Glossary
Glossary
"Autognomics" means self-knowing
- The study and processes of life knowing itself: its universal and primordial systems of order.
- Auto-to reflect within and upon self, Gnosis - the processes of knowing superior wisdom, knowledge of mysteries, or spiritual truth.
Life-itself is a process based upon certain characteristic fundamental organizing principles.
Process = changes going on towards some end. One could think of process as simple mechanical process such as gears turning gears. However, our focus is that of live process.
Living processes = are processes fully capable of creating new reality, originating, manifesting something that has not been before. Living processes have their own goals, their own reason for being, and their own power. With live process, you can have change within and prehend other entities. With life process, you can have growth. Living processes are self-knowing, social, intentional and driven by values.
Living domain is a class name for everything that is alive. This could be humans, slime mold, bacteria, any animal, plant or combination thereof or societies of any living forms. We also include the possibility that the earth itself is alive as in Gaia.
There are inherent value processes within life and all life forms that work as harmonizers in the living processes. The inherent value processes are making decisions (a cutting away) from all possibility. The facts of the moment, as they stand, will suggest many possible outcomes. The final judgment as to which one to realize will be determined by the value processes. At any moment of process what can “become” depends on the facts. What will “become” is chosen by the value processes
The Life-itself logos Paradigm
I believe that a new scientific paradigm is required by quantum and relativity physics. The old paradigm is impeding progress. Additionally there are now many new laboratory discoveries that absolutely demand a new paradigm. These discoveries are occurring in new and exciting physics and biophysics. These discoveries show that life, living entities, function in ways quite different from what had been thought. Life functions by creating societies of living entities capable of acting. They are not passive, senseless, valueless and purposeless.
A material-based-metaphysics is life destroying. It leads to thinking in terms of force and control; thus preventing natural life processes. Based on most recent discoveries it appears reality is a living organism. Life functions in oneness, holistic, and creative. Life functions by value dynamics. It is not mechanistic. It is not deterministic. Physics can no longer be considered the most basic science. The new science is called axiology. (axios for value and logos for theory). Axiology is based on the properties of life-itself. Applications of formal axiology are already achieving amazing success. This includes the new science of axiological psychology just beginning.
Now, in process philosophy there is a metaphysics of organisms. We begin there and add matching logic to develop new thinking. There are now new logics available unlike any we have ever known that can accommodate the creativity of life, replacing "truth-value consistency" with coherence maximization. The ground is prepared for new sciences more basic than physics. Life is energy capable of creating matter and forming habits leading to the laws of physics. But we need new knowledge to live.
Today there is debate between random processes producing evolution or a designer. Neither is right. Evolution is produced by life-itself!
What a paradigm is...
Current usage stems from the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn describes a scientific paradigm as specifying:
What is to be observed and scrutinized The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject How these questions are to be structured How the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted
A scientist does not violate the paradigm without risking his career and reputation. Thus do old ways continue against all reason.
A paradigm is a system of very basic ideas by which we define and recognize reality; how we make sense of experience. For example, the old paradigm reality has been "what we can perceive through our senses, if you can see it, touch it, or measure it, it is real." Once such basic ideas take hold they develop a momentum of their own. As people live with such ideas it is very hard to escape. This is the power of a paradigm. Life just keeps changing everything until the old paradigm doesn't fit or work anymore. There becomes an abundance of problems that cannot be solved. Then a new paradigm is born. The transition from the old to the new paradigm can be a time of chaos. That is our current state.
The matter paradigm: Matter is the fundamental reality. It exists in space-time. It is a discrete enduring thing. If there is activity or motion it is the result of the forces due to random collisions or forces known to physics, i.e., gravity, electricity, magnetism and the four nuclear forces. Change is simply a rearrangement of existing matter. The Greeks began looking for the smallest non-divisible particles that could be rearranged. This has produced the search for fundamental particles which continues today.
The energy paradigm: Energy is the fundamental reality, but it is a strange form of energy unknown before the development of quantum theory. It is called zero point energy; it is energy of a system at the temperature of absolute zero. It can be said that the universe swims in a sea of zero point energy. The sea is named the Dirac Sea. This energy is the energy of life itself. This energy can create matter. It can create what we perceive as living entities; material systems created and activated by internal energy flows. (This is where values show up)
A system is a composite unity; that is, a collection of components integrated into mutual dependencies to function as one entity. Living systems are self-creating. The parts in the whole system arise together by natural processes. The parts are not the same upon removal from the system. Living systems do not obey the laws of classical Newtonian mechanistic physics - they demand a different logic to understand their relational dynamic.…… Norman Hirst, a founder of AI, 1999
Reductionism involves reducing any object of study to its smallest components with the belief that, when we know how the smallest components are put together, we will know how the object under study works.
Materialism:
Materialism is the belief that we exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of material relations among material entities.
From Whitehead: “There persists …the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless and purposeless, It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being.”
This is called scientific materialism. It is not a scientific statement. It is not a scientific requirement. It is a metaphysical assumption. I suspect that most people would rather not know about metaphysics. But, like it or not, by the time we learn a language and grow up in a given culture, we are committed to a metaphysics. Hidden metaphysics can be dangerous.
The test of metaphysics is that it fits experience. This is tricky since metaphysics plays a major role in shaping experience. However, as knowledge advances there can be new experiences that the inherited metaphysics cannot account for. That is our condition today. Scientific materialism cannot account for today’s discoveries.
That scientific materialism still prevails is testimony to the power of paradigms. “Paradigm” first appeared in English in the 15th century, meaning "an example or pattern." Current usage stems from the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn describes a scientific paradigm as specifying:
- What is to be observed and scrutinized
- The kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject
- How these questions are to be structured
- How the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted
A scientist does not violate the paradigm without risking his career and reputation. Thus do old ways continue against all reason.
Worldviews – refers to preconditions, assumptions, on which our interpretations of experience are based. We learn the preconditions from society, i.e., the people with whom we are interactive. The preconditions may develop over centuries through various sufficiently fundamental disciplines; metaphysics for example.
There are two such fundamental disciplines; metaphysics and logic.
Logic: While metaphysics furnishes the world, logic arranges it. In arranging furniture we might well decide that the coffee table goes in front of the sofa, not in front of the rocker. Logic is concerned with arranging. What goes with what? What arrangements are true? What arrangements are true given other arrangements that are true? Logic classifies and it relates things. We have crash-landed on arrangements of things. Logic can not talk about process except for mechanical processes.
Triadic Logic: Finding its origins in the work of the late-19th century American philosopher C.S. Peirce, triadic theory is concerned with the unique nature of human language as a "space-time" event qualitatively different from all other known phenomena of nature. More precisely, while modern scientists are readily accustomed to studying nature from a cause-and-effect (or "dyadic") vantage point, the "language event" itself cannot be reduced solely to such terms. For as explained by language philosopher Walker Percy (1916-1990), symbolization at root involves *three* irreducible variables: the "symbol-user," the "symbol," and its "referent." Human language, therefore, fundamentally being a process involving "triads," cannot be explained from a cause-and-effect model; rather it supercedes traditional scientific methodology in ways that fully have yet to be appreciated.
Triadic theory is a part of the scientific discipline known as "semiotics," which is concerned with the systematic study of signs (or notions of reality
Organism: In a sense we all know what organisms are. Yet we really don’t know. We are organisms. Some think computers can function just as we can or that we can be made more intelligent by planting a computer chip in our brains. This is nonsense. There is no similarity between a computer and an organism.
An organism is a society. The members of the society may be cells, as in cells in our bodies. Or, the members may be us in a human society. Each member enjoys maximum freedom subject only to the constraints of global coherence.
An analogy may help. It is like a jazz band. A musician can play a riff the likes of which the other musicians have never heard and don’t expect. Thus we have and need logics of process. An organism functions in a constant state of activity. It acts with an intention. Having acted upon its inquiry it uses the senses to affirm whether anything has changed and acts again always moving towards self-development and fulfillment. The amount of energy body stores is several thousand degrees Kelvin. The concept of energy