Speculative Philosophy

Speculative Philosophy attempts to go beyond what is known into the unknown, even the unknown unknown. The most famous speculative philosopher was Hegel. He attempted to go beyond Kant’s categories by understanding the relations between the categories dialectically and then to derive a logic of the categories themselves based on first principles.
General Schemas Theory is a smaller example of Speculative Philosophy. It attempts to go beyond the Kantian idea of the homogeneous projection of synthetic a prior on spacetime and understand the schemas we actually project in science as templates of understanding and intelligibility with regard to spacetime organization of eventities. All we have is a hypothesis as to what the structure of the schemas in relation to each other might be like, i.e. the S-prime hypothesis. When all we have is a hypothesis which we are engaged in disproving, then speculative philosophy does not rest but leaps to the next level wondering what is the context of schemas, what is the next emergent level up from the schemas. And that is Emergent Worlds Theory. It is the pursuit of science that allows us to be reflexive about the kinds of schemas we project. All we need to do is comb the scientific literature looking for example schemas. S-Prime theory says that we will only find ten schemas in that literature and that they will nest without gaps representing eventities in a spectrum between the -1 to the 9th dimensions. That is the empirical side of General Schemas Theory, what schemas to scientists actually use. What is interesting about general schemas theory is that it says that we actually think multi-dimensionally, and that our concepts are higher dimensional eventities that we use to represent the various phenomena we study in the world. Of course, we have to represent these higher dimensional concepts in lower dimensionalities such as in print or in pictures or diagrams or models. But we are actually thinking in a multi-dimensional space up to the limit of nine dimensions, and that is why concepts are different from ideas, concepts are higher dimensional networks of thought, which then we have to reduce to lower dimensional representations as we produce the illusory continuities of our ideas. It is strange that the existing theories of “concepts” does not make more use of higher dimensionality to understand them. But be that as it may even though we only have the sketch of a theory of Schemas we can still ask the question as to the context within Schemas arise.
If the S-prime hypothesis is right and schemas are tied to dimensionality then we are aware that there is n-dimensional space posited by mathematics as the backdrop for the unfolding of the specific dimensions tied to the schemas. A theory of Emergent Worlds would then naturally be a theory of meta-dimensions beyond the zeroth meta-dimension in which n-dimensional space and time might be said to exist from a mathematical perspective. The reason that we want to leap to a hypothesis about the structure of Emergent Worlds is that it provides a basis for understanding better the schemas themselves if we know their context. It is a leap to say that we think multi-dimensionally, but it is an even greater speculative leap to consider that there may be meta-dimensions and that it is in these meta-dimensions that transcendences are projected by that constitute the worldview. This is an even greater leap because there is no mathematical theory as to what meta-dimensions might be like. But speculative philosophy is undaunted by the lack of scientific grounding for our philosophical ideas. Generally philosophy outpaces science because it is philosophy that makes science possible not the other way around as most analytic philosophers probably think.
Emergent Worlds Theory hypothesizes that our projections go way beyond what Kant thought was possible, i.e. the projection of a priori synthesis on space and time. Emergent Worlds Theory says that we together project worldviews which are the context for the projection of schemas on things within the worldview. The worldview is our idea of the context for the projection of all the schemas. We call it a worldview instead of a schemasview not just because of tradition, but because the world is the ultimate horizon of experience and the worldview is our contextual viewpoint on that ultimate horizon. Both Husserl and Heidegger use the world as the ultimate horizon of experience. Heidegger was against worldviews in general, but we take it that they exist. They must exist because we are not trapped within our world. The world is a schema which gives us the horizon of experience but we are not trapped within our experience we can go beyond our experience, but how? How do we go beyond our experience? This is a question that has not been sufficiently addressed by the tradition.
Hegel tried to answer that by saying that the categories of Kant were a much richer structure than Kant supposed. But even categories are trapped within the world, within the horizon of our experience. Pure speculation posits a freedom from the schemas that exist in experience such that we can view those schemas from somewhere else, from some unknown distance within ourselves. That is necessary in order to be reflexive. If there was only the world as the horizon of our experience how would we gain the distance necessary to be reflexive within our experience concerning it. It is reflexivity of experience that opens up the way toward the idea that meta-dimensions provide the distance by which we may view our experience and thus allow for the reflexivity of all experience. Meta-dimensions are the ether into which we project those headlands beyond the world, as Nietzsche called them, that allow us to get a view of our experiences within the horizon of the world. The transcendentals are scaffolding by which we take our distance from our experience in order to experience it self-consciously. The trend in philosophy is away from transcendentals toward philosophies of immanence. And we do not argue that all the projection processes are immanent. But where are the screens upon which we are projecting those transcendentals immanently? We posit that they are the meta-dimensions. We do not deny that those projections are illusions. But we must allow that the illusions themselves exist. In other words immanently we project the screens as well as the illusions of transcendence that appear on the screens. For instance, in Kant those illusions are the Transcendental Subject and Object and also God that maintains the coherence between the other two transcendentals. But for the Transcendental Subject and Object as well as God to exist as illusions projected by us there must be a broader scaffolding provided by the structure of the worldview itself. What is the structure of that broader scaffolding? We have noted that it must at least include the meta-levels of Being and the Aspects of Being. But is higher logical type theory all we need? It is the role of speculative philosophy to try to fill out the details of that structure of the worldview as an intersubjective projection. Clearly there is not just one Subject or one Object on the transcendental plane. And there is not just one plane because we know that there are at least the meta-levels of Being and the Aspects. So how many transcendental planes are there that correspond as illusory projections to the immanent plateaus described by Deleuze and Guattari. Here again we run up against the possibility that they are infinite and that we are trapped in the Cantorian paradise. But on the other hand if they were infinite then we would be exhausted in the projection of these headlands above the world from our finite immanent resources. Rather we assume that somehow the transcendental scaffolding must be finite, and that the worldview is just as finite as the number of worlds (and other schemas) within meta-dimension zero. What is needed is some type of mathematically based hypothesis about the structure of the worldview as the projected transcendental scaffolding beyond the embodied worlds that give us the horizon of our experience. How can the projected transcendental scaffolding be finite in the meta-dimensions just as the schemas are finite within meta-dimension zero? It is a real challenge to our speculative capabilities to find a hypothesis that would provide a basis for testing our comprehension of the worldview beyond the schematizations of the world.