AndriusKulikauskas

AndriusKulikauskas: I have been on a quest to KnowEverything and apply that usefully. Here's a summary:

1964 born in Santa Monica, California

1971 Motivations and self-education. Decided to pursue knowing everything, and asked God for the freedom to think in exchange for my commitment to him regardless of what I think. Focused on self-educating myself accordingly.

1978 precursors to counterquestions

1980 first attempts - Pascal's triangle, ideas in physics

1981 separation of powers, concept of everything

1982 Concluded that quantum reality "fades away" so any absolute answers must be where they are most easily found but people choose not to look, namely human life.

1982 Divisions of Everything: Threesome

1983 Twosome, Foursome, Fivesome, Sixsome. Identified "everything" as an absolute concept (with the properties: no external context, no internal structure, simplest algorithm: "accepts all things", is a required concept) and thus an anchor for absolute answers. Observed that DivisionsOfEverything were thus absolute structures, in particular, into two perspectives (opposites coexist, all things are the same), three perspectives (take a stand, follow through, reflect), four perspectives (why, how, what, whether).

1984 first work on dynamics of structure

1985 first thoughts on the structure of EightfoldWay

1986 - 1988 QualitiesOfSigns, three permutations of EightfoldWay, three Languages

1988 - 1989 Narration, Representations of divisions, Operations on divisions, Internalization, Kant's categories. Distinguished a division from its representations. For example, the division of everything into two perspectives has four different representations: (free will/fate, outside/inside, theory/practice, same/different). Hypothesized that there are conceptual languages for narration, argumentation and verbalization, and based an empirical study of folk tales, developed a theory of narration.

1992 narrative types

1993 I completed my Ph.D. thesis "Symmetric Functions of the Eigenvalues of a Matrix" which embeds all of classical combinatorics in the combinatorics of matrix edges. (This was a bit of a side track, I had hoped that combinatorics, as the "basement" of mathematics where its objects are generated, and especially the six natural bases of the symmetric functions, would prove insightful. Although I think the results are important for automata theory.)

1993 - 1994 Topologies, OperatingPrinciples I thought through four mind games which generate twelve "topologies" (Kant would say, categories) by which we can conceive separately the parts of a division. For example, "one, all, many" are defined by a search for constancy: "You either find 'one' example of constancy, or it is constantly inconstant (so that 'all' is constant), and each time you look for constancy, you assume that what you choose to inspect and what you have inspected are one and the same, so they are all multiply constant."

1995 IAmStatements, EmotionalResponses

1996 preparations for good will exercises, Counterquestions, conversing with God. - 1996: I started to apply these ideas practically, designing GoodWillExercises by which on any subject that riles us, we might distinguish between what the heart says and what the world says, and take up the truth of the heart. This helped flesh out four basic structures, each with eight perspectives and just slightly bigger than what our mind can encompass, thus able to model our intuition. One of them gives operating principles for responding to needs: (be perfect, cling to what you have, get more than what you need, avoid extremes, choose the good over the bad, choose the better over the worse, choose the best over the rest, take up the needs of another). Another gives counterquestions for responding to doubts: (What do I truly want? How does it seem to me? What else should I be doing? Does it make any difference? What do I have control over? Am I able to consider the question? Is this the way things should be? Am I doing anything about this?)

1997 - 1998 GoodWillExercises, WaysOfGettingThingsDone, EightfoldWay as structure for conversing with God

1998 founded MinciuSodas/MinciuSodas. I moved to Lithuania and, in order to make a living, started the Minciu Sodas laboratory for independent thinkers.

1999 Visualizations, four families of PrimaryStructures, SecondaryStructures as embeddings. I realized that I could think of the six "secondary structures" (8 divisions, 6 representations, 12 topologies, argumentation, verbalization, narration) as injections corresponding to pairs of the four "primary structures".

2000 EverythingWishesForAnything

2003 Unity of Representations of Structure

2004 Understanding as separation of concepts (life is the goodness of God, but eternal life is understanding the goodness of God, which is to say, keeping God and good separate). I also observed that all of the structures fall out in the chain of views: "human's view of God's view of human's view of God's view of human's view". And that this is the depth of thinking of a "lost child" who does not look for her parents, but rather goes to where her parents will look for her.

2004 - 2005 LevelsOfUnderstanding, LostChild metaphor

2005 AlgebraOfViews, Omniscope

2006 God seeing himself by having human take up God's view and God take up human's view.

Please see Overview for my attempt to pull everything together. This is a work-in-progress.

A few more notes...

I noticed the EightfoldWay and its three canonical forms in 1987-1988. In 1994 I noticed the OperatingPrinciples and then in 1995 I related them to the IAmStatements. In 1995 I came up with a model for the EmotionalResponses. In 1996 I noticed the Counterquestions and came up with a model for them. All of these models consisted of seven/eight perspectives and I presumed that they were related to the eightfold way. But it was all so complex that I couldn't find a general approach. Then in 1998 I decided to think of all the structures in terms of their purposes, what they were accomplishing. I was able to distinguish between that were useful in their own right (which I called the PrimaryStructures) and those that were auxiliary, useful as part of a structural language (and I called them SecondaryStructures). I noted that there were four primary and six secondary structures. In 1999, I realized that the latter six could be thought of as injections of the other four, in that the Divisions can be derived by way of God taking up the Counterquestions. I needed to find a general approach. So I rethought the EmotionalResponses by doing a study of Jesus' emotions in the Gospel of Mark, and thereby coming up with his speaking to the good, which I related to the DirectionsFromTheGood. I then looked for a GeneralStructure that would have what is common to all four PrimaryStructures. I was able to work out diagrams which made clear the similarity in structures. These were thought through by thinking about the roles of why, how and what, for example, in the counterquestions as opposed to the eightfold way. But it appeared that any general structure would simply be the simplest of the four structures, EverythingWishesForNothing. Meanwhile, some key ideas fell into place: the distinction between Life and EternalLife, the idea that the structures are what allows others to see themselves through us, and an AlgebraOfViews. Now a helpful distinction is between the observer and their observational plane.

From a letter that I wrote to ChristopherLangan

Dear Chris,

I'm finding your thinking very relevant to my own life work. I've started going through your introduction http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/IntroCTMU.htm which I'm finding to be a good place to start.

When I was a child, I set out on a quest to "know everything and apply that usefully". As I entered college, I realized that what little I knew about quantum physics was that "reality fades away". So I looked instead in the places where the knowledge might be most easily placed within my reach, and also that people most avoid looking, which is wisdom of human life.

I looked for absolutes and came across "divisions of everything". These can be observed as perspectives that a conversation might break down into. I observed that if we divide everything into two perspectives, then one will be "opposites coexist" (as in free will) and the other "all things are the same" (as with fate). http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Twosome We may divide everything into three perspectives: "take a stand, follow through, and reflect": http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Threesome Or into four perspectives: "why, how, what, whether". http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Foursome

I noticed that "everything" served as an absolute anchor, and that it had four properties:

• no external context (if you put it in a box, it includes the box)
• no internal structure (hence nothing for meaning to cling to, so that all statements are trivially true, as in "everything is hot, cold, etc.")
• the simplest algorithm (accepts all things)
• a required concept (we all have it, and there is no analogue in the physical world, so we could not have learned it).So this is very much like your SetOfAllSets. One difference is that I also identify this with the state of contradiction in which all things are true.

We don't actually conceive these divisions directly, but instead, we approach them by means of representations (for example, the twosome has four

• free will and fate
• outside and inside
• theory and practice
• same and different

• one* example of it, or it is *all* constantly unconstant, and in order

I'm currently working on deriving the representations and the topologies in terms of an operation +2: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/AddTwo and I've benefited a lot from Christopher Alexander's observations that "(recurring) activity evokes structure, and structure channels activity". I think the operation +2 is for what you call "self-inclusion" and I will benefit from understanding your ideas.

Finally, I think there is an operation +3 which is the shift in mental state that we call "consciousness". For example, the twosome is what is needed for the issue of "existence" (we need to be able to ask the question, Does the chair exist? (opposites coexist), but also be able to settle it with an answer (if it does, it does; if it doesn't, it doesn't; but it's settled). When we are "conscious" of this issue, the our state of mind is given by three additional perspectives, which is to say, the fivesome (for decisionmaking - space or time). I think this particular equation 2 +3 = 5 is what Kant intended by his Transcendental Deduction. And it's cyclic, so that 7 +3 = 2. I will be working on the details of this operation. I think that it should relate to your state-transition syntax, and presumably, the three elements for resolving the set-of-all-sets paradox. I expect that this operation +3 will generated three dynamic "languages" (argumentation - how do things come to matter? verbalization - how do things come to mean? narration - how do things happen?) and I have good empirical bases to work with. Underlying the languages is an "inversion effect" (like 1/1-x) whereby, in order to imagine "a God who loves us more than we love ourselves", we need to turn everything around, so that God is the smallest thing (deeper than our hearts can reach) and the unknown is the largest thing which engulfs us. (Your ideas make me consider that such a God may then find himself needing to identify with us so as to undo the inversion and not get stuck; all this to affirm that indeed the knowledge of everything may be dispersed everywhere as you say).

That's an introduction of why I'm very happy to learn of your thinking and your results. I certainly know that they are useful to me. I also know they are for real, not invented, have a warmth towards God and humans and a care for truth.

I will be sorting through your introduction, working on it at my workspace, see Christopher Langan on: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/MeaningfulConcepts and I will try to decode and interpret the various terms in your introduction. I will also be working at my lab's working group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/livingbytruth/ where I will share my letter.

I have found myself alone as I think you have in pursuing such thoughts. Yet many along the way have helped by allowing me to think out loud. In 1997, I moved to Lithuania and then founded Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt, an open laboratory serving and organizing independent thinkers around the world, primarily through the Internet. I have found that as independent thinkers we have a shared value of "caring about thinking". We find ourselves everywhere on the periphery because the people who are quick to agree end up in the center. So we each develop our own private languages. And yet we are able to agree with each other because our existential situation is the same. We are able to be absolutely inclusive by filtering in all those interested who are able to demonstrate that they can openly "work for free" on their own projects so that all might share their work-in-progress. We currently have 100 active and 1,000 supportive participants. We're working especially on global villages, tools for thinking, open economy, leadership development, loving God, social networking, global inclusion and more.

All of my work is in the Public Domain and my philosophical work is completely free-of-charge for people to use according to their best judgement. I do alert you, though, to our lab's services: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/MinciuSodas/Services http://www.openleader.com/index.php/MinciuSodas/Clients which might be helpful for you or the Mega Foundation. For example, I and my lab could help popularize your work, provide support services to the severely gifted, or explore business opportunities for your think-tank.

More about how my thinking unfolded: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Andrius my current research interests (pulling together all the structures that I'm aware of): http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Overview http://www.openleader.com/index.php/GlossaryOfStructure/Omniscope and me: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/Profiles/AndriusKulikauskas The latest news from our lab is at: http://www.ms.lt and more about our lab: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/MinciuSodas/MinciuSodas

A few participants I think you'd want to know about: Anthony Judge http://www.laetusinpraesens.org http://www.uia.org Joseph Goguen http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/goguen/ Sarunas Raudys http://www.science.mii.lt/mii/raudys/

I wish to know everything and apply that usefully.

AndriusKulikauskas: Note, the following is is a bit old! For my latest thinking see UniversalLanguage/Overview

I have prepared for this for most of my childhood, and worked on this for all my life as an adult. These last twenty-two years I have observed and collected a wide variety of structures. My starting point is God, and the related concept of everything. My ending point is life, as the fact that God is good.

I've always had trouble writing up my thoughts because they are murky, but even worse, they want to spin out in all directions. And I can't prove much of anything, although that's not my goal, either.

I've found a natural point of convergence, a conclusion from which I can work backwards and lead to all the structures that I know of. My conclusion is:

"Life is the fact that God is good". Or more simply, "Life is the goodness of God".

Starting from just one conclusion: "Life is the goodness of God", I am able to explore "life", "goodness", "God", "is", etc. and work backwards, what do I mean? It's the conclusion that pulls everything together that I've been working on, and I find it attractive and natural. It leaves enormous room for clarification, elaboration. But it also works as a conclusion, in that I'm willing to take my stand here, and I'm able to confess my dogma, what I'll not retreat from. My "core values", so to speak.

There is a greater assertion, which I have drawn from the Gospel of John: "Everlasting life is the understanding that God is good." I am finding that to work from "Life is the goodness of God" is to work backwards, whereas to work with "Endless life is understanding the goodness of God" is to work forwards.

Just as my backwards-looking conclusion reflects my outlook, so it seems that the forwards-looking assertion reflects God's outlook, his venturing outwards to everlasting life. How may my looking back, or yours, find God and take up his looking forwards?