Logos Spermatikos
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Seminal Reason

This concept was first deployed by Heracleitus, the Greek philosopher of the cosmic flux.  It was the force that brought order to the primordial chaos.  The presence of the Logos in the Western tradition appears to be what primarily distinguishes it from the Eastern tradition.

The transformative, unifying logos was originally identified with fire.  This connection persists in the tradition of the pneuma or holy spirit.  Heracleitus saw the logos as a dialectical principle connecting all opposites.  This led to the idea that all opposition would eventually be consummated in an eschatological spiritual conflagration, an idea shared with Hinduism.

The principal bifurcation in the West came about between those who view the logos as necessarily personal and those who do not.  This is basically the distinction between religion and science.  The Pythagorean tradition culminating in modern physics has identified the logos with mathematics.

Chomsky and Piaget are modern exponents of the logos spermatikos in the form of generative grammar and genetic epistemology.  These notions of the logos strike to the heart of the distinction between natural and artificial intelligence.  Can natural intelligence be identified with any algorithmic, heuristic, connectionist or functionalist formulations?

I believe that this question has been definitively answered by the linguistic philosophers.  The ceaseless, Heracleitian flux of the mind is the product of a constantly striving, vital intentionality that is nowhere captured in the formulations of mathematics.  That chaos theory might uncover a generative grammar seems baseless.  The same goes for ‘A-D-E singularity theory’ and the like.  There is simply no basis for the categories of intention or reference.  Mathematics, by definition, is a purely extensional system.  The only intensional (sic) dimension is provided by human cognition.  This is why computers are not replacing mathematicians.  Godelian self-reference remains strictly meta-mathematical and in no way susceptible to any extensional, mathematical rendering.  It is this profound lacuna that has left science completely vulnerable to the cacophony of postmodernism.

Out of this cacophony the one, true, vital logos spermatikos is destined to reemerge, and it will do so in its original dialectical, consummational, eschatological context.  The logos cannot be divorced from the divine self.  ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’  Science has spent three centuries trying to disprove this simple fact.  Its time is up.  Ole, ole, infree!

The logos spermatikos lit a fire in the mind of human kind some 30,000 years ago when we discovered language.  That fire continues to burn ever more quickly and fiercely until the consummation.  This is the true holo-caust.

No agent or agency can douse this flame.  The best that we can do is expedite the Second Coming with its promise of a final Millennium.  This is the message from the stars.  The stars come down to flame central.  This is the ‘burnt meat’ that all the visitors seek.
 

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rev. 7/13/00