panini: Daniel has suggested that I take up your further challenge as productive to our mutual ends of discussion, understanding, and constructive criticism. I'm not going to restrict myself to word counts, but will aim for brevity and clarity, if not the soul of wit.

I have a challenge. Can you summarize the central claim in a paragraph of fewer than 75 words? The follow-up question would be to explain the concepts that the claim relies on in no more than 5 paragraphs of 50 words each. You see the potential for recursion in this process, but that's not the plan. I really just want to understand the most basic logic of the claim.

Value and Being, characterized by 0 and 1, are metaphysical transnatural limits of knowledge. Their intersection is Integrity, life. This corresponds to mind ∩ body = memory. They're the basis of an evo-devo phenomenological cycle/circuit, which includes qualities, meanings; substances, forms; and signs/symbols. This may be "folded" into a cube, producing four iterations supporting dual recursions with a switch, and with signs/symbols permits reading from/writing to memory, hence I-language and cognition.

I'm a methodological naturalist, like Chomsky. I'm obviously an architectonic philosopher, a system builder, like Peirce. I'm fancy myself an organismic process philosopher, like Whitehead. These are clues to what I like and am like, and what to expect of and from me.

Metaphysics is understood as Aristotle's "first philosophy", disentangling it from the name his editors gave it by putting it "after physics". Transnatural is understood as exactly that, moving from nonexistent essence, Value, to nonessential existence, Being, spanning nature. Their characteristic numbers, 0 and 1, thus fall out naturally. As Cantor demonstrated, the unit line segment is as transfinite as an infinite line, hence a minimal yet rich structure, capable of mapping the entire cosmos and its evolution over time with room to spare. Further, without 0, there's no modern mathematics. 0 is central and essential to maths, as clearly shown by Cartesian coordinates. Poetically speaking, 0 is the "king" of numbers, and 1 is the "queen", as shown by its ability to create the rest of the natural numbers by, you guessed it, recursion. Being poses a natural limit to discoverable knowledge while Value promises an unbounded natural locus for the creation of knowledge. To paraphrase Wilhelm von Humboldt on language, Value makes infinite use of the finite means of Being. In a way, western philosophy hasn't quite known what to make of Value, and as a result, is like pre-zero mathematics: primitive, unfocused, incomplete. Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, has Taoism, a nontheistic value system, to which I'm indebted. The Tao Te Ching, or book of the way of virtue, is essentially a process philosophy. Thus, this work is, indeed, a "theory of everything", and further, a "theory of anything", but it's rather ordinary, prosaic, quotidian, humble, and homely, as well as the basis for what's to come: Integrity. I'll stop there for the time being.

(Just an organizational note: the forum's spam filter caught Poemworld's latest reply (a false positive), so panini's immediate reply, which appears to have just followed it, was written before it was approved and visible.)

In a PM, Daniel asks:

I do have a question: what do you want to accomplish? Should I focus more on the idea of poetry, and that you're trying to express yourself? I don't want to discourage that at all. I was instead replying to the ideas from a theoretical perspective on the assumption you were looking from the -- indeed, very challenging -- perspective of trying to have a scientific impact and change perspectives in the field.

In other words, what are my motives and intentions? From introspection and reflection, it's always seemed to be a kind of compulsion. It's not like I've ever had any choice or control, at least until lately. The ideas kept building and the motivations to work on them kept getting stronger and stronger. It's been at turns enormous fun and nerve-wrackingly terrifying. The breakthroughs have been ecstatic, some of the greatest emotional experiences of my life, up to and including the birth of my daughter, whose 17th birthday is today. What am I trying to accomplish? What I've stated so far. I went hunting for UG and I think I've bagged it. I wanted to see if I could close the epistemic, or explanatory, gap and I believe I have. I knew there had to be a solution to the mind-body problem because, duh, we have minds and bodies. There had to be some solution, somewhere, somehow. Do I want to shake up linguistics? Why not? But I don't think I'll ever have that chance, largely because I'm nobody from nowhere. I have no institutional standing. I have a degree (math), experience doing science (undergraduate fellowship in nonlinear dynamics at UT Austin, got my name in Nature), have done a little bit of independent creative research work ("A Novel Visual Model of Electron Configuration"), all of which you can find at poemworld.blogspot.com. This has always been my big project, something that's kept me going, whether I wanted to or not. I've been astonishingly reckless in its pursuit tbh, in a the-ends-justify-the-means kind of way. One always has visions of hitting it big, of being discovered, but I'm beginning to doubt that's in the cards, though I've not given up. I just sent a letter to Prof. Bill Seager of UToronto. He wrote a quite good survey paper on panpsychism (which I've always reacted against) and also the SEP article on the same. He's into philosophy of mind so I emailed him. I doubt I'll ever hear back. I stumbled onto his paper by googling Chomsky and Whitehead. So I did this work essentially for the hell of it, gratuitously, because I was having fun, and it was an obsession. What else can I say?

Regarding what I call "the throne", it's basically a memory processor. It all begins with phenomenology, which is justified by Charles Sanders Peirce's architectonic system, which I use as a "recipe":

Peirce’s Architectonic System
1. Mathematics
2. Philosophy
   which consists of:
   A. Phenomenology
   B. Normative Science
      which consists of:
      i. Aesthetics
      ii. Ethics
      iii. Logic
         which consists of:
         a. Philosophical Grammar
         b. Critical Logic
         c. Methodeutic
   C. Metaphysics
3. Physical [Natural] Science
https://www.iep.utm.edu/peircear/

I used to belong to a Facebook page called "Unreasonable Philosophy", where they loved to rain shit all over me, which I found useful. In particular, a guy named Brandon Evans called me out on how I proposed to represent the contents of memory, which stumped me. He was talking about phenomenology, which he never mentioned, but I finally figured out. From that I finally had a key insight about a dialectically related series of extremely general concepts. This is that series:

{substances [forms (symbols} meanings] qualities).

By dialectically related I mean that for any three concepts, the central term is defined by the two end terms, or oppositions. For example, forms are substances and symbols, or meanings are the intersection of symbols and qualities. These were integrated with Being-Integrity-Value to form the primary structure of the phenomenology:

Integrity-Being-substances-forms-symbols-meanings-qualities-Value-Integrity.

Since Integrity is at the beginning and end of the indicates it's, yes, recursive, and hence a closed structure, or path recursion, something we'll see more of later (foreshadowing):

There's a lot to recommend in this design. For one thing, as a simple directed graph, it displays a hierarchical growth and development pattern, moving from Integrity to Being, then to Substances, next to Forms, landing finally at Signs/Symbols. The other path goes from Integrity to Value, on to Qualities, through to Meanings, arriving again at Signs/Symbols. (Fwiw, this is my solution to Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness". Qualia have to come from somewhere, and Value seems to be the most likely culprit. If someone has a better idea, I'm all ears. I don't think it's panpsychism, which makes me grind my teeth. Nor do I think that trying to derive it ontologically from substances, QM, or what have you, is likely to be fruitful. I read both of Penrose and Hameroff's books and I was thoroughly unconvinced by Orch OR, but it was a heroic effort, though hubristic.) I call it a cycle or circuit, because that was my intuition and intent, but it really isn't. It deadends at Signs/Symbols, but otherwise it was overwhelmingly promising. It felt like it should be recursive, somehow, some way. It was like a zen koan: "describe a wheel that turns in two directions at once", or "describe a current that flows in two directions at once", a real head-scratcher. Then, somewhat in desperation, I decided to try taking it to three dimensions. I'd already noticed the coincidence between its number of vertices and the number of vertices of a cube, but for some reason I thought that was just too cute. But it worked, spectacularly. We'll walk through its derivation in the next post.

The fifth and last step is to connect Signs/Symbols to Substances and Qualities, closing the last two iterative loops. This is the second binary branching, or fork in the road, the first being where we began at Integrity. Y'all know what the great NY Yankees catcher Yogi Berra said: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." I did. The pictures are now talking up a storm. This is where the two recursive paths make their appearance, as will be demonstrated. It's also where the I believe the epistemic or explanatory gap is bridged, directly addressing the mind-body problem, as demonstrated by the alternating crossing from internal mental phenomenal consciousness and external somatic phenomenal experience as mediated by symbolic awareness, knowledge, and memory, or the lexicon. In addition it's where a "switch" appears, permitting the cognitive alternation between internal and external awareness and memory. I call them "RecIt Cubes" for recursive-iterative, or iteratively supported recursion. I LOVE this name btw. Here's the result:


Here are the two recursive pathways, as promised. Twin ouroboroi. So cool.


The switch can be seen more clearly by superposing the two diagrams. An observation: it is claimed that this is a metastable memory structure. In that case, the switch is meta-metastable. The "hinges" of the switch are Substances (external somatic memory) and Qualities (internal sensory memory), which swing syntactic Forms and semantic Meanings between Integrity and Signs/Symbols, establishing the contact points of the switch, hence justifying MP's claims of the existence of both Move and Merge.



Now, further justifications for all these pretty pictures should be proffered. One is that this is obviously not algebraic or symbolic logical recursion. We're not literally computers, though language is clearly computational. Directed graphs are far more suggestive of the functional neural pathways of our brains imo, being extended spatial structures and all. Another is this quote from "Why Only Us":

As Perani et al. (2011, 16058) observe, there are two dorsal pathways, "one connecting the mid-to-posterior superior temporal cortex with the premotor cortex [purple in plate 2] and one connecting the temporal cortex with Broca's area [blue in plate 2]. It has been [suggested] that [these] two may serve different functions, with the former supporting auditory-to-motor mapping ... and the latter supporting the processing of sentence syntax." There are also two ventral pathways that connect from the region where the "lexicon" is presumed to be, to the front dorsal region. The idea is that these dorsal and ventral fiber tracts together form a complete "ring" that moves information from the lexicon to the areas on the dorsal side where it is used by Merge. The key idea is that this fiber-tract "ring" must be in place in order that syntactic processing work. (WOU, pp. 159, 161.)

This is prescient, as will be shown presently. Yet another reason is that it has iterations, literal directed iterative loops, which presumably animals have and use, and since we're animals, so do we, but with a difference, which will also be examined. Here's another quote from WOU:

The essential point we have made several times is that birdsong never gets more complex than this. While linear chunking is found in birdsong — a warble-tweet sequence can be "chunked" as a single unit of perception or production, called a motif, and while motifs can be iterated, there are no motifs found that in turn contain other motifs — for example, a tweet-trill combination that is itself contained within a warble motif. (WOU, p. 142.) [Emphasis added.]

Integrity is interpreted as representing the "controller" mentioned in WOU, and, even more importantly, Signs/Symbols as the lexicon, which turns out to be at least as important as Merge, if not in some aspects more significant. Btw, Integrity is emphatically NOT the Self, but rather constitutes the core of Self memory and Others memory. Rather, it's the autonomic source and sink of motivation and attention. Animals clearly have this, must have this, but they don't have the lexicon, which is hypothesized as the neurological and mnemonic evolutionary innovation that gives humanity the capacity to read from and write to memory, mediated by symbolic awareness, and hence some limited control over it. This is what caused us to fall out of the eternal present of other animals into history, with our senses and tenses of past, present, and future. Oddly, Chomsky and MP have always taken the lexicon as given. I'm unaware of any in-depth analysis of it, but that doesn't mean it's not there. The literature is immense. Here are two quotes from WOU to support these conjectures:

But how can the (unspecified) controller for the processor know to link these two, rather than instinctively and fly? The only method is to consult the "depth" of the hierarchical structure, or some proxy for it. So the system must resort to an implicit representation to ensure that the relevant dependencies are recovered. The fact that there is some controller that can switch between multiple streams containing words that are arbitrarily far apart, using seemingly hierarchical information, gives this system considerable computational power, of the sort envisioned in a multitape Turing machine. (WOU, p. 117.)

Our general problem is that we understand very little about how even the most basic computational operations might be carried out in neural "wetware". For example, as Randy Gallistel has repeatedly emphasized, the very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to and reads from memory — the essential operations of the Turing machine model and ultimately, any computational device. (WOU, p. 50.)

This memory structure, or "device" (I guess I should start calling it a "memory system" because that's what it is and I'm just being modest and humble), offers "multiple streams", the aforementioned "switch" between them, "hierarchical [phenomenological] information", all being strongly suggestive of a "multitape Turing machine". In fact, it's even more powerfully reminiscent of a "flip-flip", or bistable multivibrator, an electronic circuit that has two stable states and can be used to store information and is the basic storage element in sequential logic, something I studied in electrical engineering back in the day. However, where the electronic version stores a symbolic 0 or 1 as an electronic off and on, this neuro-mnemonic flip-flop stores syntactic Forms and semantic Meanings, which recursion uses to construct symbolic strings.

This is enough for this post. The next post will push these ideas further, exploring their characterizations in particular.

I'm back. Let's press on, shall we?

So, a memory system has been constructed. What are a few of its features? One is that there's a proposed "ordered process of memory formation" for both internal and external events of experience, which is provided by the phenomenology and proceeds from our earliest preconscious and protomnemonic glimmerings of awareness of an incoming stimulus or signal, into their emergence into consciousness (and conscience) awareness of said stimulus or signal, and finally manifesting as full-blown (full bloom?) recognition of somatic and linguistic form and meaning. These are:

External/Somatic: Integrity → Being → Substances → Forms → Signs/Symbols
and
Internal/Mental: Integrity → Value → Qualities → Meanings → Signs/Symbols

Let's examine the two recursive pathways first, starting with the one on the left.

I → B → Su → Fo → Sim → V → Qu → Me → I

The really interesting thing about this recursive pathway is that it preserves the order of memory formation for both phenomenological paths. This makes sense because biological processes don't run in reverse (scientists have, however, figured out how to make the cell cycle run back to its midpoint, which I suppose is the exception that proves the rule). Regarding my own memories, though I can go back in time in memory, my memories run forward through the experiences I recall. My memories, and hence my memory, don't run in reverse.

Another interesting thing is that Signs/Symbols (Sim) replaces Integrity (I) as the initiator for the second part of the recursive cycle, leading into Sim → V → Qu → Me → I. This is intriguing because it suggests that language, or its elements, can act as a trigger for remembering, which seems intuitively correct. This is because human beings have limited control over memory, the read from/write to feature of our memory, this makes sense. We simply must have some feature or features that facilitate this ability. Further, this suggests that this feature uses memory to decode, that is recognize and understand, the incoming stimulus/signal.

Another observation is that this recursive pathway appears to be implicated in hermeneutical linguistic competence as it's led by the external somatic side of the phenomenology, that is, to cope with and process incoming stimuli and signals. Again, this is a feature of language that has to be accounted for somehow. The suggestion here is that it's a feature of human memory.

The second recursive pathway on the right shares some of the same features as the first, except the two phenomenological paths change places:

I → V → Qu → Me → Sim → B → Su → Fo → I

As the first recursive pathway suggests linguistic competence, this pathway suggests semantic linguistic performance. Chomsky has pointed out that ordinary quotidian natural human language "displays deep-seated features of human creativity." This creativity has to come from somewhere and, again, Value seems to be the only credibly imaginable source, but only if one is willing and able to take Value seriously as a feature of phenomenology, and hence nature. Otherwise, it appears to come howling out of the void, and is just THERE, which is another justification for Value's characteristic number of 0, zero, nullity, the number symbol for nothingness.

As in the case of the  external somatic recursive pathway, Sim replaces I midway through the process and leads the external phenomenological path, Sim → B → Su → Fo → I. This appears to serve two purposes:

1. To facilitate internal "Spell-Out", or the linearization of the hierarchical growth and developmental structure of protolinguistic form and meaning, thus phonological form, and making it available to the consciousness of the thinker as articulated thought, but which does not have to be uttered or spoken. This is known as "thinking before speaking". In Wiktionary, it is defined as:

A stage in producing an utterance that comes between syntax and the interface with the phonological form, according to Chomsky's minimalist program.

In Glottopedia, it is defined as:

In minimalist theory spell-out is an instruction to switch to PF. What happens at PF is a point of debate; if one assumes that lexical items come from the lexicon fully inflected, phonological features are 'stripped away' at PF. Another possibility is that Spell-Out accesses the lexicon to associate the syntactic structure with phonological features.

2. As the sensory-motor externalization of an utterance or speech act, the final phonological formal product.

Now, the above discussion is only addressing language, which is the species characteristic of humanity, but that's not all there is to us. We also can dance, sing, work, play, create, destroy, make love, or just have sex, amongst many other things. All of this is mediated by language and memory, which together constitute what we know as learning, along with repetition, or practice. But the point is that language is made possible by the limited control of memory, and hence liberation from the "eternal present" of animal consciousness, and the concomitant ability to read from and write to memory, in other words, to summon memory and add to it, which requires what WOU calls the "controller", and more to the point, an act of will, or intention, to remember and to use memory by thinking to create thoughts, and thus new memories, and so on, ad infinitum. Or not. Since thinking requires an act of will, we have the option of not thinking, at least to a degree, by surrendering our wills to others, following orders, or by merely being thoughtlessly reactive to our own varying selves, not to mention constantly varying others and world, or a mix of both. To the extent we use language at all, we're condemned to think at least a little, but we can minimize thought by avoiding thinking. I don't believe that it is hard to see that this is considered the preferable option by the powers that be in this world. When they require us to think for their own ends, then they attempt to circumscribe our thoughts, to fence off the range of thoughts from areas they don't approve of. Food for thought.

The ground has now been prepared for the characterization of the structures thus far derived, to describe and explain their anatomies so to speak. The first is the Internal Activation Mode (IAM):



The terms "Umerge" and "Imerge" refer first to "Unbounded Merge", the MP idea of Merge, and second "Integrity Merge", the original Merge conjectured to be the iterative Merge that all animals have in order to link up their internal and external experiences to their biological and phenomenological Integrity. Here's the second, the External Activation Mode (EAM):



The descriptions are designed to be explanatory. The IAM is triggered by intention and motivation. It is what governs semantic linguistic performance and other activities of the expressive body. It explains human creativity. The EAM is triggered by external stimuli or signals. It accounts for hermeneutic linguistic competence. It explains interpretation. Superposing the two diagrammatic maps results in what is claimed to be UG and FL with two separate recursive pathways, four iterative loops, and a switch for alternating between the two modes:



Now, I'm claiming that it is lexical memory, the lexicon, or what I'm calling "Sim", for Signs/Symbols, is the evolutionary innovation that permits generative recursion and hence language. Here is a justification for that claim, along with the neuromorphological evidence offered in WOU, namely, a model of animal mentality produced by the removal of the lexicon/Sim, which is the loss of the recursive pathways and the two cognitive iterative loops:



That's it for now. More later. I'm exhausted.

So, I'm back. Let's summarize what we have so far. An explanatory description of a structured memory system has been provided and articulated. It is composed of four iterative loops supporting two recursive pathways. Two of the iterative loops are autonomic and part of our animal inheritance:
1. the Internal Quality Iteration (IQI), which forms the directed graph boundary of the Self phase of memory; and
2. the External Somatic Iteration (ESI), which forms the directed graph boundary of the Others phase of memory.

These two iterative loops share Integrity as a boundary (the green downward-pointing arrow in the UG/LF diagram), which is considered the source and sink of motivation, intention, attention, and reaction, all of the fast parts of consciousness that keep us alive. It's characterized as the unspecified "controller" in WOU. It's the t=0, or time zero, core of the mind. It's where consciousness continually begins. Integrity also forms our "strong" memories, emotional and somatic memories, the memories that stick with us throughout our lives. Integrity is nonlingual, affective, sensational, pragmatic, the still-regnant vestige of humanity's prelinguistic past, as of course it would have be, since it's the evolved pre-lingual core of the individual, and hence of the species.

The World phase of memory forms the Deep Structure (DS) and is hypothesized to be the first phase of memory that the infant animal, and human, develops. Then comes the Others phase, followed by the Self phase. In the animal model, the World is responsible for the instinctual processing of external stimuli and signals, or signs. With humans, it is the same, but it also is where the Sim/lexicon enters the picture, bringing along with it symbols and symbolic meaning and processing.

There are two autonomous iterative loops that are considered unique to human beings. They were likely created along with the saltatory mutation that created the lexicon, or Sim. These are:
1. the Internal Cognitive Iteration (ICI), which handles our thinking about our continuously varying interior and internal states and situations; and
2. the External Cognitive Iteration (ECI), which handles our thinking about our continuously varying exterior and external states and situations.

The ICI and ECI share a common boundary, the Sim or lexicon, which is the blue downward-pointing arrow in the UG/LF diagram. This the "read from/write to" memory structure demanded by Randy Gallistel, which is the human phylogenetic evolutionary innovation that makes UG possible, distinguishing humans from animals, and permits the ontogenetic development of the array of natural human languages observed in our species.

All together, the system is active and dynamic, switching from one internal state to the other external state. This dynamic system has been described as being like a "flip-flop", or bistable multivibrator, an electronic circuit. It can be usefully analogized with a 2:1 wavenumber oscillating drumhead.


The system and structure described so far is relatively stable considering its being metastable. Together they form the Surface Structure (SS) and the computational Workspace. WOU describes the Workspace this way:

We can think of the computational process as operating like this. There is a workspace, which has access to the lexicon of atomic elements and contains any new object that is constructed. To carry a computation forward, an element X is selected from the workspace, and then a second element Y is selected. X and Y can be two distinct elements in the workspace, as when read and books are merged to form the syntactic object underlying the phrase read books. This is called External Merge. The only other logical possibility is that one can be part of the other, called Internal Merge, as when the phrase he will read which books is merged with the phrase which books within it to yield which books he will read which books, which underlies the sentence Guess which books he will read or Which books will he read by other rules. This is an example of the ubiquitous property of displacement - phrases being pronounced in one place and interpreted in another. It had long been supposed that displacement is a strange imperfection of language. On the contrary, it is an automatic property of a very elementary computational process. (WOU, p. 99.)

That addresses process. Then there is structure:

Speculatively, along with the human developmental evidence, this suggests that a fully wired word-like atom- to Merge workspace "ring" is necessary to enable the Basic Property. (WOU, p. 164.)

These descriptions are eerily coincident with the system and structures provided here. But let's see if we can flesh this out a bit more by describing how these processes work with system presented. This will be presented in the next post. Stay tuned.

Everything that has been thus far presented, from the beginning to now, is considered to be "The Crown" of a two-tiered memory system and structure. It amounts to memory processing and is considered to be thermodynamically metastable. There is a second part, called "The Throne", which is dedicated to memory storage and is considered to be thermodynamically stable. It is the source of meaning for the organism as well, solving this vexed philosophical and epistemological problem. The Crown and the Throne are connected by and intersect at a singularity, or invariant point, Integrity. Together these three pieces compose and comprise the memory storage and processing structure and system of the individual organism. Let's now take a look at the throne.

The Throne represents stable memory. Stable memory has evolved to equip the organism with a rapid-response system to its continually changing homeostasis, dynamic relational equilibria, and adaptive challenges from the environment. It is "physical/somatic, logically continuous and conjunctively homogeneous, genetic, autonomic, largely unconscious, evolved, animal, affective, implicitly generative." It is also reactive and much faster than metastable memory, as it needs to be for most organisms' survival, especially animals. Further, stable memory's phases and phase boundaries require a relatively simple interpretation that takes into account the memory content of the phases appropriate to their types (Self, World, Others), the boundaries between the phases, and finally, a "conjunctor", a way of autonomically linking together memories sequentially, that is, both conjunctively and temporally. As a matter of fact, neuroscientists appear to be closing in on something like a conjunctor https:// www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-creates-a-timeline-of-the- past-20190212/.

It turns out that I actually have an example of such a structure. It was from an independent exploration into ethics and logic, in particular, of a Cartesian cross between ethical good and bad and logical true and false. Here it is:



Symbolically, this structure has a conjunctor (the ampersand), phase boundaries (true/false, good/bad), and phase contents (right, wrong, fiction, tragedy). It's also modular and thus points towards and appeals to "modularity of mind" arguments, though idiosyncratically in a constrained and general approach. This can and will be explored later.

It was just one piece of the puzzle however. It was still needing a third phase boundary and two more facets of phase contents. The missing phase boundary was pivotal. It had to be as general and universal, yet fitting and variable, as true and false, good and bad. It turns out that an example arose from music, physics, and ultimately from aesthetics: weak and strong. Incorporating aesthetic weak and strong into the initial structure orthogonally produces a 3x3x3 matrix.



Here appears Peirce's normative trinity of aesthetics, ethics, and logic for the first time, as not simply phase boundaries, but as normative dimensions serving distinct roles for the organism. The Cartesian conjunctive crosses define the phase contents, which will be examined in a moment. All phenomena that the individual organism encounters can and will have some variation of the universal aesthetic qualities of weak to strong; the ethical qualities of good to bad; and the logical qualities of true to false. In this sense, these qualities are measures, or gauges, of Value. The binary categories of quality are thus spectra, not simply absolute states and ultimate limits. They represent Value in all of its combinations and permutations, just as Self, World, and Others represent Being in its universal and variable aspects.

There is also now a stable memory "core": a 2x2x2 conjunctive cross generated by the phase boundaries or dimensions. These will be examined in turn, along with the alignment of each facet with a partition of total memory: Self, World, Others.

The conjunctor is the cap of the matrix, and is connected to and continuous with the Integrity singularity. This makes sense as Integrity is what first encounters incoming stimuli, whether from the inside the organism itself or from the outside, i.e. from either Others or the World. This results in Integrity essentially always existing at "time zero", which also makes sense because an invariant point has zero degrees of freedom, including temporal freedom. Further, this is what memory is for, to provide Integrity with a way of storing experience in a stable and ordered fashion for both immediate and later use.

The phase boundaries turn out to be heterogeneous: weak and strong (aesthetic); good and bad (ethical); true and false (logical). These choices of normative dimensions are apposite. They act as a trio of rational and dialectical gauges for incoming stimuli and the evolved practical response of the organism to the same. They are, evaluatively and empirically speaking, all that the organism can sense and know about Self, World, and Others, but more importantly, all that the organism needs to sense or know about them. They act as a primitive and pre-lingual phenomenology. They also act as stable memory's partitions of total memory and produce the three phases/facets from their crosses, which provide the organism with a realtime feedback from stimuli, in which the organism's response is in turn fed back into system to measure its effectiveness. They are also examples of properties of Value, or qualities. Weak and strong correspond to substantive quality; good and bad to sensational quality; and true and false to symbolic quality. In this way, these three paired dualisms are the Value correlates of the three Being states of Self, World, Others. Further, they can each be associated with Value, Being, and Integrity themselves. Weak and strong, substantive quality, correlate with Integrity; good and bad, sensational quality, correlate with Value; and true and false, symbolic quality, correlate with Being. Finally, the phase boundaries, so conceived, interact with themselves as well as with each other. The Cartesian crosses of weak/strong, good/bad, and true/false with themselves can easily be ascertained. Weak/strong reflexively produces weak/weak, weak/strong, strong/weak, and strong/strong. Good/bad reflexively produces good/good, good/bad, bad/good, bad/bad. True/false reflexively produces true/true, true/false, false/true, false/false. This is instructive. These can be reinterpreted as varieties of logic. The last section should be familiar to anyone who has studied logic.

Aesthetic logic
weak and weak is weak
weak and strong is strong
strong and weak is strong
strong and strong is strong

weak or weak is weak
weak or strong is weak
strong or weak is weak
strong or strong is strong

Ethical logic
good and good is good
good and bad is bad
bad and good is bad
bad and bad is bad

good or good is good
good or bad is good
bad or good is good
bad or bad is bad

Traditional logic
true and true is true
true and false is false
false and true is false
false and false is false

true or true is true
true or false is true
false or true is true
false or false is false

The conjunctivity of stable memory depends upon the first sections of these logics. The logics suggest that the organism is particularly sensitive to, and reactive to, strong, bad, and false, probably an evolved disposition to caution. [As an aside, it also explains why conservative reactionaries always have facile comebacks.] The disjunctive complements to the conjunctive logics completes each set, opening up the space for choice, but only for humans.

The phase contents themselves, or facets, provide the organism with first-order approximations of its status and condition. It is quite likely that these terms are noncommutative. Regardless, for a non-human organism, the interactions between the qualities do not reduce to a single expression, as the approximations below attempt to do. These generalizations do tend to hold for us humans I think.



The phase boundaries can now be associated with Value states (qualities) and with Integrity (and its boundary extension), Value, and Being themselves:

Aesthetic weak/strong <=> Integrity
Ethical good/bad <=> Value
Logical true/false <=> Being.

It is time to now align a pair of boundaries with the appropriate memory phase of Self, World, and Others. This is not difficult. World is constituted by Being and Value and is so bounded. This leaves Self and Others sharing their common boundary of Integrity and its extension. Self, as possessing interiority, is bounded by Value; Others, as displaying exteriority, are bounded by Being.

The phase boundaries (Integrity, Value, Being) and the memory phases (Self, World, Others) are now set:
Integrity (weak/strong) and Value (good/bad) bound Self. Value (good/bad) and Being (true/false) bound World.
Being (true/false) and Integrity (weak/strong) bound Others.
This is an important result for when the time comes to examine metastable memory. It also permits the identification of the three facets above, namely, as Self, World, and Others from left to right.

This leaves the stable memory "core" to examine. Again, it is a 2x2x2 matrix nested within the structure provided by the conjunctor, phase boundaries, and phase contents. It serves to accumulate and summate all of the organism's experience. It is how the organism orients itself with respect to Self, World, Others; how it senses or knows its ever-changing place in an ever-changing World filled with an ever-changing Self and ever-changing Others. It is the "heart" of the organism's memory. It is also the source of meaning, which has to come from somewhere. As Berwick and Chomsky note in “Why Only Us: Language and Evolution”:

These results suggest that language evolved for thought and interpretation: it is fundamentally a system of meaning. Aristotle’s classic dictum that language is sound with meaning should be reversed. Language is meaning with sound (or some other externalization, or none); and the concept with is richly significant. (WOU, p. 101).

It is probable that the variables produced in the Cartesian cross are nonassociative as well as noncommutative, rather like an octonion. This produces a rich array of possibilities for the organism to fit itself to or find itself in. Interestingly enough, three regions can be identified: a "heaven", a "hell", and and a ring of six "purgatories". The "heaven" is the one cell that cannot be seen from outside; it sits at the center of the 3x3x3 matrix, and as the cap of the core. "Heaven" is "wgt", or "weak good true", or "weak and good and true", though not necessarily in that order. This corresponds to the young organism's ideal initial conditions, as well as the best case scenario otherwise. "Hell" is the bottom-most cell, "sbf", or "strong bad false", or "strong and bad and false". This is the organism's worst case scenario, always to be avoided. In between is a ring of six "purgatories", or moderate-to-severe middle-case scenarios. There are three upper level "purgatories", associated with, or interfacing with, "heaven", and each having two-out-of-three "heavenly" qualities (weak, good, true) and one-out-of-three "hellish" qualities (strong, bad, false). There are also three lower level "purgatories", associated and interfacing with "hell", having only one-out-of-three "heavenly" qualities each, or conversely, two-out-of-three "hellish" qualities. It is the organism's goal to stay in the upper four cells, if possible, or to struggle if it finds itself in the lower four.

Thus, stable memory forms a configuration space, or situation space, for an organism to orient itself and implicitly interpret its world, its self, and the other organisms in it. It is basically a thermomnemonic statics, a way for the organism to store memory in a temporally ordered fashion, for immediate and later use. The structure and contents, especially the qualities, provide the basis for an approach to "meaning", as well as "form", that will be used later in the analysis of metastable memory.

Let's discuss how this all ties in to meaning. Our senses provide us with information about our world, ourselves, and the others in it, with the emphasis on the root "form". Visual forms, aural forms, tactile forms, olfactory forms, gustatory forms, and more.  These forms cause feelings, reactions, that we've evolved to feel, very much for our survival. These are our instincts. They're hardwired in and then fine-tuned by experience and the accumulation of memory. This is the "principles and parameters" approach. But now we're symbolic animals, the "signifying monkey". Our cognition interferes with our instincts. This probably means that the evolution of language was in many cases a deleterious or lethal mutation. The cognitive interpretation of form becomes the issue. What does form mean? And what is meaning? How do we know? How do we know what we know? How do we know that we know it? Vexing questions to say the least.

This is where we return to Being, Value, and Integrity as the foundation for inquiry. Value becomes aesthetic, ethical, and logical Qualities, which in turn become aesthetic, ethical, and logical Meanings. These Qualities and Meanings are constantly interacting with each other, and these interactions are accumulated in memory, regardless of whether they are feelings or symbolic thoughts. Value, Qualities, and Meanings are derived from Being, Quantities (which has replaced the former Substances), and Forms. Because of our symbolic powers, we can in turn create, modify, and shape Quantities and Forms. This should be obvious.

What is not so obvious is that linguistic elements such as syntax, words, assemblages of words, sounds, and the entire symbolic gestalt, carry a semantic charge, which originates from the Qualities, and ultimately from Value. If we think about all of our sensoria as signals impinging on our Integrity, then on the Being side we can determine how much and what kinds of existential stuff is causing the signal (Quantities) and what the signals are (Forms). On the Value side, we can determine signals' magnitude or degree of amplification (weak or strong), how they make us feel (good or bad), and whether or not they're authentic or fake (true or false). From these evaluations we can create and construct meanings and accumulate them in memory. It is conjectured that these evaluative categories are consistent, coherent, applicable and adequate, within some degree of error, which can be measured and reduced. They are also complete, comprehensive, necessary, and sufficient. This is not to say that they cannot be distracted, diverted, deceived, or dominated, but that individuals with these powers can mutually and collectively detect and refute such abuses and misuses of power. What motivates this is the human instinct for freedom, which reflects the search for the "heavenly" region of evolved memory, and the avoidance of the "hellish" region. It is this instinct for freedom which prompted my own pursuit of Good, Truth, and Beauty in the form and meaning of Poemworld, and this work generally. And thus I have come full circle. For the finale, I will assemble The Crown, The Throne, and Integrity.