E4: Persona Geekoma draft

Sentiens is my term for the universe of self-awareness: sentience, intelligence. Sentiens is a subset of Creatura, the universe of life.

Note that this taxonomy differs from the universe we inherit from past (and still-present philosophies, cosmologies, theologies. Our culture has to date accepted cosmologies in which sentience, God's, precedes life and awareness. In conventional Christianity the universe is a subset of God and God's awareness. In my present model, being developed here, all sentience is a subset of life, which is a subset of existence as we know it, which is a subset of time. Note further that I grant "objective" existence to Pleroma, grant that the organisms of Creatura have a Pleromic aspect — "bodies" — but insist that the fundamental reality of Sentiens is informational: symbolic: abstract: immaterial (intensional).

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I say immediately that these qualities depend of semiotics: symbols, signs ... maps, models; and that anything that can symbolized can be symbolized well or ill. Thus, Sentiens necessarily represents a qualitative spectrum whose two poles I shall call Scientia and Dementia: the pole of accurate, intelligent, truthful modeling and the pole of erroneous, mistaken, un-sane symbol use.

Though the terms are mine, I follow Korzybski: all that is epistemology I class under Scientia; all else I class under Dementia. For example, Galileo, doing an experiment, participated in Scientia; the Church, the University, condemning him, participated in Dementia. Today, I, Paul Knatz, theorizing macroinformation, participate in Scientia; academic science and philosophy, the New York Times, not discussing it with me, participate in Dementia. The federal government, jailing and censoring me, participate in Dementia.

Thus Sentiens has a light side and a dark side.

Whether Pleroma has a Janus nature I am not ready to consider: but a minimally two-sided nature is likewise essential for an additional subset I propose with Creatura / Sentiens: Persona.

Creatura is made of of ecologies, environments, organisms. The macro-universe we inhabit has us seeing "things" in Pleroma we call stars, and galaxies ... The macro-universe which includes Creatura has us seeing "things" we call "individuals": this bacterium, that loon, this "person" "named" "Paul" ... We, the self-aware, call ourselves "human," attribute to ourselves "dignity," "intelligence" ... "rights" ... But this too has a dark side. We are social individuals: and no two societies agree on who has how much dignity, how many rights. The limits change over area: Mbutu was a "slave" in "Virginia"; Mbutu was "free" in "Ohio." The limits change over time: Mbutu was a "slave" in "1859"; Mbutu was "free" in "1869." "Women" were "property" in that "year"; "women" are "individuals" in this "year" ...

Notice: I use quote-marks to emphasize the wholly conceptual nature of the concepts suggested by the words. Pleroma may contain "things"; Sentiens contains only concepts and symbols. The informational universe is composed entirely of information.

There can be no "murder" in Pleroma. There can be no murder in Creatura except in that part of Creatura which is Sentiens: and which is also Persona.

Persona is the universe of "right": meaning that