My dog believes in magic. When I take her for a walk in the morning her brain associates that walk with her owner's desire for her to politely defecate out of doors. When she has eaten a breakfast prior to the walk, she saunters at a leisurely pace. When she has yet to gobble up her food that morning, she hurriedly and unceremoniously poops post haste.
Now this behavior is a form of a belief in our domestic pets which is the equivalent of what Johannes Kepler so astutely derided as the algebraic method. In a world where our mentality is governed by the false belief that things happen randomly we wish that we may use a formula to predict the future. If we know the value of points in a random "space" then as things go bump in the night we can know how things will wind up down the road a piece. Because you see we started here and next to here is another here. So x + y will always equal z. We are truly dogged in our belief in this concatenation of things...
But how on earth then did we emerge out of this random soup you ask? We scientists are working on that. (Squaring the circle and alchemy were the precursors of today's chaos and string theories.) Kepler said that he was hypothesizing how the Composer continuously creates an ongoing perfection with mankind uniquely qualified to comprehend that creation. Newton infamously said Hypothesis Non Fingo. Magister Newton also said through his magical biblical eschatology that the world will end in 2060. So too the nominalist logical positivist followers of Bertrand, Lord Russell declare that the second law of thermodynamics is all there is. Progress, you see in their mystical worldview is all for naught, no matter how many lifeless dimensions there are in the "landscape," all cows are infinitesimal black dark matter nothings...
Eratosthenes first measured the circumference of the earth from the shadows cast by the sun. Today, humanity's fitness to survive will be measured by our ability to conquer that same thermonuclear fusion that casts those shadows. Thus, Prometheus will truly be unbound.
Saturday, September 08, 2012
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