DREAMING AS META THINKING, Creating, Jumbling And, Or, Inverting Causation

FROM JUMBLING DREAM LIKE FANTASIES, HARD CORE REALITY LOGIC ARISES

Before we have really new logic, we often have a dream.

Dreaming can be so detailed it becomes a world with its smells, sounds, locales, individuals, situations etc. Typically they are a patchwork of what was encountered prior. For example I just had a dream where the main activities happened in a place which had the characteristics of two lodged in the Sierra Nevada I was at in the last two decades. They are located 200 kilometers and 4 hour of driving away from each other; one is characterized by many separated buildings and that feature was kept; the other is more panoramic, with fewer trees is that feature was kept. The ensemble was located by the dream machine in a climbing area I used to climb a lot at, more than two decades ago. That area is completely protected, in a park, and enjoys a magnificent panorama above a large lake, far below, and the panorama, north of lake Tahoe, extends 50 kilometers. So three distinct geographical elements, hundreds of miles and experienced decades apart, were mixed and matched in an harmonious whole. And then the intrigue enfolded, involving some significant others, in enlightening new circunstances… And out of this some strong latent emotion emerged… A new element of subconscious, not that much sub, actually… because it’s not exactly the first time it shows up: dreams can reappear…. 

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Elements of (what seems to be) reality is all we have [1;consider Plato]. What the brain can do is to combine them, and order them, according to causality. But causality is often deduced from correlation, and the causation can well go the other way. An obvious example is that the sun turns around the sky, at first sight, when in reality it’s actually the sky which turns around. 

At some point, an ancient astronomer had a dream that the sun was far away, and it was the Earth which was moving below his/her feet. To do this, the Earth, which looked enormous, had to be made smaller than the sun, which looked small. 

Reality builds neural networks in our minds. Consciousness manages them according to the practice of daily necessity. Thus our perception of daily reality is captured by pragmatism. But this daily practice lives in a much bigger context, namely what is really going on.

A standard flaw is to inverse cause and effect. This inversion is often used in war: X starts by attacking Y, typically because X is stronger than Y. Then Y, being weaker, defends itself more ferociously, in the hope of extracting a higher price in horror to X. Then X accuses Y of being hateful savages… justifying the war that they launched, retrospectively.  

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For example, English speaking European colonists in America held for centuries that  Native Americans were savages who killed European colonizers cruelly, so hating those “Indians” was the epitome of morality…. Not false, right, but wrong in a larger context. 

Indeed, in reality, Europeans came to America, and killed Americans to start with. Or more exactly… we know this from the French Jacque Cartier, circa 1530s… Europeans came to America and were told very reasonably by the inhabitants of Canada that there was no room for them the continent was full. It took generations for the French to show to the Americans that more intensive agriculture freed room for everybody. When the French, led by Champlain, around 1600s made a detailed exploration of what would come to be called “New England”, they arrived to the same conclusion: not enough room for French colonization, the land was fully occupied by Americans.

However, pandemics struck the Americans within a few years. Then the calculated brutality, racism and militarization of the Venture Capitalism of the “West Country Men” establishing Virginia, which aimed at exterminating the Americans, caused a war, a war of extermination… naturally enough, the resulting savagery, although real, was attributed to the Americans when in truth it originated with English capitalist conquest…. 

That causal inversion made it possible for the colonists to hate until they exterminated the Americans… as was intended all along by the English plutocrats for the very practical reason of stealing America from its inhabitants. This cruel inversion made morally, thus physically possible the world’s greatest empire… as the US is the progeny of Europe’s two faced medieval super power, Franco-Britannia; now Euro-American power is overwhelming as the deranged, weak minded, unimaginative Czar in the Kremlin must find out…

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In a variant of this, the innuendo becomes the reality by association. Putin and his collaborators do not behave any differently in Ukraine, accusing the Ukrainians to be “Nazis” or “nationalists”, and genociders… When actually the context, and the causation were originally created by the Kremlin…. which conveninetly forgets that France  was defeated in May-June 1940, thanks to Russian oil: without it, Nazi tanks and planes would not have moved (Russian help to the Nazis extended to all sorts of metal ores, cotton, rubber and even food which Nazi Germany could not have done without). 

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Reality, as it is perceived, is made of personal, and cultural facts, which are actually generalized neuro-hormonal networks, united by axonal chains of human theorization, most of them culturally grounded… The mind invents meta-causal chains between elements of perceived reality and causal chains viewed as elements of reality.

Causal chains, meta or not, right or wrong, make remembrance easier, so they are ubiquitous. They tend to go according to the principle of economy of energy: the simpler the inference, the more seductive it is. This is why math and science are hard, because they are not, at first, the simplest (although they are the simplest in the long term, as they deduce enormous multitudes, from few axioms). 

Those causal chains may well be wrong, and evolution became aware of that fact while the human mind became ever more an evolutionary advantage. To palliate for lack of imagination or inverted causation, and other fantasies, the dreaming state jumbles everything in all sorts of ways, leaving faint implications chains behind. So doing, fantastic dreams may stumble accidentally on a closer picture of reality which leaves a trace as potential axonal pathways, and even potential associations of emotions…. This is what is called the subconscious…

It maybe very far removed from first impressions: at first sight, the sun is small, and turns around. Culture says otherwise and is correct. The full logic of astronomy is simpler, but could only arise from the (then) fantastic dreams of ancient astronomers.

A higher sense of reality is a higher sense of morality, because it fosters in a civilization a higher probability of survival. Thus a diversity of strong experiences has its own moral advantage. These experiences do not have to be pleasant while experienced, far from it. Avalanches’ roaring, mountain lions’ and rattlesnakes’ music is most engaging. But the most worthy of a deserving audience is stinging wasps’ buzz… https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/…/01/sting-operations/ All these are guaranteed to achieve strong elements of reality.

A mystery in this is where the meta-consciousness driving dreams is located. Well, maybe it’s not located anywhere. As parts of the brain shut down and others get excited during dreaming, a great show starts, with elements of traditional consciousness trying to establish causal chains. Those elements and causality chains most worthy of interest (from greed, fear, pleasure, whatever…) are those most memorable, and most instructive…

Patrice Ayme    

  Pata, but all too real logic exhibited:

Elements of reality are neuro-hormonal networks. Causality chains between them are also (meta) neuro-hormonal networks. The latter are easier to erase than the former, because the latter depends upon the former to exist, and the former are typically more detailed in memory, being associated from many sensory inputs, typically. So it’s possible to remeber elements of reality without remembering the causality. However, causality makes memory easier to arrange… Hence drastic rearrangement of memorized causality may well occur. I call this CAUSAL INVERSION. Dreams can facilitate, but also demolish, such patalogic.

[1] Plato claimed that all and any element of reality could be shadows on a wall. Socrates describes people who were chained all their lives, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. They name these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality, but are not the real world. The shadows are elements of reality that we can perceive through our senses, while real objects can only be perceived through reason. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, deductive logic; and the theory of forms. The essay above is revealing HOW logic is evolved, and how “elements of reality” are correctly guessed, established and questioned. Socrates’ elements of reality were often nonsensical. He described his dreams as “daemons” not the activity of neuro-hormonal networks, etc…

The hard edge of today’s quest for “reality”, the forefront, is called Quantum Theory, and it’s full of questions, solutions and technological wonders… Techno-logical: notice the apparition of logic in techne… But how was the logic elaborated? Dream on…

GOING META Here, There & Everywhere

WE ARE THE META SPECIES

Samantha Power is one of the great “leaders” of this world, a US official named by Obama, one of many political parasites with dreadful powers to do nothing and everything. History will forget her, but the damage will persist. Endowed with quasi-supernatural powers, such officials powerfully zooms around in jets and armored motorcades. Such is our world: some think they can “lead” it, and it means they are above the law. So Samantha Power’s mighty motorcade zooms in Cameroon; at one hundred kilometer per hour on a dirt road. And runs over a seven-year old African child. Power was there to power up about security, she said. A world led by such power monsters is not secure, because they have no compassion and are all about themselves. This is what a powerful meta-conceptual analysis shows. (The rest of the day, the motorcade from hell slowed down to a crawl, momentarily chastised, because of the bad PR of crushing children…)

If one thinks carefully about it, one realizes that all and every progress in understanding were obtained by enlarging the scope of one’s inquiry. Typically factors not considered before get integrated, and they add logical dimensions to the logic, enabling to skirt around the difficulty the way supplementary dimensions enable to turn around obstacles. Another way of expressing this is by “going meta” (“meta” meaning beyond).

Just as there is metalogic and metamathematics, there is metaphilosophy… arguably metabiology has also arrived, with changes not just in genes, but in the bases of DNA. Plain mathematicians, or logicians do not like the “meta” version of their disciplines (nor do they like each other… except for those tremendous enough to transcend the differences). Indeed, at least once, metalogic studies invalidated a part of analysis.

Number of Books Mentioning Category Theory. For Decades, Most Mathematicians Have Feared And Despised Category Theory. CT Is Itself An Example Of Going “META”.

Category Theory can be used to formulate “Meta”. Fascinatingly, the power of Category Theory is to go “meta” by forgetting all the details, and chasing (literally!) the big picture. One does not know why this is so, except, philosophically speaking, that the bark in your face tends to block sight of the forest beyond. To go meta, forget the bark, turn your head.

The incompleteness theorems are just one example of meta. earlier examples were equations, analytic geometry, Euclidean versus non-simply-Euclidean geometries, topology (generalizing metric spaces).

When one is  a baby it’s obvious that mom (= the Virgin Mary) and dad (= Zeus, Deus, Allah, etc.) created the universe. It’s a simple, deeply satisfying explanation, which helps provide all what one needs. However, when the baby goes meta, baby discovers there are other powers out there, other factors to take into account, from gravity, to getting air out of one’s stomach.

The rest of life is a long gathering of wisdom, by broadening and deepening one’s understanding, in a succession of conceptual mutations.

Some mathematicians (such as Alain Connes) have also complained that non-standard numbers were beyond their own understanding. Well, boys, I have bad news for you all: I invalidate all and any recourse to infinity as if it were another number. That still leave open the usage of “potential infinity”. But it demolishes… potentially, a large part of mathematics (what gets invalidated, or not, would, itself become a branch of mathematics).

Philosophy is the ultimate questioning of all the bases. “Metaphilosophy” should be a redundant notion. Part of metamathematics, such as Category Theory, have become workhorses of the mainstream… even in theoretical physics. Category Theory started as the ultimate pragmatism: forget about the foundations of the objects at hand, just worry about the rules the morphisms relating these objects can satisfy.

Thus one can safely say that fundamental differences between philosophy, mathematics, science and logic are all illusory. Category Theory provides with an example: it was started with a philosophical point of view on mathematics, and is now a must in some areas of physics.

So why does philosophy have a Public Relation problem? Because philosophy attacks the established order, always, and the new orders brutes always try to impose.

The other day the German Chancellor decided to prosecute a comic who had made (gentle) fun of Erdogan, the Turkish Sultan (aka “Turkish president”). It sounds like something straight out of more than a century ago (the Kaiser was allied to the Sultan). The healthy reaction from the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci was: Massimo Pigliucci‏@mpigliucci Apr 15

“Really Germany? Fuck you, Erdogan. “Germany Turkey: Merkel allows inquiry into comic’s Erdogan insult”

That’s excellent. It is excellent, because it is very wise. This is at the core of what the best philosophers have always done: scold infamy. In another tweet of Massimo, and it was a surprise to me, Hillary Clinton was revealed to have 27 million in income (in 2014, it was 24 million). Sanders had just $205,000 (less than 1% of Hillary’s income).

Philosophy, well done, brings revolutions, all over, not just consolation. Philosophy also brings consolation, yes. Boethius, president of the Roman Senate, wrote the “Consolation of Philosophy”, while waiting for his execution by bludgeoning from the local Erdogan. In the Sixth Century. (Islam did not yet exist, but, with examples like that, it could learn from the worst.)

The elites, lest they want revolution(s), can only view philosophy as a self-defeating endeavor. Elites are rarely for revolutions (although Louis XVI of France was for the American Revolution, in spite of strident critiques from his brother and members of his cabinet, that he was creating a Republic).

The fear and contempt elites have for revolution is the main source of the Public Relation problem of philosophy.

Meantime, humanity will keep on going meta, going beyond what was established before. That’s the genius of the genus Homo.

Patrice Ayme’