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Mappings

     The Intellectual Soul is an entity, a formation of the Consciousness-Force (Shakti), poorly understood. It is through the Intellectual Soul that the illusory nature of the world is revealed and with such revelation, the purpose of Maya. The thinking of duality, whether that of science or Ontology, or that of Art, can offer very powerful images of the Reality of the Universe as long as such thinking is not a final destination of our Will to know. For this not to happen, we must be very clear about what these images are, what the thinking of duality offers us, that is, it is necessary to understand the limits of all mental representation.

    The basic epistemological axiom could be expressed like this: “There is a subject who perceives and/or conceives an object.” Let's clarify its components. The fundamental action is thinking, in which perception and/or conception intervene. Both actions are carried out by the subject (basically an unknown, an X as Kant said) based on inputs that come from the object. These inputs that come from the object express a set of properties that are assumed to be independent of the subject. (I will publish in another post with a little more detail the processes that neuroscience has considered fundamental to the animal brain, now I am going to focus on that relationship between subject and object based on a basic human intuition that animals also have: the pairing of two things, that is, of course in human terms, the mathematical concept of function or mapping. Don't panic, we are not going to discuss mathematics.)

    In the mirror of our neurons the forms of force in the Universe are reflected. But that mirror has a curvature and a degree of cleanliness typical to life and to the Human Being. Not everything in the Universe is reflected in that mirror. For example, phenomena with a duration of less than 120 milliseconds are imperceptible, they are not in our perceptual league, though they very much are in our conceptual league, since we build devices from symbolic (linguistic) frameworks that extend the capacity of perception of our senses.

    To perceive is to map, that is, to simplify, to filter, to represent the world, i.e., to project a set of “objective” inputs onto a different space, the neural space. Basically this mapping gives us an image of our own physiology: the mirror of our Intellectual Soul reflects an image of the world which is actually our own projection. We find in the world the objects that our physiology has put in the world as objects or processes. Then we forget it, and believe that we find outside things that are independent of our particular patterns of thinking.

    Concepts and ideas are also maps, but of the second order, that is, they are maps of maps. When we connect a perceptual map with another perceptual map, we are (or rather our Intellectual Soul is) generating a concept. Neuroscience limits the action of intellection to the brain, but we really think with all our physiology, and with all our emotion protocols that have become intellective. Our immune system is part of the thinking of the Volitive Soul, and it is no coincidence that the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman (whose scientific training was as immunologist) was able to make heads or tails about basic neurological mappings by applying knowledge of the operation of the immune system. Concepts are composed with other concepts according to the successive degrees of semantic complexity conditioned by homeostatic balances of the organism. From that composition emerge ideas, symbolic entities of a different order. Ideas are composed together following an ever more complex syntactical and semantic order, and develop seeds or spermata (borrowing Anaxagoras designation), forms of order that are both living and symbolical. But back to the mappings.

    What we call the world is a projection of the Human Soul onto something unknown (an Apeiron). That mapping returns to us as an object. And from this mapping our Intellectual Soul (which is more than the brain functions) spontaneously configures mappings of increasing higher order, concepts, ideas, spermata, that is, configures new mirrors in which forms that are increasingly more distant from the original input of the world will be reflected. These mirrors, these mappings display an entire infinite spectrum of worlds, both adjacent to this one and far from it.

    In my book Mythopoetics I called morphisms to the Intellective mappings, and considered the different varieties of them. I only want to highlight here two of them: endomorphisms and exomorphisms. An endomorphism is a mapping between two entities that belong to the same system. An example of this would be the metaphors (in all their formal variants) of common language and literature. An exomorphism is a mapping in which the two entities do not belong to the same system. An example of this would the process of describing the origin of the Universe. We cannot project our Intellective system onto the scenario (system) of the Origin.

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