"We Become Death": An Essay on Distraction

Abstract Distraction is often held by the relevant literature to be an environmental factor, a nuissance at best, at worst a danger that must be suppressed and eradicated. Through our essay, we seek to outline an alternative approach to the aesthetics of distraction. We argue that deviant noise has an important role to play in philosophy, aesthetics and media studies, for it is more than mere distraction. Distracting, noisy entities, in actuality, bring to our attention the finitude of our existence, highlighting the everpresent immanence of death. We may even arrive at a kind of community with the Otherness of noise, cutting through networks of control and arriving at acceptance of impossibility. The deviant that distracts is actually an invitation for us to rethink our relation to the environment and, indeed, the at times rigid borderlines separating subjectivity from the ecology of its own finitude. Keywords  chaos, death, distraction, noise, redundanc

Nonidentity, Materialism and Truth in Adorno's Negative Dialectics

The primary concern of the present paper is to answer the question, ‘What is the relation between non-identity and truth in Adorno's Negative Dialectics?' It employs Adorno's articulation of the ‘outside' of philosophy (á la Aristotle's first matter), which underpins the need for conceptual constellations if we are to mimetically examine the non-conceptual thing. Following this a further question presents itself: how do these engagements inflict a critical mark on the Hegelian method of totalization – the dialectic of truth? The essay ends with an analysis of two films, Metropolis and Primal Fear, aimed at separating out Hegelian conceptions of truth from Adornian unresolved truth; the former aimed at a universal, the latter indicative of a non-identical aporia. We must conclude with the possibility that to leave the unresolved nature of non-identity unresolved for truth is the ontological challenge par excellence that presented itself to Adorno's negative dialectics as it presents itself to post-Kantian continental philosophy today

Quantum Interpretations for Building Science/Religion Bridges

This paper attempts a systematic comparison of the multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM). The article ends with a summary table that has 13 rows and 10 columns. The columns are metaphysical principles such as determinism and reality. The rows are the main interpretations from 1925 to the present. Each row has entries such as Yes/No/Agnostic. We have contacted most of the living authors and based on their comments we have modified the entry for their interpretation. However, there is reasonable space for disagreement when it comes to determining the correct value of each box (Yes/No/Agnostic). We hope to improve the table in the future. We have also eliminated one of the columns and replaced it with two new columns. We believe that this topic is especially relevant to bridge building in dialogues on science, religion and spirituality because of the unique way that QM brings out metaphysical questions from within science. While any science may lend itself to metaphysical speculation, few sciences beyond QM have such a wide range of metaphysical speculation that all correspond to the same empirical results. This fact may humble scientists and have interesting consequences for how to build bridges between conflicting worldviews

Recent Advances in Post-Quantum Physics

Newton's mechanics in the 17th Century increased the lethality of artillery. Thermodynamics in the 19th led to the steam-powered Industrial Revolution in the UK. Maxwell's unification of electricity, magnetism and light gave us electrical power, the telegraph, radio and television. The discovery of quantum mechanics in the 20th century by Planck, Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg led to the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bomb as well as computer chips and the world-wide-web and Silicon Valley's multi-billion dollar corporations. The lesson is that breakthroughs in fundamental physics, both theoretical and experimental have always led to profound technological wealth-creating new industries and will continue to do so. There is now a new revolution brewing in quantum mechanics that can be divided into three periods. The first quantum revolution was from 1900 to about 1975. The second quantum information/computer revolution was from about 1975 to 2015. The early part of this story is told by MIT Professor David Kaiser in his award-winning book how a small group of Berkeley/San Francisco physicists triggered that second revolution. The third quantum revolution is how an extension of quantum mechanics has led to the understanding of consciousness as a natural physical phenomenon that can emerge in many material substrates not only in our carbon-based biochemistry. In particular, this new post-quantum mechanics will lead to naturally conscious artificial intelligence in nano-electronic machines as well as extending human life spans to hundreds of years and more. This development is not far off and is fraught with opportunities and dangers, just like nuclear power and genetic engineering

The Implicit Presence of the Problem of Nothingness in Twentieth Century French Philosophy

The objective of this article is to refer to and identify the implicit presence of the concept of nothingness in the central philosophical proposals of last century's French philosophy. Even though the authors are not considered Nihilistic in themselves, there does exist in them an identification contained in their reflections that point towards a particular conception of nothingness, or to one of its analogies. The study commences arguing the idea of a great puppet master as a metaphor of nothingness that is implicit in Sartre's thought; following, that unseen region that man cannot come to contemplate, according to Merleau-Ponty, will be boarded; afterwards, .reference will be made to the idea of shadow contributed by Levinas and its implications in philosophy that were passed on to us; lastly, the focus will be on what Derrida denominated as "veils”, which do not allow us to see what is.

An Emergent Language of Paradox: Riffs on Steven M. Rosen's Kleinian Signification of Being

First, I briefly recapitulate the main points of Rosen's article, namely, that the word "Being” does not adequately signify the paradoxical unification of subject and object and that the Klein bottle can serve as a more appropriate sign-vehicle than the word. I then propose to apply his insight more widely; however, in order to do that, it is first necessary to identify infra- and exostructures of language, including culture, category structure, logic, metaphor, semantics, syntax, concept, and sign vehicles, that preserve the status quo and keep subject and object disjunct. After analyzing those infra/exostructures, I engage a complementary process, coagulatio, in order to spark ideas for innovating ways in which more of those facets of language can embrace paradox

Can the Relationship Between Narrative and History be Utilised to Better Understand the Problems within Social Science?

The current decline in recognition accorded to the humanities will be shown to be linked to the efforts of the social sciences to take up a flawed scientific epistemology. Through efforts to assert itself as a naturalistic scientific endeavour, it will be argued that the social sciences sacrificed the essential imaginative and humanistic components that are integral to an effective study of the social world. This essay will show that a similar pattern occurred within history, though it was able to redevelop a functioning epistemology through an emphasis of the centrality of stories to human existence and the formation of a grand narrative. Thus, the problems within social science might then be able to be solved by considering its own grand narrative. Most importantly, the formation of grand-narratives overcomes the nihilism of European civilizations and provides the foundations for a global ecological civilization

First Person Accounts of Yoga Meditation Yield Clues to the Nature of Information in Experience

Since the millennium, first person accounts of experience have been accepted as philosophically valid, potentially useful sources of information about the nature of mind and self. Several Vedic sciences rely on such first person accounts to discuss experience and consciousness. This paper shows that their insights define the information structure of experience in agreement with a scientific theory of mind fulfilling all presently known philosophical and scientific conditions. Experience has two separate components, its information content, and a separate ‘witness aspect', which can reflect on all forms of experience, and with training be strengthened until its power of reflection identifies it as the innermost aspect of ‘self'. The Vedic sciences, Samkhya, Yoga and Vedanta develop these themes. Samkhya identifies the different aspects of experience, outer and inner; Yoga practices lead the mind to inner states of zero information content (Samadhi) in which the experience of the witness (Sakshi) is strengthened and deepened. Vedanta states the nature of the ‘self' is to know itself directly without intermediary.  All this requires the witness to have a singular loop structure. The information structure of experience therefore has two aspects, information content plus a singular loop endowing it with a subjective sense of ‘Self'.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Does Plato Make Room for Negative Forms in His Ontology?

Plato seems to countenance both positive and negative Forms, that is to say, both good and bad ones. He may not say so outright, but he invokes both and rejects neither. The apparent finality of this impression sustains a lack of direct interest in the subject: Plato scholars do not give negative Forms much thought except as the prospect relates to something else they happen to be doing. Yet when they do give the matter any thought, typically for the sake of a prior concern, they try either to support the textual evidence or to contradict it, indicating that the evidence does not stand on its own. The purpose of this paper is to determine why they tend to affirm or deny the obvious, how they try to confirm or dispute it, and what this says about Plato’s position. The strategic vehicle is a comparative case study. The data set consists of one confirmation, one contradiction, both with indirect interest in negative Forms. The confirmation comes from Debra Nails (2013), who needs to embrace negative Forms to demonstrate that the unhypothetical first principle of the all is not identical to the Form of the good, something she cannot do (or do exactly as she pleases) unless Plato recognizes negative Forms. The contradiction comes from Holger Thesleff (2013), who needs to reject negative (Ideal) Forms because the defining feature of his (Ideal) Forms is the possession of positive intrinsic value, which cannot be predicated of anything negative. Despite defending opposite views, or perhaps because of this, they jointly make up for any lack of interest in the scholarly community. I appreciate both yet ultimately side with Thesleff .  &nbsp

Science to Improve the Human Condition

Science must address a deep human concern, pain and suffering and how can an individual, without drugs and surgery, self-heal? Historical knowledge of Coulombic, Gaussian and Photonic energy in medicine and the science of human organic life energy or Qi is required to heal ourselves. How can we couple singular individual consciousness of ancient practice techniques within a scientific frame? First, where does Qi fit into science? The properties of organic and inorganic oneness, comparing the physiology of human Enlightenment to the stable state of helium at absolute temperature gives information on how to approach disease. A non-invasive diagnostic technique of the Omura O-ring is capable of testing meridian theory, giving light on Oriental medicine's limitations as compared to modern neuro-science of the dermatome. Treatment through self-help techniques of Chronic Heart Disease and a serious spinal injury gives us data in which to evaluate this approac