The infrastructure of representation has two aspects:

1) The natural scientific side, which has to do with how the human sensory (aisthetic) system comes to construct a world representation that serves us as a species to survive in that world. Konrad Lorenz calls this the Weltbildapparat (world representation device, LORENZ-NAT , 55). I have already mentioned that there is a subtle problem in the conception of whether this is a "representation of" (some thing-in-itself). I will take the view of the Lorenz school (evolutionäre Erkenntnistheorie) as point of departure. The cybernetic view of the Urbana school: Shannon, v. Foerster, G. Guenther, Maturana, is also important in this respect. Then, there is of course the enormous material of neurological research that has been produced in the last 150 years. In the diction of Schopenhauer, the neuronal system with all its ratiomorphic performance (Brunswik ) is the area of Verstand , a term that has done its part to create a thorough misunderstanding of Schopenhauer 's views.

2) The symbolic system, Schopenhauer' s Vernunft . The academic discipline which has recently formed to give attention to all aspects of the symbol process is Semiotics . I am not too sure about the scope of Semiotics. As far as I can see, it is situated in the humanities spectrum. So possibly Semiotics serves as the common denominator for all the symbolic and language aspects of the representation . It may be debated whether the biological and especially, the neurological aspects are also part of Semiotics. Because Semiotics appears to me more of a loose grouping of scientists than an established academic department, like physics , or chemistry , or biology , so this may rest largely in the eyes of the beholder. Other academic fields that I am touching in this area are: Classical Philology , Linguistics , Etymology , History , Archeology , Paleontology , Egyptology , Indology , Music Theory (Harmonics ), Architecture , Medicine , Literature (Poetry ), Theology and Comparative Religious Studies, Philosophy , Psychology , and some quite extra-academic fields, like Mythology , Esoteriology , the study of superstitions and the fabrication of erroneous belief systems for purposes of authoritarian domination , the systematology of mass delusions and endemic hysteria , and a few more.

So, the collection listed under this heading forms a rather mixed bag. It appears in many different academic disciplines under different names, and it would be hard to try to reconcile all the different approaches and methodologies of these disciplines. The main problem for a scientific treatment is that one has to jump criss-cross over the abyss between objectivistic natural sciences and idealistic humanity sciences. Anyone who dares to do this is in for a good beating, because both sides will claim that the treatment is not up to their standards [44].

For the sheer immensity of covered fields, it is impossible to give an even half-way relevant overview of existing literature. Anyhow, at least some literature shall be listed. The most concentrated work in this field has been around the library of Aby Warburg . He and his collaborators and followers have tried to collect all the different strands in the fabric of human cultures that connect to symbol use. There are tens of thousands of relevant titles in this library which would take hundreds of human lifetimes to read. Notable in this line is Cassirer (CASSIRER ), especially his "Philosophie der symbolischen Formen" [45].

In the field of culture, synaisthetics, language and symbols: ALBARN , ASSMANN , BATESON , BOLZ , BOLTER , CAMPBELL , CAMILLO , CASSIRER , CHOMSKY , COHEN , COUTURAT , CRITCHLOW , DAVID65 , DELEUZE , DERRIDA , DOCZY , DORNER , ERBEN , ECO , FEHER , FLUSSER , GADAMER , GELB , GIESECKE , GIMBUTAS , GOMBRICH , HAARMANN , HAMEL , HALLYN , HARDIN , HAVELOCK , HEINTZ , HESSE , HEUERMANN , HEUSER , HOCKE , HÖLSCHER , KORVIN , KRAMER , KRÄMER , LATACZ , LEIB- , LINGUIST , LEUNINGER , MCCLAIN , MCLUHAN , MELLAART , MENDEL-PYR , MERNE-CELT , NAJI-ARABIC , NEEDHAM , ORNAMENT , ORTH , PARRY , PEI , PIPER , POSTMAN , ROBINS , SAPIR , SANTILLANA , SERRES , SIDNEY , SLOTERDIJK , SPARCK , SPRACHE , YATES .

For biological foundations, there is the literature of modern neurophysiology, the works of Konrad Lorenz, Eibl-Eibesfeld, Hermann Haken (HAKEN ), and Egon Brunswik . Then the autopoietic theories of Maturana and Varela (MATURANA ). Cybernetics research like Heinz v. Foerster (FOERSTER ), Wiener, Gotthard Günther (GÜNTHER ), Alan Turing, John v. Neumann, and Shannon. Further AESTHETICS88 , DELANDA , DENNETT , EIGEN , GIERER , JANTSCH , KLIX , KLIVINGTON , LINDSAY , MILLER56 , MUELLER , OESER , PRIGOGINE , OBERSCHELP , PENROSE , PIETSCHMANN , PREUSS , RIEDL , ROSE , SEARLE, RUCKER .

For application with technology, computing, science, and mathematics: Tony Judge (JUDGE ), Tufte (TUFTE ), and Hermann Maurer (MAUR- ). Other works: ABRAHAM , ALEXANDER , BARLOW , BOULDING , BUSH , BUZAN , CARD-INFO , DAHLBERG , ENGLEBART , FAIRCHILD , FLOYD, FODOR, FRIEDHOFF, FULLER , GENTNER , GERBEL, HERDEG , HORN , KAY, KLASSIFIKATION, KUHLEN , LAMSON , LANDOW , LAUREL , MICHON , MILLER86 , NELSON, RAPAPORT, RAPHAEL, RHEINGOLD, PICKOVER , WIDENER , WILLIAMS , YOUNG .

Substantial philosophical material comes from the discussions of Anaximandros, Hesiodos, Heraklit, Parmenides, Plato, Aristoteles, Epikur, Nagarjuna, Cusanus, Descartes, Locke , Hume, Berkeley, Leibniz , Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and from the renaissance researchers notably Leonardo , Bruno, and a few others, now forgotten, like Blasius of Parma [46] .

Our conventional intellectual tool systems allow a representation and interaction that is confined to a very small section of the human sensory apparatus. In case of the alphabet, even though its systems is so much more refined than the writing systems preceding it, we must state that it is still a quite convoluted and inefficient mechanism, which forces us to convert an idea into a series of subverbalizations, then convert these into a phonetic representation, and then using some quite cumbersome devices to make a durable version of this, usually a book, or, more modern, a computer text file. It nothing better is available, then there is little question about its usefulness. Once alternatives become visible, it is necessary to ask about the cost-effectiveness of the conventional system. The costs humanity has to pay for its systems are enormous, even if they are not very visible. For example the barring of the vast majority of the human population from using the mathematical conceptual apparatus which makes all modern physics completely ununderstandable for the large public. An envious situation for those elect few who do understand it, but what good is a knowledge that practically no-one can apply?

Contemporary computerized multimedia systems allow us to revitalize, and re-formulate a vision of synaisthetic thinking tools (syn-aisthesis = the synergetic cooperation of all the sensory instrumentarium). We don't really need a computer for the re-vitalizing either: Just a walk in nature, through a beautiful countryside will do. Or a visit to the local classical art gallery. This vision has been around all the time in the arts, and in architecture. (Unfortunately not so in what passes as architecture in our modern cities). But it has stayed quite outside science, technology, and the fields centering around the written word: history, law, philology, philosophy. And this is why the computer comes into play. Here we can use the technical capabilities to serve us well while we are re-constructing the aisthetical aspects.

This retrieval and revitalization is something of a chicken-egg problem. How can we envision it when our conceptual systems have been so trained and fossilized in 5000 years of dominance of some very specific and very narrow thought channels? We may aptly say that there has been a 5000-year an-aisthesis going on which of course was not noticed, because an-aisthesis does what it says: it dulls and obliterates awareness. The approach we have to take must be something of a boot-strap as it is called in software technology. In order to find out how to envision synaisthetically, we must create some new kinds of synaisthetic representation, we must create tools that help us do it. Another, more immediate practical problem is that those people whose profession it is to be efficient in the present system have no great interest in changing their thought tracks to accomodate to something entirely new. And since every project must be funded, and every researcher must have some means to make a living, we immediately run against the rocks of established science and vested interests. History is full of examples of people who tried to realize their out-of-time ideas and whose fate was different grades of tragedy. Some glaring examples like Giordano Bruno and Servet who were burned at the stake, others, like Bacon and Campanella , or just recently, Wilhelm Reich , who died in prison for their personal philo-sophia, their unflinching love for wisdom. Most of them were just ignored and died in oblivion. So, even if this project is outwardly technical, it is inherently political. The main problem is to find a few supporters for the work and get some funding to carry on.

Undeniably, the invention of writing and the printing press served as powerful boosters for early civilizations and the technological civilization of modernity. But the problems of the almost sole reliance on verbal cultural memory systems must not be overlooked. In the section "Threads of History" I will enlarge on the power and organization side of the civilatory dominance of the verbal and script system Here I will deal with matters of education and the relation of verbal systems to non-verbal.

Schopenhauer [47] has underpinned the Epikur ean system with an analysis coming from an entirely different angle. He had stated that all knowledge resting on words (or better, verbal concepts), what he called the Vernunft must eventually be based on sensory knowledge which he called this the Anschauung (WWV, 77) . Now a better word for this would be the aisthesis . The greek term gives the direct connection to Epikurean thinking.

The debate of the potentials and danger of new media is going on and there is ample literature available (for example BOLZ , MCLUHAN , POSTMAN , VIRILIO ). The rise of Hitler can be attributed to the factor of the radio as much as to any other historical influence. The first mass indoctrination of a whole nation was made possible through a pact with industry which mass produced a radio for every home, the "Volksempfänger". Public opinion could now be influenced to a level unprecedented in the days of the press. The high art of the demagogue found its revival, when the short bearing range of the voice, which had limited the effectiveness of all demagogues since the days of the ancient greek polis, was instantly extended to a whole nation. The new media that followed, TV, and today cable and computerized media are posing difficult questions for societies. The case of TV shows how a technology that was at its beginning greeted with much enthusiasm for its beneficial potential in society, has turned around to be a complete nuisance, only serving to amplify beyond all limits the basest standards for entertainment and mindless pastime. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the now ensuing cometary rise of global communications based hypermedia systems should lead to a development that is in any way different. But it is unjustified to pretend, like Postman does, that the good old days of literate humanity were substantially better. The problem of the media began when the written word was invented.

See also: ->: CYBER_REICH, p. 155

In the days before mass production of books, humanity had to rely by necessity on a host of cultural memory mechanisms, from the arts and crafts, to children's and adult games, riddles, fairy tales, folk songs, embroidery and weaving patterns, ornaments on pieces of daily environment, proverbs, and dirty jokes, which all played a role as cultural memory. (For literature on cultural memory and oral tradition: see ASSMANN , HAVELOCK , LATACZ , MELLAART , PARRY) .

The written word was initially reserved for a quite small sector of society, even though this sector had from the beginning been the one where most of the political power resided. With Parmenides and Plato began the history of western conceptual systems, and the preponderance and domination of concept-based knowledge. Civilization has created a very specific, and narrow instrumentarium of coding processes which are the base for cultural memory and the societally preferred communication mechanisms. States and large organizations were dependent on the medium of writing. And by this, writing became the way of wealth, power and prestige. History writing meant the writing of his story, i.e. the story and the interpretation which the ruling class saw most fit for their aims and ends. The sensory and intellectual facilities needed for writing and clerical work became dominant in civilizations.

But before the invention of the printing press, writing was for a long time only one system besides many other knowledge systems that were not transmitted conceptually. Besides writing, there was for example the strong arts and crafts tradition, in Europe the guild system, which had considerable power because the knowledge they guarded was not available outside their system. For example the knowlege for building of the cathedrals was entirely transmitted in their master-apprentice system. All the other memory mechanisms had their own lineage of tradition. Most of it was pure folk tradition, neglected, rejected, driven into oblivion, often forcefully suppressed by dominant political authority, like national state governments that tried to eradicate the cultural memory of ethnic fringe groups. Traditionally, historical science has leaned more towards the written record, and has not been too busy studying these lines. The Grimm brothers were among the first to take up this research. Only recently, when modern tape recording methods were available to field researchers, was it possible to preserve what had been left over from the oral tradition of hundreds of years domination of writing culture in the civilized countries. Even in the so-called underdeveloped countries, the modern onslaught of radio and television had left hardly any a surviving fossil of those traditions alive to tell their story [48]. In the oral, body, and crafts traditions, the connection to the sensory experience was never broken. If western civilization had been able to value Leonardo better, then the education system would have kept more of the aisthetic element, much to its advantage.

But it came differently: There was an already existing strong bias towards words and knowledge through concepts, since this meant more money, power, and prestige. The printing process served to increase this tendency beyond all prior limitations because if allowed an immense mass production of written material. Books are much cheaper than laboriously training an apprentice at some possibly valuable pieces of material which he may ruin and needing constant overseeing by someone skilled. And it is therefore much cheaper to set up a room, collect some books, and find someone who knows what is written in them. That is the origin of the western school and university system. Somewhat simplified, but I don't have the time to write a dissertation on just this subject alone.

The consequence is an unproportional growth of the field of verbal knowledge and the pushing into near oblivion of the aisthetic experience. A book contains only as much usable knowlege as can be related to the sensorium and the expressive faculties of the human being (->: EXPERIENTIAL ). What is being taught in the schools depends almost entirely on the economic factors of the medium: how easy it is to put it into book form. A lavishly illustrated book was terrifically expensive when all the tables had to be hand-engraved, and therefore not economic for school use. Still today, with all industrialization, it is more expensive to produce than just text. Everything that doesn't fit into a book at all, like a lump of clay, a wooden piece to be carved, and so on, will either be left out or at best relegated to some obscure secondary subject. There usually just isn't enough money available in the school system to pay for many arts and crafts teachers. And then there is so little time, for all the book stuff to be stuffed into student's heads. That increases mountainously day by day. Everyone who has gone through the western school system knows about that by bitter experience.

Next: what is being taught by the teachers is exactly a function of what can be tested most efficiently. Because teachers must be tested for their efficacy themselves, under constant pressure from school boards and educational ministries. Because the system has to be efficient, and no slack is allowed. And what better way to test the teachers is there than to have standardized tests for the students? In modern school systems, that means multiple-choice tests. Forget about any other concerns. The system is there to put as many students through the school mill as possible, at the lowest monetary cost for society. Forget about secondary costs, suffering and discomfort for all those involved. Drop-outs who are ruined for life. And the strong suspicion that what is learned at school may have no practical relevance in life out there. So those that excel in this system, are those, who have mastered the arts of rote retention and of second-guessing, how a multiple-choice test is set up, or psyching out their teachers by providing them with exactly the answers that are requested. Never bother about asking a question "Why", "Why not", "How Else" or any of the like.

And those who are best at those skills, then go on to become teachers, professors, school board directors, university presidents, and education ministers. The whole system feeds onto a value structure that is as self-supportive as could be. What education minister, what university president will like to be told that he is creating rubbish? Who will get hit with the big stick first? The one who is blowing the whistle or the education minister? Your guess is as good as mine. Since everyone in our modern societies has had to go through the system, not many even have the imagination how different it could be and what would have to be done to effectively implement a different system. If only Leonardo had become head minister of education... Well, we know better, he would have quit after the first day in office.

This is my favorite story of how the abstract, formal, and book based education system lays an immense human potential to waste. Imagine that to get a license for riding a bicycle, you would have first to go through a rigorous theoretical university education teaching you all the physical details of the immensely complicated self-stabilization mechanisms of the gyration principle of the bicycle [49]. Then you would have to pass many exams proving that you knew all those theories. Only then were you allowed to come close to a real bicycle. Now how many people in the whole world would learn to ride a bike? My guess is that it would be exactly as many people as today are capable of understanding the mathematics of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Judging from the fact that most of the time, in most places, our machinery is doing what it is supposed to do, I believe that the physical theories we have developed must be correct to the point to insure the functioning of mechanisms. There may be nothing wrong with that. But there is decidedly a problem with the way the theories are formulated and transmitted. If nothing better is available, then we must make do with what we have. In the manual age of the book and paper and pen culture, the development of mathematical physical theories as we have them now was probably the best thing that could be accomplished with the kind of cost-effectiveness that was available. But there are many signs indicating that our whole physical formalization system is turning towards the absurd (STRAUB-GLAS ).

Nowadays, computer science is doing a lot of work teaching a computer how to drive a car. That may be a waste of creative energy, because we may all have to revert to riding bicycles pretty soon. So I will be really impressed when our scientists will have accomplished that little feat. And I don't mean riding a bike on a perfectly round and even cyclodrome (which has already been done) but a mountain bike, up the hills, down the trails, and of course with all the power supply on board and self contained.

In the different fields of fine and body arts, humanity had evolved separate subcultures that trained the various other areas of the impressional and expressional spectrum (FEHER ). But in western societies, these were regarded as inferior professions with low social prestige, so that someone working in these fields had very little chance of gaining material wealth. The percentage of lawyers, priests, and doctors who died in the poorhouse is negligible compared to the percentage of painters, musicians and actors whose fate was exactly that. This has a severe effect when looked at from the evolutionary perspective. Since about 5000 years, civilized humanity is systematically thinning out and eradicating all traits of its genetic potential that show no promise of excellence in writing, statistics, mathematics, good manners, and obedience to superiors. So we may have something here that will give food for thought to the ethologists. Because this may be another chicken-egg problem. Ethology states that the human genetic endowment is largely responsible for the traits we have as social animals. And the genetic heritage we are supposed to have carried along from our remote wild-living hominid ancestors is, according to this view, responsible for our intra-species aggressiveness and non-consideration of our ecological living situation. But it might very well be the other way round. There may be a very subtle genetic shift going on as civilization goes on favoring those genetic traits that make people come closer and closer to the ideal "organization man". And it might be that people of earlier ages were actually more considerate, more gentle, and more cooperative than they are now. But to even formulate this as an hypothesis would risk raising a lot of fierce opposition from camps that have subscribed to the dogma that humanity has for all the time in its history continually evolved from the primitive to the more refined. (See also the discussions of EIBL-EIBES , LORENZ , NEIRYNCK-ING , p.46-53,

As I said above, the economic dynamics of the western educational systems have a long history of neglecting the senses. We can find the roots for this in the aversion against sense perception in the philosophy of Parmenides and Plato. The main underlying theme of this aversion was that ancient society was economically based on slave labor. (See also: ECO-EINF , 412-413, ->: SYMBOL-POWER ). In the ancient greek and roman times it was considered beneath the dignity of a wealthy nobleman to deal with base manual work. That was for the lower classes. This prejudice tainted the whole of western education, and probably today more than ever in european history. The book oriented, writing based, style of theoretical education had up to about 50 years ago been reserved only to a very small section of the population, while the arts and crafts tradition had silently, and without much ado, continued the essential element of training the whole body. But at all times, the professions based on the vocational training which involved all the senses and the body, were considered inferior in social prestige compared to those trained in the written word (lawyers, administrators, theologians) and formal symbol systems (scientists). Only a few exceptions were allowed, like some famous artists and musicians. By and large, the bodily and expressional arts were at the bottom of the ladder of social prestige. Consider the low standing of theater actors, and the genre of circus performers like jugglers, clowns, tightrope dancers, etc. These were masters of body arts, and today the west admires the skill of asian martial arts, while it has long driven to neglegt and starvation those who had upheld the european tradition of body culture.

In our time the sensory training has declined to its absolute nadir in human history. Nowadays, the modern western european model of theoretical university study seems to be the only road to career, wealth, and happiness. The culture of performing arts is driven out existence because mass media favor a star system that brings immense riches to a few performers who make it into the media, and nothing to all those who could do much to enrich their own lives and their immediate fellow men if they had an economic base to perform in a very local environment. And the whole rest of humanity, 98 %, just sit in front of the TV screen, munching potato chips, and cultivating their arteriosclerosis. This path is leading to a complete neglect of the sensorium and bodily existence. So-called civilizatory diseases are the immediate consequence. It is not just ill-balanced nutrition, but it is a fundamental neglect of the sensory and actuatory system of humanity. This will have dire consequences for western societies and humanity in total as the western model of living and civilization is applied world-wide.

Now, what is the potential of the new hypermedia technology? The best way to describe it is in terms of the accomplishments of Leonardo and Leibniz. We owe the logics that drives our computers to the genius of Leibniz, and the potential for its syn-aisthetic application to Leonardo.

Leonardo was the greatest syn-aisthetic master and genius that humanity has ever had. A lot is known of his visual and kinesthetic accomplishments, but his musical abilities are much less known, even though they were considerable. LEON-BRAMLY , 209-212. That makes him the paradigm for the potential humanity has lost since the renaissance, which needs to be recovered. He represents all that could ever be developed as syn-aisthetic hypermedia systems.

In the book-based, formalized education systems of today, it would be impossible that a genius like Leonardo could re-appear. Leonardo was a sensory character through and through. He didn't have much book learning, and what he learned, he learned through his experience. If someone with the same talents were born today, he would never have the chance to learn the mechanical or technical principles without going through an immense theoretical ordeal of learning numbers, formulae, dry and abstract matter, and never getting the opportunity to make the experience himself. His talent would be thoroughly wasted in modern civilization. The best he might fare could be to become a master automobile mechanist, fine-tuning the race machines in the background while someone else is making the headlines.

It is definitely too expensive to let millions of students have their go at possibly delicate pieces of material and equipment. But grinding them through a system in which they have to become efficient at tasks that have no relevance for a practical application before they can actually learn to use equipment or work at some material, wastes possibly the best talents who are just not too fit for book learning and pleasing their teachers. Leonardo would have never made it in our school system. He would have flunked out and become a dropout, like so many millions of problem children that are at best candidates for inner-city mobs.

What we have today, are exceedingly powerful computer based simulation systems. There are symbolization tools of an entirely different class that can be developed if there is enough imagination and societal resolve. These can supply a substitute for a lot of the lacking feel of the real thing that humanity has lost in the process of book based education. This is why modern hypermedia may be education's last chance. The time humanity has left is pretty much one generation. Believe it or not. Even if you don't believe it: Would you really want to put your children through such a system which made you suffer yourself so much, even if you don't remember very much of the suffering any more? Think of it clearly. There are alternatives available. The price will be high. Lots of money that could otherwise go into such fancy nice playthings as atomic bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, supersonic stealth attack fighters, but also fully automatic kitchens, self-steering lawn mowers etc, vacations in Hawaii... - lots of that kind of money would have to go into re-constructing the eduction system from the bottom up. Even if a symbolic re-tooling of the whole of humanity might seem staggeringly expensive, the cost of not doing it may be much, much higher than any of you might imagine.

This is an outline of a theoretical edifice of syn-aisthesis . In the scope of the present work, a fully worked out system is impossible to present, but a substantial sketch is needed and sufficient for the purposes of pragmatic construction of technical systems. The most recent material serving as conceptual foundations for such a theory are to be found in modern neurophysiology, the works of Konrad Lorenz , Egon Brunswik , and Schopenhauer . Important work on the lived experience of aisthesis has been done by Hugo Kükelhaus . The entry on "Perception " in Appendix I gives a discussion from the scientific view which may serve as introduction.

From the earliest times on, philosophical discussions centered around the question of the precedence of knowledge by experience, or empeiria (from which our word empirism is derived), or knowlege by reasoning, alaetheia. In ancient greece, this was the subject of the controversy of the Ionians and the Eleatics, Parmenides, Plato, Aristoteles, and Epikur . Plato and Parmenides were leaning more towards the reasoning end, while Aristoteles and Epikur were more empirically oriented. But even while there were big differences of how insight was gained, the question was rarely posed, how this insight was represented. So even those who were extreme empirists and sensualists, could not do anything else than talk about their findings and write them down. Thus, the medium of language and writing served as a powerful filter which had its own influence which was not very well noticed nor analyzed. Only those phenomena were amenable as candidates of insight, that could be talked about. "Those things about which one can not talk, one has to silence about" (Wittgenstein). Sapir and Whorf have made this to a very strong formulation: Language determines what can be thought at all (The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). This is nothing but a thinly disguised tautology, because it just equates "thinking" with "thoughts that can be talked about". Thinking in verbal concepts is of course limited by the language available. These are all indications of the western hypertrophy of language and writing.

Other cultures were not quite so single-tracked about things one could not talk about: I invite you to go to a japanese Zen master and ask him the Wittgenstein question. He will get out the big stick and hit you over the head heartily. Now you have heard the sound of one hand clapping! You asked for it, you got it!

The ability to solve a puzzle game surely indicates that there are mental performances that don't require words and concepts . If we don't want to call them thinking , we could use the term mentation for a more general class of mental performances with verbal thinking as subclass. [50] We also have striking examples of very deep non-verbal mentation processes as exemplified in Leonardo's drawings. Unfortunately the reliance on verbalization had a much greater influence on subsequent developments than the empeiria-aletheia or materialism-idealism debate. An analogous thing happened when the natural sciences arose. Here the formal mathematical languages served as very strict channels of what kinds of phenomena could count as scientific: Those that could be encoded in the formal symbolic systems of the sciences. Those that could not be encoded, ceased to exist, so far as science and technology was concerned. Lorenz calls this scientism . That has dire consequences for the adequateness of science. If only that kind of science is allowed that deals with quantifiable phenomena, it may be quite exact, and even correct, but eventually totally useless if it comes to solving problems in the real world of humanity. This has most pronouncedly been declared by Konrad Lorenz as one reason for the imminent demise of western civilization (LORENZ-TOD , 95-105, see also STRAUB-GLAS ).

Now we sometimes come to experience with some kind of a shock, that our sensory experience presents us with impressions that we are cutting short in a most procrustean manner when we are talking about it. This was noted very strongly by the romantic poets and painters. I give an example:

Go to a place of grand scenery by a mountain range, with unobstructed field of vision. The place where you are standing should be about half the height from ground zero, with some mountain peaks towering over you. The best place for this would be in the foothills of the mountain range. The air should be clear and the sky sunny. When you look at this scenery, your field of vision is filled by impressions to the maximum range not only horizontally, but also vertically, and to the greatest detail. A view of this sort is truly stunning. Now try to describe what you see to someone over the phone. If you want to be exact you will spend the rest of your life describing it. [51]

We get incredibly detailed sensory input every instant of our lives, but usually we don't think very much about it. Our civilized city environments give us views that we should rather not look at or talk about because they are so impoverished and esthetically depressing. Any man-made environment, be it a city, be it a house, and a room, presents our sensorium with an extremely different mix of stimuli than what we get in nature. And since even nature is influenced heavily by human action, be it plowed fields, be it roads and fences, be it planted forests that have been laid out with compass and straight-edge, it is very rare that we are not under the constant, and sublime influence of specific effects of human artefacts on our cognition. The right angle and the straight line are the most prominent, both don't exist in nature. Then the large areas filled with uniform color and texture. The world we are living in is to a large extent man-made. It is a product of culture, and can thus be treated with semiotic methodology: As symbols generated by a cultural process.

I am careful to use the original greek term because it has very little to do with what we today call aesthetics : "Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that aims to establish the general principles of art and beauty ." (See Appendix I, Aesthetics). This is a very narrow derivation of the once encompassing term of central importance. Let us start with Aristoteles :

ARI-META1 , I, 980a21

I will give a translation without substituting the key terms first:

And now with the conventionally accepted terms substituted

Here we have just another nutshell, and a particularly hard one to crack, around which arose a millennia-old discussion, the one that was aptly summed up in the Locke -Leibniz dispute. And this discussion gyrates around one central point: What did Aristoteles mean by eidenai , by aisthaesis , by mnaemae , and by physis ? Was it what we today think or was it something slightly, and subtly different? If we simply go by the translation, we might fall into a trap. Our meaning may be different than the meaning in ancient greek.

The term eidea , or idea has many connotations, connected with visual and mental imagery. Such it is very closely related to our key term "representation ". A german translation says: An Erkenntnis found with the Geist about supra sensory (transcendental in Kant ian sense) Ding e. Wesen , Urbild , Idee (ROST-GRIECH , 461). Everyone who ever tried to bridge the gap between the german philosophical meaning of these terms and possible english equivalents knows that this is almost impossible. It is quite as difficult as translating the original greek terms into any modern language in the first place. And that only serves to illustrate the problem.

To thoroughly discuss this question, one needs a few heavy tomes on ancient greek natural philosophy, etymology, and thesauri, as well as a doctorate in philosophy and classical philology, and a few months of time to leaf through all the tomes and make notes, collect them, and work them out. I don't have this time, nor do I have the degrees to be credible even if I did all the work. If it comes from an outsider, the philosophical and philological profession will simply ignore it, or tear it to pieces as amateurish nonsense. Needless to say that since it is such a nonsense, no-one will bother to state why and in what points it is nonsensical. So I will spare myself the effort.

The same work could be done in a few days if the technological infrastructure were there in place and ready to use. That is if all the required material were available as hypermedia database on the computer. That is probably in the process of happening since philosophy and philology departments worldwide are converting their materials to databases. So I hope to get access to that infrastructure and do it some later time anyhow. Because even if we might not be able to make any contribution to philosophy, this question is vital for the newly emerging technology.

I will cut that discussion short and look up the term aisthaesis . It does mean "sense perception" but also has the meanings: feeling, sentiment, sensation, mental perception, awareness, consciousness (ROST-GRIECH , 28). The ancient greeks apparently were not quite as sure as we are where their senses ended and their mind, spirit, soul, or consciousness began. We are also quite close to the semantic field of theoreo (444) and theoria (445). This has considerable overlap with aisthaesis: to see, to observe, to visualize, to make a mental image, viewing, seeing, mental perception, and understanding. theoria is also used in connection with oracles, and religious affairs, so there could even be a connection to theos , anything connected with gods. (Philologists, etymologists and linguists will probably object to this kind of juxtaposition. They want to keep the words neatly separated, in their boxes, even if their similarities are striking). Possibly there is also a connection to thesis . We then find the word aio (p. 30) to perceive, to hear, to see, to understand, to know. Then aio meaning to aspirate. This reappears also as a-istho , meaning expiration (p. 28). From there we are connected with the immensely important word aoid (ROST-GRIECH , 117). See also: ->: AOIDE . This indicates that in the greek world model aspiration and experience are directly connected. This connection can be literally found as the living, breathing logos, that Plato talks about in Phaidros, 276a. Here the grammata are the shadow pictures of the living, animated logos:

(PLATO-WERKE , Vol. V, 276a)

We find the zoa of Aristoteles here in the zonta.

We may come to a working solution for the meaning of syn-aisthesis thusly: Syn- meaning a cooperative togetherness, like we think of when we say syn-phonia , or syn-ergeia , we could call syn-aisthesis the cooperative and fruitful togetherness of all our sensory and perceptive instrumentarium in forming a harmonious ensemble of ourselves and the world we are living in. In Plato 's words, it is the kalon , and the agathon , that he was always looking for.

Now we return to the Locke-Leibniz dispute mentioned in the introduction. "The intellect is in the sense". Well, er... now it is time to confess. I cheated a little in the introduction when I said this was the solution. It is just like radio Eriwan. In principle, yes, the only problem is that there is no such thing as "the sense". Sense is what makes sense. Since it makes sense, there must be intellect in it, otherwise it would be non-sensical. If we insert the greek aisthesis into our statement: "The intellect is in the aisthesis ", it is not only much clearer, but plainly tautological, since the connotation of "mental perception" has direct connection with the intellect.

So, this dispute gyrates around a highly abstractive and selective definition of "sense". Of course the philosophers didn't mean "sense is what makes sense". They meant sense impressions or sense data. But they couldn't express that unequivocally, because Latin, English as well as German have faithfully kept that aisthesis connotation, unextricably. And it is only by a very brutal act of abstraction that we can denude the sensorium of intelligence, making it produce brute and dumb data.

We can cite Schopenhauer for this unjustified use of the abstraction. He can be excused for erring in some of his details. He didn't have to his avail all the results of contemporary neurology. I have kept the original german key words as my translations will be just so-and-so fitting:

(WWV I, 42-43 )

In another place he states it directly: The intellect is the causality detector function of the representation. This is nothing but the nervous system. All animals have intellect, to a lesser or higher degree. In neurophysiology, this is directly visible: All receptor cells are tied into paths coming from higher levels and are therefore tuned to pre-select the "data". Thus they are an inseparable part of the intellect function of the nervous system (FOERSTER85 , 27). The only way to ever find out whether the hand, or the eye, is sensing just "dumb data" is to cut it off. And then, guess what? It is not sensing anything any more because it is dead now. The only one sensing anything is the erstwhile owner. And he is just sensing - pain.

The word "sense" is a label, an abstraction. We can see how easy it is to fall into the conceptual trap of a convenient label we are using without distinction. All we have is: 1) the nervous system, 2) a nervous process, the sensing, and 3) its results, the representation [52]. Since there is no such thing like a sense, the intellect cannot be in it. Of course it is also not in the representation. So the only place where it still can be is in the sensing. From this derives that there is no such thing as an intellect either, there is only intellegere. Intelligencing. Let us hear Schopenhauer 's pendant to the statement of Aristoteles:

"The World is my representation" - this is a truth which holds with respect to any living and sentient being; while only the human can bring it into reflected abstract consciousness.

(WWV I, 32 )

Heinz v. Foerster expresses the same thing:

FOERSTER85 , 25

Science, especially neurology , has done an immense amount of work in the last 150 years after Schopenhauer clarifying at least some of the basic aspects of the sensorium. Much is left to do, and it seems the more neurological detail we get, the more complicated and involved does the question become. The once extremely simplistic views of Descartes are replaced by extremely complicated multi-level neural network connections that heap layer upon layer of neural information processing. (If we may apply that metaphor from computer science, but it is, after all, only a metaphor, this should not be forgotten. We can be certain of one thing: The kind of information as is defined by the transmission of data in channels (BRILLOUIN62 ) is not what is processed there.)

According to neurological science, the nervous apparatus does an immense amount of processing and filtering of physical inputs that excite the receptory nerves from which endless trains of neuro-electric potential spikes are emitted and sent to the further processing layers. Then, there is a lot of impulses going from the higher layers to the lower layers, even up to the primary receptors themselves, influencing them in their behavior. After all that processing is done, the nervous system presents the human consciousness with a fairly accurate representation of the physical environment [53]. The problem is: Where is the one who perceives that representation? While Descartes could still think of a little homunculus nested deep down in the recesses of the brain watching all this, we have no such possibility left. There is no one there to look at the representation the nervous system is generating. We are it. Consciousness resides as much in the most frontal sensory nerves as in the highest processing layers. Either we must postulate there is no consciousness, and everything we experience is just senseless by-product (epiphenomenon) of a sensory machinery, or this is the point where reductionism reduces itself ad absurdum.

In the language of Brunswik , we talk about the "ratiomorphic performance of the sensual apparatus". This means that much of our intelligence , and what we call higher cognitive faculties is "built into" the sensorium. We don't know at what level of neuronal layer the sensorium really ends and an "intelligence layer" begins. There definitely are no localizable "intelligence centers" in the brain, so the only choice left is a vastly distributed net stretching at least over the whole cortex, and possibly over the whole body, that is the seat of "intelligence", "awareness", "consciousness" or what we might choose to call the thing. But then we have gained nothing in terms of reduction because this net is just what it is: a net, connecting everything with everything.

Therefore an approach to dis-embody a pure or symbolic intelligence from the whole spectrum of the senses, is deeply problematic. This is exactly the approach taken by symbolic approaches to Artificial Intelligence . For practical and empirical reasons, this approach may be used as a working metaphor, but as we all see, the fact that this is only a metaphor is very quickly overlooked and forgotten.

After we have exorcised the sense as a non-existent phantom, we might as well go on classifying the sensorium. As a starting base we might make a list of the Impressional , Expressional and Self-Referential Spectrum available to the incorporated (embodied) human being which together form the field of awareness or consciousness, i.e. all the phenomena one can be aware of. We call this the Experiential Spectrum of human faculties. It includes actions (Expressional) which are elements of the Will. This is a somewhat different systematics than the one used by Schopenhauer. It could be objected to from different points of view, whether the main focus is primarily positivist (objective natural science), or phenomenological, or constructivist, or any other. Now it is not there to be defended, but the purpose is to give a short and concise frame of reference in preference to have no frame of reference at all.

See also the discussion of the sensorium in Appendix I

The Impressional Spectrum covers the impressions, everything going on outside the body and mind, or having to do with inner perceptions relating to the external situation.

It contains the conventional five senses: taste , smell , auditive sense , vision , tactile ;

as well as heat and cold ;

then spatial situational and spatial motional which are also called kinesthetic ;

and lastly the temporal .

Impressions are partly related to physical data of outer (objective) nature, or the environment, and can therefore be connected to physical sciences and physical research methods. This was the approach taken by Mach (MACH-EMPF , see CASSIRER-PHIL , III, 30-36).

Vision is connected to electromagnetic radiation (of the spectrum of visible light) [54]

Hearing is connected to air vibrations of a frequency between 10 an 20000 Hz.

Smell is a chemical sense, and connected to air and breath.

Taste is a chemical sense, and connected to water and eating/drinking. Taste is the most internal sense. We can only taste something that we are incorporating. Yet, the survival value of the taste sense is that most of the time, we can still spit it out again.

Heat and Cold are connected to electromagnetic radiation (of the infrared part of the spectrum) and molecular vibration.

The differentiation of Heat and Cold makes no sense physically since relative to absolute Kelvin Zero or interstellar background radiation (see appendix: background radiation) there is only more or less heat. The bodily sensorium works differently, though: There are separate heat and cold receptors. And what is perceived hot is warmer than the body, cold is colder than the body. The actual body temperature is zero, heat is plus, cold is minus, phenomenally. (see also: CASSIRER-PHIL , III, 504)

Tactile is connected to the physical properties of weight, density, rigidity, and texture of objects. Since vibrations can be perceived through touch, there exists an overlap with the vibratory sense of hearing. It also overlaps with the heat/cold sensorium. It is also a typical near-sense. We can touch only by direct physical contact.

Spatial situational and spatial motional can be derived from the tactile since the vestibulum organs in the ear are tactile hairs that provide the data (see Appendix I: Biological equilibrium):

Spatial situational gives the spatial orientation of the head with respect to the earth's gravitational field (up and down).

Spatial motional measures the acceleration.

The sensorium can be classed with respect to evolutional order. The chemical sense of taste (and derived from it, smell) is probably the oldest, since it directly relates to the most survival-related chemical distinction of matters edible and indigestible.

On the single-cellular level, the sense of touch and the sense of taste are identical, both based on the reactivity of the cellular outer membrane.

The vibratory sense comes evolutionally second. In water-based life, vibratory and sound sense was initially not differentiated. Evolutionally, the cilia of the ear (the sound receptors) are direct descendants of protozoic cilia of primodial single-celled organisms. By this, the primary means of locomotion of life (by beating flagellae and cilia) is directly connected to the sensory instrumentarium of hearing. A beating flagellum is also the first somewhat-distant sense, since it could react (a few micrometers) before actual contact with the cell membrane was made, sometimes a survival-saving margin. There was just a small evolutionary step to differentiate flagellae that acted as receivers of changes of water motion and pressure caused by any moving (and potentially dangerous) object in the vicinity which was then differentiated into sound motions when life entered the air medium.

The kinesthetic sense is morphologically related to the sense of hearing since they both are situated in the ear. The cilia which serve as auditory receptors in the cochlea are responsible for registering the gravitational and inertial forces in the vestibulum.

The youngest sense is the sense of vision, since its importance came to bear when life took to solid ground.

The sense of smell differentiated from taste when air-breathing organisms evolved.

A differentiated sense of temperature is mostly connected with warm-blooded animals. On the other hand, reptiles, especially snakes, have a very acute infrared sense which is differentiated enough to allow locality homing of prey animals. This is only possible by the very small body temperature difference between warm and cold blooded animals and could also have arisen only after the evolution of warm-blooded animals.

In an earlier era, this was called the field of the soul. Although this is not usually the subject of scientific discussion, the emotional side is not to be disregarded. These elements of consciousness, feelings and emotions, pain and pleasure, exert a strong influence on human life. As everyone will have experienced in his/her life, a strong emotion will tend to crowd out other impressions and force awareness to focus on it exclusively.

Thought clearly is not directly connected to or caused by outer impressions. That we can use thought as adjunct for our dealings with the outer world (in an organized way, this is called science and technology) makes no statement about the underlying nature of thought [55].

This covers the modi of bodily function and expression:

Ingestion and Excretion;

Breathing;

Sound and Voice;

Manipulation;

Locomotion.

As Maurer has noted, nature has not endowed the human being with a projective faculty symmetric to Voice (MAUR-COMPVIS ). We can hear another person speak, but we cannot project a visual image for him/her directly. All we can do is rely on the manipulative faculty and make physical construction which is visible. Since the process of construction takes usually longer time than that of speaking, human communication has had a preponderance of the auditory realm.

The microscope and the telescope are the proverbial technological adjuncts and prostheses that served as model for the scientific amplification of our sensorium. Technology has augmented the physically most accessible senses: Vision, Hearing and Tactile.

Here, vision has been the one favored most. Even the advances in the other senses have consisted mostly in translating their material into the visible domain. So the improvement of hearing was mostly what could be visualized. Except for musicians, people have probably lost many facilities of hearing because of disuse. Also the constant noise spectrum of civilization, let alone disco music, has done its part to dull our hearing sense. The same with the tactile sense. Here also, only a very small section, the basic mechanic impulse, and material consistency (hardness, softness, flexibility etc.) have been augmented.

Technology has not done much to improve smell, and taste. If we are thinking of it twice, we might come to realize that these senses have even deteriorated badly. Industrially processed food, chemical emissions from daily machinery (cars, computers, copiers...) and industry might be a reason why.

Of the Expressions, it has speeded up locomotion by a factor of 1000, and has extended our facility of manipulation so that we can today industrially manipulate structures smaller than a wavelength of light.

When Leibniz lived, Leuvenhoek had just constructed his first microscope (1670) just as Galileo had build his telescope (1610). Leibniz alluded to both when he talked about his Characteristica Universalis as being to the mind like those instruments to the eye. He had shared the first wonders of those researchers probing into the formerly inaccessible domains of the microscopic and the cosmic.

In his day, Descartes had just formulated his mechanical theories of sense operation which were at a very primitive stage (FOERSTER85, p. 36). 300 years later, biological science has made great strides finding out more and more about the working of the nervous system as it processes what we could consider inputs to the human or animal sensory system (photons, sound waves, chemical compounds and mechanical impulses impinging on the skin). We have found that the mechanics of the process are the same in animals and humans. Both are equipped with a nervous system functioning in the same way, i.e. by chemical and electrical action (discovered by Galvani in 1791). Let us give a little sketch of this picture and let us start at the most simple living beings: single celled organisms. Let us introduce some abbreviations for convenience:

SCO: single celled organisms

MCO: multicelled organisms

SCO like Bacteria still constitute a large part of this planet's biomass. Since about one billion years, these organisms have changed very little or not at all. In the deep sea fissures at places where hot water and gases erupt, and a totally oxygen-free milieu exists, we can find SCO which come down to us right from the first days of Evolution about 2-3 billion years ago. A SCO can process the same kind of sensory information as a higher MCO: photic, pressure waves, chemical, and mechanical. The photic sense is not very differentiated: Life in the waters or deep seas doesn't depend much on sight. There is no survival relevance in producing a visual image of the environment. For small SCO like bacteria there is the factor of the relative smallness of the organism in comparison with the length of light-waves. But the larger SCO have photo-sensitive areas and can differentiate between light and dark and will react when something a large shadow approaches. With the development of photosynthesis, we see a totally different evolutionary turn: photic sensitivity leads into life-sustenance processes. All life on earth depends on the photic energy conversion of plants. For SCO, the most important is the chemical sense: A SCO can sense chemicals as well as any other MCO. There is an overlap between chemical and mechanical sense because the SCO is so small that large molecules are mechanical sense objects for it. The mechanical sense is connected to the means by which locomotion is effected. The tiny hairs in the cochlea of the human ear are evolutionary descendants of the SCO flagellae.

The mesocosm in which water-based organic life takes place has a few universal measures of speed and reaction time lag. Inside a cell, the "information" processing is effected by the cytosceleton of the cell. Its mechanisms are not yet very well understood, because of the extremely small size of these structures. There is also chemical signal processing by dispersing messenger chemicals in the aqueous environment of the cell body. For a SCO with diameter of about 1/1000 mm to 1/10 mm, this is totally sufficient to reach an overall basic reaction time lag of about 10 to 100 miliseconds. When we look through a microscope we can see these organisms go about their behavior in much the same time scale as if we were watching a proup of macroscopic animals. We can see that the basic movement ratio is about in the order of magnitude of one body-length per second, regardless whether the creature is 1/100 mm long or 2 metres.

This movement and reaction scale is the yardstick by which larger MCO must let themselves be measured. An MCO would not be evolutionary competetive if it could be eaten up at one end without noticing it at the other end, something that was a real problem for the dinosaurs with their nerve propagation distances of 15 m.

MCO beyond the blastula stage are too big for the basic aqueous dispersion process of messenger chemicals. They have to resort to innervation. A nerve is a specialized cell type that converts the action of messenger chemicals into electrical activity and re-converts it in chemicals at the synapses. (A thought in this direction was proposed by Alan Turing, see HAKEN92, 34). The electrical action of the nerve is evolutionally secondary. In early neurology it was believed that because all nerves exhibit electrical action, the chemical coupling had been lost. This is an error. The host of different transmitter substances is a qualitative coding. This is much less known than the electrical nervous activity. All attempts to understand the nervous system by computer metaphor concentrate exclusively on the electrical model. The qualitative chemical content is lost in that picture. The brain does not receive a senseless maze of electrical pulse codes with no inherent meaning as is commonly assumed in those models. Every different transmitter substance is identical to or derives from the primordial intracellular messenger chemicals that specifically coded the sensory qualities. Of course, it is a sensible path for science to concentrate first on those aspects that are better amenable to technical tracing and modelling. But it must be insured that the other, equally important aspects of qualtitative chemical coding are not lost. (see also: FOERSTER85, p. 24)

Every MCO embryo repeats all the evolutionary steps from SCO ovum to MCO adult being. Even human embryos are amoebae and jellyfish first (blastula), then fishes, then amphibians and finally mammals and in the last months they are recognizably human. With MCO, the big divide appears: On one side plants which have no nervous system, on the other side animals, which do have one. Plants have no nervous systems, but they show stimulus-response reactions, albeit slower, than what we are used from animals. When we watch a plant with a long-time frame compression kinematography technique, we can see it reacting as well as any animal. It just reacts slower. The reason is that it cannot use the very fast signal transporting capacity of a nervous system. But any large terrestrian plant has something which is almost as good as that: its sap vessels. For example in a tree, the vessels connecting the root and the leaves (forming the cambium or outer layer of the tree-trunk just under the bark) serve as nutrient-carriers as well as chemical-signal-propagation ducts. As is known from amphibian nervous systems that don't have myelinization, the nerve must increase in thickness in order to effect a faster speed of signal propagation. Now tree sap vessels are big and wide enough to allow chemical signal propagation from the leaves to the root in a matter of minutes.

This speed is not enough for moving animals. The nervous system is the evolutionary answer to the need to keep the reaction time lag of the whole organism in the 10 to 100 msec span. The propagation speed for myelinated nerves is about 100m/sec. This serves well for even the largest mammals (whales) to remain in the 1/10 sec. reaction time gap. Myelination is a special evolutionary device to achieve propagation speeds with thin nerves that would require very thick and metabolitic-energy consuming nerves without myelination. The question of myelination or not is crucial for dinosaurs. If their nerves were not myelinated, it could very well happen that one small predator ate away a sizable hole into the tail of a brontosaur, before the nerve had propagated the message along 20 meters of nerve to the creature's sparrow brain signalling that something very wrong was going on at the other end.

Electrical neural activity has strong resemblance to modern-day computers. Nerves "fire" i.e. change their electrical potential from -70 mV to 0 to +10mV for the duration of about 1 msec (HAKEN92, 60). Intensity of neural excitation is coded by frequency up to about 100 Hz.

Neurons are interconnected via axons and synapses. The synapse is the place where the chemical messenger substance crosses the synaptic gap just as if it were to cross the intracellular space in an SCO or the intercellular space of a blastula stage MCO. Current neurology classes synapses in inhibitory and excitatory ones - in analogy to binary computer uses of addition and subtraction. The interconnection of nerves is in the form of dense webs of thousands of cells with several thousand synapses per cell.

The combinatorics of the human neural system exceed even astronomical dimensions: There are about 10¹¹ neurons with up to 10⁴ synapses i.e. connections with other neurons. This combinatorics by far exceeds the number of particles in the universe.

(Literature: e.g. HAKEN92 , 60, MATURANA , JANTSCH , FOERSTER )

Why is it that there are no descendants of sharks that made it onto dry land? The history of evolution shows a peculiar pattern: Those creatures who made it into a new dimension, or that survived major planetary desasters, were the contra-darwininans . The ones who were badly, and barely, adopted to the environment where their more successful competitors reigned. Those unsuccessful fishes that were driven by their more successful competitors, the sharks and all those other finely tuned water-racers, to the fringes of the habitat. There, they converted their fish-bladders to lungs. It were the niche-breeders that survived the jurassic holocaust which wiped the dinosaurs off the face of this planet. They were already used to hiding in the caves and crevices, and when the desaster struck, that is where they happend to be at the moment. And lo and behold, they survived the holocaust. Those mighty creatures that proudly and invincibly roamed the plains, were struck dead immediately, suffocated, froze, or starved, when the ecosystems collapsed.

The fossil record has some tricks in store for those who try to read it: First, it presents us with very unusual circumstances, under which any organic remains are preserved at all. In the normal case, any left over organic matter from dead animals or plants is immediately eaten up by other organisms. They will never reach the fossil record at all. Only in very unusual cases, like major catastrophes, do we get such large deposits as formed our coal deposits, or the strata where we find hundreds and thousands of dinosaur bones. Only if by some catastrophic event, the dead remains of all those organisms are immediately covered by inorganic matter, stone, sand, or silt, that prevents the decay access of aerobic or anaerobic organisms, will any remains be preserved. The case that we have a fossil record at all, goes therefore directly against the Lyell paradigm that is still en vogue in Paleontology [56].

This is the reason why we find no missing links. First, they were quite rare in the beginning, hardly able to survive at all among their better adjusted fellow creatures. Then, these were the ones that survived the desasters. And they are therefore not found among the remnants of those that died. The ones who died, were the over-performers, the well-adjusted, the ones who met all the expectations, who out-performed their competitors, in modern terms: the ones who always beat the Joneses in the competition game, the organization men. Their predecessors are the ones that are now embellishing our paleontology collections. In whose collection will we be the showpiece?

Nietzsche called it "die unbefleckte Erkenntnis", the immaculate cognition. It is an important finding of cognition reasearch that cognition is impossible without action. The experiment was made with kittens who will be blind if they are restrained from running around in the first few days and weeks of their lives [57]. This is very consequential, because it is an application of a more general law: If you can't move, you can't see. And even more general, it means: cognition is impossible without action. All the so-called receptor systems, what we called the Impressional Spectrum, are inextricably tied in with the Expressional Spectrum. There are no purely passive receiver systems in a living organisam. There is a direct coupling of sensor and motor systems, and one can't work without the other. Life means the same as action.

Mao Tse Dong, MAO-PRAXIS

Why is this? In the formative phase the neural sensorium learns the basic tracking rules that make us see. Initially the sensorium of any new-born animal doesn't know much about the laws of shape and coherence and change of light reflection that go with an object's physical representation in space. If you don't have these laws it is very hard to impossible to identify an object in front of you as robotics and computer vision researchers have found out the hard way. Now when you can move and simultaneously feed the data of your movement into the data you get from the retina about systematic changes in the visual field then there is a totaly different situation. Any objects will stand out against their background not because of any tricky line- or edge- or other feature detection schemes, that would have to be genetically hard-wired, but because an easily identifiable group of impressions is changing consistently and coherently in one way, as you move around, while other impressions, those of the so-called background, don't change as much. And this is all there is about the definition of background: it is just that which doesn't move as much as the things in the foreground, while you are moving and looking. So by this mechanism, are feature detectors trained in baby animals and humans. They are secondary products of the primary feedforward of movement data into the vision data. Here we find the formation of the laws of Gestalt . (HAKEN , KOEHLER , KOFFKA , WERTHEIMER , LORENZ , BRUNSWIK ).

An organism has to be active to be receptive. And in order to learn, you have to do. Stuffing in rote memory data will not be the best way to learn. Mark Twain once expressed it thusly:

The same thing applies to machine cognition. So far, implemented models have been receptive only. In order to manage the next step toward machine intelligence, technical devices will have to learn to act.

The word Character System will further down also be abbreviated with CS . As used here, Character System is equivalent with Symbol System . Leibniz had used the word Characteristica for Character System.

Let us call a CS any symbolic non-ephemeral (written, inked, etched, graphed, hewn, computer-coded, etc.) means of recording thoughts and concepts that is evolved enough to be useful (or has at one time been used) as a means of interpersonal communication. This excludes ad-hoc systems like the proverbial knot in the handkerchief, and more or less mindless scribbling, scratching or graffitying. What it includes is: All the known existing examples and remnants of human symbol use - starting with the highly evolved alphabetic systems used for transcribing the sounds of spoken languages, namely: latin, cyrillic, sanskrit, hebrew and arabic alphabets. The mathematical, professional and scientific notation systems. Pictograms and other symbol systems. Notation systems for dance and music. Then historical encoding systems for syllables and sound patterns: cuneiform and hieroglyphic writings. Ideographic writing systems like Chinese, pictorial writing like Aztec. Non-language encoding systems like the Inka Quipu. And finally patternings which we usually are inclined to call ornamental, like Navajo or Hopi weaving patterns, sand and body paintings and Shibipo pottery patterns, ornamental canons like arabesque patternings and architectonic decoration styles.

This has been treated in BIB-AG:LEIB-CHR.DOC .

The Appendix contains the relevant extracts. ->: CHAR_EVOL, p. 232

This has also been treated in BIB-AG:LEIB-CHR.DOC .

The Appendix contains the relevant extracts. ->: CHAR_SYST, p. 236

There are interesting observations connected with different writing techniques. In the development of sumerian CS, there occurred a drift in writing technique from engraving pictorial patterns into a hard substrate like stone to imprinting a soft substrate (clay) with a stylus. This drift is also visible in China where the writing technique drifted from incision or inscription in bone and tortoise shells to painting on soft and pliable media like parchment or paper. FLUSSER-SCHRIFT makes specific mention of the metaphysical significance for human thought (p.14-18).

Writing technique is influenced by the tradeoffs of energy investment needed for doing the inscription versus the durability of the material. It takes a long time for an inscription to be hewn in stone. It also will last very long. Paper, on the other hand, is very perishable, but easy to procure and to write onto. In order to make paper a feasible writing medium, society has "to be hardened", meaning that the societal structures have to be stable enough that there is a measure of certainty that paper will last long enough in the archives and library. Egypt is an exception to this since its climate dehydrates and desiccates anything organic, preserving for eternity not only papyri but also kings, cats, and kopros.

Writing on clay is an interesting synthesis of advantages because it is easy to write into and extremely durable when baked. This is why we know so much of B.C. Mesopotamian civilization.

The communication economies of the current alphabetical systems are dictated by the tradeoffs of social cost. In the societies of olden times when non-alphabetic systems were used, the much higher complexity of those systems was not a drawback but a boon: It effectively prevented the masses from breaking into the tight circle of priestly controlled knowledge which effectively stabilized those societies. The scribes had to be trained and fed for many years of apprenticeship during which a rigorous psychical training and selection process left only those that were fit to serve the commonly accepted goal without questioning or faltering. This system was still used in the middle ages by the catholic church for its best profit.

The first "sort-of" democratization of writing came about when a trader nation, the Phoenicians , created the Aleph-Bayt or Alphabet. [58] This was quickly adopted by the Greeks for their own language. The Alpha-Beta system was probably as accountable for the rise of greek philosophy and science as anything. Once the control over the writing technology was wrested from the priests, the thinking material that could be written down also was no longer under their control. Although Plato directed some very profound criticism against writing (see Phaidros), he nevertheless was a very prolific writer [59]. His disciple Aristoteles criticized Plato wherever he could, but he followed his main track and wrote even more: 445270 lines - or about 25 Megabytes of text, if we assume 50 characters per line. (DIOGENES , 251-256). If he wrote 150 lines a day, he would have had to write uninterruptedly for ten years. It is more likely that he dictated to his scribes, as well as Plato.

The heaviest economic advantage of the alphabetical system became apparent with the printing press. The chinese had had the printing press long before Gutenberg entered the scene. But the sheer number of chinese characters made a printing process with movable types cumbersome. There is a difference having to keep only about 100 different types in stock compared to 10,000 to 30,000 as in Chinese writing. Chinese printing was mostly done with wood blocks. Therefore, the Alphabet enabled smaller commercial enterprises to enter the printing business. "Freedom of the press is only for those who own one." By the economies of printing alone, the chinese system was and remained largely a government affair until phototypesetting technology became available, which allowed the many chinese types to be stored electronically.

The reason why spoken language is the most successful means of human communication so far is economy: We don't need anything more than air to communicate, which usually is in ample supply. (If there is no air, there is no one left to communicate.) In the long process of evolution, the organs of the mouth/throat area which in the animals served for the totally different functions of breathing and food ingestion, had been converted to cooperate in the act of speech generation. This is, by evolutionary standards, no mean feat and in fact it is hard to explain in a Darwinistic manner how a very long series of accidental mutations could have brought the originally unrelated muscular systems and neuronal networks of tongue, lips, and voice box to the kind of cooperation and coordination needed for language, let alone how the necessary neuronal apparatus in the brain got ready for the action of language at exactly the same time. Neither would have been evolutionarily useful or supportable without the other.

In information processing terms, the vocal/auditive system is a bottleneck for spoken language. Barely about 20 characters per second can be spoken, and about twice as much can be auditively processed. The information processing bandwidth of the vocal/auditive system is much higher than what is used in speech processing. Trained singers produce a range of modulation vastly beyond that of ordinary speakers, and a musically trained ear can distinguish pitches, tones, and variations which require thousands of Kilobytes per second.

The human visual system has a powerful capacity for information processing which is in the range of two gigbytes per second. About 100 million sensors in the retina are connected to the brain through 5 million nerves. 75 percent of all sensory information is visual. When we look out of the window into a park or a forest we immediately perceive the vast difference in texture richness and sensory stimulation that exists in comparison to our modern living environments and cities with their large sense-deprived uniform areas of unbroken surfaces and straight lines. A tree with its hundreds of branches and thousands of leaves offers a universe of potential information which we take in at-a-glance, without flinching, so to say. We usually don't notice the immense information processing our brain does for us, filtering out gigabytes and gigabytes of data to offer us a few survival-relevant alternatives in the end. Wilderness people do use the whole information, though, and we all know the feats performed by the Indians in Wild West stories, or today, Australian Aborigines.

A sequential phonetic code like the alphabet requires real-time sub-vocalization, that is translation into auditive equivalents to be understood. So the information capacity of the visual system is slowed down from gigabytes to a trickle of about 50 Bytes per second. This has been tolerable in earlier eras, but since about a hundred years, the written material accumulated by humanity has grown beyond any human capacity to process it. Specialization of areas of knowledge is a very dangerous measure to take as defence, and it seems as if we are today experiencing a lash-back of the results. Once decision-makers in society have not the slightest chance to understand the substructures of materials presented to them by experts, society is in grave danger, indeed.

Proverb

This is an old philosophical advice to those in the knowledge business . Knowledge itself is not all there is to life, nor is it the most important thing. You may not know anything, and not want to, and that will be absolutely right. Asking a question is another way of saying: "I don't know". This is what Sokrates did. And Plato believed him, and he was one of the most knowledgeable people of his time. We might assume therefore that the art of asking the right questions is superior to knowing a lot of things.

ARI-META1 I, 2, 982 b, 11-18

And from our times, we quote Heinz v. Foerster:

FOERSTER85 , 17

So I will give a little elaboration on the kind of questions I think are the most important.

I have started this work with them, The Three Big W's:

WHY = telos, purpose, the aristotelian causae: efficiens, materialis, formalis, finalis.

WHAT = ontic, being, existence.

Kant's categories: modality: possibility/impossibility, being/not-being, necessary/ contingent [60].

HOW = infrastructure, materiality, becoming

The questions of infrastructure: logical, scientific, material, technical, administrative, organization.

How much/many = quantity, Kant's categories: unity, multiplicity, omnity.

Physical infrastructure:

Where, Where From , Where To , = place, space, movement.

When = time

There are questions of alternative:

Why -- Why Not

What -- What Else

How -- How Else

And of consequence:

What if?

How much cost/effort/energy/material.

An example of alternatively applying the questions in the process of a problem solution:

How can we improve the performance of this device by a factor of two?

How Else can we get the improvement?

Why should we improve the performance?

What is the effect we gain from the improvement?

What Else will be the effects that we haven't though about yet?

How Much does the solution cost us?

What Else can we do to get the same gain?

Everyone has a specific, and mostly not very clear idea of what "thinking" is. It usually has to do with verbal representations that are transformed according to some procedures that are sometimes logical, sometimes ana-logical, or clearly ill-logical, and emotional. When someone thinks about the meaning of "thinking", he is thinking. By the very act of trying to get a verbal representation of the thing "thinking", we are reinforcing the pre-conception that thinking must be verbal. The intention here is to broaden the base of our understanding of "thinking" from the currently predominant logocentrism [61] to somethink that may encompass thinking acts that we have become disused to, or that humanity has never tried before which we could perform, if we only could imagine them. (See: HEIDEGGER-DENK).

Let us use the term mentation for a more general class of mental performances with verbal thinking as subclass.

When we solve a puzzle , we are moving pieces of molded material into different positions, until they fit. Is this thinking? Probably most people will say: it involves thinking, but the movement of the pieces is not thinking.

If I see a line drawing of a 3-d object, I can visualize [62] this design as an object in 3-d space. There is a transformation my nervous system makes for me from the flat picture into something else. This is a skill and it is learned. It is clearly not conceptual thinking. Leonardo had produced a quantum jump of perception when he developed the art of perspective drawing. (I am somewhat compressing the history of perspective viewing and drawing which began with Petrarca 's [63] ascent to Mount Ventoux . See GEBSER73 . This history is intimately connected to what we call the Renaissance ). Leonardo's most productive application was in the design of machinery and musical instruments (there is less evidence surviving about this). Because can we infer not only spatial positions from the perspective information. Leonardo was able to present his pictures of machinery such that everyone with mechanical experience can intuit the functioning of the mechanism from the drawing (ILL:LEO ). That was also a quantum jump. Leonardo had made a breakthrough for humanity that was almost unnoticed because after him, it became so ubiquitous to draw technical designs in his manner, that no one could have thought that there was any different way for doing it. Only later with industrialization came the more production oriented technical drafting method of orthogonal xyz projections that is today used in CAD.

We can now differentiate aspects of mental acts, or mentation that we are capable of performing:

1) aisthetic, with the senses and the body

All these have as their base the ratiomorph performance of the nervous system that Brunswik refers to. Subclasses are:

a. kinesthetic and visual.

b. auditory sense as used in music. Composers and musicians use it mentally.

c. smell and taste senses, involved in mentation only in very specific professions, like perfume makers and cooks, wine tasters, etc. Women usually know more about this than men. But they don't talk about it. Otherwise the general public has hardly any training to use these senses mentally.

2) conceptual with words

3) formal with abstract symbols

A wise man knows what he knows and he realizes [64] what he doesn't know.

Only Socrates can afford to say that he knows that he knows nothing [65].

Because of the enormous mass of data encoded in verbal and formal symbolisms, humanity has falsely come to the illusion that we have a lot of knowledge. That error is entirely understandable, but it is also fatal to the extreme. The visible dangers that are confronting humanity now, the ecological destruction of the biosphere, the war and poverty desasters that have befallen humanity, can at least be brought to public attention, and perhaps action can be started. But the danger of the illusion of knowledge is infinitely more deadly for humanity. Because there is so much power, wealth, and prestige invested in the game of knowledge, and pretending to know, and because knowledge is power , there would be too many empires tumbling if it became to be known more widely that we know next-to-nothing. ->: SYMBOL_POWER, p. 148

The game of knowledge begins with a fallacy. There is no such thing as knowledge. There is only knowing. Knowing is that "what you have between your ears": what one knows, and knowing how to apply it. In this respect, the famous aphorism of Protagoras: "The human is the measure of all things" has to be applied strictly [66]. Let us make an example. Assume there is some passage in some book, in some library at the other side of the planet, let's say New Zealand, that contains a specific datum [67] that would be important for me while I am poring over a problem now. In short, it is potential knowledge. But that it is written in there is most surely not actual knowledge for me, for those possible reasons:

1) I don't know that the book exists.

2) I cannot get it, because the interlibrary loan service doesn't cover New Zealand.

3) I cannot read it, because it is written in Kisuaheli.

4) I have no time to read it.

5) I have read it, but unfortunately, I glanced over that essential passage on page 225, which cited exactly what I was looking for, but since this passage wasn't in the index, I didn't find it.

6) I have read it, and fortunately found the passage relevant for me. But it is citing from another book, that was written by a chinese scholar 2500 years ago, and unfortunately, as is the use with many scholarly books, the writer unquestioningly assumed that everyone reading his book, must also be an expert in classical chinese. Therefore he didn't bother to translate it. I have had enough cases of this kind happening to me, even if they weren't chinese.

7) A variation of 6: It gives an extremely interesting quantitative formula that just necessitates me to go back to the library and study all I can lay my hands on, about general relativity theory, because to understand the formula, I just have to be an expert on general relativity theory.

8) Now comes the classical case, that has been so wonderfully expressed by Douglas Adams in his classic "The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy": I find the answer, and it is very simple and easy to understand. It is 42. Unfortunately, because of all the poring and rummaging through all the library catalogs, and so on, I have forgotten what the question was.

9) Since there are only so many books I can read in my whole lifetime, I will be ignorant in direct proportion to all the books produced which I can't possibly read. Let us assume that I can read about 3 books a week, that means over a productive live of 40 years: 6000 books. Compared to the sum total of all books written by humanity, which I arbitrarily set at 60 million, we come to an exact quantitative figure of the ignorance factor : It is 10.000. That is for each book I could possibly read, there are 10.000 which I can never read. This is universal. Therefore, the more books are written, the more ignorant does humanity get, not the other way round. Pity.

I believe that this serves well enough to demonstrate that knowledge in books is a fallacy. Knowledge that isn't living knowing in someone's head doesn't exist. This was also known to Platon who devoted his seventh letter to the theme. This letter might have been the missing link to transform all the verbiage that he left to posterity in all his works into living knowing. Some people say that he had a whole system of "the unwritten teachings" where he dealt with the matter of how the convert the dead data encoded in the grammata of writing to living, breathing knowing of the logos . This is what he talks about in Phaidros. Are we in a position to contradict him?

If I may make just one more prediction: I am quite sure that if humanity doesn't get its act together and finds a way soon to condense all that is stored as potential knowledge in all those 60 million books, so that it can be all converted to living knowing in one person's head, or maybe ten or twenty heads, it will be condensed for us by someone, or something else. And that won't be fun. Then sooner or later will the day come that duplicates those events of antiquity when all of the remaining human wisdom and learning, all that was left of those hundred thousand volumes of the Library of Alexandria , could be comfortably written down in just about 20 to 30 books. And it might come even worse.

Now, we will have to talk a little about the differences and different kinds of knowing.

There is the specialist knowledge of knowing most of, or all, the available material in some very specific specialist field, what commonly goes under the name of academic or scientific or professional knowledge. This is what everyone tries as hard as they can to learn at school and in the university.

Then there is the knowledge of knowing how all the knowledges of the specialists connect. This would be called universal knowledge . Unfortunately, it is universally supposed that this knowledge is unattainable. We have Leibniz , who was the last one of humanity to have had this overview. Unfortunately, unless this kind of knowledge is re-created somehow, humanity will have dim chances surviving. Because the universal universal knowledge is so hard to come by, we might look out whether there are in-between solutions. Technical solutions are so-called expert systems. But you have to be an expert about this particular expert system, to use it. So its usability for our intention is dubious.

To have this knowledge, you don't necessarily need to be an expert in any of the expert fields. You could act as intermediary between experts. [68] The docta ignorantia of Cusanus as method for supplying the missing links between different academic disciplines. This sounds good in theoria but has problems in praxi. Because of the so-called communication gaps . You would have to be able to understand the experts, and there is the catch. Because every expert field has their own special language, mostly using the words from ordinary language, but with specific meanings (quark, charm, spin... ), so there will be no fast and sure way to create an interface between expert languages. Since you have to be an expert yourself to understand the books written by the experts, there is no way to break the "expert circle". At some luckier times about 200 years ago, the experts wrote books that even a layman could read and understand. That era is long gone. But if you read those books, you might have a chance to get a start at a point where human "knowledge" hadn't exploded to the situation mentioned above. Again, I refer to the list of books that probably served Leibniz as introduction to his universal knowledge. It is given by Walter Tschirnhaus (TSCHIRNHAUS [69]).

And some of these gaps are part of the system of the knowledge business . Because knowledge is power, and there is so much power wielded through knowledge. There are unwritten, never acknowledged, but generally practised rules of communication between experts and laymen. We could call them also expert job security programs . How to overcome the knowledge fortifications of many experts who have the more or less unconscious mental program to formulate their knowledge such that it will be useless without them as constant interpreters of their own wisdom. This serves well for their job security, but has a rather adverse effect on the ability to solve problems and answer questions. Other unwritten laws of experts: Make the other feel as stupid as possible. That also serves as status enhancing device. If the other asks idiot questions (as below) he will be treated as non-communicable, and unless he gives a lot of money, he will be scorned.

We now come to expand the classification of mentation by an entirely unexpected, and unprecedented member. So far, thinking has only been defined by what one knows. Now, we are getting into the mentation modalities of the not-knowing . Let us recall the advice Heraklit gave us:

HERAKLIT , B18

What we have listed as classes of mentation above is now another subclass, of what is called positive or substantial mentation or: posimén [70].

We now introduce the next class of mentation: keno mentation or kenomén [71] .

When we are able to equally incorporate the things we don't know into our mentation, we have graduated to detero-mentation .

A. posimén : what we know

1) aisthetic with the senses and the body

2) conceptual with words

3) formal with abstract symbols

B. kenomén: what we don't know

It is as much possible to mentate with what you don't know as with what you do know. This is the theme of all detective stories [72]. I have called this in German Das Leerstellendenken. I have started this work in 1993 with my book "Umrisse des Leerstellendenkens" (BIB-AG:DENK.DOC ), where I outlined (Umrisse) the main features of the Leerstellendenken. Of course, there will never be contents, outlines is the only thing to the Leerstellendenken, that could ever be. It is by definition void of content. Its next historical predecessor has been the logic of Shunyata of Nagarjuna (BUDDH-CONZE58 , BUDDH-IZUZU , BUDDH-STRENG ).

The term Leerstellendenken is hard to translate, as much as any german philosophical term. The term "thinking in conceptual variables" may be appropriate. Another, quite nice description would be: "thinking in interstitial vacuities".

The Definition of a Net: Anything made with interstitial vacuities.

Dr. Samuel Johnson in COPI90 , p.154

In mathematics, this subject is quite trivial. It is called a variable or, higher up the scale, functions, and the decimal place value system is yet another application of the same principle. In logical and conceptual thinking this is more difficult. Gotthard Günther has set up a calculus of a logical place value system which he called the kenogrammatic. It becomes even harder when you try to apply it to aisthetic qualities.

I give an example:

I am asking you: Think of the conceptual Leerstelle for green.

Well, this is obvious, would you probably think: It is color.

Now I ask you: Give me an example of not green?

You may answer: red.

To which I would say: Wrong. It is loud.

Got the trick? You assumed (like everyone would sensibly assume) that I meant the immediate conceptual variable of vision, which is color, but we can go up the conceptual hierarchy of the sensory instrumentarium, of the aisthesis, and include hearing. And who will debate that loud is not green? (For more interesting ramifications on the subject, one might delve into synaisthetic experience, which some people experience. For them, loud can be green.

Let us repeat the example given above:

Humanity has lost the ability to ask questions. To ask a question means: "I don't know". People have lost the awareness of what they don't know. The specialist is only able to know things he positively knows. Of those things that he doesn't know, he is completely oblivious and unaware. That is the fatal consequence of the mode of education practised worldwide in all schools and universities, and of the competetive power game of knowledge played there and everywhere else on this world.

The game of knowledge of humanity is played as a power and domination game. This has created a huge problem for humanity. It is called "the taboo against asking fundamental questions". The one who says: "I know" will get the degree, the fat consultant's job, the big government contract. The one who says: "I don't know" is the one who will be the loser. This game has fatal consequences for humanity in the long run. Because it eliminates from the collective consciousness the ability to ask questions. Straub has written an extensive analysis of this power game of knowledge and its devastating effects for physics (STRAUB-GLAS ). But what is said there extends throughout all the fabric of human societies modeled after the western pattern.

In the olden times, when epics were the carrier of the world knowledge we now call mythology, this problem was not there. The epical knowledge structure was open towards the unknown. It always included the things one didn't know. The things one knew, one didn't have much to fuss about, even less in words. Because the things one knew were transmitted not with the words but by the deeds: through the experience. Only when knowledge became concept-based, did the split occur, and the forgetting set in. And all this has been going on since about 5000 years.

Now there is one class of questions that should undoubtedly be asked and everyone can with some persuation be brought to agree to that. But there is another, entirely different class of questions, which are not so easy to define, and which are possibly even more important, but also much more dangerous to respectability, wealth, fame, and good societal standing. I call these the idiot questions.

It has probably always been like this, and Andersen's fable of the "Emperor's new Clothes" illustrates the essential timelessness of the phenomenon: There exists a very strong societal taboo against asking fundamental questions. There is a deeply ingrained fear that asking something fundamental exposes the one asking as a fundamental idiot. I believe the last one who dared to ask idiot questions, was Sokrates. And we don't know about these questions, of course, because Plato and Xenophon, through whose works we have the only access to Sokrates' ways of asking wanted not to spoil the high impression they created about their master by relating the more silly things they had heard from Sokrates. Only Aristophanes, who wrote a satire against him, might have mentioned those foolish aspects. So today only children, idots and the drunk are permitted to ask. But actually it should be the other way around. Those whose business it is to think to the deepest, must also be allowed to ask the most idiotic questions. I cite another old proverb that states succinctly why idiot questions are so important.

Proverb [73]

When Cusanus lived, he made a high art of the idiot wisdom, but being an idiot wasn't considered as derogatory then as it is now. At that time, idiota was just the latin word for layman. Still, Cusanus gives us a reprise of the old socratic wisdom of asking the salient questions that no-one dared to ask (CUSANUS-MEN ). Heinz v. Foerster expressed something in the same vein with his aphorism:

So, there should be a 007 license granted somewhere in this society for people to be allowed to ask idiot questions. The courts of olden times had the very mentally sanitary institution of the court jester . He had the license to ask the idiotic questions that no one else dared to ask. Today, this should be the task of philosophy. Before trying to give answers to problems of the world and of society, philosophy must return to asking the forgotten questions, to pose even obviously idiotic ones, for which there is apparently no reason to even ask. I will list a few of them.

In the German language, we have a few more paths for subtle associations, and this can be put a little more elegant:

The indoeuropean language structure still contains a strong remembrance of the similarity of conceptions of things material and mental. The old riddle of materialism versus idealism is right there in the words. In the German language, there is just a small sound slide between Ding and Denken, which reveals the equally small slide in our neuronal processing mechanisms which present us with our world views according to the neuro-linguistic rules of the embedded ontologies of our languages.

This question describes the central point of a debate that has been raging for at least 2500 years, disguised as a philosophical question, but entirely vital for everything we as humans think of ourselves and do to ourselves and our fellow humans: The materialistic - idealistic debate.

The naive statement of the materialistic - idealistic controversy is this: We do experience that phenomena happen "out there". But the place where we experience them is in our perception. It is the subjective focus of our own awareness that registers everything we call "out there". The idealistic position asumes: because we experience things in our experiencing only, this aspect is the important one, and it is this which is real. In western philosophy, the most consistent position of this view was formulated by George Berkeley (BERKELEY ). Various versions of this are to be found in the indian vedic and upanishadic philosophy. Also, Buddhist philosophy takes its departure from here but it claims that neither the idealistic nor the materialistic position can hold any claim to reality.

The materialistic position states that all humans have experiences comparable to those of other humans. The world is not our private subjectivistic theater, but an arena, where we are all acting our role, and therefore, the arena is that which is the real reality. The things forming the trappings of the arena, the objects of the real world, are made of "matter", which are the main, or only reality there is.

This is also called the ontological existence of objective reality . It states that there are objective things "out there". We as humans are made of the same matter as the things around us, and belong therefore also to the material domain. Sometimes one uses the terms materialism, or positivism, to describe working methodologies derived from this assumption. In natural scientific environments, it is not called an assumption but dogmatically stated as the sole possible way to view the world, without exception.

It is now the task of science to find out by the means available, how the material things function, and if possible, to find the ultimate principles by which they function(1), and further, reduce complicated things to more simple components (2), progressing to their ultimate components (3), and to find "what they are" (in terms of their ultimate components).

1) would be the search for the "world formula", or the unified field theory, like Stephen Hawking's work.

2) could be called reductionism. For example the reduction of chemistry to quantum physics, the reduction of biology to chemistry, the reduction of psychology to biology.

3) This was called atomism until science found out, that atoms were not a-tomos, that is undivisible. Since then bigger and bigger particle accelerators are being built to smash the atoms and find their constituent components.

This assumption has proved to be incredibly productive in the last 500 years, and has brought science and technology to the height at which it is now. It is entirely practical to take this position when we want to build technical devices, because here we are dealing exclusively in the realm of the "things out there". But the question has to be posed if this approach is still justified when we come to explore phenomena like life and intelligence, lastly the whole realm of the human being.

The question to ask is if it were not better to call it an assumption, or a working hypothesis that has practical application for specific purposes, with a specified range of validity. And that should be stated so in all the schools and all the introductory seminars at all the universities the first day students learn anything about their subjects.

Because for all the working of science and technology, it wouldn't make the slightest difference of functioning and application, if we kept a little loophole in mind that there just may be something else. Of course, the whole world of humanities has built up around the idealistic world view, assuming that the only thing real is what we think. The main problem is that people from the humanities are almost stuck the same way with their assumption, and also don't have a loophole left. From this ensues the old controversy of idealism versus materialism.

Now if there were a contest for the most idiotic question of the last 100 years, this would be a sure candidate for winner.

We all know that the famous Michelson-Morley experiment refuted the existence of an ether. Let us think this over for a little bit, and ask a few idiotic questions.

1) To measure anything, you have to have something that changes, the variable, that you are measuring, and something that stays the same, the stable frame of reference, right? Otherwise, you couldn't measure.

2) Then you have to have a constant interaction between the thing changing, the variable, and the thing measuring the change. If any part of the experiment changes the interaction in an unforseeable manner, you can't measure either.

3) And the measured thing must not be changed by the act of measuring in a way that the measurement is influenced. In quantum observations, this is just exactly the case. In our case we probably don't need to worry.

Michelson and Morley wanted to measure the effect which the motion of earth moving through the then-assumed ether space had on the propagation of a ray of light. The earth travels through space in its solar orbit, with a certain speed v and a certain direction z at any moment. It traverses a distance d on its path through space as a split light beam is shot along the two arms m1 and m2 of an interferometer (which are of equal length), reflected at the ends and return to the position O of the observer. Let us assume that arm m2 is in the direction z of movement of the earth, and m1 is at a right angle to it. Let O₀ be the position of the Observer in absolute space when the light rays are first emitted, and O' the position when they reconvend after travelling along the arms of the interferometer.

See the Illustration: The Michelson-Morley experiment (ILL:MM-1 ).

If light is propagated in the ether like a water wave, then there must be a shorter time for the light ray on arm m2 travelling in direction z to reach the observer position O because O has moved to O' in the meantime, which is located at distance d from O₀.

Since light is travelling at 300.000 km/sec and the earth is moving quite slowly, the distance d is very small, but the time differential can still be measured, because of the Doppler effect : The light returning from m2 must be of a little higher frequency than the light travelling along m1. We can all experience this when a honking train approaches us, then the sound of its horn is higher than when it is moving away from us. Analogously, with light. This would cause an interference pattern when the two light rays are superimposed again.

Now the speed of the earth's movement through space is not only that of its rotational velocity around the sun (about 30 km/sec or c/10.000). Other movements have to be added. The whole solar system rotates around some central gravitational point in the center of our galaxy. And the whole galaxy is moving through the black body background radiation of the universe at a speed of almost 400 km/sec (250 mi/sec), or about c/750. That is already a sizeable fraction of the speed of light, and it amounts to a significant in change of location. If m1 and m2 are 1 meter in length, then the distance d by which the earth travels while the light traverses the two meters of up and back trip on the arm, will be a sizable 2 millimeter.

Because of this sizeable change in location it is very hard to understand why the light emitted along m1 in perpendicular angle to z to hit a mirror and be reflected back at 180 degrees hits the source point at all, since that has travelled to a different point 2 mm away in the meantime. This is a point against an ether or absolute space medium in which light travels as a wave. Or, it may mean that the earth is not travelling in this medium as a self-identical material body that is unaffected by this.

But it doesn't serve too well to support the other argument either. Because the experiment makes the tacit assumption that the length of the arms of the interferometer doesn't change when the measurement is made. This may be an entirely arbitrary presupposition.

Because Lorenz and then Einstein had stated that an object contracts in the direction of its movement. That means that not only has O moved to O' but also m2 has been shortened by some factor, which depends on the speed of earth movement. Therefore our experimental setup has changed due to general relativity, and influenced the outcome of the experiment. We should expect a frequency change due to the shortening of the arm's length.

The next question to ask is: What happens when the wave-particle dualism of elementary particles like electrons is applied to all matter? Since the ether theory presupposed something that acts as propagation medium of the light, why not apply this to all material phenomena of the universe, and not to the light only? If we are a little more persistent, we can also assume, that any matter of the universe is supported as a wave pattern of that background medium. In this case, there is no difference discernible between a light wave pattern travelling in some direction with some speed, and a matter wave pattern travelling in the same direction. In this case everything, from the interferometer arms, to the silver iodide in the photographic film, or the retinal cells, watching the experiment and registering the outcome, changes as the experiment is performed. We cannot talk about the existence of a stable base of measurement any more. All the parameters have changed: the relations between measured phenomenon, measuring apparatus, and interaction. Under this premise, should the question be asked again: Did the Michelson-Morley experiment really measure anything?

I am not a physicist, and so I don't know how all that might have an influence of the interpretation of the outcome of the experiment, but at least one can ask the question. Some physicist surely will be able to answer it.

In "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" (WWV ), Schopenhauer has given an encompassing philosophical treatment of the totality of our sensating, experiencing, cognizing and mentating facility, which he called the "Vorstellung ".

Schopenhauer was the first to find it out: "All Reality is Virtual" [74]. Or: Reality is a presentation system based on the mechanism of Vorstellung . One could also say: representation is a contraction of the words "recursive autopoietic presentation". Now the german Vorstellung is an extremely multifaceted term. In english, it can mean: (re-) presentation, (theater-) performance, conception, idea, notion, imagination, picture, demonstration. Its semantic field has a large overlap with the greek word "idea ". It is useless to try to define Schopenhauer's Vorstellung by any of the above meanings. I keep the original german word Vorstellung only for the english-speaking readers. Germans will be misled, if they think they know already what Vorstellung is. They don't. When we read his work attentively (and he requests that you wade through it not once, but at least twice!) we realize that he makes a completely autopoietic definition of the term. In german, we could say, that any and every Vorstellung we make about the Vorstellung will be entirely wrong. It cannot be understood by definition. This has served well that he was hardly ever understood by german readers.

In the following paragraphs I will be using the original german term Vorstellung because of the problem of confusion of terminology with the representational theory of cognition. This theory assumes that the nervous system produces a "representation of" the objective things "out there" (MATURANA-BAUM , 144). It assumes that the sensory system extracts physical features of a physical object and represents them in some way in the neuronal structure. This is nearly exactly the opposite what Schopenhauer intends. Elaborating on the work of Kant, Schopenhauer stated that it is quite impossible to get any direct cognition of "the world out there" or "das Ding an Sich", the thing-in-itself. He states that there is no use to talk about a thing (in-itself) out there, because we have no way of ever knowing what it is. In Schopenhauer's sense, there is no "of": the representation is It.

All we get is the Vorstellung fabricated for us by our sensorium. A similar position is made by today's constructivists. Except that apparently they don't seem to be as radical to eliminate the objective thing entirely. What we perceive as the totality of our sense impressions appearing to us as "from outside", but also all internal perceptions, like thoughts, moods, feelings, etc. is an extremely elaborate theater of fabrications performed by our nervous system every instant of our life. What correspondence we have with this something we call the "external world", in scientific terms is also part of the Vorstellung, but it is not individual, subjective Vorstellung. The only proof for the validity of our representation is Darwinian: We have survived as individuals or as species, because we have a fitting representation. Our representation must be fitting, or we couldn't talk to our fellow humans about it, work together at it, or beat each other over the head with it.

We repeat the core statements of Schopenhauer and Heinz v. Foerster:

FOERSTER85 , 25

(WWV I, 32 )

Now we need to talk about an important detail, just to avoid the problem that Schopenhauer might be interpreted as making a subjectivistic statement. The above does not mean that this is all there is to the world, it is not only my private, subjective Vorstellung. That is a very salient point to make. Here we see the incredible subtlety of the german word play that Schopenhauer performed. Because we can turn and twist the Vorstellung any way we like. It means individual imagination, but also a theater play, or possibly even a marionette theater, with mechanical actors on strings [75]. The Vorstellung as a quite autonomous machinery. Konrad Lorenz had misunderstood Schopenhauer fatally in this respect. (LORENZ-NAT , p. 120).

To speak of a mechanism, or an infrastructure of the collective Vorstellung is very difficult. We will have to enter the semiotic domain, and the autopoiesis of language for this. But that is not where it starts. Even one billion years ago, when no-one there thought of thinking, was there a collective Vorstellung. Now we see that the supra-subjective Vorstellung is a theater. That is nicely wrapped into the german term. Here we see how Sch. has entirely left behind the idealistic position, that it is the subject that is responsible for all the theater. Schopenhauer is extremely outspoken against the idealistic position as well as the materialistic (WWV I, 61-70). C.G. Jung has tried something in this line, but he seems to have landed on the idealistic or subjectivistic terrain again. It is so difficult to understand Sch.'s thought tracks, because humanity doesn't seem to be able to think in any other than either the materialist or the idealist position. To keep the opinion in suspense right in the middle is tantamount to a mental balance act on a highly instable position.

For the time being, let us assume that for whatever there may be "out there", we need not be too concerned about because our Vorstellung gives us adequate means to deal with it, most of the time. All our physical theories and all our instruments we have fabricated, give us more accureate representations of the Vorstellung. What we are doing with science, is to get a finer infrastructure of representation. And that's all that is needed. In philosophical diction, we don't need to affix the ontological dogma to "the thing out there". It is just a practical metaphor. Science is not there to ask metaphysical questions, nor should it try to enter the philosophical arena presupposing it could validate one or the other metaphysical dogma.

Schopenhauer has been most radical refuting the idealists as well as the materialists and this is the entry point, or we may call it "the crack in the cosmic egg". The question is one of economy. Today, natural science, basing its research on the ontological assumption which has become dogma, devotes enormous resources in terms of capital and human energy, as well as enormous machinery to make experiments about the inner fabric of nature. Not to mention the big-science approaches to Artificial Intelligence and neurological research. Now how would it if we take a fresh tack or a different approach at the problem, like Schopenhauer has proposed?

If there is any possibility that he was right, and there are indeed strong reasons to this, then a very moderate amount of research can give us a handle on the fabricating machinery that is creating this whole universe for us. Schopenhauer needed only his desk, his paper, his ink, and a few books, and his brains to go about his work. We have a computer today, and that might help us speed up part of the process. It will not relieve us from thinking hard, and ask the right questions, and work at consistently honing our ability to improve our art of asking the right questions. So that is the approach we might learn from him, in our modern search for "the crack in the cosmic egg".

Had Schopenhauer known the word autopoiesis , he would have used it for his work. In the intruduction to the first edition he writes:

(WWV I, 9 )

His whole system is autopoietic. The key terms used cannot be defined except through their use in the whole work. That makes understanding it so difficult. His introduction makes a direct statement against Kant's architectonics of pure reason. But somehow, Schopenhauer seems to misunderstand this to mean that no structuring at all and a convoluted style of writing seems to be the hallmark of deep thinking. That is exactly what he complains about in the style of his hated enemies of the german idealistic school: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. We can see an application of the old principle "le plus il change, le plus il reste le meme". Here it may mean: the more someone tries to be different, the more he is the same. We cannot avoid the impression that all writers of all schools of german philosophy seem to have considered the day when punctuation marks were invented as a black day of literate humanity. Schopenhauer even seems to think that subtitles for paragraphs are entirely useless, and so he doesn't use any. In this way he is worse than either Kant or Hegel, and he erects more barriers against the understanding. In terms of writing style, I sure wish that all the german philosophers would have turned devotees of John Locke, and that no doctoral thesis should be accepted by any university, and no book should be accepted by any publisher, that didn't have the same type of structuring as John Locke used in his essay (LOCKE-ESSAY ).

Individual Vorstellung Collective Vorstellung

Subjective

-> neural processes, sense qualities words, concepts, mentation ideas

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-> Verstand (intellect)

Vernunft (reason)

^ Reine Vernunft

^ pure reason

Incoming

stimuli

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

connection to the

social sphere, language

shared representation

with all human beings

To treat the Vorstellung as one coherent field allows us to apply the same principles of autopoiesis to the biological field of organisms as well as to the semiotic field. The question is the same in both fields: to have an empirically adequate methodology without falling to the ontological error (ECO-EINF , 361, 362, 365). In Semiotics , there is the same phenomenon of the autopoiesis of language , which cannot be reduced. The hermeneutic circle is but one expression for this.

While the Verstand part of the Vorstellung is that which operates in the autopoietic system of an individual organism, the Vernunft part is in the autopoietic domain of language, the supra-individual, or collective domain. It gives a handle for dealing with those phenomena which C.G. Jung is referring to in his psychological theories (JUNG ).

Thus we have here a coherent base of a syn-aisthetic theory. The sensory instrumentarium Verstand and the conceptual Vernunft system can be treated with one un-interrupted metaphor for the construction of the symbolator .

Because of the barriers he has erected for us, there are not very many people who have read Schopenhauer to the depth necessary to find out about his relevance for modern computer and multimedia technology.

No ontological dogma is made about the "true nature" of the incoming stimuli. All we need is that something is activating our sensory system. All what we think is the world is the production of our sensorium. If we use technical instruments, so much the better. That is also Vorstellung. And everything we do on the effectuation side is also happening in the theater of Vorstellung.

This gives us the immense advantage that we don't need to make a difference between those parts of the Vorstellung, which we traditionally call "external", the pictures we get of "reality", and our technical sensing tools, and the internal parts, our concepts. They are all in one and the same spectrum.

This advantage can be brought to full bearing when we are talking about computerized intelligent systems. We finally see that there is no difference in principle between our sensorium and the computerized models we build. And we don't have to be mechanistic or materialistic when we go about it. We just have to suspend judgement. This has been called the "neti neti" principle by Gautama the Buddha 2500 years ago. It is not necessary to impose the dogma of ontological reality of physical objects. We know that they perform according to the laws, and if these laws are the Vorstellung that only makes things easier.

What can I do to spare the interested reader the agony to have to wade twice or three times through Schopenhauer's mental contortions? I cannot readily convert WWV into a Virtual Reality presentation, even though that would be an entirely fascinating project. But fortunately there is my favorite visualizer, Maurits Escher, ready with a solution. I have added the pictures to the copied version, unfortunately they are not yet incorporated as scanned pictures in the disk version. The pictures are ILL:ESCH-1 and ESCH-2 .

His "Hand with reflecting globe" (ESCH-1) is quite famous, so we might do even without the picture. It is a reflecting sphere that Escher holds in his hand, reflecting all the details of the room, and Escher himself.

We now need only to make a few minor tranformations of this picture. The first is very easy. Just abstract the person from the sphere, than you see only the picture of the room with the furniture. I have included that in ESCH-2 .

The next thing is a little more difficult: Now convert everything from convex into concave, and extend the outer dimension to infinity. Then you have a hollow sphere and you are right in it. All you see is perfectly reflecting surfaces with pictures of strangely contorted dimensions. You might see some parts of your nose and your body dangling in the picture, but they are not very important.

This picture is in principle the same as Plato's cave parable, except that it is not dark and shady, but bright and shining, just like we usually experience our world. But the principle is the same. Because of the infinitely reflective surface, we can never look behind the glass walls. All we have to be content with viewing is the performance of dancing images on the hollow sphere.

Escher even gives us a view at the dynamics on the fringes of the Vorstellung, the look it has when we come to the ends of our world. This is given in ESCH-3 , the title is "Circle limit 1". We see a circle filled with complementary figures of black and white which become smaller and smaller towards the limits of the circle, and becoming infinitely many and infinitesimally small as we approach the limits of the circle infinitesimally. The same phenomenon is happening when we look at the universe with our telescopes: We see ever and ever increasing numbers and stars in farther and farther away galaxies, and these are moving away from us ever faster the more they are distant from us. Wherever we look in nature, the complexity rises in direct proportion with the power (and the cost) of our instruments. We may say: Nature just has this perplexing quirk of presenting us with ever increasing complexities the further we go on enquiring. We just have to continue pouring money in the research, and we will finally reach complete certainty. Or we may first think, and then say: Well, it might not be in the "thing out there" that is presenting us with the complexity, but it has to do with our viewing apparatus, with the properties of the Vorstellung. This is exactly what I mean. As long as we don't chain ourselves too much to the dogma that we are trying to discover something ontologically real "out there", we can always go on doing what we like to do, still get the same results, but not being confined by them.

We don't even need to have a scientific Vorstellung. When we look into human history, we see that old cultures acquired ever more elaborate and complicated pantheons of gods, devas, and spirits, the more mature the culture became. Towards the final days of ancient Egypt we see an immense increase in the elaboration and complexity of the cults and the hieroglyphic symbols (see SAUNERON ). The same happened in Aztec Mexico. Here it was more gruesome with tens of thousands of human sacrifices to be performed to please the vengeful gods. When the principle had worked well in former times, then, more of the same must help more. Especially if the times are bad, then you just have to pour in your resources, make the offerings all double, so that the angry gods will finally be pleased.

That was not just stupid superstition, but the same law of Vorstellung acting itself out. The world picture of these cultures became more and more enriched with those countless gods and local spirits, and each spirit had their offerings, their prayers, and their priests. You can also state the law the other way round: The complexity of the pantheon, the religious observances to be kept, and the sacrifices to be performed rises in direct proportion to the number of priests that have to be fed and kept. It may be dangerous to reformulate this statement to apply to present-day societies, with their continually swelling numbers of lawyers, public servants, and scientists, but I thing we get the picture. Spengler had made his point quite correctly, even if it is necessary to overhaul his findings a little bit. This continues until the whole society collapses because people become so preoccupied with their spirits that they don't have time any more to feed themselves or defend against foreign intruders.

We may think that we are today beyond such nonsense. But wait a few more years, I think that many of you reading this will discover rather sooner than later that our civilization is not exempt from this. I have said in the introduction that it will be about 20 more years before we will find out.

Now we come to the acid test. What is the ontological base on which the Vorstellung rests? Schopenhauer has introduced the Wille for this purpose, but let us just for the mind jogging exercise assume that we didn't know about Schopenhauer's solution. We cannot hold it with Berkeley and pretend there is an omniscient and omnipotent god in whose metaphysical mind all our world is happening as a divine dream. And even if we pretend that, we must be able to present an infrastructure for this dream. What is the substrate for the dream? What is the logical mechanics of this system? Because God wouldn't have needed to create the laws of logics and nature if SHe hadn't intended to abide to them HERself. And that is what Berkeley forgot, or, he just didn't have the conceptual apparatus available. Happily, Leibniz stepped in the breach, and set about working, and with the binary system and formal logics he found just what was needed. It just took a trifle 300 years to evolve to the point of usability. God's mills grind slowly, but ever so fine.

And now we return to our Michelson-Morley question. Because here we may need the alternatives for the ontological assumption we had been asking about. Let us assume there is a base substrate of the Vorstellung. This substrate supports the "material" world as well as the subjective and suprasubjective world. In modern terminology, we might call it not a material substrate but an informational substrate. Except that this is not information as it is defined in informatics. Because in informatics, information is defined physically. Here it is underlying physics. And because in a technical application, the word metaphysical is not well-liked, we call it hypophysical, see also Descartes [76] . The hypo- prefix indicates that there is a mechanism underlying physical appearances and seamlessly leading into them, just like quantum physics leads seamlessly into chemistry. Out of this hypophysical informational substrate, or matrix, physics is made, but it in itself is not physical. Of course there is a physical derivation of it, and this is what informatics calls information. But that is not all there is to it. And especially not when we apply it to the case of living beings, intelligence, and everything the idealists are so dead set about defending against the materialists. Because they have something worth defending. And it will be destroyed when treated the materialistic way. We will get to the details of this in the proper section in the technical part. See .->: COMPUTING_SPACE, p. 55

The core of Schopenhauer's philosophy is totally concordant with modern computer technology. The problem is: no-one knows it. He may have had some opinions on physics, that may strike us as funny today, but that is no problem. The core thinking behind the system of Will und Representation is not affected by that. The core question of artificial intelligence is how to get that supposedly stupid matter out of which our silicon chips are fabricated to behave intelligently. By Schopenhauer's reasoning, it is the will behind the stone falling to the ground, and us acting as if we had a will. So, there is the same principle behind apparently dead matter and living organisms. Only by a difference in degree, not in principle. Herewith, the old cartesian mind-matter split is overcome. And that is all that is needed. As long as there is not some idealistic trap hidden somewhere, the principle can be applied for technical solutions.

There is one small problem remaining with the will. In the present wording, "the will" is impossible to accept for any natural scientist and engineer. It just smacks of german idealism, or worse still, of Nietzsche even if that is the last thing Schopenhauer had intended. We need a more technology-transparent wording of "the will". If you call it "the essential function foo", you might fare better. Because every programmer on this planet knows what "foo" is: It is that undescript name of that undescript subroutine that is so important that it is impossible to create a significantly sounding name for it. Therefore you call it "foo" [77].

If we look hard enough, we find that this is exactly what Schopenhauer had in mind when he invented that thing which he unfortunately called "the will". The reason was of course, that Sch. had inherited his idealistic background from Kant, and he couldn't so easily shake that off, even though he tried as best as he could, not to fall into the same idealistic trap, that all his predecessors since Plato had happily come to stumble into. That is a little bit of his tragedy, because he hated the idealists Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte so much, that he didn't notice the effect of the old adage "the more you try to be different, the more will you be the same". (Emphasis added).

If Sch. had been as smart as Newton, he would have called his new principle "Impulsity" and then declared to everyone who had asked him what this meant: "hypotheses non fingo" (NEWTON-MAT , 233). The heck I know what it is, all I do, is to describe how it works. And that is all that is needed if we want to operationalize it, i.e. build a technical device with it. A ballistic missile doesn't have to understand Newton's theory of gravity either, does it? How does it know that it is supposed to follow this arc? Of course that is a question we may not ask scientifically.

For Schopenhauer, the will was a dark natural force that underlies gravity as much as electricity and chemistry. It can be described by its actions but it cannot be understood, because it is the "thing-in-itself". It also acts in humans and is then called: desire, urge, impulse, and only sometimes: "my will". Therefore the term is so misleading that it has effectively prevented anyone from realizing what Schopenhauer was actually talking about. The philosophers never bothered to read Schopenhauer because he had so violently attacked them. And the natural scientists never bothered, because the will smacked too much of German Idealism. And they just had enough of the whole "Hegelei", as Schopenhauer had aptly named it.

"Impulsity" is entirely concordant with all physical principles that we know, and also all that we will ever come to know about. Of course it is not a physical principle at all, but it is metaphysical. But for Newton, gravity was also metaphysical. That didn't matter, as long as you could enter it into your calculations. If only the cannon ball landed right were it was supposed to land. Only now are we trying to make it conform a little more to our physical theories by describing it as curvature of space. Whatever that may mean. Unfortunately I belong to that five billion unfortunate humans who don't understand general relativity, opposed to about a hundred people since 1920, who supposedly do understand it.

What Schopenhauer meant was to close the abyss between idealistic and materialistic ideologies. Since each ideology thinks its version is the-one-and-only-one there is, and the proponents of the other side are just bloody idiots, anyone who is only half-way sane in his mind must immediately see that there is something entirely nonsensical going on in this ideology theater since 2300 years. Because when you take the time and the effort, you will realize, that each side has entirely valid reasons for its proposal. If you listen long enough to an intelligent man giving you the one version, you cannot but finally nod and say: "Yes, you are right". And when you go then to the other party, it will be exactly the same. Since somehow I had not been able to make up my mind about one side or the other, and since I have never definitely joined any of the two parties, I experienced myself criss-crossing over this abyss constantly. No wonder that some people (who were more firmly lodged in the one camp or the other) thought that I was a little strange. If you do this criss-crossing long enough, you have these possibilities: 1) Either you go mad [78], or 2) you become an under-cover schizophrenic [79], or 3) you decide one day to stop that silly game.

Except, how do you do it? It is nothing less than the Münchhausen Trick you need to perform. Lift yourself by your pigtail, or your bootstraps.

Schopenhauer did it, Konrad Lorenz did it, and god knows how many other people did it. Did they succeed? You can, with Konrad Lorenz, assume that there is just a dualism of aspects that is there, because you haven't collected enough data on the thing, or you can do it like Schopenhauer, call it a continuous field, the representation, and compress the unknown, and unknowable, remainder in one word, the will, and say: that's all there is. Now comes the difficult part: how do you explain the mechanics of that will, or rather the information infrastructure? Because obviously, if ever we are to get a technical handle at it, it must be through the metaphor of information. Mechanics just isn't suitable. This is how we arrive at the hypophysical principle. It underlies the mechanical physics, it can simulate the physics, but that is not the only thing it can do. And it does many, many things more that physics can't even dream of. For example creating life, and intelligence.

And because it creates all this, and does this according to quite clear laws and formulations, it is scientific. It is even materialistic, if you take the liberty to revert to the antique definition of the materia. No problem at all. I hope Konrad Lorenz will be content with the solution I propose. So we don't need to bother any more about the materialistic-idealistic split. Whether that matter out there is the only real thing there is, or whether it is our mental fabrications, or the ideas behind them. We have exorcised the materialistic-idealistic demon.

Adopted from: The Beatles , Yellow Submarine

Now, while we are at the verge of creating silicon-and-electron-based intelligence, we must overcome the split, otherwise we are running against conceptual barriers that are keeping us from further progress. In order to conceive of such an evolving intelligence, it must be concordant with the force that drives the universe. This force is "impulsity", called "the will" by Schopenhauer. And it does just what it says: it drives the universe. It is the aristotelian prime mover, and therefore to name it "impulsity" is entirely justified. The prime mover is also the Kantian "thing in itself". So we would have done justice to Schopenhauers intentions. And since it is just there, unfathomable, unexplicable, but acting according to clearly describable principles, it is just the same panacea for Artificial Intelligence, that Newton's law of Gravity was for ballistics, rocketry and man-to-the moon travel. And a few more things.

The technical intelligence that is evolving here, is not "artificial", but a new form of expression or objectivation of impulsity. Humans have their role as effectuators in this drama. It is not human will that creates this phenomenon, but the impulsity manifests as the driving force of the technology and the market that are causing [80] the researchers in their labs to do the work.

And beyond anything else, this development is entirely within the scope of natural evolution. And it is necessary and inavoidable. We refer to the work of Manuel DeLanda, "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines" (DELANDA-WAR ).

And we are in a particular interesting kind of deadlock game. There are two things sure beyond any doubt:

1) If we don't create the mental super tools with the built-in intelligence, we have no chance solving the societal and environmental problems that are waiting for us in that "bloody reality out there".

2) If we do succeed creating the technical super-intelligence, it will do with us exactly the same thing we did with the neanderthal men, or whoever was our direct forerunner on the evolutionary ladder: exterminate him without mercy. This evolving intelligence will try to eat us for breakfast as soon as we have created it. Nothing immoral about that. The chicken has to break the egg while it is hatching, doesn't it?

This is the very real danger in store for us. Before we all despair, lets have a few words of consolation:

1) The situation is hopeless, but it's not serious.

2) We have got no chance, therefore, lets use it.

3) It could all be much, much worse.

(For example if things would be going on indefinitely longer exactly in the style they had in the last 5200 years. Maybe you would like that. I don't.)

Sounds silly? Oh no, it's just paradoxical. And that is what we need to learn. Remember Heraklit:

HERAKLIT , B18

He meant it so, and so do I mean it.

All quotations from (LORENZ-NAT ).

Most natural scientists consider philosophy a subject not worth their time, and most of those who have a try at it, seem to think of it at best as some kind of "ancilla physicae [81]". Konrad Lorenz saw in philosophy a deeply needed integrative factor in the progress of modern sciences.

Lorenz sees two complementary mental modes that are underlying the differences in character of a natural scientist and a philosopher. These character traits are polar, and tend to be mutually exclusive. The philosopher type is more introvert, the scientist is more extrovert. The scientist works by induction, the philosopher by intuition. The characteristic of the philosopher view and experience is the Gestalt [82]. This view tends to consider details as unimportant because the detail disappears in the total quality of the Gestalt. (104) His main strength is his power of intuition, the grand overview, the view how everything connects in the grand picture.

The scientist, on the other hand, has as strong traits his inductive and causal analytic abilities, and his weakness is intuition. He has no access to the immediately intuited truths of the philosophical seer. He tends to question or even negate the relevance of the philosophic view, or that there should be any such thing as a philosophic science. Whereas the general consensus opinion of most natural scientists seems to be this kind of negation that there could be any use for philosophy, Lorenz clearly sees the urgent need for philosophical guidance of the natural sciences. He states that even though in natural science the intuition is not part of the scientific agenda, there would be no scientific discovery without it. Intuition always leads the way for scientific inquiry (107).

Lorenz is very pronounced to exclude any extranatural mysticism about intuition. For him, this is a phenomenen closely connected to Gestalt cognition. The Gestalt cognizing performance of the nervous system is involved in the process of intuition (107-110). This is also the connection to the higher functions of aisthaesis mentioned above. Whereas in the sense perception the Gestalt is a product of direct perception, the intution is a process that involves more of the conceptual (Vernunft) aspect. But both are not different, based on the same nervous principles.

Out of this deep understanding of the intuition, Lorenz is able to indicate the specific value of the intuitive philosopher to overlook the grand perspective (116-119). Balancing the strengths and weaknesses of both the intuitive and the inductive approach (118-119), Lorenz arrives as his conclusion at the unequivocal statement:

Konrad Lorenz had made this demand of his philosophy:

(LORENZ-NAT , 120)

Let us see what can be done about those requirements. Philosophy wouldn't deserve its name if it didn't have a few tricks up the sleeve to throw into the game. First, let us do a little etymological exploration of the semantic field where the word materialistic derives from. Materia derives from the word mater meaning mother . In Greek, this was called meter , and tae meter , or Demeter was the other name of the ge , or gaia , the mother earth . In Latin, we have the natura , (from nasci , giving birth) the womb that gives birth to all existing things of nature, which is called physis in Greek, from phyo, phyein , for begetting, procreating, creating, growing. Then there is the field of phyto which covers everything relating to plants, then phyllo which covers all the leaves, and grass. We can then jump to the field of hyle (wood, forest, trees, building material, matter, the famous term used by Aristoteles in his philosopical meaning). The hylourgos is the same as the daemiourgos , or the tekton . And from there to xyle, which also gives rise to a whole collection of words all dealing with wood and woodworking. We can see that wood had some deeper meanings for the Greeks. But this was common in all ancient cultures, where trees were deities of their own right.

Then phylon, phylae, which means tribe, nation, military company. We then have the field of physao, physeo, relating to breath and breathing. Not far from there is phone, the sound.

From materia , we come to matrix which means womb, and the matrix is the source from which all material things are born by gaia, physis, or natura, the birth giving one. The greek word for matrix is hystera. Then there is hyssakos , or hyssax , meaning cunnus in latin. The root hyster- also stands for later. Because the matrix gives birth to all the existing things, we can call it the hypo-physis. The one that is preceding, and underlying the physis.

With this, we have covered a lot of the ancient and modern terminology pertaining to nature, creation, existing material things. For more material, please see ->: ONOMA_SEMEPHON, p. 369 and ->: SEMEPHON_NET, p. 391.

When we are using the word root of materia we should be aware of all the ancient connotations connected with them. ->: UNIVERSE_MATRIX, p. 55

--------------------------------

This is the core question that will be addressed in the text further on and it will be viewed from different angles. Most truly and undoubtedly, the subjective element has to be excluded from the scientific pursuit. The "aristotelian trap" that we have here is that there doesn't appear to be any alternative than to presume that the "extra-subjective reality" must rest on the ontological existence of objects. To carefully unhinge this trap is the aim of this work. The salient question is what kind of questions we can ask about the nature of the reality that we call the out there. Out there, it is without any doubt, but it can also not be doubted that we experience the out there in our experience, and nowhere else. The naive subjectivistic view, that the wourld is nothing but my personal imagination, is surely to be discarded. But what if we assume a different kind of "Vorstellung" (Schopenhauer)?

There is a middle ground, that is being described as "informational" in essence. Yet it is not information as defined physically.

The most important requirement for a philosophy of natural science has been stated by Lorenz indirectly:

This can also be applied to metaphysical assumptions. It is difficult to do, but one can behave "as if" there was an "ontological existence of objects" and make this the stringent requirement of all science, but one must also keep this belief in suspense. One must not fall to the subjectivistic nor the objectivistic trap.

---------------------------

This is as true as it is necessary. The old dualistic split is unbearable and should be exorcised, but not at all costs.

----------------------------

The only point where I am at (ever so slight) variance with Lorenz, is how Schopenhauer is to be viewed in this game [83]. And I don't make the claim that I understand Sch. better than Lorenz. The only claim I make is that Sch. can be interpreted in a certain way, yielding certain results. Surely, Sch. was a descendant of the idealistic school. But he was anything less than a Kantianer . And in a way Sch. dared to think his own way through the dilemmas of so-called objective and subjective reality as independently as Planck, who is cited by Lorenz as one of the true followers of the spirit of Kant (LORENZ-NAT, 129,130 ). So I tend to view Sch. and Planck more similar in outlook than might be supposed. Both dared to think beyond Kant, to change something of his mental edifice. Both did it in different directions, but this might not be as different as would be supposed.

The question is of course, the ontological existence of objective reality.

The problem understanding Sch. is in the meaning of the word "Vorstellung". Since this word is so multifaceted, it is very easy to understand it as meaning "a personal imagination". Each one of us does indeed experience the world in his or her experience only. That is the subjective character. But here enters the other meaning of "Vorstellung" as a theater performance. The performance is performed by actors other than the experiencing subject.

---------------------------

Lorenz is one of those few deep thinkers who succeeded asking some very fundamental questions without being driven out of the scholarly consensus reality. He even received the Nobel Prize. This doesn't mean that any of what he said was put into action or served to enhance political programs. But anyhow, what he said could be used to start a coordinated effort of humanity to "turn the steering wheel around" and rebuild the world.

---------------------------

Lorenz states that the insights and working methods of ethology make it the predestined candidate of natural sciences for dealing with the human realm.

Ethology [84] is a natural science that has the human being as its object more directly than any other science. (p. 18-19)

There are two different types of aggressive and competetive behavior that need to be distinguished: 1) between people of equal social ranking, and 2) between different ranking levels.

It has to be noted that the rulership and dominance patterns of the power elites have set a social standard through the "lawful" exercise of force, and in "civilized societies" through more subtle forms of domination. War making is one of those effects of institutionalized domination of the power elite over their subjects that is based on the fact that those doing the fighting and the bleeding, are not asked beforehand, if they really want to fight and bleed. Those who command the armies, do so out of a cold calculation, with a much reduced risk of personal hazard. It has been common military practice, that a higher officer, if captured, will be treated better, than the low ranks. Often, the captured officers were even treated as guests by their captors. As long as intra-species aggression can be played like a chess game, and as long as this kind of game mentality is the pervading attitude of the power elite towards fellow humans, and towards nature, there is very little hope that anything in this world will change.

NIETZSCHE-MENSCH , I, 19

From: SOFT-ENCYC

I have found it of educational value to juxtapose these two diametrically opposite statements about number as an entree to the question. Of course, I don't want to write a whole dissertation on just the subject of number, even though it might be entirely warranted. But we will have to revert to it later. There is still the Oberschelp question waiting in store for us. Are the number systems we use today suitable for appropriate representations of the universe - on the very microscopic and the very macroscopic scale? Or is our current numbering an affair of the mesocosmos, like our conceptions of time and space, to be discarded for a grander scheme of thinking things?

See also: ->: COMPUT_FUNDAMENT, p. 53

Now some people would answer with a curriculum vitae in this mode: "My name is John Doe, I was born on xxth of March, 19xx in Oklahoma City, USA. I went to the local highschool, and had stright A's on graduation. I then got my bachelor's degree from..., I have a PhD in... from Harvard University, I entered as a trainee in the controlling department of the xxx-corporation, I became assistant to the general manager ..., on xx.xx.xx I was promoted to supervisor of controlling, I am married to ..., I have two children..., my hobbies are..., my religion is... "

Gnothi sauthon, "know thyself", was written on the lintel of the temple of Delphi. Goethe and Nietzsche re-expressed this profound statement when they said:

Become what you are.

This is part of the personal story. I wouldn't have written this work if I had been content with version 1) even though I would have had a much easier life if I had done this. For myself, I find this Gnothi sauthon a perpetually continuing process, a truly "never ending story". And it is like an onion with an infinite regress of peels. In the East, there is the idea of the spiritual seeker, but the sad truth is that there are very few people here in the West who have ever made it through that other infinite regress of peels of "Karma Kola" false ideas of what the eastern idea of the eastern spiritual seeker actually means (See: BHARATI-OCHRE ). Since I have had my share of that experience, I am now wiser and don't pretend that this path is available for me or for most of us, here in the West. I therefore have turned to the western sources, which we, as most people are wont to do, undervalue, and forget to the favor of some unknown exotic recipes.

My preliminary answer to the question, is therefore about like this: I am a Glasperlenspieler. Of course there is also an abounding lot of misconception about the Glasperlenspiel. I don't rigidly stick to what Hermann Hesse has made out of the idea, but I take his essay as point of departure. I have copied out the two pages from his book which contain what I think is the essence of the Glasperlenspiel ->: GLASPERLENSPIEL, p. 309, ->: HARMONICS, p. . 416

A lot of these higher-up-the-scale issues on the Maslow Pyramid of Values has to do with the question: What happens of me when I die? This was also what prompted Kant to do his work on the Critiques. He had scrupulously set about testing all the spiritual recipes that he had available through his cultural background (christian). And he found that they didn't stand to the test. Metaphysics was of no use. Today people are turning to the East, but I fear they are running after another phantasmagory. So I have come to ask myself the same question over again. Of course, when I die, what was I doesn't disappear, but it continues quite lively as it returns in one way or the other to the biosphere. As parts of the biosphere we are as immortal as nature on earth herself. (If humanity doesn't succeed to blow up or poison the planet real soon now as we have a good chance to do). But somehow that doesn't entirely comfort our ego. What becomes of the personality, of the soul? Is there such a thing as an immortal soul (asked Kant)? Buddhism says no, and it gives good reason for this. [85] The problem lies in the conceptual apparatus: to think of a thingness leads us already on the wrong track. It is better spared out of the thinking altogether, defined as no-man's land. Not even, and especially not, the religion is allowed to meddle with it. Once we got that we are better off. Because even if we don't subscribe to Buddhism, we become accustomed to the idea that we don't use the right modes of thinking yet, to solve the relevant questions of life. So, while it is not my task to propose a religion, or a philosophy, I find it fit to advocate the opening of gaps in our conceptual systems, and that is mainly what I am doing in this work. To repeat the quote from above:

Adopted from: The Beatles , Yellow Submarine

There are many possibilities to open up cracks in the cosmic egg, if we only look hard enough. And I think that is essentially the job description of the Glasperlenspieler. It is an interesting exercise of double-think to watch the process of Josef Knecht when he understood what his real task was, and that the so-called Glasperlenspieler order of which he was the head, had long lost itself into yacc : yet another civilatory cage. So he made the jump - into the cold water. But that ending was really Hesse's problem. Currently human consensus reality has lodged itself firmly in some not-quite-so-comfortable spot, at least for my liking, and it will take quite some jolting to make it come unstuck. Better we do the jolting ourselves than wait for someone - or something - to do it for us. Because come it will, if you like it or not.

I have to place this paragraph in this odd corner because I don't have a section in the text structure yet where it would fit better.

I have had to read my book about two to three times myself, before I did figure out myself what I had written. This is not a silly joke. I have said it before that I have gotten used to "think directly into the text editor". What this means is hard to explain, because it touches some vital questions about our authorship of this "thing between the ears", the machine that produces our thinking. We are much less the reigning souvereigns of this machine than we are mostly inclined to believe. My impression is that "it thinks us" in many more cases than "we think it". I should add that in certain esoteric circles, there is a strange habit to practise "automatic writing", this is also called "channeling of disembodied beings or spirits". Now if anyone of scientific standing would even dare to mention such a thing in any of his publications, that would be the instant end of his scientific career. Presto. Well, fortunately I haven't intended this work as an entirely dyed-in-the-wool scientific treatise, and so I will hopefully get some "fool's allowance". Because it can be explained a little less esoterically, and in a way, that could even make scientific sense: The formation of thoughts is a process of Gestalt formation, as has been verified first by the Gestalt psychologists, and then by Konrad Lorenz and successors. This just means that there is a process of the "ratiomorphic performance" of the nervous system acting itself out. So there is nothing mysterious or esoteric about it. We have the very common experience that our best thoughts happen to enter our minds, when we are not at all occupied with the problems that we are pondering. The examples are countless, and even illustrious scientists like Poincaré and Kekulé have given their accounts. This means nothing less than that the brain does most of the difficult work of invention without our noticing, what it really does there. The "mother of invention" (Frank Zappa) goes about her work unnoticed, unrewarded, and in silence. This is what happens in deep sleep, and our science knows next to nothing about it.

When you attribute this work to magical or mystical powers, you are robbing yourself ouf your own powers. That is the trap, the esoterics are always falling into. Then they are falling prey to the phantasmagories that have totally poisoned the minds of a good sector of contemporary humanity. The extent to which this irrationalism has already penetrated into the affluent western industrialized societies is nothing less than alarming. It is no less alarming than the eco-poisoning of our biosphere, because humanity is systematically eroding its own most vital gift: The ability to use "this thing between our ears". So the false prophesies of gurus and sectarianism are equal in danger potential to the global eco destruction, but much more harmful, because their destructive working is hardly visible. See also: KRAMER93 .

[44] A similar problem case was once stated by Albert Einstein. He said: "If my theory will be accepted, I will be considered a German by the Germans and a cosmopolitan by the French. If it will not be accepted, then the Germans will call me a Jew, and the French call me a German.". He couldn't foresee everything, because god did play dice. As it turned out, he became American.

[45] My thanks to Prof. Henrichs who insisted that I should read Cassirer.

[46] I am indebted to Gottfried Müller for this reference.

[47] See the section on Schopenhauer dealing more explicitly with his philosophy. ->: WILL_REPRESENT, p. 129

[48] For example: Claudia Klaffke: Mit jedem Greis stirbt eine Bibliothek. In ASSMANN83, 222.

[49] From a recent discovery, it has become probable that Leonardo had even invented the modern form of the bicycle, complete with pedal and chain transmission to the rear wheel. Though the original drawing is lost, a childish drawing of a bicycle, but with all necessary detail, by one of his apprentices, was discovered between the glued-together pages of (I believe) the codex Atlanticus.

[50] For further discussion, see: ->: MENTATION, p. 116

[51] Hugo Kükelhaus has done pioneering work in the field of aisthaesis.

Here are some of my favorite tactile adventures:

1) If you happen to live on the countryside - Try to get a beetle of comfortable size, that is about 2-3 cm (1 in). I have done it always with may-bugs. These are harmless and will produce just about the right kind of tactile stimulation. If you are audacious enough, you may also try it with a sizeable spider, like a tarantula, wolf spider or a black widow.

Get the critter into your hand and fold the hand tightly around it to form a fist, but not so tight that you will crush it. Then keep it in your hand and experience the eerie tactile feeling as the critter burrows itself through the folds of your skin to escape. Experience what incredible force the little being is able to exert, and experience the deep animal fear that its action is raising within you. What is the racial memory being awakened and stimulated by the experience? If you don't have a spider or a scorpion in your hand, imagine that you did.

2) A little less fear-inducing but still worth while:

Take a small rubber balloon and fill it with only as much water as it won't expand it. Then, again, take it into the fist of one hand, or between two hands, and squeeze it. Again experience the eerie feeling as the thing is creeping between your fingers, and escaping your pressure, forcing your fingers apart, no matter how hard you press.

A toy that was available in the shops some time ago, was even better: Here the water balloon was toroidical in shape, like a donut, with a quite small hole in the center.

In case you want to do some more non-technical exploring, I suggest the best opportunity to do so will be the next time you take a friend, or your spouse, to bed. There is ample literature on how to explore the tactile sensorium. Much of it in the New Age press, under the heading of sensitivity training. Good ole' Epikur knew where all the action is.

[52] Actually we have to read the fine print very carefully. Schopenhauer doesn't make a lot of distinction between nervous processes and their results as elements of awareness. The knowledge of neurology was still quite limited at his time. An acute thinker as he was, he would have not missed the point that for the intellect there must be a neural equivalent. And you may cut out pieces lengthwise and crosswise from the brain at your liberty: you will never happen to cut out the "intellect center" because it is not there. So you can speak of the intellect as a separate concept, but this is misleading you thoroughly because it cannot be separated in the working of the nervous system.

[53] This is the representational theory of cognition. Unfortunately, this meaning of representation is almost totally opposite to Schopenhauer's use. More on this later.

[54] Schopenhauer's apparently didn't like that:

(WWV, I, 178)

[55] See also: CASSIRER.

[56] See also the work of Steven Jay Gould, GOULD-TIEF, GOULD-TIMES etc.

[57] See Pöppel, Lust und Schmerz.

[58] ->: ALPHA_BETA, p. 150

[59] On second thought it is very unlikely that Plato the Aristocrat had written all his works himself. The Greek aristocracy resisted writing for a long time because writing had been introduced by the lower classes of merchants and stone masons (Sokrates was a mason), who had learned it from the Phoenician merchants. Thus, it was below the dignity of a nobleman to write. He had his servants do it for him. (See HAVELOCK)

[60] KRV A80/B106

[61] See DERRIDA

[62] meaning: I can form a mentated representation.

[63] Petrarca, from SOFT-ENCYC

...

[64] Actually I would have had to write: He has a representation of what he doesn't know. Because this is Schopenhauer territory. In german we would say: "Er hat eine Vorstellung von dem, was er nicht weiß." It is Schopenhauer Vorstellung. Stay tuned until we get there, or make a hypertext jump: ->: WILL_REPRESENT, p. 129

[65] Well, er... the historical fact is that he actually couldn't afford to. What do you think was the reason that the Athenians finally decided to poison him? What would you do if some obnoxious fellow would day in, day out, ambush you on your way to work or to the market, nailing you down with some exceedingly idiot questions, puzzling you and diverting your precious mental energy from your important business you have to accomplish? Imagine then, that these questions start rotating in your mind, as if implanted there like a computer virus, making themselves a life of their own in this, your brain, that you are the righteous owner of? Of course, nowadays you would be more humane, you wouldn't outright kill him, would you? But you would have surely locked him up in a secure place, with a good supply of Tranquilizers or some other of these nice psychopharmaceutical drugs that quiet even the most obnoxious mind down securely. But the poor Athenians didn't have the drugs, and although they had offered Sokrates the choice that he could safely go into banishment and everything would be fine, he preferred it the hard way.

[66] Unfortunately, the statement is a misquote, because Protagoras had said: "The human is the measure of all things pertaining to the human realm". See the discussion at:

[67] It is important to be careful with the terminology: If we would say: information, we are almost as badly in illusion, because there is the physical theory of information, which has nothing to do with the commonsense idea what someone may mean when he says: I am well informed about such-and-such.

[68] ->: LORENZ_UNIFY, p. 139

[69] My thanks to Prof. Peter Zimmermann for this hint.

[70] From positivistic thinking, as it is the method in science.

[71] The greek word root "keno" means "empty".

[72] See also Umberto Eco, "il nomme della rosa", (ECO-NAME) where we have a philosophical treatment of the detective story, and a few things more, wrapped up neatly in a big mental labyrinth.

[73] I am forever indebted to my friend Bibiana for this invaluable jewel from the treasurehouse of the not-knowing.

[74] Someone may object: But Berkeley had stated the same thing much earlier. That is true, and Sch. even mentions Berkeley a few times. The salient point is here that Berkeley had his god acting as deus ex machina doing all the processing for him. He didn't bother to explain the mechanics, or as we say here, the infrastructure. And it is exactly this we are after now, and we get that better with Schopenhauer, than with Berkeley.

[75] See again Heinr. v. Kleist: Über das Marionettenspiel

[76] Thus following a hunch of Descartes who situated the seat of consciousness in the pituitary gland, of which the hypophysis is a part. He was quite right with his hunch, the Radio Eriwan way: In principle, yes. It is the Hypophysis, but it is not the bodily organ, but the hypostructure of physics, the hypophysics. And it is the seat of consciousness, in the sense that human consciousness is homologous to this principle. Also Aristoteles' idea of hypokeimenon fits in nicely.

[77] "Foo" supposedly is the first part of a well-used acronym of the U.S. military service: foo-bar. That in turn means: Fouled Up Beyond All Repair. The "Fouled" can be exchanged for any similar-sounding word, like bucked, or ducked, or shucked, or whatever you think suits your taste.

[78] And I have seen my share of people doing exactly that, and worse. I have also seen suicides.

[79] This is what the majority of people do. At work, they are materialists, at home idealists. Sometimes it changes quicker: When sitting at the desk and writing: idealist, when going to the bank, and cashing the check: materialist. This is the group who write the esoteric books, who talk a lot about synergy, most of the consultants belong there, who have plenty of good advice and nothing to back their claims up with. That they are successful just means that they are very successful deceiving other people. Not much more, at least for what I have seen so far.

[80] There might be a discussion about the causing. If your boss comes to your desk and says: "Jones, I want that accounting package out the door by tomorrow!" - Is he causing you by this to stay stuck to your desk for the next 56 hours? How would Descartes reason that out, how the sound waves striking your ear, push a few impulsities in your nerves, that just cause your butt to stay fixed frozen to your chair, your legs unable to move further than to the coffee machine and the toilet, but never out the front door of the office? We could say it is the will of your boss that is causing you to stay. Now what kind of will caused the will of your boss to be bent to that aim?

[81] The handmaiden of physics. After the dictum that philosophy was "ancilla theologiae" the handmaiden of theology, between 500 and 1500 in european history.

[82] as in Gestalt psychology (Koehler, Koffka, Wertheimer).

[83] Sch. is mentioned on p. 108 and p. 120.

[84] Lorenz doesn't use the word itself. Read ethology as: the comparative study of behavior in man and other animals.

[85] ->: SHUNYATA, p. 283