William: you know, love and deep friendship is definitely possible in cyberspace
William: you and I, Steve and you, are proof
William: me and Krishna, me and Geetanjali

Aida yes

- Friday November 20 2009, 04:57 -

William: lunch time?
William: I am now in my beloved Ubuntu operating system

Aida I just had lunch
Aida today is weekend
Aida how are you?

William: went to sleep at 9 pm and woke up at 3am

Aida wow

Aida what time is it there now

William: excited to be making progress in learning Linux
William: almost 5am in New York. What time is it there in Iran?

Aida it is 1:30 pm here in Tehran

William: did you have lunch

Aida do you know how I can use Socratic method?

Aida yes I did.

William: you mean, you desire a tutorial in use of socratic method

Aida yes

William: i would liken it to Zen Buddhist Koan method

William: which means that books which instruct in Koan, give insight into socratic

William: in a nutshell: Socrates has TWO nick names in the dialogues

Aida I want to extract the truth in myself and people without offending them and as if they have discovered it themselves

Aida yes?

William: one is NARKE which means sting-ray, it is where we get our work NARCOTIC

William: because Socrates NUMBS his interlocuter into APORIA, which means cul-de-sac, no-way=out

Aida haha

William: he does this by a technique called ELNENCHYS, which means refutation
Aida refutation?what is it

William: and it is part of a process called DIALECTIC which Plato likens to a weavers loom with WARP AND WOOF, threads at 90 degrees
Aida what is warp and woof

William: ok… hypothetically, lets say that YOU are prepossessed or convinced of some position

William: it might be regarding a medical treatment

William: or, political issue

William: or whatever

William: so, by means of dialogue, question and answer,

William: i maneuver you into the position where you contradict yourself

William: and i help you to reach a BLANK WALL, in which you suddenly FREELY admit to yourself and others that you did NOT really know what you took for granted

Aida can we practice that

Aida but what if am smart enough?

William: now, socrates is also called MID-WIFE

Aida I know

William: in the sense that he helps people GIVE BIRTH to understanding

William: but, there is a joke in plato about WIND EGGS
Aida yes?

William: IN nature there are times when a bird does lay an empty egg
William: which has nothing but air inside

William: but it is also a pun on FLATULENCE
William: in other words, if someone is full of shit… they give birth to fart
William: so, it is a bit of platos humor

Aida haha

William: now, the very best way is to actually read the dialogues

Aida but socrates thinks we are all full of wisdom but we have forgotten the truth we carry

William: one brief dialog with Meno, Socrates attempts to prove that mathematical knowledge is inherent even in an uneducated slave boy

William: so, Socrates takes a slave boy, and questions him about a geometric issue of triangles
William: socrates seems to demonstrate that, through eliciting questions, the slave boy arrives at the true answer….
William: for Socrates, this means that the soul has pre-existence…
William: otherwise where would such understanding come

- 05:07 -
Aida interesting.
Aida do you think he is right?

William: second, Socrates (plato) sees geometric and mathematical truth as EXISTING as IDEAL FORMS (eidos) or plural EIDEI

William: WELL, this is very interesting, Einstein and Kurt Godel were friends, and mathematicians

Aida yes?

William: Kurt Godel passionately believed that the elements of number and geometry had some real existence in another dimension

William: whereas, Einstein saw them as ad hoc tools

Aida what is ad hoc?

William: and not having any sort of Platonic existence as ideal forms

William: ad hoc is latin for TOWARDS THIS END OR GOAL

William: IT is a contrivance or tool, a means to and end, and once the end is acheived, the tool is discarded

William: Wittgenstein speaks of this in Tractatus

William: Wittgensten says that we construct a LADDER of sorts, which is some ad hoc method, for us to ascend to some higher plane of understanding, and once we arrive, we push away and discard the ladder

William: same with Mahayana buddhism….

Aida we invented geometry and numbers etc

William: Samsara is the 10001 things in life which mess our minds…
William: the VEHICLE or boat, is a contrivance of ideology, which helps us arrive at the other shore

William: but ONCE WE ARRIVE we leave the boat behind
William: the boat was not the end, but only a means to an end

Aida yes

William: one sees this symbolism in Homer, when Odysseus is advised to take a ships oar (for rowing), place it on his shoulder

Aida but it mattters a lot in the beginning

William: and begin a pilgrimage to some distant unknown land

- 05:12 -

William: he is told that eventually, someone who has never seen the ocean will ask him what that strange object (the oar ) is

William: when THAT happens, then he must plant the oar in the ground, and make a sacrifice, and he will be purified

William: now, of course, Homer is mythos,…. but the story is very useful for us to understand the ad hoc nature of language and axiomatic systems

Aida I dont understand

William: and, sometimes, we make the error of seeing THOSE as an end in themselves, with a substantive reality

Aida why should he plant the oar
Aida and how he will be purified

William: well, the oar is a TOOL, which is only useful at sea, to propel a ship

William: but, in a desert, it is useless

Aida yes

Aida like religion which is useless in this century

William: so, in life, and in cultures, we often see that individual or even nations, cling to something which was really meant as a transitional tool

Aida yes

Aida like money ,,,

William: for example, in pre-history, before writing, there was only discourse and oral tradition

William: around a campfire

Aida how exciting

William: THEN writting was devised

Aida yes.how else I could talk to nietzsche and plato

William: THEN, the liveliness of the tradition kind of DIED, as the redacted and codified text became something SACRED in itself

Aida they dont move around my campfire

William: which is a form of idolatry
William: and your example of money is excellent
William: in pre-history, no money, but communal tribal survival where there is no concept of private property
William: and the SHARING means survival of the small struggling group or species
William: THEN money as coins of precious metal is devised

Aida but lets not get distracted from our aim which was to learn socratic method
Aida but lets not get distracted from our aim which was to learn socratic method
Aida dialectics.

William: then, love of people is replaced with love of money, and people become a MEANS to an end , rather than an end in themselves

William: now, Kant says that once people become only a MEANS to an end, that is the source of the unethical

- 05:17 -
Aida I wonder if there is an end even.

William: and Azar Nafisi, in “Reading Lolita in Tehran” offers the notion that the Iranian Govt. does to its people what the old man in Lolita, Humbert Humbert does to little Lolita

William: namely, he OBJECTIFIES her

William: she is no longer a person, with a life of her own, to be nurtured

Aida what do you mean objectify

William: but instead she is an object, a possession, for him to hold on to for his own gratification

Aida yes men usually think that way of their wives

William: when we love another in a non-erotic sense, as a parent for a child, we are not selfish, we endeavor to lead the child to INDEPENDENCE, which naturally involves their distancing themselves from us

Aida they forget they are similar human beings who have to live their lives.

William: to lead a life of their own

Aida well usually parents cant take that independence without suffering

William: that is why in old testament bible in genesis, in early pages, it says that the children leave the parents and cling to the new spouse

William: so, what we selflessly love, we are willing to give up one day, for the sake of their independence

William: but a selfish love is treating person as OBJECT for our own needs, and so, we do not EMPOWER them towards independent self-hood
Aida yes..I always thought what is the use of me getting married..my mom sacrificed her life to prepare everything that is needed for my growth?and development and what is the point of me leaving her
William: a modern expression of socratic method is exemplified by that one psychotherapist, i will think of name in a minute, who wrote “On Becoming a Person”

Aida oh
Aida is it a book

William: he developed a technique of REFLECTING back to the patient, like a mirror, what the patient was really trying to say.

William: i think i must google on his name
Aida yes please
William: Carl Rogers

- 05:23 -
William: and his technique is Rogerian

Aida aha

William: in otherwords, often, in discourse, we do not really LISTEN well to the OTHER person

William: we are anxious to express our SELF , our own notion
William: BUT, if we become Rogerian, we act as a MIRROR, for that person to explore their true feelings

Aida that is true.I talked with my boyfriend today. and realized myself doing that.

Aida so he got bored and left.!

William: we reflect BACK to them, in slightly different words, what we perceive them to say

Aida I usually try to be the mirror.but sometimes I like to be seen too..to find myself in others

William: AND we act in a positive manner, as if we agree, as if they are really helping us to understand something

Aida yes perfect

William: but in reality, we are allowing ourselves to serve as a kind of SCAFFOLDING to help them construct their own edifice or building of self

Aida true

William: but you see, a builders SCAFFOLD, the bars and ladders that allow the builder to scale the walls and roof of the structure

Aida but the problem is

William: they are AD HOC

Aida usually people do not talk what we like to talk about
William: and when the edifice is finish, the scaffolding is dismantled and perhaps discarded

William: well, you see, for example… with you and me….. you suddenly ask about socratic method

Aida how can we lead the conversation to some meaningful subject
Aida yes.but you are my type.

William: so, i transform myself into an instrument , a tool , which can possibly help lead YOU to your own conception , understanding, of socratic method

William: but, to be such a teacher, a socratic teacher, requires the ability to shift into a selfless non-egoistic mode

- 05:28 -
William: i must take one minute to refil humidifier for wife, and give her pill for thyroid be right back

Aida sure

William: back, quick like a bunny

Aida hi

Aida is she fine?

William: Bertrand Russell commented that all of the history of philosophy is but a footnote to PLATO

Aida what does it mean

William: she wakes up, takes thyroid med, sleeps for an hour more, and then she can eat

William: well, it is very helpful to read Bertrand Russell’s History of Philosophy

Aida yes am reading that

William: to gain grand overview of western philosophy

Aida I have read half of it

Aida but then decided to read each philosopher

William: now, Russell means that, in essence, Plato posed everything, every problem, issue that the next 2500 years has attempted to address
Aida about him there first and then his works

- 05:33 -
William: and he is quite correct, regarding the west

Aida that is perhaps true

William: BUT, One cannot make the same claim about EASTERN, buddhist, hindu, taoist, philosophy

Aida why not?

William: now, one CAN claim this about Arab Islamic thought in the sense that they were heavily influence by Aristotle, and preserved the greek writings for the west

William: ah, hmmm…. well, that would take me some time to put into laypersons terms

William: the DIFFERENCE between platos west, and the east, likes hidden in the understanding of JAIN philosophy, and taoism

William: as two repositories

Aida i dont know much about eastern philo

William: BUT, east and west come together in 20th century with the workers in relativity and quantum

William: as a matter of face, on physicist, a personal friend of einstein, designed his own heraldric emblem based upon the YIN YANG symbol

Aida yes?

William: and, during the lifetime of einstein, kurt godel, max plank, heisenberg, and the other fellow whom i forget, with the yin yang heraldry

William: they debated about the eastern vs western ways of understanding reality,….

William: so for first time in history it came together
Aida interesting

William: one may also gain insight into the merging of east and west by reading the writings of… oh my, i just had his name, aha…. Radhakrishnan

- 05:38 -
Aida is he indian?

William: who was a prime minister of India, but also, a consummate scholar of both eastern and western tradition

William: yes, an Indian scholar, prime minister for a period

William: i have a collection of modern essays ABOUT the works of Sarvapal Radhakrishnan

William: you see how my memory skips like record with a scratch
William: that is why google helps so much
Aida

William: like, i google on “the making of a person” and come up with Carl Rogers name

Aida your memory is perfect.am amazed

William: i cannot retain everything at once
William: no one can

Aida true
Aida am reading about how to improve memory
Aida how to use mneomonics?

William: it has to do with something called MULTIMIND which was coined by Robert Ornstein, a researcher into the psychology and physiology of consciousness, in the 1970s along with Charles Tart

Aida how can you have a multimind

William: you see, in the human brain, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
William: so, we have multimind structures, from very primative to most advanced, and they are multitasking

Aida what do you mean by ontogeny and phylogeny

William: so, at same time as we philosophize about ethics, another part is a neanderthal seeking food, violence

William: ok,… consider the development from embryo to child to adult

Aida yes?

William: each stage of development in womb, the ONTOLOGY or becoming… emulates the evolutionary PHYLOGENY

William: kingdom, phylum, class , order family genus species
William: which is Linnaeus
William: in the 17th century

William: and, curiously , it resembles certain operating systems and sofware products

- 05:43 -
Aida ontology means development of the person?

William: which of necessity, preserve backwards compatibility to earlier platforms

William: well, ontos means being existence palpable reality
William: logos means reason, understanding , expository expression in language

William: so the logos of the ontos , is an account of BECOMING
Aida and phylogeny is?

William: in platos Timaeus, BECOMING is the middle ground between non existence and BEING

William: phylos is a family or tribe

Aida interesting!

William: but, first are ancient seas, with millions of years of lightening striking the chemical laden waters
William: until, organic compounds form
William: and those begin to acquire a behavior, like a meme, to replicate
William: and those become bacteria, which is quite different from a nucleated cell
William: the bacterium has no nucleus but had the ribosome directive activity

Aida yes and

William: so, right now, we use the various classes of bacteria, as laboratories to understand synthesis

Aida this is ontogeny?

William: but the ONTOLOGY, or evolutionary development, over eons
William: produces various levels or phyla of organisms

William: and in the GENOME study, we can quantify the similarity and different

William: BUT, each new stage, bears deep within the markings, the heritage, of earlier stages

Aida this is not true

- 05:48 -
William: so, for example, in the brain, the Limbic SYSTEM is VERY PRIMITIVE, and yet it is perhaps there that our moment to moment experience of consciousness is SYNTHESIZED

Aida there are differences between procaroytes and eukariotic creatures

William: aha, but, it IS true, and as long as you embrace the resistance, and say that it is not true, then you have an empediment to the understandings

William: yes, but ALWAYS, there is some common precursor

Aida no I mean it is not that they carry the primitive state forms

William: just as there is common precursor to human and neaderthal

Aida but that they have things in common

William: i was trying to remember the procaroytes aud eukariotic terms
William: regarding bacteria…

Aida am confused what was the main track

William: now, everything boils down to the big question, is reality ultimately digital or analog

William: which hinges on HOLISM vs REDUCTIONISM

William: holism says that the whole is GREATER than a sum of the parts, and that cognitive analytical axiomatic analysis will never breach the gap
William: wherease REDUCTIONISM is that the whole is PRECISELY the sum of the parts, and that through analysis, we can ultimated digitize everything precisely
William: descartes dreamed that one day there would be an equation for a tree

Aida yes. he believed in reductionism

William: hegel dreamed of an END TO HISTORY, which means ABOSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE where they succeed in string theory AND CAN ultimately express symbolically what is happening in the ontology of being
Aida

William: so, from big bang beginning, to final heat death of maximum enthropy

- 05:53 -
William: where nothing further can happen, because thermodynamically there is no more potential energy
William: you see, life lives upon negative entropy
William: entropy is a measure of disorder

Aida yes

William: a crystal is a highly ordered structure with potential energy
William: when crystal is disolved, energy is released
William: it also gets into Carl Jungs monograph on The Nature of the Psyche
Aida yes

William: can you not post for one minute, until i say hello, i have one system message

Aida how can you correlate all those things
Aida sure

++++

William: you see,…. discourse and writing itself is an artificial PROJECTION of a multidimensional process of multimind, into a linear discourse of axiomatic precations

Aida talking to you is like reading a james joyce novel
Aida one needs some big refrence book to see what your words are reffering to.

William: so, in an aristotelian syllogism is A implies B, implies C….. emplies Z, ergo, Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum) we have demonstrated what was to be shown

William: that is LINEAR

William: but, my mind, my understanding, is not linear, it is many many things at once

William: my 60 years of experience
William: sO, If you mathematically project a 3 dimensional shape onto two dimensions

- 05:59 -
William: you have something you may graph and use as a tool, but it is DIFFERENT from the original object of three diminsions under consideration
William: BUT, suppose we seek a model of some economic phenomenon, or some metabolic phenomenom,…. it may have 10 or 20 dimensions
William: but, we cannot deal with 10 or 20 dimensions at once
William: so, we seek an axiomatic model, as a tool, which allows us to deal with it
William: but, you see, our moment to moment experience of CONSCIOUSNESS, IS A Process of data reduction…

Aida yes

William: we selectively ignore a myriad of external and internal experience, to focus on our discussion, or an opera…. or ball game

Aida yes

William: BUT, when that funciotion of brain BREAKS DOWN and we are overwhelmed simultaneously of ALL sensations
William: then it is madness
William: it is psychosis
William: i am forgetting better word
Aida
William: it is the stage beyond nurotic
William: neurotic
Aida nervous breakdown!
William: well, yes, psychotic… better yet SCHIZOPHRENIC

Aida yes.psychotic

Aida what was the exact name of the book of carl rodgers?

William: a neurotic person understands whee and who they are, but, the overemphasize things which are unimportant, and they are caught in a circle of repition, like a broken record

William: carl rogers “on becoming a person”

William: now, carl rogers had one psychotic patient….
William: he merged so closely with her, that HE began to suffer psychotic symptoms
William: and he speaks of that danger

- 06:04 -
William: aristotle said the one unique characteristic of being human is MIMESIS, we love to IMITATE
William: and that allows us to adapt
William: we BECOME Like fish with scuba, and like birds with plains
Aida
William: planes
William: but what is our virtue, and makes possible survival in diverse ecological niches
William: can also be our enemy

Aida how can we distinguish ourselves from our enviroment

William: whenever we become locked into one mode, even when changing circumstances demand a shift in gears to some opposite mode

Aida and how exactly know what we say or do is beloning to us and not external words.

William: each of our faculties has a positive necessary function, fear, desire , lust, hunger, weariness
William: but, each can become imbalanced and become pathological
Aida I wonder how one can generate new ideas out of nothing.
William: if our species did not have an overwhelming sexual dimension, we would not have survied for 500,000 years

Aida yes.

William: BUT if we cannot bridle the sexual side, then we cannot be doctors or lawyers of professors
William: similary if we bridle or suppress TOO Much, then that becomes a patholgy

Aida why not?

William: think of anorexia
Aida it takes time?

William: a virtue of moderation taken to an extreme which becomes a pathology

Aida sorry got disconneted

William: there is a healthy place for anger, it is a useful tool for survival, and even for healthy function society

Aida I wonder how can one balance all those elements
Aida make balance between*

William: but, when anger becomes unconrolled, then it is destructive, and also, it becomes an END IN ITSELF rather than simply a means to an end

- 06:09 -
William: so, the whole greek thing was, balance, moderation, the MIDDLE WAY, the mean between the extremes

Aida for example………I was thinking to acheive what I want to in my life I dont have time to get married and have children etc

William: so, it is like the goldilock fairytale

Aida what is it

William: one bowl of porrige is too hot, the next is to cold, and third is just right

William: goldilocks

Aida oh

William: and the three bears

Aida yes
Aida aha yes
Aida it was funny story

William: it is a childrens story , but it illustrates balance, moderation, in a simple way

William: no matter HOW Complex something is, there is always some simple model or parable to illustrate it

Aida yes a guy asked his class why should she rest in the bears house after eating porridge etc

Aida a student said…to commit suicide!
William: and a parable or a sufi teaching story, is a tool to reshape our mind to better comprehend the REAL problem

Aida hey wait a second

Aida can we study a problem of me

William: well, again, WIttgenstein reachs the higher plateau, and then kick away the ad hoc ladder which helped him to get there
William: you see, bible, koran, vedas, and roman law, are all ladders which help us to evolve to where we are

Aida are you listening?

William: BUT, at some point, we must let go, and adopt something that suits TODAYS
William: oh, the problem of you
William: well, i see you from a great distance, and have my theories
William: but, i may be mistaken
William: for example your boyfriend, now ex, was a ladder which helped you to make a certain life transition
William: and it was positive
William: BUT, if you stay with that, it becomes counterproductive

- 06:14 -
William: a ladder which serves its purpose and one point, becomes a crutch, if we do not let go

Aida but I havent said my problem yet

William: so, say your problem

Aida but you do not listen…

William: i was speaking of my perception of your problem
William: so i am listening
William: you ask me to address grand issues of all history
William: i cant go to warp speed, and easily put on the breaks

Aida yes but then you disconnect from me.

William: i am listening

Aida and then you forget am talking to you.

William: well, it depends on how dear the topic at hand is
William: to you
William: i am listening now

Aida yes the topic is dear.

William: state your problem

Aida but you forgot we wanted to practice socratics dialect and not a one way speech

William: your NEXT problem

Aida ok now my turn!

William: well, you MUST carefully read all the dialogues, and study what Socrates is doing

William: and ask questions

Aida but you leap from one subject to the other and I get confused
William: but, what is the life circumstance in your life where you desire to use socratic method

William: because, my mind works as it does, multidimensional
Aida and lose the track of our subject

William: and i try to project it to linear
William: for you

Aida it is interesting.. but at the end you have said too many beautiful statements but we cant reach the end

William: plus, you must understand, i can afford the luxury to be multidimensional ME, because long ago I gave up the chance to be a directed and disciplined YOU

Aida we can not have a meaningful conclusion of what was said.
Aida am not disciplined

William: well, you must understand, discourse has its limits, the next stage is writting essay or book

Aida that is my problem
Aida I have too many interests

William: SO, if you could have lunch with Pplato himself, it would NOt BE as good as reading Plato’s republic

Aida and want to understand too many things

- 06:19 -
William: because, a writer, SPENDS YEARS, distilling everything into one book or essay

Aida yes I read his republic

William: so, at any given moment, the author is LESS than his work

Aida but I am talking to you now.and not reading hid republic

William: and he at times STUDIES his own work
William: because it has become a scaffolding which surrounds the cathedral

Aida can I ask something

William: he constructed it, true, but he must climb about in it,…. he cannot be everywhere at once, on the dome, and at the windows

William: yes
William: ask

Aida which methods you think works best being multidimensional and gain a little of everything or being one dimensional and going in to depth of one subject only?

+++++

William: you confront your own frustration

Aida since I have this problem…………………

William: you see, i cannot give you a Sitaram pill, to swallow, and instantly become 60 yr old sitaram

William: yet, when we approach a teacher, that is what we desire
William: which is only natural

Aida in order to improve in my studies………..I have to put all the time I have on studying medicine

William: now, what is your precise roblem
William: exactly, at each moment in our life, we GIVE UP 1000 possible futures, in order to actualize only ONE

Aida but I love to learn …I like to read philosophy and psychology and history and art I like to paint and practice my violin

William: so, successful life, is a process of data reduction
William: success is a process of intentional failures

Aida but if I do that I wont be able to organize my studies to the level that I could continue them the way I desire.

William: we give up chance to be a ballerina or concert pianist, in order to be physician or politican

Aida but I can not do that..I mean I can not be a physician only

William: and as physician, we give up chance to be surgeon or anestheosiologist, in order to become our one specialty

- 06:24 -
William: lets say nephrologist, or cardiovascular
William: or neurologist

Aida I want to understand life

Aida and it is not all written in medical books

William: it is division of labor
William: well, you want to be , what do the call it, POLYMATH

Aida yes and unfortunately I want it to be perfect.

William: actually, though i sounds blasphemous, you want to be God, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent
William: now, that is a GOOD desire, for it is a desire to perfect oneself

Aida I mean I want to be the best I can be in my job and also in whatever am interested in
Aida but it contradicts…I mean I can not focus on everything and be perfect in them
Aida yes I cant be god..

William: we desire ALL that is good, but we must make choices, and settle for what is reachable, achievable, based upon our own gifts and shortcomings, and the age and society and technology in which we live

Aida and I reproach myself of not being able to be one

William: so the woman who wrote Pride and Prjudice, Jane Austin, had to be content with paper and quill and ink
William: no word processor, no internet

Aida we make choices but we do not know if they are the best ones

William: and she had to make do with a patriarchal society, with victorian morals, which frowned upon the woman author

Aida for example I can put time to succeed in my career only and study and study
Aida and of course it is a precious career
Aida but I worry to lose my human side and goals and become narrow-minded and lose insight about why I am doing my job

William: there is a story about a donkey, who is surrounded by many different buckets of grain, delicious,…. all at an equal distance

Aida why am living it
Aida or giving life back to people

William: but because the donkey cannot decide which is best to approach
William: he sits there, hungry

Aida yes am the donkey

William: because to chose any one bucket, is to give up and ignore the others
William: now, diffeent story,…. thee are many piles of hay, and many hungry cows
William: but, there is also a dog

Aida I dont sit there but I go toward each for a while and then doubt!!!
William: the dog cannot eat the hay

- 06:30 -
Aida and go back to the other direction

William: but the dog is selfish and barks at all the cows, to keep them fromt he hay

Aida haha

William: so, you are caught in an existential trap
William: which you may explore with Kierkegaard and Sartre and Camus

Aida yes I recognize myself while reading them

William: Sartre speaks of the young man, in war torn france, who is his mothers only support, but his friends join the underground resistance
William: he is damned whatever choice he makes

Aida I really worry not to live my life they way I want to lead it
Aida yes?

William: if he stays to care for mother, he is unpatriotic bastard who does not joint his comrads in underground resistance of nazis
William: but if he is patriot, and good comrad, his is bastard to abandon his poor mother

Aida yes

William: so, damned if he does, and damned if he doesnt
William: so this is the BIND…

Aida I feel that way

William: i forget the best term

Aida bondage?

William: but the schizophrenice is a pathology which seeks to escape from the intolerable DOUBLE BIND

William: ACTUALLY, when i was only age 4
William: i noticed the dog in the next yard, on a chain
William: i realized he was in a double bind

Aida how come?

William: but i could not put it into words
William: well, he wanted one thing, but the chain kept him back
William: he had two directives, mutually exclusive
William: lets say, his job is to chase way the intruder

- 06:35 -
William: but, when he runs to do that job, the chain chokes him and pulls him back
William: so, my mother was placing me in a similar bind
William: and i told her about the dog

Aida wow
Aida how cute

William: i exlained to her that she was doing to me just what the dog was in
William: but, she could not catch the analogy

Aida how could you do that in age 4?

William: because, SHE had two conflicting goals to place upon me
William: well, that was how my mind was…

Aida how exciting

William: also, i heard someone say “time passes QUICKLY when we have a pleasant passtime, but SLOWLY when we have an unpleasant task
Aida yes
Aida can I ask something?

William: SO, i thought they meant quite litterally that TIME itself changes
William: but listent
William: I DID AN EXPERIMENT at age 4
William: at nap time, i took my most favorite book, whcih was soft blue colors, about virgin mary

Aida are you sure it happened then

William: and looked at it
William: yes, positive
William: and while i looke at the pleasant book, i tried to judge the speed of time
William: then i switched to my LEAST favorite book, a harsh red on fireengines

Aida wow

William: and as i looked at that, i tried to sense the slowing down of time

Aida how?
Aida haha

William: but, i realize that one could not detect the change in time
William: so, that was my existential experiment at age 4

Aida wow very impressive

William: so, you see, such Sartrean things are innate in the human mind
William: because, i was illeterate, i couldnot read
William: and there was no telivision
William: and only music on radio
William: so i could not have overheard
William: and the people around me did not read or discuss such matters

Aida so how could you measure time..you couldnt read the clock

- 06:40 -
William: BUT, the point was, i constructed an experiment
William: i attempted to measure

Aida yes .very unbelievable

William: but, yet, not uncommon
William: Ramanujan was a poor boy in india with no schooling
William: he found a handbook of mathematics, no proofs, just the formulae
William: and he independently PROVED, and derived all the equations

Aida is it possible?

William: Ramanujan died in his 40s

Aida do you think we all can do that?

William: but he was one of the greatest minds in NUMBER THEORY
William: and number theory is called the QUEEN of all mathematics

William: number theory involves statements like, all prime numbers

Aida can I ask you something ?again

William: and greater and lesser infinities…
William: yes

Aida now that you are 60 …do you think you lived your life and gained what you wanted to?

William: so, you see, at 4, i was like socrates slave boy in the Meno
Aida did you reach where you wanted to reach
William: well, i had many blessings
William: i never knew war or hunger and had good health and dental care
William: i had luxury of liberal education

Aida no I mean human achievements……..

William: and freedom from constraints of professional requirements like university
William: i did not have to “publish or perish”
William: i had my own printing press and soap box of internet

Aida but didnt you want to do that?

William: well, it HAPPENDED…
William: i didnt set out to be this or that
William: opportunities arose and i chose them

Aida I mean when you were 30
Aida what did you think of your 60
Aida what you wanted to gain and you gained it or not?

William: of course, i had notions of goals, but that was an illusion
William: well, what i did gain was the opportunity to become what i am
William: you see, and acorn is not an oak tree

Aida how do you feel now that those goals arent fulfilled?

- 06:45 -
William: yet, its essense is an oak tree
William: so, we BECOME what we are
William: an infant is not Bertrand Russel, or Walt Whitman, or Barack Obama
William: but, it is a seed containing that ultimate personal
William: so we become what we are
William: by labor, chance, circumstance, serendipity

William: if one reads the Nobel acceptance speech of Hemingway, and then of Faulkner

Aida and if we dont become what we wanted to become do we feel we wasted life?

William: who were always lifelong enemies

Aida I really worry to waste my life

William: as they embodied literary values / goals which were diametrically opposed
William: then one sees how their life unfolded
William: and the extent to whcih they were fulfilled
William: and the extent to which they were frustrated and failed
William: and throw in F. Scott Fitzgerald

Aida yes?

William: so, in that limited literary context, one may explore the drama of the very question which you pose, about the individual as the pass through life

William: making choices….and with each choice, giving up forever a 1000 possible futures
William: to actualize ONE future
William: and it is an act of faith

Aida and you know then we are not sure we really made those choices.freely

William: we cannot know, at the moment that we risk our lives to cross a berlin wall
William: we cannot know whether it is our doom, or our salvation
William: BUT, even inaction is an action
William: if we do nothing, that too is a choice, and has consequences

Aida so you do not regret for whatever choices you made?

William: if we are the donkey who never approaches one of the equidistant food buckets
William: well, i often think about these things

- 06:50 -
William: and, i could choose to mourn and have regrets
William: but yet, what I became, Sitaram, was a unique opportunity

Aida

William: to say and do things at a stage in history when no one else could afford to say and do those things
William: without suffering consequences
William: because i was no one, there were no constraints

William: imagine you are rev. Billy Graham, or he Dali Lama, or Pope Benedict, but suddenly you walk along a beach one morning with Mic Jagger
William: and you suddenly are inspired by some truth that Mic Jagger possesses

Aida who is Mic Jagger?
William: Mic Jagger is a successful rock star singer
William: and age 70 he still belts out songs like age 20

William: and he embodies wild rebellion
William: but, because you are Dali Lama, or Pope, you are CONSTRAINED to be true to what you embody
Aida

William: otherwise, millions become disillusioned, and you give up your special persona

Aida haha

William: so, your very success, in being what you have become, is a chain, a limtation

Aida true

William: so, you are not totally free…

Aida that is true

William: there is a part of me which feels talented to explore in writing my sexuality
William: BUT, if i do that, i become branded as a porn writer
William: so, i give up what i have as Sitaram

Aida aha

- 06:55 -
William: and, the author of Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, gives up is persona if he begins to write as I write
William: so, whatever ladder we climb to reach whatever cloud or plateu
William: we must KICK AWAY that ladder, so we lose our precious ladder

Aida yes

William: PLUS we are stuck one the top of Everest, but we cannot not be on top of Killimanjaro, or Madderhorn, or Grand Titons

William: so, there are many heights, many depths, but we must choose one…

Aida how do we know it is the right one

William: but in one Psalm in bible, it says, “I go up to the highest moutain and Thou are there Lord, so I go to the deepest ocean, and Thou are also there,… and whereve I go, I cannot escape you, but neither can I join with you and unite with you in an absolute fashion

Aida or there is no right or wrong path

William: but, it is all realtive, sujective, contextual
William: i cannot tell someone to become Sitaram, they must become THEIR OWN Sitaram

William: which may be very different from me, but it is all essential
Aida

William: That Argentinean writer.
William: Jorge Luis Borges

Aida yes?

William: writes a story about an orthodox man, who spends his life chasing and persecuting an Heresiarch
William: a leader who teaches heresy
William: finally, he captures the Heresiarch, and execute him
William: the, he too dies, and comes before God

- 07:00 -
William: only to learn that, for God, both HE and the Heresiarch, are important components of some much larger organism
William: some much larger being…. and BOTH are essential
William: just as in musical harmone

William: the three notes of a chord are DIFFERENT,
William: yet in combination, they become something beyond themselves

Aida superhuman?

William: a Neapolitan sixth is a major 7th chord build upon the flatted second note of the scale of the piecee
William: so, it sounds as a profound punctuation
William: discordant, yet, making a point
William: so e.e. cummings speaks of “the dilemma of flutes”

William: it comes back to Platos analogy of Dialectic being the weavers loom
William: there is the WARP, the treads running vertically
William: and the WOOF, whcih run horizontally
William: and the SHUTTLE which weaves in and out,….

Aida ?

William: and it s a continual process of SEPARATING and CONJOINING of opposites
William: but the product is a TAPESTRY
William: and the tapestry on one side, depicts a picture
William: but on the back side, is all loose threads
William: there is a famous tapestry from the middle ages
William: depicting the norman conquests
William: or, the prehistoric cave paintings

Aida yes?

William: my vision, my view, is based upon these 60 years

- 07:05 -
William: but, it is unique to me…
William: to share it, you would have to be me, to have lived through the 50s and 60s and 70s

Aida what is unique?

William: MY view, my understanding, my contentment, my frustration
William: same with Hardy “Jude the Obscure”, same with V. Woolf and “Orlando”
William: I couldnt remember yesterday that the Novella was “Orlando”
William: but i saw the book this morning on my shelves

Aida yes?

Aida and
William: someone said to Helen Keller (the blind deaf from birth) “life is filled with suffering” and she answered “BUT it is also filled with the OVERCOMING OF SUFFERING
William: so, as lincoln said “each person is about as happy as they make up their mind to be
William: cognitive therapy “is my cup half empty or half full”

Aida true

William: in highschool, had i known what i know now, i could have rejected liberal arts, beecome an accountant CPA, and perhaps been wealthy, financially secure
William: but i would not be able to speak with you today of these matters
William: now, perhaps, some of my thoughts will live on for 1000 years

- 07:11 -
William: and become a part of something much larger

Aida yes.I wouldnt talk with you now if you were an accountant
William: but, had i become wealthy accounant,… at the end… my house would be sold, my art collection,…. relatives would take the inheritance, and perhaps it would ruin them, they might become gamblers or alcoholics
William: NOW, what we have discussed these past years…..become seeds which i plant in tehran, and seed which you plan in new york

Aida maybe you would go to different museums around the world and explore more
William: so, perhaps that grows in the next generation, to something that works a lasting peace an harmony
William: between our cultures
William: so, are we being wastrels, with empty talk, idling our time
William: OR, is this the most essential dialogue
William: which will build something enduring, like the Great Wall of China, which is the only man made structure which is visible from outer space
William: and yet the Great Wall itself is crumbling….
William: and Venice is sinking

Aida

Aida it is essential at least to me

William: because like every good ladder, and every seamans OAR, there comes a time when it is pushed away, or planted in the ground and sacrificed
William: so, like shakespear says in Lear….. we are on the stage for our hour, and we rant as a mad man, with great sound and fury
William: and it passes away, as the tinkling of bells and the sounding of brass symbols
William: Hegel saw Napoleon one day, pass through a town , in all his glory

- 07:16 -

Aida yes?

William: and yet Napoleon had his Waterloo
William: so, we play roles, and in the end, all passes
William: Solomon’s wisdom – THis too shall pass

Aida what remains then?

William: the riddle “what is the ONE THING i may say to you that, if you are sad, you shall become happy, but if you are happy, you shall become sad
William: the answer is “This too shall pass
William: sickness passes, health passes, poverty passes, wealth passes,
William: nothing endures

Aida life passes.

William: yet, if it were not for constant change, there would be no drama

Aida so it loses its meaning.

William: and we draw the meaning of our life from that drama
William: without failure, there can be no victory
William: yet victory carries failure within itself like the seed which carries withing the oak tree

William: such is life
William: but, we have some good conversation
William: there is a cartoon of Charlie Brown from Snoopy, Charles SHultze
William: wearing his baseball cap and catchers mitt
William: never winning a game
William: always the losing team
William: but he grins, and says, we may not win many games, but we have some great conversations

Aida haha

+++++++++++

Aida I enjoyed talking with you
William: so, have i helped a little

Aida yes very

William: yes, and I cannot be me without questions like yours
William: every answer is meanings outside of the context of a question

Aida thank you for sharing time!

William: and thank you for asking

Aida it made me relieved so much.

William: yes,….. therapeia, in greek, is a process of maintaining balance, and realieveing pressures

William: or releasing pressures
William: kind of a discursive acupuncture
William: one, a patient said to his therapist, whatever shall i do when you are no longer around

Aida yes?

William: the therapist (Sheldon Kopp) said, by then you shall become YOUR OWN therapist, and internalize these discussions

Aida ok I have to become my own therapist now!

William: just as, even when our parents have passed, we leave a room, and hear our mother or father say SHUT OFF THE LIGHT
William: CLOSE THE DOOR, you dont live in a barn
William: we internalize

Aida haha

William: we become our own parent our own teacher

Aida our own lover and friend

William: our own judge jury and executioner/jailor

Aida and child

William: yes, that oo
William: that too

Aida I always find myself guilty and execute myself

William: yes, but then, the next day, you give birth to yourself again and like the Phoenix arise from your own ashes

Aida I have to find another judge within me!

William: but, if you were not driven by that torment, that suffering, you would not struggle and strive up the mountain

Aida now I have to do something with my life uncle wiggly.

William: your Sisyphean task
William: you ARE doing it
William: you are exactly as you SHOULD be at any given moment

- 07:27 -
William: that is the message of the Bhagavad-Gita
Aida yes., in a more practical form.am passive now.

William: and various eastern gurus

Aida only mentally active

William: the saint, the thief, the tyrrant despot, the prostitute, the scientist, the politician the lawyer

Aida have to form the thoughts and give birth to ideas and then act based on them

William: each are what they should be, at that moment

Aida ah that is beautiful message

William: unravelling the karmic knots of many previous existence

William: without hitlers opression we would not have things like Viktor/s Mans Search for Meaning

Aida haha

William: or that movie… now i forget the name AHA SCHINDLER’S LIST
William: the movie about the man who saves all the jews
Aida I was readiung the search for the meaning
William: all i can think of now is jacobs ladder….
Aida it really made me depressed.so I couldnt continue
William: but that is not the movie
William: it will come to me
Aida now you take care of yourself and hug concordia for me
William: sams message, jacobs ladder
William: ok…. yes.

Aida love you !
Aida you helped me gigantically

William: luv you to very much, my daughter
William: but, in a pinch i would marry you, if it made sense, ha ha

Aida thanks..take care@}

William: a means to an end
William: a ladder to that cloud

Aida am no good wife.. I have no time

William: to be kicked away

Aida yes

William: but, it would be a marriage of celibacy

Aida I prefer to be your niece

William: much like my current one

Aida be well !!

William: you too sweet heart
William: in love, we become what is needed by the other
William: but when we love ourselves properly, then we become what we need when we need it

- 07:32 -
William: and then move on
William: now, run along
William: and play nicely

Well it’s not a Zombie cat - both dead and alive. But it’s uncertain if it’s dead or alive. It’s funny but it may be the starkest truth known to our species.

Since I started reading (and probably understanding) eastern philosophy I figured out two things clearly. It’s more like intuitively knowing than logically knowing (remember axioms and theorems back from school days). First thing is the concept of Advaitism. (Non Duality, Monoism, Unified Energy Field, the Infinite, Brahman, the Source, Etc. Etc.) It’s funny how many different names we have to describe something which is One. Second concept is that – though I know this concept of advaitism is true, it’s damn difficult to realise it. Now wait a minute – I am no where claiming that I am on the path of illumination or nirvana or anywhere near that. But I definitely consider myself initiated seeker (I am serious so please don’t laugh at me).

So I started reading here and there and bumped into The Law of Attraction. This again has got the Unified energy field theory at it’s nucleus. It cites basic tenets of quantum physics to make the case and then builds upon logically. If it sounds logical or not? Yes it does. At least to me. This again got me into reading basics of quantum physics. Initially I dreaded the subject as it has an air esoteric erudite arrogance around it. And also I never liked Shrodinger wave equation (the O in Schrödinger has 2 dots on top of it – it’s a German word which is Romanized based on phonetics). Also, though I did fairly well in integral calculus I didn’t like the Integral signs. They looked like snakes standing on their tale. But because the seeker I am, I went on to read the basics of Quantum Physics. As a habit I like to find the pure – the essence of a concept. So what I understood from Quantum Physics is this that – there is no absolute existence of anything/being in isolation of an observer. A slightly different version is that everything thing is an infinite but single field of energy and the point existence of anything/being is just not absolute but it is a probability of existence.

Whoa! Probably I didn’t articulate the best but given the abstractness of the concept I can grant myself a little blabbering here. Anyways, if one reads the Bohr’s concept of complimentarity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Einstein’s theory of relativity – they all basically point to the same stuff, probably in different ways. That’s the reason though got their Nobel prizes for something basic (Einstein for photo-electric effect, Physics 1921, Bohr for structure of atom in 1922 and Heisenberg for uncertainty principle in 1932), their important works are around relativity, uncertainty, unified energy field.

So I thought of playing with this idea practically. It’s like the computer in which you are hopefully reading my post – actually doesn’t exist. It’s just a probability. It will exist only when you observe it. Or if you are driving on a road with your eyes closed, the speeding truck coming from the front actually doesn’t exist – till you actually see it (observe it). I wouldn’t try that however.

But then again this got me thinking. With internet this concept looks more applicable and practical. Different websites exist in space. They exist as bits or magnetic fields in remote servers at many places in the world. But they appear materially only when someone tunes into them or observes them. Else they are just a field of probability. Same is the funda with phone. It also resonates with the Vedic knowledge – which says it’s a continuous stream of knowledge, it has got no beginning and no end. (It’s not exactly continuous knowledge – because continuity is with respect to time and there is no time actually – there’s just NOW) WOW! Before Newton discovered gravity, the actual force of gravity did exist. It existed always. But it was realised or known only when Newton observed it. This argument is true for all the scientific discoveries.

Whatever is true to naked eyes may not be always the truth. However, knowing that it’s true how to actually realise it is the big question. One thing is sure though – the more we know the closer we get to the past and our actual selves (actually there’s no past or present and also no ourselves as al time is NOW and everyone is ONE).

PS: By the way..sorry for the title. I am a consultant and titles have to be buzz-words, are done at last moment, relevance is neither intended nor guaranteed.

Hay un artículo de Carlos M. Madrid Casado que habla de las posibles diferencias de cardinalidad entre la mecánica cuántica ondulatoria de Schrödinger (continua) y la mecánica cuántica matricial de Heisenberg (discreta). Pese a las pruebas de equivalencia matemática (que supondrían una equivalencia a nivel “instrumental”), el problema no se resolvería, sólo se desplaza a un nivel “ontológico” o “filosófico”, surgiendo un problema de interpretación. Las dos teorías, aun válidas matemáticamente, filosóficamente son incompatibles, contradictorias en sus fundamentos. Ontológicamente seguiría habiendo una diferencia de cardinalidad entre ambas teorías y, con ello, no habría una equivalencia “física” total, sólo “matemática” (a nivel de “resultados” sí, pero no iguales en “esencia”).

Aquí lo tenéis, a ver qué os parece, se titula el artículo “Entre Física, Matemáticas y Filosofía”:

http://www.nodulo.org/ec/2009/n085p01.htm

- Extracto (siendo MM la Mecánica Matricial de Heissenberg y MO la Ondulatoria de Schrödinger, la negrita y subrayados son míos):

“Nuestro propósito es construir un argumento por reducción al absurdo contra el realismo estructural a partir de nuestro caso de estudio. Supongamos por hipótesis que los modelos matemáticos MM y MO son, respectivamente, isomorfos a las estructuras de los sistemas reales X e Y que aspiran a representar. En principio, si la relación entre modelo y realidad es de isomorfismo, las estructuras de X e Y deben ser también isomorfas, dado que MM y MO lo son (Teorema de Equivalencia de Von Neumann) y la composición de isomorfismos es isomorfismo (si X es isomorfo a MM, MM y MO son isomorfos y MO es isomorfo a Y, entonces X e Y son isomorfos). Ahora bien, realmente, ¿son la estructura de X y la estructura de Y isomorfas?

Si lo fueran, deberían tener la misma cardinalidad, como es matemáticamente bien conocido. Pero esto no es, ni mucho menos, así. La estructura de X es discreta, dado que el dominio de MM son los números naturales (lo que se asociaba a una concepción corpuscular del microcosmos). En cambio, como estudiamos, la estructura de Y es continua, dado que el dominio de MO son los números reales (lo que se asociaba con una concepción ondulatoria del microcosmos). MM y MO nos dibujan dos estructuras de la realidad no isomorfas. Resumiendo: MM y MO son matemática y empíricamente equivalentes, pero estructural y ontológicamente incompatibles. Contradicción.“

Hoe lullig is dat? Na een jarenlange constructie-periode heb je dan eindelijk je 27 kilometer-lange deeltjesversneller onder de Zwitserse/Franse aardbodem af, komt er iemand achter dat ergens tussen de sterren, er al eentje bestaat. Toegegeven, de grootste deeltjesversneller die we nu kennen, bevindt zich wel bijna aan de andere kant van het heelal, maar toch.

Natuurlijk is dit een interessant feit, maar praktisch gezien heeft de LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Zwitserland het grote voordeel dat wetenschappers nauwlettend elke reactie kunnen manipuleren en observeren. Maar observatie kan tegelijk een geheel ander probleem vormen. Zoals Werner Heisenberg in 1927 al naar voren bracht, beïnvloedt de daad van het observeren de reactie van datgene wat je observeert.

De kwantum-kat

Erwin Schrödinger’s gedachten-experiment probeerde in simpele termen de complexiteit van dit nieuwe idee/probleem uit te leggen. Het idee achter kwantumfysica, of kwantum-mechaniek. Deze theorie zegt min of meer dat vaste materie bestaat uit een oneindige hoeveelheid van mogelijkheden. Diezelfde brei van mogelijke opties komt pas samen tot een enkele, ‘vaste’ realiteit, op het moment dat het geobserveerd wordt. Met andere woorden betekent dit, dat De Realiteit pas echt onze realiteit wordt op het moment dat we het bewust waarnemen.

Als je het zo bekijkt, is kwantumfysica de verklaring voor Descartes’ uitspraak; ‘Ik denk, dus ik ben‘. ‘Waarnemen’ is immers slechts een optelsom van onze zintuigen plus het bewustzijn dat alles observeert en ontvangt als signalen. De signalen die we ontvangen vanuit onze zintuigen gaan via elektrische signalen naar onze hersenen waar ze geïnterpreteerd worden. Die kwab grijze massa in ons hoofd ‘vertaalt’ het vervolgens weer in een beeld of omschrijving dat wij herkennen of kunnen identificeren. Als je hier weer op voortborduurt, zou je zelfs kunnen verklaren waarom de Big Bang (de oerknal) aanneembaar is.

Met een grote knal

Kort samengevat bestaat alles wat wij als wij waarnemen, zoals stoelen, gebouwen en zelfs mensen, uit atomen. Elk atoom bestaat uit een vaste kern met daaromheen een aantal losse deeltjes die om die kern heen draaien. Zie het als een soort mini-zonnestelsel.

De ruimte tussen die losse deeltjes en de kern is in feite een vacuüm, oftewel compleet leeg. Als je alle ‘vaste’ deeltjes uit elk atoom in het gehele universum bij elkaar zou rapen en samenvoegen, is het geheel niet veel groter dan de gemiddelde doperwt. Deze denkbeeldige erwt is het universum voordat de oerknal plaatsvond. Alles wat wij als werkelijk beschouwen, samengesmolten in een tijdloze, kleine korrel. Totdat er op een gegeven moment iets plaatsvond dat ervoor zorgde dat deze korrel ontplofte, uit elkaar spatte, in alle verschillende richtingen.
En zie daar! Ons universum, oneindig en voor eeuwig uitdijend richting het oneindige. Miljarden maal miljarden zonnestelsels.

Wat nu precies datgene was dat deze korrel tot ontploffing bracht is vooralsnog een mysterie. Toch lijkt kwantummechanica te suggereren dat dit onbekende element een vorm van bewustzijn moet zijn geweest. Een soort alomvattende geest of vorm van intelligentie die vanuit die kiem vol mogelijkheden een heel universum liet bloeien tot hetgeen we nu om ons heen zien.

En hoe dieper wij als mens graven naar die kleine kern van vastigheid in onze wereld (de samenstelling van een atoom), hoe meer we op nieuwe mysteries stuiten. Het begint bij moleculen, die weer bestaan uit atomen, die dan op hun beurt weer bestaan uit nog kleinere deeltjes. De complexiteit van het geheel heeft meer dan één wetenschapper doen denken dat er achter dit alles wel een hogere vorm van intelligentie moet zitten. Hoe kan het anders zo perfect in elkaar passen?

Higgs Boson

Dus wat hopen ze daar in Zwitserland te bereiken bij CERN? Naast de diverse doelen die ze nastreven, zijn ze voornamelijk op zoek naar de Higgs Boson, oftewel het ‘God-deeltje’. Dit deel bevindt zich slechts theoretisch binnenin een berekening die Het Bestaan zou moeten beschrijven en verklaren. Het feit dat wij als mens een kunstmatige constructie (de LHC) kunnen bedenken die we pas later terugvinden in een natuurlijk kosmisch verschijnsel, roept in mij alleen maar trots op. Een vreemd soort trots, dat op de gehele mensheid van toepassing is. ‘Hebben we toch maar weer even mooi geflikt!’

Ik denk zelf dan ook dat als dit universum daadwerkelijk ontstaan is vanuit slechts de daad van het waarnemen, dat de oorspronkelijke waarneming alleen gedaan kan worden door het hogere bewustzijn dat ik eerder noemde. Iets dat zo groot is, dat wij het niet eens kunnen bevatten. En als dat inderdaad zo is, zou het verklaren waarom zoveel mensen zich tot een bepaalde god of anderzijds spirituele stroming richten. Omdat het gebrek aan ‘zeker weten’ een leegte achterlaat die alleen gevuld kan worden door iets kosmisch, iets dat buiten alle aardse proporties valt. Een verwondering over de complexiteit en diversiteit van De Realiteit.

Wat ze dan ook vinden daar onder de Zwitserse grond, zal de kijk op ons huidig bestaan naar alle waarschijnlijkheid voor een groot deel veranderen. En mocht het gebeuren dat ze per ongeluk een zwart gat openen dat dit hele bestaan opslokt, dan was het mij een waar genoegen om deel te mogen nemen aan deze werkelijkheid en proberen we het na de volgende Big Bang toch gewoon opnieuw?

“- Por mi parte- comentó Niels-, puedo estar muy de acuerdo con los positivistas acerca de lo que pretenden, pero no acerca de lo que rechazan. Todo lo que intentan hacer los positivistas es dotar a los procedimientos de que se vale la ciencia moderna de una base filosófica, o si se prefiere, de una justificación. Ponen de relieve que las antiguas filosofías carecían de una auténtica precisión de conceptos científicos, y piensan que la mayor parte de las cuestiones que plantean y tratan los filósofos convencionales no tienen ningún sentido en absoluto, que no son más que pseudoproblemas, y que, como tales, lo mejor es ignorarlos. Por supuesto, esta insistencia de los positivistas en la claridad conceptual es algo que yo respaldo plenamente, pero el hecho de considerar prohibida toda disquisición en torno a temas más amplios, sencillamente porque estos dominios carezcan de conceptos lo suficientemente definidos, no me parece demasiado útil: esa misma prohibición podría impedirnos comprender la teoría

(…)

- Tampoco a mí me parece útil esa forma de restringir el lenguaje -dijo Niels-. Todos conocéis el poema de Schiller “Sentencias de Confucio”, que contiene aquella frase memorable: “sólo una mente plena es clara, y la verdad habita en las profundidades”. En nuestro caso, una mente plena no se compone sólo de una abundancia de experiencia, sino también de una abundancia de conceptos con los que poder hablar de nuestros problemas y de todos los fenómenos en general.”

“La verdad habita en las profundidades”, en Más allá de la física. W. Heisenberg.

Dr. med. Wilhelm Reich steht mit seiner Entdeckung der Orgonenergie in einer kontinuierlichen Tradition von Ärzten, die der Physik neue Wege gewiesen haben. Diese Herangehensweise war äußerst fruchtbar, die umgekehrte, von der unbelebten Natur auf die belebte zu schließen, hat uns, wie in Die zwei Seiten der mechano-mystischen Naturwissenschaft erläutert, die mechanistische Genetik gebracht. Hier die Tradition, in der Reich steht:

Der Arzt Georg Bauer alias Agricola (1494-1555) hat die Gesteins- und Bergbaukunde begründet. Als größte Autorität auf dem Gebiet des Magnetismus in seiner Zeit und als Begründer der experimentellen Methode ist der Arzt William Gilbert (1540-1603) hervorgetreten. Von ihm stammt der Begriff „elektrisch“. Sein Berufskollege und Begründer der naturwissenschaftlichen Denkrichtung in der Medizin, Santoro Santorio (1561-1636), der auch eine medizinische Waage zum Studium des Stoffwechsels konstruierte, maß nicht nur als erster das Fieber mit dem Thermometer, sondern erfand auch den Feuchtigkeitsmesser. Der Mediziner und „Iatrochemiker“ Johann Baptist Helmont (1577-1644) unterschied erstmalig andere Gase vom „Element Luft“. James Hutton (1726-97), ebenfalls Arzt, war der Begründer der Geologie. Der Medizinprofessor Joseph Black (1728-99) entdeckte die spezifische Wärme und die Umwandlungswärme.

Der Professor der Anatomie Luigi Galvani (1737-98) half mit, die moderne Elektrizitätslehre zu begründen. Bizzi und Chiurco, zwei Mitarbeiter Walter Hoppes (der Anfang der 70er Jahre die Orgonomie nach Deutschland brachte), schreiben über Galvanis Forschungen, mit ihnen hätte er sich als erster der Lebensenergie experimentell genähert. Obwohl er als Gründer der Elektrophysiologie anerkannt wird, begründete er in Wirklichkeit eine Theorie der Lebensenergie. Er nannte die von ihm entdeckte biologische Energie zunächst „animalische Elektrizität“, dann „galvanisches Fluidum“ und schließlich „Lebenskraft“. (Eine verblüffende Parallele zur Geschichte des Begriffs „Orgonenergie“.) Galvani ging sogar so weit, eine Verbindung zwischen der atmosphärischen Elektrizität, zwischen dem „elektrischen“ Ozean und dem Organismus zu postulieren. Diesen Punkt bringen die Autoren in Zusammenhang mit dem Konzept Benjamin Franklins (1706-90), der elektrostatische Phänomene mit einem pulsierenden „einheitlichen Fluidum“ erklärte (Hoppe: Wilhelm Reich, München 1984).

Der Arzt Thomas Young (1773-1829) gelangte über die Beschäftigung mit der physiologischen Augenoptik zur Wiederaufnahme der Huygenschen Wellentheorie. Ein anderer Mediziner, William Prout (1785-1850), stellte die für die Entwicklung von Chemie und Physik so fruchtbare und nach ihm benannte Hypothese auf, daß die Atome der Elemente aus Mehrfachen des Wasserstoffatoms bestünden. Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878), ein Professor der Anatomie und Physiologie, begründete experimentell mit seinem Bruder, dem Physik-Professor Wilhelm Edward Weber (1804-1891), die Wellentheorie. Sie machten die ersten Beobachtungen über den Unterschied zwischen Gruppen- und Wellengeschwindigkeit. Der berühmte Léon Foucault (1819-1868) war von Haus aus Mediziner. Mit seinen Pendelversuchen wies er experimentell die Achsendrehung der Erde nach, er maß die Lichtgeschwindigkeit und arbeitete über die induzierten elektro-magnetischen „Foucaultschen“ Wirbelströme.

Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878) formulierte als erster den allgemeinen Energieerhaltungssatz. Durch Beobachtungen in seiner ärztlichen Praxis war er zu dem Schluß gelangt, daß mechanische Energie, Wärme und chemische Energie äquivalent seien. Auf dem gleichen Gebiet und in die gleiche Richtung, von der Biologie zur Physik hin, arbeitete der Professor der Physiologie Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), der später Physik lehrte. Er erfand Instrumente zur Untersuchung der Augen, begründete die physikalische Theorie der Tonempfindung, beschäftigte sich mit der Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit der Nervenerregung und brachte z.B. die Hypothese von der atomaren Natur der Elektrizität auf. Der Physiologe Henry Gray (1825-1861) unterschied zwischen Leiter und Nichtleiter für Elektrizität.

Reich war über seine ausgeprägten naturwissenschaftlichen Interessen zur Medizin gelangt und hier vor allen Dingen zur Sexologie. So mußte er zwangsläufig auf Freud stoßen. Dessen Theorien gingen aus seiner neurologischen Forschung, aus der Darwinistischen Biologie (z.B. Onto- als Wiederholung der Phylogenese) oder beispielsweise aus der „Psychophysik“ Gustav Theodor Fechners (1801-87) hervor, der wiederum als Schelling-Schüler auf die deutsche Naturphilosophie zurückgeht.

Heute wird gerne so getan, als hätte Freud den Begriff „Energie“ (ursprünglich ein biologischer Begriff) nur als reine Metapher benutzt, doch war es für ihn vielmehr ein erklärendes Konstrukt. Reich hat dann gezeigt, daß diesem Konstrukt eine Wirklichkeit entsprach. Doch während Freud sich von seinem Hintergrund als Physiologe emanzipieren wollte, führte Reich den ursprünglichen naturwissenschaftlichen Ansatz weiter, kam zur Biologie und schließlich, wie viele Ärzte vor ihm, zur Physik und begründete dabei ähnlich wie der Arzt Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) ein neues naturwissenschaftliches Lehrgebäude. Die Systeme beider Männer reichten von Fragen der Medizin, oder z.B. der Erziehung, bis hin zu physikalischen Betrachtungen über Elektrizität und Gravitation. Es gibt auch eine direkte Linie von Mesmer zu Reich, denn der Mesmer-Schüler Puysegur erfand die Hypnose, wie sie von Freuds Lehrer Charcot praktiziert wurde.

Außer über den dänischen Physiker und Schelling-Schüler Hans Christian Oerstedt (1777-1851) hatte die deutsche „Naturphilosophie“ fast keinerlei Einfluß auf die Physik. (Eine Ausnahme ist der Einfluß der „deutschen Lebensphilosophie“ auf Leute wie Heisenberg bei der Ausformulierung der Quantenmechanik.) Die Naturphilosophie hatte Oerstedt dazu gebracht, nach der Einheit in der Natur zu suchen. So schlug er die Brücke zwischen Elektrizität und Magnetismus. Entscheidenden Einfluß hatte die Naturphilosophie auf die Biologie (z.B. auf die Zellenlehre und Embryologie). Mit Reich sollte ein Ausläufer der Naturphilosophie (vermittelt durch Bergson, Freud und andere) mit ihren Hauptcharakteristiken (Lebensenergiekonzept und im weitesten Sinne „dialektische“ Betrachtungsweise) endlich auch der Physik zu konkreten Entdeckungen verhelfen, nachdem Goethe mit seiner Farbenlehre gescheitert war und nur im biologischen Bereich „subjektiver Farben“ wirken konnte.

Während in der Biologie die Mechanisten Anhänger der falschen Präformationslehre waren (der ganze Organismus sei schon im Keimei vollständig en miniature vorhanden), folgten die Vitalisten der richtigen Theorie der Epigenese (der Organismus entwickelt sich durch Neubildung aus der Keimenergie einer spezifischen Formkraft). Ähnlich nahm Reich die Naturgesetze nicht als gegeben, statisch und unveränderlich hin, sondern suchte ihre Genese zu ergründen, sie auf Orgonenergie-Funktionen zu gründen.

Recomendado por “el niño subliminal” en un comentario a los apuntes sobre la sección áurea un interesante vídeo titulado “La sección áurea y el pato Donald” que puedes ver en youtube. En mi opinión, no sólo es útil para entender la sección áurea sino también como aproximación al papel de las matemáticas en los pitagóricos y Platón.

La sección áurea aplicada a la Leda atómica de Dalí

Sobre este tema de la sección áurea también recomienda “el niño subliminal” el documental titulado “Dimensión Dalí, la obsesión de un genio por la ciencia“. En este se muestra la profunda influencia de los descubrimientos científicos del s. XX en la obra de Dalí. En su pintura influye no sólo el psicoanálisis de Freud sino también la relatividad de Einstein, la descomposición atómica de la materia, la mecánica cuántica a través de Schrödinger , el ácido desoxirribonucleico descubierto por Watson y Crick, la matemática de las catástrofes de René Thom y también la sección áurea a través de su amistad con el matemático rumano Matila Ghyka. Esta influencia es evidente en la conocida obra de Dalí Leda atómica.

Dalí, Leda atómica, 1949, Museo Dalí de Figueras.

El determinismo supone que todas las leyes físicas son de obligado cumplimiento, es decir, son necesarias. Por tanto, si las leyes físicas se cumplen siempre, nosotros estamos determinados por una serie de causas que desconocemos y nos impiden ser libres. Desde este punto de vista no existe el azar ni la casualidad.

*Azar: para las ciencias físicas y biológicas, en realidad lo que nosotros llamamos «azar» no es más que la ignorancia sobre las causas que producen un hecho.

Entendemos indeterminismo como aquella postura filosófica derivada de la mecánica cuántica, el principio de la incertidumbre de Heisemberg, la teoría del Caos, y los sistemas dinámicos de Ilya Prigogine. Según estas teorías físicas, el azar, el caos y la complejidad juegan un papel influyente en las leyes físicas: la mecánica cuántica, sugiere que las partículas se mueven aleatoriamente y solo es posible su predicción de forma estadística.

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El problema que se plantea, es que nunca podemos estar absolutamente seguros del destino y posición de una partícula que se mueve en una complejidad de elementos. Los físicos deterministas proponen que el movimiento se debe a la ignorancia y sobre las causas físicas que afectan a cada elemento. Un ejemplo de movimiento caótico aparece en la predicción del tiempo y en general en todos los sistemas complejos que poseen muchos elementos.

La tercera postura entre el determinismo e indeterminismo es la probabilidad estadística —que nos dice que no hay relación entre la causa y el efecto— El conocimiento de las leyes de la naturaleza nos permite cambiar y alterar nuestro futuro.

 Nano Technologies: Homo-Sapiens 2.0; Tell me more; (October 22, 2009)

            First, a few applications such as unpolluting earth soil, cleaning underground water sources, flat screens, light weight batteries with high energy density, observation of each cell and molecule in the body, miniature medical instruments, prosthetics controlled by the brain, butterfly controlled by remote control and used as a living drone, powerful portables computer, photovoltaic paints that can be applied on roads and buildings, solar generators that may produce one thousand gigawatts (terawatt). 

            For example, nanoparticles of gold combined by strings of AND are fixated on a tumor; with low level of infrared light we got very clear and precise picture of the organ; then with an appropriate higher level doze of infrared light nanoparticles of gold fry the tumor. Silver has properties of killing 150 kinds of viruses and bacteria; nanoparticles of silver applied on patches can disinfect surgical instruments, hospital bed sheets, drapes, and clothes; cold water is then enough for thorough disinfection and thus saving energy. Nanotechnology permits the control of auto-replication in living systems in order to execute precise and fixed tasks.

            There is one drawback: health consequences are not known.  For example, seven Chinese female workers died within 5 months when the nanoparticles of (oxides of zinc, copper, and titanium) were used in the paint for added properties.  Each one of the patients had just about 20 nanoparticles due to lack of appropriate ventilation; that number of nanoparticles was enough to destroy the lungs and spread rash to the face, and arms.

            The military is very hot on nanotechnology and invests heavily.  For example, a single microgram of nano-antimatter has the power of 44 kilos of TNT, miniature thermonuclear bombs (almost impossible to detect and easy to manufacture), nano-robotics that can travel in the body and be used for many tasks such as imagery, diagnostic, and targeted treatment; there is this nano pathogen “grey goo” that can infect planet earth within 24 hours. Russia and India are actively developing the nano technology toward military applications since 2007.

            The USA created the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2001 during Clinton; the budget of this research institute is 1.5 billion in 2009. Europe created its own nanotechnology research centers in 2002; the budget of 3.5 billion Euros is earmarked for the years (2007-2013); priority is given to nano-sciences, nano-materials, nano-medicine, and nano-metrology, and studies of the impact of these new technologies on society.

            A nano particle is smaller than one thousandth the width of paper cigarette or 10 at the power of (-9) of a meter. It is not that small: just bigger than atoms and much smaller than molecules.

            The rational for quantum mechanics or physics is understandable; the manipulation and interpretation of the corresponding set of equations are not.  It requires warpy minds, slightly worse than computer programmers. The fundamental idea of quantum physics is that we cannot measure accurately both time and location of a nano-particle. That is how physicists interpreted the consequences of the fundamentals of Heisenberg; a new theoretical science that generated newer philosophies.

            A UN report warned that soon we might end up with two kinds of homo-sapiens; the normal kinds (mostly the poor and the non-elite) and a variation of homo-sapiens 2.0 endowed with aptitudes and capabilities not enjoyed by the normal kind. The nano-medicine is mobilizing funds from the rich and leaders of multinational institutions to extending life expectancy to 150 years. The power of nano-sciences resides in the convergence of many disciplines such as biology, computation, genetics, cognitive, electronics, and robotic sciences. Nanotechnology is integrating all these sciences.

Solvay Conference 1927

Erwin Schrödinger fue un físico austriaco que ayudó a crear los fundamentos de la mecánica cuántica. Al igual que Einstein, Schrödinger no estuvo de acuerdo con los extremos a los que otros llevaron la nueva ciencia. Fue uno de los pocos científicos que se alinearon con Einstein en contra de la mecánica cuántica, intentando buscar una teoría unificada que mejorase las teorías que todos los demás apoyaban. Hasta que ocurrió un terrible malentendido.

Einstein y Schrödinger trabajaron juntos en los primeros años 30 como profesores del Instituto Kaiser Wilhelm en Berlín. Ambos destacaron en esta institución extremadamente rígida y formal como profesores que trataban a sus alumnos como iguales. Los dos disfrutaban de paseos juntos, a pie y en velero, y llegaron a ser amigos íntimos.

Como muchos de sus contemporáneos, Einstein y Schrödinger comenzaron a escribirse acerca de su trabajo mucho antes de conocerse en persona. En los años 20, toda la comunidad de físicos se concentró en una nueva clase de ciencia que había dado en llamarse mecánica cuántica, ya que estaba basada en la idea de que la luz y la energía no eran flujos continuos, sino que estaba formada por paquetes llamados cuantos. Einstein fue el primero en sugerir que la luz estaba hecha de cuantos, por lo que participó en el desarrollo de la mecánica cuántica desde el principio. Pero este campo estaba empezando a adquirir lo que Einstein y Schrödinger estaban de acuerdo en llamar un giro estrafalario.

Cuanto más y más se aprendía, más parecía que la mecánica cuántica eliminaba las leyes de la causalidad, insistiendo en que los procesos atómicos eran tan aleatorios que no se podía predecir exactamente lo que ocurriría a continuación. En 1925 Werner Heisenberg propuso una nueva clase de matemáticas matriciales que podían usarse para hacer predicciones probabilísticas acerca de cómo un átomo podría reaccionar en una situación dada. Este trabajo fue saludado, y con razón, como una gran ayuda para la incipiente teoría, pero también implicaba la idea de que solamente se podían hacer “conjeturas” acerca del comportamiento del átomo.

Al año siguiente, Schrödinger publicó lo que esperaba que fuese una alternativa mejor. Ideó otro conjunto de herramientas matemáticas para que sirvieran de ayuda con la mecánica cuántica, llamada mecánica ondulatoria. Einstein se alegró mucho con la noticia. Las matemáticas de Schrödinger, haciendo referencia a las cualidades físicas de las ondas como hacían, parecían dar esperanza a la idea de que había una razón física tras las rarezas del comportamiento atómico. Einstein, que estaba muy a disgusto con las probabilidades de Heisenberg, escribió a su amigo Michele Besso en mayo de 1926: “Schrödinger ha aparecido con un par de artículos fantásticos sobre las reglas cuánticas”.

Pero la euforia de Einstein no duraría mucho. Casi inmediatamente, se demostró que las matemáticas de Schrödinger, tan diferentes de las de Heisenberg a primera vista, eran de hecho idénticas. Schrödinger había confirmado esencialmente la inherente aleatoriedad que otros científicos estaban pidiendo ávidamente. Schrödinger estaba tan contrariado por el giro de los acontecimientos como el propio Einstein, llegando a decir que si hubiera sabido lo que sus artículos iban a desencadenar no los habría publicado. Con todo, la cuestión de si era mejor usar la mecánica matricial de Heisenberg o la ondulatoria de Schrödinger se convirtió en un debate acalorado. Aunque no le gustase la forma en la que otros interpretaban sus matemáticas, Schrödinger entró en la refriega defendiendo su propio trabajo, lo que fastidió a Heisenberg, que escribió a su amigo Wolfgang Pauli diciendo: “Cuanto más pienso en la parte física de la teoría de Schrödinger, más repulsiva la encuentro [...] Lo que Schrödinger escribe acerca de la visualizabilidad de su teoría ‘es probablemente no demasiado correcto’, en otras palabras, son chorradas”. Hoy día el más usado es el enfoque de Schrödinger.

A pesar de su importante contribución a su desarrollo, Schrödinger tuvo reservas sobre la mecánica cuántica toda su vida. En su famoso experimento mental conocido como el gato de Schrödinger, trataba de burlarse de una ciencia que insistía en que nada en el mundo atómico puede conocerse a no ser (y hasta) que se mida. Lo absurdo que le resultaba a Schrödinger pensar que el gato pudiese estar a la vez vivo y muerto le convencía de que la teoría de la mecánica cuántica no era todavía comprendida del todo, la misma posición que mantenía Einstein.

Independientemente de la frustración con la que veían cómo otros científicos se entregaban a los absurdos de la mecánica cuántica, tanto Einstein como Schrödinger sabían que la teoría hacía un fantástico trabajo a la hora de predecir las probabilidades de los acontecimientos atómicos. El trabajo de Schrödinger con la mecánica ondulatoria era una parte crucial de ese éxito, y Einstein fue uno de los que nominaron a Schrödinger al premio Nobel varias veces. Schrödinger ganó el premio de física en 1933.

Dado que Schrödinger, como Einstein, no creía que la física cuántica estuviese completa, se unió a Einstein en la búsqueda de una nueva teoría. Einstein se refería a ella como la teoría del campo unificado, ya que sería la teoría omnicomprensiva que uniría toda la física. Consecuentemente, en los años 40, cuando Einstein vivía en Princeton y Schrödinger había dejado el odio de Alemania para vivir en Irlanda, Schrödinger era una de las pocas personas con las que Einstein compartía sus ideas. “No envío esto a nadie más”, escribió Einstein en 1946, “ya que tú eres la única persona que conozco que no lleva anteojeras en lo que respecta a las cuestiones fundamentales de nuestra ciencia”.

Pero la colaboración tomó un rumbo inesperado cuando Schrödinger anunció que él había resuelto el problema completamente. Estaba convencido de que había encontrado la teoría del campo unificado gracias al uso de la geometría afín. Anunció sus hallazgos el 27 de enero de 1947, no en una revista científica, sino a bombo y platillo en una rueda de prensa a la que asistió el primer ministro de Irlanda, Éamon de Valera

Einstein se quedó estupefacto: el trabajo era idéntico a lo que él le había enviado. Si bien Schrödinger se las había ingeniado para hallar una nueva forma de derivarlas, las ecuaciones que había anunciado eran las mismas que Einstein había encontrado y que, a esas alturas, ya había descartado por incompletas. Einstein hizo unas feroces declaraciones al New York Times en las que venía a afirmar que una publicidad exagerada como la de Schrödinger hacían un flaco favor a la ciencia, ya que “el lector tiene la impresión de que cada cinco minutos hay una revolución en la ciencia, algo así como un golpe de estado en alguna de esas pequeñas repúblicas inestables”.

Schrödinger mandó una disculpa a Einstein, intentando explicar como podía haber cometido ese error colosal, pero Einstein no cambió de opinión. Einstein escribió a Schrödinger para decirle que deberían tomarse un descanso en su carteo y concentrarse en sus trabajos. Pasarían tres años (hasta poco antes del fallecimiento de Einstein) antes de que reanudasen su correspondencia.

Imagen| Metsuke_iLife

The illusion of knowing is the major obstacle to discovery; (October 4, 2009)

            Even a century ago, a scientist published a single manuscript after a life time of research and toiling; transmission of opinions and suggestions were sent via long erudite letters by peers. Translators of these remarkable books didn’t go unnoticed and were rewarded academically. Nowadays, any “respectable” scientist works for several institutions, private and public, and at various nations.  Two centuries ago, scientists did not need to refer to Pythagoras or Archimedes.  Modern scientists have no time to refer to Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Lavoisier, or Kelvin; soon Einstein and Heisenberg will be outmoded.

            The team of the geeks in “Sciences and Future” met in August for brainstorming in “pause mode” to deliberate on the unique question “In the last few decades, what discoveries were true breakthroughs?”  The team reached an understanding on five scientific fields: climatology, neuroscience, astronomy, cellular biology, and Internet. Consequently, I will answer a few of the questions that you might think you know in these fields so that our knowledge is no longer an illusion.

The internet shifts from the virtual to the real

            There are three generations of internet or Web. The first generation or Web1.0 was created from 2003 to 2005 and is represented by MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube that gathers people on common interest social aspects or making “friends”.  The second generation or Web 2.0 is represented by Twitter or the microblogging platform for messages restricted to 140 characters. Thus, these micro messages can be regrouped and analyze to constitute a story contributed by many Twitter bloggers.  The third generation of Web 3.0 is ready technologically; this generation is already labeled object oriented intelligence sources.  For example, you record a message on your cell phone and then stick a yellow sticker on a wall or an object. The next visitor will pass his cell phone over the sticker and copy your message of whatever you have seen or appreciated. This generation can zip all kinds of products and gather intelligence and compare with other resources.  Personally, I think that even the Twitter is already a perfect source of information by intelligence agencies; these centers can hire thousands of Twitter users and direct them on specific topic of interests in many countries.

Cells can be rejuvenated to its embryo stage

            The lab technician would take samples of your skin. The skin cells can be treated to reach its first born state.  Whatever genetic diseases that cell inherited it will take another 30 years for the disease to emerge.  All the while you are thirty years younger. Better, skin cells can be treated to isolate a specific cell for any body member like liver, heart, brain, or whatever.  The sick tissue in any part of your body can be rejuvenated within a month. This biomedical technique of treating adult cells into embryo state was made possible because many laws prohibited using fetus embryo on the ground that the cell belonged to another person.

Is man’s activity altering nature more than geophysics?

            Man feared the return of the ice age; it turned out that the climate is getting hotter and the poles are melting.  The emergence of urban and industrial societies as a geophysical force is altering the environment power for rejuvenation according to human threshold for survival.  Since 1824, Joseph Fourier theorized that gases in the atmosphere have the potential to increase surface temperature. Even in 1896, John Tyndall predicted that the concentration of CO2 will increase temperature to 5 degrees by the end of the 20^th century. Now, this is a fact and each year the casualties in man and nature are increasing by the violence of climatic changes. People are waiting anxiously the international summit on the environment in Copenhagen this December. Awareness of man effective participation in climatic changes was proven when the ozone layer of O3 in the stratosphere was depleting. Seas level is increasing 3 mm a year since 1993.  So far, only Danemark produces the fourth of its power using eoliens or wind turbines.

            Ex-President Bush Junior said in 1992: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” The philosopher Michelle Serres said in 1990: “This world that we treated as an object is returning as a subject; capable of vengeance.”  The humorist Coluche said: “For an ecologist to be elected as President then trees should be allowed to vote.”

The brain is in perpetual re-structuring

            There are specialized neurons that can be activated when an action is executed or when an action is also observed (mirror neurons).  These mirror neurons are the biological basis for empathy, imitation, and training; almost every decision is influenced by our emotions.  Neurons have the potential to flow or transfer from one brain to another when recycling cognitive aptitudes such as reading and writing are elevated.  Neurons and connections are modified when training tasks are memorized.

            We have 8 varieties of intelligence; mainly the visual, spatial, naturalist, logic-mathematics, corporal, musical, inter-personal, and intra-personal intelligences. The new battery of experiments for testing cognitive and movements capabilities are designed to account for our eight kinds of intelligences. It is the quantity of synapses (connections) and not the weight of the brain that differentiate among the various intelligences. There are phases in our sleep when brain activities are most intense while muscular activities are extremely inhibited; this phase is called “paradox sleep”.  We produce new neurons at every stage of growth, especially in the hippocampus and the smell brains. Almost 10% of our synapses are established when we are born and they increase with our activities and cognitive demands (efforts, mental and physical, mean increase in fresh synapses and neurons).

Hormones or chemical messengers for the brains  

            Serotonin is a chemical messenger to the brains; it is implicated in sleep, feeding and sexual habits. A decrease in its production is associated to depressive moods. Anti-depressant drugs increase the concentration of serotonin in the blood.

            Dopamine is a chemical hormone that controls movements, moods, addiction, and the circuit of pleasure; its deficiency generates rigidity in the muscles which is the symptoms of Parkinson disease.

            Adrenaline is a chemical hormone that is secreted at moments of stress and is attached on large numbers of receptors to re-enforce cardiac functions, accelerate the heart beats, elevate arterial pressure, inhibit digestion and increase the level of glycemy.

            Cortisol is secreted in moments of stress to increase the rate of glucose in the blood stream and liberating energy to counter dangers.

            Insulin enhances the stock of glucose in the tissues and thus decreases glycemy.

            Acetylcholine is a neuro-transmitter that excites the targeted brain when acquiring new training and for enhancing memory; its deficiency is the origin of Alzheimer disease.

            Erythropoietin stimulates the synthesis of red blood cells; its deficiency results in anemia.  The word “doping” is related to sport competitors abusing of this hormone.

It would be near impossible to find a genuine cricket lover across the eight major cricketing nations who would not be shattered to see the game moving ahead without a substantial role of Pakistan. On the contrary there would be millions lamenting that tours to Pakistan have suffered for a few years for reasons that are beyond the control of either the administrators or the fans of the game.

In this season even indifferent observers would have turned serious followers had they been witnessing how Pakistan cricket navigated through a dark, treacherous period and emerged joyous and unscathed on the other side; in the process they also sparked unadulterated joy among millions of supporters back home. Forget home; they must be even lifting the spirits of the rival camps.

Younis Khan and his team have given the other Test playing nations enough reason to see the fact that it would be a collective loss for all cricketing nations if tours to Pakistan remain stalled. Tours though are not decided by cricket captains and emotional fans; more so as the aftershocks of Mumbai and Lahore would be felt acutely by the governing bodies of countries scheduled to tour Pakistan.

On their part though, Pakistani cricketers have done enough for the world to take notice. On Wednesday they gave another proof—if it was at all needed in the first place—on why the game of cricket is so much poorer without the incendiary brilliance that their team brings to this rather small mix.

It was not an ideal surface to bat on but it produced a match that single-handedly justified the Champions Trophy. The Aussies put Pakistan in after winning the toss and bowled 50 overs with intensity to restrict Pakistan to 205. The chase began like a typical Aussie hot pursuit, with boundaries raining. At 62 for 2 after 12 overs, the seasoned Ponting and Hussey took charge; Ponting extra cautious while Hussey free-flowing. The Aussie captain perished in the 32nd over—to a slog-sweep off Malik caught wide of square leg, courtesy a great effort by Umar Gul.

It was just a precursor to the period that I call the ‘Pakistan Factor’. This elusive and dangerous quality that makes a Pakistani team lethal is scientifically defined as the product of mass and velocity: commonly called momentum. And in its own peculiar way, this momentum does not run contrary to the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle*—one of the fundamental pillars of Quantum Mechanics named after the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who presented it in 1927. In simple cricketing terms it can be used to say that momentum can be observed but what triggers it remains elusive.*

When Pakistan began their World T20 campaign this year, they played England in the first game and lost by 48 runs. A match report said: ‘Pakistan was well short of their best, especially in the field where they dropped at least four catches and produced countless more sloppy pieces of groundwork. … maybe suffered from knowing they have a second chance against the Netherlands …but this defeat was so heavy that even a win in that game might not be enough.’

Pakistan won against Netherlands and then lost to Sri Lanka. They then defeated New Zealand emphatically, and something that can’t be measured accurately triggered what could be seen plainly: Pakistan had gained momentum. Pakistan qualified to the semis as the 4th team to take on the unbeaten South Africans.

Osman Samiuddin, Pakistan editor of Cricinfo, in a preview to the T20 semi-final called it first a clash of ethos, of philosophies and even of time, more than a semi-final. It was the art of cricket against the science of it, cricket’s future against its past.

South Africa had all bases covered. “The whole machinery is intimidating …the mission pre-programmed; with seven consecutive wins… they have also taken the inherent unpredictability of this format out of the equation. They are well-oiled, and their psychologist talks about 120 contests and of processes over outcomes. They win even warm-up matches and the dead games because every game counts. They are cricket’s future.

Pakistan are the past. They are wholly dysfunctional, but just about getting along, though unsure where they are going. They don’t control extras…. They are least bothered about erasing the flaws because any win will be in spite of them. They did hire a psychologist though, and you can only imagine what those sessions were like… There are permanent mutterings of serious rifts. They may not bat, bowl or field well all the time, but sometimes, they do what can only be described as a ‘Pakistan’: that is, they bowl, bat or field spectacularly, briefly, to change the outcome of matches. You cannot plan or account for this as an opponent because Pakistan themselves don’t plan or account for it.”

Osman hits the nail on the head when he says that it is not something that Pakistan plan for; meaning that it happens and also meaning that it is in harmony with my ‘not-so-scientific’ comparison with the revolutionary theory of the Quantum Physics genius Heisenberg.

Pakistan took on South Africa and despite scoring a gettable 149, Afridi turned the game on its head by taking Gibbs and De Villiers cheaply and almost back to back. Sri Lanka had been the more consistent team in the tournament; but in the final it was Pakistan that was more hungry.

Ponting sensed the danger today as his strike rate of 50 suggests; rarely does he score 32 runs in 64 balls. Asif was back in the 40st over after a dull first spell; Ajmal had sent Ferguson back a while ago. Then followed the madness, the brilliance, the call it what you like, the-what I like to call as the Pakistan Factor.

Rana Naved started a new spell in the 41st over and his fifth ball, an in-swinging dipping yorker, shattered Hussey’s off stump; it was as if lightning had struck. Hussey left after a fluent 64; 31 needed from 9 overs with 5 wickets left.

It was already crazy when the back-from-hell Asif made it absolutely maddening in the 42nd over; Hopes drove straight to mid-off and Younis pouched a low catch. Johnson survived a run-out scare; White had no such luck. The fifth ball was an Asif special: It landed on a good length outside the off and cut back sharply to pierce the bat pad gap and shatter the timber behind; an unbelieving pale White made his walk back. Twenty-three in 36 balls with 3 wickets in hand and Rana Naved bowled two maidens on the trot.

In between the maidens Johnson hit a four and was deceived the very next ball by an Ajmal beauty; a short and quick doosra that Johnson misread and it came back to crash his stumps. Australia had needed just 36 runs in the last 10 overs with six wickets in hand. Seven of those 10 overs yielded half of the runs at the cost of 4 Aussie wickets. It was sheer madness, it was pure magic, and it was quintessential Pakistan. It was something that would have made Werner Heisenberg—the 1932 Nobel Prize winner in Physics—smile.

Only Pakistan could have brought Australia to such a desperate situation in an otherwise one-sided contest. And only Australia could have survived a tsunami like that and yet manage to cross the line. If unpredictable is the word for Pakistan then the Aussies can best be summed up as unyielding. Lee and Hauritz saw Australia home in the last ball of the match.

Pakistan now moves ahead with the momentum that makes them so lethal by their side. It would be tempting to put your money on them but it would not be wise: Some things are best left uncertain.

——————————————————————————————————

*Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that it is not possible to simultaneously measure both the position and momentum of a particle with precision. Conversly, it also means that more the precision in measuring one of them the greater would be the inaccuracy in measuring the other. There are many ways to define and derive the principle. It is one of the fundamental building blocks of Quantum Theory.

The principle was at the core of dialogues between British physicist David Bohm and the 20th century ‘spiritual thinker’ J. Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti was spotted and raised by The Theosophical Society: which he left saying what remains as his most famous one-liner, ‘Truth is a pathless land’. The dialogues are available in a 1985 published book titled The Ending Of Time. It is the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that prompted Albert Einstein’s famous comment, “God does not play dice.”

Welcome to The Philosophers’ Blog Carnival at Camels With Hammers!

Cover illustration for Bertrand Russell. Nightmares Of Eminent Persons and Other Stories. London: The Bodley Heasd, 1954.

(via Peter Mandik’s Brain Hammer)

First I want to kick things off with a super post not actually submitted to the carnival but worth your attention nonetheless.  Phil Goetz writes:

The history of religions sometimes resembles the history of viruses.  Judaism and Islam were both highly virulent when they first broke out, driving the first generations of their people to conquer (Islam) or just slaughter (Judaism) everyone around them for the sin of not being them.  They both grew more sedate over time.  (Christianity was pacifist at the start, as it arose in a conquered people.  When the Romans adopted it, it didn’t make them any more militaristic than they already were.)

The mechanism isn’t the same as for diseases, which can’t be too virulent or they kill their hosts.  Religions don’t generally kill their hosts.  I suspect that, over time, individual selection favors those who are less zealous.  The point is that a culture develops antibodies for the particular religions it co-exists with – attitudes and practices that make them less virulent.

I have a theory that “radical Islam” is not native Islam, but Westernized Islam.  Over half of 75 Muslim terrorists studied by Bergen & Pandey 2005 in the New York Times had gone to a Western college.  (Only 9% had attended madrassas.)  A very small percentage of all Muslims have received a Western college education.   When someone lives all their life in a Muslim country, they’re not likely to be hit with the urge to travel abroad and blow something up.  But when someone from an Islamic nation goes to Europe for college, and comes back with Enlightenment ideas about reason and seeking logical closure over beliefs, and applies them to the Koran, then you have troubles.  They have lost their cultural immunity.

The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of.

Next, at Brains, University of California San Diego neuroscience PhD and current Duke postdoctoral fellow Eric Thomson thinks David Chalmers is unjustified and speaks vacuously when he claims there is a so-called “hard problem” in describing consciousness whereby features of what it is like to experience consciousness will admit of no account.  Thomson laments what he sees as the stifling effect of this idea being treated as something of a dogma:

By analogy, when I talk to Creationists about a cool biological phenomenon, they immediately seem compelled to explain its origin in terms of God’s amazing designing powers. It is really quite strange, as they are perfectly intelligent people, capable of having good discussions of other things. However, when it comes to the topic of phenotypes, their creativity, their scientific curiosity, and (most importantly) their obsession with evidential details and brainstorming about possible mechanisms are all shut off.

I see a similar cognitive short-circuit in many people when it comes to consciousness, especially if they have acquired the hard problem reflex. No matter what is being discussed about consciousness, the reflex kicks in and everything just stops (compare to, “Wow, I can’t imagine how this happened, God is a great designer.”). They contribute nothing beyond a bumper sticker to the discussion, and aren’t interested in any more details. I might as well be whistling Dixie.

And the real fun starts in the comments section to that post, so be sure to click on the link.

Richard B. Hoppe suggests that the problem of scientific demarcation might better be focused on finding the criteria that mark pseudoscience as pseudoscience, rather than a set of necessary and sufficient criteria that mark science as science.  He writes:

But the task as I see it is not to define science in such a way that one can point to something and say “That’s science.” It seems to me that it’s quite possible, in principle at least, to argue that ID/creationism, for example, is “pseudoscience” without the necessity of reference to a demarcating definition of science. If one starts with the complementary problem, namely defining pseudoscience independent of any particular definition of science, then we might make more progress. That is, it may be more fruitful to demarcate pseudoscience than to attempt to demarcate science.

This approach has the advantage that it does not require us to worry about questions like whether history is a science or an art (the topic of a faculty development workshop I attended eons ago). We don’t have to wonder if the conjecture of the existence of multiple universes is ‘real’ science or fanciful speculation. We can focus on the pathology and ask what its defining properties are.

He then offers rough sketches 5 criteria for pseudoscience and what they entail.  Here are the criteria he discusses: 1. Inflationary Credentialism. 2. Perseveration with demonstrably false arguments.  3. Perverse mistreatment of evidence, 4. Claims of unfair exclusion or even persecution,  5. Claims of maverick status.

Also not actually submitted to the carnival but worth highlighting is this paper abstract posted by Brian Leiter:

Should we think of what I will refer to generically as “the law of religious liberty” as grounded in the moral attitude of respect for religion or in the moral attitude of tolerance of religion? I begin by explicating the relevant moral attitudes of “respect” and “toleration.” With regard to the former, I start with a well-known treatment of the idea of “respect” in the Anglophone literature by the moral philosopher Stephen Darwall. With respect to the latter concept, toleration, I shall draw on my own earlier discussion, though now emphasizing the features of toleration that set it apart from one kind of respect. In deciding whether “respect” or “toleration” can plausibly serve as the moral foundation for the law of religious liberty we will need to say something about the nature of religion. I shall propose a fairly precise analysis of what makes a belief and a concomitant set of practices “religious” (again drawing on earlier work). That will then bring us to the central question: should our laws reflect “respect” for religion” or only “toleration”? Martha Nussbaum has recently argued for “respect” as the moral foundation of religious liberty, though, as I will suggest, her account is ambiguous between the two senses of respect that emerge from Darwall’s work. In particular, I shall claim that in one “thin” sense of respect, it is compatible with nothing more than toleration of religion; and that in a “thicker” sense (which Nussbaum appears to want to invoke), it could not form the moral basis of a legal regime since religion is not the kind of belief system that could warrant that attitude. To make the latter case, I examine critically a recent attack on the idea of “respect” for religious belief by Simon Blackburn.

Prior Adams explores a possible allusion in Kierkegaard’s choice of  the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, under which to write Fear and Trembling, exploring parallels between the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and a Grimm fairytale:

the name Johannes de Silentio is an allusion to the Grimm’s fairytale The Faithful Servant. E. Hirsch first considered this allusion in “Teologik Tidsskrift for den danske Folkekirke” and it makes sense when we consider the events of the story. The faithful servant—Johannes–was turned to stone because he warned the king of three dangers. The king then felt terrible about what happened to Johannes and vowed he would do anything to return him back to normal. Afterwards the king had two sons, and Johannes—as a stone figure–told the king that if he would cut off the heads of his sons, and sprinkle their blood on the stone, then Johannes would return back to normal. The king does this. After Johannes becomes normal, he then brings the king’s sons back to life. The story ends with the queen exclaiming, “God be praised, he is delivered, and we have our little sons again also.” (ii) 

Both Abraham and the king face a similar dilemma.

Also:

David Gross provides commentary on the entire Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, while reading through the work for the first time.

ξένία responds to remarks in Therein McGinn’s book Mindsight which relate to images and perceptions and the differences between them.  She quotes McGinn:

The object of my imagining does not feed new information to me as I imagine it, and there is no updating of my beliefs about its properties. I do not adopt an attitude of cognitive openness to what the object might reveal about itself; there is no dynamic flow of information from it to me– just a static positing of the object, which is causally remote from my current mental activity. There is no observational inputfrom the object. [...](Images) tell us nothing we don’t already know. (p.18/19)

And then she replies:

McGinn writes, as if the object of ones imagining were an entity that could be analyzed independently from the mind that ‘created’ the image. In an important way, however, I do not believe any causal relationship can be established on purely conceptual grounds. Not only is there an important ingredient, empirical scientific investigation, missing to support his claim, I believe that McGinn overlooks a very important conceptual aspect of the problem: Images and percepts are not merely given/created by the mind and stand as independent entities. They are part of the mind. The mind is made of images in a way. It is hard to see how, when viewing images and percepts from this perspective, one could postulate the causal relationships McGinn writes about. In a very interesting sense, the entities in question overlap ontologically. Because of this, they can not be described as having separable properties.

John Ku combines philosophy and computer programming to demonstrate how to make Ruby Quines:

This MetaMonday post delves into the puzzling nature of quines and will show you how to create one in Ruby. If you’ve got a passion for self-reference, mathematical logic, functional programming, or philosophical paradoxes – this post is for you!

A quine is a self-referential program that performs the neat trick of outputting its own source code without cheating. Cheating could be accomplished by accessing the external file system that the code is stored on, or in trivial cases, compiling empty code which, unsurprisingly, prints itself.

Initially, you might think that writing a quine would be pretty easy to do. After all, most programming languages will have a command to simply print out a string. For example, in Ruby, puts "Hello World!" would print outHello World! as its output. So couldn’t a Ruby quine then, simply consist of the puts command followed by a string containing that line of code?

On close inspection, we can see that that strategy won’t actually work because it results in an infinite regression. The string printed by the putscommand would have to include the whole source code, including the string itself and theputs command that precedes it.

To see how he goes about making them click here.

For philosophers looking for thought experiments, Kenny Pearce offers a list of some of the best short works of philosophical science fiction.

What’s in a name?  Andrew Bernardin of Evolving Mind discusses the unfortunate cultural consequences of Einstein and Heisenberg not going with their initial preferences for naming the phenomena they respectively discovered:

First, relativity. Einstein’s famous breakthrough was the realization that because the speed of light is constant, measures of space and time are relative. Thus, relativity theory. Yet Einstein’s initial focus was of the first part of that equation. The real “outside the box” thinking was this: while all other motion carries a relative speed (relative to the observer), the speed of light does not! It is always the same, it never varies. And so Einstein used the word “invariance” to describe his great theoretical advance.

If Einstein’s theory were know today as the theory of invariance or invariance theory, I wonder what the worldview-implications would be. Rather than, “well, it’s all relative,” would people today be saying, “well, it’s all invariant”?

Second, quantum uncertainty. In a similar fashion, Heisenberg’s famous breakthrough first carried a different name. His breakthrough: the more accurately you measure of a particle’s position, the less accurately you can measure its speed. Heisenberg first referred to this phenomenon with a German word that translates as “inexactness.”*

Had that stuck, how would quantum inexactness have differently influenced people’s worldviews?

Heisenberg also used indeterminacy. This is my preferred word. And one of the reasons why is accuracy. The measures aren’t uncertain; they are relatively imprecise or less accurately determinable. And scientists are certain about that. Another reason is that these other words don’t carry the same ability to bogusly distort people’s worldviews. The woo-meisters love “uncertainty,” for if science is uncertain, they can better inject their feel-good bologna into the workings of the universe.

While you’re here at Camels With Hammers, I invite you to take a little time to read Camels With Hammers Philosophy, a post in which I summarize the majority of the ideas I’ve argued for in depth in my posts over my first three months on this rejuvenated and renamed blog.  You can also browse the titles of many of my thought pieces in the right hand column of the blog.

And finally, no carnival would be complete without some freaks, so here is Zombie Karl Popper as presented by Chaos Pet:

If you would like to submit an academically serious blog post on philosophy, click the submission button here:  

To find the next blog carnival and search the archives of previous carnivals, click here:


Your Thoughts?

These are certainly not my own words… Though I have replaced my own name within their framework of wisdom. And there is a reason for doing this…

And, as if to Know and Embrace this Wisdom that Toporek helped me to discover, I just had to copy out his beautiful flow of words and add my own name in there as an affirmation of this freedom of Self.

“So, tell me Karl, what are you going to be when you grow up?”

The Scream, by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch... A feeling I've felt before.

As a child, it always bothered me when an grown-up asked me that question. And being so young and naïve, I didn’t know exactly why it bothered me so much… But today, with a little more headroom on my shoulders, I think I’m beginning to understand why it did, and still does, bother me…

The only absolute certainty is uncertainty itself.

According to legend, it was this assertion that prompted the Delphic Oracle to recognize Socrates as the wisest man in Greece. Socrates replied that he possessed no wisdom whatsoever, but paradoxically the Oracle interpreted his unapologetic acceptance of ignorance as evidence of great wisdom. The pride of many prominent Athenians was wounded by the idea of being ranked below this self-proclaimed ignorant, so he was accused of corrupting the young, and was sentenced to death by poisoning.

2,000 years after Socrates’ execution, at a point in time between the birth of Descartes and the death of Kant, the West became helplessly enamored with certainty. Calculus became the fundamental discipline that helped us understand and define reality with great accuracy, even when it was ineffective at amicably resolving the battle between Leibniz and Newton regarding its discovery.

According to Lao Tzu, what is true can’t be described, but after Newton’s discoveries of gravity and the laws of motion, it was hard not to be convinced that reality could be outlined and explained through scientific exploration. Newton was followed by Bernoulli, Coulomb, Avogadro, Fourier, Faraday, Kelvin, Joule and Maxwell, and with every new discovery the certainty that the universe could be completely understood through the reductionism of equations grew ever stronger. The prevalent scientific posture after Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism was that at the end of the 19th century “all the great physical constants would have been approximately estimated, and the only occupation left to men of science would be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals”. Of course history had different plans, and a new batch of scientists that included Curie, Rutherford, Planck, Einstein and Bohr proved that the universe was not that simple to figure out. Radioactivity, the equivalency between energy and matter, the relative flow of time, and light behaving as both wave and particle were a few of the new discoveries. During the 20th century each new finding increased the level of uncertainty, but the final blow to the dream of absolute scientific determinism came in 1926, when a young German physicist proved that it was impossible to know the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. At the age of 25, Werner Heisenberg formulated the Uncertainty Principle, laying the foundation of what became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. The implication of this discovery was that unpredictability ruled at the fundamental level of subatomic particles. The principle imposed a very real physical limitation on human knowledge, one that could not be overcome by technology. At an elementary level, scientists were doomed to predict only probabilities, never actual outcomes. Einstein strongly disliked this conclusion and died trying to disprove it, but years of experimental consistency confirmed his worst fears: God does play dice.

In 1932 Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Since then, the description of reality has only gotten stranger and more uncertain. Some of the latest scientific breakthroughs, like the discovery of Quantum Entanglement, seem to imply that not only is time an illusion, but locality as well. Recent discoveries by Leonard Susskind, Juan Maldacena and Ed Witten support the idea that we live in a holographic universe and that, despite its apparent solidity, objective reality does not exist. According to the Holographic Principle, objective reality is just a mirage created in our brains based on sensorial input; its our way of interpreting an otherwise undifferentiated, infinitely interconnected and splendidly detailed hologram. In this universe, all aspects of reality are merely interpretations relative to the observer, making it impossible to reach any kind of universal certainty.

It took 2,500 years, but Socrates was finally vindicated: The only absolute certainty is uncertainty itself!

So now we return back to this troubling question… “So, tell me Karl, what are you going to be when you grow up?” As I grew older I would get the same uncomfortable feeling when, at a job interview, I was asked “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” I even found it utterly uncomfortable when a priest prompted a young couple to promise eternal love to each other.

At some point I started to realize that, in most cases, the people asking me these questions were just trying to satisfy their own expectations with my answers, and that very often I would provide the expected response just to keep them at ease. Many of the people striving for certainty just want the confirmation that their particular belief system is legitimized; confirmation that a son will be a doctor and not an ballet dancer, confirmation that a partner will never behave in a way that may threaten the marriage, confirmation that a couple’s public commitment will continue to validate the church’s authority.

Today I know that the uncomfortable feelings those questions arouse in me had little to do with any particular answer, and a lot to do with the questions themselves; that I do not want my future to be seen as a means to validate someone else’s expectations, that by answering I am turning myself into a potential liar, and that the only honest answer to such questions is, and should have always been, I DON’T KNOW. Any other answer would represent a self-imposed compromised fate, a voluntary limitation of my own freedom, an imposition of countless personal and communal hopes and fears over the limitless possibilities of reality.

I DONT KNOW may not be the most romantic or reassuring answer, but it is often the most honest. Unfortunately more people today want to be right rather than honest. Through schools, temples and popular culture we are taught to perceive certainty as a virtue. The preacher narrates Biblical events as if he had experienced them himself, and talks about the afterlife as if he had already been there and back; the science teacher talks about subatomic particles as if he had actually seen them; and all over the world celebrities are admired for their apparent confidence and self assurance (heck, if Bono gets behind this cause it must be important). Recently we have experienced a string of international leaders that are far more concerned with appearing to be right than with actually doing the right thing.

Religion manufactures certainty from the past and imposes it over the present, while present science places its faith in future technologies to increase its own certainty. Everyone holding a position of authority refuses to display signs of ignorance for fear of appearing weak or conceding.

I am not afraid of doubt, but I am terrified by the recent resurgence of certainty and fundamentalism. Doubt can bring about humbleness, while certainty can lead to arrogance. Some of the most horrific episodes in history are those involving arrogant madmen.

Instead of allowing perception to be informed by experiential reality, a madman will try to force reality to conform to his prejudice. He will try to impose an order on reality and will attempt to destroy any element that challenges such order. But chaos is the reality of nature, while order is just the dream of men. Inevitably, one man’s dream will become another man’s nightmare, and our attempts to impose an artificial order on reality will often end up in despair and destruction.

Expectations are futile, control is a painful illusion, we are made of uncertainty. Let chaos be and order will naturally emerge; strive for order and you will live in chaos. How do I know this?

I DON’T KNOW…

If you would like to find out more about Toporek and his work, please click here.

I’ve been thinking about the uncertainty principle and trying to think of a classical answer as to how this apparently dual nature of subatomic structures can exist and came up with this thought experiment:
What if the “duality” of a particle is a false premise? What if there are no subatomic pointlike-particles such as the electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, etc that we’ve been taught exists. What if instead of being pointlike-particles all these subatomic structures were all waves? If this was the case then we mistakenly apply Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle for it only applies to pointlike-particles and not waves.

Consider a wave that approaches a detection grid. As the wave nears the grid it is the wave front that shall contact the grid. The point where the wave-front contacts the grid is called the tangent for the grid touches the circumference of the wave-front at one point which it displays as a point of light leading (or rather misleading) us to believe it was a pointlike-particle that made contact and illuminated it. Remember that these subatomic structures are so small that they do indeed appear to be pointlike-particles and the wave-fronts which emanate/radiate from them while on a quantum level may be considered large are—in a real world scale—also extremely small so that even upon “seeing” these waves—as in a cloud chamber—they still appear to be particles.

Borrowing the description of these structures from string theory—in which there are many parts I do not agree—we see “particles” are strings of energy which vibrate at various frequencies and which when coming into contact with other strings the sum totals of their combined frequencies add up to the various “particles” we know of. These frequencies interfere either constructively or destructively to give us the various frequencies of the various strings.
Now, consider just one such string traveling in a box toward a detection grid. As this string travels along its trajectory it is continuously radiating and so if a screen with one small hole is place between it and the detection grid the parts of the waves that are radiated away from the central wave illuminates (though not necessarily in the visible spectrum) everything around it including the detection grid beyond the dividing screen which contains the small hole. The radiated waves which all arrive at the detection grid ahead of the primary wave may not be detectable to the grid as these grids are not set to read such weak energy nevertheless these low energy waves are there and causes the grid to act as a black body which re-radiate these low energy waves thereby laying the ground work which eventually lead/add to the interference patterns we see when we either add a second hole to the dividing screen or we move the hole in the screen to another position.

If we do not move the hole or add another hole then we do not see an interference pattern because the low energy waves which are radiated away from the main wave-front are at intervals which do not cause interference with itself and so when each of them arrive at the detection grid they too touch the grid a manner which interfere constructively with the main wave-front.

If we simply change the position of the hole while leaving the trajectory of the string unchanged then the waves which arrive at the detection grid arrive at a different point on the grid as a result of the change in the position of the hole. If the change in the position of the hole is sufficient enough (very likely as the only way it would not cause interference is if we moved the hole exactly one wave length away from the original position) it will cause an interference pattern.

Finally, if we add a second hole instead of moving the position of the hole and the trajectory of the string is exactly central to the position of the two holes then the string structure radiates through both holes at the same time and the wave-fronts which go through each of these holes—which are not exactly one wave length apart—interfere destructively to cause the wave patterns we witness on the detection grid.

Hypothetically, if we spaced (or moved) the holes exactly one wave length apart and set the string on a trajectory which would put it exactly central to the two holes then these separate wave-fronts should act constructively upon reaching the detection grid and we would not see any interference patterns.

Other thoughts:
There is no such thing as a perfect vacuum anymore than there is such a thing as absolute zero. You may get infinitesimally close to absolute zero just as you can get infinitely close to a perfect vacuum. I believe that if you can find a perfect vacuum there also you will find absolute zero.

Dimensional solution for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle:

The absolute position of a particle can be determined solely using 3D (xyz) space, but the motion of a particle must be evaluated in 4D (xyz+t) space. Both attributes cannot be known at the “same time” because that dimension (time) doesn’t exist in 3D space. The only exception would be a particle at perfect rest in its 4D environment, in which case, motion is nil and time is obviated as a meaningful factor. Meanwhile, the momentum of a particle may only be known in a type of “5D” (xyz+t+m) space.

La riflessione gnoseologica ed epistemologica contemporanea ha portato alla luce il ruolo determinante del soggetto della conoscenza nell’atto stesso del conoscere. Contrariamente ai presupposti del “dogma” positivista della pura obiettività, il principio di indeterminazione di Heisenberg ha reso evidente come ciò sia vero perfino per le scienze naturali: anche in queste discipline, il cui “oggetto” sembra essere regolato da invariabili leggi di natura, la prospettiva dell’osservatore è un fattore che condiziona e determina il risultato dell’esperimento scientifico, e quindi della conoscenza scientifica come tale. La pura obiettività risulta perciò pura astrazione, espressione di una gnoseologia inadeguata e irrealistica.

Tarcisio Bertone

Namaste.

Continuing the series of blogposts on the theme ‘Advaita and Science’, in this VI part we take some time to study some of the writings of Mr.John Dobson.  While I had heard a lot about John Dobson’s deep interest in Vedanta, I had not read any of his many books on the subject of Vedanta and Science.  I sought an opinion about him from a very knowledgeable friend of mine living in the West and this is what I got as a reply:

// John Dobson is an extremely erudite scientist/scholar of Vedanta, astronomer by profession. He was a disciple of Sw. Ashokananda, and was a sannyasi for nearly 20 years in the Ramakrishna mission in California. ….
He has a very readable booklet at:

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/9535/Vedanta/vedanta.html

(downloadable in zip format) [I hear that the geocities site may soon be closing.]

I have heard him lecture, and I think he has a good grasp of Vedanta philosophy.//

Here presented below are some excerpts from Dobson’s book ‘The Equations of Maya’:

http://quanta-gaia.org/dobson/EquationsOfMaya.html

THE EQUATIONS OF MAYA

We have talked a little bit about equations and a great deal about maya. Now we have to take a hard look at our physics to see if any of our equations can be taken as descriptive of maya.

First of all, let me remind you that the physics of the last century — the physics of Swami Vivekananda’s day — was nothing like the physics of this century. In those days it was taken for granted that the mix of the chemical elements in the Universe had been given at the time of creation — if there was a creation — or had been around forever — if there was a forever — and that if you just kept shuffling the mix long enough, it would come out in the present configuration again. The swami sometimes referred to that view. Don’t take it as “gospel truth”; he is just quoting the scientific view of his day. In those days it was taken for granted that the Universe consists of real particles with real mass and real energy moving through real space in real time. It was taken for granted that mass and energy were different things, that space and time were independent of each other, and that if we knew the present position and momentum of the particles, we could predict the entire past and future of the Universe. No one thinks like that now. There have been some major revolutions in our understanding of physics since then, and they began just after Swami Vivekananda passed away.

Relativity

In the winter of 1895-96, Swami Vivekananda met Nikola Tesla and asked him if he could show that what we call matter is just potential energy. The swami said, “I am to go and see him next week to get this new mathematical demonstration,” ⁽¹⁰⁾ which apparently never came. It is probably unfortunate that Tesla didn’t get it shown, because if relativity theory had arisen out of a suggestion by Swami Vivekananda, the history of modern physics might have looked very different. The notion that what we see as matter is just potential energy was published as an appendix to Einstein’s relativity paper ten years later, in 1905.

In 1905, Einstein changed our geometry from 3-D to 4-D. He put time into our geometry where it belongs. Time and space come into the geometry as a pair of opposites, so that if the space separation and the time separation between two events, say here-now and there-then, are equal, the total separation between those two events is zero.

Euclid assumed that space separations are objective, but Euclid’s geometry is a theoretical geometry about a theoretical space that does not, in fact, exist. Space separations, and separations in time, are not objective. Observers moving with respect to each other measure different distances between there and here, and different times between then and now. What is objective is the total separation, the space-time separation, between there-then and here-now.

The equation looks very much like Pythagoras’ equation for the hypotenuse of a right triangle. In Pythagoras’ equation you square the two sides of the triangle, add the squares, and take the square root of that sum. But in Einstein’s equation, to get the space-time separation between two events, you square the time separation and subtract it from the square of the space separation, and take the square root of that difference. ⁽¹¹⁾ So that if the space and time separations between those two events are equal, the total separation between them is zero. And that puts the separation between the perceiver and the perceived at zero, because always we see events away from us in space by the trick of seeing them back in time in just such a way that the total separation is zero. That separation equation, as I see it, is one of the equations of maya. If this Universe is apparitional, like a dream, then the separation between the dreamer and the dream must be zero.

It was this change in the geometry that allowed Einstein to realize that what we see as mass (matter) is just potential energy. E = m. That is the equation that Swami Vivekananda hoped to get from Tesla. So now we see that matter (mass), as well as energy, is just the underlying existence showing through in the apparition. So that equation, too, is an equation of maya. ⁽¹²⁾

There are many things which are easier to see now than they were in Einstein’s day before the discovery of neutron stars and before the suspicion of black holes went public. It is easy to see now that the gravitational energy transformed to kinetic energy in the fall of an object to the surface of a neutron star would be a tenth of its rest mass, so that the energy released in the splash of a ten gram marshmallow on a neutron star would be enough to vaporize a town. It is easy to see now that, falling to the event horizon of a small black hole, one third of the energy would be released, and that all of it would be released if the black hole contained all the rest of the matter in the observable Universe. It is easy to see now that as Einstein said in 1917, “There can be no inertia relative to ’space’, but only an inertia of masses relative to one another.” And it is easy to see now that that inertia is related to their separation in the gravitational field, and not to their proximity to each other, as Einstein seems to have thought. ⁽¹³⁾

It is easy to see now that the Universe is wound up against gravity because the undivided shows through in the separation. And it is easy to see now that the Universe is wound up against the electrical charges of the minuscule particles because the infinite shows through in the smallness. ⁽¹⁴⁾ And we owe a great deal of these considerations to Einstein. But there is another revolution that has taken place in our physics which is considered even more basic than Einstein’s change in our geometry. That is quantum mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics

Matter does not behave according to our genetic expectations. Our genetic expectations are Newtonian. They assume Euclidian geometry, and they assume Newtonian physics. They take for granted that space separations are real, and that causation is transformational. That is why so many people have so much trouble “understanding” relativity and quantum mechanics. Our genetic expectations are offended. We cannot easily accept the fact that it is impossible to know everything about a physical system, just as it is impossible to identify the snake for which a rope has been mistaken. But there is this deep uncertainty lying at the bottom of our physics.

In the late 1920’s, Werner Heisenberg pointed out that the product of our necessary uncertainty in where a particle is and our necessary uncertainty in its momentum can never be smaller than Planck’s constant over two pi. Also that the product of our necessary uncertainty in when something happens and our necessary uncertainty in the energy of the happening can never be less than that same amount. This is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which I take to be another of the equations of maya. What it says is that if we see what we see through the screen of time and space, we cannot quite tell what it is that we see.

Richard Feynman has said that every statement in quantum mechanics is a restatement of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. This quantum behavior is what keeps the electron from sitting down on the proton in a hydrogen atom, in spite of the enormous electrical attraction between them. If we knew that much about its position, our necessary uncertainty in its momentum would be so large that the momentum associated with that uncertainty would be enough to drive it off. That is why we don’t fall through the floor. If the electrons are pushed too close to the nuclei, they simply buzz harder and keep us up. That’s why the planets don’t collapse. It’s the uncertainty necessitated by the fact that the first cause of our physics is apparitional.

Summary

These three equations, as I see it, are some of the equations of maya. Einstein’s separation equation sets the separation between the perceiver and the perceived at zero. The dream is in the dreamer. We see the bright star Sirius eight and a half light years away from us by the trick of seeing it eight and a half years ago. And the distance away comes in squared with a plus sign but the time ago comes in squared with a minus sign, so that if the two are equal, the total separation goes to zero. Einstein’s more famous equation, E = mc², in which “energy is set equal to mass,” is the equation which Swami Vivekananda had hoped to get from Tesla, because, as he said, “There cannot be two existences, only one.” And Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle includes the notion that the observer is always mixed up in what he sees. There is no longer any talk of a Universe independent of the observer any more than there is talk of an apparitional snake independent of the person who is seeing the apparition.

Whence and Whither?

For a long time I have felt that the physicists were just on the verge of noticing that the first cause of our physics is apparitional, that our physics is the physics of an apparitional Universe. I mentioned it to Johnny Carson when I was on his show a couple of years ago. I said that when you mistake a rope for a snake, what you do is to look at it very carefully, and you notice that it has these diagonal markings on its back. And you think, “It looks like a rope. Have we had ropes long enough for the snakes to imitate them?” And you call it a rope-snake. Then you look carefully at the end where the rattles should have been and you see hemp fibers. “Aha! Rope-snake hempii.” There was so much laughter that I couldn’t finish. We were cut off by the music. But what I wanted to say was that when you find that the head end is also hemp fibers, you realize that it really is a rope. I wanted to say that only this last step has not yet been taken by the physicists. Relativity and quantum mechanics are not about an actual Universe. We already have the physics of an apparition.

There are some interesting differences between the physicists and the mystics. The mystics take existence for granted, and want to get from here to there. They want to see beyond the apparition. And the physicists are likely to take non-existence for granted, and want to get from there to here. The Big Bang cosmologists want to get the Universe out of nothing. It’s like asking us to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing. But that’s not what shows in our physics. If behind what we see there were only a zero, then where would gravity come from, and electricity, and inertia? I have to side with the mystics. On observational grounds I have to take existence for granted.

Another interesting difference is that the physicists are Parinamavadins. They believe that causation is transformational and that the Universe is actual, whereas the mystics are Vivartavadins. Regardless of what they write in their books or what they say from the pulpit, all the mystics and religious aspirants agree that faith is at the root of spiritual experience. And that would not be possible unless the Universe were apparitional. If the milk has been made into buttermilk, faith that it’s milk will be of no avail; whereas, if you have mistaken your friend for a ghost, faith that it’s your friend ends the problem.

Here let me remind you that physics and philosophy are our maps. They can be judged as true or false according to whether they correspond or do not correspond to fact. But mysticism (or religion) is a journey, and about a journey one does not ask whether it is true or false, but only where it goes. Will it take me to the goal?

Our problem is to reach the goal. To see beyond the screen. You remember that Swami Vivekananda said that the Universe is the Absolute seen through the screen of time, space, and causation. It’s no use asking how the Absolute became the Universe. The Absolute has not become the Universe any more than the rope has become a snake. Our problem is to see it straight. And you remember that Sri Ramakrishna said that maya is nothing but the egotism of the embodied soul. And that is genetic……
Our problem is to reach the goal, and not be hoodwinked by the genes. But this is not a journey from one place to another in an actual world. It is a journey from one point of view to another. That is why it is often referred to as an “inner journey.” It is a journey from an erroneous point of view, dictated by the genes, to a point of view from which we can see through the genetic mirage.

…..

And let me remind you that space is not that which separates the many, but that which seems to separate the one. And in that space that oneness shines, therefore falls whatever falls. And space is not that in which we see the small, but that in which the infinite appears as small. And in that space that vastness shines, therefore bursts whatever bursts, therefore shines whatever shines. And finally, time is not that in which we see the changing, but that in which the changeless seems to change. And in that time that changeless shines, therefore rests whatever rests, therefore coasts whatever coasts.

Swami Vivekananda said that science and religion would meet and shake hands. I think that time has come
#      #      #

Related Reading:

1. http://adbhutam.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/attributes-and-substantive/
2.  http://adbhutam.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/a-vichara-on-swatantra-and-paratantra-independent-and-dependent-realities/
3. http://adbhutam.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/a-vichara-on-the-paramopanishat-pancha-bheda-prapancha/

Om Tat Sat

Advaita and Science – III
In the earlier post in this series, a Vedantin-Scientist’s conclusion on the advaitic way of the development of modern physics was presented.  In the following excerpts this view is seen to be shared and reiterated  by others as well.

An excerpt

http://www.indiadivine.org/audarya/advaita-vedanta/144903-re-there-light-enlightenment-einstein.html

Namaste Sri Ananda,

>Einstein’s basic approach was simply to ask what reality is
>seen in common, beneath the varying appearances that depend
>on different points of view. And he saw that while space and
>time are varying measurements, light shows us a background
>continuity that does not vary in this way.

It was enjoyable to read what you said about relativity and Advaita.
Here are just a couple of comments to consider.

Einstein’s theory of relativity really rests on one fundamental
pillar, not two or three, as sometimes reported. It is that the
fundamental laws of nature are the SAME for all observers.

For example, Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism are the same for all
observers, and hence the speed of light is the same for all
observers, since this follow directly from the equations. From the
constancy of the speed of light, everything else in the special
theory follows, namely that spatial and temporal measurements of the
same events will be different for different observers in relative
motion.

So the spatial and temporal measurements differ, but the laws are the same.

I can’t help but think that this uniqueness of the laws must be a
manifestation or reflection of the fundamental advaitic unity of the
divine nature. It seems like too much of a coincidence otherwise.
That is, when the ‘unity’ of the divine consciousness manifests in
the multiplicity of phenomena, the laws governing those phenomena
somehow reflect the underlying unity of the divine source, which
remains latent in the swirl of multiplicity.

But I draw a further conclusion from relativity, which nobody else
seems to. If measurements of the same events differ for different
observers, then this can only mean that there CANNOT be any objective
reality outside of consciousness corresponding to the events. For
example, if the measurement of the length of a rod is different for
different observers, then there cannot be a ‘real’ and unique
material rod external to the observers, which they are all looking
at. If there were such a unique rod, external to consciousness, then
it could not have a varying length. This is my own unorthodox
interpretation of relativity, which most physicists would probably
deny.

The various rods are thus only in the consciousness of the observers,
which is how they can have different lengths in the first place.
They are all images in the minds of the observers, or else they are
purely hypothetical entities derived from images (i.e. observations).
I make that last remark, because sometimes scientific measurements
are made without being able to see an image, e.g. on meters and dials
and so forth. In that case, the alleged object is entirely
fictitious, but since this idea is so radical, I won’t belabor the
point. (Some would argue that this is in fact a reason to
reintroduce realism, but I am prepared to fight them to the death.
Well, I guess we don’t need to be so melodramatic.)

Anyhow, relativity can be used to give INDEPENDENT confirmation of
idealistic principles, which I already believe in for entirely
different reasons. And the proper philosophical idealism is the true
interpretation of Advaita, which makes it all clear and reasonable.
That is why I am so enthusiastic about it, even though many others
stubbornly resist it, because they do not fully understand it.

And I might add that other unrelated developments in quantum
mechanics are totally consistent with this viewpoint and are
virtually inexplicable except in terms of some kind of idealism. It
is not New Age nonsense to claim that modern physics cries out for
the principle that Consciousness is everything. The arguments are
very subtle and profound and require the utmost intelligence. This
represents the current frontier of human thought, and the recent
developments are astonishing, even more so than the original
relativity and quantum mechanics of the early 20th century.

Regards
Benjamin

Another excerpt

http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Vedanta.htm

Advaita Vedanta has influenced modern science enormously. Schrödinger was a Vedantist, and he claimed to have been inspired by it in his discovery of quantum theory. According to his biographer Walter Moore, there is a clear continuity between Schrödinger’s understanding of Vedānta and his research: “The unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. In 1925, the world view of physics was a model of a great machine composed of separable interacting material particles. During the next few years, Schrödinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One.”. Fritjof Capra’s widely proclaimed book The Tao of Physics. The Tao of Physics (full title: The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism) was a 1975 book by physicist Fritjof Capra. It was a bestseller in the United States, and has been published in 43 editions in is one among several that pursues this viewpoint further, as it investigates the relationship between modern (and particularly quantum – a quantum is the smallest increment into which many physical properties are subdivided. Most commonly, quanta are the fundamental units of something measurable. Electromagnetic energy, for example, is quantized into photons, wavelike packets of fixed freq) physics and the core philosophies of various Eastern religions including Hinduism,

Om Tat Sat

4 December 2000

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/dec2000/post-d04.shtml

We received the following letter on the article “The post-modernist wonderland: Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont” [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jul2000/post-j01.shtml] posted July 1, 2000 on the World Socialist Web Site . A reply by the article’s author Stefan Steinberg follows.

Hello, Stefan Steinberg,

I read your article on postmodernism with interest and would like to make a few comments on it. I have the book [Intellectual Impostures], and, indeed, its remarkable approach is to confront some sectors of so-called postmodernism in philosophy, literary science or natural sciences with their own confusion. There is no need to dwell on Irigaray and Kristeva, because they do indeed, as demonstrated, have a completely feuilletonistic conception of the term “postmodern”. For them, as for many others, postmodernism is nothing more than an intellectual Disneyland intoxicated on arbitrariness where everyone can use anyone as they please. Eclecticism is the credo of these people. Just to even consider counterposing poetry with a mathematical parameter or reducing relativity theory to a gender-specific view shows a complete lack of argumentational sense.

But now to your reflections on “What is Postmodernism”. You underscore the claim by Sokal/Bricmont that the general tendency of postmodern thought is the rejection of a comprehensible objective reality and the introduction of relativism in all sectors of thought and science. The first statement is completely wrong, and the second one doesn’t touch on relativism as it is generally understood, namely when one conceives of relativism as an outlook according to which every perception of the perceiver is only relatively correct, i.e., is not to be seen as generally valid.

Let us deal with the term itself. Around 1880, the English salon painter John Watkins talked about how he and his friends wanted to move forward to a “postmodern style of painting” (Higgins, Dick: A dialectic of centuries. Notes towards a theory of New Arts, New York, 1978). He thought this painting style he strived for should be more modern, as opposed to the French Impressionists. The term thus contains not a reactionary, but a progressive critique (we shall see whether it lives up to this). The term postmodern is also used by Rudolf Panwitz who writes about postmodern man in his book The Crisis of European Culture published in 1917; albeit also in the adjective form. Federico de Oniz used a completely opposite meaning of postmodern in 1934. For him, this was a category of the study of literature which he applied mainly to a correctional phase of histo-American poetry. Later, Arnold J. Toynbee also employed the term postmodern in 1947, but this does not need to be discussed in detail.

For our discussion, the term only really becomes interesting with the debate on American literature, as introduced by Irving Howe, who in his essay Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction (Partisan Review XXVI, 1959, pp. 420-36) heralded in a complete reversal with his use of the term. He describes contemporary literature as being characterised by limpness, as having lost its potency. This was an accusation (although he also considered it a natural development) inasmuch as he stated that the new mass society with its egalitarian forms found its approximation in literature, i.e., no longer possessed innovative power. Worth mentioning are also Leslie Fiedler: Cross the Border—Close the Gap ( Playboy, December 1969) (so there was “transcending of borders” already then!) and several others which I cannot deal with, since although I can name them (Joyce, T.S. Eliot, etc.), I don’t know their writings. So that would be intellectual straw-clutching on my part. The important thing to note is that the term first became a central topic of debate in American literature of the 1950s.

The concept of the trans-avantgarde found its adherents in art at an early stage. What this means is that several modern artists no longer wish to see themselves as minions or propagandists of a social mission. Understandably, this will appear to you to be a peculiarity of individualism, since the social reference of art was, characteristically, always also the location of a social component, but, to use the words of Bonito Olivas, that doesn’t mean that art has to be a-social, and will henceforth always be understood as an alarm system. In sociology, the term “postmodern society” appears for the first time in the writings of Amitai Etzioni (ibid: The active society. A theory of social and political process, New York, 1968). Etzioni defines society as a social type which, in relation to the needs and members of itself, is forced to constantly undergo self-transformation, and thus encounters society as dynamically and plurally defined. If we are to take things seriously, the term postmodern finds its first philosophical definition in Lyotard’s writings (La condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir, Paris, 1979)—and thus we come to the essence of the matter. Actually, the whole point is that, initially, Lyotard wasn’t even referring to postmodernism, but rather to the peculiarities of modernism.

So what, in the opinion of the “postmodernists”, is—so frequently mentioned— modernism?

“Today, culture strikes everything with similarity” is a central postulate of Horkheimer and Adorno, with which they join in a specific chorus of lament which was de rigeur in Critical Philosophy. And that is exactly the crux of the matter. In relation to intellectuals this meant that the identification of an identified subject with history, the intellectual who propagated the historically concealed subject of universal significance, can only be accessed through singularism and universalism—this era was finished for Lyotard. One of the tricks of modernism was the conception that the infinite allness (totality) is a rational aloneness and can be fully mastered by means of a universal science (e.g., “Technology is the essence of knowledge”—a guiding principle of modernism). As such, they also take a stance against Hegel and Marx, not because of affection with regard to contemporary perceptions, but rather because this proposition is contained in their philosophy. “The whole is the truth” is therefore the kernel of Hegel’s thought as well. The meta-discourses of Lyotard thus contain not only Marxist theory, but also the claim to unity (totality) of theories in general. Modernism was, however, also defined by an oppositional stance, expressed in the attitude that “you can’t improve on what is past, you have to build it anew”, thus questioning the given facts, which are to be superceded by modification and enhancement. The forms of rationality are diverse and are to be continued in like manner, so that a superior level can be achieved. Thus, dialectics are also contained in this.

You mention Heisenberg and Einstein. What significance does their science have with regard to issues of sociology in our context? As a result of Einstein, Heisenberg and the scientific discoveries of the early twentieth century it was possible to set forth that all magnitudes defined in a reference system cannot be determined with complete accuracy. This applies both to Einstein’s concept of time as it does to Heisenberg’s delocalization of matter. The central proposition of both of them can be summed up for this topic as follows: there is no access to the totality, all knowledge is limitational. That Mach and Bogdanov wanted to deduce the non-existence of matter from this is basically of no relevance for the discussion of postmodernism.

Now, you say that they were not capable of coming up with a new conceptional approach, something new and creative. I disagree. The root causes for a postmodern position are precisely in the recognition of the diversification of sectors of production, of the changes in social structures, of the changes in communications brought about by technology, of the transition to the diversity of (postulated) forms of rationality. The change of modernity does not occur through abruptly breaking away from what has been, but rather through transformation. In other words: through a process! Postmodernity does not situate itself after modernity, but proceeds from the assumption that the postmodern tendencies are and were already contained in modernity, but were merely concealed. Truth, justice, humanity exist only in the plural and are thus counterposed to all hegemonial approaches (regarding types of thought, social concepts, orientation systems). Postmodernism is not anti-modernism, since plurality was already propagated by modernism (cf. Max Weber: the “polytheism of values” as a characteristic of modernity), but it is concretely opposed to the striving for unity in philosophy and social utopias, which in this sense are “meta-discourses”.

“A postmodernist is someone who is aware of the irreducible diversity of forms of thought and life, and is able to use that recognition”. That is a central proposition of postmodernism.

The postmodernist can understand the perception that society needs a new influx of enthusiasm, but in modernism this integrative effect is seen as only possible through a new unity; the postmodernist regards this as completely wrong. Yet it is not the position of postmodernism to say “Nothing needs to happen, everything is proceeding as it should”; that is a position of modernism. The argumentational structure is thus that there are new technologies and scientific discoveries, they are moving forward unstoppably, let us create the way of thinking appropriate to them. Shouldn’t there be a counter-position, in addition to the philosophical approaches of Popper, Habermas or Luhmann, that is not definable as “late modern”? Imprecision is the yardstick or, more rather, the exclusive claim of a proposition is questioned. Plurality, discontinuity, antagonism, particularity thus penetrate to the core of scientific knowledge. Exclusivities (monopolism/universalism) are discarded. Speaking with Adorno against Hegel: the whole is the untruth. And it is precisely this defence of diverse worlds of life and meaning that is the inspiration of postmodernism. As long as one perceives the dissolution of totality as a loss, however, one is still in the realm of modernism.

The primacy is no longer the unqualified correctness of the Own, but the fundamental right of the Other and a basic recognition of the Other in its otherness. Society is thus not only differentiated in the global view, but already in its day-to-day operations. Plurality is not seen as a new discovery, but rather, where it was only mandatory sectorially, it now becomes obligatory for the entire breadth of culture and life. Plurality is an historical good. Plurality is the current paradigm. The intransgressibility of manyness and openness are the redemption. Reality is not homogenous, but heterogenous; not harmonious, but dramatic; not unified, but diverse. There is a restriction of the types of discourse (i.e., anti-universalism) and thus a tendency against all totalizations; thus also the guiding principle of postmodernism. The philosopher is not called upon to deliver recipes for a just decision, but to make sure that the logic and practice of the debate is recognised and perceived as such. Sensibility for the heterogeneous goals and types of debate, pursuing these goals, is the essence of contemporary humanity. They are the ideal of the postmodernist philosopher.

Frankly, I found this to be something new and not at all “the distorted reflection of a society that has long since run out of steam”. But wherein lies the essential problem of postmodern philosophy? All this can be easily constituted as diversification (or rather the semblance thereof!), advances in technology, etc., and is still far from being a philosophy. The real essence of the debate are issues of political science, i.e., how can decisions regarding social processes be regulated in a binding fashion. So the pivotal aspect of the debate is, given that diversity is undisputed, what are the conclusions regarding unity? The philosophical question is quite different: In view of the diversity of rationalities today, what is the possible and necessary form of rational thought?

This is the subject that should have been debated, because it would have been much more interesting to investigate this question; that would have brought with it some nice “philosophical test series” that really do end up in cloud-cuckoo-land.

I will draw to a close here, but would like to add one more thing. It is an entirely unscientific method to imagine that one only needs to examine the biography of a person in order to automatically arrive at that person’s philosophical world view. If I were to write a book about the Fourth International, it would be simply facile and petty-bourgeois to write a chapter entitled “From Ministrant to Revolutionary” in which I could point to the biographies of several members in order to say to the audience “Aha! I knew it all along, they’re all pseudo-morphoses of Christian sects!”. This is something I often noticed, and yet it is only a crutch that allows some lines to be filled with text (although it wouldn’t be uninteresting). Moral valuation and sociological analyses are often intermingled here. You are certainly right in your basic assumption when you emphasise that “the degeneration of Stalinism was decisive, etc…. and propelled sectors of the intelligentsia to the right”. That certainly applies to many French intellectuals, but to explain a philosophy by observing cultural life is as wrong as it could be. Lack of principles and “scientific objectivity” have no inner relationship whatsoever. Value judgements and knowledge from experience (as something objective in perception) are basically different. It makes no difference whatsoever who was once at the meeting of this or that group. That doesn’t explain anything, but just pretends to.

I will finish here with best regards and hopes for the continued success of the web site.

MG

Dear MG:

thank you for your letter and comments on my review of the book Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. It seems to me useful to deal with a number of points you raise which, in my opinion, very accurately reflect the confusion and basically socially reactionary standpoint of postmodern thought which you defend.

In the first paragraph of your letter you write of the eclecticism of Irigaray and Kristeva representing “some sectors” of “so-called post-modernism”. The insertion of “so-called” to somehow qualify the conclusions arrived at by Sokal and Bricmont is your own invention. While I concentrated in my review on the excesses of Irigaray and Kristeva, one of the strengths of Intellectual Impostures is the thoroughness with which the authors tackle not just a few fringe figures, but many of the leading lights in the French postmodernist movement. The inescapable conclusion after reading the book is that we are not just dealing with a few unhealthy branches which can be lopped off restoring the tree to health. The extent of the abuse of elementary scientific conceptions and procedures is so widespread in the school of postmodernism that we are forced to look at its roots.

In your second paragraph you reject my conclusion that the general tendency in the postmodern is “the rejection of a conceivable objective reality”. You state that this assertion is “completely wrong”, but regrettably in the course of your entire letter you do not present a single argument either of your own or from any of your postmodernist role-models to defend the standpoint that there is a “conceivable objective reality”.

On the second page of your letter you develop an argument against my review with the words: “You mention Heisenberg and Einstein” and then conclude your paragraph with the claim that Mach and Bogadanov’s attempt to “deduce the non-existence of matter is basically of no relevance for the discussion of postmodernism”. First of all may I point out that I never referred to Heisenberg and Einstein (who vigorously opposed Mach’s arguments with regard to the disappearance of matter) in my review. I did refer to the controversy surrounding the intervention by the physicist Mach into philosophical questions and the response by Lenin.

Secondly, irrespective of the fact that you develop arguments against positions and people I do not mention in my article, how are we to proceed when you vehemently deny that the general tendency of postmodernism is the rejection of a conceivable objective reality and then rule out discussion of an historical instance when this was precisely the question posed? Why do you not want to discuss this issue?

I repeat, how are we to deal with the epistemological standpoint of postmodernism when you reject consideration of historical instances where this question stood at the heart of the debate? The writings of post-modernists on the issue of the movement’s epistemology are copious. Without excessively testing the patience of our readers allow me to quote one leading American postmodernist writer, Elizabeth Ermath.

In the customary smug tone which is a hallmark of such individuals she writes that the postmodernists: “no longer require an ‘objective’ world to guarantee like some sort of bank for intersubjective transactions—the relations between one consciousness and another, or to guarantee an identity between illusions. There is only subjectivity. There are only illusions. And every illusion, because it has no permanently objectifying frame, constitutes reality and hence is totally ‘objective’ for its duration” Sequel to History” (Princeton, 1992).

I could quote many another postmodernist sources who argue in similar fashion, but it appears to me that the message is clear. Miserable so-called modernists require the crutch (or bank) of objective reality in order to limp through life, while the canny postmodernists have succeeded in seeing through this deception, cast themselves free from the weight of earthly dross to drift off in the far superior realm of illusions and subjectivity.

The modern and the post-modern

Perhaps, to clarify matters, permit me to summarise your description of what you refer to as the “modern” and the “postmodern”. This is not easy task bearing in mind the incompatibility of a number of your own arguments. What is one to make of your definition of modernism involving an attitude which states: “you can’t improve on what is past, you have to build it anew … question facts … supersede by modification and enhancement … ” which sounds to me to be emphasising the active role of mankind in transforming reality and your later claim that a position of modernism is: “Nothing needs to happen, everything is proceeding as it should,” which appears to state that everything proceeds independent of man’s subjective intervention.

Notwithstanding such confusion a few fundamental positions are clear in your letter. You write:

1. “One of the tricks of modernism was the conception that the infinite allness (totality) is a rational aloneness and can be fully mastered by means of a universal science (e.g. “Technology is the essence of knowledge”). Continuing your argument you state that:

2. the meta-discourses of Lyotard (note) include the “claim to unity (totality) of theories in general.

3. You go on to support the German thinker Theodor Adorno against Marx and Hegel’s notion of “the whole” or “totality”.

4. Finally, you declare that the relevant question to be asked is: “In view of the diversity of rationalities today, what is the possible and necessary form of rational thought?”

5. Regarding the origins of post-modernist thought you state that the “root causes from a postmodern position are precisely in the recognition of the diversification of sectors of production, of the changes in social structures, of the changes in communications brought about by technology, of the transition to the diversity of (postulated) forms of rationality.” You reinforce this point later on when you speak of “diverse worlds of life and meaning that is the inspiration of postmodernism”.

In point 1. above you refer, I presume, to the basic premise of Enlightenment thought that the world is knowable and can be improved by the conscious application of science and technology. This general conception, developed over a period of centuries, resulted in the separation of science from religion and was bound up with, as well as being an active element in the transformation of one social system (feudalism) to another—capitalism. Why is this conception a “trick”—what is your argument to justify the claim that this is a trick? Furthermore when you reject the above premise, then how can you reconcile this with your statement that postmodernists do not reject the notion of a conceivable objective reality. Your critical attitude towards technology expressed in the same passage recalls, of course, the positions of the reactionary German philosopher Martin Heidegger which were dealt with in a recent series of articles on the WSWS.

In point 2, along with the three so-called “meta-discourses” of Lyotard which he rejects as a possible basis for any analysis of reality you propose to banish “theories in general.” Is this not rather a sweeping move? Are you quite clear of the repercussions arising from what you are saying? Is not post-modernism itself a theory?—confused, backward looking, tending towards subjective idealism—but nevertheless a theory. In this respect, in point 4 you pose the question “In view of the diversity of rationalities today, what is the possible and necessary form of rational thought?” and then also in the text: “how can decisions regarding social processes be regulated in a binding fashion … what are the conclusions regarding unity?” But how is it possible to tackle such questions without a theory? i.e., a general conception of the world drawn from practice and experience which allows comparisons to be made and conclusions drawn as the basis for further practice.

Towards the end of my reply I propose dealing with point 5. Permit me first of all to take up your objections towards Hegel and Marx which are of course a hallmark of postmodernist thinking.

The popular conception of Hegelian thought propagated by postmodernists is to equate Hegelian dialectics with the dogmatism of Stalinist politics and declare that Hegelian thought is totalitarian, fixed and dogmatic. The postmodern version of Hegelian “totality”, as a scientific or philosophical concept, is infused with the content of totalitarian political systems to imply something rigid, dictatorial and oppressive to the individual. This is then proclaimed to be the state of the “modern”. Opposed is the apparent liberalism, individualism and anarchy on offer in a postmodern world.

In fact every leading figure in the Marxist movement recognised that the revolutionary core of Hegelian thought, freed from its idealistic shell, was to emphasise the transitional nature of everything seen through the prism of the dialectic. At the same time it is only possible to recognise this transitional nature because of the interconnectedness of all things and the fact that matter and thought are governed by general laws which themselves have to be discovered and continually developed in the course of concrete study in each particular field.

What did Hegel and the Marxists say?

In common with the main body of postmodernists you identify Hegel’s conception of totality as the main enemy. What did Hegel say? In his work Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel writes: “The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz, to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself.” Hegel expressed the same idea in a more popular form in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, p. 128): “All things … meet their doom; and in saying so, we have a perception that Dialectic is the universal and irresistible power, before which nothing can stay, however secure and stable it may deem itself.”

The decisive advance undertaken by Marx and Engels was to free the Hegelian dialectic from its idealistic shell and, based on their research of the real underlying driving forces of social and natural development, establish the dialectic on a materialist basis. In the introduction to his book Anti-Dühring Frederick Engels wrote as follows: “A system of natural and historical knowledge which is all-embracing and final for all time is in contradiction to the fundamental laws of dialectical thinking; which however, far from excluding, on the contrary includes the idea that the systematic knowledge of the external universe can make grand strides from generation to generation.” And then further on in the same work: “the real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science”.( Anti-Dühring Chap IV)

The dialectical nature of truth and cognition was also commented on by Lenin in the course of his studies of Hegel’s Science of Logic during the First World War: “cognition is the eternal, endless approximation of thought to the object. The reflection of nature in man’s thoughts must be understood not ‘lifelessly’, not ‘abstractly’, not devoid of movement, not without contradictions, but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.38).

Finally Leon Trotsky also drew attention in his writings to the advantages of the dialectical approach: “The dialectic does not liberate the investigator from painstaking study of the facts, quite the contrary: it requires it. But in return it gives investigative thought elasticity; helps it cope with ossified prejudices, arms it with invaluable analogies, and educates it in a spirit of daring, grounded in circumspection” (quoted in Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933-35 edited by Philip Pomper).

The acquisition of truth in the form of a fixed, unshakeable body of ideas or the notion that it is possible to arrive at a sort of final absolute truth (via perception) which you imply in your letter, has nothing to do with either Hegelian or Marxist thought. What both Hegel and Marx did emphasise is the possibility for mankind to learn, to develop theories, based upon which it is possible to change and improve nature and the society in which we live. In spite of its radical pretensions and phraseology, what characterises postmodernist thought is its essential conservatism, its readiness to accept the social status quo in favour of the small change of “micro-politics” and individual advancement. In this respect it is no wonder that the postmodernist movement is so hostile to the revolutionary implications of Hegel’s dialectic.

The development of society and production

Let me at this point return to what I have designated your fifth point. You write that postmodernism has its roots in … “the diversification of sectors of production … social structures… changes in communication”, etc. You are referring in fact to a very contradictory process. While it is true that in the social sphere it appears that diversification (the creation of new nation states, the emergence of regionalist interests, sectional politics, etc.) is the prevailing tendency, the twentieth century also witnessed enormous strides towards the harmonisation of knowledge and the potential unification of humanity.

Based upon the advances in science in the last century it is now acknowledged that a profound understanding of the development of the universe (astrophysics) is only possible with intimate knowledge of microscopic physical processes (microphysics). In very many branches of science there has been an increasing tendency towards integration and assimilation—physics and mathematics for example.

At the same time the potential for the unification of the world’s population has been brought closer than ever before with the introduction of the computer and Internet communication. In the fifteenth century, Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci stated in one of his riddles: “The time will come when people from the most distant countries will speak to one another and answer one another.” To realise Leonardo’s dream 600 years later is not a technological task, it is a social one—the overcoming of social inequalities founded in the capitalist system of production. Powerful objective processes are at work drawing humanity together. The main ideological obstacle to mankind making the steps towards a new international socialist community is expressed in confusion over the lessons of history and the hostility of sectional social interests—both elements of which are powerfully represented in the postmodernist school of thinkers.

One final point: at the end of your letter you write that is entirely unscientific to draw conclusions regarding someone’s philosophical world-view from their personal biography and employ an analogy from the arsenal of Stalinism “from Ministrant to Revolutionary” to justify your point. The materialist approach to the issue of philosophical world-view has nothing, of course, in common with the crudities of Stalinism, but does that mean that there is no relationship between someone’s personal biography and the philosophy he adopts?

The profession of the Dutch philosopher Spinoza was the precision grinding of lenses used in the first telescopes to peer at the universe. Did this fact have something to do with the philosophy he developed ?—I think so. I could go on: Descartes wrote outstanding treatises on optics, Leibniz developed differential calculus, Kant developed his own theory of the universe. All of the great Enlightenment thinkers paid the closest interest to the development of science and made their own independent contributions. This concern with science is directly reflected and bound up with their philosophical outlook.

If the book Intellectual Impostures has made one thing clear, then it is the following: that bound up with their biographies, there is utter contempt and hostility on the part of postmodernists to the development of science and technology. Does this have a bearing on their philosophical world-view?—I think so.

I prefer the formulation of German philosopher Fichte as quoted by the Russian author Ilyenkov: “As Fichte said, the kind of philosophy you choose depends upon the type of person you are. Everyone is attracted to a philosophy which corresponds to the already formed image of his own thinking. He finds in it a mirror which fully presents everything that earlier existed in the form of a vague tendency, an indistinctly expressed allusion” (E.V. Ilyenkov, Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism).

In closing I would like to recall your initial comments on the “eclecticism” and “Disneyland” argumentation of Irigaray and Kristeva. To be quite frank, with regard to the ideological eclecticism of your own contribution, your tendency to make sweeping statements without the slightest effort to seriously argue the case together with a thoroughly reckless use of language and concepts leads me to say that, in my opinion, you deserve Irigaray and Kristeva and they deserve you.

Nevertheless I hope, in the course of this brief note, I have been able to clarify some of the differences between the school of thought known as postmodernism and the ideas defended by the Marxist movement and the World Socialist Web Site.

Yours fraternally,

Stefan Steinberg

Note: I dealt with Lyotard’s conception of meta-discourses in my original review article of Intellectual Impostures—S.S.