Sophia speaks - Bruce Alderman

[Neelesh Marik]

Six grammatical categories that underpin philosophical approaches: pronouns, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and prepositions – are understood individually and then woven into a quasi-holographic, integrally philosphemetic formulation of metaphysical pluralism, enacting the principle of non-exclusion. 

Some questions and comments that come up for me both for personal clarification from you Bruce and potentially useful for the discussion forum:

While the role of Integral calculus in dispelling the ‘myth of the given’ is commendable, does IT manage to avoid the epistemic fallacy which occurs wherever 'being' is reduced to our 'access to being.'? Students of Bhaskar may throw some light please. This was a stated objective of ITC 2013, was n't it? I wonder if any other paper covers this.

Is OOO, by virtue of its centrality of the object, positing that even heaps and artefacts have all four quadrant dimensions of being (proto-consciousness etc)? 

Adjectival philosophy treating quality as primary – here does a distinction need to be made between inanimate objects such as the 'warm, yellow sun', and a sentient person (3p) with essence (A.H. Almaas) that is both unqualifiable and a verb-noun? I think that distinction is made later with reference to Cittamatra and bundle theories?

Also the attributed nature of quality is necessarily linked to state (or the temporary mediating endo-structure) of the ‘attributor’ at the time of attribution? 

The differences in the emphasis on the person vis-à-vis the situation between the English and the Japanese could be a good indicator of the individualist/ collectivist tenor of the culture? (Hofstede’s IDV dimension, and perhaps even MAS and PDI)

If we subscribe to the ‘illusion of free will’ theory, then in some sense, all processes are ultimately non-owned processes in an individual level, but perhaps co-owned at an supra-individual level (dominant monad of a socio-cultural holon, which essentially self-organizes without an agentic central controller)? This also seems consistent with Being singular pluralism and centrality of the ‘with’ in co-essentiality. 

Big question: can the embodied and enactive role of grammar in being ontologically resonant and potentially revelatory, move the needle a bit on what is mystically referred to as the ‘ineffability problem’? Matters that need deeper study – perhaps while dwelling on other papers, include Whiteheadian concrescence, Bonnitta Roy’s processual model, Latour, and the effectiveness of Rescher’s process semantics and Bohm’s Rheomode in helping us create a new language to shift our narrative?

I have to say that personally for me, just dwelling on the adjective-noun-verb inter-linkage in silence offered a fabulous meditation experience in which all three parts of speech blended into a phenomenological experience enormously rich, multi-dimensional and ineffable beyond the grammatical categories themselves. Perhaps with some more state-and-stage training, the simultaneous contemplation of all six will take 'the bottom out from under the bucket'!

Thank you Bruce for this gift. 

[Rev. O.M. Bastet]

Very cool !! Works that way in business/organizational languaging also. There is Vision, Mission, Purpose, and the values are "the way we act while moving toward those." Definitely adverbial: compassionately, sustainably, respectfully, ........

Going over now to hit the Like button for you, Bruce!

[Rev. O.M. Bastet]

Phooey. Closed already. Well, bon chance indeed!

[Balder]

Thank you, anyway, Alia!  And thank you, too, David, for the interesting and definitely relevant reflections from Wieman; I will check out the essay when I have more time later this week.

[Ambo Suno]

Hi - I really like a couple of things about these ideas. I of course like the reinforcement of the idea that there is a good match between attractor sites/landscapes/conditions with values (and in this case adverbs are pointing to values.) It reminds me that through common values, spheres of sharing and isomorphism are experienced - "we spaces" and we feelings arise in this milieu. Ergo, adverbs also contribute intimately and immediately to the lower two quadrants. Good to have it highlighted.

I associate dynamic systems and especially non-linear dynamic systems with the word "attractor" as well as the visual imagery of a landscape that has traditionally been used to elicit the moving complexity. I have loved this early rendering and others similar, placed below, which is in the context of biological development, in regard to making truth more approachable and, particularly, aesthetically. I love various forms of topographies - so flexflowy, kinetic, affectively stirring - aesthetically they are like eating flan or custard for me.

In a doctoral dissertation I included this diagram (I think I remember), and I tinkered with it in a couple of incarnations of a business card.

Change - from the point of view/kinetics of these eggs - hmm, what way will life go, what grooves will tendencies cruise, run, and topple down? A tiny seismic shift could alter the eggs' travel, and the shape of this fabric. As we know now, even time-space fabric can stretch and shrink, with subtleties almost unimaginable. Sometimes life feels like that. "Every whichway but loose." :)

Balder said:

ADVERBIAL ATTRACTORS

In Evolution's Purpose, McIntosh -- following Frederick Turner, Allan Combs, and others -- suggests that values might be seen as akin to attractors in a chaotic system: produced by, or inseparable, from the system itself, but nevertheless also governing the system (and sometimes pulling it towards greater transformations). Such an attractor model of values (or virtues or 'spiritual beings,' in Turner's approach) offers a possible postmetaphysical take on Platonic ideals, and echoes Whitehead and MacIntyre both in the insistence that values (or virtues) are internal to social activities and embodied beings.

Here -- echoing Layman as well as McIntosh -- values might be seen as the qualitative, gravitationally attractive surplus of dynamic systems or processes: in other words, as abverbs. Not simply as 'accidental' (adjectival) qualities of a self-existing substance, but as the reciprocally formative effluence or radiance of events or processes.

And here, 'values' would be just one instance of an 'attractor model' of adverbial modes (which might include Whitehead's eternal objects, among other things). This really isn't very different at all from what I already argued in Sophia Speaks, but the attractor model offers a familiar and workable way to conceive of the role of adverbs, philosophically, as inseparable from and co-constitutive of process (rather than, like adjectives, accidental to substance).

[Edward theurj Berge]

In the strange and wondrous land of hyperlinking I came upon this old post in another thread. I said:

Hmm, Museque says that perhaps there is a meditative praxis to be had invoking prepositions to activate primordial image schemas and thus induce nondual states. The prepositions then could bridge back up to egoic rationality and thus integrate such states. This would be the methodology or practice part (how) in addition to the phenomenological (who) and neurological (what) aspects.