My Big TOE: Defining AUO and The Fundamental Process

I'm going to review here for my own edification some of the foundational pieces of Thomas Campbell's My Big TOE.

Two concepts form the foundation of it.

Absolute Unbounded Oneness
The first is mystical. "Mystical" means laying outside the bounds of what can be defined by our knowledge as science has discovered and clarified it. That which is mystical is either inaccessible to our minds, or is yet to be discovered by science. He (rightly, in my view) dismisses the idea that there is no beginning to existence as without basis in science, mystical in itself, and worst of all illogical. The alternative is that there is a beginning, but beginnings "belong to the next higher level of causality and are beyond the purview or scope of a subsystem's own causal logic" (vol.1, sec. 2, chap. 24).

The idea is this: that the "engine" or "source" of our reality (the physical universe and individual consciousness) is a "primordial consciousness," called here an Absolute Unbounded Oneness. The AUO uses the Fundamental Process to interact with itself toward new states of existence by changing its undifferentiated oneness.

The second idea is not mystical.

Wang Bi: Clarifying the Judgements

A translation of the I Ching by Wang Bi (226-249)--some insights from his "general remarks:"

1. Clarifying the Judgements
A Judgement "discusses the body or substance of a hexagram as a whole and clarifies what the controlling principle is from which it evolves."
Because "the many cannot govern the many," there is One that governs the many, as One "controls all activity in the world."
There is no such thing as absolute chaos--things follow their own principles, are united by a "fundamental regulator," are integrated by a "primordial generator." Because this is so, one can pick one line of a hexagram and "use it to clarify what is happening." This One enables us to understand situations even if variables are multitudinous--"if we keep to a single center point when viewing what is about to come to us, then things converging from the six directions lose their capacity to overwhelm us with their number." In other words, a "chief controlling principle" inheres in all things, and the I Ching offers Judgements as these principles.

wanting, etc.

All these Republicans calling for capped spending, it's humorous how naive they are about the American character of 2011. My Republican brother in law is a Fox News Republican, i.e. very little knowledge of political science, cultural understanding, economics; mere repeating of mantras. Incidentally he has little self-reflection, such that he doesn't apply the diagnoses he supports to his own life, he doesn't have consistency between what he advocates and what he lives, he's a hypocrite. Americans won't stop spending because we want too badly. We want, and the only way to satiate wants is to spend.
________
Speaking of wanting, 3 titles I'd like:
RL Wing's I Ching Workbook 978-0385128384
Wu Wei's The I Ching: 978-0943015071
Lao Tse's Tao de Ching: 1562790854
and
Frederick Franck's Drawing trilogy

I can get them all for a few bucks.

McKenna: The fifth dimension, information & entropy, science and possibility

A few days ago (6/12) in my print journal, I wrote

"The rules, that is what practicing drawing is for, to learn your rules so you're expressing yourself intelligibly, just as writers learn spelling, grammar and syntax and more advanced writers manipulate their words to convey stories hitherto untold, unfelt. that's why quality matters not (in the learning stages), one is learning the rules, and also learning the rules to self-expression: "I want to say this. How is it possible for me to express an emotion, a feeling about someone or something?" In learning the rules of self-expression, one improves his efficacy in the domain of expression, so that he can say what he feels, or it comes across, is transmitted, broadcast, sent, displayed, offered, proffered, given, understood, felt, expressed. Plopped down, we orient ourselves to the third dimension and to Earthly physics, then we learn the fourth dimension, the passage of time and Earthly time, days, minutes, seconds. Entrance into the fifth dimension may be expression, which has its own rules but is bound by human limitations." 

And then I heard this from Terence McKenna (from the Psychedelic Salon, podcast 32) yesterday:

"Language is in conquest of dimensional expression, or something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time & space, of higher and higher dimension." Early life forms, fixed slimes, are like points of being, who by breaking free and becoming motile, still without perception, are like lines, and when "light-sensitive photons" are trapped in their membranes, intend to move toward light, which is entrance not only into the third but also the fourth dimension because to move from here to there is a matter of executing will over time as well as space. Thence evolution is about efficacious means of movement in and through the third and fourth dimensional world, a "topological manifold with a temporal axis."
"But then, with the advent of spoken language--spoken language is about the recovery of memory at a later date; it's a data recall system. [He's drawing, intentionally, most likely, on ideas in Flatland: we beings of the fifth dimension should have access to the fourth, as the square did Lineland and the sphere did Flatland. This is accomplished by language, by which we can travel to the past (kinglists, histories) and into the future via strategizing, fantasizing.] When you get to writing, this time-binding function is now totally explicit...the purpose of these behaviors is to keep the past from slipping away.
"From the point of view that evolution is the conquest of dimensionality...you can see that the primate conquest of time by these time-binding technologies is the phenomenon we call human history." This is why we speak, write, invent alphabets and mathematical notation. Full conquest of the 4th dimension will require machine symbiosis and humans to become more than "semi-cannibalistic primates [into] machine-tenders of a global nervous system."

OK so that's one big idea. The next big idea is related to Terence's notion that not only is the universe a novelty-producing and conserving mechanism, but that novelty is occurring at quicker rates through time. What I'm interested in here is close relationships between the thoughts of 3 big thinkers of the late 20th century: Luciano Floridi, Terence McKenna, and Thomas Campbell, relating to the concept of entropy. Floridi addresses entropy as it relates to information, viz. that entropy applies to information as it does to the physical world, that without intentional conservation it will dissipate and cease to exist. Note here the parallel between this concept and Dawkins's meme notion. Floridi introduced the notion in relationship to his Information Ethics: it is our obligation to preserve and conserve information as long as it enriches what he calls the infosphere; it then becomes unethical to destroy information and to let valuable information be destroyed or go to destruction. Thomas Campbell's notion of entropy has wider implications related to the existence of love in the universe: as entropy takes life away, it is the human objective to extend life and this can be done by love. Bertrand Russell too has something about entropy in one of his radio broadcasts I just listened to, I'll have to find it and transcribe it here. This is the incipience of an essay on the evolution of the application of the concept of entropy in the late 20th century.

Here's what McKenna said about it in the same talk:

On Teilhard de Chardin's "nuosphere", "the atmosphere of electronic and radar and radio and telegraphic and television signals; that we would build a new atmosphere, as it were, a technosphere of information. And information is a very key concept in all of this. What I call "novelty," you could arguably call "information;" what I call "habit," you could arguably call "noise." And this is a vision of being where there is a struggle between these two antithetical forces--one, described by the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. The other described by novelty theory, and Ilya Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc. etc. And they are, in every situation, locked in struggle. The amount of order and disorder in any situation is dictated by the unique configuration of the local struggle between these two forces, if you want to put it that way. But the good news is, it's not a Manichean thing--it doesn't go on forever, these two forces are not quite equally pitted. Over time, novelty wins. Order wins. Order triumphs over disorder, and builds higher states of order. So in a way, you could think of the whole process as what engineers call a "damped oscillation." That habit is this oscillation in a space of perfection, and that it is eventually damped by the surrounding telos toward concrescence [see Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality]."
...
"What really is happening is that a...leap forward [towards control of the world matter and energy] is being taken, and all under the aegis of this key concept of information. Information is more primary than time and space, more primary than light and electromagnetism. Information is the stuff of being--it's all you will ever know, it's all you can ever know. The rest are ghostly hypotheses to explain the behavior and the presence of information. It's almost as though it has a syntactical life of its own. It's almost as though it's a virtual lifeform of some sort, that is running on a primate platform [see Danny Hillis, The Connection Machine]...To this point, the human beings have been almost like the host of a parasite...a syntactical net...we were early parasitized by a kind of virtual life form that lives only in syntax, and is essentially timesharing and piggybacking our nervous system, but at some point we insisted around it, in somewhat the way a cell membrane trapped early bacteria and turned them into mitochondria, so now we can think with this linguistic symbiote that shares our brain space. However, [see George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines]...when we talk to each other, when we make sense to each other, what we say can be perfectly made formulaic through symbolic logic...[which is in other words] capable of portraying human language and human logical process perfectly. The interesting thing is that this language, symbolic logic, is the language that machines speak with great fluency. This is the great bridge between us and the machines: that fundamentally we speak the same language. That "and" and "and" to a microprocessor mean the same thing. So there is no great barrier; it's all conceptual between us and machine intelligence. Machine intelligence is the most likely form of alien intelligence to arrive and complicate our social dialogue because in a sense it's already here, we're putting a great deal of effort into creating it, and its emergence depends to a great deal upon these same appetites for novelty that allowed us to squeeze ourselves out of the rules of molecular chemistry. Again, it's happening at these very high megahertz rates; machine evolution will not be like human evolution; what took us 50,000 years to achieve, it can achieve, through distributed processing, in minutes, hours. Hans Moravic says, of artificial intelligence, we may never know what hit us. It will simply come to be."

And another synchronicity, related to my latest venture back into calculus. I wrote recently

"Terence McKenna said math is pretty much the only truth he can see at this point, and my inspiration in picking up calculus comes from my desire to know more about the operations of the world. Understand the world's laws and you understand more about limitations generally. And life is quite simply God imposing limits on himself. We are of God, a substance of God with limitations: limits of knowledge, of knowledge of what is one or more dimensions outside our domain. It is our objective to figure this damn thing out, that's why we enjoy puzzles, it's a fractally smaller piece of the larger objective...If we figure out our laws, laws of science and math, we know how far to tread and we understand more about what we have to work with."

Note that's inspired by McKenna as well as Huston Smith and Thomas Campbell, who posited the idea that the largest domain of God is inaccessible to human understanding. Anyway, Terence said this in this same podcast I've been quoting from:

You see, in a way, what science is all about is, it will tell you what is possible. If you want to know if something is possible, you ask the expert in that science."

In other words, the limitations. To orient yourself intellectually in the third and fourth dimension, you learn the limitations, you ask science.

And finally, on the topic of discovering why things happen, McKenna again:

"But what science can't tell you, and what is what you usually really want to know, is, out of the class of the possible, what things will actually occur? And we have no theory for this, strangely enough...A fundamentalist Christian would say 'God's will. Out of the class of the possible, what comes to be is God's will.' Well, that would be one theory of what it is that winnows the actual from the possible. A scientist would say 'preexisting conditions.' In other words, somehow the circumstances into which any phenomenon is born skew it towards its ultimate developmental end-state. This is almost like the law of karma: by the circumstances in which you find yourself, you're carried forward to some conclusion that was inevitable based on that. Novelty theory is not predestination. It doesn't say that the future has happened. If you believe the future has happened you have all kinds of philosophical problems on your hands because for truth as a concept to have any meaning, you have to have error. If you think what you think because you can't think anything else, then what does the search for truth and meaning look like in a cosmos like that? It's meaningless. So there must be at least that much freedom: freedom to err in the mind."