In-Sight Publishing

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

“The sole difference between the real and the reverse universe” is the Second Law of Thermodynamics in this examination of the nature and structure of reality via its apparent laws. Sidis in The Animate and the Inanimate makes this distinct motion about this particular law compared to other laws.

In this sense, the Second Law of Thermodynamics becomes a fulcrum for the operations of the first universe, or the real universe, and the reverse universe, or the reverse time universe. All physical laws, according to the earlier portions of the text, must be, by necessity, reversible.

While, at least, one is not. More will be expounded in later chapters about the illusory nature of laws in this regard through the text-based representation of a thought experiment, not on the nature of time but, on the nature of natural law through time. Natural law here does not mean a religious ethic found in Natural Law.

For laws’ operation through matter as a consistency, matter in the real universe and the reverse universe will be the same. However, against common sense or ordinary experience in the real universe, balls will bounce up the stairs rather than down. This peculiarity speaks to the strangeness of the reverse universe compared to the real universe.

The stairs “throw” the ball up — utterly peculiar, strange. Physical law describes the actions of the ball, the how. Such a why, though, it seems entirely queer. Sidis proposes this within the framework of the common denominator of the real universe and the reverse universe.

One is the Second Law of Thermodynamics with the energy of the universe “constantly running down.” With differences of energy in different volumes of the universe, the cosmos will equalize the energy distribution, eventually.

Further, he explains. Any law connected to this Second Law of Thermodynamics will be irreversible by derivation as well. Even though, energy can be reconverted; heat will be lost. The energetic clock runs down, not up, here.

This is an example of an irreversible law when contrasting the real universe and the reverse universe, of Sidis. He considers the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in fact, the “sole” difference between them.

What is the reason for this universal peculiarity? With a universe running down from the concentrated forms of energy to pure evenly distributed heat means the universe will exact upon itself a state in which no further state transitions seem possible: a dead universe as the real universe, in the end.

In the reverse universe, the universe, in some sense, winds up, not with a loss of heat with collisions, but an increase in heat or molar kinetic energy. Heat is gained, not lost when contrasting the reverse universe and the real universe collisions.

When comparing a machine efficiency to the physical laws, Sidis measures all as less than 100% efficient, because heat is lost, not gained. By its nature, in the thought experiment, the reverse universe becomes more than 100% efficient — let’s call this superefficient.

In turn, the reverse time universe becomes superefficient vis-à-vis mechanical efficiency to the point of a minimum of >/= 100% in the real universe. Yet, as physical property mirrors one to the other, the reverse universe maps onto the real universe in most respects with the mechanical efficiencies, potentially, as reflective of one to the other in terms of supraefficiency and superefficiency.

One universe’s supraefficiency is another’s superefficiency when considered on a reversal of the factor or variable of temporality. Sidis remarks on temperature too. With two bodies at 0° and 200° Fahrenheit, the available energy would be represented by the temperature of the hotter body or the one corresponding to 200° Fahrenheit.

While, at the same time, the colder body remains 460° above Absolute Zero here. In each of the two bodies, there is 460° of unavailable energy for the two. With the same mass and specific heat, the total available energy, under the Second Law of Thermodynamics, would be 460° and 460° plus a corresponding 0° and 200° Fahrenheit, respectively, for a total of 1,120° Fahrenheit between the two bodies.

The total energy available becomes 200°:1,120° for a total energy conversion possibility of 18%. Energy in this available form becomes unavailable because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics with the amount of available energy in the universe consistently running down and not up. Cosmos exists as zero-sum in this framework, so far.

A cosmogony, cosmology, and eschatology of the transient and the self-constrictive. A constriction bound by the progression of time as experienced as an Arrow of Time moving ‘forward.’ In such a reverse universe, energy is not dissipated as heat but inculcated or absorbed — in a manner of speaking — into the bodies in an environment.

“Bodies” here means general bodies, not human or animal alone. Energy below the coldest is drawn upon as a reserve and there exists a reserve fund of energy building energy differences based on reserve rather than dissipation, as in a supraefficiency versus a superefficiency.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

That’s the discourse of writing behind the words or something like it. For earlier writers, writing, or typing in the modern period, is a huge pain in the behind, the backside. It’s tedious, seemingly unnecessary. But they do it anyway. The structure of a sentence. The decorum of grammar, the frame of syntax, and the content of suitable word choice and correct ordering of words.

Over time, these become automated for writers. They feedback into deeper structures of the mind for the automaticity of structure and content, where intent drives it, now. An emotion, for example, can be a driver. When writing for a wedding magazine, there is writing from an emotion felt in the chest, oriented to a higher-order abstract principle, which gets integrated together as the writing unfolds.

Until, it feels right, intuitively. Intuition plays a large role in writing, after enough writing. How much? A sufficient amount for the person, which adds nothing to the descriptor. But it’s really that way. You have to write, and write, and read, and read, and write, and read, constantly. Over time, intuition may play the only role.

You must not develop the skills, alone, but the actual structures for thinking as a writer. Writing adapts a core feature of human capacity, so identity: language. Acts of writing are speech acts formalized. The process of continual refinement, of endurance of the mind, and renewed breakthroughs into genuine self-expression.

The formalities have been dealt with, automated, and then intent guides the entirety of the process. This can be considered capital “O” Offshoring. You offshore the lower-level basics to the non-conscious, but more active, parts of the mind. Then you can focus on vetting of ideas your mind throws at you, and the putting of emotion and true self to page.

Your own subjectivity poses another perennial question.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

On December 20, 2017, Peter died. His body destroyed itself in an autoimmune attack. He was knocked out. Doctors connected him to an assistive machine. It kept his body alive, while ‘asleep.’ His lungs filled with fluid. They needed draining by the machinery of plastic, metal, and electronics.

Loved ones gathered around. They knew. It was time to begin the end. His body shut off between the morning into the early afternoon with the closing down of the machine keeping his unconscious body alive.

Death, to not be; Pete met the proverbial scythe of the unending eternal. Weeks passed to months and then a few years. Eileen couldn’t manage the pain, the void, the vacuum of Pete’s memories in her. More than 60 years of the union met as a singlet, a widow.

All unions meet the inevitability of an end with the ever-present two-word question, “Who first?” No matter the depth of the love, the thread-count of the connection, the amiability of the friendship, or the years built after one another. Death cares not for these; lovers do.

In this sense, lovers represent life, itself.

Holding onto a photo of Peter, Eileen met with family members in the early and early-middle parts of February 2021. To reconcile, to meet, to discuss life and love, while drifting in and out of consciousness, she was probably undergoing a psychogenic death.

Little sleep, no eating or minimal food intake, barely sipping water, the implosion of the self over a bond broken. “I’m coming, Pete,” over and over again. She just wanted to be home because her current house was a stranger’s abode, lonely and alone.

February 14, 2021, Valentine’s Day — poetically, Eileen Jacobsen died. Maybe, she met her valentine, maybe not. A Sunday departure from the stage. The Thursday before, some grandchildren visited her.

She turned to one and said, “Oh, hi, Scott.” A greeting meeting the last visit before the final, “Bye.”

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

Existence means, typically, extant being. With historical sensibility, existence means being in a broad sense of history, current moments, and the future. The quality of “to be” seems like the act of existence.

The domain of reasonable discourse seems split between the evident and the self-evident in existence. Evident, in this frame, means the sensory continuum of experience and its extended continuum into formalized empiricist mechanisms and methodologies.

The self-evident as a being which knows and knows that it knows; no way out of this: existence, then self-evidence, and then evidence. Powerful derivations form from this. An object — dynamic — universe develops a separate station in the process of evolutionary change with a subject emergent in it.

Slowly, subjectivities come birthing forth out of the universe, as a part of the nature of nature. It’s a peculiar happenstance of the ordinary structure of reality. An object universe producing independence of mind within itself, as such. This makes metaphysics a useless subject matter.

Where metaphysics unnecessarily complicates the study of this operational framework. The world becomes existent, ontology, and knowable to some extent, epistemology, but integrated into and of itself, voiding metaphysics, because the knowledge of the structure of reality requires reality. This is so a priori with an evolved/constructed mind with the capacity to know to such a degree or a posteriori through the study of material reality.

The knowing cannot be decoupled from the known because the knowledge exists as a property of a being capable of knowing, which exists in the extant or the known, the potentially known, and the unknown. Even though, the concept of a “property” makes little sense with the demarcation, the line, drawn by an observer. Only existence exists, and properties, the inherencies of an object or process, derive from this, while existence remains the ground state and the self-evident makes the distinctions.

The evident would form the basis of the latter (a priori) and the self-evident the former (a posteriori). In this manner, we come to ontology and epistemology as an integrated loop and metaphysics as moot. Another field dealing with values is axiology.

Axiology is mere as the values held by such minds evolved or constructed within the universe. Those are tautologically necessary for survival, so good enough, plus some room for variation — good and bad for further survival. Valuelessness is the currency of the universe, while values are produced internally to it — global valuelessness and localized value.

It’s akin to metaphysics as without place. A higher-order language isn’t raining down upon the universe. The universe integrates its functionality into itself, while evolved critters appear to have derived some truths about it — mistaking symbol use for some externally derived law (leading to an infinite regress or merely definitional games to close the gap).

This does not require a unicity of reality but becomes assisted with an apparent unicity of it. Assume as such, the physical laws seem to represent it — work, a reframing with merely axiology, epistemology, and ontology, and constrained further, at that. The evidently requires the existence and the self-evident implies existence. The nature of the evidence here means the senses, lower-order, and higher-order, and tools and types to extend them.

Those capable of back-translation into the mind of the being which knows and knows that it knows. Without this translatability, the entire pursuit of knowing remains internal. As noted in other works, existence seems statistical more probably — vastly so — than non-existence. In this, we come to another profundity.

A simple argument for the statistical inevitability of existence over non-existence, so the nature of reality is to exist rather than not. The object universe with apparent unicity across all fundaments becomes an extended first principles assertion without necessary coherence, without the complete mapping of the universe. This means a convenient placeholder for all of science.

“It works,” doesn’t mean true. It means functionally true, operationally factual. Structures and processes are known better than before. This knowledge comes from inside the system, not outside, once more voiding metaphysics.

What happens in this context, we have existence marching merrily along with its statistical probability in existing over not, then separation with technical evolution of complex interconnected, integrated information processors capable of knowing, at a basic level, and knowing that they know, at an advanced level with no known upper limit to the latter.

The self-evident comes from existence in the form of consciousness, not a magical-mystical process or phenomenon, but a technical mastery of mapping the world into a system internal to the universe as a natural occurrence. A sensibility of recursion comes into play here.

Further, the sensory system built into such an organism means the consciousness develops degrees of freedom incomprehension of the apparent unicity of reality for self-developed evidence about the world. These refined and formalized in something akin to science in empiricism if not outright advanced science means the self-evident extends to the evidence in two senses.

One, it’s internal integration only. Two, its further external extension brought back to the internal integration and filtered into the self-evident and its framework too. The frames of referents coalesced in one mind.

From this, the ‘metaphysical,’ in fact, means the epistemological for the ontological, even if unable to sense the rules of the universe. It’s not top-down or bottom-up; it’s integrated internally or not. The integration happens within a system capable of doing so.

Naturally, this excludes metaphysics and requires ontology and epistemology as natural parts of the way the cosmos works and internal minds to it operate, unavoidably. Philosophy needs a complete overhaul and reconstruction in this manner. Furthermore, the axiological simply means the evolved or constructed values of organisms or mechanisms. Things of significance or not, i.e., valued or not, or valued in different ways and to different degrees.

Existence means an integrated whole of the past, the present, and the future, unfolding by its own nature. Sometimes, a separation between the object into subjects with the unavoidable self-evident in the subjectivities and then the occasional evident (and extensions) with more comprehensive couplings of their minds and the universe.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

The “mind,” as with “consciousness,” as terms have garnered a reputation as symbols of the spiritual or otherworldly raining down on the ordinary life of now. Somehow, a supernatural unification of phenomenal experience. Somehow, another world entirely airdropping qualia into a singular field of subjectivity.

Somehow, a divine presence in the form of a spirit or a soul embedded in the heart of a human being or bound to some Source extant at the beginning and end of all. Somehow, some Alpha and Omega binding all as one unto itself and gifting a singlet experience for each conscious being. Somehow, a holy text, reality as a language, and word games to close the gap while making a fool and pretending to not act as such.

Somehow… in the face of overwhelming complexity, and befuddled masses, and confused leaders of thought, and poorly evolved minds, other ploys are invented to explain one of the mysteries or problems of the evolutionary world, the brain, and the mind. Naturalism as a counter to the supernatural claims, while still limited.

What if? Just, what if? What if the explanations of the processes of the natural world happen in accordance with principles of existence or Laws of Nature, and so human beings must be explained in like manner?

What if the brain is part of the natural world, and so must be explained in like manner? What if the body and the brain are part of the natural world, and so must be explained in like manner? What if “consciousness” and “mind” were completely disconnected from the spiritual or otherworldly?

In a natural world, these terms become meaningless with a sense of the ordinary. Life becomes an ordinary process. Existence becomes itself. The universe manifests as a self-such process, as out of the necessity of existence, as life out of Universe.

“Existence,” “Life,” “Universe,” each as manifestations of the ordinary, not extraordinary — not in size or variation, but in continuity. Things exist and flow one from the other.

The order of the Universe means nothing, as a disorder or pervasive inconsistency would mean nullification of the structure of the Universe, so, in the end, no universe. Whether an argument for divine creation or transcendental generativity or identity of reality as a god, these amount to word games from The Word people.

If discarded, the more parsimonious explanation sat in front all along; all these acts of existence are not choices to exist, but inevitabilities of existence with pathways of possibilities as probabilities manifesting as they can and not as they should. Whatever the world, we live in the best of all possible worlds because all worlds are the best of worlds because they are possible.

What if? Truly, what if? What if terms including “mind” and “consciousness” mean the same process of unification of qualia, phenomenological experience, and apparent unitary subjectivity in the Universe?

Terms matter, similarly, for example, the multiverse proposed would be a universe, as the universe is all that exists or virtually exists. A multiverse converges to a universe and an original universe becomes a singlet in this universe, so voiding the term and not the idea of the multiverse.

Our hidden assumptions and wrongful derivations from the terminology lead us astray in coming to correct views about the world as a natural dynamic object grounded in the valueless exchange of information as in an informational particularity and informational cosmology.

Information as transforms of spatiotemporal quantities of reality from one moment of time manifested into the next as pathways permit from current organizational structures of reality.

One such series of manifestations come from dynamic, complex structural transforms of the human nervous system with an apparent tight correspondence to individual subjective experience and externalized behavior.

Mind and consciousness mean subjective experience. An apparent unification of qualities of experience, objects perceived, concepts formed, and thoughts strung along with the concepts about the concepts, the objects, and the qualities of experience.

In turn, a concretized sensibility of subjective experience, as mind and consciousness, mean a technical, informational, finite series of transforms over a finite amount of moments. These transform amount to the micro-mosaic mirror informational universe in a spatiotemporal quantity.

The informational content of a human brain can be calculated in this manner and the time in life can provide a ranged metric of the amount of transformation of states, so the quantity of information in this spatiotemporal quantity.

No infinities exist here. Akin to the numbers, a hidden assumption in numbers belies the reality of reality, the nature of nature, the fundaments of the cosmos and the universe. In a finite universe, Universe can be represented by numbers, finitely.

The hidden assumptions of the numbers come from the infinities. A series of precision requires information and increasing precision needs more information; infinities differ and many apparent infinities in numbers rest on true finite. Infinite precision requires infinite information.

0.0 differs from 0.00 and 0.000 differs from 0.0000. In this manner, 0.0 becomes an approximation 0.0000 and the common assumption or premise behind numbers is an infinite series with 0.00000…, so as to demarcate reality, in our representations, as an infinite object.

We must reflect. If an infinite object, and dynamic, so transformational, then an infinitely informational object with changes of state — one into another. These mark an oddity, an error. The universe becomes an apparent finite construct with functional infinite aspects (large finite beyond current comprehension).

The infinities hidden in mental constructs of numbers when applied to the Universe must be truncated to make reality real in the mappings or couplings of approximate mental constructs to its true frame(s).

In like manner, folk psychological notions of consciousness and mind relate to hidden infinities to hide or mistake the nature of the matter; “subjective experience” does not, as we experience the limitations at all possible moments of subjectivity.

Consciousness as another worldly creation bound to this world pertains to a feeling of an infinitude beyond the natural, so the supernatural, the metaphysical, or the extra material, the non-informational. Same with mind.

When chucked out of incoherence, due to poor explanation, or elasticity of definitional bounds to make the superfluous or meaningless, in definition, seem profound, simplicity sets forth. The universe is a finite construct; mind and consciousness as subjective experience, as technical products of evolution — pressure, selection, reproduction, further pressure, selection, reproduction.

Structure, the nervous system, and process, informational transforms of the structure, and associated apparency of unity of the qualities of experience, the objects of experience, the concepts of experience, and thoughts related to them, unavoidably exist as finite, as Universe remains inevitably finite.

Numbers, subjective experience, and Universe come to the reality of finitude and informational transforms — the so-called natural found in Naturalism with precision and proper, deeper definition. Thusly, which is all to state, Naturalism is correct, while Informationalism is more correct.

Quod erat demonstratum.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

Oftentimes, more difficult circumstances can unravel the desired peace, calm, self-respect, and sense of internal dignity of the individual human being, whether a tough time on the job, a death in the family or simply a day marching from one bad moment to another.

I take the time to reflect on the commute home from work. I am a custodian at a pub and a bistro (separate businesses under the same umbrella and general contracting). I bike home each day — on a bicycle, not a motorcycle.

Both the last shift and the bike ride home give me time to gather myself, mentally. The fishing reels were sent out each day and reeled in at the end — trying not to make a jumble of them.

From whatever tangled weave of the chaos of the day comes in, I can begin to make sense of the overarching of the day, the narrative. With maturity over time, an understanding comes forward. The story is imposed on the day.

James Joyce’s writing was much like this. In which, numerous conflicting voices come together, impartially, incomplete, and formulated within an environment of The Real — the truly incomplete and partial. I take a cue in writing from him — take a different point of view, at one level, but, at a meta-conceptual level, take multiple points of view at the same time.

An interesting meta-consistency comes out of such a structure, comes out in such writing. The application of different narrative voices brings about a sense of the bland. The voices smudge, unless examined closer, there is an interesting effect within the writing.

I find the commute home by a cemetery helpful for writing. I peer over the gravestones and consider the numerous lives and the number of thoughts that must have crossed through each person that is no more.

In this sense, there is a consideration of the dead as the living, while the lives lived no longer take part in the play of this dramatic, small town in which I inhabit, find myself, have been home to, but do not consider home — as nowhere is home to me except in my own mind.

A place of refuge, of peace, and the central source of responsibility in the control of the sense of equanimity and thought. Working at a pub seems much different than the world of journalism or writing. It’s rough-and-tumble play, but in an adult or more mature context — or, maybe, not more mature.

So much happening at once, and a context in which individuals drink, get rowdy, come for the company, meet from the local university for an informal meeting, go out with friends to catch up, sit with their wife for some beef dip and a pint of beer, get out with the girlfriends to reconnect and share stories about parents and relationships, and so on, all this going on; so much so, it can be a bit bewildering at times to behold.

But, regardless, there is a general sense in which the numerous narratives, to each individual observer, is part of a larger meaningless whole, while the individual meanings to each part feel quite real, so, for all intents and purpose, is real enough.

The dead giving this living series of thought — through the cemetery or the mass of ceremonialized and memorialized corpses — is, in a deep way, a commune. I have seen this, often, from motorcyclists — real “bikers” — and the weepy old and young alike from mainstream Canada.

It is a space of the ever-still, once-existent, who provide a sense in which life continues onward, while the past never left entirely. It is a way of saying, “Others were here. You will be here, or somewhere like it, in some unknown near-future.”

Cemeteries, to me, remain places of the Still. A community of the dead. A gathering of the memorialized. A bounded collection of remains. The past stuck as the extant present, 6-feet-under.

So, the markings of the partially forgotten, but never entirely so — for a time. The dead become monuments of fractured tapestries through time inscribed with a name, a start date, and an end date, and, perhaps, a short encapsulating message, ‘They were here a second ago.’

A series of narrative timelines partially overlap one with another. This is to say, cemeteries aren’t for the dead; they are for the living. And the dead through the living garner some semblance of life once more.

The dead never died. Nothing ever ceases to be entirely, precisely. Cemeteries are a rare space for reflection and represent a Still Commune to me. A place for a repeated coming to terms with the reality of death, and find a sense of the bedrock eternal in a normal experience of transience and change.

This bedrock can be seen in the True Self or the core sense of identity. Marcus Aurelius was not a great philosopher, nor was he an ideal human being. He was an individual who through the individual struggle with his own self and the pains and pressures of the outside world produced deep wisdom, intuition about the world, human affairs, and himself.

Within this intuition and wisdom, he became a great person, unusually virtuous, restrained, and showing a representation of this bedrock of the unchanging in the ‘power over one’s mind’ — True Will.

This sensibility of cemeteries as a place for reflection, for regaining the “peace, calm, self-respect, and sense of internal dignity” desired by most, makes them a perennial place for all. To honour the dead with the presence of the living, yourself, you gift yourself in the process, in a realization of death, of the numerous voices speaking from the beyond, and the partial, incomplete, and inconsistent nature of our individual natures and narratives in this larger world.

A sense of resolution settles over the landscape, of the mind.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

For the LORD your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.

Bible (King James Version) Deuteronomy 20:4

Christian soul, here is the strength of your salvation; here is the cause of your freedom; here is the price of your redemption. You were a captive, but you have been redeemed; you were a slave, but [by Him] are made free. And so, an exile, you are brought home; lost, you are reclaimed, and dead, you are restored to life. This lets your heart taste, O man, this let it suck, this let it swallow, while your mouth receives the Body and Blood of your Redeemer. In this present life make this your daily bread, your nourishment, your support in pilgrimage. For by means of this, this and nothing else, you remain in Christ and Christ in you, and in the life to come your joy shall be full.

Anselm of Canterbury

And whoever desires other than Islam as religion — never will it be accepted from him, and he, in the Hereafter, will be among the losers.

Quran Chapter (3) sūrat āl ʿim’rān (The Family of Imrān); Surah 3:85

Salvation pertains to a coupling between an emergency and a saving from said emergency. The natural discourse of transcendentalist religious imagery, languages, metaphors, texts, and figures, is salvation at the core. A problem exists in the world, including human nature. A solution exists for this problem extant in the world. Choices can be made to solve this problem or not.

If chosen on the path to the solution, then salvation for the individual or some larger purpose, e.g., the mission of God, can be met conclusively. The rewards may be reaped for the struggling ascetic spiritualist on some metaphysically-driven purpose with a reunion with the divine, with God, with the angels, with Brahman, with Allah, with Creator, or with… something.

An incorporeal facet of a human being sits as a premise behind these arguments as a cornerstone or a foundational piece because the human spirit or soul is considered something eternal, never ceases existence.

The cessation of the physiological processes of the body does not end the soul in this view. This notion implies the physicality of the body links to some metaphysicality of the soul. The physical-metaphysical divide seems unclear.

In this sense, all the provisions of the laws of the sciences wrought forth bring the idea of the physical as a non-sense idea, which becomes one idea; while, at the same time, the metaphysical seems nowhere in the formulae.

Most formulations about metaphysics of the laws of nature delineate some higher-order language or mathematical construct to encapsulate the cosmos. This seems false. The laws describe the tendencies of operation of the universe intrinsically, not extrinsically, as in the descriptors happen intrinsically and do not become extrinsically derived. This dispenses with metaphysics almost whole cloth.

This metaphysicality of the soul becomes problematic on this level. Similarly, the soul seems like an issue because the entire fabric of the cosmos seems reasonably described without it. An unnecessary premise in the descriptive argument about the universe becomes non-parsimonious, so unnecessary.

You can add it if you like, but you add nothing as you see the issue. The physical seems like a self-limit of the material and the material seems like a self-limit of the natural, while the natural seems like a self-limit of the informational, where the informational means the simple difference in constituent parts between one state at T=0 and another state at T=1. The sum of the difference between time-state 1 and time-state 2, ∑{T1-T2}, equates to the information contained in the state change.

The additional spatiotemporal volume to contain the soul would be problematic, including its associated energetic properties. On another level of analysis, the informational content in that which exists would require more information for the existence of billions of souls.

Even more problematic, the claims for these souls, traditionally so-called, require a formulation of a divine architect who, on this basis, would be wholly wasteful for a holy being — by definition imperfect.

Do not mistake me, I believe in souls, as stated in “Soul Ensoulment — Not <em>I have a soul</em>, But <em>I am a soul</em>.” They need proper framing. Onto the problem or the problems as they were, salvation remains foundational to most major religions. A problem exists. You need salvation from this, e.g., as a sinner et cetera.

The questions remain as to the survivability of the notion of the soul in a transcendentalist manner. The field of theology dealing with this is called soteriology. Either rituals and ceremonies can save someone, individual efforts, or the help from ‘above’ can do it.

If a person, and if a problem for the person, then, inevitably, there will be salvation awaiting them if they choose the right path. All manner of religious systems proposes this. In North America, we see the predominance of Christianity and its salvation by works, by faith, by Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross.

In the Middle East and North Africa region, we see Islam. Salvation through the submission to the divine Will of Allah with salvation only granted upon the mercy of Allah alone. There is no other way. Given the global demographic of religious believers, especially in the Abrahamic religions, we can find this within the context of half of the population of the planet.

Soteriology, truly, is the crux upon which global ideology rests firmly. People desire life after physical life. They want to escape the body. They believe in a naïve, metaphysical soul. They want to cheat the fates, nature, and the laws of it.

Yet, here we exist, like froth on a stone tossed into eternity floating alone, together, as has been extrapolated by modern research into the biblical narratives, especially Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou, very little, probably, is factual. One could make safe claims about the supernatural claims of other religious traditions.

The soteriological arguments for these faiths rest on ungrounded certainties without a proper warrant. The holy texts must be true. The divine figures must be divinely inspired, even made of some divine essence or substance. Sin must be actual.

Sin in the Bible includes pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Hamartiology is the study of sin. Its origins, effects on life, and on one’s self afterlife. These sins, in the parlance of theology, become expiated, as in expiation or the cleansing of the sins.

Grace is imparted, as in impartation or something granted. Sin is covered or cleansed; grace is imparted or granted to the newly born Christian, as an example. This is the idea of redemption at the Cross. Soteriology, hamartiology, expatiation, impartation, and redemption, and so on, all biblical direct claims or extra-biblical interpretations.

A sin is an act offensive against God. These offenses against God get tallied and marked against a person and mar their soul, in a manner of speaking. Within this framework, the sacrifice of a God-man at the Cross redeems Mankind’s sins with the grace of Christ.

Once more, all are founded within the assertions of this text.

God sure made things difficult for salvation with such a rich lexicon and confusing structure. More seriously, if the premises upon which the theologies ground themselves become subject to a profuse lack of confirmation or an apparent systematic virtual disconfirmation without affirmative evidence over decades, then the, rather obvious, tentative conclusion — to date, and more reasonable — would be the rejection of their empirics or claims to truth.

Furthermore, with the rejection of such bases, the claims within soteriology become conditionally subject to such scrutiny, too. No veracity to the textual claims or supernaturalistic historicity; therefore, no necessary God in such a written form, no Yeshua as saviour, no Cross as redemptive device, no sin needing saving from, so no soteriology for half of the world’s population. It’s not impartation or expiation, but a fabrication.

What happens to soteriology in this framework? It vanishes. The naturalistic and digital philosophies of the world take place now. Yet, the questions remain about the richness of the theological landscape. For one, it’s dying. For two, astrology continues its fantasy-march, too, and retains a rich, complex internal structure disconnected from reality as well.

Theology continues in such a manner as with astrology. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s only a matter of playing out a centuries-long end game. With the natural before us and the informational in us, perhaps, our options sit with the knowledge of our evolved capacities and limitations.

These capabilities and boundaries set the functionality and structures of the human organism. Our cognitive capacities sit within this range, too. Thusly, the only Sin is no sin, while functional, civilized human life requires education of the mind, training of the body, and conditioning of the heart. Our evolved drives can work against this at times.

In this light, we do not need saving from an external source but require an understanding of our evolved selves and the necessity for adaptation for a modern society. In turn, this means the only path forward for soteriology is one directed on the self to save oneself and others from, well, oneself.

Drug addictions, poor hygiene habits, lack of education, poor decorum, cross-cultural insensitivity, bad nutrition, lack of clarity in writing and speech, and the like, these amount to the ‘sins’ or the wrong behaviours and psychology in most social contexts for a civilized human being.

Soteriology in this sense becomes autosoteriology founded in the natural sciences and evolving to various flavours of civilized sensibilities within the universalist ethic of individual responsibility tied to social awareness and responsibility.

With this, soteriology dies, and so with it, theology, and the freethought march of the secular continues apace with autosoteriology as a guidepost.

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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): SocioMix

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kindness from ordinary people, one to another.

When you imagine a daily activity, tying shoes, making coffee, staring at the cat, making eye contact with a stranger, or helping a child tie their shoes, making a cup o’ joe for a loved one before they wake up, petting the cat, and asking stranger, “How are you, today?”, they strike countless times in a year.

They’re ordinary. They’re here as if presented in a banal black-and-white film from an early 20th century silent film. Nothing too much to make of them; no-person to see on the other side. A distant observer taking part in an activity for their self for one part, of the day.

That’s it.

Another lousy sunrise, even, these moments may reflect a Buddhist version of the proverbially enigmatic Enlightenment state of consciousness, but, maybe, that version has it all wrong. The colour in the film in a current moment made in reaching out to another may be the more substantial inversion of the image.

By “moments of kindness,” the intention is getting at the feeling of sincerity — you just know it — and tenderness to create an intuitive grasp of genuine connection, how ever small, with another individual, for a moment, swift.

Sincerity, in this sense, comes to mean an emotional honesty akin to the phrase “intellectual honesty.” I live for those moments. Everything is at ease, put right, by themselves. An effortfulness in the emotionality means an insincerity, even pushing the breadth of the harshness. It jars the emotions the way an intolerant sound ruining a piece of music does it.

I mean, I’m looking at my cat right now: Should I pet him, as suggest above? Maybe, at the same time, in overthinking it, I lose the sincerity of the act; its naturalness. There is a there, there; there’s a transaction, a trade, there.

And to force the act would be to enforce the moment, so as to nullify the idea of a genuine, sincere act of tenderness, the idea of sincerity and tenderness is natural actions guided by a honed instinct there when young and relearned in adulthood.

Moments as gradient transitions one into the other in harmonious action with oneself and the environment. Graduated, natural, emotionally honest acts are the basis for not only an authentic life, and a real life.

They’re some of the best moments of peace in our lives. They put us at ease. Sincerity and tenderness in our lives are just those moments when done to us, and when done by us to others. A day coming to an end in reflection of those fluttering moments sets forth an expectation the next morning, the new beginning, for a happy cyclical quality to what has happened before. `

In truth, a naturalness to our acts in life affects the quality of our mental and emotional life, and brings out the one true thing we all have in us, by being us: an affirmation of life.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

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An institution comes as a formalized system of rules, of structure, guiding and hierarchically ordering the people contained within it. Christian mythology orients itself on the teachings, life, and personhood of Christ.

Insofar as these become functionally instituted and realized, modern political religion can be seen with the formulation of Evangelical Christianity. A recent development with precedence in the history of the Christian religion and in the history of religion.

Something of a political tool in order to bring out policy and reform in the favor of the religious who identify as Christian and against others who identify as another religion or who may identify as non-religious.

Where I live, there’s Trinity Western University in which the individuals who adhere to political Christianity have become truly institutionalized. They have both a “Community Covenant” and a “Statement of Faith.”

It’s a strange notion to try to have an academic institution, where an “academic” institution should remain bound to the open boundaries of the free inquiry mandate of academic or intellectual life while having a constrained account as to what implies an academically free life.

If we take some of the ideas of freedom vis-à-vis academic free inquiry of ideas, then even the notion of a restriction of free inquiry becomes an assault on the very foundations of an academic tradition spanning centuries.

Yet, at the same time, we come to the fact of the Evangelical Christian tradition imposing ideological constraints on that which can be thought and the manner in which those thoughts may be expressed within the context of community.

In this manner, any religious institution cannot embody the most important facet of higher learning emergent in the formulation of a fully critical mind rather than a constrained critical mind; constrained by the fact of religious dogma, this dogma restricted to the formulation of critical thought with the end result of the favorable consideration of the dogmas of the Christian religion, so as to denude the possibility of a truly critical mind.

This is the infection of faith in academic life and it remains a stain since its continued entrenchment in the hallowed halls of academe. It comes to community life too, this poison. LGBTI members of the community, who I have known, and will not claim status as one or not, personally, have been exclusively demonized in the theology of the institutions.

They have come from families in which the Christian religion is a tool of oppression, hate, and transcendent self-loathing for these individuals. Nothing is wrong with them; everything is wrong with the theology towards these individuals.

An imperious and petulant formulation of the theology as a political and social tool to crush dissent with minorities as a prime target, including the LGBTI community. Individuals who are bullied, harassed, rejected from the community, and made inherently by their nature part of the result of a sin-ridden world, will more likely self-harm or kill themselves.

This is not due to the Devil, to demons, to spiritual forces as in a spiritual battle, and the like. This is, by and large, due to the manner in which religious ideology continues to influence popular discourse to the detriment of vulnerable members of our communities and families.

The Evangelical communities before us have, generally, done a terrible job and performed a terrible disservice to the LGBTI communities. These youth, undergraduates and the like, are more likely to self-harm and commit suicide due to these violent ideologies — aggression against the self.

So, I implore: Why is this the case? Why does this have to happen? What makes these communities so holy when they commit such sins in the sight of God Himself so as to create an environment so toxic to their youth as to make them want to harm themselves, even kill themselves?

What is justice in this injustice? What is compassion in this dispassion towards the least among you? Where is the sense of commitment to the care and concern and love for those who should be image-bearers of God Himself?

This Community Covenant and Statement of Faith make clear; your nature, as LGBTI peoples, goes against the values and standards of this community of Christ. Institutionalized Evangelical Christianity remains an integral terror on the hearts of the young and, in fact, a burden on our social and medical systems due to the mental health anguish delivered to their young, our country’s wider young.

It is despicable and should not only not even be on the books; it can be said to be anti-biblical, as the covenants set forth by their God should suffice, “No?” It would seem to stipulate that God requires help from the mortal and, thus, proclaiming some usurpation of the rights and powers of God, as if a human institution knows better than God Himself.

In this, it’s quite clear. It’s not only another covenant. It becomes a form of blasphemy in violation of the revelations and powers of God. Why the need to constrict the free choice of mortal beings, undergraduate students and graduate students, in so close a domain as the intimate, as love?

One would surmise the purposes as one of control in which the individuals who might stand up and speak out against these absurd practices would be shut down by the institution as a whole, whether by a snitch culture through other students or via a culture lead by faculty, staff, and administration, who adhere to the letter of the law of the Community Covenant and the Statement of Faith.

In short, it turns legitimate religious or spiritual sentiments, turns them on their heads, and then makes an enforceable formulation of virtue and vice, as in an authoritarian formulation of the Christian faith, and institutionalized Evangelical Christianity.

LGBTI students, as evidence from Egale and others shows, are at higher risk of self-harm and suicide due to social stigma, discrimination, prejudice, and the like. Institutions with these kinds of cultures set a standard of harm to their student bases and should stop.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

As a skeleton for some of the previous focus on the term Christian Humanism comes the idea of “Incarnational Humanism” too (Gibson, 2011),[1] most formally identified humanists come as atheists or agnostics (Humanists International, n.d.).[2] In most personal experience, this means 90% or more of them.

In fact, in one national group’s internal member survey, this showed in the demographics of the membership. Often, there can be an accidental — sometimes, a deliberate — repurposing of the term “Humanism” to me capital “A-” forms of “Atheism,” as some capitalized abstract intended as a synonym with Humanism (American Humanist Association, n.d.).

This seems like the implied equivalent arguments: If Atheism, then Humanism; Atheism; therefore, Humanism. If Humanism, then Atheism; Humanism; therefore, Atheism. Neither of these makes sense to me, especially statistically based on known demographics internal to the humanist communities, not even in this hemisphere.

Any synonymizing of the terms becomes invalid, and, indeed, unsound. Even simply as an empirical matter, the evidence doesn’t stack with the claims. Of the 10% of humanists, or less, who do not identify with atheism or agnosticism in a formal sense, as a declarative statement of personal identity, “I am an atheist,” or, “I am an agnostic.”

Far more terms extant, however, I want to leave those to further exploration at a later time in the discussion. For those who wish for something akin to a religious humanist outlook, then we live in Canadian society with the freedom of belief and freedom of religion (Charter of Rights and Freedoms[3]), bound within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[4] with the similar or the same stipulations, these could provide a path for individuals with a sensibility towards the existentialist, against the zetetic[5] or extreme skeptic, away from fundamentalist traditional dogmas and doctrines and hierarchies, and towards the ‘spiritual’ inasmuch as this can be defined in more precise terms apart from New Age (Melton, 2016) co-opting of the term, which has been termed “newage”[6] to rhyme with “sewage” before.

Now, when it comes to the two terms, “Incarnational” and “Humanism,” comprising the idea “Incarnational Humanism,” this will have some overlap with some of the above, while not linked in a direct manner to the formal institutional Humanism seen today with the various organizations bearing the cattle-like branding.

Perhaps, this can give the first portions of it. The pre-Christian or the pagan[7] sense of the terms of incarnation(al) and humanism. These can have specific meanings too. There is a sense of pre-Christian as a neutral term if meaning pagan, so Christian Humanism was meant as a sort of post-Pagan Humanism.

In a similar manner, there is the idea of the declining Christian West and an inclining secular West. Both relate to these ideas of a pagan revival in a sense coinciding or xo-extant with the decline of the Christian religion.

Some speak to becoming more human, as in “fully human” in terms of Incarnational Humanism.[8] If we work within this framework of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave[9] and Christianity, then the idea of becoming, of being in transition, of working towards, etc., seem like apt phrasings.

One identifies the ideal who became “fully human” in Christ as recounted in the Gospels with God, the Creator, and Sustainer of all things, with the ‘descent’ of God into human form.

Then this makes the central targeted objective in the totality of one’s being, one’s life, to become more like Christ, to be in the transition towards a more Christ-like state, or to be working towards an existence more akin to Jesus — the only fully human being.

We’re all partially human in contrast to this metric and in flux, either moving closer to or farther away from the example of Jesus. To the Allegory of the Cave, we became more Christ-like by being unshackled shaken, and turned to the light of Christ’s truth of the teaching, life, and personhood.

In this sense, Christian Humanism or Incarnational Humanism is a different formulation of the idea of Christianity as a manner in which to actualize one’s true nature in alignment with the divine nature of God.

One is not God; one is as God, moment-by-moment.

References

[Trinity Western University]. (2014). What is a liberal arts education? — Calvin Townsend, MCS. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/93433427.

American Humanist Association. (n.d.). Humanist Common Ground: Atheism. Retrieved from https://americanhumanist.org/paths/atheism/.

Buttrey, M. (2013, Fall). Incarnational Humanism: A Philosophy of Culture for the Church in the World. Retrieved from https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/publications/conrad-grebel-review/issues/fall-2013/incarnational-humanism-philosophy-culture-church-world.

Cohen, S.M. (2005, July 24). The Allegory of the Cave. Retrieved from https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm.

Government of Canada. (1982). Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Retrieved from https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html.

Humanists International. (n.d.). What is humanism?. Retrieved from https://humanists.international/what-is-humanism/.

Gibson, D. (2011, December 29). The doctrine of the Incarnation. Retrieved from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/doctrine-incarnation.

Jacobsen, S.D. (2017, February 15). An Interview with James Randi (Part Three). Retrieved from https://in-sightjournal.com/2017/02/15/an-interview-with-james-randi-part-three/.

Melton, J. G. (2016, April 7). New Age movement. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Age-movement.

RationalWiki. (2020, March 1). Zetetic. Retrieved from https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Zetetic.

United Nations. (1948, December 10). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.

[1] The terminology seems most directly considered and laid out via DDr. Jens Zimmermann. Zimmermann explores some of the contextualizations of Humanism within the context of Incarnational Humanism as a philosophy of culture, i.e., a Christian humanistic philosophy of culture or “a spirited defense of classical Christian theology as the best ground for a humanist philosophy of culture.” Duly note, this philosophy comes as a minority orientation within the humanistic orientation because the vast majority of humanist organizations harbor atheists or agnostics, not Christians. Thusly, one frame, among many, could see Incarnational Humanism as a Christian humanist philosophy of culture, Christian Humanism, or as an individuated development of Religious Humanism in general. See Buttrey (2013).

[2] “What is Humanism?” states:

Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance that affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. Humanism stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based on human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. Humanism is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.

Humanists International. (n.d.). What is humanism?. Retrieved from https://humanists.international/what-is-humanism/.

[3] The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms remains part of the Constitution of Canada, while a recent construction under the Rt. Hon. Pierre Trudeau circa 1982. Its fundamental stipulations on religion and belief in Article 2 state:

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

© freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association.

Government of Canada. (1982). Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Retrieved from https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-15.html.

[4] Akin to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from December 10, 1948, in Article 18 states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.

United Nations. (1948, December 10). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.

[5] See RationalWiki (2020).

[6] See Jacobsen (2017).

[7] “Pagan” means “pre-Christian” in this context rather than co-existent non-Christian. Pagan, in this sense, means before the era of the formal Christian religion seen within the Roman Empire.

[8] See Trinity Western University (2014).

[9] See Cohen, S.M. (2005, July 24). The Allegory of the Cave. Retrieved from https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

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I live in a National Historic Site of Canada called Fort Langley, British Columbia, Canada. I work for the local board of the community association here, magazines (e.g., a wedding magazine as the ‘Guy-in-Residence’), blogs, and newspapers, a restaurant (where I get burned and cut), and gardening-landscaping (where I only get cut, lucky me).

I find the intellectual jobs more fulfilling as I am able to listen to music while I write rather than simply working and trudging along in some boring manner. Nonetheless, they reflect some commonalities of patterns of activity.

In the one, I am simply motioning with my arms and body as a whole to bring about some changes to the physical environment in mostly pointless capacities. For some, it’s making the dishes clean; in others, it’s making a garden tot for the season, ready for viewing, aesthetic.

I volunteer in different local and national educational efforts. Typically, education on human rights and science. I have a school in Uganda with my namesake, as I fund some of it, directly, or help with applications of funding for it, indirectly, where probably about 100, or a little fewer, elementary school children get a humanistic or Humanist education, extremely unusual in their area.

I was raised by near-retired or retired women most of my life in the community; I would probably be on the streets without them. I owe my life to these people. However I may neglect this or they may not know it entirely, I do.

My life, my form of mind, my sensibilities, my emotional development come from through, as a reflection of them. In some sense, I am an aged woman in mentality while a man in body, and a male in sex. I’m not an old woman; I’m an old lady.

Much of my quarantine time has been taken up with internships like this or writing on a variety of subject matter, one of those is the topic of human rights and philosophy. I have been doing plenty of interviews and some reading too.

While, I listen to much Classical Music, so-called, for the mere purposes of enjoyment, as shown in Bach, Vivaldi, or Corelli, while abhorring Telemann or other clunkers. One of the texts of continual amusement, for me, has been H.L. Mencken’s “In Defense of Women.” Here’s the opening quote:

A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow.

In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, a habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance.

The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank… She may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence, and childishness.

But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul. This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct.

A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need for an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion. That ironic note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if she is skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously.

I find him enormously funny, witty, and enjoyable to read, a superior writer. Someone who I take great joy in reading and imbibing to certain degrees. It is these sorts of things that take my time and take me away into the world of mind while away from the world.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

The Transcendent claims some otherworldly status to significant portions of the human species. Something of a sense of the beyond the external, trans-external. By external, I would merely posit the evident, as in the evidence given by the senses to primitive peoples; the evidence of the sciences provided in centuries prior in its clunky manifestations; and, the modern sciences with more robust methodologies or operations, and sensory-enhancing tools, to come to ideas about the world.

In all, this “external” means an external to the cogito of the individual; the most essential part of the person as the core of the soul, as such, eventuating as in an evolved armature, material framework, for its potential to manifest outwards.

The soul, as the cogito, is the true internal, natural self, as in the knowingness of the self and the existing self: knowing that you know, and knowing that you exist as a being in the world. There is a fundamental distinction between these two while part of the unicity of reality, its unique unitary property.

When speaking of the Transcendent, two ideas come to the fore of the conversation. One of these is in the formulation of the transcendent beyond the previously defined external. Another aspect is the formulation of the transcendent as an extended external, as part and parcel of the external given before.

In the former, a sense of the ways in which the internal self connects to the external in an ordinary sense, as in the five senses. While, at the same time, a sort of extension into a transcendent realm with hidden powers, marvels, and beings.

Yet, quite necessarily, these are unnecessary constructs. The Transcendent, in this former sense, represents something of the mind, as, when tested in a modern stringent scientific sense, something outside of the bounds of the reasons given the normal externally.

In the latter, somehow, the external becomes something of the superphysical. In that, there is some beyond the world evident to the senses, even accessible to the experience of the senses in principle because of the nature of the “transcendent.”

The “latter” can tend to come with definitions of the supermaterial powers of individuals. In the light of these reflections of the Transcendent, one can find philosophical notions of a transcendent being, while, at other times, a process of a superphysical reality connecting all as a medium by which supernatural powers are claimed.

Whether the sense of some far beyond “being,” or a literal transcendent being, or human beings with supernormal capacities bleeding into the supernatural, the prime focus should be on two things. One, that which is self-evident; two, that which is evident.

To the self-evident, human beings exist to themselves individually, as beings who know that they exist and know that they know. There is a knowledge of self-existence and a recursive knowingness, as in knowing that one has the capacity to know without or with regard to having knowledge in the first place.

Beyond these, the probabilistic become the centerpiece, as in knowledge of Existence amounts to a statistical affair past the sole cogito. Which is to say, the senses as an extension into the natural world of the cogito, itself.

To speak of the Transcendent beyond these domains outside of mathematical principles or established scientific truths, one is in the position of a person explaining the dimensionality of something in mind rather than in the world, where those lines in the mind do not have an independent existence from the mind and, thus, exhibit no dimensionality and so comprise no space and no time as in the mind; whereas, that which exhibits an existence in this external existence from the cogito, generated independent of it, comprise true dimensionality, so finitude.

These in mind dimensions, rather ‘dimensions,’ exhibit dimensionality and spatiality in mind, while, since of the mind, comprise no real space and so no real dimension, thusly exhibiting neither infinitude nor finitude of dimensionality, but only nothingness.

While the Transcendent claims exhibit this in-mindedness, similarly, once removed from the canvas of the mind, they no longer exist, while forever exhibiting no properties as the dimensionality of mind exhibits neither finitude nor infinitude.

In this manner, the Transcendent is neither finite nor infinite, but a word claimed for something in the trans-external, the extended external, or even of the mind, while simply and purely being of the mind and then derived as truly nothing.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

When I made God a cherub, you put me in prison. Now, if I make him a grown man, you will do me even worse — Leonardo Da Vinci, when the charge of sodomy became definitively not guilty

And yet they want to comprehend the mind of God, talking about it as though they had already dissected it into parts. Still, they remain unaware of their own bodies, of the realities of their surroundings, and even unaware of their own stupidity. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I was working on some writing, and then a Christian professor friend, who remains a controversial figure within the Christian circles for him, recommended Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. I took some of today to read the entirety of the text and comment on it.

In the following, as I continue to grow in friendship with this individual, I followed through with reading and commentary on relevant points within the text by Heidegger.

Someone nuanced and active in the life of the mind. A Christian humanist or a Nietzschean humanist of sorts, where Christian Humanism does not rely on the necessary divinity of Christ as given by either the Immaculate Conception (virgin birth) or the Resurrection after the sacrifice at the Cross.

In some sense, one could count as an outright atheist, from the view of literalist Protestant Christians, with the rejection of the Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection, while adhering to a form of Christian Humanism as one aiming to become and live a life as Christ exemplified symbolically and literarily given in the Gospels.

Henceforth comes the comments with additions for smoother transitions and some other orientations or framing for consideration, please, some amusing and others serious with block quotations as the quotes from the letter by Heidegger:

But whence and how is the essence of the human being determined? Marx demands that “the human being’s humanity” be recognized and acknowledged. He finds it in “society.” The “social” human is for him the “natural” human. In “society” human “nature,” that is, the totality of “natural needs” (food, clothing, reproduction, economic sufficiency), is equably secured. The Christian sees the humanity of man, the humanitas of homo, in contradistinction to Deitas.

Some who are “secular humanists” as truly Marxist humanists or Marxian humanists can be interpreted from this, and likely true. Some have seen African humanist stances as within ancient philosophical stances of African peoples.

In some African philosophical stances, for example, Ubuntu or Unhu, the individual self can only be recognized within the context of the social self. In this, the social self is the foundation stone for the individual self.

A more whole manner of conceiving of the individual, as an extended self and coming to fruition in (healthy) relations in a communal sense.

One could extend this as a bidirectional relationship of the individual self, the sole organism, and the interpersonal self, so a bidirectional relation of the personal self and the inter-personal self as one dynamic unit while individuated, clearly.

A Marxist dictum as a half-truth, as fully natural and only half of the natural; wherein, the social equates to the natural and the individual equates to the natural, while both in inter-dependency become something more, so “only half of the natural” becomes only true in the asserted independence of either.

By way of contrast, Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which from Plato’s time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of being.

No statement from him on an inversion of a metaphysical statement, as such, so a metaphysical universalization.

Still unsure, however, in this manner, it may negate the presumed separation between the physical and the metaphysical — move beyond them through a process of inversion — rather than merely moving from one metaphysical statement to another metaphysical statement, reversed or not.

Something analogous to the existence of something is the essence of something, and contrariwise, instead of asking which precedes which, seeing one as the mirror image of the other in a duality of themselves while unified without necessary recourse to temporality to sort the ordering of “essence preceding existence” versus “existence preceding essence,” or essentia preceding existentia versus existentia preceding essentia — thus moving past these arguments altogether to a more complete plane.

The human being is rather “thrown” by being itself into the truth of being…

That’s a funny line. Just imagining someone hurtling towards the truth of being unwillingly in clothing labeled Acme Co. Maybe, a “Born to Lose” tattoo with “throwings” in German scrawled beneath it.

“Being” — that is not God and not a cosmic ground. Being is essentially” farther than all beings and is yet nearer to the human being than every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from the human being. Human beings at first cling always and only to being. But when thinking represents beings as beings it no doubt relates itself to being. In truth, however, it always thinks only of beings as such; precisely not, and never, being as such. The “question of being” always remains a question about beings.

Took him long enough, being seems like a dynamic manner of that which is stipulated statically as “existence” or something stretching infinitely inward and outward. I like his emphasis on being itself as a focus on beings themselves. Being is; questions of being pertain to beings because beings comprise being themselves.

Yet, the distinction seems muddled and the wording unclear in some manner as to that which is in regards to the “be-” of “being,” as has been stated before about Heideggerian philosophy altogether.

We usually think of language as corresponding to the essence of the human being represented as animal rationale, that is, as the unity of body-soul-spirit.

The unity of body-soul-spirit seems almost redundant on a number of levels. All seem like one, where the soul and the spirit can collapse into one, and, in some definitions, the body and the soul become one and the same with the former as part of the latter.

His emphasis on language as the “house of being,” which is “propriated by being and pervaded by being” would seem friendly to John 1:1 advocates, as in the essence of the human being in language.

Do not tell some branches of Christians that “being,” as such, is “not God.” If language is a house of being, then the house may be confined to categorical human cognition ‘house’ while the being is both the farthest and nearest of it, too.

Human beings belonging to the truth of being, as guardians of it, seems both correct and incorrect. Correct in the propriation of language, of human beings, by being to represent the truth of being.

While truth meaning “actuality” or “the fact of the matter,” being will — ahem — be, regardless, whether human beings and language are propriated by being Itself, or not.

His commentary of Sartre cites the title of “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” which means existentialism is not only Humanism or the only Humanism according to Sartre. His correction of Sartre seems valid, nonetheless, on “principally being.”

We can, as before, continue on the lines about inversion on metaphysical statements, where some statement A equals some statement B, where this becomes A=B and the reversal becomes B=A, i.e., whether A=B or B=A, a difference in the presentation of the same formulation becomes the same. This means a reverse, not an inverse.

Heidegger points to metaphysical statements as metaphysical in either order. I agree with him. However, if a potentially novel process, as I read him, I will denominate or name an operation “Universal Metaphysical Inversalization,” not Objective but “Universal” as in possibly incomplete with room for exceptions.

This process would be an inversion of metaphysical statements in such a manner so as to yield metaphysical reality truly as a ‘physical’ reality, even statistically so if this can be correlated strongly or principally with some physical reality.

It would not delete the ‘magic’ or power of the former metaphysical statement, but, rather, ‘physicalize’ the formally metaphysical, whether absolutely in its totality or probabilistically to the point of asymptotic certainty.

Any prior metaphysical with ‘physical’ (needs to be redefined and extended) status now, as in the ancients thinking the water was the ground of being (Thales). We know water is two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen, where the previously metaphysical becomes the ‘physical’ in countless cases in recorded history or simply manifest as evidence-less (so neither metaphysical nor physical, but non-existent).

This is not a process of reversing metaphysical statements. It is a formal operation with incompleteness, room for exceptions, while universal in application, as a formal process for ‘physicalizing’ the metaphysical — to bring ‘heaven’ to Earth, perhaps another title could be “De-Divinization.”

So, the that which is beyond moves to the that which is, absolutely in its totality or probabilistically to the point of asymptotic certainty. In this, the entire concept of being implies a certain process metaphysics as if some undivided base, but, seems, principally, two properties, on the face as one, and then reified into an infinite singular.

Where it’s both to exist and existing, or existence and time in existence, for being Itself, this can be divided properly, as things that are the veracious, into existence, as opposed to non-existence, and temporality, as opposed to a-temporality or non-temporality.

An existence can simply be, but cannot be be-ing, as such, because be-ing implies process, dynamics, so a time-sense for the process, for dynamics, of existence itself.

That is, an inescapable fact of “being,” as such, as both existence, principally, as the “be-,” and temporality, derivatively, as the “-ing,” from which human beings, language or the house of being, arise in order to provide something for being to propriate for guardians of Itself, or being.

Insofar as existence and temporality present themselves, we come to the reversal of the known universe or existence as providing the basis for not simply knowledge of hypothetical non-existence and a-temporality, but informed non-existence and a-temporality by simply parsing actual existence and actual temporality, as they are in themselves, to define their antitheses, or to become proper products of Universal Metaphysical Inversalization.

I would consider this neither philosophical “Being” nor philosophical “Time,” but a manner to derive natural philosophical “Existence” and natural philosophical “Temporality” out of previously considered metaphysical “being, Itself.”

Those with principles of existence or ‘Laws of Nature’ as correlates to either, e.g., the Second Law of Thermodynamics for the Arrow of Time, as in actual temporality.

Similarly, the idea of the appropriation by being for human beings and language may be processable through the same operation to come to current scientific metanarratives and narratives inclusive of ‘neural correlates of consciousness,’ so-called, but empirics, nonetheless.

Thus, the infinitude of being becomes probably a massive finite giving the apparency of infinity to human beings or the guardians of the truth of being, or those with property agency to speak to the truth of existence and temporality. These become more concretized, grounded, everyday formulations of the metaphysical, the far-out philosophical.

But the holy, which alone is the essential sphere of divinity, which in turn alone affords a dimension for the gods and for God, comes to radiate only when being itself beforehand and after extensive preparation has been cleared and is experienced in its truth.

This is like a long anti-theological theology exposition. It reads as if providing an explanation of the divine or transcendent while negating the common notions of gods or God, where being precedes the gods or God while proposed as a source of the Transcendent and the Immanent.

Homelessness so understood consists in the abandonment of beings by being. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of being.

This would be a great political party platform, as well as make as much sense outside of metaphysical context as some party platforms.

Heidegger repeatedly claims metaphysical status to that which does not necessarily have to embody such a status. In that, the claimed metaphysical can be merely the asserted metaphysical, a category error.

Love this quote on nationalism and internationalism:

Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system. Nationalism is as little brought and raised to humanitas by internationalism as individualism is by an ahistorical collectivism. The latter is the subjectivity of human beings in totality. It completes subjectivity’s unconditioned self-assertion, which refuses to yield.

It’s beautifully phrased. I would merely simplify the structure to existence and temporality implying a dynamic object or process-object called reality and then agency in reality as the subjectivity within or evolved from the process-object for process-subjects or subjectivity, or agency out of existence and temporality.

I wouldn’t agree with the characterization of human nature as a rational animal, though correct on the “animal” part. Both Sartre and Heidegger with the former questioning the foundations of Humanism as meaning something and the latter proclaiming a sense of a metaphysical implied within the terminological meaning and history or in the query of the former seems to miss the sauce of the pasta.

Human nature can extend infra-rationally/non-rationally (not irrationally), inter-rationally, and super-rationally in regards to its animal nature, or instinctively and emotionally, between itself and others, and in various ideas, respectively, about reality (existence and temporality) or ‘being’ without recourse to the realm of the Transcendent, as in not subject to the limitations of the material universe.

Because the brain, as the evolved construct delivering the mind, proceeds in such a manner to have an organ, organized matter through time, producing a ‘language of being’ with the language constrained by or subject to the restraints of reality, processed through reality, and principally about reality or abstracted in an Imaginarium from the bases of reality, where even the apparent transcendental thinking remains constrained by the universal statistical principles of existence or Laws of Nature which produced a finite organic extension such as the brain in processes of evolutionary selectivity over deep time.

A cognition constrained by, mentation within, computation about, and thinking abstracted from, reality, Itself, including failures of accurate mapping or coupling of thinking to reality, which happen all the time.

Following from agency within reality, and with ethics — literally, not metaphorically — defined as actions in the world, ethics seems to follow naturally from it. In that, agency, or beings with awareness, in the universe, by the nature of their existence and their existence through time imply a morality, where the entirety of their nature, their souls in a true sense, manifest their ethics or morality, whether they are aware of such ethics or morality, or not.

Ethics is an inevitable co-extensive production or byproduct of agency in existence and temporality.

With temporality meaning successive moments of existence, this couples both agency, existence, and temporality, to the consequentialist stream of ethics because ethics/morality as actions in the world, mentation or (inclusive) action, implies sequences of moments with actions over time in them bound to an agency, as noted, whether cognizant or not of the comprehensive structural embedment of ethics/morality in agency acted out in existence over time.

Thus, nihilism, as an ideological stance, only makes sense in existence of time and existence, Itself, without agents, as agency implies and derivates ethics/morality by the fact of their being, as operators in existence through time.

To ask, “Is there ethics?”, implies an agency, this negates nihilism in asking the question. Therefore, the question isn’t, “Is there an ethic or a morality, or not?” The question is, “What ethic or morality?”

Heidegger seems entirely wrong on this point, as Heidegger points out the incorrect view of Sartre. So, am I claiming Heidegger and Sartre are wrong? Yes, I think thoroughly and demonstrably wrong in both cases, by definition.

Thus, a transcendent or supersensible being either collapses to a mundane or sensible being, a universally metaphysically inversalized ordinary extended physical, or rather natural-informational, being, or both, negating the idea of a ‘more clear transcendent’ or “supersensible being” in the end implying the “highest being in the sense of the first cause of all things.”

I love the analogy or imagery of Heraclitus at the stove. I suppose this could be made about the ‘warmth’ of many popular users of philosophy. So, he does take some sweet time to explain being (and time) in a philosophical or metaphysical definition, the beings in being, the language or house of being as that which is propriated by being, and then thinking as building on the house of being as the jointure of being or the union of being with the truth of being.

He is tapping into a certain intelligibility criterion. The optically substantive nature of Being is asserted as requiring beings or understanding it through intelligibility somehow. However, quite obviously, existence and essence seem as if one and the same to me.

So, this form of argument makes little sense. I would only buy original truth if taken as the light behind the blackened orb which science pokes holes in to reveal the Real or Reality. I would argue you can take original truth as not a priori and so a proposition or a correspondence basis of truth.

Thinking does not seem to surpass all praxis as thinking is a sort of motion without motion and highly constrained by much praxis. I love his statement of the laws of logic as grounded on the laws of being; however, once more, I would argue this as an apparently precise and inadequate language to the nobleman’s personal task or game.

Where, principles of existence lead to the Laws of Nature, of which we, in fact, have a language, as Galileo Galileo reminded us, with the language of nature written in the language of mathematics, where this taps nicely into the lack of absoluteness of knowledge.

Is this truly a critique of Humanism? Not really, it’s more a critique of Existentialism, hence a critique of Sartre, while exhibiting the errors of his ways, in turn.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

To Sartre, existence precedes essence; to Heidegger, essence precedes existence. Both fundamental stipulations of philosophical systems, or sets of systems, in which the ancients and the moderns pit themselves in locked horns.

The Essentia Set or the Essence Set as the prime set of historical philosophy; the L’existence Set or the Existence Set as the prime set of modernist philosophy. The Essence Set as the superset dedicated to the search and argument for the essence of being.

The Existence Set as the superset devoted to the examination and discourse on the existence of being. In either case, the logical orientation of one in relation to the other creates a sense of time or a necessitation of temporality for completion of a set, as such.

In this, the Existence Set characterized, properly, as existence precedes essence. Where the existence of an object or a subject comes before its essence. In some existentialist philosophy, we can consider this a formulation of self-creation, not because of but, in spite of the environment in which one finds oneself.

For the Essence Set, the appropriately staged as essence precedes existence. Where the essence of an object or subject pre-exists its actual existence. This becomes the basis of the separation between essence and existence, or existence and essence, in either formulation.

The existence of something comprises its actuality in reality, as in something being in the world rather than not being in the world. This being in the world comes as an antipode to not being in the world.

Not to be in reality comprises non-existence, while to be in the world comprises existence, in a philosophical sense, a traditional sense, these become, indeed, binary propositions about objects and subjects in existence and existence, Itself.

In that, the philosophical systems on offer provide a sense of the absolute in a reality of the philosophical or a discourse of the thought out rather than the thought out and tested against experience.

Existence does seem profound as if the only thing mattering in a world of sense, spite, and the Sun. Something mysterious in its evident-ness, though evident to the self as the self is self-evident to oneself.

This explains the power and profundity proposed by existentialist school philosophers about existence coming first. The existence of something present before the self and then the self makes an essence or nature out of the existence.

The existential becomes a means by which to create an essence out of existence, hence “existence precedes essence,” as in an essence comes out of the creative possibility manifold of the existent. If nothing existed, what essence to create?

This is the legacy of existentialism. In turn, the essentialists, who propose the primary stature of the essence, invert this or proposed this first, and then those who came later, e.g., existentialists, reversed the proposition to existence first and essence second.

The essentialists proposing something of human nature beyond the existent, as in the essence exists in some pre-existent capacity or comes as a constraint, as nature, binding the possibilities of an object or a subject to materially operate in such a manner or to act in such a manner, respectively.

The essence could come as a platonic Idea or the nature of the subject, or object. To make matters complex, these become dividers when connected in terms of the chicken or the egg of the matter. Which came first, essence or existence?

This explains the dictums of existence precedes essence and essence precedes existence. It comes as a matter of one or the other, and never the twain. Yet, either twangs the mind in an awkward inorganic sound, something ugly in the first and in the second.

Some principle of the ugly pervades either belying particular incorrectness of concept and principle or in formulations seen in both. The existence of something without an essence would seem to tell the tale of the Materialists.

While the essence of something without an existence would seem to explain the stories of the Spiritualists. Why one without the other? Why one preceding the other? As in, a temporality of sense hidden in the dictums; that which explains the problem and provides a more comprehensive solution to either.

In that, the essence of something amounts to its nature. Something seemingly incorporeal, other, created without the actuality of an existent thing as out there in some multi-infinite realm outside of the singular finite unicity of the universe.

The existence of something may reflect an essence or contain an essence, but the essence exists outside of the existence of something as if accessed distal from the actual. Mathematical objects and operators may have some essence prior to actual existence in the universe.

In this manner, the essence of something in the universe exhibits or contains the essence without itself being the fully existent thing. It is the difference between human and human nature.

What I deem incorrect and correct in both comes in the fact of existence, the actuality of an object or a subject, or both as seen in reality, exhibits its deepest essence.

Which is to state, the existence of something — its actualization — is its essence, as in the self-existence and contingent existence of an object or a subject, in reality, comprises both its existence and its essence, simultaneously, where the property of existence Itself is its essence, in which the fundamental essence of the existent object or the existent subject is defined by both their existence (and their self-existence).

Every existent subject — which becomes redundant, so “every existent subject” as “every subject” — because its essence is its existence means by be-ing­, as in existence and existence through time, exhibits its essence, while even a singular moment finite object universe with a ‘frozen’ subject embedded within it; this, too, exhibits an essence as existence and essence as existence, as the exhibited essence of the singular moment finite object universe and the finite subject of the universe is existence while differentiated from one another in the form of existence.

To this manner of thought, the essence defined the nature of the ‘spirit’ of the objects and the subjects found in the set of all possible realities equates to the existence, in which the essence comes into being as existence, as a complete sufficiency of identity and actuality.

The object universe and the subject in the universe comprise reality, where both exist and self-exist apart from the non-existent; wherein, their sufficiency of differentiation become self-existent properties as individuated ‘islands’ with the subjects built as smaller ‘islands’ in the objects, as particulate synergies of objects with the agency, comprises something self-existent in a manner and form conceived as separate, individuated, while associated in the weave of existence.

Back to essence precedes existence and existence precedes essence, to Sartre’s notion of transcendence, this becomes palpably absurd, as the nature grown over time constrains the possibilities of the human being while the range of degrees of freedom for the human being provides a modicum of ‘transcendence’ more properly deemed actualization, entirely natural.

Thus, existence does not precede essence, while essence does not precede existence. The idea of an essence independent of the actual appears palpably absurd, as this remains an interpretation, in which the interpretation means qualitative differences on existence, where existence may exhibit properties and not essences.

Some claim as the only essence as to exist and existence itself containing this ‘essence,’ so denuding the potential for a distinction between the two, while in existence the fact of agency implies a particular subject or set of subjects within the dynamic object universe.

Where, the Existence Set and the Essence Set collapse one into the other, and become the Existence Set inclusive of the necessary Essence Set and exclusive of the unnecessary members of the Essence Set, the extra-natural.

Existence exists as a union of essence and existence, while the previously considered ‘essence’ set apart from the spiritual or the supernatural can be considered properties, which would mean objective, repeatedly verifiable distinct properties of the dynamic object universe, including the properties of mass, energy, and gravitation, and so on, the properties as principles derived therefrom, where these become known to agents (“scientists”) in the dynamic object universe while existing in spite of the discovery or not.

Within this set of properties, some dynamic object universes can derive dynamic subjective objects within the same dynamic object universe in which truly no differentiation exists except in the fact of the subjectivity of the subject in the larger object, as in our own universe.

Primary properties of existence comprise the properties discovered through later methodologies for the approximation to the facts of existence with the scientific method, hypothetico-deductivism as the means by which to accumulate the evidence and derivate principles of existence as the distinct properties and principles of existence as Primary Properties.

Secondary properties exist due to dynamic subjective objects in the universe in relation to the dynamic object universe in which the dynamic subjective objects or agents perceive and conceive the dynamic objective universe to realize Primary Properties in mind or the individual properties or the qualitative distinctions of agency in reality.

For example, “a happy Sunday,” “a holy person,” “a smell of roses on a fine spring in the meadows of my hometown,” “the love my life,” “the choir of angels of Heaven singing glory, glory, glory to the Lord God omnipotent,” “my favorite football team,” and the like.

With capitalizations, do these become ‘official’? These Secondary Properties of the Primary Properties of the world as qualitative distinctions in mind, infinitely divisible, infinitely combinatory, with the only limitations as the mentation limits of the agents set by the armature limits of the agents’ computational apparatuses themselves, the dynamic subjective objects, in the dynamic object universe, where Existence and the Primary Properties of Existence set boundaries on the probabilistically possible and probabilistically impossible as well as the qualitative agentic-ally derived Secondary Properties of Existence.

In this sense, Existence becomes finite with no particular upper limits to its capacity while merely finite, even ‘infinite’ as seemingly infinite and so a gargantuan or large finite, in various degrees; Primary Properties exist as finite objects, spatiotemporal events, and principles of existence of Existence; whereas, the Secondary Properties come with the agency in some existences, whereby Existence becomes infinitely divisible and infinitely combinatory with the constraints on the divisions and the combinations, in an agentic qualitative sense, coming from the “armature limits of the agents’ computational apparatuses themselves.”

Existence comes with constraints based on self-consistency, order, the possible, the probabilistic, while, with agents, harboring infinite aspects, individually and combinatorially. Therefore, “Neither L’existence Précède L’essence Nor Essentia Precedes Existentia, But Both” means the bedrock essence comes “to exist” and existence exhibits “to exist” by its fact; and, therefore, neither existence precedes essence nor essential precedes existence, but both, as in essence collapses to existence while both emerge simultaneously, as one. Furthermore, Existence comes as it comes, emerges as it emerges, in each manifestation of the possible, while the principles of existence, the objects, and the relations between the objects through temporality comprise the dynamic object universe of Existence, and in some universes with the agency the Secondary Properties of Existence become forms of constrained infinite potentialities in Existence, while constrained by that which is evident, the Primary Properties of Existence, and coming from the sense of the self-evident, the agentic, to know that you exist and know that you know; thus, both (and more).

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.

Boris Sidis

The man of genius whether as an artist or thinker requires a mass of accidental variations to select from and a rigidly selective process of attention.

Boris Sidis

William James Sidis died hidden, largely. A former child prodigy in mathematics and polyglotism, purportedly. Many myths exist about the man. Nonetheless, he represented a social scientific experiment by his father, Boris Sidis, M.D., Ph.D., to see the capacities of the mind stretched to a limit at an early age.

The Animate and the Inanimate remains the main work publicly counted as part of the canon of Sidis. In this text, he proposes something of a twin-universe inversion thought experiment with, on the one hand, an ‘ordinary’ universe, such as our own, and, on the other hand, a reverse universe or an opposition universe to the ‘ordinary’ universe vis-à-vis the variable of time.

One of the earliest sections covers reversible physical laws. The “physical” seems disputable to me. However, the reversible physical laws appear rather apt as a descriptor of the situation at hand. By and large, the dynamics of the universe remain the same, surprisingly, in such a thought experiment upon reading and reflecting on Sidis.

The reversal of the known laws in the 1920s, or the time of the publication of the text, would result in a frame rate of the same gaps, scale of the same size, and cause-and-effect cosmos of the current order, merely in reverse order.

Bill was an avowed atheist on a first-order analysis, did not believe ‘in the big boss of the Christians,’ and believed, potentially, in something beyond the human. In some sense, one can consider a matrix of beliefs with a panendeistic view as a more in-depth perspective while an atheistic view, as a first approximation, seems reasonable too.

The difference between no gods and one that doesn’t personally care seems nil on an individual basis. The reversal of velocity, acceleration, effects on constituent parts of atoms, of mass, and the like, would appear the same in the original universe and in the reverse universe. Reversible physical law seems set here.

Any consideration of a change of an object or a force in the real universe must correspond to a change of an object or a force in the reverse universe in like manner while in opposition to the axis of time.

In this, any alteration of a velocity will require a countermanding velocity. The change of velocity requires another velocity. All forces in either universe remain the same and, therefore, the changes in the force in one make for a change in the other in the reverse time direction. The first law of thermodynamics, by logical deduction, remains the same in the reverse time universe as in the real universe.

A change of momentum is proportional to the force impressed in the second law of motion. Whether a reverse time universe or the real universe, the momentum does not change, thus the second law of motion retains fundamental character.

The third law of motion is every action has an equal and opposite reaction. With the first two established, we come to the factuality of the third. The three laws of motion retain their character in a reverse time universe.

Wherein, the laws and forces of the real universe exhibit a universal quality to them. For the conservation of energy and matter, Bill Sidis explains, laws of attraction and repulsion, of refraction and reflection, can be reversed; all can be made in a fake universe with only a reversion of the factor of time while retaining their fundamental character.

At one basic level, physical laws with the capability of reversion through time are a powerful thought experiment on the nature of time and the relation of law to reality.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

We must doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, but how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to the senses, such as the existence of God and the soul.

– Leonardo Da Vinci

I have been having some preliminary thoughts about the Renaissance Humanism painter-philosopher, Leonardo Da Vinci, as in percolating about the ways in which to approach the subject matter.

Often, he gets called the Rennaissance Man or the Universal Genius due to the ubiquity of both his expertise and domains of deep knowledge. In some manner, Da Vinci was a pervasive intellect.

Someone who, whatever he touched, he mastered. Someone of a brilliance rarely seen in the modern period in which specialization is the flavor of the day, not universality.

In this sense, there is a general sensibility of awe, about him, and distance, from the philosophy behind him. When I examine his words, and I look at some of the life trajectories, I note several indicative points of caution.

Not only a beautiful man, a bright person, and an inquisitive sensitivity to the natural world, someone conscious of the ways in which the Church, as in the Roman Catholic Church, dominated, domineered, and crushed all dissent with force, even by torture or murder by the ‘state’ or the Church arm.

He was cautious in statements, even in scientific discoveries as the Church was a force for ignorance and suffering, as today, by and large. He kept statements at odds of the Church away from the public, so the hierarchs.

He wasn’t polite; he was political. Leo was a genius. Few doubt it. Near as I can tell, fewer questions exist about the man’s life than about his philosophical views. He seems as if a scientist, an engineer, a technologist.

Someone interested in the natural world as the natural world with observation as key to the comprehension of the world, where the senses cannot provide a definitive answer to the vexing questions of the day.

There can be approximations. There can be estimations. There can be grasping some order of the truth, as in the facts of the matter about reality. However, the sense of the self and its senses reign supreme to Leonardo.

Someone distinctly aware of the limitations of the faith structures in his midst. In his notebooks, thus tucked away, he proclaimed in capital letters, “IL SOLE NO SI MUOVE,” or, “THE SUN DOES NOT MOVE.”

In short, decades before the official finding, he deduced the heliocentric reality of the Solar System rather than the biblically asserted geocentric view of the Solar System.

This contradicted centuries of biblical teaching and Church authority. Therefore, he put the text in his notebooks, never discovered until after death, presumably, as a monument to both his genius and his caution.

He considers the state of nature as the state of nature itself. In that, a collection of physical laws manifest and order the universe and living systems. He dissected corpses, incorporated findings of anatomy and physiology in drawings and artistic works.

He had a sense of the real. He had a compassion for the living, even releasing some animals in captivity if he passed them by paying for their fee. He was someone in love with life and in love with the discoveries about the natural world.

In this sense, as an amorist, as in amour, or love, he was a lover of nature and the real human nature, not the statements of holy texts or the authorities of the men in dresses in Rome.

He died in France. Someone in what has been termed Renaissance Humanism. Something of an amorist-naturalist and a humanist in a full sense of the term without religious connotations or transcendentalist sensibilities.

Someone for whom the natural world is that which is, sufficiently ordered, and reason as a guide to order the thoughts about the world gathered and organized through the senses.

He would be a rare individual, even today, as a naturalistic thinker, comprehensive in the dimensionality of considerations about the world, and oriented towards the use of proper reason to come to some truths about reality at large.

In short, a man of reality and virtue.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Sociomix

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021

I plan to take a walk to the cemetery this evening. One of the joys in taking time to oneself is the silence. A relationship with others, to some, such as myself, only becomes possible with the moments of silence.

Those times way from the crowd, apart from others. There’s a sense in which aloneness provides time for being. The time to refresh, relax, and regain some sense of self in a busy world of work and obligations.

It may seem counterintuitive to some degree. However, the idea of the modern world is constant movement. Something is in flux. In reality, it’s a world of half-truths and half-falsehoods.

We’re a global population of stationary butts and moving minds. Our fingers type away at the keyboard while the glutes stick to the proverbial cushion. In a time to walk away, into nature, late in the night, I find peace.

I find this as a time to relate to myself, to think, to ponder, to conceptualize, to imagine, even to dream. I take the time. I travel. I walk and take transit only. I live a simple, modest life.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Alone with myself to take some time away from the world of the rushing digital landscape. When I head out, deliberately, I walk along with the stride of others no more.

A cemetery, a graveyard, a tombstone here, a marking there, a stack of moss on stone over the beaten path, truly, they’re the piles of the forgotten. Those deemed in the past.

I walk by them going to work. It’s in the day. It’s not the same. It feels as if just a bunch more grass. There are people around. They have things to do; hell, I have things needing doing.

When I go at night, there’s a sense of intimacy in relations with myself. The descriptor coming to mind is a “communion” of sorts. The sense of unity with the self in time, in silence, with the dead.

It can sound morbid. I understand, completely. However, I would propose or embark on a different interpretation of the sense of relationships and events. People play golf, knit, fish, hike, bike, walk, and so on, alone, sometimes.

This helps them get away from some of the stress of the day, make a mark on their psychological wellbeing. Rather than, the continuous integration in social life with others.

It is building a firmer sense of self and building a sense of self-understanding, or taking time away for personal development and/or wellbeing. When I take these walks to or through the cemetery, it is a time to reflect.

All those who had gone before. Everyone with a story as deeply tragic and hopeful as my own. Life is full of the ups and downs of the ordinary. My sense of relationships is both interpersonal and intrapersonal.

You know others and yourself through others. Also, you understand yourself through yourself. In that, for the latter, time away is not exactly the time of play. It’s a serious time for deep reflection, consideration, contemplation.

A moment in a day without the demands of social life or the rigorous requirements of work. I take this time for building personal peace, reflecting on the day, and to center my inner voice.

If you’re ever wondering about a cornerstone of mental health, then I consider one of the more critical parts as the knowledge of oneself. Part of this comes from self-reflection.

One of the only times to have time for this is in self-reflection. Because when in the company of others, your self can be diminished in some respects. You’re paying attention to the social cues and emotional needs of others.

While, at the same time, you’re having to gauge internal feelings and calibrate to the social situation and act emotionally appropriately. In this, your sense of self merges with the environment.

This is fine, but for self-insight, you need to optimize internal resources. One manner in which to do this is to take time for yourself, in silence. For myself, this occurs amongst the dead and in the night, whether cold or cool.

I find this a way to sit, inquietude, as if as silent as moonlight on a gravestone.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.