AND, on the third hand, here is binary thought, reduxduxdux

A lovely example of binary, thought, is today's news. Binary thought-- everything is either this or that. The basic construction of ordinary mentation and the means for humanity to -- redecorate the planet. Applied to the interior world binary thought gives us group think. Utterly necessary for most people. Original thought is simply not viable for large numbers of people. The qualities that predict the ability to hear the value of, a message such as that of Jan Cox, or other teachers, Gurdjieff, are, not known to this writer.  Even Jan could not always predict its presence in his listeners. So--our example at this link.
What we have is a narrative at the Skeptical Inquirer website of a person's journey from "new age' ideas to those of the skeptical inquirer. They say "skepticism" in the article. So you have a starting point and destination. New Age to skepticism. That is what they say, but in fact, what you have is the difference between a heroin addict and a methadone addict. Not much difference at all. Because it is based on binary thought, the reality, the vividness, of our world, the between the words, is lost. And lost, because of a total lapse of skeptical thinking. The website we link to is not skeptical at all. The real skeptics were skeptical about their OWN thoughts. None of that here. The 'skeptical inquirers' are not inquiring about anything. They have made up their minds, and stuck their labels according to their unscientific whims, all over their locker of the word world. So you can have new age blather, or dogmatic scientistic repetitive rote ordinary mentation.
Not interested in either, you might like to check out Jan's web site Jan Cox, who said, "if you tell me you're not falling for that, you're telling me you have already fallen for something else." The possibility of original thought is extant.

An example of non binary thought in the last sentence.

The Fields medal is widely considered the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel prize and is awarded by the International Mathematical Union on the opening day of the International Congress of Mathematicians, which takes place every four years....

The last time the event was held, in 2006, it was somewhat overshadowed by winner Grigori Perelman's refusal to accept his prize for solving the Poincaré conjecture.
ICM 2010 kicked off today in Hyderabad, India, with the Indian president Prathibha Patil awarding the prizes...

Cédric Villani of the Henri Poincaré Institute, Paris, France [was one of the recipients of a Fields Medal]...


Villani's work is also related to physics, in particular the mathematical interpretation of the concept of entropy. He has applied this to solve long-standing problems, such as how fast the motions of gas particles converge to equilibrium....


When asked why mathematics has been so successful at finding applications in the real world, Villani – sporting a burgundy silk cravat and a palm-sized spider brooch – said: "It is a very pleasant mystery. Let's continue to enjoy it and explore."

The Grendel We Cling To, part 2

The following was written at the same time as The Grendel We Cling To, post of July 2.  Below we talk about what could be a modern equivalent of dragons. By this I mean what could function to move the story along. Move the story along means for the mind to keep going, to give the effect of motion when actually all the mind can do is a bunch of still shots, like the effect of motion in a movie. Dragons we talked before about because their abduction, battles with, defeating of, moved along stories of human grief, loss, triumph and made these things understandable, gave them significance. Below I suggest that a modern equivalent is the physical sciences, that in fact by talking about science, we are enabled to obscure, to forget, the real conceptual and physical gaps in our knowledge of the world. Kind of ironic, unless we remember what Jan Cox said, there is no such thing as irony in the world, that the term irony means you do not understand what is going on.  There will be some repetition below...

Dragons, in human history, have served to move the story, the people, the world, along, they provide motion, in a world which is now, and has always, been, at the heart, incomprehensible.  Dragons are the plot points, that incite and demand human activity, they slay the heroes, the give a purpose to the quest, the dragons draw in big black lines the irreducible dimensions of the human world.

I wonder is there not some modern substitute for monsters?  The accent of reality is not on dragons in modern literature, even when they appear in stories.

Does the world make more sense now. Some would say yes. But does the world really make more sense than it did to forest dwellers two thousand years ago?

I merely raise a question which will make no sense to some, and they need read no further. Although I cannot resist pointing out that the blame we cast on corporate despoilers of pensions, of gulfs, may actually be just a way to avert our gaze from the reality of the limitations of the human intellect.

I wonder if there is not some way to deal with the rush of reality in our modern times, while still acknowledging somewhat a world which compared to the human brain conceptual apparatus, makes the latter puny.  Possibly it is still true that the known world is so far surrounded by incomprehensibility that we still need some kind of monsters to let us operate in this sea of the unknown, without finding the truth fatal.  The words about monsters serve as a kind of shield like Perseus used, to slay a monster which to see directly would be freezing.  We still need monsters to move the action along is the theme of this essay.  Our assumption is that the human intellect is part of a larger cosmos, but the human intellect is merely a part and not equipped at a mechanical level to deal realistically with questions that involve counting beyond two. And yet reality is far more complicated than the binary functioning human brain can grasp.  This assumption I will not defend now, but merely point to the writings of Jan Cox, at the moment, for reasons of space, for readers who find this phraseology intriguing.

I suggest we live In a world where Zeno, where Hume, can poke holes in any scientific argument, (and wind up being ignored for their troubles, since no literate response is possible).

When you examine the external world, it ultimately is not coherent.  Now I know most scientists out there are sputtering (if they read this far) well we just have not finished our TOE, (Theory of the Extraneous). You can list scientific mysteries til the ravens come back to Oakland. Modern scientists must deny the obvious or they would be unable to proceed in the piecemeal manner they do.  The ocean of the unknown would swamp the brave intellects who do battle at the frontiers of the known, if they did not pretend their task was doable, if the scientists did not compartmentalize in effect, and ignore the surging sea of the unknown, a sea in which we bob and must, to struggle at all, bob unbrowbeaten.

Why the gap between the observed world and quantum physics, when don't the measurements of the universe's expansion make sense, and of course, the good physicist can say, well we are working on it, give us some time. Nice and irrefutable, and ---possibly---newsprint, wallpaper, over the gaping whole we avert our eyes from. What if, these stories about how the research has just not turned over the right stone, yet, what if these stories are just, the dragons of the twenty-first century, a means of moving the story along, because, you sense you cannot stop.  What if modern science itself is the monster of the twentieth century.

You cannot stop, say, your mind, from clacking. Something within senses that such a halt could be destructive for something we love a lot, our sense of identity. (Or whatever, I'm just making this up, maybe.) The mind cannot live mechanically on the slippery coast of reality.  There must be stories which help us ignore the terrifying aspects of our world. Aspects like, its immensity.

Is it not motion, change, time itself, that poses the biggest theoretical trilemma? Same reality as that faced, pondered, fingered, expounded upon, by those forest dwelling, forebears of most of us.  They wrote Beowulf, and used the tools at their disposal to understand their world. The to and fro, cleaving and sundering, mincing and meditating, the everchanging and frozen expanse we find ourselves a part of, that moving, improbable, yet ceaseless, sea.

To take any kind of view, is to distort this world. Yet we must, go out, come in, search for a meaning beyond the hormonal verities; we must sometimes also, speak----and so those bards fixed on the hard part, the worthy quest, what makes it all move, and dragons is as good an answer, as the others I have heard---if you must have answers. For isn't the real, our daily experience of flow of change, that very flash of light, and dark, isn't that our reality, and if you have followed any of this, then see---- that real---- is what cannot be explained. If you go to war, or find a treasure, or win a Nobel, you are interacting in the world, but it is an utterly implausible world, and only the brave can even glimpse that ----fact.

Let me rephrase my proposal: the world, all the objects in it, if viewed and studied by the mind, do not really fit together. An example is David Hume's point that you cannot prove the validity of inductive logic, inductively.  My example is the world as lived flows in a manner which the external sciences cannot explain.

The old stories tell of dragons and monsters: these creatures function as a kind of explanation of movement---people's lives are threatened by nighttime attacks by monsters, people's motives, the reason they go into the woods, is to revenge themselves on a monster, or find the treasure monster's might have. The flowing quality of the medieval world is explained (partially) by monsters.

In our century, a similarly clumsy attempt to explain the vivid life we actually experience is made by scientific explanations. Both attempt the same thing, and both fail.  Both can teach us something.

Thoughts on an Independence Day Holiday

The etymology of the word poem, a thing made.  The only making people CAN do, to mirror the world, is to imitate the reality of the world, the creativity --- that is the making of life to which one created can aspire.  To make the mechanical, and call that making life, is to miss the reality of the world , the reality of the world that could count as a making. 

Which is related to the progress in making robots. Robots, to make them human, when really, what the progress with robots proves, is that people are robots, not that robots can be human.

All of which is related to the idea of independence...Independent of what? Planetary gases? Those of the dreams of the puerile, the dreams of superman.  A first step towards independence must be a consideration of what the word could mean.  That would be a step in the direction of freedom.  

The Grendel We Cling To

What is going on with those monsters in Anglo-Saxon poetry, the Grendels, the dragons? Beowulf is a good example.

Surely most people wonder this when exposed to the literature or music, of anonymous bards, and very nonomous musicians like Wagner?  Don't we all  find monsters enthralling, but---- why? 

Here might be one reason: the dragons and monsters thrill us because their historic function was crucial for humanity and that function was----they represented the real.

Huh, you ask, dragons don't exist, and there is no way some Anglo Saxon story-teller ever saw a dinosaur.  How could dragons function as the reality note in a story? 

Monsters demonstrably mark the spot on maps where there is an unknown.  The Indians (American) in the 17th century spoke of monsters on the river (Mississppi), monsters who had a huge roar and would not let travelers pass.  This might be the way a plains people would describe a waterfall. 

Our conceptions are always static, a word is not a word if it cannot be defined, but a definition is a confinement.  There is no real motion if your reality was exactly as your words portray it. And yet it –the world --moves.  To comprehend this movement is one function of monsters.  At best all the human mind can do, at best---is take still snapshots of the rapid rush we are contained in.

Dragons move the story, the people, the world, along, they provide motion, in a world which is now, and has always, been, at the heart, incomprehensible.  Dragons are the plot points, that incite and demand human activity, they slay the heroes, they give a purpose to the quest, the dragons draw in big black lines the irreducible dimensions of the human world.

You ask why the young and  good are killed.  At the level of words it makes no sense.  Yet the flow of reality is experienced even if we cannot capture, convey, our world in words.  This gap between words and reality, is where monsters come in. They provide the differential over which the water of reality can flow, in a closer approximation to the world we experience, than can words alone. 

Yet now, over a thousand years after Beowulf, slew and was slain, we still love dragons, and even sing about their disappearance.  Does that mean the epistemological issues raised in this essay are resolved. I wonder is there  not some modern substitute for monsters?  I wonder and intend to continue this essay soon...

Kawkawkaw

Words are like bird feet.  And if you picture thousands and thousands of bird feet, you get a glimpse of the boring and mechanical quality of ordinary thought.  Back up though,-- words are like bird feet. The point is that birds fly, that is their glorious advantage. But they have feet and feet allow them to land and peck around, get their nourishment, and to secure themselves in trees at night. Feet connect birds to, in the words of Jan Cox, "the bosom of the mother." (He was talking about plants that cling, to earth, maybe I have stretched things too far with that picture.) Anyway feet are critically an aspect of avian reality, but they are not the motor of the species. And words are like bird feet, but most people assume that man's cerebral dimension is typified by words.  Most people never glimpse that man's ability to perceive reality involve words at the most mundane level. Words are critically important, but not the limit, not the glorious dimension that is a human potential, albeit a potential that cannot be gained, mechanically.

If you don't know what concentration is,

If you don't know what concentration is, how are you going to evaluate any possible fluctuations and analyze any possible significance?

The media of late (well since 2007) has raised the question of the effect of surfing the web on people's ability to concentrate.  However, the lack of an effective definition of concentration, one that focuses on it as an aspect of the human mind, and a potential power of the human mind, means that any investigation suffers from a confusion of terminology. Also the authors of these queries are focusing their speculation on too small a target, and so are doomed to fail.  They are looking at an individual mind, when such does not objectively exist. The rational binary, mechanical mind in the human species, does not exist to investigate questions of inner reality, and functions to rearrange the external world, to quote Jan Cox, loosely, and majorly, this binary mind serves to link the millions of people on the planet into a organism whose significant changes occur on a scale beyond that of an individual species, and at a level characterized by the epiphenomenal nature of verbiage. This is difficult to study since the survival of the organism needs every individual part to consider it's own cellular survival as crucial to the health of the larger organism.  A standard aspect of biological life.  

Have I gotten off the subject of concentration?  People do not know what concentration is, so again, their efforts to analyze the significance of the web, will not yield satisfactory results.  The average person has no clue about the nature of concentration, or the powers it can attain.  

Now spelling, that is a topic which needs to be analyzed in terms of the cyber changes we are participants of. It is not that texting and instant messaging has altered orthography. The interesting and perhaps minor thing is spell checkers. I used to be a marvelous speller. So vain was I of this ability that people did not hesitate to point out the lack of connection between spelling and intelligence.  I never used a computer spell checking program in document creation. Now though, with the built in spell checkers in email programs, I am so used to using it to find typos, that I never question my spelling and just accept whatever group of letters that make that red underlining disappear.  My native abilities in this field are fadding.