Peter J Worth | Florida Atlantic University (original) (raw)

Papers by Peter J Worth

International Journal of Intelligence Science, 2023

With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchi... more With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchies, or concept maps as they are sometimes called, which is aimed specifically for use with literary texts, as such distinguishing itself from the majority of research literature on the topic which is primarily focused on building ontologies from a vast array of different types of data sources, both structured and unstructured, to support various forms of AI, in particular, the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. We first elaborate on mutually informing disciplines of philosophy and computer science, or more specifically the relationship between metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, computing and AI, followed by a technically in-depth discussion of DEBRA, our dependency tree based concept hierarchy constructor, which as its name alludes to, constructs a conceptual map in the form of a directed graph which illustrates the concepts, their respective relations, and the implied ontological structure of the concepts as encoded in the text, decoded with standard Python NLP libraries such as spaCy and NLTK. With this work we hope to both augment the Knowledge Representation literature with opportunities for intellectual advancement in AI with more intuitive, less analytical, and well-known forms of knowledge representation from the cognitive science community, as well as open up new areas of research between Computer Science and the Humanities with respect to the application of the latest in NLP tools and techniques upon literature of cultural significance, shedding light on existing methods of computation with respect to documents in semantic space that effectively allows for, at the very least, the comparison and evolution of texts through time, using vector space math.

International Journal of Intelligence Science

One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)... more One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the last two decades has been the development of techniques for text representation that solves the so-called curse of dimensionality, a problem which plagues NLP in general given that the feature set for learning starts as a function of the size of the language in question, upwards of hundreds of thousands of terms typically. As such, much of the research and development in NLP in the last two decades has been in finding and optimizing solutions to this problem, to feature selection in NLP effectively. This paper looks at the development of these various techniques, leveraging a variety of statistical methods which rest on linguistic theories that were advanced in the middle of the last century, namely the distributional hypothesis which suggests that words that are found in similar contexts generally have similar meanings. In this survey paper we look at the development of some of the most popular of these techniques from a mathematical as well as data structure perspective, from Latent Semantic Analysis to Vector Space Models to their more modern variants which are typically referred to as word embeddings. In this review of algoriths such as Word2Vec, GloVe, ELMo and BERT, we explore the idea of semantic spaces more generally beyond applicability to NLP.

Open Journal of Philosophy

This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradi... more This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradition that not only influenced the Greek and then Latin world in antiquity, but also had a lasting influence on intellectual and theological development in the West right up until the Age of Enlightenment. To this end, the focus is on the Socratic tradition, through Plato and then Aristotle, and then the Stoic tradition whose strong imprint can be found on early Christianity, representing the core seed of Western theological evolution via Judaism, Christianity and then Islam.

When looking at the first mythological and philosophical works from antiquity, it is very easy to... more When looking at the first mythological and philosophical works from antiquity, it is very easy to get lost in the "facts" surrounding these ancient works and lose sight of their true meaning and import to the people and cultures within which these works emerged from and out of. Much of the modern academic and scholarly literature concerning these ancient "theophilosophical" works falls into this category. To a large extent, the purpose of this work is to try and “recover” said meanings of these ancient works as much as possible, and to look at them within a much broader theological, mythological and philosophical narrative that we find throughout Eurasia in the first millennium BCE, the so-called "Axial Age" of modern man.

Scientific Research Publishing, 2023

One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)... more One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the last two decades has been the development of techniques for text representation that solves the so-called curse of dimensionality, a problem which plagues NLP in general given that the feature set for learning starts as a function of the size of the language in question, upwards of hundreds of thousands of terms typically. As such, much of the research and development in NLP in the last two decades has been in finding and optimizing solutions to this problem, to feature selection in NLP effectively. This paper looks at the development of these various techniques, leveraging a variety of statistical methods which rest on linguistic theories that were advanced in the middle of the last century, namely the distributional hypothesis which suggests that words that are found in similar contexts generally have similar meanings. In this survey paper we look at the development of some of the most popular of these techniques from a mathematical as well as data structure perspective, from Latent Semantic Analysis to Vector Space Models to their more modern variants which are typically referred to as word embeddings. In this review of algoriths such as Word2Vec, GloVe, ELMo and BERT, we explore the idea of semantic spaces more generally beyond applicability to NLP.

Open Journal of Philosophy, 2022

With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an... more With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an epistemological interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM). Our interpretive stance follows a long line of consciousness (what we call mind) based interpretations, or explanations, for the of the so-called measurement problem in QM, a position held by physicists (and mathematicians) such as von Neumann (1932), Wigner (1963, 1967), Bohm (1980, 1993), Stapp (2001, 2009, 2011), Manousakis (2006), Blaha (2009), and Pradhan (2012) among others.

Given this perspective, we conceive of the measurement problem to be a function of the boundary condition between mind and matter itself, a condition we wish to shed light on by abstracting the problem of measurement itself out of physics proper and (more directly) into the domain of philosophy explicitly using modern conceptions of epistemology and information theory, as well as quantum measurement theory, to construct a system of metaphysics, based upon knowledge and information processing and theory, that sheds light on the relationship between mind and matter generally.

In this context, akin to Alan Turing’s work in theoretical computer science in 1950 (Turing 1950) which introduced the concept of a theoretical computing machine which ultimately provided the basis for modern computers, we introduce the notion of an idealogical computing machine, or IRA (Idealogical Reference Architecture), which is constructed based upon modern software development models and paradigms (Object Oriented Programming and design primarily) which represent the de facto standard used by information processing systems in modern computing applications. We however, take the additional conceptual abstraction from information to knowledge, after which IRA can be viewed within the broader philosophical dialogue – both in its Western (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer) as well as Eastern (Vedānta, Samkhya, Daoism) dialects. Hence the title of this work, an epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics.

To this end, we hope this work can serve as a framework for comparison and further development as a sort of reference architecture – in philosophical, theological and (theoretical) scientific circles – to provide precision and clarity to metaphysical discussions in the same way the Turing Machine provided for a more precise definition of computer system design (and limits).

Journal of Social Philosophy Research (Sciknow publications), 2014

As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at... more As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at the dawn of civilization (a feature which so notably marked the civilization of Ancient Greece and in turn is the marked characteristic of Western civilization to this day), it becomes evident that this philosophical movement represents not only a somewhat rebellious socio-political force in the region that in turn provides some of the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of monotheism as it evolves into Christianity, but it also has profoundly influenced the worldview of the West even to this day, providing the semantic and intellectual framework within which we view the world around us, and within which the branches of science and study exist even to this day.

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first individual to challenge the truth of the mythologies that had so profoundly influenced the ancient civilizations of the East and West, and were the first people to begin to explore the nature of knowledge, what could be known, or perhaps better put what in fact could be known to be, itself, providing us with philosophical and intellectual frameworks which came to shape Western civilization for several thousand years and still remains a profound influence on how we approach knowledge, and scientific study today.

As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at... more As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at the dawn of civilization (a feature which so notably marked the civilization of Ancient Greece and in turn is the marked characteristic of Western civilization to this day), it becomes evident that this philosophical movement represents not only a somewhat rebellious socio-political force in the region that in turn provides some of the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of monotheism as it evolves into Christianity, but it also has profoundly influenced the worldview of the West even to this day, providing the semantic and intellectual framework within which we view the world around us, and within which the branches of science and study exist even to this day. The ancient Greek philosophers were the first individual to challenge the truth of the mythologies that had so profoundly influenced the ancient civilizations of the East and West, and were the first people to begin to explore the nature of knowledge, what could be known, or perhaps better put what in fact could be known to be, itself, providing us with philosophical and intellectual frameworks which came to shape Western civilization for several thousand years and still remains a profound influence on how we approach knowledge, and scientific study today.

Much has been written as of late on the characteristic and influential philosophical school of th... more Much has been written as of late on the characteristic and influential philosophical school of thought called Stoicism which was originally founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the second century BCE and further fleshed out and promulgated by Cleanthes and then subsequently by his student Chrysippus, collectively referred to in modern classical studies as the Old Stoa. This work intends to try and provide a succinct overview of the philosophical tenets which were characteristic of the school in the early period as well as identify some unique contributions of the later Stoa which are represented by the Roman/Latin intellectual and politically elite such as Seneca, Cicero and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The paper also reviews some of the earlier Hellenic philosophical traditions from which it Stoicism drew some of its primary tenets and evolved in conjunction with, as well as in the Summary provide an overview of some of the lasting contributions Stoicism has made to the development of the philosophical and theological tradition in the West. Although none of the complete writings and treatises written by the Old Stoa are extant, much of their philosophical tenets are covered by later authors and philosophers whose work is and this article draws on some of these what you might call pseudo-primary sources (in particular Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius) as well as various secondary, more contemporary sources who draw not only on these sources but also extensively from Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta which is an invaluable collection of fragments and quotations of the early Stoa composed in the early part of the 20 th century and from which much of what we know about specific tenets of at least early Stoic philosophy come from.

At some level a religious tradition can be thought of as distinguished by, or even defined by, it... more At some level a religious tradition can be thought of as distinguished by, or even defined by, its creation story – i.e. its cosmological narrative-and the Hindu/Vedic tradition is no different in this regard although it has many nuances and variances that distinguish it from Western theological traditions. If we approach the mythology as codified in the Hindu literature with an open mind – and myth in the Hindu tradition runs very deep-we can see strong undercurrents of Vedic philosophy from within the creation narratives themselves, speaking to the importance of philosophy from the very earliest texts we have from the tradition. The deep philosophical history of the Indo-Aryans, what we today call Vedanta (which Yoga is very closely related to and from which Buddhism emerged), ultimately sprung forth from these ancient creation stories, the mythological tradition as it were, which in turn yielded over time an in depth, scientific and analytical approach to the nature of mind and its relationship to liberation and experience of the divine which forms the basis of Yoga in all its forms.

Books by Peter J Worth

Lambert Academic Publishing, 2022

With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an... more With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an epistemological interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM). Our interpretive stance follows a long line of consciousness (what we call mind) based interpretations, or explanations, for the of the so-called measurement problem in QM, a position held by physicists (and mathematicians) such as von Neumann (1932), Wigner (1963, 1967), Bohm (1980, 1993), Stapp (2001, 2009, 2011), Manousakis (2006), Blaha (2009), and Pradhan (2012) among others.

Given this perspective, we conceive of the measurement problem to be a function of the boundary condition between mind and matter itself, a condition we wish to shed light on by abstracting the problem of measurement itself out of physics proper and (more directly) into the domain of philosophy explicitly using modern conceptions of epistemology and information theory, as well as quantum measurement theory, to construct a system of metaphysics, based upon knowledge and information processing and theory, that sheds light on the relationship between mind and matter generally.

In this context, akin to Alan Turing’s work in theoretical computer science in 1950 (Turing 1950) which introduced the concept of a theoretical computing machine which ultimately provided the basis for modern computers, we introduce the notion of an idealogical computing machine, or IRA (Idealogical Reference Architecture), which is constructed based upon modern software development models and paradigms (Object Oriented Programming and design primarily) which represent the de facto standard used by information processing systems in modern computing applications. We however, take the additional conceptual abstraction from information to knowledge, after which IRA can be viewed within the broader philosophical dialogue – both in its Western (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer) as well as Eastern (Vedānta, Samkhya, Daoism) dialects. Hence the title of this work, an epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics.

To this end, we hope this work can serve as a framework for comparison and further development as a sort of reference architecture – in philosophical, theological and (theoretical) scientific circles - to provide precision and clarity to metaphysical discussions in the same way the Turing Machine provided for a more precise definition of computer system design (and limits).

Dorrance Publishing, 2022

This work sits at the tail end of a progression of studies into theology, mysticism and philosoph... more This work sits at the tail end of a progression of studies into theology, mysticism and philosophy which reaches its apex here philosophically. It builds off of the understanding of the (shared) foundations of theological, mystical and philosophical knowledge from antiquity that we explore in Theology Reconsidered and Homo Mysticus that have supported the development of advanced societies throughout human history, and conjoins this knowledge with more modern conceptions of the world as reflected in scientific disciplines such as Physics, Psychology, and Biology to establish a new system of metaphysics, a postmodern system of metaphysics, which accounts for philosophical skepticism as well as physical materialism and has both a psychological as well as physical element to it – the world as it appears and the world as it is in Kantian terms.

In creating this model, we first illustrate the deficiencies of the prevailing metaphysical paradigm, one that reflects a deep-seated belief in the ontological supremacy of “objective reality”, and find the source of these deficiencies, point them out and then make some adjustments to the underlying system (Kantian metaphysics primarily) such that its misguided conclusions are both brought to light and at the same time corrected. In so doing we in effect root our system of metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Awareness, directly into the Western philosophical tradition.

Along the way we directly address some of the more pressing postmodern concerns regarding how society is structured and how knowledge is acquired and gained more generally. This journey takes us from the rationalist and empiricist pre–Enlightenment Era philosophical positions, deep into Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where the very foundations of reason are analyzed in painstaking detail and the world as it truly is is relegated to the domain of (mere) speculation, whereas the world as it appears becomes the means by which we can understand the world definitively, scientifically.

This work analyzes the postmodern condition from a metaphysical perspective and looks to understand the intellectual building blocks out of which it was constructed and in so doing shed light on its flaws, imbalances really, that have led us to such precarious times where the foundations of everything are questioned and everything is about power (Nietzsche, Foucault). We follow the development of these ideas from Kant through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, and then analyze these positions with respect to other dominant philosophical systems both from Western antiquity (Hellenic and Judeo-Christian) and Eastern antiquity (Indian and Chinese philosophy) to illustrate the imbalances of the postmodern philosophical position and through which we can construct a more (post) modern conception of metaphysics which fits the current scientific data.

What we arrive at is a metaphysical paradigm which reflects the very core of our psychological being, and also reflects the very core of being itself, a system which corrects at least some of the metaphysical distortions upon which postmodern philosophy is based, and provides us with the intellectual building blocks for us as individuals to better understand our place in the world and for us as a collective to better understand our place within Nature and ultimately the universe.

Dorrance Publishing, 2022

This is a work of deep analysis and meditation regarding sacred geometry and its relationship to ... more This is a work of deep analysis and meditation regarding sacred geometry and its relationship to ancient theological texts from antiquity - covering the I Ching (Daoism), Hellenic Philosophy (Plato, Aristotle...) to Vedanta and Buddhism.

Sacred geometry is considered from the context of textual exegesis as well as personal enlightenment and the expansion of the personality (persona).

Various frameworks for understanding these themes and how they evolve through different social and cultural contexts throughout history is also presented.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015

This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradi... more This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradition that not only influenced the Greek and then Latin world in antiquity, but also had a lasting influence on intellectual and theological development in the West right up until the Age of Enlightenment. To this end, the focus is on the Socratic tradition, through Plato and then Aristotle, and then the Stoic tradition whose strong imprint can be found on early Christianity, representing the core seed of Western theological evolution via Judaism, Christianity and then Islam.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2016

One of the unique attributes of the Chinese philosophical tradition is its lack of focus on what ... more One of the unique attributes of the Chinese philosophical tradition is its lack of focus on what we would call in the West “theological” concerns, i.e. issues related to how the universe was created (cosmology) and what divine forces if any preside over it. While even in the theo-philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle we find a rejection of mythology and the realm of the gods as simply matters of faith or speculation, Aristotle’s prime mover and Plato’s demiurge still play a fundamental metaphysical role in each of their respective philosophical systems, even if they are not front and center so to speak. In the Chinese tradition however, while we see an implicit theological stance per se in the role of Heaven (Shangdi/Tian), we do not find it dealt with specifically or directly in the works of the philosophers themselves, outside of an occasional appeal to the divine as a benchmark of world and natural order. In other words, the existence of Heaven is not denied per se but it takes on the form of a more “naturalist” view as the philosophical systems mature in the classical period.

Dorrance Publishing, 2019

The science of our modern age is able to neither address nor solve our current global problems. A... more The science of our modern age is able to neither address nor solve our current global problems. Author Juan Valdez believes we should study humanity’s ancient wisdom and philosophy texts to develop a new intellectual paradigm that can respond and support our current needs.

Eurasian Philosophy and Quantum Metaphysics (Theology Reconsidered) is an in-depth study of the origins and meanings of ancient philosophies before they were fractured into mythology and religions and attacked by modern science. Beginning with creation mythology in Eurasia through the development of philosophical thought, to the Scientific Revolution to our own modern Quantum Era, the progression – and abandonment – of ancient wisdom is carefully studied. Valdez reviews and analyzes the ancient texts themselves to understand what they truly say and not what later historians have said about them. The Indo-Aryan Vedas, the Torah, Rene Descartes’ Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy, Neils Bohr’s Atomic Theory, and more, are all respectfully and critically assessed.

As enlightened as we may consider ourselves, Valdez calls attention to how limited modern thought has become. By reviewing past wisdom, we can not only rediscover the roots of modern thought but place Wisdom itself at the top of intellectual pursuits. Eurasian Philosophy and Quantum Metaphysics (Theology Reconsidered) is a rich and nuanced study on how humanity has thought of itself.

International Journal of Intelligence Science, 2023

With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchi... more With this work, we introduce a novel method for the unsupervised learning of conceptual hierarchies, or concept maps as they are sometimes called, which is aimed specifically for use with literary texts, as such distinguishing itself from the majority of research literature on the topic which is primarily focused on building ontologies from a vast array of different types of data sources, both structured and unstructured, to support various forms of AI, in particular, the Semantic Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee. We first elaborate on mutually informing disciplines of philosophy and computer science, or more specifically the relationship between metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, computing and AI, followed by a technically in-depth discussion of DEBRA, our dependency tree based concept hierarchy constructor, which as its name alludes to, constructs a conceptual map in the form of a directed graph which illustrates the concepts, their respective relations, and the implied ontological structure of the concepts as encoded in the text, decoded with standard Python NLP libraries such as spaCy and NLTK. With this work we hope to both augment the Knowledge Representation literature with opportunities for intellectual advancement in AI with more intuitive, less analytical, and well-known forms of knowledge representation from the cognitive science community, as well as open up new areas of research between Computer Science and the Humanities with respect to the application of the latest in NLP tools and techniques upon literature of cultural significance, shedding light on existing methods of computation with respect to documents in semantic space that effectively allows for, at the very least, the comparison and evolution of texts through time, using vector space math.

International Journal of Intelligence Science

One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)... more One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the last two decades has been the development of techniques for text representation that solves the so-called curse of dimensionality, a problem which plagues NLP in general given that the feature set for learning starts as a function of the size of the language in question, upwards of hundreds of thousands of terms typically. As such, much of the research and development in NLP in the last two decades has been in finding and optimizing solutions to this problem, to feature selection in NLP effectively. This paper looks at the development of these various techniques, leveraging a variety of statistical methods which rest on linguistic theories that were advanced in the middle of the last century, namely the distributional hypothesis which suggests that words that are found in similar contexts generally have similar meanings. In this survey paper we look at the development of some of the most popular of these techniques from a mathematical as well as data structure perspective, from Latent Semantic Analysis to Vector Space Models to their more modern variants which are typically referred to as word embeddings. In this review of algoriths such as Word2Vec, GloVe, ELMo and BERT, we explore the idea of semantic spaces more generally beyond applicability to NLP.

Open Journal of Philosophy

This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradi... more This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradition that not only influenced the Greek and then Latin world in antiquity, but also had a lasting influence on intellectual and theological development in the West right up until the Age of Enlightenment. To this end, the focus is on the Socratic tradition, through Plato and then Aristotle, and then the Stoic tradition whose strong imprint can be found on early Christianity, representing the core seed of Western theological evolution via Judaism, Christianity and then Islam.

When looking at the first mythological and philosophical works from antiquity, it is very easy to... more When looking at the first mythological and philosophical works from antiquity, it is very easy to get lost in the "facts" surrounding these ancient works and lose sight of their true meaning and import to the people and cultures within which these works emerged from and out of. Much of the modern academic and scholarly literature concerning these ancient "theophilosophical" works falls into this category. To a large extent, the purpose of this work is to try and “recover” said meanings of these ancient works as much as possible, and to look at them within a much broader theological, mythological and philosophical narrative that we find throughout Eurasia in the first millennium BCE, the so-called "Axial Age" of modern man.

Scientific Research Publishing, 2023

One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)... more One of the critical hurdles, and breakthroughs, in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the last two decades has been the development of techniques for text representation that solves the so-called curse of dimensionality, a problem which plagues NLP in general given that the feature set for learning starts as a function of the size of the language in question, upwards of hundreds of thousands of terms typically. As such, much of the research and development in NLP in the last two decades has been in finding and optimizing solutions to this problem, to feature selection in NLP effectively. This paper looks at the development of these various techniques, leveraging a variety of statistical methods which rest on linguistic theories that were advanced in the middle of the last century, namely the distributional hypothesis which suggests that words that are found in similar contexts generally have similar meanings. In this survey paper we look at the development of some of the most popular of these techniques from a mathematical as well as data structure perspective, from Latent Semantic Analysis to Vector Space Models to their more modern variants which are typically referred to as word embeddings. In this review of algoriths such as Word2Vec, GloVe, ELMo and BERT, we explore the idea of semantic spaces more generally beyond applicability to NLP.

Open Journal of Philosophy, 2022

With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an... more With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an epistemological interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM). Our interpretive stance follows a long line of consciousness (what we call mind) based interpretations, or explanations, for the of the so-called measurement problem in QM, a position held by physicists (and mathematicians) such as von Neumann (1932), Wigner (1963, 1967), Bohm (1980, 1993), Stapp (2001, 2009, 2011), Manousakis (2006), Blaha (2009), and Pradhan (2012) among others.

Given this perspective, we conceive of the measurement problem to be a function of the boundary condition between mind and matter itself, a condition we wish to shed light on by abstracting the problem of measurement itself out of physics proper and (more directly) into the domain of philosophy explicitly using modern conceptions of epistemology and information theory, as well as quantum measurement theory, to construct a system of metaphysics, based upon knowledge and information processing and theory, that sheds light on the relationship between mind and matter generally.

In this context, akin to Alan Turing’s work in theoretical computer science in 1950 (Turing 1950) which introduced the concept of a theoretical computing machine which ultimately provided the basis for modern computers, we introduce the notion of an idealogical computing machine, or IRA (Idealogical Reference Architecture), which is constructed based upon modern software development models and paradigms (Object Oriented Programming and design primarily) which represent the de facto standard used by information processing systems in modern computing applications. We however, take the additional conceptual abstraction from information to knowledge, after which IRA can be viewed within the broader philosophical dialogue – both in its Western (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer) as well as Eastern (Vedānta, Samkhya, Daoism) dialects. Hence the title of this work, an epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics.

To this end, we hope this work can serve as a framework for comparison and further development as a sort of reference architecture – in philosophical, theological and (theoretical) scientific circles – to provide precision and clarity to metaphysical discussions in the same way the Turing Machine provided for a more precise definition of computer system design (and limits).

Journal of Social Philosophy Research (Sciknow publications), 2014

As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at... more As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at the dawn of civilization (a feature which so notably marked the civilization of Ancient Greece and in turn is the marked characteristic of Western civilization to this day), it becomes evident that this philosophical movement represents not only a somewhat rebellious socio-political force in the region that in turn provides some of the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of monotheism as it evolves into Christianity, but it also has profoundly influenced the worldview of the West even to this day, providing the semantic and intellectual framework within which we view the world around us, and within which the branches of science and study exist even to this day.

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first individual to challenge the truth of the mythologies that had so profoundly influenced the ancient civilizations of the East and West, and were the first people to begin to explore the nature of knowledge, what could be known, or perhaps better put what in fact could be known to be, itself, providing us with philosophical and intellectual frameworks which came to shape Western civilization for several thousand years and still remains a profound influence on how we approach knowledge, and scientific study today.

As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at... more As one digs into how philosophy emerges in the West, and how Reason began to rise in influence at the dawn of civilization (a feature which so notably marked the civilization of Ancient Greece and in turn is the marked characteristic of Western civilization to this day), it becomes evident that this philosophical movement represents not only a somewhat rebellious socio-political force in the region that in turn provides some of the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings of monotheism as it evolves into Christianity, but it also has profoundly influenced the worldview of the West even to this day, providing the semantic and intellectual framework within which we view the world around us, and within which the branches of science and study exist even to this day. The ancient Greek philosophers were the first individual to challenge the truth of the mythologies that had so profoundly influenced the ancient civilizations of the East and West, and were the first people to begin to explore the nature of knowledge, what could be known, or perhaps better put what in fact could be known to be, itself, providing us with philosophical and intellectual frameworks which came to shape Western civilization for several thousand years and still remains a profound influence on how we approach knowledge, and scientific study today.

Much has been written as of late on the characteristic and influential philosophical school of th... more Much has been written as of late on the characteristic and influential philosophical school of thought called Stoicism which was originally founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the second century BCE and further fleshed out and promulgated by Cleanthes and then subsequently by his student Chrysippus, collectively referred to in modern classical studies as the Old Stoa. This work intends to try and provide a succinct overview of the philosophical tenets which were characteristic of the school in the early period as well as identify some unique contributions of the later Stoa which are represented by the Roman/Latin intellectual and politically elite such as Seneca, Cicero and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The paper also reviews some of the earlier Hellenic philosophical traditions from which it Stoicism drew some of its primary tenets and evolved in conjunction with, as well as in the Summary provide an overview of some of the lasting contributions Stoicism has made to the development of the philosophical and theological tradition in the West. Although none of the complete writings and treatises written by the Old Stoa are extant, much of their philosophical tenets are covered by later authors and philosophers whose work is and this article draws on some of these what you might call pseudo-primary sources (in particular Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius) as well as various secondary, more contemporary sources who draw not only on these sources but also extensively from Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta which is an invaluable collection of fragments and quotations of the early Stoa composed in the early part of the 20 th century and from which much of what we know about specific tenets of at least early Stoic philosophy come from.

At some level a religious tradition can be thought of as distinguished by, or even defined by, it... more At some level a religious tradition can be thought of as distinguished by, or even defined by, its creation story – i.e. its cosmological narrative-and the Hindu/Vedic tradition is no different in this regard although it has many nuances and variances that distinguish it from Western theological traditions. If we approach the mythology as codified in the Hindu literature with an open mind – and myth in the Hindu tradition runs very deep-we can see strong undercurrents of Vedic philosophy from within the creation narratives themselves, speaking to the importance of philosophy from the very earliest texts we have from the tradition. The deep philosophical history of the Indo-Aryans, what we today call Vedanta (which Yoga is very closely related to and from which Buddhism emerged), ultimately sprung forth from these ancient creation stories, the mythological tradition as it were, which in turn yielded over time an in depth, scientific and analytical approach to the nature of mind and its relationship to liberation and experience of the divine which forms the basis of Yoga in all its forms.

Lambert Academic Publishing, 2022

With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an... more With this work we introduce a system of idealogical metaphysics which is primarily born out of an epistemological interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM). Our interpretive stance follows a long line of consciousness (what we call mind) based interpretations, or explanations, for the of the so-called measurement problem in QM, a position held by physicists (and mathematicians) such as von Neumann (1932), Wigner (1963, 1967), Bohm (1980, 1993), Stapp (2001, 2009, 2011), Manousakis (2006), Blaha (2009), and Pradhan (2012) among others.

Given this perspective, we conceive of the measurement problem to be a function of the boundary condition between mind and matter itself, a condition we wish to shed light on by abstracting the problem of measurement itself out of physics proper and (more directly) into the domain of philosophy explicitly using modern conceptions of epistemology and information theory, as well as quantum measurement theory, to construct a system of metaphysics, based upon knowledge and information processing and theory, that sheds light on the relationship between mind and matter generally.

In this context, akin to Alan Turing’s work in theoretical computer science in 1950 (Turing 1950) which introduced the concept of a theoretical computing machine which ultimately provided the basis for modern computers, we introduce the notion of an idealogical computing machine, or IRA (Idealogical Reference Architecture), which is constructed based upon modern software development models and paradigms (Object Oriented Programming and design primarily) which represent the de facto standard used by information processing systems in modern computing applications. We however, take the additional conceptual abstraction from information to knowledge, after which IRA can be viewed within the broader philosophical dialogue – both in its Western (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer) as well as Eastern (Vedānta, Samkhya, Daoism) dialects. Hence the title of this work, an epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics.

To this end, we hope this work can serve as a framework for comparison and further development as a sort of reference architecture – in philosophical, theological and (theoretical) scientific circles - to provide precision and clarity to metaphysical discussions in the same way the Turing Machine provided for a more precise definition of computer system design (and limits).

Dorrance Publishing, 2022

This work sits at the tail end of a progression of studies into theology, mysticism and philosoph... more This work sits at the tail end of a progression of studies into theology, mysticism and philosophy which reaches its apex here philosophically. It builds off of the understanding of the (shared) foundations of theological, mystical and philosophical knowledge from antiquity that we explore in Theology Reconsidered and Homo Mysticus that have supported the development of advanced societies throughout human history, and conjoins this knowledge with more modern conceptions of the world as reflected in scientific disciplines such as Physics, Psychology, and Biology to establish a new system of metaphysics, a postmodern system of metaphysics, which accounts for philosophical skepticism as well as physical materialism and has both a psychological as well as physical element to it – the world as it appears and the world as it is in Kantian terms.

In creating this model, we first illustrate the deficiencies of the prevailing metaphysical paradigm, one that reflects a deep-seated belief in the ontological supremacy of “objective reality”, and find the source of these deficiencies, point them out and then make some adjustments to the underlying system (Kantian metaphysics primarily) such that its misguided conclusions are both brought to light and at the same time corrected. In so doing we in effect root our system of metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Awareness, directly into the Western philosophical tradition.

Along the way we directly address some of the more pressing postmodern concerns regarding how society is structured and how knowledge is acquired and gained more generally. This journey takes us from the rationalist and empiricist pre–Enlightenment Era philosophical positions, deep into Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where the very foundations of reason are analyzed in painstaking detail and the world as it truly is is relegated to the domain of (mere) speculation, whereas the world as it appears becomes the means by which we can understand the world definitively, scientifically.

This work analyzes the postmodern condition from a metaphysical perspective and looks to understand the intellectual building blocks out of which it was constructed and in so doing shed light on its flaws, imbalances really, that have led us to such precarious times where the foundations of everything are questioned and everything is about power (Nietzsche, Foucault). We follow the development of these ideas from Kant through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, and then analyze these positions with respect to other dominant philosophical systems both from Western antiquity (Hellenic and Judeo-Christian) and Eastern antiquity (Indian and Chinese philosophy) to illustrate the imbalances of the postmodern philosophical position and through which we can construct a more (post) modern conception of metaphysics which fits the current scientific data.

What we arrive at is a metaphysical paradigm which reflects the very core of our psychological being, and also reflects the very core of being itself, a system which corrects at least some of the metaphysical distortions upon which postmodern philosophy is based, and provides us with the intellectual building blocks for us as individuals to better understand our place in the world and for us as a collective to better understand our place within Nature and ultimately the universe.

Dorrance Publishing, 2022

This is a work of deep analysis and meditation regarding sacred geometry and its relationship to ... more This is a work of deep analysis and meditation regarding sacred geometry and its relationship to ancient theological texts from antiquity - covering the I Ching (Daoism), Hellenic Philosophy (Plato, Aristotle...) to Vedanta and Buddhism.

Sacred geometry is considered from the context of textual exegesis as well as personal enlightenment and the expansion of the personality (persona).

Various frameworks for understanding these themes and how they evolve through different social and cultural contexts throughout history is also presented.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015

This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradi... more This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradition that not only influenced the Greek and then Latin world in antiquity, but also had a lasting influence on intellectual and theological development in the West right up until the Age of Enlightenment. To this end, the focus is on the Socratic tradition, through Plato and then Aristotle, and then the Stoic tradition whose strong imprint can be found on early Christianity, representing the core seed of Western theological evolution via Judaism, Christianity and then Islam.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2016

One of the unique attributes of the Chinese philosophical tradition is its lack of focus on what ... more One of the unique attributes of the Chinese philosophical tradition is its lack of focus on what we would call in the West “theological” concerns, i.e. issues related to how the universe was created (cosmology) and what divine forces if any preside over it. While even in the theo-philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle we find a rejection of mythology and the realm of the gods as simply matters of faith or speculation, Aristotle’s prime mover and Plato’s demiurge still play a fundamental metaphysical role in each of their respective philosophical systems, even if they are not front and center so to speak. In the Chinese tradition however, while we see an implicit theological stance per se in the role of Heaven (Shangdi/Tian), we do not find it dealt with specifically or directly in the works of the philosophers themselves, outside of an occasional appeal to the divine as a benchmark of world and natural order. In other words, the existence of Heaven is not denied per se but it takes on the form of a more “naturalist” view as the philosophical systems mature in the classical period.

Dorrance Publishing, 2019

The science of our modern age is able to neither address nor solve our current global problems. A... more The science of our modern age is able to neither address nor solve our current global problems. Author Juan Valdez believes we should study humanity’s ancient wisdom and philosophy texts to develop a new intellectual paradigm that can respond and support our current needs.

Eurasian Philosophy and Quantum Metaphysics (Theology Reconsidered) is an in-depth study of the origins and meanings of ancient philosophies before they were fractured into mythology and religions and attacked by modern science. Beginning with creation mythology in Eurasia through the development of philosophical thought, to the Scientific Revolution to our own modern Quantum Era, the progression – and abandonment – of ancient wisdom is carefully studied. Valdez reviews and analyzes the ancient texts themselves to understand what they truly say and not what later historians have said about them. The Indo-Aryan Vedas, the Torah, Rene Descartes’ Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy, Neils Bohr’s Atomic Theory, and more, are all respectfully and critically assessed.

As enlightened as we may consider ourselves, Valdez calls attention to how limited modern thought has become. By reviewing past wisdom, we can not only rediscover the roots of modern thought but place Wisdom itself at the top of intellectual pursuits. Eurasian Philosophy and Quantum Metaphysics (Theology Reconsidered) is a rich and nuanced study on how humanity has thought of itself.