Post by aarvoll (INTJ) on Sept 11, 2018 21:32:20 GMT
Integralism, a term popularized in the 1890’s in Spain, reflects a traditional Catholic social teaching which favors conformance of secular politics to the moral teachings of the Church. The aim of the state under an integralist interpretation is to direct man toward his ultimate spiritual goal. Hence Catholicism, under Integralism, ought to be declared as the state religion and political legitimacy ought to be tied to the authority of the Church. This was effectively the state of affairs under the Ancien Régime and the medieval west more generally.
This essay will speculate on a much broader Integralism, which seeks to order philosophy, science, art, culture, pedagogy, human organization and individual choice according to a general conceptual scheme. The connection of this philosophy to the traditional Catholic position is clear, as these facets of life were in fact ordered under the Catholic Church during the nascent period of our now senescent civilization. The major part of the series of conceptual revolutions characterizing our age have in fact been adopted into the Catholic perspective, but this assimilation has been conducted ad hoc and so the weakening of Catholic moral authority has followed as the inevitable consequence of a poorly integrated weltanschauung.
Today we do not have the benefit of an academic system unified by an overarching metaphysical and moral consensus, and we living in the current civilizational interstitial are faced with the task of surveying the least integrated and most abundant intellectual environment in our history with an eye to the materials necessary for a sound framework. Many of the philosophical developments which will lead to the successful integration of Metaphysics, Ethics and Epistemology are no doubt already extant, and it will be up to those seeking the foundations of a new and comprehensive worldview to take stock of these developments with an open mind. Scientific theories, likewise, are present in abundance which may hold some keys to the highly integrated worldview, and moving forward these theories will have to be considered in light not only of their intrinsic merits but also their coherence with an as yet unidentified cannon of compatible theories and with an equally elusive unifying philosophy.
Taking stock of this wealth of information requires an organizational engine of integration, wherein ideas to be considered are not analyzed in situ but brought through the kaleidoscope of scientific, metaphysical, artistic, ethical and cultural lenses. The structure of this engine is not our concern here, it is rather the general epistemological principle entailed in the approach.
This notion of a unifying framework of knowledge is not without presuppositions. In pursuing a method of integration across fields we presume a metaphysical principle of universal reducibility. This approach rejects, ex hypothesi, ontological pluralism, an ironic implication considering the desideratum here is a pluralistic epistemology, but the implication cannot be logically denied, since supposing a wholistic account of the world is to suppose a general syntax within which the unique languages of physics, logic, literary criticism, etc., are translatable. A general syntax must underly the structure of reality in order for an integrated account of reality to exist.
Are we to consider this axiom of ontological monism to be mere presupposition, an option to be favored or not as against modernist pluralisms depending on whim or fancy? Chris Langan’s principle of “syndiffeonesis” suggests no:
“The concept of syndiffeonesis can be captured by asserting that the expression and/or existence of any difference relation entails a common medium and syntax, i.e. the rules of state and transformation characterizing the medium. It is from these rules that the relation derives its spatial and temporal characteristics as expressed within the medium. Thus, a syndiffeonic relation consists of a difference relation embedded in a relational medium whose distributed rules of structure and evolution support its existence.”
-CTMU p. 17
All difference relations entail a common medium by virtue of which their particular characteristics are expressed in the first place. The idea that one might use one completely isolated rubric for ethical judgement, another for evolutionary theory and an unrelated third for analysis in linguistics, is an idea that ignores the fact that for ethical, evolutionary and linguistic phenomena to exist the qualities that distinguish them must have a grounding in something more general, and the same applies to that underlying generality- it too must derive its own characteristics from a syntactic medium with rules that allow those characteristics to be intelligibly expressed. This tower of turtles must find its base in a turtle of absolute generality, a turtle that provides the groundwork of meaning for all other turtles.
There are two obvious paths into developing a worldview with an explicit universal syntax. Chris Langan has taken steps along the first path from above; Ken Wilber has taken highly misguided steps aiming at the second path from below. We start from metaphysics and work our way down, or we start with analysis of lower order processes and compare these through the kaleidoscope of lenses mentioned above in order to reach the unifying framework that makes sense of the whole. When faced with dichotomies like this my personal dictum is, “Always both!”.
Of course this dictum can lead to a heaping on of conceptual matter, and the burden of information gathering and processing can become too great for an individual. To adapt to this, and to the input overload of the information age, a proper conceptual framework should be an output of a cybernetic social and computational collective. To complicate matters further, this cybernetic structure must be informed by the conceptual framework which is its goal, meaning an evolutionary model with extensive feedback systems is quite simply the only solution.
To allow the individual to interface with this collective in a productive way a new pedagogical approach must be innovated. This pedagogy must itself become an evolutionary system, but a few basic needs direct us to an initial state. Since every idea must be processed through all interpretive lenses available to the cybernetic collective, each node of the system must be literate to some degree in the communications output of all other nodes. The human mind and individual schedule unfortunately do not allow for full cross-comprehension within the system, meaning that a simplifying filter must be applied to all outputs, extracting as much of the essence of each idea in as few bits as is possible. A mechanism must also be present for allowing otiose outputs to die out. Once outputs of the cybernetic conceptual framework generating structure are rendered manageable they must be collated in a form suitable to the demands of the hobbyist scholar.
There are two basic dimensions that such a form must have: space and time. The spacial dimension of conceptual relations can be expressed as a Venn diagram, or alternatively as a tree diagram. The temporal dimension can be expressed as a timeline. Since all concepts have an historical inception, whether or not we know exactly when that was, they can all take their place in a timeline. Since all concepts fit somewhere in the hierarchy of ideas, being subsumed under more general and subsuming more specific concepts, they can all take their place in Venn and tree diagrams. An interesting and useful feature of this circumstance is that the timeline and the diagrams intersect at every point. The pedagogical application would be to work through the timeline from the beginning with the diagrams as a resource for understanding where historical elements fit in more general conceptual structures.
To restate, all outputs, simplified and registered as valuable, ought to be included in an integrated temporal and spacial diagram of knowledge. Interfacing with such a diagram would act as an initiation into the productive activity of the collective, but its intrinsic utility extends well beyond this. This pedagogical approach would have wide value to students and autodidacts of a flavors, and its commercial appeal may well be significant enough, once the diagram is endowed with an intuitive and aesthetic user interface, to generate significant funding which could be used to aid the necessary project of the truthful and integrated worldview of the future.
This essay will speculate on a much broader Integralism, which seeks to order philosophy, science, art, culture, pedagogy, human organization and individual choice according to a general conceptual scheme. The connection of this philosophy to the traditional Catholic position is clear, as these facets of life were in fact ordered under the Catholic Church during the nascent period of our now senescent civilization. The major part of the series of conceptual revolutions characterizing our age have in fact been adopted into the Catholic perspective, but this assimilation has been conducted ad hoc and so the weakening of Catholic moral authority has followed as the inevitable consequence of a poorly integrated weltanschauung.
Today we do not have the benefit of an academic system unified by an overarching metaphysical and moral consensus, and we living in the current civilizational interstitial are faced with the task of surveying the least integrated and most abundant intellectual environment in our history with an eye to the materials necessary for a sound framework. Many of the philosophical developments which will lead to the successful integration of Metaphysics, Ethics and Epistemology are no doubt already extant, and it will be up to those seeking the foundations of a new and comprehensive worldview to take stock of these developments with an open mind. Scientific theories, likewise, are present in abundance which may hold some keys to the highly integrated worldview, and moving forward these theories will have to be considered in light not only of their intrinsic merits but also their coherence with an as yet unidentified cannon of compatible theories and with an equally elusive unifying philosophy.
Taking stock of this wealth of information requires an organizational engine of integration, wherein ideas to be considered are not analyzed in situ but brought through the kaleidoscope of scientific, metaphysical, artistic, ethical and cultural lenses. The structure of this engine is not our concern here, it is rather the general epistemological principle entailed in the approach.
This notion of a unifying framework of knowledge is not without presuppositions. In pursuing a method of integration across fields we presume a metaphysical principle of universal reducibility. This approach rejects, ex hypothesi, ontological pluralism, an ironic implication considering the desideratum here is a pluralistic epistemology, but the implication cannot be logically denied, since supposing a wholistic account of the world is to suppose a general syntax within which the unique languages of physics, logic, literary criticism, etc., are translatable. A general syntax must underly the structure of reality in order for an integrated account of reality to exist.
Are we to consider this axiom of ontological monism to be mere presupposition, an option to be favored or not as against modernist pluralisms depending on whim or fancy? Chris Langan’s principle of “syndiffeonesis” suggests no:
“The concept of syndiffeonesis can be captured by asserting that the expression and/or existence of any difference relation entails a common medium and syntax, i.e. the rules of state and transformation characterizing the medium. It is from these rules that the relation derives its spatial and temporal characteristics as expressed within the medium. Thus, a syndiffeonic relation consists of a difference relation embedded in a relational medium whose distributed rules of structure and evolution support its existence.”
-CTMU p. 17
All difference relations entail a common medium by virtue of which their particular characteristics are expressed in the first place. The idea that one might use one completely isolated rubric for ethical judgement, another for evolutionary theory and an unrelated third for analysis in linguistics, is an idea that ignores the fact that for ethical, evolutionary and linguistic phenomena to exist the qualities that distinguish them must have a grounding in something more general, and the same applies to that underlying generality- it too must derive its own characteristics from a syntactic medium with rules that allow those characteristics to be intelligibly expressed. This tower of turtles must find its base in a turtle of absolute generality, a turtle that provides the groundwork of meaning for all other turtles.
There are two obvious paths into developing a worldview with an explicit universal syntax. Chris Langan has taken steps along the first path from above; Ken Wilber has taken highly misguided steps aiming at the second path from below. We start from metaphysics and work our way down, or we start with analysis of lower order processes and compare these through the kaleidoscope of lenses mentioned above in order to reach the unifying framework that makes sense of the whole. When faced with dichotomies like this my personal dictum is, “Always both!”.
Of course this dictum can lead to a heaping on of conceptual matter, and the burden of information gathering and processing can become too great for an individual. To adapt to this, and to the input overload of the information age, a proper conceptual framework should be an output of a cybernetic social and computational collective. To complicate matters further, this cybernetic structure must be informed by the conceptual framework which is its goal, meaning an evolutionary model with extensive feedback systems is quite simply the only solution.
To allow the individual to interface with this collective in a productive way a new pedagogical approach must be innovated. This pedagogy must itself become an evolutionary system, but a few basic needs direct us to an initial state. Since every idea must be processed through all interpretive lenses available to the cybernetic collective, each node of the system must be literate to some degree in the communications output of all other nodes. The human mind and individual schedule unfortunately do not allow for full cross-comprehension within the system, meaning that a simplifying filter must be applied to all outputs, extracting as much of the essence of each idea in as few bits as is possible. A mechanism must also be present for allowing otiose outputs to die out. Once outputs of the cybernetic conceptual framework generating structure are rendered manageable they must be collated in a form suitable to the demands of the hobbyist scholar.
There are two basic dimensions that such a form must have: space and time. The spacial dimension of conceptual relations can be expressed as a Venn diagram, or alternatively as a tree diagram. The temporal dimension can be expressed as a timeline. Since all concepts have an historical inception, whether or not we know exactly when that was, they can all take their place in a timeline. Since all concepts fit somewhere in the hierarchy of ideas, being subsumed under more general and subsuming more specific concepts, they can all take their place in Venn and tree diagrams. An interesting and useful feature of this circumstance is that the timeline and the diagrams intersect at every point. The pedagogical application would be to work through the timeline from the beginning with the diagrams as a resource for understanding where historical elements fit in more general conceptual structures.
To restate, all outputs, simplified and registered as valuable, ought to be included in an integrated temporal and spacial diagram of knowledge. Interfacing with such a diagram would act as an initiation into the productive activity of the collective, but its intrinsic utility extends well beyond this. This pedagogical approach would have wide value to students and autodidacts of a flavors, and its commercial appeal may well be significant enough, once the diagram is endowed with an intuitive and aesthetic user interface, to generate significant funding which could be used to aid the necessary project of the truthful and integrated worldview of the future.
