Dear Reader,
I thought you might enjoy the following excerpt from Part II. of F.E.D. Vignette #4, "The Goedelian Dialectic of the Standard Arithmetics."
[p. II-10] --
" ‘‘‘Person-ification’’’ and ‘Im-Person-ation’. The physical terms, the tangible ideographical symbols, that the core ‘meta-model’ of this essay sums, are not, in any sense, in themselves, subjects, or agents -- centers that initiate action -- in their own right. How could they be? They are but, e.g., small, solidified pools of toner, adhering to paper.
Of course, to those who share in the ‘‘‘inter-subjectivity’’’ for which these desiccated droplets make meaningful marks, those marks evoke, whenever those ‘sharers’ read them, specific meanings, particular ideas. But these ideas live, so far as we know, only inside individual human minds.
Ideas are vivified only by living human beings, forming them, holding them in mind.
Ideas may have some minimal subconscious, unintentional ‘subject-hood’, some agency, in a human mind, once willfully formed in that mind by action of its ‘mind-er’. But almost all of any ‘agent-hood’, or ‘subject-ness’, that ideas possess, is consciously lent to them by each human subject who forms them in mind, in response to, e.g., human speech, or to some textual symbol(s).
Their ‘subject-ivity’ is borrowed from the real subjects.
Their ‘agent-ness’ persists only when, and only while, they are being ‘‘‘person-ified’’’, or ‘[im-]person-ated’ by a real person.
To believe otherwise is fetishism, that signal symptom of ideology, of the failure of science -- like the “Fetishism of Commodities”, the fetishism of Money, the fetishism of Capital, the fetishism of [exchange-]Value in general -- that Marx so devastatingly diagnosed in the ideology-compromised science of classical capitalist political economy.
To believe otherwise would be a ‘fetishism of Ideas’, akin to the ideology to which Plato’s Socrates -- and to which at least the early Plato as well, prior to The Parmenides -- succumbed: not to mention so many others since!
These physical symbols -- these ‘empapered’ patterns of ink, staining the page -- are dead; a deceased residue of past, ended thought-life, that once guided the hand that wrote down their ‘conventioned’ representatives as marks on ...papyrus..., parchment..., paper, as human mind-remains, ‘psychoartefacts’.
And dead they remain -- unless a living person enlivens them, by comprehendingly reading them, and by [re-]cognizing them”: ‘‘‘impersonating’’’ them -- infusing them with living personality, with living human subjectivity, with active agency -- by thinking them, and therefore also by ‘‘‘incarnating’’’ them in that person’s seemingly flesh-less mind; by ‘‘‘mentally embodying’’’ them, in that person’s seemingly ‘body-less’, ‘dis-embodied’’’ mind -- as acting, interacting, [self-]critiquing and [self-]changing human thoughts, residing, for a time, within the space of self-aware consciousness of a breathing being.
The conclusion with which we are left is that what these symbols really represent are human acts, human cognitive acts -- “Mental Operations” [cf. Boole]. It is people -- human persons -- who animate the Cs and the Ms of Marx’s C<--->M<--->C's and M<--->C<--->M's, who stand behind, and act behind, who ‘enmask’ themselves with -- who “personify” [Marx] -- these “social relations of production”.
Likewise, it is people who animate that which the arithmetical-system category-operators -- N#, a#, m#, f#, etc., denote.
Like each fictional character of a famous novel, made into a movie, the ‘idea-eventities’ which these ‘connotograms’ and ‘categorograms’ conjure in the consciousnesses of their ‘cognizors’ can live and act only if impersonated by a human person, by a human subject, by a human actor.
Objects, including even pre-human/extra-human living ‘[ev]entities’, other biological beings, do not ‘self-awarely’ enact dialectical critique.
To our knowledge, only humans can enact true critique.
Therefore, the dialectical-ideographical symbols employed in this essay, the operator symbols for immanent critique that constitute our main ‘meta-model’, must denote intuitive operations, operations that can only be carried out by human subjects: they denote the operations of human minds.
What these symbols symbolize are [trans-Boolean] human mental movements, ‘‘‘dialogical’’’ and ‘self-dialogical’ mental activities of human beings.
In the last analysis, the formulae of our ‘meta-model’ evoke a description of, or a guide to, one’s own thought process, one’s own self-dialogue, in process of considering the meaning/definition of number in modern/- contemporary Standard Arithmetic(s).
These formulae are ‘mind-guides’, ‘replayable’ condensed recordings of, e.g., past, polished, proven-to-be-advantageous ‘thought-trains’/ ‘thought-sequences’ / thought-progressions -- ‘‘‘programs’’’/ ‘‘‘software’’’, not for a digital computer, but for a human mind; ‘thought-recipes’ & ‘thought-guides’; scores for symphonies of thought.
Our written-out recordings are a means for presently following the past thoughts of others, or of ourselves, thoughts that left behind a ‘‘‘fossil record’’’ in tangible, written form, a form that can be deciphered/‘re-minded’ to ‘re-navigate’ present readers’ thoughts, anew, down mind-roads of old, on trails blazed before, by others.
If you are “following” the categorial progression/systems-progression modeled herein -- conjuring up for yourself, in your own mind, ‘similants’ of the connotations and intuitions of the axioms-systems that its terms interpret -- then its symbols, its formulae, its equations, are, thereby, now about you.
¡These symbols are now describing and guiding what is going on in your own mind while you read them, and while you think them!
They are now describing, as well as steering, your own thoughts.
The symbols of this progression of symbols are symbolizing the progression of your own thoughts now. All of this algebra is describing your own mental operations now. All of this ideography is ‘‘‘graphing’’’ the flow of what have become your ideas now.
The formulae that follow -- the human minds behind them -- call out to you to embody them in your own thoughts, to lend them your mind, and to let them orchestrate the flow of your consciousness, just for the time that your beholding of their presentation takes you.
These formulae call you to become them, to “simulate” them in your own inner seeing, to ‘‘‘personify’’’ them, to ‘im-person-ate’ and to ‘im-person-ize’ their intensions and connotations, their meanings, until they have made themselves known to and in you, via the systematic journey of comprehension of modern, standard arithmetic and number along which they are now ready to conduct you."
Regards,
Miguel
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