[ORG] and mathematics

[ORG] is the mode that changes scales, that creates boundaries, that changes magnitudes, that is related to creating the sense of parts and wholes. In this sense it sounds as the most mathematical of all modes.


Again I go to Lawvere through Rodin

"Arising [..] from the needs of geometry, category theory has developed such notions as
adjoint functor, topos, bration, closed category, 2-category, etc. in order to provide
(i) a guide to the complex, but very non-arbitrary constructions of the concepts and
their interactions which grow out of the study of space and quantity.
It was only the relentless adherence to the needs of that basic subject that made category
theory so well-determined yet powerful. [..] If we replace \space and quantity"
in (i) above by \any serious object of study", then (i) becomes my working de nition
of objective logic. Of course, when taken in a philosophically proper sense, space and
quantity do pervade any serious eld of study. Category theory has also objecti ed
as a special case
(ii) the subjective logic of inference between statements. Here statements are of
interest only for their potential to describe the objects which concretize the concepts."

I see all this tweets in AIME about parts and wholes and I wonder why people don't take advantage of others (mathematicians) who happen to have thought about these issues some time now!

As far as I see AIME would say something like the following for a simple system like a triangle:

a "side in a triangle" has to pass through the "triangle" in order to say some interesting things about it. And the same happens for two other "sides in a triangle", for the "angels in the triangle" etc.
So "triangle" is the whole and "sides" are the parts in the sense that the "sides" (etc) have to "pass through" the "triangle" in special ways , so that different interesting things are told about them.

In this sense Latour's insistence of not creating a higher level of "wholes" relative to parts can be satisfied (although geometrically the part-whole relation seems to me to be a primitive one)

All this sounds to me a very algebraic way to deal with part-whole relations and I find it extremely improbable that the relevant concepts have not beed already worked out by mathematicians.
Please, some mathematician teach them how to speak!

Socrates and the anthropologist

In AIME the anthropologist has the place of Socrates. She moves around searching for truth (an old term but I like it). Poor Socrates is treated like a straw man. He was supposedly searching just along [REF]. But Voegelin's Socrates (Plato and later Aristotles) are not just dealing with [REF].

What kind of text is the MOE?  To me , a commoner, looks like a philosophical work. Like Daniel Dennett and others it relies on scientific work to make points that go way beyond science. Or at least [REF]. What kind of key houses philosophy? Is it [PRE] ? I doubt it. How can just the choice of the appropriate key, each time, count for the distninctive feature of philosophy?

It is also a source of foundations (foundations as fundamental ways of articulation), which reminds me of the similar concern of mathematics which brings me , through andrei rodin, to this statement of Lawvere which seems close to the spirit of AIME

"In my own education I was fortunate to have two teachers who used the term “foundations”
in a common-sense way (rather than in the speculative way of the BolzanoFrege-Peano-Russell
tradition). [..] The orientation of these works seemed to be
“concentrate the essence of practice and in turn use the result to guide practice”. I
propose to apply the tool of categorical logic to further develop that inspiration.
Foundations is derived from applications by unification and concentration, in other
words, by the axiomatic method. Applications are guided by foundations which have
been learned through education. "

Perhaps the distinction between the two different senses of axiomatization is similar to Latour's claim that he does not want to make a system.

Voegelin says"the order of history is the history of order" and in this order one may see successive versions of [REL]. Let us not see it progressively. Let us say perhaps, coexistant options of [REL]. The "Noetic" version (of classical philosophy) being one of them.

Socrates meets the young anthropologist and they embrace each other. A meeting of souls in a tormented world where people will clash and fight

I am not a modern (perhaps I do not even understand what philosophy means modern-wise), so I can pick and chose from MOE as I like and find useful to my ends. Even if erroneous (who am I to judge) AIME works like a lever that allows joints to appear in the constitution of the moderns and in this sense allow us to feel closer to them, to empathize them. So even if I look a jolly fool I do enjoy the sense of space.

Thinking on [FIC]

1. pg 253 "..end up giving both artists and scholars the feeling that they are exploring "the same world", the one right in front of them, which they take to be spectacle seen through a window"

Perhaps one could add that the "window" is the eyes and there is constructed a similar "unique world" on the other side of the eyes, in the skull: the mind.

The bishop as a [TEC]hnologist

I was thinking the place of the bishop and the priests in the local church from the point of view of [TEC]. The church is made up of all these different lives and these different lives are all these different "materials". The local church is a project in time and the bishop and priests the [TEC]hnologists who work, so that it stands in time.
Ἐὰν γὰρ μυρίους παιδαγωγοὺς ἔχητε ἐν Χριστῷ, ἀλλ᾿ οὐ πολλοὺς πατέρας· ἐν γὰρ Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ διὰ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου ἐγὼ ὑμᾶς ἐγέννησα. (1 Corinthians 4:15)
Perhaps this standing is manifest in the Eucharist.
In AIME, [TEC] is in a process of creating subjectivity: I act technologically and as this effort succeeds I find myself to be the author of the technology and an ingenious person. So [TEC] metamorphoses me.
But it is not this way in the church (I think). The [MET]amorphic backfire of [TEC] should not find there the person of the bishop  for "it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me".
The bishop is "εις τυπον και τόπον Χριστου" (St. Ignasius, Letter to the Magensians) which reminds me "To discover the sense is not in the first pace to seek the connection between one word and another [or one might say the connection between different orders in the church or the connection between the clerics and the lay people] , but the connection between a word, a speech act , a course of action, and what must be put in its place if the latter are going to continue to have meaning to make sense - that is, for them to continue to exist" (pg 254)

AIME, Reset Modernity and two parables

If I get it right the various parts of the trajectory that ends to the Reset Modernity (for the time being) is like the drawing of the political cycle: the hard effort to help set up a public around an issue.
I was reminded of the parable of the sawer. The seed falls ("the kingdom of heaven is here" What? Where is it? "you think you are included but don't be so sure" Might I not be saved? Me? the inheritant of the patrimony?), the seed is an issue around which a public forms (One of the things I enjoy in AIME is this dialogue with my tradition).
But there are so many different responses: the person who doesn't even get what goes on, the one who is enthousiastic and then just diasppears, the one who has "so many other things to do". And it seems not so many who are fruitful.

Then there is another parable and this came to my mind in relation to the phraising of the world to come, in the ending chapter of MOE.
There is this view of the Panathenaics (pg 483), then the announcement "there is no God, there is only one Earth" and in the end the closing of the book "It is that civilization that our inquiry seeks to praise in advance, in order to ward off the worst".
(What is this worst? A glorious death has been higghly apporeciated by many cultures. )
This Panathenaics procession brings to my mind the extension of the rights to be  Roman citizent to the people living in the Late Roman Empire. We are all "brothers and sisters", but we now include in the brotherhood or sisterhood other beings.

There are two ways to perceive this procession with my non modern eyes.
The one comes from the parable of the Wicked Vinedressers (Matthew 21:33-46). A flat Babel. We can build by ourselves a world where we will be the masters. We will expand the participants but in this new community there is nobody towards Whom the community gives account. We abolished fear! To my eyes this is modernity to the extreem and I wonder in what sense this is a basis of negotiation with this part of humanity that happens to pray.
The other comes from the idea that the procession was ending to Athena's statue. The Panathenaic procession was the carrying of the new clothes for the statue. Suppose Gaia is on the place of Athena. And the new clothes, perhpas the new manners of thinking and practicing through which humans (and others?) present themselves in front of Gaia. (Gaia who is nether Earth not a Godess). Which will not stay for ever but may need another renewing in another procession. In accordance with AIME there is a multiple of issues of quality, of success and failure, therefore there are issues of salvation. Gaia could be another name for Heaven, this Heaven that is "inside people's hearts". The vision of Gaia as the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven? The Procession as the Church? This is the closer I can come (though one could connect Gaia with Christ or question the connection between the Trinitarian understanding of God and this vision here) to see negotiatory passings between AIME and traditions like my own. (anyway I am not a theologian but in my tradition commoners were always talking too much)
But to be honest I would expect much more AIME ending working like the first way than like the second. 

Reseting Modernity and negotiating with the others

In AIME, one of the big themes was "preparing the negotiation with the others"

It is bizzare how current history seems to be conversing with this project! For in the way western and central Europeans deal with Syrian refugees they express in a very clear way how strongly they do not want to negotiate with others. Or rather that they prefer distant negotiations (like distant wars with airplanes).

Even Reset Modernity, in my non-modern eyes is very strongly modern: These people gather, supposedly facing very big challenges and ... they don't pray. They feel so much in control: they will put down their art, their sciences, their political institutions and hopss! the solutions will start pooring out.
As the fox said to the woodcutter in Aesop's myth: "the words do not fit with the dids". For all its turn to the arts, the manner of going around is the modern way. (Who is it, Christian, or Muslim, or Jew that would not start such a serious endeavour with a prayer? I guess Budhist and Taoists and Hindus too would not start just by the first step of a subproject. If I am wrong, if there is something equivalent to a prayer here, what is it?)

Has the modernization front stopped? To me it seems that what we experience is a really expansive movement of modernizing. In the Arab world the moderns use a combination of soft and hard power to push modernization really deep down. The kindling of the different fractions combined with the sealing of European borders creates varieties of hellish experience which are attributed to the lack of modernity in the popoulations that are afflicted ("arab culture does not fit well with democracy").

So the moderns stand like the judges in Judgement day: "Do you have the proper memes? Will you be allowed the priviledge to live with us? Do you hate vehemently enough the aspects of the culture that you come from that do not fit with us?"

To me it seems that Reseting Modernity, in the current context of massive migration looks body-less. The body (the weirdness of meeting with the other, the cunning of finding ways around, in real time, with real consequences), is delegated for the contemplative experience that will cup passing through the different parts of the exhibit.

[MET] and popular science on "who we really are"

I was reading the chapter on [MET] and at the same time contemplating on the following

and I say to myself that this view:" you are a bag of molecules, a hardware that runs a particular software", the view that supports "looking to the universe from beyond" (as if we are the only sentient being and all the rest is the artifacts Physicists have imagined) is a [MET] being trying to pin us, to make us take ourselves for what it has already specified.

Παιδια των δασων και των έρημων πόλεων

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151012-feral-the-children-raised-by-wolves