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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