Love (Hegel, Hölderlin, Unitrinity, Schelling...)

by Maria Odete Madeira

Hegel and Hölderlin introduced a new thinking about sensitivity, in opposition to the anguish and insecurity before alterity (natural, personal and social), that were at the origin of Aufklärung.

This new thinking tried to capture and recuperate the pulsional dynamism and the affective dimension that constitute the human being.

The issue of love was developed as a reply to intrinsic problems and to an internal determinant dialectics, that operated as function of synthesis in the system, that is, a middle-term between the theoretical order and the practical domain.

Love was incorporated, in Hegel’s logical system, as fundament of the harmony of the “Spirit”, in its function of unification of reflexive and effective synthesis of the thought and the feeling.

Love configurated, in Hegel, the dialectical motion of reason, as exposition, negation and return of reason to itself, surpassed. The loving dynamics adequately described the character of the “Absolute” as a fundament of itself, that is, the reconciled return to itself, from its other (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Theorie Werkausgabe).

A different thinking about the feeling of love, seems to come from the notion of Unitrinity, that inscribes itself in the kenosis of the Son (Christ) that reveals God’s mystery as love, a gift that inscribes in space and time an ineffable exchange within the divinity itself. That is, the love as a feeling towards the other, because God as unity does not exclude the other (Son), the Son is already within divinity itself as object of intentionality, for the realization of the love, realizing what can be considered a Superunity (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite).

In the unity, the feeling of love is already a communion with the other without negation, unlike Hegel, and closer to Schelling.

One cannot find, however, in any philosopher, a feeling without an intentionality, without an underlying reason for its being, in the case of Hegel this reason is to be negated and surpassed.

In a neurobiological framework and in a philosophical framework, both feelings and emotions possess an unsurpassable intentionality, they are always about something (their object of intentionality) that relates the individual/agent/subject with his/her environment (culture, civilization, people, recollections, artifacts, etc), possessing a fundamental adaptive value.

Epicurus - Clinamen

by Maria Odete Madeira

While disagreeing, with regards to the topos of the universal essences, Plato and Aristotle were in agreement with regards to a fundamental point: the scientific discourse (episteme) could only be considered as true when that same discourse satisfied criteria of universality and of necessity. Thus, it was demanded of the inquiry to find the foundation of any statement of truth or of falsehood, in what were the first causes and the first principles of the things, themselves.

In this way, in order to have discursive rigor, the matter and its forms or essences (eidos) should be analyzed separately as different things, both in terms of their identity as well as of the value that was assigned to them. The epistemic analysis of one should not contaminate, interpretatively, the epistemic analysis of the others.

The object of knowledge, that object's matter and its form or essence, as well as its meaning and definition, obeyed, for Plato and for Aristotle, rigorous criteria of appropriateness and agreement, that would allow a general deductive semantics. These criteria prolonged themselves in Euclid’s geometry and in the statics of Archimedes, both based upon a system of axioms that constituted self-evident truths, and upon a system of theorems derived from those same axioms.

The semantic determinism of the Greek scientific discourse was generalized as an epistemic model until Epicurus, distancing himself from the primitive atomism of Democritus, introduced the notion of clinamen (declination) as a capability, an arbitriu that the atoms have to deviate themselves spontaneously from their trajectories. Thus, Epicurus incorporated, in the philosophical and scientific discourse, an irreducible element of unpredictability at the epistemic level, absent up until then, with ontological and epistemological consequences about that which was considered as criterion of truth.

Without putting into question the “general laws of nature”, known at the time, the author localized a present and permanent dispositional element of constitutive arbitrariness (arbitriu), in any process of formation of emergent structures, as an element incorporated in the dispositional genetics of these same structures with consequences at the level of the systemic perception and cognitive processing/computation, and at the ontological level of the threat of destructuration and the opportunity of structuration, present in any physical existent, and that function as mechanisms of potential risk (linked to the mechanisms of life and death) and, thus, undetermined, permanently displaced, within the structure itself.

About the Life of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Life

by Maria Odete Madeira

Any production of knowledge is supported by an organizing activity that acts in accordance to rules that have, as their objective, the resolution of problems that promote the organism’s survival and adaptive fitness.

The discovery of the double-helix, by Watson and Crick, allowed the application, to the notion of living organization, of the cybernetic scheme of a machine governed by an informational program, inscribed in the structure of the DNA molecules, that organizes and directs all the activities of the cellules (Morin, 1986).

In this way, a living organization can be signaled and referred as a self-cognitive, self-organizing and self-replicating agent that is capable, through exchanges with the environment, of concentrating, in itself, the flows of order that feed it and sustain it as a localized individuated structure.

The knowledge of the life of the systems introduces us to the life of the knowledge, itself. Being, doing and knowing are, thus, inseparable.

The development of communication networks, between the different agents, allowed the transformation, of the natural flows and turbulences, in the subjugated motricity that was at the origin of the human space of millions of years ago, and that can be signaled as a bio-anthropological space aimed at the satisfaction of the biological needs of survival and of the immediate and practical interests, full of feelings and emotions, fantastic visions and terrors, but also full of techniques and precise calculations, synchretically linked to the objects.

In that historical time, the time of the myth, the interface with the environment was profoundly biological, accompanied by that which Damásio (1999) designates by core consciousness, characterized by a weak grasping ability and a weak reflexive operativity that did not allow the exercise of abstract thinking.

The type of thinking produced was profoundly linked to the aleatority of the motion of the natural forces, whose nature revealed itself as powerful, threatening and dramatic.

In this way, the production of judgments exhibited a perceptual and conceptual pattern that allowed the hominidian networks to signal, identify an classify the ecosystemic space, as a fluid and fluctuating nature, determined by local dynamic, unstable, coevolutionary and organic rules, foundationally conditioned by locally emergent mechanisms of territorialization and deterritorialization, rhizomatically aleatorial, producer of myths (meudh, mudh, myo, mytheo, mythos) and of rites, linked to the vital emotions and feelings of immediate survival and creators of visual, tactile, acoustic, and olphactive action spaces, conceptually non-schematizable, but that interacted with the strategic calculus that allowed the development of techniques of working the stone, then the bone and, also, the metal, as well as the development of cognitive memories, associated with the knowledge of the plants, of the animals and of the environment.

From the passage of the mythological thinking towards the so-called rational thinking, the knowledge came to be explicitly referred to as kosmos, or order, and as logos, term of Greek origin, derived from the verb legein that, originally meant to gather, to enumerate or to choose.

In turn, the noun logos, that initially meant collection and (re-)collection of the multiple, came to mean the discourse.

The kosmos and the logos, that substituted the myth as an attempt of interpretation and explanation of the reality, in its complexity, corresponded to the development of the capability of the organismic human grasp, accompanied by the expansion of consciousness.

The core consciousness, thus, lost operative protagonism to the extended consciousness, which came, since then, to operate in the interface with the environment. In accordance with Damásio (1999), if core consciousness is the indispensable foundation of consciousness, extended consciousness is its glory.

Unlike core consciousness, extended consciousness allows to work on temporally more expanded interaction surfaces, connectable to mechanisms of retension and protension.

Unity and System

by Maria Odete

The unity (unitas, atis) is a syntax that can be operationalized to capture, in the systems, that which, in them, is about their internal cohesion, consistency and coherence.

These internal systemic properties (cohesion, consistency and coherence), enactively produced by the system (Varela), signal, refer and identify the system as a being or entity, and, therefore, also an identity.

The system, considered in terms of its individuation, bearer of an identity, is, thus, signaled as a concrete spatio-temporally localized existent in permanent rotative coincidence with itself.

In this way, from an ontological approach, the unity can be thought of as a concrete relational existence, coexistent with that which, in the system, is multiplicity, division and dispersion.

If it is the case that, to form itself, the system needs the existence of a principle of unity enactively present in the system itself, it is also the case that the existence of that same principle of unity depends, constitutively, upon the capability of the relational dynamics of the system to produce and operationalize that principle of unity as a permanent organizing principle, dispositionally available in the system, and that can be thought of as an ontological, logical and epistemological attribute that makes any judicative syntheses about the nature of the unity of the system dependent upon the relations that are coexistent and actively present in the system, since the unity itself of the system is grounded (urgrund) upon those relations.

In this way, the unity can be consistently considered, in the statements, as an organizing principle, systemically synthesized, monadologically complex, relational and in network.

Without relations there can be no systemic unity.

On Mathematics

by Carlos Pedro Gonçalves


In formulating the question “what is mathematics?” it is important to notice that the intellectual matrix and structure that underlies our concept of mathematics is Greek. This should not be confused with a statement that mathematical activity started in Greece, it does mean, however, that our usage of the term mathematics and our conception of what it means to “do mathematics” has a Greek root.

Thus, in trying to answer the question “what is mathematics?” we should, perhaps, first look at the Greek root of the word mathematics, which is mathematike which comes from manthein (to learn, to study), meaning learning, study, science. It is also important to look at the expression mathematike tekhne, which places mathematical activity as science techne, in Latin being translated to ars mathematica.

As a science techne, the mathematical activity tries to find the quantities, structures and patterns exemplified by the things, and builds an abstraction of these quantities, structures and patterns that allows the study of these quantities, structures and patterns in themselves, in their nature and generative mechanisms.

The Death of John Wheeler

by Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

“I like to say, when asked why I pursue science, that it is to satisfy my curiosity, that I am by nature a searcher, trying to understand. Now, in my eighties, I am still searching. Yet I know that the pursuit of science is more than the pursuit of understanding. It is driven by the creative urge, the urge to construct a vision, a map, a picture of the world that gives the world a little more beauty and coherence than it had before. Somewhere in the child that urge is born.”

John Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam, p.84.

The passing away of John Wheeler:

http://jayryablon.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/john-archibald-wheeler-rip/



The “it from bit”


The “it from bit” is a fundamental perspective about the foundations of quantum theory, and about the nature of the universe.

Given the choice, by Wheeler, of the Aristotelic realistic framework, the philosophically consistent interpretation of the “it from bit” means that an actualized reality (the it) comes from a question that nature asks itself, as a result of a particular kind of physical interaction where a quantum system is “asked a question” about the pattern of exemplification of a physical property, such a question is of such a nature that it begs a yes/no answer on the part of the system, hence, the term the it (actualized reality) comes from the bit.

A physicist would state, using the terminology proper of quantum theory, that a decoherence inducing interaction would produce a local diagonal density operator with respect to an expansion of some observable’s eigenbasis, an eigenbasis to which the “observing system” is physically sensitive. The “observing system” does not need, according to Wheeler, an elaborate level of reflexibility, something as simple as a piece of mica, for instance, does the job!

The term decoherence refers to the process that produces a local loss of interference terms of the system’s state. Through the decoherence process, the system’s environment interacts with the system in such a way that an entanglement is produced with respect to a certain observable’s eigenbasis.

Thus, for instance, if there is a system of particles that effectively acts as an obstacle that is able of localize the particle, the potential regions of localization correspond to a correlated potential state of the particle’s position and a potential state of the system of particles. The positioning pattern of interaction introduces a decoherence with respect to the position observable. Informationally, this can be considered to correspond to a yes/no question placed by the system of particles to the particle. Prosaically, the system of particles asks the particle, with respect to each potential region of localization: “Are you here?”.

A typical physical experiment of this is the double slit experiment.

Now, what Wheeler states is that when the particle is asked this question, and when decoherence occurs, the branching of potential alternatives forces a “choice” of a potential branch to be actualized. This actualization depends on the degree to which each branch tends to be actualized, which is nothing but the measure of the intensity of the dynamis or potentia. As it is the nature of the dynamis to tend towards the act.

In terms of quantum cosmology, this is a perspective with fundamental consequences:

- Before the actualized universe we have to consider a myriad of potential universes, each tending to be actualized with different propensities;

- A quantum computation inducing entanglement had to take place that led to the actualization of a given universe, or, at least of some characteristics of the universe.

The second point makes us question the nature of the first event. Either there was a single actualized event that originated the universe, which would mean an initial maximal entanglement with respect to the relevant cosmological observables, or, there were a series of actualizations that processually produced the final result of the big bang. Wheeler admits the theoretical possibility that some parts of what could be considered to be in the universe’s past may only be actualized some time in the future. This is visually expressed by the Wheeler’s eye (see beginning of the article), which pictorically represents the question placed by Wheeler: Does looking back “now” give actual reality to what happened “then”?

About this question Wheeler defends that the point is that the universe can be thought of as a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole. Its history is, in this sense, not a history as we usually conceive history. It is not one thing happening after another after another. It is a totality in which what happens “now” actualizes what happened “then”, determining what happened then.

The Conceptual Confusion between Potentia and Possibility in Physics

by Maria Odete Madeira

Some errors of interpretation of philosophical concepts used in science lead to fundamental problems at the root of the theories, when these concepts play a foundational role in the edifice of that theory. An example of this is the statement, by Heisenberg, of an equivalence between dynamis (potentia) and possibility.

Heisenberg established, incorrectly, an equivalence between the Aristotelic notion of dynamis and possibility.

The dynamis and the possibility are two distinct notions, both logically as well as ontologically. All existing things, situations, events, beings or entities, are contingent things, and, because of that, are, as such, subjects of change, in this way, all physical existents are a composite of dynamis (potentia) and energeia (actus), the dynamis being as real as the energeia.

The dynamis that composes each physical existent is, logically and ontologically, a principle and, also, a temporal moment of determinable indetermination, its determination being done by the energeia that corresponds to it, logically and ontologically, as its principle of determination. Every situation, event, being, entity is constituted by these two principles: dynamis and energeia.

The possibility is an abstract term of any language, be that language logical, epistemological or ontological. The possibility designates the intelligible structure of the possible: possible is all that can be or not be, without logical contradiction.

Any physical existent has in itself, as such, its own possibility, as a neutral element that precedes and accompanies it along its existence. All that is, or exists, must be possible to be or exist, because it, effectively, is, or exists, and, equally, all that is not, or does not exist, must be possible not to be, or not to exist, because it, effectively, is not.

The category of possibility is, in the motion energeia/dynamis/energeia, logically and ontologically, a neutral element. One can talk about a determination of the dynamis by the energeia, and, thus, of an actualization, but one cannot talk about an actualization of the possibility, nor establish an equivalence between the notion of possibility with the notion of dynamis.