Disignorance

Wow is this a great holiday or what. Here is another story that speaks for itself. This link,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html
is to the comments of a theoretical physicist Sean Carroll and the cool thing is, here is a scientist, not a science popularizer, so, after you read his assessment of what modern physics is lacking, notice---the number of times he says we don't know the answer to that and, his solution "think harder." This is a real scientist here talking, and there are some comments to be made on this category of person.
1. Real scientists have fun. That is why they are not more interested in the work of Jan Cox. (Of course now that Jan is dead, it is a question a living teacher, which I am not about to get into here.). Real scientists already DO a low grade version of "real work," and it is ------- fun beyond words.
2. But as I hinted, these fun having scientists are not driven by the psychological discrepancies which motivate many to search for some version of Real Work. So they miss the push to go forward and miss, well, everything. That's okay. We recognise our brothers even if they fail to get the family connection. Of course most who seek to solve a certain disignorance, never find the real work either. And at least the scientists are having real fun. Their yellow circuits are flashing on newness, they are living on an edge.

3. Real scientists do not have to face the primordial problem of how do you remember to (let's say, remember the work, it has different names.) All the natural scientist has to do is glance at the physical world surrounding him---that is where his intellect is focused, and the external world is where his achievement comes from. The natural scientist is using the mechanical mind for the job it is designed to do. Of course they are going to put words where words can't go. But you can't have everything. So the link I am giving is to an example of the most fun you can have with words on.

The link should be above, but here it is again:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/carroll09/carroll09_index.html

A holiday license

Quoting is something I do sparingly, even of Jan Cox, ---usually, but
I just got the following from a newsletter associated with
wordsmith.org. What grabbed my heart was the Indo European root of the
word 'science.' The info is in the derivation of a word, scienter:
Quote:
scienter
PRONUNCIATION:
(sy-EN-tuhr)
MEANING:
adverb: Deliberately; knowingly.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin scienter (knowingly), from scire (to know; to separate one
thing from another). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to
cut or split) that also gave us schism, ski, shin, science,
conscience, and nice.
End quote.

And this reminds me of one of the astounding things Jan Cox said: and
this is a close quote. He said, if you do not know the etymology of a
word, you cannot use it properly. His example was the 'word cakewalk.'

And quoting Jan, I found this recently, after some comments I made in
an attempt to convey something Jan helped me glimpse, about faith.
Here is a quote from a paper Jan wrote and numbered 6950.
"That which is real and practical requires no faith, but still- a man
must believe in the work or he wastes his time. If a man does not
believe in what he does, nothing will happen. If a man does not
believe in the ideas of the work, he can never think in a new way...No
man can be converted to this work."

end...quote....

The Burglar's Bugle

It is possible to grasp the dilemma that determinism presents to the
rational, verbalizing, mind of man. The self described mind of man as
elucidative, and illuminating, can only conceive its own destruction
or impotency at the picture that any knowing, any dialogue, inner or external, is
not affected by the exchange of ideas, but rather a flow of forces,
loosely described as genetic. The picture of the mind producing words
as a genetic bugle might put forth sound should not obscure that the
verbalizing mind plays a crucial role in the progress of humanity, as the
arranger and rearranger of the external world. a function Jan Cox outlined.
And perhaps that includes the imperialistic aspect of the verbalizing
function of the human mind, as part of the propulsion for this
progress.

It may be that the prospect that a few men, through out history, have
succeeded in leveraging this determinism to gain a foothold, a toe
hold, on a vista, from which everything, including determinism, may
(one surmises) appear,-- glorious--, if non transmittable via the ordinary intellect,
is equally scandalous, (as scandalous as the fact that determinism
points to the impotency of the rational mind) to the verbalizing
function of the human intellect.

Easy even to feel sorry a bit for the human mind, if it didn't so resemble
some gadget sold on late night television.

But of course the human intellect is
superb as evading basic, and really obvious, truths. The picture Jan
drew many years ago of the intellect is in this story---man is a
person in a house who thinks he hears a burglar, and the
burglar-----is in a position to say, here, let me help you --find this
intruder..

Human Soup for the Chicken Lover's Soul

The fact is most (I was going to say all, but how do I know) of us
take breaks. What supports you then, when you are not struggling, is
mechanical habit, and that suffices for, for most peoples whole lives.
The only safe place to retreat to, is the pararational alertness Jan
Cox describes. The ordinary definitions of faith have no place in a
real struggle, except you could call the humble awareness of your own
ignorance, and not panicking when you glimpse the enormity of your
ignorance, a kind of faith. But generally speaking, what the ordinary
call faith is for a few, a "kick this door in" scrawl that points the
way to, in addition to the constant need for pararational alertness, a
direction for (what Jan Cox calls) 'neuralizing,' which could be said
to be a whirling around of various possibilites in your head, not
landing on one explanation but trying to think of as many explanations
for the circumstance that called forth the label of 'faith.' A bunch
of explanations all together at the same time.
What you want is at least a soup of the unthought of before, mixed
with the undeniable, and tossed together with a sense that as
mysterious as the world is, you can make sense of it--not the whole
thing, but spoon full at at time, and the spoonful, is not at all the
whole soup, but is still always just a part, that spoonful of
understanding you taste. It all starts with a stone of novelty.
And throw in some commas.
And---what if, really, what if----your best ideas, your best intentions, your secret assumptions, were of the level of significance of----a chicken scratching in the grass....what if.....
this chicken is adorable but exists in a world of jaguars, among an infinitude of things, which the chicken cannot cannot know, regardless of the chance of encounters.

A Light of the Present

The idea that since light has a finite speed the star light we see
originated actually at some time in the past, maybe billions of years
ago, has lost its ability to amaze, though perhaps not irremediably.
Few focus on the reality that the fact the light we see from a candle
must actually also originate in the past and thereby must give us, a
picture of ---- the past, not the current reality we suppose.
And who can imagine that words are like candles. As our OWN words,
even, leave our lips, they are already in the past of any spinal cord
reality. They do not reflect our current thoughts, intentions,
necessarily.
Yet like the Mayan ball games where the loser was a blood sacrifice,
our verbal interplay -- the mass of words, a token, a ball in play,
becomes the entire universe, for modern man. And as in any game,
there are rules, arbitrary rules, which all must accept. And the
rules, say the game is ----not a game, but reality.
There is a way to silently step back and verify for oneself, the game,
it's limitations, it's pretensions. There is a way, but surely it
would be inappropriate to speak of that WAY, to those who trifle with
--- important things, and weight heavily, the irrelevant. And those
who, to use the terminology of Jan Cox, do not even suspect the
importance of an aim.
So yeah, maybe there is such a thing as a light of the present, but how could that be what this post is about?

Impossibility for breakfast

An Italian court has been in the news because a judge there reduced a
murderers sentence (originally nine years) after presented with
evidence the guy had a gene for aggression.

Quoting New Scientist:
"Last week, Nature reported that Pier Valerio Reinotti, an appeal
court judge in Trieste, Italy, cut Bayout's sentence by a year after
finding out he has gene variants linked to aggression."

The science community sputtered about how individual responsibility
was not different for someone with such a gene, and other stuff. The
facts pointed out by Jan Cox, the 20th century empiricist of
mysticism, is that genetics determines everything. Everything, those
nice ladies who would die rather than spill tea while filling
someone's cup, are just as helpless as some bonking conker.

The mechanical mind cannot remember the above and also keep in mind
that man cannot, should not, relinquish a hold on his belief that
individual responsibility is possible. The entire progress of human
history depends partly on persons maintaining such a conviction. So
scientists and more often, commentators will talk on about
environmental versus genetic influences and free will, without ever
noticing such discussions shred comprehensibilty, and this is not
noticed because people HAVE to believe in individual responsibility.
They cannot notice that to talk of genetic influences makes no sense
unless you can draw a line between what is genetically determined and
what is not.

To try though and grasp these contradictory things can be a start
toward appreciating the nature of the human intellect, an organ with a
function different from that imagined by public intellectuals. To
appreciate the impossibility of a task, like personal change in a
universe completely determined, is a necessary step for persons with
a certain aim.

The Reality of Paganism

It is odd that the world has given up paganism as a serious theology,
which it was once. Now not a trace is left, of any explanations. Yet
paganism was unsurpassed in explaining the world in one respect. In
this paganism has never been surpassed. Paganism communicates how
genetics determines everything. Modern science every few years comes
up with research results indicating the power of genetics to explain
behavior, and after a nervous giggle, the western mind forgets the
entire event. Completely. But a couple of millenia ago, there was no
reason to deny that man was not an autonomous creature. Having your
life determined by a drunk deity, a cranky blacksmith, a jealous
woman----explained the observed world in a quite competent manner.
Paganism was empirical. The gods were like your crazy neighbor only
the god had real power to control events, not jsut, like your
neighbor, chatter. What else could one conclude?

And we gave up a workable view of human events, for......monotheism?
What is that about?
How could we have gone from a theory that explains the evidence, for
one that expects man to improve himself, a hopeless waste of energy in
most cases. Well yes, there is a reason that monotheism works----it
provides a mechanism to accomplish a certain kind of progress, but not
the progress that religion describes, rather, on a large scale, the
progress of religion is the efficiency of change on a large scale. But
what a hard sell, if anyone looked at the facts. And yet monotheism
did prevail in the west. Perhaps the reason for the triumph of
monotheism is that the intellect of man reached a certain stage of
progress in a human economy. Not the stage of effective control of
human behavior, the intellect of man cannot claim that, but---the
intellect of man can claim the goal of rational behavior is a workable
goal. It is the ability of the human mind to tout the advantages of
rationalism, that explains the triumph of monotheism. For the god of
the monotheists, is, possibly, just that human intellect, which claims
to be able to understand, ---everything. The triumph of a sole god is
the triumph, of a world transparent to human understanding. Maybe.