Table of Contents

Introduction: Origins

     Singular They

     Imaginary Heroes

First Trio: Journal of Literary Semantics

     Mythic Spacetime
 
     Narrative Algebra

     More Features

Comments: Follow-up

     Hero Cycle

Second Trio: Semiotica

     Mythic Algebra Uses

     Numbers

     Laws of Association

Epilog: Future Directions



Introduction: Origins

     While this book reprints six academic papers and related material, its origins are not in the dry, technical world of academic theory. It started with comic books. Before I went to school, before I learned to read, I ‘read’ comic books at home. Four decades later I was again reading them at home, and developed mythic algebra from them.
     Mythic algebra is a hybrid system of various parts of basic mathematics, sets and algebra cobbled together to describe the symbolic processes of the mind. Originally derived from mythology and superhero comic book stories, the system has been aimed to cover all mental activity, incorporating non-mathematical processes like mental association. This led to the idea that mythic algebra is the ur-mathematics out of which true mathematics, and any other language, evolved.
     This collection of academic papers is based on a radical assumption, that the mind works on symbolic processes which are the same no matter how expressed. Today’s educators speak of different learning styles, which is no doubt true. Beyond this, everyone assumes that each field of thought, each subject area, involves different ways of thinking. How one does mathematics differs from how one understands the arts, stories, language, or any other mental activity. Yet we have one brain for all of this, and while scientists can identify different areas of higher brain activity depending on type of thought, all areas are said to be interconnected. There are also many different types of connection: chemical, electrical, physiological, organelle, and perhaps electromagnetic broadcast. But if all these are considered the building blocks, what structure do they make?
     Notwithstanding the actual variation of brain parts and connections, when they all work together, does it make a single, unified process? Obviously it does, since we are autonomous animals that think and move on our own. While this fact is easily conceded on the level of body motion and physiology, it is rejected at the level of thought. Our personal conflicts, our ambivalent desires, are taken as signs of the competing systems in the triune brain, the reptilian brainstem versus the mammalian midbrain versus the human frontal lobes. Yet the triune brain produces a single person, even if it is only a highly evolved radio box to receive a spirit. Leaving aside spiritual questions, how could any unity of process be recognized? How could this be described in a functional notation system?
     Enter ‘the new math,’ that abandoned approach to teaching grade school mathematics in the 1960s. I am a product of that, for I absorbed the emphasis upon sets as a basis of understanding the world. It has colored my thinking, becoming my natural viewpoint upon anything, long before it inserted itself into my way of thinking about comic books and the first published paper here (from 2000), ‘Mythic Spacetime.’ I get ahead of myself, and must retreat to earlier decades, to give an unpublished example of a worldview colored by sets.