In this section, I will give a few ways of approach to my subject, and to may way of working. Both are a little unusual and off the beaten paths. I will therefore present several different ways of approach. You may leaf through this section in any way that pleases you, until you find an entry point that suits you most. Hypermedia technology is a writing technology that transcends writing. It is hard to conceive of the changes in store for us as a consequence to this. Because the consequence is that some of our very thinking modes and fundamental basic processes of thinking will change, modes that we have become accustomed to in the last five millennia. These modes are so ubiquitous, so pervading, and so subtle that they have make the foundation of our civilizations, our sciences, even of what we think is essentially human. And the consequences reach even further: when our thinking changes, our world changes also.

This may be difficult to envision and even more difficult to accept, even in the "what if" mode of thinking. So I predict that this text will not be easy reading for most of you. The experience I had so far with people trying to read is was often resistance and rejection. If you feel that you have to reject this work, I am asking for your consideration. As Freeman Dyson says: "At any particular moment in the history of science, the most important and fruitful ideas are often lying dormant merely because they are unfashionable... there is commonly a lag of 50 or 100 years between the conception of a new idea and its emergence into the mainstream of scientific thought... it necessarily follows that anybody doing fundamental work... is almost certain to be unfashionable." (DYSON83 , 53) This work is unfashionable, indeed. But I wouldn't have gone through this work of 15 years as of the time of this writing, if I hadn't considered it important. And this is my motto, from the Heraklit citation above: "If you don't aim for the unexpected and the unthinkable, you will never find it: for it is untraceable and inaccessible".

First, I will present my main mode of working - asking the questions:

Was , Wie , Warum

This path of discovery is about asking fundamental questions and getting unexpected answers. The citations above indicate this. It is the systematic exploration of the unthought of and the unthinkable, that is the background of this endeavor. But asking fundamental questions may be risky business. "Sapere aude", "dare to be wise" starts with "dare to be foolish". If you dare to ask the idiot question, if you risk being the fool, you might have a chance to hit onto something so fundamental that it has escaped the most inquisitive minds of humanity even though it has been sitting in plain view from time immemorial. Asking questions always precedes getting answers. It is the way we are asking the questions that is decisive. And so often do we get wrong and useless answers because we don't ask the right questions, or don't ask them consistently enough. Our current modes of organized knowledge have done much to bar certain questions from being asked. There is a veritable taboo in human societies against asking fundamental questions. I will do my part to rediscover the lost art of asking questions, which we may also call the Socratic art. See: ->: THAUMAZEIN, p. 115.

The most fundamental questions of this universe are: What , HoW , Why. These, I call the Three Big W's. The successive application of these three types of questions gives a modality of thinking, which we could call the "trialectics of question ". With these mental tools, we can go on asking: What is reality? What is producing this world? What does it mean to be human? What is thinking? What is knowing? What is ignorance? What is the relation between thinking and symbols? What is aisthaesis? What does thinking with the body mean? All these questions relate to the first line of the title: "Infrastructures of Representation". Section 3.: "Semiotics, biological and cultural aspects" will deal with these questions.

The second line of the title: "A Quest for Multimedial Symbolization Systems" is about this one question: How could humanity improve its thinking? This question will be the core part of this work. It is the tangible and practical aim to provide a discussion of the fundamental principles, and the necessary infrastructure, the noetic, scientific, technical, and societal requirements and foundations for the construction of a "technological ars memoriae [6] ", a "syn-aisthetic symbolization tool" [7] , or as I call it in my terminology: the Symbolator [8] . This technology is emerging with the further development of computer based hypertext and multimedial symbolization systems that we can forecast with some measure of probability for the next 20 years. I will give a perspective of what kind of work could be done in these 20 years, if it is possible to continue on the path laid out here, that is, if the necessary funding and infrastructure will be available. Section 3. serves as supporting base for this issue, and Sections 2. and 4. will deal with the practical and technical matters of its implementation.

Humanity now has its moment of kairos [9] , the fortuitous historical instant which may pass all too soon. We have the chance to change the base of our thinking. That will change history, and humanity, for ever and for sure. But unlike genetic engineering , which is right now already in the full process of changing history, and humanity, for good or for the worse, when we change our thinking, we might have a chance of understanding what it is we are doing before it is too late to do anything about it.

The quest for understanding what it was that influenced humanity so deeply 5000 years ago, when writing was invented, will lead us on a long journey through human history. This is mainly covered in the Section "Threads of History" and the ones following. [10] History and writing are inseparably intertwined. But before writing, there was an epoch of at least 5000 years of high cultural development of humanity. This epoch is only now being discovered as archeology uses a vastly expanded set of technical and scientific tools to analyse the many diverse and different traces of early human culture as they are preserved in the archeological record. Already, our picture of history is changing profoundly as all these bits and details from archaic cultures are slowly and painstakingly inserted into a new grand puzzle of prehistoric human development. In the chapter "The Age of Aoidoi", I will give a speculative account of an information structure of archaic prescriptural society that is still vastly beyond the current scientific imagination.

Some of the unexpected results that I got: It is more important to be able to ask the questions than to try to get an answer. Because an answer I have today, may be useless to me tomorrow. The way we ask the questions has a very subtle predetermining effect on what we can get as answers. This is the advice Heraklit gives us. Always be ready to ask a question that you would never think of even asking. This has to do with the higher forms of thinking, deutero-mentation , and trito-mentation. I use the more general term of mentation for forms of thinking that we wouldn't be able think of now. As for all forms of mentation , there must be representations that manifest the thinking processes. In the conventional case, we call them symbols. [11] Formerly, there was only the human brain doing all the symbol processing. That had a severely limiting effect on the kind and the complexity of symbols that could be used. The human brain is a very powerful processing system, but it means to misunderstand it thoroughly when we consider it as a computer. Of course, the brain can function in a way the computer works. But that is exactly not what its strength is. In the earlier ages of humanity, we had to mis-use the brain as a computer, because nothing better was there. Now that we have got the real thing, we don't need to burden our brains with tasks that the computer can do so much better. For example helping us to construct the symbol systems for deutero-mentation , and trito-mentation, thinking modes that are exceedingly difficult when attempted with the unaided brain. And for those, who fear that humanity may be going all the way down the drain, if we don't learn the differential and integrational calculus in school any more, here is my consolation: There is a good chance, that if we have constructed our symbolator, we might even be able to bootstrap ourselves into a level of mental performance that lets us suddenly realize, that we don't need the machine any more - we might find other symbolization systems that are much better than anything we have now, and that are better suited to the functioning of our brains. This might be the day when the dream of Leibniz comes true: when we will have created the Characteristica Universalis. And it may be a little different than what Leibniz imagined, because its characters may turn out to be the stoichea , the building blocks that the demiourgos , the constructor of the universe, was using himself to go about his work. This is what Plato talked about in Timaios.

->: CHARACTERISTICA, p. 212, ->: ONOMA_SEMEPHON, p. 369, ->: STOICHEA, p. 372, ->: HARMONICS, p. 416

In the discussion, I am following a dual track approach, according to Leibniz ' motto:

Theoria cum Praxi .

One track is Bottom Up, pragmatic, empirical, technological, and application oriented, to be used in contemporary hypermedia technology, with attention to detail, implementation, technical feasability, organization, juridical, patenting, economic rationalisation, management, and, most importantly: financing.

The other track is Top Down, theoretical, and philosophical, with the ancient meaning of the word root theoria, as Leibniz meant it: The Vision, a bird's eye view from the grand perspective of the oumo universale , the universal thinker , covering 10 billion years of cosmic evolution, 10,000 years of human cultural evolution, 5,000 years of phonetic-script based civilization as it emerged in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia , Egypt , Greece and Rome .

And lastly, the immense amplification of the accumulation of knowledge as it occurred after the invention of the printing press 500 years ago and the application of the scientific principles of Galileo , Descartes , Leibniz and Newton since about 300 years. The philosophical outlook is in the meaning as intended by Plato : The search for wisdom (sophia ) for wisdom's sake, without direct application to knowledge, techne, career or material profit What I hope to show is that a balanced perspective resulting from both approaches may be possible, or even profitable. That it is still today, in this age of ultimate specialization, valuable to at least aim at some measure of universal thinking . Of necessity, a work based on such an approach cannot be considered as finished at any stage of progress. The days of the renaissance uomo universale are long gone. But even if we know that we will never get there, aiming, and striving for this goal might be valuable in itself.

The question "Why ?" is at the beginning of all philosophy and maybe a little more in human intellectual and mental history. Plato and Aristoteles have put this question at the beginning of all enquiry into what is in us and around us, the universal scientific and philosophical enquiry which was still one and the same from Plato 's time up to about the Renaissance . In the ancient greek terminology, it was the thaumazein , mala philosophikon pathos, the sense of wonder, amazement, and astonishment which lead us into this process. It seems that this question was forgotten when science and philosophy made their split around the time of Leibniz . Science asks about the "how " of things, not about the "what" and "why " which is relegated to (some specific branches of) philosophy. ->: THAUMAZEIN, p. 115

When I started my university studies in the then newly established academic field of informatics , Joseph Weizenbaum gave a talk at our department. His way of asking the question "why ?" of informatics and technology in general was stated as an aphorism: "Nobody is helped that he can do something ten times faster or more efficiently when he is in the process of falling into a pit." Yet that seems to be exactly what happens with technological cvililization. We don't know where we are going, but we are for sure going there fast, with increasing speed every day. The human population on this planet explodes. In the science laboratories and technical research institutions all over the world, the speed of technological advance doubles every five years. Data processing is a good example for the process. We can process a million times the number of data bytes than people could do manually a hundred years ago. Every year, the data processing capacity doubles, but to what end? Are we therefore in a better position to deal with the problems of our societies?

The vision of the age of enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries is totally shattered. Instead of creating a world of universal peace, comfort, and well-being, science and technology have helped us create a juggernaut that is devouring the living substance of this planet to the point of eco-destruction [12]. Just about 500 million people on this planet live in a world of comfort and well-being, like only kings lived up to 100 years ago. The rest live on different levels of insecurity, like the poor and unemployed in the rich countries, or the middle classes in poor countries. Then there is about one billion people whose life is a constant confrontation with the spectre of death by starvation, war, epidemic disease, and eco-poisoning. A life which is not a life at all but hell on earth. It is unnecessary to add further to a discussion which is being led in countless books and on the political scene about what needs to be done to avoid the consequences of the seemingly inevitable self-destruction course of humanity. I might mention as one of the most thoughtful and insightful works the intensive appeal to humanity that Konrad Lorenz made in LORENZ_TOD and LORENZ_ABB . The insight is there, but the power structures of society smother all attempts to effect any decisive change of course. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. For all those that have ears to hear, but not the time nor the inclination to think, the words of Konrad Lorenz:

LORENZ_TOD , 83

My answer, and my contribution, the reason why I am doing this work, is this: Humanity has opened up a tool chest of incredibly powerful mental tools when it developed writing , mathematics , and logics , and began to imitate certain aspects of nature with technology . As we say: "most things are easier to get into than out of". Once one is habitually used to a certain procedure, it is hard to stop it. And there is a tradeoff, a cost factor for every gain. It is often not visible where that cost is and how it is exacted. That this cost factor exists has been known and has been pointed out time and time again. Plato stated the dangers of writing in no uncertain terms in Phaidros, and Leonardo had been one of the first to foresee the adverse consequences of technological advance in full clarity [13] But the gains for those who could reap the profits always seemed to outweigh the cost for the community [14] (HARDIN85 ). Those that tried to alert us were brushed aside, relegated to oblivion, and every once in a while put to death at the stake, the cross, or other ingenious means, just to add a little deterrent against going astray from the normatively accepted paths of society. ->: LEONARDO, p. 36

Nowadays, the pendulum may be swinging in the opposite direction. The costs have silently accumulated in their effect over millennia, and are suddenly appearing on the balance sheet with all weight. The accumulated effects of our mental auxiliary systems have developed such that we, our minds, and our understanding, are completely dumbfounded and at the mercy of the processes we started. We are in the position of the sorcerer's apprentice. The tool chest has silently converted to a pandora's box.

I propose that we need to regain, and to rebuild our originality and authorship of the sources of this thinking process that began many thousand years ago, but became clearly visible around the time of Plato . That is, we need to get a better understanding of our thinking, and a new handle at what we are doing when we think. With the new computer and multimedia technology, different modes of mentation will be possible that will allow us different perspectives about our world and about ourselves. This will be a chance to open a new chapter of human self-reflection and self-understanding. In its essence, it will be:

The continuation of Philosophy by other means - Towards A Cybernetic Philosophy

This work presents a cybernetic world model for a post-alphabetic humanity that is making the transition from a history of five millennia of writing based civilizations into an era of fundamental re-definition and re-shaping of our thinking processes through the new hypermedia technology that is emerging in our days. Humanity is now at a historical crossroads, a moment of historical decisiveness like it appeared 500 years ago with the invention of the printing press, or 5000 years ago when writing was invented. The technology of writing has influenced and changed humanity profoundly, and even if we owe practically all our civilization to writing, we have also paid a high price. Non-verbal and non-conceptual thinking (or mentation) has been largely pushed into oblivion. Therefore this work is also paradoxical: It tries to put in written words something that humanity has lost when we all came to rely too much on the written word. The new technologies will change the kinds of mental processes we have conventionally called "thinking" to an extent that were unimaginable in the age of writing. Hypermedial representation and symbolization systems are much much more than, and also much different from, the conventional pictorial adjuncts to our written texts as we are used from picture books. They are also much different from the moving pictures we know from cinematographic technology (movies and television). To find the predecessors of what is in store for us in the near future, we must go back to ancient civilizations such as Egypt when the art of picture-mentating (thinking through pictures, as opposed through words and concepts) was still alive.

This era will not just bring a change of re-presentation of the things we have become used to. When we change our thinking, the things will also change. The new representation will also change the world as we experience it. That is, everything will take an almost revolutionary turn around in the next 20 years to come, and we will end up with a totally different physical infrastructure for our universe than the one we have now. This change is consequential and inevitable. The old world models of matter made of atoms that have been the foundation of the last 2500 years of human civilization are in an inextricable way intertwined and interdependent with the atomic mental technology of the alphabet. Just as the alphabet cuts up the spoken sounds of language in indivisible, atomic, single sounds, so has humanity followed this method in its intellectual course of those 2500 years, and especially the last 500 years, since the printing press allowed the incredible jump in efficiency of processing this phonetic alphabet.

This profound change has already been expressed in the cyber age motto: "All reality is virtual!". Except that very few people have so far realized its full significance. The philosopher who had expressed this essence long before anyone would think of computers and cyber age, was Arthur Schopenhauer. If he were asked today to express the salient idea of his main work in contemporary language, he would use this wording. And in the modern cybernetic terms, his work would today have the title: "The Universe as Impulsity and Representation". This can be translated without difficulty into all major european languages without changing the main terms. Every educated person in the whole world would immediately recognize its relevance for our modern neuromancer cyber age and globally connected computer network civilization. Schopenhauer's work, which was considered an obscure treatise of speculative philosophy at his time, has gained a totally new momentum as the world came to meet his projections. The difficulty modern physics has with the wave-particle dualism, and the problems of quantum mechanics, indicate that the way the physical world is viewed in our contemporary theories poses riddles that are hard to solve in the present paradigms. The approach of Schopenhauer is expressed in a contemporary information-based world model that could be called hypo-physical. It is not meta-physical, as in the older philosophical attempts, but it fits seamlessly into the scientific structure of the exact sciences. Schopenhauer's representation is in modern terms a cellular space. In a cellular space model, the presently known physical laws are produced by a universal simulator that produces these phenomena because it is programmed this way. In the older physical models, one talked about an ether, and before science, there was the universe-generating matrix of ancient mesopotamian and vedic cosmologies. They all refer to a substrate that underlies the apparent phenomenal world. In the vedic terminology, this was called the Akasha. In the present work, this is called the "Infrastructure of Representation". This infrastructure is an information infrastructure. Presently, information is defined in terms of physics. In the future, physics will be defined in terms of information. This will not change anything in the working of physical laws, only their foundation will change. In order that we will be able to perceive this different infrastructure, we need a new mental technology. Much as our present world views are interdependent with the ways we think and perceive in words and concepts, so will the new mental tools that are emerging with the new hypermedia technology allow us to form different understandings of the world and of ourselves. If we are to look for an example of this change in perspective, we may take the change from Newton's gravitational theory to Einstein's general relativity. The newer theory didn't prove the older one as false, but as a special case in a more general scheme. So will it be with the informational paradigm of the universe. And within this paradigm, we will have much less problems accomodating for such phenomena as animated life and intelligence, that are so hard to come by in the present materialistic and mechanistic paradigms of science.

Although at present, the work "Infrastructures of Representation" is presented as a book, this is to be viewed only as a scaffolding for a hypermedia work that will be based on the structure of the text. The written word can only serve as a pointer to something that cannot be expressed with the old text paradigm any more. The new ways of thinking will have to find their own appropriate modes of expression and representation. To achieve this, a 20-year program is formulated for the construction of the Symbolator, a mental bootstrap for humanity to lift itself into heretofore unthinkable modes of mentation. The written word only serves as scaffolding, as outline, to point to something which it in itself can never yield: Give us back, what 5000 years of civilization word use and abuse have robbed humanity of: The immediate look-and-feel of dealing with the things themselves, instead of just talking about them with possibly empty words, phrases, and formalisms.

NIETZSCHE-ZARA , Also sprach Zarathustra, 2

Instead of writing an "abstract" as introduction, one might try to present one's views "in a nutshell ". This metaphor is an alliteration to the germinating seed of something that becomes quite involved as the progress of growth bears on. A large tree with all its branches and leaves can become quite unmanageable. But by watching the nut germinate and grow, we may get to know more about the tree than when we study it in its finished form. So I will show the germinating nucleus of the work and then I will let it unfold.

. By architectonic I understand the art of systems ... By system I understand the unity of manifold cognitions under an idea

KANT-KRITIK , A832/B860, ->: ARCHITECTONIC, p. 279

This is the advice given by Kant . The focal point of any work is the idea expressed in it. As he points out further down in his treatise, this idea may not be clear to us in the beginning:

But even if it is not immediately visible, the idea serves as ordering principle as we are refining it. The more we succeed to clarify the idea , the more we have the chance to succeed with the work, and to communicate it to others.

Now the idea of this work is the relation between the idea, the thing, and the representation [15] . A core question is about the appropriateness of representations, if and how there may be representations more appropriate than others. We may re-phrase this: the essence of our thought processes, the mentation , which is called the "pure reason " by Kant , has a correspondence and a relation to external and internal means, the representation, like language , symbols , images , etc. we are using to manifest, reflect, and structure our thinking. It is the mechanism of reflection , as it is philosophically called. The meaning of the term representation follows the outline given by Schopenhauer in his "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung " ("The World as Will and Representation", abbreviated WWV in the following.) [16] There has been an old discussion about this relation which is aptly summed up by the Leibniz' commentary to Locke 's argument:

What no one noticed, possibly not even Leibniz himself, was that they both agreed in their views much more than their differences might suggest. George Berkeley (BERKELEY ) and Schopenhauer already came quite close to the solution: "intellectus est in sensu " - presto. That being done, all that is left is to show the "How". This is what I call in the title the "infrastructure of representation ".

Now it is easy to see that the term infrastructure, if taken in a theoretical and technical (techne ) sense, leads into the term architectonic (archi /archae -tekton ). By this we are back at Kant and see how the "infrastructure of representation " connects with the "architectonics of pure reason ". These are the noetic requirements. In a different, more pragmatic meaning, infrastructure implies all the technical and scientific requirements.

On or path, we will re-discover some aspects of thinking that submerged, or became forgotten, in 5000 years of script based civilization, and more so, in the last 300 years of scientific and technological progress. We will see if those aspects are helpful in creating new tools that support our thinking. Only if there are stringent reasons to assume that new and unconventional representations for ideas are better suited than what we have now, will it really make sense to invest a great amount of time and energy into creating them. Otherwise, those will be right who say that our tried-and-trusted cultural memory systems, with 5000 years experience of phonetic language encoding in alphabets and our mathematics, all preserved in books, are the best way to go about things in the future.

This metaphor of the nutshell can carry us even further: it indicates some riddle, some enigma, something that is hidden and not easily seen. There is a nut to crack, a difficult problem that cannot be solved by applying tried-and-tested knowledge and methods. I will give a small selection of fundamental problems and questions here. The first question is:

Kratylos 434a, PLATO-WERKE , Vol. III, engl. transl. A.G.

Plato makes an argument in this work that words are not just arbitrary sound combinations whose relation to the things named is based only on social convention. While this is an error according to modern linguistics, the statement quoted above is even stronger. No wonder that Kratylos is by scholarly opinion a good example of a situation where Plato was completely wrong, no matter how deep and insightful his approach to other subjects was. There is not very much one could cite for Plato's defense. The examples given in the dialogue are not very convincing. But is the question he posed really solved for all and for good? This will be taken up again in the present work and we will see what comes out of it. A hint can be given right now: it depends on what Plato meant by pragma . The greek word has many connotations with work and business done, that is the result of a process. It is also related to the praxis mentioned in the Leibniz motto. If we take the position that Plato meant pragma to be the result of a process of mentation , then this is a different issue than when we assume that he meant "empirical things out there". For further discussion, see :

Our next question will be:

OBERSCHELP80 , 41, 42, transl. A.G.

While the Kratylos question may be an example from the awakening of the western mind of a question that may not be rightfully asked as a philosophical question any more, the Oberschelp question stands as example for a debate that goes on behind the scenes of the big-science community. Because if there is any reason to rightfully ask this question, then so much of all the big-effort money spending on technological methods (like Artificial Intelligence ) may be wasted. We could squeeze an old joke on the difference of philosophy, theology, and dialectical materialism to fit the issue: Because it may be that humanity is searching with more and more technological apparatus a black cat in a dark room which has the perplexing habit of being less and less there the more we cry: "We have it by the tail, a little more research money, and we will have it all!" The salient issue behind this is that it may be wise to put just a little research money into a totally different place, one that is not so favorable with big science. (STRAUB-GLAS , 223-226).

See ->: COMPUT_FUNDAMENT, p. 53

After this mighty jump across 2300 years, we might as well be finished with the riddles and get going with more tangible matter, but we are not. Because we will now jump back right to where we came from: To another enigmatic piece of Plato 's wisdom, or fancy, as we may have it: his version of the creation of the world, in Timaios :

Timaios, 35b-c, PLATO-WERKE , Vol. VII, engl. transl. A.G.

This we might call the Timaios question. While we are postponing any attempt to decode this riddle, we just observe that this statement of Plato has to do with number and proportion , and it has to do with the real nature of reality . Such, it addresses the same fundamental issue as the aforementioned Oberschelp question. What I will try to show in the following is that we have here a core question on the concept of number and the appropriateness of numbering systems when dealing with the nature of things. Plato's account in Timaios is an account of the pythagorean concept of number which is of a quite different nature than we are used to nowadays. For further discussion, see: ->: HARMONICS, p. 416, ->: AVATAR, p. 345

PLOTIN-ENNEA , V,3

A.G.

A.G.

The philosophical part of this work is some kind of mind-jogging: how to unhook a few stuck conceptual deadlocks, that we may have unknowingly got bogged down with.

Here I will come to think about some of the technical details of the Symbolator project. What it is that I want to build, what it will be good for, and how much it will cost to build. More on this will of course be following in the later parts on organization, finance, and technical detail.

The first technological principle is: It doesn't have to be fully concordant with current academic consensus, in order to be workable. If other working principles can be made plausible then that must be admitted as working hypothesis. The theory of the Symbolator, as I am outlining it here, cuts across a full spectrum of academic disciplines from philosophy, linguistics, philology, semiotics, evolutional biology, neurology, informatics, and a few more, and it is impossible to completely validate the assumptions made beforehand by the standards of each discipline. The completed Symbolator is essentially needed to validate the hypotheses. It will be a complete conceptual and theoretical bootstrap. This is not such an unusual situation. When we look into history, technology has been up front the academics more often than is readily admitted today.

We know that technology and engineering had progressed pretty much on its own dynamics up until the beginning of the 18th century. Toulmin has given us the details. Inventors never waited for the scientists when they implemented their gadgets (TOULMIN-KRIT ). Before Galileo, engineering had nothing to do with the scholarly learning and that was good so, because if engineers had relied on the aristotelian theories, the roman armies would have never left their garrisons, because there were no roads, they would have never won a battle, because there was no steel, and Caesar would have never conquered Egypt, because his ships would have fallen apart while still in the harbor, and the roman buildings would have collapsed while under construction. If roman engineers had used roman numerals for their calculations, as is today believed by academic historians, they wouldn't even today be finished with their calculations, let alone have constructed one stable building. Similar with modern computing. I think I am not mistaken that the works of Englebart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and all the others who invented the current state of the art in hypermedia and virtual reality did not go through complete academic verification before they implemented what they wanted.

The chicken-egg problem with a new principle is always that in order to prove it, an apparatus must be built that shows that it is working. A little piece of new technology must be invented. This costs money. Therefore, if the principle is entirely new, then it may be hard to convince those who control the funding, that it is wise to spend money on exactly that project. Especially if resources are tight, and other, well established and well-credited projects are shrinking or even scratched. Then it is entirely understandable that research establishments as well as all the rest of society, stick to the "tried and tested". The methods that have shown their worth in yesteryear, and which will also surely work tomorrow.

CIRCLE_LIMIT ).

I wouldn't be doing what I am doing here if I were not convinced myself that it is worth my time and effort to do it. I have invested about 10 to 15 man-years into the project. Most of it was funded through my work as industrial consultant. One hour of industrial consulting can be rated at around $ 200,-. So we can assume that I made a capital investment of between $ 4 million and $ 6 million. That is no peanuts, is it? And I consider this an investment and not just a hobby.

When academic computing, or informatics, adopted the natural scientific positivistic standard, it threw out a lot of cybernetic work in the 40's and 50's that didn't fit too well into that scheme. One notable proponent of this other view was Gotthard Günther . He had unfortunately proclaimed that his work was based on Hegel's [17] logic which made his theories "non grata" in the scientific community. Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses. Had he just said he was doing neuronal morphogrammatics, no one would have noticed, and he might have become famous. It happened otherwise. Now, he had developed his ideas for a long time at the Uni of Illinois in Urbana, where Warren McCulloch had assembled a group of persons whose work continued in the following years. Mainly by Heinz v. Foerster , who founded the Biological Computers Laboratory in Urbana in 1957 and directed it until 1976. And from there emanated a stream of ideas from now well-known researchers like Ross Ashby , Lars Löfgren, Herbert Brün, Gordon Pask, and Humberto Maturana, whose theory of autopoiesis is of particular importance for this work.

Gotthard Günther had introduced idealism into the cybernetic debate, and that has not been fitting in the natural scientific position of informatics . Maturana had tried his autopoietic solution on the natural scientific base, but apparently there are some little, unobstrusive, but still the more fatal consequences when you try to think the matter through, or worse still, implement it on a computer.

What I am introducing here, is the neither-nor assumption as it is proposed by Schopenhauer . I don't mean to sell the whole philosophy of Schopenhauer, neither his abnegation of life, nor his hate of women. And I don't suggest to anyone who isn't really up to wading through a maze of verbiage that he should read Schopenhauer . No, it is much more simple than that. Sch. has presented a working mental model that doesn't have to rely on neither the materialistic assumption nor the idealistic. He of course never had engineering in mind, and so he didn't prepare for any practical application of his work. That will have to be filled in here. But he has left us with some very interesting mental bootstraps, that can be beautifully converted into technical bootstraps, if we go about it the right way.

He has left us a principle for autopoiesis that cannot be thought through in the framework of the ontological assumption of science. In order to think this principle through, one has to pursue the track a little while outside the trodden paths of the last 300 years of scientific development. One has to know how to do this, not to fall into idealistic traps, or esoteric phantasmagories. But it can be thought through, and then there is something practically useful.

In this study it is not my aim to propose a new approach for intelligent machinery . I think that this is fine, for those who like their computer to be smarter than they themselves are. I myself believe that there are already enough smart-asses around there who try to tell me things which I cannot verify nor falsify, and I either have to believe them, or I just have to go my way. No, in this respect, I am very selfish. I want to have something that makes me smarter. If I can get that with a smarter computer, that is fine. Those dumb "blech-idiots" are still so stupid that they could sure use a little bit more intelligence. But it must always serve my practical aim to make me smarter, or otherwise the whole thing will be useless, or rather, it will be terrifically dangerous. I always have to refer to the "Neuromancer " stories which are so incredibly accurate in the picture of a brain-dominated thousand-year-reich of cyber age they create. We already have a host of very dangerous influences of those darned little mouse- and icon computer interfaces that are exerting their detrimental effects on our mental processes. There are so many trojan horse s and mind-worm s ready to be hooked into our brains by a profit-seeking industry totally unencumbered by any ethical concerns. What if our computers became only half as smart as we are? God beware!

See GIBSON , ->: CYBER_REICH, p. 155, ->: ICON_PROBLEM, p. 73

The trick of the trade is the same as with the old proverb of "the glass of water that is either half full or half empty". I want to have a computer that can be a hundred, or a thousand, or even ten thousand times smarter, than I am now, provided that:

This is what I call a Symbolator . No great philosophical, semiotic, or technical definition, of the nature of the symbol process , of neural feedback loops , or any of that gizmo. That can wait until I get around to it in the semiotics and technical sections. No, plain useful down-to-earth, pragmatic application. The only thing that counts for me is this thing between my ears: the brain . And if I can get any technical device that helps me use this thing between my ears in any better way, so much the better.

Now, as we all have found out using these little computers, as stupid as they may be, they have one devillish attitude: They make us feel so darn stupid! They have an unerring, unflinching, unforgiving, uninfluencible, determined, mechanical intelligence , that, may it ever be so primitive, instills a certain type if fear in us. There are whole sections of the population who still resist using the computer because of this fear, which is entirely justified, because there is a very specific danger in those devices, that those who are playing with them, the computer engineers, and the computer kids, have gotten used to, just as much as one gets used to wielding a chain saw.

To understand what is happening here, I had to go the whole way through human history, like an archeologist scraping through the mud, discovering shreds here, debris there, and vanished traces over there. Because what is happening here is just another layer of transformation of our mental processes as they are accomodating to just another new auxiliary device humanity has fabricated for its comfort, material improvement, utility, or out of sheer vanity.

The process is very similar to what has happened when civilizations adopted writing. Since we in the western industrialized countries are now a fully literate civilization, there is simply no way imagining any more what life, and more specifically, mentation [18] was like, before we had put anything that could be expressed in words into writing, and that, in books.

(->: MENTATION )

The Symbolator has to do with re-learning a whole lot of things that we apparently have forgotten: The most important of these seems to be: The world doesn't consist of words only, and it doesn't consist of only those things that can be described with words, patented with words, and put in legal contracts with words. And if we substitute "words" by "words and mathematical formulae" then it will be the same.
The widespread use of computers by large sections of society has the best chances to convert in a matter of maximally 50 years the whole global industrialized population to mental modes of functioning that are determined by the way user interfaces are programmed. A similar conversion needed about 5000 years to induce the mental states of world population to the mental modes of writing oriented verbal thought, the prose style of talking and thinking.

Ever since the days of ancient egypt , humanity has lost touch with the art of expressing symbolic thought in pictures. Of course, there has been art, and architecture. But since the main operational system of mentation became word and concept oriented, there had been a split. The egyptians still knew about these things, and it is not only by sheer conservativism, that they kept the hieroglyphics , even though they had the demotic cursive writing. And it is not completely true that hieroglyphics were "just a fanciful form of alphabet". Even though Champollion rightfully debunked the phantasmagoric ideas that Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Athanasius Kircher entertained about them, these ideas had "a grain of salt" about them (->: SONG_SYNAISTHESIS ). Because there was a certain way of "picture thinking" hidden behind those hieroglyphics, even if they just encoded phonemes.

This is why I am making such a great detour through the whole of human cultural history, to find those traces that may lead us to a better appreciation of what it means to use the mentation modalities of sounding and moving visual images .

Because if we don't have a good idea what that means, we will always get stuck with the logocentrism , as Derrida calls it (DERRIDA74 ). The almost inexhaustible source of confusion that the ubiquitous, and 5000-year old domination of verbal mentation modes, what we usually call thinking, are playing their tricks on us.

And there has never been a symbolic memory technology available to humanity in the past that allowed the combination of sounding and moving visual images at the same time. This is completely novel ground. There is of course the whole field of theater , song , dance , puppet theater [19] kinematic arts , etc. But this was considered as art, not as mentation . (For further discussion of the connection of visual symbols and sound, see ->: HARMONICS ).

This is then the technical core of this work: Not just to have computer technology that lets us manipulate pictures, and moving images with an incredible pain***, as we have in contemporary CAD , drawing and drafting, and multimedia animating software . When you want to construct a reasonably complicated drawing with Corel Draw ®, or any other of the standard market systems, you can easily spend a day on just one drawing alone. That is allright, if you are working as a designer for commercial graphics, and have to produce just another nifty ad for Kako-Kalo that will earn you a bundle for just that one piece. But if you are a teacher wanting to design a textbook of thermodynamics , and you want to put a very good picture next to each chapter you write, you are in trouble. ABRAHAM-DYNAMIC is a good example how a book like this has to look like. Of course the drawings there were hand-made. You will be in much worse trouble if you were audacious enough to design a whole course completely multi-media based. Or you must have a lot of pocket money to spend, or a rich uncle. Because you won't get that kind of money from your school board. The current user interface metaphors are just not suitable for this kind of work. And it is in the present mouse- and icon-technology where most of the problems are hidden.

I invite you to try to construct a drawing of a reasonably simple and normal biological system like the DNA with Corel Draw : Just try to design a double spiral: that is a spiral rolled up in a spiral. You will never make it. But if you use a Logo -like approach, it is almost trivial. Just use the basic subroutine that is creating a circle [20], let it increase one step in the z-axis, while it makes about ten steps on the x-y plane, and you have the basic spiral. Then you take that subroutine and apply it to a copy of itself, with the values for xyz multiplied by 20. Of course, you will have to use x(1,2) y(1,2), z(1,2) for the double indexing. You will see that with about half an hour of programming, you will have created a beautiful spiral, spiralling around itself, mathematically perfect, and so easy, every fifth-grader could do it.

This is exactly the kind of programming that none of the available design programs on the market can do (if I am informed correctly). Possibly Mathematica can do that. I didn't have time to check. But the design programs should let you do this also. There is a little story to this: every one of these design programs converts its output to Postscript® . Now Postscript is a programming language, albeit one that hardly anyone ever gets to see as live code, and if one gets to see it, one will regret it for life. But just imagine, that we use the approach of Postscript , call it 3-D Script , add some sound and motion gizmos, think the whole concept over a little bit so that it doesn't look as abhorrent and write-only as current Postscript does. Then one could add a little topping and provide an interface like Visual Basic, and presto, you will have the nicest Symbolator that I could ever imagine. And the cost? Just a trifle 50 to 100 man-years. That is nothing compared to the thousands of man-years that have cost the computer industry billions in the last operating-system wars of Windows NT contra OS/2 contra Windows 95 , contra NeXT Step ...

I have done much of the dirty ground work in my Leibniz system , in about 5 man-years. So I have some know-how to get about these things. I know what it means to build a mentation bootstrap .

So we can parse the famous principle of the software-industry, the bootstrap , both ways, and it comes out right both ways: The boot-strap [21], by which you can lift yourself, and the boots-trap, of which you must be aware of.

Because if we want to really get right into this matter, we will have to find some new ways to think in visual and motional symbols. And to get into that thinking, we must implement working models on a computer. And while we are implementing them, we must perfect our own internal representation of what we are doing in software, reflect it into our own "thing between the ears" as I have called it above. In short: we must perform a whole visual and auditive conceptual cultural bootstrap , what would take thousands of years reality time "out there" in normal cultural evolution, but it can, and must, be done in just a few years if done with the right tools and with the right theories.

Of course some versions of this work are already in full swing all over the world since that is essentially what the computer industry is trying to get to. Except they don't really know where they are heading, what is driving them, and what is obscuring them. If it just were not for those few inconspicuous little hidden details of the project, those hidden traps of well-worn mental modes of logocentrism , that would invariably lure researchers and software engineers into by now well-filled pitfalls of former failures.

It is just like in childbearing : You can't be just half pregnant. And with a halfway solution, you will have lost, no matter how nice your gadget looks. Because you lose both ways: If you make your gadget smarter than you are, you lose, because it will control you instead of you controlling it (->: CYBER_REICH ). If you don't make it smart enough, you lose too, because you need the gadget desperately to solve some problems waiting for you "out there" that you can't put off any longer.

In this section I will give some reason why this project is named after Leonardo and Leibniz.

Leonardo and Leibniz lived pretty exactly 200 years apart. They lived pretty exactly to the same age. Leonardo was born on Apr. 15, 1452, in Vinci, he died at the age of 67 on May 2, 1519, at Cloux, near Amboise, France. Leibniz, was born July 1, 1646, died at the age of 70 on Nov. 14, 1716. Leonardo was the characteristic figure of the uomo universale of the Renaissance. Leibniz was probably the last uomo universale of humanity.

Both were considered by their fellow contemporaries somewhat strange, a little or more than a little crazy. Their ideas were rarely understood and often ridiculed, and not many people of their time recognized them as geniuses. Neither was able to connect close enough to a center of political and financial power that their ideas could be worked out to any appreciable extent. Both died after a wearisome and restless life, broken-hearted and worn out from continuously running up against the granite walls of a humanity that was only interested in their petty games and local politics, and base amusements. Both were not known to have womanized very much [22]. It didn't seem to make a lot of sense to either one to procreate on the physical plane. Their children were multitudinous, and long living, on the idea plane. This is what they have in common. Apart from that, there could possibly not have been any personalities as radically situated at opposing ends of the human spectrum as they were.

Leibniz was a thinker, a rationalist, a politician, a mathematician, a logician. He had taught himself Latin at the age of 12, in order that he could read the books in his father's library which contained a quite complete overview of the collected wisdom and knowledge that was available to humanity in that era [23] . By the age of 20, he had mastered it. Apart from Latin, he conversed freely in French, and when he wrote German, one can still feel that this language was not as well suited to the discussion of great subtlety that he was used to. His ability to use the formal language of mathematics was equally superior. His invention of the calculus made him immortal in the scientific halls of fame. Leibniz was absolutely true in his principles and his loyalty and service to his superiors. He was unswerving in his religious determination to do anything possible to keep god in the world of science which was quickly transforming to utter materialism. His universalistic outlook was not any more fashionable in the emerging climate of modern natural science, nor were his religious beliefs.

While Leibniz professed as his motto "theoria cum praxi " he never really lived up to his good practical intentions. His political and technical projects never succeeded even approximately as his eminent theoretical mind had intended, if he got started with them at all. More often than not, they were too visionary or all-encompassing to find credibility with the rather narrow-minded provincial framework of local german princes for whom he worked. Probably his calculating machine is the great notable exception of a technical construction that was workable. His great life time project, which had kept him in service with the house of Hanover , to compile their complete history, was never completed. [24] Perhaps the only practical thing that he ever really achieved in his lifetime was that he assembled and managed one of the largest and best libraries of his time, in Wolfenbüttel.

Leonardo was the embodiment of "praxis cum theoreia ". For him, theoreia was not theoretical in any abstract or formal sense, but derived directly from the antique meaning of "higher vision". He had the vision, and his sense of vision must have been of unbelievable acuity, because he saw and drew things that we are now aware of only because we have slow-motion kinematography , and polarized light for visualizing turbulences . Apart from that, he was through and through practical, one could say empirist , even though he never bothered about any -ism, he believed only his senses, and his experiments. Being born as illegitimate child of a wealthy advocate, he received only the standard middle class education, consisting then as now of the three R's: Readin', wRidin', 'Rithmetics. He never learned Latin to the exent that he could profit from the scholarly books which were at his time almost exclusively in Latin. For that same reason, he also had little training in the mathematical arts. Therefore, he had to rely by necessity on the most readily source of information available to him: His sensorium, and his observation. And he developed these facilities to a height of acuity that possibly no human attained to before or after. He was an engineer and an artist, had no interest in philosophy, nor in politics, had no loyalty to anyone, except himself, and he would have equally served the Sultan in Istambul [25] had he offered him a decent life time tenured position (LEON-HEYD , 128). Leonardo promised a lot to everyone who would listen to him, but he didn't seem to care as much as Leibniz that he hardly ever kept a promise. For him, the paintings and statues he sometimes delivered to his princely commissioners, were just a way to get funding for his ever continuing and consuming research projects. If he had no time left for the paintings, too bad for them, the research was more important.

Leonardo was highly esteemed for his artistical work by his contemporaries, but he was not quite considered a towering genius of humanity. Those who dealt with him thought he was more a trickster and a cheat, since he promised much and rarely delivered. He didn't care much about god, even less about catholic religion, and last but not least, he was homosexual. Had he not been so famous, and had he not been wise enough to keep to himself about what he was thinking and researching, he would have most assuredly come to a glaring, blazing, and illuminated end on top of an inquisition bonfire, together with all his notes, sketches and technical models.

Leonardo was the greatest master and genius in the field of visual and kinesthetic syn-aisthesis that humanity has ever had. Let us not bother now too much of the specific meanings of these terms. The fact that Leonardo could rise beyond being just a gifted artist to any stature of unique and universal geniusness is directly attributable to specific and historically singular circumstances of the Renaissance era. The Renaissance was the age of the uomo universale . At Leonardo's time, there were many outstanding persons able and proficient in the fine arts as well as engineering: Giotto , Brunelleschi , Francesco di Giorgio , Verrocchio , Leon Battista Alberti , as well as other savants in the vein of to the uomo universale whom he had himself met or heard about: Paolo del Pozzo Toscanello , Toscanelli , Benedetto dell'abbaco , Carlo Marmochi , Francesco Araldo , Domenico di Michelino . (LEON-KEMP , 88, LEON-BRAMLY , 132, 143, 144). This was the fortunate historical kairos of Leonardo's time: the education of engineering hadn't progressed far enough into the overweight of formalisms , pushing any aisthetic instruction out of the back door, as is now practiced in all engineering schools on the globe. At his time, there still existed the possibility that someone, who was primarily aisthetically inclined, could absorb all the knowledge available, reach perfection in it, and go beyond anything that humans were able to create in the 200 years to come. That is up and past the time of Leibniz. This was possible, because Leonardo had perfected the aisthetic techniques of understanding . Single handedly, intuitively, unerringly guided by his senses, his style totally neglected by the formalist ex-cathedra mentality that framed the higher school education and the engineering curriculum in the 500 years after him. Leibniz was totally opposed to Leonardo in this respect. Leibniz would have never lifted a hammer himself, or used a screwdriver.

At any later time in european history, the engineering education system threw out any predominantly aisthetic talent long before it could show its abilities in the profession. Someone like Leonardo, trying to enter that system later would invariably be deterred by the formalistic maze of standard technical education, and drop out after the first term. He would possibly become a gifted, but entirely forgotten artist, as was the fate of countless young men afterwards. Never bother about the women, they were deterred by the system even before entering it. That is a sad fact of our education systems, and Leonardo is practically the sole exception western european civilization has to offer. Leonardo was not unique in his potential, but western civilization has managed to lay to waste all that other potential that was available.

Maybe Leibniz was more optimistic than Leonardo, he had even developed an own philosophy, the theodicee , to prove that this world is the best of all possible worlds. But being able to prove that on paper didn't really do anything about the actual state of humanity in that bloody reality out there. Leonardo didn't care for philosophical consolations. He was through and through engineer, and he knew about the iron dynamics of the ensuing technological development long before it unfolded in full swing, that is right now, 500 years after him. He envisioned global catastrophe as result of the inevitable course that humanity would go under the influence of technological domination. His visions of deluge and global ecologic catastrophe that he sketched near the end of his life, are as magnificient and enigmatic as his greatest masterpieces, like the Last Supper or the Mona Lisa . (See LEON-HEYD , 183, 184., LEON-WALL , 181-183, LEON-GANT , ILL:LEO ) And they are predicting pretty much what is happening today and in the near future.

Am I being too prophetical, when I predict that humanity will get to experience "the full swing" of his vision to materialize pretty exactly around the 500th anniversary of his death, the year 2019 ?

In this section, I will give "my story". I am writing this work as part of an ongoing discussion with the many people with whom I came in contact about my project in the course of time. Some contacts are purely scientific, but others are more personal. This is for those people who know me personally, and those who read my paper and want to have a few personal impressions. It always helps the reader who is not too interested in the minutest technical details to get a feel for the person behind the story. Therefore, it is part of the introduction.

What you are reading is a further step in a long history of research and development that I have been involved in since about 15 years. There have been numerous internal papers and publications as well as extensive software development in the Leonardo-Leibniz Project . An outline of the writings can be found in the bibliography under BIB-AG. The titles listed there show the conceptual development as it progressed starting with the Diplom thesis in 1977, via several articles in the computer press in 1983-84, and the articles and reports on the Leibniz [26] System development in 1989-91 to the later papers up to 1995. The whole documented project work so far covers about 6 Megabytes of LPL (Leibniz Programming Language) source code and about 3 Megabytes text in articles and books.

I cannot say when this quest started. I can recall occasions and instances in the earliest years of my life that have a connection to the present work. I have somewhat arbitrarily set the starting point to an event that occurred to me wile travelling in India. I have enclosed a story on this in the appendix. Unfortunately it is in German, and I cannot, or will not, translate it. It is also not scientific, but again, for those who want to have a bit of my personal story, this will serve well. See: ->:

All during my university studies, I had been busy looking far and wide into things that had not the slightest career enhancing relevance for my future profession as a computer scientist, like philosophy , neurology , linguistics , indology , egyptology , history , comparative religion , and a few more. When I finally had to come up with my degree, I chose a subject for the thesis that would give me at least some leeways to amplify on my intellectual hobbies, while still containing a core structure of computer science. I called it: "Artificial Intelligence and Learning " (BIB-AG:AI-LRN77 ). As motto I chose a quotation from Leibniz : "Let us calculate, Sir" which he had used as programmatic declaration for his Characteristica Universalis . This was actually a trojan horse , since I meant with the quote that there was something missing in the approaches AI was using to make calculated representations of the world. But of course I couldn't prove that. I just thought that Leibniz had a tack on the matter when he engaged in his lively dispute with Clarke near the end of his life. I succeeded getting my degree, but then couldn't get any sensible concept for my PhD thesis that would still fit into the computer science framework. I had managed to diffuse out of the thought structure of what a good computer scientist is supposed to think like, if he ever is to earn his PhD in a German Computer Science department. I wasn't thinking like a natural scientist, but I also didn't quite fit the scheme for the humanities. I had developed an own style of thinking which didn't fit the categories at all.

I then started working in the computer field. I was in California in 1978-1980, and had gone to the Palo Alto home brew computer club a few times. Somehow I was around while all those things broke loose that were later called the micro computer revolution, even though I didn't get to know Steve Jobs personally. So I chanced to get to work on the first Apple I , Imsai , Sol , Altair , Northstar Horizon , Dynabyte , and what other unspeakable contraptions the genius of microcomputer tinkerers came up with. I had read all the marvel stories in Byte magazine , but was much less impressed when confronted with the machines in reality. Sure, I loved the personal feeling those little boxes gave you - finally having a computer all for your own. But working with them required one to enjoy a specific kind of masochism. Teletype paper tape as the only long-time storage, because disk drives cost a fortune. 8K Bytes of memory to work in. One had to constantly defeat the machinery to do what you wanted it to do. Conditions improved as time went on. One day, we all had floppy disk drives, even though it was impossible to take the disk from one computer and go to the next machine and use the data there. Not so, my friend, the designers have decided that it is in the best interest of company profits to ensure customer brand-fidelity, that they never even think of going with their data to a different machine. And one fine day I even went to see a friend who had managed to borrow, beg or steal, a hard disk drive from the company he was working for and hook it up to his computer. What a marvel! Five full megabytes of almost instantaneous access storage. Unimaginable, what one could store on this drive. The price was also unimaginable.

For me, the day of revelation came, when I had the first CP/M machine running a text processing program called Wordstar. I had never been fond of writing. I just hated being terribly self-conscious hitting those darn typewriter keys, always afraid of missing the one I wanted and having to go through an ordeal of correcting or even re-typing the page. I had learned touch-typing in school, so I didn't care for the slow-but-sure hunt-and-peck method with two fingers. So when I got that text program, somehow my whole world changed. I could write as fast as I wanted, forget about the errors, they can be corrected later. The most important thing is to get the ideas into the text while they come up. Wordstar used a scheme for cursor movement, the Wordstar Diamond (about which I will be talking further down). This was denounced cryptic and unintuitive by many people. I couldn't understand why. There was some kind of a learning curve in the beginning, but once learned, it was extremely powerful. I learned that the ability to express myself in writing was crucially influenced by the kind of flexibility my system allowed me to modify my work as I was going about the writing. I have heard of the writing style of other people. They told me they were thinking out everything neatly and cleanly on paper, and then typed it in themselves or had someone else do it for them. What nonsense, did I think. It is so much faster and more efficient if I think directly into the text editor. But somehow I have not been able to tell anyone what that really meant: To think directly into the text editor. Anyhow, I started writing and have never stopped since. Up to now, it is about 10 Megabytes, including 6 Megabytes of program code.

I was doing work in real-time embedded industrial control systems. This is the kind of devices that do computing for you, but you never get to see a computer. Intelligent washing machines, car electronics, missile guidance systems, and the like. Back in the olden days, they had to be squeezed into exceedingly tight memory spaces. If a manufacturer could put a system into 16K Bytes instead of 32K, he could save a lot of money in those days of TTL memory chips . Today that constraint isn't as stringent any more, but I got some experience of what it means to re-cycle single bytes. One machine I was programming for was an ingenious device that acted as assembly control for the manual assembly of electronic components. The machine supplied all the parts to the operator as they were supposed to be mounted, and even showed with a light point the exact location where they were to be mounted. The human was needed for the superior ability to position the parts, for which much more expensive and inflexible machinery would have to be used if done fully automatical. This capital outlay could only be economic in very large batches. For small to medium batches, it was more economic to do manual assembly. This machine was an example of the closest possible human machine feedback loop one could get. It capitalized on a domain of performance that is essential for any kind of virtual reality, but so far hasn't really been come close to: the essential question of zero time feedback . Now, of course, zero doesn't mean physical zero, it is a physiological zero . The human nervous system has a reaction lag constant of about 50 milliseconds, below which, everything is experienced as instantaneous, and above which, we can say: there has been a time difference between the events. At about 200 msec, we can say: This one occurred earlier than that one (see: PÖPPEL, ->: NEURO_BRAIN ).

Besides the bread-and-butter work, I never lost track of my quest. That Leibniz question kept nagging me year in and year out. Sometimes more, sometimes less perceptibly. I implemented a totally self-contained computing universe, called the Leibniz system . When I finally decided it was time to stop, the system had grown to 100.000 lines in about 6 megabytes source. It could very well have been the largest self-contained software system ever constructed by one person. Anything over 10,000 lines is usually created in a team approach. Creating a 100,000 line system takes anything from around 20 man-years to unlimited when done in an industrial setting. That is without maintenance. I have re-written the code of my system up to five times. In about 5 years, spare time. It has to be pointed out, that a self-contained system cannot be compared to a 100,000 line financial accounting package, which has a very narrow range of application. There is a totally different flavor in a universal system, which permeates through it whole and all.

Unfortunately, the Leibniz system was too all-encompassing and too self-contained to be explainable to anyone. I could not manage to get any other programmers to do any real work on it, because as with everything self-contained, you have to understand the whole before you can understand the parts. Today, you call this auto-poietic , if you want to be really scientific about it. The common scientific approach is to understand complicated things by reduction, by recursively dividing it up into parts and pieces, that are small enough to be understood [27]. Contrarily, an auto-poietic thing can be understood synthetically only. And anything longer than about 10 pages of computer listing cannot be expected to be understood synthetically by normal, ordinary, practical, down-to-earth folks, as computer programmers usually are. Of course, programmers are specialists at understanding systems of ten- or hundred thousand lines of code. This can be done, if, and only if, there is a way of decomposing them into modules that are separable after the usual rules of the trade. Those rules are not written anywhere, and at the universities, one usually never gets beyond a complexity of around a thousand lines, so the real tough jobs are those that the budding programmer novice gets thrown at his head once he enters the professional field for earnest. If you have a system that is not separable after the usual rules, it will be hard to explain to someone else. The whole thing becomes a chicken-egg question. And in our world of time and money, there are not many programmers willing to waste many hours if they can make an easier buck with more conventionally structured systems.

So, I found out that I had to do all the programming myself. Sometimes, people helped me, but when it came to integrate what they had produced for me, I found out, that I had to write it again, and when I was finished writing it again, it had changed totally beyond recognition from what my original helper had produced.

I had thought to develop the Leibniz system as a commercial product, but when people kept asking me: "What does it do?" I could only answer: "It is a software development environment". Now the next obvious question was: "What does it do better than my favorite {Turbo C / Microsoft C / Pascal / Visual Basic / Smalltalk / Fortran / Cobol } system?". Well, it did in fact do some things better than those systems, otherwise I wouldn't have thought it worth the while creating the whole thing. But I found out that the effort invested by a programmer to learn one specific system and get proficient in it, is so great, that you would have to offer exceptional advantages, and literally have to promise him heaven on earth to make him change. As one cigarette commercial once aptly coined it: "He would rather fight than switch". And that is quite understandable. So the commercial success was not the kind of smash hit as I had intended it to be.

You may not always get what you want, but you still get something that is of use for something. After all, I had done the whole work with that darned Leibniz question in the back of my mind. And it turned out that I had got some hands-in, down-to-the-bits experience in a totally Leibnizian endeavor: The possibility to create a totally self-contained computing universe.

This opportunity existed only in the very narrow time frame when microcomputers were small enough that one single programmer could manage to command the whole thing. That was from about 1978 to 1984. This was the time of the cometary rise of the Steve Jobses and Bill Gateses , and many more, who relapsed into oblivion as quickly as they had risen, when the IBM PC rendered all the other microcomputer models (except the Apple ) obsolete. It was an extremely narrow time frame of opportunity, a historical moment of kairos , that was unexpectedly, and unprecedentedly, there, and passed, before anyone really knew what was going on. When the general public had finally realized what had happened, there existed a few new industrial big players: Apple , Microsoft , SUN , and the IBM PC compatible industry . And business was going on as usual. Apple and Microsoft, and the rest of the microcomputer industry, were squarely placed in the hands of the financial market, and what could and would be developed rested on the decisions of those who allotted the megabucks that it took to put a few hundred or even thousand programmers to churn out yet another memory-buster, processor-buster example of over-byte bloated we-can-do-it-all-in-one-exe-file monster software piece that we have become accustomed to be presented with in ever-recurrung releases of new goodies for the last decade or so. We have just seen the latest multi-megabuck, thousand man-years, human wave battles being waged in the great "operating systems wars".

After about five years of technological development, micro computers had passed the earlier generation of mini computer s in complexity, and after ten years, they were up equal with the mainframes . Now, no-one knows about mini-computers any more, and the once mainframes are now called servers, or something like this. The days of the lonesome software-cowboy toiling in his garage, hoping to become as rich as Bill Gates were over. Of course, good money can still be made, when you write for a very special market, on an existing platform like Microsoft-C . But this is not what I mean building a totally self-contained system from scratch.

The possibility to develop whole systems single-handedly had only existed on micros, because the mainframes and minis had always been big-company affairs almost from the beginning. So there was never much of a question that someone in his garage might create a huge system on them. In those days there simply was not enough storage on those computers to allow a large system. Minis typically had 16 to 64 K Bytes of RAM. When they became big, like the Digital VAX , the mini companies had long grown beyond their own garage beginnings, forming multimegabuck corporations, with the usual hierarchical management for their tasks, just as the mainframe industry had given them a model, amply documented with the IBM OS for the /360 series that has so vividly been described by Brooks (BROO75 ). It may be interesting to note that the creator of the VAX operating system was commissioned by Microsoft to produce their Windows NT system. He could apply his expertise well.

So, the next instant of kairos was that even though micros had started with 16 K Bytes RAM in 1978, within seven years, in 1984, they had 640 K usable RAM. And the whole thing at the same prices. The money to buy 16 K Bytes RAM in 1978 allowed you to buy 640K in 1984, and an added hard disk of 20 Megabyte. So, there was enough space to build a sizeable system in, without having much more expense in terms of hardware. The Leibniz system had the space to grow. 640 K doesn't seem much, but this is because of a secret pact between the software manufacturers and the chip industry, which are, you may have guessed, all controlled by just one and the same financial conglomerate, and it is therefore not hard to understand why there is good reason for this ever-increasing resources hunger of modern software. The whole computer industry is simply programmed as a money-making machine , forcing users to buy ever new computers every year, because of ever-increasing hardware requirements, so that they can run all those ever-so-fancy new packages which just won't seem to move on an older machine.

If you use different programming strategies, you may end up with a factor of ten in terms of processor and human efficiency playing at your favor. But don't tell anyone, because the big guys might send a hit squad after you, if they find out that you might be ruining their nice money game.

So, this historical moment of kairos offered me too, an opportunity. Even though I didn't get rich and famous like Bill Gates , I also didn't end up losing millions, like Steve Jobs . There might only have been three or four people in this whole world who have single-handedly created self-contained 100.000 line systems of the kind of the Leibniz system . But there are no other programmers who could have noticed the not-so-technical significances of what they had created. As I have said, computer programmers usually are normal, ordinary, practical, down-to-earth, folks, and I mean it. The closest anyone of them will in his life ever get to anything metaphysic al is reading cyberpunk science fiction , like Neuromancer . Basta. And I still have to meet a philosopher dealing in metaphysics who would trust a computer enough to touch it even with a five-foot pole. Those people are still steeped in some kind of Hegelianism that considers anything made of filthy matter as beneath their dignity.

See also: ->: SOFTW-METAPHYSIK ->: SYMBOL_UNIVERSE , ->: SCHÖPFUNG

So I had the very rare opportunity to find out a few things about computing universes that have later become known under the name of Virtual Reality . Except, even then, they didn't get the full implications of what that meant. Because almost everyone thinks that Virtual Reality is supposed to be some kind of carbon copy of the reality we think we have around us. Nope. That is only half the rent. It gets really exciting when you come to think of the metaphysics . Unfortunately metaphysics does not belong to the standard curriculum taught to computer science students . You have to go out of convention's way pretty far to get any taste of that.

And that is not as much sheer fun as reading the bible or any other good mythological fairy tale might make you think. Because the sheer will-power of creation turns into utter necessity no sooner than you turn around. As I found out, it is devilishly difficult to be a god. Because the proverbial "the devil is in the details " is the most profound theological statement the human mind has ever come up with. Unfortunately, the theologians themselves have never heard of that one. A very interesting story by Stanislav Lem with a similar title, which even made it into a (probably not very profitable) movie, supported my findings that there must have been something about the business of god, which all the theologians, including the ever-so-logical Leibniz had overlooked. God must be sitting somewhere up there, being very ashamed of himself, and being terribly self-conscious about the mess that he had created in this beta-version 3290449432.b,Release-IV of the universe, and he still hasn't gotten things as right as he had intended. From the very mundane point of view of the master programmer of the universe, everything of what we lowly earthly creatures call deluges, cosmic catastrophes , and so on, that had suddenly interrupted the fates of this planet and this universe, and wiped out life on earth (or humanity) again and again, were nothing but minor "deletes" in some minor subroutines of the grand overall cosmic operating system , that our divine master programmer had apparently botched, and then tried to get a little better in the next version. As we all know from ancient vedic cosmology, every once in a few thousand billion years, the cosmic master programmer makes a radical "re-format" of the whole hard disk of the universe and starts afresh - If he doesn't get totally tired of programming altogether and decides to go out fishing on this fine day of Brahma .

Of course, this conception didn't come out of nothing. In 1980, I had had an experience which shattered my conceptions of the mind , of the self , and of the universe . If I were to date the start of my quest to any specific date, it was then. I have recorded that event as good as I could. But every one of those who have made similar experiences, knows that it is entirely impossible to convey with words the force of such an impact. But it has been tried again and again to express, even in the full knowledge that it is not possible (->: AVATAR ). To try to translate the account from German to English would be futile, and so I leave it as I recorded it.

This is just one reason why I think that the next 20 years are the irretrievable moment of kairos for humanity. If humanity will not act, then other forces will. Leonardo and countless others have tried to alert us to it. If humanity will not listen, well, what happens then? You guessed it: God the master programmer, or whatever metaphor suits you most about what is driving this universe, will just make a minor delete in one of his minor subroutines driving this universe, there will be a few minor local catastrophes, maybe an insignificant planet called earth busted beyond recognition. That is nothing new, and has happened time and again before. But on the overall, business will go on as usual in the universe, on this fine day of Brahma . What is happening on this planet is probably not very important for the whole universe, and the folks who are running it. That's all. Of what great use is this speck of humanity on this little ball in that insignificant corner of the universe anyhow?

It may be apparent by now, that what I call the Leonardo-Leibniz project is not just some trifle idea that I dreamed up in my fancy. Gradually in my progress, I uncovered patterns of something pervading all the development of humanity, into which I became involved, or maybe even sucked up, with me being the last one to realize what was going on. I will now say a few more things on how I came to the project:

In the christian tradition, there is the beneficial institution of the patron saint . This has equivalences in all the other major religious traditions. It is itself a continuation and adaptation of the very old tradition of local and departmental spirits and devas, genii, and sub-gods, that populated an immense pantheon of the lower ranks of the spiritual hierarchy of antiquity. We know only the upper echelons now: Zeus , Athene , Mars , Venus , and so on. Each god and sub-god had its specific field where s/he reigned and people prayed to him/her to get luck in their affairs. The patron saint is the newest christian upper garment in a very old emperor's wardrobe. Behind this is a psycho/mythological method. The patron saint serves for the one who addresses him/her as guiding line in their own striving in life. When I adopted Leibniz as my patron saint, I didn't really know about this very much. I had the aims and goals of Leibniz guide me for 15 years now, and now I know a little better, even though that may still be not very much. But it has served me. In a world where a mentor is very hard to get, and those who pretend to be one, may be the worst frauds, which you will not find out until it is too late for your life, you should try your best to find some pattern of honesty, consistency, and consequence that you can adhere to while all the world around you runs after every new fad, buys the newest bottle of Kako-Kalo (Kakon-Kalon , as is the solution of this riddle), and strongly believes in the unspoken central dogma of modern materialistic-hedonistic society: "A hundred Million flies can't err. I've got to be in that game also". Leibniz may have gotten quite a few things wrong in his life, and he may have run after a phantom most of the time. But he was one of the most honest, most sincere, and most consequential spirits, who was also gifted with one of the most exceptional minds of humanity. But he could have been as intelligent as he could ever be. If he were not honest, it might be very dangerous to follow him.

You may end up wandering some pretty lonely trails if you go this way. And you may get hit over the head quite often by some entirely well meaning fellow human, who tries in his best intention to save you from this entirely senseless search of something that cannot be there because modern science has found this is not a question one is supposed to ask. And you may be howling in despair because all you experience is a seemingly endless pitchblack dark night of the soul (St. John of the Cross ).

By gradually following his thought tracks, uncovering bits and pieces here and there, I came to hit on some fundamental questions that he had banged his head against vigorously without being too successful doing anything about it. Not that I consider Leibniz' solutions he had devised as too impressing. I considered, and still consider, reading his verbiage as painful and I have to literally force myself to wade through his mental convolutions. The only consolation I have is that it could be worse: I could have to read Hegel .

Now after many years of chipping and gnawing at the monumental mental edifice that he and his collaborators had erected, I came to the conclusion that there is one thing extremely more important than trying to understand what they got as results. This essential thing is: to learn the questions. And even beyond that, it is more essential to learn to ask the questions. Because in every epoch we live in, things seem different from which ever side we look at them. But some of the questions remain, and even if the questions change, the art of thaumazein is still where all the action is (->: THAUMAZEIN ). And the primeval pattern of the most fundamental questions is embedded in the Three big W's: What, hoW, Why. These are the keys to the universe. This is what I learned from Leibniz , Aristoteles , and Platon . May all their other works rest in piece and rot together with their bones.

Chinese Proverb, related by Alfred Schinz

Unfortunately there is no sure way to get to the questions except to wade through their verbiage, tantalizing as that may seem in times. And there is a secondary problem: The more other people wrote about what they think what these towering geniuses meant, the more they were heaping interpretation upon interpretation. And reading the interpretations may not be the best way to come closer to the questions. This pattern was not clear enough to me until I read Schopenhauer 's "Über die Universitätsphilosophie". And Schopenhauer stated it very succinctly: If you want to make a career as professional philosopher in one of the universities, then it is good to know what all the other philosophers have said. It is essential that you learn their style of argument, and what it needs to win them. But when you want to find out the real things, you have to go to different places to find out. You won't get that at the universities.

Antes que se la coman los gusanos, que la aprovechen los humanos [28]

Epicurean Proverb

I finally understood that Leibniz in all his geniusness and sincerety may have gotten something essential wrong. And his best intentions had turned out quite the opposite. His logics and mathematics, that he perceived as illuminated by the transcendent spirit of god, served only to implement a technology that has no use for god. I then found out, that if we had understood the so-called materialists and empiricists better, in the line of Demokrit, Epikur [29] , and Berkeley, humanity might have fared better. Because Epikur and his school had advocated something which makes people less vulnerable to -isms. He had advocated that people trust their senses. He had said that the sense of well-being, the bodily homeostasis , was the most reliable indicator to look for if we want to find out the worth of things (titles under: EPIKUR ). When it doesn't feel good, it might sound good, and logical, and entirely convincing. But it still isn't good. The question may not be about logical truth s, because what is logically true may not be useful at all, nor advantageous in practice. Epikurean teaching is about applicability, appropriateness, practical usefulness, and what we call today ecology .

Because so much abuse and misinterpretation has been heaped on the Epikurean teaching, especially as advocating an uninhibited hedonism , this needs to be clarified. Epikurean teaching does not advocate debauchery . In order to fine-tune the bodily sensorium that it can act as an indicator, one must primarily avoid clogging it, by food, drink, and stimulation. Consequently one should lead a life there was fairly austere. Only then is it possible to experience the bodily homeostasis as enjoyment. Any excess in the above areas is already a sign that the homeostasis has been lost. "The aisthaesis is where the action is." (Epikurean proverb).

Berkeley had also advanced a coherent world model on reliance on the senses (BERKELEY ).

I might also cite the much-misunderstood sophist Protagoras , who had made a very sensible statement, that qualifies him as the founder of ergonomics .

All through the ages, reliance on the senses has been the opposite of scholarly, theological, and philosophical dogmas. Because the gist of all other teachings was, somewhat simplified: The less good it feels, the more you can be sure to be on the right path of salvation [30]. No matter what kind of path and what kind of salvation was meant with that. This began already with Parmenides , and Plato followed suit. Initially the reason for distrust of the senses was that they supposedly lead to error. Now the following schools of philosphy and theology might have disagreed with Plato in any way they wished, but all agreed that one had to follow the teachings of the masters and the preachers, but not the senses. Because this was the most sure way to dominate people after they had become insecure and distrusting of their own perceptions. This is the foremost mechanism used in all the primary schools on this planet: Cut the children off their used and familiar environment and sense inputs, lock them up in an austere, sensorily denuded room, with bare walls, force them to sit still in uncomfortable benches, never let them try out anything themselves because they will break it anyhow, and most importantly, let them listen to their teacher, and speak only if asked. This very same method has evolved into a veritable mind-bending technology throughout the millennia, and as we experience all around us, these arts are having their heyday right now. All the Hitler s, Khomeini s, Stalin s, and Mao s, have been masters of this school. A very insteresting analysis of that technology is in KRAMER93 [31].

So I have come to unroll the whole carpet again, from the beginning, and arrived at the core questions, together with their answers:

and the variation thereof:

See also: ->: THING_THINGED

We may state the question differently: Rationalism over Empirism , or Leonardo over Leibniz. To me, there are some stringent reasons for Leonardo over Leibniz . Leonardo seems to be the one who has been most successful following this path. Since he was wise enough not to make any noise about what he did, he managed to survive. And if we follow his thought tracks, we may eventually re-discover what he found. And it is possible to follow the senses and not end up where the empirists in the line of Locke went. Locke was quite correct, and he might have been misinterpreted by his followers and his adversaries alike. So let's get back to asking the questions. What was it with empirism that took a wrong turn?

It is easier to find the wrong turn of rationalism. The example of Leibniz shows that rationalism is entirely successful rationalizing to complete logical satisfaction that "this world is the best of all worlds" while humanity "out there" is having one of the most terrific experiences of "hell on earth" that could ever be dreamed up by the most sinister-minded horror movie director. This was the time of one of the greatest human desasters and cultural breakdowns that had devastated central Europe , namely Germany and Bohemia : the 30 year war . This had just ended when Leibniz was born, devastating Germany to an extent that would have made Morgenthau envious. Not to mention the human catastrophe of spanish mass extermination of American Indian cultures, which was not long past. ->: MASSACRES ->: DESASTERS

As Toulmin and other researchers have shown, the time of the origin of modern science, the time of Descartes , Leibniz and Newton was anything else than an optimistic, bright, prosperous, and enlightened age. To the contrary, it was a time of extreme cultural agony, fear, disorientation, and doubt. (See also: TOULMIN-KOSMO , BERMAN83 p. 25-61 , PIETSCHMANN83 , ZINN89 )

Now inventing a theodicee might do serve to make the impression of the desaster bearable [32], so that a sensitive spirit like Leibniz wouldn't have to collapse because of desperation. But it must be asked if it not also served as a blinder. Because maybe there was something about the plight of human existence on earth that could be done about, if it were viewed from a different perspective.

[6] art of memory

[7] syn-aisthesis= the synergetic cooperation of all the sensory instrumentarium

[8] See: ->: SYMBOLATOR_DEF, p. 30

[9] kairos is the ancient greek term for the momentary, fortuitous instant, that has to be grasped or the opportunity will disappear never to be presented again.

[10] ->: SYMBOL_POWER, p. 148, ->: NEW_HISTORY, p. 163

[11] ->: THAUMAZEIN, p. 115, ->: HERAKLIT, p. 1

[12] LORENZ-NAT, p. 136

[13] The turbulent desasters engulfing human civilization that he drew are exactly the kind of phenomena you get as consequence of global warming and destabilization of the climate that are waiting for us. See also the chapter on Leonardo later in the introduction. Literature: LEON-HEYD, 183, 184, LEON-WALL, 181-183.

[14] See the "double C - double P game": the method how to get rich and powerful and have the rest of humanity pay for it. How to Commonalize Cost and Privatize Profit. (HARDIN85)

[15] The word representation is used here in the sense of Schopenhauer. There is a potential of confusion with the representational school of in the field of cognition research that is using the word in a different sense. This school assumes that the sensory system extracts physical features of a physical object and represents them in some way in the neuronal structure. We can express this as a representation of (something). In Schopenhauer's sense, there is no "of": the representation is It. In the words of the Virtual Reality school: Reality has always been Virtual. See also: MATURANA-BAUM, 144.

[16] ->: WILL_REPRESENT, p. 129

[17] Hegel is the arch-idealistic "Gottseibeiuns", the ultimate terror image of all natural-scientific thought.

[18] I have to differentiate verbal and conceptual thinking, which has been most amplified by writing and the printing press, from other mental process, which we may call thinking or not. To stay clear of confusion, I call mentation anything that includes verbal thinking, but also forms of skills that have nothing to do with words, like learning to mentally transform a drawing into a 3-d object.

[19] see: Heinrich v. Kleist: "Über das Marionettenspiel"

[20] Forget about 2 r * pi ! It is "ten steps forward, one step to the left", repeated until you come back to where you started out with the turtle.

[21] German ingeniosity has found something quite as good, and about 300 years old by now: The famous tried-and-tested "Münchhausen lift-youself-by-your-pigtail" trick, which would even make an indian rope trick sorcerer look pale by comparison because Münchhausen managed to lift not only himself, but also his horse. He actually performed usable work with his trick, and not just some amusing spectacle like the Indians do.

[22] About the womanizing of Leibniz, even though nothing much is known, that doesn't mean that nothing existed. It could as well mean that both parties involved had stringent reasons to conceal anything going on as much as possible. Leibniz was a lowly bourgeois, and all the people he dealt with, especially the princesses of the house of Hanover, with whom he dealt most, were of highest nobility. Any suspicion of a liaison must have been fatal for both. The baroque age is as well known for double standards as any other age that had strict outward rules that were just there to be broken, but let no one know about it. See also the entries on Sophie Charlotte in: Eduard Vehse, "Illustrierte Geschichte des Preussischen Hofes", Franckh, Stuttgart 1901

[23] A good overview of the scientific spectrum is given by Tschirnhaus, who was a longtime friend and collaborator of Leibniz (TSCHIRNHAUS). Thanks to Peter Zimmermann for the tip.

[24] I have written a whole book on Leibniz: BIB-AG:LEIB-CHR.DOC for anyone interested.

[25] Who was, for christianity then, even worse than the devil.

[26] Leibniz is a trade mark of A. Goppold

[27] Descartes: On method.

[28] I am forever indebted to my friend Bibiana for this invaluable juwel from the treasurehouse of folk wisdom.

[29] Excerpt from SOFT-ENCYC (Appendix I):

Epikur grew up on Samos, in -323 he went to Athens. The family was displaced in the wake of the makedonian conquest of greece. He started teaching in -310 in Mytilene and Lampsakos, returned -306 to Athens, and opened up his "philosophy school in the garden". His school had strong roman following in the highest circles, and the fragments discovered in Herculaneum belonged to the library of Caesar's father-in-law Piso.

[30] A particularly good example is the puritan code of ethics: You may do anything you want, as long as you don't enjoy it.

[31] Thanks to Marion Hera NZ, for this information.

[32] See Voltaire's Candide, where the theodicee was masterfully satirized.