`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

Under Construction


Philosophers


There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy - William Shakespeare - Hamlet


Index


  1. A fine Summary

  2. Pythagoras and Euclid

  3. Heraclitus and Parmenides - Becoming versus Being

  4. Plato and Aristotle

  5. Plotinus and Emanation from the One

  6. Occam's Razor and Plato's Beard

  7. Descartes Dualism

  8. Baruch Spinoza - All is God

  9. Leibniz' Law and Newtonian Mechanics

  10. David Hume and the Empiricists

  11. George Berkeley and Immaterialism

  12. Immanuel Kant - Reason

  13. Schopenhauer and Hegel

  14. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky

  15. Henri Bergson and Duration

  16. Husserl, Heidegger and the phenomenologists

  17. John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart - Time

  18. Georg Cantor, Zermelo and Fraenkel, and Kurt Gödel - Mathematicians and Logicians

  19. Gottlob Frege and the Foundations of Logic

  20. Bertrand Russell - Logic and Neutral Monism

  21. Alfred North Whitehead and Process

  22. Wittgenstein and Language

  23. Sartre and the Existentialists

  24. Deleuze and Guattari

  25. Roger Sperry's Wheel

  26. Karl Popper's Three Worlds

  27. W. V. O. Quine and Ontological Commitment

    28. Contemporary Thinkers


  28. David Chalmers and The Hard Problem of Consciousness

  29. John Searle's Chinese Room

  30. Thomas Nagel - What is it like to be a bat?

  31. Stuart Kauffman and Emergent Biology

  32. Frank Jackson and Mary's Room

  33. Douglas Hofstadter and I Am A Strange Loop

  34. Donald Hoffman and Multimodal User Interface

  35. Giulio Tononi and Integrated Information Theory

  36. Karl J. Friston and the Free energy principle

  37. Ken Wilber and Four Quadrants

  38. Bernardo Kastrup and The Idea of the World

  39. Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary

  40. Thomas Campbell and My Big TOE

  41. Rupert Sheldrake and Morphic Resonance

  42. Max Tegmark and Our Mathematical Universe

  43. Avshalom Elitzur and an Expanding Block-universe

  44. Stephen Wolfram and the Hypergraph

  45. Graham Priest and the True Contradiction

  46. Jonathan Schaffer and Priority Monism

  47. Peter Eldridge-Smith and the Hypodox

    48. Alternative Thinkers


  48. Raymond Moody and Near Death Experiences

  49. Michael Newton and Hypnotic Past Life Regression

  50. Ian Stevenson and Past Life Recall

Philosophers


Before considering anything about philosophy, or science for that matter, we have to acknowledge that we do not have all the answers - yet. Furthermore, we probably will never have all the answers, largely because there is emergent novelty in the Universe, so there will always be new things to discover or invent. When Stephen Hawking claimed that we were just 20 years from knowing everything, he was really only referring to a very limited 'everything' - one that lay at the bottom of the reductionist's heap, i.e. the unification of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. As Hamlet said 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'


Below are some brief comments on a few philosophers whose ideas [or some of those ideas] could be useful to be aware of.


I should reiterate that I am not an academic, much less a professional philosopher [nor am I a scientist], so please don't take my brief comments on other philosophers as some kind of proper critique, my comments stand only to place my own ideas in some kind of context of mainstream philosophies [as I have incompletely understood them to be]. There is always bound to be more that could be written about any of them, the purpose of mentioning them here is simply to draw attention to them.


It is important to realise though, that on the one hand these giants have been mistaken, because we do not have the answers, so they must eventually become superseded. But, that on the other hand, some of the things that they have said and written will become the foundation stones of whatever future philosophy becomes the accepted standard for our descendants.


A fine Summary


Robert Lawrence Kuhn has produced an excellent summary of most, if not all, of the proposed explanations of consciousness, in a wide ranging paper that includes, I believe, 324 theories, and touches on the widest ramifications and sources, including everything from materialism through to the paranormal, and implications for life after death.


The paper can be found by following the link at Closer to truth


Pythagoras and Euclid


Pythagoras (b.circa 570 BC d. circa 495 BC) [him of the triangle] and Euclid (lived around 300 BC) are essential to the history of both Mathematics and Philosophy. There is a problem with Pythagoras, in as much as little is really known about what he did, or did not, say or do. Also, the Babylonians knew much about the ratios of the squares on right-angled triangles [Pythagorean triples] over a thousand years beforehand. But whoever it was, the idea of Pythagoras proving 'the square on the hypotenuse...' is what is important. Pythagoras, or not, it is essential to know about because it showed that things could be proven. Also, Pythagoras is supposed to have taught that everything was made of numbers [this, a very long time before some scientists quite recently came around to a similar point of view].


Euclid is important because ... well, as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it, Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Euclid is our origin of geometric truth. Again, I am not concerned if the correct person gets the credit, rather, it is the concept of knowing true things, and the process through which the truth can be known, that is of importance.


Heraclitus and Parmenides - Becoming versus Being


Heraclitus (b.circa 535 BC d.circa 475 BC) and Parmenides (b.circa 515 BC) between them set the oldest version of the question that Virtualism exists to answer. Heraclitus gave us flux - 'everything flows' - the doctrine that you cannot step into the same river twice, and, more important to me, the unity of opposites; that a thing is held in being by the tension of what opposes it, as the bow and the lyre are. Parmenides gave us the opposite verdict; that Being simply is, that it cannot not-be, and that all the change we think we see is mere appearance. For Parmenides there is really only The One.


The whole subsequent history of the argument - Plato's Forms, Spinoza's Substance, Georg Hegel's dialectic, right through to priority monism today - is in some sense an attempt to have both, the One and the Many, Being and Becoming, without contradiction. Virtualism's answer is that you do not have to choose, because emergence is precisely the mechanism by which the Many in flux are born out of The One. Parmenides was right that there is a single root; Heraclitus was right that everything above that root is becoming and held in being by opposition - which is just paradox under an older name. The two old men were each describing one end of the same emergent process.


Plato and Aristotle


The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato - Alfred North Whitehead - Process and Reality


Of the ancients, Plato (b.after 428 BC d.before 347 BC) and Aristotle (b.384 BC d.322 BC) are the most important thinkers, and they gave us two distinct views of the World. Plato gives us an idealist view, that prioritises the ideal above the real, while Aristotle is much closer to contemporary thought with a view that prioritises the reality of things.


The problem with relying on the ancients is that they knew nothing about modern science, and so operated at a distinct disadvantage. That said, they do give us an interesting starting point, albeit one that is a question of metaphysics that has raged, hot and cold, for thousands of years since.


The question is one of whether the form of things exists before the actual thing, and governs the nature of the actual thing, or whether the reality of the thing exists first, and so defines the form that it has.


You might ask 'What is a form?', and I think that there are a number of ways of answering that, each ultimately the same, but each couched in terms that would have been acceptable in the eras that provided the explanations. Also, it is quite likely that something has been lost in translation from foreign writers, especially those from so long ago.


My understanding is that the 'form' of a thing is the whole thing minus its parts. Really a nothing, but also the spirit of the thing, its ghost, its essence, its totality and its heart, and that without which it would not be itself.


I am less interested in whether the form precedes the object [I actually think that they arrive together], and more interested in how the form of a thing shapes the way in which that thing can subsequently change. An example of this is Roger Sperry's Wheel, which exhibits emergent epicyclical motion due to its roundness. Without the whole round form the wheel would not rotate, yet roundness is only present in the whole, but not in any of the parts. So roundness is emergent, and rotation has a downward causation on the parts of the wheel, causing them to move with epicyclical motion as the wheel rolls.


Plotinus and Emanation from the One


Plotinus (b.circa 204 AD d.270 AD), in the Enneads, gave us the most fully worked-out account in antiquity of how a Many might come from a One. His scheme has The One overflow, without diminishing itself, into Intellect, and Intellect into Soul, and Soul at last into the material world - each level a step further from the source. It is the original generative monism, and it is striking how close the shape of it is to what Virtualism needs; a single source that gives rise to number, and through number to everything else.


Where I part company with Plotinus is on two counts. First, his emanation is a timeless overflow that runs downhill, each level a degradation of the one above, whereas Virtualist emergence is driven by paradox and runs in both directions - material things emerge from less material things and vice versa. Second, Plotinus begins with a plenum, a One already brimful of everything; Virtualism begins with Nothingness, and has the first something forced into being by necessity rather than poured out from an existing fullness. Still, of all the ancients, he is the one who was reaching for the same machine.


Occam's Razor and Plato's Beard


William of Occam (b.circa 1287 d.1347) gave us the idea that there was some advantage to keeping ideas simple. Although Plato was a lot earlier, W. V. O. Quine has given him a beard - his world of ideals, to be shaved away by Occam's razor.


Plato's beard has to undergo growth in order to be; no potential actually exists in truth, nor in reality, until the path has been beaten to its door and necessity has birthed it in response to some paradox. This is why Virtualism is not Idealism, nor even Dualism. Nobody can claim [with any right] that a Jabberwock existed in any sense before Lewis Carroll wrote Jabberwocky. The artist creates the ideal, and the artwork, in the same moment. The artwork reflects the ideal and shows the audience that aspect of the artist's virtual self. In this respect we are all artists, we all perform and create, and in doing so show our inner self to our audience.


The evidence of science, empiricism, and experience, is for emergence and a reality to actually be 'out there', but is there any guarantee, Occam's razor apart, that it is not all really a Matrix?


Descartes


Most famous for 'I think therefore I am.', and originating all the Matrix-like dualism, Rene Descartes (b.1596 d.1650) attempted a broad assessment of thinking as a means to create a foundation for all philosophies. It should be apparent that I admire the ambition, but I would suggest to Descartes that there is another direction from which to approach all-things; namely to utilize thought experiments and come at the problem from The Far Side.


Baruch Spinoza - All is God


Baruch Spinoza (b.1632 d.1677) was excommunicated from his Jewish community in the Netherlands, for views that would become the claim that we all are God, although what he claimed was a bit more complicated than that. What is clear from his book Ethics, published posthumously, is that he thought that we were trapped by our emotions, but liberated by our minds. Generally, Spinoza is reckoned to have opposed Descartes' philosophy of mind-body dualism, possibly for much the same reasons as Princess Elisabeth - an objection that to the modern mind should seem redundant, because of our understanding that the Universe is composed of quantum events, that themselves are all fundamentally just numbers. Hence, even if body and mind emerge from two separate paths, their common foundation enables interaction.


Spinoza believed that God is 'the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator.' - Wikipedia


This view claims God to be the 'substance' of all things, and 'modes' of that substance are then thought to create all the actual things and their properties. Such a 'God' is thought to be self-created and infinite - both Nature and perfection.


Absolute perfection, is, as noted above, reserved solely for Substance. Nevertheless, mere modes can attain a lesser form of blessedness, namely, that of pure understanding of oneself as one really is, i.e., as a definite modification of Substance in a certain set of relationships with everything else in the universe. - Wikipedia


In the above, Spinoza can be thought of having an almost Buddhist view of what we might call 'moral purpose', i.e. of using mind to know what really is true. In elevating mind and dissing emotion, Spinoza makes the same mistake as many, that is; disregarding the innate wholeness of individuals. A holistic view sees all parts as important, and this is possibly the most significant difference between Virtualism and Spinoza's philosophy - added to which, Virtualism has a combined ontology and epistemology that gives full justification to ideas that Spinoza was attempting to discover.


Spinoza had a very systematic method of axioms, propositions, and demonstrations, by which he sought to prove his philosophy. From these we can see a possible similarity with Leibniz' Law - in Proposition V; and it is clear from Proposition VI that the entire scheme has no true common ground with Virtualism, because Spinoza denies Emergence in Proposition VI. 'One substance cannot be produced by another substance.'


Leibniz and Newton


Gottfried Leibniz (b.1646 d.1716) gave us the 'Identity of Indiscernibles', a metaphysical rule, sometimes known as Leibniz' Law, and which says [if I can paraphrase] that if two things have no differences, then they are in fact one thing.


This law, is at the heart of my thinking on both Existence and Consciousness. What it means is that if two objects are indiscernible, then they share the same facts. But also, it is important to recognise that facts pertain to whole objects; that facts are truths about objects; that facts may be of external or internal relationships, but that they are never simply one node. Even the fact of wholeness is a relationship to all other wholenesses, and thereby to the relationship of wholeness to nothingness. Facts are virtual, and the fact of indiscernibility is therefore also virtual, as are all relationships. This explanation goes beyond Leibniz, but makes sense of Leibniz' Law, because the law cannot apply to material objects, because these are always discernible by separation. Indiscernibility implies lack of separation, and that only applies to ideal objects, of which there can only be one instance of each individual ideal. NB. this has little to do with Plato's conception of the ideal preceding the real. Rather it is closer to Aristotle's, and Sartre's, conception of existence preceding essence, except that within Virtualism essence and existence are one and the same.


I should clarify that Leibniz' Law is often applied by philosophers to the opposite principle, the Indiscernibility of Identicals (if a = b they share every property), which is near-trivially true. My argument for Iconism leans heavily on my take on the controversial direction, believed to have been disproved by Max Black's twin-spheres objection (two qualitatively identical spheres in a symmetric universe). However, I deny the validity of that view, for one thing his universe is contrived, however perfectly constructed, no material objects could be such perfect balls. To be physically indiscernible they'd need to be electrons, and as pointed out by Wheeler, they would then effectively be one and the same electron travelling back and forward through time.


Leibniz did say that the most important question was 'Why is there anything at all?', and gave us the principle of 'Sufficient Reason' - essentially showing that all things had to have a reason or ground.


Contemporary with Leibniz, Sir Isaac Newton (b.1642 d.1726) developed similar mathematical techniques, and went on to revolutionise the world of science with his laws of motion, and discoveries about light. Although superseded by later scientists, for extreme cases, Newton's laws still hold for Rocket Science, and we might say he started the wave/particle debate when he claimed light was composed of corpuscles.


I should meet the obvious objection here, which is Max Black 's. He imagined a universe containing nothing but two exactly similar spheres, a mile apart and alike in every property - which, if they share all their properties yet remain two, would seem to sink the Identity of Indiscernibles. My reply is that the spheres are not in fact indiscernible; each stands in a relation the other does not - being a mile from that one - and since, in Virtualism, relations are facts and facts are what individuate, the two spheres differ after all. Black's case threatens a version of the law that counts only intrinsic properties; it does not threaten a version for which relations are real.


David Hume and the Empiricists


David Hume (b.1711 d.1776) would say it is more likely that I am wrong, because my explanation has never been known before [this is paraphrasing Hume]. But Hume would be wrong, because his argument is a fallacy, because it does not allow for discovery, and the history of humankind is one of discovery.


Hume had quite a lot to say about inferring the presence of things from other things; notably that a never seen shade of blue might be known from all the other witnessed shades of blue. Such concepts, whether correct or not, become important when we consider translation, a process of taking meaning from one culture, and making it understandable to the citizens of another culture. There will frequently be concepts present in the former that have no parallel in the latter, making translation tricky.


His two most famous contributions: the problem of induction, and the critique of causation (constant conjunction, no perceivable necessary connection) have a great bearing on the whole of Virtualism, but while his arguments may have worked in the past, they cannot survive alongside Virtualism's engine of change.


George Berkeley and Immaterialism


George Berkeley (b.1685 d.1753) is the third of the great British empiricists, between Locke and Hume, and the boldest of them. His slogan was 'esse est percipi' - to be is to be perceived - and from it he argued that matter, as some inert stuff existing unperceived behind our ideas, is not merely unknown but incoherent. All that exists, for Berkeley, are minds and their ideas; and to stop the world blinking out of existence whenever no human happens to be looking, he had God perceive everything always.


Berkeley matters here because he is the origin of every later idealism I take issue with - Kastrup's consciousness-first ontology and Hoffman's icons are his grandchildren. And he is half right, in a way that is worth conceding; we never do encounter matter bare, only ever our icons of it, so the empiricist cannot simply point at the stuff and win the argument. But Berkeley draws exactly the wrong conclusion. That we meet reality only through icons does not abolish reality; the brute facts still bite, whether perceived or not, as anyone who has stubbed a toe in the dark can confirm. Virtualism keeps Berkeley's insight that experience is iconic, and throws out his conclusion that matter is therefore unreal.


Kant


Immanuel Kant (b.1724 d.1804) is thought to have revolutionized just about every way we think, and he asked:


Kant was kean to distinguish between what we could rationalize, and what had to be taken as a given, an a priori, or as Russell may have called it, a brute fact. One such a priori, for Kant, was time. Kant thought that we just had to just accept it as it appeared to be.


Kant wanted to explore the way in which we built a coherent idea of the world, from so much chaos that surrounds us. [according to the 'tube!] How do we organize the 'content without form', and how do we then make objective knowledge from it?


Kant was responding to the empiricist David Hume, who believed everything came to us via our senses. Kant felt this was wrong, and brought us rationalism, the power of pure reason.


I think I will cut to the chase here, and ignore what comes next on Youtube.


It seems to me that science produces empiricists, who create theories and then test them with the truth of correspondence. Coherence with the whole of science is necessary for the discovery of this truth.


But this brave confidence in what we have already discovered is surely misplaced. If the history of science tells us anything, it is surely that science has a Trotskyite method of perpetual revolution, leading to an evolution of newer, better, more accurate, more useful concepts about the material world. We know science is incomplete, and so must be open to further revolution.


Science demands that ideas ultimately be empirical by being testable. That, one imagines, leaves precious little room for pure reason, but imagining so would be mistaken. Einstein achieved tremendous leaps by performing thought experiments - not always getting the right answer, but it shows that theory - reason, can take us a long way.


But testing theories can be either impossible, or prohibitively expensive. The search for the Higgs boson cost millions, but got there in the end. Where did it get? To finding signatures that fit with the theory. So the 'proof' is one of coherence, it does not mean that the theory is the final say on Reality.


I believe that Kant is very wrong to think that anything can be known a priori. Thus there is no pure reason. Reason must always be in regard to things - either sensed things, or remembered things, or imagined things.


The representation of Kant, online, doesn't impress me. He seems to have combined empiricist and rationalist thought, leaning to the rationalist side - which is all fine. But beyond that, seems hopelessly lost. Pure proofs must be a matter for mathematicians, because the physical world will always require tests to show that reality matches theory.


But is that really so?


Could there be a thought experiment, or even just a thought process, that was so coherent, so convincing, that it could be accepted as necessarily true without any need to resort to empirical tests?


Clearly that is what I believe Virtualism to be, and the factor that makes it stand alongside [some] mathematics, as an exercise in pure reason, is precisely that it takes nothing as 'a priori'.


Schopenhauer and Hegel


'We can will what we do, but we can't will what we will'


Arthur Schopenhauer (b.1788 d.1860) had a particularly psychological approach to philosophy, one that emphasized the will as key to our being. However, one could never encounter the will, only the consequences of it as it drove us to action.


I reckon that this distinction between the self in action, and the self as the director of action, is mistaken. [Pen]Ultimately the choices of the person, the animal I should say, are the product of a probability that is rooted in quantum processes of the body/brain, together with constraints that affect those quantum processes. The constraints include the 'will', which is largely the product of memory, together with the external constraints on memory, and opportunity, which I'd suggest include the spirit of the age, well of the moment at least.


For me, the will of Schopenhauer is simply the self, the water that is the product of the sum of our parts. Specifically, to will is to want, and we will always lack what we do not have, 'the grass is greener...'. For Schopenhauer, art is the thing that allows us to transcend self as we stand in awe of the beauty of another. However, I see that experience, as with any heightened moment in life, such as climaxing during sex - when it goes perfectly, not as losing the self, but as gaining the self by the process of growth through filling the gap of what is lacking in the self, what is wanting. Nature is said to abhor a vacuum, and this saying is an expression of the will to satisfy any want, any lack, within us. Crucially 'within us' means that we have to carry the photographic negative as the vacuum that requires filling. It is an addiction that we all have, just like the need to breathe, to drink, to eat, to love, to be loved, for warmth, comfort and shelter, and numerous other things.


Georg Hegel (b.1770 d.1831) has it that we are the product of history, compare to Jean-Paul Sartre's view that we make our self, but these and other thinkers are all largely incorrect, because the self that wants, the self that wills, the self that lacks, is the product of all factors that form the self. These include one's genetics and biological development, and health, one's education and experience, one's social and geopolitical positions, one's material possessions and wealth, and all the environmental conditions in which we swim. What all these have in common is that they come to us through our senses, and remain with us through memory. The senses are mediated by photons, and memory is mediated by the truth of consciousness. Both kinds of experience create icons of mind via the brain and its activity, and icons are the objects in question [that they are iconic of] to the extent that they are identical to them. Thus it is that both our history and geography, and biology, and everything else, makes us what we are by placing constraints and opportunities on and in our path through life.


But Georg Hegel deserves more than that, because of all the philosophers before me he came nearest to the actual machine. His dialectic has development driven by contradiction; a position generates its own opposite, and the clash of the two is resolved not by one side winning but by both being taken up into a higher third that preserves what was true in each. He called that move Aufhebung - sublation - a word that means cancel, preserve, and lift up all at once. Strip away the idealist scaffolding and that is paradox-driven emergence in all but name.


More striking still is how the Science of Logic begins. Hegel starts with pure Being, utterly empty and without any determination - and finds that, so emptied, it is indistinguishable from pure Nothing. The two collapse into each other, and their truth, he says, is Becoming. A reader of my own account of Nothingness and the beginning will see why I cannot ignore the man; he got to the doorstep. Where Hegel and I part is direction and driver. His dialectic is powered by Spirit, the Concept, the Absolute coming to know itself - an idealism in which the whole unfolds itself into its parts. Virtualism runs the other way and without the cosmic mind; the engine is paradox over relations, not Geist, and emergent wholes are built up from parts rather than handed down from an Absolute. (A small correction often worth making; the famous 'thesis, antithesis, synthesis' tag is Fichte's, not Hegel's own.)


Nietzsche and Dostoevsky


I find myself disagreeing with just about every idea I hear is attributed to Fredrich Nietzsche (go to page)(b.1844 d.1900), so have not studied his texts much. For instance, he claims 'Behind feelings there stand judgments and evaluations which we inherit in the form of feelings. The inspiration born of a feeling is the grandchild of a judgment - and often of a false judgment' This is just wrong, in Virtualism; perceptions lead to feelings [emotions], and then emotions to judgments, an elemental pathway that goes earth, air, water, fire. What Nietzsche describes is the opposite retrograde path, which shows that his perspective here is faulty, although coincidentally in keeping with his own retrograde Jupiter.


Should you counter Nihilism with goodness or greatness?


The philosophies of Nietzsche v Fyodor Dostoevsky (b.1821 d.1881) suggest two solutions to the question of life, which is more of a question of what does a human do with intelligent consciousness; is it best to just be an animal and enjoy everything to the max, because life is short and terminal? Is it better to follow an ideal? Nietzsche's ideal was to be more than, to be superman; Dostoevsky's ideal was to retain a child-like naiveté of goodness. They were essentially stating opposite moral positions, that Nietzsche might have described as Master morality and Slave morality.


My immediate reaction is that both must be wrong, because otherwise people would have grasped the true answer - no -not really, my immediate reaction is I know best, or will, once I have considered the question. After all, I am in possession of the compass of all things, so must be better equipped than either Nietzsche or Dostoevsky. [This is not wholly serious on my part].


The trouble with Nietzsche is; which way is up? His answer that 'might is right', the noble are noble and so can define their own rules according to their will. There is no justification for this, and it is not very nice to boot, providing a semblance of respectability for dictators such as Hitler and Putin. No, Nietzsche's philosophy is just evil. At its heart is division, and division is always a bad thing. It leads to inequality, privileged classes, and ultimately the persecution of minorities as the rich and powerful seek scapegoats with which to distract the bulk of society from any awareness of their own disadvantaged position.


The trouble with Dostoevsky is the same as for Nietzsche - which way is up? His answer, that niceness is enough, has no justification either, although it provides no succour for dictators. Recently, the film ' The Banshees of Inisherin ' explored the question of niceness, possibly finding it lacking in various ways.


Existence - life, for us - has so many dimensions, so many ways of being, that it would be impossible for any individual to know which of them to follow, which rule to hold supreme on the wheel of life.


You can't even retreat from the question and adopt a middle ground, not without making choices, and we are choice making machines, that produce ghosts.


At least I now don't have to read the interminable Brothers Karamazov. It is long and boring, and rambling. Who isn't?


Clearly, one changes throughout life, so the answer probably changes with you.


For Nietzsche, the solution is Ubermensch, i.e. become an artist, and thereby give life, your life, meaning where God cannot, because God is dead! The advantage here is that with art, all paths are outward from the obscured inner self, to the outer world and any of its denizens.


The Ubermensch, as artist, externalizes aspects of their inner self - the process of art - and in doing so combines disparate entities that when combined cause the emergence of art, by reproduction of the icon that exists within the artist's soul. Here the icon may be original, or not, but the icon precedes the artwork, occasionally crystallizing as a discovery from the process of artistic construction. Even when, as did Marcel Duchamp, the artist finds an object [Fountain], it is the naming it art that is the creative process, and that is as valid as any work of artisan skill.


The problem I would still have with Nietzsche, I think [while being largely ignorant of his ideas], is that there is no objective measure to compare disparate themes as good or bad. Added to this, we are all artists, everything that we do in life is an expression of our inner self [and outer self to some extent, and possessions]. One thing I will grant Nietzsche is that recognition of art as being the thing that matters, I'm just not sure whether he recognized that everything was art, and on the surface the whole concept of Ubermensch appears elitist, and is very suspect. Nietzschian philosophy only tells half the story, and so people take what could have been a good idea and it becomes a force for evil. The concept of ubermensch was, for Nietzsche, an ideal to aspire to, to achieve greatness by artistic expression. However, no man is an island, and ubermensch is a bad idea, as is his concept of slave morality, because it separates. Art is what we all practice, whether we know it or not, whenever we do anything it shows our inner self to some extent, and great art does so well; for art to succeed the experience is better shared, there is no point being 'great' in isolation, separating oneself off as ubermensch achieves nothing, whereas any actions shared with others create art, some good, some bad, but the roots of morality are in destruction and creation, and the balance or fairness or justice, therein. Ubermensch is destructive because it separates, so is categorically bad, like right wing politics, war, and theft - all destructive, although on occasion unavoidable.


Nietzsche also re-introduced the theory of eternal return - that we may have to re-live the same life over and over - although it is questionable as to whether he actually believed it to be the case. If matter is finite and time is infinite, the argument might go, then any arrangement of atoms and events will repeat - an idea that is probably nonsense; because if the Universe does end in heat death, then change ceases, and effectively that is an end to time.


Henri Bergson and Duration


Henri Bergson (b.1859 d.1941) is the philosopher I ought to have read first, given what I have called my theory. Two of his ideas are close to home. The first is duration - duree - real lived time as a continuous flow, which Bergson set against the spatialised, ticking, clock-time of the physicists; for him the second of these is a convenient fiction laid over the first. That is very nearly my own position, that the t-axis of physics is a reification, and that time is something emergent rather than a fundamental dimension laid out in advance. The second idea is the virtual itself; Bergson's virtual is real but not actual, a reservoir of tendency that becomes actual through a creative process - and it is from Bergson, by way of Deleuze, that the word descends to me.


Bergson even staked time against Einstein directly, in their famous encounter of 1922, and was judged by posterity to have lost - though I would say the loss was the physicist's frame winning, not the philosopher's point being refuted. Where I leave Bergson behind is his elan vital, the vital impulse he posits to drive evolution; Virtualism has no need of a special life-force, because paradox and emergence do that work without any added ingredient. But on time and on the virtual, he is an ancestor, and an honourable one.


Husserl, Heidegger and the phenomenologists


Phenomenologists like to emphasise experience of the World as the basis of personal consciousness, denying a separate self, i.e. separate from the experience [I believe]. Before phenomenology, consciousness was seen as representational of external reality, as an alternative, Edmund Husserl (b.1859 d.1938) offered Intentionality, a study of what thoughts are about, and eventually, with other thinkers, this morphed into Existentialism.


Clearly, I disagree with this point of view, because the self includes the environment of the self, the body as well as what is recorded from all our prior experience, and consciousness is what emerges from the priority we give each memory. Denying the self in this way seems to be equivalent to acknowledging atoms, but denying the existence of the World.


Martin Heidegger (b.1889 d.1976) also said that the most important question was 'Why is there anything at all? However, he seems to have believed that it is not a question that we can sensibly answer, because we are unable to stand outside of Existence [he may not phrase it quite like that]. I say that we can stand where we like because we have the great advantage of imagination. This allows us to place ourselves in impossible situations, and imagine what they would be like. Of course, one has to be careful about any kind of perception, we are frequently mistaken about what we see, and 'should have gone to Specsavers', but wisdom gives us the potential, at least, to decide what is reasonable, and what is not. Hence, we can imagine Nothingness, and then have a very good idea of how Something came to be.


John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart - Time


John McTaggart (b.1866 d.1925) was one of the first to attempt to really get a grip on Time. He gave us the ideas of the A Series and the B Series, two ways of looking at Time. He also had a C series, but this is largely ignored. Unfotunately, McTaggart like most thinkers, failed to grasp the emergent nature of time. He did have a great name though.


Georg Cantor, Zermelo and Fraenkel, and Kurt Gödel - Mathematicians and Logicians


Cantor (b.1845 d.1918) was a German mathematician for whom it seemed certain that there were more real numbers than natural numbers, and he set out to prove it with three proofs, of which the most famous is his diagonal proof. Subsequently he was labelled a corruptor of the Youth by Leopold Kronecker, due to Cantor's insistence on there being actual infinities - many of them. Subsequently this led to Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel developing Set Theory (of which Wittgenstein was no fan), including Set Theory's Axiom of Infinity - infinity is assumed to exist, and Kurt Gödel deriving his Incompleteness Theorems.


Cantor has been accepted into the canon of mathematics, and anyone who denies Cantor's take on numbers tends to be labelled a Cantor Crank by the establishment, which I think tends to show what a house of cards built on sand the edifice of modern mathematics has become, to be so sensitive to criticism. That said, I must be included in that group of Cantor Cranks, because I vehemently dispute his diagonal proof, largely because it denies to natural numbers the courtesy he extends to real numbers. Fundamentally, I claim, numbers are not as mathematicians assume them to be. This has profound implications for both mathematics and theories such as Gödel's that rely on mathematical methods.


Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems purport to show that some true things cannot be proven, and he does this by converting provable statements into unique numbers, and then utilises Cantor's diagonal proof to imply that there must be unprovable truths. However, I suspect that the Virtualism theory of Emergence undermines Gödel's theories, providing an entirely different way of understanding Existence - in such a manner that in principle all things can indeed be proven. Indeed, that provability is a necessary component of truth. NB. We do not have to have knowledge of proof, for the thing to be true.


Gottlob Frege and the Foundations of Logic


Gottlob Frege (b.1848 d.1925) invented modern logic more or less single-handed, giving us the quantifier and the machinery that everything since has been built on. Two of his contributions touch my own concerns. The first is his distinction between sense and reference - that 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' pick out the same object (Venus) by different routes - which is exactly the territory Iconism works in, where the icon is the mode by which a thing is presented to a mind. The second is his logicism; the programme of showing that arithmetic is really just logic in disguise, that numbers are logical objects, eternal and discovered rather than made.


It is the second that I must oppose, head-on. For Frege, numbers sit in a timeless 'third realm', neither material nor mental - a Platonism about number that Virtualism flatly denies, because in a true Nothingness there are no numbers either, not even those. Numbers, for me, emerge; they are the first somethings forced into being, not the eternal furniture Frege took them for. There is a grim irony here that I cannot resist noting; Frege's whole edifice was brought down by a single paradox, Russell's, arriving by letter just as the second volume went to press. Paradox forcing the collapse and rebuilding of a system - I could hardly ask for a neater illustration.


Bertrand Russell - Logic and Neutral Monism


Bertrand Russell (b.1872 d.1970) I have already called upon more than once for his 'brute facts', and he repays a proper entry. With Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, the great attempt to ground mathematics in logic; on his own he gave us the theory of descriptions, which dissolves puzzles about 'the present King of France' by showing that such phrases are not names at all but disguised existence-claims. And it was Russell's paradox - the set of all sets that are not members of themselves - that wrecked Frege's system and forced the whole reform of set theory. He is, among much else, a connoisseur of the productive paradox.


But the Russell most interesting to me is the late one, the neutral monist. In his later work he held that mind and matter are not two fundamentally different stuffs but two arrangements of a single neutral material, differing only in how they are organised. That is a near neighbour of my own claim that the mental and the material are two sides of one coin, both emergent from the same relational root. Where Russell stops short is that his neutral stuff just sits there, inert and given; it does not generate. Virtualism supplies what his picture lacks - an engine, paradox, that makes the single root productive rather than merely common.


Alfred North Whitehead and Process


Alfred North Whitehead (b.1861 d.1947), whom I quote elsewhere on philosophy being footnotes to Plato, is the thinker whose system comes closest to my own, and I am almost embarrassed not to have led with him. In Process and Reality he argues that the basic furniture of the world is not enduring substances but events - 'actual occasions' - each a momentary process of coming-to-be that takes up its predecessors and adds itself to the total. Reality, for Whitehead, is the process; being is made of becoming, novelty is fundamental, and the universe is a 'creative advance into novelty'. Substitute my own vocabulary and a great deal of that is Virtualism.


Two differences keep us apart. Whitehead builds experience into the ground floor - every actual occasion has a dim sort of feeling, a doctrine called panexperientialism - whereas I keep consciousness for Iconism and refuse to smuggle it into every event; difference must exist before any consciousness of difference can. And Whitehead needs a God, with a primordial and a consequent nature, to supply order and to harbour possibility. Virtualism does without; the laws of nature are deposited by the closing of the loop, not held in a divine mind. But on the central move - process before substance, becoming before being, emergence as the fundamental fact - Whitehead got there first, and got there grandly.


Wittgenstein and Language


Ludwig Wittgenstein (b.1889 d.1951) is primarily known as a logician, and student of Russell. He published only one philosophical book in his lifetime, the Tractatus; his second, Philosophical Investigations, appeared posthumously in 1953 and largely refuted the first.


Part I - the Tractatus - 1921, written during WWI while serving in the Austrian army.


Part II - Philosophical Investigations - 1953, his second and final philosophical publication.


Sartre and the Existentialists


Jean-Paul Sartre (b.1905 d.1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (b.1908 d.1986) raised the issue of the effect others have upon us, either when we know we are looked at, or when we know we are touched.


It is also reported that Sartre did not believe that we had an unconscious mind, which given the sheer quantity of sensory impressions and menial tasks that pervade our lives without ever becoming conscious, unless they accidentally gain some added significance, makes one kind of doubt Sartre's ability to assess the situation clearly.


This goes to show that just because a thinker gains a modicum of reputation, or a whole ton of it, that is no justification for accepting their opinions. It is just as much an ad hominim fallacy as is dismissing the ideas of someone of ill repute, or no reputation at all!


Sartre was actually correct to suggest that we decide what meaning to give our life. But not that we are condemned to freedom. We only ever have limited freedom, and so we have an amount of inbuilt meaning from the off. So Sartre, like most philosophers, was only partially correct.


The bottom line is that all black and white answers are only partial, because they lack nuance, and so cannot map life which certainly does have nuance.


Deleuze and Guattari


Gilles Deleuze (b.1925 d.1995) was a French philosopher who along with Félix_Guattari (b.1930 d.1992) came up with the idea of Desiring Machines. However, (while I am far from expert about Deleuze) I am given to understand that his perspective was highly influenced by the phenomenologists and therefore focused on the external. The machines of Deleuze seem to describe the function of the desiring self, excluding the parts that produce the machines. As such, their theory appears to be incomplete.


Roger Sperry's Wheel


Roger Sperry (b.1913 d.1994) was a neuroscientist who created the example of Sperry's Wheel, to explain one kind of emergent phenomenon. The roundness of the wheel emerges from the arrangement of its parts, and causes the emergent epicyclic movement of those parts as the wheel rolls.


Karl Popper's Three Worlds


Karl Popper (b.1902 d.1994) was a philosopher who had significant idea on truth, the falsifiability of science, and an ontology that included three worlds - the material, the mental and a third that could be seen [although these are not his terms] as emergent from the intersection of the first two worlds, i.e. formed from the cultural content stored in physical objects such as books, and recordings, that are material, but not active as is mind.


W. V. O. Quine and Ontological Commitment


Willard Van Orman Quine (b.1908 d.2000) gave us, in 'On What There Is', the very phrase 'Plato's Beard' that I borrowed earlier, and a good deal more besides. His criterion of ontological commitment is the question every ontology has to face, including mine; what does your theory say there is? His answer - to be is to be the value of a bound variable - means that you are committed to whatever your best theory has to quantify over, and to nothing else. Pressed on Virtualism's terms, my answer is that what there is, at bottom, is relations - virtual facts - and that everything else is these relations emergent into structure.


Quine wanted 'desert landscapes', an ontology as sparse as possible, and was suspicious of anything immaterial or abstract. He would have looked askance at my emergent immaterial facts. But two of his other ideas are friendly to me. 'No entity without identity' - his demand that we have no business positing things we cannot tell apart - is Leibniz' Law wearing modern dress, and central to Iconism. And his holism, the picture of knowledge as a single web that faces experience as a whole rather than claim by claim, chimes exactly with what I said about coherence under Kant; theories are confirmed by hanging together, not by matching reality one fact at a time.


Contemporary Thinkers


David Chalmers and The Hard Problem of Consciousness


David Chalmers (b.1966) hit the nail on the head when he labelled the problem of consciousness as the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It is hard to say what consciousness is, and how it is, because it is nothing like any other thing we know about. It must be partly because of this difference that Rene Descartes initiated Dualism. It really does seem 'as if' there must be two different kinds of things. However, Virtualism, by showing all things to be emergent, says that there are many kinds of things, but that they all are just virtual things, each emergent in their own manner, and this perspective enables Iconism, which then explains consciousness, demonstrating that while hard, the problem is not impossible.


David Chalmers also gave us the philosophical zombie, a creature that physically is just like us, but that has no conscious experience. The zombie is used to disprove a materialist explanation of consciousness, which would be fine, but sadly, Virtualism shows that the physical nature of the zombie, being just like us, would in fact, generate emergent consciousness in exactly the same way that we do. So, really, David is mistaken and giving us the kind of word salad that claims to conceive of thing, but which in fact is just words. The non-conscious zombie is as unconceivable as the five sided triangle, neither can exist - in any sense at all. However, there is the issue of awareness, and it could be argued that the p-zombie was conscious, but unaware, just like most drivers and voters. To be aware, I would say, is to be conscious in the context of recall, i.e. to sense and remember at the same time. In this regard, awareness creates memories, and allows future recall. Consciousness allows for interrupts, from sensory input and from memory, and does its best to guess at what these are.


John Searle's Chinese Room


John Searle (b.1932) famously showed that digital computers cannot have thoughts, because, according to Searle, they only manipulate syntax, never semantics, i.e. they deal in symbols not meaning. I will have more to say about this, but his was an argument against StrongAI, and while I believe that he was broadly correct, I would explain it differently, because at first sight, it does rather call on us to ask what is so different about the human brain, that it is not just another Chinese Room?


I would argue that there are two features of digital computers that stop them having what we'd call thoughts. These are firstly that they encode information, and it is encoding that strips meaning away from data. Searle is on this track when he draws the distinction between syntax and semantics, but it it important to also point out that brains do not encode, they produce analogues of things. The second major difference, not spotted by Searle - I believe, it is that digital computers never assemble whole objects, so there is never any higher conceptual level to their data, it is always raw. The brain, being a massively parallel processor, is able to contain many wholes at once, whereas the digital computer does not. It's data is stored on discs, or other memory formats, and may as well be graven on tombstones for all the life that it can contain. Even the program code, even if assembled to machine code, is still no better than documentation of the process, while on disc, and you can't run documentation. And then when it runs, it does so bit by bit, so is always incomplete. Our perception may be flawed, shakey at times, frequently mistaken, but even as an approximation of things it does a pretty good job of mimicry, and it is that which makes all the difference.


There are those who argue that the whole system understands Chinese, but that is foolish because although the behaviour gives that impression, there is actually nothing internal to the system that could 'be' anything more than one solitary symbol at any one time. The symbol has no intrinsic meaning, by definition of the room, so the systems response is mistaken. In Virtualism terms, there is no juxtaposition of contrary ideas that could cause a paradox to force the emergence of some new thing that we'd then call thought. In the brain there is constant activity, jostling for pre-eminence and so producing mind. Mind, in turn constrains brain activity, and leaves a trail of consciousness.


Thomas Nagel - What is it like to be a bat?


Thomas Nagel (b.1937) posed the question 'What is it like to be a bat?', suggesting that consciousness was what happens when 'there is something that is what it is like to be ...[the conscious entity]', here Nagel is focused on the self that is doing the being, and the qualia - the sensations in consciousness, of things being sensed. But, this may be a mistake; the primary experience of consciousness, at its brightest and loudest [but not exclusively], is when we are conscious of a real thing in the external, objective world around us. So the question is not 'what is it like to be a bat?' - Nagel's question, rather it should be 'what is it like to be a table, a chair, dinner, music, another person?' These are the objects of consciousness, the icons of other things, of anything, that we construct within our minds, that are so accurately the thing under consideration, that they become to some extent identical with the thing in mind, thereby according with Leibniz' Law, and then, when the icon's connections to our self are so numerous [or large in some other way of measuring] that they exceed all other competing icons, that specific one assumes centre spot, and becomes aligned with our centre of being. At that moment, we will have moved toward the icon, and the icon will have moved toward our centre, all within the abstract/emergent/virtual being of our mind. At that point we very truthfully are the thing that we are conscious of; maybe not precisely, but our self is no longer subjectively solitary, an island; we have made objective contact, to the extent that we have formed an accurate icon of the third party, be it a chair, a table, a glass of wine, a painting, an animal, or a lover.


The great thing about other conscious creatures is that they too can be conscious - of us! That is a very big deal, because it amplifies our being, our own experience, and therefore the objectivity of our subjective self. Exceptionally, when the two way street of true love is invoked into existence, by the mutual perfect reciprocation of true experience of the other, then we both gain the ultimate benefit of the virtuous circle, which is the thing that creates peak experience.


This, then, is why it is not so important to consider how a bat may think, or how the bat's senses are so different from ours. Rather, all animals [and according to Iain McGilchrist they all have at least some vestigial left brain and right brain] sense someting of the things that they encounter, some, such as rats, can learn, can recall that which they have previously sensed - sheep do this when they run to anyone driving a tractor and they remember that the noise signals the farmer is going to feed them, Pavlov's dogs were the same - we really cannot justifiably assume that we are very much different from any other form of life on Earth.


The answer to 'What is it like to be a bat?' then is 'Not very different from being us.' We all ocupy the same world, and that is the world we sense. When we sense an object we gain a gestalt of it, for us colour emerges when we see a moth, but the bat gains a different perception; it may lack colour, butthere may be information in the echo that goes way beyond simply locating the moth. After all, the bat would want to identify anything that didn't make a good dinner. The point is not that we experience a different flavour of consciousness, but it is that both us and the bats, and any other conscious creatures, experience the World - as it is, to some extent.


Stuart Kauffman and Emergent Biology


Stuart Kauffman (b.1939) makes claims for Emergence at the level of Biology and above, citing such things as peptide rings.


Frank Jackson and Mary's Room


Frank Jackson (b.1943) continued the them of thought experiments based on rooms restricting the variables, with Mary's Room, where the idea was to illustrate the difference between Dualism and varius kinds of Materialism. Mary inhabits a closed environment where she is only exposed to black and white, no other colours. However, she has all the information science could possibly and potentially provide; so the question is, if Mary comes out into the colourful world, does she learn something new when she sees a blue sky, or a red bus? If Dualism is true, then she does. But, if Materialism is true, then she does not. It seems, on the face of it, that she must learn something about what blue is like, but is that really the case? There is a philosophical argument here, but Virtualism says yes she does, and explains why she does.


Douglas Hofstadter and I Am A Strange Loop


Douglas Hofstadter (b.1945) is the author of 'I Am A Strange Loop', also of 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'.


In 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' Douglas attempts to show how a 'self' arises from entities that can have no potential, individually, to be a 'self'.


In 'I Am A Strange Loop' Douglas comes very close to explaining the mystery of consciousness, getting as far as the mind working in analogies, but then he seems to spoil it all by missing the salient points. Our clever use of language has nothing to do with the matter.


Hofstadter gets that consciousness functions by analogy, but the impression I get is that he has a significantly different version of the concept of analogy, and I get no sense that he understands that the functioning of every level of mind has to be by analogy, or else something essential is lost in translation to code. In which case his lack of IT literacy is on show, I think; and this is crucial to explaining consciousness - it is a fundamental requirement to grasp the correct expression of each link in the chain, and as far as I can tell, Douglas fails to see that the analogy is less important than its analog nature.


Douglas, who gives away his roots when he denies all use and knowledge of MS-Powerpoint, lacks [it seems] the awareness that you cannot run documentation. He is inspired by Gödel, but fails to see that the analogies of formulae in Gödel numbers are abstractions, and so lose something in the same way that the spirit of the past loses the mass of the present. The thing lost may, or may not be important, depending on context, but the Gödel number is largely 'documentation'.


Donald Hoffman and Multimodal User Interface


Donald Hoffman (b.1955) is the author of 'The Case Against Reality', and propounds a theory (Multimodal user interface theory) of 'Conscious Realism', that claims all real objects are icons on the user interface of a conscious agent, much like on the desktop of a computer. This idea holds that consciousness is fundamental, and as with all theories that claim some factor to be 'fundamental', that which is supposed to be fundamental remains unjustified. Much the same is true for the fields of Quantum Field Theory, and the space or time of General Relativity.


Ultimately, all theories that make a claim of illusion, or lack of reality, fall flat in the face of the 'brute facts', as called them. Reality is just that; real! We can't dismiss it just because it is inconvenient in its apparent dissimilarity to consciousness.


The main thing about Hoffman's icons is that they are of the desktop variety, not the religious variety, and that distinguishes his theory from Iconism, because with Iconism you gain the identity of the object and the icon, via Leibniz' Law, and that is a rational mechanism that does justify the explanaion. Hoffman's icons have no such explanatory power. For Hoffman 'Nothing about the shape of the file icon resembles the shape of the file itself', which he sees as an advantage.


But I must be careful not to make a strawman, by misrepresenting Hoffman, He states purposefully that 'MUI theory is not idealism. It does not claim that all that exists are conscious perceptions. It claims that our conscious perceptions need not resemble the objective world, whatever its nature is.' This gets to the crux of the difference between Hoffmans's icons, and those of Iconism.


Where Hoffman is, I think, correct, is when he says our best modern scientific theories tell us that material reality is not the fundamental thing. But, he makes no claim about the ontology of reality; he is only saying that it need not be in any sense the same as what goes on in consciousness. In this regard, he and I are diametrically opposed, as I make the claim that Leibniz' Law can be applied to all things, and that hence Virtualism and Iconism both function precisely because of the similarities between things.


Karl J. Friston and the Free energy principle


Karl J. Friston (b.1959) is one of the most highly cited living scientists. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, and is a key architect of the free energy principle and active inference. - Wikipedia


The free energy principle is the idea that the brain makes predictions for the purpose of reducing uncertainty. The brain aims for accuracy, hence repeatedly revises its inner modelling in the light of new information. The method is highly probablistic, and is claimed to be motivated by a drive for least surprise. However, while much of that has merit, I would argue that what the self aims for is comfort, and that accuracy, achievement, and the avoidance of surprise, all contribute to comfort.


Ken Wilber and Four Quadrants


Ken Wilber (b.1949) came up with the Four Quadrant model to map a theory of everything, however, his categories of individual/collective, and of internal/external, are IMHO just inappropriate of everything, that is; they do not cater for everything. However, it does look as though he is concentrating on social and psychological everythings, perhaps with a bit of spiritual included. I would claim that my own assessment, that places the categories as objective/subjective, and as wholes/parts, actually forms the correct model of emergent Existence, and so is better able to define and identify all those things that Ken Wilber hoped to map with his own quadrant model. The other thing is that the Mandala is the map of every emergent possibility because it does not stop at quadrants, but fractal-like continues ad infinitum - boundlessly, and so can not only incorporate everything that is, but can show the abstract of everything that could possibly be. Wilber makes the mistake of categorizing emergent things according to their final object nature, rather than according to their root natures as priority. This means that many things become miscategorized, and the categories themselves become unclear.


I should add that categorising things as internal/external is in many ways identical to categorising them as wholes/parts; parts are necessarily internal to the thing that they are a part of, in some way, and to see the whole of a thing can be to see it from the outside. But, I would add that parts also relate to wholes, even though they exist within the whole, so they are not exactly the same as 'internal'.


In the same manner, individual/collective could be mistaken for objective/subjective, but while these are just words, and could be taken to mean the same thing, there are nuances that make me prefer my terms, because I understand them to be somewhat more precise in their meaning.


Giulio Tononi and Integrated Information Theory


Giulio Tononi (b.1960) is best known for Integrated Information Theory, an enterprise in which he is supported by Christof Koch (b.1956)


IIT starts with consciousness as a certainty, a la Descartes, and attempts to draw conclusions about the physical objects that are required to underpin that consciousness, thus bridging the gap from phenomenology to the mechanism of consciousness. This assumes that consciousness can be fully accounted for by wholly material means, and that the physical foundation must be constrained by the conscious experience. However, the assumptions leave many others, notably John Searle unconvinced.


Christof Koch says, and I for one agree, that consciousness is a new physical state, only I would go one step further and say that the emergent stuff of consciousness is the stuff of spirit, and that is formed from the same kind of relationship that makes the numbers and fundamental laws that govern the behaviour of everything in Existence.


Bernardo Kastrup and The Idea of the World


Bernardo Kastrup (b.1974) author of 'The Idea of the World'. However, the problem with this, as with any other anti-materialist, and anti-reductionist, theory, is that he has to start at the wrong end of things. Materialists start in the middle, and ignore greater things in pursuit of a fundamental on which to base everything, while Idealists generally start with some ultimate wholeness [Bernado calls it consciousness] that is also believed to be fundamenal, and so from which material reality is supposed to appear - and 'appear' seems to be the right word, because in this theory material reality is the product of consciousness, so does not properly exist in its own right.


Bernardo claims that all recognised forms of Emergence fail to show some property that could not be deduced from the more fundamental level, although he stresses the forces of Physics, which is a little disingenuous, because there are plenty of emergent phenomena in Chemistry and Biology, that do not comply with deduction from Physics. For instance, crystaline structures. But we can take the more straightforward example of magnetism; here we get the emergence of magnetism whenever we have movement of electric charge in an electric field. Similarly, Time, and Gravity, also emerge, but we are so close to these that we usually misteke them as fundamental.


The problem with Bernardo's approach, is that there is just as much problem in denying material reality its role in Existence, as there is in denying consciousness and immaterial facts. Material facts will bite you whether you are conscious or not, so it is foolish to relegate reality to a secondary role, at least while we are inhabiting a material universe. He is also bypassing the glaringly obvious fact that we do not yet have all the materialist answers; we cannot fully explain Quantum Mechanics, so he is making a fallacious argument.


But the main thing is that Bernardo ignores, or plain does not see, the fundamentally emergent nature of Nature, i.e. that even the fundamental forces, including gravity, are emergent, even time. So, we can make use of our consciouness to deduce the manner in which consciousness is produced, and conclude that Existence is both material and ideal, and that it is not at all far-fetched to see that these interact because they are two sides of the same coin. Bernardo is very wrong when he says it is a mistake to conflate the image [in the mind] with the object [in reality], and Leibniz' Law is based on recognition of their identitical natures.


The key question is which came first? The answer to which is very simple, the whole always emerges from parts, the opposite is impossible because emergence requires paradox, and a whole is never paradoxical except in its parts. Virtualism tells us that a whole lot of immaterial things had to emerge before any material things could exist, so we see a clear direction to this, but it is not Bernardo's consciousness creating matter. Only once difference exists can consciousness of difference exist, and any other description of consciousness is mere word salad.


Bernardo claims that the whole Universe functions similarly to a brain, in as much as it produces a cosmic consciousness, or rather, is 'produced by'. However, while there is undoubtedly a totality of consciousnesses within the Universe, they are not connected, except by the facts of being whole, and being conscious; neither is there any sensory mechanism with which the Universe can process data about itself, except via the unconnected consciousnesses. So, there doesn't really seem much hope for that idea. The collective of all consciousnesses would be joined in certain places, wherever there was a common experience, and this may be what gives rise to the theories of Jung, and of Sheldrake. The bottom line is that consciousness occurs between things, where there is commonality, and those things may be reality, or memory, or imagination, and it is the brain that is instrumental in amplifying them.


Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary


Iain McGilchrist (b.1953) is author of 'The Master and his Emissary', and his recurrent theme is that of Left Brain and Right Brain, and the manner in which these two parts of all animals function. The gist is that they are not the accountant and artist of popular culture, rather, that each half has a specific job to do in forming the whole conscious experience. The Left looks at the detail of things, and experiences consciousness as mechanical parts, while the Right looks at the whole of things, and experiences consciousnes as of living entities. In this way a single object can be experienced simultaneously as both kinds of entity, and the brain's inhibitory mechanisms then allow the most appropriate perspective to dominate.


McGilchrist has a non-materialist perspective, saying that 'it is not scientific to say that everyting must be explained by matter, that is just a prejudice.


Thomas Campbell and My Big TOE


Thomas Campbell (b.circa 1940) [not yet on Wikipedia] is best known for being an assistant to Bob Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute and initiator of the term OBE - out of body experience. Campbell has authored 'My Big TOE',his theory of everything, based on those experiences and his own scientific background. In his TOE, he makes much use of the term 'virtual', but as far as I can tell. in this he is more in keeping with Donald Hoffman's take on reality, at least describing what exists in predominantly IT terms, i.e. as 'the System' - it being the system that produces us, and then our consciousness that creates the appearance of the reality we inhabit.


Unless I am totally mistaking his words, I disagree entirely with what Tom Campbell claims, because my use of the word virtual is to claim that the fundamental property is existence, and that from this, via numbers, all things - of absolutely any kind; material, ideal, or conscious - that all things emerge as the virtues of the thing that they become, i.e. as the facts of the matter. There most definitely is not any 'system' behind the virtual nature of things, it is just that each kind of thing is the way it is, and if you really want to be fundamentalist about it, that means that the bottom line of everything is that anything is made of facts at every level. Now, it is crucially important to realise that some of these facts are very hard! Material reality is real, make no mistake about that, but material things emerge from less material things, and vice versa.


Rupert Sheldrake and Morphic Resonance


Rupert Sheldrake (b.1942) is best known for the concept of Morphic Resonance that makes the claim that novelties become easier to reproduce with each subsequent iteration. An example he gives is that of blue tits stealing the cream from bottles of milk, a development that started in Southampton in the 1920s, and which was studied as bird behaviour. The study, by Cambridge University, found that seemingly independent instances of the habit, starting in widely separate places, accelerated in their occurrence. Also the habit quickly restarted, with a new population of birds, after milk deliveries resumed post WWII.


Max Tegmark and Our Mathematical Universe


Max Tegmark (b.1967) is a Swedish-American physicist, and author of Our Mathematical Universe. His claim is that we live in a universe that is composed of mathematical objects. It is not that the Universe is caused by mathematical objects, it is a mathematical object. He goes on to claim that mathematiccal objects just exist; that they don't need to be created by anything. It is a point of view that I'd take exception to, because in my opinion a nothingness means no mathematical objects, not even numbers.


Avshalom Elitzur and an Expanding Block-universe


Avshalom Elitzur (b.1957) is an Iranian-Israeli physicist and philosopher, and is noted for the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb tester experiment in quantum mechanics. His recent interviews claim the beginnings of a theory that proposes that a new present Now emerges into nothingness from a prior Now as quantum wave functions collapse, in much the same way as the Big Bang, as a quantum event, causes the initial Universe to emerge into nothingness. If I have understood him correctly, his ideas follow the concept of an expanding block-universe in which the past and present are real, but in which the future simply does not exist. I cannot agree with this view, because Virtualism denies the reality of the past, admitting only to the existence of the past as factual truth rather than as reality.


Stephen Wolfram and the Hypergraph


Stephen Wolfram (b.1957) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman, who has created a theory of the Universe that he calls the Hypergraph. This theory claims that the Universe is a set of mathematical points, connected by 'edges', and that repeated computation readjusts the position of these points. I am clearly not doing his idea justice, but my aim is simply to draw your attention to it. Also, perhaps to draw a distinction between his idea and mine, as on the face of it, one could easily think that they were similar. After all, Virtualism also claims that the Universe emerges from a set of points that are numeric in nature, and that these points move. However, Virtualism provides a coherent mechanism, semi-Machian, to explain why space, gravity and time emerge, while Wolfram seems, I think, to rely on some unexplained set of computational rules he calls the Ruliad.


Graham Priest and the True Contradiction


Graham Priest (b.1948) is the foremost living philosopher of paradox, and a man who takes contradictions more seriously than almost anyone has dared. His position is dialetheism; the claim that some contradictions are actually true - that there are statements, the Liar chief among them, which are both true and false, and that we should accept this rather than explain it away. To stop such a true contradiction from infecting everything (in standard logic, from a contradiction you can derive any statement at all) he employs a paraconsistent logic, in which contradiction is contained rather than catastrophic.


Priest is an indispensable ally in one respect and a clear opponent in another. The ally; he refuses to treat paradox as mere error to be swept up, and insists it tells us something real - which is exactly my own starting conviction. The opponent; for Priest the true contradiction stays true, a permanent feature of the landscape, whereas for me a paradox is unstable, a pressure that is productively resolved - the contradiction is the trigger that forces a new thing to emerge, after which it no longer obtains. Here I am closer to Hegel than to Priest; the contradiction is sublated, not housed. Priest keeps the paradox; Virtualism spends it. He has also written illuminatingly on the limits of thought, and on Hegel, so the proximity is no accident.


Jonathan Schaffer and Priority Monism


Jonathan Schaffer [b. - verify] has revived monism in a precise modern form he calls priority monism, argued most fully in 'Monism: The Priority of the Whole'. The claim is not that there is only one thing - of course there are many things - but that there is one fundamental thing, the cosmos as a whole, and that everything else, every part, is derivative of it. The whole is prior to its parts, and grounds them, rather than being built up out of them. It is Parmenides' One made respectable for contemporary metaphysics.


Virtualism is a near cousin and an awkward one. The kinship is real; I too hold that there is a single fundamental root, a One, from which all else derives - that is monism, and I own it. But the direction is where it gets delicate. Schaffer's whole grounds its parts top-down; and yet I say elsewhere that an emergent whole always arises from its parts, paradox living in the parts and not in the whole. The resolution, I think, is that these operate at different levels - there is The One at the root (with Schaffer), and within its unfolding each emergent whole is built from parts (against him) - the One being generative through paradox-driven subdivision rather than a static whole grounding a static many. But I flag the apparent tension honestly rather than paper over it; it is exactly the sort of thing a sharp referee would press, and it deserves a clean statement before the paper leans on it.


Peter Eldridge-Smith and the Hypodox


Peter Eldridge-Smith [b. - verify] is the contemporary philosopher whose work sits closest to the heart of my own, and the one I am most in debt to. In his paper 'Generic Definitions of Paradox and Hypodox' he gives rigorous definitions of a matched pair. A paradox is over-determined; it forces a contradiction, too much truth, a glut - the Liar sentence, which comes out both true and false. A hypodox is its dual, under-determined; it leaves a gap, a question that consistently could be settled either way but is not - the Truth-teller, 'this sentence is true', which can be either with no contradiction at all. Where ordinary logic treats both as pathologies to be quarantined, Eldridge-Smith treats them as a clean, general structure.


What Virtualism does is take that structure and put it to ontological work. The paradox and the hypodox become the two directions of the single emergent engine. The paradox, over-determined, is the inward, rotational, erecting move - the overfilling that forces a new thing into being. The hypodox, under-determined, is the outward, linear, populating move - the open imminent future, a gap of genuine possibility not yet settled. Eldridge-Smith defines them in the realm of logic and semantics; I argue that relations-about-relations are simply a sub-region of one relational domain, so the same pair operates as the very mechanics of existence. His logic is, I think, a true ally to my ontology - and I should say plainly that the definitions are his, the ontological gamble mine.


Alternative Thinkers


Alternative thinkers are often called pseudo-scientists, but that ad-hominem insult is not a proper way to deal with anyone, let alone their subject matter.


Raymond Moody and Near Death Experiences


Raymond Moody (b.1944) known as a researcher into the NDE. Author of Life After Life, probably the most influential book to be written on the subject.


Michael Newton and Hypnotic Past Life Regression


Michael Newton (b.1931 d.2016) was known as a psychologist, and researcher into past life and between life recall through hypnosis. Author of Journey Of Souls, a detailed account of the various stages of soul development and the transitions to and from life, based on a series of case studies that he made using hypnosis to induce past life regression.


Ian Stevenson and Past Life Recall


Ian Stevenson (b.1918 d.2007) was known as a researcher into past life recall, based at the University of Virginia. Author of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) and Reincarnation and Biology (1997). Much of his investigation involved children who recalled past lives, but also in 1986 he interviewed Shanti Devi, whose example can be seen here(go to page)



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