Quantum indeterminacy a thorough misconception

Here another note on quantum indeterminacy that complements what I've written over the years on the subject, especially in the Appendix to Movement and Time in the Cyberworld.

Quantum indeterminacy, as first introduced at the turn of the 20th century, is taken to be the impossibility of accurately measuring the position and the momentum of a quantum entity (photon, electron, etc.) together at the same instant of time. The Planck constant gets in the way. Either you measure its instantaneous position to a high degree of accuracy, and lose accuracy in measuring its instantaneous momentum, or vice versa. This is captured mathematically (initially by Heisenberg in 1925) by expressing the dynamics of such complementary quantum entities in matrices which, as is well known, do not commute. The product of the inaccuracy range measuring position and the inaccuracy measuring momentum, expressed as the commutator of two matrices, is equal to a non-zero multiple of the Planck constant, h.

This mathematical result has long since been experimentally confirmed, or rather, conversely, the mathematical result expresses what was found initially by experiment by Einstein in 1905 on Planck's insight that a quantization of the energy of light via the Planck constant would avoid grave antinomies in the theory of electromagnetism. Einstein followed Planck's hunch. This earth-shaking event in the history of modern physics, however, comes already late in the day, since the onset of the mathematization of physics eventuates already in the 17th century with Galileo, Descartes, followed, famously, by Newton.

Descartes' post-humus work Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind) already lays down the rules for how the phenomena are to be approached scientifically in the Modern Age, namely, quantitatively, mathematically. The phenomena themselves come to be denoted by mere algebraic symbols for magnitudes that appear in equations that have to be solved (cf. Movement and Time in the Cyberworld 2.7 Cartesian rules for an algebra of magnitudes in general as foundation for the modern mathematical sciences). Newton is inspired by this mathematical spirit of the age to find his three simple mathematical rules for governing the (loco)motion of physical entities. Without Newtonian mechanics we would not be living in the modern world. Without his predecessor Aristotle, Newton would have lacked key concepts for his theory. Crucially, Newton mathematized two concepts from Aristotle's ontology of productive movement: δύναμις (dynamis) and ἐνέργεια (energeia). Modern physics has thoroughly suppressed its ontological origins. Drunk on success, it has never looked back and today still claims to be the queen of the sciences with the key to providing the answers to the deepest questions of the universe, including its origins (Big Bang theory) and the secret of what life itself is (a complicated kind of organization of matter). It is still toiling at the coalface of quantum gravity that unfortunately turns upon understanding what curved, four-dimensional space-time is supposed to be in a quantized universe.

Quantum indeterminacy is a deep misconception resulting from the scientific compulsion to measure dynamic phenomena in order to be able to calculate and precalculate the motion of the relevant physical entities that are now deemed to be quanta, i.e. it is a product of the mathematization of physical movement for the very small. The drawback in the case of quantum entities is that their dynamics can only be precalculated probabilistically within a certain margin of error determined by the Planck constant. No worries. At least upon many repetitions of the same physical procedure, the statistical accuracy can be improved, and that's good enough for practical purposes. It's only with one-off experiments that strict efficient causality fails. Quantum computers still remain shining tantalizingly on the horizon offering the prospect of one day speeding up algorithmic calculation to unimaginable heights. Quantum physicists' eyes light up at the thought of being able to simulate any physical process on a quantum computer.

The mathematized approach to the dynamics of any physical phenomena whatsoever, and quantum dynamical phenomena in particular, requires that time itself, in which all physical movement must take place, be mathematized as a real variable in the pertinent equations. Even though complex imaginary variables crop up for some quantum phenomena, e.g. wave phase, time itself remains real, continuous, differentiable. Differential equations with respect to time abound, and they need to be solved to be of use. In particular, any (loco)motion of a quantum entity is presupposed to be accessible at a real instant of time, t. Without such accessibility, quantum indeterminacy would make no sense. Even a photon or electron is supposed to have an instantaneous position, velocity and momentum within a certain range, even when there are Planck limits to measuring them definitively as real observables at real, measured time, t. Taking this limitation into account, position, velocity and momentum are thus conceived mathematically as probability distributions. That time is conceived to be composed of consecutive instants, however, is a mathematical fiction dictated by the will to precalculate motion.

The truth of the phenomenon of time itself is not that it is one-dimensionally linear and composed of instants but, in its most elementary guise as an idea of the human mind, the interleaved open unity of the three well-known temporal dimensions of past, present and future, prior to any effort to mathematize them. The three empty dimensions enable simply a passing-through of essencing entities to the psyche in which they are interpreted and understood in some way. These three temporal dimensions are independent of each other insofar as they do not require or enforce any linear, controllable succession of events, whether they be physical or otherwise. In particular, the movement of the mind focusing on events in three-dimensional time is completely free, unbound by any physical, material constraints. To physics' dismay and consternation (if it were ever capable of dismay and consternation), three-dimensional time itself is non-, or rather, pre-material through and through.

In order for us humans to see, i.e. eidetically conceive and understand, any movement/change at all, including physical-material motion, as such, we must see trifocally, all at once, into all three temporal dimensions. We are endowed with trifocal mental vision. In particular, any physical entity, including a quantum entity, is not merely there in a present, so-called instantaneous position, but is, all at once, also where it was and where it will be, even if none of these wheres is determinable with any precision.

It is impossible for modern scientists, as such, to appreciate this because they have all been trained to approach the phenomena quantitatively, in obedience to Descartes' Rules. Stepping outside the Rules, thus leaving the fold, would render them to be non-scientists. The modern scientific mind can never accept the phenomenological interpretation of time as three-dimensionally open. Such a conception throws a spanner in the works for the precalculability of movement. Instead it contents itself with constructing hypothetical, theoretical models that are then experimentally tested to validate their predictive correctness, as a poor substitute for the truth of the phenomena concerned. The experiments are often designed in advance to empirically test predictions arising from the mathematical models of theoretical physicists, e.g. the existence of gravitational waves (a physical dynamical entity) was predicted by a mathematical model expressed in equations that gave directions to the scientific mind about how to detect them with appartuses gathering empirical data. The data gathered in a recent experiment were interpreted appropriately to confirm the existence of gravitational waves. This is the empiricist-positivist game that all modern science continues to play with sublime complacency, not to say arrogance.

The modern scientist is the agent, or rather, stooge of the unbridled will to power over all kinds of movement, physical or not. As loyal adherent to the empiricist scientific method, s/he is also imbued with the hubris of modern science to regard itself as being at the leading edge of human progress and human betterment. The modern scientist is a figure representing the quintessence of the subjectivist metaphysics of the Modern Age and as such cast historically as the subject underlying all movement in the world, obsessed with controlling it. It is thus blind to and overlooks the openness of three-dimensional time to which we humans belong. Three-dimensional time enables freedom of movement of the mind as well as our interplay with one another, phenomena that are only distorted and violated when subjected to the will to power over movement.

The way out historically is to (learn to) let go of this unbridled, obsessive will to power, a step back which Heidegger calls Gelassenheit (letting-go, letting-be). 

Respite — tranquil, serene.

The step back gains distance from Western science (ἐπιστήμη), whose will to know, from the outset, was always a will to predict, to control. Stepping back from the will to power enables us to see the phenomena themselves more clearly, perhaps to interpret them more truly, thus opening up hitherto unimaginable existential possibilities.

Further reading: Perplexities of quantum mechanics.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo (4.8) De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld (2.7, Appendix) De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Descartes, René Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii Philosophische Schriften Meiner, Hamburg 1996.

Statistical fudging.

Aristotle's "before and after" & quantum gravity.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Martin Heidegger Gelassenheit Neske, Pfullingen 1959/1985.

Der Tod hat scharfe Kanten

Der Tod hat scharfe Kanten.

Devastation of the Earth

The horrendous consequences of global climate change — along with other calamities: knots of plastic floating in the ocean, spurious crap floating in our mind — are becoming more apparent every day. Its deniers remain stalwart in their (self-interested) denial. Huge efforts to make a transition to so-called sustainability make headway and also suffer setbacks from fierce resistance. Powerful, effective opposition is led by profit-seeking corporations and national states with their 'developed economies'.

Well-meaning, concerned scientists work hard to present the undeniable facts of climate change. They gather the empirical evidence, interpreting it through well-established laws of physics to enlighten both politics and the general public. The opponents do their best to present 'alternative facts' that downplay the threats of climate change or deny it altogether. They are the stooges of another, unspoken, non-physical global law of movement. Only the profit-making interests of certain big players in the gainful game are visible. If only their interests could be contained and curtailed by appropriate political action on all levels from the local to the global! That would be democracy in action, progressives say.

This amounts to whistling in the wind so long as the underlying, hidden global law of movement in its own Medium remains unknown. Due to profound ignorance of the law of movement of the global economy, the facts on the surface, although modelled correctly, misinterpret events in their truth and therefore propose illusory or makeshift remedies. We continue to live and act blithely in the untruth. The empirical-positivist thinking of modern science is unable to even diagnose our dilemma, to reveal its truth. It is entirely oblivious and essentially blind to our toxication and intoxication by the Medium that enslaves us as free players. Spellbound by the illusion that we humans are free individual subjects acting collectively through 'our' democratic institutions, it is already captured by the status quo and obliged to dismiss any thinking that delves deeper than the facts on the surface as ideological. 

The tatters of philosophy remaining after the onslaught of empiricist positivism are engaged in a scholarly game of tiddlywinks among positions concerned inter alia with ethics, normativity, history of philosophy, defence of 'our' democratic values, including fair play. The core value of liberalism, viz. fairness, is rendered hollow by the Medium, since, despite the best efforts to devise norms and laws to implement and ensure fair play, it is thoroughly undermined, subverted and trumped by the Medium. The Medium dictates its terms and conditions (e.g. ruthless exploitation of mineral resources, containing (wage-)inflation) for its continued successful valorization, upon which all seems to depend (e.g. to 'create' jobs). The capitalist agents of the Medium's valorization, aligned as they are with 'conservative' politics, are always at an advantage, since they stand for 'growth' and promise prosperity.

Who or what is the culprit responsible for the ongoing devastation of the Earth? 'We' humans in the so-called 'anthropocene'? Due to our 'technological progress', as proffered by so-called 'philosophers of technology'? Are these interpretations of our dilemma seen through as woefully inadequate? The question, who we are as humans, demands that the question of whoness be insistently posed. Today's degenerate philosophy is unable to even understand the question, having long since given up even on the question of whatness. How, in view of the ubiquity of the Medium as universal medium of sociation (Vergesellschaftungsmedium), have we been cast as humans in the present historical era? As merely more or less free, as more or less unfairly treated players in the global gainful game? Is that what the so-called Free World amounts to? While the Earth descends ever deeper into utter degradation?

Further reading: Three laws of movement (again).

CO2 and The Medium.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.

Thingified value begets individualized freedom.

Democracy's highest (hidden, thingified) value. 

Freedom in liberal democracies.

Life, death, degeneration (temporalogically)

What is life?, a question related to the question: What is the psyche? Aristotle answers the former question by answering the latter. For him, the psyche is the eidetic 'look' or εἶδος of a physical body capable of living, its very essence or whatness, which he expresses in the formula that a living physical body has its starting-point for movement and stasis within itself. This having of such a starting-point is its entelechie (ἐντελέχεια) or perfected presence as a living physical body. Aristotle's gaze is thus directed toward such physical bodies that can move themselves, animate, empsyched things (ἔμψυχα) in distinction from physical bodies that are not so endowed, i.e. inanimate ἄψυχα.

Only physical kinds of movement are therefore pertinent, which for Aristotle comprise four kinds or ἔιδη: change (μεταβολή) of i) what, ii) how, iii) how much and iv) where, i.e. i) progeneration, ii) quality (sense perception e.g. hearing-not hearing; sleeping and waking, activity and inactivity), iii) quantity (growth and decay), and iv) locomotion/mobility. For Aristotle, only physical bodies capable of such self-movement can partake of life.

Restricting consideration now (temporalogically) to human living, what about other kinds of self-movement, i.e. those of the non-physical variety? In the preceding post I have already spoken of the movement of the mind as the psyche's capacity to move freely throughout three-dimensional time, a degree of freedom that material, extended, physical things do not enjoy, since the mind is thoroughly pre-physical, unencumbered by matter. 

Or, to take another kind of movement: what about the movement of interplay between and among mortal humans when they sociate with each other, mutually estimating who each other is? Is that not their social living? Interplay is a kind of movement that eludes efficient-causal explanation within the bounds of a tacit ontology of productive movement. This, of course, does not prevent sociology and social psychology from fabricating countless explanatory models based on endless empirical research to account quasi-causally for social behaviour.

There is yet another kind of self-movement to consider, since the self-movement of life is only the converse and complement of the self-movement toward death. What does mortality mean for us humans? Do we die only when, through decay, the physical body loses its self-movement? Which kinds of self-movement?  The loss of mobility, for example, does not equate with death, nor even the loss of sense perception. How about loss of movement of the cardio-respiratory organs? If machines can maintain the functioning of the cardio-respiratory organs artificially, does this still count as living? After all, it is doubtful whether lungs and heart that cannot move themselves, and are thus no long empsyched, are still living. 

Does death coincide with the loss of movement of the brain, i.e. the organ employed by the mind for mental movement? It is at least plausible that the mind loses its freedom of self-movement in three-dimensional time when its physical organ is defunct. Furthermore: is there the possibility of mental life after the physical body dies, i.e. is no longer capable of self-movement? Such a possibility seems to lie beyond the realm of human experience. Whose mental life could it be after death? Conversely, is there the possibility of mental death (e.g. coma), while the physical body lives on? Can mental movement, i.e. thinking, degenerate qualitatively, without impairment of brain function, e.g. through exposure to mass media and the cyberworld?

Mental movement through three-dimensional time, i.e. imagining, would seem to be the freest of all human self-movements and probably also the most potentially deleterious. Why? Because  imaginings can become untethered from any phenomenal touchstone. Opinion, belief, conviction rely upon an imagination that is more or less careless, fanciful, undisciplined in interpreting what comes to mind. Does the freedom of the mind degenerate into arbitrariness, caprice, prejudice and dogma when thinking does not bother to carefully interpret the phenomena, to at least establish the correct facts as best we can? (Even though the truth of the phenomena thereby remain concealed.)

Presumably it was the freedom of movement of the imagination that occasioned Kant to subject it strictly to the rules of understanding when revising the first, A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 to produce the second, B edition of 1787. In this way, the superiority of the logical mind was reasserted and upheld. Kant's logical rules of understanding, however, are fashioned after the Newtonian laws of movement of physical objects, and these are laws of continuous movement in one-dimensional, linear time conceived as a succession (Nacheinander) of now-instants. The so-called superiority of human rationality is thus maintained at the cost of a massive petitio principii, or begging of the question, since the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft) is the prototype of three-dimensional time as inadvertently conceived by Kant within the strictures of his subjectivist metaphysics. Kant's subsequent suppression of the imagination's role amounts to a suppression of the truth of the phenomenon of three-dimensional time.

A similar petitio principii is performed when it is conceived that the mind moves, or at least rationally moves, according to syllogistic rules of logical inference. This dogma opens the way to conceiving mental movement as constrained by a series of if-then rules, i.e. as a kind of computation, that then can be adequately imitated by a Universal Turing Machine. Since any computer whatsoever, including those running A.I. algorithms, can be conceived, in principle, as a concatenation of Turing machines, nothing then prevents our believing that the algorithmically steered cyberworld, although patently artificial, nevertheless faithfully models our human mind so that, conversely, we (mis)conceive our mind itself as some organic, 'wet' kind of computer (to wit, the brain), thereby suitably degrading our self-conception.

If free mental movement is at the core of our mortal animation, and if this mental movement is (mis)conceived (hermeneutically) as computation that can be replicated by A.I. algorithms running on ever more powerful, energy-hungry, inanimate computers, have we thereby already cast ourselves as the living dead?  What's the remedy? Think again! From scratch.

Further reading: The human psyche (temporalogically) (previous post).

Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul).

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024. 

Immanuel Kant Kritik der reinen Vernunft 1781/1787.

'Turing's cyberworld of timelessly copulating bit-strings' 2012.

'Turing's Cyberworld' in Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A Festschrift in Honour of Rafael Capurro Matthew Kelly & Jared Bielby (eds.) Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016 pp. 65-81.

'Algorithmic Control of Movement in Time: Abolishing even our selves ourselves' in Kinder und Jugendliche in der Krise: Gegenwärtige Herausforderungen und neue Perspektiven Rainer J. Kaus, Hartmut Günther (eds.), transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2025 pp. 219-233.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Energy-hungry, surrogate Cyberworld.

The human psyche (temporalogically)

 300th post

Psyche according to Aristotle

What is the human psyche? The modern empirical science of psychology does not confront itself with this question, but contents itself with a quick definition such as consciousness or cognition and, more recently, with the dogma that these latter are somehow generated by material, neurological brain processes.

For deeper questioning of the human psyche, we have to return to Aristotle's De Anima (On the Soul), if only because his investigation laid the groundwork, i.e. the foundational concepts and way of thinking, that has governed Western (and today global) thinking on the psyche, even, unknowingly, on modern psychology.

After reviewing and criticizing the thinking of his predecessors in Book I, Aristotle starts anew to pursue the question, "what the psyche is" (τί ἐστιν ψυχὴ 412a3), a question that cannot be answered without understanding fundamental concepts from Aristotle's Metaphysics. Here I will have to assume a knowledge of these concepts. His investigation proceeds in a number of steps to find the psyche of "physical bodies" (σώματα...φυσικά 412a12f) that "have life" (ἔχει ζωήν 412a13), and is thus wider than the question concerning the specifically human psyche with which I am concerned here. Living bodies for Aristotle comprise plants, animals and humans as a special kind of animal.

The first answer deems the psyche "to be an essence as the 'look' of a physical body having the potential/ability to live" (οὐδίαν εἶναι ὡς εἶδος σώματος φυσικοῦ δυνάμει ζωήν ἔχοντος 412a20f), whereby this eidetic 'look' is the body's "having its end" (ἐντελέχεια 412a10) or "perfected presence" as living. (A non-living thing such as an axe, for example, has the eidetic look and perfected presence of something that is good for chopping.) This perfected presence of the psyche accounts for a living physical body's both "sleeping and waking" (ὔπνος καὶ ἐγρήγορσις 412a25). The "ability to live" is further specified as having organs (ὄργανα 412b1) which is exemplified by a plant (a living physical body) having roots in analogy to the stomach (412b4) that enables nutrition.

The general definition of the psyche is then given as the "essence/whatness of such a body" (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τῷ τοιῳδὶ σώματι 412b11) with organs, which amounts to "having the starting-point/principle of movement and stasis within itself" (ἔχοντος ἀρχὴν κινήσεως καὶ στάσεως ἐν ἑαθτῷ 412b17). Note that the psyche for Aristotle is an eidetic 'look' or 'idea' formulating the principle of self-movement of living bodies, and not a material cause (αἴτιος). The emphasis is on understanding what life is, rather than trying to causally explain it — especially not from material causes.

This concept of psyche applies to the living physical body as a whole and also to its parts. Aristotle provides the example of the eye as a bodily organ, whose essential whatness as organ of a living body is its "eyesight" (ὄψις 412b19), i.e. its ability to perceive visually. The eye is endowed with such psyche even when it is closed and cannot see, just as a living body is still alive even when asleep, i.e. 'dead to the world'. The organ of sight in this case is an organ of sense perception (αἴσθησις) that enables an openness to and receptiveness for everything presently visible in the world. Such sense perception is necessary for a living physical body in order for it to orient itself and move itself in its environs, and the bodily organ of the eye enables such self-movement characterizing for Aristotle what life itself is, and the role of the psyche as the essence or whatness that enables life, in this case, the sense perception necessary for life.

Temporalogical conception of the human psyche

What does this entail for the attempt to conceive specifically the human psyche starting from the elementary concept of three-dimensional time? The conception of life in this case is restricted to that of human life. The psyche is conceived first of all as belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time composed of its three characteristic dimensions of past, present and future familiar to us humans, but also mostly taken for granted and overlooked because, as such, these temporal dimensions are empty. We humans are instead focused on what comes from each these dimensions: from the past, from the present and from the future, and not on the empty, unmoving dimensions themselves that hide themselves in their inconspicuousness. 

What moves or stands still in coming from any of the three temporal dimensions is received by the human psyche which has this temporal receptiveness by virtue of belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time which thus provides the initial conception of the human psyche itself. Openness to the environs through sense perception is at the basis of the traditional conception of life in general*, and human life in particular, entails that this openness is restricted to what sense perception can perceive in the present. By contrast, a temporalogical account of the human psyche, and thus of human life itself, starts with its openness to all three temporal dimensions and what comes from each of these dimensions into the psyche's focus in order to be understood. This implies that the human psyche has a faculty of understanding that interprets what comes into focus in one way or another. It is thus hermeneutic through and through. This psychic faculty of interpretive understanding may be called the mind which is able to roam throughout three-dimensional time.

Hence e.g., to expect the visit of a friend from the temporal dimension of the future, is already to understand, to interpret the friend as a living human, which in turn implies already an implicit understanding both of what life is and of what, or who, a human essentially is, i.e. of a human's whatness or whoness. For Aristotle and Plato and the entire Western tradition, the human is a kind of animal, a legacy by which today's thinking remains bound, or rather, in which it remains incarcerated for the sake of preventing any deeper questioning and recasting. Even though the metaphysical, ontological interpretation of human being has receded into oblivion since the rise of empiricist positivism in the mid-19th century, and today's hegemonic understanding of the human as an evolutionarily evolved animal with an exceptionally large and complicated brain holds sway, there is still the need to pose the question of who the human is, thus revising this traditional understanding that has become thoughtless dogma. This requires 'doing a da capo' and starting again from an alternative beginning that may be called temporalogical, rather than ontological.

The phenomenon of human life itself, interpreted temporalogically, starts from the psyche's belonging to three-dimensional time. The self-movement of human life is then initially conceived, i.e. interpreted hermeneutically, as the ability of the psyche's understanding to roam, perhaps apparently haphazardly, throughout the openness of three-dimensional time by virtue of the psyche's power of imagination, focusing on this or that which comes to mind from any of the three temporal dimensions. This kind of self-movement of human life may be appropriately called the life of the mind. Mental movement thus gains precedence over physical movement upon which Western thinking remains fixated to the present day.

A friend's coming to visit is then tacitly 'always already' (a priori) interpreted eidetically** as a human endowed with a psychic openness to three-dimensional time and a mind able to roam freely through this temporal openness. This has consequences for how an encounter between friends is to be understood, namely, as an interplay between two humans, each of whom is endowed with an understanding mind endowed with free, temporally three-dimensional movement. To unfold further the phenomenon of interplay neglected by traditional thinking, however, cannot be undertaken in this brief post, whose aim has been to merely indicate how Aristotle's metaphysical-ontological conception of life can be recast temporalogically from an alternative starting-point. I have attempted this recasting, at least in outline, in On Human Temporality.

* Cf. "..the living being characterized first of all by sense perception", ...τὸ δὲ ζῷον διὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν πρώτος 413b3, the first sense treated being that of touch (ἁφή 413b5).

** εἶδος (_eidos_) reinterpreted temporalogically is the hermeneutic 'look' an essent offers of itself when presencing and absencing for the mind from three-dimensional time.

Further reading: Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul) esp. Book II Chap. i 412a1-413a10.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Coffee to go

Coffee to go,
or philosophy to stay —
the choice is yours.

Quest for truth or will to power?

Philosophy is often characterized as the quest for truth, a noble striving. Truth itself is usually said to be located in the λόγος (logos), i.e. in statements, propositions that can be true or false. Plato's famous struggle against the Sophist in his eponymous dialogue strives to catch the slippery Sophist, who claims that it is impossible to make a false statement because that would amount to saying and asserting what is not, μὴ ὅν (mae on), non-being. The great predecessor, Parmenides, had been interpreted as prohibiting any attempt to say μὴ ὅν because it amounts to saying nothing. The Sophist, however, always said something, and accordingly this could not be contested because a false statement was impossible to make. His statements were all true.

The upshot of Plato's famous, intricate dialectic in his Sophist dialogue (254b-257a) among the five generic ideas (γένη) of movement (κίνησις, kinaesis), standstill (στάσις , stasis), same (αὐτό , auto), other (ἑτερον , heteron) and being (ὅν, on) is that non-being (μὴ ὅν) is indeed possible, because the idea (εἴδος, eidos) of other is able to mix with that of being. The negation of being through otherness does not result in total annihilation of being, but rather in a determinate negation. E.g. the negation of beauty (τὸ καλόν) is not nothing but the non-beautiful (μὴ καλόν, mae kalon), the ugly.

With respect to the logos (λόγος) as being (ὅν), it is shown through the dialectic that the logos can be either true (ἀληθής) or false (ψεῦδος), the latter through mixing with otherness. The Sophist is thus unmasked as a purveyor of falsehoods, and correspondingly, the Philosopher is shown to be the one who seeks the truth through true statements and enters the battle to refute false, sophistical ones. 

Does that mean that the philosopher is like an investigative journalist who uncovers the true facts of the matter by exposing false statements? Not so fast. There is a difference between true, i.e. correct, facts as stated by a logos, and the truth of phenomena themselves, as we shall see.

The philosophical quest for truth would seem to have nothing to do with a struggle for power over others, for truth itself is supposed to be pure, standing above and untainted by the falsity that is employed to fool and mislead others. Philosophy would then be the endeavour calling upon us to humbly submit to the unvarnished truth as revealed by true statements. In particular, such true statements can be deduced syllogistically, i.e. by drawing conclusions from accepted premises via rules of inference. Logical argument then consists in presenting such a cogent derivation from accepted premises, that the opponent has to bow to the superiority of the incontestable argument. Hence there is an element of striving for power, after all, albeit a benign one, for the so-called good of the other, when all falsity is expunged from argument as far as possilble. Indeed, today's (analytic) philosophy is often represented as the contest among various positions to present the better, irrefutable argument.

A statement, however, always says something by interpreting what it is talking about as such-and-such. E.g. I hear a noise above my head and interpret it as a pigeon scratching around on the roof, an interpretation that may turn out to be either factually correct or false on closer inspection. I also implicitly interpret the pigeon, without further ado, as a living being, and in this interpretation there is further a implicit interpretation (or preconception) of what life itself is. The 'as' here is the hermeneutic or interpretive as, that is not merely factual, but concerns the preconceptions that inundate our understanding of the world and without which we would not be able to lead our daily lives.

What is the case, then, when I see swifts wheeling about overhead? I implicitly interpret them as a kind of bird flying in the sky, and flying itself is a kind of movement, so the generic idea of κίνησις (kinaesis) comes into play here. I easily recognize and understand the phenomenon of movement, albeit implicitly. My implicit interpretive understanding of what movement is has to be unfolded to become explicit. This interpretation is not singularly my own, but borrowed from the long tradition of interpretations of movement going back to the Greeks. The explicit interpretation of what seems to be self-evident has been the proper business of philosophy from the start.

Why the Greeks? Because it is the Greek philosophical interpretations of movement that tacitly have become globally hegemonic today by providing the foundations for all the modern Western sciences. The question, What is movement?, motivated Greek thinking from the very beginning. Early on, in Timaios, Plato counterposes the kind of movement called γένεσις (becoming)  to ἀεί ὅν (eternity, standstill). Movement for the Greeks comprises especially all kinds of physical change, starting with becoming. The early philosophers were therefore also called 'physiologists' (φυσιολόγοι). Even time itself is conceived (hermeneutically) as either a measure of change or as the element in which all change takes place, whereas standstill, changelessness are identified with timelessness, as still is the case today. In this way, the phenomenon of time was interpreted as derivative of physical movement.

Although the Greeks are familiar with other kinds of change, such as a change of heart or soul, i.e. of the ψυχή, their thinking focuses on physical changes. Not only are the various kinds of physical movement (change of place, quantitative change, qualitative alteration, progeneration) investigated, but such movements are conceived as having a cause (αἴτιος). Scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) for the Greeks is always connected to aetiology. In this interest there resides already a will to power over (all kinds of physical) movement, and phenomena of movement are interpreted already under the impetus of this will to power. Efficient causality amounts to knowing 'if this, then that'. Such causal rules can be applied to control movement. If-then rules themselves rely upon a linear conception of time as a succession of instants that can be exactly measured by some sort of clock: If at one instant this happens, at the next, that will happen. This enables physical movements of all kinds to be predicted or, even better, manipulated and controlled.

The choice of kinds of physical movement as the focus of attention for Greek thinking on movement derives from its conceiving physical beings themselves to be composed of a 'look' or form (εἴδος) and matter (ὕλη). Matter, namely, can be manipulated. First of all, any know-how for making something, i.e. τέχνη ποιητική (technae poiaetikae), enables the possessor of the know-how, i.e. the maker, to causally control and master the movement of making toward its envisaged end goal, or (τέλος).

It was Aristotle who, in Book Theta of his Metaphysics, provided the first and only ontology of movement we have today, namely, the ontology of efficient-causal, productive movement that surreptitiously pervades all of modern science, even those sciences whose will to power over movement is directed also at non-physical kinds of movement, notably psychology, sociology and economics. Hence e.g. psychopharmacology aims to control psychic movement by means of material medications. 

By trying to fit the ontology of efficient-causal movement to kinds of movement that are patently not physical, such as the phenomenon of rhetorical speaking, Greek thinking already did violence to the phenomenon by misinterpreting it (cf. Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric). Due to this infection by the unbridled will to power over all kinds of movement and change, modern science continues to do more violence to phenomena of movement by interpreting them as reducible to material causes. Hence, in particular and notably, there is a collapse of the mind into the brain in modern scientific thinking, a corollary of which is the denial of free will.

The interpretation of phenomena of movement through an ontology of efficient-causal movement is not false in the sense of being factually incorrect. On that level, given its presuppositions, everything is perfectly correct, and experiments can be carried out to verify the hypotheses postulated! The misinterpretation lies deeper, by forcing an ontological interpretation onto phenomena of movement that do not at all conform to the ontology of efficient-causal movement. The untruth of the interpretation cannot be detected by any empiricist scientific methodology, because the violence to the phenomena in question has already been perpetrated beforehand, a priori, in the very preconception. Hence, for example, data gathered from a large enough sample may reveal statistically significant correlations that point to underlying efficient-causal connections that remain ultimately merely hypothesized. A link between cause and effect is never physically detectable, but only hypothesized on the basis of experience with a postulated theoretical model. But no imaginable experiment can even prove that efficient-causal links pertain universally between occurrences.

The consideration of phenomena of movement and change different from the paradigmatic ones employed to consolidate today's scientific thinking can show that alternative ontologies of movement are necessary. The non-hermeneutic nature of today's hegemonic philosophy as taught in universities, however, prevents it from seeing the will to power nested within the noble quest for truth. This blindness is precisely the way the status quo can be upheld and scientific progress progress whilst simultaneously suppressing any alternative ontologies*.

* Cf. e.g. Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.

Further reading: Plato Sophist.

Martin Heidegger Platon:Sophistes Gesamtausgabe Band 19 (GA19) Marburger Vorlesung Winter Semester 1924/25 ed. Ingeborg Schüßler, Klostermann, Frankfurt §§77-81.

Philosophy as quest for truth.

Arguing positions — or interpreting phenomena?.

Space in three-dimensional time

Space is a much-used word with many nuances and connotations, the basic meaning presumably being the physical one of where physical things are located, namely, in space. Space's sister concept is 'time'. Time and space go together like horse and carriage and are treated pretty much on a par, but with space having an edge on time. Time tends to be imagined spatially as intervals from then to then along a so-called time-line. One speaks uninhibitedly of 'points of time' and time intervals between them. It seems easier for our Western mind to imagine time geometrically. Geometries themselves are imagined spatially because (Euclidian) geometric figures are abstractions from the usual, experienceable three-dimensional space. From the very beginnings of physics with the Greeks, time was conceived geometrically, counted along a continuous time-line, and places became positions or points in geometrical space.

In modern relativity physics, time is explicitly cast spatially as the path of light in a four-dimensional space-time. When any physical event occurs, is measured by the path of light from the event to the observing subject or apparatus, any physical event in the cosmos being recorded in space-time co-ordinates (x,y,z,ct). 

How does this square with the recast conception of time as three- or even four-dimensional? The tables are turned completely and utterly. The openness of three-dimensional time is entirely pre-spatial, and even space itself is attributed a derivative status. What essences — i.e. what presences and absences in three-dimensional time for the psyche's power of imagination — encompasses far more than the physical, which is endowed first of all with extension, magnitude. Physical entities in traditional ontology are also material. Such physical, material entities with extension require places (τόποι, _topoi_) to be somewhere, and so make room for themselves by taking places. This carries over to temporalogy in which only physical, extended, material essents essencing in time require places. 

All other essents presence and absence in the psyche's all-encompassing openness of three-dimensional time, without requiring places, to be interpreted, and hence understood, in some way by the psyche's understanding. Thus, we mortals belong first of all to this temporal openness as the most primordial, and probably most inconspicuous, phenomenon open to our mind. What comes to mind is mostly non-physical, e.g. an everyday matter that has to be dealt with, such as your tax return or the weekly shopping or your child's overuse of digital media. Although physical things requiring 'wheres' or places are involved in such matters, even then they are generally not even physically present to the senses, but come to mind non-sensuously. They are simply part of a situation or a matter to be taken care of. Countless other issues and essents that come to mind, such as the idea of fairness or value, are in themselves entirely whereless (but may materialize somewhere).

The notion of space itself is derived from imagining physical essents in places, say, in a geographic landscape or in a building, and abstracting from the solid, physical things located therein, to attain (perhaps topographical or survey) maps and (perhaps detailed architectural) plans. Spaces such as the open sky over a valley or the empty space in a room result from subtracting physical essents in their respective places and in this sense are on the way to total abstraction. Such abstractions are a poor substitute for countryside or for what Australian indigenous peoples call 'country'. Once abstraction is performed, physically located things can then, turned around, be conceived geometrically as point masses in a Euclidian or some other geometrical space, and these point masses can then be inserted into dynamic equations of motion (perhaps to become military targets for bombing). The essencing of physical things perceptible by the senses taking their respective places at some 'where' or other, however, is existentially prior to the abstract conception of space itself. Through centuries of habituation, today's conventional Western thinking conceives space abstractly, i.e. more or less geometrically (or even mathematically via Cartesian co-ordinates), as the empty spatial openness that provides positions for connected point masses. Physical things are then conceived as the material concretion of such abstract geometrical figures. This is especially apparent in architectural design, but also, say, in how A.I. deployed in autonomous vehicles detects 'objects'. Geometry itself, however, is a discipline whose figures are abstractions from the experience of the physical world with its places where physical essents take their places.

All-encompassing three-dimensional time that is open to us mortals through the fourth temporal dimension is truly all-encompassing, encompassing even (the idea of) geometrically abstract space itself in which physical, extended essents can be conceived to take their places. First and foremost, or primordially, we essence in time. To the present day, our thinking skips over this inconspicuous, all-encompassing, three-dimensional temporal openness, confusing it with the openness of space which, however, is only derivative, d.h. not an elementary, primordial phenomenon. The wide open spaces of a landscape are themselves temporal, essencing in three-dimensional time for our mental capacity of understanding. Physically extended, temporally essencing essents taking their places generate space, rather than conversely: Space does not make room for physical essents by conceding places to them.

The same goes for the world, which essences primordially in time. Three-dimensional time itself encompasses the world, even the universe, since nothing at all can essence for us, i.e. for our understanding mind, without this temporal openness. Modern physics, however, studies the universe under the rubric of cosmology, whereby it reduces the cosmos to being composed entirely of matter and forces pertaining to matter. Otherwise this science has no purchase on its 'object', that is conceived as independent of us 'subjects' and investigated via apparatuses receiving data (principally electromagnetic radiation) from 'out there'. But if the cosmos essences in three-dimensional time, perhaps there is more to it than lifeless matter, i.e. that pre-material, non-physical, whereless essents inhabit the cosmos which we mortals, caught in the hermeneutic cast of our historical age, cannot yet conceive.

Further reading: Why three-dimensional time?.

The stone is in the psyche.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019 esp. Chap. 2.

Why three-dimensional time?

Why three-dimensional time? is a question mostly prefaced by the question, What is three-dimensional time?, simply because the very notion meets with perplexity everywhere and, among the intellectual elite especially, very quickly with dismissal. Why? Because the phenomenon of three-dimensional time is taken as the starting-point in the attempt to go back to scratch — da capo — to revise our Western thinking, to enable our mind to make a fresh start. This upsets well-established ways of thinking, is strenuous and often leads to dead-ends that require steps to be retraced. 

Any attempt to rethink elementary phenomena da capo will meet with massive resistance, because old habits of thought, with all their uninterrogated preconceptions and prejudices, are tied also to deeply entrenched vested interests, starting with preserving one's own status and identity, one's very whoness. 

Taking three-dimensional time as starting-point amounts to claiming that it is the most elementary phenomenon implicitly already invoked when trying to think through any other phenomenon. This claim can only be made good by actually undertaking the attempt to think through how our phenomenal world hangs together precisely through conceptual interconnections among key elementary phenomena, starting with: what is the conceptual relationship between time and movement. Such thinking through (διάνοια) may be called dialectic, a way of thinking, talking-through, discoursing, discussing practised already by Plato with respect to key elementary concepts but, famously, also much later by Hegel, who learned much from Plato's dialectic. Thinking through conceptually the relationship between time and movement reveals that from the start, with Aristotle, Western thinking got this relationship back to front and upside down.

I have already published a book* undertaking the attempt to think through da capo from a concept of (the phenomenon of) three-dimensional time, so there is a danger of merely repeating myself. To avoid that, here only theses are presented that articulate salient aspects of my attempt. Readers are thus left to connect the dots themselves.

i) The phenomenon of three-dimensional time is readily accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to look at it, to ponder it slowly, providing from the outset potentially a radically different way to think about the human psyche and mind that actually has to be spelt out.

ii) The human psyche is conceived as belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time, which provides the initial conception of (mortal, human) life. The psyche's openness to the world is no longer primarily mediated by the bodily senses in the temporal dimension of the present as has traditionally been the case with sense perception (αἴσθησις). Indeed, consideration of the body only comes later along the path of thinking.

iii) The openness of three-dimensional time is for us mortal humans. This entails it must be passed through to us through a fourth temporal dimension to reach us. Hence four-dimensional time! Our mortal liveliness is our psyche's belonging to and partaking of three-dimensional time.

iv) The mind's movement within all-encompassing three-dimensional time already heals the split between subject and object that is the hallmark of thinking in the modern age, for there is no outside to time and hence no 'external' world vis-à-vis an 'internal' world of consciousness, and especially no 'objective' time 'out there' nor any 'inner' time. 

v) Healing the subject/object split amounts to rehabilitating Parmenides' insight that thinking and being belong together (τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι Frag. 3), but putting it on a entirely new foundation, because 'being' now means 'essencing' within the openness of all three temporal dimensions. Now 'minding' and essencing belong together, the mind itself being the psyche's faculty of understanding. 'Beings'  become 'essents' essencing in the openness of three-dimensional time by presencing and absencing for the mind. What has traditionally been investigated as ontology now becomes temporalogy, an investigation of the modes of essencing of essents in three-dimensional time.

vi) Physical movement of material entities loses its privileged position as the paradigmatic kind of movement from which traditional one-dimensional time is counted. Kinds of movement other than the physical, material come into view. Matter no longer serves as a self-evident basis for thinking, as in the modern sciences.

vii) Time is no longer derivative of physical movement, but rather conversely, all the different kinds of movements happen, or 'essence', within the all-encompassing openness of three-dimensional time. Linear time counted off physical movement turned the Western mind and world upside down from the very start.

viii) Traditional ontology implicitly presupposes physical movement as paradigmatic, whence the dominant ontology of physical movement was developed and generalized by sleight of hand in the modern sciences to other kinds of movement. Different kinds of movement other than the physically material require their own ontologies, or rather, temporalogies of essencing essents. These present a challenging task for thinking attempting a fresh start.

ix) The cause-effect link ubiquitously assumed in modern science, that goes along with the one-dimensional time-line, including a cyclical one-dimensional time-line, loses its self-evidence. Movement in three-dimensional time is less constrained, freer, since the three temporal dimensions are independent of each other, but dovetail. In truth, mental movement is the freest kind of movement that cannot be constrained by reducing it to material, physical movement unless we allow our own thinking to be thus constrained. The hegemonic modern scientific way of thinking exercises this restriction and constraint today on our mind.

x) With non-physical kinds of movement coming into view, the concept of matter is relegated to its proper place, and non-material kinds of movement beyond the purview of the modern sciences given their due. On the whole, the psychic-mindful pre-material comes into view.

xi) The hoary mind-body problem can be taken on from a completely different angle, since mind and body are no longer separate, but rather, the body is within time and thus in the mind which, in turn, is conceived as the understanding faculty of the psyche. How body and mind interplay with each other is no longer restricted to the temporal dimension of the present, but attains a further intricacy by paying heed to the other two temporal dimensions.

xii) The psyche is no longer thought as embodied, but rather the body as empsyched and thus as entimed. Empyschment entails that the body is alive precisely through aspiring to partake, via the psyche, of the openness of three-dimensional time. Thus, traditional ways of thinking are turned upside down.

xiii) Phenomena of deconcealment and concealment associated with truth (ἀλήθεια) have to be rethought paying due attention to the three-dimensionality of time, since they no longer occur solely or primarily in the present. A complex intertwining of de/concealment with the three temporal dimensions has to be thought through.

xiv) How we mortals sociate with one another in society is a kind of movement in its own right, different from physical movement, requiring its own temporalogy. The sociating interplay is a one of ongoing mutual estimation, of mutual esteeming, evaluating, appreciating, etc. along with their deficient opposites.

xv) Mortals' economic sociating in an historical kind of economy called capitalism (our own age) also requires its own temporalogy that takes into account both the character of the competitive gainful game, in which we mortals are all players, and the underlying, hidden, sociating Medium of thingifying value endlessly accumulating, i.e. endlessly valorizing. All that essences becomes a fleeting 'look' (form, εἶδος) of thingifying value transforming cyclically through its various 'looks' in order to generate a surplus.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo* De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Braucht Demokratie Philosophie?

Hier einige Notizen zu einem Gespräch im Kölner Philosophischen Forum am 06. Juni 2025.

Ich greife nur eine Frage auf, nämlich Achims Gegenthese zu Hartmut Rosas 'Demokratie braucht Religion': 'Demokratie braucht Philosophie'. 

Die Demokratie bezeichnet heute — sehr kurz und skizzenhaft gefaßt — eine politische Verfassung (eine geregelte Weise des gesellschaftlichen Miteinanders), wodurch das Volk selbst die Quelle bzw. Arche der über es ausgeübten Macht sein soll, und zwar dadurch, daß die einzelnen Bürger i) ihre Meinungsfreiheit bezüglich der öffentlichen politischen Angelegenheiten ausüben dürfen wie auch ii) ihre Stimme zur Wahl von Abgeordneten in der gesetzgebenden Institution abgeben können. Die Gesetze wiederum werden letztendlich durch Staatsgewalt durchgesetzt und aufrechterhalten. In der demokratischen Politik geht es um einen Streit der vielen Meinungen darüber, wie die überlegene Staatsmacht ausgeübt werden soll — ein durch die Meinungsfreiheit vermittelter Machtkampf der Bürgermeinungen also, in dem sowohl das Eigeninteresse als auch das Gemeinwohl eine Rolle spielt oder spielen sollte. 

In der Philosophie hingegen geht es nicht um Meinungen, sondern um Wahrheit und zuvor schon um die Frage, was überhaupt Wahrheit ist, d.h. die Frage nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit. Bei solchem Fragen wird bereits in Frage gestellt, ob Meinungen wahr sein können, und wenn ja, unter welchen Umständen. Z.B. ist eine Meinung schon wahr, wenn sie richtig ist? Ist eine richtige Meinung wahr, wenn sie begründet werden kann? Ist überhaupt die Wahrheit mit der Richtigkeit von Tatsachen gleichzusetzen? Schon mit solchen Fragen ist ersichtlich, daß die Philosophie vor der Politik mit ihrem Machtkampf der Meinungen liegt. Die Philosophie ist überhaupt vorpolitisch, politische Fragen müssen ausgeklammert bleiben, eben weil wesentliche Fragen vorher geklärt werden müssen, worauf die Politik oder politische Meinungen keine Antworten geben können. Umgekehrt versteht nicht einmal die Politik, ob demokratisch oder nicht , genuin philosophische Fragestellungen. Wenn einer seine 'politische Philosophie' hat, ist zu hinterfragen, ob diese Philosophie auf bloße Meinung und feste Überzeugung hinausläuft oder eher durch ihre Wahrheit eine wohl begründete politische Haltung erst ermöglicht. 

Mitten in Platons berühmtem Werk über die Verfaßtheit der Polis — in seiner Politeia bzw. (lateinisch) Res publica VII 514a2-517a7— finden wir das berühmte Höhlengleichnis, in dem gleichnishaft gesagt wird, worum es in der Philosophie geht, nämlich um eine "Umlenkung der ganzen Seele" (περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς), und zwar vom gefesselten Blick auf die bloßen Tatsachen zum wahren Blick auf die Idee des Guten (ἰδέα τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ). Das Wort 'Idee' kommt vom Griechischen ἰδεῖν, 'sehen'. Eine Idee ist also ein Anblick, den ein Seiendes von sich aus einem Anblickenden bietet, der ihn so oder so versteht bzw. deutet. Welche Seele ist bei dieser totalen Umdrehung gemeint — die Einzelseele oder die Gesamtseele eines Volks bzw. der gesamten Menschheit? Wenn jene, dann ist die Bemühung um die Philosophie eine Bemühung um die Selbstverwandlung, durch die ich lerne, ganz anders zu sehen bzw. zu verstehen, nämlich die Wahrheit der Ideen selbst, die mit der Richtigkeit der Tatsachen nicht verwechselt werden darf. Ich bin dadurch verwandelt, daß ich die Welt durch ein Gefüge von zusammenhängenden Ideen verstehe. Die Welt selbst ist eine andere geworden, eben weil sie von Grund auf anders ausgelegt wird.

Die Bemühung des Philosophierens, diese Differenz und damit die Ideen selbst sehen zu lernen, bestünde demnach in einer Auseinandersetzung mit sich selbst oder, wie Platon sagt, in einem Dialog der Seele mit sich selbst. Die Idee des Guten als höchster Idee sehen zu lernen, ist nicht die Bemühung, eine Vorstellung davon zu bilden, was gut für mich ist, denn dies wäre eine bloße Meinung, bloß meine gegenüber anderen Meinungen. Die Frage nach der Idee des Guten ist zunächst keine inhaltliche, sondern danach, was Gutsein überhaupt heißt. Dasselbe gilt auch für die Idee der Gerechtigkeit, die der Freiheit, die Idee des Menschen, die des Lebens, die der Bewegung, die Idee des Kapitals usw. 

Solche Einsichten zu erlangen, ist in erster Linie eine Sache der Selbstauseinandersetzung bzw. des Dialogs mit sich selbst in der 1. Person, gleichsam eins zu eins. Ich muß lernen, alle Vor-Urteile, alle Vor-Begriffe, die den Blick auf die Ideen selber verstellen, wegzuräumen. Es geht nicht um bloß individuelle Ideen bzw. Vorstellungen, sondern um die Seinsweisen von Seiendem. Die Anblicke sind gemeinsame, über deren Deutung wir auch miteinander in einem philosophischen Gespräch reden können, in dem es nicht bloß um Wissenserwerb geht, sondern jeweils auch um Selbst-und-Welt-Verwandlung. Die gemeinsamen bzw. allgemeinen Ideen, wovon gesprochen wird, gehen uns als Einzelne an, und es gibt keine Garantie, daß wir in diesem Gespräch zu einer gemeinsamen Ansicht der Sache selbst kommen. 

Nichtsdestoweniger setzen sich in der Geschichte entscheidende Leitideen, wie z.B. die Idee der Gerechtigkeit oder die Idee der Energie, durch. Diese Leitideen sind keine ewigen, unveränderlichen, wie die griechische Philosophie dachte, sondern selbst in einem tiefen Sinn geschichtlich-schicksalhaft.

Ein philosophierender Dialog mit sich selbst oder anderen ist also zu unterscheiden von irgendwelchen Analysen einer faktischen, sachlichen Lage, wie sie z.B. politische Analysten, Soziologen oder Historiker bieten, denn solche können und müssen in der sog. 'objektiven' — etwa auf dokumentierten Fakten basierenden — 3. Person angeboten werden und haben zumeist den narrativen Charakter eines Geschehens. Solche 'Geschichten' können sehr wohl in den demokratischen Medien hin und her diskutiert werden. 

Die Differenz zwischen den Tatsachen und den Ideen kann als ontologische Differenz bezeichnet werden, womit auch der wesentliche Unterschied zwischen den modernen Wissenschaften und der Philosophie bestimmt ist. Denn die Ideen bringen das Sein des Seienden auf den ontologischen Begriff, während die modernen Wissenschaften — diese stillschweigend und ahnungslos voraussetzend — von den festgestellten experimentellen bzw. empirisch-gegebenen, ontischen Daten ausgehen, um ihre theoretischen Modelle zu 'verifizieren' oder ihre empirischen Studien durchzuführen, um festzustellen, wie die Lage zur Zeit faktisch ist. Auch dies sind Bemühungen in der 3. Person, die keine Selbstauseinandersetzung bzw. -verwandlung erfordern. Ich bleibe nach wie vor unverändert, wer ich bin, wenngleich etwas kenntnisreicher. Die Welt bleibt im Grunde dieselbe. Hingegen in der Philosophie mache ich eine Bewegung durch, in der, wer ich bin und wie die Welt in Ganzen verstanden wird, sich wandelt. 

Insofern braucht die Demokratie, wie sie in modernen (noch) liberalen Gesellschaften gelebt und praktiziert wird, keine Philosophie; als solche kann sie damit nichts anfangen. Denn sie geht (und muß gehen) von den Menschen, wie sie sind, und ihrem Dafürhalten aus. Es können höchsten ihre Ansichten in politischen Machtkämpfen — z.B. Wahlkämpfen — durch demokratische Debatten und rhetorische Mittel beeinflußt werden. Die Frage nach der Idee des Menschen, d.h. nach dem, was bzw. wer der Mensch ist, kann in der Demokratie oder gar in den Medien als Orten der freien Meinungsäußerung nicht einmal gestellt werden, sondern ist zuvor schon stillschweigend geschichtlich beantwortet und steht fest. 

In unserem Zeitalter (der Neuzeit) und schon seit langem, d.h. seit dem ersten Anfang mit dem griechischen Denken, ist die Frage nach dem Wesen des Menschen mit einer Was-Antwort beantwortet. Wir sind entworfen und somit geschichtlich-schicksalhaft geworfen als eine Art Tier, d.h. als eine Spezies (um deren Überleben es angeblich evolutionär geht), auch wenn die nach-Cartesische europäische Philosophie noch gern vom 'Bewußtseinssubjekt' redet. Mit unserer materialistisch vorausgesetzten Basis im Tiersein sind wir heute auf dem besten Weg das, was die Philosophie als νοῦς bzw. Geist bezeichnet, auf die neuronale Tätigkeit des Gehirns zu reduzieren. Bereits heute 'denkt' man so von sich. Die Philosophie hat schon längst ausgedient, während die Neurowissenschaft in Begleitung der rasant aufkommenden KI in der immer weiter um sich greifenden Cyberwelt ihren Siegeszug antritt. Trotzdem ruft die Demokratie heute ohnmächtig nach sog. ethischen Maßstäben bzw. 'Leitplanken'. 

Gibt es, gibt Es heute noch die Möglichkeit eines Denkens mit der Kraft, die Frage danach, wer wir als Menschen sind, von einem anderen Anfang aus zu stellen, um damit unser Menschsein geschichtlich anders zu entwerfen? Sind einige von uns in einem Schritt zurück vom festgefahrenen Weltentwurf für ein solches Infragestellen überhaupt empfangsbereit?

Soviel für heute. 

Weitere Lektüre: Platon Politeia VII. Buch.

Harmut Rosa Demokratie braucht Religion Kösel Verlag München 2022.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Energy-hungry, surrogate Cyberworld

It seems we have fast adapted to life in the cyberworld, that used to be called cyberspace, a misleading term because the cyberworld is more than a space. This is indicated already by the 'cyber' in its name that derives from Greek κυβερνᾶν (_kybernan_) 'to steer, guide, govern'. The cyberworld has everything to do with governing all sorts of movement via algorithmic control. It is also a world because it is all-encompassing, enabling near-total immersion in it as a surrogate alternative to the familiar physical and social worlds. As a surrogate, it is also dangerous, especially for the youth, by offering an escape from problems in the interplay with others when growing up. It seems you have more control playing algorithmically steered games than interplaying with flesh-and-blood others. The algorithms exercise a mesmerizing attraction especially on young minds through the seemingly endless and easy existential possibilities they offer.

The basic unit of the cyberworld is the Universal Turing Machine, a mathematical construct thought up by Alan Turing in the 1930s to model what he regarded to be human thinking. In his 1936 paper on Computable Numbers, he casts human thinking as computation, a hermeneutic recasting of what has long been conceived as reason (νοῦς _nous_, ratio, rationality), with enormous ramifications that, more often than not, are sold to a naïve and misled public as 'human progress' in 'improving lives'. This ambivalent progress consists in enhancing power over kinds of movement even beyond the 'classic' case of physical movement, especially to the kinds of movement through which we humans sociate with one another. Such enhancement includes increasing immersion in and dependence upon the cyberworld with its media platforms and communication apps, and ever-increasing subjugation to and dependence upon what the algorithms steering the cyberworld allow or disallow.

But what is an algorithm and what does it have to do with the Universal Turing Machine? The 'Universal' refers to Turing's ideal construction that can accept any computable algorithm at all to control it via instructions. Although such an ideal machine will never be built, it nevertheless theorizes what any computer at all does, namely, work step-by-step through the digital data input to the algorithm employing purely if-then rules encoded in the algorithm. Both the algorithm and the data are nothing other than strings of digital bits, 0 and 1, or bit-strings. The algorithmic bit-string steers how the data bit-string is to be acted upon by the algorithm's logical if-then rules to generate step-by-step, along the one-dimensional time-line of successive now-steps, a third bit-string as output. The algorithm is hence a set of encoded if-then instructions. The output bit-string controls some kind of movement either within or outside the cyberworld. The cyberworld thus consists of countless trillions of algorithmic bit-strings copulating with data bit-strings, whose output bit-strings may merely be fed into other algorithms or used directly to control a movement, e.g. whether you can access your online bank account or whether a rocket launches.

Since any computer, even if it be a super-computer or a quantum computer, works according to if-then rules, in principle, any computation can be carried out by a Turing machine with the appropriate algorithm. In turn, any algorithm at all, even those driving multi-level artificial neurons employed in Artificial Intelligence, can be broken down, in principle, into the Turing simplicity of a bit-string. It is also easy to see that, since the Turing machine only computes according to if-then rules, computing already existing data bit-strings, it acts with blind necessity from the past, i.e. it does not 'see' into the temporal dimension of the future at all. Such imaginative seeing into the future, envisaging a possibility, however, is the hallmark of human freedom that a Turing machine cannot simulate.

In truth, a Turing machine is not in time at all. It is only we humans who are exposed to the openness of three-dimensional time and are able, for instance, to insert logical if-then rules into an algorithmic bit-string with a particular end or τέλος (_telos_) in mind. A corollary of this is that the Artificial Intelligence employing multi-level, so-called 'deep-learning', artificial neurons, no matter how mind-bogglingly complex these become, only works by detecting patterns in already existing data and extrapolating them into the future. Predicting what is coming from the future thus becomes a statistical matter relying on the so-called Law of Large Numbers: in the long run, in a significant number of instances, the A.I. algorithm will generate correct predictions. When deployed e.g. as advertising in the cyberworld's mass markets, A.I. will 'predict' consumers' behaviour sufficiently well, based on the personal data collected on their previous consumer behaviour. 'Sufficiently well' here means merely that the advertising will generate enough hits (actual purchases) to be worth the trouble, and especially the cost, of doing the market research, i.e. gathering the personal data of unsuspecting prospective customers, and writing the appropriate A.I. algorithm to nudge their purchasing behaviour.

The cyberworld conceived as countless algorithmic bit-strings copulating with countless input-data bit-strings to generate countless output bit-strings controlling movements of all kinds (physical, mental, social, ...) is, of course, a theoretical idea that nevertheless provides an answer to the ontological question: What is the cyberworld? The idea of the Universal Turing Machine is the key to grasping its essence, its whatness. However, the cyberworld as we know it is actually physically constructed by deploying the suitable technologies from the material sciences through electromagnetic engineering (esp. constructing fast digital networks) to computer programming. Actually carrying out computations in this artificial, engineered world is a kind of physical movement that, in turn, requires physical energy to drive it. To change a bit in a material electromagnetic medium from 0 to 1 or vice versa requires electrical energy that has to be generated in some way. Electrons must be made to move in a controlled way.

This contrasts with the movement of the human mind itself, that can only be crudely modelled by conceiving it as computation or as physical movement at all. The mind moves freely and effortlessly, pre-spatially and pre-materially, through the openness of three-dimensional time, hip-hopping from one temporal dimension to another and understanding what comes into its focus one way or another. The mind is hermeneutic, interpretive in nature, not computational, employing the brain as its organ in an extremely energy-efficient way. Today's A.I. experts and neuroscientists marvel over how energy-efficient the brain is, after having misguidedly conceptually reduced mental movement to physical brain movement, imagining that  consciousness is an immaterial epiphenomenon generated by the physical movement of material neurons. How does the brain manage such energy-efficiency? they ask in their perplexity, imagining themselves to be committed materialists. 

This acknowledgement of perplexing energy-efficiency does not stop them from continuing to physically construct and extend the energy-inefficient, artificial, surrogate cyberworld. That is their mission. In so doing, they notice that the physical energy requirements to perform digital calculations explode exponentially. Already today, data centres, especially those carrying out A.I. computations, are consuming immense amounts of electrical energy surpassing the electricity consumption of entire small cities. The need for algorithmic control of all kinds of movement through the digitized, electromagnetic medium of the cyberworld, however, is insatiable, since it has proved itself to be highly effective. 

The cyberworld has turned out to be invaluable as the medium of choice for algorithmically disseminating disinformation on a mass scale, in particular, to influence voting behaviour in elections. The state has discovered that it is indispensable for controlling the movements of its citizenry, e.g. through surveillance as well as for tax collection. Digital technologies are today indispensable for increasing productivity and accelerating the turnover of deployed capital, thus enhancing the endless valorization of thingified value (The Medium). The cyberworld is also the domain of a global mass market for both capitalist enterprises and consumers where produced goods and services are sold to realize revenues for capitalist enterprises both large and small. The opening-up of the internet for commercial purposes in the 1990s was a boon for endless profit-making, starting with the giant U.S. tech corporations that were the first to see its capitalist potential.

In other posts I have discussed what lies behind this insatiable striving for power over movement of all kinds that dovetails so seamlessly with the striving for endless valorization. These are two ambivalent 'devilishly divine' ideas that have possessed our mortal mind and are personified by two hitherto unknown gods (or demons) whom I have named Willy P. and Pleon Exia. The cyberworld represents perhaps the consummate realization of the two gods' collaboration.

Further reading: 'Turing's cyberworld of timelessly copulating bit-strings' 2012.

'Turing's Cyberworld' in Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A Festschrift in Honour of Rafael Capurro Matthew Kelly & Jared Bielby (eds.) Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016 pp. 65-81.

'Algorithmic Control of Movement in Time: Abolishing even our selves ourselves' in Kinder und Jugendliche in der Krise: Gegenwärtige Herausforderungen und neue Perspektiven Rainer J. Kaus, Hartmut Günther (eds.), transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2025 pp. 219-233.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024. 

Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy KDP 2024.

The Good & other gods.

The Good & other gods

It is general knowledge to those conversant with philosophy that the highest idea in Plato's thinking is called the Good, τἀγαθόν (_t'agathon_). The corresponding highest idea or εἶδος (_eidos_ 'sight', 'look') in Aristotle's Metaphysics, which he names "the god"(ὁ θεός), is the Fair, τὁ καλόν (_to kalon_). The two words are very often used synonymously in ancient Greek, and even combined into one word: καλοκἀγαθός (_kalokagathos_, 'fair and good'), the 'fair and good', the 'excellent'. 'Fair', καλόν, can be taken in the sense of 'beautiful', but also in the senses of 'noble', 'excellent', 'useful', 'fair in dealings', 'justly good', just as ἀγαθόν, can. 

Beings in their being, i.e. in their partaking of being conceived as presencing, offer to mortals the sight of their goodness and fairness in the multiple senses noted. Insofar as beings are deficient, lacking goodness and fairness, they offer instead the sight of their badness, ugliness, unfairness. For Aristotle, the highest, divine 'sight' of the fair is the "unmoving mover" that motivates movement toward the end or τέλος (_telos_) of fairness. The bad or τὁ κακόν (_to kakon_), as the lack of the good and fair, detracts from this end, drawing all into an opposite movement.

In Aristotle's thinking, along with the εἶδος or sight, the end or τέλος is still conceived as a motivating cause of movement. In the modern sciences, both eidetic and teleological causes of movement have been eliminated in favour of the two remaining Aristotelean causes: the efficient and the material. It must be noted, however, that in evolution theory and biology, the teleological cause of movement and change is implicitly present and ubiquitously deployed. How so? Because all life strives to live; evolution theorists as well as biologists invariably talk and think in terms of how mutations and certain features of organisms enhance their chances of survival. The telos of the living is life itself.

Be that as it may, the (remaining) efficient cause is the scientific know-how itself that knows how to efficiently move and manipulate the material cause, which is physical matter in one or other of its 'sights'. The core modern science of mathematized physics focuses intensely on matter as putatively the ultimate cause of all, and the modern mind seems to be more or less entirely taken in by these hubristic scientific pretensions. "We are stardust" (Joni Mitchell), sings one popular song.

Plato's and Aristotle's idealistic gods have been pushed aside and pooh-poohed by modern science in favour of what is called a scientific worldview of objective reality that, in turn, boils down to what the empiricist scientific method wrings out of empirical, material facts as 'verifiable'. Modern science is said to be (objectively) evidenced-based, whereas all other thinking is regarded as tinged more or less by (subjective) ideology. Such secular thinking is apparently godless, without any connection to the divine. For this reason, even in this secular age (at least in the West), modern scientists often seek compensation and solace in religious belief. Religions have an afterlife even after having suffered the onslaught of the materialist scientific worldview that crystallized in the 17th century and triumphed (apparently once and for all?) in the latter half of the 19th century. Even philosophy capitulated, adapting for survival as an ancillary. After the rise of empiricist positivism in the mid-19th century, the analytic philosophy that emerged at the turn of the 20th century achieved its apogee of self-denial and surrender to positive, i.e. fact-based, modern science in the guise of logical positivism, from which it has scarcely recovered. Nonetheless, this impoverished philosophy maintains its hegemony among the philosophies via the corrupted political and economic hegemony of the Anglo-American world.

Which brings us back to ideas as gods. Are there ideas that reign surreptitiously as gods in these apparently godless times whilst remaining unseen as such? This is a paradoxical thought, because the essence of an idea or εἶδος is to be seen as a sight by the mortal mind. Perhaps these ideas have just been overlooked or shoved aside and repressed by our shared mind that is and has been preoccupied by two related, apparently eminently secular ideas for centuries, or even millennia, namely, i) the idea of progress in effective human knowledge and ii) the idea of the betterment of the material conditions of human life known today as the 'standard of living'. The two ideas are easily linked in what can be called materialist ideology by pointing out that progress in scientific knowledge has enabled improvements in human living conditions through myriads of technological innovations. They both seem to be good, and both are propagated incessantly today as such, but is this unmitigatedly so? Is there another side of the coin? An essential ambivalence? A darker underbelly?

From the very beginning of Western thinking with the Greeks, knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) has always been concerned with what was coming from the temporal dimension of the future, either by predicting it or, better, by positively shaping it. The former could be had via signs from the gods or through knowledge of the causes, whereas the latter was realized by means of the sedimentation of knowledge into the various arts of making (τέχναι ποιητικαί), which always involved also a knowledge of and skill with materials in order to bring forth what was envisaged as the telos. Here there is a will to power over movement and change at work that seems to be unadulteratedly good, beneficial for humankind and, moreover, has no in-built or inherent limit (there is always room for improvement, as they say). As unadulterated, unmitigated, untempered, unlimited, infinite (ἄπειρον), this Western will to shape the future may be called the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement and change. The bridling of the excesses of this will to power has been assigned to ethics which, in both Platonic and Aristotelean variants, have an appreciation of the dangers of the limitless. Unfortunately, traditional ethics as handed down from the Greeks, even to the present day, has no ontology of the specific kind of movement pertaining to sociative interplay* through which mortals could consider limits to their actions. The only kind of movement for which Greek thinking explicitly worked out an ontology is that of physical movement.

Greek thinking also concentrated upon the art of physically making things, to the exclusion of other arts, notably the art of acquisition (τέχνη κτητική) and the art of wealth-getting (τέχνη χρηματιστική). Aristotle does treat the latter briefly, pointing out its dangerous nature that resides in its inherent limitlessness; there is never an end to wealth-getting, whereas the art of acquisition may find an end in acquiring the desired use-value. Only millennia later, in the 19th century, was a Western philosopher, a meticulous student of Aristotle, able to convert Aristotle's insight into the limitless of wealth-getting into the famous formula for the essence of capital: M->C->M+ΔM, or money-capital advanced in order to get more money, a surplus value. This formula turns the formula for exchanging one use-value for another, i.e. C1->M->C2 upside down. With this inversion, as it turns out in our age, the world is also turned topsy-turvy. In the latter formula, money serves only as a means to an end, namely, that of acquiring a good on the market with another use-value, whereas in the formula for wealth-getting, the beginning and end of a circuit differ only quantitatively in amounts of money-capital. The circuit has no definite end-point, but can be repeated endlessly.

Marx deciphers these circuits. especially the former, as circuits of transformation of forms or 'sights' of thingified value. In my formulation, that takes Marx's thinking a step further, what capital is, i.e. its essence, is a limitlessly augmentative circuit of the Medium of thingified value. Limitless valorization of the Medium of thingified value is the law or principle of movement of what is commonly called capitalism. One could say that today's global capitalist economy is driven by the absolute will to valorize the Medium of thingified value. As absolute, the will is limitless, never coming to an end (τέλος) where it could be finally satiated.

The absolute will to power over all kinds of movement and change and the absolute will to valorize the Medium are interlinked and intimately intermeshed through the circumstance that improvements in the productivity of production and circulation processes, including the acceleration of turnover, enhance the valorization of the Medium. These two insatiable wills are personified by two hitherto unknown gods that subterraneanly inhabit our historically shared mortal mind. I name them Willy P. and Pleon Exia (lit.: more-having). Together, in a pernicious partnership, they exercise hidden hegemony over our mind, that is all the more effective for being hidden. For it seems superficially, through the fog of implicitness, that the principles of movement for which these unbridled gods stand are unreservedly good: improvement of the human condition through mastery of movement and change, coupled with enhanced material standards of living. In their ambivalence, they are impostors impersonating the Good and the Fair. And if they do not stand unqualifiedly for the Good (there are downsides), then — even without insight into the depth of our infection by these divinities, amounting to unabashed cluelessness — it appears (or rather: we kid ourselves) that their 'excesses' can be contained and regulated, say, through liberal-democratic government and a system of international organizations institutionalizing 'universal' human values. In this way, 'our Western' system of values, including above all individual freedom, may be preserved.

The adoration of Pleon Exia and Willy P. is performed unknowingly, but — under this veil of ignorance — all the more fervently. Among the rich and political elites, the fervour intensifies to a feverish frenzy masked by arrogant complacency.

* Cf. Social Ontology of Whoness Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.

Further reading: Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy. 

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Aristotle's purely energetic god of the fair. 

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

Mind over matter

In the physics of relativity theory, time is conceived as quantitative, being measured by the path taken by light through space, whether it be straight (special relativity) or curved (general relativity with gravitational curvature). Any physical event is then specified by four-dimensional space-time co-ordinates (x,y,z,ct) with the fourth spatialized time co-ordinate measuring the time taken for light (i.e. electromagnetic radiation) to travel from the event to an observer's signal receiver. Hence, for example, we on Earth are approximately 8 light-minutes from the Sun and 1 light-second from the Moon. This entails in particular that everything we perceive sensuously on Earth with our eyes is bathed in and made visible by light that is at least eight minutes old. It was emitted from fusion reactions in the Sun itself and made its way to Earth.

This is the way Einstein tailored his relativity theory to suit the needs of cosmological theory, whose empirical input consists of electromagnetic data received on Earth by any sort of receiver, including optical, radio or other kind of telescope. Cosmologists readily accept that they are, as they say, 'looking back in time' along the path of light taken by a cosmological event to the receiver.  Hence registered (clock-) time is relative to the observer-receiver.

For our mind, however, there is no (linear) time delay in thinking of the Sun as there is in receiving physical light from the Sun. We only ever see the Sun by eyesight with a delay of eight minutes, whereas we can think of the Sun instantaneously at any time, even at night when the Sun is sensuously invisible, and without employing any apparatus. Similarly, anything physical we perceive visually on Earth by daylight is perceived only in the present moment with the aid of eight-minute-old light from the Sun illuminating what is perceived. 

By contrast, my mind and your mind can think of and understand not only its sensuously perceptible environment, but also anything at all, both physical and non-physical, passed through to it from any of the temporal dimensions of past, present and future. The mind can move and switch freely from one imagined situation to another, skipping from one temporal dimension to another. Even the present, sensuously perceived situation is only understood by being interpreted by the mind with the help of the power of imagination. The openness of the three temporal dimensions for such mental skipping and interleaving of situations, both physically material and non-material, is entirely different from the measured, linear time not only of relativity physics, but of all physical science. Throughout modern science one is content with measuring time along the so-called time-line to pin-point events of all kinds, including  non-physical ones such as the handing down of a verdict by a court.

As I said, relativistic physics is dependent upon light to see anything at all, to register the data of anything physically material. The science of physics in general investigates the movement of anything physical that can be moved, with physical beings themselves being characterized as having extension and being composed of matter, matter itself having measurable mass. This is the way it has been with physics since its inception with the ancient Greeks, although the mathematization of physics only sets in with a vengeance much later, in the 17th century, thus turning extension (μέγεθος _megethos_) and mass (ὄγκος _onkos_) into quantitative mathematical variables.

The detection of physical events of extended, massive things by light, however, has the quirk that, according to both relativity theory and quantum theory, the light signal upon which such detection depends is composed of a stream of massless photons. Even more quirky is that in principle, according to Einstein's famous equation of mass-energy equivalence, E=m.c^2, physical mass can be converted entirely into the pure motion of massless light. The speed of light c is only attainable when all mass dissolves into pure motion. Light is therefore on the cusp of dissolution into the non-material altogether.

Modern science, however, is highly sceptical about there being anything at all non-material, and this prejudice is reinforced by modern physics, which claims to be the foundational science for all natural and social science. It has an intense focus (in particle physics) on the investigation of matter down to its smallest building blocks in quantum entities which are conceived as the fundamental particles from which all entities at all are 'made'. Quantum entities (including the Higgs boson) are then supposed to 'explain' the 'creation' of the entire universe, along linear time, of course, linking cause and effect. The beginning of all is then located at the beginning of the time-line called the Big Bang (or some other imagined mathematized theoretical construct).

Is that which truly exists, the famous ὄντως ὄν (_ontos on_) of Plato and the Platonists, in the end nothing ideal, but thoroughly material? Is it only matter that truly exists? Only material causes count throughout modern science because they enable material manipulation and hence the mastery of all kinds of movement and change of at least materially based entities. This mastery starts with being able to predict movement, to precalculate it. Taken literally and etymologically, the ὄντος ὄν can be translated as the 'beingly being' or the 'essentially essencing', with both 'being' and 'essencing' being understood participially as a kind of ongoing, continuous movement. Such essencing has to be entirely incomprehensible and foreign to modern science.

Again, is it the case — as it seems to be under the hegemony of modern science and its lead science, physics — that it is only matter that truly exists? Every phenomenon modern science attempts to grasp is led back to putative material causes, even the movement of the mind itself (in neuroscience). But what is matter? Matter is already an interpretation, i.e. an accomplishment of the mind. In today's modern physics, matter is a certain interpretation within our own historical epoch that differs from its interpretation in another historical age. In this sense, matter itself is an idea! This idea is an historical, hermeneutic cast of what matter is conceived to be in our age. One could object that this is circular thinking, and indeed it is. What matter itself 'truly is' can only be thought within an hermeneutic circle that is inextricably linked with the interpretations other primitive phenomena, notably, movement and time itself.

I have already pointed out that the physical movement of material beings is a special kind of movement amenable to being conceived along linear time, which itself is a specific, historical interpretation of time initiated by the Greeks, and Aristotle in particular. Such physical movement has been at the heart of Western science since its beginnings. Today, physical, material beings can be modelled by mathematized, or at least quantified, physical theories with an eye to mastering, i.e. predicting, their movement and change. 

As indicated above however, the movement of the non-physical mind is not subject to such physical restrictions. The mind moves freely through an entirely different kind of time that is no longer one-dimensional, but three-, or even four-dimensional (the fourth dimension allowing the passing-through of unified three-dimensional time to the psyche with its mental power of understanding; cf. On Human Temporality esp. Sections 1.2 and 2.2). The purest, freest kind of movement, that of the mind, is non-material*, although nothing prevents the mind from thinking of things material, without being affected by them. The mind can indeed follow physical movements along linear time as a special case, as it does in modern physics. But to interpret the movement of the mind itself, an alternative historical hermeneutic of time is required. Moreover, mental movement and physical movement do not exhaust the kinds of movement readily accessible and observable in familiar phenomena. Both social, sociating movement and economic movement, for instance, demand their own investigations of what these kinds of movement are.

* The embodied mind of us mortal humans does require the material brain as its organ, its tool, and mental movement can be impeded by dysfunctional bodily organs, but thinking itself is a non-material kind of movement.

Further reading:  On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Three laws of movement (again).