Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
The Semitic Origins of the West
07
Jul
Our culture and society is often referred to as
Judeo-Christian, but if we look deeper into history, Judeo-Christian culture descends from Semitic, and thus both Arabs and Jews descend from Semites, as does much of North Africa.
At the root of three great religions is Abraham: Jews, Arabs and Christians, here is his pilgrimage from Babylon of the Chaldeans, the Biblical narrative places him in Ur of the Chaldeans, is the neogenesis of these three great peoples, of which only a few eastern peoples where these religions already penetrated and also some originary peoples where there is still their initial religiosity.
Abraham goes through two great civilizing crises the Babylonian fall and after his pilgrimage to ancient Assyria arriving at the city of Aleppo, which under the rubble of the war and the earthquake still exists in Syria today, and then from to the Hebron valley, where he spent by a second civilizing crisis in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, where there were orgies and decadence.
He leaves there and goes towards Egypt, and his son Isaac will also remain a nomad, the fight between his sons Esau and Jacob is famous, Machado de Assis has a book with this name and we could say that the polarization of humanity is older than we think.
From Jacob will be established the lineage of the 12 tribes from his sons, and from the lineage of Judah will come David, while from the lineage of this one will come Joseph son of another Jacob, and of Joseph be born Jesus.
Understanding this Abrahamic descent, with all the struggles and contradictions that have taken place in history, is fundamental for us to understand both Christian, Islamic and Jewish culture, an inter-religious and multicultural dialogue is possible if we understand that the history of a single God, just as a distant historical past unites these peoples.
Religious fundamentalism prevents this dialogue, the evangelist Matthew who was an enemy tax collector of the Jews, refers to his own conversion like this (Mt 9,10): “While Jesus was at the table, in the house of Matthew, many collectors came of taxes and sinners and sat at the table with Jesus and his disciples” and Jesus will say “it is the sick who need doctors” and completes the teaching by saying “I want mercy and not sacrifices”.
How much division, hatred and violence in the name of God, this is not religion, it is just fanaticism.
The noosphere and oral culture
06
Jul
The period of oral culture predominated
before 3000 BC, although there were scribes in Egypt, cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia and ancient Babylon, there was also writing in Ancient China and also in the civilizations originaries in the Americas: Mayans, Aztecs and Incas.
The form of dissemination of culture and, therefore, of the evolution of the noosphere was through prophets and oracles, whose main function was the transmission of oral culture and preceded literate and philosophical teaching, until we have a more notable turn in Greco-Jewish culture -Roman.
In biblical terms, according to Genesis reports, using genealogies presented in the bible, we can say that it is at least 6 thousand years old, but if we understand the narrative, Abel was a shepherd and Cain was a farmer, so this narrative begins at the moment when man becomes more sedentary and the civilizing process becomes clearer, the fact that Abel is a shepherd is symbolic for biblical language.
If this is a fact without historical proof and also Noah and the flood are still an eternal search for documentation, however their sons Shem and Ham can already be found in history, since the Semitic and Hamite peoples are registered in history, and Jafé who was to dwell in the tents of Shem.
The Semites were the dawn of the Mesopotamian cultures that peaked in Babylon (1792–1000 BC) and were later dominated by the Persians.
Prophets and oracles will be fundamental in ancient cultures, they should have a certain “divine” illumination so that history does not get corrupted and customs are changed.
According to Genesis 11, from the Flood to Abraham passed about 292 years, and from the birth of Abraham to the settlement of Jacob in Egypt passed about 290 years, ‘from Abram to the coming of Christ is about 2000 years, and then begins an era of written culture, and thus the gospels appear while in ancient Greece the Socratic and Platonic schools, since we know of Socrates through Plato and then the Aristotelian school, period that the schools and writings are fixed.
It is not about overcoming oral culture, but it appears together with writing, handwritten books, which later became famous for copyist monks, this period is called scriptorium.
Oral culture remains with native peoples, also among African peoples, printed writing will be a conquest of modernity, so to speak of schooling is to speak of modernity, and now we are in a new transition due to new media.
Noogesis and the mind
05
Jul
Noogenesis as a process of formation and
evolution of the human mind is a term coined by the philosopher and anthropologist Teilhard Chardin in his book “The human phenomenon”, the earth had already passed through the pre-Cambrian era of the geological formation of the Geosphere and the formation of unicellular life, the Biosfera of multicellular until the appearance of animals from the Mezozoic era whose last period is the Jurassic known for the cinematographic fantasies of dinosaurs.
This juvenile land, as Teilhard Chardin calls it, is followed by the Cenozoic period, where an event called K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) took place, which was a mass extinction that altered the Earth’s biodiversity, approximately 65.5 million years ago. , and which altered Earth’s biodiversity with the extinction of large animals such as dinosaurs and giant reptiles.
This is how Chardin describes it: “the cell, the natural grain of life, just as the atom is the natural grain of unorganized Matter. It is blindly the cell that we have to try to understand if we want to assess what the Life Step specifically consists of.” (CHARDIN, p. 84).
Even without knowing “the limits of relativistic physics”, Chadin explains our diversity based on it: “I must recognize that the consideration of a dimensional medium where Space and Time organically combine is the only means that we have found so far to explain the distribution of substances material and living around us” (CHARDIN, p. 87).
It was Alexei Eryomin, in his monograph Noogénesis and the Theory of Intelligence, who updated the concept of noogenesis: “it is the process of developing intellectual systems and implanting them in space over time” (Enyomin, 2022), a concept that did not is contradictory to Chardin, as quoted above.
Thus Enyomin will plot the velocity across the membrane of a unicellular organism (from 10 degrees meters per second), through the cytoplasm (2-10 to -5 degrees per second), from the multicellular organism (0.05 meters per second) to the impulse of human nerve cells (100 meters per second, quantum-electronic connections within a population, and we arrive in the world made as a human artifact where the speed of waves, electric currents, lights, video or opto-electronics reach 3×10 at 8 degrees per second). second (image).
Understanding biogenesis, as a certain sequence of regular, interrelated transformations in spatio-temporal processes helps us to understand life and also human origin without abolishing the spiritual-metaphysical aspect that it involves.
Chardin, T. O fenômeno humano. Trad. José Luiz Archanjo, São Pualo, editora Cultrix, n/d.
Enyomin, A. L. (2022) Biophysics of Evolution Intellectuais Systems, Bophysics, Vol. 67, n. 2, pp. 320-326.
Cosmogony, cosmology and eschatology
04
Jul
We have already developed here the
idea of Kosmos in Greek philosophy, which is a time that designates the entire universe as a whole, but it is also “order”, “beauty” and “harmony” for the Greeks, now with powerful telescopes such as the Hubble and James Webb we know that there is also chaos and disharmony in the universe, but the deeper question remains: how did it all begin?
Cosmogonies are a body of doctrines, from religious and mythical principles to scientific ones that seek to explain the order and principle of the universe in its cosmogenesis.
As man became more sedentary, he tried to better adapt to nature to satisfy the needs of animals and plants, needing to look at the sky and understand the seasons to better control crops and pastures for animals.
Practically all civilizations (or civilizational eras) elaborated their cosmogonies, for example, in Western civilization the geocentric model of Ptolemy (the earth is the center), passed to the Copernican model (the heliocentric model), now with the power of James Webb we are looking at the first galaxies and this is possible because the light reaching us has already traveled several light years, so we are seeing a picture of the past.
Thus, our vision of cosmogenesis is gradually changing, at the moment, for example, the telescope that works with a different spectrum of light, the infrared, managed to spot a galaxy 400 million years after the big bang (if this theory is right), which means 13.5 billion years ago (photo), that is, we are seeing almost our cosmogenesis.
Cosmology is then increasingly closer to cosmogesis and this would mean a vision of both, but the essential questions are still missing: where did we come from and where are we going?
Thus, an eschatological vision, beginning and end, is lacking, and one question is already certain, although the planet could collapse and with it our civilization, due to the action of an external cataclysm or a destruction of human artifacts: a war, the very danger of there are so many nuclear power plants on the planet, remember the incident of Fukushima in 2011 and Chernobyl, the planet now has 440 active and 23 under construction, in addition to the military arsenal in several countries.
In the midst of the stormy wind of our time, Christian cosmogony takes shelter and waits in the divine presence of that reading that says (Mt 8:27): “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” when the apostles wake him up on the boat because of the weather and the rough ocean.
Truth between logic and onto-logic
30
Jun
The truth in the ontological construction of
the Greeks, there is something inexorable to Being and this led them to believe that somehow this was configured in a cosmological whole, the “highest good” of Plato or the “immovable motor” of Aristotle, was not just physical, but also meta-physical realities.
The physis for them was for the pre-Socratic philosophers something permanent, primary and fundamental and later it was elaborated as nature, which included the “cosmos”,
Plotinus, a neo-Platonist, will extend this reality to the Soul, which would be an intelligible form that thinks inside the intellect, in the current debate about consciousness in Artificial Intelligence, we would say that it is sensibility, of course it is necessary to resume in the context of Plotinus, he states in Ennead VI, 4:
“And we, what are we? Are we the one or are we the one that was associated and exists in time? Indeed, before birth took place, we were there [in the intelligible], being other men, and some also gods: pure souls and intellects united to the totality of essence, parts of the intelligible, without separation, without division, but being of the whole. (and even now we are not apart)”.
Thus the whole remains, if there is not in Plotinus the God as known by monotheistic religions, there is the idea of the whole that “put on us and added to himself that man”, in the continuity of the text above.
Saint Augustine starts from this idea to affirm that the soul is “the presence of God in man, and his connection with the Creator, responsible for the similarity of man with God”, as well as associating the soul with the One, a category also used by Plotinus , and in him the One is God.
It is true that modernity abandons the idea of God and, by dividing thought into objective and subjective, makes secondary what takes place in the mind, thought and soul, in short in the noosphere, and this also happens with the religious world, as we posted yesterday it is not enough to say “sir, sir” it takes an action that corresponds to a certain belief.
Even in his historical time, for those who believe this epiphany continues, Jesus already asked his disciples “who do men say that the son of man [I am]? ” (Mt 16,13), because he knew that much of what it is like to be divine and timeless would be confused with earthly and contextual aspects only, in times of cruelty and hostility it is necessary to rethink what we think of eternal, timeless and that we will no longer legacy for all mankind.
Noosphere and True
28
Jun
The concept of Noosphere comes from Volodymyr Vernadsky (1863-1945)
later adopted and developed by Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), it is the idea of a third layer beyond the Geosphere and the Biosphere (biological life) that develops human thought, not only from the point of view of knowledge, but of everything that motivates the Being, the passions, cultures and decisions that are taken and develop the way we relate and live in society.
But since we organize ourselves in society, cultural development where the layers of structures and forms of transfer of cultures happen and develop already form a layer of “thought” of society.
Teilhard de Chardin, who in addition to being a paleontologist was a Jesuit priest, elaborated that the entire universe is enveloped in this layer of “thought” and that it is in constant evolution, which for a long time was worth some objections on the part of religious people.
With a look at Google and also attentive to the “intelligence” of mechanisms such as ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing and others, it necessarily leads to a discussion of what Artificial Intelligence is.
We have already indicated the book by Jean-Gabriel Ganascia “The myth of singularity” about the falsity of some technoprophecies about the machine overtake the Human Intelligence, we have also indicated the recent interview with Miguel Nicolelis, a renowned Brazilian scientist, known for his research in neuroscience.
So this sphere of thought lives in constant evolution and the tools and technologies are underlying parts of this evolution, however it is necessary to understand what in fact they are and how they can contribute to life on the planet, it is the collaboration of the noosphere with the biosphere.
The truth is that which is established as reality in the face of human challenges, many things are outside human thought, such as cataclysms and events in celestial bodies, but the healthy development of this sphere of human thought is important.
For Teilhard de Chardin, the spiritual part also collaborates and participates in this development, for him the whole universe is divine and Christocentric, that is, a revelation of love for man and life.
About false prophecies it is good to remember the passage of Mt 7,15: “Beware of false prophets: They come to you dressed in sheep’s clothing, but inside they are fierce wolves”, but it is easy to recognize them alert reading: bad trees bear bad fruit.
Temporal and eternal truths
27
Jun
The construction of the idea of truth by the Greeks comes from aletheia,
it refers to the self-manifestation of reality and beings to the human intellect, the word means a-lethea (not hidden, not veiled), this truth is either evident or can be constructed by reason.
This construction gave rise to “episteme” to oppose “doxa”, or mere opinion of the sophists, but they did not lose sight of the whole, which for Plato was the “highest good” and for Aristotle the “immovable engine” and both ideas approached God as is thought by Christians.
Thus knowledge was seen as a whole, and the contingent was seen as accidental, uncertain and doubtful, which occurs, but opposes the whole truth.
Aristotle had the classic ontological differentiation between the contingent and the necessary for the Being and this antagonistic relationship is expressed in a hierarchical relationship between the techné and the episteme, of course it has a historical and contingent meaning here, but it helps to understand the technique in its genesis.
The technique has no end in itself, it is linked to human purpose, and therefore it is not neutral, it is instrumental and serves human purposes.
We jump to the end of the low Middle Ages, in its period little studied and understood with the quarrel of the universals of Boethius (480-524 AD) and language studies of the monk Alcuin (735 –804 AD).
Boethius wrote “The consolation of philosophy” but it is a fragment of his writings that gave him fame, it is found in the quarrel of universals, the question of whether universals are things or merely words, this will give rise to the debate between realists and nominalists until the end of the middle idea, where the idea of truth will replace the Greek Eidos that means each Being has an essence.
In his ontological development Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) thus explains God as a necessary being: “a necessary being is the being that must exist, that cannot not exist”, thus the argument can be rewritten as: “The proposition ‘ God exists’ is necessary” or simply “God is” pure Being.
But modernity broke with ontology until Hidegger’s revival.
This break deepened in Cartesian reason, mediated by classical physics and the end of metaphysics, united with the idea of an abstract and idealistic universal knowledge.
Kant’s critique of pure reason (1724-1804), and German idealism with its apex in Hegel (1770-1831) give the final outline to an abstract and idealistic truth, the reach of Western Greco-Christian culture finds its end and truth becomes relative, the episteme just a method of neutral truth.
Revelation and unveiling
23
Jun
While in philosophy, unveiling is the clarity attained by metaphysical or 
ontological intelligibility, which is not restricted only to the material, empirical or quantitative aspects of reality, unveiling in theology is revelation and intelligibility through faith.
Both seek knowledge of the whole, from its original aspect, passing through the means (the paths and methods it proposes) to understand rationally or through the “revelation” of harmonic knowledge (elucidation) of divine truths or those contained in the Scriptures (justification).
Thus, Theology, while it is the study that represents an effort of the reason (and spirituality) for a greater understanding of what is said through the Scriptures, however, it is always revelation because divine knowledge is infinite, while human knowledge is finite.
Thus, the word unveiling (removing the veil) is suitable for rational effort, but without the resource of metaphysics and ontology, it remains tied to revelation, which is pragmatic rational knowledge.
The effort to understand the new data from the James Webb telescope, for example, is already giving physicists and astrophysicists new understandings of the universe, but it is increasingly difficult to understand the initial moment or what initial substance it formed, the answer seems to be go beyond its limits when conducting hypotheses: without this one there is no beginning or there are other multiverses beyond our universe.
Thus, unveiling is that knowledge that goes towards the essence of what we are and where we are heading and what ethical-metaphysical laws govern us and we should obey them.
So un-veil can indicate that more than an initial substance (a primordial monad or an initial cosmic energy) there can be a Being and an intention in creation.
If the eye is the lamp of our body and reveals reality to us, we must go beyond it to reveal the secrets of eternity, because our knowledge is limited.
This wisdom is the one that affirms, in the biblical reading that we know how much two sparrows are worth, but the divine (Mt 10,31-32): “As for you, even the hairs of your head are numbered. Do not be afraid! You are worth more than many sparrows.”
Phenomenology and the other
20
Jun
The Other is not a contemporary category, however how it is realized
from the Husserlian phenomenology is something entirely new, not by chance Heidegger, Husserl’s student and disciple thought ipseity thought the rooting of otherness in “ipseity” itself (Selbstheit) (which differentiates one being from another, refusing to think the “self” (Selbst) according to the categories of substance and “identity” (Identität), thus his ontology of the Other is entirely new (within philosophy) .
If we want to deal with identity, a category proper to a period of individualism and alleged finite totalities, we can say that in a more current modern anthropology, the “theory” of identity must be seen as giving the Other the “similar” aspect as a “human being”. ”, but defined as “diverse” and “unequal” in the set of interethnic, intercultural or interreligious relations.
It is this contact between different cultures, religions and even ideological identity positions, that the civilizational process is at stake, there is no lack of “influencers” and groups that encourage one type of culture in repulsion to another, treating the unequal and the different as “enemy ” and this does not even mean that they do not exist, in a war for example, but the negation of the Other.
There is no lack of philosophers who have dealt with the subject, we highlight Husserl’s phenomenology and its influences: Heidegger, Edith Stein, I highlight Paul Ricoeur (The self as an other) and Emmanuel Lévinas (Ethics and infinity) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method).
But also Habermas (The philosophical discourse of Modernity and The inclusion of the Other) and Byung-Chul Han (The expulsion of the other: Society, perception and communication today) which are very good for analyzing communication and society today, but without a clear view of Being as Being as in Heideger’s ontology.
Recognizing the Other as having dignity and deserving respect, even if in positions different from ours, is the remedy for today’s lack of empathy.
Where to solve the civilizational crisis
16
Jun
During this week we developed the idea that amid so many shadows,
still light and salt to give meaning and life to the civilizing process, it is possible to overcome the anger of war and the hatred of differences of opinion if we introduce new elements of healthy living into society.
From NGOs and volunteers who work in war camps, to people who work with determination and self-control in an increasingly difficult and intolerant daily life.
There is no general rule, it is necessary to accelerate the diplomatic process for understanding and overcoming war, it is necessary to advance a process of educating an integral man who knows how to deal with different factors of social life, including ethnic, political and religious differences.
The growth of the egocentric circle due to ideologies and bubbles of closed circles, they reinforce individualistic and group thinking, can be changed by widening the circles of coexistence and allowing and giving belonging to excluded groups and people.
But above all, it is necessary to strengthen the healthy tissue, the little light and little salt that, even if it is little, can make a difference and change environments, groups and even entire nations, restoring their self-esteem at the same time as developing tolerance with other peoples.
The tragic scenario that is being designed may have its course altered, but it is first necessary to save that healthy tissue where respect, tolerance and social peace still breathe.
The most peaceful and responsible religions and social groups, the lack of control attached to the ego is childlike as Freud developed, it can give way to mature relationships between people, groups and peoples.
In the biblical passage in which Jesus notes that the crowds were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Mk 1:15) he not only encourages the disciples to help them, but also reminds them that first: “6 Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel!” and say that the “Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” and it will not come by the hand of powerful and narcissistic people, but by the life and word of these followers of yours
