Reminder: The thread "Second Enlightenment" (SE) is destined to discuss the rationality of SE as well as to inquire into the sources of the irrational manipulation of masses and to look for remediation.

X1. Scientific Revolution X2. Ontology X3. Ideology X4. Social awareness X5. Establishment

with X=F/S respectively for the first/second enlightenment. We start by the first enlightenment as guidance to the formulation of the second and warning of pitfalls.
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The present section deals with the steps S3. Ideology of the second enlightenment.

PREFACE

We shall call "Specific Ideology" the ideology stemming from the concurrent ontology and from the state of science. It emerges from an obsolete established context and usually had to assert itself through revolution.

Taking the first enlightenment as example, we see that its ideology had to fight against the established theological context, which obstinately and fanatically refused to abdicate. The established theological Middle Age used all available social and political means to oppose the new scientific ideology. No prior period saw as many stakes, no one had more appearances of Middle Age than Renaissance. The obsolete establishment comes to its apogee when it is still socially, but no more intellectually ruling. All established institutions are still founded upon obsolete principles, the new ideology manifests itself via a few individuals such as Copernicus, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci, who are persecuted and sometimes murdered as Giordano Bruno; fanaticism and intolerance propagate themselves through the masses. The old establishment seemed to triumph just before abdicating.

Inspired by this example, we shall analyze our contemporary situation in two sections:

1."Specific Ideology of the Second Enlightenment"
2."Emergence from the established context".

SPECIFIC IDEOLOGY OF THE SECOND ENLIGHTENMENT (SE)

We shall see "ideology" as "applied ontology", as a conversion of ontological principles to rules governing individual and social behavior.

Consequently, taking as granted the acceptance of the SE ontology as outlined in the previous chapter, we shall start by selecting its principles susceptible of transforming into practical ideological rules.

Ontology of the SE has been derived from the Second Scientific Revolution of the Extended Relativity and one cannot expect even the most erudite non-specialists, let alone the large public, to be acquainted with its underlying scientific details.

Ideology may only be based upon the ultimate, most general denouements of the ontology, in the case in point upon the new reason embodied in the ERN structures and their applications to logic, esthetics and ethics.

As we said in the ontology chapter, applying ER does not mean that each time I exceed the speed limit I have to run the computer ERN procedure. Extrinsic, computerized ERN is extension of Mind's natural, intrinsic ER inference posited by the SE ontology. The computerized ERN is a tool assisting the natural ER in processing most complex problems exceeding its inborn limits, such as ecology, globalization, demography, etc. and running it concerns specialists. General, ideological impact of ER consists in waking up to its natural inference buried for centuries under tons of dogmatic pseudo-logic, in acceptance of the dialectic reason it embodies and in understanding results and implications of extrinsic ERN models.

ERN inference challenges the established reason by contesting its underlying reifications and pseudo-logic, which we shall discuss in the following sections.

REIFICATIONS

In the ontology chapter we have defined three fundamental attitudes:

1. Rational intellection founded in the immanent physical reality.

2. Instinctivity, applying superficial transcendental illusion as pragmatic guide of the day-to-day practice.

3. Reification, a factitious attitude founding intellection in the transcendental illusion.

At the first glance reification may seem tantamount to instinctivity, but second thoughts reveal their essential dissimilarity.

Instinctivity is natural, pragmatic and unreflective, thus void of intellectual deceit. There is certainly no deceit in leaping to the side to avoid a bus, or in hammering a nail in the pragmatically justified belief that it will drive it into the wall. Reification, on the contrary, stems from bad faith, in the best case from auto-deceit, but more often from the intent to deceive, manipulate and rule social groups.

Seemingly real immanent Imagery is constructed by Sensorium as a map of some hypothetical territory - "Transcendency". This raises the temptation to regress it to this territory and to deal there with a "real" and no more seeming reality. Reification consists in yielding to this temptation. Yet, no matter how tenacious and persistent it may be, the transcendental "reality" of regressed mental constructs is nothing, but a "transcendental illusion".

Once in the reified transcendency, sky is the limit of unrestrained speculations, whether realist, idealist or whatever "... ist".

There is no strict rule governing these phantasms, but it often happens that mental secondary constructs - Einstein's "physical bodies" - are reified as "real objects" of transcendency, founding hundreds of shades of "realism".

Not less often the mental "physical bodies" or their symbolic names are reified as transcendental "ideas" founding hundreds of shades of "idealism".

A particular type of reifications concerns abstract models. General Relativity, for instance, conceives its abstract "cosmos" as reduced to 4d curved SPACE phenomenally equivalent to Field, higher density of the latter equivalent to greater curvature of the former. It is customary to speak about the "real" (i. e. reified) "cosmos out there" as based upon such "real" rules governing the "real" relativistic SPACE and Field. Now, these rules and concepts apply exclusively to the mental, immanent model of the GR and it does not make any sense to reify them into the unreachable and incognizable transcendency. It's fatuous to populate the transcendental "reality" with anything and in particular with Riemann tensors.

Abstract concepts of models can be justified exclusively by their capacity to represent and to coordinate (imagery) events. "Primary" representative concepts may be regressed to their original events which embody their meaning. Such regression is not reifying, as it stays within immanency. It is tantamount to understanding the concepts. Primary concepts such as force, acceleration, temperature appear usually in mathematical formulas. Over and above being understood, primary concepts may be reified, but it's not a very harmful reification: we talk about temperature as if it were "real", yet remembering that it is observable, i. e. immanently perceivable.

Besides primary concepts, model formulas contain secondary, auxiliary ones, helping to structure them as rigorous and efficient expressions, such as mass, momentum, energy, entropy or heat. And just as the secondary "physical bodies" are more unshakably reified than their constitutive events, so tend the secondary concepts to be more persistently reified than the primary. Popular prejudice sees the "world out there" populated with masses, energies, entropies, etc. It's much more pernicious than the principally linguistic reification of the primary concepts. Even Hawking falls prey to the illusion of "real" entropy and promotes it to the foundation of time, which is by itself the deepest foundation of the immanent physical reality, needing no reified crutches.

In vulgarizing comments physicists occasionally use such shortcuts as "matter", which don't appear in any formulas and thus have no proper physical meaning. Herds of pseudo-philosophers took this vulgarization for physics, hijacked "matter" and reified it to the cornerstone of innumerable materialisms, physicalisms and realisms. Such reification of complete phantasms is particularly dangerous, as shows the Dialectical Materialism, a perverse intercourse of two apparently contradictory reifications, a phantasmic materialism and the equally phantasmic absolute Hegelian idealism. As Gulag's ideology it exterminated over hundred million people.

We have distinguished three types of reification:

1."Primary" - reification of primary concepts, symbolizing perceptual events such as temperature, force or distance. It's not harmful when used as metalanguage shortcut without interpretative or "existential" pretences.

2."Secondary" - reification of secondary concepts which help to structure the primary within abstract expressions, but don't symbolize any perceptual events - such as mass, momentum, energy. It's silly and misleading in scientific research, but socially not dangerous.

3."Phantasmic" - reification of meaningless abstractions, such as matter, substance, god. After installing them in transcendency it confers on them illusory "meaning" and "existence" by pure speculation. We have seen how socially dangerous it may get in the case of apparently innocent term "matter". Due to this potential social impact, it is the principal type of reification pertinent to ideology.

We live in nearly totally reified world and enumeration of all gods, loves, patriotisms, freedoms, honors and fidelities would fill the Congress Library, headed by "my honor calls itself fidelity" - the device of SS.

When Einstein said "A new manner of thinking is essential if humankind is to survive", he meant braking the chains of reified phantasms.

Let's recall that ERN is an efficient filter of reifications due to its inherent factual falsification.

PSEUDO-LOGIC AND ERN DIALECTIC

Few terms are more confused than "dialectic" and we shall not embark on comparative study of historic partial or total dialectic failures, to mention the tutorial Socratic, the speculative Medieval, the fatuous Hegelian, the deadly Marx-Engelsian and the ill-founded Sartrian.

We shall mean by "dialectic" our Relativistic Dialectic (RD) - the reasoning founded upon "Dialectic Dichotomy" (synonymous with "Polarity", more pertinent to the physical context). RD admits the "dialectic equivalence" of apparently contradictory terms (or "poles"), both indispensable to define a phenomenon in physics, or a situation in humanities. Thus, apparently contradictory poles, the discrete photon and the continuous wave conjointly determine the polarity "light". Thus, apparent contradictions "friend" and "enemy", attributed to the same entity may conjointly determine the dichotomous situation if considered dialectically, or may misrepresent it by use of pseudo-logic. We shall illustrate this case with a disgraceful historic example.

Traditional naive pseudo-logic uses sort of +/-1 arithmetic. Friend of my friend is my friend (1*1=1). Enemy of my enemy is my friend
(-1*-1=1). Thus USSR, the enemy of my Nazi enemy was necessarily my friend.

Enemy of my friend is my enemy (-1*1=-1). Thus Finland, fighting against USSR was necessarily my enemy.

And, logically, France and Britain committed one of the most shameful acts in their history - declared war on a tiny Finland defending her existence against the monstrous Soviet giant.

But ERN dialectic would show Finland as both friend AND enemy with the respective plausibilities about 95% and 5%.

On condition of remembering that the WWII has been fought in defense of freedom, against totalitarian enslavement and setting accordingly the axioms.

Besides proper fuzzy logic procedures, the principal merit of ERN consists in boosting pertinent axiomatics.

EMERGENCE FROM THE ESTABLISHED CONTEXT

Ideology of the first enlightenment emerged in its "original context" which witnessed the first scientific revolution, to wit Europe, headed by Italy, France and Britain. Subsequently it radiated to America, leaving the rest of the world unaffected.

Similarly, we shall examine the emergence of SE ideology in its original context, to wit the "West" and afterwards consider the chances of its radiating to the rest of the world.

THE WESTERN CONTEXT

Philosophy

Sartre said: "Having discovered the world through language, I have over long time taken language for the world". We say with him: He who starts with the reality will find in it the meaning of the language. But he who starts with the language will fail to find both, its meaning and the reality.

One may say without exaggeration that contemporary philosophy starts and finishes with the language, replacing meaning and reality with word games.

True, Sartre and Heidegger conceived diligent systems having the merit of reasonably dealing with awareness and temporality. Unfortunately, they centered their systems on illegitimate inflections of the copula "be", which reduced them to word games played with inane "Beings".

And after them comes the desert of fatuous mediocrity, of Wittgensteins, Quines, Searles, Kripkes, Derridas, Focaults, Chalmerses, etc., etc., squandering taxpayers money on papers not worth the paper they are printed on.

Most, if not all contemporary philosophy is busy playing with reifications. Reifying the mental secondary constructs - Einstein's "physical bodies" - as "real objects" of transcendency calls forth innumerable shades of "realism": direct, indirect, critical, modal, representational, transcendental (sounds like a joke), just to mention a few, culminating in the particularly ridiculous physicalism reifying some phantasms having nothing to do with physics.

Not less often the mental "physical bodies" or their symbolic names are reified as transcendental "ideas" founding hundreds of shades of "idealism": absolute, actual, platonic, objective, subjective, solipsistic, transcendental (a good joke) and quantum-idealism
- the most ridiculous form of physicalism.

A special case encompasses unbridled scientists oblivious of Newton's "hypotheses non fingo" and Dirac's "shut up and compute", who hitch up their trained intellects to the task of producing phantasmagorias which have to be seen to be believed.

It's difficult to range them, as to the unprejudiced eye one idiocy looks much like another one, but the palm of celebrity goes to the Copenhagen Interpretation. "Real objects" created by "collapse" of an abstract formula or by conscious observations, shamanic panspsychism and multiple Universes boggle the normally constructed mind. A new recruit, Madeline Bassett quoted by P. G. Woodehouse puts it in a nutshell: "every time a fairy hiccoughs a wee little star is born".

No less fatuous is the whole field of predicate logic, ignoring the basic mental CD polarity (Continuous/Discrete) with continuum preponderance and endeavoring to found inference in the discreteness on its own.
(see http://findgeorges.com/CORE/C_NOUMENAL_VIEW/b_predicate_logic.html )

It has two outcomes: Foundations of Mathematics and General Reasoning.

Founding Mathematics in discreteness is a total failure.
(see ref. 1: http://findgeorges.com/CORE/C_NOUMENAL_VIEW/c_set_theory.html ) Mathematics, like anything else, may only be properly founded in continuum, i. e. found arithmetic in geometry, as Frege finished by honestly recognizing, although it wrecked the work of his whole life. Uniformly fatuous, the ill-foundations of mathematics reached the apogee in incredibly ridiculous Goedel's Theorem.
(see http://findgeorges.com/ROOT/RELATIVISTIC_DIALECTIC/C_MODELING_AND_LOGIC/CB_ CRISIS_OF_NOUMENALISTIC_LOGIC/cbd_goedel_and_liar_paradox.html ).

As for support of General Reasoning, ref. 1 shows complete inadequacy of the predicate logic. All it achieves is to stand in the way of the ERN dialectic and to leave humanity incapable even to formulate, let alone to solve its critical problems.

Just one example more of a brilliant scientist - Penrose - hitching up his intellect to the task of producing an incredible mass of crap. QUOTE Some strong AI advocates erroneously tried to escape the argument by philosophical argument that we "believe" we are consistent formal algorithm, and we do not prove it. This is elementary logical fallacy. Simply our scientific theory of mind is based on axioms
(postulates), which we accept to be true and we accept that these postulates do correctly describe the reality. Therefore in our scientific knowledge strong AI thesis is either theorem or axiom. What some AI advocates overlook is the fact that axioms are provable! Simply an axiom is provable by any other axiom, and this is basic postulate in mathematical logic. Indeed more generally - every true statement is derivable from any other statement, including the possibility that it is derivable (provable) from arbitrary false statement. This is indeed the first axiom of propositional calculus B=(C=B). UNQUOTE Let's have some fun playing with it a bit. Admitting with Penrose that "Strong AI" is a belief that we are "consistent formal algorithm" and that computers - being one as well - may see red and feel pain, one may argue that Penrose rightly refutes this idiocy. However, the refutation is no less fatuous than the claim. Refuting the claim that angels are female is no less stupid than the claim itself. But that's nothing compared with the rest of the argument based on the astounding fatuity of "provable axioms". The whole edifice of human science reposes in axiomatic theories consisting of theorems deduced from axioms which are taken arbitrarily for granted and are unprovable from the theory. If axioms' provability "is basic postulate in mathematical logic", then "mathematical logic" is clearly crap. If "every true statement is derivable from any other statement", then Axiom of Euclide should be derivable from the last CI axiom, to wit "every time a fairy hiccoughs a wee little star is born", but we humbly admit to be at a loss to see how to go about such derivation. And if it's implied by the "first axiom of propositional calculus B=(C=B)", then all it proves is that the propositional calculus is a pile of crap.

To finish with the philosophical context let's have a look at a survey of philosophers and graduate students about the "burning issues of the day" in

http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl? affil=All+respondents&areas0...

A priori knowledge: yes or no? Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? Aesthetic value: objective or subjective? Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will? God: theism or atheism? Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean? Logic: classical or non-classical? Mental content: internalism or externalism? Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism? Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism? Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes? Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory? Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view? Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? Proper names: Fregean or Millian? Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism? Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? Time: A-theory or B-theory? Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch? Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

With exception of the trolley problem (which is not at all philosophical, but represents indeed a burning call for a philosophical support), all issues are purely speculative, having nothing to do with any reality and obsolete to the point of losing any, even speculative interest. It looks as if the wardens of loony bins called universities were doing their best converting volunteer- to certified patients.

Kant compared the history of human thought to an obscure ocean from which emerge at times enlightened isles of rationality, rare and far between. The astounding self-incurring and sticking power of naive dogma stems according to Kant from laziness and mental cowardice. Laziness to think, rather than to enjoy snug platitudes of naive view. Cowardice to stray off beaten tracks and to follow Horace's "Sapere Aude" (Dare to Reason).

In this light we may conclude that one of two aspects of the established ideological context - the philosophy - is irrational and dogmatic by choice of laziness and of mental cowardice. It dominates the educational bureaucracy, but its mediocrity and discrepancy is tantamount to intellectual vacuum, which may leave a chance for the timidly emerging rationality of the Second Enlightenment.

The second aspect - religion - is irrational and dogmatic not by choice, but by definition. We shall examine its extent and gravity in the following section.

Religion

One may appreciate the extent of religiousness by the fact that only 15% Americans consider themselves as irreligious. And yet, the USA is officially an irreligious country by virtue of the First Amendment separating state from religion:

*** Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
***

Are 15% Americans imposing their irreligiousness upon the vast religious majority? Not at all. The First Amendment represents de facto the religious majority, guarantying it the all American principle of free competition and protecting it from the state monopoly. The "free exercise" clause makes sure that the state will be run by overwhelming religious lobbies.

We shall take the 15/85 ratio as representative for the whole West, due to the leading role of the USA and to the apparently less religious France and Scandinavia being largely compensated by the East and South of Europe, at least in 95% religious.

So 85% of Westerners, religiously and irrationally minded, seem to be hermetically sealed off against the SE rationality. To what extent the irreligious 15% may be open to it?

Conclusion of the Western context

The obsolete, irrational edifice of the established Western ideology has two breaches through which may squeeze itself the ideology of the Second Enlightenment:

1. Mediocre, intellectually hollow philosophy, calling for a new Kant, but bureaucratically entrenched to repulse him.

2. A part of the small irreligious minority of the population, hopefully receptive to rational ideas.

We shall examine the chances of SE rationality to emerge through these breaches in the next chapter dedicated to the social awareness of the SE ideology.

THE REST OF THE WORLD

Even in the problematic case of SE ideology winning the West, the achievement would not be entirely conclusive. The new reason, which Einstein deemed necessary to save the mankind, can do it in our globalization epoch only when it embraces the whole planet. But the rest of the world does not seem receptive to any sort of rationality. It is irrational, dogmatic, enslaved by religious or "materialistic" tyrannies, often tribal, analphabetic, fanatic and ruthless.

We shall come back to this apparently hopeless issue in the next chapter.