Why 7?

WHY 7?

As a sign-use, “seven” has ever communicated in two ways: arithmetically, as text, entering into relations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with respect to other numbers. And ordinally, as in the counting series “first, second, third…..seventh”). Since this second, ordinal use involves the conception of actual succession, as in counting, it may be contrasted with the textual in this respect as being “tokened”. The contrast between what “seven” communicates, as text, and what “7” communicates, as token, is taken up into, then cancelled, by the convention of counting (!) them substitutable for each other in script.

Number signs in general, it has been learned and taught, can be treated arithmetically, taking equations as textual expressions of identities, whatever these might be. Thus, numbers are indispensable for making accurate and precise references to objects by filing systems; and precisely deductive comparative descriptions (“halves of equals are equal to each other”, etc.). From the very beginning of communication, number tokens are intrinsically ordered 1 to 10 by learning sounds and sequences correlated with the five fingers on each one’s hand as ‘digits’. (“Start over when you reach 10” – it is the ‘power’ completing the “one” in a circle of nine segments; the Anneagram.)

Let the ordinal number “seven” be a token of any actual 7-stage sequences having the following characteristics, required to fit them under sign-use processes:

1. The first stage is pure multiplicity; numbers are correlated with objects through aggregate totalities such as measured distances, forces, field effects, shock, etc., Thus, the hypothetical domain of neural stimuli transmitting signals to the central neural, brain-mind areas of function at any given time, from the various locales on which the terminate, can be considered a definite “totality”. It’s measure is the psychic potential that passes over into consciousness.

2. The second stage predicates on totalities of the first that emerge as qualitative content of consciousness: Kant’s “phenomenal” vs. “noumenal” contrast. This makes dreams, as nature’s first spontaneous intra-psychic communication, the metaphysical link Freud anticipated between body and mind. The same consciousness that dreams in sleep is the one that recalls what was dreampt upon waking, and can relate what analysis discloses it communicates to the context of daily life.

3. The third stage predicates on ‘clusters’, or organized ‘clumps’ of items of stage two, taken as individual totalities (“this pen” = S*) indicated as common objects of perception when two people communicate. These clusters of predicates are attributed to external sources when their causes are organized as three-dimensional objects. These objects are constituted by a triad, the two legs of the base of which is their individual conscious perception to the third, point, the object itself – through the sign-use (S*). For shared rational discourse, it is necessary to distinguish the object that can be referred to by name, by common agreement; and the predicates of the object determined by specific characteristics. This is necessary to distinguish what is true-by- definition (=follows from what is posited by the name, if it is a predicate) and true-as-matter-of-fact in predicating on any objects S* (text).

Note: this three-step series is constructed around the notion of a single quantity of energy (*1) passing over a threshold to waking consciousness (*2), becoming organized for purposes of communication (reconstructed) into clusters of sense-perceptible qualities (*3) as “physical objects in the common three dimensionall world”. Arriving at *3, and as if “squaring” the preceding units *1 and *2, is the distinction between predicates of any instance of *3 (“x” such that “x is a 3”), and the instance itself. This is a metaphysical fork in the road that leads ‘down’, on the one hand, to the distinction between outer and inner determination of succession in perception; and leads “up”, on the other, to the distinction between will, as the capacity of consciousness to respond to rational moral law in freedom in respect to disposal of “x” expected of the responsible adult subject.


4. The Fourth stage completes the first three by bringing the unity of its original impulse up to the level of moral predication.

“I (can, do will) that X” (movement of arm to pick up the pen, for instance) is a fourth stage sign-use, S*. An S*4 is presupposed by any attribution of responsibility to persons for their actions. Kant also showed this. The present formulation only extends his observation that “ought” implies “can” to the universe of *3, laid out, as it were, as a common totality through which, and to which, all responsible humans relate, each from within their own worlds of private tokenspace, in so far as they relate to each other under rational moral law in freedom. At this stage, the person predicates on their own predications, on what they name and attribute to the clusters of qualities in private tokenspace.

At the same time, in doing so, there is drawn into the process taking the Fourth stage further the awareness of ego-centered consciousness;

5. The awareness of oneself as a personal agent, as if surveying the acts of the responsible person by themselves as a totality. But this is achieved in the order of learning development only through interaction through “I”’s = S*5”.

6. Pure textual awareness as consciousness of S*1-5, shared as common intellectual is posited as extending from sign-use for all sign-uses, as the psychosemiotic vocabulary and axioms, S*6.

7. GOD = S*7 – token of the totality completing itself through S*6.

These last three stages unfold on the inner, psychic side of the sign-use process as the “upper triad” (left side) in the Anneagram-hologram consciousness model.

Compare: the Bible, Days of Creation; Gurdjieff, under "Art" (in All and Everything).