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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Dec 21, 2015 - 11:45am PT
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^^^ Right you are. But isn't it "questioning" that causes us to evolve?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 21, 2015 - 05:08pm PT
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There are no answers not because one can’t find answers but because the questions themselves don’t really exist. We’re just amusing ourselves.
You answered the question of what we are doing.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 21, 2015 - 05:10pm PT
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Ok, if that works for you, my friend. Doesn't matter, does it?
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 21, 2015 - 05:14pm PT
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because the questions themselves don’t really exist.
This not true.
Everything does exist in the material world although it is temporary and fleeting ....
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 21, 2015 - 07:53pm PT
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And here I thought we were talking about Dostoyevsky . . .
Eddie & Fedya
;>)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 21, 2015 - 08:18pm PT
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If that's Fedya, then who's Gabby?
We are talking Russian writers.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 21, 2015 - 08:24pm PT
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Yes . . . I can see the striking and understated wisdom in that quote. Great literature that only a master could compose. It makes me embarrassed to sit around permuting my ten numbers . . .
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 22, 2015 - 05:49pm PT
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The Ideal Mathematician
This little article is depressingly accurate in its description of a prototype research mathematician. I was a full-time teacher and a part-time researcher, but my experience in research was like that of this "IM". The international research clique in which I participated was relatively small - perhaps a hundred or so, and the sub-clique in which I was active, perhaps 20-30.
The prominent mathematicians who led my group are mostly gone or elderly ,retired, and no longer active; and since it was difficult for many years for my generation to find positions in large research institutions, those of us who gravitated to small state universities or private colleges had no doctoral students to promulgate our wisdom and interest. That's how a mathematics specialty dies away.
My interests were in the analytic theory of continued fractions and similar topics, and were not difficult to explain to other mathematicians, unlike more modern ideas in "soft" analysis. Generally, specialty topics these days are as described in this piece: way, way out there on the frontiers, the ends of journeys fraught with hazards, accessible to only a few intrepid adventurers.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 22, 2015 - 06:21pm PT
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As in art, if you are not of a popular school, your mathematics may be mainly of interest to yourself, at least for the times you live in. That does not mean the art or math is bad. We had a great artist in our small town of Springville NY who never sold a painting and never wanted to.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 22, 2015 - 06:54pm PT
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As a Christmas exercise in embracing goodwill and open-heartedness and understanding and good cheer and all that jazz, I'm going to take an hour here and try and make as clear as I can what I believe is the source of all true religious sentiment, above and beyond addressing the primordial but largely disowned human fear that we are all going to die.
This is a nuanced subject but let me take a whack at it from the perspective that we experience a duo reality of personal (subjective) and impersonal (the realm of objects “out there”) points of view. Squaring these perspectives is related to what PPSP often refers to as transcending our normal dualistic manner of operating in the natural world.
Because there is little promise of quantifying this by traditional means, I'll use a metaphor (literature) to approach the subject of “reality” (which includes all people, places, things and phenomenon for all time and non-time), keeping it as close to home – what I know professionally – in the hopes of playing into my strengths, which likely is the easiest way make clear statements.
So what is literature? If we consider it as a stand-alone source object external to our bodies, say a book or an article in a magazine or even a tweet on our phone, the tangible, objective fruit of our inquiry can only frame a series of seemingly organized letters. Typically black works on a white page. A human being of this world, with specialized knowledge of particular languages can look at this lettered code and generate all manner of qualified evaluations about what the code IS, what it means and says and refers to, above and beyond the simple marks/letters on a page or a monitor. But that is what we humans can do WITH the black marks.
Another intelligence from some other realm, given that they have similar sense organs, might experience the black marks as similar geometric shapes, but the human take on what the letters are, mean, and imply will be totally lost on them because the symbols are redolent of an essentially human, subjective milieu. But what happens when a human who understands the language of the symbols digs in and pulls those words into their subjective experience. The symbols in the book or article jumps alive.
Good literature seems to be a living phenomenon, and the best stuff encourages total immersion whereby through active imagination and referencing their own natures and personal pasts, the reader is no longer experiencing some object “out there” but becomes a kind of proxy participant in the experiential universe implied and provoked or sourced by the objective symbols on the page or monitor. Note how this happens in movies, whenever we “suspend judgement” that the flickering flow of images is not “real,” but something our minds literally bring to life.
With a story or a movie in which we manage full immersion, to varying degrees we transcend the duality of the impersonal symbols or images/sounds that are out there as simple physical data, as opposed (seemingly) to the personal sphere in which we live and experience the world. Quite naturally we understand that “literature” is not merely the symbols or images, but the interface between the objective source stuff and the personal gestalt we bring to the work.
We can argue about this process this way and that but we all can agree that without our subjective participation, the marks and symbols on the page or the screen are merely geometric shapes overlaid on a background. The black symbols betray no objective evidence of any story or narrative or any thing greater then the black marks themselves. Put differently, the story is not entirely “in” the black marks, nor yet do they entirely evoke or source the narrative. Moreover, our minds evoke the story, but they do NOT create the black marks. There is truly some thing out there.
Now consider for a moment that to lesser or greater degrees, the black marks/symbols are not qualitatively different then most any other object in time and space, and what we experience “out there” is in a sense, little more than a version of the simple line drawings we see in kid's coloring books, where they fill in the blanks and garnish on details with many colored Crayolas or felt pens.
Stepping back, some might say – Not so fast. What you are talking about (beginning with your literary metaphor) is merely a story or a subjective experience. What we measure is objective and physical whereas what you describe is “merely” in our heads, imagined, nor real = physical – a tacit admission that the experiential is not, itself, physical. Shakespeare and Milton were merely making sh#t up. What we are measuring is actually THERE, and we can prove it through experimentation and objective methodology that render reliable predictions.
Conversely we might say that what you are measuring are in fact simply the black marks/symbols on the page, so to speak, objects that are “out there.” Then the rejoinder that while this may be true, those physical marks “source” or create the emergent experience that you claim is more than the marks themselves. And round and round we go.
Fact is this circular tango is often triggered by the default to reductionism, whereby the physical is held to be the source of all phenomenon, which in theory can be entirely described by material processes.
I always wondered about this, and since I have been hammered for “misunderstanding” science, I put the question of physical reductionism to a climber and professor of cosmology (specializing in the Big Bang), saying, I always bungle the so-called scientific offerings to these questions, so kindly give me yours, asking, “Tell me about the time line per the big bang. If we find ourselves right here in this body in space and time, and start reducing down and back along the causal chain, what do we find? He provided this excerpt:
“Before the big bang, there was not yet any matter, but there was a lot of energy in the form of light, which comes in discrete packets called photons. When photons have enough energy, they can spontaneously decay into a particle and an antiparticle. (An antiparticle is the exact opposite of the corresponding particle--for example, a proton has charge +e, so an antiproton has charge -e.) This is easily observed today, as gamma rays have enough energy to create measurable electron-antielectron pairs (the antielectron is usually called a positron). It turns out that the photon is just one of a class of particles, called the bosons, that decay in this manner. Many of the bosons around just after the big bang were so energetic that they could decay into much more massive particles such as protons (remember, E=mc2, so to make a particle with a large mass m, you need a boson with a high energy E). The mass in the universe came from such decays.”
I wondered about photons, if they were really there BEFORE matter, as the cosmologist claimed, and if so, following the reductionist model, from whence did the photons come from. In short: What, specifically, gave rise to the photons? What were the photons origins?
But playing the Devil's advocate, I wondered: “What if the astronomer is wrong about energy/light existing first, that is, do other scientists have other ideas about what is more fundamental, what was antecedent on the causal chain: light/energy, or matter.
Remember, reductionism ALWAYS refers to a prior cause or more fundamental thing or phenomenon that GAVE RISE to the next thing/object/phenomenon in the causal chain. So again, what came first – light or matter.
I put the question to a physicist at Rocreation, the local gym, who said per the cosmologist: Bollocks! Light was birthed BY the big bang. No such particle existed BEFORE. The aforementioned cosmologist apparently drank the bong water, he joked, but he added this:
“The odds are almost insurmountably stacked in favor of energy existing BEFORE matter, though the issue is confusing. While our current understanding of physics keeps us from making accurate analysis of anything that happened in the first 10^-43 s after our universe “started” (Big Bang), many, or some scientists, at any rate, believe there first existed some sort of vacuum that contained energy. Particles (mostly matter) may have popped into and out of existence from the energy in this vacuum state. If they did, energy was still primary and lasting, while the matter was virtual and incorporeal insofar that it didn't last. If particles didn't pop into and out of existence, energy definitely came first. Either way, some of the positive energy eventually became mass of matter particles. This most likely happened (mostly) during the ultra short era of cosmic inflation when the scale of the universe increased by at least 50 and possibly more than 70 orders of magnitude in a fraction of time (read: Planc). Some matter particles likely were there at the beginning of cosmic inflation, but most were formed during changes of vacuum states during inflation. Fact? Not hard and fast, but that's a hypothesis that is taken seriously by many studying the subject.”
I asked yet another friend that I carpool with to give me the rock bottom basics per energy and inflation and she offered this tidbit:
“The key assumption of the 'inflationary universe' is that just before the Big Bang, space – or some phenomenon of dimensionality – contained an unstable form of energy, whose nature is as-yet not entirely known. At some instant (a very fluid word in this context), this energy sourced the fundamental particles from which arose all the matter we observe today. That 'instant' marks what we call the Big Bang.
A remarkable consequence of this model is that, if even a pinpoint of space contained this primordial energy, then the pinpoint of space would expand rapidly and would most likely source, or bring into existence, more of the same kind of energy. In fact, all the matter in the universe could have arisen from a bit of primordial energy existing in a space no larger than, say, a pea. This amazing scenario is a consequence of applying Einstein's theory of gravity to the inflationary universe model. Thus the known laws of nature can in principle explain where the energy and matter in the universe came from, provided there was at least a tiny seed of source or primordial energy to begin with. Worth noting is that there is no know model claiming that there was some primordial MATERIAL that occasioned the big bang, or that there was some funky quantum MATERIAL field in which bucolic energy flickered in and out of existence. Virtually all evidence and all viable theories point to energy as the first or 'efficient' cause of physical reality as we know it.”
But what was this primordial form of energy? And more importantly, sticking to the reductive model, that always looks to the previous link in the causal chain to “explain” the phenomenon in question, where did the primordial "seed" of space and energy come from in the first place?
If the astronomer was correct that this seed was in fact
light, what sourced the light? And if the cosmologist is whacked on bong water, as the other scientist kidded, from whence came the primordial seed? And how is any of this related to overcoming duality?
That's coming up. I have to fly to Switzerland tomorrow and will get my notes in order per the good part.
Feliz Navidad!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 22, 2015 - 06:56pm PT
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Verdad, JL.
Have a good visit. Our daughter is in Geneva for 6 months.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 22, 2015 - 07:08pm PT
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I said that questions don’t really exist.
The duck said: Everything does exist in the material world although it is temporary and fleeting ....
I’ll demur.
When you see everything as One, what questions would you have or could you ask?
No one can say whether or not there is a material world. All we know is our own experience. You can’t get beyond your own experience. No one can. That “fact” has led many masters to say all sorts of things that appear ludicrous, or impossible, or poetic. There is no material existence that one can truly know, for all that one can honestly know is their perceptions . . . that is, their own experience. The fact is a tautology. Non dualism is (beyond its apparent terminology and conceptuality) is a tautology. As such, it cannot be said what it is. No tautology can.
One may be able to surmise a material existence, but there is no need.
When you see that 2+2 = 4, what questions do you have? Do you ask what a 2 is? Do you ask what a summation is? Do you ask what a 4 is? All of those questions are irrelevant because you know . . . although you cannot say.
There is no need to spin narratives. Everything once truly seen (when self-verifying) is known. There is no need or possibility of explanation. It’s like a feeling. No one can question a person’s feelings. Explanation is a silly exercise. Explanation is only requested by people who do not know. For those who do not know, nothing can explain.
This is gnosis. This is direct apprehension. It’s also called rigpa or pristine awareness or seeing nakedly.
When you see, there is nothing to say other than what Steve Jobs said on his death bed in his last moments: “Wow, wow, wow.”
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 22, 2015 - 07:12pm PT
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There is no need or possibility of explanation.
Then why are you explaining .... :-)
Time: “Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once”
Ed H ... "There is no need for God"
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 22, 2015 - 07:57pm PT
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Duck: Then why are you explaining . . . . :-)
You can come-up with that interpretation.
How can I say this properly?
I don’t see how anything goes together. I can’t say what the parts are. I only see that things are. What they are is an unanswerable mystery to me. Perhaps one might see that as an explanation.
It’s late for me here with the in-laws, and I’m maxed out on blood sugars—post prandial depression, I think it’s called. But I would like to add what Largo wrote.
From my readings, literary criticism was first the result of “learned scholars” thought about what constituted “the Great Canon of Literature” taken from white male writers. However, it was later not as “legitimate” as the growing fields of the sciences, so some scholars in the 50s or thereabouts began to make the criticism of literature (and what established great literature) divorced from the great works by focusing on the structures of various well-known stories. That is, a science of literature emerged through a divorce from literature itself. The stories did not matter as much as the form or the structure of the stories. Since then literary criticism has morphed into a greatly fragmented set of theories that focus on point-of-view narration, the intention of an author, social milieux, the personal history of an author, ideological hegemony, political intentions, and all sorts of notions that seems to be nothing at all about the “stories” that literature communicate to readers. (It’s far too fragmented and erudite—and some might say irrelevant—for me to talk about here. Look up critical theory or literary criticism on Wikipedia.)
My point in this is that what was once the simple telling of stories (myths, ironies, comedies—in all sorts of long and short forms) has become almost unintelligible to any normal reader. Some argue that this has occurred from the institutional influences that drive for legitimacy toward positive empiricism. That is, even literature has succumbed to scientism.
More and more often, unless one is highly trained and educated in a given field, what is being research and discussed would appear to have almost no relevance to everyday life and living.
Explanations are interesting, but so they really matter? Do we change? Do our lives change? Does the world change?
They’re fun. They’re amusing. They generate these threads. I’d say, don’t take them too seriously or too concretely.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 23, 2015 - 12:51am PT
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Thank you Largo for elucidating your thoughts, vis-a-vis, the issues of ontology which spring up in this thread.
But it seems to me that, as important as it is for philosophy to ask the question, "what is the nature of reality" there is no actual way to answer the question. The same thing holds for your OP title. There is probably no way to ask the question either. An important lesson learned in science is to ask questions that can be answered. I don't know about philosophy but they seem to get more mileage asking questions that don't have answers....
Anyway when you start your dive into the rabbit hole of science and "physical reductionism" and all that, you seek advice from a Caterpillar, you eat that mushroom, but a Cheshire Cat directs you in some other direction, a Duchess gives you a pig... and some mad hatter writes a response...
you aren't going to get there from here...
If your program is to show that what there is is "no-thing" because, ultimately, science provides a limited understanding of the universe and fails to provide a vocabulary for things it does not know... well, who can argue with you?
Science is not constrained by philosophy, and the ontological discussions are usually side stepped by experience. One takes a look, "to see what one can see" as the proverbial bear.
If, upon taking a look and finding something not yet explained, one might start to seek an explanation, both by looking more carefully, and by trying to work out how this new thing is related to old things. The issue of ontology is moot, we are looking at a thing... there it is sitting right in front of us... waiting to be explained.
The use of "reductionist" techniques seems somewhat irrelevant to the issue at hand. I am not even sure what you mean by it, and judging from your account of the discussions you've had, others may be similarly confused.
When we propose a particular quantum field theory of those particles relevant to the "big bang" the theory does not address the origin of the particles themselves, or their coupling... so while we might describe other particles as composites of the "more fundamental" particles and fields, we haven't answered the question regarding even more fundamental particles, etc... the field theory doesn't provide the answer even though we might get a mechanism for producing our universe "out of the vacuum" by way of some quantum fluctuation.
The particles are our Swiftian fleas... in the quantum domain, energy is quantized... and a quantum of energy is what? it's a "particle." That's what relativity does to us...
Even the vacuum is incredibly complicated with most of it being unknown... which is something we can actually know.... the vacuum is not "no-thing" and we can demonstrate that. But I agree that it is only a dodge from "first cause" to make the vacuum eternal... a vacuum waiting to boil forth another universe... maybe we'll even be able to study that.
My point here is that we will just keep on like the bear, going over the mountain to see what we can see, and not worry about the philosophical necessity or impossibility of it actually being. We don't know, but we're all from Missouri...
and there is no phenomena that escapes our curiosity and our examination and eventually our ability to make progress on an empirical basis. You cannot demonstrate that science is inadequate to study the mind, it may eventually come up with a physical theory for it... philosophy cannot pronounce on the likelihood, the phenomenon of the mind is physical, it is a thing, sitting here.
Science will never answer the question "What is Largo's mind?" in the detail you care about...
have a happy and productive solstice... it's an ancient tradition at reasonably high latitude...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 23, 2015 - 10:16am PT
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 23, 2015 - 01:31pm PT
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Ed, I'll try and keep this inquiry going but I think you might benefit from understanding the nature of your own biases. When you say, "An important lesson learned in science is to ask questions that can be answered. I don't know about philosophy but they seem to get more mileage asking questions that don't have answers.... " you probably assume that A) philosophical questions are seeking scientific answers (numerical quantifications), and B) the only "real" answers are said numbers, all else being "imagined."
What I have said so far is that most objects we know comprising the physical world, and take to be objective, existing "out there," are vastly imagined and colored and largely sourced by mind, which takes the raw, undifferentiated stuff of reality, and fashions these phenomenon into objects.
The digression into reductionism was to underscore the illusion that when people say that mind IS matter, and can be entirely explained by physical processes, a thorough investigation of what matter IS not turns up no conclusive definition whatsoever. All science I have seen so far points to the probability that matter itself was sourced by energy.
Put differently, when you say that I am possibly looking for science to co-sign the idea that no-thing is real, as opposed to the reductionistic view that "things," objects and stuff/matter is the real deal, you have actually flipped the logical assumption implied by the smart money saying energy sourced matter.
In other words, the idea that no-thing is the long shot and that science has proven that matter is "real," it appears the exact opposite is most likely - that the closer people look into what matter is, the less it seems to BE the bottom line, and in fact it seems more like fairy dust then the tangible, objective stuff our sense organs tells us it is.
So long as we live in a body, matter is a real thing to us - that is surely true for us humans. But that reality is at least in part not simply the matter - what it IS - imposing itself on us, but rather the interplay of mind/body with the undefinable energy/particle matrix that geysers from (fill in he blank). When a human reads a story, the result is the interface of mind and black marks on a page. When a human exists in this world, that world, and the his experience of "it," is the interface of mind and, on close inspection, the ineffable stuff "out there."
Either way, and no matter where you stand on these issues, the idea (from the Cosmologist who drank the bong water) that we are all sourced by light is an interesting one, moreso that light/energy itself was never created in the first place, that there quite possibly IS no first place.
Happy Holidays all,
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 23, 2015 - 03:51pm PT
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nope, not what I said...
I said we explain what we see, the explanations tell us to look for something else and we go to see if we can see it...
that's all.
You can do whatever you want to do... in fact, you're doing the same thing, but you seem to need some philosophical certainty that what you are doing makes sense. You will never find philosophical certainty on topics of ontology...
...you state experience is at the core, and empirical studies are based on experience... however you get there.
I am fully aware of my biases, and in fact have "voted with my feet," I'm a card carrying scientist fully invested in that point of view. I'd like to see just how far it could take us in understanding things like "The Mind."
You proclaim that it won't take us far... but the proclamation doesn't have much meat on the bones... you object by saying the meat I want doesn't exist... my reply is that you're entitled to your opinion, but your cupboard is bare... that works for you.
The interesting thing, as you point out, about experience (and empiricism) is that you actually have to go out and experience it...
...and when your are adventuring out there, you actually might not have a lot to go on, so you take the advice of others with a grain of salt.
You don't have an explanation of mind, you've been interested in it for a while, and you are ready to say various pathways are unproductive. You didn't find your explanation, might be that it wasn't along those pathways, might be you got lost... who knows, we only know you didn't succeed.
You needn't muddle your arguments with "what is energy?" "what is matter?" etc... these are red herrings in what you are trying to convey.
What I do believe is that what you define/think of/perceive/meditate on/etc, mind is, that will not be amenable to scientific explanation. My guess is that is because it doesn't have much to do with what mind is. It is your perception of mind.
Anyway, thanks for you thoughts...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 23, 2015 - 05:41pm PT
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So long as we live in a body, matter is a real thing to us
Can't argue against that. And afterwards?
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