I must apologize to the reader in advance for what will seem to be a rather difficult set of ideas laid out in this post. At the outset, I want to lay out some ideas that are basic to me but strange to many. These ideas are developed more fully in other posts in the series and specifically in Zen philosophy an the Western version of it (Mindfulness). I am deeply influenced by Hofstadter and Dennett, whose ideas are strange, radically new and far from obvious. I take it that "mind" and "soul" both refer to the experience we all have of being "something". An essential idea of all religions is that this "something" survives death and is therefore separable from the body. I believe this to be mistaken, but I am left with the problem of "locating" the mind. Skeptics who reject the religious view tend to take it for granted that the mind is an "epiphenomenon" of the brain - somehow arising from the interaction of billions of neurons...

" Laws of Form " are the foundation for mathematics based on the fundamental idea of categorization. Any freshman course will show how all of mathematics is built up on the foundation of set theory - the logic of categories. Even in High School, we are taught that there is no such thing as a "real" circle - in the real world, things that we call circles are actually only approximately circular. But we are left with the idea that a circle is a "real thing". "More real", in fact, than the circles of actual experience. We take the form of distinction for the form." There is a circularity in bringing into words what is quite clear without them. And yet it is in the bringing forth into formalisms that mathematics is articulated and universes of discourse come into being. The elusive beginning, before there was a difference, is the eye of the storm, the calm center from which these musings spring. There is a delicious circularity in this idea - so...