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.
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.
Peter's conflict with Simon Magus by Avanzino Nucci, 1620. Simon is on the right, wearing black.
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.
Antimatter Starship - Earth to Pluto in less than six months? 92% light speed?
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.
