Overview of the Current Weltbild of Positivism

          It has been found convenient to center this overview of the nature of the current weltanschauung -in contrast to that of The New Monadology within the many facets of the Mind/Brain problem.  The three images examine these aspects of the relationship

                             1.The Nature of the Logic/Maths Scaffolding within which the Relationship  is configured.

                             2  Contending with the "Second Category" of Consciousness -and the Whole Subjective realm

                             3  The Epistemological Dilemma:  Naive Realism versus 'Representationism'

          This page should be read in conjunction with that addressing The Cult of Science

          Figure 1 drives home the numbing 3-fold destitution of positivism with respect to its formal underpinnings. The leftmost of the fou icons within the figure is just about all that the positivist allows to survive of the mind/brain ensemble.  Seemingly, only the physical brain is there.  As will be explored further below, his position with respect to consciousness is ambiguous;  about the greatest concession he is prepared to make is to allow it as a non-efficaceous epiphenomenon.

         However, entirely apart from the category problem, one needs to have only an elementary knowledge of recursive functions, thermodynamics and probability theory for it to be made clear that the the scope of the lex naturalis that the Positivist allows falls very far short of accounting for the astonishing manifest everyday performance delivered by every one of us.  Exotic extension tothe canon are urgently called for.  The New Monadology offers a suggestion in the form of a kind of phase change that suitably constituted molecular configurations may undergo.  For starters of what I have in mind, see the Formal Scaffolding page. The icon labelled ''Exotic Brain' in Figure 1 conveys some notion of its constitution as a kind of offset private space than maintains a continuum with the classical 3-D space of the physical cortex.  It is assumed to be of a field nature that is dipersed over the entire cortex. 

         Despite the domonstrable inadequacy of classical physics and its satellite discip-lines to deliver the goods, matters of exotic extensions -what form they might take and how they might be related to tclassical foundations simply never come up for mention.  That they might be needed at at is seemingly simply not an allowable option, Why this should be so is curious since the taking of such a step would be in the best traditions of the way in which the enterprise has grown and expaneded in the past. Whenever it is discovered that existing laws are no longer adequate in accounting for newly discovered facts, extensions to the canon are muted and put to empirical verification.  The 20th century was to witness this in spades over matters of relativity and quanta. 

         However, the second of the four images in Figure 1 doesn't tell the whole story here, because it fails to disclose the need for a drastic exension to the very fondations of of logic and mathematics.  What mathemticians currently deal with are formal disciplines which are bottom-upin nature, having parsimonious foundations in terms of a few axioms, postulates and other primitives.  What we are in need of adding here is a second formal canon that is top-down in nature having its origins in a nominally seamless unity.  The system is essnetially top down in which its concealed configuration hangs from iuts apex.  This second realm is -as yet- near-universally ignored and unexlored. unexplored.  However, no categorical or modal extensions are implied.  We are still limited here to the same extrinsic category set of time, space degree and numerosity.  This having been said, however, we must immediately add that despite their essential absence, this new top-down formalism does furnish their confiurational underpinnings.  Just about nothing, in the entire realm of the Lager Reality is free of this need incluing the essential agency of your persona and mine.  .  This ubiquity of Logos is something that has led mathemtaically inclined philosophers to the false belief that this is all that there is, 'up there'. 

        This third image has been given the appropriate title of Dispoisitonal mind.  It is what is preserved of ourselves and the microcosmic image that we sustain and entertain during deep sleep and narcosis.  In this state of slumber, we temorary retire into theconfiguration of engrams that define all aspects of our nature - to re-emerge upon awakening.

         The fourth image in the series shows what is added upon our emergence from sleep.  Firts, looking just at formal matters, what manifest is a covariant instance from the source invariance that dispositional mind embodies.  this now undergoes formal and categorical enrichment in which these properties and characteristics that have no presence within either classical or metamathematics become manifest within the implicit realm of consciousness.  We're talking here of modalities and categories of every kind -agency, consciousness, value, 'meaning', the qualia of perception, good and evil and the eternal verities of goodness truruth and beauty.   Further, their passing presence is inseparable from a llive connection to their source within the realm of transcendence. Finally, it is only during conscious episodes that growth in the formalism that each of us entertains could ever have come into existence.  This need, one need hardly say, is not accepted by mainstream intelligentsia -depite Gödel's discovery of his celebrated theorem -and, for that matter, of the fact that all creative mathematicians are Platonists -virtually to the last man. (For more on these matters, see the formal scaffolding page) 

          Figure 2 below takes a look at that category that so embarrasses the positivist -that of 'consciousness.  he sleeping brain presents no problems -since it is an exclusively physical (if exotic) entity.  The most that he is prepared to concede is that upon awakening, there is some kind of catching fire, or perhaps irradience that must do nothing to disturb the physical underpinnings.  That way physics itself remains secure, undistirbed and ultimate in charge.  To put it another way -as suggested by the third icon- i9t is as thoughthe cortex were fundamentally diseased, forever hovering on the bring of the fate suffered by the principle character in Edgar Allen poe's 'Facts in the Case of Dr Valdemeer' [??].  

       The third figure concentrates upon the epistemology of perception/praxis -that is, the relationship between our image of the empirical reality that we experience andoperate upon, and the reality itself.  The epitemology of  'naive realsim' that all of us entertain in the course of everyday existence asserts that we directly reach out and know this Reality by direct conscious engagement.  However, Neuroscience has long demonstrated that this cannot be the case.  That world that we directly experience is actually a surrogate facsimile trapped within our brains from which it might be said to be offset.  That naive realism is false is the greatest of the veridical paradoxes;  it is to be emphaticaaly offset from the pseudo-paradoxes of Einstein's 'relativity' that covertly claims that the findings of Michelson and Morley are to be interpreted ontically rather than epistemicaslly.  These matters are trated at length wirthin the  major document