LifeIS Book

Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 1 Life IS Creative Organism, an Abductive Hypothesis towards new Science; Metaphysics and Value Logics for Life-itself (2005-2012) By Norm Hirst with assistance from Skye Hirst What follows is a compendium of papers first compiled here 2/3/17 A shift in the habits of Life, as we know it, is occurring: A Personal forward There is a paradigm shift occurring. The transition underway is from a rigid, mechanistic, and materialistic worldview to a process organismic worldview supporting a foundation of interconnectedness, cooperation, and the intersection of science and spirituality. A new paradigm must start with abductive hypotheses. I present the following as a presentation of abductive hypotheses. In semiotics abduction is a kind of reverse deduction to discover a law or some factor that would render some phenomenon intelligible. (Most of Sherlock Holmesís so-called deductions were abductions.) The importance of abduction is that it is creative; it escapes the confines of deduction and induction. In this book we’re not putting forth claims of truth or arguments for a position, but we are putting forth claims of usefulness; what do we need to be investigating to support such a shift. What is needed, we propose, is a new metaphysics and value logic towards the creation of new science (beyond physics) more fitting the emerging new paradigm. Also, with the help of this abduction, we hope movement forward beyond the constraints of materialism will be encouraged. There are many world-over contributing their roles in revealing the “subect matter” for the new metaphysics and new kinds of logics requisite for a science to form. It is nothing short of humanity “growing a new mind.” And by working together with those seeing the turn, we may even be able to grow our alliances with nature and her laws to make corrections in errors generated by a science of “things” (physics) long held as the sole foundational science being applied to living processes and living beings. What does this emerging knowledge mean and how can and does it impact our lives? How do these emerging insights lead to a paradigm shift unlike any in the history of 2500 years? And how can they help with social change? A preface from Norm Hirst on his Inquiry History: Fifty years ago I, Norm Hirst, became convinced that there was going to be an urgent need to understand values. At MIT I studied values with Robert Hartman, a visiting professor developing value theory as formal axiology for a science of value. I thought I would find the logic of value in the mathematical and logical foundations of physics. Instead, I would discover through a lifetime of inquiry that physics and it’s foundations in substance metaphysics and accompanying logics is totally inappropriate for applications to understanding life. Way down deep human knowledge developed in a way that became committed to errors that destroy life. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 2 I studied physics gaining experience with an actual science. I studied the philosophy of science to help me understand science in general. I studied mathematics to understand the driving force behind scientific inquiry. I studied the theory of logic to understand the limitations of mathematics. I discovered the limitations of logic itself. I then studied the most modern theory of formalisms and discovered that logic, as we know it, is simply one amongst many possibilities for doing meaningful formalisms. What people today believe is rational is simply one choice. Believing that philosophy itself was a way of exploration I turned to it. Mainstream substance philosophy offered a worldview, a metaphysics that further entrapped us. In the beginning of my journey when I was a physics student at MIT I met Robert Hartman. Hartman was an internationally known philosopher and visiting professor at MIT. He taught a course on value theory that he referred to as formal axiology. Three hundred years ago natural philosophy, after twenty-five centuries of development, was turned in to natural science. Hartman believed that value philosophy was ready to produce a value science. Hartman also believed, as I do, that science is inquiry based on a formal theory. This is the primary difference between science and philosophy. Philosophical inquiry is based on theories expressed in ordinary language; though the language may be bent all out of shape to express philosophical ideas. Hartman’s value theory was expressed in formal axiology. Axiology simply means value theory. It is derived from axios for value and logos for theory. In the theory Hartman made a startling discovery. The highest class of values was referred to as intrinsic values. The lowest class of values was referred to as systemic values. Yet it could be clearly seen that contemporary societies judged systemic values to be the highest. Hartman referred to this as “inversion of the value hierarchy”. It was obvious that this inversion led to needless suffering and tragedy. Today it is the root cause of terrorism. Back then, mid 1950’s, I was certainly naive. I thought Hartman should immediately go testify before Congress to give them the news. I soon realized that, if he did, the members of Congress would not believe a word he said. I also believed more work had to be done so there could be no doubt. The theory had to be unshakeable. I thought we needed a new form of mathematics. To begin looking for a new form of mathematics, I bought all three volumes of Principia Mathematica, the volumes in which Russell and Whitehead developed mathematics from logic. From them I concluded that logic was fundamentally unsuited to thinking about values. I began to feel rather hopeless. The next step for me was an accidental discovery. Quite by accident I discovered a book about a new kind of logic I had never heard of. (Combinatory Logic by Curry and Feys) I began to realize that our thought processes might have been trapped by 25 centuries of tradition. Whole new ways of thinking seemed possible. If so, what we called reality might be something created based on incomplete understanding. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 3 This idea was confirmed for me in the 1970’s when I read a paper by Gotthard Günther, a professor from Germany visiting the United States to work on cybernetics and biological computers. The paper clearly demonstrated his claim that traditions in logic were failing us and we could not go forward without new logics. I also began to see that values only worked in living processes. Since our culture’s worldview is based on mechanisms there is no real understanding of values because there is no understanding of living processes. When we speak of living processes we are often asked what living processes are. One might object that there has been a lot of progress in biology. Surely biologists must know about living processes. But Robert Rosen, a mathematical biologist, warned us in his book, “Life Itself”, not to ask biologists what life is. They don’t know! I am sure my reader may find this to be an improbable assertion. Know that Robert Rosen was a Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University. He wrote thirteen books including seven volumes of Progress in Theoretical Biology. Biologists, like all of us, are limited by paradigms. The current paradigms of science are reductionistic and mechanistic. By this paradigm, to understand a living organism one takes it apart to get at the basic components that function as mechanisms. Mechanisms are processes prearranged to produce certain results given certain inputs. Put simply, living organisms can be studied as if they are machines. But they are not machines. Such study produces misleading results though not necessarily totally wrong or useless results. Today’s high-tech medicine is based on studying the body as a biochemical machine. Sometimes high-tech is the only approach to save a life, but all too often it is unnecessary and damaging. I have sought understanding of life and its logic to provide a foundation for understanding values. Mostly it has been one step forward and two steps backward, but not always. The occasional one-step forward with no steps backward have added up. Such disciplines as process philosophy, autopoiesis, axiology, semiotics and new logics have contributed valid pieces to the puzzle of life and its logic. These are all actively developing disciplines. The number of scholars around the world involved in their development is growing though it may still be a minority. Recent experiments of the past 20+ years in physics and biophysics are producing results that cannot be explained with the traditional scientific materialism and substance philosophy. A new worldview is required. Not only is a new view of reality required, we also need to change protocols of inquiry to cope with it. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 4 Breakthroughs to which I refer: About recent breakthroughs and some of their implications: • An eminent mathematical biologist (Robert Rosen) demonstrated that, given the requirements of life, physics could not be the most fundamental science. A theory of life cannot be derived from physics. • In 1992 a prominent biophysicist, Dr. Mae Wan Ho, discovered that living tissue has extraordinary electrical properties that provide instantaneous communication throughout a living organism. There is body awareness before there is nervous system awareness. Nerve messages may take a fraction of a second. • Living entities are holistic. Humans consist of 75 trillion cells living in a pure democracy. Each cell enjoys maximum freedom to act, subject only to the requirements of maintaining the body’s coherence. • Our bodies are like super jazz bands playing our personal themes in 72 octaves of vibration. • Perception is not computer-like with sensors picking up data. Rather it is a case of senses in active inquiry interacting with our environments and causing perturbations to our theme. Thus every one of us might perceive a different reality. • In living entities, energy is stored in forms of a wide diversity required for survival. All life requires this diversity to not only survive, but to thrive. • Add section on Water from Mae Wan Ho’s last book Living Rainbow H20 The more we learn about how life works and how to recognize life, it becomes clear that we are each living cells in a living cosmos. The challenges, the quickening pace of events; the stunning changes in weather, the seeking for meaning and order in it all are all indications of this fast approaching shift, a paradigm shift unlike any of us have seen during our life-times. To get through the mechanistic deadlock to further understanding requires a new foundation of philosophy with matching logic. Towards that end I bring into question scientific materialism and advance considerations for the foundations of a new science for life as organism. Scientific materialism, in spite of its triumphs in creating technology, is such a limited and incomplete view that it is deadening and destructive when applied to living contexts. The challenges will be based on new discoveries in physics and biophysics. Presenting them has a dual purpose. I think they decisively falsify scientific materialism and provide ideas that have to be incorporated in a new worldview to understand life. Towards a science of life as creative organism, we consider the following topics: 1. Life as fundamental and creative, not matter 2. The characteristics of life as organisms and organismic functioning Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 5 3. Foundations for a new organismic philosophy and formalism 4. Logic (Early Formalism) of Organisms Prologue A new age of understanding Life as organism, we speculate, is an emerging world-view concerning the natural laws in life that have long been overlooked by science and much of the Western world philosophy. It would appear, even, that there are basic organizing principles that give rise to the beauty, aesthetics and cooperative powers throughout nature. These principles reveal how individual life-forms are both autonomous and connected with maximum freedom to act, choose and fulfill themselves, how the value process is inherent (not as set of words to aspire to), how life is not static, but ever changing and opening to new possibilities for health and balance; how life forms reality from within, and how values, rules and metaphysical laws function as internal guides, how they form within and can change; how perception and communication comes from learned felt senses stored within our body/minds, and how peace is a result of being able to realize a coherence from within over and over. Until 1990s, the dominant scientific view was that the universe was composed of inanimate matter and that life was some kind of accident. Signs of life on other planets have been sought, while doing research to discover how life happened. Pre 1990 worldview was a profound misunderstanding of reality from which humans became analogous to the proverbial “bull in a china shop”. The hideous record of destroying life and inflicting suffering has been the result. Since 1990 profound breakthroughs in understanding life have occurred. Since 1990 indepth studies of how life functions while it lives are revealing insights that break with what has previously been held as the paradigm of science with the foundations being physics. (See work of Mae Wan Ho among others who are bio-physicists) An Abductive Hypotheses • Life-itself is a primordial matrix, an originating force out of which living entities are formed and manifest. • Living entities are self-creating according to the laws of Life-itself • These laws, although they are in process of being discovered, would appear to be foundational, epi ordering processes through which living entities manifest. In physics we have laws of matter. In life-itself, we have laws of life, coherence laws Old assumptions: Living organisms as unrelated discrete packages. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 6 New life assumptions: All life may be cosmically holistic and connected. Old assumptions: Physics can be captured by mathematics, as we know it. New assumptions: Life cannot be captured by mathematics, as we know it. Autopoiesis; a new discipline of inquiry about organisms, points out the nature of organism as self-creating, obeying self-laws of autonomy, self-knowing, self-referencing and connectedness. From Autopoiesis as well as other disciplines rising at the edges of science traditions, we see many indicators of necessity to grow a new mind for this emerging understanding of our reality. After the initial basis of a rational life, with a civilized language, has been laid, all productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic insight of artists, or by the imaginative elaboration of schemes of thought capable of utilization as logical premises. In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious. Alfred North Whitehead Section I Ok. What is Life? Today there is so much confusion about what life is, it is hard to tell what is living and what is not living. In the past life has been defined solely by observable attributes such as the ability to produce offspring and it has to be carbon based with the required number of elements. Thus I propose an abductive hypothesis. If something appears to be self-creating, it is living! Natural objects such as plants and animals need no assembly. They simply come into manifestation as whole entities. Self-creating entities come into manifestation holistically. There are no parts. There may appear to be parts. We have many distinct organs that can be interpreted as parts causing many to think of the body as a machine. However research about living functions reveals a different understanding. Surprisingly, the same can be said of organizations of life such as families, businesses, churches, governments and economies. In a living organism the total organism contributes to how the organs function. There is nothing machine-like in a living entity. If parts are assembled to produce something, it is not living. Nonliving are only the things that are built part by part. In machines, assembled part by part, each part has a definite separate function contributing to the functioning of the machine. Each discrete part will not change what it was designed to do in a machine. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 7 You may say, of course not, yet biology as it is practiced today is based on physics and laws of matter. The recent break-throughs are helping us to advance new foundations that can now lay the ground work for truly understanding more what life is and how it functions from the Epi-Gnome to the Living Cosmos. The implications for a better life for you and me and for our world are breath taking and awe-inspiring, but most of all they give new meaning and purpose for life at every level. The now emerging discoveries and understanding of life offers hope. In the future we can live life, as it should be, in peace and love. Here we begin to share with you a brief overview of some of these foundational shifts in understanding natural law of life-itself. An early definition of Life-itself produces a living entity that comes into existence through self-production by self-referential processes. This is an intrinsic characteristic of life, not observable by the laws of matter assumptions. Life means the organizing principles that are creating all forms of life. I shall talk of the “laws of life” referring to the laws by which organisms function. There will be many differences of details but throughout there will be organizing principles that characterize life and life as organism. All forms of life are organisms and they obey universals. It is our hypotheses that on every hierarchal level in living entities, the same kind of processes will occur and can be recognized as universal living processes; organismic. These principles obey very different kinds of logic than that known in the scientific materialism of physics. The material world can be accounted for by induction and deduction, but in the world of life and organisms abduction is also required. Bear in mind as we go, the subject of this paper cannot be approached in the old style of simulation by computation. Life is Sui generis, that is, life is unique and in a class by itself. It cannot be compared to or explained by physics. What is coming out in today’s research in biophysics labs around the world requires understanding how living organisms are free to act and combine in societal unities. Life is fundamental. Life is unpredictable and uncontrollable. To be alive is to be able to act. There is nothing in our history of ideas, whether philosophical or scientific, that deals with living self-acting entities. Everything in our philosophy and science is an attempt to imitate life with non-living entities not capable of self-determining and self-initiating action. We will talk about life as energies within the electronics nature of living organisms, and mysteries such as how bodies of so many parts can be holistic. The answer is the organizing processes within them are holistic. The living processes within them are “metastable” and constantly have to be maintained by energy. If the organizing processes cannot be maintained, all that’s left is hardware. Life means organisms. There seems to be more agreement to this than I would have expected. Actually, organism is a broader category then we knew. If it is an organism, it is alive. This draws a distinction between mechanisms, as in computers, and organisms that do not function by mechanisms. Organisms may include the cells in our bodies, you and me, or you and me as cells in society, the ecosystem, the economy, or planet earth as a cell in the Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 8 universe. Thus it is being said today that the cosmos is an organism; what used to seem an outrageous claim that the cosmos is living. We know that the Gaia hypothesis claims the earth is a living organism; the cells in our bodies are organisms, now, by high tech observation, the molecules in the cells are living organisms. Organism/NOT/computers: In a sense we all know what organisms are. We are organisms. Yet we really don’t know. 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. Life means structured energy in the Sea of Dirac (pre-space), a primordial matrix that creates the physical universe as a living entity/organism. Within this living entity (infinite because there is no other) are many hierarchal societies of organisms, all connected and interacting. Life is primordial activity, which Bohm called the implicate order. …it is possible, not only for the manifest level of ordinary experience, but for the quantum level underlying it, to emerge from a deeper implicate level in which the classical Cartesian notions of form, order and structure have more or less dissolved…this suggestion is close to one that has been under consideration recently by physicists, i.e., that of ‘pre-space.’ …[1] Life-itself holds the organizing principles (a built-in functioning logic) of living entities - how they manifest and function. Old and Emerging Worldviews; how they contrast What are the old and emerging new worldviews; how are worldviews formed, effect values and actions that create our experience? Claire Graves’ work (see Beck’s Spiral Dynamics, and Wilbur’s Theory of Everything) points to this evolutionary process of human knowledge forming and changing from centuries of philosophical observations of experience, then forming sciences that produce results that form mainstream manifestation. (See LaLoux’s book Reinventing Organizations) Forty years ago I realized that although there was a lot of talk about values no one seemed to really know what values were. I set out to understand values. Then I realized that a major contributing factor in our ignorance was that values only made sense and functioned in process. That was a time of Joe Friday on Dragnet saying, “Just the facts mam”. Just the facts are the residue left behind by process. Any culture that encourages “just the facts” does not permit perception of process and, consequently, understanding of values. Process means a sequence of changes leading to some end. There are two kinds of process; mechanistic and creative. They might also be called non-living and living process. Values are only operative in living process. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 9 Non-living and living processes are quite different in how they are organized and what they can do. Non-living processes are built on mechanical principles of cause and effect. Knowing how a non-living process is organized, and knowing its current activity, one can predict, by chains of logic, where it will evolve baring chaotic breaks. In contrast, living processes are autopoietic, i.e., self-building, autonomous, self-knowing and value driven. These properties preclude the possibility of applying logic as we have known it and, also, applying language to understand living processes. This is not the first case in which language proves inadequate. Physics cannot be understood in ordinary language. Physics, even Newtonian physics, requires the calculus. However, physics as it developed, did not violate the so-called “laws of thought” as put forth by Boole. Now we know that quantum logic does. But quantum logic does not begin to wreak the havoc on traditional logic that the properties of living processes do. Now, to understand living processes we need to understand such ideas as consistent yet paradoxical logics. Fortunately, logic research in the past few decades has provided the grounds for understanding such logics. Unfortunately, hardly anyone knows such grounds exist. We might now divide reality into two domains. There is a non-living domain of machine like processes and there is a living domain of autonomous, self-knowing, value driven creative processes. The non-living domain is well known. The character and dynamics of the living domain, the largest, most important domain and the one that most influences not only our quality of life but also our ability to go on living are an area of vast ignorance. What we perceive depends on what we think. Traditional thinking has revealed certain aspects of reality while blinding us to other aspects that may be more important. Traditional thinking has been focused on a reality of facts. We have lost sight of the creative processes that manifest the facts. Those processes bring about constant change. Facts are like snapshots along the way. We can compare it to a movie film. The film has a sequence of still frames, i.e., snapshots in which there is no motion. Imagine cutting the film into a pile of still frames and then trying to imagine what the movie is like. Reality is analogous to a movie. Traditional thinking cuts it into a series of snapshots. We try to guess what reality is about. Too often we guess wrong. With today’s technology we cannot afford to. I was shocked when I realized there is nothing in today’s science that helps us understand life. The concepts of science have been restricted to how lifeless passive entities will move under external forces. It is a view that works well for understanding machines. It is totally inappropriate for understanding life. It is destructive of life. We need a new mind. Reality is analogous to a movie, but there are many differences. The only connection between the frames of a movie is that someone has assembled them one after another. In life the connection is that a frame grows out of previous frames. They are called “actual occasions”(Whitehead). An actual occasion is manifest in a process that Whitehead described as “the many become one and are increased by one”. Our ordinary thinking does Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 10 not permit understanding of this phrase nor does it allow perceiving it happening. Humanity is profoundly unaware of and misunderstands living reality. We are like the proverbial bull in a china shop smashing and killing life with great abandon. One example: Life requires diversity and variety. Call it biodiversity. Biodiversity is essential at every level from the ecosystem to the soil in which healthy plants can grow. Life requires cooperation between the diverse many. Competition is thought to be necessary for survival. In our gardens we note bugs are eating a plant. This is war. The bugs and our plants are enemies. So the plants can win insecticides are used. What is not known is: 1. The plants radiate signals regarding their health. The bugs are only attracted to signals of sickness. They are garbage collectors and scavengers. 2. The sprays kill the organisms in the soil needed for healthy plants. Keep it up and all the plants will be sick. I believe we have reached that state. Farmers now need fertilizers to grow anything on their now deeply depleted soil. 3. Fertilizers make the plants grow to look good. Fertilizers are similar to the drugs prescribed by doctors. They don’t cure anything. They just improve appearances. The supportive natural environment has been smashed and killed until it is hard to find healthy food. One-track minds infatuated with force, cause end effect, lead to genetic engineering. Now it is known life-itself does not work the way they thought. The subtle dance was missed by which the genes work as a society. Having planted genetically modified crops strange genes are blowing in the wind threatening our ability to grow normal crops. It seems that the modern day approach to every problem is control by force or “fightingagainst.” There has been a war on cancer, a war on drugs, endless wars and all they achieve is destruction. What will the new mind (new paradigm) be? What is changing is movement from “thing” reality to “living process reality.” Basically as you go from thing realities to living process realities it requires a different way of thinking, different attitudes towards thinking. In the thing reality you think about facts. Facts are what is. It feels like there is nothing you can do about it. Life is a process reality, and what you need to be thinking about is how it changes. What are the Laws of change? Not what IS, but how the process EVOLVES. Thus, the central core of our work has been to go beyond the collected dominate ignorance of that which is always with us and so obvious, yet ignored, because there has been no language built around a living process set of assumptions. To do so we have adopted a form of scientific inquiry suited to the subject matter. As the inquiry progresses we gain insights into what is effective in dealing with the living domain. For example, principles leading to effective government, effective management and principles leading to health, meaning, etc. We are anxious to share the results and in the sharing we will discover empirical approval or disapproval of the theoretical hypotheses for the requirements for life-itself. With over 20 Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 11 years of working with these hypotheses there is strong evidence that they can provide navigation to the growth of a new mind; a new peaceful world that works for all life. Our goal has been to make the nature and requirements of life-itself more fully conscious. There is now a struggle for the future. This has been visible as violence and war increase throughout the world. Now the stakes have been elevated. President Bush chose a violent response to the violent attack of 9-11. (With President D. Trump, the role of this work takes on added urgency.) The use of force and violence to control the world leads to less freedom that ultimately erupts in more violence. A downward spiral occurs when attempts to control life with more laws, more restrictions, a narrow interpretation of "rule of law" are used in the belief that control will restore order during such times of violence. As soldiers worldwide are discovering, more is accomplished by winning "hearts and minds" than by using force and rules. The current dominant worldview cannot support life (manifest living entities) We all are born into a language using community from which we all learn a whole system of starting assumptions. Norm Hirst Further illustrating the problem Ken Wilber, in his book “A Theory of Everything”, presents the significance of discoveries originally made by the psychologist Clare Graves. Graves discovered an important evolutionary hierarchy in human development. The version discussed below by Wilber is taken from the book “Spiral Dynamics” by Don Beck and Chris Cowan. Stage Characteristics Population Power 1 sharpen instincts and innate sense 0.1% 0% 2 seek harmony and safety in a mysterious world 10.0% 1% 3 express impulsively, break free, be strong 20.0% 5% 4 find purpose, bring order, insure future 40.0% 30% 5 analyze and strategize to prosper 30.0% 50% 6 explore inner self, equalize others 10.0% 15% 7 integrate and align systems 1.0% 5% 8 synergize and macromanage 0.1% 1% 9 slowly emerging Population shows the percentage of the world’s adult population in each level. Power shows the levels of influence. These percentages are changing rapidly as we move into advancing levels. Some people are still in early stages. The difficulty is that people in different levels of the hierarchy will experience, see and believe in totally different realities. Let us contrast two such levels. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 12 “Level 4: Life has meaning, direction and purpose, with outcomes determined by an all-powerful Other or Order. This righteous Order enforces a code of conduct based on absolutist and unvarying principles of “right” and “wrong”. Violating the code or rules has severe, perhaps everlasting, repercussions. Following the code yields rewards for the faithful. Basis of ancient nations, rigid social hierarchies; paternalistic; one right way and only one right way to think about everything. Law and order, impulsively controlled through guilt; concrete-literal and fundamentalist belief, obedience to the rule of Order; strongly conventional and conformist” (A Theory of Everything, p9) “Level 6:Communitarian, human bonding, ecological sensitivity, networking. The human spirit must be freed from greed, dogma, and divisiveness; feelings and caring supersede cold rationality; cherishing of the earth, Gaia, life. Against hierarchy; establishes lateral bonding and linking. Permeable self, relational self, group intermeshing. Emphasis is on dialogue, relationships. Basis is of value communities (i.e., freely chosen affiliations based on shared sentiments). Reaches decisions through reconciliation and consensus (downside: interminable “processing” and incapacity to reach decisions). Refresh spirituality, bring harmony, and enrich human potential. Strongly egalitarian, anti-hierarchy, pluralistic values, social construction of reality, diversity, multiculturalism, relativistic value systems; this worldview is often called pluralistic relativism. Subjective, nonlinear thinking; shows a greater degree of affective warmth, sensitivity, and caring for earth and all its inhabitants.” (A Theory of Everything, p10) Obviously a level 6 person cannot live in a level 4 reality. A level 4 person cannot approve of a level 6 reality. There are large segments of the population living in the same world but not the same reality. The struggle for the future will be fierce unless … I learned long ago that one should not judge what could be done in the future by what can be done today. Knowing the laws of Newtonian physics we can fly; fly to the moon if we so desire. Knowing the laws of quantum physics we can build computer chips. But I remember another era, the 1930’s! Flying to the moon was clearly impossible because to fly required wings and air to support them. There simply wasn’t enough air between here and the moon. Then there was the Dick Tracey wrist radio. That was an absurdity because not even a single vacuum tube could fit in a wristwatch-sized container. Now we can put a whole computer in a molecule. What has made the difference is knowing the relevant natural laws of physics and how to work with them. 1st 4 stages of human knowledge development have been "outer" directed. In an "outer" directed society, administrations can justify use of narrow systemic values of right and wrong. The experience of life becomes deprived of meaning and purpose. Prosperity is defined in terms of having enough money to control and impose force. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 13 Beginning with the next stage we are moving to an "inner directed" society. With the "inner directed" stage, people will now seek to find meaning, ask who they are, and what their own values are. Society will not be based on rules, but value harmonization of great diversity with each individual entity contributing to the widest and highest good. We will learn to value how each individual contributes to the diversity life requires for survival. It will become evident that both individual and collective wellbeing are needed and possible if we grow a new mind. What role might you have in shaping where it is going? Paradigm changes are very difficult. A paradigm is a set of assumptions about what reality is. This shift occurs one person at a time. When each of us does the work of changing our own paradigm, then this shift occurs rapidly and universally throughout the human consciousness. The power of a paradigm holds us in a grip until enough people can begin to experience the value and power of the emerging one. An inner paradigm is made of beliefs, habits of thought and perception derived from experience. As we examine the previous Levels as mentioned in Spiral Dynamics, a person growing up in Level 4 would be frightened by loss of the central authority. So as we each develop towards greater awareness of our own paradigms, free ourselves from limited beliefs, and develop new assumptions about how life works, as the numbers increase in awareness, we collectively tip the scale towards realizing that the old paradigm no longer serves us and the shift occurs individually and collectively. Supporting the individual shift is a quiet revolution occurring in sciences, philosophy, and religion. There is something beginning in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, and theology that hold the potential to transform the nature and function of science and mathematics-and the very foundations of human inquiry and discovery, from physics and biology, to medicine and the social sciences. We are presently standing on the threshold of a truly profound and sweeping paradigm change, a real revolution in science whose implications are every bit as significant as the ancient discovery of fire. With the understanding of fire, our civilization was born. With the understanding of life itself, civilization will take on a new dimension of completeness, ushered in with a new Renaissance in the sciences and humanities. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 14 Section II If Current Dominant World View Can't Support Life, it may help to understand from where has the Current World View of Western Thought come - what formed that dominant perspective impacting economies, cultures, science, & religions? There is a popular belief that science consists of a number of crystallized truths - laws and facts about the universe that are empirically verifiable. But science, like all human endeavors, is not infallible. There is no final scientific test for anything. Scientific discovery, like life, is a process, not a set of conclusions. It is a lifetime endeavor of constantly asking new questions….. Scientists have a burning curiosity to know, striving to understand more and more about the great cosmic handiwork. With disciplined rigor of keen eyes, skilled hands, and trained minds, they behold nature in new ways in order to reveal previously unknown facets of the cosmic design. They arrive at fresh insights about the patterns of connections and regularly abandon old models and theories. …… Perhaps the greatest obstacle that frontier scientists…face is political—the tendency for human systems to resist change, to resist the impact of new discoveries, especially those that challenge the status quo of the scientific establishment. (Excerpts from Beverly Rubik, LIFE AT THE EDGE OF SCIENCE, Publisher, Date) How do we get beyond our present state of knowledge? The history of humanity is a history of transcending past states of knowledge. In the past a state of knowledge lasted so long it must have seemed there was no other way. Now change is occurring so fast that the current state of knowledge must seem a transient condition. What do we mean by getting beyond our present state of knowledge? It would seem as if knowledge is constantly advancing. But by state of knowledge we mean something more fundamental than simply the totality of what is known. What we mean is current paradigms. Paradigm, what do we mean? (See T. Kuhn's 1962 Book, The Structure oof Scientific Revolutions for deeper explanation) Paradigm refers to those unstated assumptions that give meaning and validity to potential knowledge. For example physicians are trained to view the body as a biochemical machine. As a machine illness suggests that the machine is broken and someone has to fix it by known physical means such as by the addition of chemicals that alter the chemistry of the machine. Thus physicians turn to drugs. In contrast, the existence of energy flows carrying out the processes of self-creation may appear as nonsense to anyone who believes in biochemical machines. Thus alternative healing based on energy flows may be condemned as charlatanism. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 15 It is important to understand this point. Every professional discipline, without exception, is based on a paradigm. We all are born into a language using community from which we all learn a whole system of starting assumptions. What we can ultimately experience and perceive depends on what that system of starting assumptions permits, unless, of course, we consciously revise it. Fortunately, language is intrinsically meaningless. We have to work with it to shape it and render meaning. In the course of shaping language, the role of philosophy, we may find flaws in our starting assumptions leading to conscious revision. Conscious revision is a most difficult process. Let us say we begin with the assumption that the world is composed of things. We learn to recognize things, to act with things, and to survive amongst things. But then we find things which don’t quite act right for things. (For example, the wave/particle duality in quantum physics.) Then begins a glimmering insight that there is something besides things. Initially this may be a frightening insight since we have no experience surviving in a world of more than just things. But ultimately the insight grows until it cannot be denied. And philosophers and scientists talk about it. It becomes part of the language, and new generations are born into a different world. Right now we, the people of the world, are in a transition phase of conscious revision. The system of starting assumptions that has served for twenty-five centuries has begun to fail. Two indicators of the failure are the peculiarities of quantum physics and crises in the foundations of mathematics that occurred around the beginning of the 20th. Century. More spectacularly we find social institutions beginning to fail. What happens during such major shifts? When such changes occur, historically, there is much polarization and attempts to control the breakdowns through authoritarian style governmental actions. A democracy cannot withstand such actions. It quickly becomes something else. When freedoms are taken away and suspended in order to control change, democracy is in trouble. Understanding what democracy is and how it needs to be protected and defended is crucial at all times, but especially at this time when this shift is occurring. Understanding is called for and deep awareness unlike at any other time. The role of each of us at this time is to grasp new understanding of how Life from inside> out works and how what we value creates our reality that is forming today. As citizens of our world, we have an opportunity to make this shift, but not without some work and commitment to learning and working this new emerging understanding. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 16 Some terms clarification for further discourse Newtonian mechanism: We use the terms Newtonian and mechanical or mechanism as equivalent. The mechanical paradigm is based on mathematical language for describing “dynamical systems”. Although physics has advanced beyond Newton through the discovery of relativity and quantum theory, the basic mathematical tools remain Newtonian in character. This mathematical language has a built in duality representing a distinction between internal states and dynamical laws. Even relativity and quantum theory still use this framework though quantum theory requires a radical modification of what constitutes a state. Living systems have no such states. It appears as if resolving the problems of interpreting quantum theory, require different mathematics. What is science? Science is the study of change or process. Change cannot be random or without order. If it were there would simply be chaos instead of us. Also, change cannot be deterministic. If it were there would be no meaning, values would be irrelevant. Science discovers and expresses, brings into consciousness, those organizing principles that order but do not determine change. Look! If I am going to walk there has to be friction between my feet and the ground or floor. If there were no friction it would be worse than trying to walk on ice. Yet friction does not determine if I will walk or where I will walk or how I will walk. Science is formal theory development (sign or symbol system) applied to subject matter (philosophies). When you interpret the elements of a formal sign system with the elements of experience (subject matter), it leads to scientific understanding of that subject matter. Once significant understanding is developed, the theory can be applied and tested. If a single exception is found, the theory is rejected. In science everything is synthetic. We explicitly create connections between elements of theory when we specify their properties. Theory requires following explicitly stated rules. This is called calculation. In science we give up ordinary language in favor of calculating with formalized systems of signs. Through such a language of calculation we synthesize. Thus we have a closed loop: subject matter => linguistic analysis => fundamental insights>axioms => calculation => subject matter “Form of function” - To achieve a science we must find a way to express the “form of function”. Much has been written on “form and function”. But now we are concerned with the “form of function”. To be simple, if the function of a door is to plug up a rectangular hole the form of the door must be rectangular. Thus form and function go together. But the form of the door function is to open and close or to swing back and forth. Speaking a noun language we are more concerned with “what something is” rather than “what something does”. Our language is not well suited to the form of function. Even the most basic law of physics, Newton’s law, force equals rate of change of momentum, Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 17 involves a relationship, equality, between a vector, force, and the time derivative, a calculus operation, on the product of a scalar, mass, and a vector, velocity. In English, this isn’t worth pursuing. And, until we could pursue it we walked, rode horses, and drove ox-carts. Today, we drive automobiles and fly to the moon. In English, or any other language, there is much we cannot talk about such as the “form of function”. Thus there is much we cannot share. The yearnings of my heart are known only to me, and yours, to you. But that is not the worst of it. If there can be no head without heart and no heart without head than the yearnings of my heart can, at best, be imperfectly fulfilled and imperfectly known to even me. To achieve a science requires intellectual invention of a means for expressing the organizing laws of the forms of function of that which has remained a mystery in experience combined with an intense desire to penetrate the mystery at last and becoming free to soar to higher aesthetic realms. Science requires both head and heart, and so do we. Thus our work may seem paradoxical. On the one hand I see rigor of thought and expression on a par with mathematics. On the other hand I see promotion of aesthetic experience on a par with music or poetry or spiritual enlightenment and the fulfillment of dreams. It seems fashionable today to distinguish between mind and heart. Mind can never know the reasons of the heart. There are many such dichotomies. (Rational-Intuitive, Feminine-Masculine, Head-Heart) Many people would consider science to be rational, masculine and head centered. Many believe that what we need now is more intuitive, feminine and heart centered. Advocating science must seem to be some peculiar eccentricity. Yet that is what we are doing. In life these dichotomies go together. There is no rational without intuitive, no intuitive without rational. There is no feminine without masculine and no masculine without feminine. There is no head without heart, no heart without head. And, I insist that science is rational-intuitive, feminine-masculine and head-heart. Philosophy and science are complementary methods of inquiry. What is philosophy? It is observation of experience and trying to explain it by adapting ordinary language to make sense of it. I hold that philosophy and science are complementary methods of inquiry. In philosophy we use ordinary language to talk about our subjects. Through talking, we analyze. What is Metaphysics?: insert definition- see Whitehead and Hartshorn What is theory? It is a whole system of related hypotheses and their consequences that reduce to a unity. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 18 Philosophies and Metaphysics that have shaped our current worldview. Our current worldview is based on “Substance” Philosophy Substance or Being Metaphysics: (See history of human knowledge) Substance Metaphysics assumes that material substance is fundamental and everything has to be derived from material substance. Our Western tradition is based on "substance" philosophy. Background of Philosophy/Science development: From the time of Greek philosophy, around 500BC, until the end of the 19th Century, human knowledge developed as a theory of things. During the 17th Century the theory of things became scientific with Newton’s physics. Towards the end of the 19th Century, physicists believed that physics was a completed project with only a few details to be investigated. Physics was thought to be the most basic science from which all other knowledge should be derived. Then came the 20th Century! The 20th Century ushered in two new kinds of physics producing three in all. Quantum physics developed for very low energy physics. Newton’s physics remained for energy levels typical of human experience. Relativity physics developed for very high energies. Physics is not a completed project. Indeed, it is full of mysteries. For example, while the mathematics of quantum physics produces remarkably reliable results no one yet knows how to interpret what is going on at the quantum level. There is more to reality than we know. It is time for a fourth theory of reality! The 21st Century requires a new beginning. The 20th Century was a magic century for technology development; not an unmixed blessing. However the technology has enabled seeing and discovering processes never before known. Now we move away from a theory of things to a theory of process. We find that thing theories are embedded in process theories. As such they account for certain aspects of reality but not the fullness of reality. Things are passive. They are acted upon. They are not actors. All we can know is the relations between things. In physics we have theories to calculate the changes in relations based on the operative forces. There is no indication as to what it all means. Indeed, I would characterize our time as a time of no meaning. About process metaphysics Rescher says: 1 “… a process metaphysics propounds certain characteristic stresses of emphasis in contrast to those of a substance metaphysics, as follows: Substance Philosophy Process Philosophy discrete individuality interactive relatedness separateness wholeness (totality) 1Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics, State University of New York Press, 1996, Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 19 condition (fixity of nature) activity (self-development) uniformity of nature innovation/novelty unity of being unity of law (individualized specificity) (functional typology) descriptive fixity productive energy, drive,etc classificatory stability fluidity and evanescence passivity (being acted upon) activity (agency)” These metaphysical categories reflect what we look for in experience. I found it to be an interesting exercise to try changing my experience by looking for interactive relatedness rather than discrete individuality, etc. Above terms and concepts in Substance Philosophy further explained. Discrete individuality means that everything is separate and not context dependent. It simply is what it is and does not change itself. Everything becomes an assemblage of independent parts like parts of the body. It doesn't support life because a living entity is not composed of parts or static states. Separateness means something cut away from the rest of the whole. Condition is a fixed state that does not change at all. It's like a machine part that is what it is no matter what happens around it. Unity of being means it is a singular part with specific purpose that exists for its own sake, not changing, or affected by change. Descriptive fixity means being always consistent in describing something and that description never changes and it is only one narrow way of describing something. My heart works like a pump. Classificatory stability means however you classify something, it is not going to change. Ex: My trumpet is a musical instrument. Passivity (being acted upon) means the thing can only move if a force hits. It can't move or exercise any will of its own. Ex. A rock These ideas are the foundations of current thinking in all of us about the assumptions of reality. They are powerful in holding us hostage. Some would say, it’s in our DNA. The above set of philosophical assumptions gave rise to the theory of reductionism. Reductionism simply means that a phenomenon is best understood by understanding an assemblage of its basic parts. Thus has been the search in physics for most fundamental particles and their theory. It has been believed that if we understand the most fundamental particles they can be assembled into atoms. Atoms can be assembled into molecules. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 20 Molecules can be assembled into cells. Cells can be assembled into organs. Organs can be assembled into organisms. Thus you and I can be explained! Well, of course it is nonsense. In the domain of discourse in Western Science, everything that is observed is or is reduced to passive particles and force. It has no living entities in it. The foundation science is physics. Consider: When people in government formulate policy, they can only imagine that they see passive particles and force. Ex. Each human is a particle needing to be controlled. Sciences (Physics, Newtonian) that have formed current worldview. Given the reductionistic philosophical foundations, science developed in the following ways. It was believed that the only scientific approach to the question “What is life?” must proceed from the Cartesian metaphor (organism as machine). Classical approaches in science, which also borrow heavily from Newtonian mechanics, are based on a process called “reductionism.” The thinking was that we can better learn about an intricate, complicated system (like an organism) if we take it apart, study the components, and then reconstruct the system-thereby gaining an understanding of the whole. 2500 years has brought us to need for change in science. What is science? How does it form and shape thought and actions? We'd like to distinguish here what is Science and what is Not Science? One of the most disheartening aspects of our working towards a new science is the fact that so few people have any idea what science is. I base my view of science on physics and the philosophy of science. From this view very little of what is called science passes muster as a science. Most so-called science should really be called “empirical philosophy”. I have no power to legislate how people will use the word “science”. There is a discipline called “the philosophy of science”. This is a branch of philosophy dedicated to understanding what science is, and isn’t. It deals with such issues as what is scientific proof. In answer, there is no such thing. No catalogue of facts can make a science. No catalogue of beliefs, opinions or ideas can make a science. Science is something different, something that most people have never experienced. I am going to try to create a picture. Looking at the statements made in science they are not made in any language and they are not about facts. Scientific statements are made using the elements of a sign system and they are about principles. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 21 The gadgeteers and data collectors, masquerading as scientists, have threatened to become the supreme chieftains of the scholarly world. As the Renaissance could accuse the Middle Ages of being rich in principles and poor in facts, we are now entitled to enquire whether we are not rich in facts and poor in principles. R.M. Hutchins, Chancellor of University of Chicago 1945-51. The sign system for physics is mathematics. Actually, mathematics is a symbol system. Symbols are degenerate signs. Scientific statements are about the organizing principles of processes. Process means a sequence of changes leading to some end. There are two kinds of process; mechanistic and creative. They might also be called non-living and living process. Values are only operative in living process. The difference between scientific knowledge and other kinds of knowledge is the difference between how and what. Facts are “what statements.” I consider who questions as being the same as what questions. Come to think of it, “who, what, when, where” are simply facts. Suppose I can name, in order, all the presidents of the United States. That might get me a good grade on a test. Beyond that – so what? Way down deep we have committed ourselves to "thing" metaphysics. The world is made of things. So we talk about things. What can you say about things beyond “who, what, when and where”? Who did it? When? Where? All are good questions. Actually we do not live in a world of things. We live in a world of process. If we cannot deal with how and why questions we have no effective understanding of the world. We are the victims of processes we do not understand. Blame it on God! We never see that we, ourselves, set in motion the processes that ultimately did us harm. As philosophers might say, “ God’s mills are exceedingly slow but they grind exceedingly fine.” Ordinary knowledge statements are descriptive. Scientific knowledge statements are injunctive. So maybe I won’t blame God. I will blame our schools instead. George Washington was our first president. Understand it? Of course you do. F = d(mV)/dt Understand it? Of course you don’t. It is an injunctive statement. It is giving you commands. If you do them you will understand the statement. To know that the statement is giving commands you need to know the infinitesimal calculus. Specifically you need to know how to carry out the calculus’ commands. They don’t tell us in school that the way to learn mathematics is the same as the way you learn to play the piano. Practice, practice, practice. You can memorize the equations in the book until the Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 22 end of time and still not understand them well enough to work with them. Thus you flunk math. Schools convince you that you cannot do math. We should have a class action suit against our schools. The above equation is Newton’s law of motion. You might get it in school as f = ma; a scientifically useless algebraic expression. In the correct expression I have used both capital and small letters. This is to distinguish between vectors and scalars. F and V are both vectors, i.e., magnitudes with directions; m and t are simply magnitudes. The expression d/dt means the derivative of. The equation is a differential equation. It is solved by integrating it. I want to provide a little example of how science works. Newton discovered the law of gravity. Now forget about falling apples. Newton was working with Tycho Brahe’s recorded observations of planetary orbits. The orbits revealed an anomaly named the “equal area law”. Newton wanted to plug a force into his law of motion that would explain it. He discovered an inverse square law works. kmem/R2 = d(mV)/dt On the left of the equal sign is the inverse square law of gravity. Note that m refers to the mass of the earth while m refers to the mass of the body orbiting the earth. Note that m appears on both sides of the equal sign. Thus it cancels out. That is why heavy bodies and light bodies fall at the same speed. Mathematically one can prove that solutions to the equation must be conic sections. That is the resulting orbit must be a circle, an ellipse, an hyperbola or parabola. Now we are getting to what science really is. A single observation of a non-conic section orbit would falsify an inverse square law. What scientists really do is not proving this or that or the other thing. What they are looking for in their observations, laboratory or not, is a falsifying instance. Verification of a theory leads to nothing new. Falsification would lead to a Nobel Prize. Pity poor Newton. Falsification was swift in coming. The orbit of Mars is an ellipse – almost! The orbit doesn’t quite close on itself. Thus it is almost an ellipse but it rotates in space. This is described by the fancy term “precession of the perihelion”. Newton was wrong! But, damn, he was not all wrong. He was more right than wrong. What are we to do about this? The inverse square law is actually very useful. It works for practically everything but the Martian orbit. So we use it even though we know there is a glitch. Someday we will fix it. One proposal for fixing it was to change the 2 in the inverse square law to 2.000000000001. That is a very small change. It fixes the problem! But wait! Now conservation of energy in Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 23 the gravitational field doesn’t work. We have replaced a glitch with a disaster. Better we keep the 2. I believe relativity fixed the glitch. If it hadn’t what would I be thinking about. Well first of all the derivative d(mV)/dt under the rules of the calculus really splits in two d(mV)/dt → dm/dtV + m dV/dt. Until relativity physicists believed in conservation of mass, dm/dt = 0. Thus that term had no effect. But now we know Einstein showed that E = MC2 It is interesting that Newton’s law, as he proposed it, turns out to be relativistically correct. Though I doubt that this effect would be sufficient. A second point that intrigues me is the proof requiring conic sections is a reductio ad absurdum proof, i.e., it ends in a contradiction. More recent research on formalisms shows that may not be as harmful as we previously thought. There is something to think about here. I am trying to portray a condition of science. 1 All the laws have to fit together in a coherent whole. 2 The scientific formalism displays the connectedness and the coherence. 3 Working with the formalism can, and often does, reveal new laws. Two dramatic cases follow. 1) Maxwell’s equations leading to electromagnetic waves. Around 1860 Maxwell pulled together all that was known about electricity and magnetism based on single experiments. He produced four equations known today as the Maxwell’s equations. These four equations interactively relate currents and voltages. Maxwell soon realized that they formed a basis for wave equations. Now I need trumpets and drum rolls. In 1860 electromagnetic waves had never been heard of. Based on Maxwell they were produced. Now we know that light is electromagnetic waves in a certain frequency range. They are the waves that make many technologies possible such as x-rays, radio, television, pagers, cells phones, microwave ovens, satellite navigation, and on and on. Around 1840 something happened illustrating the idea that revolutionary advances in science often require prior revolutionary advances in the formalism. We have all heard of Euclid’s geometry. Euclid put forth his geometry around 300 BC. 2140 years later Euclidean geometry was the only geometry; it was the geometry of the world. But the parallel postulate worried mathematicians for reasons that practical men would most likely Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 24 consider foolishness. Nevertheless, mathematicians wanted a proof. I believe they had wanted a proof for a long time. Now they realized that they could prove the parallel postulate by assuming it false and producing a contradiction; again a reductio ad absurdum proof. But the contradiction never came. Instead they derived curved geometries. Of course it was thought for a long time that Euclidean geometry was the real geometry. Then Einstein came along with relativity based on curved geometry. Note that if curved geometry had not been well developed between 1840 and Einstein relativity would have been impossible. What we can discover depends on what we can think. Newton’s law, as given above, can also be expressed in English. “Force equals rate of change of momentum”. Swell! What can you do with that? As philosophers we could debate it. Different schools of philosophers could probably find different meanings for every word. Also, as philosophical contemporaries of Newton we could have easily demonstrated its absurdity. (As Einstein is quoted on my Amazon Cup, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”) In Newton’s time any oxcart driver could have vouched for its absurdity. Thirty years after publication of Newton’s Principia the philosopher John Locke argued that in spite of Newton’s accomplishments he had good reason to predict that there could be a science of man but never a science of nature. Man could understand himself but nature was created by the mind of God and surpassed human understanding. Today the argument is reversed. Since we have a science of nature we suggest that it is because nature is simpler. In English the concepts are analytic. In mathematics they are synthetic. In English, Newton’s law is useless. In mathematics, Newton’s law overcomes its apparent absurdity to be accepted as the foundation of physics. Why is that? Analytic concepts are learned from experience by abstraction. Synthetic concepts are constructed. As we move forward into understanding life itself we will see that no two people have the same experience. No two people will have exactly the same understanding of an analytic concept. Synthetic concepts have exactly the meaning that we say they do. They create experience. This will be an important point. Biophysicists are observing living organisms in ways that have never before been possible. The technologies that are created by physical science, such as ultrasound, enable them to view the inner workings of organisms as they go on living. Biologists, like all of us, are limited by paradigms. The current paradigms of science are reductionistic and mechanistic. By this paradigm, to understand a living organism, accepted scientific protocol requires taking it apart to get at the basic components that function as mechanisms. Mechanisms are processes prearranged to produce certain results given certain inputs. Put simply, living organisms have been studied as if they are machines. But they are not machines. Such study produces misleading results, though not necessarily Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 25 totally wrong or useless results. Today’s high-tech medicine is based on studying the body as a biochemical machine. Sometimes high-tech is the only approach to save a life, but all too often it is unnecessary and damaging. Biophysist Mae-Wan Ho’s book, The Rainbow and the Worm, 1998 speaks of organismic nature not mechanistic Do take note of the radically anti-mechanistic nature of organisms. Mechanical systems work by a hierarchy of controllers and the controlled that returns the systems to set points. One can recognize such mechanistic systems in the predominant institutions of our society. They are undemocratic and nonparticipatory. Bosses make decisions and workers work, and in between the top and the bottom are “line-managers” relaying the unidirectional “chain of command”. Organic systems, by contrast, are truly democratic; they work by intercommunication and total participation. Everyone works and pays attention to everyone else. Everyone is simultaneously boss and worker, choreography and dancer. Each is ultimately in control to the extent that she is sensitive and responsive. There are no predetermined set points to which the systems have to return. Instead, organisms live and develop from moment to moment, freely and spontaneously. From the “substance” metaphysics – we got classic logics to materialism Traditional classic logic (Needs clarification) Characteristics of Traditional Logics: • Truth preserving • Thing oriented (extensional) • Consistency that denies process • Static • Excludes self-reference (self-knowing) • Excludes values Results of materialism: • Deterministic • Materialistic • Cause and effect, there is no way of seeing process or how something becomes other than cause and effect • Passive things/a thing world • Parts/things/machine-like • No final cause • Only way to cause action is with force Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 26 • It’s predictable • Has need for consistency/ truth preservation • Discrete separate things • Deals only with facts Psychologist, E. Rosch characterized perception based on materialism worldview of knowledge as follows: In the analytic picture offered by the cognitive sciences, the world consists of separate objects and states of affairs, the human mind is a determinate machine which, in order to know, isolates and identifies those objects and events, finds the simplest possible predictive contingencies between them, stores the results through time in memory, relates the items in memory to each other such that they form a coherent but indirect representation of the world and oneself, and retrieves those representations in order to fulfill the only originating value, which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner.[17] Consequences of this old world-view This needs careful work to add current events also see section on Applications and Implications Section III Overview of New Mind We need to grow a new mind; A Synergy of Society, Science and Spirituality 1. What is needed to support life? 2. What is needed are a new metaphysics and a new logic. 3. What will the new mind be? 1. Overview of New mind; What will be New Mind? Basically as you go from Thing realities to Living Process realities; a different way of thinking is required, different attitudes towards thinking. In the Thing reality you think about facts. Facts are what is; it feels like there is nothing you can do about it. Life is a process reality, and what you need to be thinking about is how it changes. What are the Laws of change? Not what IS, but how the process EVOLVES. That requires different habits of thought. What role might you play in the changing of habits of thought? Well, realize that life advances; the world advances; there is evolution (if not Darwin Evolution, at least “evolution”). Things are changing and putting different requirements on us and we have reached a point in time where we require whole new thinking. Not only is there a tremendous change in consciousness throughout the world, but also we see that this Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 27 change is reflected in the fact that philosophy is changing paradigm from substance to process. Science is changing paradigm to get rid of reductionism and the Cartesian divide between mind and matter. (examination of binary limitations). Even Theology is changing where it is no longer satisfied with the traditions of Theism and Pantheism, but is integrated into a new way of thinking about God called Panenthiesm. Everywhere there are changes in consciousness leading to this change in paradigm. A. In constrast to“Substance” Philosophy, “Process” Metaphysics is strong possible foundation for new metaphysics: Process” Philosophy – a minority worldview going back to Hereclitis 500 BC Philosophical/metaphysics of Process: Rescher's process description Substance Philosophy Process Philosophy discrete individuality interactive relatedness separateness wholeness (totality) condition (fixity of nature) activity (self-development) uniformity of nature innovation/novelty unity of being unity of law (individualized specificity (functional typology) descriptive fixity productive energy, drive, etc. classificatory stability fluidity and evanescence passivity (being acted upon) activity (agency)” Need insert of deeper explanation of Process charachateristics in above contrast chart, as was done for Substance earlier Whitehead Process and Reality; Page 20-30 Categoreal Scheme - Section II & III. I. The Category of the Ultimate II. Categories of Existence III. Categories of Explanation IV. Categoreal Obligations B Semiotics of Charles Peirce: Also, in terms of values one can see a relationship between Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic values with the levels of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness of Charles Peirce’s semiotic process. The main critical judgments of this Peircian perspective are: (i) The biological context FOR man is that of an intelligent and language-using organism attempting to sustain itself in an environment which is partly supportive of, and partly hostile to, that attempt. (ii) There are no privileged starting points for any organism Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 28 in its attempt to adapt. The organism can "set out" from nothing other than the state it happens to be in when it sets out to adapt. (iii) Clarity and precision in experience are results of analysis of consequences of an organism's attempt to adapt. Such results may not be thought of as primordial. They are basically corrective. (iv) To adapt, an organism must put forth effort. It is the insistence of experience over against organismic or human will, including surprise which confounds expectation, by which adaptation may be achieved. Effort and surprise are thus the fundamental means by which organisms attain a satisfactory state of adaptation. (v) The situation in which one experiences the contrast between the ego and non-ego, the "other," is itself continuous. Awareness of oneself as ego, as other than the non-ego encountered, presents a double consciousness, whose relation is symmetrical. On the other hand, when something has a mode of being not merely in itself but over and against a second thing, the symmetrical relation through opposition takes on the quality named "existence" which belongs to fact. This existence is on BOTH sides of that duality C Hartshorn (Theology) Panentheism -insert needed D. Theoretical Biology (Formalisms for living processes - Rosen) E. New ways of thinking (new logics) At this time Logic is challenging the very notion of logic. Does logic really make any sense? What is it? All the research in logic done in the 20th Century raises the question of “How do you think?” which also reinforces the need for a New Mind. Crises in mathematics at the end of the 19th century caused more research on logic during the 20th century than all previous human history. Much was learned and most of it has never been applied to current research. If has often been said that logic is the laws of thought. This clearly is not so. Logic, as we have known it for 25 centuries, is clearly about truth preservation. In linguistic arguments based on truth premises, one must not fall into falsehood. But, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out no one listens to Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy judging the truthvalue of every line. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 29 I would rather follow Whitehead that propositions, the basic elements of traditional logic, are lures for feeling. To quote:2 The conception of propositions as merely material for judgments is fatal to any understanding of their role in the universe. In that purely logical aspect, non-conformal false propositions are merely wrong, and therefore worse than useless. But in their primary role, they pave the way along which the world advances into novelty. Error is the price which we pay for progress. I fear that fatal conception of propositions is all too common today. Considering that "life is creative," that fatal conception is destructive of life. Based on some of the 20th century discoveries I wonder what logic is. I conclude that it is the study of formal reasoning in all the many various forms. Formal reasoning is also conscious reasoning. It is also communicable reasoning. What it has to do with thinking can remain a mystery for now. Unfortunately formal reasoning remains a mystery for most people. An example is mathematics. In mathematics every concept is precisely defined, but not in the way linguistic concepts are defined. Linguistic concepts are defined in terms of experiential properties. A chair might be defined as a knee-high seat with a back. Through experience we have learned to recognize chairs. But the variety of chairs is greater than we can count. Thus there is vagueness allowing for value judgments. In contrast, allowed operations and their effects define mathematical concepts. The rules of mathematics define how the concepts can be combined unlike languages where concepts are combined based on experience. Formal logic and mathematics are both examples of formal reasoning. Today there are 30 new systems of formal logic. But there are also new formal systems, "strange systems," which don’t look like logic at all. Logic is about propositions, typically subject-predicate propositions. The "strange systems" are about acts and applying acts to acts. They are called applicative systems. They do not have propositions. They are not about truth. They allow what is normally called inconsistency, a fatal error in previously known logics. The advantage of formal reasoning is the underlying formal system can provide thought recipes. Thus a large group of observers can communicate precisely what they are thinking. Formal reasoning is what gives science its power. Without formal reasoning there is no science. There is empirical philosophy, a necessary precursor to science. There is no science applicable to life. I believe applicative formalisms will provide the necessary thought recipes. "Knowledge does not keep any better than fish." Alfred North Whitehead 2 Alfred North Whitehead, “Process and Reality”, p187 Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 30 Need for LIVING logics, final cause, & values Organization: We are concerned with the organizational requirements of autonomy based on the work of Robert Rosen in his book Life Itself. The organization is a system of relations, the relations generated as answers to “why” questions. Rosen reverts back to Aristotle’s four causes, i.e., material, formal, efficient and final cause. For an autonomous entity no “why” question can be answered by something outside the entity. Thus the organization is closed. Though final cause has been banished from science for some time now Rosen demonstrates that final cause is essential and it does not present the teleological problems that led to its banishment. Logic: This series of considerations breaks with twenty-five centuries of tradition. So much so that I am not sure it should be called logic. Traditionally logic has been based on propositions. Propositions are statements that can be considered true or false. Also rules for transforming propositions into new propositions, provided that from true propositions one cannot transform them into false propositions. This is known as consistency. Today there are more than thirty known non-standard logics. Any or all of them may have applications in the living organization. This is an important research topic. However all of the non-standard logics have the general flavor of logic. Here I propose a different notion. Through logical research there is now considerable sophistication regarding what might be called formal systems. Our concern here will be the ability of formal systems to express ideas which have never before been expressed and which can not be expressed in language or logics as we have known them. Primitives of the formal systems will be functions and/or relations, not propositions. Truth-values will be irrelevant. N.Hirst Limits in traditional extensional Logics: To date, sciences have been based exclusively on mathematics born of extensional logics, i.e. formal systems of incomplete signs, entailing a symbol and its reference to something. Alternatively, intensional logic is based on a triadic system of complete signs, entailing a symbol, a reference to something, and a meaning. LOGICS Defined: Intensional logic - logic with consequences based on meaning Intensional logic is based on a triadic system of complete signs, entailing a symbol, a reference to something, and a meaning. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 31 Extensional logic - logic with form (logic form) only As of today there are no intensional logics. This division of logic resulting in the compulsive ignorance of intensional systems is a malady screaming for attention. It impacts on all that we do. Even the so-called information sciences, are based on logics that are totally devoid of meaning. We do not talk about it because so far no one has known what to do about it. As we begin to feel the pain caused of our ignorance, we begin to know the need for change. The apparent limitation in the foundations of mathematics just referred to, led to more research in logic being done in the last several decades than the entire previous history of human kind. Indeed, not just more but unimaginably more. Today we can conceptualize entirely different systems of logic, systems of logic that actually violate with impunity rules of logic that have held sway for 25 centuries. At the same time, we see evidence that human consciousness is evolving to the level of thinking in complete signs. These two conditions allow us use of intensional logics for the first time in history. The following diagram illustrates the divisions of knowledge resulting from such use. Knowledge of intensional logics based on complete signs will allow the development of formal sign systems applicable to life itself. These sign systems in turn will allow a calculational rigor defining true life sciences. FOUNDATIONS of Knowledge non-life sciences life sciences extensional logic intensional logic mathematics autognomics physics biology Reductionism needs revision: What about Aristotle’s “final” cause? There is a lesson here. Reductionism needs revision. Aristotle proposed the doctrine of “final” causes, i.e., which things and events in the world can best be explained by some purpose or good to which they are conducive. If today’s biologist proposed a final cause he/she would be drummed out of the profession. But isn’t it possible that in multiple layers of divergent logic making up a single organism a higher layer’s logic places demands on a lower level. For example, the human liver requires the cells that compose it to be quite different from the cells that compose an eye. Well, can we not consider the requirements of the higher level to be a final cause for the lower level. By contemporary thinking we cannot because the higher layer does not exist until the lower level exists to make it. There can be no liver until there are liver cells. (See Stanley Salthe’s book on Biological Hiearchies) Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 32 But now let us dig deeper still. However you think about it, there is the question of what form constitutes proper thinking. Do we have to think about things? Could we talk without ever using the word “thing?” Now we are getting to the most fundamental level, i.e., the level of metaphysics and logic. At this level we can begin to understand the blinding limitations of our most fundamental paradigms and how they contribute to failure to understand values and life. Rosen gives a Heads Up on Final Cause: In his book "Life Itself” Robert Rosen, a mathematical biologist, argues that a living organization must include its own Final Cause. Aristotle proposed four causes, Material Cause, Efficient Cause, Formal Cause and Final Cause. Rosen proposes to consider formal systems, logic, by viewing the axiomatic basis as material cause, the rules as efficient cause and proofs or derivations as formal cause. Note there is nothing in logic corresponding to final cause. Therefore, logic as it has been known is incapable of application to living systems. In this impoverished state of logic, Final Cause has been banished from science. Any biologist who dared include Final Cause would be banished from his profession. What is required to make sense of Final Cause? Need for LIVING logics, final cause, & values What is required to make good scientific sense of Final Cause? What is required is the ability to formalize self-referential relations, relations of relations, entailments of entailments. A. Autopoiesis: Two Chilean biologists, Maturana and Varela, founded Autopoiesis. It defines the conditions on process by which a living organism can both create and maintain itself in a state of autonomy in a constantly changing ecological niche. Organization and Structure: It is important to be mindful of the concepts of "organization" and "structure," used in this theory of living processes. By autopoisis definition, organization refers to those processes that create and maintain the structure. For any living entity the organization is invariant while the structure has plasticity. Put simply the organization processes do not change themselves, but are capable of changing the structure built around them to adapt to changing circumstances. We use the term organization differently than commonly used. The general notion of invariant organization appears in discussions of autopoiesis, the biological theory of selfcreation and self-maintenance. However, the details of organizational processes are left Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 33 to the imagination. Indeed, no one could have adequately discussed the details since the requisite logic has not been available. From file:///C|/autopoiesis/EA.html#theory Thinking’ is an observer-ascribed description invoked to explain the unobserved / unobservable process(es) by which a subject organism mediates the interplay of its sensor and effector interfaces from / to its medium. When an observer observes two moments of the flow of the behavior of an animal, and it seems to him or to her that the second is logically derived from the first through some intervening internal process, while he or she cannot deduce the connection from the relational situation of the animal solely, he or she says that such animal thinks, and calls thinking the internal process that gives rise to the second behavior. However, ‘thinking’ (in the colloquial sense of a formulaic or algorithmic processing of propositional or logical elements) cannot be a constitutive component of autopoietic theory’s account for cognitive activity. This colloquial sense of ‘thinking’ entails the problematical notion of representation and ignores the structurally-determined dynamics of the organism which actually (in the explanatory framework of autopoietic theory) provide the basis for addressing this phenomenon. What the nervous system does while the animal is ‘thinking’, is to operate in its internal dynamics according to the structure it has at that moment as a result of the structural changes it has undergone contingently to the living of the animal ... According to this, the internal dynamics of that nervous system will give rise to successions of behavior that cannot but be logically or coherently connected between them in the context of the historical circumstances of the realization of the living of the animal. So, the expression “thinking” is a manner that the observer has of indirectly referring to the internal operation of the nervous system as it participates in the generation of behavior. (Maturana, Mpodozis & Letelier, 1995, IV.6.) B. Formal Axiology: Hartman Axiology is the theory of value. Here we choose the work of Robert Hartman who was transforming axiology from value philosophy to value science. His formal definitions of Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic value and the laws relating them explain many puzzles. “Axiology” simply means value theory. Formal axiology refers to the logic of value as proposed by Robert Hartman. That is, a distinct formal system is developed for application to values. It is a quite different formal system from, say, the mathematics of physics. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 34 The Laws of Values: Beginning with a look at values of living process, we immediately see ways to address the complexity of social issues. Are there natural laws of value? Yes, but don’t expect them to tell us what to value. There is no law saying gentlemen should prefer blondes. One’s values can be extremely personal. However, whatever one’s values there are lawful processes at work. There are three kinds of value; intrinsic, extrinsic and systemic: Intrinsic values are aesthetic and/or unique. They defy description. Extrinsic values are practical values. As such they can be judged good or bad. Systemic values are laws or rules. Under systemic values judgements are right or wrong. (Binary in nature) Remarkably, the three kinds of value are related to the three levels of Peirce’s Semiotics; firstness, secondness and thirdness. Firstness is where signs first appear. They are not quite real yet. They are entering as possibilities. Firstness is the realm of all possibilities. As such it revokes the standard logic law of non-contradiction since both a sign and its negation may enter as possibilities. As the realm of all possibilities it is the source of intrinsic value. Secondness is the domain of signs that have become semiotically real. In this realm they obey standard logic. Either the sign or its negation was chosen. Secondness corresponds to extrinsic value. Thirdness corresponds to law or to signs of mediation. This realm revokes the standard logic law of excluded middle giving a logic of probabilities. Thirdness corresponds to systemic value. The law of value places intrinsic over extrinsic and extrinsic over systemic. This law has been verified through the use of the Hartman Value Profile in a wide variety of cultures. Unfortunately our Western culture inverts this hierarchy leading to tragedy. The cause is the fact that systemic value is quite finite and easily talked about. It seems so clear, so objective against the often times apparent linguistic vagueness of extrinsic and intrinsic value. Today values are not well understood because living process is not well understood. It is only in living process that values are operative. In our search for data we discovered the Union of International Organizations (UIA) in Brussels, Belgium. This organization, founded in 1910, has over 20,000 organizations as members and maintains databases that are quite amazing. They maintain a database of 1200 world problems, a human potential database showing several thousand approaches to human potential as proposed by different cultures and schools of thought and a database on values. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 35 An interesting development in the world problems database is the tracking of connections between problems including the display of circularity. For example, problem A exacerbates problem B which exacerbates problem C which exacerbates problem A. This constitutes a reinforcing loop. In addition to tracking such loops, the database tracks the interconnection of such loops. Thus the world problems form a holistic network. This is in line with Autognomic theory, especially insights gathered from the contributions of autopoiesis to the theory. It is clear that attempts to solve the problems piecemeal will fail. Needed to solve the world problems is an understanding of values that can lead to a coherent world wide human potential movement. But as the UIA argues, there is no such understanding of values. Their own studies list hundreds of value words, both positive and negative, along with value oppositions and some surprising empirical observations. For example, belief systems that combine both positive and negative values work better than belief systems dedicated to positive values alone. But they confess that a belief system everyone could agree to isn’t in the offing. I realized forty years ago that these conditions were inevitable. That is why, forty years ago, I committed myself to do research leading to the requisite understanding of values. It is that research that led to Autognomics. Many people believe that values are not rational, that there is no logic to values. They are simply a matter of personal or cultural choice. I can understand people thinking this way. There is a logic of value, but it bears no resemblance to logics we have known. We have often seen commonaly used values clarification exercises in which the exercise is to rank order a list of value words. Of course, it is emphasized that there is no “right” order. People will differ. Of course they will differ since, from the value logic perspective, all the words on the list are typically from the same value class. To rank order them is nonsense. To understand values requires changing from a thing perspective to a process perspective. A thing like perspective is exemplified by reductionism in science, i.e., getting down to the “mechanics” of the most fundamental particles to understand the world. As a corollary we might compare it to a fact perspective. Remember the phrase, “Just the facts mam,” popularized by 1950s TV show, Dragnet. In the composition of reality we find both perspectives. There is both what there is and what is being done. Reality as available for our experience comes about in a cyclic process. First, there is what there is. Then there are acts made possible by what there is which create a new what there is leading to new possible acts. Each moment of “what there is,” we call facts. The facts will make a spectrum of acts possible. The final choice of acts is based on values. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 36 Logics we have known are appropriate to the mechanics of fact. Note the emphasis on propositions that are judged true or false. Note the emphasis on truth preserving rules. Note the emphasis on truth consistency. Of any given proposition p we can assert p or not p but never p and not p. A proposition cannot be both true and false. Yet turning to values one can feel drawn to a value and simultaneously repelled by it. One can want something and not want it, all at the same time. The logic of value is functional, not propositional. Propositions may be thought of as stating what is, i.e., fact. Functions express transformations. It doesn’t make sense to say that a transformation is true or false. Thus we need to rid ourselves of our past notions of logic and begin anew. I suggest that different value words actually refer to different functions. Thus do they represent a different level of language from most words? Consider the word ‘good’. (By convention single quotes around a word indicate we mean to talk about the word as opposed to using the word.) Philosophers have discussed the word ‘good’ for twenty-five centuries. So far the only one, to my knowledge, to see the logic of it was Robert Hartman. He defined ‘good’ as a relation between the intension and the extension of a concept where • The intension of a concept is a set of attributes that make up the meaning of the concept. • The extension of a concept is a set of objects to which the concept applies. • ‘Good’ might be applied to a member of the extension if its attributes fulfill the intension. For example, if one’s concept of chair has the attributes of a knee high seat with a back then an object one calls a chair is a “good chair” if it does have a knee high seat with a back. In contrast, if a knee high seat has no back then one might call it a “stool” unless one sees that the back is broken off in which case it would be called a “bad chair”. Traditionally definitions of ‘good’ have been given in terms of states of affairs that someone considered good. Value has been defined as the greatest good for the greatest number. In this way there is clearly room for much difference of opinion. There will never be agreement with this approach. On the other hand, Hartman’s definition is a formal definition. As such it can fit everyone’s notion of good. If people disagree about what is good, Hartman’s definition points to the source. Based on experience they have formed different conceptual intensions. The disagreement ceases to be a matter of TRUTH, it becomes a difference of opinion. While I agreed with Hartman’s brilliant contributions to what is known as formal axiology (value theory), I felt a sense of unease with their foundations. It seemed to me that values played their role in the processes of life. This led to the formation of Autognomics where we focus on the processes of life. The central question has been whether or not Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 37 the processes of life have a different logic from those logics we have known? If so, does it help us understand values? The answers are a resounding “yes” to both questions. Therefore we use logic of value and logic of sign processes for Logic of Life. The logic of life involves much that the traditions of logical inquiry rejected. For example; self-reference and paradox and the fact that the logic of life is creative rather than truth preserving. I suggest that the logic of life actually involves two complementary families of logics that function together to manifest life as we know it. One of those families of logics is the logic of value. C. Central to the logic of life is the logic of sign processes or semiotics as put forth by Charles Peirce. While Peirce’s contributions are brilliant we must keep in mind that Peirce died in 1914. The kind of revolution we see today in functional logics was unknown to Peirce. Thus we are concerned with semiotics as extended by today’s functional logics. Semiotics talks about signs involving both an object and an interpretation. Thus we might re-word Hartman’s definition. ‘Good’ now becomes a matter of sign interpretations. But this rewording is equivalent in the semiotic framework to Hartman’s wording in the more traditional philosophical framework. Thus Hartman’s insight remains in tact. Hartman also argued that there are three kinds of value that he called Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic. He advanced logico-philosophical arguments to show that Intrinsic was greater than Extrinsic and Extrinsic is greater than Systemic. Thus in a conflict of values Intrinsic should take precedence over Extrinsic and Extrinsic should take precedence over Systemic. This is a critical point because, if Hartman is right, it points to a major error in the human use of value arguments. Hartman called this error, “inversion of the value hierarchy”. Value arguments often invoke such words as “justice” which are Systemic value words. Such words are often proclaimed to be the highest value. Inversion of the value hierarchy accounts for the greatest crimes against humanity committed throughout history. It accounts for religious persecution and ethnic cleansing. Hitler could not have happened without inversion of the value hierarchy. While I agree with Hartman’s arguments, as with most philosophical arguments people might differ. Inversion of the value hierarchy needs more thorough grounding. Thus we are most anxious to show how the value hierarchy develops and functions in living processes. As a start I suggest we have a rich mix of logics already in semiotic theory. In terms of Peircian categories, the logic of firstness rejects the traditional rule of non-contradiction. The logic of thirdness rejects the traditional rule of excluded middle. In addition there are six levels of sign development by semiosis. I suspect each of the six will exhibit logical peculiarities. (See these were mentioned earlier, may need to be repeated or brought back here see page ?) Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 38 As we are beginning to discover, social systems are composed of an interactive multitude of different processes each governed by a distinct logic. In our experience this is apparent as we consider the fallacies that have been committed in talking about values. Some Axiological Fallacies: (p123 Structure of Value, Hartman) A fallacy is confusion of elements that ought to be distinct. In the following “frames of reference” refers to distinct logics. For example, confusion of: General frames of reference - the metaphysical fallacy, confusion of mathematics and axiology - religion has not withstood the test of science. Specific frames of reference - the naturalistic fallacy, applying the frame of reference for one science to another such as ethics and psychology or chemistry and religion. When it is said that the good is pleasure or preference, or God’s will, or the interest of the proletariat, or a matter of human conduct, then we have respectively, confusions of ethics with psychology, theology, economics and sociology. (p124) General with specific frames of reference - the moral fallacy, a fallacy of types confusing the general and specific. When it is said that goodness in general is the goodness of God, is the beautiful or the true, or the classless society confuses axiological value with theological, aesthetic, epistemological and sociological value respectively. Either general or specific frames of reference with their subject matter - the fallacy of method, a logical confusion of types such as the scientist confusing his own behavior with the behavior of the subject matter.

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Section IV-A Steps for Advancing Knowledge (What theory should be like) See other papers by Norm Scholars Invitation World Crisis Propositions How a science is formed (the development of a new language or sign system) The following is an outline of work to be done A Natural Evolution of Knowledge is occurring. After 25 Centuries of development humankind has reached sufficient sophistication in the use of formalisms to represent the universal laws of life. What is now needed is a formalism for Life-itself, to have a universal language to help us talk about what current science would call intangible, but very much operative throughout the living domain. This means when examining life, we must first consider what is life, what is not life, what are the individual and collective relationships and meaning and what are the processes, values, and logics that are operative throughout all life. By looking at the organizing Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 39 principles of life, one isn’t overwhelmed by the details, but can communicate and manage the variety through the use of formalisms. For example the mathematics of Newton provided foundations for all of our physics today in all of its variety of manifestation. Science follows philosophy. Usually about 2500 years of philosophical observation occurs before a formalization develops that helps us know what to do with the observation. This is a natural evolution of knowledge. Human understanding grows, and sometimes it grows to the point it makes a revolutionary change. Before Newton there was about 2500 years of natural philosophy studying what nature is made of; the study of what could be observed in the physical realm. Then 300 years ago Newton and Leibnitz developed the calculus of change bringing about science and its revolutionary impact on the material world creating physics as we know it today. By the end of the 19th century, physicists believed they had discovered everything there was to know and all there was, was cleaning up details. Simultaneously, however, with the end of the 19th century came awareness of profound failures in mathematics leading to more research into the foundations in mathematics than had occurred in the entire previous human history and resulting in whole new ways to think, i.e., new logics. Then in early-20th century quantum theory and relativity ushered in domains of physics that we don’t understand to this day. The mathematics works but we don’t understand why. Nevertheless, the mathematics has lead to revolutionary discoveries such as computer chips. Now other dimensions of reality we have never been able to perceive before such as electromagnetic field dynamics within the living domain are advancing our human knowledge evolution. A major revolutionary change is well under way. The emerging paradigm will have impact on everything alive and it is possible that the living domain includes everything with physics and the laws of matter being but a fragment of the whole. I invite those scholars around the world who are poised to make the transition from philosophy to science in understanding life. I believe that the time is right for this transition in that there are enough disciplines mature enough for this development to occur. The formalisms are available. The pieces are ready to be brought together into a cohesive whole for a science of life. For those used to thinking the difference between philosophy and science is subject matter, this will seem a strange proposition. However, I propose that the work be done with the following understanding: • That the difference between philosophy and science is a difference in methods of inquiry. For philosophy, the methods are observing and trying to explain in natural language. For science, the method is a formal theory whose expansion leads to observation as a test of the theory. • That the methods of inquiry are complementary. • That the methods can be, and should be, applied to the same subject matter as we develop this science of life. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 40 Habits to be challenged: Under the press of contemporary science there are several habits of thought that need to be questioned and, for the subject matter of the living domain, abandoned. For example, my partial list: • Valid scientific method can only be quantitative. In opposition, I believe this is only true if the theoretical formalism, such as the infinitesimal calculus, assumes numerical order in its foundations. Today formalisms deal with many non-numerical forms of order. • The Church-Turing hypothesis which says that every effective process is computable, i.e., syntactic. In opposition, there are many versions of the Church-Turing hypothesis. Concerning mechanical processes it may be right. However, there is the natural sciences version. “According to Turing-Church, all physically realizable, dynamics are equivalent to computation.” (Conrad, ACM 28, 464-480). Robert Rosen has shown that organisms are not computable. He states that they have no largest model. • The predominant opinion held by scientists is to only ask “how” questions, never to ask “why’ questions. The foundations of mechanism require inquiry into how something works, how it is made, how the parts fit together etc. “How” questions deal with structure. In opposition, life is not mechanistic and it functions by meaning. “Why” questions deal with meaning. Meaning can never be reduced to structure. “Why” questions require inquiry into meaning and reason for being, e.g., final cause and Newton’s mathematics doesn’t allow for final cause. The consequences of asking only “how” questions have led to a lot of costly, useless research in the attempt to treat meaning as syntactical. In living processes, syntax and semantics are complementary functions that must work together. Therefore how and why questions must be asked to fully accommodate the functions within the living domain. • The rejection of Aristotle’s final cause because Newton’s mathematics did not allow it. In opposition, the mathematics of organisms do require final cause. • Reductionism as a fundamental method of understanding how something works: In opposition, reductionism destroys the organization that should be the proper subject of study to understand life. Functions within a living organism cross the boundaries of physical components. A single function may include several components. Therefore destroying the organization destroys the ability to understand such functions that are essential for life. • Ashby’s Law concerning the requisite number of states. In opposition this law doesn’t apply to the living domain since recent research (Mae Wan Ho and others) has shown that organisms have no fixed states. • That physics is the most fundamental science from which all else should be derived. In opposition, physics can be shown to be a special case of biology as it should be. • That logic must preserve truth. In opposition, Life is creative and filled with paradoxes and there are new forms of logic that accommodate these functions. • Linear infinitely divisible space-time. In opposition, organic space is fractal, (and perhaps out-side space/time?) Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 41 As we begin to do this new science such common assumptions must not be imported into the work with very careful consideration. This will be a challenge for all of us as it has been for me, but an essential discipline. Possibly to be used as primary outline of book/paper The Power of Formalisms, Logic and Mathematics: Formal languages and natural languages, such as English, communicate in different ways. A natural language statement is descriptive. A formal language statement is injunctive, i.e., a command to do something. Thus formal languages strike closer to where humans naturally learn. Further, by controlling acts explicitly rather than simply implied collections of acts, as in descriptions, formal languages establish what might be called thought recipes. This is what makes scientific inquiry so powerful. In the domain of formal languages the possibilities for misunderstanding are minimized. And, formal languages are well suited to communicating ideas that are totally opaque in natural languages. What can not be said in English can be said in mathematics. Having said it in formal language can force us to recognize aspects of reality for the first time. There are many examples going back to Pythagoras in 600 BC. Pythagoras was forced to recognize irrational numbers, i.e., non-terminating decimals. Since they did not represent ratios they were called irrational. But they just did not make sense at first and today we use “irrational” for something that does not make sense. As an example of how formalisms can force recognition of new elements consider the square root of -1 (√-1). Working with equations such as x2 + c = 0 can seem pretty innocent. But if c is set to one the equation becomes x2 + 1 = 0 which reduces to x2 = -1. Then x = √-1. But there is no ordinary number that can be squared to produce –1. Thus mathematicians invented an imaginary number called i where i2 = -1. Does it have any practical significance? Yes, it does. It plays a major role in electromagnetic theory, electronic circuit theory, cybernetics, etc. Euclid developed his geometry circa 300 BC. His geometry had a fifth postulate, i.e., that parallel lines will never meet. It worried mathematicians. More practical men may have scoffed at their concern since nothing could be more intuitively obvious than the idea that parallel lines will never meet. Euclidean geometry was accepted as the geometry of the world. Then around 1840 mathematicians found a way to test the fifth postulate. In testing they discovered new forms of geometry, non-Euclidean geometry. People still went on believing that reality was Euclidean. Then along came Einstein and relativity. As a result of non-Euclidean geometries a lot of new mathematics had been developed providing Einstein with the tools he needed to express relativity. Without the new tools there would have been nothing he could have done. Suddenly, in the 20th Century, reality became non-Euclidean. This is a little appreciated fact, major breakthroughs in science are often preceded by new formalisms that give scientists the tools to understand, look for and find hitherto unknown Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 42 aspects of reality. For example, see fractal geometry that developed in mid- twentieth century. Fractal geometry is developed on fractional dimensions. i. Logic and Mathematics The relationship between logic and mathematics has a somewhat peculiar history. From Pythagoras and Euclid to the end of the 19th century, mathematicians developed mathematics to accord with their logical intuitions. Except for some details, logic remained as Aristotle proposed it. Then, at the end of the 19th Century, mathematics was beset with paradox. Thus began what became known as Hilbert’s program. Hilbert proposed that mathematicians had to formalize logic as carefully as they formalized mathematics itself. Thus began formal logic, also called mathematical logic. It is this kind of formal logic that was the impetus for Russell and Whitehead to write Principia Mathematica. But then Gödel’s incompleteness theory wrecked the Hilbert Program. Gödel proved that there are truths of arithmetic that can not be reached by any such formalism if it is consistent. ii. Contemporary Science I believe the foundations of contemporary science are incomplete and, if the subject matter involves living processes, dangerously misleading. For example I believe the following foundational assumptions should be questioned if the subject matter is living processes: • That science must be quantitative. This is only true if the theoretical formalism, such as the infinitesimal calculus, assumes numerical order in its foundations. • The Church-Turing hypothesis concerning the scope of computability • The rejection of final cause • Reductionism • Ashby’s Law • That physics is the most fundamental science from which all else should be derived. • Logic. Logic is conservative while life is creative. No doubt this is only a partial list. I believe we are all facing a crisis mechanistic thinking is not going to solve. An important step is to recognize there is more to reality than we have known. I speak of a “living domain”, a domain of as yet undiscovered natural law organizing life-itself. By life-itself I mean life no matter what form it comes in. I believe those natural laws are ready for discovery. I think we need to start over with new foundations. In any case, I would like to see a task force, even if only in cyberspace, to call attention to the problematic nature of science for dealing with life. Also, to explore, challenge and modify current foundations. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 43 iii. Organizing Principles Organizing Principles are principles that maximize freedom while minimizing chaos. For example, traffic laws. In some countries everyone is required to drive on the right side of the road. In other countries everyone is required to drive on the left side of the road. The choice of right or left really doesn’t matter so long as everyone adheres to it. Notice that the traffic law doesn’t require anyone to actually drive. It doesn’t say who will drive, when they will drive, how fast they will drive or where they will drive. All it says is that if, in fact, anyone ever does drive they will avoid chaos in the form of having an accident and possibly being killed if they drive on the designated side of the road. Actually there is no guarantee they will avoid chaos. Someone else may be on the wrong side of the road. But they do minimize the chance of chaos. In the context of driving the law maximizes freedom. Natural laws, as in physics, also have this character. Gravity, for example, which says two bodies, or masses, will attract each other with a force proportional to the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Will there ever be two masses? Gravity doesn’t say. As our bodies sag under the influence of gravity we may wish there were no gravity. But without gravity we couldn’t live on earth. We would fly off into space. Also, with the help of mathematics we can show that the inverse square law leads to closed orbits. Thus a solar system can form such as the one that keeps the earth in orbit around the sun providing us with energy and heat to support our lives. Newton’s law of motion, often written F = ma, tells us that whatever state of motion a body is in, it will stay in unless some force acts on it. Also it tells us how much force is required for a given change. It does not say whether or not there will ever be a force. In fact F = ma is a high school version of Newton’s Law that misses important information. It should be written as F→ = d(mv→)/dt This equation says that a force vector is equal to the time derivative of the product of mass and a velocity vector. A vector is a quantity with a direction. In Newton three numbers standing for its projection on what is taken to be three unit orthogonal base vectors represent it. In relativity we go to four such numbers to include time as well as space or, as they say, “space-time”. One need not try to understand this. I only mention it to make a point. Organizing principles, or natural law, can involve many relationships and operators. They may look like simple equations but people trained in mathematics or physics know the apparent equation is only the tip of the “iceberg”. To deal with them in English would be impossible. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 44 Organizing principles only say that if such and such result is to be achieved then such and so conditions must be met. They do not predict though many have claimed that science is predictive. That is because scientists will provide the such-and-so conditions to see if they do get such and such results. It is not unheard of that a scientist receives a Nobel Prize for actually making a significant prediction possible. iv. Research Goals For reasons that will emerge below, the goal of our effort should be a science. Both art and philosophy will help produce the science. As we consider this we realize that the science of physics, as we know it today, only began 300 years ago with the work of Newton. Think about it! We ask what conditions made such a profound transition, i.e., from natural philosophy to natural science, possible for Newton? Then we ask are similar conditions available today for making the transition from value philosophy to value science? We conclude the conditions are there. We are on the threshold of the grandest revolution in human history as we learn to understand and think about life, love, the spiritual and God. But let me emphasize that we are speaking of science. Science is a worldwide effort that accepts and integrates the work of many. As I write there are many throughout the world whose work and contributions are positively inspired and thrilling. Our intention is for the Institute to have a role in this embryonic revolution. v. Science: We believe that living process is organized by natural laws. The goal of science is discovery and articulation of natural laws. For non-living process physics has discovered the natural laws, it has expressed them, developed them, and applied them. We might know them as Newton’s law of gravity, Newton’s laws of motion, Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of relativity, and the laws of quantum theory. Knowledge of these laws has transformed our world. The laws of quantum theory have a rather distinct character. They are profoundly different from all the other sets of laws in physics. We will argue that quantum phenomena are at a pre-habitual level of physical reality and thus are closer to the laws of living process. Now, we believe scholars throughout the world and including the TAI scholars are ready to discover and articulate the laws of living process. But one might ask, “why is this essential”? Isn’t it enough, for example, to believe in love or in one of the world’s major religious traditions? No, it isn’t! Ideologies have wreaked havoc. One might believe in the power of love and still carry a gun for protection because simply believing in love does not tell one how to act in a threatening situation. Also, note that in physics there is universal agreement in those parts of physics that have been established. No one is going to argue that they can make a normally heavy automobile accelerate from 0 to 60 in ten seconds with a one-horse power engine. By discovering Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 45 natural laws we are discovering how process actually works. It isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s just the way it is! But in discovering natural law we are dealing with a different level of reality than that which we experience. In physic’s laws of motion, for example, objects are point masses; a totally unrealistic concept. Similarly, we won’t be able to articulate the organizing principles of living process in familiar experiential concepts. Philosophical rules of thumb such as “the greatest good for the greatest number” will not satisfy. Bertrand Russell said that philosophers know what they are talking about but they never know what they are saying. In contrast, he pointed out, mathematicians know precisely what they are saying but they never know what they are talking about. Russell is quite right. And the method of scientific inquiry is to combine philosophy and mathematics such that the scientist knows precisely what he is saying and what he is talking about. vi. Working the Transition: Scholars around the world are poised to make the transition from philosophy to science in understanding life. For those used to thinking the difference between philosophy and science is subject matter this will seem a strange proposition. However, I propose that • the difference between philosophy and science is a difference in methods of inquiry • the methods of inquiry are complementary • the methods can be, and should be, applied to the same subject matter • the methods of philosophy are analytic and inductive • the methods of science are synthetic and deductive • for any given subject matter the initial inquiry must be philosophical • science can only begin when philosophical inquiry has sufficiently matured Thus in proposing a transition to science I am also proposing that philosophy has sufficiently matured. 1. As a first step in building a science we begin constructing the domain of discourse. For physics, in Newton’s time, the domain of discourse consisted of such basic notions as numbers, space, time, force and particles. Also the requisite formalism, as required for a science, became the differential/integral calculus as created by Newton and Leibniz. Now for a life science we need to find the proper basic notions and a suitable formalism. As pointed out above, we won’t be able to articulate organizing principles in familiar experiential concepts. Thus to get at candidates for basic notions we turn to philosophical metaphysics. However there are two strands of metaphysical development in Western philosophy. One strand, which we sometimes call the majority report, is the metaphysics of Being or Substance. The other strand, the minority report, is the metaphysics of Process. For our purposes we turn to the minority report that had its origins in Greek antiquity but did not reach sufficient maturity until our own century; notably in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 46 Simultaneously we need to develop a suitable formalism. Though the general public is unaware of it, crises developed in mathematics around the turn of the century. Consequently, during the last few decades more research has been done on formalisms, sometimes called logic, than all previous human history. Suddenly we see that laws of logic that have held since Aristotle are merely special cases suitable for building logics of restricted application, e.g., application to non-living domains. Now our minds can be freed to pursue alternative patterns of thought once seen as impossible. Thus we begin with the sister disciplines, process metaphysics and the logic of formalisms or epi-logic. Together they represent the most fundamental, the most basic candidates for the life science domain of discourse. We will now find many differences between currently known domains of discourse and domains to be created for understanding life. For example, “actors” will replace particles, signs will replace symbols, acts will replace attributes, and so forth. 2. As a second step in building a science we begin constructing a formal theory of the subject matter, i.e., living processes. To compare this step with physics, first a formalism was developed, the calculus, and then specific laws relating to motion and gravity were expressed in the calculus. For this purpose we turn to some existing disciplines which are somewhere between having been philosophies and becoming science. Two such disciplines are autopoiesis and axiology. Two Chilean biologists, Maturana and Varela, founded Autopoiesis. It defines the conditions on process by which a living organism can both create and maintain itself in a state of autonomy in a constantly changing ecological niche. Axiology is the theory of value. Here we choose the work of Robert Hartman who was transforming axiology from value philosophy to value science. His formal definitions of Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic value and the laws relating them explain many puzzles. Also, in terms of them one can see a relationship between Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic values with the levels of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness of Charles Peirce’s semiotic process. Today values are not well understood because living process is not well understood. It is only in living process that values are operative. vii. A Synthesis: We know from both semiotics and autopoiesis that our experiences of reality, our perceptions, are not simply dictated through our senses by an external reality. Our experiences and perceptions are co-created by ongoing interactions or, in the words of Floyd Merrell, interdependent interrelations, between that external reality and our selves. Thus we should ask, what do we bring to this co-creation and how does what we bring effect our experience and perceptions? We all are born into a language using community from which we all learn a whole system of starting assumptions. What we can ultimately experience and perceive depends on what that system of starting assumptions permits; unless, of course, we consciously revise it. Fortunately, language is intrinsically meaningless. We have to work with it to Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 47 shape it and render meaning. In the course of shaping language, the role of philosophy, we may find flaws in our starting assumptions leading to conscious revision. Conscious revision is a most difficult process. Let us say we begin with the assumption that the world is composed of things. We learn to recognize things, to act with things, and to survive amongst things. But then we find things which don’t quite act right for things. (For example, the wave/particle duality in quantum physics.) Then begins a glimmering insight that there is something besides things. Initially this may be a frightening insight since we have no experience surviving in a world of more than just things. But ultimately the insight grows until it cannot be denied. And philosophers and scientists talk about it. It becomes part of the language, and new generations are born into a different world. Right now we, the people of the world, are in a transition phase of conscious revision. The system of starting assumptions that has served for twenty-five centuries has begun to fail. Two indicators of the failure are the peculiarities of quantum physics and crises in the foundations of mathematics that occurred around the beginning of this century. More spectacularly we find social institutions beginning to fail. There are two disciplines primarily concerned with systems of starting assumptions. They are philosophical metaphysics and logic. These are not popularly known disciplines since in normal times one can simply accept tradition. However, in times of radical and fundamental change these two disciplines should come to the fore. That is where we begin. Our Western tradition is based on substance philosophy. The revision, the new metaphysics, is based on process philosophy. viii. Process Metaphysics: About process metaphysics Rescher says: “… a process metaphysics propounds certain characteristic stresses of emphasis in contrast to those of a substance metaphysics, as follows: Substance Philosophy Process Philosophy discrete individuality interactive relatedness separateness wholeness (totality) condition (fixity of nature) activity (self-development) uniformity of nature innovation/novelty unity of being unity of law (individualized specificity) (functional typology) descriptive fixity productive energy, drive, etc. classificatory stability fluidity and evanescence passivity (being acted upon) activity (agency)” Actually, process philosophy has a long history. It began with Heraclitus in the 6th. Century B.C. Some process philosophers include Gottfried Leibnitz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,, Charles Peirce, William James, Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 48 Morgan, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Alfred North Whitehead, Wilmon H. Sheldon and Charles Hartshorne. Now process philosophy has become a very active branch of inquiry in which there are many competing positions. Without becoming involved in any one such position Rescher characterized process philosophy as a doctrine committed to certain basic teachings or contentions as follows:3 • that time and change are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding • that process is a principal category of ontological description • that processes – and the force, energy, and power that they make manifest – are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental, than things for the purposes of ontological theory • that several if not all of the major elements of the ontological repertoire (God, nature-asa- whole, persons, material substances) are best understood in process terms • that contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding. Taking the above as a minimum statement of our requisite metaphysics we immediately see problems for logic as we have known it. Time and change are principle categories, yet time is not mentioned in logic. This problem, the omission of time, was recognized by Aristotle. Also among the fundamental categories are contingency, emergence, novelty and creativity. Yet a fundamental property of logic is that it should be “truth preserving”. Note that nouns dominate our language. But not all languages are so dominated. There are verb-dominated languages. Further, David Bohm, the famous physicist who proposed implicate/explicate order, attempted to create verbs out of nouns. Similarly, we find logic dominated by things. Propositions are typically in subject-predicate form. Numbers are defined extensionally in terms of sets. And even in relational logic there are only relations between things. There are no relations between relations. Thus our first step in building the desired science is to reform our notions of logic. viv On Reforming Logic: Logic is now undergoing a revolution. Due to crises in the foundations of mathematics, crises which make the Y2K computer bug seem trivial by comparison, more research has been done in logic during this century than all previous human history. And even that remains an understatement. It is not just more! It is incomparable! Once upon a time logic was concerned with propositions and truth preserving rules of inference. Logic today is as different from logic of the past as is quantum physics different from Newtonian physics. Perhaps even more so! We want to form a logic of process. Central to the notion of process is the idea of what is being done, or acts, rather than what is. The importance of “what is” will arise later as a 3 Op. Cit. Page 31 Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 49 condition on what can be done. Can logic be expressed strictly in terms of acts? Yes, it can be. To illustrate we turn to what is now known as combinatory logic. I prefer to call it combinator logic so as to not get it confused with combinatorics. Also, combinators might better be considered an epi-logic, i.e., logic of logic. Back in the 1920’s rigorous processes for substitution of variables was a serious problem in mathematics. A German logician, Shoenfinkle, proposed a method of variable free mathematics. An American logician, Haskell Curry, was, at that time, in Germany as Shoenfinkle’s student. Curry went on to develop combinators and might well be considered the father of combinatory logic. Combinators might be viewed as simple acts. The acts are expressed as reduction rules. In the following expressions the bold capital letter is a combinator. The expression says to replace the left side with the right side. Or, we might envision this as the combinator rewriting what follows it and then going away, having done its job. For example: Ix > x elementary identificator Cfxy > fyx elementary permutator Wfx > fxx elementary duplicator Bfgx > f(gx) elementary compositor Kcx > c elementary cancellator Now one might wonder how this leads to variable free mathematics. To take a simple example, consider the expression (x+1) 2 . Normally we would substitute some number for the x, say 2, add the one and square. This can be expressed in combinators as B(WM)(CA1) where the bold capital letters are combinators and the non-bold capital letters are ordinary arithmetic operators. Instead of substituting 2 for x we apply the combinator expression to 2 as follows: B(WM)(CA1)2 Notice that (WM) corresponds to the f in the reduction rule for B, (CA1) corresponds to g, and 2 corresponds to x. Now we can apply the B to get WM((CA1)2) Now we can apply the W to get M(( CA1)2)((CA1)2) It is a convention in combinator logic that parentheses cluster left and when in normal order parentheses need not be shown. Thus ((CA1)2) can be written as (CA12). Applying the C rule we get M(A21)(A21) Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 50 Now there is nothing left but to do the indicated arithmetic. It is amazing to think that these five basic acts can represent all computable functions. Perhaps it is even more amazing to think that we really only need two rules. They are: Sfgx > fx(gx) Kcx > c Also note, S = B(B(BW)C)(BB) It seems as if most work on combinators today is done in terms of SK systems. Included in the on going work in computer science is combinator graph reduction. Functional languages are implemented in terms of SK graphs. Special hardware can be, and is being, designed for such graph reduction. Also, combinators are proving to be most useful in ordinary circuit design. Also, getting away from the thingness of the past, natural numbers can be defined as combinator processes and so can the arithmetic operators.. ix. Some Conclusions on logics: Combinator approaches introduce us to some profound differences. First, to study more traditional logical notions, known as illative notions, a pure combinator framework is established and then illative operators are adjoined. There are many illative systems being studied. One particular issue concerns rules of inference. The combinators shown above can represent all computable functions. However, with those combinators we immediately face a difficulty. We can form a paradoxical combinator Y. Y = WS(BWB) This combinator has the property that Yx = x(Yx). Thus if we let N stand for negation we get YN > N(YN) > NN(YN) and so forth. Since we have been taught that we don’t want paradox in mathematics, and we probably don’t, the existence of a paradoxical combinator, and there are many more, threatened the use of combinators in developing mathematics. Much work has been done on developing normal forms and type theories that avoid paradox. However, there is another way to look at it. The problem with paradox is that it leads to inconsistency, and an inconsistent system is useless. This may seem an odd way of speaking since most people are likely to think paradox is inconsistency. Let us examine this a bit. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 51 In setting up a formal system the first activity is to define what can be said, i.e., defining “well formed” expressions. The second activity is to separate those well-formed expressions we want to assert as part of the theory from those that we want to exclude from the theory. If the rules of procedure collapse the separation then the theory is considered to be useless, i.e., it can prove or assert anything. It is inconsistent. Now a surprising observation is that paradox need not lead to inconsistency. Historically a rule called modus ponens was a standard rule of inference. Paradox combined with modus ponens will surely lead to inconsistency. Yet there are now known rules of inference that can be combined with paradox without leading to inconsistency. For autognomics, which studies living process that includes values, this surprising observation is a more important point since values typically do have a paradoxical character. For example, in an experiment in which people were given a choice in pairs between three things of equal value if they chose A over B and B over C they would typically choose C over A. Since Y was named the paradoxical combinator new discoveries have led to its name being changed to fixed-point combinator Y0 . From Y0 an infinite series of fixed-point combinators can be generated as Yn+1 = Yn(SI) Now the study of fixed-point combinators has become quite active. The study includes both the search for fixed-point combinators and, when found, determining their usefulness. Two sites we know of where such studies are being done include Argonne National Laboratory and BRICS, Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus in Denmark. (BRICS stands for Basic Research in Computer Science, Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation.) A BRICS paper, “Constructing Fixed-Point Combinators Using Application Survival” was written by Mayer Goldberg while visiting BRICS from the Computer Science Department, Indiana University. Fixed-point combinators will play a major role in autognomics due to their usefulness in formulating recursive and mutually recursive processes. As autopoiesis makes clear living processes are recursive while living organisms are maintained by mutual recursions. (this point may have shifted at the end of his research years as according to Mae Wan Ho there are no fixed states in life, life is always creating the next becoming) I believe a most important next step is to combine semiotics with Rosen’s work. My reason is that semiotic processes take on a life of their own in what may be a primordial matrix. *** Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 52 Section IVB (The following is Repetition on many points as talked about above, but some additional ideas from the following section need to be brought out.)

• • • • Steps towards a New Science - A new Mind: (Another description of process

described in above section)` 1. As a first step in building a science we begin by constructing the domain of discourse. For physics, in Newton’s time, the domain of discourse consisted of such basic notions as numbers, space, time, force and particles. Also the requisite formalism, as required for a science, became the differential/integral calculus as created by Newton and Leibniz. Now for a life science we need to find the proper basic notions and suitable formalisms. To get at candidates for basic notions we turn to philosophical metaphysics. However there are two strands of metaphysical development in Western philosophy. One strand, which we sometimes call the majority report, is the metaphysics of Being or Substance. The other strand, the minority report, is the metaphysics of Process. For our purposes we turn to the minority report which had its origins in Greek antiquity but did not reach sufficient maturity until our own century; notably in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Simultaneously we need to develop a suitable formalism. Though the general public is unaware of it, crises developed in mathematics around the turn of the century. Consequently, during the last few decades more research has been done on formalisms, sometimes called logic, than all previous human history. Suddenly we see that standard logic is only suitable for special cases of restricted application, e.g., application to nonliving domains. Now our minds can be freed to pursue alternative patterns of thought, once seen as impossible. Thus we begin with the sister disciplines, process metaphysics and the logic of formalisms or epi-logic. Together they represent the most fundamental, the most basic candidates for the life science domain of discourse. We will now find many differences between currently known domains of discourse and domains to be created for understanding life. For example, events will replace particles, signs will replace symbols, acts will replace attributes, and so forth. 2 .As a second step, we begin constructing a formal theory of the subject matter, i.e., living processes. To compare this step with physics, first a formalism was developed, the calculus, and then specific laws relating to motion and gravity, as discovered in observing planetary orbits, were expressed in the calculus. For specific laws we turn to some existing disciplines which are somewhere between being philosophies and becoming science. Three such disciplines are autopoiesis, axiology and semiotics. Also, the work of Robert Rosen and the work of, biophysicist, Mae Wan Ho. SubjectMatter: Living processes “laws” being identified and expressed are emerging from disciplines listed below for identifying “subject matter” The Laws of Value, natural inherent hierarchical capacities for valuing Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 53 Laws of Learning, knowing what and how we know Laws of Perception and Communication, knowing from inside out, from within Laws of Autonomy, creation and maintenance of self Laws of Process and Reality, metaphysics - foundations of our world view Laws of Functionality and Relations, how everything and every event is connected Laws of Coherence (Relational? Quantum Coherence) Autopoiesis: Two Chilean biologists, Maturana and Varela, founded Autopoiesis. It defines the conditions on process by which a living organism can both create and maintain itself in a state of autonomy in a constantly changing ecological niche. Autopoiesis also teaches us that the role of the central nervous system is not to create models of the external world as is believed in so much cognitive and computer science. The role of the central nervous system is to synthesize acts. Therefore perception comes from “informare” not from external sources. Perception begins with acts followed by the senses being directed to detect what changed. Physical senses are not passive receivers but are active inquirers. Axiology: Axiology is the theory of value. Here we choose the work of Robert Hartman who worked towards transforming axiology from value philosophy to value science. His formal definitions of Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic value and the laws relating them explain many puzzles concerning value conflicts and paradoxes. The value harmonization process is a process of finding the most effective action for any situation or condition using the value hierarchy. Living beings, by necessity, must use all three dimensions to find such effective action. Different value dimensions come into play for different functions. For example a person can be valued for all her unique combinations of identity (intrinsic, unconditional love), or for her blue eyes or ability as a mother (extrinsic, conditional measurement), or for how she is the right type for a part in a play (systemic, right or wrong). A paradox then would be we should love one another, but justice requires execution. Justice is a systemic value and carrying out the required execution places systemic over intrinsic. Hartman’s value classes are based on intensions (meanings). The classes are: • Intrinsic based on the intension of a unicept, a unique concept applicable to one, and only one, object. Intrinsic values are aesthetic and have cardinality (size) of ℵ1. • Extrinsic based on the intension of an analytic concept applicable to many objects and learned from experience by abstraction. Extrinsic values can be judged good and bad. Extrinsic values have cardinality ℵ0. • Systemic based on the intension of synthetic concepts produced by postulates. Systemic values can be judged right or wrong. Systemic values have finite cardinalities. Note: “Cardinality” is a mathematical term for the number of elements in a set. The alephs (ℵ) refer to orders of infinity. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 54 The value calculus is based on the cardinality of the intensions. Intrinsic values take precedence over extrinsic and extrinsic values take precedence over systemic. When interaction takes place between living beings, intrinsic valuation is necessary to realize the full potential of the interaction. The reason develops from the fact, as shown by Rosen, that living organisms are not computable. A living organism is internally a society and externally is part of a society. To fully interact with an organism requires a potential infinity of approaches and perspectives. Extrinsic valuation reduces interaction to a single criterion and judgment. For example, “he is a good worker” or, remembering the movie, “she is a 10”. But at least with extrinsic valuation there is some room for variety in how one might become a good worker. Systemic valuation is still more constraining. Systemic deals with rules. There is no gray here. Systemic is black and white. It is no wonder religious leaders have tried to teach us the importance of love (intrinsic value). Facts and Values: We all live in a world of process. What is manifest, what we call reality, “becomes.” There is nothing that has “become” without arising out of prior existents. As philosophers might say there is no creation ex nihilo, i.e., creation out of nothing. To understand the relation between facts and value we need to understand the processes of “becoming.” In the process of “becoming” there will be a succession of facts. Each moment of facts establishes a ground for what can become in the next moment of facts. What will become is decided by values. Let us be clear. At each moment of process what can become in the next moment will be dependent on the facts of the current moment while what will be chosen for the next moment, what will become, is chosen by values. This means that what develops in our lives depends on what we value. However, “God’s mills grind exceedingly slow but exceedingly fine”. It can take a long time for the consequences of a value choice to work themselves out. Thus we may not associate the results with the value choices leading to them. Also, the relations between the value choices and the results may be quite subtle. We may not ever realize that we held the values that led to disaster. Semiotics: Semiotics is the theory of sign processes. Signs are like symbols in that they stand for something (a semiotic object). However, signs also have interpretants. Thus a sign is a triad consisting of the sign vehicle, a semiotic object and an interpretant. The theory of sign processes was put forward by Charles Peirce a century ago. Until now it has been largely ignored. Now however Peirce’s genius is being recognized. There are many centers for the Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 55 study of Peircian semiotics. There are scholars around the world developing semiotics, including new versions such as biosemiotics. I believe a most important next step is to combine semiotics with Rosen’s work. My reason is that semiotic processes take on a life of their own in what may be a primordial matrix. *** Reforming Logic with Combinator Logic; Combining Logic with Metaphysics; the Basis for the Synthesis of these aforementioned disciplines: There are two disciplines primarily concerned with systems of starting assumptions. They are philosophical metaphysics and logic. These are not popularly known disciplines since in normal times one can simply accept tradition. However, in times of radical and fundamental change these two disciplines should come to the fore. That is where we begin. We know from both semiotics and autopoiesis that our experiences of reality, our perceptions, are not simply dictated through our senses by an external reality. Our experiences and perceptions are co-created by ongoing interactions or, in the words of Floyd Merrell, interdependent interrelations, between that external reality and our selves.4 Thus we should ask, what do we bring to this co-creation and how does what we bring effect our experience and perceptions? We all are born into a language using community from which we all learn a whole system of starting assumptions. What we can ultimately experience and perceive depends on what that system of starting assumptions permits; unless, of course, we consciously revise it. Fortunately, language is intrinsically meaningless. We have to work with it to shape it and render meaning. In the course of shaping language, the role of philosophy, we may find flaws in our starting assumptions leading to conscious revision. Conscious revision is a most difficult process. Let us say we begin with the assumption that the world is composed of things. We learn to recognize things, to act with things, and to survive amongst things. But then we find things which don’t quite act right for things. (For example, the wave/particle duality in quantum physics.) Then begins a glimmering insight that there is something besides things. Initially this may be a frightening insight since we have no experience surviving in a world of more than just things. But ultimately the insight grows until it can not be denied. And philosophers and scientists talk about it. It becomes part of the language, and new generations are born into a different world. On Reforming Logic: A major step in building the desired science is to reform our notions of logic. Logic is now undergoing a revolution. Due to crises in the foundations of mathematics, crises which make the Y2K computer bug seem trivial by comparison, more research has been done in 4 Floyd Merrell, Signs Grow: Semiosis and Life Processes, University of Toronto Press, 1996 Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 56 logic during the 20th Century than all previous human history. And even that remains an understatement. It is not just more! It is incomparable! Once upon a time logic was concerned with propositions and truth preserving rules of inference. Logic today is as different from logic of the past as is quantum physics different from Newtonian physics. Perhaps even more so! Initially I propose some relaxed conditions. The first step towards logic can be used to simply say what can not be said in natural language. As expression becomes stable other criteria can be examined, i.e., Coherence. We want to form a logic of process. Central to the notion of process is the idea of what is being done, or acts, rather than what is. The importance of “what is” will arise later as a condition on what can be done. Can logic be expressed strictly in terms of acts? Yes, it can be. To illustrate we turn to what is now known as combinatory logic. I prefer to call it combinator logic so as to not get it confused with combinatorics. Also, combinators might better be considered an epi-logic, i.e., logic of logic. Combinator Logic –work of Haskell Curry Back in the 1920’s rigorous processes for substitution of variables was a serious problem in mathematics. A German logician, Shöenfinkle, proposed a method of variable free mathematics. An American logician, Haskell Curry, was, at that time, in Germany as Shöenfinkle’s student. Curry went on to develop combinators and might well be considered the father of combinatory logic. Combinators might be viewed as simple acts. The acts are expressed as reduction rules. In the following expressions the bold capital letter is a combinator. The expression says to replace the left side with the right side. Or, we might envision this as the combinator rewriting what follows it and then going away having done its job. For example: Ix > x elementary identificator Cfxy > fyx elementary permutator Wfx > fxx elementary duplicator Bfgx > f(gx) elementary compositor Kcx > c elementary cancellator Now one might wonder how this leads to variable free mathematics. To take a simple example, consider the expression (x+1) 2 . Normally we would substitute some number for the x, say 2, add the one and square. This can be expressed in combinators as B(WM)(CA1) where the bold capital letters are combinators and the non-bold capital letters are ordinary arithmetic operators. Instead of substituting 2 for x we apply the combinator expression to 2 as follows: B(WM)(CA1)2 Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 57 Notice that (WM) corresponds to the f in the reduction rule for B, (CA1) corresponds to g, and 2 corresponds to x. Now we can apply the B to get WM((CA1)2) Now we can apply the W to get M(( CA1)2)((CA1)2) It is a convention in combinator logic that parentheses cluster left and when in normal order parentheses need not be shown. Thus ((CA1)2) can be written as (CA12). Applying the C rule we get M(A21)(A21) Now there is nothing left but to do the indicated arithmetic. It is amazing to think that these five basic acts can represent all computable functions. Perhaps it is even more amazing to think that we really only need two rules. They are: Sfgx > fx(gx) Kcx > c Also note, S = B(B(BW)C)(BB) It seems as if most work on combinators today is done in terms of SK systems. Included in the on-going work in computer science is combinator graph reduction. Functional languages are implemented in terms of SK graphs. Special hardware can be, and is being, designed for such graph reduction. Also, combinators are proving to be most useful in ordinary circuit design. Also, getting away from the thingness of the past, natural numbers can be defined as combinator processes and so can the arithmetic operators. Some Consequences: Combinator approaches introduce us to some profound differences. First, to study more traditional logical notions, known as illative notions, a pure combinator framework is established and then illative operators are adjoined. There are many illative systems being studied. One particular issue concerns rules of inference. The combinators shown above can represent all computable functions. However, with those combinators we immediately face a difficulty. We can form a paradoxical combinator Y. Y = WS(BWB) This combinator has the property that Yx = x(Yx). Thus if we let N stand for negation we get YN > N(YN) > NN(YN) and so forth. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 58 Since we have been taught that we don’t want paradox in mathematics, and we probably don’t, the existence of a paradoxical combinator, and there are many more, threatened the use of combinators in developing mathematics. Much work has been done on developing normal forms and type theories that avoid paradox. However, there is another way to look at it. The problem with paradox is that it leads to inconsistency, and an inconsistent system is useless. This may seem an odd way of speaking since most people are likely to think paradox is inconsistency. Let us examine this a bit. In setting up a formal system the first activity is to define what can be said, i.e., defining “well formed” expressions. The second activity is to separate those well-formed expressions we want to assert as part of the theory from those that we want to exclude from the theory. If the rules of procedure collapse the separation,then the theory is considered to be useless, i.e., it can prove or assert anything. It is inconsistent. Now a surprising observation is that paradox need not lead to inconsistency. Historically a rule called modus ponens was a standard rule of inference. Paradox combined with modus ponens will surely lead to inconsistency. Yet there are now known rules of inference which can be combined with paradox without leading to inconsistency. For autognomics, which studies living process that includes values, this surprising observation is a more important point since values typically do have a paradoxical character. For example, in an experiment in which people were given a choice in pairs between three things of equal value if they chose A over B and B over C they would typically choose C over A. Since Y was named the paradoxical combinator new discoveries have led to its name being changed to fixed-point combinator Y0 . From Y0 an infinite series of fixed-point combinators can be generated as Yn+1 = Yn(SI) Now the study of fixed-point combinators has become quite active. The study includes both the search for fixed-point combinators and, when found, determining their usefulness. Two sites we know of where such studies are being done include Argonne National Laboratory and BRICS, Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus in Denmark. ( BRICS stands for Basic Research in Computer Science, Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation.) A BRICS paper, “Constructing Fixed-Point Combinators Using Application Survival” was written by Mayer Goldberg while visiting BRICS from the Computer Science Department, Indiana University. A. Ontology of Life (Developing domain of discourse) 1. Key concepts and definitions in space and time Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 59 B. Epistemology or metaphysics a. Primordial Matrix 1. Dirac Sea a. Ervin Laszlo 2. Harris (that it was required) b. Laws (marriage of Process Philosophy and Logic) Combining Logic and Process Metaphysics: Once upon a time the subject of logic was, itself, well defined. One could point to propositional calculi, predicate calculi, type theories, truth preserving rules of inference and processes of reasoning as the subject matter of logical inquiry. One could also point to laws of logic that had held for centuries such as the laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle. At this time there are thousands of formalisms that might well be considered as the logic of something; formalisms that have very different properties from anything traditionally called logic. Such formalisms are studied in depth. Yet it is often impossible to know how to interpret them. For example, a system of entailment was developed at Yale with the goal of capturing the English meaning of “If x then y”. Some logicians would have equated the implication relation in the propositional calculus with “If x then y”. But implication can be true even though the antecedent and consequent have nothing to do with each other. As implication is defined a false proposition can imply anything. When Bertrand Russell was challenged at a dinner party to prove from a false proposition that he was the Pope he replied, “Two equals one is false; the Pope and I are two, but two equals one, therefore the Pope and I are one”. The Yale system, developed in part by my friend, Professor Alan Anderson, had rules requiring the relevance of the antecedent to the consequent. When they developed a model for the system, a model discovered by Professor Nuel Belnap who was Alan Ross Anderson Distinguished Professor at Pittsburgh, it was found to require eight truth values with two of them designated as truth and six designated as falsehood. Of course, no one knew how to interpret eight truth-values. And it was clearly the end of excluded middle asserting there are only two truth-values, true and false. While formalisms are offering new systems to be interpreted, process metaphysics offers new opportunities for interpretation. For example, Peirce’s semiotics has three main categories known as firstness, secondness and thirdness. According to Floyd Merrell, firstness violates the principle of non-contradiction while thirdness violates the principle of excluded middle. Thus traditional logic does not adequately interpret Peirce’s semiotics. We might now suggest for example, pure combinatory logic for the logic of firstness, plus a systematic study of adjoined illative systems in relation to the requirements of secondness and thirdness. Finally, we should recognize that Peirce died in 1914 and Whitehead in 1947. Process metaphysics is, today an active area of inquiry which, while profiting from the insights of both Peirce and Whitehead, has moved beyond them and has available from other Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 60 disciplines such as quantum physics and modern formalisms restraints and opportunities never before available.

• • • Basic contentions of the process metaphysics (from Rescher)

• that time and change are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding • that process is a principal category of ontological description • that processes and the force, energy, and power that they make manifest are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental, than things for the purposes of ontological theory • that several, if not all, of the major elements of the ontological repertoire (God, nature as a whole, persons, material substances ) are best understood in process terms • that contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding. Taking Rescher’s summary as a minimum statement of our requisite metaphysics, we immediately see necessity for new logics. Time and change are principle categories, yet time is not mentioned in traditional logic. Also among the fundamental categories in process metaphysics are contingency, emergence, novelty and creativity, yet a fundamental property of traditional logic is that should be “truth preserving.” Thus the foundation of this research is a wedding of process metaphysics and modern formalisms satisfying Bertrand Russell’s observation that a philosopher knows what he is talking about while a mathematician (formalist) knows precisely what he is saying. Section IV C In summary of Science Formation Process: (another repetition with some ideas added, clarified & simplified perhaps) In the process we have four levels of investigation: A) Discovery of new knowledge (what we’re talking about) identifying the furniture 1. New experience and knowledge identified and seen and created through art and artists 2. Theoretical Philosophy Development: Identifying the furniture, developing the foundation metaphysics B) Development of ways to talk about new knowledge (new logics) 1.Talking about it to share it with others to get observer community looking at this new experience, not having it come just from one person so that enough people are aware of the same processes. This process leads to the development of a philosophy of meta-physics. 2. A logic language is developed called the rules of procedures. (logics and mathematics) Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 61 C) Application of rules of logic (to create recipes for understanding the new knowledge) Theoretical Tools for specific Science Begins 1.Tools are then used to develop thought recipes for specific sciences 2.Transition from philosophical to scientific theory 3. To discover commonalties that become the final meta laws we are looking for, rules of logic are applied to specific subject matters such as: autopoeisis, Varela and Maturana axiology, Robert Hartman semiotics, Charles Peirce biosemiotics, mathematical biology, Robert Rosen 4. Members of the observer community can precisely understand each other = preparation for a new science. 5. Simultanesouly, empirical philosophy research poses questions to reality such as: Observations on living organism to see what you can say about how they work A health problem A business failure Peace solutions Economy Management Ecological care of natural resources D. Combine the theoretical and empirical philosophical research to form a new science New insights based on coherence of new foundations applied as guide for emerging new worldview New worldview emerges producing new societies, new solutions - old ways fall away Applications research which goes on indefinitely 1. Apply the meta-principles for guiding processes for different sectors of life and society. Section IV D Functions and Processes to re-consider about organisms (for some reason I think this belongs here) • ***We know that life transcends many conditions classical physics led us to believe; such as: The second law of thermo dynamics, things move towards a collapse of order, no single space-time, that everything is connected in a single unity, we cannot act Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 62 without impacting on one another. General relativity and quantum physics have invalidated the world of classical physics. This all leaves us with the question, what is reality made of? Life-itself is such a strong intelligence, greater than anything known. Mathematics itself is paradoxical, like life, isn’t consistent. • ***How Aristotle’s four causes play into the picture. • We tend to think of causes in physical terms. Something A acts so as to effect B making B do something different than it would have done without A’s act. Aristotle’s four causes are quite different. Each is some thing or condition without which B could not happen. For example, creating (building) a house there is: o Material cause – literally building material as supplied by Home Depot. o Formal cause – specification of form as in a drawing or blue print o Efficient cause – acts giving manifestation – carpenters, brick layers, plasterers, painters, etc. o Final cause – purpose, answers why questions. • Restricting causes to things bumping into each other cannot account for life. We need to understand process where by process I mean multiple entities expressing their intentions interactively to bring about a new reality. • I have said that reality is a sequence of events. Each event begins in available facts judged by values to produce the next event. For example - Building a house will be a series of events. Beginning each event one must have the proper building material available to continue. This is a condition required for the event. In this case of building a house, material cause. • ***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. • Process: One could think of process as simple mechanical process such as gears turning gears. However, the notion of process we want is one of multiple entities asserting their will interactively to create new conditions. • ***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 Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 63 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. • ***Reality – Over 25 centuries metaphysical and logical inquiry has shaped our social notions of reality. For the last three centuries Newtonian physics has added to the development. Newtonian physics is coherent with substance metaphysics and classical logic. • Now we see that modern physics, i.e., quantum theory and general relativity, is not coherent with substance metaphysics and traditional logic. Also, modern physics shows us that what we thought was reality was just an approximation; an approximation that worked within certain energy limits. • Today, human activities and technologies violate those energy limits. Thus we are in trouble. • Process metaphysics, modern logics, new mathematics and modern physics form a new sense of reality in which a theory of organism can be developed. You can use the understandings of autopoiesis, axiology, semiotics, modern logic, and process metaphysics. • ***Organism: In a sense we all know what organisms are. We are organisms. Yet we really don’t know. 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. But it all works out as long as the rules of coherence are adhered to. 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 the body stores is several thousand degrees Kelvin. • We are all connected - twin particle experiment, Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 64 • Quantum potential fields • Flow and structure • Organization and structure-autopoeisis • How do we develop knowledge - 1sness, 2ndness, 3rdness • **Inside> out autonomy, the only thing the organism really knows is it’s inner experience by inference, by abduction, it makes hypothesis. There are no in-puts in living organisms. By body awareness, intuitions are developed from experience formed in the body/mind directly through fields of energy. Free will and how it plays a key role in the functioning of an organism. It’s a kind of “feel-think.” Autonomy implies there are no inputs or outputs. No inputs/outputs is not a law as such. It is a consequence. It has no form, but it is a consequence with consequences. If a living organism had inputs and outputs then the living organism would be one with its environment. It would not have autonomy. To add value it needs autonomy. On the other hand it needs to be one with the larger organism it belongs to. The solution to this is that the organism, as an information system, is a closed autonomous system. This is the brain and central nervous system function – informare. Simultaneously, by the liquid crystalline nature of its connective tissue it is aware of field effects • Self-reference and self-knowing • Reality of an organism isn’t consistent but is filled with paradoxical and conflicting polarities through out which it oscillates continuously to maintain coherence • The role of diversity in a living organism • Wholism not fragmentation; we learn to feel-think, to not divide our reality into things, but focus on momentary perspectives of experience, like a living reality • The role values play in process in the growing of experience and perception • Analytical versus synthetic concepts • Scale makes the difference in understanding how life works. • How are Perceptions formed • Coherence and unity – Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 65 • Intention and manifestation, process • Identity, imprint; life satisfying its identity through finding effective action. • Life is an experiment with some meta principles that it is trying to fulfill by the nature of its identity in the niche it is living and finding itself. • Fulfillment – • Balance and correction • Finding effective action • Materialism versus spirituality • Every moment a choice • Trust – Love • How emotions guide us • Tipping point • Process • A grand plan: Is there such a thing? • Space time relationships • Economy – entropy and energy management • Cultural values • The hiearchy of values; intrinsic, extrinsics, systemic • How life or an organism solves the problems of living by finding effective action. • What is the role of cooperation and collaboration versus competition, control and dominance? • Human knowledge development moving into the 6th level (Graves), or Genuine 3rdness of Peirce. • Memes, and levels of human knowledge development Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 66 • Note that nouns dominate our language. But not all languages are so dominated. There are verb-dominated languages. Key concepts • that which is alive, life dynamics, life-itself, living domain • process, creative process and becoming • love, (a deeper understanding of what love is and what love means) and the power of what it means to “just love,” “love makes the world go round,” “ love is all you need” • meaning oriented (intensional) • oscillation • self-reference (self-knowing) • value-driven (a fuller understanding of the dynamic of value processes in life and how they work) • connectedness in how we relate and effect one another • inside>out, how world views are “in-formed” “infomare,” to be formed within. • freedom to be, self-determination, autonomy • coming together, while maintaining diversity

• • • Form: What is the form of the laws of life? This is a difficult question since I am not

sure what people mean by form. A basic law of life might be autonomy, i.e., every living organism has to be autonomous. Autonomy begins with making distinctions. That is, the living organism has to distinguish itself from everything else. That said, I could say the form of indications is given by Spencer-Brown’s calculus of indications. Thus, in answering the question I could suggest we begin with Spencer-Brown’s book, “Laws of Form”. The basic calculus of indications can be interpreted for conventional logic. In more advanced chapters the book introduces re-entrant forms and higher order “arithmetic”. These have no equivalence in conventional logic. There is a clear cleavage between what we used to be able to think and what we can think now. The new thinking applies to life. The word “arithmetic” has nothing to do with numbers. It refers to calculations that can be done with the forms. For example 􀀀􀀀 = 􀀀. If we think of the squares as meaning, “make a distinction”, then the form says making it twice is the same as making it once. This may seem trivial and of course it is. I don’t have the characters to show the possibilities from the entire arithmetic. I will have to do them by hand. The expressions can get very complex and surprising, especially when you add the re-entrant forms and higher order arithmetic that points to new realities. I write about the arithmetic to illustrate another problem. I say arithmetic. You think 2+2. I think 􀀀􀀀. In addition, there is also an algebra, meaning expressions with variables. The purpose of an algebra is to specify a process while leaving what it works on indeterminate. There are formalisms that can do the job without variables. See Haskell combinators. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 67

• • • Now what about the form of field effects? My experience with fields goes back to

physics. Lets think about electric fields. An electric field fills some region of space. For our awareness there is nothing there. If you shoot an electrically charged particle through it the path of the particle will deviate as it “experiences” the field. We envision the field as being electric force vectors at each point of space. As a charged particle passes a point the electric vector at that point will give it a shove changing the speed and direction of its motion. The only way to detect an electric field is with an electric charge. Similarly there are magnetic fields. The effect of electric and magnetic fields depends on their strength that diminishes with their distance from their source. There are many other fields in physics. There are also quantum potential fields whose effect depends only on their shape. Simultaneously a living organism forms both body awareness and brain awareness. Due to the speed of liquid crystals body awareness is formed before brain awareness that depends on the slower conduction of the nerves. The total might be called mind.

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Section IV E A prolegomena by Norm Hirst on the Axioms of Life Copyright © held by Norm F. Hirst, 3/3/04 (written 2004 again clarifying in diferent ways) Living organisms are self-aware, self motivated actors. Thus they are totally outside the domain of current scientific thinking. Current scientific thinking is either classification, as in creating a taxonomy, or causal dynamics. In the case of causal dynamics it is assumed it must be both quantitative and predictive. Classification tells us nothing useful for understanding living organisms. Classifications are based on external physical properties. They tell us nothing about internal awareness or motivations. By causal dynamics I mean motion due entirely to external forces. Since living organisms are self-aware and self-motivated we give up on prediction. As for quantitative I believe that is a mistaken notion. Science involves mappings into some form of order. Numbers were a convenient form of order to begin with. However, they are clearly not the only form of order. Now if we are going to have a science of life we need to ask what we expect of it. Since living organisms are self-motivated actors we are not going to predict behavior as we might from a robot. Nor are we going to be able to control people. We are not even going to consider it. But what we can do is begin to understand what is possible. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 68 Here we are concerned with all living organisms and the environment they create. Is the ecosystem a living organism? The evidence indicates that it is. If so, what is now being learned about the way living organisms function raises troubling questions. Is our abuse threatening its life? If it dies we will have no life support system. If, as now appears to be, living organisms manage their energy requirements in terms of diversity of life forms the ecosystem needs biodiversity. The loss of species is not just an aesthetic problem. Is an economic system a living system? Some economists are claiming that they cannot understand economics with the old scientific paradigms. They need a living system theory of economics. As with the ecosystem economies need economic diversity. Ultimately globalization will bring about the end of the world’s economy. Physicians think of our bodies as biochemical machines. They are not machines. There is no similarity to machines. Nor are they purely biochemical. This belief in machines has stymied the progress of medicine. Physicians today can rarely cure anything. Medical interventions are work arounds. They remove symptoms but they do not return the body to normal healthy functioning. As we understand living organisms more fully medical care will more resemble what is portrayed on Star Trek. It will utilize the generation and application of fields that will guide the body back to health. Our bodies are processes, not things. We are in denial about what is most obvious. Think and observe! Picture our bodies ever changing from birth to maturity to old age. We don’t need maintenance people to install updates. The body is a process of constant re-creation. Generally it re-duplicates itself. Now we need to explore what kind of process and how do we express it. Formalism: What we have to say about living process does not fit well in language. Why should it? Language is intended to communicate about more practical matters. We need to resort to formalisms. Unfortunately few people have experience with formalisms outside of physicists and mathematicians, and they don’t have experience with the kind of formalisms we now need. Formalisms are used to express the generation or creation of forms. Thus formalisms feature acts. For example, start with 0. Add one to produce a result. Repeat! Add one to the result. Keep repeating! Those simple instructions represent the creation of the whole infinite order of integers. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 69 (Key Thesis) All the formalisms known today produce an order of things. The integers are things. To understand life and living organisms we need a new style of formalism. We need formalisms to produce orders of acts. The philosophical basis is process metaphysics, not substance metaphysics. That is, fundamental concepts are concepts of acts, not objects. To put it another way, we work with verbs, not nouns. This rejects subject-predicate forms of logic. This also rejects the typical emphasis on truth. Life is creative rather than truth preserving. Rather than subject-predicate propositions judged by their truth-values, we turn to combinations of acts judged as to the effectiveness. Effectiveness is a value judgement.

• • The driving force of life is to achieve harmonized (coherent) variety and diversity.

The measure of value is proportional to the measure of diversity and the measure of coherence. A process is a combination of acts, though combination is a rather weak word. Perhaps we should speak of a society of acts or a nexus of acts. Envision acts embedded in acts. Envision acts relating acts. Envision an organism as a society with many foci of subsocieties acting simultaneously and driven by coherence. Substance metaphysics has forced upon on us worldviews precluding values. With a few exceptions, the literature on values is rather ridiculous. Values are not things. They are conditions on living processes. I said that living organisms are self-knowing and self-motivated. Everything that today’s science deals with effectively is simply the passive result of causal interactions. A living organism has to choose. * In semiotics it is thought that an organism prepares to act based on deduction, particularly in thirdness where knowledge of laws becomes available. By deduction it calculates what is likely to be next in the world of its experience. No doubt this is part of the truth. But for a living organism that has to choose there is the need to be sensitive to the totality of what is possible and out of that totality what is most desirable. Thus we enter the realm of values that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been adequately explored.

• A living organism begins with a single act of manifestation

Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 70 Section V Beginning Axioms (The work continues towards Axioms with Abductive hypothesis) Wikipedia definition: An axiom or postulate is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Greek axíōma (ἀξίωμα) 'that which is thought worthy or fit' or 'that which commends itself as evident.'[1][2] The term has subtle differences in definition when used in the context of different fields of study. As defined in classic philosophy, an axiom is a statement that is so evident or well-established, that it is accepted without controversy or question. [3] As used in modern logic, an axiom is simply a premise or starting point for reasoning.[4])) 1: All life is connected – connected by both EMF and quantum potentials 2: All living entities are autonomous, so they can differentiate subject only to coherence 3: All living entities operate by electromagnetism – see liquid crystalline nature 4: All living entities are complex in the Rosen sense – no largest model, they are not machines 5. All living entities are self referential Self-referential implies self-observation and awareness 6. Self-referential violates classical logic – leads to paradox resolved by oscillation 7 Living entities survive by learning effective acts – not representations as in talking 8. Living entities exhibit invariant organization and structural plasticity The computer like distinction between hardware and software can illustrate this. The hardware is unchanging but what it does depends on values given by the software. But don’t take this illustration too seriously. A physical organism can change itself. For example changing synaptic connections. Also there is the issue of the liquid genome, I await the book 9. For living process space is fractal. Space time as we have known it does not apply 10: Physics is not basic to life. The science of living process is basic to physics Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 71 11: Living process is social, i.e., carried out by democratic societies of cells. 12: The society is called a nexus. “Regnant nexus” replaces the notion of controllers 13: Regnant nexus are transient as required 15: Process results from individuals acting to introduce coherent novelty 16: At all levels from atoms to the universe, life forms societies 15: Truth conditions (knowledge) become important in predicting the effectiveness of acts 10: But oscillation can undermine truth conditions – leading to fear and conflict 11: Reality for a living organism is a co-creation of knowledge and the external context 12: The external context always involves both poles of categorical contrasts 13: Reality is created by choosing one, or the other pole – thus reality is always limiting 1/18/06 RE-considerations on Organisms Further Exploreing Axioms My Process of discovery: My experience led me to conclude there was something profoundly wrong with the way life was understood and lived. I believed the problem involved values. I discovered that understanding values required understanding life itself. Understanding life itself and values has been my sole focus for fifty years. I have been greatly troubled by seeing the emphasis put on the so-called physical world as if that were the home of reality. To me reality, including physical reality, is the creation of life-itself. Life is a creative process. AH#1: Life is sui generis. That is unique and in a class by itself. It cannot be compared to or explained by physics. Life is fundamental. It is thought that first the world of inert matter was created, that inert matter is fundamental, that the world was either created by random processes or some form of intelligence. Choosing random processes is about as enlightening as saying some form of magic, we really don’t know. There is no way to do any form of observation to check out the random process approach. The most we can do is some probability calculations. The results persuade me to give up the idea. (Probability and statistics are not the same.) Choosing intelligence is equally unrewarding unless we can find some intelligent agent. Inert matter cannot do anything except move in response to external forces. Physics is the Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 72 science of the motion of inert bodies under external forces. There is nothing in physics able to turn its will into self-generated actions. Thus physics can be done in mathematics. Mathematics consists of symbol systems. Symbols are dyads, i.e., two things coupled in a relationship. For example, the word cat and the class of feline animals. In suggesting that life is fundamental I am suggesting that arrangements of inert matter are produced by living processes. Living processes are processes combining entities that both have a will and can turn it into action. Such processes require sign systems. Signs are triads, i.e., three things united by a relationship. Two are the same as in symbols. The third is the sign’s meaning. Thus with signs we can distinguish, in context, cat as feline, earth moving equipment, cat boats, catamarans, whips, prostitutes, etc. Sign systems were developed by Charles Peirce, 1839-1914, as semiotics. But that is still not going to be adequate for dealing with living processes. Classical logics, the 30 new logics known today (??), and Peirce’s logic have inherited subject-predicate forms of proposition, i.e., classifying forms such as x is Y, x is round, x is a ball. In short, logics show their linguistic heritage. I don’t believe living processes speak human languages except for some of the living processes of humans. After years of studying logic I have reluctantly come to agree with Whitehead. Remember he was the co-author with Russell of “Principia Mathematica” in which they demonstrated how mathematics could be derived from logic. Together they wrote three large volumes. Ultimately the project was shown to be seriously flawed with the publication of Godel’s incompleteness theorem. The last thing Whitehead wrote appeared in his festschrift volume. 5 “… Logic, conceived as an adequate analysis of the advance of thought, is a fake.” He applied this notion to attempts to achieve exact statements in philosophy and science, “The exactness is a fake.” He also points out:6 “Abstraction involves emphasis, and emphasis vivifies experience, for good, or for evil. … This is the abstraction involved in the creation of any actuality, with its unity of finitude with infinity. But consciousness proceeds to a second order of abstraction whereby finite constituents of the actual thing are abstracted from the thing. This procedure is necessary for finite thought, though it weakens the sense of reality.” A conclusion, he points out:7 “What I am objecting to is the absurd trust in the adequacy of our knowledge. The self-confidence of learned people is the comic tragedy of civilization” 5 The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, p700 6 op. Cit. p681 7 Op. Cit. p689 Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 73 My point up to here explains why I say life is “sui generis”. There is virtually nothing to turn to for help in understanding life. I suggest, for foundations to build on, process metaphysics and an epilogic known as combinatory logic. I prefer to call it combinator logic so it is not confused with combinatorics in mathematics. I believe metaphysics goes together with a style of logic. Logics, as we have known them, are suited to substance metaphysic. Neither, nor both, can account for a living reality. Over the years I have read many attempts to over come the deficiencies in logic. Truth valued combinations of subject predicate propositions cannot work for life. AH#2: Life does not arise out of inanimate matter. Inanimate matter arises out of life. An ability of life is forming habits. Every living entity learns by finding effective acts. An act is effective if it produces the result the living entity intended in doing the act. If sufficiently similar conditions occur again the living entity will repeat an effective act. With enough repetitions the act will become habitual. Inert matter is a locus of such strong habits that there appears to be no life left in it. AH#3: Life is not a thing. It is a creative process. Things can be referred to as nouns. They are like a lump of something that can be named, defined and described, once and for all time. Since languages are typically noun based, they are handy for talking about things. But life is not a thing. Verb languages may be better suited but even they will not suffice. Creative processes require multiple processes that are interdependent and interactive. Each creative moment is based on facts as initial conditions, possible values and finally decision, AH#4: All living entities are self-creating, i.e., autopoietic The point is that all living entities come into being as a whole entity and grow into maturity as a whole entity unlike machines that are assembled piece by piece by some other. There is a distinction between being autonomic, obeying self-law, and allonomic, obeying some other’s law. Machines are allonomic, they obey the laws built in by external agencies. There is no way for any other to build in the internal laws of a living entity. We can not know the inner laws of another person, thus we should not judge. AH#5: Autopoiesis requires self-awareness and self-reference. Self-reference is required for self-awareness. Self-reference wreaks havoc on traditional logic. It invalidates truth-values and the ideas of consistency. No living organism can be consistent. Thus life is vibratory. This mistaken belief in consistency leads to Jung’s dark side AH#6: Self-reference introduces paradox invalidating conventional logic. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 74 I have often heard that people are not logical. By conventional logic that is certainly true. However, they are quite rational but rational by different kinds of logic. AH#7: There are modern logics that allow for such apparent paradox. This means the ancient prohibitions against inconsistency are invalid except in particular circumstances. The idea that we should behave consistently is impossible since life is vibratory. Jung’s dark side is unnecessary. AH#8: The apparent paradox is resolved by oscillation. The paradox is that opposites can both be true, i.e., A and Not A. This is resolved by letting them alternate over time. AH#9: Life is vibratory. Thus life cannot be consistent. Resolutions affirm ideals we promise ourselves to live by. Unfortunately the vibratory nature of life makes it impossible leading to a sense of failure and loss of self-esteem. Thinking it also leads to Jung’s notions of the dark side. AH#10: Living entities are manifest with an invariant identity. Identity refers to the process specifications by which their autopoiesis occurs. We might say biological identity or genetic identity. For example, as cells are produced for our bodies they are produced with unique characteristics that identify them as our cells AH#11: Living entities are created as a single whole. There are no parts. It seems as if there are parts. We have hearts, brains, kidneys, livers, etc. But they are not truly parts as in machines. Consider the heart as a pump. It is known to day that it is much more than just a pump. How ever think machines for a moment. Pretend there is a machine with a pump pumping some required fluid. Barring the pump breaking it will pump as it was designed and built to pump. Now suppose a critical pipe is about to burst if the pump doesn’t slow down. In a machine the pipe will burst. If the machine were an holistic entity the pump would know it had better slow down and generate alarm signals for maintenance. It takes nerve messages some time to get around. Not much, maybe only a millisecond, .001 second. On that basis I doubted that the body could really be holistic which I thought of as complete simultaneity throughout the body. Then in 1992 Mae Wan Ho discovered that living tissue is liquid crystalline. That permits such rapid communication that whole body simultaneity is possible. Modern medicine is divided into specialties. The effects of holism are likely not seen. AH#12: Living entities are born into unknown environments to which they must learn and adapt. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 75 I have often heard that animals live by instincts, that only humans live by intelligence. Living in Maine where we have had much more opportunity to observe wild life makes that old belief seem preposterous. Since there is no way to know what the environment will be throughout their life times there is no way they can be preprogrammed with instinct. Adapting requires intelligence. AH#13: To permit learning and adaptation the identity processes allow for structural plasticity. An example is growing new synaptic connections throughout our life as we learn. AH#14: Survival depends on learning effective acts. An act is effective if its results are what were intended. The hypothesis stems from the discoveries of autopoiesis that reverse traditional theories of perception. The traditional theories of perception have passive senses, sensors, feeding information to the brain, the brain makes sense of it and stores it as representations of the external reality. When carefully examined the traditional theory is impossible. This is also the theory on which artificial intelligence work has been based that explains the failure of artificial intelligence. What is required is an embodied brain capable of acting on the world. Meaning is supplied by the intent to act combined with reports from the senses. The senses are not just passive sensors. They are directed to seek certain results. If the results satisfy the intent of an act the act becomes part of the organisms repertoire. AH#15: Life is creative processes. It cannot be understood or managed or survived on the basis of one system. In contrast computers can be seen as one process, sequential step by step as programmed from beginning to completion. Parallel processing does not change this. In parallel processing a single process is segmented into different segments that can be run on separate processors simultaneously. The results are then combined into one process. For life imagine, as an analogy, a building full of computers. They are all running different programs looking at different aspects of the same reality. Based on values they are all cooperating to combine their knowledge to help each one decide what proper action would be for it. Life requires variety and diversity. Thus we are all born with a different identity. AH#16: To maintain its uniqueness a living entity must distinguish itself from its environment. See the logic of distinction in Brown’s “Laws of Form”. AH#17: Distinguished, living entities must be autonomous. This means they follow their own internal law. There is simply no input mechanism to change their internal operations. Force may change their external acts. They will rebel as soon as the force is removed. The rebellion may have dangerous consequences for whoever applied the force. They who would fight terrorism should pay attention. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 76 AH#18: Autonomy implies they are closed to information. Information is not a commodity. Let me send you a packet of information. “The five primitive combinators can be replaced by just two, K and S.” Got it! No, of course you don’t. Unless you have studied combinators it doesn’t mean a thing. If you had studied combinators I wouldn’t need to tell you unless you were just starting out and had not gone beyond the five primitive combinators. In my experience I don’t remember people thinking about information being a commodity until the publication of “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” by Shannon and Weaver. The theory is only about detecting and correcting signal errors as in missing bits in digital communication. AH#19: Informare, formed within, replaces information. As a living entity our experiences include talking to one another. We begin to connect the sounds with experience. When we are spoken to, we associate what is said with our own experience. We may also form concepts, abstractions, etc. Thus we think we can communicate. Sometimes it happens, but it is an iffy process that takes great care. AH#20: A living entity can only know and do what its own living history has provided. AH#21: A living entity cannot violate its identity. Now we begin to see many consequences such as a person cannot be controlled, may not be able to fulfill arbitrary expectations, there is no possibility of literal language and we all live in different realities. AH#22: A living entity has maximum freedom of action subject only to coherence conditions within its living context Coherence from coheres – to stick together. Coherence means compatible habits of acting. Coherence can mean quantum coherence to axiological coherence.. AH#23: Living acts are never the result of cause and effect as in physics. They are acts chosen on the basis of values. AH#24: Values are internal experiences AH#25:For the simplest entities the only choice may be to act or not act. For humans the choices may be a very complex variety AH#26: For humans there are three kinds of experience, aesthetic, practical and correct. These are named intrinsic, extrinsic and systemic AH#27: These form a hierarchy which is I>E>S Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 77 Section VI Summary and Conclusions 2007 A summary and conclusions towards new living logic for Science of Organisms Excerpts from Towards a Science of Life As Creative Organisms; Published in Cosmos and History - The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy Characteristics of Organisms • Self-creating • Self-referencing • Self-motivated, acting • Self-knowing • Autonomous (self-law) • Connected • Cooperative, must form societies • Invariant identity • Comes into existence in its totality, it has no separate parts • Originates acts • Choices are made from value intelligence • Able to act in unrestricted, unknown environments Requirements of Organisms • Instant communication • Variety • Energy management • Holism • Vibratory - between categorical contrasts/oscillation. • Cooperation • Living at edge/Avoidance of equilibrium • Improbable/Non-predictable Recent Empirical Philosophy about Organisms (early naming of orders of acts) Organisms are self-creating, i.e., autopoietic -autopoiesis requires self-creation, selfcorrection & self-reference. Autopoiesis requires autonomy. It rejects allonomy leading to informational closure. • Living entities exhibit invariant organization and structural plasticity. Selfmaking requires self-knowing and self-reference. These requirements destroy the applicability of logic as we have known it. Also life is dipolar requiring the assertion of both poles of categorical contrasts, a paradox resolved by time and oscillation. Do not think of anything living as being logical. There is a rationale to be discovered. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 78 Meanwhile, give up consistency and shine light on Jung’s dark side. See good days and bad days as being in the normal flow. • Living organisms are holistic. There are no parts and no states. Organisms are created as a single whole. It seems as if there are parts. We have hearts, brains, kidneys, livers, etc. But they are not truly parts as in machines. • Life works by creating new realities, novelties, variety. It is life itself that produces evolution, not random processes or survival of the fittest. Living processes are vibratory, oscillating between both poles of categorical contrasts to find effective acts in its creation process. This is why, for thinking about life, I reject consistency and truth valued inference. • Organisms are autonomous. Autonomous means self-law. Everything they know and can do is developed within by processes only now being discovered. They are not like any processes a machine view would imagine. There are no computations. There are societies of living entities, cells in humans, societies of molecules in the cells and so on down to particles. At each level the societies permit maximum freedom subject only to coherence conditions some of which are values and value processes. And we, as human beings are cells in a higher order society. The role of values and the valuation process that Hartman put forth now becomes incredibly important. Strictly speaking I believe it is valuation processes that are important to living entities. The necessary autonomy of living entities prevents their having any informational inputs. Yet they do need to discover what works in their living context. They do that by acting, to find effective acts. Acts that produce the organism’s intentions are effective acts. • Organisms are “informationally” closed systems. This seems to conflict with Prigogine’s thinking for whom organisms are open to their environment taking in energy and creating islands of order within the universe moving towards disorder. Here, I am only asserting that organisms are closed to what we think of as information. Otherwise they are open to taking in energy, for example. In the case of possible conflicts with Prigogine, the primary conflict would be the idea that the universe is moving toward disorder. As a living organism, the universe is not moving toward disorder, but it certainly may appear to be as old orders are destroyed to be replaced by new orders. Life is creative. • Informare. Living entities are autonomous, i.e., only responsive to self-law based on informare. Informare means formed within. That is, the “information” available is not gathered by senses from the outside; it is formed within. They are autonomous, so they can differentiate subject only to coherence. Autonomy implies they are closed to information. Information is not a commodity. Informare, formed within, replaces information. • Organism can only know and do what its own living history, and that includes inherited history, has provided. • The only thing the organism really knows is its inner experience. By inference and by abduction, it makes hypotheses. The hypotheses are often called “abductive hypotheses”. Abductive hypotheses are advanced for their possible usefulness and are subject to tests to determine their value. There are no in-puts in living organisms. By body field awareness, intuitions are developed from experience formed in the Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 79 body/mind directly through fields of energy. It’s a kind of “feel-think process we call “felt sense.” Free will plays a key role in the functioning of an organism. • Organisms are capable of acting and initiating their own acts. They are free to act and choose their acts based on values. In living processes there is no cause and effect or determinism. Life evolves based on values. At all the levels mentioned above, living entities are choosing acts based on values characteristic of their level, i.e., molecules, cells, societies, etc. • Living entities are manifest with an invariant identity. Identity refers to the process specifications by which their autopoiesis occurs. A living entity cannot violate its identity. Yet a living organism can be in process and change over time. Thus the identity allows for structural plasticity. The process specifications cannot be changed or violated, but they do allow freedom in their fulfillment. In the development of structural plasticity the organism can maintain its identity. Now we begin to see many consequences such as a person cannot be controlled, may not be able to fulfill arbitrary expectations, there is no possibility of literal language and we all live in different realities. • Holistic means the entire organism functions as a single unity. Appearances to the contrary not withstanding they have no parts. • Organisms are meta-stable, living on the edge. When something appears to be trying to push it over the edge, it can suddenly mobilize massive energy. The organism is a “meta-stable energy structure” within the physical structure of a living organism. Being meta-stable, it requires energy to maintain it. Turn the energy source off and it is gone. This is also true for living organisms such as us. For us the energy source is the oxygen we breathe. Without oxygen the meta-stable energy structure dissipates. There is nothing left but non-functioning “hardware.” • Organisms avoid equilibrium. For example in energy management thermal equilibrium would mean death. Thus non-thermal energy is stored in many nested fractal space-time regions. If the energy in our bodies were thermalized it would produce thousands of degrees Kelvin. In nature biodiversity is essential for energy management; without sufficient biodiversity our life support system will not function • Organisms are a pure democracy with each entity making choices for itself autonomously and at the same time for the benefit of the whole organism. It functions like a jazz band. In a jazz band each musician autonomously decides what to play, yet his or her decisions work to the benefit of the whole. In a press release, from The Institute for Science in Society, Dr. Ho says: Quantum Jazz is the music of the organism dancing life into being. We are all quantum jazz players, in the very substance of our being. Organisms are thick with spontaneous activities at every level, right down to the molecules, and the molecules are dancing, even when the organisms sit still. The images obtained give direct evidence of the remarkable coherence (oneness) of living organisms. Even if we could know the complete state of an organism we could not predict its next state • Organisms have maximum freedom of action subject only to coherence conditions within its living context. Coherence from coheres – to stick together. Coherence means compatible habits of acting. Coherence can be quantum coherence to axiological coherence. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 80 • Organisms are autonomic and come into being as a whole entity and grow into maturity as a whole entity unlike machines that are assembled piece by piece by some other. There is a distinction between being autonomic, obeying self-law, and allonomic, obeying some other’s law. Machines are allonomic; they obey the laws built in by external agencies. There is no way for any other to build in the internal laws of a living entity. • Organisms are complex systems versus simple systems (autonomic). Complex (living) does not mean the same as complicated. Within Organisms and Organism Ways: 1. No simulation possible 2. Many living entities acting uniquely 3. No largest model 4. Always becoming 5. Cannot be predicted 6. Ordered by valuation and meaning Organisms are Not simple (Allonomic) systems 1. Mechanistic 2. Ordered by cause and effect 3. Finite in nature, allonomic, built by external agencies

• • Logic of Organisms (Early considerations)

Considerations for Organismic Formalisms I do have problems with the word logic. Logic is a collection of formal systems originating in the need for sound arguments. Needed now is a class of formal systems with different properties for different purposes. The logic of physical matter (discrete things or objects) is much concerned with truth preservation, consistency, mono-polar, and cause-and-effect. For 2000 years it was believed that paradox was fatal. We now know that it need not be, but it does require a different kind of logic. The logic of life is creative, rich in variety and even paradoxical as it embraces both poles of contrasts (strong/weak). Instead of cause and effect, life logic supports willful intensional acts. Philosophy is a talking discipline. We exchange ideas by describing what we have in mind by talking. In science we exchange ideas by thought recipes or formalisms. This has two advantages. First, we can exchange ideas that cannot be meaningfully said, and second there is no ambiguity. Using logic whose structure is derived from natural language, we see propositions. These are a form of sentences expressing what we want to say. If we begin Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 81 with true sentences, and follow the rules of logic we will not inadvertently wind up defending false statements. In contrast looking at mathematical formalism expressions, we are not likely to want to say anything. Mathematical expressions or formalisms are commands to do something. There is something I want to illustrate here. In high school I learned that Newton’s law of motion was F = ma. That is easy. F is a number equal to two numbers, m and a, multiplied. Simple, I know how to multiply. But that is not Newton’s Law. It is nothing scientifically useful. Newton’s law is F = d(mV)/dt. Except for the fact that I learned calculus I would have no idea what to do with it. F and V are vectors. In n-dimensions vectors are sets of nnumbers called n-tuples indicating a magnitude and direction. The only simple number here is m for mass. The expression d(mV)/dt means the derivative of mV with respect to time, i.e., how fast it is changing. Now we encounter a whole set of rules for doing this. It is the job of empirical philosophy to discover and describe what there is in the world. Empirical philosophy is a precursor to science leading to thought recipes. As an existing science creates serious difficulties scientists will often say, “Let’s be philosophical”. Much of the work being done today by biophysicists, for example, is empirical philosophy. They are discovering what we need to know to develop a science of life. Will Mathematics Serve? Mathematics creates the required thought recipe for physics. Can it create the thought recipes for a science of life? I think not. I believe that applying mathematics to living contexts is itself a disaster. Life is a domain of organisms. It would help if we had a fully developed theory of organisms. For now consider the following: Organisms are born to create and maintain their own life. They are self-creating, i.e., autopoietic; they are not just self-organizing. They maintain their own life by constantly recreating it. Their purpose is not to become machines fulfilling some external task. Thus they are autonomic, i.e., obeying self-law. They are autonomous. An organism’s purpose is to develop its own life. Thus maintaining its life does not mean homeostasis. Since its purpose is not something external, no organism is an input/output machine. They have no information inputs or outputs as the theory of autopoiesis claims. [18](Varela) Mae Wan Ho, a prominent biophysicist, has used advanced technology to observe living organisms as they live. After 27 years of laboratory observation she describes a human as a society of 75 trillion cells functioning with no controllers or set points, unlike computers. A living society might be described as a super jazz band including instruments as small as 10-9 meters to as large as 1 meter and performing our personal theme with endless variations in 72 octaves without a pause. Our bodies are not doing computations, or logic as we know it, nor anything our technology-oriented world is prepared to understand. In a press release, from The Institute for Science in Society, Ho says: Quantum Jazz is the music of the organism dancing life into being. We are all quantum jazz players, in the very substance of our being. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 82 Like the little fruit-fly larva, the Daphnia, and any other small creature, we too, would be resplendent in all the colors of the rainbow when observed under the polarizing microscope at a special setting that lets you see right through to the tissues and cells and especially the molecules, as they are busy being alive, and keeping the organism alive. Organisms are thick with spontaneous activities at every level, right down to the molecules, and the molecules are dancing, even when the organisms sit still. The images obtained give direct evidence of the remarkable coherence (oneness) of living organisms.[19] Even if we could know the complete state of an organism we could not predict its next state. During my computer days I learned a lesson about variety proliferation; I learned the power set law. The total variety in a set of things is 2n where n is the number of things. For example for three things the variety is 23 or 8. I can write them out: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111. The variety in eight things is 28 or In short, mathematics won’t serve because its rigidity does not allow the flexibility required by living processes. For a logic of organismic function, we should be mindful, based on experience, that it should lead to the the following results: • New Realities • Novelty • Variety • Paradox • Cooperation • Avoidance of equilibrium, is meta-stable • Energy, energy stores • Improbability • Effective Acts • Functioning as a unity • Evolution, not random processes or survival of the fittest • Oscillation and vibratory processes between both poles of categorical contrasts to find effective acts in its creation process Rosch description of primary knowing as emerging human development ways of knowing and acting summarizes this world view. ..."primary knowing" arises by means of "interconnected wholes, rather than isolated contingent parts and by means of time-less, direct, presentation" rather than through stored "re-presentation." "Such knowing is open rather than determinate, and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself," said Rosch. Acting from such awareness is "spontaneous, rather than the Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 83 result of decision making”, and it is "compassionate…since it is based on wholes larger than the self." In contrast to... Results of materialism: • Deterministic • Materialistic • Cause and effect, there is no way of seeing process or how something becomes other than cause and effect • Passive things/a thing world • Parts/things/machine-like • No final cause • Only way to cause action is with force • It’s predictable • Has need for consistency/ truth preservation • Discrete separate things • Deals only with facts Rosch characterizs materialism worldview of knowledge as follows: In the analytic picture offered by the cognitive sciences, the world consists of separate objects and states of affairs, the human mind is a determinate machine which, in order to know, isolates and identifies those objects and events, finds the simplest possible predictive contingencies between them, stores the results through time in memory, relates the items in memory to each other such that they form a coherent but indirect representation of the world and oneself, and retrieves those representations in order to fulfill the only originating value, which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner.[17] In the context of primary knowing, analytic knowledge can be beneficial. However, without primary knowing, analytic knowing can be fatally flawed. Today all social institutions are failing. Without knowledge of life, analytic knowing produces “work-arounds” that are ill adapted and exacerbate the catalogue of existing problems. I make the following distinctions between traditional logics and organismic formalisms: Characteristics of Traditional Logics: • Truth preserving • Thing oriented (extensional) • Consistency that denies process • Static • Excludes self-reference (self-knowing) • Excludes values Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 84 Characteristics of Organismic Formalisms: • Abductive/Creative • Meaning oriented (intensional) • Allows oscillation • Dynamic • Requires self-reference (self-knowing) • Value-driven The primitives of the Organismic Formalisms: • Will not be things • There will be acts and inner relations (Inner relations are relations that change the related) • The rules will not be inference rules but transformations • They will not have truth-values • Truth values will be replaced by coherence, coherence will be conserved • They will not have subject-predicate forms of propositions. • Categories will not be object categories but function categories • The questions we will ask of organismic formalisms will not be “is it true”? • We will ask, “Can one get there from here”? One might ask, “What will it be?” I can give some clues. A basic frame will be inspired by the logic of combinators used to develop variable free mathematics. This provides for what is called applicative logics, i.e., applying functions to functions. Here the functions will be acts, transformations. Finally, for a world of organisms I suspect the formalism will not feature the inference/induction pair of processes. Rather, it will feature transformations/abductions. Organisms have to be what might be called self-programming. Also, they have to be selfconnecting to their organismic environment. This requires abductions. I suspect that abductions will depend on primary knowing. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 85 Concluding thoughts: What is life? Life is more like a verb and an adjective than a noun in that verbs are often processual, and adjectives have to do with value, while nouns are usually a matter of thingness, and of substance. Life as organisms is process. Life is not a thing. It must be stressed that life, being creative organisms, is basically free. However, when and where it gets bogged down and develops habitual patterns, it is not free; and only then when freedom is lost, can it be understood by logical concepts, theoretical physics, mathematics, and the hard sciences. But the ultimate goal of life is to increase value. What values and how they’ll be manifested is a free expression of organisms. Purposes (final cause) do not lend themselves to prediction by the hard sciences. Being creative organism, life comes with value intelligence: its creativity has direction and purpose that becomes its own free gift to the universe.

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Addendum I (needs to be added to and edited) Implications and Consequences developing from Abductive Hypothesis; Remaing Section is on Applications (So What?) The following are considerations on results and benefits of growing a new Mind using hypotheses of Life-itself metaphysics and living value logics. May they provide guidance for thinking and finding new action for social problems facing our world, today. The question of the day is, “What do we do with all the complexity?” Pointing to Solutions There are many apparently unsolvable social problems and failing institutions. I suggest that they are resulting from errors in our current understanding of Life-itself. Knowing today what is being discovered about how living organisms actually function is nowhere near what we used to think. The “actual functioning” points to practically every problem we have in society today and explains why those problems exist. By understanding the actual functioning, many of those problems can be simply dissolved. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 86 Medicine, specifically health care. It is well known today that in the US we are the most expensive health care system and by no means the most effective. It usually ranks somewhere in the middle-to-bottom of effectiveness in comparison to other countries with less expensive systems! Also in an article (of all places) the Journal of The American Medical Association, tells us that doctors are now the third leading cause of death (250,000 patients a year)! I think that is a somewhat unfair statement; it’s not doctors that are out of kilter. It is the whole medical system, how it is set up, how doctors are forced to practice. But also contributing is the specialization that causes fragmented approaches to a holistic body focusing only on parts of the whole; the heart, or the liver, or the brain. With all the medical professions there are, and looking as they do at one particular focus as if they were mechanics working on a machine, they cannot really understand what is going on in the organism, so they often do more harm than good. Medicine: It is no secret that the United States has the most expensive medical system in the world while ranking far from being the most effective. The cost of medical care is rising to the degree that Specialization: The human body is a holistic entity in which everything affects everything else. Modern medicine divides into specialties as if the body were a machine with parts. A patient can go from specialist to specialist only to find that no “part” has failed. Each specialist will probably try many of the latest high tech tests and possibly prescribe irrelevant drugs that may worsen the patient's health. Beliefs: In the recent past, our lives have been imprisoned by mistaken beliefs Frankly the books by Foss and Pert shocked me. To the extent that physicians believe in reductionism and separation of mind and matter, the Cartesian split, is difficult to understand. Both ideas have been thoroughly discredited in dealing with life. Reductionism prevents understanding holism. In life, mind and matter are like two sides of one coin. The book by Foss shows that some physicians are learning the Cartesian split must be discarded. The book by Pert reveals how M.D. dominance of NIH, and their belief in the Cartesian split, prevented important research. References: The End of Modern Medicine: Biomedicine Under the Microscope By L. Foss Molecules of Emotion By C. Pert In the recent past, our lives have been imprisoned by mistaken beliefs Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 87 Some physicians refer to the body as a biochemical machine I have heard many people refer to the brain as the computer in our heads. But now there are new discoveries in the biophysics laboratories that destroy these mistaken beliefs. To understand these discoveries requires ways of thinking we have never known It is too much for one article, there is much to discuss and will be in future articles But to begin – consider two new discoveries The connective tissue of our bodies has amazing electromagnetic properties The technical term is “liquid crystalline” Thus the connective tissue provides instant body coordination through out the body enabling it to function as a single entity. Also the connective tissue functions analogously to a radio antenna picking up coordinating signals connecting us to the larger environment Body awareness develops before brain awareness The central nervous system, which includes the brain, is a closed system That means it has no inputs – a rather surprising discovery difficult to understand It also explains many puzzles and frustrations found in dealing with human behavior Such as when you tell someone something they really should know and they ignore you. Having no inputs they may have no way to process your message Every item of knowledge and belief is formed within by processes just becoming known and not yet fully understood. I will discuss some of these processes in the future.

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On the subject of education, having talked about the way we learn makes it very obvious that the way we try to have schools educate will not work. It will fail. It will destroy students. It will lead to teenage suicide or absolutely turn them off from living, and from learning, and really block inquiry. It literally destroys them. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 88 And the reason for that is that they are not empty containers into which we can pump in information. As we said, they have to learn from experience, they have to build up a background of experience (acts). That means that children have to play. They have to have time to find themselves. They have to have time to reflect on themselves. They have to explore: who am I, what am I, in what am I interested, what turns me on, what do I want to think about? And then, when they get enough play, enough private experience to start building on, then you can facilitate their learning by facilitating their inquiry, and they can get an education. But to just put them in a chair and say, “You’re going to sit there and listen to all this and memorize these things and pass a test," it’s destructive. It turns them off. It’s inhuman! It should be a criminal offense to treat a child that way. It is no secret that U.S. schools are failing to educate. Of course they are. As we now know living organisms are closed to information. I am sure this is difficult to understand. Life implies autonomy. As autonomous entities we must learn in terms of our own autonomous ways of being. That means we must inquire through both external and internal acts. The results are better called informare than information. Informare means formed within. Through experience we form within understanding. We are not machines into which information can be pumped as if it were a commodity. In fact, it cannot be done to machines unless they are properly programmed in ways suitable for the intended information. I am inclined to think of the ways in which we school as being criminal malfeasance. Every child needs time for self-discovery. They need time to play, to reflect, to wonder and to learn the meaning of their feelings. Then they learn what feels right to them and what they need to pursue in inquiry. Then they can meaningfully educate themselves with school as a facilitator. As it is I think our schools are diabolical instruments designed to destroy children so they become docile employees. The founding literature leading to our public schools today shows that creating docile employees was their purpose. They have not failed. They have accomplished what the founders intended.

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Schools: by 2004 Norm Hirst The older I get the more interesting life becomes. At 72 I can review all sorts of experiences to see how things turned out. The world today is very different from when I was a child. Looking back I see often we were misguided. Great plans didn’t work out while things happened to our benefit. Today I have been thinking about school. I still remember the enthusiasm with which I started school. I wanted to learn. I thought that was what school was for. I was wrong. Something else was going on. School became a most unpleasant boring drudgery. If I was going to learn I had to do it myself and not allow school to interfere. Now I was too busy learning to pay attention to school. Thus, in High School I flunked every subject but band and orchestra. I played trumpet. Thank God, in those days promotions weren’t dependent Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 89 on passing. My dereliction of attention didn’t delay my passage. I agree with Churchill that “school made a somber gray patch on the chart of my journey”. Everyone seemed to be sorry that I had ruined my life and could never hold a good job. Through it all I wanted an education even though I was not sure what “education” meant. I was only sure that school did not give one an education. After three years I decided to try again to see if I could find an education. I applied to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aka MIT. MIT considered a three year old high school record to be irrelevant; particularly since my SAT score was 1500 out of 1600. Thus I attended MIT and graduated. I graduated thinking MIT was probably the only college that was interesting enough for me to get through it. I believe I did receive an education at MIT. MIT was different from any school I had been to. Memorizing was a sure way to flunk. We didn’t learn about subjects such as physics. We learned to do physics. For most people this is such an unfamiliar idea it is hard to talk about. A more familiar analogy might be learning to play a musical instrument. You can read an instruction manual, you can memorize it and pass a test on what it says, but you still can not play. To play you must do it. You practice. You make mistakes. You get so frustrated you want to scream. You are convinced you will never get it right. How did you get into this anyway? Then one day – by God your playing. That was what MIT courses were like. I will never forget my first physics test. I scored a 40. I could not understand how to apply the mathematics to the strange problems I had to solve. I was failing. I went to see the professor. I told him “I can’t do this.” He said, “Of course not, you haven’t learned how yet. Keep trying, you will get it”. I expressed my concern that with grades like 40 I was failing. He assured me that if I aced the final I would get an A no matter what the intervening grades were. I aced the final. I experienced that as my personal accomplishment. So-called rote learning would never have given me that! Education is what one develops inside based on his or her own inquiry. It can not be done to you. There is no test for it. Its form fits the individual’s identity. Thus education can serve as a basis for developing meaning in one’s life. Education results from a self directed process of inquiry and experimentation. The legitimate role for school is to provide resources for such a process, not to educate. So what goes on in our schools? Rote learning! What good is rote learning? For real life I can’t imagine it being any good unless one is a performer and needs to learn a part. Rote learning involves learning sequences of words without an experiential context to give them meaning. A performer must give them such a context from their own life experience. But as a way of providing students with the knowledge they need for life such learning is a cruel and stupid hoax. But it is easily testable. It suits the temper of the time. Learning is natural. Whether one is seven months or seventy years there is a natural desire to learn. Unfortunately this desire can be eclipsed when learning is seen as hours of drudgery in rote learning for no reason other than passing a test and then forgetting it all. And I might add such school learning certainly unprepares the student for life. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 90 When I was in school I was required to memorize lists of jobs that I might pursue as an adult. Of course I did not memorize them. Nevertheless, I do know that no job I have held in my adult life was ever on those lists. I know that because such jobs didn’t exist until my last year at MIT. I worked with computers for 48 years both programming them and being involved in artificial intelligence research and cognitive science. Today there are frontier sciences teaching us that the real world is not what we thought. I see the changes coming. That is for another day. For now, the only legitimate preparation a school can offer is coaching in how to be oneself and facilitating the student’s own inquiry. Today’s students are going to have to quickly adapt to a whole new world. Now there is a point of worry. Talking about the coming changes it is not unusual for children to tug on their parents and say, “that is what I have been trying to tell you”. They seem to be born with a new consciousness. Trying to force them into old molds is devastating to them. For God’s sake, love them, support them and give them time and space to grow.

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Law: It is no secret that the legal system is failing in several ways. Courts are over worked. Justice is a crapshoot. Prisons are over crowded and I believe we have the largest percent of the population in prison of any industrialized nation. There are so many misunderstandings of life creating the legal system, it would take a book to even begin to expose them all. Would we be savage beasts without law to control us? It has been common opinion that automobile accidents result from violations of law such as speeding or drunk driving. Some time ago Harvard University received a grant to investigate fatal accidents with the same thoroughness applied to aircraft accidents. The results were surprising. The largest cause of accidents was mechanical failure of the vehicle accounting for over 30%. The second largest cause was faulty highway design also accounting for over 30%. The third largest cause was driver error accounting for over 20%. Speeding and drunk driving each accounted for less than 5% The research report pointed out that the police are not trained or equipped to carry out a proper investigation of such accidents. Their duty is to discover what law was violated. As an example a man driving home from work went off the road, smashed into a tree and was killed. There was a smell of alcohol so the police concluded it was a case of drunk driving. The Harvard team discovered broken bottles of scotch. However none of the seals were broken, they had not been opened. Then they ordered an autopsy that revealed no alcohol in the driver’s blood. The smashed auto was taken to the laboratory for further investigation. The cause of the accident was a tie rod controlling steering broke before impact. Aside from the research report I have never heard another word about the research. People have continued to believe accidents are usually due to misbehavior such as speeding and drunk driving. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 91 I have also read reports concerning innocent people being convicted of murder. DNA evidence reveals it is not uncommon. Further research reveals a shocking fact. The law authorities are often under tremendous pressure to solve a murder case. Thus the police will assume their most likely suspect is guilty and, if necessary, manufacture evidence to convict. Too many innocent people have been put to death. There is more than enough evidence that the death penalty has little merit as a deterrent. Yet we are the only industrialized nation that still has a death penalty. Who and what are we? We live in a world with three kinds of values. They are • Intrinsic: values of love and aesthetics • Extrinsic: connoisseur and practical values • Systemic: rules, right and wrong values Do we speak sense or just what is politically correct? I believe the latter. We live in a culture that has reduced everything to the systemic, the lowest form of value. Now little matters but money. Life requires all three kinds of value. We have become a culture of nonliving.

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Business/Organizational/Institutional Organizations function by the same requirements of living entities. However, once again the model follows the machine metaphor that has created economic machines, not living companies. The damage is enormous to our environment, workers, and those who function by the law versus life. Business cannot continue to destroy its environment for profit motives only. The very purpose for business is to provide human beings a way to be alive, not to make a living. Business is living organism, not an economic machine: In The Living Company - DeGeus points out businesses cannot be morally responsible because it’s the responsible thing to do, but the only the thing to do to survive. If you don’t take care of your environment you live in, whether it be employees, customers, communities, or ecological concerns, you don’t survive yourself. The same is true for countries, municipalities, families, communities, teams etc. Practitioners think about what they have lived through versus some professor putting forth some abstracted idea that is not rooted in living experience. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 92

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Opinions Are Not Enough Norm Hirst 12/27/01 It is shocking to realize that the future of human kind, whether we will live in peace or perish in a holocaust, depends on the opinions of whomever happens to be in power. Opinions may be right or wrong, leading edge or backwards, enlightened or unenlightened. Whatever they are they guide the actions taken by world leaders for better or worse. Our lives hang by fallible opinions! There must be a better way. In my opinion President Bush squandered a magnificent opportunity to change the course of history. Following September 11, 2001 the U.S. had the high moral road. It was that moment when the U.S. could have foresworn arrogance and violence, the kind of arrogance and violence that makes us hated. In doing so we would have diminished the capability of the terrorists to follow their game plan. Instead of confirming what terrorists have been taught about us to make them hate us, we could have caused doubts to make them think again. Many argued that if we did not retaliate they would strike again. In my opinion they will strike again if that is what their game plan calls for whether or not we retaliate. I also believe the probability of more strikes is somewhat higher if we do retaliate than if we don’t. In my opinion, in your opinion, in his/her opinion, in their opinion, in our opinion – a cacophony of voices shouting forth what is believed to be true. Everyone has a different idea about how the world works. Yet everyone suffers the consequences of whatever opinions happen to be held by those in power when a crisis arises. This turns the future into a crapshoot, and that is not good enough. The 21st century world is too small, 21st century technology too destructive, to let the future depend on random opinions any one of which might be totally in error. There has to be a better way. How can we achieve more reliable knowledge as a basis for action? I want to suggest scientific inquiry, but then I must reject science, as we know it. I want to suggest a new form of science, a science of many aspects. Science as we know it is based on philosophical principles whose development began twenty-five hundred years ago. Development of those principles has lead to enormous success in understanding the habits of matter and in the building of remarkable technologies. Today’s science is humankind’s greatest achievement. It is also humankind’s gravest error since it eclipsed our understanding of life. Based on our knowledge of matter we believe in force. We bombed Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. We thought such force would make the enemy give up. Instead the enemy won! Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 93 We forgot the meaning of flowers growing out of cracks in cement sidewalks. The living will is a power that overcomes. Most of us forget that we create our own reality. Most of us believe in an objective reality that just happens to us. We believe in the computer paradigm in which we become inputoutput machines. Our senses pick up signals from an external reality that they send to our brains to calculate an output response. We just keep responding to whatever happens. We did not cause the attack on us, but now we must respond. It is now known that the computer paradigm does not work for living organisms. First we do something. Then our senses are directed to detect what changed. We learn by doing and evaluating the result. Over the course of a lifetime we may, each and every one of us, learn totally different realities. But we expect each and every one of us to be living in the same reality. We interpret each other’s acts assuming a common reality. “What your acts mean to me is what they would mean if I did them.” Thus it is that two people, or two peoples, can profoundly misunderstand one another. Misunderstanding leads to hostility. Hostility leads to violence. Both sides will sincerely believe the other side started it. Neither side will ever realize its own contribution to cocreating the violence.

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On Terrorism By Norm Hirst December 26, 2001 Terrorism is a hot topic. How should we deal with terrorists? It is well known that one must not negotiate with terrorists since that would only encourage more terrorist attacks. How do we know that? I doubt there is any empirical evidence. There are probably cases in history that one can claim proves the idea. I doubt they would hold up under rigorous scrutiny. I suggest people believe we cannot negotiate with terrorists based on their beliefs about human nature. It is what we call an abductive hypothesis. As such it should be tested before it is believed. But given people’s ideas of human nature it must seem too dangerous to test. We are left with only one option for dealing with terrorists; violence, and that too is dangerous. Indeed, the danger of violence has been greatly amplified as 9-11 demonstrates. Worse, with the potential for nuclear weapons in a suitcase or biological weapons 9-11 is a pale beginning. If beliefs about human nature are preventing finding more constructive and less dangerous ways of dealing with terrorists it is time to reflect on those beliefs. Indeed, I will suggest that it is beliefs about human nature that prevents constructive dealings with all our problems. Autognomics was founded in recognition of the incompleteness of human knowledge. For all the triumphs of science in creating technologies there was no triumph in understanding values. Robert S. Hartman, the philosopher, pointed out that if Plato could be brought back to life he would find our books on physics utterly incomprehensible but he would Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 94 understand our books on values. This symbolizes the crisis of our time. We can create nuclear bombs in a context of no greater wisdom than was available to Plato. In our research to understand values we have made a great deal of progress including the discovery of what might well be called a primordial matrix containing the laws of life-itself. Here matrix should be understood in terms akin to womb, primordial means before all else, and life-itself means the principles of life regardless of its material forms. In short, there is a domain of law organizing the manifestation of life including its physical, psychic, and spiritual manifestation. As we come to understand these laws we find that human nature is not at all what has been believed. Our culture’s beliefs are based on misunderstanding and misinterpreting certain appearances. Every human is born with an invariant identity seeking expression and a personality trying to find a way of expression in the world. When the personality can not find a way for the identity’s expression, a compensatory life style is formed. It is on observation of compensating humans that cultures have based notions of human nature. To solve the problem of terrorism what must now be done is to support and work for human rights such that fulfilling life styles are available rather than compensatory styles.. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, wrote a book entitled “In Our Own Best Interest”. This is primarily relevant to American readers. Nevertheless, it is virtually a handbook for dealing with terrorism. Yet, a reviewer said that William Schulz was once a minister so one could understand his thinking but it definitely isn’t real politics. Based on beliefs about human nature people are inclined to think that higher values are Sunday school virtues unworkable in the “real world”. We learn from the organization of life that higher values are a requirement of successful living. The world does not work with less. That is why there are so many problems, so much suffering. Terrorism is a sign of a world not working. Schulz is precisely right in his approach. Values fall into three very abstract classes called Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic. The classes each obey a different logic. By the natural laws of value Intrinsic values are the highest while Systemic values are the lowest. Intrinsic values take precedent over Extrinsic values and Systemic values. Extrinsic values take precedence over systemic values. Letting > mean takes precedence, Intrinsic > Extrinsic > Systemic. Unfortunately our cultures have reversed the order to Systemic > Extrinsic > Intrinsic. The practical essence of this is that intrinsic valuation leads to modes of perception revealing virtually all possibilities for development. Systemic valuation leads to modes of perception permitting only a narrow range of “theoretically correct” possibilities for development. Unfortunately, as revealed by the Hartman Value Profile, our culture encourages people to dismiss intrinsic valuation of themselves and live by systemic notions of what they ought to be. This deprives them of their own unique meaning and pushes them along paths unsuited to their natural development. Thus, by projection their views of human nature are rather grim. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 95 As a society we continue living by tragically erroneous folk-law that prevents constructive approaches. It is required that we learn to celebrate the glory of our God given potential. That is what the laws of life require if we are to live. It means creating an entirely new reality. Our goal at Autognomics is to bring the laws of life into conscious awareness so we can learn how to create such a new reality.

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Transforming the Workplace into a Life Giving Experience; By Plant Manager Tess Jette It begins with an understanding of the value of each individual as singularly unique and as a significant part of the whole. It begins with a philosophy that everyone is here for a reason and that there is a reason for every result. It begins with a desire to create, to be aware, to be involved, to be passionate, to relate, to nurture and to love. It begins with an act. Every act contributes uniquely to the makeup of who we are. Recurring results of specific acts become stored data that form our physical and emotional reality. That reality is confirmed each time an act is repeated and causes a similar effect. The reality from that act becomes a rule for living that we incorporate into the conceptualization of who we are and what we can expect. If the act of a child is to reach out for affection and that child is pushed away or abused that child eventually stores the information that reaching out for affection is not an effective act. The living being is continuously acting out on its environment. If a person matures cataloging negative results the outcome is an erosion in the trust of oneself to effectively act with positive results. The reality we begin to form from the moment of the first act, whether it is a conscious memory or not, is the emotional reality that we draw on every day to make decisions. When a group of people are drawn together in a work environment, each relates and communicates according to his/her own accumulated set of rules. They bring with them a singular perception of the world, their value in it and an expected result of how they will be received and treated. The possibility of ending up in a work environment that includes only people who feel well adjusted, centered, self-assured, confident, and valued is probably zero. We live in a culture that glorifies technology and we live and work amongst people who have learned to not trust in their own felt sense. They no longer act from the heart but rather based on the result of information received from external sources, hence the lost of trust in their own “gut” feeling of what is good or bad for them. Our first acts are based on instinct. The act is formed from within, from a feeling of pure self-interest, self-motivation or self-protection. It is only in an environment that allows freedom of action without retribution that each being can truly follow a path that is genuinely true to that being’s sense of self. Each individual, allowed to test acts without fear, in a trusting environment, is then truly in a place of learning. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 96 The highest and best goal for any manager is to try to create this learning environment. The only way to achieve this is with trust. By trust we mean trusting that each person’s activities, creations, ideas and feelings are no less valued than anyone else’s. One must trust that every person is emotionally and spiritually exactly where they need to be in their life and that you have no control over their unique decisions for themselves. The role management plays is to serve, to create a safe haven, a trusting environment that allows people to feel. Once a person truly believes that it is o.k. to feel and express those feelings honestly without fear of injury something wonderful thing begins to happen. You get to know the people you are working with. The structure of the workplace, both physical and spiritual, is key. What is apparent is that fewer rules and regulations make managing easier and allows the community to selforganize. Some parameters, however, are absolutely necessary. Boundaries are required to establish a safe environment and maintain a sense of fairness. Rules and regulations should be reviewed periodically to determine if they still apply to the entire community, and whether they still make sense at all. Every community is dynamic and evolving. It is also important to make sure that rules are not being put in place as a reaction to a single incident. Each incident should be handled on an individual basis taking into consideration the circumstances surrounding the event. Always look at the SYSTEM first, not the individual. The first reflection should be with management. Ask the question, “Did we provide the right support, were we completely clear, is there a way to avoid a similar event in the future without adding restraints to our entire community?” As an example, a small manufacturing company in Connecticut had multiple errors with shipments. Even with all the signage, notes, meetings and paperwork provided to insure that every possible question was answered prior to shipping mistakes still occurred. Management was at an impasse as to how to make clear what needed to happen. The first instinct was an old one; just say it louder. Instead of jumping up and down and berating two genuinely committed employees about how they had failed the company, management completely turned the “traditional” table. The two employees came into the conference room with heads bowed completely expecting to be shamed into doing a better job. Management began the meeting as follows: “When a ship runs aground who gets blamed? It’s not the guy steering the ship, it’s the captain.” Management took full responsibility. They admitted that even with all the systems created they had failed to provide one that worked for everyone. The solution presented was for these two employees to remain in that conference room and design a new system that would work for them. They were given an unlimited timeframe to accomplish this task and were assured that the company would purchase whatever tools necessary that they felt would assist them. In a matter of 2 hours they submitted a completed presentation (which included the purchase of lime green labels). Management affected the changes immediately. The system was in place for quite some time and worked for as long as it needed to….which was until the next change. The entire event was positive, learning and empowering. They “owned” this system; it was their creation, not management’s. In turn they shared in the responsibility to maintain it and take pride in the overall results. No one was admonished. No one was written up. Everyone walked away feeling valued, appreciated and energized. Even though the Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 97 occasion revolved around task oriented issues the premise for the solution was to first look at the emotional impact of failure and admonishment towards the employee. Every time you take away the employee’s ability to find their own solution you are decreasing their power and adding to your own list of things to manage. They become lazy in their thinking and lose interest in what they are doing if all the decisions are made for them or they are constantly dictated to. What the entire workforce learned from this experience was that it’s o.k. to make a mistake; that is how we learn. Knowing what to leave behind and what to take forward is the mark of excellence in management. The ability to change is an absolute necessity. The ability to change with immediacy is what makes change effective. It is possible to change policies or systems very quickly, within hours or even minutes, if you are not entrenched in rules and control. Employees adjust very quickly to change if they see it often enough and have a sense of confidence that their feedback will be acknowledged. Management must be responsive to the needs of the employees. If long periods of time elapse the general consensus is that management does not care, that the only time change occurs is when it affects management personally. The crux is that unresponsiveness and stagnancy affects the entire entity. If changing one small item that is problematic for a person in the shop is not important to the manager sitting in his office then there is a complete failure. Over time, an employee becomes increasingly disassociated from management and less and less effective in his/her job. This is a clear example of acts and their effectiveness. Six pillars of process that must be maintained to insure a life giving, productive workplace. I. Embrace change; it is the essence of life and growth. II. Get personal and be present III. Work is a privilege and it is creating IV. Create a nurturing and sensory rich environment V. Love the workers and the workplace before the work VI. Make time for community and celebration Each of these pillars support evenly but not necessarily simultaneously. They are equally important and must be exercised accordingly. Remember, the environment is organic which means it is in constant change. It must be tended to, watched over and cared for as a living entity. Tedium is a reality. The work needs to get done and you may not be able to compromise the physical aspects of the task. You can, however, affect the environment. When employees trust that they are being cared for and valued they respond in kind with increased motivation and a feeling of joy in the workplace. Onerous tasks become secondary to the overall sense of well being. Tess Jette, Plant Manager at the time of writing, small manufacturing company

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Science-Religion: Norm Hirst Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 98 Life is a unity of spirit and matter. To live fully requires understanding both aspects. Understanding spirit requires the truths of religion. Understanding matter requires the truths of science. Now scientists talk about evolution. Religious folks speak of a designer. Science and religion are at war over truth. It is time to end the war. I believe neither science nor religion is in any condition to end the war. I also believe that neither science nor religion is in any condition to serve us in the 21st Century. No doubt reality evolves, but “natural selection” needs far more explanation than current science can offer. The religious offer a designer, i.e., God. For a design to work life would have to be fully determined in advance. What is required is the ongoing presence of intelligence. That requirement does not fit theism. It could fit pantheism. In pantheism God is immanent is all there is. The advantage of theism is that God is transcendent providing a vision of where we are going. We require both theism and pantheism, i.e., panentheism. No doubt science has led to great technological triumphs. It has changed the material world to make life easier if not better. It has opened opportunities to make it better. It has relieved the struggle for bare survival and given us time to reflect and grow. But the scientific method of reductionism and the Cartesian separation of matter and mind creates a worldview in which life is impossible. Reflection and personal growth would be pointless. Turning to religion I confine myself to Christianity since it is the only religion I have experienced. Further, I have only experienced protestant sects. Though I have never stopped believing in God I left churches thoroughly disillusioned. It seemed the only important belief is that Christ died for our sins. Never the mind that he taught a gospel of love. If I accept Christ as my savior I am right with God. I can read the most violent war like verses of the bible and become a killer Christian reeking death and destruction on others to purge wickedness and sin. Why not? God, after all, judges us and though he is inscrutable he is so determined to have obedience that he will punish us for an eternity in Hell if we fail to obey. As killer Christians we are doing God’s work. Of course not all Christians are killer Christians. Probably only a minority are. That they exist at all shows great misunderstanding and insufficiency in today’s spiritual understanding. That they have acquired such power in American politics is tragic. I am sure killer Christians can cite chapter and verse from the bible to justify what they believe in doing. Is the bible the inerrant literal words of God? From my reading I know that bible scholars have many problems with the bible’s origins and history. I believe they would say “no”. But I have a different reason for the rejecting the idea. As current research reveals more about living processes it is revealed that no living organisms have information inputs. There is no possibility of literal language. If God wanted to communicate to us he wouldn’t do it by writing a book. I believe God does want to communicate with us and that he does communicate with us. We need to learn how and pay attention. My God I do believe in God! When asked if I do so believe I find the question difficult to answer. One never knows what the questioner has in mind for God. It could be the God of theism or Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 99 the God of pantheism. Surprisingly it could even be the God of atheism. It isn’t always true that atheists don’t believe in God. Often they just don’t believe theism is the right belief. When people claim not to believe in God I wonder if they really do not or would it be more accurate to say they do not believe in the God they were taught. My God is the God of panentheism. Theism didn’t fit my experience, nor did pantheism. I might have wound up not believing. That would have been unfortunate since intuitively, spiritually, my experience said there is a God. Had I stopped believing my life would have become an empty shell. Some scientists today would have us believe complex living organisms are the result of probabilities. I do not and can not accept that idea. There are other folks who say there had to be a designer. I reject the adequacy of probabilities. The designer idea moves in the right direction but misses the mark. I believe we require an active intelligence. This suggests pantheism where god is immanent in all reality. God is the guiding intelligence. But guiding us to where or what? What is the meaning and purpose? To serve these functions God must be transcendent. This suggests theism. Panentheism unites and integrates both theism and pantheism. God is the guiding intelligence and final attractor The earliest philosophers to write about God would, today, be classified as panentheists. But then, as philosophers became more sophisticated they found logical problems. Theism and pantheism emerged out of their attempts to resolve the logical problems. Putting them back together we are faced with the logical problems. However, what is known about logic today wasn’t yet known when I was born. Today there are new logics capable of resolving the logical problems. They are also capable of leading us into new ways of thinking I am pleased t o discover that the logics needed to understand God are also the logics needed to understand life itself. (Add required pursuit of process theology and life itself) (Add need for spirit for values to work properly) John Streeter, my 89 year old friend, before he passed away, spoke often about the need to end the war between science and religion. John was a science historian. Now I have learned that, Charles Townes, the Nobel Laureate in physics, continues to speak of science and religion, also at 89 years. I am only 73, but I am all for removing the gap between science and religion. Classic science is based on foundations that enable speaking of matter in motion. The key is matter is not capable of acting, it can only be acted upon. When it is things change. Mathematical equations can often be applied to predict the change. Out of this science has produced amazing technological accomplishments. However, when it comes to life science remains quiet. One might think that biology would have something to say about life. Unfortunately biologists have confined themselves to the so-called scientific method. The result is an impoverished biology that can not talk about life. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 100 I am alive. Does my life have meaning? Does any life of any form have meaning? Science has no answer. Answering that question should be the job of religion. From what I see I don’t think religion is doing it well. Of course I am not familiar with all religions. John Streeter often expressed despair that Islam was attracting far more worshippers than Christianity. As a devout Christian he feared that Islam would replace Christianity. As I see it neither science nor religion will serve as they are in the 21st century. A key ingredient in Classic scientific method is reductionism. To understand anything you break it down into its simplest parts and then see how they go together. Reductionism was decided upon in Greek philosophy 2500 years ago. I have been wary of it for a very long time. When I was four or five years old I was locked in a room with nothing to do. I noticed an alarm clock ticking away. I wanted to know how it worked. There were tools, so I took it apart. With the parts strewn over the table I had no idea how to put them together or how the clock worked. I was only sure that I was in real trouble. By believing that we can understand living entities by taking them apart we are all in trouble. Living entities are not assemblages of parts. They are holistic, about which science has noting to say

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Communication between Realities, Norm Hirst TAI’s research to understand values and life itself has discovered characteristics very much at odds with common beliefs. If true, as we believe, common beliefs become a serious impediment to solving the world’s problems. Living organisms function in ways very different from what has been thought. Thus their interactive dynamics is very different from expectations. Evidence abounds. When I was in the Air Force “Peace through strength” was painted on all our aircraft. “Peace through strength” has been a popular saying since the Romans, yet the 20th. Century was truly disgusting in its violence and degradation. Our B-52’s pounded North Vietnam without mercy. The devastation was even extended to Cambodia. Then we lost the war. But, by common wisdom, the terror of bombing should have brought the enemy to its knees. It often appears as if policies and actions developed by common wisdom are designed to fail. The rhetoric may sound inspiring. The consequences are dreadful. Yet we never learn. Something is wrong! It is a common place today that the brain is a computer. (When I was a boy the brain was thought to be like a telephone exchange.) In fact, the brain is not a computer. It doesn’t function as if it were. Nor does calculation play a major role in life as many believe. It is a common place today to envision humans as input-output machines, our senses are thought to be passive sensors sending signals to the computer brain to calculate an output response. Surely bombs will generate signals of pain. Surely the brain will calculate a pain avoidance response. That will dampen their enthusiasm for fighting. It’s the only rational Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 101 response. But it doesn’t work that way. Instead the enemy becomes hardened and more dedicated to the task of defeating those who would inflict pain and dominate their lives. They will become ever so much cleverer in how they approach the task. Why? Living organisms are not input-output machines. They are not machines. They have no input. Output is not their goal. This may sound outrageous, but it turns out to be true. To fully understand the difference between humans and machines requires more than I can include here. However, consider that a human is value driven and autonomous. A human is a unique self-knowing entity seeking self-expression. Perception works precisely in reverse of what the computer model suggests. A human acts, and having acted the senses are alerted to report what changed. If the changes conform to what the human intended the act is considered an effective act. Life becomes an ongoing search for effective acts by which the person grows in meaning and habits. Consequently, what we know and what we are capable of perceiving depends on our own private history of acts by which we have formed meaning and habits. It may be that no two persons live in the same reality. There are many consequences that defy common sense. 1. Conflict is inevitable as you want to live in a reality you have developed for your selfexpression and I in mine. 2. When conflict arises we will each punctuate the timing of the process according to our respective realities. In any conflict both sides become convinced that the other side started it. I will know that I am an innocent victim and you are an aggressor. Both sides will insist that resolution depends on the other side making amends. Resolution may never occur because neither side will relinquish their demands that the other side, the aggressor, proves good faith. 3. In logic and language, self-knowing produces paradox. In life the paradox is resolved in oscillation. Both paradox and oscillation as observed will prove the other side does not act in good faith. 4. Since language is a bridge between the two realities language has to be meaningless until it is interpreted. Both sides must establish interpretation habits to understand one another. Since there will be differences in their interpretations the grounds are established to further prove the other side does not act in good faith.

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New World View Written in response to article Free Press, Norm Hirst A guest columnist wrote Mac Deford’s article for May19 presenting a conservative view. The author proposed to discuss certain broad categories where the differences between conservative (Republican) and liberal (Democrat) viewpoints are most pronounced. I don’t believe either viewpoint can cope with today’s reality. That is why, I believe, conditions in Washington have degenerated to the condition Senator Snowe described in her May 26 article. She said that, “Washington is locked in a downward spiral of coarse partisanship, raw ideology and podium-thumping belligerence”. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 102 Can the dominant party use raw power to govern and control when they have little understanding of what reality now requires? Can they speak truth when they are lost in spin? To me they sound rather Orwellian. Western philosophy and science have encouraged thinking of nature as lifeless mechanisms and passive rocks. Living organisms are thought of as biochemical machines. Current research reveals a very different reality. I quote from one of today’s foremost philosopher/scientists, Ervin Laszlo. “In the light of the current, revolutionary advances in the natural sciences and in the study of consciousness, the concepts of matter, life, and mind have under-gone major changes.” These changes reveal that traditional worldviews are lacking important truths. It is time to put aside both conservatism and liberalism. Both result from interpretations of experience based on misunderstanding. Both fail to solve problems. Our politicians can argue forever about which is right. The answer is neither. While they argue conditions degenerate. It is remarkably difficult time. History and experience can no longer be our guide. It is time to bring new understanding to formulating new ways. With our government proposing development of Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators our lives depend on it. Scientists are beginning to glimpse the nature of a quantum vacuum, an energy sea underlying all of space-time. The subtle relationships that exist between that which is manifest and the energy field in the depth of the universe transforms our views of life. To quote Laszlo once more: “Life evolves, as does the universe itself, in a ‘sacred dance’, with an underlying field. This makes living beings into elements in a vast network of intimate relations that embraces the entire biosphere itself an inter connected element with the wider connections that reach into the cosmos.” Classical Darwinism should be discarded along with conservatism and liberalism. The living world is not a struggle of all against all competing for advantage. Further it is recognized that for evolution to produce the results it has requires intelligence. The dominant worldview features cause and effect plus force. That is all that works for nonliving matter. That is all that works for living entities seen as complex machines. It is now clear that living entities are not machines. Being alive I can act without being pushed or pulled. Living entities can act in what seems to be an infinite variety of ways because they choose to. Life does not work by cause and effect as machines do. Life works by harmonizing an enormous variety in diversity by maintaining coherent relatedness. Our own bodies consist of 75 trillion cells enjoying maximum freedom in a pure democracy as they function to maintain coherence. There is nothing machine like. It is now known that living organisms do not function as machines do. I find it remarkable that once upon a time it was thought that living organisms functioned by clockwork like Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 103 mechanisms. When I was young clockworks had been given up and replaced by telephone exchanges. Now the fancy of the day is computers. I programmed computers for nearly 50 years. Back at the beginning there were no high level languages. Programming was done in terms of the actual hardware instructions. I understand computers very well. There is no similarity between computers and living organisms. Ideas such as we will become smarter by having computer chips implanted in our brains are absurd. Such nonsense was presented at a former Camden Pop Tech Conference. Today the brain is often spoken of as being a computer. We perceive by our senses picking up data for the brain to make sense of. The brain is not a computer. Further, neither the brain nor computers can just pick up sense data and make sense of it. Something else is going on. Perception begins in how we act. Just think of a baby waving his /her hands around and touching toys. The baby is inquiring about the world. For the baby and as all of us throughout our lives acts are followed by reafference messages to the senses asking what changed. The job of the nervous system is to synthesize new acts. If the result was what was intended by the act the act becomes part of our repertoire. Otherwise a process known as abduction begins in search of better acts. This is how we learn. (Schools often try to replace this natural learning process by force-feeding linguistic information that is ungrounded in experience and meaningless.) There is also something else going on. It has been discovered that living tissue is liquid crystalline. This means that living tissue supports much faster communication than nerves. The tissue currents provide instantaneous communication through the whole body. There is body awareness before there is nervous system awareness. It also means that our bodies are like antennas picking up signals. Now we ask what signals? Here there is speculation but it is very well informed speculation. By well informed I mean that there is good evidence but it is not yet fully understood. Traditionally physics has been based on four fields. It now appears there is a fifth field in the sea of energy known as the quantum vacuum. It is not a force field, it is a field of probabilities. There is reason to think that this field is the field that organizes life. By this field all life is connected and subject to quantum coherence. Our bodies are 75 trillion cells living in a pure democracy with maximum freedom subject to the requirement that they contribute to coherence. If they do not they become cancer cells that must be eliminated or the body ultimately dies. As above so below, we are cells in a larger organism, our society. Our society is a cell in a still larger organism, the life of the world. What are we to do with all this? One final quote from Laszlo: “But what if nature – the universe itself – is not a passive rock or a lifeless machine? What if people are not complex machines, and not separate from each other and from their environment but profoundly, though subtly, linked?” Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 104 Indeed, what if? Would we still relate to one another as we have been. As we all become more aware of how life actually functions we will discover that our past views have inflicted tragic errors and unspeakable suffering. I believe that many people are becoming aware while others a clinging to old ways. That is what is causing so much confusion. Life requires variety and diversity to function. In society nothing would work if we were all the same. To do all that is needed requires people with all sorts of backgrounds, skills and interests. Government requires many views to be harmonized. Any concentration of power in one person or one way of thinking will fail to consider all possibilities. Nature is a living system. It is not ours to do with as we wish. The ecosystem is our life support system. It requires biodiversity for its energy management. If we eliminate biodiversity we will kill our life support. The ecosystem is showing signs of distress by creating weather anomalies. Every living entity is unique and has intrinsic value. Years ago Roger Williams, the biochemist who discovered vitamin B5, wrote two books on our uniqueness. One, “Biochemical Individuality” is for biochemists. The second “You Are Extraordinary” is easy reading. He leaves no doubt that we are biochemically unique. Since what we know depends on our individual history of acts we are cognitively unique. Individual uniqueness is necessary in life and is no justification for considering anyone to be of lessor value. There can be no literal language. The meaning of language depends on interpretation. Given our cognitive uniqueness there is no standard interpretation. Communication requires work and patience. Failure to communicate while thinking we did can create endless disputes and confrontations. There can be no implicit messages. It is often thought that doing certain acts or saying certain language will send a message. This is a myth that we should do away with. In terms of the sender’s knowledge and experience it may be clear. In terms of the receivers’ knowledge and experience, it may not even be noticed or interpreted to mean the opposite of what the sender intended. In government I would like to hear no more of, “It will send a message”. Now consider the following from the May 19th article.- “Sure, the UN has a role to play, but it must recognize in a unipolar world – a world where there’s only one superpower and we’re it – kowtowing to the 3rd World doesn’t cut it anymore. In the old days, when we were struggling for world supremacy against the Soviet Union small countries lining up with us and against them was of value. But no longer. The UN either gets in step with our vision of the world, or it just becomes irrelevant. We don’t need the UN: it needs us- and on our terms.” So speaks the voice of self-destructive blindness. If force were the only active principle it would make sense. There are 6 billion people in the world. As life works there are 6 billion Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 105 active principles to be harmonized. The United States will be seen as a dangerous threat to be destroyed. Of course no one can equal us is military power, nor do they need to. Due to the current federal deficit the federal government has to borrow $2 billion daily to keep going. Other countries loan the money. Our largest benefactor is China providing about $200 billion for 2004 and possibly as much as $300 billion for 2005. I believe the Chinese see some trade advantages in doing this. But what if they change their policies. The world is moving in favor of China, not us. What if we can no longer borrow the money we need? That is only one scenario. Every nation is entangled in more relations then can be counted. We can be put in a place we won’t like without anyone dropping bombs or firing a shot. Let us hope no one resorts to bombs or shots. Today’s weapons can easily end all life on this planet!

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Why Peace is so Elusive! By Norm Hirst February 19, 2003 • Summary: “Peace through Strength” is an old and familiar idea. Its Latin version was a Roman motto. It has been tried. Yet over the centuries there has been no lack of war. During my 70 years I grew up with World War 2, served in Korea, protested the horrors of Vietnam, watched the Gulf War on television and now our President wants a fifth war. My soul is weary! • I have dedicated forty-five years of my life to trying to understand the causes of war so that it could be eliminated. I believe I am beginning to understand. Contemporary leading edge research is leading to a revolution in our understanding of life, living organisms in general and humans in particular. It is all based on what has never been known before; new thinking, new logics, new sciences and new technologies. A partial list includes: • Now Process philosophies showing us a far more accurate and effective way to perceive living realities • New logics that escape the limitations of traditional logic • New sciences from physics to new biology along with advances in understanding values • New technologies that allow non-invasive observation of the inner processes of living organisms. Current dominant world view has been tragically inappropriate when dealing with life. Traditional thinking creates a view of reality. Modern physics proves that such a view can not possibly be true. The emerging new biology demonstrates where such a view goes wrong. Strength is a polar opposite to weakness. For life to function both poles are required. Either pole in isolation will stultify life leading to a loss of normal process and violent breakdown. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 106 I see the emerging new biology as a science of living organisms. In the past the only way to understand organisms was to kill them and cut them up to study their structure. Actually biologists went further in conformity to reductionistic models of science. The idea was to get at the smallest parts. Then you could figure out how the smallest parts went together. Then you could understand how things functioned. Biologists didn’t seem to understand that from the first cut to the smallest part they were destroying the organization that made an organism alive. With primitive logics, incomplete mathematics and philosophies of cause and effect appropriate only to non-living things they misconstrued what living organisms are about. With cause-effect logic it makes sense that sufficient force, or strength, should make an enemy behave. With the logic of life it makes no sense at all. Sufficient force doesn’t make someone behave. It makes them murderous! Ariel Sharom should pay attention. The ideology of force is so strong that many people can not experience the reality it produces. My Observations: Since Korea the mere thought of war has been appalling. How can any human being believe that death and destruction on a warfare scale can be justified. Earthquakes can cause death and destruction. War is not like an earthquake. An earthquake is a natural disaster. No one is to blame. War, on the other hand, is a man made disaster. Some persons in positions of power chose to go to war. When they do so choose they condemn thousands of people to death. In World War 2 I believe it was 15 million. In the future I think leaders who propose war should have to explain in advance why they believe it is worth the likely degree of death and destruction. Traditional World View – the thing view: All worldviews have a philosophical basis. We usually don’t think about it. People who would eschew philosophy would deny dependence on philosophy. Yet it is the philosophers job to detect the philosophy at the foundations of a worldview and to analyze its consequences. Traditional Western worldviews are based on a philosophy of things. Things have discrete individuality, they are separate, they are constant and they are passive. They are acted upon. Complex things are built up with separate simpler things. Parts are connected so they can act and be acted upon in a causal environment. Thus we have reductionism in science. Emerging World View – the living view: In the emerging worldview there are no things. There are fields and events. A series of events created by sufficiently similar fields may be identified as an entity. Entities are not discrete. They exist by interactive relatedness. They are not separate. They participate in creating wholeness. They are not constant but active in self-development. They are not passive. They are actors. They are not parts to be connected since they do not exist as living entities except when they are participating in wholeness. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 107 About Humans: What has been believed about human beings? For an initial cut there are good people and bad, or evil, people. They are discrete entities with no intrinsic common interests. They compete to meet their needs and may form extrinsic common interests. They are selfcentered and will pursue what is to their advantage. External forces to which they must adapt their pursuit of self-interest primarily motivate them. They perceive those external forces through passive senses providing input. Without enforceable rules to live by they would create chaos. What a wicked set of false beliefs! They are the roots of our troubles as they work against what nature has provided. Let us look at what current research is teaching us. A human is a society of 75 trillion cells. The society is a pure democracy. There are no bosses, no controllers. Each cell lives with maximum freedom subject only to certain coherence conditions. Those coherence conditions are necessary for the organism to go on living. If a cell were to violate the coherence conditions the organism might die thus destroying the cell’s life support. Seen from a larger perspective humans are cells in a larger organism. Humans too should live in a pure democracy with maximum freedom subject to coherence conditions. To illustrate the difference between coherence law and ordinary law consider organizing automobile traffic flow. Drivers must avoid head-on collisions. Traffic could be organized by having drivers check in with traffic central, announce their desire to drive in a certain direction on a certain road and then wait for clearance. Not a workable solution. A workable solution can be found in a coherence approach. Everyone must drive on the right side (or left) of the road. Notice that the coherence law doesn’t say who will drive, or where they will drive or when then will drive. It doesn’t even say whether or not anyone will ever drive. Also notice the degree to which it is self-enforcing. (I suggest that scientific laws are coherence laws.) Now if humans really were discrete with no intrinsic common interests coherence laws would not work. We would not even be aware of them. However there is more to living organisms than has ever been known. The connective tissue in all living organisms is liquid crystalline. Thus body conditions are, within the body, instantly known everywhere. This is what enables an organism to function as one single unity. Body awareness precedes brain awareness. Body awareness can provide awareness of surrounding fields. Thus the body is dependent on quantum coherence and other coherence law. Humans are not discrete without common intrinsic interests. Humans are all connected as religious leaders have taught for over 2000 years. Love one another! What diminishes you Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 108 diminishes me! Religious leaders have known it for 2000 years. They just didn’t really know how or why. Love’s time is now. Each human is born into this world with a unique and invariant identity. By identity I am not thinking personality. I am thinking the laws of our internal coherence. Humans are not blank slates. Humans have a great deal of freedom to act and change and grow. But there are limits. I will never become a flower, nor a woman and my study will never be neat. Living organisms are unique and autonomous. “Autonomous” means self-law. This provides for a value principle. Value is proportional to diversity harmonized. To put it another way, the more differences that can be harmonized into a single unity the greater the value. Thus humans are born with unique potential to be developed by their own internal logic. Autonomy requires that human senses and perceptions work differently from what has been believed. Tradition has it that perceptive processes begin when our senses pick up signals from the outside world. Those signals are sent through the nervous system to the brain to make sense of them and to calculate a response. This is known as input-output. No living organism is an input-output system. No brain, whether carbon based or silicon based, could make such sense of non-contextual input. (That is why artificial intelligence has failed!). To understand a living organism the theory of perception must be turned around by 180 degrees. The perceptive processes begin when the organism acts. The act may be an external physical act or an internal mental act. Following the act the senses are alerted to detect change. The organism will judge whether the change was as intended. If so the act is judged “effective’ and adds to the organisms knowledge. If not, the act is ineffective and becomes a perturbation provoking inquiry. Thus what an organism knows, and the world it lives in, depends on its history of acts. This is an important observation. Typically it is assumed that all live in the same world and that another’s acts mean what they would mean if the observer did them. There is no way to know what another’s acts mean without inquiry. The standard practice in human relations, whether individual or international, of not talking to someone not approved of is a recipe for failure and madness. For example, refusing to negotiate with terrorists. The UN Approach: On February 14 I tried to listen to the UN Security Counsel proceedings. I wanted to hear the reports from the weapons inspectors and the debate that followed. The experience reminded me of what it must have been like to live behind the “iron curtain” listening to Radio Free Europe. I was listening to NPR and something was blocking their signal. When the German minister spoke and then the minister from Iraq they were totally and completely blocked. I heard not a word from either. Later I learned that some television was also blocked. What I did hear from other speakers was disillusioning. Their thinking was based on two choices. Either Saddam does what we tell him or we may have to use force. It is credible force that has enabled the inspectors to achieve what they have so far. If we are not willing Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 109 to use force we send a signal that the Security Counsel is weak. It is disillusioning to think that the members of the Security Counsel are still thinking this way as we enter the 3rd Millennium. The 20th Century was a horror. Combining high tech weapons that can kill millions at the touch of a button with the horrors of the holocaust and genocide I want to weep for humanity that seems to have gone so tragically wrong. If we all learned nothing else from the 20th Century we should have learned there is no credible force. I learned about high tech warfare in Korea when I met a young Korean boy. He was probably about 10 years old. He told me about how his whole family, grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters had been out working their fields when some jets flew over shooting their machine guns. He was the only one left alive. His family was collateral damage. People who just wanted to live their lives die because they were in the path of destruction and unnoticed by the people who pushed the buttons controlling the weapon. And what I saw was only a primitive beginning. Those in authority haven’t the integrity to speak truthfully. They won’t say, “ We killed some people who didn’t deserve to die”. Instead they refer to collateral damage. In contemplating the use of force they can use language that hides what they are really doing. In the U.S. the name “War Department” was changed to “ Department of Defense”. That way we in the U.S. can pretend we are not doing dastardly acts. We are just defending ourselves. I propose that whenever someone wants to propose the use of force they should be required to speak to the consequences. For example, if someone proposes invading Iraq they should add that such an invasion will kill, say, 10,000 people half of whom are children. They should state if they believe killing 5000 children to remove Saddam Hussein is worthwhile.

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Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 110 Addendum II Glossary (Needs to be added to and edited) A Glossary of Terms required to read this book: i. On Natural Law: The success of physics, and all the resulting technology, should convince us that natural law as it is discovered in physics is worth discovering. But what is natural law? Natural law consists of relationships, or systems of relationships, that prevent chaos while not unduly inhibiting freedom. As an example, consider Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration. This law prevents the chaos that would occur if everything were free to just fly about since nothing will move without an applied force. Imagine living through an earthquake with everything moving without apparent rhyme or reason. On the other hand, freedom is not unduly restricted since by applying appropriate force we can bring about any desired motion; even going off into space. What the law of motion tells us is what has to be done to bring about any desired motion. If the only motion we desire is walking we don’t 1have to know anything since nature has equipped us appropriately. If we want to design a vehicle that will accelerate from 0 to 60 in 10 seconds then we need to apply the law to determine the force we must generate. But note that the law tells us nothing about whether we should, or should not, build such a vehicle. The law only tells us what we must do to bring about desired results. On Natural Laws of Life: Similarly I suggest there are natural laws of living process that explain values and what we must do to bring about desired results in any living domain. “Living domain” refers to transactions between living entities. Imagine the difference between giving a command to another person as opposed to giving a command to your computer. However, these natural laws cannot be developed in terms of mathematics as it is known today. These natural laws will require new logics and new mathematics, since no current mathematics allows for relations on relations. What is science? Science is the study of change or process. Change cannot be random or without order. If it were there would simply be chaos instead of us. Also, change cannot be deterministic. If it were there would be no meaning, values would be irrelevant. Science discovers and expresses, brings into consciousness, those organizing principles that order but do not determine change. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 111 Look! If I am going to walk there has to be friction between my feet and the ground or floor. If there were no friction it would be worse than trying to walk on ice. Yet friction does not determine if I will walk or where I will walk or how I will walk. Science is formal theory development (sign or symbol system) applied to subject matter (philosophies). When you interpret the elements of a formal sign system with the elements of experience (subject matter), it leads to scientific understanding of that subject matter. Once significant understanding is developed, the theory can be applied and tested. If a single exception is found, the theory is rejected. In science everything is synthetic. We explicitly create connections between elements of theory when we specify their properties. Theory requires following explicitly stated rules. This is called calculation. In science we give up ordinary language in favor of calculating with formalized systems of signs. Through such a language of calculation we synthesize. Thus we have a closed loop: subject matter => linguistic analysis => fundamental insights>axioms => calculation => subject matter “form of function”. To achieve a science we must find a way to express the “form of function”. Much has been written on “form and function”. But now we are concerned with the “form of function”. To be simple, if the function of a door is to plug up a rectangular hole the form of the door must be rectangular. Thus form and function go together. But the form of the door function is to open and close or to swing back and forth. Speaking a noun language we are more concerned with “what something is” rather than “what something does”. Our language is not well suited to the form of function. Even the most basic law of physics, Newton’s law, force equals rate of change of momentum, involves a relationship, equality, between a vector, force, and the time derivative, a calculus operation, on the product of a scalar, mass, and a vector, velocity. In English, this isn’t worth pursuing. And, until we could pursue it we walked, rode horses, and drove ox-carts. Today, we drive automobiles and fly to the moon. In English, or any other language, there is much we can not talk about such as the “form of function”. Thus there is much we can not share. The yearnings of my heart are known only to me, and yours to you. But that is not the worst of it. If there can be no head without heart and no heart without head than the yearnings of my heart can, at best, be imperfectly fulfilled and imperfectly known to even me. To achieve a science requires intellectual invention of a means for expressing the organizing laws of the forms of function of that which has remained a mystery in experience combined with an intense desire to penetrate the mystery at last and becoming free to soar to higher aesthetic realms. Science requires both head and heart, and so do we. Thus my work may seem paradoxical. On the one hand I see rigor of thought and expression on a par with mathematics. On the other hand I see promotion of aesthetic experience on Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 112 a par with music or poetry or spiritual enlightenment and the fulfillment of dreams. It seems fashionable today to distinguish between mind and heart. Mind can never know the reasons of the heart. There are many such dichotomies. Rational-Intuitive, Feminine- Masculine, Head-Heart. Many people would consider science to be rational, masculine and head centered. Many believe that what we need now is more intuitive, feminine and heart centered. Advocating science must seem to be some peculiar eccentricity. Yet that is what we are doing. In life these dichotomies go together. There is no rational without intuitive, no intuitive without rational. There is no feminine without masculine and no masculine without feminine. There is no head without heart, no heart without head. And, we insist that science is rational-intuitive, feminine-masculine and head-heart. Philosophy and science are complementary methods of inquiry. What is philosophy? It is observation of experience and trying to explain it by adapting ordinary language to make sense of it. I hold that philosophy and science are complementary methods of inquiry. In philosophy we use ordinary language to talk about our subjects. Through talking, we analyze. What is theory? It is a whole system of related hypotheses and their consequences that reduce to a unity. Paradigm: (To be filled in) Subject Matter of The Autognomics Inquiry is Life-itself and its processes, for which a necessary condition is autopoiesis (self- making ). Heretofore the study of living processes has been done as if they are allopoietic processes (machine processes). What is life or life processes? Autopoiesis (self-making) is necessary but may not be sufficient to account for all the properties of life. Autopoiesis is necessary for life. Thus any attempt to understand life that leaves out autopoiesis will understand it as if it were a machine. Thus modern biology fails to understand life. Its understanding of a living organism is as if it were a machine of interconnected parts obeying laws fixed from the outside. Life is autonomic, i.e., it obeys self-generated laws. A machine is allonomic, i.e., it obeys laws built in by the external builder. Life science: We define life science to be concerned with any organization involving processes of life, i.e., self knowing (self referential) processes. We include single celled organelles to complex human organisms; individuals to societies and their community structures. We include bacteria, fleas, Fred's family, the Mormon Church, and the U.S. Government. We include the Autognomics Institute. When we assess the scope of the coming life sciences it is shocking how little we know scientifically. Though many might claim that these life sciences already exist we claim that what exists is more accurately called empirical philosophies, a term used in the hard science Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 113 childhoods of the turn of the century. This is not a put down. Empirical philosophy is a necessary precursor to science. Empirical philosophy can not become science until the necessary sign formalisms exist. Science marries precision with meaning. It is the ongoing practice of saying precisely what we mean and meaning exactly what we say. Thus, to produce a science, we need the pure theoretical work described above in addition to the insights and experience of those who work closely with life processes. They might be experts in psychology, religion, management, social work, as well as biology, genetics, or medicine. The list seems endless. LOGICS Defined: Intensional logic - logic with consequences based on meaning is based on a triadic system of complete signs, entailing a symbol, a reference to something, and a meaning. Extensional logic - logic with form (logic form) only As of today there are no intensional logics. This division of logic resulting in the compulsive ignorance of intensional systems, is a malady screaming for attention. It impacts on all that we do. Even the so-called information sciences, are based on logics that are totally devoid of meaning. We do not talk about it because so far no one has known what to do about it. As we begin to feel the pain caused of our ignorance, we begin to know the need for change Addendum III Excerpts from Norm Hirst Paper in Science; Gordon Conference #3 on Human Values and Natural Science, 1970 Norm Hirst - Some Thoughts on Scientific Axiology … For intuitive insight, Birkoff’s remarkable work is certainly worthy of consideration.. Let us examine that the esthetic measure is the density of order., i.e., Mathematician George David Birkhoff (1884–1944) M=O/C Measure, order and complexity The strategy for increasing the esthetic quality of experience, under this measure is to arrange for an increase of order and a decrease in complexity. That this does in fact occur we will illustrate with the following discussion. For example the development of a human life… We consider the life of a human to be a sequence of events, moments of new experience from birth to death. The human being can also be considered a personal society, as well as actual occasions within a higher order society ..society in the norm sense of the world. In discussing the ethetic measure of geometric shapes Birkhoff makes a great deal of axes of symmetry. This is an important clue. We will define the order of an experience to be the number of separate transformation groups which can be applied to the experience…. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 114 …briefly perception is constructive rather than passively receptive. Human percpetion and development begins with the establishment of a repertoire of transformation groups, or schema, in the motor system and develops to the transformation groups of the higher mental processes. The higher mental processes give us transformation groups over and above those required to merely function and survive in the world. They are to be expected given the influence of a general drive towards increasing esthetic experience. Thus, it certainly makes sense to say, with Robert S. Hartman (Structure of Value), that a thing’s value is equal to its number of attributes. This is certainly the beginning of the truth, if we remember that ‘attributes’ is a way of denoting those transformation groups utilized by the nervous system in developing our experience of a thing. At a first approximation, and with fixed complexity, a thing’s value is proportional to its number of attibutes. Now let us assume that man has developed, as fully as possible, his potential for creating order in his experience. His next step must be to decrease complexity. He does this by entering into a higher order of society. Norm quotes From Experience and Conceptual Activity – Nov 15 1965 by Johannes M. Burgers The realization of values in a conception becomes more rich and the satisfaction attained more intense when the conception has at its disposition prehensions of certain forms of order already recognized in the experienced data. This is an obvious generalization of what we observe in the conceptions arising in the human mind. The required prehensions can be obtained if the process in which the conception arises belonged to a structured society. He concludes… The creative urge in the universe promotes the emergence of structured societies of manifold types and of great complexity in order to reach more intense satisfaction. And Values are realized in the universe by the grouping of processes into societies and of societies into more extensive societies of elaborate structure. The societies must have a certain persistence and possess a sufficient measure of stability against changes of their environment since otherwise the values would be lost with each such change. There will never be an end to the emergence of new societies. Norm – we are considering various candidates for notions of order, complexity, and esthetic measure. A formal and adequate theory of order appears to be a key problem, not only for axiology, but for the foundations of such sciences as biology and psychology as well. We must account for such effects as the mere repetition of order becoming a negative, rather than a positive, effect. We suspect this is due to the requirement of change to realize mutually exclusive values. The exact point at which repetition becomes boring probably depends on the time constants of the individual experiencing organism. As we progress, we will and have considered: 1. That a scientific axiology is possible Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 115 2. That science means no more, nor less, than the replacement of intuitive notions by formal ones. 3. That discovering the rationale of value requires a basis in process organismic metaphysics 4. That expressing the rationale of value requires the replacement of ‘normal’ logics by combinatory logics 5. That value evolves in experience according to extremum principles of esthetic measure. Addendum IV Methods of Inquiry and how to Get Involved Inquiry Circles: One way to begin compiling these insights and experience is through what we call "inquiry circles." In the inquiry circles “frontliners” (people within fields who are pushing beyond current paradigm) are gathered together to discuss some topic, i.e; violence prevention. At various points in the discussion hypotheses based on the theory as postulated so far are put forth for consideration. Does the hypothesis explain the frontliner’s experience? Does it suggest workable solutions? In addition to hypotheses, questions based on the theory are posed. Our experience with inquiry circles has often been startling. Following a hypothesis or questions the frontliners have suddenly understood new ways to think about the direction or outcomes of what they have been doing or what they might try. I differentiate between organization and structure. If we consider ourselves functioning as the "genetic" code to begin the Institute, we soon realize the necessity to "try on" some structures to reflect that organization. Envision a structure of three concentric circles. The outermost circle is a perceptual circle, the middle circle is a conceptual circle, and the inner circle is an epi-theory circle. The three circles are connected with open, working lines of communication and axiological mediators. The purpose of this structure is to act in the observation, maintenance and response of life. The outer ring is made up of connective agents, i.e. actors, mediators, and sensors. A connective agent might be a group of social workers involved in violence prevention. They act as both actors and sensors in this example. The mediator would be their inquiry circle. Rather than having departments dictated by tradition, the number and variety of connective agents would depend entirely on who wants to inquire about what. There can be no brakes put on inquiry! It is the responsibility of the middle circle to conduct the inquiry circles. The job here is to continue with our past practice of working from theory to pose novel hypotheses and questions. Note that conducting the inquiry involves acting. These acts constitute inner acts of the Institute. The middle ring may have something analogous to committees made up of people with expertise and/or interest in various fields. Copyright © held by Skye Hirst, 2005-2017 116 Now comes the inner ring whose job it is to conduct inquiry circles for the middle ring. I called this an epi-theory circle since its job involves the introduction of new ways of thinking, new logics, etc.