Your Honor, this Complaint seeks declaratory and equitable relief on the ground that the Edenic Covenant was structurally defective ab initio—lacking informed assent, lawful consideration, proportionate and intelligible penalties, and enforceable scope—and was therefore incapable of valid or equitable enforcement against the original parties or innocent successors.
IN THE COURT OF EQUITABLE REVIEW OF THE COMMON LAW OF REASON
MANKIND, by and through its first representatives, ADAM and EVE,
Plaintiffs,
v.
THE COVENANT OF EDEN, by and through its sole author and imposer,
Defendant.
…
**COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY RELIEF, EQUITABLE RESCISSION, AND STRUCTURAL INVALIDATION OF COVENANT**
NOW COMES the Plaintiffs, Mankind, by and through its first representatives, Adam and Eve, and for their Complaint against the Defendant, the Covenant of Eden, allege and state as follows:
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
This action arises from the formation, imposition, and enforcement of an a priori covenant governing the conditions of human existence. Plaintiffs seek declaratory and equitable relief from a covenant alleged to be structurally unsound, epistemically recursive, and defective at inception, and further alleged to have been imposed without consideration, without meaningful consent, and under materially incomplete disclosure of its operative penalties.
Plaintiffs neither affirm nor deny the authority of the covenant’s author per se, but instead place at issue the legal and moral soundness of the covenant’s architecture as imposed upon innocent agents incapable of informed assent. Nothing herein shall be construed as a surrender, waiver, or abandonment of any claim of possession, stewardship, or ownership of the planet Earth, nor as recognition that the Defendant, by virtue of the covenant or any prior interaction thereunder, holds lawful title to, or exclusive dominion over, the Earth. This Complaint addresses defects inherent in the covenant itself, independent of any subsequent inducement, temptation, or third-party interference.
This is very well-done and highly amusing. I dare say the Buddha, who was the world’s first well-known and still-known-about skeptic, would approve of this. ABN
I just learned the term “process philosophy” and am happy to say that FIML is “a psycholinguistic process philosophy combing both theory and action to both understand and improve what we are.”
Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative.
Another fundamental point is FIML is super objective within an area of cognition, perception, and belief that has traditionally been inaccessible to objective assessment and measurement.
“Monks, a friend endowed with seven qualities is worth associating with. Which seven? He gives what is hard to give. He does what is hard to do. He endures what is hard to endure. He reveals his secrets to you. He keeps your secrets. When misfortunes strike, he doesn’t abandon you. When you’re down & out, he doesn’t look down on you. A friend endowed with these seven qualities is worth associating with.”
[Below is a very thoughtful comment on an ABN post: Psychology and mental illness. In his comment the writer, John Range, provides a first-rate psychological, historical and philosophical context for understanding FIML practice. I hope readers will take the time to consider Range’s insights. The article he refers to is The Myth of Mental Illness by Paul Lutus. ABN]
Dear ABN
I applaud your efforts to reintroduce the study of the “psyche”into psychology.
FIML’s methodology rests on pure experience, the only point allowing for a scientific resolution of the deep seated and serious problems raised by Paul in his article.
FIML tacitly recognizes the genuinely empirical nature of data “immediately” given in the 1st person perspective of our “inner” or mental world of experience as well as, data “mediately” given in the 3rd person perspective of our “outer” or physical world of experience. It does this without reducing one to the other or invalidating either, in any way. Psychology has heretofore lacked such an explicitly stated methodology integrating without distortion these two disparate domains. The methodology of FILM has the added and by no means trivial advantage of being clear simple and intuitive.
Paul correctly notes and laments that psychology in failing to find a way to ground its theories based on 1st person experience in an unbiased and impartial manner has in many ways descended from its lofty status as healer and guardian of an unbiased and impartial standard of sanity to the dubious level of emotional masseurs and/or agents of state totalitarianism.
Whereas Paul fails to consider the mental world of experience as anything other than a myth derived from the ghost-in-the-machine epistemology, FIML, is rooted in an astute recognition the subject/object dichotomy does not itself inhere within the structure or function of pure experience, but is rather a set of external relations added to it.
“What I want to do in this post is point out the ways that FIML practice does not have the sorts of problems Lutus describes. FIML is not (yet) supported by large studies because not ]enough people have done it and we don’t have the money to conduct the studies. Nonetheless, FIML practice is based on real data agreed upon by both partners and in this respect is evidence-based, though the kind of evidence used in FIML practice is not the same kind that is used in large studies of many people.” [Psychology and Mental Illness]
The recognition of “immediate” 1st person experience as real data, that is to say as real empirical data runs directly counter to the (hidden in plain sight) metaphysical bias underpinning Western civilization since Descartes and Newton.
Ironically, even the connotations of the terms “subject” or “subjective” when taken in contradistinction to the terms “object” or “objective” imply our “immediate” and directly perceived 1st person experience is somehow ontologically inferior to our 3rd person experience which is merely indirectly perceived and “mediated” through the senses.
This provably false bias, is virtually ubiquitous in modern culture, as it operates at the pre-conscious conditioned level in which people believe without knowing they believe. For example, the term “objective” can denote (1) “Unbiased and Impartial” and/or (2) “the 3rd person perspective”. These two distinct meanings, of the term “objective”, are chronically (and all too often disingenuously) conflated.
By including the qualifying phrases “in this respect” in the above quote and “in that” in the following sentence “It works with real data that is objective in that both partners must agree on it.” [ibid] you sagaciously, albeit tacitly, recognize and avoid this conundrum.
Nevertheless, the conflation of these two (in matter of actual fact mutually exclusive meanings) lies at the root of Paul Lutus’s suggestion that in order for psychology to be a legitimate science it must emulate Newtonian physics by simply abandoning its quest to incorporate our lebenswelt or “lived-world-of-experience” basing itself solely on “physical” data. From the perspective of non-linear consciousness studies, this is hardly a step forward. Rather epistemologically speaking it is a step back into the dark ages.
I cannot fail to note in this regard, that I said emulate Newtonian physics because as it turns out, Paul’s “suggestion” runs counter to developments in Quantum Mechanics.
For more than half a century, attempts to resolve what is known as the “measurement problem”, (“In QM you know exactly what is happening until you look”), have forced a grudging yet growing consensus and recognition from practicing theoretical quantum physicists, that even, and especially in, QM’s deep foundational mathematical structure; the 1st person perspective of the observer cannot be separated or excluded from the 3rd person perspective of the system being observed!
The empirical data of quantum physics together with its irreducibly descriptive mathematics has, taken by itself, literally forced theoretical quantum physicists to recognize the stubborn fact that within the formal structure of quantum theory, the observers “immediate” 1st person perspective cannot be discarded, disregarded or stripped from the mathematical description of experimental results. [CF Theoretical quantum physicist Henry Stapp’s oeuvre for example]
Paul’s suggestion is not new. Psychology has for over a century been trying to model itself after Newtonian physics to the point that in its early development, the study of the psyche (our “immediate” 1st person experience) was banished by behaviorists from psychology (psychology is, of course, etymologically rooted in Greek meaning “the study of the psyche”).
This flawed approach brought us the various flavors of behaviorism and (along with the difficulties so strongly pointed out by Paul) contributed to the tarnishing of the star of the various psychological disciplines which partially grounded their approach in the 1st person perspective such as Karen Horney’s psychoanalysis, Carl Jungs analytic psychology, Victor Frankl’s logotherapy, Fritz Pearl’s gestalt therapy, etc., etc.
Their tarnishing pf the 1st person perspective in psychology was also assisted, by at least two other not entirely unrelated historical factors. (1) Data given within the 1st person perspective of our “inner” or mental world of experience remained stubbornly incommensurable with the best data given within the 3rd person perspective of our “outer” or physical world of experience. Both in theory and in practice the non-local nature of mind proved exasperatingly difficult to integrate with the local nature of the brain. (2) In psychology’s parent discipline, “philosophy” Husserl and Brentano were having finding it equally difficult if not impossible to find their coveted philosophical “Archimedean Point”. Ultimately they failed to discover an unbiased and impartial ground for phenomenological analysis. Here too, incommensurability reared its head.
FIML deftly avoids all these pitfalls. By simply focusing on the here and now interaction of two individual mindstreams, the justification of FIML’s methodology rests securely on one self evident, empirically given fact concerning the nature of being in time: we directly perceive our mindstreams as being none other than this very coveted integration of our inner and outer worlds of experience.
FIML also is quite compatible with William James’ “Radical Empiricism” as put forth in his seminal paper “Does Consciousness Exist?”
As an aside, for my part, after meditating on these relations and in the interests of crystal clear communication, I now attempt to avoid using the word “objective” when I mean “impartial and unbiased,” even though it is grammatically correct.
Otherwise, since subjective data may be taken in this sense to be “objective” data, one must insure that adequate pains are taken in order to avoid rather convoluted and/or highly ambiguous sentences.
FIML is a dynamic fact gatherer, a dynamic gatherer of facts between two people.
As these facts increase into the dozens, then hundreds, partners will see in themselves and each other a very different picture of who they are, a unique mosaic of their actual psychologies as they actually function in real-time, real-world situations.
This gathering of many idiosyncratic facts, this creation of a mosaic of psychologically unique communicative facts, reshapes the mind, its self-awareness and its understanding of what mind and consciousness truly are.
FIML is a species of subjective science.
It works with objectively agreed upon micro communication data.
The advantages of working with micro-data are three:
1) micro-data are easy to identify, remember and agree upon with little ambiguity or confusion
2) micro-data once discovered are emotionally and psychologically easy to accept, to admit
3) micro-data are objective in that both partners agree on what they are
Acquiring a mosaic of micro-data facilitates beneficial extrapolation into meso and macro levels of the mind.1
And this allows for a profound reshaping of both partners’ minds and psychologies.
This dynamic fact-gathering and enhanced understanding of the mind forestalls solipsistic error and also the error of clinging to group norms.
For Buddhists2 and others who practice mindfulness, FIML can be understood as partnered mindfulness. ABN
For Buddhists, a FIML query arises in the second skandha, deepens in the third skandha and is initiated verbally in the fourth skandha, thus altering the fifth skandha or preventing its habitual recurrence. See The Five Skandhas for more. ↩︎
FOR BUDDHISTS: I hope readers of this site who are members of a Buddhist Sangha or close to one will encourage their Sangha to learn and practice FIML mindfulness.
FIML would work especially well within a monastic community. It would greatly enhance their mindfulness and raise their common awareness to new heights of clarity and harmoniousness.
Lay Buddhists who see each other often and already communicate well would also benefit greatly from FIML practice, both as a group and as individuals. ABN
Traditional human operating systems include a standardized language, standardized semiotics, and a “personality,” which is generally understood to be a measure of how the individual has adapted to the standardized language and semiotics of their time-period.
Standardized in this context means that the language the individual uses is some version of a recognizable dialect, while their semiotics is some version of a recognizable subculture, which may include such elements as clothing styles, beliefs, goals, expectations, education, mannerisms, and so on.
When we speak of a person’s psychology, we usually mean their emotional make-up, their habitual thought processes, their fears or talents, the sum total of their experiences, etc. In this context, a person’s semiotics can be understood to be the signs, symbols, and underlying meanings they see, feel, believe, and respond to. Semiotics, as we are using the term, might also be understood to indicate the distinctive features of a subculture.
For example, the musical semiotics of someone who likes jazz and does not like country will be different from someone who likes country and not jazz. This difference may say something about these two people’s psychologies but in many cases it is much simpler and clearer to just talk about the differences between their semiotics. Similarly, their different tastes in music may say something about the subcultures they belong to, but again it is often much more useful to isolate these differences as different semiotics.
Most people are using a traditional human operating system (THOS). A THOS is defined in the first paragraph above. It is characterized by being largely static and roughly agreed upon by many people.
Personality today is generally understood to be something that is sort of defined or indicated by the Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. But how do you measure that? Well, you use tests that explore the standardized language and semiotics that is deemed “appropriate” to the culture to which the testee belongs.
If the testee is not fitting into the standard mold (the standard semiotics), the tester will probably conclude that the testee is either not agreeable, open, conscientious, or extroverted. If the testee is seriously bothered by the standard semiotics for which he or she is being tested, they may also be marked as “neurotic” by the test-giver.
How would you do on a Big Five personality test given in North Korea by North Korean psychologists?
The problem with standardization of “personality” metrics and/or semiotics is standards only help us delineate ourselves in some ways; they cannot be expected to truly define us.
To define yourself, to know yourself, you need an independent operating system (IOS). Obviously, if your IOS gets too far from reasonable human norms (decent ethics, being rational, respecting evidence, etc.), you will lose the good things that humans have figured out over the centuries.
So how do you get an IOS but remain able to draw on all the good stuff of human history and the culture(s) you know best?
You have to change how you use and perceive language and semiotics. You have to find a way to free yourself from being a standardized semiotic between your ears.
If you read the Big Five personality traits and start measuring yourself according to them, what is the basis for your measurement? What does openness mean to you? Gay sex on a roller coaster? Being open-minded about an essay like this one? If you feel sensitive and nervous in North Korea (neurotic as defined by the Big Five) is that good or bad?
What if the society you live in makes you feel nervous and sensitive because you know it can be violent, greedy, hypocritical, and ignorant? Would you feel secure and confident (the opposite of neurotic) if you were in an office where you knew white collar crime (Libor, say) was being done daily? Would you be open to blowing the whistle and risking ostracism or even jail time?
When language, semiotics, and personality are all defined in more or less standard ways and you think you need to go along with that, you can say good-bye to what the Buddha called the thusness or suchness of your being. Buddhism is all about discovering/uncovering the “ultimate reality” of the “real nature” that inheres within us.
One problem with Buddhism, though, is it has become standardized. If you are nice, trusting, and sweet to everyone you meet, you will have your head handed to you in a matter of days in most US cities. We simply cannot expect to model behavior today according to an ancient monastic ideal that we very probably cannot even understand anymore.
The best way to get an IOS, and I believe practice Buddhism in today’s world, is do FIML because FIML practice allows you and your partner to use all the good stuff from human history to develop your own way of talking to each other and understanding each other. A FIML generated IOS frees partners’ semiotics from extrinsic definitions and this allows both of them to comprehend themselves and each other in unique ways that account for their idiosyncrasies—the suchness and thusness of both of them, taken together and independently.
If an individual pursues thusness alone, they will form many wrong ideas because it is impossible for an individual to check their own work. When FIML partners work together and remain mindful of the good things in human history, they are able to check their work and discover the suchness that underlies them.
As mentioned in other posts, FIML does not tell you what to think or believe. Rather, it provides a method to help you and your partner think for yourselves. FIML will change your THOS to an IOS.
If FIML partners are guided by fundamental Buddhist ideas, they will progress more quickly and be less likely to take wrong turns. Understanding the emptiness of standardized semiotics will make it easier for partners to see how cultural norms can interfere with a deep comprehension of life. Keeping basic Buddhist ethics in mind at all times will help partners avoid moral excess or thoughtlessness. Contemplation of dependent origination will give partners a ready guide to understanding the uniqueness of every communicative event. Buddhist teachings on clinging or attachment, especially when understood as clinging to wrong ideas or wrong semiotics, will greatly help partners discard mistaken beliefs and views that may have been influencing them for decades. The Buddha’s teaching on impermanence will make it easier to see through the long history of THOS and why we need new ways to speak, listen, and think today.
Psychological, cognitive, emotional, or communicative problems cannot be fundamentally corrected by using general analyses or generalized procedures. You can teach someone to think and see differently, even to behave differently, by such procedures, but you cannot bring about deep change by using them. The reason this is so is change through generalizations does little more than substitute one external semiosis for another. The person seeking change will not experience deep change because all they are essentially doing is importing a different explanation of their “condition” into their life.
This happens with Buddhists who remain attached to surface meanings of the Dharma as well as to people seeking mainstream help for emotional problems. Any change will feel good for a while in most cases, but after some time stasis and a recurrence of the original problem, or something similar to it, will occur. You cannot become enlightened by importing someone else’s ideas. You cannot achieve deep transformation by replacing one inculcated semiosis with another. You cannot find your authentic “self” by using the static ideas of others.
The way around this problem is to use a technique that is at its core entirely dynamic. Buddhist mindfulness, which stresses attentiveness in and to the moment, is a dynamic technique. The problem with this technique in the modern world is it is not well-suited to the cacophony of signs and symbols that surround us almost all the time. Mindfulness too often entails being mindful of a cultural semiosis that is itself a tautology, a trap that does not contain within itself an obvious exit.
Mindfulness coupled with FIML practice overcomes this problem because the interactive dynamism of FIML gives partners a tool that strengthens mindfulness while at the same time affording them the opportunity to observe in the moment how their habitual semiosis operates, and why it operates that way. FIML gives partners the means to create a rational leverage-point that they can both share and use to grapple with neurotic issues that have always eluded generalized treatments.
FIML does not tell partners how to be or what to think. It describes nothing more than a technique that gives partners access to their deep “operating systems.” If you hack your “operating system” with FIML practice, you will find that you are able to eliminate neuroses (kleshas in Buddhist terms) and replace them with a semiosis (subculture) of your and your partner’s own choosing. To do FIML, partners must have a deep ethical, emotional, and intellectual commitment to each other, but it is important to recognize that these are not static or generalized ideas. They are dynamic principles upon which the transformational behaviors of FIML are built.
FIML is the quintessence of interpersonal social behavior. FIML is the quintessence of interpersonal cooperation. As such, it transforms what we call “personality” by altering the basis of experience.
If social behavior is understood quantitatively, then “more social” means more social contacts.
If social behavior is understood qualitatively, then “more social” becomes “better social”; i.e. more honest, true, profound, fulfilling.
It is not possible to have high-quality interpersonal interactions without a precise way to manage and correct errors in communication as they occur.
Personality is based on interpersonal experiences. Change the experiences and you change the personality.
Improve the experience and you improve everything.
…Ramsey’s idea was that a given belief is to be understood in terms of its causes and effects, the ways in which it’s formed and the role it plays in behaviour, in conjunction with other beliefs, desires and mental states. This idea, now called functionalism in the philosophy of mind, is considered by many the most promising way to make sense of mental representation.
A philosophy of psychology must contend with similar problems as a philosophy of mind, and vice versa.
So how to understand any given belief pertaining to any psychological matter having to do with self or other?
In addition to what is stated in the quotation above, psychological “belief” (or, better, analysis) must contend with real-world, real-time events as they happen.
Understanding must be based on real-world, real-time events. That is precisely what FIML does or allows us to do. That is what FIML is for.
FIML can be understood as a philosophical process or method of thinking that is constant, continuous, and never stops. FIML situates the mind’s understanding of itself and other in an ongoing psycho-philosophical inquiry that is stabilized by being an agreed upon method that partners can use and refer to whenever they want.
In this, FIML reflects, embraces, and participates in the conscious development or evolution of thought, mind, spirit, belief, awareness. FIML is actively in the world while also providing a psychologically stable place from which to observe the world, self, and other.
In many respects for humans, there is nothing more basic or important than consciousness. Since FIML consciously works with consciousness as it shifts and adapts to another consciousness in real-time, it is arguably the most basic and objective thing there is.
Language cannot be divorced from communication with other. Theories of language and mind must account for this. Since communication with other is an activity (that always affects each), a philosophy of mind/belief/language must be based on an active method of ongoing communication analysis.
Just as you cannot learn to swim without getting into the water, you cannot have a philosophy of mind that does not actively analyze and influence communication in real-time.
This post is concerned with the micro, meso, and macro levels of existential semiotics and communicative thought, and how those levels affect human understanding.
Micro levels are very small units of thought or communication. These can be words, phrases, gestures, etc. and the “psychological morphemes” that accompany them. A psychological morpheme is the smallest unit of an emotional or psychological response.
Meso levels lie between macro and micro levels. Longer discourse, a sense that people have personalities or egos, and the basic ideas of any culture appear at this level.
Macro levels are the larger abstract levels that sort of stand above the other two levels. Macro levels might include religious or scientific beliefs, political ideologies, long-term personal goals or strategies.
Most people most of the time socialize on the meso level, often with support from shared macro level beliefs or aims. For most people, the broad outlines of most emotions are defined and conditioned at the meso level. This is the level where the nuts and bolts of convention are found. This is the level that tosses the beach balls of conversation back and forth across the dinner table and that defines those balls. The meso level defines our subculture and how well or badly we conform to it. The meso level is necessary for much of social life and sort of fun, though it is by definition not very detailed or profound. It is something most people can agree on and work with fairly easily for an hour or two at a time.
Many people define themselves mainly on the meso level and judge others by their understanding of this level. Many subcultures become stifling or cloying because meso definitions are crude and tend to leave out the rich subjectivity of individuals. Macro definitions are not all that different from meso ones except that they tend to define group feelings more than meso definitions. Groups band together based on macro level assumptions about ideologies, science, religion, art, style, location, ethnicity, etc.
Since most people are unable to fully access micro levels of communication the rich subjectivity of the individual mind is rarely, if ever, communicated at all and almost never communicated well.
In other fields, micro levels are all important. For example, the invention of the microscope completely changed the way humans see and understand their world. All that was added by the microscope was greater resolution and detail in the visual sphere. From that arose germ theory, material sciences, modern biology, modern medicine, and much more.
Micro levels of communication are basic to how we understand ourselves and others. Poor micro communication skills consign us to communication that occurs only at meso or macro levels. This is a problem because meso and macro levels do not have sufficient detail and also because meso and macro levels become the only tools we have to decide what is going on. When we are forced to account for micro details with the crude tools of meso thought, we will make many mistakes. Eventually we become like the long-term cigarette-smoker whose (micro) alveoli have collapsed, destroying full use of the lungs.
Without the details of the microscope, people for millennia happily drank germ infested water. Without a way to resolve micro levels of communication, people today, as in the past, happily ingest multitudes of micro error—errors that make them ill.
Micro communication errors make us sick because we make many serious mistakes on this level and also because our minds are fully capable of comprehending the sort of detail we can find at the micro level. We speak and listen on many interpersonal levels like crude beasts when we are capable of very delicate and refined understanding.
FIML or a technique similar to it provides a method for grasping micro details. Doing FIML for a long time is like spending a long time using a microscope or telescope. You will start to see everything differently. Detailed micro analyses of interpersonal communication changes our understanding of micro communication and also both the meso and macro levels of existential semiotics and communicative thought. Microscopes allowed us to see germs in water and also to understand that some of those germs can kill us.
American Buddhist Net 