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Mailing List complex-science@necsi.org Message #9657 | |
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Do not know, things are much too complex about that, the math figurations do not stand alone, and there is a sum of events that are linked to them, that could depict even wider sums? and thus the change could be impossible?
Theorization of what I said, an answer solution? is provided when it solves the question and thus nor the question nor the answer exist any more. The outgrown might mean this thing, the condition is no more?
So if we could depict it somehow, an hierarchy (though still not so good in the depiction cause it is still linear? no better word to state it in my mind now)
means that the solution is in a higher order than the question itself and can not be provided in the lower order whatever transformation is used? maybe something like that, so maybe the refiguration is not in math itself, but it is in leaving the math behind? and the way we think behind?
I also think that the hierarchy is a good depiction but not vague enough, belonging to the external and not internal-external.
(Sorry for the internal-external it seems like symmetry and mirroring though I do not know if it is so, in particle physics I sometimes use examples, symmetry does not always exist, does this has to do with a denouncement of the external-internal symmetries I use? do not know...)
The question of science itself, is should not it become more simple instead of more complex? if we are approaching reality itself why such ever more complexity? why does not science gives us real? knowledge of what is going on?.
In the mystical-myth traditions enlightenment gives understanding of the world around you what does science give us?
In the hierarchy depiction of solutions science is a split event of the whole? and to approach something broader one should abandon science ? do not know... John the events of Atlantis and Greek Language belong to the linear history perspective, a succession of events, the atractor is Atlantis maybe to a glorius past and our leftover? but the reality has no attractor?, just events...
So the myth of Atlantis may mean something and out of the possible interpretations we choose the most coherent? to our data? but we try to have all possible interpretations and still leave the question open?
Languages and etymology along with the myths might give us more info? do not know, you are more the expert of languages that is why I ask you, a few of the words in English I checked spoke more of transformations of events rather than something concrete, but the transformation lost most of its degrees of freedom as the years passed?....
Greek though is different language much more logical and stable in its represantations?
do not know my ancient greek are almost inexistent/
Stan The Greek word is apeiron a thing that has no end, peras, and from this comes the Latin that later became infinity...
I met recently a person who says that Greek and numbers might have representations, which for me takes to arithmology, (something also used in hebrew), but I can not say whether it is so or not, cause I have not checked it, and I also do not trust the opinion of the one who stated that. The condition is of course mcuh broader than I give here hope I could learn more on the facts...
Certain people for some reason are attracted to the ancient past and also glorify it? but is there something more to this glorification other than a deficiency of the one who glorifies? my mind goes to myths again.
To end the mail, this again from another list, where no answer was given...
Something more on the something more on the modesty part, which in fact was not so modest of me. Guess that I am falling in the degree of representations but today is a holiday so on I go, with nothing of mine this time, but Sheldrake's.
Well, science is inevitably based on assumptions about the nature of the universe. In the seventeenth century the view that most scientists started from was a kind of neoplatonic conception of God, where there's a sort of timeless mind underlying the universe, essentially mathematical in nature. In this view, the mind of God is filled with mathematical equations and mathematical forms which are what ultimately shape and govern the whole of nature. The conventional scientific assumption of universal changeless laws of nature is simply derived from this neoplatonic theology of the seventeenth century. Most scientists have eliminated the mind of God from the world machine, but what they are left with is the ghost of the mind of that God, which is the idea of eternal laws of nature, fixed forever and applying to the whole universe. The big bang theory itself depends on this assumption. You assume that the laws of nature observed over the last fifty years in the laboratories on Earth apply throughout the entire fifteen-billion-year history of the entire universe, without variation, in every single part of the universe, even parts as yet unobserved by our extralarge arrays of radio telescopes. And, on this assumption, you then crank back the calculations to arrive at the big bang. But the assumption of universal laws of nature that never change, that have all been there from the beginning, is a pure assumption. There's no empirical evidence for it whatever. Insofar as people have tried to study the laws and constants of nature on Earth, they vary. I mean, we are always updating our view of the laws of nature and the so-called constants, like the speed of light. If you look at the data, they've actually fluctuated wildly over the last fifty or a hundred years in which they've been studied. These fluctuations have been dismissed as experimental errors. But in my book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World I actually go through the history of the fundamental constants, and I discuss how constant are the fundamental constants. The empirical evidence shows they are not very constant. The assumption is that, okay, if the empirical facts show variation, the empirical facts must be wrong because we know they are constant, because they are constants. Science is based, through and through, on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the universe, and this one of eternal laws and unvarying constants is in fact, in my opinion, very questionable. A lot of my own work is based on the assumption that the so-called laws of nature may not have been fixed through all time. In an evolutionary universe, why shouldn't they evolve? And in fact, my own view is that they are not laws at all. They are more like habits. There's a kind of memory in nature and these habits of nature evolve as time goes on. They are not fixed laws that were all there from the beginning—a position that can never be proved by experiment, but can only be assumed as an axiom. Yet most scientists take this for granted, as an unquestioned assumption. So I think science is based on all sorts of assumptions about nature which are essentially theological or metaphysical. In point of fact, most of the ones that science is dominated by at the moment come from a particular kind of theology common in the seventeenth century, this very Greek neoplatonic theology of God as beyond all space and time, with a mind that is eternally full of changeless mathematical ideas, and with the universe coming forth from that kind of mathematical God. If you don't call it "God," you just call it the laws of nature, or mathematical reality or something. But this is the assumption. Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg and all the leading physicists of today, including Einstein, all subscribe to this kind of view. Even though they wouldn't call it "God," they believe the ultimate reality is a timeless mathematical realm. I do not know if his possitions are real, meaning were his depictions falter in the historical representation of facts or any other kind of facts, but he sounds interesting though he talks in other books about psi dogs, angels, morphic fields, and living suns. Well, I suppose in some cases it's because people like small little bits of work—"resultlets," as David called them, not results but "resultlets." When Dave did his work he really dealt with ideas, with concepts, and in very broad brush strokes; whereas the fashion in physics today is that it should all be hyper-mathematical, and he always mistrusted mathematics. Mathematics to him was a good tool, but it was a tool and no more. The thing with mathematics, even the most beautiful and elegant mathematics, is that somewhere in there a lot of assumptions have been hidden, and when we speak together, using ordinary language, it's a little bit easier to discover what those assumptions are. Mathematics tends to conceal a lot. He was also suspicious of other aspects of the way physics was being done—for example, all this reliance in particle physics on breaking things apart rather than seeing them in an all-embracing fashion. You see, Dave felt there had been a major revolution in this century in quantum mechanics and relativity, but that our thinking hadn't really caught up with it. In the old order you could fragment things, you could define everything on a Cartesian grid of space and time. Now we needed an entirely new order, and the implicate order, which is inherently infinite, was one of the approaches he was working on. But of course, that's asking too much of physicists. They like to see things small and finite, and Dave was too much of a global thinker, I think, for many of them—except the very good ones, who were sympathetic to Dave because they realized that something new was called for. This is of the two Davids the one speaking about the other Peat to Bohm. So? But are these analogies valid beyond use as fanciful metaphors? A psychological theorist, Julian Jaynes, questions the relevance of psychology's use of scientific metaphor. He refers to "a delusion in our reasoning" and a "huge historical neurosis. Psychology has many of them. And one of the reasons that the history of science is essential to the study of psychology is that it is the only way to get out of and above such intellectual disorders."49 He argues that each age has described consciousness in terms of the images of its external gestalt. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that . . . an enormous space whose boundaries . . . could never be found out . . . Augustine among the caverned hills of Carthage was astonished at the "mountains and hills of my high imaginations," "the plains and caverns of my memory."50 Jaynes refers to the first half of the nineteenth century as "the age of the great geological discoveries . . . This led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers." Then, "in the middle of the nineteenth century, chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness . . . was a compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory . . . As the steam locomotives chugged their way, . . . the subconscious becomes a boiler of straining energy." He then notes that "when the astonishing successes of particle physics were being talked of everywhere," when "the solidity of matter was being dissolved into mere mathematical relationships in space," this seemed to psychologists like the same unphysical duality as the relationship of individuals conscious of each other.51
In contrast to Jaynes's critique, Arthur Koestler sees that "all decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines."52 (And for the cultural critic George Steiner, "even the illicit metaphor, the term borrowed though misunderstood, may be an essential part of a process of reunification. It is very probable that the sciences will furnish an increasing part of our mythologies and imaginative reference."53 Even Jaynes admits that the "concepts of science are all . . . abstract concepts generated by concrete metaphors. In physics we have force, acceleration (to increase one's steps), inertia (originally an indolent person), impedance, resistance, fields, and now charm."54 "What I have argued so far is this," writes Steiner. Until the seventeenth century, the sphere of language encompassed nearly the whole of experience and reality; today it comprises a narrower domain. It no longer articulates or is relevant to all major modes of action, thought, and sensibility. Large areas of meaning and praxis now belong to such non-verbal languages as mathematics, symbolic logic, and formulas of chemical or electronic relation.55 And conversely, the physics, mathematics, and astronomy sections of bookstores now carry such titles as The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?; The Mind of God; Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer?
For Jung, "the common background of microphysics and depth psychology" is as much physical as psychic, and so is "neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental."56 Pauli sought "to find a new language that could make the hidden dimension in nature accessible to the intellect . . . neutral with respect to the distinction between psyche and matter . . . from the physical and mathematical symbols . . . in his dreams." He alluded to the self as the "radioactive nucleus," and in a 1950 letter to Emma Jung he described synchronistic phenomena as "radioactivity."57 So? Complete when? and consistent to what? and why when and what and not the opposite? Modesty or humility? when what how where and why? Stan thanks for the Aristotele causations, John for the answers, guess we work together, but in a slow process...
Filika,
Thanasis
Ps: the mail is argyrioy@gmail.com so if anyone wants private talk would be happy...
2008/7/4 <complex-science@necsi.org>:
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