Several people have been interested in clarifying the Ghost Not paper. The very fact that this is necessary proves that it is currently not good enough! This doesn't surprise me - the whole series is an attempt to condense a pretty radical view into something small enough to reveal the coherence of the big picture, and just doing this kind of condensation usually implies that one tries to specialise the presentation for a particular audience - yet the whole series currently has no specific audience in mind!
So I'm very glad indeed that others are interested in doing a better job of this. In later iterations we will always understand more anyway, and there are opportunities to make the ideas clearer by specialising the presentation for particular audiences by choosing appropriate language and perhaps only presenting aspects of the idea that are needed to demonstrate what the author wants to talk about. In the existing series I kind of deliberately made life more difficult for myself. For example, including the argument that once one has seen around M0, there is an alternative way of understanding cause and effect ("3: Reciprocal Cosmology") which has been seen many times before ("6: History") makes the core M0 argument ("1: M0", "2: The Ghost Not") harder to present. The reason why it makes things harder and the reason why I did it are related. The problems come in because of the increased probability of eliciting ritualised contempt/threat displays from people who (as was pointed out last week) can't even rememeber what they displayed contempt for immeadiately after doing so. The related benefits are twofold. For rational people, the overall case for there being two modes of consciousness and an alternative paradigm that the superior state keeps seeing is stronger than the sum of the parts. For irrational people, dripping the ideas in one at a time will (I believe) only lead to them (mis)categorising each concept and then asserting that since it has been categorised it may be dismissed. Ramming the whole thing down their necks in one go is the only way to get past this unconscious, robotic behaviour. When we are interested in applying the ideas in many situations, these constraints come off, and the job becomes less ambitious.
From my point of view, another thing that I'm aware of is that the semiotic issues discussed in "2: The Ghost Not" are my favourite subject area. I've probably been bedazzled by the beauty of it and become less than coherent from the point of view of people with other interests! So rather than attempt to help write the new versions myself, what I've tried to do here is describe what I'd hoped the existing paper does, so that others can select the bits that might be helpful in different situations - and further test the ideas! As a good example of this, I think Philip's model of a person drawing marks on a window is quite right - it describes the situation very clearly. The only reason why I responded to it a bit pensively (and perhaps gave the impression that I thought it was wrong), is that it isn't a complete expression of what we so far know - and I was very much concerned about completeness in the early days!
A final source of weakness of the existing paper is that doing Reciprocality meant departing from conventional thinking and simultaneously attracting a great many contempt displays - including physical violence towards myself and my equipment. This probably made me intellectually defensive - overly likely to bang on about things that people in this group would quite happily take as givens! That is stuff that probably could be either deleted entirely (for some audiences) or expanded to be an entire document (for others).
So what I'll do is describe what I hoped the existing paper would do, and then shut up and see how others would express their perceptions of the ideas. The ideas are out there in reality. All we can do is perceive and express them. They belong to no-one. There are as many ways of telling the story as there are people, and we could probably benefit from many Ghost Not V2.0 papers! As they get cooked, I'll just put them on the website!
People trapped in the Ghost Not are always very keen to "show" that they are "good people" because they "know" the correct "facts". They will never say "I don't know" (unless they are patronisingly informing others that there is no such thing as reality at all). Guilt, blame, and fear of contempt/threat displays always take priority over the truth. They are "very clever" in how they play games with weasel words, as opposed to more simple minded folk who just look at what is in front of them. It is unfortunate, since the only thing that matters is the truth, and yet their continual insistence that they are always correct makes learning quite impossible for them. Therefore it is not possible to engage in reasoned dialogue with them. This is doubly ironic when discussing the Ghost Not itself with them, since even though the effect is recognised as a conditioning that is implanted in most children in early childhood, they persist in seeing any suggestion that they are afflicted as a claim that they are morally inferior - "bad people" in their own "childish" language. They then insist that is it not they but the speaker that is Ghost Not afflicted, even if they haven't read the paper and don't know what it is. Sigh. I am therefore going to take this opportunity to do two jobs at once by citing examples from the progstone group to make my point, and simultaneously stating what I think these examples are about.
One clear mistake in the Ghost Not paper that has been revealed in several comments, is that it doesn't make it clear that it isn't so much a linear argument so much a simple concept that has profound consequences that can be expressed in many ways, and all of the ways are equivalent. This is especially interesting because the "subject headings" under which the equivalent expressions are made are very different. When we can make exactly the same statement in art criticism and formal logic, then we have unified art criticism and logic in a new way. And indeed, we see in the Ghost Not a reason (or several reasons if we wish to express it in many "subject headings") why the "subjects" are distinct in the first place! This is the reason why I'm so interested in the equivalence between the crossing of the boundary between inner and outer painting in "la conditione humane" and the crossing of the first distinction in the primary algebra. Both boundary crossings are caused by the same conditioned habit of narratising, and both lead to the same deep consequences. They are the same thing!
So what we really have is one simple habit that is instilled into children, and then a number of equivalent expressions of consequences. The habit I called "narratisation" - which Philip suggested after Julian Jeynes. What does "narratisation" entail? There are two simultaneous components to this action, which I shall call "categorisation" and "abstraction".
Small children can be seen being taught to categorise by infants' school teachers and children's TV programmes. It's the core action of packing. Teacher holds up a picture, and says, "What's this?". The children must categorise the depicted item. It stops being an object in its own right, and becomes an instance of a class of objects. Any particular feature of the particular object is instantly lost, and any property of the class that the child has not rote memorised is similarly lost. Sometimes classes have appropriate actions associated with them - methods. There is no such thing as multiple inheritence, so an object can only be an instance of one class. The children are taught that as soon as categorisation has been accomplished, any associated action should immeadiately fire. This is the root of the fatuous "arguments" that one hears where one person will claim that an object is (for example) a road vehicle, and another will say that this is not the case and that it is a track laying vehicle instead. There is assumed to be not any track laying road vehicle, since they are distinct categories.
Abstraction then involves taking the object out of its context. If the child says "It is a field", or "It is a field with a house in it", that will be called "wrong". Only if the child takes the object (house) that is in a context (field), and denies the existance of the context - "It is a house", will the child be "correct", and its peers will not be egged on by teacher to perform contempt/threat displays. The object is then moved into an "internal whiteboard" before any other mentation (however limited) proceeds. The object has itself been stripped of its richness, and with the movement onto the internal whiteboard, all of the relationships that the object has with other objects - via the "object request broker" of the context - are also lost. Only those relationships which are explicitly rote memorised and themselves represented on the internal whiteboard exist. All other possible relationships do not exist One consequence of this is the development of multiple choice exams, which sane children must always score badly on because all the choices are actually valid but only one is "correct".
An early enthusiast of Consciousness Studies was the mathematician Rene Descartes, who invented the idea of the "Cartesian Theatre". The idea of this is that there is a little theatre somehow inside people's heads, and that which was perceived on the outside was represented in the theatre. The person somehow then "perceived" what was happening in the theatre. It's a weak explaination of consciousness, because it just transfers the question to, "What watches the theatre?", but in fact there is more than a little of the old idea of "humunculi" - little people inside people - lurking here. What is interesting about the Cartesian Theatre in these terms is that it may be more than a historical model of the internal whiteboard. Perhaps Descartes in his idea expressed something which is usually left implicit - the idea that people usually perform this abstraction operation.
What is important about the internal whiteboard is that people are conditioned to see the internal whiteboard - and not the perceived reality - as "real". Therefore it must be complete. In order to maintain the delusion, they cannot admit that there is another reality to which the internal whiteboard must conform. Therefore unknowns in the outside reality must be filled in with pure fantasy in the inner, bogus reality. And of course, the person must learn to be unable to differentiate between elements of the internal reality that bear some relationship (however shallow) with the outside, and their own fantasies. The pressure to do this is maintained by asserting that rote memorising "knowledge" indicates moral and intellectual superiority, and not so doing indicates moral and intellectual inferiority. Thus people will always make up fantasies and deny that they have done so to the extent that they even forget that they have done so. The incessant tricks that the person has to play on themselves to cover up the discrepancies between the reality up their backsides and the reality that hits them in the face become a price that they assert are not paying to maintain their delusional state. Then they go into intellectual free fall. Their "knowledge" is already "perfect", the universe keeps saying otherwise, therefore the entire universe is beneath their contempt. Always, they - and not the rest of the universe - know what is happening. They can only see the moon when sunlight is shining on the side nearest them, so the other side must be in perpetual darkness. The sun and moon cannot possibly be doing things that they don't know about! Therefore they speak of the "dark side" of the moon and cannot accept that it is merely the "far side".
This is the root of people who don't feel the need to actually read documents before making their pompous and patronising - never conjectural - yet totally fallacious statements about them. Why they will start by demanding that others (who have read - may even have written - the documents) "admit" that their fantasies are the case, and then later insist that (for example) where they were previously railing against the injustice of Nazi style coercion of others what they were actually doing was making a valueless (tautological) observation that action is action. And then claim that they are doing this because they are a definitions pedant, and others should be more precise about their language! Indeed the very business of definitions pedantry involves attempting to define all words in terms of other words that people have found up their own backsides, rather than phenomena found in observable reality. Ultimately, sane people define words by pointing to what they mean in the glorious richness of external reality (which others can also see), rather than chop, chop, chopping the valueless shell words on their internal whiteboards.
Nobody's fooled but them of course, but that is the point. It is also the root of people who make pompous, unsubstantiated "objections" to what others say Utterance policing is an inevitable consequence of people who live in a fragile fantasy world that continually conflicts with reality. Because the fantasy must always be held superior, utterances that conflict with the fantasy must be responded to with contempt/threat displays that we know as "pomposity". The term "saying properly" is one I have heard on many occasions. The ridiculous consequences are always denied by the complainant, but they aren't intended to fool the people being addressed - only the speaker. For example, in this group we have people in Russia, the USA, the UK, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand, and yet one of the regularly posting dyadics has made pompous "objections" to criticism of "our education system". Apart from the meaninglessness of the word "our" in this context indicating its disconnection from reality, if the education systems were perfect, there would be no need for this group! There is an obsession with claiming that things are what they should be in terms of the person's fantasies, and never mind the facts. The justifications for governments the world over funding and encouraging the growth of the heroin trade are always based on such bogus reasoning.
Such a person always has the catch-all of asserting that there is no such thing as reality (other than what is up their own backsides), and that all knowledge (including for some reason knowledge of the structure of their own logic) is therefore impossible. Yet in the next breath they will assert that they have absolute knowledge that there is no such thing as "ESP" - even if not a single definition of what is meant by "ESP" has even been proposed, let alone adopted! Perhaps a blessing of the modern age is that while the denial, denials of denials and so on are unbeatable in traditional conversations, Internet conversations are recorded for posterity in archives, and the truth of statements such as the above can be ascertained.
The resultant wretch is what I have called "dyadic" - meaning living in a duel, split universe - as opposed to a "monadic" - living in one universe. Now we can express the terrible consequences of being dyadic in different detailed ways, and show that the expressions are all equivalent.
When I described the Ghost Not concept to an (American) artist, he wheezed with laughter and said, "Heck yes - we call it buck-eye. Buck-eyed people never draw what is there. You've got to teach them to see with their eyes and made a bug-eyed face.
In the paper, the examples of Van Gogh's "Wheatfield" shows how what artists do when perceiving and expressing the deep structure is made impossible when all particular properties of real objects and the relationships between them are deleted by narratisation.
The extraordinary way that people who are speaking from a position of ignorance feel entitled to patronisingly criticise people who do know what they are doing - as if they are educating rather than having an opportunity to be educated - is demonstrated in the example of Van Gogh's bedroom.
These examples show how much the problem is part of day to day human experience in M0 societies - how little people really see.
The "Starry Night" example brings us into another area - one that afflicts science in particular. Dyadic defence of the internal "reality" produces scientists who feel that it is their task to defend the orthodoxy of current "knowledge", and merely derive new effects from that "knowledge". This makes it impossible for dyadic scientists to discover new basic principles from observation. The current "knowledge" is always complete, and any suggestion that there might be other phenomena to observe is responded to by "proving" the perfection of the "knowledge" by merely categorising the observation.
This leads to some very bizarre attitudes. I once read a "debunking" of a Russian woman who was supposed to be able to levitate small objects without touching them. The debunkers asserted that the woman was not doing anything interesting, since she was concentrating electric charge in her fingertips leading to a 20,000 volt static potential difference between her fingers and the objects. Categorisation performed, perfection of existing categories proved, end of chat. My guess would be that the woman was a fraud, and the debunkers were just as fraudulent themselves. We know of marine animals that use powerful electric discharges for defence, but we've never seen a mammal do it. If one mammal could do this, others ought to be able to concentrate a couple of Kv at least, and we've not seen it. Of course this didn't worry the debunkers, since a physical effect worthy of investigation can only be perceived by them as a challenge to the completeness of their internal whiteboards, and the job consists of nothing more than rejecting the challenge by an act of categorisation. Whether any of the debunking was actually true didn't really matter. Their job was to "say properly", or else their colleauges might perform contempt/threat displays, and that would be terrible. Fear driven behaviours instilled by teachers continue to rule these people throughout their lives, and they provide their own reinforcement. If one "scientist" fails to perform a contempt/threat display, the others will perform contempt/threat displays at him!
We see this again and again in the insistence that phenomena do not occur, unless the speaker happens to know of a causal mechanism at that moment. It just isn't possible to assert to such "scientists" that a mysterious co-relation can be observed - one must have mechanism as well. James Lovelock has commented that no-one would listen to the Gaia theory until he had taken it far enough to demonstrate specific feedback mechanisms. Similarly, I knew I had to stay "out in the cold" until long after I had found the mappers and the packers - I needed mechanism as well if I was to stop the nonsenses I had seen in the workplace and elsewhere. In the case of Van Gogh's "Starry Night", dyadic scientists of the day would have asserted that the effect he had painted (with such wonderful precision that we can recognise what was happening just by looking at his picture) was not happening because the phenomenon of a temperature inversion was not yet included on their internal whiteboards.
Another example is the very interesting observations of maverick scientist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake reckons that there is more to the morphogenesis of living things than the execution of a program stored in DNA. He has some interesting examples, and calls the idea the "hypothesis of formative causation". He claims to detect a relationship between the developing shape of one example of a living thing, and all the other things of that kind currently alive, and alive in the past. He doesn't know what the mechanism is, and just uses the term "morphic resonance" as a conceptual bucket to refer to the mysterious communication. Many scientists get very confused about Dr. Sheldrake, and insist that formative causation does not occur, because Sheldrake does not propose mechanism. It is interesting that in the model of "3: Reciprocal Cosmology", formative causation is an allowable consequence barely worthy of comment!
The weak, self-enclosed version of science builds from the inside out, deriving effects from known causes. The strong, reality describing version of science starts with observed phenomena, and builds from the outside in, finding the mechanisms that make the phenomena occur. That is how new causes are discovered. Because the majority of scientists are dyadic, we have very few people making new discoveries. Despite their ritualised chants to the contary, most scientists perceive science as being done exactly as it was 1,000 years ago: "If it ain't in Aristotle, it ain't so!"
It's like a figure and ground inversion in a picture by M.C. Escher. The dyadic scientist concentrates on the fragile "figure" of known causal relationships. The monadic scientist concentrates on the robust "ground" of observable phenomena. In the act of abstraction, the dyadic scientist deletes all the richness of the context, and replaces it with a space of null properties that he has found within his own ignorance.
The value of the mathematical expression, which I devoted a lot of discussion to in the paper, is that it is elegant and abstracted, such that we can see that Ghost Not effects are not "emergent" in some (pixie dust) way from complex situations, but are the inevitable consequence of the narratisation habit. The Ghost Not perverts even our understanding of the logical OR operation. Because it does this, and then operates throughout the entire field of deductive logic, it produces a psychological "bug" that cannot be logically identified. All steps in the logic are correct and consistent, but the conclusion is wrong, because the bug was injected when each thing to be considered was dragged over a distinction and hence negated.
The mathematical model also shows how the Ghost Not always swaps inclusive and exclusive statements, such that "road" AND "track laying" must always become "road" OR "track laying".
Aspects of this expression of the Ghost Not have been studied before. The concept of the "included middle" is one attempt to break the problem, but doesn't go all the way. Alternative logic systems which allow a third state - "undefined" - have also gone some way. What the paper shows is that such systems need a fourth state as well - "not forbidden" - to work. The state "not forbidden" is related to the concept of the "included middle" in that it enacts the concern of Proudhon about tyrannical societies wherein "everything not forbidden is compulsory". The state "not forbidden" (or "possibly") does not make the conclusion compulsory, but does assert that it is allowable. Practical experience with the Tribus Kyoto turbines makes the point that this is no mere logical nicety.
I suspect that the Ghost Not concept together with the primary algebra, will allow us to come to a deep understanding of many situations where people's lives are more unhappy than they need be, by using them to find fallacies coded into our very languages.
Freudian "alienation" describes people cut off from their world, and then cut off from their own feelings as a result of this. It's the situation depicted in Magritte's "la conditione humane", except I reckon Magritte has expressed the Ghost Not in a very pure form, and hence has epistomological priority with respect to Freud.
When I wrote "2: The Ghost Not" I hadn't read Celia Green's "The Human Evasion". Had I done so, I might have made an attempt to make the two papers mesh, since Green does a superb job of describing the social consequences of the Ghost Not. Certainly the Ghost Not provides a description of people with their minds inside-out at the deepest level, such that they always engage in "testing behaviours" and similar appalling actions in their personal relationships.
Between "2: The Ghost Not", "The Human Evasion", and Laing's "Knots" and "The Politics of Experience" we have a complete, ground up, coverage of this logically based kind of human psychological dysfunction.
Magritte's inner painting is a barrier of alienation equivalent to that described by Freud. The objects in the inner painting have none of the context of the outer painting, where the bushes can have animals hiding behind them. The context is missing. Crossing Magritte's distinction does the same thing as crossing a line in an Escher picture in that black and white figures swap colours. In the graphical form of the primary arithmetic, placing an outer distinction around a form inverts black and white. The distinction in the primary arithmetic is the distinction of the inner painting. All is one.
I'm not the mathematician Philip is, but I have a friend who is an accomplished dressmaker. When she must work on a dress, she sometimes takes it off the dummy and turns it inside out. What was a smooth, elegant, continuous piece of fabric becomes a horrible shape. It usually ends up such that she can arrange it as a continuous curve, but no Earth creature is shaped like that! There are bits sticking out all over the place. So the Ghost Not takes a single, self-consistent universe, and by inverting a person's perceptions of it, converts it into a horrible shape, with isolated packets of knowledge that do not fit together. It converts the one harmonious truth into a vast array of "subjects" - exclusive vs. inclusive. When we find the error, we find that it can be expressed in many ways, all of which say exactly the same thing. Wow!
I go on a great deal about seeing like an artist in the paper. My problem was, how does one tell a person who is doing something that they don't recognise that they are doing, that what they are doing is stopping them seeing the deep structure, when they can't see the deep structure because of what they are doing?
I tried to solve the problem as best I could by reference to a known field, with a known skill, and concrete examples (paintings) that demonstrate the idea. If I hadn't felt the need to do this, the paper might have been a very different shape. Certainly it would have been simpler. I wouldn't have bothered with the initial distinction between artists, scientists and alchemists, for example. I wanted it because otherwise I imagined artists would say it contained science and therefore was not the case, and scientists would say it contained art, and therefore was not the case. Doing this brought it's own problems of course, for example there were contempt displays in Slashdot regarding my statement that scientists shun inductive reasoning - but I stand by that statement. In my experience most scientists do shun inductive reasoning, and if an effect cannot be described deductively from already known causal mechanisms, they simply assert that it does not occur. They are very confused about the difference between what they know and what exists. Every generation has some fool senior scientist who asserts that science is complete - there is nothing more to do - simply because his "knowledge" is equal to his "knowledge".
I don't know the right answer to this problem, except that it will be easier to solve with a known audience. But those were the design trade-offs that motivated me.
I think the concrete examples, climbing the ontological stack from the simplest to the most complex situations are important for demonstrating the reality of the effect. The "Intersect Problem" is my favourite, because the three ways of drawing a Venn diagram don't need words. (That said, the point about why stupid nature doesn't see the utility of our clever logic and insists on giving us fundamental NOR and NAND operations is rather cute, too!)
I'd be tempted to classify the allowable and novel, yet obvious results of applying "2: The Ghost Not" in "3: Reciprocal Cosmology" as an example also, but so far I'm nervous of doing so. Several correspondants have suffered mind-wipe (or been assasinated by the dreaded Bavarian Illuminati) when I asked not "Is it correct?", but "Is it allowable and novel?". Therefore I still don't know that it is allowable and novel, and can't cite it as an example. This is something that really gets up my nose. I suspect it must be an effect of the Ghost Not. The very idea that an idea might be classified by its finder as allowable and not necessarily correct must seem to be somehow obscene to Ghost Not afflicted minds! Or maybe it is correct, but the truth blows their minds :-(
Anyone with a Physics department near them, please ram "3: Reciprocal Cosmology" under their noses and observe what happens. But keep your head down in case it is the Bavarian Illuminati after all :-)
I've also been promising myself to extend the examples in a positive direction by citing what I reckon are four examples of people who were able to think "outside in", and made the characteristic profound and yet screamingly obvious, simple breakthroughs that signify the Ghost Not at work. These are:
1) Kirchoff's Law in electronics
2) The Monkey and the Coconuts puzzle
3) Penrose's global methods for computing black hole entropy
4) Lovelock's Gaia concept
I might also add:
5) The "KILL SYSTEM" command at the MIT AI Lab
But don't feel obliged to wait for me to get a round tuit!
The universe is logically asymettrical. This is because any anti-universe in any external context whose existance "balances" the existance of the universe is by definition outside this universe, and so can have no effect on anything going on within it. From the inside, the universe exists and that is all there is to it. I've never seen this simple point made anywhere before, and this seems to be because most people think they live in a logically symettrical universe. There is symettry to be found in the universe, but the symettry emerges from the underlying asymettry. This is demonstrated in the way the logical OR - the simplest binary logical operator - produces aymettrical otputs given symettrical inputs. The logical asymettry of the universe is important in the mathematical expression, because it means that inverting the truth value of an entire expression really does produce a different result while maintaining the internal consistency of the reasoning.
The whole universe is a single, logically asymettrical object which simply exists. Within it we have evolutionary processes. In these, differing life-forms collaborate, each motivated by their own self interest, to create rich ecosystems. Dyadics split the single, real universe into a pair - the denied real universe and the acknowledged universe up their backsides. Once they have done this, they end up with a deep symettry which makes things look very different. Logical AND - the true mode of logical juxtaposition - is converted into logical OR. Instead of bee AND flower they must see bee OR flower. The monadic lives in a universe of collaborative co-evolution, the dyadic lives in universe of compeditive evolution. From the deep ontological root of the original dyadic split, the dyadic must see mutual opposition everywhere. (At this point dyadics will begin to perform contempt displays, claiming that they are competing with others for the cool R&D job or something. This, they claim, is one example of competition, and this proves that in the universe of OR, there is not any co-operation anywhere. Sad, isn't it? They can't get their split little brains round the idea that competition AND colloboration can co-exist in a system, and what matters is the dominant trait. If competition was really the dominant trait in evolution, rich ecosystems would degrade into very simple ones consisting of a single life-form, which would then drop dead of starvation. Needless to say, dyadics deliberately arrange their own business affairs in exactly this way, and then claim that it is an inevitable of nature.)
Another example might be the way a statement that Mother Theresa did very little good will be met by the (false) claim that this is equal to saying she did bad, and that this is not the case, and so the initial statement is false. (In fact, apart from the logical bogosity, I reckon a good case can be made for the idea that Mother Theresa did harm as well as good, although that is not a "saying properly". I mean, the Catholics are really expediting the paperwork to beatify her right now, but they don't seem to be expediting anything to deal with the situation of thepoorofcalcutta. Moreover, converting thepoorofcalcutta to mothertheresaspoorofcalcutta seemed to me to simply establish the misery of the teeming millions of that city as a fact of life throughout the wealthy world. And reality check - at its busiest, her hostel never held more than 30 people! People didn't watch films about mothertheresaspoorofcalcutta to get educated about macroeconomical dysfunction - they watched the spectacle that Mother Theresa made of herself, thought how disgusting a way to live it was, shuddered and uttered the falsehood that they thought it a good idea!) From here we get to the idea that being anti-selfish isn't the same thing as being altruistic, and anti-altruism isn't the same thing as selfishness. This is because I do not sit within my system boundary, and you sit within yours, and both system boundaries sit in a null space that doesn't connect us. We are both animals living in the same environment. Similarly, most people who claim that they are rational are in fact anti-spiritual (which isn't the same thing) and most people who claim to be spiritual are in fact anti-rational. Anti-spiritualism and anti-rationalism are OR mutually opposed, spirituality and rationality are AND the same thing. Monadics define themselves positively in terms of what they are, dyadics define themselves negatively in terms of what they are not. Figure and ground. Take a monadic, stick a distinction round him, and you have a negated dyadic. Every expression of the Ghost Not concept is equivalent to every other expression. The isomorphisms are so deep they kick in before we are into the domain of applicability of words. I really think this concept is very wonderful. Burble burble :-)
The dyadic obsession with the idea that everything must always and in everything be opposed by another anti-thing is the root of their obsession with "balance" - the need for every "saying properly" to contain its own denial. Dyadic "balance" makes positive statements impossible, conclusions impossible, and provides fertile ground for further "saying properlys" - lie systems - to be constructed.
Something that isn't expressed at all well in the paper is perhaps the most important aspect of the co-concealing of dopamine self-addiction and the Ghost Not. People addicted to their own dopamine over-secretion have the feedback loops in the brain squelched. This prevents them seeing the deep structure. People conditioned to narratise delete all isomorphisms from their awareness by enforcing a null context without relationships. Therefore people afflicted with both can neither see nor reason about deep structure.
Freedom from dopamine self-addiction can come from being born into a non-M0 society, suitable training (for example Programmers' Stone or mystical schools), a defective dopamine receptor in the brain, or overactive dopamine cleanup mechanisms? What can produce freedom from the Ghost Not? Since it works on deductive reasoning, reading a Ghost Not paper should help, but its hard to detrain yourself out of something you don't know you're doing. Mastering an art (for example poetry or programming) where seeing reality will consistently lead to the Quality Plateau should be best. But where do "naturally" Ghost Not free people in M0 societies come from? They certainly exist, and those who I've spoken to seem to fall into two broad groups. Both are naturally immune to dopamine self-addiction. One lot were overlooked as kids (never got noticed and never got taught to narratise). The other lot had a very hard time (there's no benefit in denying reality when you're having the shit kicked out of you). The overlooked kids seem to be vulnerable to a particularly nasty horror in later life - I've seen 3 cases. They don't realise there's anything wrong with the world, until one day they do realise. They then form an incorrect theory, that seems to involve some sort of active "evil principle" at work. The results are quite horrible, since this is then a person with their full human faculties, no inhibitions, and a quite wrong, but nevertheless good, theory of the world. Only the fact that they quickly tear themselves apart psychologically limits the damage they can do.
Many natural immunes I've talked to are so profoundly afflicted with the Ghost Not (and very nasty about it), and dopamine self-addicts are so uninventive, that I came up with the idea that the natural immunes invented narratising to resolve the fear of the Bogeyman, and then taught it to the self-addicts. But I'm by no means convinced that this is correct. The example of a teacher simultaneously ritualising children and teaching them to pack, does suggest that "narratisation" may just be a natural consequence of living in a mentation free, action oriented, stimulus and robotic response kind of a society.
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