A POPULAR MISCONCEPTION amongst purely classical students of existential philosophy is to assign identical underlying logical frameworks to dramatically differing fields of study. This can most clearly be seen in the various attempts since the late 1890s to construct thematic links between the mixed disciplines of behavioural theory, the philosophy of science, and applied physics.
The complacency of science as the 19th century came to a close is all too apparent to us now, for it was believed then that Man had discovered more or less all that there was to discover. Just around the corner, however, lay Einstein and his double whammy of Special and General Relativity, which clearly showed that Newtonian physics was merely part of the story.
As if this paradigm shift was not enough Quantum Physics later burst onto the scene, kicking ass and taking names. In place of the classical determinism of Newton came the intrinsic uncertainty of quantum mechanics, as elaborated by Heisenberg, Giacomo, and Spock.
The aftershocks of this slam-dunk to the scientific community were felt in every field of study, from gastronomy to advanced industrial acupuncture.
No longer could we claim absolute certainty of an object's physical properties at the level of the atom.
No longer could we swagger arrogantly about, champagne glass in hand, monocle in eye, at sophisticated dinner parties boasting of our mastery of the subatomic world.
These days were no more and many a fashion-conscious scientist took early retirement or chose less demanding labour, like financial journalism or pimping for the House of Lords.
A major breakthrough occurred in 1921 when D. F. Russell, author of the seminal paper 'The Confluence of Electro-intuitive Empiricism', elaborated on La Fontaine's Theory of Archetypes. In essence his thoughts concerned the structural congruences between the relational properties of conceptual matrices, and the idea that such informational arrays possess intrinsic properties in and of themselves.
In the 1930 Quotidian Determinism Almanac Jules Giacomo, La Fontaine's friend and colleague, invoked Mach's Principle to demonstrate, quite brilliantly, that physical inertia and the assigned emotional states of conscious beings relied on the same topological mechanism.
There was initially uproar at the seeming impossibility of there being any deep connection between two such disparate disciplines as behavioural psychology and physics (classical and relativistic).
Giacomo explained to a sceptical scientific public that consciously aware entities misidentify their own inner states as being external properties of other beings - a form of projective mapping from subjective to quasi-objective. Central to this, he said, is the absolute logical necessity of complexity arising as an emergent property of a process of evolution acting on vast numbers of entities, be it molecules, prokaryotic cells or more advanced organisms. Eventually as this evolutionary process itself evolves it will give rise to systems complex enough to generate their own individual inner representations of themselves and other entities of similar type. (I should say that the base assumption here is that certain characteristics of complex self-generating informational matrices are inherited from one generation to the next, moderated by non-goal-oriented random mutation logically dependent on the very same mechanism which is responsible for evolutionary adaptation.)
When applied to humans, Giacomo stated bluntly that there is an unavoidable synaesthesia between self-awareness and group awareness at the level of the society in situ. This inevitably leads to category mistakes which we interpret as phenomenologically distinct properties of the external world and its agents.
Just as an object in an otherwise empty universe cannot be said meaningfully to have mass, inertia or velocity (lacking a reference frame) so too, claims Giacomo, such emotional and intentional properties as we ascribe to others must be relational constructions, not intrinsic properties to be measured.
D. F. Russell and La Fontaine were initially highly critical of Giacomo's theory, and they worked hard to find a flaw in its chain of reasoning. Eventually, in 1933 at the Berlin Symposium, they announced that they agreed with this new synthesis and from then on intended to work collaboratively with Giacomo to tackle the other problems of post-quantum behavioural theory. Unfortunately by this time the three of them had developed extreme drug dependencies on sweet sherry and walnuts, and their joint endeavours were put on hold until they were cured in 1936.
In the next article in this Post-modern Theory thread I will describe their further works.
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