Note: I'm in the midst of revising not just the prose but the categories. Sentiens is a double universe, an ambiguous universe, divided between incompatible worlds I shall call Scientia and Dementia: a semiotically responsible, sane component and a pathological, un-sane component.
I've changed these terms, editing has yet to catch up.
Dementia (AKA: Pathologica): The World of Un-Sane Models: The Universe of Being Wrong!
2006 06 24
With Sentiens comes symbolic processing. Awareness is representational. With representation comes the possibility of misrepresentation. Pleroma cannot be wrong. Creatura cannot be insane: not until Sentiens emerges. With Sentiens necessarily emerges Pathologica.Development Scrapbook
2009 03 03
Pleroma could for all we can tell exist without Creatura, Creatura could not exist without Pleroma, Creatura could exist without Sentiens.Could Sentiens exist without Pathologica? I don't think so.
And how much of Sentiens is occupied by Pathologica will determine how long Sentiens can survive. Survival needs accurate representations, honest and intelligent models. Jesus may be a group-fiction, but Socrates seems to have lived: the good teacher who gets executed for his qualities. Socrates died, that Athens died.
Whether or not a Jesus of Nazareth got crucified, the Romans did crucify lots and lots of folk: you can just bet some of them were candidate reformers. Rome lived on and on, and so has Jerusalem. But should the biosphere flouish while major decisions are made my kleptocrats who shove dissenting voices aside?
Should an America endure that arrests its reformers, no accurate report of the arrests being made by the press?
In jail an ex-MLB star told me of yachting top-speed all over the Hawaiian Pacific, paying no attention while smoking cocaine. That's civilization: Look, Ma! No hands! No uncompromised brains either.
We humans call ourselves "intelligent," attribute self-awareness to ourselves. I agree, without reservation: provided that we recognize that those attributes are spectra, have a range; they are not absolutes (Yes / No, On / Off ...) We'll have a better sense of how intelligent, and how self-aware, we are when we meet another intelligent, self-aware entity: another species ... or a meta-entity, a god. Maybe we'd think the Martians were a can short of a six-pack, maybe we'd think the god was Wow-Zowie!, maybe the god would think we were a few cards short of a deck.
Trouble in Sentiens' Pleroma
I repeat a post just made at my IonaArc blog:
The other day I noticed that I'd made my usual points about the trouble Galileo got into with the Church and the universities over his discovery of Jupiter's satellites. Years ago Knatz.com and this blog established a post or two on common pk symbols: god, Jesus ... Galileo, Abelard ... My Galileo point also jibes with important points made thus far principally at my Macroinformation blog. Gregory Bateson distinguished between the universe of Pleroma, the physical universe, and Creatura, his name for the universe of life. I extend his point to distinguish between Creatura and his sub-universe Sentiens, the universe of consciousness, of intelligence, of self-awareness.
Now: Galileo's difficulty was with establishing a fact about Pleroma within a self-satifisfied authoritarian society, wrong in its map of Pleroma. Imagine how much more difficulty he would have had had he tried to establish basic truths about the Church, the universities, about human society!!!
People like facts to be flattering, not true.
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