Kant and a priori knowledge

Source

Re-reading one of the seminal books of my youth - Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - and it occurred to me that the term 'a priori', as attributed to Kant, could be renamed to a subsconscious mental model.

Consider these quotes where the terms around 'a priori' (such as  priori concept) has been replaced with "mental model"

Unless we apply the concepts of space and time to the impressions we receive, the world is unintelligible, just a kaleidoscopic jumble of colors and patterns and noises and smells and pain and tastes without meaning. We sense objects in a certain way because of our application of mental models such as space and time, but we do not create these objects out of our imagination, as pure philosophical idealists would maintain. The forms of space and time are applied to data as they are received from the object producing them. The metal models have their origins in human nature so that they're neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept.

and

Kant called his thesis that our mental model are independent of sense data and screen what we see a ``Copernican revolution.'' By this he referred to Copernicus' statement that the earth moves around the sun. Nothing changed as a result of this revolution, and yet everything changed. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our mental model of it was turned inside out. The effect was overwhelming. It was the acceptance of the Copernican revolution that distinguishes modern man from his medieval predecessors.

What Copernicus did was take the existing mental model of the world, the notion that it was flat and fixed in space, and pose an alternative mental model of the world, that it's spherical and moves around the sun; and showed that both of the mental models fitted the existing sensory data.

Of course - a mental model is a pattern of thought, which means that it is part of the pattern of sentience. This needs to be added to the Sentience Theory wiki I'm developing.

Black holes spawn baby universes

The Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity - which I'm sure has to be called the ECKS theory - is very cool especially because it seems to reinforce myths of the phoenix-like creation of life out of death.

From http://io9.com/5586017/was-our-universe-born-inside-a-black-hole-in-another-universe

This potentially means that many of the black holes in our own universe are the incubators of entirely new universes, each separated by the infinite time gap of the event horizon. That said, some properties of the mother universe could trickle through to its daughters, and detecting some of these properties could actually provide experimental proof of the theory. In fact Poplawski speculates this inheritance of properties could solve another great mystery of cosmology.

 It would also explain why I never liked the term 'white hole' - because, if I understand this theory correctly,  material from a black hole does not comes out  from a white hole somewhere else, instead it creates a new universes.

However, it means that my visualisation the universe has changed - whereas before I imagined it as bumps and swirls on an infinity of strings that loop around to forma a torus, I now suspect that the strings are interconnected like a web - branching and rebranching - some to die off and others to spawn. The family tree of God.  

It also reinforces my personal belief that the mulitversal consciousness - or God, if you prefer - is a sentience that that can recreate itself. More on that when i finally get around to publishing my sentience theory.

You'll never be born here again.

Need to record this newest piece of evil as reported in Newsweek at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

Aug. 20-27, 2007 - In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."


But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

Makes me so angry. Oh for a free Tibet.