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  ......... TO BECOME A PERMANENT THING
A Discussion Concerning Immortality
 
Moore Sansom
Copyright © 2008 The participants below. Permission granted to distribute in any medium, commercial or non-commercial, provided author attribution and copyright notices remain intact.

TO BECOME A PERMANENT THING
May 20, 2008

RICHARD SANSOM:

                                                   

                     To Become a Permanent Thing
                                   by Richard Sansom

 

In youth, the poet writes in the phantasmagoria of life,

since age is over the horizon, beyond the hills of living,

and all there is is the color and fantasy of the moment,

and the passion of its telling, and the love of its truth.

 

But in age, well past those luscious jungles of imagined touch,

there is memory in place of anticipation,

and anxiousness in place of welcomed expectation.

 

Much has already taken place ,

and the road one is on is all too familiar,

as opposed to that path, every turn of which was fresh,

as if there is now a treadmill of sameness

that holds each moment in a repetitive grind

and informs the heart of tomorrow’s gloss

on the ups and the downs that await.

 

There is no new flower, but a thousand old ones;

there is no grand anticipation, but a thousand de-ja vus,

wherein the jumbled pictures of youth

are mingled with the slow interregnums of age

and dreams are embraced as a way to make a voyage

back to the leaping, yelping times of youth.

 

Ah, the poetry of age and aging – it is bound to be,

especially in the hands of the ill equipped,

a sad and dilapidated architecture of words,

that sings the saddest songs so few will hear,

and fewer still would enjoy.

 

I picture old folks gathering around a large fire

in the woods, the flames casting dancing shadows,

and the group huddled in the camaraderie of age

all remembering the cascading tumult of their youth

and making a chorus to that looming past

that rises up in the smoke among the trees

as if it is duty to some oracle of faith

that all that went before is never lost,

but floats up with the smoke, and mingles with time and sky

to become a permanent thing.



RICHARD SANSOM:
At the end of the my poem that you reproduced you added:

                                    *I have lost my sense of permanence.*

I often have that feeling too, but then something, probably my little struggling inner self, takes over and tells me that it is not up to me – that what we are and have been is cosmically permanent. And I do not mean something spiritual or religious, but matter of factly permanent in the sense that in the time-space-mass continuum nothing is ever lost. Of what value that may be is up to the one leaving his trail of life, accomplishments, regrets and satisfactions. Lately I have been dwelling on my early youth in Houston, just before and at the beginning of WWII. I see my young eight year old self in his daily life as if it is a real existing process that does not exist only in my imagination. I know this probably sounds silly or extravagant, wishful and the product of an aging mind, but I do not care. It is a way of seeing one’s life as a whole and very permanent event. Thanks for your comments on the poem….. Regards, Richard


GARY C. MOORE:
Ever since I met my father-in-law, now dead, I have been acutely aware of the utter waste of significant human memories by death. Despite Marcus Aurelius and his we are all just a part of Mother Nature, good or bad which reduces the distinction to nonsense and I think he is right except for his exception *for one self*, so many people - maybe everyone - has experienced at least one significant event in their lives that , for most, dies with them. For me, the only *significant* events of my life are my finding the Basilica San Piero e Grado about which, at least in English, has never been written about - maybe very recently but I originally searched the web thoroughly and found nothing - and the dolphin I found on the Tirranian beach [I think my poems about both are buried somewhere in Jud‘s site.]. My father-in-law was a combat marine at Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa as well as embassy guard in Beijing after the war. All of that is lost now.


Of what Jud has told me, his experiences as a soldier in Egypt still stick in my mind. I remember your remarks about your youth in Japan. If there was a divine providence, and we probably still subconsciously think in this way in hidden forms of abstraction, no one’s significant memories would be erased. Hell, supposedly there is a quantum providence that guides evolution through the huge statistical improbabilities of life forming at all and accounts for many of the sudden jumps in evolution whereas simple Darwinian evolution - supposedly - would still have life getting out of the bacteria stage and seems to be supported by what scientists have found in the rest of the universe, mere PREDICTIONS of bacteria or nothing at all, nothing whatsoever other than life on this ball of mud.

JUD EVANS:
A great discussion which touches upon all the right points that we all share. Some of us *get the message* about impermanence earlier than others. Like you guys I have been aware of the brevity of the brief materialisation of the stuff that we comprise of since early youth. That, BTW, was one of the things that got up my nose about Heidegger. To qualify as being one of his tiresome *Daseins* one had to be aware of *our comportment towards death* as if the knowledge of our own eventual demise was a blessing only bestowed by God or The Philosopher of Nazism on the loony, angst-struck transcendentalist, reifying right.

Antonio is quite right, reification and the reifiers are the enemy. The good doctor exhorts us to fight them - but how? As far as I can see, taking the piss out of them (ridiculing them) is the only way of getting at them they have even infested the White House and 10 Downing Street - they are so completely brainwashed it means (for all ontological purposes) they are as good as brain dead.

Regarding our eventual death and the loss of our unique experiences and our memories of them I dont think it really matters. I will qualify that. Obviously it matters to us as individuals right now, and presumably the nearer we approach the end of our stay here on earth the more it concerns us. (I will not say *death* - or *life* because neither exist - only the living and the live - the dying and the dead exist)

Why say that? Because I think it helps to de-reify the Being Here and not Being Here bit that the church makes such a fuss about. Have you ever thought why the religous agenda-makers and the *trannies on the make* make such a big deal about death and have statues of agonising death hanging all over the place? The ghouls even errect then at roadside shrines and cross-roads in some countries - just to spoil your nice run into the countryside with the kids. It is their way of trying to control you - they constantly remind you of God for their own evil purposes and that is EXACTLY why the reificating runt Heidegger was so obsessed with it - it was a leftover from his training as a Jesuit control-freak.

Enjoy a good dreamless sleep sometimes? That is what "death" is like - it is like *nothing* and as *nothing* does not exist either, that is both what it is like and what it is not like. It is the *lead-up* to not being permanently concious that causes the concern - not the actual event of entering into the *Big Sleep* (ever see the film?)

Our writings, our photographs, the souveniers that the kids keep of us, the things we made, the tunes we wrote, the garden gate we knocked together, the children we made, the kisses we kissed, will all turn to dust. But while we are alive *The Death of the Author* and creator does not take place - it may do as far as some premenstrual post- modernist freaks are concerned - but it does not happen to us.

OK, what is the bottom line? The bottom line is do all the things that you really enjoy whilst you can. This does NOT mean adopt a reckless way of behaving or doing anything that will interfere with a comfortable, secure and as far as possible pain-free, healthy way of life. We must cut through the filagree of delicate and intricate reificationary binding that has been fouling up our lives.

Omar Khayaam was on the right track but fouled up by emphasing the grape too much. Why do I say that? Well the conversation that we are having now is one that I had many years ago with my best buddy. WE agreed that we would each be a *witness* to each others lives, in order that at least, for a time, a little of our experiences, thoughts etc would be stored, recorded in memory etc - not only with regard to the possible death of oner of us - but so, when meeting and being together, we could jolt each others memories and tell each other things about ourselves that we had forgotten.

Well the grape got him - it has practically erased all his memories and wiped his neurological retrieval-system as clean as a wankers whistle.

I urge you to read Khayyam as a philosopher (as well as a poet) of great insight and profundity.

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/rubaiyat.htm

Thank you both for coming up with all these wonderful perceptivities which are a joy to read. It is so comforting and in a way reassuring to be priviledged with such remarkable peers. Good friends, good books, good wine - what more can a man want - lifetime data-loss has nothing to offer compared to this?

GARY C. MOORE:
Now, I know everyone, including me, is very suspicious at the least of quantum theory on this list. However, there have been many real physical experiments [there are also a number of common everyday machines purportedly using quantum theory to operate like scanners in stores] with it that have had very strange results like the sloted card board with, first, light shown through, and then the even more disturbing results from the photon gun shooting single photons through the slot which never seem at all to go in a straight line, a single path from an unmoving source, which purportedly supports the concept of infinite alternate universes. This is what Michael Creighton’s novel TIMELINE is about, and he explains his version of it very well, but I have now read about it in several other places. Interpretations of the data vary slightly but seem to support a similar conclusion. So when you say *that what we are and have been is cosmically permanent. And I do not mean something spiritual or religious, but matter of factly permanent in the sense that in the time-space-mass continuum nothing is ever lost* may have some basis in demonstrable fact, however useful or useless it may be.
   

CHRIS LOFTING:
There are issues here re interpretations. QM is a specialist language derived from our basic language creation dynamic that encodes properties of our methodologies into our maps and so if you don't know this is going on then your interpretations of events can be 'fanciful'.

All of the QM experiments covering single and double slits etc (and so covering the EPR 'paradox') are in fact examples of what you get when you self-reference a dichotomy in the presence of indeterminacy; and this at ANY scale. IOW wave/particle duality is a product of methodology - we can in fact create the patterns using pen and paper, see part III of "Categories of Mediation" - the section titled:

"Brain oscillations, indeterminacy, and emergence of the 'particle/wave' duality"

http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/categories.pdf

IOW our experiment DESIGN is determined by our brain structure and methodology in interpreting reality. Part of this methodology is oscillations and their processing to derive meaning. In the EPR experiments the oscillations are manifest in the dichotomies used - e. g. left-slit/right-slit etc. This level presents the ANTI-symmetric, and the recording medium the symmetric where, over time, a pattern emerges indicating all of the 'dots' are linked together. This is a wave interference pattern that comes out of the design itself. This is also present at the classical level of our brains where rote learning of distinctions will, over time, create the formation of a rich associative memory (intuition feeds off this).

Simply put, the QM guys have no idea what they are dealing with in that they refuse to consider their brain make-up and how IT determines all meaning. LOCAL context (consciousness) will then relabel these meanings to fit local conditions and differentiate one locale from all of the others (and so create specialist metaphors that are taken literally due to ignorance of brain function.)


GARY C. MOORE:
I am rather retarded in several different ways but feel your point is important to understand. No, to tell the truth, I do not know what is going on with Quantum Mechanics, but it seems an issue I recurrently have to confront. Initially I took Heisenburg’s indeterminacy principle to mean basically you cannot do two substantially different things at once, a common sense approach. But I have seen the indeterminacy principle conflated to *prove* indeterminacy is a real factor in material reality.

    In a common sense, it is as *the word is not the thing* or *the map is not the territory*, that is, a word merely points out some experiences of the *object*, even its identity as an *object* instead of *objects* since any object can be literally or figuratively divided into parts down to . . . but in no way exhausts all the information any object can give. It is merely one pointer among many possible pointers. What I recently wrote about Umberto Eco, C. S. Pierce, Heidegger, and Heidegger’s dismissal of *resistance* as empirically important [he loathes Empiricists in general], or so it seems to me, to indicate irrefutably the reality of an *external* world completely separate from any and all words because if something unknown hits you in the head that object - or objects - can only be *known* as *something that hit you in the head*, that it counts as an irrefutable material referent for no other reason than its resistance to your head and your  head’s resistance to it, and that as *resistance* gives whatever real reference the word has to reality to the word so that in ALL cases the word is always secondary and referential even if you do not know anything more about what hit your head. So essentially all words, signs are pointers even if you do not know what they are pointing at. That is all they are, though they can be *pointers* in extremely complex ways.

   
You have probably explained this elsewhere, but what exactly is *our basic language creation dynamic*? I have discussed elsewhere Aristotle accepting that animals have *kinein* or judgment or reasoning of sorts, that it is actually encoded in the physical field of sight, that is, left, right, up, down, far, near, time as speed through space, like the Left/Right dichotomy either you mention here or in the segment of THE CATEGORIES OF MEDIATION both of which are way over my head but I tried to understand. I would like to try to tie this in, though, with Paleolithic cave paintings, especially those of France and Spain, where:

A] the cave paintings are NOT done to be viewed [if at all, certainly not like a museum] since they are placed in highly difficult if not dangerous viewing points,

B] the ONLY common denominator amongst all cave paintings throughout the world is *therianthropy*, the changing of animal species into one another,

C] the use of dots and  other figures NOT in a decorative way [as is quite obvious once one is aware of the problem - these are nothing like decorations on pots whatsoever though they are like the comments in Greek some Greek vase painters made and Etruscan vase painters imitated meaninglessly without understanding Greek], and

D] as the archeologists Jean Clottes and Ann Sieveking say, describes *a language for which we have no vocabulary* for a cave painting culture which existed using these common elements from 35,000 to 15,000 BCE - 20,000 years. Sometimes these paintings with nearby [associated?] dots look exactly like pictures with captions. Anyway, I have to see my grand-daughter now and would appreciate any help in these matters.

    There is also the structure of the gene which, again I have read in several places, that seems to record, if maybe not specific events, at least stages of not just human but all animal evolution since the gene itself is around 98% the same in all life, including bacteria. And worse, only six trigger peptides - there is a specific name for them I cannot think of now - govern what the gene will reproduce, that is, whether you become a man or a lobster. And these trigger genes are exactly the same and act as genetic keys or switches in all life. And then there is the mystery of mitochondrial DNA, an outside introduction of DNA, present in all cells from the earliest form of life. And there are numerous peptides that seem to have no present function, seem totally unconnected to anything, that sit side by side with species forming peptides. So Lamarckian evolution is STILL not dead and completely out of the running and maybe you are permantly imprinted somewhere on the universe. I, for one though, simply do not feel so.


CHRIS LOFTING:
It is a factor in the realm of the asymmetric. Our brains derive asymmetry from mediation dynamics across part/whole, anti-symmetric/symmetric, interactions. This realm of the asymmetric is a realm of perpetual transcendence through the use of language - the issue of course is that it is never ending and so incompleteness is a property of language creation. The confusion overall is of mapping system vs territory. OUR meaning territory is grounded in symmetry and its distortion through ratio analysis
(parts, LOCAL differences). Consciousness has emerged from the 'middle' of the part/whole (1/X, X/1) dichotomy and uses self-referencing (Recursion) to derive categories that, if done deep enough, generate enough categories to be used as analogies in fleshing out finer details of each category - and so we can transcend meanings through 'adding a dimension' to increase our categories and so give us finer distinctions to play with. This PROCESS allows for a finite dynamic to generate a infinite number of labels to map a finite set to unlimited local contexts.

Since consciousness comes out of the asymmetric so its reflections on reality, if done through ignorance of its own dynamics, can confuse properties and methods of the mapping system with what is being mapped.

For example, quantum mechanics is a metaphor applied at a specialist level to describe that level using specialist labels that represent the ONE set of possible categories as derived from a self-referencing neurology. As such, as neuron-dependent beings, we all have a sense of 'wholeness' but what it is applied to is determined by local contexts.

This derivation of basic categories through self-referencing comes out of what is call the 'chaos game' where any containment of noise, at any scale, will elicit spontaneous order through self-referencing.

This process stems from symmetry where we 'cut' the 'universe of discourse' in that any such universe is interpreted as a thing, as a closed system and with that come properties of closed systems - conservations laws, metaphor creation (all is basically same and metaphors allow for differentiating 'same' in different contexts to give local differences)

Since we work off instincts/habits as primates so our basic nature is grounded in symmetry. This is an issue in that the universe is obviously NOT symmetric, only aggregations bring out symmetry such that the local realm is anti-symmetric moving into asymmetric (expressed in the uniqueness of consciousness).

Uncertainty is a property of the asymmetric. Language comes out of the asymmetric. Confusing the expressions with what is expressed is confusing map with territory. That said, at the base level of our being our neurology is 1:1 with reality and as such is the perfect map! BUT it lacks precision in the context of consciousness, of mediation dynamics such that we exaggerate, amplify, to get precision that is communicatable and so overlay the basics with countless labels.

GARY C. MOORE:
You have probably explained this elsewhere, but what exactly is *our basic language creation dynamic*?

CHRIS LOFTING:
... the asymmetry of brain oscillations in attempting to derive meaning - we have a precision scale that takes us from the oracular to the explanatory to understanding. Science will focus on the explanatory and as such is one step away from generating understanding. To get understanding requires knowledge of the source of meaning in the form of communications in the form of languages.

The development of consciousness stems from mediation dynamics and in ancient times that would cover analogies to local contexts - i. e. what the animal forms in their LOCAL context manifest overall in the form of feelings
(power (anger, sex), acceptance/rejection etc)

Reason is not limited to humans, in the brain of all neuron-dependent life forms there is development of reason as we move 'up' the hierarchy and anthropomorphism is common, even today ;-)

Awareness is not limited to humans, what IS is awareness of being aware
(consciousness) and that varies by degree from apes to us. Full blown consciousness requires high levels of differentiating and so precision. These dynamics equate with frontal cortex and pre-frontal cortex where such are very well developed in humans and are trainable to a level of eliciting a sense of SELF after about 24 months of life. From there on it is all training, finer differentiating etc that lets us surpass our chimp cousins
(who are adults after age 4).

An essential feature in art is cultural symmetry - thus the art covers a topological dynamic where distortions are possible but no symmetry-breaking. It is from symmetry we gain our sense of aesthetics and so our sense of perfection etc. If the cultural symmetry includes tight integration with local context and so life forms, then those life forms can symbolise properties of symmetry (e. g. 'all is connected' etc and so allowing 'sharing' of space between humans and animals, especially in ancient times where the ties were strong).

Innovation OTOH 'breaks' symmetry or at least offers a distortion so extreme that it can elicit change overnight - a single word can do that as well.

GARY C. MOORE
Dear Chris, I greatly appreciated you comment in your letter last letter

QUOTE
*Reason is not limited to humans, in the brain of all neuron-dependent life forms there is development of reason as we move 'up' the hierarchy and anthropomorphism is common, even today ;-)

    Awareness is not limited to humans, what IS is awareness of being aware
(consciousness) and that varies by degree from apes to us. Full blown consciousness requires high levels of differentiating and so precision. These dynamics equate with frontal cortex and pre-frontal cortex where such are very well developed in humans and are trainable to a level of eliciting a sense of SELF after about 24 months of life. From there on it is all training, finer differentiating etc that lets us surpass our chimp cousins(who are adults after age 4).

EXCEPT could the real fundamental difference be the teaching of language and the ability to use it - at this point seemingly a unique human ability beyond five or six hundred words in an apes sign language vocabulary - that is mostly potentiated by greater memory power either built physically into the brain [but why? how?] or potentiated by the memorization structure [like Mateo Ricci's Memory Palace] inherent in linguistic structure itself as taught?

GARY C. MOORE:
Dear all including Antonio.

More - but I am running out of brain cells.


JUD EVANS:(earlier)
    This can be evidenced by the very fact that God said to Moses, I AM who I AM and thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I AM has sent me to you. He did not say (triadically) Tell them WE ARE sent you. Only changing objects that are constantly becoming slightly different versions of themselves with each passing instant could ever exist.


GARY C. MOORE:
This is interesting. Have you studied the original Hebrew of this passage in EXODUS? In GENESIS, amongst several minor traditions, scholars have delineated two major traditions, the Elohist and the Jawist. The Jawist text reflects the writing and expressions of the book of EXODUS. But the Elohist tradition refers to God as *El [singular] Elohim [plural]* or *That Particular Lords or Gods*, an uncouth and awkward expression if there ever was one which shows the value of extremely conservative textual traditions that brings us such puzzling expressions.

JUD EVANS
I suppose that when such a monotheistic *turn* takes place in any society, for example when Saxon Britain was Christianised, or when Cyril and Methodious Christianised the Slavs and suddenly there was only one God in place of many, there is bound to be a bit of confusion at first? On a longish car trip to a Christain conference in Durham recently (North west to North East) my companion ( a bible scholar) said that some bible buffs can detect exactly where Genesis-writer (A) begins and Genesis-writer (B) stops. Of course, at the time of the Moses-God confrontation Jesus was not around - not even a gleam in his Fathers all-seeing eye, so the *son* element in the terrible trio was not available for spiritualist accountancy or metaphysical muster purposes.

GARY C. MOORE(earlier)
Therefore the conceptualisation of Being is an illegitimate heteron
***

GARY C. MOORE:
How about binomial computer language? The old cards with their punched square holes to let through light and register positive response versus unpunched surface registering nothing -001111000110? ***Nothing ***

JUD EVANS:
The zero or noll feature developed by the Indians was a comparitive late-commer as a useful fiction. As an eliminativist all of number is a conveniently human-created fiction including the Johnny-come-lately zero. Only *that which is numbered* exists as with *time* only *that which is timed* exists. The fact that mathematicians and science extrapolated *number* or *time* away from its numbered or timed material objects (abstracts *number* and *time* and calculates such abstractions with the brain or in a programmed computer constructed to operate like the brain does not mean that the numbered or calculated abstractions then exist - it simply means that mentating, numbering and timing humans and their computers exist.

GARY C. MOORE:This accords with what Eco and Pierce say on pp. 33-34 of KANT AND THE PLATYPUS. Everything and anything can only be known at all through strings of positively indicative statements so that to say *There is nothing* indicates a positively indicative statement in whose context it is an answer, not the indicative of a thing called
*nothing*. This was mentioned in my letter *Unwelcome*.

JUD EVANS:
Eco is right, although he does not put it the way an eliminativist would, which in my view based more upon principles of parsimony and simplicity. Following Plato and his critique of Parmenides (who claimed that anything that did not exist could not even be referred to or mentiuoned) the Heideggerians claim that as a heteron *nothing* exists as the opposite of *being*.

    The Indo-European Mother Language (the language of Ur) 16S anskrit has an unbroken historical record of about 3000 years. So, beginning with any of the modern Indo- Aryan languages (like Urdu and Hindi), one should in principle be able to reconstruct where and how complex predicates originated.

Diachronic linguist Miriam Butt of UMIST in her The Light Verb Jungle, reminds us:

Vedic is generally dated until about 600 BCE. Epic and Classical Sanskrit fall into the time from 600 BCE to 200 CE. Together with Vedic, these are referred to as Old Indo- Aryan. It is generally agreed… that the ancestral construction of the modern V-V complex predicate is the Sanskrit gerund or absolutive in -tv¯a(ya), or -ya/y¯a.[8] (Butt. 2003.
7.1) *



GARY C. MOORE:
Now even conservative scholars date the RIG VEDA back to 1500 BCE.

JUD EVANS:
You are perfectly correct but Butt was refferring to vedic being dated UNTIL not FROM about 600 BC from which Epic and Classical Sanskrit are then dated to fall into the time from 600 BCE to 200 CEas the quote makes plain

GARY C. MOORE:
Many people date it back much further because of the descriptions of the stars in the heavens when they rose in the sky along with the conjunctions with the planets. Also, the so-called Aryan invasion of India has been shown to be a myth,..

JUD EVANS:
As Dravidian historians of south India and Sri Lanka voriciously claim.

GARY C. MOORE:...
a deliberately induced myth by English/European scholars to justify Aryan racial superiority [this comment is evoked by your *the language of Ur* which, until I looked up note 16, I thought referred to the *Ur of the Chaldees* of Sumer and the Bible]. As far as I know the provenance of Sumerian has not been found and is only translatable to the extent a Semitic language like Akkadian has delivered correspondences.

JUD EVANS:
Edo Nylands *Origin of Sumerian* is worth a look on my website at: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ling_sumerian.htm

GARY C. MOORE:
The hieroglyphs of Mohenjodaro and Harrapa and elsewhere of the Indus valley culture still resist translation since, unless cognate texts giving correspondences are found in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley [which is possible because there is archeological evidence of commerce between the Indus culture and Sumer both ways], there is no Rosetta Stone for the Indus culture. That is, unless . . . Now the original English archeologist who excavated Mohenjodaro SPECULATED massive massacres of the original inhabitants in the Indus valley culture because no evidence of a non-Aryan language in that culture survives in any form or fashion.

The whole Aryan invasion theory was postulated back in 1788 when the relation of Sanskrit etcetera was discovered and, of course, could not have been the language originated by those dirty brown savages that actually live there. No such massacres occurred though. There is no evidence for an Indo-European invasion until the Portuguese under Admiral Albuquerque, the Dutch, the Danes, the French, and the British East India Company showed up. Admiral Albuquerque, with a human hunting license like the English of South Africa [with enthusiastic Afrikaner support] from the Mughal Emperor Arangjeb [spelling], massacred Hindus gleefully as the most atrocious of heretics in both Christian and Muslim eyes [even the Jews of South India were persecuted which Mateo Ricci protested against]. The British East India Company enjoyed blowing Indians out of their cannons in 1857. But nothing of the sort happened around 1500 BCE or anywhere thereabouts in the Indus valley. So common sense says Sanskrit and related languages were already spoken in India when Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa were mighty commercial centers. Or they were Dravidian related which is a non Indo-European language. But still no vast massacres to prove Ayran racial prowess, and there is a Dravidian language island in the middle of Baluchistan [in separatist revolt against Pakistan right now] whereas most of the 200,000,000 speakers live in southern India. I thought it was related to Tamil, an Indo-European language, but it seems it is not. Dravidian has no better claim than Sanskrit to be the language of the Indus valley culture. But it sure the hell is not anything else unless someone has some surprising news. I do not know if any attempt to relate it to Sumerian could even be attempted.

JUD EVANS:
I also have a complete deconstruction or rubbishing of Sanskrit by an Indian scholar *Dead Sanskrit was Always Dead - The Anti-Sanskrit Scripture* by Shyam Raohere: here: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/sanskrit_exposure.htm

GARY C. MOORE:
Anyway, nothing of Sanskrit literature was ever written down until a thousand years ago because of the on slot of the Muslim holocaust that exterminated the Jain scriptures altogether. Everything including Panini was memorized. Quite a vast undertaking that says a great deal about the potential of human memory rarely used nowadays. Something worth investigating all on its own.

JUD EVANS:
I remain in awe of the people who memorised such texts. Every Moslem must commit at least 12 vs. or lines of the Qur'an to memory and even today there are people who have managed to commit to memory the whole of the Koran.

Thanks for the stimulating observations and comments Gary.

Nothingness (an absence of objects) could not exist - because if nothing existed (or did not exist) then nothing would be in a state of non-existence, and to be in any state at all - of whatever nature - is to exist in that state, and to exist in a state is NOT not to exist. 12 or wrongful ideational mirror image of the Greek instantiation to mae on (that which is not.) Interestingly in the case of both Being and Nothing the concepts are particular modes of the human neurological system when it selects the words as nominals bereft of any denotatum in an attempt to denote the presence or absence of some unspecified entity or entities. The cognitive intellections Being andNothing are ALWAYS used as non-existent others (heterons) for purposes of differentiating occupied rather than unoccupied space.

CHRIS LOFTING: (addressing The General Theory of Reification)

"Nature acts this way.." ! Natural selection favours aggregation of bits into instincts/habits. This will FORCE the NATURAL emergence of symmetry. With THAT has come the anti-symmetric in the form of parts analysis. A MINDLESS artefact of making distinctions is in border creation and so the letting-loose of what lives on borders - complexity/chaos dynamics (and so self-referencing and the containment of noise). This will NATURALLY elicit fragmentation of the whole and so the emergence of discretisation, objectification, and associated dynamics. With that comes the NATURAL oscillations across the part/whole dichotomy and from THAT, given enough neural complexity, comes consciousness as an agent of randomness/mediation. There is no INTENT necessary, what had come has come out of basic, mindless, evolution processes where natural selection gives way to conscious selection
(genetic engineering etc) but at the LOCAL context.

Hancock makes just this point for his own thesus on therianthropy. The World As I Found It Perfect example of real ontology, solipsism that negates its own category because there is nothing to really compare solipsism to.
*** What you say about God fits in perfectly, or seems to, with what Umberto Eco says clearly and Heidegger very obscurely, that *God* as a concept is subordinate to language as primary. *In the beginning was the word*, not God, unless you literally equate God with language.

The link here is to asymmetric mediation skills of the neurology out of which comes our language. The current version of Categories of Mediation bring out 'sameness' in mathematics, emotions, and linguistics in the ground of the generation of Mathematics as a language. The relevant section is pasted below:

"Ash and Gross define Mathematics as: "The logical study of patterns: Patterns of numbers . Patterns of permutations . Patterns of points . Patterns of systems of solutions to .. equations. We use the term "pattern" in its broadest sense, to mean any arrangement of things that follow some orderly rule, allowing for prediction and contemplation" (p233 Ash & Gross 2006)

With the focus of this current text we take a more generic analysis where the moment we focus on 'bit' forms of representation so emerges considerations about logic and mathematics and so "patterns". Of special interest here is the ease in which we can derive the properties of Mathematics from the identified basic categories of mediation and so from pattern matching in the form of analogy-making. This demonstrates the ease in which a language is formable from basic self-referencing.

The basic types of numbers cover: Whole Numbers Irrational Numbers Rational Numbers Imaginary Numbers

Mapped to our set of basic categories of meaning we have:

Wholeness - focus on whole numbers (where this category still reflects differentiate/integrate in the form of prime vs composite numbers)

Partness - focus on rational numbers (harmonics)

Static relatedness - focus on irrational numbers (sharing of space with another/others, invariance)

Dynamic relatedness - focus on imaginary numbers (sharing of time with another/others - morphic/cyclic change)

Real numbers are made up of whole numbers, rational numbers, and irrational numbers. Complex numbers are made up of Reals and Imaginary.

Neurologically our mapping of intervals is highly manifest in the processing of sound. Our ears respond to sound logarithmically (frequency ratios, not differences, determine musical intervals and mathematical form is in idealised numbers that are in fact simplified ratios, 2/1 become 2, 56/1 becomes 56 etc and so ratio is objectified into a constant) When this response format is generalised, partness brings out this focus on intervals as measured as ratios where such form the foundations of the harmonic series and so of rational numbers but also of discreteness in general (working backwards we move from rationals to wholes and so reflect the transformation of continuous to discrete).

Of note here is this basic dimension of meaning derived from self-referencing is logarithmic in form, covering a spectrum where each category covers an arithmetic series as it does a geometric series (and so a focus on octaves overall - the arithmetic series is the harmonic series, the geometric series is the octave series)

The focus on PARTNESS is a focus of the realm of the anti-symmetric that covers differences WITHIN sameness where that includes 'null-sameness', aka the unique. With the language of the neuron being in frequencies, wavelengths, and amplitudes we can see the harmonics processing of partness where harmonics are 'partial' waves. Overall we see here the links of music with emotions and mathematics in that the latter two specialist realms show their roots in self-referencing and part/whole dynamics.

An additional factor here, in the context of meaning derivation, is the formant, associated with frequency it maps to vowel production and so an element of precision in communication (the vowel determines, for example, hot from hat) - generalised to information processing it covers precision in meaning extraction in general and equates to the emotional content of a word
- see part IV where is presented the linking of emotions to the same methodology of self-referencing as we have here with Mathematics.

The development of cardinality reflects a grounding in the symmetric and with that grounding comes symmetric 'laws' (associative, commutative, distributative). With the development of ordinality (AFTER cardinality and in tune with the development in our brains of hippocampus activities focused upon sequencing) comes a focus on vectors - we add to scalars a sense of 'direction'. There is still symmetry in the sequence in the form of repetition and cycles but the higher the required precision the more asymmetric we get.

Thus the development of finer and finer levels of precision shift a focus from the symmetric/anti-symmetric to the asymmetric. We see this in the classification of numbers from real into complex, complex into quarternions, quarternions into octonions. There is also the general movement in Mathematics from the geometric forms of representation (dimensional) to algebraic forms of representation (dimensionless).

Thus a focus on mediation elicits a mediation tool-kit of specialist languages to be used in dealing with reality. The origin is in the simple difference of '1' as compared to the introduction of sameness through '2' onwards. With this comes the qualitative difference seeding number in the form of the positive/negative dichotomy.

The conjugate requirement of complex numbers mean they reduce to sets of real 'pairs' thus:

Real - (a, 1) Complex - (a, b) Quaternion - ((a, b),(a, b)) Octonion - (((a, b),(a, b)),((a, b),(a, b)))

This reduction to pairs brings out a dynamic grounded in self-referencing a dichotomy where such will bring out pairings.

On the other hand, we find the same generic qualities come out when we focus on the fight/flight dichotomy and its self-referencing to bring out the categories of basic, primary, emotions; as such we find equivalence between mathematics representations and emotional representations where both perspectives are derived from the asymmetric but linked to symmetry and as such to a realm that is dominated by issues with the aesthetic and 'perfection'.

We note that current Mathematics is grounded in Set Theory and so is grounded in group concepts and the realm of the symmetric (where such a realm is riddled with patterns!). On the other hand, the complement to set theory is the area of the mereological and so includes coverage of the unique through a focus on parts and the individual (e,. g. Simons, 1987) - what we will find overall is that the origins of Mathematics are in the realm of mediation and so the autological/paradoxical realm of the asymmetric where we develop the toolkits for representing reality through our mediations with reality. There is a price for doing this - incompleteness, as discovered by Godel but at a time ignorant of the findings of neurology that map mathematics to our mediation realm (the asymmetric) and so the realm of representations/mediations rather than what is mediated/represented."

There maybe interesting but rather useless speculation about carrying this idea out, but once again, as with every dedicated theology, it ultimately trivializes the concept *God* to being a mere metaphor acting just like the way you say *Being* acts, it is not existing but points to a material structure that does exist.

Emotionally there is a tie to symmetry. Matte-Blanco's work on symmetric thinking brings this out

Matte-Blanco, I., (1975,1991)"The unconscious as infinite sets"

... and his work is utilised in such as:

Bomford, R., (1999) "The Symmetry of God" FAB

Neurologically there is a tie to a sense of 'bliss' being elicited by the brain areas covering symmetry (e. g. right hemisphere bias that can also elicit depression). Of note is that symmetry goes nowhere - there is aesthetic determinations but static and this equates with idealised beauty etc being 'eternal'. This also equates with symmetric perspectives being closed systems, self-referencing, all-encompassing, all-conserving and so on.

RICHARD SANSOM:

It has been shown, from early histories, that our species invents and believes in some kind of life after death. As thinking organism, it seems only natural to wish ourselves into a painless and benign future, especially for most of us since life often is hard, unrewarding, dangerous and painful. I suppose that my own take on the matter is simply more of the same, but grounded in something I consider at least vaguely plausible – depending on ones belief in Time, Space, Matter and Motion – with a tincture of Einstein thrown in for scientific foundation. There is no succor in my theory since I cannot conceive of any way to access that time-space-mass continuum, and further, there is no real blessing to its existence. It is simply an occasionally useful poetic fantasy.