- Systèma
- The word is the Greek σύστημα, a whole set together, from συνίστημι, to stand together; the ring writes it in Cyrillic, Система. Science and philosophy are taken as one system: Hegel’s sublation, Aufheben — two terms lifted into a third that keeps them both — runs through the philosophers on its first page and the method of the sciences on its second, and the third page turns the method on the organ that does the thinking.
- The ring
- The second of the seven rings, on the first verse of al-Fātiḥa: بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ, In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful — the verse every ring opens on. Its function is how to use your brain, and its al-Dīn page sets the Bismillah beside the first revelation, Read, in the name of your Lord who created (96:1–2), and the single soul of 4:1.
- Contents
- Six pages, from the Bismillah to the Shahada: the System of Science, Hegel’s three works and the thinkers beneath each, Socrates to Hobbes, with their sublations — Mind and Body into Spirit, Nothing and Being into Becoming, Natural and Human into Divine; the Scientific Method, hypothesis, experiment and model as a cycle, on a grid of seven sciences from physics to economics; the Nervous System, from the synapse and Hebb’s rule through Hodgkin–Huxley to the lobes of the brain and the neural network; al-Dīn, Creation, al-Nafs and the Bismillah; and a closing song.