Two recent studies yet again point to the principle that in an evolving living universe we can never come to the end of knowledge about it. However, by plumbing what we don't yet know, we can outline where areas of advancement in knowledge most probably lie.
In a remarkable survey of the protein communities, it has been estimated that we probably know less than half of what makes up cellular organization. This was made possible by combining two technologies via artificial intelligence as the article makes clear. (This use of AI as a method of categorizing biological functions does not mean that it replaces human creative thinking but merely aids it.)
The second study used the very same database MuSIC 1.0 or multi-scale integrated cell to show how families of proteins are organized as subunits of interactions. Again, the tool of AI is used to measure the distance of protein functions.
In addition, yet another study from Baylor School of Medicine and the Czech Academy of Sciences shows remarkable evidence of the coordination of protein complexes regulating transcription in an astoundingly harmonic orchestral fashion. This discovery of such wonderfully precise and delicate fine tuning at the cellular level yet again harkens back to Leibniz' dictum of pre-established harmony.
In this blog, I have attempted to show how a method adopted from Riemannian geometry fits the protein "interactome." The machinery of protein aggregates operates across a multiply connected manifold of functions. Individual and groups of proteins also may play roles as singularities that operate in separate and distinct functions. In this way, the Riemann surface function adequately models the global connections of these individual and protein conglomerates.
At the higher level of such global organization in virtually all realms of physics, biophysics and human psychology Riemann's principle of geometrical mapping of multidimensional interrelationships holds enduring value. And no doubt will be applied to successfully to organize such databases.
It may seem to any rational observer that the good ole USA is at a nadir of sorts these days. And perhaps that is perhaps an understatement... What with a pending hyperinflationary blowout, "elite" geopoliticians deliberately provoking the Russians and the Chinese at a time when they both have demonstrated hypersonic weapons. And China marches forward in space while the US flounders as usual.
Oh, and did I mention the corona virus and possible civil war here at home?
However, if the observant reader amongst you has taken notice of the banner on this little old site directly above, I am yet of the opinion (if I may be permitted to use that much abused term) that just as in Poe's Pit and the Pendulum after we begin to come to grips with the shock and terror of our headlong careen toward oblivion, a determined and grim sort of rationality response takes hold of us. And we begin the agonizing process of blood and sweat problem solving even in this most dire of circumstances. Recall to mind that back in Poe's days we were headed for a cataclysmic civil war too. And yet somehow the cavalry, in the form of Abraham Lincoln saved the Union at the very last moment...
So Voltaire, the misanthropic pessimist, satirized Leibniz in Candide as a befuddled and constantly falsely optimistic Dr. Pangloss glowingly opining upon the beset of all the possible plagues visited upon mankind his renowned adage that this is the best of all possible worlds.
And yet... Here we are with the advent of commercialized nuclear fusion. And this point is key it is not just an alternative energy source. I personally spent some twenty odd years out flogging the premise to all and sundry that would take note on the contrary the technology is potentially transformative. And I implore you for God's sake do read this tremendous write up by my former colleague Marjorie Mazel Hecht on the advent of the Fusion Torch here. If you would like proof of why this is indeed what the title of this post claims.
Enough said.
In the theater, the stage is but a prompt for the mind to travel in place and time. Thus we engage and acquiesce as audience to the poetry of illusion.
A dream of things past that beguiles the conscience may be our realm to imagine. Or the present enwrapped in the birth pangs of a future waged by outlooks on the stage of choice, either true or false.
The judgment is not far off for only some self acclaimed prophetic seer to be thereby materialized in the drama. Yet, we are soaked and saturated in that war of the rulers of mind.
So, to our todays must we be made aware, they are but as dust in the tapestry of unfurling time and space. And it is thus pregnant of hope with an intensity that powers even whole galaxies along the pathway toward assisting creation as the next step along the curve of that final mission of that thing we denominate as "humanity." If this be mere worship, that is a shortcoming. For the task at hand must be resolved forthwith.
So we are dismissed from the interlude back to the acting not in the mindseye but here and now, in reality.
The question before us here is whether this injunction in the title of this post is valid and consistent with universal lawfulness. Certainly we, as a species, can evoke such a principled passion, inclusive of intellectual and emotionally artistic capacities, to undertake this mission. This is now beyond mere conjecture.
Yet we instead, childishly, insist upon dealing with our rather miniscule grievances and animosities in the very face of such a vast purpose as somehow taking precedence. Isn't that rather irreverent folly? Why should we expend any more effort attempting illusory control over the fancied lifeboats called nations on this pale blue dot?
Each of us has embedded within our consciousness the tools to prove this ineluctable truth. Which is to say that our existence, as we know it, is purely potential for humanity to overcome whatever problems we face. And therefore an ultimately ongoing good. On the other hand, the forever unknown state, if it be that, of non existence, if not the opposite of good is not worthy of wringing our collective hands over. Thus, we can only not acknowledge a universal good of continuing creation in our relationship as a species with the harmony of universal development through a sheer perversity of will.
So, we can sing with Beethoven in his last great string quartet the tune of "It Must Be" as a paean to immortality and a fugue of coeternal harmonic human universal development:
Dante's great Commedia truly "came home" as all proper comedies should with Beatrice leading him on an imaginary tour of the known solar system and universe. This occurred as it must by analogy to the rhythmic cycles of the human singing voice cantata. For by overcoming the apparent insoluble dilemma of how to imagine our species as occupying the vantage point of interplanetary travel would necessarily elevate the language culture of the common vernacular in Dante's Italy. It is you see a matter of mental perspectiva. Much in the same way that Brunelleschi overcoming of the construction of the grand dome in Florence was to have been afterwards.
Here then is the representation of the great Florentine artist Botticelli of Dante and Beatrice in "heaven."--
I came across a posting recently about Ferdinand Verbiest, the Jesuit polymath who became a central figure in the Chinese court of Emperor Kangxi. It turns out that Verbiest invented a steam powered car during this period. Here is an illustration of his invention. This was apparently invented around 1672.
As far as this article goes, it is unobjectionable. However, it needs to be to put into an overarching context of what exactly motivates the "adults in the room." Most, like Greenwald, would have it that simple explanation is that the greedy military/industrial complex seeks forever wars to keep the funds pouring into their coffers. Certainly there is an element of that for many in the environs of the beltway bandits. Yet, there is another much more pernicious explanation that uneasily unites the neocons and the humanitarian "regime change" zealots of right and left in their quixotic globalist presumptions. It is the doctrine of imperialist geopolitics. It was this that motivated "Great Game" the arming of al Qaeda as a bulwark against the former Soviet Union during the Reagan administration. It is still this that motivate the Bzrezinskiite Democrats to attempt to encircle Russia today with "Color Revolutions." If the "American elites" suppose that we are the heirs of the British Empire, there is nothing but the chaos of collapse and decay forthcoming...
By reliably harnessing the power of nuclear fusion and then matter/anti matter reactions, humanity will be provided with the capability to reach and populate distant galaxies with human planetoids as spaceships. This coupled with breakthroughs in biophysical sciences to create a virtual unlimited healthspan will redefine for society time Itself. We will escape the locked in schema of apparent cycles of crisis management that we as a planet bound species are so mentally hampered with today. In other words, there will be a new degree of freedom achieved which will transform our very cognitive and biophysical limitations. This will constitute the addition of an orthogonal dimensionality of degree of freedom of type n + 1, through which the manifold economic geometry of society will be rigorously transformed.
This has nothing to do with a supposed artificial intelligence "singularity," or the "omega point." This is not the "end of history" or any utopian fiction. But rather, this is the natural lawful desire of the unfettered mission embedded in our constitution. To continuously perfect our living functioning in accord and in a new relationship with yet to be discovered potentialities of this immense universe. Ours is to forever remove the bounds of limitations. This is the true essence of joy and beauty. An as of yet untested era for us all awaits, beckoning to new homes light years hence.
In this manner does the true signification of the immortality of our species appear.
What is propping up the decayed condition of the US after years of deliberate takedown and looting of our previously world leading manufacturing capability. Cheap labor for the production of consumer goods? Yes. But that depends upon the projection of US supremacy in raw global military power.
Now, very rapidly, the illusion of the vaunted post industrial, information, entertainment, forced criminal labor, privatized military, and consumer economy is unravelling. Because we have collectively been unwilling to forgo our addiction to these quaint illusions produced by and bestowed upon us by so called elites.
There are some very needed remedies for all this, however, implementing them means replacing these very illusions. It requires first admitting how wrong the whole direction the nation has taken especially since about the time we actually had an appropriate mission with the assassination of JFK.
Unfortunately, the way history has worked is that the shattering of illusions must wreak havoc upon our lives before we can change courses. The control over credit must be wrenched away from those who have presided over this destruction. There are many promising directions for adopting plans and policies that could pull us up by our bootstraps and allow for cooperation among nations to end this nightmare. But first, the old regime along with its train of illusions must be replaced.
There is some unknown process whereby the structure of reality at the very small is ordered. We constantly are reminded of this today as the weird illogical realm of quantum physics. Apparently events are somehow connected by what we imagine to be instantaneous communication of these infinitesimal parts of the physical world.
At the other largest scale of the structure of our universe we can view enormous networks of skeins of galaxies. But these very structures are organized somehow as a whole, even though there is the fact that any method of communication among its parts would need to be faster than the speed of light.
Herein lies the paradox that in the extremes of the very, very small and large our version of how the macroscale world of sense certainty functions breaks down. The notion that we can be certain that the universe is energetically winding down toward a final sort of heat death seems awfully presumptuous of us given how little we actually know about its constituent processes. For example, about what constitutes so called dark matter and dark energy.
Bernard Riemann, among the greatest creative thinkers of the last two millennia put it this way:
"Questions concerning the immeasurably large, are, for the explanation of Nature, useless questions. Quite otherwise is it however with questions concerning the immeasurably small. Knowledge of the causal connection of phenomena is based essentially upon the precision with which we follow them down into the infinitely small. The progress of recent centuries in knowledge of the mechanism of Nature has come about almost solely by the exactness of the syntheses rendered possible by the invention of Analysis of the infinite and by the simple fundamental concepts devised by Archimedes, Galileo, and Newton, and effectively employed by modern Physics. In the natural sciences however, where simple fundamental concepts are still lacking for such syntheses, one pursues phenomena into the spatially small, in order to perceive causal connections, just as far as the microscope permits. Questions concerning spatial relations of measure in the indefinitely small are therefore not useless.
"If one premise that bodies exist independently of position, then the measure of curvature is everywhere constant; then from astronomical measurements it follows that it cannot differ from zero; at any rate its reciprocal value would have to be a surface in comparison with which the region accessible to our telescopes would vanish. If however bodies have no such non-dependence upon position, then one cannot conclude to relations of measure in the indefinitely small from those in the large. In that case the curvature can have at every point arbitrary values in three directions, provided only the total curvature of every metric portion of space be not appreciably different from zero. Even greater complications may arise in case the line element is not representable, as has been premised, by the square root of a differential expression of the second degree. Now however the empirical notions on which spatial measurements are based appear to lose their validity when applied to the indefinitely small, namely the concept of a fixed body and that of a light-ray; accordingly it is entirely conceivable that in the indefinitely small the spatial relations of size are not in accord with the postulates of geometry, and one would indeed be forced to this assumption as soon as it would permit a simpler explanation of the phenomena.
"The question of the validity of the postulates of geometry in the indefinitely small is involved in the question concerning the ultimate basis of relations of size in space. In connection with this question, which may well be assigned to the philosophy of space, the above remark is applicable, namely that while in a discrete manifold the principle of metric relations is implicit in the notion of this manifold, it must come from somewhere else in the case of a continuous manifold. Either then the actual things forming the groundwork of a space must constitute a discrete manifold, or else the basis of metric relations must be sought for outside that actuality, in colligating forces that operate upon it.
"A decision upon these questions can be found only by starting from the structure of phenomena that has been approved in experience hitherto, for which Newton laid the foundation, and by modifying this structure gradually under the compulsion of facts which it cannot explain. Such investigations as start out, like this present one, from general notions, can promote only the purpose that this task shall not be hindered by too restricted conceptions, and that progress in perceiving the connection of things shall not be obstructed by the prejudices of tradition.
"This path leads out into the domain of another science, into the realm of physics, into which the nature of this present occasion forbids us to penetrate."
I would add here that since the time of Riemann, we have made incredible advancements in expanding our knowledge of the universe in the "immeasurably large" with revolutionary viewing technologies across the spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths. Therefore the question of continuous versus discrete manifolds can now be appropriately investigated in this domain as well.
It all boils down to a lack of understanding of the potential of the human mind to solve problems in its capacity to act lovingly as a mirror of ongoing creation. If you will dear reader, permit me to explain.
Many common people in these United States smell a rat when it comes to the neo-Malthusian agenda behind the pseudoscience of climate change. While it is true as the nose on your face that pollution stinks, we need to not throw the baby out with the rather smelly bathwater. We can chew gum and walk at the same time for we are Americans, no?
So, we being called upon to solve a problem that we require new resources to improve, not sustain, but improve our material standard of living for an increasing population base, we developed the science to create those new resources. But we dropped the ball by allowing the financial controllers to loot our nation's industrial potential.
Who to blame? We need no scapegoats. The blame lies within...
If you are with me so far, consider the mission of biophysics research is necessarily forced by its very subject matter to oppose neoMalthusian premises. It cannot help it even when it must conform to crass mechanistic assumptions. If we are going to save lives, rather than prevent "overpopulation," then we must discover how to do that. In essence, this is no different than creating new resources previously unknown to humanity.
So, when we go looking for enemies rather than looking to solve problems, like the problem of a pandemic outbreak of a mutating and previously unknown corona virus, we are driven mad. It won't be the first time and hopefully not the last...
When the Earth is engulfed by the Sun
And Andromeda collides with the Milky Way,
Where will you be, oh progeny?
What is your domain to roam?
What lifespan, what your power be?
And communicate how?
Across what universe at length?
What questions and quests do urge you on now?
And all but forgotten antiquity
Like some artifact quaint--
I sit and contemplate
Here, alone.
And now like some infant
Glimpses the unfathomable unknown.
In the mathematical analytic system developed to make possible the calculation of relative motion we have the invention of the partial differential. This is a spin off of the Leibnizian quest for the true infinity of the differential (as I have previously cited the history of this in the context of the ibn Sina, et.al. principle of the Necessary Existent, also known as a concrete universal.) Which is to say that if one could instantaneously account for all contending conditions and kinds of force impinging upon matter there would be derived a concrete universal quantum for the progress of its relative motion.
Kepler's quest for a universal ordering principle for the orderings of planetary motions was based upon placing one's purview outside the mere point in space being acted upon. His imagination took the standpoint of vicariously experiencing of the ongoing process of creation. Thus it was only in that regard that he specified the necessity of formulating the differential or derivative calculus for every portion of planetary motion.
Now this higher framework is precisely where Leibniz adduced his truly revolutionary breakthrough by advancing a concrete universal derived from the series of probabilities developed as a sort of game theory of expansion of sums by Blaise Pascal, et al.
So today, I was profoundly impressed to learn of an elegant hypothesis for an ordering of planetary compositions by William McDonough of the University of Maryland: magnetism. Thus it is an analogue to the principle of partial differential. That is, if we hold all other possible variables conditioned with respect to the magnetism of the star system of the partial magnetic property of that system we have the basis of a universal ordering of the cores of its planets. Wonderfully beautiful and lawful. I am certain that Kepler himself would be quite pleased!
One of the principles of Leibniz' great Monadology is the proposition that lower or simple monads have no "windows through which anything could come in or go out." However they do possess confused perceptions of what is near to them:
7. Further, there is no way of explaining how a Monad can be altered in quality or internally changed by any other created thing; since it is impossible to change the place of anything in it or to conceive in it any internal motion which could be produced, directed, increased or diminished therein, although all this is possible in the case of compounds, in which there are changes among the parts. The Monads have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out. Accidents cannot separate themselves from substances nor go about outside of them, as the ‘sensible species’ of the Scholastics used to do. Thus neither substance nor accident can come into a Monad from outside.
Now our representations of cells is that "things," i.e. proteins, do come in and go out continuously via the cellular surface gates. And indeed that there are protein enzymatic engines of ATP supplying internal energy to all cells. So in Leibniz' Monadology the study of these changes would have to place cells and their proteins including those signaling molecules Intergrins that permit cellular communication as mere ephemera that come into and out of being, constantly being reduced and recreated as constituents of "cellular automata."
61. And compounds are in this respect analogous with [symbolisent avec] simple substances. For all is a plenum (and thus all matter is connected together) and in the plenum every motion has an effect upon distant bodies in proportion to their distance, so that each body not only is affected by those which are in contact with it and in some way feels the effect of everything that happens to them, but also is mediately affected by bodies adjoining those with which it itself is in immediate contact. Wherefore it follows that this inter-communication of things extends to any distance, however great. And consequently every body feels the effect of all that takes place in the universe, so that he who sees all might read in each what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or shall happen, observing in the present that which is far off as well in time as in place: σύµπνοια πάντα [sympnoia panta], as Hippocrates said. But a soul can read in itself only that which is there represented distinctly; it cannot all at once unroll everything that is enfolded in it, for its complexity is infinite.
62. Thus, although each created Monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it, and of which it is the entelechy; and as this body expresses the whole universe through the connexion of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe in representing this body, which belongs to it in a special way.
And yet that which separates a simple lower monad absolutely from human monads is our unique ability to mirror the necessary existence of the ongoing potential of universal perfection.
29. But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God. And it is this in us that is called the rational soul or mind.
So as I have looked to Riemannian surface biophysical models in the past with the "poles" of branchpoints being proteins, it must be kept in mind that these are not lower living Monads but mere chemical compound constituents that come into and out of being. And therein lies the research of the division of the living from the non living. This particular connection is the most necessary aspect of progress in biophysics. For exploring these interconnected protein functions will make all advances of biophysics quest to extend our life and "health-spans" possible, in the analogous manner in which exploring the energetics of elemental constituents of matter will propel our species into space colonization.
Further, it is the division of non-monadic elements into groupings of Vernadsky's domains of inorganic, organic and noetic and their potential interactions that should inform the metatheoretical design for scientific research. For instance, in the domain of the noetic must be included the philosophic purpose for setting research agendas. Is it a requirement that we by necessity must increase the secular healthy lifespan of humanity? How is this to be achieved per capita and overall? Does the defense of society against inevitable impacts from meteors and comets figure in?
Moreover, it is the historical quality of hypothesis that mediates future deployment of noetic resources. In this regard, these hypotheses "live" beyond their attachment to being produced by an historical person. Among these higher hypotheses, Plato's demonstration of the universality of geometrical knowledge triggered a proven truth about the necessary changes of governance for the survival of society. That is, the breakdown of the irrational barriers to advancement and perfection of knowledge imposed by arbitrary rule by oligarchical families maintained by usurious financial interests of pantheons of pagan cults.
Embedded in our collective psyches are a host of mostly unexamined truisms about the manner of "successful" functioning in the affairs of the present day. The illusion of individual freedom of choice is perhaps the among the hardest to navigate around.
We live in a bubble of "information" provided to us by a would be elite game masters. This provides a type of security blanket to hold up this grand illusion. What is really taking place on the world stage these days is quite the opposite of freedom. While the U.S. has been deindustrialized per the dictates of the "free market," how has the purchasing power to use the cheap labor of our offshored industrial capacity been enforced? By military supremacy, a.k.a. nuclear war blackmail.
However, it now appears that the geopolitical chessboard will be shortly toppled. In a world based upon appeals to the principle of reason, we will forego such imaginary nonsense and instead cooperate to pull humanity away from the brink of immolation. The pathway to do so is quite astonishingly clear and consistent.
We could institute a complete revamping of global monetary affairs ordered to produce nearly illimitable opportunities for advancement beneficial to the future of our species. For instance cooperation in defeating disease, development of nuclear fusion, rebuilding and creating new cities, fresh water projects, and space colonization. Or we can persist in the falsehoods that we have been trained to subconsciously regurgitate that are leading nowhere but our own thereby well deserved, inevitable destruction.
Number as a physically generated causal principle is limited by a process akin but not commensurate with the expansion of the metricality of substance.
This previous sentence may be taken as a deictic product of the poetic imagination. As such, it is not embeddable in any formal system of logical analysis.
The condition of ironic boundedness is forever without proof, yet seemingly a potentially well ordered power capable of expansion and therefore of a type of proof.
That proof is a living Monad and as such may not be resolved just as the Universal Principle may never be rectified as a fleeting word in the here and now. It is an impossible linguistic proposition.
Therefore, the substance of what is currently referred to as dark matter and dark energy is the poetic paradox of the unproven distribution of prime number generation as a tensor of unknown metrical curvature. Q.E. D.
If one puts the stamp of the infinite on one's work what happens after death? Alexander revolutionized warfare and yet his conquered dominions went by the wayside. Charlemagne? Likewise.
Simon Magus used parlor tricks to ensnare the faithful. We see the like, again and again, still today. There is many a slip twixt the intention and the reality.
We imagine perfection of forms that may never apply to reality. Is it the same with imagination of imperfections? Let us take the issue of the future to attempt to answer that question.
Will there yet be an adulthood of humanity? Perhaps such would be reckoning with the unbound internal freedom of childlike wonderment that is lost for what is passed off as "growing up?"
For what meaning will the zeroes on the ledger of your monetary worth hold after your mortal coil has gone? Perhaps they can be encoded and kept a quantum secret in the cloud as a DNA algorithm? What would Hecuba's tears or her drachmas mean to you then?
The temple of liberty? Is it built upon the sacred property of the commonwealth or something merely ephemeral? Like the shadows cast upon the wall of the big screen TV?
Social movements are ephemera. However, what is enduring is worth standing and fighting for. The future choice among alternative realities. That decision outlasts us all. The human mind is demonstrably unique and not subject to the mere passions of arbitrary change. There is no unveiled secret that can be kept hidden from the intention to create a future suitable for it.
I came across this very interesting hypothesis on the nature of "black holes" today from a theoretical physicist by the name of Igor Nikitin. The one attribute that is very important here is that this hypothesis is purely physical in that it does not embrace the absurdity of a zero dimensional point of infinite gravity as a black hole, but replaces this impossibility with an infinitesimal reality: a plank scale collapsed star.
The problem that starting from so called first principles of deductive mathematical logic is simply that we are dealing with things that cannot exist. Points are not physical realities. So the pretension that they are is incompatible with reality. This also applies to the idea of the nothingness of the purported beginning of physical reality: the "Big Bang."
Kepler, who revolutionized astronomy, himself made this charge against the non-physical algebraicists of his day. Riemann, whose contributions to geometry made Einstein's breakthroughs possible, made very much the same point at the close of his doctoral thesis that we cannot confuse mathematical theorems for physical reality.
But this is precisely what the glorified icons of academia have done and are continuing to do today. Nikitin may be right or not. And of course, we need to test his hypothesis rigorously. But, at the very least his hypothesis does not suffer from the outset in the same way as do so many others that accept without question the irrational premises of mathematical fictions as reality.
I have removed all my links on this site as you may or may not have noticed. Sometimes the simulacrum of truth is nothing but an illusion. Truth at this point of time in this political landscape is almost non existent, unfortunately.
I can say this that the world is careening either toward a cataclysmic series of financial collapses and war (perhaps of annihilation) or a new practically unfathomable Renaissance of space colonization and all that entails.
As for joining a movement or trying to initiate one, at this point all I can do is put my voice out there and continue to promote the spirit of doing and bringing forth the good.
The "Butterfly Nebula" is shown in false "color reassignments" from the scheme of Hubble where "red light from hydrogen atoms as green, red light from sulfur ions (sulfur atoms with one electron removed) as red, and green light from doubly-ionized oxygen (oxygen atoms with two electrons missing) as blue.
Leibniz declared in his Monadology proposition number 68: "Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves."
So what do we "see" in this image? Is it merely random diffusion of gaseous or plasma elements? We are given a narrative that the future effects of a butterfly's flight might determine a chaotic change in the concatenation of mechanistic chains of dependent kinetics. Yet it seems to be the case that humanity is not merely subject to such arbitrary forces.
Such that beauty is an ongoing composition of Creation that we willfully operate on to bring about ever more order in consonance with our need to embody that ultimate higher creative power that only we may conceive being the self-aware potentially creative Monads all dwelling in the "simultaneity of eternity."
Shelley said that Plato was a poet in the broad sense of the word. So the ironic banning of poets from the vision of the Republic is more than interesting, is it not? Socrates was put to death by democratic means. His crime? Making the polity lose faith in the gods by the public questioning of what constituted their godliness. For if the gods were merely irrationally lustful and vindictive tyrants that would punish humanity for the Promethean hubris of creativity, how could such rule over humanity? Except, perhaps, as a rotten and misbegotten oligarchy.
So Aristophanes, the poet, in the broader sense of that term, composed a play called The Clouds ridiculing Socrates.
Now the issue of what true poetry is, perhaps, needs to be somewhat elucidated. Many times we are told that the ironical juxtaposition of ambiguity in a strictly metered form is poetry's sine qua non. It is overwhelmingly the case that the most highly developed music imparts in the medium of sound the substance of creative problem solving as great fugal dialogue. Now much babble has been written over the centuries about "dialectics." There are "dialogues" that cannot properly be called profound ideas regarding humanity, even though they may be quite impassioned.
A very ironic instance of this is the French decadent school of Charles Baudelaire that praised Poe as a revolutionary purveyor of the "flowers of evil." And yet, it was just the opposite. For instance Poe roundly attacked the downright criminal protégé of the romantic poet Sir Walter Scott, the so called Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. However, you have to decode Poe to realize this, like so many of his other attacks on Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, they were not outright. This is also the case in Poe's series of satires on the subversive literary circles of his day. Such as his ripostes anent the wife of Guiseppe Mazzini, Margaret Fuller and of course his many swipes at the transcendentalist followers, (Emerson Thoreau, Longfellow, et al.) of that rather vile and disgusting literati named Thomas Carlyle who penned the evil The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.
The idea of celebrating evil is nothing new to the generations of drugged up Thelemic rock groupies of drug fiend and Satanist Aleister Crowley, of course. Mark Twain wrote a much overlooked such literary dialogue called The Mysterious Stranger. Now, it might be argued that Clemmons was merely referring to the Babylonian model of god as a ruthlessly punishing and irrational destroyer of his creatures. But that would be some very big stretching.
Perhaps the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder should be applied just a bit more rigorously. For the luridly dramatic paintings of the murderer Caravaggio might be supposed to be beautiful given their meticulous execution, but are they really beautiful? Perhaps it is not so simple as a' that....
The nominalist wants to define each and every term of his or her existence as though it is a logical proposition of a social contract. I never had a card that I carried declaring my membership in the political movement associated with Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. My time of some twenty years of that active association was brought to a close some twenty plus years hence.
In the time that I spent drumming up support for various planks of the campaigns of the International Caucus of Labor Committees, it more often than not was a hindrance to fundraising to bring up the much reviled name of the "political extremist and convicted felon" Lyndon LaRouche. So, today for myself it is rather ironic that there is a public skirmish over who is to be blessed, so to speak, with the mantle of carrying on a political organization in his name.
Today, having retired from my workaday job, I find myself at a sort of crossroad in my ripe old age. Political movements desire visibility. Therefore, even if we might sometimes disagree with some or perhaps many of the tenets of one another's professed philosophies, if we can show that society must pay respect to a person's "qualifications" that will serve us in building the "movement." Or so goes the mostly unspoken assumptions about appeals to that which society respects, willy nilly.
And yet, I distinctly recall the a document written by LaRouche on the strategy of recruitment to his movement that was polemically critical of the tactic of foregoing one's principles for the purpose of collecting "gate receipts." In fact, rereading just now his autobiography, The Power of Reason, he always considered the issue of collecting gate receipts as a tendency toward conciliation of backwardness to be just the opposite of that course he established in forming and steering his political movement. A movement he avowed he would abandon forthwith if it stopped serving that purpose.
What is it that is desired to effect change in the required revolutionary direction in order to uplift humanity to finally defeat its age old enemy in its many guises? How to overcome the inherent weakness of past concessions to pragmatic deals of current political realities?
What is it that is of enduring substance in this ever changing current of history? As I spoke to in the previous post, the demonstration that reason is the characteristic of all humans by Socrates was revolutionary. The Renaissance Erasmian Imitation of Christ is in this mold. Just as we must elevate our reason above the constraints of the axioms of the simple counting numbers as the basis for producing a square in order to double it (and yet a degree more for the doubling of the cube,) so must we resolve the paradox of Christ as the Prince of Peace and yet the bringer of "not peace but a sword."
For if we would have not the peace of the grave but instead a grand design for a concert of nations to propel humanity forward into the peaceful era of space colonization, what must be routed and overcome by the metaphorical sword for that to happen? Is it not the age old shackles that imprisons those universal creative powers that give meaning to the premise that each not in a war against all, but rather each created in the image of the ever developing and living, universal Creator?
Today in America there is a rising incidence of suicide that is lowering the life expectancy. Why? The hopelessness of the drug/radical environmentalist counterculture. It appears that getting high to escape the high tech imitation of the Roman Circus we have become eventually leads to a despairing and futile dead end.
On the other hand, with a mission orientation for space colonization, we can expect the average human "healthspan" to significantly increase secularly with very little end in sight. We will accomplish what would seem rather miraculous today in the same way that building cities on the moon and Mars would have seemed to mortals just a few hundred years ago.
For instance, the program of space colonization entails a scientific mission of overcoming the deleterious effects on human health of weightlessness or reduced gravity and mutagenesis from cosmic rays. Therefore, we can expect the secrets of cellular defense of microbes against radiation such as Deinococcus radiodurans to be put to use to provide our own species protection. Likewise, we will unlock the means to regeneration of tissue that we are currently homing in on in modern biophysics.
As to the predicted baleful prognostications of diminishing natural resources, that really has cast a pessimistic pall over the outlook of our youth, the future of technological progress holds just the opposite prospect. With nuclear fusion, the concept of a plasma torch will become a reality. This means that the age old dream of transmutation of elements will no longer be the domain of crazy Hermeneutical cranks like Isaac Newton. We will unleash the never ending abundance of resources with the amount of energy dense throughput or intensity at our disposal. The increased lifespan, biophysical breakthroughs and availability of resources will make Kraft Ehricke's vision of the creation of artificial planetoids for long term human space exploration a reality.
And what will fuel these planetoids' propulsion to the vast stretches of space that we invariably seek to explore? Fusion probably won't do the trick. Up until now we can only produce puny amounts of anti-matter in particle accelerators for the prospective matter anti matter reactions that could propel such colonizers. Ah but, it turns out that anti-matter will be available in relative abundance in many orbits of our own solar system, let alone many, many others in yet to be identified.
This then is the vision of the eternal optimism of the creative purpose of humanity.
I have been justly criticized of late for not expressly "unpacking" (as the current argot goes) my thoughts so as to make them comprehensible for the uninitiated. So I have decided to explicate the revolutionary dialogue of Plato, the Meno, that stands out in human history as embodying precisely the principle of imparting profound truths to the "everyman," so to speak. Please bear with me I will enlarge upon why this theme is of fundamental importance shortly. I am hopeful you, dear reader, will take away something of lasting value from this discussion.
The profound leap in human history that this dialogue represents cannot be underestimated. For it challenges the very underpinnings of the arbitrary and destructive rule by a monied oligarchy. This is not to say that I am merely alluding to conditions prevailing at the epoch of Plato and Socrates. To wit: if it is the case that any human can be proven to naturally possess the power to mentally reconstruct the most advanced concepts of civilization, then indeed all men are created equal. I will come back to that last statement as it seemingly contradicts the well known words of America's Declaration of Independence.
Socrates engages in a dialogue with Meno and his uneducated slave boy. The proof that the slave reconstructs comes from a breakthrough in geometrical knowledge of the Egyptians. The question is by what method can the area of a square be doubled? By nature, no one of a certain age is at a loss to comprehend the universal geometric idea of what a square is. A corollary would stand to reason that the same would apply to a circle and so on. So Socrates proceeds to guide the slave to find the answer through drawing out the proof in the sand that the only answer that may be constructed so that there is no doubt comes from the use of the diagonal as the new side of square with the doubled area.
Now, in doing so the slave has proved the Pythagorean theorem that nowadays every school child learns to repeat. "A squared plus B squared equals C squared." However, almost no children are walked through this Socratic proof, but instead are expected to produce the algebraic formula upon demand. I, for instance, got a scholarship to major in mathematics at the University at Buffalo without ever having been initiated into the non algebraic or synthetic geometric proof . Yet the proof is egregiously simple once it is grasped by the mind (or soul, if you will.)
This brings me back to issue of self evident proofs. Leibniz speaks about irreducible ideas that are incapable of being simplified into component parts and therefore are indeed self evident. The foremost among these are that the human soul, i.e. that our shared mental, conscious creative reason, is by its very nature indivisible. It has no parts. Can this be somehow be proven otherwise? Well, many pedantic academics, like the asses in Goya's cartoons, have tried and will continue to do so as long as they are paid for it. They have hard to comprehend theories about how intelligence is an "emergent" property of the complexity of systems of neurons in the brain, for example. For many, the ability to cleverly and convincingly retell such far fetched theories upon demand will obtain the parroting student a degree and perhaps tenure as a doctor of complexity theory at the most prestigious universities in the land. But in essence this is all so much worthless drivel based upon the logic of provably false premises, if you would but honestly look within.
The truth is that there is a universal efficient power above the arbitrary rule of any would be oligarchy. That truth is wonderfully and beautifully intelligible. It is profoundly and ironically simple such that any human mind might partake of it. And it is embodied in the principle of the Republic. The creation of a self governing society to do the good so that humanity and its posterity will increasingly come into conformity in an ever more perfect union that is indeed inscribed in the principle that all men are created equal.
I hope I may have somewhat clarified to some degree whatever has been heretofore cloudy, misty or murky in my many posts here in this blog, ironically named in honor of the genius of Edgar Poe's Thingumbobesquire.
Poe's tomb in Baltimore, where I used to stroll by daily while working nearby
I am an iconoclast, not an "expert." However, I do have the power of reasoned dialogue, as should all thinking citizens of this planet. So, what I want to accomplish here in this post is to bring up some pertinent questions about the topic in its title.
What I am referring to is the discrepancy and inconsistency in the attitude of the public toward the dual issues of self preservation of society and economics. Now, many so called conservatives will pooh pooh the idea that the current pandemic is all that dangerous to necessitate extreme public health measures like quarantine and vaccination. On the other hand, the liberals will denigrate the claims (or simply ignore them altogether) that the so called Green New Deal policies will lead to the inability of society to maintain the current world population of some nearly eight billion souls on this planet, let alone increase that number considerably.
I think that kowtowing to either false set of beliefs is frankly immoral. The problem is that the population suffers from the illusions that are imposed upon their thinking. This is nothing marvelously new. In fact, it is old as proverbial mud. The problem is that the lessons from allegories can be pretty much interpreted as it suits to reinforce the false axioms of these aforementioned belief structures. Plato's Republic features a very challenging such allegory, the "myth" of the cave.
The question is are we being shown mere shadows projected by "puppet masters" on our current equivalent of walls of the cave in order to chain us or better immobilize us to the passivity of "chains of illusion?"
The level of poverty in most of this planet, including pockets in the USA, if not remediated will inevitably lead to the outbreak of old and new epidemics via the vectors of lack of sanitation, including fresh water and lack of adequate nutrition. So, shutting down the borders and fiddling while the planet starves will come back to haunt the isolationists. Likewise, shutting down the use of hydrocarbons (the term "fossil fuels" has been proven incorrect and should be abandoned) means that we consign the world to increased poverty leading to the very same outcome of poverty and mass epidemics.
I believe these outcomes based upon the deliberative dialogue of reason are unassailable. Now, I have spent some forty years or so of my adult life promoting solutions to the economics of the power of an age old establishment that controls the power of money and military as a means to enforce the disastrous results that society currently confronts. The truth is indeed out there. However, unless you, dear reader, squarely face that you are being manipulated into an ideological straightjacket of immobility, then humanity will continue to needlessly suffer ever greater catastrophes.
Reading Plato's Republic, it is indeed an unanswered paradox that it is proposed that poets be excluded. What of the Republic of Letters? It certainly is the case that the Aristophanes play The Clouds did a "number" on Socrates. Likewise, Voltaire's' Candide pilloried Leibniz. The forms of art, poetry, drama, sculpture, architecture and music purport to have a sort of solid inviolability supported by reason. Or at least that was the case until those very forms became a source for irrational arbitrary "invention." Indeed, there is a sort of self consistency with those very forms as a "language" that provide the opportunity for the development of the truthful irony of the finite work of art versus the non finite possibility of development. Therein, perhaps, lies supernal beauty.
Upon what ground exactly is the rationale of the critic's work founded? I have recently written for example that there is a "test" for religion. If it is unfettered and unchecked does what passes for religion devolve into a mere tool to stir the passions in obeisance to the whims of a ruling oligarchy? In America, Edgar Poe apparently gained undying enmity beyond the grave for his trenchant criticism of the ills of poetic meter. However, there is perhaps much more to that sort of criticism than meets the eye, since it is the case that his satires were always political. Even Poe's comment that the extremely popular tales of his contemporary James Cooper were in truth rather pedestrian and that Cooper was a "quietist." This, even though Cooper was quite comfortable in exposing and justifiably denouncing the oligarchy of Venice and the contemporaneous press of his day as being a tool of would be American oligarchs.
Today, this charge of quietism has almost no touchstone for modern audiences. However, that was far from the case at the time. For instance, take the poem of Henry Longfellow, The Three Silences of Molinos. This is a kind of paean to another New England radical, abolitionist "mystic," John Whittier. Now this Molinos was indeed, a quietest. In order to trace out all of the seemingly chaotic connections that were quite well known at that time and bring them to "light" in terms of today's touchstones for my readers it is necessary to take a detour down a somewhat arcane sort of rabbit hole. But I promise it is quite relevant to the current political and social circumstances in which we find ourselves embroiled.
Whittier wrote a sort of a paean to Master Eckhart, wherein much is made of rather mystically magical practices like the lots of Urim and Thummin that resolve into this mystical quietism:
It is sometimes claimed by the mystical cult of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood and T.S. Eliot, that Dante Alighieri and Marguerite Porete were in some ways birds of a feather. And as such are representatives of an earlier pre Renaissance era of simplicity and courtly Romanticism. This parallels the slander against Cusa's mysticism.. For it could be said that Marguerite wrote in the vernacular old French in order to uplift the common people with a national language, etc. However, nothing could be further from the truth and in no way compares to Dante's grand political design in his De Monarchia and Divine Commedia. Likewise Cusa's convening of a great council for reconciliation of faiths to bring about an end to barbaric geopolitical wars of his day. These were both real world challenges that laid the groundwork for the yet to be developed scientific statesmanship of the American System.
I turn now to the theme I briefly brought up in my last posting on Cusa: concrete universals. In his Vision of God, Cusa furthers his claim to a scientific method that is wholly consonant with the idea of the principle of the ongoing process of perfecting human practice. Sometimes referred to as the Imago Viva Dei. I have brought up elsewhere that the Meno dialogue of Plato is analogous to an untutored child grasping profound principles of science that represent clear revolutionary historical advances. For example, the practice of the infinite "vanishing point" in drawing is elementary and easily reproduced by any grade school student. However, look at this in light of Cusa's Concrete Universal. Really the principle that no matter where you look, that infinite projective space, a concrete universal, is ever present would seem miraculous to previous untutored societies. This is the non mystical meaning of the connection of the universal mind, the maximum, non other with the sovereign and inviolable non divisible mind (or soul if you will) of the individual.
And so, here, I need to make another downward journey into the bestiality of what motivates the control of the oligarchy and its hatred of the principle of Prometheus, the bringer of the technology of fire. Various mystery cults that promote the control of priesthoods owned by oligarchies have been with us since time immemorial before it were even possible for epic poems to be written down. The most perverted and egregious of these would have to reside here in the Americas with the death cult rituals of the Aztecs. However, it must be kept in mind that the heinous and superstitious magic of child sacrifice serves as the basis of most of these oligarchical epics including the Greek cycle of tragedies of the House of Atreus.
So the question is how does it make any sense that these same monstrous Aztecs who carried out such thoroughly evil rituals also had intricate knowledge of astronomical cyclic calendars? Well, the answer is it was that very actual power that necessitated esotericism. I leave this for you dear reader to follow up on, for it is my hope that that this might engender a thirst to resolve the many paradoxes that the forgoing brings to mind.
