Kaled AIT HAMOU is a researcher in biosemantics and was director of the department of linguistics at the University of Abidjan from 1982 to 1990. His published works include ‘Structure and typology of quantification in natural language’, Vol. 36, Fayard, 1979, which has recently been digitized by the University of California (2007). He was also one of the first authors to contribute to our magazine with « My grandmother is 12000 years old » [PLASTIR 2, 11/2005]. We should already focus on the transdisciplinary nature of bio-semantics looking and going across disciplines such as biology and the production of meaning and the construction of language, cognition and evolution. The Paleolithic and the Neolithic have thus no secrets to the author who study them in the neuroanatomical and hormonal perspective, focusing in particular on the ontogenetic Sapiens pre- and post-pubere stages. If our young grandmother had the same brain vascularization that us, it is thus indeed that she transmitted to us the brain and laryngeal anatomical structures necessary for any semantic production. However, Kaled Aït Hamou aims to show the relevance and extent of such relations during these two stages of cortical development of Homo sapiens. If the neural brain has primacy in the first stage, this is clearly the brain hormonal one that governs the second. Therefore, the understanding of the emergence of meaning, and its different expressions between primates and hominids and between different hominid as pre-sapiens and Neanderthals, the Sapiens and Homo sapiens goes through an analysis of the semantic through the cerebral vasculature, but also voice productions, sounds, intonations, the capacity of duplication of sounds and the ability to produce through sophisticated semantic notions. The author shows us – logico-semantic demonstration and anatomical laryngeal centres schema or cortical meningeal and vascularized structures to support – that the connections between patterns of hormonal and neural communication lead to the emergence of biosemantics. Several specific language (sound language segments) or mathematically demonstrable examples (genericites of algorithmic operations) will be used for this purpose. Similarly, Aït Hamou describes in detail, the relationship between counterfactual statements – where he distances himself from Thom’s semiophysics – and the manufacture of the tool or the involvement of the two modes of communication (hormonal and neural) in the emergence of consciousness and of contradictory notions (paradoxes of Russell and of Zeno) in the logico-deductive reasoning. He concluded on the impact of contrefactualisation and of the modes of communication <hormonal vs neural> during evolution – hominid prior to or cohabiting with Homo sapiens having a restricted hormonal brain contrefactualisation space and being thus unable to enact laws or to differentiate the superlatives. “It is, that after the dynamics of the connections between neural and hormonal brain was based that the transmitter cortex could assume the binding between very very big and so great that we wants. This link is crucial to mathematics.”, says the author.
ART AND SCIENCE, TWO WAYS OF PERCEIVING THE WORLD
Anne-Marie POCHAT, native of Abidjan, is an artist painter with a graduate scientific background. She has participated in the work of the GLACS, Research and Thinking on the Art and Science group linked to the College de France from 1988 to 1991 in Paris. His work, far from been splited, to make science, art or vice versa, is thus of art and science without discontinuity: two ways of seeing the world. This fertile crossing gave birth to works marked by the origins of life – the infinitely small – before she met the astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 2001 where she will open to the infinitely large (see PLASTIR 3, 06/2005). Many exhibitions followed, including Aquacosmos and heart of stars, Saint Denis of Reunion (2001), Sundial, Verrières le Buisson (2002), Dream world, Saint Denis of Reunion (2003), San Francisco (2005), Los Angeles (2006) and Birth of the worlds, Gallery Imagin’art, Sainte Rose (2008). Her paintings plunge us in the heart of the mystery of creation, without never revealing it. Man have to take the step beyond his terrestrial contradictions to reach the Summit. “Science produced theories and concepts that provideus tools to explain the world and try to dominate it» (from our human point of view)” she says, equating the work of art for the singular expression of a perception of the world, to a consciousness that science would be outsourcing, objectificating, and art, share inner. However, we are all in this world she says. As concerning art, it “produces forms but is never engaged in these forms because its essence is freedom. It proceeds in a flight of the soul outside of the space; he won over time”. This plasticity of forms is “to ‘something’ obvious by the nature and the spirit of the one who creates them. They are information to decrypt”. In summary, for Anne-Marie Pochat, the engine of creation is in this search for meaning, while the science engine resides in the pursuit of knowledge. However, art and science are potentialised in any actual acquisition of knowledge, in any enlargement of the field of perception. Hence the fundamental role of art in the blazing shot of matter and psyche which is reflected in: the universe’s dream.
DELUOL: WHEN THE MIND CARVES THE MATTER
Marc-Williams DEBONO is a researcher in neurosciences, writer and editor of PLASTIR. He has published many books as “ The Era of Plasticians ” (Aubin, 1996), whose the subtitle was: “ New scientists in front of the world’s poetry ” indicating a path. That of the opening and decompartmentalization of disciplines, the Middle also, if one refers to the lessons of the far East, but with sources and nuances that are strictly related to the concept of plasticity he his since this time attached to redefine, as much on the conceptual level than at the pragmatic level. He founded for this purpose the “Group of Plasticians” in 1994 and then the association “Plasticities Sciences Arts”, both consisting of a network of transdisciplinary researchers and renowned authors, contributing to this new vision of a plastic world. The author here delivers a quite unusual exercise, fruit of the discovery on a scorching afternoon at Saint Michel en L’herm in Vendée (France) of a unique Museum-memory showing the works of art of the sculptor André Deluol. From there was born the idea, – once is not custom, – to postpone his famous “ Stone buddies ” in PLASTIR. Because Deluol appeared to me at the first glance as a plastician in the sense we understand it, a man who has been able to exceed his condition of artist, sublimate the body, and even more, who very early felt the need to massively cut in stone without other intermediary than his mind. This ultimate guide, reluctant to follow patterns and passions, if not that of the « divine proportions » of ancient Greece (Atalante, 1980, Rhea, 1995), of Dionysus, that give the work its finitude, its very existence, took him truly to magnify stone, any mineralogy, in order to extract the essence marrow. An extreme pleasure, an extreme freedom without never confining them to licentiousness is observed here, a knowledge that we know cannot be purely innate, but which derives more from synaesthetic intuition, oral touch or tactile vision, than art to paint or sculpt. That this bulimia of life led him to sculpt all kinds of materials: oil, marble, granite, walnut, sandstone, African wood, glass, onyx and stones of various origins (of Chauvigny, Richemont, of Brouzet, Isère, Bretagne, Lorraine, Gard, etc.) giving monumental, bas-reliefs, statues or images for many cities, embassies, churches, museums (Petit Palais, Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, Alger & Amsterdam museums), exhibitions or historic monuments. At the end, Adam and Eve (1929), Confidence (1934), Mary (1935), Bacchanalia (1945), Adam and Eve, (1983), Group, 1986, Drunkenness (1985), Embrace (1989), Terrestrial foods & The game (1991), Arabesque (1992), Desire (1996), The three graces (1999)… Don’t include everything. What call out in all of these sculptures, as in the first ecstatic faces of the paintings of Deluol, is the consistency, the density or the Red line of the Plastician. This ability have the great sensitves to incubate the art coming from elsewhere, in this case the Callipygian Venus of the Paleolithic to the Greek statuary, of a Carpeaux, a Rodin or a Maillol, passing through Roman art, Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism of a Delvaux, or even from more far, Etruscan art, African art, Indian and Asian arts, without attempting to make any synthesis, but reviving them through a unique and singular expression of a mind sculpting matter without intention than to give it to see.
ON THE TRACES OF PATANJALI – A SECOND READING OF THE « YOGAS SUTRA » XV TO XX OF PATANJALI
Mariana Thieriot Loisel has been coordinator of the Faculty of philosophy of the Monastery of St. Benedict in São Paulo (Brazil) before doing a post-doctorate in educational sciences at Laval’s faculty of philosophy in Canada. She continues today these researches in philosophy in areas relating to human mutations in Montreal (Canada). Faithful contributor to our journal where she has published a large number of these works on education, intentionality and consciousness or still about the status of women, she invites us here to follow the next issue of her translations and interpretations of the ‘Yoga sutra’ Patanjali in Sanskrit, which the last was published in PLASTIR n°20. There, the author showed us how meditation gave meaning to the imaginary, Vikhalpah (Sutra IX), how this imaginary was indented in our memories and our experiences, how it could lead to the denial, or even to « lack experience » (Sutra X). The teachings of Patanjali guide her today toward harmonic and ritual of the yoga practice (sutra XIV), taking this time as keyword the « dispassionate » consciousness to be at Samjna Vairagyam. A State necessary to the Brahmins in order to suspend the passions of the body as to those of the spirit and to be present at meditation, « a State of emptiness » where nothing comes to divert the mind of its effort of knowledge. The sutra XVI tells us that at the level above Vairagya (self-control, depassionment) is located Vaistrynia (transcendence) and that there are different degrees of self-denial to achieve. And the author to situate this action of transcendence of the properties of the matter as the best way to know mind and action it exerts on us. Everything happens as if we would absolutely need to stop this residual noise that invades our mentality, and gradually replace the incessant representations we have of reality by a meditation on their own meaning. It is only at this price that one can reach the presence itself, overtaking. The sutra XVIII invites us to discover the illumination, otherwise rimbaldian, so closely linked to « an intense practice of a meditation on the residual impressions (from the past)”. Illumination or ‘enstase’ which is achieved through spirituality come of age, i.e. between the three centers of energy, knowledge and intuition (Sutra XX).