Hello ToKers,

As Mark has mentioned, at the Center, we have been teaching an experimental
online course this summer, with about 30 academics and professionals among
our colleagues from around the world, The Life and Death Seminar (LADS),
subtitled The Art of Being Ruled by Robots.

The primary text for the 12 weeks has been Aristotle's *On the Soul
and Memory and Recollection* translated by Joe Sachs of St. John's College
in Annapolis. This has been countered with Complexity/Chaos. I have been
teaching Aristotle while Mark has focused on all that has purposefully been
anti-Aristotlean up to our time. I have presented Aristotle in the context
of his times: Scribal over taking Oral (literacy), his looking beyond
Athens and his taking a biological/medical/psychological approach to the
study of animals and humans, as the first Social Scientist of the West.
Aristotle bases his study on Grammar (what is it and what causes it),
rather than Dialectic. This is to say, what is the "thinghood" or cause of
living things. In short, we can't understand humans if we don't understand
what they are and what forms them (so studying dead things and focusing on
abstractions from reality won't help us much, thus his break with Plato,
among others).

Now that Gregg has opened the ToK list to what is typically viewed as
"black boxes" in Cause and the "Mind" (though I wonder if Psyche is more
accurate), perhaps I can contribute.

If we begin with what Mind and Psyche mean, we might be surprised.

The OED entry for *psyche *begins with the ancient Greek notions of Psykhe:
breath, to breathe; hence, life; the animating principle in man and other
living beings, the source of all vital activities, rational or irrational,
the soul or spirit, in distinction from its material vehicle, the body;
sometimes considered as capable of persisting in a disembodied state after
separation from the body at death.

[If I did not know any better, I'd say that the OED editor for this entry
thought Aristotle's definition was correct 2300+ years later]

OED goes on: The soul, or spirit, as distinguished from the body; the mind.
[I will return to Mind below]

Btw, the entry for *psy *is: psy-war, see psychological warfare. The entry
for *Psychol *is: The conscious and unconscious mind and emotions, esp. as
influencing and affecting the whole person. See CG Jung.

For those that recall their Roman mythology, Psyche and Cupid appear in the
2nd-century poem *Metamorphoses *by Platonicus. Psyche is Soul while Cupid
is Eros or Desire (the movement that comes from our senses).

The OED entry for the* mind *is quite extensive and the first entry is *faculty
of memory*: the state of being remembered; remembrance, recollection,
remind, the record of, happy memory, commemorating, memorial,

The next section II is *thought; purpose, intention; *one's view. judgment
or opinion; desire or wish; and to form and adhere to a decision, without
shilly-shallying(!); Inclination, tendency, or way of thinking and feeling
in regard to moral and social qualities; moral disposition; to entertain
sentiments.

Section III is *Mental being or faculty*: the seat of a person's
consciousness, thoughts, volition, and feelings; the system of cognitive
and emotional phenomenon and powers that constitutes the subjective being
of the person; the incorporeal subject of the psychical faculties, the
spiritual part of the human; the soul as distinguished from the body; one's
waking consciousness.

Recalling the oral Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the goddess of
Memory...remember what it means to be a Greek! Mnemosyne presided over a
pool in Hades (river of memory) as a counter to the River Lethe from which
souls drank to forget their prior lives.

So what we have is a lot of the Soul perceiving, remembering, recollecting,
and thinking - as Aristotle tells us, all based upon our senses "being
acted upon" - and pointing towards action and speech.

For Aristotle, the beginning of Social Science [think causes of humans and
"The City"], is the Soul and how it is Formed.

On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 12:12 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>
>
>
>   Thanks for the reactions and interesting reflections.
>
>
>
>  Let me focus a bit on point 6. I view Newtonian physics as the
> consolidated birth of modern Enlightenment science. And I see it as
> incorporating and validating two of Aristotle's causes, material and
> efficient, as in Newton's mechanics as being a map of the universe as
> matter in motion (i.e., efficient cause). The language game of material and
> efficient causes are effective for explaining the Material dimension of
> complexity (although, as you note, a purely mechanical efficient cause
> conception is replaced by uncertainty and probabilities in quantum
> mechanics), and formal and final causes were generally neglected or
> rejected in classical physics.
>
>
>
>  Formal and final causes are much more applicable in the life into mind
> into social sciences, although they have not been generally
> accepted/appreciated because of the physical eliminative reductionist
> determinism that many adopted. I see the science of information as having
> the potential to be a science of the formal cause. And, as more and more
> biologists are arguing, I see information
> processing/computation/communication as being the key defining feature that
> gives living organisms their self-referential/self-organizing forms. After
> all, what is being processed other than patterns and forms?
>
>
>
> Of course, in its broad contours, information processing was a way to
> bridge matter and mental causation, which is why the cognitive revolution
> (the mind/brain as an information processing system) had such a dramatic
> impact. I also see the connection between information processing of forms
> and metaphysics. When I speak of the ToK System as a metaphysical system,
> it refers to the informational-representational map of the forms in the
> universe.
>
>
>
>   As this collection developed by "the information philosopher" suggests,
> this is a very complicated subject with lots of angles on it. I have not
> seen the idea that information science is a science of the formal cause
> fully developed yet (although if you read the overview in the link
> provided, you will see some hints at it), and I have not fully developed it
> in my own head, but that is where my intuition points me.
>
>
>
> Best,
> Gregg
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
> On Behalf Of Mark Stahlman
> Sent: Thursday, August 9, 2018 10:12 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Toward a Metaphysical Empirical Psychology
>
>
>
> Gregg:
>
>
>
> Very well done (and congrats on getting it published) . . . !!
>
>
>
> Some further thoughts, focusing on causality (and Aristotle) --
>
>
>
> 1) What causes *paradigms* (aka "worldviews") to happen? (Hint: new
> technologies as "social forms.")
>
>
>
> 2) Metaphysics requires *formal* cause -- as Aristotle told us in his
> "Metaphysics" (i.e. 350BC).  So its "disappearance" is linked to a shift in
> our understanding of causality (continuing right up to
>
> today.)  Why did that happen (i.e. what was the formal cause of the loss
> of formal cause)?
>
>
>
> 3) What you call "Christian" metaphysics (i.e. pre-Enlightenment) was
> mostly Catholic (in Europe), so Protestantism (which largely side-stepped
> metaphysics, instead focusing on "salvation," since the 2nd Coming was
> widely anticipated) needs to be accounted for, with its emphasis on *final*
> cause.  Furthermore, Catholic metaphysics (particularly in terms of your
> continuum) was largely based on Aristotle.
>
>
>
> 4) Max Weber told us that the "world has become disenchanted" in his
>
> 1917 "Science as a Vocation" lecture, following on Nietzsche's 1880s "God
> is dead."  This was *not* the view of the Enlightenment -- where most of
> the people remained explicitly Christian -- and this "atheist"
>
> change coincided with *modern* psychology (remembering that there has
> always been psychology, typically embedded in medicine).  Which technology
> formally caused that to happen?
>
>
>
> 5) Freud is an interesting figure.  He was trained by Franz Brentano, who
> was a Dominican priest and who taught him Aquinas (and Aristotle.)
>
>   Why did Freud turn his back on his own training?  "Christian
> metaphysics" isn't the same as the *theology* you describe -- which is why
> "faith" and "reason" have always been separated, most recently in a 1998
> Papal Encyclical titled "Fide et Ratio."
>
>
>
> 6) How did Claude Shannon's work provide "a new perspective on
> causation"?  Yes, I know that the earlier "Newtonian" approach has been
> called "reductionist" and the new one "holistic" but which
>
> *cause* does that invoke?  Efficient/kinetic cause was destroyed by
> early-20th century science but all they came up with to replace it was
> "probability."  Complexity science retrieves *material* cause (thus the
> "Big Bang" and all the talk about matter), so is that what you mean by a
> "new perspective"?
>
>
>
> 7) Aristotle details your "basic psychology" in his "On the Soul" -- which
> has been the topic of a class we're teaching this summer at the Center.  My
> guess is that the future "language game" will have to come to grips with
> "mind" (an empirical term) vs. "soul" (a metaphysical one that long
> predated Christianity &c.)  The Greek term for the English term "soul" is
> *psyche* (from which we get "pscyhology.")
>
>
>
> 8) Specifically human behavior takes us to Aristotle's "Ethics,"
>
> "Politics" &c.  As we've been discovering, today's ignorance about
>
> what Aristotle actually said (and why he said it) is overwhelming.
>
> Cherry-picking (with what seems to be noses -firmly-held) is about as good
> as it gets.  Why would that be?
>
>
>
> 9) There can be no "improvement of human well-being" without a
>
> *paradigm* change.  The acceptance of your ToK also depends on that
> shift.  The symptoms you describe apply to the old one.  But, alas, we are
> already in a new one.  Yes, that's good news for us all.
>
>
>
> Mark
>
>
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