Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage.
Paperback version of the 2002 paper published in the journal Progress in Information, Complexity, and Design (PCID). ABSTRACT Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self-execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self-selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. SCSPL relates space, time and object by means of conspansive duality and conspansion, an SCSPL-grammatical process featuring an alternation between dual phases of existence associated with design and actualization and related to the familiar wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity. Addressing physical evolution on not only the biological but cosmic level, the CTMU addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion, while preserving virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.
The book seeks to characterize reflexive conceptual structures more thoroughly and more precisely than has been done before, making explicit the structure of paradox and the clear connections to major logical results. The goal is to trace the structure of reflexivity in sentences, sets, and systems, but also as it appears in propositional attitudes, mental states, perspectives and processes. What an understanding of patterns of reflexivity offers is a deeper and de-mystified understanding of issues of semantics, free will, and the nature of consciousness.
Gifted spiritual teacher and intuitive Matt Kahn guides readers on their spiritual path with 10 Golden Rules to help unlock emotional freedom. Do you feel an insatiable drive to fulfill a mission greater than yourself? To be reacquainted with a long-lost desire to follow the excitement of passion, inspiration, and playfulness? Have you reached a turning point in your reality? In this powerful work, spiritual teacher and intuitive Matt Kahn explores the 10 Golden Rules for emotional freedom-divinely curated and practical to the demands of everyday life. Infused into each rule is Matt's loving, heart-centered perspective, to help guide you through your own profound spiritual transformation. By overcoming self-sabotage, hardship, and anger, you will find true liberation and the infinite current of unconditional love that nourishes your heart. Matt's energetically encoded mantras and exercises will enable you to jumpstart your spiritual growth and access deeper levels of ease, freedom, and joy. Unlock the Universe's plan for you and the milestones that will become the personal testimony of your life on this Earth.
The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. ,
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Preface by Pierre Bourdieu Preface by Loic J.D. Wacquant I Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Beyond the Antinomy of Social Physics and Social Phenomenology 2 Classification Struggles and the Dialectic of Social and Mental Structures 3 Methodological Relationalism 4 The Fuzzy Logic of Practical Sense 5 Against Theoreticism and Methodologism: Total Social Science 6 Epistemic Reflexivity 7 Reason, Ethics, and Politics II The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 Sociology as Socioanalysis 2 The Unique and the Invariant 3 The Logic of Fields 4 Interest, Habitus, Rationality 5 Language, Gender, and Symbolic Violence 6 For a, Realpolitik of Reason 7 The Personal is Social III The Practice of Reflexive Sociology (The Paris Workshop), Pierre Bourdieu 1 Handing Down a Trade 2 Thinking Relationally 3 A Radical Doubt 4 Double Bind and Conversion 5 Participant Objectivation Appendixes, Loic J.D. Wacquant 1 How to Read Bourdieu 2 A Selection of Articles from, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 3 Selected Recent Writings on Pierre Bourdieu.
