Part 09: The Seldon Dialogues, Excerpts -- Human “Self-Consciousness” as an advanced species of ‘Self-Reflexivity’/‘Self-Refluxivity’.

Part 09:  The Seldon Dialogues, Excerpts --

human “self-consciousness” as an advanced «species» of ‘self-reflexivity’/‘self-refluxivity’.

Dear Reader,

FYI --

It is my pleasure, and my honor, as an Officer of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.] Office of Public Liaison, to share with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, key excerpts from the internal writings, and sayings, of our co-founder, Karl Seldon.

The ninth such release in this new series is pasted in below [Some E.D. standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s discourse].

ENJOY!

Regards,

Miguel Detonacciones,

Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.],

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

“... Many of our readers wonder how, on the one hand, we “see only a single science, the science of history” [Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.], and, on the other hand, include, in natural history, also human history -- i.e., include ‘psych[e]ohistory’, the [later] parts of natural history, involving «arithmoi» of «monads» that contain psyches; «monads» that exhibit “self-consciousness”.”

“Some also wonder what is all this talk about ‘‘‘self-reflexive functions’’’, and ‘self-refluxive functions’.”

“Well, it all has to do with the fact that human, ‘‘‘proprioceptive’’’, ‘self-perceiving’, ‘self-biased totality-perceiving’, ‘self-cognizing’ consciousness is an advanced special case, and kind, of high-frequency, continual ‘‘‘self-reflexivity’’’ and ‘‘‘self-refluxivity’’’.”

“As Bertrand Russell would have it, in terms of the logical and set-theoretical paradoxes that, for him, were to be suppressed [but which we see as rudimentary formal models immanently-critically pointing to ‘logical nonlinearity’, i.e., to dialectic, and to human self-consciousness]:  “In all of the above contradictions (which are merely selections from an indefinite number) there is a common characteristic, which we may describe as self-reference or reflexiveness.” [Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Prinicpia Mathematica, vol. I, Merchant Books, LaVergne, TN, 2010, p. 64.].”

“Elsewhere, Russell noted that the “propositional function” expressing, in the Principia Mathematica formalism, the famous “Russell Paradox”, which crashed Frege’s system -- the proposition about the set of all sets which are not members of themselves [Is it or isn’t it a member of itself?] -- is of a peculiar, “quadratic”, kind, instead of being of the ordinary, first degree, or “linear”, kind.”

“That is, this “paradoxical”, or “contradictory” propositional function is of second degree -- it is a nonlinear logical function. ...”