intensional’ and ‘extensional’ are normally applied to languages (or contexts within a language), or to the logics which study these languages or contexts. (The following brief exposition will not be news to those familiar with philosophy of language, and may be skipped.) A context is extensional when it is one in which the following principles of inference apply (where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are singular terms): Substitution of co-referring terms From ‘… a …’ and ‘a = b’ infer ‘… b …’ (For example: from ‘Vladimir is taller than George Orwell’ and ‘George Orwell = Eric Blair’ infer ‘Vladimir is taller than Eric Blair’.) Existential generalization From ‘… a …’, infer ‘∃x… x …’ (For example: from ‘George Orwell is shorter than Vladimir’ infer ‘There is someone who is shorter than Vladimir’.) An intensional context is one where one or both of these principles is not generally valid or truth-preserving. For example: the sentence ‘Dorothy believes that Vladimir is taller than George Orwell’ is an intensional context, since together with ‘George Orwell = Eric Blair’ it does not entail ‘Dorothy believes that Vladimir is taller than Eric Blair’. The first two sentences could be true while the third is false (if Dorothy does not believe that George Orwell = Eric Blair). Intuitively, the way to understand the distinction is to see extensional contexts as those where truth or falsehood depends solely on the extensions of the expressions involved (hence the above principles), and intensional contexts as those where truth or falsehood depends on the way the extensions are conceived. Frege’s famous theory of sense and reference is an attempt to account for the logical and semantic properties of certain intensional contexts. Frege dis- tinguished the reference of an expression, what it refers to, from its sense, the ‘mode of presentation’ of the reference. In our example, the same refer- ence (the man, Orwell) is presented in two ways, by the sense associated with the expression ‘George Orwell’, and by the sense associated with the expres- sion ‘Eric Blair’. Now, since Frege’s discussion in ‘On sense and reference’, such psychological contexts have been at the focus of many discussions of Page 20 MIND 12 intensionality. But it is important to emphasize that contexts other than psy- chological contexts are intensional. (For example, the inference from ‘the number of coins in my pocket is five’ and ‘five is necessarily odd’ to ‘the number of coins in my pocket is necessarily odd’ is invalid, because ‘… necessarily …’ creates an intensional context.) The general feature of inten- sional contexts is that their logical properties (e.g. whether they allow the validity of inferences) are sensitive to the ways in which things are described (e.g., picked out as ‘George Orwell’ or as ‘five’). Insofar as the truth of sen- tences, and their logical properties, are determined only by the extensions of the expressions in question, then logic does not need to take account of the way in which the extensions are picked out, the intensions of these expres- sions. Logics which attempt to display the logical properties of intensional contexts are called intensional logics. When the terminology of intentionality was reintroduced by Brentano in his 1879 book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, there was no mention of intension and extension. Brentano’s concern in this book was to distinguish the newly emerging science of psychology from physiology on the one hand, and philosophy on the other. He made this distinction not in terms of the different methods of these disciplines, but in terms of their different subject- matters. The subject-matter of physiology was the body, while the subject- matter of philosophy included questions such as the immortality of the soul, and so on. Psychology’s subject-matter, by contrast, was mental phenomena, and the difference between mental phenomena and physical phenomena was that mental phenomena exhibited ‘what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages’ called ‘the intentional inexistence’ of an object.15 Mental phenomena are intentional, they have objects. So the link with the Scholastic idea of esse intentionale is made explicitly. But Brentano did not characterize intentionality in terms of the intension- ality of psychological contexts. It is somewhat mysterious, then, that when R. M. Chisholm introduced Brentano’s ideas to English-speaking philosophy in the 1950s, he defined intentionality in terms of criteria of intensionality.16 And when Quine, in his Word and Object (1960), talked about Brentano’s thesis of the ‘irreducibility of the intentional’, he was talking about the irreducibility of intensional language to extensional language, not Brentano’s claim that men- tal phenomena are irreducibly intentional.17 And as we saw above, the ideas of intentionality and intensionality are distinct, and have distinct origins. This conflation of the distinct ideas of intentionality and intensionality is perhaps more understandable given Quine’s method of ‘semantic ascent’, which asks us to investigate phenomena by investigating the language we use to speak about phenomena. But nonetheless, the conflation has given rise to nothing but confusion, and we need to be absolutely clear about this at the beginning of our enquiry. For it is plain, despite what Chisholm says, that Page 21 MIND 13 intensionality cannot be a criterion or sufficient condition of the presence of intentionality. Regardless of whether intentionality is the mark of the mental, there are intensional contexts which are nothing to do with intentionality Of all the mysteries of nature, none is greater than that of human consciousness. |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_(book)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
natura naturata
Max Muller, in his lectures, noted the striking similarities between Vedanta and the system of Spinoza, saying “the Brahman, as conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza’s ‘Substantia’.“[107] Helena Blavatsky, a founder of theTheosophical Society also compared Spinoza’s religious thought to Vedanta, writing in an unfinished essay “As to Spinoza’s Deity—natura naturans—conceived in his attributes simply and alone; and the same Deity—as natura naturata or as conceived in the endless series of modifications or correlations, the direct outflowing results from the properties of these attributes, it is the Vedantic Deity pure and simple.”[108]
What I am trying to show here is beatifully expressed by mevlana:
kâşki hesti zebani daşti/ ta zi hestan perdeha ber daşti
her çi guyi ey demi hesti ez an/ perdei diger beru besti bedan…”
Keşke varoluşun zebanı(dili) olsaydı da var olanların üzerindeki perdeyi kaldırsaydı”
şu anda hakikate dair her ne söylenirse söylensin bil ki o söz de hakikatin üstüne çekilen bir diğer perde olup onu bizden gizleyecektir.
And again, here is a translation of “ayet el kürsi” which describes the absolute consciousness of God comparing it with human consciousness. Here is the translation by J. Arberry:
God
There is no god but He, the
Living, the Everlasting.
Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep;
To Him belongs
All that is in heavens and the earth.
Who is there that shall intercede with Him
Save by His leave?
He knows what lies before them
And what is after them,
And they comprehend not anything of His knowledge
Save such as He wills.
His Throne comprises the heavens and earth;
The preserving of them oppresses Him not;
He is the All-high, the All-glorious.
“There where is the nous, lies the treasure.” The Gospel of Mary, p. 10
.
Cnsc: Awareness of what is happening?
- Identity problem: Hüviyet, Mahiyet, Nefs: the problem of identity in semantics, logic math., science and metaphysics
Descriptions of the words : Identity, one, unity, plurality
|
i·den·ti·ty [ī déntətee] (plural i·den·ti·ties) noun 1. what identifies somebody or something: the name or essential character that identifies somebody or something 2. essential self: the set of characteristics that somebody recognizes as belonging uniquely to himself or herself and constituting his or her individual personality for life 3. sameness: the fact or condition of being the same or exactly alike 4. mathematics equation true for all its variables: a mathematical equation that remains valid whatever values are taken by its variables 5. mathematics Same as identity element [Late 16th century. < late Latin identitas < ident-, combining form of Latin idem “same” < id “that”] i·den·ti·fy [ī dénti f] i·den·ti·cal [ī déntik’l] adjective 1. alike in every way: exactly the same as or equal to something else, or alike in every respect · wearing identical dresses · His name was identical to mine. 2. developed as twins from same egg: describes twins of the same sex and with the same genetic makeup that have developed from a single fertilized egg
(past and past participle i·den·ti·fied, present participle i·den·ti·fy·ing, 3rd person present singular i·den·ti·fies) transitive verb 1. recognize and name: to recognize somebody or something and to be able to say who or what he, she, or it is 2. consider as same: to consider two or more things as being entirely or essentially the same [Mid-17th century. Directly or via French identifier < medieval Latin identificare “make the same” < ident- (see identity)]
identify with intransitive verb 1. feel affinity with: to feel a strong sympathetic or imaginative bond with somebody or something and a sense of understanding and sharing his, her, or its nature or concerns 2. associate one thing with another: to consider somebody or something as closely linked with somebody or something such as a school of thought or political movement (often passive) identity crisis (plural i·den·ti·ty cri·ses) noun 1. anxiety about social role: a period during which somebody feels great anxiety and uncertainty about his or her identity and role in life and society, typically experienced in adolescence or middle age 2. anxiety of group: a period of anxiety or confusion about the nature, aims, and role of a group, organization, or business |
|
Watch again the Story of one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSpadYjnYl8 |
|
one |
|
one [wun] unit unum essence of the universe (plural ones) CORE MEANING: a grammatical word indicating a single thing or unit, and not two or more · adjective just one accident out of thousands · adjective a one-legged man · pronoun Central Newark, once home to several bank branches, now has one. · pronoun Bill got one of his boxing gloves off. 1. adjective, pronoun unique: used to indicate the only thing or person with a specific characteristic · the one exception to this 2. adjective, pronoun used to distinguish something: distinct from others of its kind · from one thought to the next 3. adjective at nonspecific time: relating to an unspecified time in the past or future · one August afternoon 4. adjective used for emphasis: used instead of “a” and “an” to emphasize a following adjective or expression (informal) · He’s one cool customer! 5. adjective particular: introducing the name of somebody who is not known to the speaker · a letter from one Thomas Atherton of Southport 6. pronoun typical individual: used to refer to people in general (formal) · One can eat well here. 7. pronoun somebody or something unspecified: used to indicate somebody or something not specifically identified (dated) · the voice of one crying in the wilderness 8. pronoun previously mentioned: used instead of a preceding noun to indicate somebody or something already mentioned · nothing but an old vase, and a cracked one at that 9. pronoun joke or story: used to refer to a question, joke, or remark · That’s a good one! 10. noun 1: the number 1. It is the smallest whole number, designating a single unit, and the first cardinal number. 11. noun something with value of 1: something in a numbered series with a value of one · to throw a one 12. noun U.S. dollar bill: a one-dollar bill (informal) 13. noun time measure: used to indicate the time as one hour after twelve midday or midnight · We’ll stop for lunch at one. 14. noun music musical notation: the numeral 1 used as the bottom figure in a time signature to indicate that the beat is measured in whole notes [ Old English ān < Indo-European] all one not important enough to be of any consequence to somebody · It’s all one to me. |
Unity versus plurality
Particular versus universal
Singular/ individual versus general and whole
.
in semantics Naming and Necessity. S. Kripke ve dainton Phenomenal self
.
in logic logical atomism (“all propositions are TRUTH-FUNCTIONS OF elementary propositions, in other words that atomic propositions, which are singular, affirmative, and categorical and consist of logically proper names of simple entities together with an attributive or relational predicate, directly Picture their verifying facts, while non atomic propositions conceal them)X russsell doubted this reducibility eg.,intensional propositions about beliefs. (logical positivists call them protocol or basic propositios and saw them as direct, non inferential reports of experience rather than as pictures of facts.) the earlier suspicion of metaphysics hardened into pricipled hostility by viena circle
|
“Identity”, Conundrums of Time & Fuzzy Logic: Degrees of Truth “…Time is involved in various other conundrums, one kind of which we will look at in this chapter. This kind concerns problems that arise when things change; and specifically, the question of what is to be said about the identity of objects that change through time. “Here is an example. We all think that objects can survive through change. For example, when I paint a cupboard, although its colour may change, it is still the same cupboard. Or when you change your hair style, or if you are unfortunate enough to lose a limb, you are still you. But how can anything survive change? After all, when you change your hairstyle, the person that results is different, not the same at all. And if the person is different, it is a different person; so the old you has gone out of existence. In exactly the same way, it may be argued, no object persists through any change whatsoever. For any change means that the old object goes out of existence, and is replaced by a quite different object. “Arguments like this appear at various places in the history of philosophy, but it would be generally agreed by logicians, now, that they are mistaken, and rest on a simple ambiguity. We must distinguish between an object and its properties. When we say that you, with a different hairstyle, are different, we are saying that you have different properties. It does not follow that you are literally a different person, in the way that I am a different person from you. “One reason why one may fail to distinguish between being a certain object and having certain properties is that, in English, the verb ‘to be’ and its various grammatical forms – ‘is’, ‘am’, and so on – can be used to express both of these things. (And the same goes for similar words in other languages.) If we say ‘The table is red’, ‘Your hair is now short’, and similar things, we are attributing a property to an object. But if someone says ‘I am Graham Priest’, ‘The person who won the race is the same person who won it last year’, and so on, then they are identifying an object in a certain way. That is, they are stating its identity. “Logicians call the first use of ‘is’ the ‘is’ of predication; they call the second use of ‘is’ the ‘is’ of identity. And because these have somewhat different properties, they write them in different ways. The ‘is’ of predication . ‘John is red’ is typically written in the form jR… The ‘is’ of identity is written with =, familiar from school mathematics. Thus, ‘John is the person who won the race’ is written: j = w. (The name w is a description here; but this is of no significance in the present matter.) Sentences like this are called identities. “What properties does identity have? First, it is a relation. A relation is something that relates two objects….Now, identity is a very special relation. It is a relation that every object bears to itself and to nothing else.” (1) “…And here, time comes back into the issue. To explain what the problem is, it will be useful to employ the tense operators of the last chapter, and specifically, G (‘it is always going to be the case that’). Let x be anything you like, a tree, a person; and consider the statement x = x. This says that x has the property of being identical to x – which is obviously true: it’s part of the very meaning of identity. And this is so, regardless of time…. “…What the inference shows is that if x is identical to y, and x has the property of being identical to x at all future times, so does y. And since the second premise is true, as we have just noted, it follows that if two things are identical, they will always be identical. “And what of that? Simply, it doesn’t always seem to be true….” (2) “While we are on the subject of identity, here is another problem about it. Everything wears out in time. Sometimes, parts get replaced. Motor bikes and cars get new clutches; houses get new roofs; and even the individual cells in people’s bodies are replaced over time. Changes like this do not affect the identity of the object in question. When I replace the clutch on my bike, it remains the same bike. Now suppose that over a period of a few years, I replace every part of the bike, Black Thunder. Being a careful fellow, I keep all the old parts. When everything has been replaced, I put all the old parts back together to recreate the original bike. But I started off with Black Thunder; and changing one part on a bike does not affect its identity: it is still the same bike. So at each replacement, the machine is still Black Thunder; until, at the end, it is – Black Thunder. But we know that that can’t be right. Black Thunder now stands next to it in the garage. “Here is another example of the same problem. A person who is 5 years old is a (biological) child. If someone is a child, they are still a child one second later. In which case, they are still a child one second after that, and one second after that, and one second after that, … So after 630,720,000 seconds, they are still a child. But then they are 25 years old! “…These are some of the most annoying paradoxes in logic. They arise when the predicate employed (‘is Black Thunder’, ‘is a child’) is vague, in a certain sense; that is, when its applicability is tolerant with respect to very small changes: if it applies to an object, then a very small change in the object will not alter this fact. Virtually all of the predicates that we employ in normal discourse are vague in this sense: ‘is red’, ‘is awake’, ‘is happy’, ‘is drunk’…” (3) “So what are we to say? Here is one answer, which is sometimes called fuzzy logic. Being a child seems to fade out, gradually, just as being a (biological) adult seems to fade in gradually. It seems natural to suppose that the truth value of ‘Jack is a child’ also fades from true to false. Truth, then, comes by degrees. Suppose we measure these degrees by numbers between 1 and 0, 1 being complete truth, 0 complete falsity. Every situation, then, assigns each basic sentence such a number. “What about sentences containing operators like negation and conjunction? As Jack gets older, the truth value of ‘Jack is a child’ goes down. The truth value of ‘Jack is not a child’ would seem to go up correspondingly. This suggests that the truth value of ⌐a [i.e., not a, Y.O.] is 1 minus the truth value of a. Suppose we write the truth value of a as │a│; then we have: │⌐a│ = 1 – │a│ [i.e., “│…│” the number which is the truth value of, Y.O.] “Here is a table of some sample values: [See the table below, Y.O.] “What about the truth value of conjunctions? A conjunction can only be as good as its worst bit. So it’s natural to suppose that the truth value of o & b is the minimum (lesser) of │a │ and │ b │: “│a & b│ = Min(│a│.│b│)” (4) [e.g., if │a│is 0.25 and │b│is 0.75, │a & b│will be 0.25, Y.O.] “What of validity? An inference is valid if the conclusion holds in every situation where the premisses hold. But what is it now for something to hold in a situation? When it is true enough. But how true is true enough? That will just depend on the context. For example, ‘is a new bike’ is a vague predicate. If you go to a bike dealer who tells you that a certain bike is new, you expect it never to have been used before. That is, you expect ‘This is a new bike’ to have value 1. Suppose, on the other hand, that you go to a bike rally, and are asked to pick out the new bikes. You will pick out the bikes that are less than a year or so old. In other words, your criterion for what is acceptable as a new bike is more lax. ‘This is a new bike’ need have value only, say, 0.9 or greater. “So we suppose that there is some level of acceptability, fixed by the context. This will be a number somewhere between 0 and 1 – maybe 1 itself in extreme cases. Let us write this number as ε. Then an inference is valid for that context just if the conclusion has a value at least as great as £ in every situation where the premisses all have values at least as great as ε.” (5) “…Maybe because we confuse complete truth with near-complete truth. A failure to draw the distinction doesn’t make much difference normally. But if you do it again, and again, and again, … it does. “That’s one diagnosis of the problem. But with vagueness, nothing is straightforward. What was the problem about saying that ‘Jack is a child’ is simply true, until a particular point in time, when it becomes simply false? Just that there seems to be no such point. Any place one chooses to draw the line is completely arbitrary; it can be, at best, a matter of convention. But now, at what point in Jack’s growing up does he cease to be 100% a child: that is, at what point does ‘Jack is a child’ change from having the value of exactly 1, to a value below 1? Any place one chooses to draw this line would seem to be just as arbitrary as before. (This is sometimes called the problem of higher-order vagueness.)…” (6) ———- |
in math., : e.g. associative law ax(bxc) = (axb)xc any function of two arguments which satisfies a similar identity is said to be associative, f.(g.h) (x) =f(g(h(x)))) = (f.g).h(x)) the law is taken as an axiom for many mathematical structures like groups… also in commutative law a+b = b+a axb=bxa exception is exponentiation 2 üzeri üç 3 üzeri 2 ye eşit değil… multiplication of quaternion s( a generalization of comlex numbers :their multiplications are not commutative= ve matricelerde de olmaz. Identity, in mathematics, a number or operation that leaves others unchanged when combined with them. Zero is the identity for addition; one is the identity for multiplication. For example:
7 + 0 = 7
7 × 1 = 7
math., coincidental identical,
And metaphysics Identity as a philosophical question
in nature: Empiricism and verification, confirmation, correspondence to the reality/ identity of facts
Sense impulses beware us about the existence of natural forces.we perceive physical facts and we comprehend them by the use of abstract concepts. Then begins those strange language games, with special symbols of semantical logical mathematical signs. We live in a symbolic world called, sometimes as consciousness… They seem to belong to an external world which is outside of our body, different and alien to our selfhood. But what are these alien forces, and how are we going to identify those forces with anything, with any identifiable cause which affects us so and so.
Identity of a thing, thing-in-itself, unity and plurality, unity and essence, discrete and continuum
Ve dainton Phenomenal self
Sümbül efendi instead of theseus
particular/individual/ Singular (which means the identity of a thing in itself) versus universal/ holistic identity (conceptual beings like society) like number (which is individual) versus general number theory perception and conception: individuum (est ineffable) xUniversal
“Forma substantialis totius non superadditur partibus, sed est totum complectans materiam et formam cum praecisione aliorum”:”Nothing is added to the whole of the substantial form by the parts that constitute it, but it is the whole that embraces both content and form while maintaining the precision of the different parts that constitute the whole.” aquinolu st thomas
Foundational and accidental, physicalist monism, ultimate structure of matter
Beliefs about nature
Fact, event, process
Particular universal individualism/reductionism-holism
Discrete and continuum
Time space causality substance
Monism dualism and bifurcated existence
Fork like existence space-time space time out of space-time
Metaphysics All happens in time except God
What remains permanent in spite of time
Energy, substance, movement, causality, gravity, action at a distance, weak force, strong force, wave-particle duality electro magnetic field synchronical co-existence and diacronical events of time
Space time substance identity causality, unity
Discrete and continuum
essence, unity, goodness, truth, thing, and something (Latin ens, unum, bonum, verum, res, and aliquid).
c. different approaches to this problem: idealism, realism, nominalism, logicism–analythic philosophy, empiricism,
materialism, naturalism/ phsycalism, empiricism, apriorism/rationalism,(substance and cause as categories of kant. there is a fixed amount of substance in the universe because ex nihilo nihil fit and every event has a cause)) scepticism, scientism, intuitionism, formalism realism idealism reductionism holism
d. methodological disputes: reductionism, individualism and holism, syncretism, evolutionism, mysticism, historicism
different categories of being
monistic materialism implies that there is only one kind of existence which is bound to be phsical being in space and time
what is fundamental what is accidental illogical character of QM
if a formal math cannot be consistent then comes into stage mathematical intuition
then if you are not platonist but formal mathematician how can you prove anything certainly without being sure the consistency of math
algorithmic probabilty m. Minsky mentioned
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emotion_Machine
four kinds of existence
time, space, space-time out of space and time
causality, language, soul, self identiy, consciousness and mind exists in time
material objects of universe exist in space-time
overinflated materialism: everything exist only in space as atoms and time is an illusion
god, math, ideas, real substance of existence exist out of space and time
Identity thesis of consciousness: Mind is identical with brain (consciousness, self awareness, self etc, they are all emergent properties of brain)
The real problem begins with identity of selfhood- which is the owner of the mind and consciousness and also whole body and this is the personal identity which perceives believes and conceives the whole reality of existence in accord with its tools of sense, common sense, mind, and metaphysical/linguistic tools of expression.
What is Mind? Mind (soul) and body problem. descartes
Mind and Consciousness: ego sum ego existo: knowledge begins with consciousness, comprehended by the mind and expressed by a language
1. Identity of selfhood: Who am I?, What Am I?
Personal Identity, what is particular about a person. It includes those qualities that distinguish one person from another and the consciousness of one’s own being or identity.
For information on:
• components of the self, see Anatomy; Personality; Mind; Intelligence; Soul; Will (philosophy and psychology)
• the awareness and nature of being, see States of Consciousness; René Descartes: Philosophy;Martin Heidegger: Being and Time
• the self defined by its own free choices, see Free Will; Existentialism; Søren Kierkegaard
• will as the essence of the self, see Arthur Schopenhauer
• self as the product of environment and experience, see George Herbert Mead; Ludwig Feuerbach
• ultimate self or absolute, which is God, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Dialectic;Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Self-Knowledge of the Absolute
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/#ConAcc theseus un gemisi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
http://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Parfit%202012.pdf
When we reach the age of 20,
we cease to be teenagers, but we don’t thereby cease to exist. Nor
do caterpillars cease to exist when they become butterflies.
Human clones There are many actual cases of another relevant kind. One such case
is that of Nancy Cruzan, whose cerebrum ceased to function, but
whose brain stem maintained her body in a vegetative state forseven years until a US Supreme Court ruling granted her parents’
request to have an artificial feeding tube removed. On Cruzan’s
gravestone her parents had inscribed:
Departed January 11 1983 At Peace December 26 1990
When Cruzan’s cerebrum was irreparatly damaged, her parents came
to believe, Cruzan the person departed from her body, though the
human animal continued to exist with its heart beating and its
lungs breathing until, after the feeding tube was removed, the heart
stopped and the animal was at peace
Suppose again that, because your body below the neck is fatally diseased,
as is your clone’s cerebrum, doctors will successfully graft
your head and cerebrum onto this your clone’s brain stem and
headless body it has the same dna with your own body and same cerebellum, what happens to your identity then? It is the second you but not your original identity nevertheless if identity involves continiuty . Same problem: ba’sü badel mevt.
If cloning would be possible then it would mean creating a new soul is
2. Mind and consciousness (awareness): know thyself! last frontier of the human quest is mind: why it is important? the implications of selfhood: (Cognosce te ipsum, gnothi sauton, men arefe nefsehu)
3. Mind and its fictions and dreams : dreams, lucid dreams
a. kinds of dreams (rem, lucid hypnotic etc)
b. dreams of imagination and reality: art as a free and fictive dream of virtual reality by imagination creatrix
c. constructive but constrained dreams,: time, causality and space, history, synchronical reality as present and futuristic dreams
d. korzybski’s concept of time-binding
4. mind and comprehension : apriori, aposteriori; empiricism rationalism scepticism
.
II. Mind and its knowledge:
Epistemology
1. works and tools of the mind: sensation, perception, conception, qualia (feelings), intuition, imagination creatrix, intellect and hitherto unknown resources of brain and selfhood like instincts
2. acts of the mind and its perspectives: it dreams, creates, believes, knows (scire), contemplates, memorizes (the history of past experience) tries to find a meaning in his personal history and also, in history in toto, and tries to find the meaning of life and existence, aspirations of the soul, self articulation and realization of selfhood
.
III. How mind acquires knowledge? and what is true knowledge?
A- Res cogitans :
1. Mind’s Limitations of consciousness :limited consciousness because of limited sensations: limits of sensory organs organs
sensation, perception, intuition, conception (analysis of conceptions and consistency), imagination, self awareness. A priori, a posteriori
Consciousness and perception: good example is The Simile of the Cave
2 Mind’s limitations of of expression tools : art and language; semantics, logics, mathematics
a. Mind’s linguistic limitations of comprehension because of the usage of everyday language and the logic of ordinary languages
b. semantics, abstraction levels, what is the meaning of truth? Truth:
c. Mind’s Logical limitations of reasoning: different kinds of logic.
d. Mind’s Mathematical limitations of reasoning for the conceptions of reality
Formal, realist and intuitive mathematics, Infinity and set theory, CH continuum Hypothesis ,What is space and space-time continuum? Geometry: space and its dimensions, Geometries with 2, 3, 4 ,6N 10, 11, 26 and “ n “ infinite dimensions, Euclid, Riemann, Lobachevsky, Hilbert 6N faz spin, chaotic, string (String theory needs 11 or 26 dimensions)
.
B- Res extensa:
Comprehensive limitations of Mind: empiricism, rationalism, scepticism
knowledge about external phenomenon:
perception and conception: individuum (est ineffable) Universal
facts, undividable individual event and events, Principle of individuation,) processes: substance-existence and events of space-time
substance-existence and events of space-time
external objects, name, concept: particular, universal individualism and holism
time, space, space time, substance (essence, mode, attribute), change, causality (necessary and Sufficient reason), determinism, consistency
.
IV. Instincts, intuition and illumination by mystical experience
critical evaluation and jurisdictive judgements:
Sceptical argumentation about mind and knowledge