ncongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures (...) that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists. (shrink)

Since the time of Aristotle, metaphysics has been an ill-defined term. This paper defines it as a logically idempotent metalinguistic identity of reality which couples the two initial ingredients of awareness: perceptual reality (the basis of physics), and cognitive-perceptual syntax, a formalization of mind. The explanation has been reduced to a few very simple, clearly explained mathematical ingredients. This paper contains no assumptions or arguable assertions, and is therefore presented as an advanced formulation of logic which has been updated for (...) meaningful reference to the structure of reality at large. This structure, called the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, resolves the problems attending Cartesian dualism by replacing dualism with the mathematical property of self-duality, meaning (for reality-theoretic purposes) the quantum-level invariance of identity under permutation of objective and spatiotemporal data types. The CTMU takes the form of a global coupling or superposition of mind and physical reality in a self-dual metaphysical identity M:L<-->U, which can be intrinsically developed into a logico-geometrically self-dual, ontologically self- contained language incorporating its own medium of existence and comprising its own model therein. (shrink)