COURSE MATERIALS

Course Outline

DOWNLOAD: Free ebook  (~750 pgs, illustrated, 15MB PDF)

NOTE FOR MAC USERS: Apple’s default “Preview” application does not render this PDF correctly, so you’ll need a good PDF reader, like Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, which you can download here.

Or get a print version of the book from lulu.com for the base price of ~$19.62.  I set the price nearly as low as possible, and only make 2 cents per copy.  Gotta get it back somehow … .

And here is a gallery of images from SpinbitZ I, for easy reference in discussions etc.

COURSE INTRODUCTION

SpinbitZ Volume I lays out the foundations of this project through an analysis of the embryological structure of pre-conceptual ontological and epistemological forms and deeply operational metaphorical primitives, such as the hidden forms and aspects of the infinite, tripping the common mind into paradox.  It does this partly through an analysis of fundamental mathematics, which can be seen as the most rarified and generalized form of ontological reasoning and intuition.  It takes the reader from a deep embodiment in the fine-structure of the Infinite—with a conceptual and perceptual resolution of the core paradoxes thereof—and guides him or her through the higher-level complexities of an evolutionary and integral Interface Epistemology.

The following is from the Author’s Note of SpinbitZ Volume II (forthcoming), and it will suffice for an intro for the concepts discussed in Volume I and likely to be discussed throughout this course :

By the time I began writing SpinbitZ, Volume I, I had collected about a thousand pages of notes. Half of that (approx., dispersed throughout) was used in the nucleus of the first volume, and I had planned on using the remaining notes for the second. The initial book was to be about ontology (“the territory”, reality, the nature of infinity, etc.) and the second one about epistemology (“the map”, theories of knowledge, etc.) and meta-paradigm science. But given my discovery of the deeply turbulent enfolded nature of the interface between the ontic and epistemic, that distinction, while largely still relevant, is also, oddly, true in the inverse.

While the first volume had an introduction to an Interface Epistemology near the end, it only touched on the ontology, which I had initially wanted to get to; though it did so at the deepest epistemic levels at the interface between them. And while this second volume has the word “Ontology” in the title, it is deeply empowered and enabled by the epistemological efforts of the first volume, and is a continuation of that effort. The turn inward to the roots of knowledge allows the deeper involution to and through its own roots. This is especially true when we get to the implications of what it means to be a fractal.  Simply put, ontological tools are fully epistemic, and epistemological tools are fully ontic. They are inextricable, because ontology has to be based on knowledge, and knowledge is based in reality. To do either ontology or epistemology effectively, one requires an embodied and functional understanding of the interaction and interface between them. In the end, we’re all just ontopistemologists.

And so digging through the roots and nature of knowledge (episteme) in SZI took us on a tour of the perceptual rudiments of conceptuality itself, which (by definition) underlies the very ground of possibility of all (resonant and understandable) human ontologies. My goal, of course, is to maintain as much contact with embodied conscious intelligence as possible. Connecting deeply to the qualitative aspect is absolutely critical to remaining grounded in an evolutionary capacity for the mind to comprehend the reality, especially in the looming fore-shadow of the dreaded and long wished for “Singularity.” And I have seen first-hand that the loss of this connection to evolutionary understanding (e.g. qualia, intuition, causality, understanding, etc.) is fully a failure of the imagination, generally under the weight and eclipse of simpler, and inadequate culturally driven metaphors and instincts (e.g. the “solid bias” underlying classical causation eclipsed—due to its own inadequacy at deeper and wider levels in the material spectrum—by the mathematical and probabilistic physical theories of the quantum, as we’ll explore later).