II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

3. The Book of Naturome: A New Translation

			This Nobel Physics 2011 “Written in the Stars” poster is online at: www.kva.se/en/Prizes/Nobel-prizes, and available in paper by email request. It was awarded to three men at lower left for "the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe” as humankind’s textual, edifying quest now spans these celestial reaches. But the child at lower right ought to go forth in a revolutionary enscripted ecosmos that centrally includes and requires our curious human selves in its developmental course. What might nature's true language be – could a planetary kindermind realize it is truly genetic-like in kind? Thus we come to offer “Naturome” as current citation.

This section will consider another way that a 21st century phenomenal knowledge can come into accord with and fulfill a familiar, numinous tradition. Two books of revelation have long been said to inform humanity’s religious encounters. One is God’s received word in the Bible, Torah, Koran; the other is God’s works in the evidences of cosmic and Earthly creation. In 1987 Pope John Paul II wrote to George Coyne, SJ, Director of the Vatican Observatory, stating that “the matter is urgent” for a rapprochement between theology and science. In the first lecture set up in response, Danish historian Olaf Pedersen advised that the best means to achieve this would be to recover the venerable concept of Nature as an intended revelation.

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. famously advised Galileo in 1623.

Such a second testament has deep roots going back to Plato, Aristotle and Augustine. Each creature was a living sign, an exemplary emblem, the worldly environment an edifying guide. The mission to limn a Divine signature and scripture motivated Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and 16th to 19th century theologians and metaphysicians. But into the later 19th and 20th century as a vicarious evolution became known along with galactic spaces, Earth, life and people became contingent accidents of its blind, entropic mechanism. As an academic postmodern despair sunk in, any sense of an incarnate narrative was abandoned.

2020: In the scope of this Natural Genesis posting, a New Translation phrase has been added. As an example we note Information-Consciousness-Reality by the Swiss physicist James Glattfelder (2019, herein), which is fully online at its Springer page. While an algorithmic future is surmised, it is proposed that into the 21st century the new nonequilibrium sciences of dynamic network complexities as they inform and self-organize might represent a second, worldwide decipherment.

Ablondi, Fred. Reading Nature’s Book: Galileo and the Birth of Modern Philosophy. New York: Peter Lang, 2016.

Armstrong, Karen. The Lost Art of Scripture. New York, Knopf, 2019.

Faltynek, Dan, et al. On the Analogy between the Genetic Code and Natural Language. Biosemiotics. April, 2019.

Glattfelder, James. Information-Consciousness-Reality. International: Springer Frontiers, 2019.

Kuppers, Bernd-Olaf. The Language of Living Matter: How Molecules Acquire Meaning. International: Springer Frontiers, 2022.

Lackova, Ludmilla. Folding of a Peptide Continuum: Semiotic Approach to Protein Folding. Semiotica. 233/77, 2020.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Garden of Truth. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Sandford, Emily, et al. On Planetary Systems as Ordered Sequences. arXiv:2105.09966.

Sherwin, Byron. Golems Among Us. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004

Van Schaik, Carel and Kai Michel. The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Zaharchuk, Holly and Elizabeth Karuza. Multilayer Networks: An Untapped Tool for Understanding Bilingual Neurocognition. Brain and Language. Volume 220, 2021.

2023:

Codex Sinaiticus. http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/en/. A new website online in July 2009 as a digital version of the oldest known Christian Bible, via a joint project of the British Library, National Library of Russia, St. Catherine’s Monastery, and the Leipzig University Library. Its several hundred large (~15 X 14 inches) leaves of prepared animal skin are attributed to a number of scribes, along with signs of post editing. The endeavor, hailed for its historic significance, evinces the importance of a scriptural basis for Abrahamic Western culture. But what, if anything, has been revealed or learned since? The two cultures of postmodern humanities and a Ptolemaic physics, in their quandaries, lately deny any creation or purpose. However might we peoples just now imagine, decipher, and read an ordained, salutary 21st century natural testament?

Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript of the Christian Bible written in the middle of the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the Christian New Testament. The hand-written text is in Greek. The New Testament appears in the original vernacular language (koine) and the Old Testament in the version, known as the Septuagint, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians. In the Codex, the text of both the Septuagint and the New Testament has been heavily annotated by a series of early correctors.

'Codex' means 'book'. By the time Codex Sinaiticus was written, works of literature were increasingly written on sheets that were folded and bound together in a format that we still use to this day. This book format was steadily replacing the roll format which was more widespread just a century before when texts were written on one side of a series of sheets glued together to make a roll. These rolls were made of animal skin (like most of the Dead Sea Scrolls) or the papyrus plant (commonly used for Greek and Latin literature).

Opening the Book of Nature. www.bookofnature.org. A website for a California-based ministry with this title name, which was a onetime 2007 posting. Our interest is its Nature as a Great Book page with over 50 citations to this effect across two thousand years. The entries are drawn from the Abrahamic faiths and beyond, along with ecologists and poets. They course from the Bible, Origen, St. Ephraim the Syrian, St. Augustine, Muslih-uddin Sa’di Shirazi, St. Bonavanture, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Dante, Martin Luther, Dogen Kigen, Shakespeare, Galileo, William Penn, Longfellow, Baha’u’llah, John Ruskin, John Burroughs, George Washington Carver, Martin Buber, Aldo Leopold, Fritjof Schuon, Matthew King, Lakota Nation, to Pope John Paul II.

It may then be noted that every entry is by a man except for St. Therese of Lisieux. In this trope a natural scripture is seen as a reflection of its Creator rather than about any innate identity or worth of this extant world. Into this third millennium, a Book of Naturome due to our worldwise humankinder can now reveal both a transcendent and immanent parental origin and image along with an evolutionary genesis of a planetary progeny. Such a divine destiny was the essence of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s 20th century contribution. I was coeditor of Teilhard in the 21st Century: The Emerging Spirit of Earth (2004), which gathered chapters to envision, along with an advocacy of a sustainable environment.

Ablondi, Fred. Reading Nature’s Book: Galileo and the Birth of Modern Philosophy. New York: Peter Lang, 2016. A Hendrix College philosopher revisits and reminds of this iconic 17th century discernment of an edifying mathematical literacy by which to read and avail a natural creation. See also The Found and the Made by Dan Brugier (Transaction, 2016) for another paean to an innately textual nature made for us to learn to read.

Aerts, Diederik and Lester Beltran. Are Words the Quanta of Human Language? Extending the Domain of Quantum Cognition. arXiv:2110.04913. Brussels Free University theorists (search) continue to pursue their good idea that a natural affinity exists between this fundamental realm and our expressive, textual sapient discourse. In regard, a wider persuasion and endeavor seems underway to discern a literate narrative in relative kind from physical domains all the way to our global sapience. By these lights, a book metaphor is a valid, universal representation via prose and poetry. See also A Planck Radiation and Quantization Scheme for Human Cognition and Language by the author at 2201.03306.

Quantum structures are being identified that well describe situations occurring in human cognition. Known as quantum cognition, the approach was used in information retrieval and natural language processing. Here we build on recent advances to show how quantization effects are present in our human literacy in the form of the words behaving as quanta of language, analogous to how photons behave as quanta of electromagnetic radiation. We investigate this entanglement, compute the von Neumann entropy and the density matrices of the words so to note that non-locality occurs spontaneously. We interpret these results in terms of the prospect of developing a quantum-inspired thermodynamics for the cultural layer of human society. (Abstract excerpt)

Allahyari, Mehdi, et al. A Brief Survey of Text Mining. arXiv:1707.02919. A University of Georgia, Athens, GA, computer informatics team of MA, Seyedamin Pouriyeh, Mehdi Assefi, Saied Safaei, Elizabeth Trippe, Juan Gutierrez, and Krys Kochut review the latest automatic summary methods to retrieve and distill meaningful content from the vast flow of online literary corpora, broadly conceived. A companion piece is Text Summarization Techniques at 1707.02268. And to reflect, a natural narrative is implied whence our human role may be to learn to read, write, comprehend and continue this procreative realm written in a genetic language.

The amount of text that is generated every day is increasing dramatically. This tremendous volume of mostly unstructured text cannot be simply processed and perceived by computers. Therefore, efficient and effective techniques and algorithms are required to discover useful patterns. Text mining is the task of extracting meaningful information from text, which has gained significant attentions in recent years. In this paper, we describe several of the most fundamental text mining tasks and techniques including text pre-processing, classification and clustering. Additionally, we briefly explain text mining in biomedical and health care domains. (Abstract)

Armstrong, Karen. The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts. New York, Knopf, 2019. In her latest erudite treatise, the British polyscholar worries that the religions of the first Axial Age – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the west and eastern Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese beliefs have sorely lost their way as they became removed from an original numinous wisdom. These early texts have now been mistranslated, misunderstood and co-opted to serve all manner of counter mayhem. Herein ecumenical sections proceed from Cosmos and Society to Mythos, Logos, Sola Scriptura and Sola Ratio as it surveys the long arduous course of our human expressions. Her claim is that archaic passages out of context, as fundamentalists revert to, nor centuries of mechanical science (Bacon, Newton) or philosophy (Nietzsche), which have come to atomic and cosmic naught, will ever serve and save us today.

Akin to Allan Schore (2019), Karen Armstrong’s insightful reprise and revival is to weave in the dual brain hemispheres, guided by Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 tome, with their right relational, holistic vision and left discrete detail complements. And as Jessica Riskin’s 2016 science history cites, again all the index names are male. What is needed is a recovery of primal prosodic rhythm, active rituals, vital stories, so as to reconnect with an ineffable divine oneness. By these lights and more, we might be able to animate profane mechanism with a once and future sacred significance.

In recent decades, neurologists have discovered that the brain’s right hemisphere is essential to the creation of poetry, music and religion. It is involved with the formation of our sense of self and has a broader, less focused mode of attention than the left hemisphere, which is more pragmatic and selective. The right hemisphere has a holistic rather than an analytical vision; it sees each thing in relation to the whole and perceives the interconnectivedness of reality. It is at home with metaphor, in which disparate entities become one, while the left hemisphere tends to be literal and to wrest things from their context so it can categorize and make use of them. (5)

Scripture, therefore, began as an aristocratic art form. A scripture can be defined as a text that is regarded as sacred, often because it was divinely revealed, and forms part of an authoritative canon. Our English word for it implies a written text, but most were originally composed and transmitted orally. “Scripture” was often sung, chanted or declaimed in a way that separated it from mundane speech, so that the words – a product of the brain’s left hemisphere – were fused with the more indefinable emotions of the right. Scripture was essentially a performative art, and until the modern period, it was nearly always acted out in the drama of ritual and belonged to the world of myth. (10-11)

Barton, David. Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. How might we altogether imagine a textual cosmic literacy? An ancient truth avers that we are immersed in a natural scripture, which we yet do not know how to read, a perception which inspired the Renaissance revolution of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Although postmodernity lauds ‘grammatology,’ it rejects in their despair any such abiding narrative. This present book is a lucid tome all about writing and reading systems and their achievement.

Berry, R.J. God’s Book of Works. London: T & T Clark, 2003. In his Gifford Lectures, a scientist employs the popular two books concept of God’s scriptural word and the created realm as complementary expressions of the same truth.

Biagioli, Mario. Galileo’s Instruments of Credit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. The concluding long chapter, The Supplemental Economy of Galileo’s Book of Nature, provides novel insights into how this metaphor of a natural revelation which complements Divinely inspired scripture was deftly employed in order to keep the clerical inquisitors at bay while defending scientific exploration.

The book of nature was not a single topos but a constellation of closely related topoi he used from 1612 to 1641: the "grand book of the universe," the "open book of the heavens," the "book of nature," the "grand book of the world," and the "book of philosophy." What tied these images together was their role in Galileo's attempt to legitimize his brand of natural philosophy by casting nature as a material inscription of God's logos - a "text" that was simultaneously opposed to the Aristotelian corpus and complementary to the Scripture. (226)

Blumenberg, Hans. Readability of the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. This especial volume ha been translated some forty years later to make it available when we need its unique contribution. A leading philosopher and historian of his day, Blumenberg was not postmodem or polemic but laid out his own "Metaphorology" view of an analogic affinity amongst everything, Here he chose the concept of a deep sense from Greece to 20th century genetics of how natural existence could be appreciated to have a literate, textual book-like essence.

The Readability of the World (c. 1980) represents Hans Blumenberg's main articulation of his analogic philosophy first cited (c. 1960) in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. In his view such patterns of thought and feeling have a fluid form as they serve a vital purpose tp allow peoples to orient themselves in an overwhelming world. As an exemplary instance, the author chooses the historic concept of an extant world with a literate-like identity. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality, and Blumenberg traces its course from ancient Greek cosmology to a latest 20th century version as a DNA genetic code. In an anthropological mode, many longings to contain all of nature, history, and reality in an intelligible way such as the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur'an to Diderot's Encyclopedia and Humboldt's Cosmos to ACGT nucleotides are covered..

Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) was an important European philosopher of his day who avoided both postmodern and polemical modes. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Münster and wrote The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, The Genesis of the Copernican World, (search) and more. His thoughtful contributions are only now being translated, when we most need them.

Bono, James. The Word of God and the Languages of Man. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. A study of the pervasive but cryptic image of a Divinely authored natural testament in the medieval mentality.

Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. Genes, Memes, and the Chinese Concept of Wen: Toward a Nature/Culture Model of Genetics. Philosophy East & West. 60/2, 2010. The author is a Tuskegee University philosopher with an Oxford University doctorate, and a previous post at Zhejiang University in China. The article first notes how the traditional Chinese organic cosmology is deeply literal and textual in kind, as expressed by “wen,” a term for fluid pattern, structure, writing, and poetics. Such qualities then serve to “auto-generate” a dynamic biological becoming, distinct from western moribund mechanism. In such wisdom, dual natural realms abide of extant, overt worlds, and their intrinsic, descriptive source.

The paper goes on to say that if nature and culture are seamlessly scripted, from a 21st century vantage might these ancient articulations be seen as intimating a “genetic” agency from molecular DNA to societal discourse. (And one may add the latest quantum, algorithmic, information/computation theories) A significant further connection is then made of this Eastern literal essence with the Greek and later Christian “Liber Mundi” or book of nature trope of the world most of all as “word,” a patently readable creation. This is a rare and important comparison that can potentially, as not before, join bicameral Abrahamic and Asian realms into a single natural revelation.

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