A Vector of Disinterest
We seem to have a choice: to study the Variable or to study the Constant.
In fact, there is no difference: to study that which always changes is to study the unknowable; to study that which never changes is to study that which is beyond knowledge.
Choose your vector of dis-interest.
Keywords:
Being human is a good gig. Being humane is a better gig. Enjoy the gig whatever it is.
”
About Pavel
GOAL: to help you reclaim eating moments of your life with meaning and moderation; to help you leverage self-acceptance and compassion; to help you appreciate the ordinary perfection of what is; and to help you rediscover your essential self.
www....
Connections
Funny you should say this
Just yesterday, I was working on my book, "Radio Science for the Radio Amateur" and I stated that, "In order to begin to comprehend the bizarre, you need to fully understand the normal."
The fact that our universe is held together by some pretty rigid laws in no way mkes it less interesting....or easy to complrehend. We do know that if there ARE no laws, then nothing is knowable.
Happy New Year!
Eric
Thank you!
Thank you, Eric. That's right: no laws - no patterns (to discern). Well thought through, fellow mind.
Be well and happy new year to you and yours.
Modern Heraclitus
Your posting reminds me of several basic principles that Heraclitus set forth.
1. As you'll recall, he challenged the prevailing Greek view of a static reality or unchanging essence with his assertion "All things are flowing....You cannot step into the same river twice." Emerson echoed this truth in his essay Nature.
2. "All things are one," with opposites ( your Change-Variable and Eric's normal-bizarre above) dependent on each other for their distinct or separate identities (being).
Shifting subjects, with your therapeutic specialities, highlighting the essentials of each one in a series of separate blogs would make for interesting Red Room reading and also further illustrate the "unity of all things." Isn't this "unity" part of Buddhist thought as well?
The best to you,
Brenden
I would like to propose the
I would like to propose the Judeao-Christian viewpoint that time is neither static, as in Greek thought, nor cyclical, as in Buddhist thought, but rather linear....with a beginning and an end.
Genesis 1:1 states: "In the Beginning God created"
It's really fascinating to do a word study on thise five words....in fact they sum up Christian theology nearly completely.
1) In: The implication here is that there's an OUT. God stands OUTSIDE of his creation. This is at direct odds with Pantheism.
2) the: definite article....distinguishes a single item, not one of many
3) beginning: what is referenced by the previous definite article. There is ONE beginning, not many...THE beginning
4) God: Interestingly, God makes no attempt to define Himself here. He is unknowable....in this regard, there is full agreement with Greek and Buddhist thought. However, God has shosen to reveal himself to us in minuscule increments. We "see thorugh a glass darkly" as the Apostle Paul suggests. Paul address MOST of his teaching to the Greek mind.
5) created:This is, of vourse in stark contrast with evolution
This is the core of my "Theology in Five Minutes" seminar. It's AMAZING the discussions this initiiates right from the start.
I look forward to some interesting discussions here, as well!
Blessed New Year!
Eric
The Unknowable
Eric,
Your comment does indeed provide much substance for discussion. Pavel may well respond in greater depth in the context of his original posting and the extent to which his concept of the "unknowable" comports with, if at all, the incomprehensibility of a Creator existing separately and eternally "outside of" a SINGLE creation with a beginning and end.
What specifically peaked my interest was your focus on the linear progression you infer from Jude0-Christian theology of a creation with a beginning and end. Some Biblical citations (e.g., Ephesians 3:21), however, support a cosmology in which creation has no end; i.e., in saecula saeculorum, commonly translated as "for ever and ever" or "world without end." In this view, any kind of apocalyptic event, rather than resulting in an end of all things, simply ushers in a radically transformed/transcendent creation. In a sense, this transformation represents a kind of evolution (admittedly NOT of the Darwinian kind) of what God originally created.
It's all considerably "out of my depth," as the saying goes. So my additional comments here are not meant as anything more than one of many ways to continue the discussion you and Pavel started. Pavel, I'll understand if your reaction is that this discussion has already "veered" wildly and recklessly off the intended course you initially set it on.
Brenden
Thank you!
Brenden and Eric, thank you, I am enjoying this exchange but, frankly, too fried at the moment to comment. Thank you, fellow minds.
Personae
At least you no one can fault you for being inauthentic! For literary artists, it's tempting at times to try out a persona or "strike a pose" in a blog and/or comment to see what responses it gets.
Happy New Year
Just saying...
For me, the only journey is into the heart of God, via the Way, Jesus Christ, who makes it intimate and personal, rather than remote and unknowable.
This is rewarding on all fronts, in all contexts, on all levels. It delivers. It reaches out to others. It helps me to understand who I am and confers a purpose, even making sense of suffering.
Even since I can remember, I've had to answer the question: Why am I doing this? This, rather than Why am I here? Why are we here?
This is not to pontificate. It's merely to share experience and the hope that mankind can move more swiftly towards an Intelligent Peace.
Amen Sister! I've always
Amen Sister!
I've always preferred the "Come let us Reason" approach. I haven't had much success with pontification. ::) And the non-pontificatory approach is a whole lot more fun, anyway. :)
Blessings!
Eric
of constants and variables
When you are at peace with the paradoxes and still retain clarity within, you are one step closer to the source of it all.
projections
Interesting to see what's being projected onto this post.
What's the Rorschach of it?
But I need to be a little remote, to stand outside
Even of myself. Rosy seems to express an Evangelistic view regarding God, but I find Evangelism a rather dangerous way to go. It makes it too easy to confuse our poor selves with the Deity, or worse, with Satan--among whose favorite disguises is the dog collar. "God told me to" is one of evil's most famous excuses. I need a certain remoteness, a certain perspective to experience both God and the freedom He bestowed on me. "Don't believe everything you think" is one of my mottos. The question is not whether God is on my side, but whether I am on His.
As for the Rorshach, well, I'm too much of an amateur to have much an inkling . . . .
Thomas
I'm glad if my comment sparked your interest:)
God doesn't tell me to do anything. He offers, and, one way or another, for better or worse, I choose.
It brings to mind the words of St Francis of Assisi: Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.
I'm afraid I am very bad at it on all fronts!
Hi Thomas: There are
Hi Thomas:
There are certainly dangers with the Evengelistic approach, but I won't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly there have been some misguided attempts to "defend God" that even most thinking Christians are learning to avoid. I realize that the phase "thinking Christian" is deemed by many to be a contradiction in terms, but believe me, there are more of us around than commonly thought...and quite a few of us on Red Room, to boot (like Rosy!)! The fact is, I generally distance myself from "non-thinking Christians"...not because they make the rest of us look bad...but just because for the most part they're BORING to be around! I'd much rather exercise my brain cells "sharpening swords" with an open minded person of any persuasion than joining a crusade. I consider myself a diciple of C.S. Lewis in this regard.
There have been a lot of unfortunate redefinitions and misapplications of some very good words in Christianity. "Apologetics" is one of them. Some take this to mean that God needs some kind of defense...that we need to "aplolgize" for him. I think God is perfectly capable of defending himself. We read in the book of Job how displeased God himself was at Job's efforts to explain God! Nowhere in all of Scriptures are we commanded to prove the existence of God. This is so self evident that God himself doesn't even waste his breath trying to prove his existence. He merely directs us to Creation.
True apologetics is simply removing all the stubling blocks to the truth...and sometimes that means stepping out of the way ourselves.
Eric
thank you
Thomas: a nice epistemological reality check.
As for the "inklings," congrats on a great pun!
That was a great pun, wasn't
That was a great pun, wasn't it? :)
I thiknk the Rorshach of anything is that w tend to see just what we want to see. :)
One of the main problems I see with the Rorshach test is that the figures are always symmetrical about at least on axis...this imparts an automatic bias into the test right from the start. The universe isn't that symmetrical :)
Eric
yes
Apophenia!
Holding my breath!
I'm out of my depth here, but enjoying the elevation of the discourse.
Ink and inklings aside...
Whose reality, I wonder?
How about existentialism? How
How about existentialism? How about each day and each to his/her own and how about quitting the messing around with high faluting thoughts. Live. For each moment. Live for yourself first and after that .................m
States of Mind
I suspect this whole debate centres on our understanding of subjective and objective. Finding an equilibrium is the life challenge of every individual. Stray too far either side and you become Camus' Outsider.
It was fashionable, as I recall, in the late sixties to challenge assumed definitions. The novel itself entered an experimental (and eccentric) phase. States of mind and inner landscapes were laid open as never before within structures that barely existed.
Perhaps this is not surprising after two World Wars and the splitting of the atom. There has been a break-up of form in all contexts, social, psychological, emotional, political... Some of it may be to the good. But I cannot help seeing a fine irony in that all our rigorous insistence upon objectivity seems to lead to isolation in subjective realities. The human organism is comprised of both.
In respect of Mary's 'high faluting thoughts', a physicist might say if you can't make a model of it, it doesn't exist. To extend that, if it is not demonstrable in patterns of behaviour, in action and consequence, it isn't worth the mind-space. So I guess I am agreeing with her.
Just to add - linked to my earlier comments - what is generally overlooked, and often denied, is that existentialism is a Christian state of being. It is not about certainties and the 'knowable'. It is about faith and living life on the edge. The opposite of faith is not doubt: it is the futile search for certainty.
Has It?
- "the time has come to resynthesize the subjective and the objective" [oliver l reiser, cosmic humanism, in 1970s]
has it?!
- yes, for some, and not yet, for others.
perfect timing!
- as ever...
We have a rule of thumb in
We have a rule of thumb in the physics lab that any instrument you have needs to be at least ten times as accurate as any phenomenon you want to measure. You can never measure the more precise by the less precise.
This puts us in a real dilemma when trying to "measure" God....any devise at our disposal is woefully inadequate. Since God is the measuring stick of all things, (again referring to Genesis 1:1) we are left to faith, as Rosy has pointed out. But it is not a blind faith.
If God were actually provable by our measuring stics, there would be no requirement for faith, and hence no REWARD, either. God is a REWARDER of those who believe. And yet, we're also told that there is enough incrotrovertible evidence that "a fool hath said in his heart there is no God."
In legal terms, God's existence would be "beyond all reasonable doubt."
The problem is, so much doubt is UNreasonable.
Eric
Love all of this debate -
Love all of this debate - love rolling those fabulous words around in my mouth. I was just out feeding the hens. The mist is in. The air soft, tangible really. I was surprised at how pleasant it was outdoors because from the cocoon of the kitchen the garden looked gloomy and unwelcoming. I was wrong. All I had to do was to don my wellington boots and raincoat. It renewed my faith in the land, I touched it and it spoke back to me. Now I bake the bread. My gods, my kachinas are kind on this day. For me it 's as pure and simple as that. m
The One Constant
Returning to a key concept in the original blog, one of the most self-evident CONSTANTS in human experience is that our "awareness" or consciousness is a combination of both sensation/feeling and abstraction/thought ("processed" sensation). It seems some of us are aligning ourselves in primarily one camp or the other. I'm going with both, though knowing that makes me vulnerable to the criticism of "hedging one's bet."
"We think by feeling, what is there to know?"--Theodore Roethke
WYSIWYC: What You See Is What You Choose (to see)
Consider a soap bubble on a sunny day: what color is it? It depends, right? On what? On the angle of view.
Certainty is an impasse. Reality is rarely (if ever!) either “this” or “that.” Dichotomous (i.e. dualistic, i.e. 2-fold) logic is too black-and-white to capture the iridescence of reality. Syādvāda, an ancient Jainist doctrine of 7-fold postulation, allows you a multiplicity of angles of seeing reality.
Syādvāda teaches that:
- it is impossible to determine the truth of a system within its own thought
- each truth is valid within its own system
- therefore, there is more than one truth
Thus, Syadvada encourages a 7-fold way of referring to reality. Syadvada offers the following view-specific preambles when describing some aspect of the iridescent reality:
1.Syād-asti — “in some ways something is”
2.Syād-nāsti — “in some ways something is not”
3.Syād-asti-nāsti — “in some ways something is and is not”
4.Syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ — “in some ways something is and it is indescribable”
5.Syād-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ — “in some ways something is not and it is indescribable”
6.Syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ — “in some ways something is, is not and is indescribable”
7.Syād-avaktavyaḥ — “in some ways something is indescribable”
The word syadvada comes from two roots. Syat means “may be”, whereas vada means “assertion”. Placed together syādvāda becomes the assertion of what may be, the assertion of possibilities.
A bit confusing, huh? That’s reality for you. It’s too fluid for our certainty-craving mindbox.
Syadvada Quick Lube for the Mind
Here’s my own (semi-poetic) interpretation of this 7-fold logic.
1.
If you can see the reality in at least seven ways
You can be at peace with it.
And one with it too.
2.
The essence of any mind-war or body-war is: “I think This” versus “I think This.”
From the side it looks like it’s just two people arguing about their respective version of “This” and there is a point to it.
But from inside the seven-fold Syadvada you know there isn’t any one point, just a field of possible points of view.
They are fighting for the exact same thingless thing they call “This.”
3.
And the name of this “This” is
The Nameless.
4.
Truth be told: truth is silent.
Closing Questions for an Opening Mind:
Did you like this comment? Perhaps, you did. Perhaps, you didn’t. Perhaps, you did, and, perhaps, in some ways, you didn’t. Or, perhaps, in some ways you neither liked it nor disliked it. Or, maybe, just maybe, you can’t quite describe what you felt. It’s almost always like that….
What’s this comment about? About reality, of course, and, of course, about something entirely indescribable…
Final question to you: is reality colorful or transparent? WYSIWYC: What You See Is What You Choose (to see).
Dr. Pavel: You have hit
Dr. Pavel:
You have hit precisely on the very quandary we encounter when we work within a closed loop.."the system within its own thought." However, this is also addressed in Genesis 1:1, by the term In. as being very distinct from OUT. Indeed if there is not a God outside the system, there is no hope of anyone inside said system to actually learn anything. Unless, of course, God himself decides to penetrate the bubble and reveal himself, which is at the very core of the Scriptures.
In fact, anyone who pursues truth at all, is, by definition acknowledging that there is an objective truth. If there IS no objective truth, then the pursuit of knowledge is both impossible AND pointless. We live by the hope that there is something to know. If truth is simply our own perspective...how can we possibly know if we've made any progress in that direction...or ANY direction.
I believe God has revealed a good deal of his nature in physical nature. Nothing we can observe will be contradictory to him, but that doesn't mean we can entirely know him by studying nature alone. However, there is so much inherent order in Nature that the only alternative to intelligent design is stupid design, and I haven't yet met anyone who believes in that! :) One only has to look at some supposedly random process such as the Mandelbrot set, to see that even randomness itself is an illusion. There is a built in logic to every process we call random...hence the "rules of chance."
Interestingly, it was a Muslim colleague of mine who presented the best case for intelligent design I'd heard....the precise matching of the Sun and Moon during a Solar eclipse.....an extremely unlikely coincidence, that for a brief instant allows us to see the Sun's corona.
Again...can I prove God? No. Can I come up with a whole lot of difficult to refute evidence? I certainly can, and to be honest, most physicists believe in some kind of intelligent design, even if they don't acknowledge Christianity. The universe clearly loves order.
Eric
WYSIWYCTS
Yes!
As Jesus Christ himself attested two thousand years ago.
Christians 'see' he is the (expected, searched for) 'model' through which God, the Creator demonstrates his undying Love for his Creation. He indicates one eternal, indivisible Truth outside Time and Context, subject to no qualifying or modifying clauses.
God, as Eric's Intelligent Design and Creator of Cosmic Order, clearly has to act to satisfy his own equation when humanity has distanced itself through its own conceits. (He doesn't make it compulsory, or a condition of his love, to buy into that. We choose.)
All personal beliefs, religions, philosophies, creeds aside, the truly active principles in human Life are based on what St Paul called 'the evidence of things not seen.'
Can you see Love?
Can you see Love?
Yes!
The Hidden Reality
All interested participants,
When one reads the latest discoveries and related thinking about the cosmos in such books as Brian Greene's THE HIDDEN REALITY (also a recent PBS series), what seems "apparent" ( aren't we human beings working largely with superficial appearances gathered through our rather "gross" and limited senses and hi-tech extensions of them?) may be quite different from some "ultimate" reality currently way beyond our understanding. Just take the "micro"--"macro" scale only and what "space" an entity such as our Milky Way Galaxy (or even the much larger "Local Group" of galaxies) might represent on it. It could be that our entire spiral Galaxy (with an estimated radius of some 100,000 LIGHT YEARS and taking 2oo million years to complete just one full spin) is just ONE cell or even atom in some incredibly and infinitely larger macro structure that is way beyond the comprehension of a being with our limited perception and intelligence. In this view, we human beings are even more "benighted" than an ant, having climbed to the top of a blade of grass, looking upward toward the the branches/trunk of the nearest tree. Just as the ant can at best (if at ALL) discern only the vaguest blends of light and and darkness and, further, cannot possibly "see" or sense its context beyond a few inches, so too are we humans , in relation to the infinite cosmos, similarly ill-equipped to comprehend our "context" and form even the most rudimentary conception of our relative place in this context.
I'm all for scientific inquiry as long as we recognize that our most advanced or "leading edge" discoveries about the cosmos are not even the proverbial "tip" of the iceberg (the cosmos) but rather, at best just a "speck" on that tip. If we are fortunate enough as a species to have another million or two million years, we might possibly get a clear picture of the so-called "tip" itself, but that still leaves 99% of the iceberg beyond our comprehension. Additionally, our entire galaxy or a large portion of it could be decimated by some unpredicable and unavoidable cataclysmic event like being "zapped" by a burst of deadly radiation originating from a source infinitely far away or colliding, as is actually predicated, with a neighboring galaxy.
Given this much larger picture or context, the continued existence or future of our species is precarious and tenuous indeed. Shakespeare said it best in KING LEAR when he wrote, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods," the "gods" being either the ones conceived in our various theologies or, in a secular view, the inexorable processes and forces at work in our cosmos. Thus, we have more than sufficient cause standing in awe of it all with "fear and trembling" as described in existentialist philosophy [Soren Kierkegaard].
Brenden
well said
Well said, Brenden. I join you in this attitude of epistemological sobriety.
vector chosen
the conversation appears to be dying.
the vector of disinterest has finally been chosen: having stumbled upon our respective differences and having banged on closed doors, we finally retire to our respective corners of subjectivity.
all as it should be.
A road to nowhere
The proposition was self-fulfilling to begin with, Pavel.
Luckily, this is the unique forum that is Red Room where we may respectfully explore some interesting byways :)
indeed
indeed, indeed
Maybe it's just elevated to a
Maybe it's just elevated to a "Tensor of disinterest."
:)
Eric
tensor?
What do you mean, Eric?
Hee hee! A mathematical
Hee hee! A mathematical pun
Actually, a vector is a tensor of order 1.
Or, put differently, a tensor is to a vector, what a vector is to a scalar..
I guess this could open up another Pandora's Box!'
'
Eric
good one
good one, wraps it up nicely, deliciously circular and self-referential
Not dying
Pavlov,
When given the choice of studying variables and constants, what popped into my mind was stasis - a period of inactivity or equilibrium, from the Greek histanai or "stoppage."
Perhaps we don't have to choose or know why; perhaps we can rest and let what is happening be.
Jules