The Problem of Coexistence

Paracelsus supposedly said, "There are no poisons, only quantities". I would rather say that some things can only coexist to a given degree.

P.S. Watch out for umbrellas.

Should philosophers be more poetic?

The liberation theologian and poet Ernesto Cardenal writes poetry that explores the relationship between science and our spiritual world. For example, in his poetic opus Canticula Cosmico (Cosmic Canticles) he writes:

Y el gas se condensó más y más
cada vez con más y más masa
y la masa se hizo estrella y empezó a brillar.
Condensándose se hacían calientes y luminosas.
La gravitación producía energía térmica: luz y calor.
Como decir amor.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION (by Jonathan Cohen):

And the gas condensed more and more
gaining increasingly more mass
and mass became star and began to shine.
As they condensed they grew hot and bright.
Gravitation produced thermal energy: light and heat.
That is to say love.

Luz y calor, como decir amor. With a few simple words we are joined in communion before a combusting campfire. Or transported to an imagined afternoon nap under the radiating fusion of an early autumn sun. The observable, and empirically confirmable, is connected to our inner meaningful lifeworld.

Science exposes how amazing the Universe truly is. But the predominantly prosaic language used in a scientific context often fails to conjure the beautiful connectivity illustrated, time and again, by probative empirical means. Ernesto Cardenal remedies this short coming by exploring scientific inquiries through poetry. Though he does not substantiate his implications scientifically, he definitely participates in meaningful conjecture built atop scientific inquiry. In this sense, he is no different than a philosopher. He creates connections between that which at first glance seems distant and orthogonal. Cardenal is a theologian who uses language not just effectively, but evocatively as well.

Language is our fundamental toolset for illustrating what is not obvious prima facie, at the moment of sensual apprehension. It is a symbolic juxtaposition of experiences that have passed out of immediacy. It is apple juice, the liquid of a long gone fruit. Or amorous longing, the desire for an absent predicate of love. And beyond such neighborly concepts as fruit and juice, longing and loving, are juxtapositions that tie together what seems infinitely separate. In death is life. At the end is a beginning. We are all stardust.

Contrast Cardenal's theological poetry to Judith Butler's infamous and price winning philosophical prose:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Whereas Cardenal draws powerful analogies through simple but evocative subject-predicate relationships, Butler obscures her meaning in long dense run-on sentences. As we venture into Butler's world, we get further and further away from the familiar. Our lifeworld recedes in the distance until all we are left with are unfamiliar references, juxtaposed in yet meaningless contexts. Butler defends her prose by pointing out that everyday common-sence can place a veil over the truth. What seems like the case may not be so. And philosophy's job is, so to say, to explore the familiar in unfamiliar ways. And therefore calls for a new and unfamiliar language. We cannot break common fallacies except through uncommon means.

To some extent, Butler has a point. But that does not defend her initially incomprehensible prose. If anything is wrong with her prose, it is at the very least inefficient. Since it relies heavily on largely unexplained contextual reference (such as "Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects"), she requires the reader to be well versed in her own lifeworld. We must study Butler to understand Butler. This may seem to be the case with many of the great philosophers. Not so. Plato can be understood without extensive knowledge of his life or of Ancient Greece. Having a degree in the Antiquities and philosophy certainly helps. But it is by no means required. For example, Platos' work The Republic contains mostly passages along the following lines:

Now the first and greatest of necessities is food, which is the condition of life and existence.

Certainly.

The second is a dwelling, and the third clothing and the like.

True.

And now let us see how our city will be able to supply this great demand. We may suppose that one man is a husbandman, another a builder, some one else a weaver—shall we add to them a shoemaker, or perhaps some other purveyor to our bodily wants?

Quite right.

The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.

Clearly.

The intentionality of the words echo across two and a half millennia. I suspect that Butler's will fade into the fog of forgotten contexts. Unless, of course, she has discovered something that in time will seem as natural as it was once unfamiliar. Plato may be more comprehensible because his investigations have had roughly 150 generations to transition from the uncommon into one of the bedrocks of philosophy. As alien as quantum mechanics once seemed and as hard a time we may still have to access its world, new visualizations, and analogies like electron clouds, are slowly making its invisible realms part of our extended perceptions. Perhaps Judith Butler is so astute a genius that her contemporaries are bound to ridicule her novel insights. We chortle as she sheds the old and once obvious and battles her way through a dense unfamiliar jungle "toward the politically new". I doubt it. But nonetheless, since my crystal ball is as foggy as a polluted 19'th century London, my doubt is ultimately but conjecture.

One could say that the role of science, philosophy, and even theology is not to be evocatively beautiful, but brutally expository. And one might claim that poetry adds no value to the form of discourse these fields are engaged in. It is of little import to their actual relationship that amor and calor rhyme in Spanish. Their english counterparts, love and heat, do not rhyme. And yet it would seem strange to claim that their relationship is any different depending on the cultural context. The sun and fire making has been similarly important to Inuits and Bedouins through the ages. Anyone who has experienced a cold Saharan night will not be surprised.

Science favored language is in fact math, a concise and precise set of international formalities that minimize misunderstandings. ∏ does not mean 2.71828183 in Canada and 3.14159265 in Japan. But not all science can effectively be communicated using math. Though I'm not a biologist, I suspect that expressing the cell underwent meiosis would be quite cumbersome using vector fields! Math is in some sense poetic, but not in the phonetic sense. Since the relationship between the intended is irrelevant of the symbols and sounds used to express them, using these relationships may, unlike in tonally unpoetic mathematical languages, fool us to see connections where there are none. But Almost anything is fraught with dangers. Knowledge of logical fallacies can be used both to fool and as a powerful safeguard against bamboozlement.

Poetry is a powerful way of efficiently highlighting connections. Though the emphasize may be phonetically language dependent and divorced from the "actual" conceptual links, they condense the amount of information necessary to transfer understanding and make their impression far more powerful. Of course, if we loose knowledge of the articulated phonemes, all such advantage is lost. The efficiency is dependent on a high degree of cultural fluency. But imagine you were parsing the text of an ancient civilization. You slowly figured out the meaning of some words but knew only a fraction of the phonemes. However, it seemed evident to you that this is poetry that works not only on a conceptual but a tonal level. Would it not make it more likely that the texts meaning would suddenly leap on you like a saber toothed tiger?

Should philosophers be more poetic? Or would poetics be a distraction from the central mision of the philosophical endeavor?

Bust Open the Herring and Dance

It's been a long time... way too much through the mind lately. I'll return...but on a continuation of the somewhat extended and originally short intermezzo, the transformation is almost complete. 14 years and counting, North American. Now shed your skin European fogies! Follow Berlin's half plus century. Transition fully to an age beyond the antiquated words of a half decade plus dead Derrida...subsume yourself in chemistry and biology, text addendumed. Politically confused with utmost global clarity.

 Now move with your LCD Sound System.

 

 Bust open the sour herring. The knäckebröd is in the jar!

Exercise for Geek Freaks

Short intermezzo...

Tired of all those talking heads spewing nonsense on some "news" program as you exercise? Try this: Start off by silently walking at a brisk pace on your treadmill for 5 minutes or so to warm up. This is the centering phase. Shift to a running speed of about 8 km / hour. The speed needs to be exact but will depend on the length of your stride. I'm roughly 1.81 meters tall and the given speed is geared at someone of my height and stride. Adjust accordingly! Then, turn on the following video:




Play in a loop for about 30-40 minutes. Work up a good sweat. Burn some calories! Get some muscles going! Yeah, baby! And when you're just about too exhausted to keep going, let's go totally transcendental. Switch down to a brisk walking speed of about 6.4 km. Again, the exact speed will depend on your stride. Then start the following video in a 15-20 minutes loop:



Be one with the zone. Transcend, my friend! And take that conjecture of  talking heads with a grain of salt. Especially when you get those endorphins going and your mind opens up to inspiration. And get those muscles going geek freak!

Keep to your adjusted speeds. If you need more performance, adjust the inclination of your treadmill. I currently do the above exercise at a 2-4 % incline. 

PS. May Benoît Mandelbroth's legacy inspire us all in strange and unexpected ways!

Insightful or Rational? Meandering Reflections...

Circular reasoning upsets our sensibilities and infinite regress troubles us. I'm no exception. But on reflection it does strike me as odd that we are willing to postulate infinite space in all its varieties, closed or open, and yet regard their logical equivalents as fallacies. Certainly saying, "Children should not be tortured because it makes them suffer" is to some satisfactory. But to others, the intellectually curious, it begs the question "And?"

"Is torture not by definition the infliction of suffering? So, what you are saying is, in effect, that we should not torture because it is torture? And why did you specifically mention children? Does this imply we can can cause suffering to teenagers and adults but not the innocent?".

Intellectuals are like children. Almost anything you say to them begs a question. But forbid we get caught in a loop! It unnerves us. And having learned the magic of derivatives, we expect something as concrete and as solid as a number if we split the world into ever smaller parts. Concrete?? A number? What are those abstract ideas called ZERO, ONE and TWO anyway?? What does concrete really mean?

James P. Houston of Scotland, a.k.a. Curious, proposed on Talking Philosophy that perhaps morality requires no justification at all. This is tantamount to intuitionism. James concurrently asked what could possible justify not subjecting children to torture. A bit odd, but all right, let's run with it. Children and torture it is.

So, child torture is wrong because...well, to cause suffering is simply wrong, child or not. End of story! Right? Yes, but a thorough and universal application of this insight seems to implore us to something like Jainism. Unless we declare suffering a purely human condition. And even so we might have to come to terms with violence against our brethren in order to defend life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness against the brutality of the unenlightened. Those pesky vikings surfing the crest beyond the firth, willing to ransack, pillage and cause untold suffering.

We could claim that what got us into a Gordian knot above is reason itself. So we shed reason as such and abandon ourselves to the pure realm of intuition. Aum vajrapani hum...You will simply know when violence, and the ensuing suffering, is due and when not. I can sense in my very gut what it means to defend oneself and what it means to inflict undue torture. To the intuitionist this might seem fine, but I for one will have to scream out "Hold on! We have just jettisoned what seems to have given us Euler's formula, de Brogli waves and the Boyer-More algorithm!" I cannot, will not, no no no! It upsets my intuition and gives me heartburn. Calcium carbonate, please!

The Zen butcher might reprimand me, "Whenever you eat, you eat too much!"

He will fill me with sake and kick me onto the beaten path.

"Where do you get those wonderful steaks from anyway, Mr. Butcher?"

"What do you think, they grow on trees!!!

Off I go. Back to the mountain.

Philosophy is replete with claims about the obvious. We've developed a whole vocabulary to appeal to people's most basic sensibilities. Prima facie, self-evident, tautological necessity. The intuitionist will point to this and admonish the rationalist for trying to explain everything. "Why do you ask for the reason we should not torture children? Do you question that 1 + 1 = 2? Or that the ratio of a circle's circumference to diameter is always pi? Shame on you!"

"Fair enough. More sake, please. Can I get off this mountain now?"

Good houses are certainly built on firm bedrock, not puffy clouds in the sky with who knows how many thousand's of feet to the ground. Levitation is an art mastered only by the few "enlightened". And a little skepticism from the rest of us is not out of order. How do we chaff the "enlightened" from the "quacks"? Is it not the philosopher's job to socratically find that bedrock on which everything is built, and make such distinctions? Ah, yes, but the intuitionist bypasses all that nonsense, silencing the mind in 6 easy steps.

But for the rationalist there is, alas, no repose. She remains unconvinced. Her mind is still restless, her thoughts unsettled. Yes, she is aware of the conclusions of her own project: the incompleteness theorem. Ah, the incompleteness theorem, yes, the incompleteness theorem smiles the intuitionist.

"But what about everything between here and the unprovable axiomatic base of everything", protest the rationalist. She is flustered but insistent. "What about finding the smallest string of all strings? Help me Chaitin and Kolmogorov! Help me! "

"You mean Brahman", whispers the intuitionist. That magnificent but incomprehensible force behind everything. "Speak with me, Aum... " Ring, ring. "Hold on. Have to take this call. Brahmy is on the line. Be right back"

"Brahman, shaman", says the rationalist in stubborn refusal. "You know who wrote that software that makes it possible for us to share so much data over wireless frequency channels based on fast Fourier transformations? I did, my friend I did!" She is combative. "No torture because it's torture?? Brahman, shaman!" She is worked up.

"I have to call you back, dude. I've got Ms. Fizzy Tizzy Logic here. She's off on one of her dangerous escapades again. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Spot on. I'll call you right back, Brahmy." Click. "Look Ms. Fizzy Tizzy No Fuzzy, sometimes things can't be explained by your simple rules. And when you try it, you conclude that the moon is made of cheese. Come on. The moon is not made of cheese, is it. You just know that smack right there, no."

"No, it isn't. Obviously not because...."

"It isn't? You sure?"

"The whole moon is cheese thing is just bad prepositional logic, that's all! Look, it's easy to prove that..."

"Yes?"

"I know what your trying to do Mr. Mushy All Feel Goody! You're just trying to get me caught in a game of stacking turtles on turtles!"

"You can call it what you want, baby. Your way it's turtles all the way. Not everything has a sufficient reason. Sometimes you just know, hotcakes."

"So Mr. I Feel It All Here in the Heart, are there an infinite number of primes?"

"Sure, yeah..."

"And how do you know this Mr.Cuddles? You feel it right there in your gut, do you?

"No, but Euclid...ah, ok, fine. Ah, yes, but what's a prime? Ha! Right there! Eh? What do say about that"

"A prime is by its very definition..."

"Never mind. I gotta call Brahmy back. I should give you the number. You definitely need to kick back, relax and connect sometimes".

Something rational is something achieved through the faculties of reason. In logic – its main tool – the conclusions must by necessity be a product of the assumptions. The illogical is something nonsensical, something that is unsound. When held in the mind it only produces disharmony. The consequent always necessarily follows from the antecedent. Logic cannot by the very nature of what it's meant to be, produce something that does not follow from the premises. This is true regardless of whether we speak of propositional, modal or any other type of logic.

If logic does not produce results by necessity, the very logic used to achieve the result must be altered. But what is consequently true is not necessarily correct, and what is consequently false is not necessarily incorrect. Everything hinges on the antecedents, the proposed axioms, the assumptions we make. If the axioms are correct, the result will be correct. And if the axioms are incorrect, then the conclusions will be incorrect. Or, in the latter case, I should say might or might not be incorrect. You can still produce a correct result despite flawed assumptions. They are unrelated to one another. But, importantly, you cannot produce a flawed outcome from accurate assumptions. Logic demands that it be structured such that this is an impossibility.

The rational is a powerful process, a set of strict rules that when applied step by step produces a valid outcome. It's no wonder that so many intellectuals are enamored with the rational to the detriment of the intuited. But its outcome will only necessarily accord with the facts if, and only if the facts used as an input are themselves true. And herein lays the crux.

So intuitions continue to haunt us as we descend the endless stack of ever stranger and transmogrified turtles. The transcendent truth – that torturing children is plain and simply wrong – temptingly calls us to abandon our search for stringent and logically foolproof grounding.

And then, as we are ready to nuzzle in the obviousness of it all, we are side swiped by the insanity of...



And we begin with fervor to again find undeniable, logically uncontradictable proof of the, to us, seemingly obvious, that child torture is an abomination. Turtles! Here I come!

[TO BE CONTINUED....]