Mythopoetics

  Silence is more than repose or the mere absence of sound, for repose has a duration, and absence is the negation of something. This obvious facts were made completely clear and explicit by Cage in his wonderful  4’33’’ . Thus, it should make more sense to talk about  silences , in plural, avoiding the common reification of a concept that usually expresses an indefinite absence and metaphysically grows to express a final and pervasive state of the cosmos.  In music, there is one kind of silence whose function is orchestrational: we decide which voices intervene, and the absence of a voice at a given moment in a piece implies choices of color and texture. Furthermore, as we read in Berlioz ( Treatise upon Orchestration ), silence can be obtained through orchestration:  With the view of expressinig a lugubrious silence, I have in a cantata divided the double-basses into four parts ; causing them thus to sustain long pianissimo chords, beneath a decrescendo ...

1. We consider that A is the conceptual ground or foundation of B when the cognition of B is impossible without the cognition of A, and A is immediately certain for our intuition. We say that A gives a semantical self-image, for it does not need further explanation, but B cannot produce a semantical self-image. 2. Music Theory has developed since Antiquity with the aid of mathematics, reaching today a fully mathematical status. 3. Mathematics is a formalized symbolic language. 4. Tarski’s theorem states that a formalized language cannot produce a semantical self-image. Therefore, music theory could not be the ground of musical action or of anything else. In fact, music theory -as well as musical action- are based on the social life of the human group, which in turn are based on the homeostatic protocols for survival: emotions. 

A persistent discussion that I used to have with Morton Feldman when I studied composition with him at Buffalo was about the relationship between the music sonic material of a piece and the musical idea for the organization of the work. Feldman always thought that it is the material what determines and conditions a composition, what makes it work for a specific time-span and not for other. His orientation was mainly orchestrational and harmonic, so the material choices would have to do with the right chord orchestration, the appropriate and careful choice of progressions, registers and timbres. My answer was that such choices of orchestration had a double foundation, empirical and conceptual, and that if we separate them we only obtain an incomplete picture of the composition. In fact, I insisted, it is the conceptual part in the choice of the material what gives a link between the microharmony of the chordal progressions and the general structure of the piece (as much in tonal as in ...

Neither our individual destinies, nor our future as species are written in the stars. For the same reasons, there is not a music of the spheres beyond the orbit of the Platonic composer and mathematician. Transcendental idealism is the remnant of the ancient fears and superstitions, not only entertained by the old narratives but also by the not-so-obvious mythologies of the universal law inherited by philosophy and later by modern science. Not all modern science believes in the existence of a  universal law , but its Queen, theoretical physics, worships such hypostasized order of the universe, giving the norm for how we should think about the cosmos, and defining reality disregarding the serious epistemological problems of completeness faced by formal systems after Gödel, expensively selling their tale about the universe in tune with the most careless medieval metaphysics. This scientific mess, poorly balanced by the advances of life sciences, helps very little to the development ...

The prevention and treatment of illnesses is conditioned not only by our biological knowledge but also by the effective integration that we have of other sciences and our control of the physical environment. Medicine is obviously linked to the rest of human knowledge but, being the science of human life, is also determined by the particular social forms in which our life develops, by the economical conditionings in which health and sickness find an additional restriction. In this sense, medicine is a social science and a social action, not a mere biological knowledge of the physiological functions of the human body. The social action of medicine, the self-care and self-preservation performed by human societies, is not the result of the efforts and ideas of a single generation but a vast cultural endeavor. For that reason, it cannot come as a surprise that beyond the evident success of our survival as species, the accomplishments and failures of the medical practice have not been mea...

Let us examine the problem from the point of view of rational ethics based on anthropological grounds. By  rational , I mean a discourse whose statements are not contradictory among themselves, and by  anthropological grounds,  I mean a non-transcendental valuation of life, a human axiology. Particularly, I will use two anthropological ethic principles: P.1  Principle of life preservation : We have to preserve human life. P.2  Principle of primacy of the public interest : the life of the group has preference over the life of the individual. Human individual life is conditioned by the life of the group and subsumed to its needs. Not only my actions are rightful when they do not imply any sort of harm to others, but they cannot be autonomous when there is an urgent need of the society: we work and die for the group whenever is needed. And since the needs of society are always urgent, life preservation is limited by public interest, as has always been the...

In the Samoan myths of the afterlife, the soul of the poor is food for the soul of the noble and rich [Frazer, 1922]. Are we living in the Samoan afterlife? Well, for some of our unfortunate contemporaries the situation is not so different. Simon Rippon has discussed the issue in an interesting paper on the Journal of Medical Ethics, where he analyzes the thesis of the moral and economic benefits for the poor which provides the free market of live donor organs. He expresses the thesis of the Laissez-Choisir  (LC) argument in three premises. P1. People in poverty who would choose to sell their organs if a free market existed must regard all other options open to them as worse. P2. If we take away what some regard as their best option, we thereby make them worse off, at least from their own perspective. P3. If a policy makes some worse off from their own perspective, it would be paternalistic for us to judge otherwise and to implement the policy on their behalf. We o...

Bennet and Hacker [2003] have discussed at large the regrettable state of the relationship between philosophy and neuroscience after Crick, Edelman and Zeki expressed, in different terms, their reticence to grant philosophy any competence in questions about consciousness . While Edelman [2001,208] proposed the grounding of epistemology in neuroscience, Zeki [Bennet and Hacker, 2003, 398] went as far as to say that neuroscience will solve the problems of philosophy. Unfortunately, neuroscience has not been able to fulfill such an ambitious program, but its contributions to epistemology are certainly elucidating areas that for long remained obscure and contradictory. A polemical situation like this is not new for the philosophy of science. The epistemological discussions raised by the Vienna Circle and their extensions and developments well through the XX century met similar objections, especially among physicists. But the problem has even deeper roots, and goes back to the distinc...

  Modern computers are based on the Von Neuman architecture, which consists in a central processor that executes sequentially one operation at a time over a given data according to some predefined instructions stored in a memory. Such machines can be reduced to a universal Turing machine, furthermore, the Church-Turing thesis postulates that any computation can be described as a program of the so called universal Turing machine. The thesis can be equivalently formulated as: any computation is a sequence, and such sequence can be composed further into more complex sequences by a concatenation rule common to the smaller sequences. Does human computation follow the Church-Turing thesis? The parallel wiring of human brain seems to deny it,  in fact, the computer metaphor for the brain is inaccurate and crude, as many authors (Edelman) have carefully discussed. Sackur and Dehaene’s interpretation of the experimental data from some basic arithmetic computation suggests that th...

According to the widely accepted  commentary-key paradigm  for the definition of the concept of consciousness proposed by Lawrence Weiskrantz [1997], subjective reports are the primary criterion for deciding whether a percept is conscious or not. The proposal is akin to the  accurate report  concept of  Seth, Baars and Edelman [2005]. The reports do not have to be verbal, in fact, many neuroimaging experiments are based on manual reports of conscious perception [Dehaene, 2006]. In any case, the paradigm assumes attention as a key property of consciousness, for it would not make any sense a non-attentional report. However, the proposition “there is consciousness  iff  there is attention” is not subscribed by some neuroscientist, for subjects can become conscious of an isolated object or the gist of a scene despite the near absence of top-down attention, and, conversely, subjects can attend to perceptually invisible objects [Koch and Tsuchiya, 2006]. ...

We can conceive something necessary within a particular scenario, like when we define cause as a necessary relation between events which determines a temporal sequence of those events within a particular conceptual frame, but can we conceive consistently a necessary being in absolute terms? Necessary relations in relative terms are introduced by definition as exomorphic conditions of the system, and they work as definiens for other relations and objects. Such is the Lebenswelt intuition of cause, which simply expresses a composition of representations (o better, mappings in a neural space) according to a sequence. However, as an absolute determination, the old bronze chain of Ananke reappears as a transcendental object that grounds a full set of old hypostasis of the universal law. Kant’s arguments for the fourth antinomy are equivalent to these: A. There is something absolutely necessary in the world, both [1] as a part of it and as its cause . 1. Our experience of the world...

While the previous two antinomies of reason examined the contradictions in the use of concepts of our basic space-time intuition, such as the idea of a beginning or of basic quanta, Kant’s third antinomy mixes the basic intuition of causality with the moral concept of freedom, two notions of different conceptual order. The result is a rather confusing argument, though the reductio ad absurdum works beautifully simple by the appeal to the epistemological principle of conceivability: an object can only be conceived through a defined and finite sequence of mental processes. Let us understand by cause a necessary relation between events (objects, relations) which defines a temporal sequence of those events within a particular conceptual frame. A. Causality according to laws of nature is not the only way to derive the relations and objects of a given scenario: we must include also causality according to freedom . 1. Assume that there is only causality according to the laws of nature...

By atom I mean the literal denotation of the word: something which has no parts, as conceived by Democritus and Leucipus. Today atoms are strings, or branes, or whatever object that we may fancy as being the end of the line in the decomposition of things into smaller parts. Kant’s second conflict of the transcendental ideas is formulated in relation to the notion of simple substance, in the sense of a basic form of atom or monad. Let us formulate the antinomy without his Aristotelian semantic operator of substance/accident . I will use two principles which I consider evident: Principle alpha : A composite object is constituted either by simple or by composite elements. Principle beta : An object, whether simple or composite, can only be conceived through a defined and finite sequence of mental processes. A. Every composite object in the world is constituted by simple elements, and nothing can be conceived anywhere but the simple or what is constituted by simple elements . ...

    Antinomies are the guardians of a threshold. It seems rather reasonable to suppose that the universe had to begin sometime. Our traditional myths confirm it, they even ascribe authorship to the action, and even modern mythology tells us of an instant cero, (or is it a one?)  anyway, a Big Bang explosion started everything. If we ignore the idea of an instant cero, which presupposes an observer beyond what we are saying that happens, i.e. the universe is the universe plus something else unrelated to it (remnants of older mythologies) it all seems commonplace and obvious. Then philosophy steps in (didn’t it step already?)and asks: is that a metaphor or do you really mean it? Is it not necessary for an explosion to happen that the exploding thing expands in something which is already there, say, space? Then space and time were already there, are they objects? Certainly, if they were there, they cannot be relations among objects for there were not any yet. However, if y...

       There is a wonderful passage in Lucretius in which Nature speaks to the old dying man who wails aloud, over-complaining about his own death: What troubles you so much, oh mortal? The passage is part of a long funerary advice for those who do not practice the dreams of an afterlife, a consolation before death that follows the principles of the human law.    If you lived well, what is all this groan and moan about? Why don’t you, like a banqueter fed full of life retire, and rest in peace forever, you greedy?    But if you lived a miserable life, if all you once had is now spilt and lost, why do you lament the end of your pains, why would you like to add more, you fool?    The one who lived gathering blessings develops greed, a condition of the dopaminic emotional system in which the neurotransmitters responsible for the movement and search functions of the organism cannot be turned off. It is curious how such a lack of b...

    Let us construct a symbolic formal system with the following elements: 1. An arbitrary axiomatic system which contains Gödel’s axiomatic system together with its rules of inference, say G a . 2. The functions and relations of the system are recursively defined and free from contradiction. 3. We construct an isomorphic representation of the subsystem of non-numerical symbols by a system of positive integers, ascribing natural numbers to the symbols. Therefore, we can express any formula in numerical terms (particularly as a sequence of primes, as Gödel did, but the fundamental theorem of arithmetic is irrelevant for our argument), and also express proofs as sequences of positive integers. 4. We construct a set of formulas F which are directly provable within the system and which represent common expressions of our calculus.  Then, for every formula f i ∈ F, there is a numerical formula p i ∈ P, for P ⊆ F, such that G a ⊢ p i . Construct now a f...