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Kantian Bilateral Interior Cosmos

September 15, 2021

Plato's cave allegory, Kant's two senses & evolution of our bilateral brain explain our ghost-like human existence & spiritual well-being.

From the earliest days, American ethics, the rules for the moral & intellectual life of the West, used to be founded upon the two principles of self-reliance and good neighborliness.  Americans have been creative inventors in science, engineering & agriculture, in addition to building a complex tripartite statehood governing the new nation through administration, legislation & courts of law.  But always. in every case & circumstance,  it has been the individual initiative of Americans, that was the motive force which made America what it is today, the uniquely vibrant livable free country.  

We should consider the underlying functions of neural brain circuits, organic structures that have evolved adaptively by Darwinian rules subject to selection pressure.  A main component is our bilateral interior cosmos, providing us with all the detailed information about our environment as well as the universe at large.  In the left brain resides our self-reliant private Ego, making plans, launching initiatives.  While, your public Ego dwells in the right brain, looking around, meeting with your friendly neighbor.  In the private left hemisphere, our bilateral double Ego comes to life as sovereign pure logical intellect, but in our physical environment is subject to mathematical rules of geometry in three dimensions, while in the social world we are subject to stringent moral laws in the public right brain.

We explore how we can learn to adjust our inner cosmos for a better chance of survival,  living in a mixed society in a difficult environment, not always among friends.  We strive to be leading a good life with reliance on the merciful universe under true insight into the fragile nature of our human existence.

Recently, there have been detrimental developments, and it is the theme of this blog to find the sources of decline in a general lack of attention toward the wholeness of the nation and the overall  unity of general awareness & comprehension of the beehive kind that is present in the mature structure of a healthy, thriving society, her foundations & origins as well as the top rung of the very latest emergent enterprise.  

The growth of bureaucracies  has been perhaps the most neglected source of poison  killing individual creativity.  The  very truth of scientific achievement has come into doubt, even the validity of chief dogmas, but in every case subject to revision & correction based on the holistic principle of unity in our world, where all are affected by all and everything depends on everything, the Kantian Function Of Oneness of the human understanding mysteriously harmonizing with the natural universe of galaxies & elementary quantum particles.

These considerations give rise to the purpose of this blog to restore America by holistic science.  An ancient logical architecture exists that lets us understand that individualism is based on the human mind existing solely in each human organism, each child born to us is making anew what has existed for ages, and inside its 40 billion neuron cerebral cortex will form an interior cosmos, bilateral, each brain hemisphere housing its own inner cosmos:  Phenomenal in the right brain, noumenal in the left, two basic features of the human mind, mirrored in the organismic structure of the central nervous system (CNS), which Immanuel Kant discovered while working on his Critique of Pure  Reason.  This of course is why this blog is named after him.  Our mind is created in the form of the Kantian bilateral cosmos.

It has long been the principal theme of philosophical debate what exactly is the correspondence of our knowledge of nature and of ourselves with the true conditions.  Perhaps the best known case are the opposing schools of nominalism vs. realism.  Google:

Realism is the philosophical position that posits that universals are just as real as physical, measurable material. Nominalism is the philosophical position that promotes that universal or abstract concepts do not exist in the same way as physical, tangible material.

The debate originated with early thinkers (Presocratics) but was brought into sharp focus by Plato, in his famous cave allegory:  Humans live in a cave––the mind––& are chained down to stare at the blank wall in front of them, viewing shadows of icons, images carried behind their backs, lit by a fire deep inside the cave.   For all of history since, Plato's insight has made us aware of the metaphysical gap separating our human understanding of the world from ultimate reality.   A great example is quantum physic's particle-wave duality discovered a little over century ago in the photo-electric effect by Albert Einstein based on Max Planck's radiation law.  

Today we would say that whatever we experience is worked up in form of our bilateral cosmos as our own free creation, the best possible summary account that we can give, based on whatever our freely synapsing 40 billion cortical neurons come up with.   Recent neuroscience has confirmed  that memories are stored inside giant pyramidal neurons apparently by early protein synthesis, not based upon Hebbian learning ideas, synaptic potentials  & neural  network configuration.

The bilateral inner cosmos, divided in its noumenal left and phenomenal right halves, probably can be identified with the default mode network (DMN) discovered by Marcus Raichle, WUSTL (Raichle, Macleod, Snyder, Powers, Gusnard & Shulman, 2001).  This refers to the frontal lobe part of the DMN.  The parietal lobe portion is somewhat separate, the conceptual categorical apparatus (CCA) or toolbox.  Coincidentally, Raichle was awarded the 2014 Kavli Neuroscience Prize,  sharing it with Brenda Milner,  pioneer on bilateral brain function (and to another, 3rd scientist).  Holistic principles demand that all of our epistemology is worked out by fitting new data into the existing noumenal cosmos and constantly reorganizing the whole, as the DMN works ceaselessly 24/7, except in emergency situations.

This fitting process is known to physiological psychologists as a P300 event related potential (ERP) seen on the EEG.  It is a positive voltage observed  on the EEG 300 ms after a novel "odd-ball" stimulus.   From  my gymnasium days,  I recall my first time in the Roman Pantheon.  The impression was overwhelming.  But  by next day, it already had been fitted into my inner cosmos, neuro-anatomically the DMN, & had turned into the familiar same old...!!   Heidegger has this fitting process covered in his 1935 metaphysics lectures (available in two English translations from MIT Press).   This now is called top-down (TD) processing,  important vitally for object identification to all animals, as bottom-up (BU) is hopelessly inefficient.  As one neuroscientist put it, in some of the half-dozen sequential visual processing centers V1, V2, ..., there are more fibers running backward––for TD, processing feed-back, than forward ––for BU, finding edges & corners, etc.

In more detail, we summarize:  The left cerebral hemisphere is for Kant's inner sense & noumena, in time sequentially analyzing  memory of the entire past history of the individual, & for making plans always based on sequential logic and verbal language structures.   The right cerebral hemisphere is for Kant's outer sense & phenomena, in space perceiving images of scenes in the outer world & anticipating events as they develop, based on geometry and dynamics.