exactphilosophy.net 2018 (1 Nov)
Archive copy (5 Nov 2018). Thread at Google Groups:
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.philosophy.taoism/c/gYcVefUS-wk
Posts 011-014 by "undifferentiated" (Google Groups) "{:-])))" (From)
were actually the first time in my life that someone dared / cared to
comment in some detail on the core idea of my site (elements defined in
terms of in/out, rest/move, etc.). Posts after 018 were not interesting
any more in that sense to me, nor otherwise especially original to me.
Still, an indirect "secret" reply to some slightly later posts:
I still sometimes dream of finding a new model of physics where "virtual
particles" and the "spooky actions at a distance" of entangled quantum
states would be represented by a single, more fundamental concept. Maybe
I still will someday, and then I would probably post the idea somewhere.
And fundamentally, all concepts that have been given words are the same,
in the sense that they can only be measured more or less indirectly, so,
yes, there are differences between "virtual particles" and "real" ones,
but not "fundamentally" in the sense just mentioned. Such reasoning is
maybe also what the "exact" in "exactphilosophy" could stand for? ;)
Then again, this here may have been my very last appearance in Usenet!
If that be the case: Bye, bye, and thanks for all the fish...
Alain Stalder )o+
exactphilosophy.net
Snapshot of core content (without "artemis" articles) of 1 Nov 2018.
Notable additions:
* A somewhat formal definition of "movement outside"
and generally the core content revisited ("way")
* Jung's psychological types and "in/out"
* Empedocles and the elements taken literally: Zeus as the root of
fire, Hera of earth, Hades of air and Nestis of water
* Artemis articles:
- Paradoxes (5 articles)
- How astrology might really work (also in German)
- USA/CH, Sedna, Original ideas in ...
© 2002-now Alain Stalder
--
Welcome
I present a way of looking at the world here. That way or idea is not
something that can be proven. But some of the fruits it contains might
be considered for tending to, grow and become part of existing systems
of thought.
Just click sequentially through all menu items on the left, like reading
chapters in a book, and take your time, or go to 'artemis' for every-
and nothing...
I am a physicist (*1966 in Zürich, Switzerland) and am doing this as a
hobby.
Alain Stalder
--
way
After defining elements from immediate perception of the world, inspired
by Kant and Schopenhauer, I relate these elements to physics, the
ancient Greek elements, and to the 8 trigrams of the Chinese I Ching.
--
space and time
Imagine that you have just now started to look at the world.
[image]
One of the first things that you notice is space. There is you and an
outside world that you can see, and you can see more than one thing.
What separates you and what you can see, and what separates the
different things that you see, is space in its most immediate
definition.
Then you also quickly notice that some things move and others do not.
This is time, again in its most immediate definition, as motion or being
at rest.
[image]
Things can rest or move outside and inside the mind. Thus there would a
priori be 4 different kinds of things: What moves outside, what rests
outside, what moves inside, and what rests inside. Let me call them
elements and give them the following names: emo, ero, emi and eri.
emo moves outside
ero rests outside
emi moves inside
eri rests inside
Using a camera, emo and ero might be defined as the difference between
two images taken shortly after each other. Differing pixels would be
emo, same pixels ero. For example, a ball that rolls down a slope would
itself not be emo as a physical object, but emo would be the area the
ball spawns between the two images (excluding the middle if the ball is
uniformly colored).
[image]
leads
Some literature quotes, ideas and different points of view. Always also
see 'artemis' for eventually articles that may expose some topics in a
more contemporarily amenable way.
* Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason. 1787.
In the early chapters, Kant discloses that some observable things
cannot be isolated from the self, but instead appear to be themselves
a priori necessary for thinking and observation. These a priori
concepts include space and time in their immediate sense - the
structure in which things appear in the mind and seem to exist outside
of it.
* "By means of the external sense (a property of the mind), we represent
to ourselves objects as without us, and these all in space. Herein
alone are their shape, dimensions, and relations to each other
determined or determinable. [...] Space is not a conception which has
been derived from outward experiences. For, in order that certain
sensations may relate to something without me (that is, to something
which occupies a different part of space from that in which I am); in
like manner, in order that I may represent them not merely as without,
of, and near to each other, but also in separate places, the
representation of space must already exist as a foundation. [...] We
never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the
non-existence of space, though we may easily enough think that no
objects are found in it." (translated by J. Meiklejohn)
* "Time is not an empirical conception. For neither coexistence nor
succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did
not exist as a foundation a priori. [...] With regard to phenomena in
general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to
ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well
represent to ourselves time void of phenomena."
* If I can imagine something, is it then really inside of me? Isn't
there already a separation (space) between me and what I imagine? Such
an extreme definition of self or inside would mean that the self
cannot have any (consciously accessible) attributes, no memory etc.,
because any such attribute of the self would be something that can be
considered by the self and would thus, by definition, not be part of
the self...
* This definition of self reminds of the Tao ("way") in Taoism. Lao Tzu
starts the Tao Te Ching with "The Tao that can be Tao'ed
(trodden/spoken), is not the real (unchanging) Tao".
* The definition of emo as the difference between two images is from
September 2018. Before that I would often consider, say, a ball itself
(or at least its visible surface) as ero, as long as it would rest,
and as emo, when it would be rolling. That overall view still shows a
bit in the first drawing above.
The concept of a "ball" is a priori much more complex than comparing
two images, which becomes evident once you try to program computers to
recognize (3-dimensional) items on 2-dimensional images. How a concept
like a "ball" comes to be in the mind appears to require a lot of
interaction with the environment (typically quite early as a child),
and in the end it is philosophically not so clear whether a "ball" is
rather a natural thing, something that objectively exists, or rather a
useful cultural abstraction of reality, copied from others. See also
e.g. Kant or Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
The new definition of emo↔ero is more fundamental, even though it
reminds of the shadows in Plato's Cave. Thus it might a priori be
better suited for such a fundamental concept as elements are. But,
without having explored where different definitions lead, settling on
just one may be a bit early.
* How would rest/move be defined for other senses than vision?
How would eri and emi be measured inside? Would the only "objective"
way be to measure brain activity outside? Would that be fundamental
enough in this context?
Could the self (observer)4 be measured?
* Would a female observer also consider what is seen as not being part
of herself or would she rather tend to identify with what she sees?
(Is the own body part of the self? And lovers, family, friends, house,
garden, etc.?) In other words, is the distinction between in and out
hard or soft (gradual)?
* What about sleep, dreaming, trance, drunkenness? Why only have a fully
conscious observer?
--
metamorphosis
The next thing that one notices is that motion can start and stop, and
that changes outside and inside seem not to be independent of each
other. In other words, the elements change, maybe even metamorphose into
each other.
What causes or allows these changes? Whatever it is, it must be
something fundamental, like the four elements. So let me simply call it
the fifth element, e5.
Free will seems to be a part of e5. It is possible to lift a spoon and
then to throw it away, i.e. to get something outside that rests into
motion (ero→emo). However, free will cannot be identical to e5, as some
things are much harder to control (try lifting a tree) and things
transform all the time without conscious influence.
Freedom inside the mind seems larger than outside. It is much easier to
lift a tree in the mind, than a real tree. But let me tackle things from
a different angle: Outside on average more things rest than move, while
inside the mind, things are almost always more flowing.
For example, a tree is at rest in most situations, except for a little
movement of leaves and maybe branches. But if you close your eyes and
try to imagine a tree at rest, it will get very hard after a few seconds
not to deviate to other thoughts and to keep the tree at rest.
[image]
In conclusion, on average outside activity is needed to get things
moving, while inside activity is needed to keep things at rest. More
abstractly, emo and eri are thus active, ero and emi are passive. Also,
what is outside resists motion on average more than what is inside. So
emo and ero are hard (out), emi and eri are soft (in). What moves
usually does so in various directions. Hence what rests appears to bind,
what moves appears to release.
emo moves outside active hard release
ero rests outside passive hard bind
emi moves inside passive soft release
eri rests inside active soft bind
e5 transforms the above elements
If you leisurely observe a scene outside, like at the beach, usually
most things will be resting, but there will be some movement. If you
then close your eyes, in my experience, what will be immediately visible
after closing your eyes will be the few things that moved, but frozen in
movement, hence apparently a transition emo→eri, a transition in which
activity is preserved.
[image]
Accordingly, passivity outside would then yield passivity inside,
ero→emi. Actively created change outside, which more often means to get
something in motion than the other way round, usually needs active focus
inside first. Hence transitions in↔out would go both ways, emo↔eri and
ero↔emi. Motion outside can also come to be and stop without much
activity inside, like when an apple falls from a tree. Similarly, such
things can also happen inside without much activity outside. Hence there
would apparently also be transitions emo↔ero and emi↔eri. All in all,
apparently a circle ero↔emo↔eri↔emi↔ero, while other transitions would
at least be less frequent.
[image]
The elements could a priori interface in six ways: emo-ero, emi-eri,
emo-emi, ero-eri, emo-eri, emi-ero. Any interface between elements must
be unobservable, because otherwise it would be something that is
perceived inside or outside, i.e. it would be one of the four elements.
The same argument can be made for e5, of course.
Let me imagine an interface in-out as an infinitely thin membrane. And
imagine, say, a blob of ero at the interface. If it remained passive, it
could start to flow while permeating inside, becoming emi, or the other
way round, and similarly for emo and eri.
[image]
Since interfaces between elements would be invisible, just like e5, they
might a priori have an arbitrarily complex nature, so that the above
picture is a priori maybe just one of the simplest ways of seeing them.
leads
* If free will or the observing self is a part of e5, what is the rest?
Cause and effect, fate, destiny, the free will of others? Quantum
mechanics has relativized the first assumption somewhat, or maybe not.
* What property of the issue of free will or not leads to millions of
variations when thinking about it? Could it possibly even be literally
the effect of many "transformations" in the mind, even in circles,
whatever that may mean precisely?
* Freedom to lift a spoon does not automatically mean freedom of choice
whether to want to lift the spoon or not.
* The interface ero-emi could be seen as the arrangement of things
outside related to a mood, a flow of feelings inside.
* When I say that outside more things rest than move, I mean this in a
very specific sense: Relative macroscopic motion at time scales that
human beings can register.
At long time scales, all things move; microscopically everything is in
motion, as heat is nothing but random motion of atoms or molecules.
When I turn my head, all objects move, but relative motion between
them remains small.
* The present approach to nature is consequently centered on the human
perspective, on direct experience of nature. Modern science usually
differs from that by trying to pick a point of view from which a
problem is easy to describe.
The oldest example for this is astronomy that has been greatly
simplified by solar centered calculations instead of using many
arbitrary epicycles in geocentric calculations.
* Modern science is a very valuable companion for the present approach,
especially for helping to exclude naive mistakes.
* Can my observations about motion, activity and hardness outside and
inside be formalized and thus proven? How would such a mathematical
representation look like? What assumptions would it be based on?
* In any closed system, entropy, roughly a measure of disorder, can at
best remain constant, but usually it increases. With time, macroscopic
directed motion and structures decay into microscopic random motion,
which is, by definition, heat. Life manages to escape this fate by
operating in open systems, by exporting disorder into the environment.
That way, living beings can grow from microscopic seeds to complex
structures and animals can repeatedly create directed motion.
Since science considers the outside world to be mainly inanimate and
the mind to be located in a piece of organic matter, the brain, it
predicts that outside motion tends to disappear, while inside the
conscious mind has a hard time focusing on something, because lots of
mostly unconscious activity in the brain keeps stirring things up.
Science is thus essentially compatible with the considerations
presented so far, except for science's qualitative notion that
creating motion inside the mind is active, requires energy, like
outside. This might, however, simply be due to the viewpoint of
science, which only considers facts in the outer, material world and
might thus not be able to describe inner processes as experienced from
the inside...
* In meditation, calmness of the mind (eri) is often sought by actively
focussing the mind on something, thus reducing emi.
* In daily life, the outer world seems often bigger and stronger than
the inner one. If you look at a bicycle and then close your eyes, you
can quite quickly imagine the bicycle in your mind, but if you then
imagine, say, that you add wings, and open your eyes again, you will
usually not see a winged bicycle.
Conversely, you can usually make everything outside disappear by just
closing your eyes ("turn black", ero), or you can turn your head or
walk away, so that the influence on what one sees outside is
immediately very strong in that sense.
Adding wings to a bicycle outside is still possible, but harder,
because the outer world is harder. It requires several steps involving
eri (planning, focussing), which then lead, via emo, and to a
different arrangement of ero, a winged bicycle.
--
greek philosophy
Aristotle defines elements to be composed of properties that can be felt
by touching. He uses two pairs of opposites, hot-cold and wet-dry, to
define four elements, which he names fire, earth, water and air. And he
identifies wet-dry with soft-hard, viscous-brittle and smooth-rough.
Unlike later the Stoics, he does not consistently identify hot-cold with
active-passive and light-heavy. If you do, you get:
fire hot (active) dry (hard) emo
earth cold (passive) dry (hard) ero
water cold (passive) wet (soft) emi
air hot (active) wet (soft) eri
Aristotle defines a fifth element as immutable, moving only in circles
and existing only in space, while the other four elements move linearly.
And he also arranges the four elements essentially in a circle in which
they transform into each other by flipping one of hot↔cold or wet↔dry at
each transition. The shared theme of a circle links the transformation
of elements to the fifth element.
[image]
This yields a one-to-one correspondence to my previous definition of the
elements, including the same circle.
leads
* Aristotle. On Generation and Corruption. Around 350 BCE.
* "Since, then, we are looking for 'originative sources' of perceptible
body; and since 'perceptible' is equivalent to 'tangible', and
'tangible' is that of which the perception is touch; it is clear that
not all the contrarieties constitute 'forms' and 'originative sources'
of body, but only those which correspond to touch." (Book II,
translated by H. Joachim)
* "From moist and dry are derived (iii) the fine and coarse, viscous and
brittle, hard and soft, and the remaining tangible differences. For
(a) since the moist has no determinate shape, but is readily adaptable
and follows the outline of that which is in contact with it, it is
characteristic of it to be 'such as to fill up'. Now 'the fine' is
'such as to fill up'. For 'the fine' consists of subtle particles; but
that which consists of small particles is 'such as to fill up',
inasmuch as it is in contact whole with whole-and 'the fine' exhibits
this character in a superlative degree. Hence it is evident that the
fine derives from the moist, while the coarse derives from the dry.
Again (b) 'the viscous' derives from the moist: for 'the viscous'
(e.g. oil) is a 'moist' modified in a certain way. 'The brittle', on
the other hand, derives from the dry: for 'brittle' is that which is
completely dry-so completely, that its solidification has actually
been due to failure of moisture. Further (c) 'the soft' derives from
the moist. For 'soft' is that which yields to pressure by retiring
into itself, though it does not yield by total displacement as the
moist does-which explains why the moist is not 'soft', although 'the
soft' derives from the moist. 'The hard', on the other hand, derives
from the dry: for 'hard' is that which is solidified, and the
solidified is dry."
* "The elementary qualities are four [...]. Hence it is evident that the
'couplings' of the elementary qualities will be four: hot with dry and
moist with hot, and again cold with dry and cold with moist. [...]
Fire is hot and dry, whereas Air is hot and moist (Air being a sort of
aqueous vapour); and Water is cold and moist, while Earth is cold and
dry."
* Aristotle arranges the elements in a cycle fire-air-water-earth:
"Thus (i) the process of conversion will be quick between those which
have interchangeable 'complementary factors', but slow between those
which have none. The reason is that it is easier for a single thing to
change than for many. Air, e.g. will result from Fire if a single
quality changes: for Fire, as we saw, is hot and dry while Air is hot
and moist, so that there will be Air if the dry be overcome by the
moist. Again, Water will result from Air if the hot be overcome by the
cold: for Air, as we saw, is hot and moist while Water is cold and
moist, so that, if the hot changes, there will be Water. So too, in
the same manner, Earth will result from Water and Fire from Earth,
since the two 'elements' in both these couples have interchangeable
'complementary factors'. For Water is moist and cold while Earth is
cold and dry-so that, if the moist be overcome, there will be Earth:
and again, since Fire is dry and hot while Earth is cold and dry, Fire
will result from Earth if the cold pass-away."
It appears that Aristotle excludes other transitions, because why else
would they be slower if not because they would have to take place in
sequence as two transitions along the circle?
* Some fragments of Heraclitus suggest the same circle, namely DK B76
"fire's death is air's birth, and air's death is water's birth" and
B36 "psyche's death is water's birth, water's death is earth's birth,
from earth comes water, from water comes psyche", if psyche (or soul)
is identified with air. But knowledge of Heraclitus is based on
fragmentary quotes from later authors like the ones above. Fragment
B31 describes a transformation from fire to sea (water?) and says that
sea is made of equal parts of earth and whirlwind (air?); fragment B90
suggests that he considered fire the primary substance.
Similarly, there have been many views by different philosophers, some
of which are mentioned further below.
* In On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle considers light-heavy not
to be an attribute of any specific elements:
"(i) heavy and light are neither active nor susceptible. Things are
not called 'heavy' and 'light' because they act upon, or suffer action
from, other things. But the 'elements' must be reciprocally active and
susceptible, since they 'combine' and are transformed into one
another. On the other hand (ii) hot and cold, and dry and moist, are
terms, of which the first pair implies power to act and the second
pair susceptibility."
But in On the Heavens, he considers air and fire as light and water
and earth as heavy, in the order earth-water-air-fire, and postulates
the existence of an immutable fifth element that dominates in the sky,
is neither light nor heavy and moves in circles, while the first four
elements move linearly:
"[...] all locomotion, as we term it, is either straight or circular
or a combination of these two, which are the only simple movements.
[...] Now revolution about the centre is circular motion, while the
upward and downward movements are in a straight line, 'upward' meaning
motion away from the centre, and 'downward' motion towards it. [...]
For if the natural motion is upward, it will be fire or air, and if
downward, water or earth. [...] circular motion is necessarily
primary. For the perfect is naturally prior to the imperfect, and the
circle is a perfect thing. [...] These premises clearly give the
conclusion that there is in nature some bodily substance other than
the formations we know, prior to them all and more divine than they.
[...] there is something beyond the bodies that are about us on this
earth, different and separate from them; and that the superior glory
of its nature is proportionate to its distance from this world of
ours. [...] things are heavy and light relatively to one another; air,
for instance, is light relatively to water, and water light relatively
to earth. The body, then, which moves in a circle cannot possibly
possess either heaviness or lightness. For neither naturally nor
unnaturally can it move either towards or away from the centre. [...]
this body will be ungenerated and indestructible and exempt from
increase and alteration [...] earth is enclosed by water, water by
air, air by fire, and these similarly by the upper bodies" (Book I,
translated by J. Stocks)
* Most things in the sky beyond clouds are round or cyclic: sun and moon
are round, planets, as well as stars during night and seasons, move
periodically in predictable cycles.
* The fifth element is also called ether or aether and quintessence.
Many different views of the fifth element and closely related concepts
have emerged over time.
Plato used the word aether to describe the purest form of air in the
Timaeus. But there is also a strong association of the sky with fire,
because stars and planets appear to emit light and the sun provides
heat, and also because fire was often considered the lightest of the
four elements.
The fifth element is generally considered "divine" because gods were
often believed to live in heaven. And it is often also seen as special
in other ways, like able to create life, or immortal like the soul or
maybe pneuma, or able to create matter and to hold it together, or
maybe identified by some alchemists with the philosopher's stone,
which was believed to be able to transform matter, like lead to gold,
etc.?
* Do such associations (historically founded or not) fit well with the
definition of e5 simply because they all keep going in circles around
the same questions?
* Aristotle appears to consistently link hot/cold to active and wet/dry
to passive, see quote from On Generation and Corruption above, or the
following quote from Meteorology:
"All this makes it clear that bodies are formed by heat and cold and
that these agents operate by thickening and solidifying. It is because
these qualities fashion bodies that we find heat in all of them, and
in some cold in so far as heat is absent. These qualities, then, are
present as active, and the moist and the dry as passive, and
consequently all four are found in mixed bodies." (Book IV, translated
by E. Webster)
* David Sedley writes in chapter 11 of The Cambridge History of
Hellenistic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2000) that the
Stoic's identification of hot-cold with active-passive emerged from
medical tradition, from pneuma, breath, which was seen as a mixture of
fire and air, and mentions also that this identification was not so
clearly the only view of the Stoics in their time. A bit later
astrological views emerged that see fire and air as male, and water
and earth as female. See Vettius Valens's Anthologia in the 2nd
century CE and hints in earlier texts by Dorotheus of Sidon and Marcus
Manilius. These views have essentially prevailed, including in
medieval alchemy and up to contemporary astrology.
* According to Diogenes Laërtius in the third century CE, the Stoics
would have identified fire with hot, earth with dry, water with wet,
and air with cold (and dry):
"[...] the four elements are all equally an essence without any
distinctive quality, namely, matter; but fire is the hot, water the
moist, air the cold, and earth the dry - though this last quality is
also common to the air. The fire is the highest, and that is called
aether, in which first of all the sphere was generated in which the
fixed stars are set, then that in which the planets revolve; after
that the air, then the water; and the sediment as it were of all is
the earth, which is placed in the centre of the rest." (7. LXIX,
translated by C. Yonge)
The papyrus Anonymus Londinensis from about the first century CE says
essentially the same about Philistion (apparently Philistion of Locri,
a contemporary of Plato):
"Philiston thinks that we are composed of four 'forms', that is, of
four elements - fire, air, water, earth. Each of these too has its own
power; of fire the power is the hot, of air it is the cold, of water
the moist, and of earth the dry." (XX 24, translated by W. Jones)
According to David Hahm in The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (1977), this
view might have already been quite common among physicians in
classical times. Artistotle's texts about biology seem to implicitly
reflect that view quite clearly, like that air is inhaled cold and
exhaled hot (pneuma). Although there appear to be no contemporary
sources that would directly prove such an identification, Hahm's
detailed argumentation that the Stoics aimed for a unified view of the
elements across all fields seems to make this plausible.
In Stoic belief, the cosmos emerged from fire via air to water to
earth, and back (see Hahm for details), essentially along Aristotle's
circle of the elements.
* In Academica (45 BCE), Cicero lets Antiochus of Ascalon say the
following, influenced by Aristotle and the Stoics:
"Accordingly air [...] and fire and water and earth are primary; while
their derivatives are the species of living creatures and of the
things that grow out of the earth. Therefore those things are termed
[...] elements; and among them air and fire have motive and efficient
force, and the remaining divisions [...] water and earth, receptive
and 'passive' capacity. Aristotle deemed that there existed a certain
fifth sort of element, in a class by itself and unlike the four that I
have mentioned above, which was the source of the stars and of
thinking minds." (Book I 26, translated by H. Rackham)
* In contemporary astrology, fire is associated with imagination, air
with (abstract) thinking and communication, water with feelings, and
earth with pragmatic realism.
* In ancient Greek philosophy there was also the idea of matter
consisting of indivisible physical units (atoms). In Plato's Timaeus,
a model is presented that combines both views by associating the five
elements with the five Platonic solids: fire-tetrahedron,
air-octahedron, water-icosahedron, earth-cube and the roundest one,
the dodecahedron, for the whole world/universe (pan).
In 4 dimensions there are 6 generalized Platonic solids, in 5 and more
dimensions always only 3, namely generalizations of tetrahedron, cube
and octahedron.
* Empedocles is often credited for having first mentioned the four
elements in the following fragment (DK31B6):
[image]
It speaks of "four roots" at the origin of all and then lists four
gods with some attributes, in this order: Zeus (flashing/shining),
Hera (live-giving/-bearing), Aidoneus (no attributes), Nestis
(moisture, tears/dew). Interpretation and attribution to elements is
controversial and has already been so in antiquity; start maybe at
John Opsopaus (see links).
If you take Empedocles literally, Zeus would maybe most immediately be
the root of fire, because of his attributes and because he creates
lightning, Hera the root of earth, because she bears (creates) a
child, Nestis the root of water, because of dew and tears (rain?).
This would leave Aidoneus as the root of air, which seems rather
unexpected at first. Aidoneus is a variant of Aides (Hades) since at
least Homer, and maybe most likely means "unseen" or "invisible". In
Plato's Cratylus Socrates proposes "knowledge of all noble things"
instead. In any case, air and knowledge are typically invisible, and
death arguably kills everything except an immortal, invisible soul,
which then dwells in the underworld, in Hades.
Still, so far Hades-air seems not to be most obvious fit, but maybe
still clear enough for a secretly initiated reader in antiquity? Note
that Aidoneus is the only one listed without explicit attributes, so
maybe his name itself is the attribute, and the list of contemporary
deities served also to veil a secret "oath" to the four elements and
related medical traditions?
The Hippocratic Oath in its oldest preserved form also starts with
four names: "I swear by Apollo the healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia,
by Panacea, [...]". The sun god Apollon would maybe be most strongly
associated with fire, his son Asclepius as a wise doctor with air, his
daughter Hygieia with water, as she is often shown with a snake that
drinks from a bowl in her hands (and with hygiene, of course, which
often involves liquids for disinfection), and Panacea, another of
Asclepius' five daughters, with earth, as she used to heal with
plants. Did doctors implicitly take an oath on the four elements, more
so than on the explicitly named gods or saints?
The order of elements in the oath would thus be Aristoteles' ordering
from light to heavy, while Empedocles' order would remind maybe more
of the myth of Dionysos, who was born first from fire (Zeus in form of
lightning), then from earth (Zeus' thigh), then from water (chopped to
pieces, cooked and put back together), then from air (struck with
madness), finally to be reborn as arguably a "higher octave" of Zeus,
as the fifth element, also symbolized by wearing a lion's pelt? The
zodiac starts with fire (Aries), then follow earth, air, water, and
then fire again, in the fifth sign, Leo.
The myth of Dionysos reminds also of ancient Egyptian myths around
Osiris, Isis, their dismembered son Horus, and Seth, or of ancient
Egyptian creation myths, like the one of Heliopolis, where there
appears to be a sequence water-fire-air/water-earth/heaven-..., which
also resembles Hesiod's description of how the world came to be, and
creation myths world-wide. In such myths, elements are usually
automatically listed in a sequence, as later by Aristotle by lightness
or in a circle.
To ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians were apparently sort of like
the ancient Greeks in modern perception, an admired ancient culture.
It appears that the ancient Egyptians might have kept things more
secret than the Greeks in their time, maybe only passing it on from
master to pupil shaman?
Finally, as a teaser, note that the pyramids have five corners, an
earthly base of four, plus one on top.
--
i ching
All cultures seem to know some kinds of elements, but let me consider
the 8 trigrams of the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching or Yijing.
☰ heaven, strong, creative, father
☷ earth, devoted/yielding, receptive, mother
☳ thunder, inciting movement, arousing, 1st son
☵ water, dangerous, abysmal, 2nd son
☶ mountain, resting, keeping still, 3rd son
☴ wind/wood, penetrating, gentle, 1st daughter
☲ fire, light-giving, clinging, 2nd daughter
☱ lake, joyful, joyous, 3rd daughter
They seem to resemble Greek elements in pairs, namely heaven-wind (air),
earth-mountain, fire-thunder and water-lake. Let me rearrange them into
another table:
☰ heaven air rests male
☴ wind air moves female
☶ mountain earth rests male
☷ earth earth moves female
☲ fire fire rests female
☳ thunder fire moves male
☱ lake water rests female
☵ water water moves male
Interestingly, the trigrams that correspond to the Greek elements, i.e.
resting air and earth, moving fire and water, are exactly the male
trigrams.
Let me map each trigram to the result of a transition between two
elements in Aristotle's circle of the elements, ending with the
corresponding element and starting with a male element (fire or air) for
the male trigrams (father and sons) and with a female element (water or
earth) for the female trigrams (mother and daughters):
[image]
The trigrams seem to fit closely: Thunder as fire that has suddenly come
down as lightning from the sky (air), in contrast to fire steadily
clinging to the matter (earth) it burns; wind as air that gently
evaporated from water, in contrast to gases from a fire risen to heaven;
a lake as water sprung from sources (earth), in contrast to water fallen
down as rain from the sky (air); a mountain as earth solidified from
lava (fire), in contrast to softly yielding earth from sediments
deposited by water.
☰ heaven air ← fire rests male
☴ wind air ← water moves female
☶ mountain earth ← fire rests male
☷ earth earth ← water moves female
☲ fire fire ← earth rests female
☳ thunder fire ← air moves male
☱ lake water ← earth rests female
☵ water water ← air moves male
This arrangement is none of the two traditionally known ones, more
similar to Earlier Heaven than Later Heaven:
[image]
More symmetries, some similar to Earlier Heaven:
* Daughters and sons are arranged from father to first to second to
third children, and finally to mother.
* Opposite trigrams in the circle mirror each other if you mirror each
trigram at the middle line (i.e. swap first and third line) and invert
all lines (yin↔yang).
* Trigrams that transform to or from outer elements have a broken (yin)
line in the middle, which would fit with outer elements being harder
and more brittle, breaking more easily.
* Excluding the middle line, between adjacent trigrams in the circle
exactly one line is inverted (yin↔yang).
leads
* The I Ching is a divination system. By tossing coins or drawing yarrow
sticks, one determines hexagrams (two trigrams) that are given
meanings in the text of the I Ching. More precisely, the oracle
results in two hexagrams, describing the evolution of the current
situation to a new situation.
* This new arrangement of the 8 trigrams and 4 elements in a circle was
inspired by a passage in the introduction of Richard Wilhelm's
translation of the I Ching or Book of Changes (translated from German
to English by Cary F. Baynes):
"The eight trigrams are symbols standing for changing transitional
states; they are images that are constantly undergoing change.
Attention centers not on things in their state of being - as is
chiefly the case in the Occident - but upon their movements in change.
The eight trigrams therefore are not representations of things as such
but of their tendencies in movement."
So the 8 Chinese trigrams would express essentially the same elements
and changes in a circle as the 4+1 Greek elements, i.e. the fifth
element would be contained in the trigrams.
* Also in terms of bind/release, the trigrams seem to fit closely: Fire,
heaven, lake and mountain hold their element in place; thunder, wind,
water and earth let it go.
* No common historical roots are known, nor any roots of the above
arrangement of trigrams in Chinese history, so did both cultures
mirror nature independently, even unknowingly?
Interpreting earth-water-air as the states of matter solid-fluid-gas
and fire as a chemical reaction or physical phenomenon that produces
light and maybe heat, the elements could be considered what is most
commonly encountered in nature.
The elements represent also elementary needs: air to breathe, water to
drink, food to eat, sunlight and fire as energy.
Conversely, the very nature of oracles is that things are connected,
maybe also globally to some degree?
* In the yarrow stalk method of consulting the I Ching, one starts with
50 yarrow stalks and initially puts one away. This seems to be a
reference to the cycles of moon and sun, because 50+49 lunar months
are only about 1.5 days short of 8 solar years, which is also why the
Olympics in ancient Greece were held alternatively every 50 and 49
lunar months. Hence the moon advances about 3/8 of the circle every
solar year, drawing an eight-pointed star over eight years, as well as
appearing in eight different lunar phases.
[image]
Venus never separates more than about 1/8 of the circle from the sun
and appears to stand still 5 times in 8 years, drawing a pentagram
that shifts only slightly between cycles. The Mesopotamian goddess of
love Ishtar was associated with Venus, usually depicted as an
eight-pointed star and sometimes shown together with sun and moon.
The yin-yang symbol ☯ reminds of moon phases.
* The five Chinese Wu Xing, water, metal, fire, wood and earth, which
are often called "elements" in the West, but literally mean
"moving", stand most immediately for the five planets visible to the
naked eye, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, while the "Four
Symbols", black turtle, white tiger, vermillion bird and azure dragon
stand for the four directions and for constellations in the sky (each
for a group of 7 of the 28 mansions). Together with the I Ching maybe
standing for sun and moon, this would complete the sky and what it was
believed to reflect down on earth.
* In the five Wu Xing, earth often has a somewhat central role,
surrounded by things that emerge from it and go back to it: water from
springs, fire from volcanoes, wood growing from earth and metal mined
from it; four very useful ingredients for humans to shape their
worlds, like using fire to smelt ore into metal tools, which can then
be used to cut wood into houses, furniture, bows, plows, water wheels,
etc.
* In the Chinese zodiac, four star signs are assigned to earth, arranged
in a cross, and in the four sectors in between, the two star signs
there are assigned to water, metal, fire and wood, respectively. This
reminds a lot of Aristotle's circle with trigrams above, so maybe the
Wu Xing earth would correspond to the static Greek elements and the
other four Wu Xing to the trigrams of the I Ching for the
corresponding transformation? Can this be identified in the attributes
of the star signs of the Chinese zodiac?
* Is the association of trigrams with elements and their changes also
closely mirrored in the hexagrams and their changes?
* When consulting the I Ching as an oracle, the different lines are
assigned the numbers 6 to 9:
6 old (changing) yin - - to --- -x-
7 new (unchanging) yang --- to --- ---
8 new (unchanging) yin - - to - - - -
9 old (changing) yang --- to - - -o-
These numbers are also associated with the Wu Xing and derived from 5
(earth) plus 1 to 4 (water, fire, wood, metal), see the Yellow River
Map, e.g. in Wilhelm/Baynes.
As a different approach, let me number the elements in Aristotle's
circle as 1-2-3-4, starting a priori with any element and going in
either direction of the circle. Now, map transformations of elements
to the sum of the three elements involved, 1+2+3 = 6, 2+3+4 = 9, 3+4+1
= 8 and 4+1+2 = 7, where the element in the middle is the one that is
transformed.
This gives also the numbers from 6 to 9 and note that new yin and yang
are obtained for the sequences that cross from 4 to 1, i.e. into a new
cycle.
Let me number the elements 1-fire, 2-air, 3-water, 4-earth (starting
with the lightest element according to Aristotle):
6 transformation of air 36 = 6 x 6 Stratagems
7 transformation of fire 49 = 7 x 7 Qixi (Ch'i?)
8 transformation of earth 64 = 8 x 8 I Ching
9 transformation of water 81 = 9 x 9 Tao Te Ching
This fits astonishingly well with contemporary Western astrological
views of the elements. The 36 Stratagems provide stratagems to use in
politics and war, which fits well with air as conscious planning mind.
The I Ching yields a priori images of changes in the outer, material
world, the element earth, which are then interpreted in a more
detached way. The Tao Te Ching, which comes in 81 sections, often has
something that flows like water. Besides the 50/49 yarrow stalks,
there is the Qixi Festival on the 7th day of the 7th month of the year
when magpies mythologically build a bridge across the milky way to
briefly reunite two lovers, and ch'i (qì) stands for life energy and
breath (which reminds of pneuma), and is pronounced almost like the
word for 7 (qī) in Chinese.
In ancient China, fields in agriculture used to be divided into
squares of 9 = 3 x 3 fields, with 8 fields (earth) owned by individual
families around a central 9th field that belonged to all families and
contained the well (water).
[image]
* The most ancient Chinese oracles used bones (typically shoulder bones
of oxen) or turtle plastrons (the belly part of the turtle shell).
Holes were drilled and heated with a heat source from the back of the
plastron to produce cracks on the front, which were typically
T-shaped. Although many oracle bones and plastrons have been found and
the ancient writing can now be read to quite some degree, little seems
to be known about how cracks were interpreted. There seems to be no
direct evidence for an influence on the I Ching, so far.
A plastron consists essentially of 6 pairs of scutes (shields), anal,
femoral, abdominal, pectoral, humeral and gular, with a flexible hinge
between the first and the last 3 pairs of scutes, which reminds of the
structure of hexagrams.
Applying heat to a plastron can cause it to crack, to become broken.
Are yin and yang lines as broken (weak) resp. unbroken (strong) lines
in the I Ching thus related to more ancient oracles involving heat?
Heat dries up, makes brittle, so would a yang line correspond to no
crack emerging, because it was wet to start with, hence be considered
strong in the sense of resisting heat?
On the northern hemisphere, stars appear to rotate around the north
pole in the sky, the direction assigned to the turtle of the four
symbols. Is the turtle with its shell maybe a model of the world, with
the plastron standing for what is down on earth and the upper part of
the shell for the sky? And similarly lower and upper trigrams of the I
Ching?
The hexagons on the upper part of the shell could be seen to form 6
unbroken/yang lines (heaven) and the pairs of plastron scutes 6
broken/yin lines (earth).
[image]
* In Greek mythology, as early as in Hesiod's Theogony, Cronos and Rhea
had 3 sons and 3 daughters. Their parents were Ouranos and Gaia, which
mean heaven (or mountain) and earth. Zeus, the third son, was close to
his mother Rhea who tricked Cronos and hid Zeus from him, so that Zeus
grew up on mount Ida and after his revolution reigned on mount
Olympos. Just like the mountain trigram (3rd son) is close to the
earth trigram (mother) in the circle?
The mother might have been considered naturally closer to her youngest
children because they emerged last from her.
--
möbius
Let me arrange the circle of elements and trigrams onto a Möbius Strip
as follows (click below to zoom in):
[image]
Inner elements are placed on the inside of the strip, outer elements on
the outside. That way, the strip reminds of the supposed permeable
membrane between in and out, but with different elements touching: The
symbols for the moving elements fire and water touch on opposite sides
of the strip, coinciding perfectly, and the same is true for the resting
elements earth and air. All lines of the trigrams on one side of the
strip are mirrored by their inverted lines (yin ↔ yang) on the other
side, so that yin and yang are different sides of the same on the strip.
So, even though fire and water would touch, and maybe mirror each other
between in and out, they could not transform directly into each other,
only indirectly by going along the single surface of the strip via air
or earth.
[image]
leads
* In a harmonic oscillator, two kinds of energies are transformed into
each other. For example, for a mass on a spring, the energy in the
spring transforms into the kinetic energy of the moving mass and
vice-versa. This gives the motion of the oscillator four special
states, when either of the energies is extremal. And the motion
between these states is periodic, thus overall reminding of the circle
of elements.
However, the natural pairing of extremal states of a harmonic
oscillator is opposite states in the cycle, which naturally fits
rest/move in the elemental circle, but makes it hard to relate two
pairs of adjacent states to opposites like active/passive or in/out in
a natural way.
* Could a mathematical model of the elements as defined here grow into a
scientific way of doing metaphysics, as in Kant's Prolegomena to Any
Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science?
rest/move in/out passive/active
bind/release wet/dry cold/hot
soft/hard heavy/light
malleable/brittle dark/light
mixed/isolated female/male
collective/individual moon/sun
night/day
un-/conscious
Such a mathematical model, as useful as it could be, would be
essentially air, something that rests inside the mind.
* Aristotle considers four "causes" in Physics and Metaphysics, which
remind of the four elements. Matter reminds of earth, form of air,
primary source of fire and final goal of water.
* Is the female fire trigram a form of inner fire, emo mapped to some
form of eri, that is clinging to a dream, an idea, a wish despite all
outer hardness? Is the female earth trigram a form of inner earth, ero
mapped to some form of emi, something that can yield devotely to outer
hardness? Is the female lake trigram a form of outer water, emi mapped
to some form of ero, which brings calm to the outside world without
hardness? Is the female wind trigram a form of outer air, eri mapped
to some form of emo, free flowing mind and communication?
* Is the Chinese approach thus more balanced? Conversely, is the Greek
approach more likely to start new things, exactly because it is maybe
initially more imbalanced? Are both needed for 'full' balance? Is
there more?
* In Psychologische Typen (1921), C.G. Jung combines extra- and
introversion with implicitly the four elements, which he terms
thinking (air), feeling (water), intuition (fire) and sensation
(earth), into 8 psychological types, almost certainly already
implicitly inspired by the I Ching.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961): "I first met Richard Wilhelm
[...] in the early twenties. In 1923 we invited him to Zürich [...].
Even before meeting him I had been interested in Oriental philosophy,
and around 1920 had begun experimenting with the I Ching." (Appendix
IV, recorded and edited by A. Jaffé, translated by R. and C. Winston)
Also in Psychologische Typen, Jung additionally categorizes thinking
and feeling as "rational" or "judging", intuition and sensation as
"irrational", but even writes:
"But I am prepared to grant that we may equally well entertain a
precisely opposite conception of such a psychology, and present it
accordingly. I am also convinced that, had I myself chanced to possess
a different individual psychology, I should have described the
rational types in the reversed way, from the standpoint of the
unconscious-as irrational, therefore." (A III 5, translated by H.G.
Baynes)
In that sense, what Jung calls "irrational" could also be considered
"realistic", as judging the world rather based on measurement outside
than on inner conceptions, just like in science, as opposed to e.g.
medieval Christian views, where looking at Jupiter's moons through
Galileo's telescope could apparently not have convinced people that
not everything revolves around earth. In astrology, rationality is
typically air, reality typically earth, but both air and water (which
is usually considered rather irrational and related to the
unconscious) have to do with judgment, which is maybe not so
astonishing, considering that eri and emi would be inner elements. In
my definition of the elements, the world consists a priori
symmetrically of both in and out, except that the observing self is
arguably observing rather from the inside out, and perceives and
judges the world based on all four elements.
So Jung would have been quite close in a way, which I might relate to
the astrological placement of his moon in Taurus in the 3rd house. In
any case, Jung's text is the first I know of to bring "in/out" near
"elements", with extra-/introverted and judging from within or
without. (I had taken a quick look at Jung's psychological types in
1998 or a bit later, but only discovered this when I took another look
on 28 Oct 2018.)
* Near the end of Apuleius' The Golden Ass (around 150 CE), Apuleius
encounters the goddess Isis at full moon at the sea shortly after
moonrise:
"Her many-coloured robe was of finest linen; part was glistening
white, part crocus-yellow, part glowing red and along the entire hem a
woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung swaying in the breeze. But
what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black
lustre of her mantle. [..] It was embroidered with glittering stars on
the hem and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery
moon." (Chapter 17, translated by Robert Graves)
Astrologer Antiochus of Athens and physician Galenus of Pergamon
attributed colors resp. body fluids (humors) to elements around the
time Apuleius lived, based on older roots going back at least
partially to Hippocrates: white to water (phlegm, phlegmatic), black
to earth (black bile, melancholic), yellow to fire (yellow bile,
choleric) and red to air (blood, sanguine), the colors of Isis' dress
above, plus stars and moon for the round fifth element in the sky.
* In alchemy, also since about at least the same time, the transition of
materials toward what is now called the philosopher's stone was
believed to be from black via white (moon) and yellow (sun) to red,
i.e. earth-water-fire-air, which is roughly in order of lightness of
the elements and their relatively layered appearance on earth. It is
apparently also the order of elements in the four tasks that Venus
gives Psyche in an inner story in The Golden Ass, as I explore
elsewhere, see artemis. All of this has ancient Egyptian roots, with
Osiris (and his brother Seth), Isis and their son Horus, as well as
with ancient crafts of creating fake noble metals and gems.
* One of the oldest ancient Indian Upanishads, the Chandogya Upanishad
(ca. 1000 BCE), speaks of three elements, fire (red), water (white)
and earth (black):
"The red colour of [gross] fire is the colour of [the original] fire;
the white colour of [gross] fire is the colour of [the original]
water; the black colour of [gross] fire is the colour of [the
original] earth. Thus vanishes from fire what is commonly called fire,
the modification being only a name, arising from speech, while the
three colours (forms) alone are true." (Part 6, Chapter 4, translated
by Swami Nikhilananda)
Why do these three colors red-white-black appear in so many cultures
as primary colors? Robert Graves links them to the moon and I guess he
is right, but why stereotypically the colors of the moon at night
instead of green, brown, blue, etc. of nature at daylight when there
is so much more color?
Maybe because the colors that remain when light gets dimmer would be
more fundamental? Moon, stars and sky at night? And also the colors of
a fire, humanity's own light source at night, independent of a full
moon: Colors that reflect light for the passive elements earth (black
coal) and water (white ashes), colors that create light for the active
elements air (red embers) and fire (yellow flames)?
Did ancient cultures maybe often not distinguish red and yellow as
separate colors? Only three elements first?
* Plato talks about colors in the Timaeus, Aristotle in On Sense and the
Sensible. Both start with black and white as basic colors, which is
scientifically correct in the sense that by selectively taking
frequencies out of the full spectrum of white, you get all colors,
including black and white.
There are three kinds of color sensors in the human eye, for red,
green and blue, sorted from low to high frequency. None triggered (no
light) is black, plus red gives red, plus also green gives yellow,
plus also blue gives white, hence a sequence black-red-yellow-white or
earth-air-fire-water.
* Is the Lakota "Medicine Wheel" so old that it already came to America
with immigrants walking across the Bering Sea at least 10'000 years
ago? The Yangshao culture "Xishuipo M45 Tomb" in China, which dates
back to the 4th millenium BCE, features the mosaic of a tiger opposite
the mosaic of a dragon, as constellations in the sky, exactly the
animals that are traditionally assigned to West and East in China.
My impression is that the more you go back in time, the more likely
"knowledge about elements" was something that only "shamans" had and
only secretly passed on to their pupils.
* In August 2015, I assigned Greek goddesses to pairs of elements and
moon phases, and tentatively flipped Athena and Hera in May 2018:
Artemis/Hecate to birth/death at new moon as fire around water, Hera
(and Clotho) to growth as a young woman or girl at the first quarter
as earth around air, Aphrodite (and Lachesis) to bloom as a mature
woman at full moon as water around fire, and Athena (and Atropos) to
withering as an old woman at the last quarter as air around earth.
Artemis/Hecate would thus contain both first and fifth element, and
elements would touch as on the Möbius Strip.
* Zhuangzi's famous butterfly dream:
"Once Chuang Tzu dreamt that he was a butterfly, a fluttering
butterfly who felt at ease and happy and knew nothing of Chuang Tzu.
Suddenly he woke up: Then he was again really and truly Chuang Tzu.
Now I do not know whether Chuang Tzu dreamt that he was a butterfly or
whether the butterfly dreamt that it was Chuang Tzu, even though there
is certainly a difference between Chuang Tzu and the butterfly. This
is how the change of things is." (translated by me from the Wilhelm
translation to German)
The same day I had first quoted the dream here, on the streets of
Zürich, two butterflies on a truck, 21 Sep 2016 at 13:34. White, red,
black, a little yellow, even a little circle and her.
(In Apuleius' encounter with Isis, it is left open whether he was
"just dreaming" or "it really happened".)
[image]
The image is by Elena Vizerskaya (Getty Images 108350631); I bought
the rights to use it, too, just to be safe.
* See Billy Culver's Energy Language website, which inspired me in
summer 2016 to reconsider old attempts to arrange elements and
trigrams on a Möbius Strip or an infinity symbol ∞ and whose style
influenced the graphics above, but in my feeling his images carry more
potential than that.
* (The walking cat of the metamorphosis section came to me at Delphi in
Greece on Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at about 13:09, ate some of my
food, a dry pretzel and salmon jerky, then, after a few burps (still a
kid) and playing a little, took a nap of about 20 minutes on my lap,
then left roughly in the direction of the Athena Pronoia temple, where
I had been a bit earlier. During these few minutes there were no
doubts what to do and felt so good, like having a child to care for.
Was the AC maybe even an oracle for the AC of π, with the moon maybe
late at glowing quincunxes, or early spring?)
[image]
--
evolutions
Some ways in which the idea presented earlier might evolve with time.
--
mixed feelings
The inner elements eri and emi are softer than the outer ones, which
suggests that they would mix more easily.
The idea is now that what appears outside as individual and separate
beings is unconsciously connected inside...
[image]
...and that these connections result in feelings that change for often
not obvious reasons (emi), while naming inner concepts allows to impose
some abstract calm (eri).
Astrology links water (emi) to feelings, love, music, art, religion, the
collective and/or individual unconscious, and more. Now, the idea of a
collective unconscious goes back to Jung, while it may in the end still
be so that such unconscious collective connections are created by more
Freudian individual unconsciouses, via subliminal channels in normal
day-to-day external interactions between beings.
But let me explore things in the Jungian picture first, as a
Gedankenexperiment, because it is initially easier, and because it
mirrors the initial assumption more directly.
How one feels at any moment would be a mixture of individual and
collective influences. Not that what other people think would be
directly accessible, just indirectly with regard to how one feels in a
particular situation, or how one feels regarding individual possible
next steps.
Individuals that are emotionally and physically close would likely have
the strongest influence on a person, but also large groups of people,
like same village, country, religion, etc., could together have a strong
influence.
Influences from a collective unconscious could go well beyond the sum of
what is in individual conscious minds. Since the collective unconscious
would effectively be a very large brain, consisting of many more brain
cells than any individual being, it might have a much more complex and
sophisticated mind than any conscious individual and it could know all
kinds of details about everybody.
Such a view of a collective unconscious would resemble the concept of
god or gods in many religions, and it would likely be fragmented into
smaller units at several scales, like families, countries, religions,
etc., each with its own collective feelings, plans, and so on.
Jung noticed that in dreams and in cultural creations some archetypal
patterns repeat. These archetypes might simply be part of the thoughts,
experiences and knowledge of the collective unconscious.
Precognition in dreams or art might simply be picking up collective
intentions that are only later realized and can be felt and dreamed
about already while the collective unconscious is only planning or
considering them.
How would the collective unconscious effectively direct the individuals
it consists of? Telling each and every one what to do at each moment
would likely not be possible, just like the conscious individual mind
would not be able to tell each of its nerve cells when to fire.
But maybe with a general concept like astrology, which creates a
balanced and relatively complete set of individuals, each with its own
approach to new problems? Faced with a particular problem, a Leo, for
example, would feel more like solving it in a "Leo way", due to
collective feedback, so that in any situation different approaches would
be tried by different individuals and a good solution would usually
emerge. Since astrology tries to reflect all possible approaches in a
structured way, the search space for solutions would usually be quite
complete.
In other words, a culture with a system like astrology would have an
evolutionary advantage in the sense of Darwin. Astrology would then not
necessarily need to have anything to do with planets and stars in the
sky, more so with relatively ancient beliefs about them.
Assuming the collective unconscious would extend to matter considered
inanimate, oracles like the I Ching or Tarot could really reveal some
intentions of the collective unconscious, maybe paired with emotional
feedback which parts of the response to focus on or how to interpret it.
If so, also astrology might a priori still have natural causes, direct
influences from planets and stars, collective feedback from the universe
itself.
However, there are some arguments that speak against astrology having
dominantly natural causes from the sky. There are different astrologies
in different cultures, each of which comes in different flavours and has
different schools of thought. Besides many small examples for a
detachment from actual constellations in the sky, the most prominent one
is Pluto in Western astrology.
Pluto was at its discovery in 1930 thought to be a planet that is about
as big as planet Earth. Over the following decades it first emerged that
Pluto is much smaller, consists mainly of ice and finally in the early
21st century that Pluto is rather part of a belt of objects in similar
orbits and with similar sizes. In 20th century astrology, however, Pluto
was attributed a major role, both in mundane events and personal fates.
In my perception, part of that view did reflect reality, so that it
seems most plausible to me that astrology is largely a cultural creation
of mankind that works by collective feedback.
Now let me come back to the initial question or to how something with
the properties of a collective unconscious could come about in view of
contemporary physics.
The most immediate explanation would be that there are direct connection
between brains, mediated by some kind of "waves". But this can largely
be excluded today, except maybe at close range, in the sense that any
explanation of that sort would require new physics.
So let me focus on known physics and try to look for the most simple and
obvious explanation. What I propose is that people simply mirror who and
what they encounter in their lives inside their brains.
People's brains would thus contain "copies" of everyone they know, most
prominently and precisely of their loved ones. What exactly the neural
networks would mirror would not be consciously available to individuals
nor would it likely be easy to analyze scientifically even if the full
structure was known. But it could in principle allow people to make
fairly accurate predictions about what their loved ones would do and
when. For example, one person could possibly think of the other one
almost exactly the moment that other person would have picked up the
phone to call.
In terms of network terminology, this would be a store and forward
network instead of one where information is propagated immediately.
leads
* Mirroring the outside world is such a central part of the human psyche
that it would seem likely that nature would try to make use of any
physical effect it could.
* Experimentally distinguishing different effects that could explain
such phenomena seems to be very difficult.
* Candidates would include entangled quantum states, as in the EPR
paradox, and self-similarity as in fractals.
There would be neither senders nor receivers in these views; sharing
would be fundamentally symmetric. Would maybe different people simply
look at the same things inside?
* See "Zeitzeugnisse" under artemis for my contributions of 2002 to some
possibly new physics related to this, which make additional very
specific predictions.
* Big data and deep learning could be used to find and analyze such
collective structures, including astrological ones.
* Science is based on some implicit, but fundamentally unprovable
assumptions, like that nature is more stupid than people and repeats
stoically given the same questions. Since numbers only come to be
after a measurement, it is difficult to compare a mathematical model
of the situation before measurement with reality. So, the "Veil of
Isis" may not be easy to lift, if at all, also related to e5, etc.
--
star signs
Star signs in the Western zodiac seem to reflect transitions between
elements within Aristotle's circle.
Fire signs seem to transform from earth via fire to air, while water is
missing:
[image]
The archetypal image is simply a fire that transforms wood (earth) to
smoke (air). Aries as a young fire has most earth, Leo most fire,
Sagittarius most air.
In psychological astrology a wound is a central theme for the two later
fire signs Leo and Sagittarius, namely for the fisher king in Perceval
and Chiron in mythology.
In the model that wound is simply the human body (earth) that is wounded
by the fire of life, as any human body must die one day. Only what is
learned in life can be formulated in words (air) and can thus be passed
on to later generations, thus becomes immortal in a way. So there is a
transformation from mortal body to immortal mind, or from animal via
man/king to god.
Learning and getting compassion—the element water that is missing in the
transformation of the fire signs—in the process is a vital goal for
older fire signs.
Air signs seem to transform from fire via air to water, while earth is
missing:
[image]
The archetypal image is a cloud (air), which emits both lightning (fire)
and rain (water). Gemini as young air has most fire, Libra most air,
Aquarius most water.
Paris, who is associated with Libra, chose Aphrodite's offering of love
and marriage with Helena, the most beautiful woman in the world, hence
love (water) and thus the possibility for the missing element earth in
the form of children as fruits of love. Similarly, the opening of
Pandora's Box, associated with Aquarius, symbolizes birth.
Water signs seem to transform from earth via water to air, while fire is
missing:
[image]
The archetypal image is a river with Cancer as a source and young river
emerging from the mountains, maybe from a glacier (earth), merging with
more and more rivers and becoming a stream as Scorpio (water) and
finally flowing into the sea as Pisces from where most water eventually
evaporates again (air), by the power of the sun (fire), the missing
element and goal for the water signs.
So, the transition is, like for the fire signs, from earth to air, but
this time for a passive, female element. The river that flows down to
the sea is more fated than fire, since it is passive, it cannot resist
the movement.
But the way up in the end towards light is important, like, for example,
for the crab that bit Heracles into his ankle while he was fighting the
Hydra in the swamps, and got its place in the sky as the constellation
Cancer.
Earth signs seem to transform from fire via earth to water, while the
missing element is air:
[image]
The archetypal image is a tree with Taurus focussing on the directly
visible, but short-lived beauties of the tree that grow with the power
of the sun (fire), Capricorn restraining himself to the parts of the
tree that persist across seasons and which keep it from falling down,
namely trunk and roots, which feed it with water and the substances
diluted in it, and Virgo in between, between beauty and fate.
It is this fate or necessity, which creates minimal structures like the
branches and roots of a tree, thus order, the abstract element air.
This solves the riddle that even though Virgo is often depicted as being
very concerned about order, many Virgos do not keep their lives and
homes in strict order. It is Virgo for whom order is an issue, for
Capricorn it is a given and for Taurus it is not that important, except
a bit, as Taurus is transforming from fire to earth.
Persephone, who is associated with Virgo, was collecting flowers as a
maiden, looking at the sunny (fire) side of life, but already starting
to look down to earth, starting to wonder about how things work, what
makes the flowers grow, etc., when the earth opened up, Hades abducted
her and she became his wife, the queen of the underworld.
For all elements transitions start with a dry element and end with a wet
one. This mirrors that often when one gets older, one realizes that
things are not so clearly and reliably what they appeared to be when
first encountered.
element transition missing image
fire earth→fire→air water fire
air fire→air→water earth cloud
water earth→water→air fire river
earth fire→earth→water air tree
Maybe some day it will be possible to synthesize most properties of the
star signs formally from the transition between the elements defined by
in/out and rest/move?
Libra, for example, learns from observation of motion outside (fire) and
inside (water). Since Libra's transition is towards water, the gift of
"inner vision" is given to Teiresias by Zeus and outer vision is reduced
by Hera, except for observing omens, which are arguably just outer
reflections of collective inner intentions.
leads
* For more detailed expositions, see the longer article Elementary star
signs under artemis or my book Elementary Star Signs (2018), which are
both also available in German.
The idea dates back to 2001 and was first published in 2002.
* The four tasks of Psyche in Apuleius' The Golden Ass seem to mirror
the same transitions very beautifully and precisely, in the order
earth-water-fire-air, with goals air-fire-water-earth.
* Are there similar elemental transitions in the Chinese zodiac?
--
artemis
The oddest thing of all, the thing that most strikes us when we embark
on a story is the total void spreading out before us. The events have
occurred and lie all around us in a continuous, formless mass without
beginning or end. We can start anywhere... - Věra Linhartová
avantgarde
Welcome
[pdf-en] Welcome to my garden...
[pdf-fr] Bienvenue dans mon jardin...
[pdf-de] Willkommen in meinem Garten...
[pdf-de] What is exactphilosophy?
I Ching
[pdf-en] Elemental changes in the I Ching?
[pdf-de] Elementare Wandlungen im I Ging?
Astrology
[pdf-en] Elementary star signs
[pdf-de] Elementare Sternzeichen
[pdf-en] Deep Learning and astrology
[pdf-de] Deep Learning und Astrologie
[pdf-en] How astrology might really work?
[pdf-de] Wie Astrologie wirklich funktionieren könnte?
[pdf-en] Birth charts of Switzerland and the USA
[pdf-de] Geburtshoroskope der Schweiz und der USA
[pdf-en] Sedna times?
Paradoxes
[pdf-en] Paradox of love
[pdf-en] Paradox of measurement
[pdf-en] Paradox of solar eclipses
[pdf-en] Paradox of decoherence
[pdf-en] Paradox of π?
Dug-up Facts
[pdf-en] Birth time of Caesar Rodney
[pdf-de] Geburtszeit von Caesar Rodney
[pdf-fr] Première mention de Lilith comme second foyer de l'orbite lunaire
[pdf-en] First mention of Lilith as second focal point of the lunar orbit
[pdf-de] Erste Erwähnung von Lilith als zweitem Brennpunkt der Mondbahn
[pdf-de] Dada und Duchamps Fountain
[pdf-en] Dada and Duchamp's Fountain
[pdf-fr] Dada et la Fontaine de Duchamp
[pdf-de] Original ideas in the book "Elementary Star Signs"
[pdf-en] Eigene Ideen im Buch "Elementare Sternzeichen"
Public Relations
[pdf-en] Teslacard Postcard Action 2010
[pdf-de] Teslacard Postkarten-Aktion 2010
[pdf-en] Mountain Astrologer ads
[pdf-de] Mountain Astrologer Anzeigen
[pdf-en] Delphi for Palm OS
[pdf-de] Delphi für Palm OS
Zeitzeugnisse
[pdf-en] Discoveries revisited
[pdf-en] Web archives
[pdf-en] First mentions
Art
[pdf-de] Die neugierige Statue
--
References
* Andreas Schöter. Bipolar Change. Journal of Chinese Philosophy. Volume
35, Issue 2, p. 297-317 (June 2008).
Abstract I reconsider the natural characterization of change and
non-change that arises from the algebraic approach: this sees change
as yang in contrast to nonchange, which is yin. Following a persuasive
example from Alain Stalder, rather than consider change solely in
contrast to non-change, I develop a formal characterization of
different forms of change considered relative to each other. This
extension allows the internal structure of a change to be made
explicit in a new way, bifurcating the change into yang parts and yin
parts. I call this extended definition of change bipolar change.
Links [Preprint] [Publication]
--
Books
This website in 2017 – all web pages plus the articles Elementary star
signs and Elemental changes in the I Ching? in English and German, as
well as some Zeitzeugnisse:
exactphilosophy.net 2017
Alain Stalder
Paperback, 168 pages, US Letter
Color
ISBN 978-3-906914-01-5
More info or buy:
Lulu Amazon Barnes & Noble
Google Books Artecat Alain Stalder
This website in August 2016 – all web pages plus the article Elementary
star signs in English and German:
exactphilosophy.net 2016
Alain Stalder
Paperback, 70 pages, A4
Black & white
ISBN 978-3-033-05801-9
More info or buy:
Lulu Amazon Barnes & Noble
Google Books
See artecat.ch for generally accessible books around ideas from this
website in English and German, and more.
--
Links
* Yi Jing Algebra
Mathematical approaches to the I Ching, by Andreas Schöter.
* Greek Elements
Detailed article by John Opsopaus; from ancient Greece to Jung.
* Artecat Alain Stalder
My tiny publishing company; books and more related to this website.
* Four Elements
Inspiring book by John O'Donohue; breath, tears, hearth and sphinx.
* Energy Language
Images speaking about elementary cycles and more, by Billy Culver.
Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything. -- Gottfried Leibniz
To be exact, philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language. -- Ludwik Wittgenstein
Actually, modern math is the long sought after, perfect language for philosophy.
Technically, math is a formal ontology.
So much for exact philosophy.
pi
On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 6:21:50 PM UTC-6, pi wrote:
> Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything. -- Gottfried Leibniz
LOL there is certainly that.
>
> To be exact, philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language. -- Ludwik Wittgenstein
Gobbledygook. Witty has the idea that language has something to do with
something but clearly he ain't got it all figured out.
>
> Actually, modern math is the long sought after, perfect language for philosophy.
Disagree.
>
> Technically, math is a formal ontology.
As a language it's quite limited.
>
> So much for exact philosophy.
>
> pi
Yep, nothing exact about it, much.
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/what-is-exactphilosophy.pdf
(Note the reference also to pataphysics... ;)
--
What is exactphilosophy ?
A new word for the dictionary that I would define maybe like this:
exactphilosophy n.
A way of doing philosophy that aims at producing scientific
hypotheses, while avoiding logical inconsistencies (or making
them explicit) and correcting factual errors whenever detected.
It avoids to make things too specific unless they are carefully
settled, influenced by ancient Asian traditions, especially by
the Tao in Chinese philosophy, and by pataphysics. It could be
imagined as floating around reality like a magic carpet, while
gently trying to settle down.
Note that this is about exactphilosophy in one word and not
capitalized.
The adjective would be _exactphilosophical_, the adverb
_exactphilosophically_, the verb _exactphilosophize_. Privately, I often
abbreviate exactphilosophy as _xphi_ or even, more rarely, _xφ_.
A little background and explanations
The fox icon of this website is related to hexagram Wei Chi (64) of the
I Ching, especially as translated and interpreted by Wilhelm/Baynes,
which mirrors the above definition of exactphilosophy closely, see next
page.
You might also be tempted to claim that “The exactphilosophy that can be
exactphilosophized is not the true/eternal/unchanging exactphilosophy.”
The concepts of exactphilosophy were also influenced by and are related
to Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to
Present Itself as a Science, and other of Kant’s works.
Conversely, exactphilosophy is not related to The Society for Exact
Philos- ophy (∗1970), although some of the rigorous methods developed
there might become useful also in exactphilosophy some day, or maybe
not.
Note that exactphilosophy is intended to be a word in the dictionary, a
name given to a novel concept that did previously not exist in this
form; it is not a brand or organization, hence never in competition with
anything of that kind.
Feel free to add or associate more texts from Taoism, or not. For
example, see chapter 66 of the Tao Te Ching or Zhuangzi’s “Zauberperle”
in Wilhelm’s translation to German. In that sense, the “magic carpet” in
the definition above might float above, below or within reality, and
more...
Philosophy itself is already a composed word, composed of philo and
sophia, very roughly “love of wisdom”.
I Ching – 64. Wei Chi / Before Completion (Wilhelm/Baynes)
above LI THE CLINGING, FLAME below K’AN THE ABYSMAL, WATER
This hexagram indicates a time when the transition from disorder to
order is not yet completed. The change is indeed prepared for, since all
the lines in the upper trigram are in relation to those in the lower.
However, they are not yet in their places. While the preceding hexagram
offers an analogy to autumn, which forms the transition from summer to
winter, this hexagram presents a parallel to spring, which leads out of
winter’s stagnation into the fruitful time of summer. With this hopeful
outlook the Book of Changes come to its close.
THE JUDGMENT
BEFORE COMPLETION. Success.
But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,
Gets his tail in the water,
There is nothing that would further.
The conditions are difficult. The task is great and full of
responsibility. It is nothing less than that of leading the world out of
confusion back to order. But it is a task that promises success, because
there is a goal that can unite the forces now tending in different
directions. At first, however, one must move warily, like an old fox
walking over ice. The caution of a fox walking over ice is proverbial in
China. His ears are constantly alert to the cracking of the ice, as he
carefully and circumspectly searches out the safest spots. A young fox
who as yet has not acquired this caution goes ahead boldly, and it may
happen that he falls in and gets his tail wet when he is almost across
the water. Then of course his effort has been all in vain. Accordingly,
in times “before completion,” deliberation and caution are the
prerequisites of success.
THE IMAGE
Fire over water:
The image of the condition before transition.
Thus the superior man is careful
In the differentiation of things,
So that each finds its place.
When fire, which by nature flames upward, is above, and water, which
flows downward, is below, their effects take opposite directions and
remain unrelated. If we wish to achieve an effect, we must first
investigate the nature of the forces in question and ascertain their
proper place. If we can bring these forces to bear in the right place,
they will have the desired effect and completion will be achieved. But
in order to handle external forces properly, we must above all arrive at
the correct standpoint ourselves, for only from this vantage can we work
correctly.
Tao Te Ching – Chapter 66 (Legge)
That whereby the rivers and seas are able to receive the homage and
tribute of all the valley streams, is their skill in being lower than
they;–it is thus that they are the kings of them all. So it is that the
sage, wishing to be above men, puts himself by his words below them, and
wishing to be before them, places his person behind them. In this way
though he has his place above them, men do not feel his weight, nor
though he has his place before them, do they feel it an injury to them.
Therefore all in the world delight to exalt him and do not weary of him.
Because he does not strive, no one finds it possible to strive with him.
Zhuangzi – Magic Pearl (Wilhelm/me)
The lord of the Yellow Earth was strolling beyond the limits of the
world. There he came upon a very high mountain and contemplated the
circle of recurrence. There he lost his magic pearl. He sent knowledge
to find it, and did not get it back. He sent sharp eye to find it, and
did not get it back. He sent thinking to find it, and did not get it
back. Then he sent out self-oblivion. Self-oblivion found it. The lord
of the Yellow Earth said: “Strange, indeed, that exactly self-oblivion
as able to find it!”
The exactphilosophy.net logo
Note that the fox in the logo of my website is not alone, but closely
and harmo- niously accompanied by some sort of “p” comet or something,
and vice versa:
[logo]
Thanks a million for that. I call this combination “foxyfox”, by the way.
[photo]
(Alfred Jarry, Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien)
While I'm at it...
Paradoxes
- https://www.exactphilosophy.net/paradox-of-love.pdf
- https://www.exactphilosophy.net/paradox-of-measurement.pdf
- https://www.exactphilosophy.net/paradox-of-solar-eclipses.pdf
- https://www.exactphilosophy.net/paradox-of-decoherence.pdf
- https://www.exactphilosophy.net/paradox-of-pi.pdf
(All written down this autumn, actually on a single day...)
--
Paradox of love
Is love a real connection between two lovers ? Any direct connection
becomes physically impossible according to current science as soon as
two lovers separate a few miles (and do not use technical devices to
communicate). Is love thus just a mutual illusion that exists only
separately in the two lovers, maybe even when they are physically
together ? The answer is both, in a way, as follows.
The human brain mirrors much of the outside world on the inside, in
order to be able to communicate with the outside world and to predict
how things will behave. This includes especially loved ones, which are
mirrored much more intensively and in more detail than most other beings
and things outside. Since this mirroring usually does not mean that
everything is analytically understood, but is mainly just mirrored by
“training the neural networks" in the brain, the mirror image of a loved
one allows also to predict things about a loved one that neither person
is consciously aware of, nor even that it would be stored in some
analytically structured form in their two brains at all.
In network technology, there is the term of a store-and-forward network,
a network where there are no permanent connections, but data is stored
at each node and exchanged whenever the connection becomes available
again. In the case of the two lovers, they would, of course, talk to
each other and exchange themselves with all of their senses as soon as
they meet again after having been separated, say, during the day at
work. But a store-and-forward network is still a network, as long as
there is repeated exchange.
Hence you could at least qualitatively explain why, say, the loved one
called you on the phone just when you were thinking about him or her,
etc. You would have simply mirrored each other so closely, that similar
thoughts and feelings would have occurred to both of you at the same
time.
But it goes even further: Connecting two brains in such a way
effectively creates a larger brain, potentially a larger being, the
“relationship", with maybe its own thoughts, dreams, feelings, and so
on. This is likely why relationships can never be fully understood by
the two lovers, simply because they really “go over your head", as they
involve two heads, and the dynamics between them is impossible to fully
grasp for a single brain.
All in all, some aspects of a relation can never be changed, you only
have the possibility to stay in it or leave it, or maybe change the
dynamics by adding new elements, like when you have children, which then
also become part of a larger complex of brains, the family, in this
case.
In conclusion, love would be a real connection, but not be permanently
synchronized, unless yet unconfirmed new physics would still allow it.
--
Paradox of measurement
Can measurement be scientifically investigated at all ? Let me explain.
In physics, resp. in exact sciences, in general, measurements are made,
and once they have been made, the results of these measurements are
considered to be settled with certainty, i.e. at least in principle the
measured data can be kept intact forever and practically everybody
looking at the data will agree on what it is—not necessarily on what it
means or implies, but on what it immediately is. Hence the terms “facts"
and “reality". Of course, that this is always the case is fundamentally
an assumption, but as long as no confirmed exceptions are found, that
remains de facto a fact and reality.
A bit more abstractly speaking, measurement turns the world into
numbers, "gödelizes" it, or, if you prefer, transforms it into a
sequence of bits. Scientific hypotheses usually also make use of
concepts that cannot be measured directly, but in the end only
hypotheses that reproduce the numbers of measured data become theories
in physics, or in exact sciences, in general.
Now, since before measurement, there are by definition no measured
numbers, yet, the methods of exact science cannot be applied to how the
process of measurement works, simply—repeating the first part of this
sentence in other words—because there are by definition no numbers that
can be measured during measurement, since during measurement is by
definition before measurement.
It would thus not be possible to analyze and model measurement with
scientific methods, since those require by definition measurement first.
This might, by the way, explain at bit why the measurement process in
quantum mechanics is so hard to understand, and why there are still so
many contenders. It hints maybe also at some secrets of nature that
might maybe not be so easy to access. A key assumption in science is
usually that nature is “more stupid" than the experimenters, that it
would stoically repeat the same answers to the same questions. Jung
suggested in his article about “synchronicity" that nature might answer
differently when not forced to answer with “yes" or "no", as the case in
many scientific experiments, but instead given more freedom, naming
oracles like the Chinese I Ching as an alternative. Put differently,
measurement appears to be a bit like the “Veil of Isis"—not so easy to
lift.
--
Paradox of solar eclipses
During a total solar eclipse, the moon stands between earth and sun,
completely shielding the sun from view on some spots on earth. In
contrast, the gravitational forces of sun and moon on earth simply add
up; there is no shielding by the moon. In quantum field theories, forces
are mediated by virtual particles, more specifically by bosons (even
spin). Virtual particles connecting sun and earth would thus not
interact at all with the moon in between.
How would a virtual particle mediating the force of gravitation between
sun and earth “know" that it should “not stop" at the moon in between ?
Let me explain this in more detail. First of all, there is today no
quantum field theory of gravitation, but the general argument also
works, for example, for electromagnetic forces, where there is a quantum
field theory (quantum electrodynamics, QED) that works with fantastic
precision.
A Faraday cage is a closed box of a material that conducts electricity.
If you apply an electric field outside, such that charged particles
outside the cage will be attracted or repelled, there will be no force
inside the cage. The cage would thus appear to shield what is inside
from the outside world. But this is not what immediately happens. On the
surface of the cage, positive and negative charges separate such that
they generate an electric field that exactly compensates the one imposed
from outside, so that all adds up to zero inside the cage.
Speaking in terms of virtual particles, virtual photons in this case,
there would still be virtual photons connecting the source of the
electric field with any charge inside the cage, thus exerting an
electric force on each such charge, but there would also always be
virtual photons connecting the surface of the cage to the same charges
inside, so that forces would cancel inside.
What makes this paradox, is that virtual particles interact heavily with
matter, but are also able to “travel" completely undisturbed through
other matter. I wrote “travel" in double quotes because virtual
particles can “travel" faster than the speed of light “behind the
scenes", which means that which way they “travel" depends on the
observer, more precisely, on the relative speed of the observer relative
to the setup. This is simply a consequence of special relativity; see
e.g. Richard Feynman’s article “The reason for antiparticles" (1987).
Virtual particles remind of the “spooky" actions at a distance that can
instantaneously (faster than the speed of light) correlate measurements
in quantum mechanics, as first brought up by Einstein, Podolski and
Rosen (1935). Or think of the Aharonov-Bohm effect, where there is zero
electric field, but a directly unobservable non-zero electric potential,
and an observable effect.
A quantum theory of gravitation would presumably feature spin 2
gravitons, implying no negative masses (“charges"), hence not even
apparent shielding.
--
Paradox of decoherence
I combine several well-known Gedankenexperiments, namely the one by
Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR), plus Bell’s Inequalities, and Schr
̈odinger’s Cat, as well as Wigner’s Friend, into a new
Gedankenexperiment, that I essentially first devised in January 2003 for
a Usenet post to the sci.physics.research newsgroup. Archived here:
https://www.classe.cornell.edu/spr/2003-01/msg0047545.html
From: Alain Stalder <astalder@exactphilosophy.net>
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
Subject: Re: Some questions on decoherence and QM.
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 22:30:49 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <astalder-A850F5.13133713012003@news.bluewin.ch>
In article <3E1C9025.A2D5A6CB@uni-essen.de>,
Urs Schreiber <Urs.Schreiber@uni-essen.de> wrote:
> Frank Hellmann wrote:
> > A measurement of the quantum system described by rho in generally still
> > has a propability for both classically exclusive states though, so we
> > still have a superposition of classically exclusive states.
>
> The last phrase must read: "a *mixture* of classical states".
>
> Using the density operator one is bound to talk about
> statistics only. Decoherence cannot and does not explain "how"
> a system chooses from the possible outcomes a specific one
> when we measure it. Decoherence only explains how the "quantum
> probability" becomes a "classical probability", very roughly
> speaking, but it still only gives probabilities.
It is worthwhile to explain what exactly "classical" means in
this context. This is maybe most easily seen if Schroedinger’s
Gedankenexperiment is combined with the experiment for testing
Bell’s Inequality:
Two entangled photons fly in opposite directions and then each
pass through polarization filters. A photon detector after each
filter either kills or does not kill a cat on each side,
depending on whether the respective photon has passed through
the polarization filter.
Decoherence tells us that each cat quickly ends up in a state
with a density matrix that is practically diagonal. Or, more
loosely put, the cat is "either dead or alive, but not both".
Can we conclude that whether the cat is dead or alive is already
determined, that an experimentator who looks inside to discover
either a dead or a living cat will only note what was already
determined before ?
No, because Bell’s Inequality excludes any local hidden variable
theories in which for both cats it would already be determined
whether the cats are dead or alive. In other words, "classical"
means in this context only that you cannot do interference with
Schroedinger’s cats, i.e. that they statistically behave like
measured cats, but not that measurement has already occured
through decoherence.
Hence some of the "strangeness" of quantum mechanics remains,
especially if you modify the above Gedankenexperiment to include
what is typically called "Wigner’s Friend". Replace each cat by
an experimentator who looks at the detector, and place two other
experimentators outside the respective labs.
Now, when does measurement occur ? When the inner experimentators
look at the detectors, or when the outer experimentators open the
doors to the respective labs and ask the guys inside about what
they have measured ? At least decoherence tells us that we cannot
distinguish experimentally between the two possibilities, because
in both cases all experimentators behave statistically classical.
In conclusion, decoherence is a big step towards understanding
measurement in quantum mechanics, but does not go all the way,
at least not yet.
Alain Stalder
The more recent article “Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the
use of itself" by Frauchiger and Renner (2018) shows that at least in
some cases quantum mechanics as a universal theory of how the world
evolves can lead to logical inconsistencies regarding measured data from
the point of view of different observers. In other words, if that proves
to be true, decoherence could certainly not explain measurement in
quantum mechanics in general.
In a way, this would have already been clear from my Gedankenexperiment:
Just singling out some quantum coherence that would decay independently
on both sides, except the one that is bound to remain correlated, does
not make sense. In my view, since science generally assumes that there
is one “reality"— otherwise published theories and measured data would
not be the same for all, i.e. the whole setup would be inconsistent—the
only remaining solution might be that there really are connections at a
“speed" faster than light behind the scenes, i.e. also that the future
would have an influence on the past, albeit only within the limits of
the strange things that quantum theory permits.
But the previous sentence is, of course, not really news in this
generality. In any case, I hope that my Gedankenexperiment might help
future research in quantum theory a bit, if only as inspiration.
--
Paradox of π ?
I wrote down the four paradoxes about love, measurement, solar eclipses
and decoherence earlier today, while almost all ideas go back way
longer. I have purposely left many things open in those earlier
articles, in the hope to maybe spur the imagination of readers a bit
more, and also because I might rather be interested in different things
than pursuing them in the future.
My official take on this “fifth" paradox is that it is just wild
speculation:
Long-range “telepathic" connections with polarized spin 1 symmetry,
passing unperturbed through any matter, mediated maybe by selective
perception of virtual photons or the like ? Unofficially, “eppur si
muove"?
Such connections, especially between two lovers, would be felt most
strongly if both persons would look into the direction of each other or
into opposite directions, and gradually less strongly if not. Also, the
feeling would be maximal if the symmetry planes of their heads would be
aligned, e.g. if both were lying with their heads in the same direction
or any opposite ones, and gradually weaker if not. The feeling would get
weaker with more distance between the two, but apparently not decay
quadratically with distance, and no matter in between, not even earth
itself, would make a clear difference. The explanation might be that
virtual photons, or maybe other spin 1 bosons, would mediate the felt
connection, hence the symmetry of polarized light.
Adliswil, 19 October 2018 π.
And this longer article, aimed at a broader, contemporary public,
but maybe also showing a bit what "exactphilosophy" can reveal if
done for a while...? ;)
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/how-astrology-might-really-work.pdf
(Also available in German; emerged in early October this year.)
--
How astrology might really work ?
Nowadays scientists and astrologers live in almost completely separated
worlds. I am a physicist and versed in both. From where I am standing,
the following would seem to be the most plausible, as I will expose
step-by-step afterwards:
* All people, even those who consciously do not believe in astrology,
would be noticeably influenced in their behavior by astrology.
Nowadays, it should also be possible to experimentally confirm this.
* The effect of astrology, at least the way it is used today, would
immediately have practically nothing to do with the planets and stars
in the sky. Astrology would rather be a collective effect,
unconsciously created by practically all people on earth.
* This would imminently be a "bitter pill” for many astrologers and
scientists, since each party would in the end have to give up a basic
assumption in order to return to a jointly accepted world view.
Conversely, this would also be a chance, not least since today
astrology is often practiced by women and science often by men.
* On the path to the above view of astrology, I can also make other
concepts more amenable to science again: Love, religion and deities,
telepathy, world soul, collective unconscious, etc. In a certain way,
the path is even more significant than the goal in this text.
* In the end, fortunately a lot remains fundamentally open, also whether
there might maybe still be direct correlations between "heaven and
earth”, as basically presumed in astrology.
I will first sketch how the human brain mirrors the world in its inside,
resp. in the network of its neurons. Building on that, I will describe
what happens when two people love each other, and then expand this to
more people, and many different concepts which have emerged over
millennia, until I get to astrology. Finally, I will briefly explore
additional possibilities a bit more freely.
Mirrors
In the head of every human being there is a copy of the world, or at
least of part of the world. It contains fellow humans, other living
beings and many things, plus how they behave, also in interaction with
oneself. Everyone can imagine, say, an acquaintance inside, even if that
person in currently not in view, and often also how that person would
behave in certain situations.
This mirroring of the world to the inside, into the human brain, is what
essentially allows people (and animals) to live, to deal with the world,
without e.g. quickly falling down somewhere.
[image]
A key point regarding this mirroring is now that it is often essentially
only mirroring, but not consciously understanding how that which is
mirrored exactly ticks—let me explain this sentence more thoroughly in
the following.
In the brain, billions of nerve cells (neurons) are connected to each
other. Today, such neural networks can be replicated also on computers,
to a certain degree. For example, such a virtual neural network can be
"fed” with millions of digital photos and drawings of the digits from 0
to 9. That way you can train the network, until becomes able to often
correctly name the digit on an image it had never seen before.
[image]
Does that now mean that the network has understood what it is doing and
how it is doing it ? Or that it would even be able to explain that ?
This seems rather unlikely to be the case, it is probably rather as
colloquially with riding a bicycle. You can learn it, but afterwards you
do not really know what you do.
A concrete example: Ride quickly on a bicycle and then—very carefully
and gently (!)—pull a little bit on the left side on the handlebar, but
really pull only horizontally. This is what one would naively think what
one does when one wants to take a left turn. But this is not what
happens experimentally, instead rather a force results that wants to
tilt the bicycle to the right (!)—hence please take caution if you try!
What you have to do instead to take a left turn, is to also press
somewhat onto left side of the handlebar vertically from the top, which
has physically to do with the fact that the rolling wheels are also a
spinning top. But what is essential in this example, is that a trained
neural network does not imply that the laws of the outer world are
somehow analytically accessibly stored in the head. In the head there is
thus rather an often just as incomprehensible copy of the world, not an
analytical model of it.
More psychologically speaking, unconscious content in the brain would
often not be present in analytically resolved form. A trauma would have
rather simply "burnt” itself into the structure of the brain than that
the brain would have understood its structure. In this sense, it is
probably often not correct to speak about bringing up unconscious
content into consciousness. I would rather be so that hypotheses about
the inner structure would lead to an inner reaction whenever they mirror
the inner structure well. That would thus not be much different from how
a scientist postulates hypotheses about the outer world and then
compares them experimentally with it.
I hope this was now not to complicated to understand. Brief, the brain
often rather mirrors the world, creates a copy, than it really
understands it. That way also structures get into the brain which the
person cannot consciously understand. This could, by the way, even go so
far that laws of nature of which no scientist is yet aware would be
mirrored inside, too.
But isn’t one person alone and abstractly "the world” rather boring ?
Let’s look at two lovers instead, and what maybe goes on in their heads.
Love
Is love a real connection between two people ?
Of course, it often appears to be so, for example, when the loved one
calls you exactly when you think about him or her. Only, scientifically
no connection is possible when, for example, the two lovers work at
different places in the city during the day, and they do not use
technical devices (e.g. cell phones) in order to communicate with each
other.
[image]
It could of course be that today’s science is wrong in that respect,
resp. that such connections really exist but could not be confirmed,
yet. But I will totally exclude this for the moment, since how brains
work alone can already explain a lot. But I will come back to such
possibilities towards the end of this text.
In any case, the two lovers of the example above will usually still feel
clearly in love and connected when physically separated during the day.
Is their love thus only purely an illusion, which only exists inside the
respective head of each lover? Would love maybe even only be an
individual illusion, in each of them separately, when they are
physically together ?
Well, when you love somebody, you usually like to fill your brain with
any available impressions from that person. That way inside a mirror
image of the person emerges, which probably even also encompasses a lot
which oneself does not consciously understand, and also the loved person
not necessarily consciously knows or understands, but which will be
stored in the structures in the brain in a rather unconsciously mirrored
way. That way one could thus, for example, possibly sometimes also
instinctively predict in total isolation when the loved one will call.
In network technology there is the notion of a "store and forward’
network, a network in which information cannot flow all the time, but
only at certain times, and is stored locally in between, just like when
the two lovers meet again in the evening after work and talk to each
other, and so on. But it remains a network, as long as the two keep
exchanging information again and again.
But so far this does maybe not fully mirror what happens with lovers,
yet—or also in families, and less intensively with friends and
acquaintances. In principle, the two brains of the two lovers connect
and form a single brain. Hence almost certainly also superordinate
structures emerge, which overlap between the physical vessels in the two
heads, thus forming a larger neural network than could exist in a single
brain.
Such a larger compound of nerve cells could in principle be able to
develop independent wishes, dreams, thoughts, etc., hence a relationship
could go beyond what the two lovers would be able to fully capture
individually. This mirrors maybe already often how it is in a relation:
often beautiful, but analytically often not fully seizable. In a way,
you can only decide whether you want to stay in a relation or not, but
not fundamentally change its nature.
This has now, of course, been quite speculative in detail. The brains of
the lovers would still be comparably more separated from each other that
the nerve cells in the individual brains from each other. And yet, as a
"store and forward” network, and by storing most shared information in
parallel on both sides, the above possibility still seems, to a certain
degree, most plausible to me.
If two lovers were separated a long time from each other, many things
could develop separately into different directions, but not necessarily,
if the two really hang on to it. Hence it would be difficult in practice
to distinguish experimentally whether the two are really permanently
connected or not, since both possibilities would manifest almost
identically.
Collective beings
[image]
If you now extrapolate such connections created from mutual mirroring,
like between two lovers, to more people, like family, acquaintances,
village, city, region, country, even the whole earth, including also
many animals, different "collective brains” would emerge at nested
scales. What would hold these compounds of brains together would be,
depending on how you look at it, the power of love or mutual mirroring
of each other, just like two lovers. There would thus be a collective
brain for each family, then, building on that, one per community, and so
on, up to country and earth, while, of course, these entities would
overlap in many and diverse ways in practice.
The idea is now again that such collective brains would a priori be
quite able to have independent thoughts and feelings, hence could feel
joy, fear and anger, could have plans, dreams and a will, etc.—simply
everything that also a single human being is able to think and feel. But
it could also go beyond that, because more connected nerve cells with
more stored information would potentially be, just like in a relation of
two lovers, a "superbrain”, which would be able to have thoughts which a
single human could never grasp, just like a single nerve cell in the
human brain would hardly ever be able to really grasp the thoughts which
it helps to process in the human brain.
This is maybe best conveyed as follows. Ants often form trails, which
connect sources of food with their nest. Only, the individual ant does
not really know that there is a trail, it simply follows the chemical
scents, and, if you observe it, often not in a straight line, as one
might think, but instead with a lot of going left and right, and
sometimes also with shortly turning back. In the small brain of the ant
there appears thus to be no concept of a "trail”, but only that
following the chemical scents is good and not following them is bad,
resp. probably that the ant typically feels more happy when it follows
the scents than not, hence that the scents makes the ant happy.
[image]
Of course it is questionable whether such a compound of brains could
really be more intelligent than individual humans, since the connections
between the brains could overall only be much less intensive than inside
a brain between nerve cells. But in any case such a collective brain
would have a different perspective, thus something similar to an "ant
trail” would be more easily accessible to the collective brain than to
an individual brain, if only because the "ant trail” is a collective
concept.
The analogy with the ants might also mirror how a collective superbrain
might be able to "guide” individual people, namely with something
equivalent to a "scent trail” for the ants. More about this fundamental
idea later.
In the immediate sense, the scent trail is created and refreshed by the
ants themselves, i.e. the physical environment is definitely also in
play with regard to collective beings. Already in a single human brain
chemistry plays an important role, and information is also stored
outside the body, in books, photos, films, or also in everyday objects,
clothing and architecture, simply in everything that is created and
changed by human beings. That way a single thing, or one replicated into
many copies, can act on many people and help to form them. Thus
collective brains would also be collective living beings with a "body”.
Now to various cultural concepts that emerged over millenia and which
strongly resemble ideas of a collective being.
Religion
The idea of or the belief in higher beings, which are often immortal and
invisible, hence in goddesses and gods, probably exists in humanity
already since primeval times. A collective being formed by all believers
would probably also live much longer than individual people, as long as
believers keep having faithful offspring. Quite similarly in human
brains nerve cells are replaced with new ones during life, but
personality is still roughly maintained during life. And such a
collective being would also not be directly visible in the world, resp.
it would reflect in almost anything, which would also often fit with
deities.
If previous argumentations were accurate, would there now really be
gods, if in a certain way "only” created by the respective believers ?
The answer would essentially have to be yes. Because, if you admit that
individual persons exist, even if they "only” come to be from single,
interconnected neutrons, then there would also have to be goddesses and
gods, which would "only” come to be from individual, interconnected
brains, resp. the neurons in them.
Religions can be very helpful, can help believers to experience life as
deeper, more beautiful, richer, more meaningful than it is to
non-believers, not dissimilar to how lovers experience love; and
religions can also be quite generally useful for society and living
together. Conversely, of course, also many wars and crimes have come
from religious backgrounds.
Would deities maybe all in all rather be more like the ones in Greek
mythology: Not always without fail, but also with human traits, plus
maybe even some, which might even surreally surpass humans, in good and
in bad ?
Earth soul
Greek philosopher Plato coined the concept of a world soul (lat. anima
mundi, gr.psych ́e tou pant ́os), and there are similar concepts in
different cultures. Behind that concept lies also the fundamental
question of whether the cosmos is overall alive or not. According to
today’s science there are animals and plants, plus some other lifeforms,
but a rock would be inanimate, and also by far the largest part of the
cosmos.
It could, of course, still be so that more things would be alive than
assumed today. As already mentioned, there are interactions between
living beings and inanimate matter. Living beings consist apparently of
exactly the same building materials (atoms, etc.) as inanimate matter.
But all in all, such a world soul in the larger sense would require
assumptions that would go beyond the ones made so far, so let me also
come back to this toward the end of this text. A world soul in the sense
of a compound of all living beings on this earth would, however, most
likely exist under the assumptions made so far. I will simply call it
"earth soul” in the following.
For this earth soul, the self would be earth and the environment would
be the "sky” resp. the cosmos around the earth, with sun, moon, planets
and stars. Would this earth soul now simply admire what it sees outside
of itself, and like to mirror itself in it, like in a lover, or like in
a mother or father, as creator ?
[image]
In any case, in such a rather lonely situation, without any other
inhabited planet in sight, would there not be a very big wish that what
happens outside in heaven would also mirror on earth, if only to feel
more connected, less lonely ?
This reminds, of course, already strongly of the astrological mantra "as
above so below”. But first to another concept, which is likely quite
significant around astrology, to Jung’s "collective unconscious”.
Collective unconscious
Carl Gustav Jung went beyond Sigmund Freud by postulating that
unconscious processes in the psyche could also be of a collective
nature, probably based on the observation that certain "archetypical”
themes keep surfacing very similarly again and again even to mutual
strangers, in dreams as well as more seldomly in real-life experiences.
Under the assumption of collective brains, the collective unconscious
would simply be that part of collective thoughts and feelings, which is
(at least most of the time) hidden from individual people, hence is not
conscious to them, or even not directly stored in individual brains, but
would only indirectly come to be in the collective compound, like the
ant trail, which probably also does not exist in individual ants.
All people, and also many animals, dream at night in their sleep. Could
it now maybe even be so that dreams would reflect collective thoughts
more than individual ones ? Or could it maybe even be that a collective
brain would sort of lay out its plans like a "scent trail” for dreamers,
such that the affected person, after waking up, would more likely occupy
him- or herself with certain themes, or would do things, which would
rather fit the plans of the collective brain? And similarly with
particularly impressive real-life experiences ?
In any case, such a collective unconscious, or also generally a
collective brain, would often have the character of "fate” or "destiny”,
roughly in the sense in which Liz Greene cites Jung in her book "The
Astrology of Fate” with "Free will is the ability to do gladly that
which I must do.”.
In other words, if you behave according to the wishes of the collective
brains at different scales, thus family, country, religion, beekeeper
club, etc., this would be honored by the surroundings with a feeling of
happiness in exchange. You would thus be fundamentally free as an
individual to do whatever you want, but, as a social being, you would
also respect your surroundings, and there especially not only what is
conscious to individual people in your surroundings, but also respect
unconscious collective wishes, which could very well be diametrically
opposite to immediate conscious surroundings, for example, as the "black
sheep” of a family or a village.
The collective unconscious would thus also have a "fated”, guiding side,
resp. collective beings would quite generally have a guiding influence
on individuals and also on smaller collective beings. And, of course,
collective thoughts which reflect in dreams could appear as precognition
of the future or of remote events to individuals.
All in all, it is difficult to distinguish between collective "brains”,
"beings”, "souls” and "unconsciouses” without more precise assumptions.
Astrology
My ansatz how astrology would work is the following:
Unconsciously all people "believe” in astrology, resp. are part of a
collective brain that believes in astrology, resp. at least considers
it useful and precious.
Astrology, resp. its different forms in different cultures, would thus
be a view that the earth soul, resp. its smaller collectives, would have
of the world, and which they would let influence individuals.
Immediately the strongest influence would thus come from the astrology
of one’s own culture, from other astrologies rather less, while, of
course, nowadays cultures often also mix.
Many modern people will now probably ask: Why would such an archaic
belief have persisted also in all the many people who consciously think
so little of astrology and often know almost nothing about it in detail?
What exactly would be useful or meaningful in that ?
Maybe primarily this: Thanks to astrology it would be achieved that also
in small groups of people there would be different characters, with
different ways of approaching the tasks that live poses every day. Since
then different approaches would be tried, on average presumably a
solution would be found more quickly than if people would be
considerably more similar to each other. Astrology would thus have an
evolutionary advantage if the sense of Darwin; this is why it would also
even have survived Enlightenment almost unperturbedly, as far as it
concerns the collective, unconscious part.
In addition, during the normal course of a year, for each month the
assigned star sign and its attitude towards life would fit well with
activities in a primarily traditional agricultural environment, which
dominated e.g. in Europe during centuries. For example, towards the end
of summer (Virgo) people would like to work carefully and precisely, and
sort things, as in the past often useful for bringing in the harvest,
and then, at the beginning of autumn (Libra), they would rather like to
exchange parts of the harvest with others in trade, in order to obtain
balanced stocks of goods for the winter. Until recently, this would thus
have been an additional evolutionary advantage, at least compared to
other collective views that would mirror nature less directly. Of
course, this is only true on the northern hemisphere and with Western
Astrology, not e.g. with sidereal Indian astrology.
With fate it would be more or less like quoted from Jung above: People
would be fundamentally free as individuals, but, as social beings, they
would be driven by often unconscious collective thoughts and wishes, so
that, wanting to feel happy and fulfilled, they would still most often
find their way in life on the paths laid out by astrology, almost like
the ants on their ant trail, with often as much back and forth, and
sometimes even going the opposite way.
But where would the stars be in that? Well, in this picture they would
in the immediate sense actually have no influence, instead "only”
collective views about them, which do not always mirror the sky
accurately. From a collective perspective, the earth soul, or parts of
it, would very well have its views about cosmos and reflecting it, but
it could also be wrong at times.
The prime example for this is planet Pluto, which had only been
considered a planet during a certain time, from 1930 until 2006, when it
has been, scientifically consistently, reclassified, to a so-called
"dwarf planet”.
Now, in the view of astrology, Pluto would have a strong influence on
human fates, and also on many collective events, including world
politics, and so on. In my view that was also actually the case in the
20th century, thus these forces were effectively acting on people, and
probably still continue to do so now, to a somewhat reduced degree.
Pluto was also the first planet discovered in the USA. Uranus and
Neptune were still discovered in the old world, in Europe. Hence behind
Pluto there is also a lot of the collective that the USA forms
consciously and unconsciously, which, of course, also includes many
people world-wide beyond the USA. Hence it is not astonishing that
exactly scientists from the USA and other English speaking regions
initially objected most to the idea that Pluto would now suddenly no
longer be a planet.
But I do not want to talk about politics here; instead I just wanted to
illustrate that astrology really has an effect in daily life, at large
and small scale, but also certainly deviates far enough from the reality
in cosmos outside of the earth that an immediate symmetry can rather be
excluded.
Birds of pray can, by the way, see planet Uranus in the sky with the
naked eye, and possibly also Neptune or the asteroid Ceres. Had the
earth soul maybe already been conscious of these celestial bodies, only
Pluto came as a surprise ? But even then, for Pluto there would still
have been the freedom to steer, which name the new planet gets, and thus
a meaning that could still fit with some events that happened before its
discovery ?
And would the three pyramids at Giza maybe, as suspected by Robert
Bauval, intentionally mirror the three stars of the Belt of Orion
(Osiris), only that this had not been conscious to the ancient
Egyptians, but "only” unconsciously collectively to all Egyptians, and
hence the sky is not perfectly mirrored ?
[image]
There are more examples, where astrology does not truly mirror the sky,
like that the moon is typically drawn geocentrically on horoscope
charts, hence where it would be seen from the center of earth, not from
the respective point on the surface of earth. And, of course, the
division of the zodiac into 12 segments of equal size, by now completely
separated from constellations due to precession, is not something that
mirrors directly in the sky, and a division into 12 segments seems also
rather to reflect the somewhat more than 12 lunar months in a solar
year, than that it would immediately have natural causes. In China there
are quite different constellations, for example, a division into 28
"mansions” on the ecliptic, where the moon would be visiting a mansion
each day of a lunar month.
Astrologers within a cultural circle usually share many methods and
views, but besides that often also very often use further, quite diverse
methods. Think only of the many different house systems, or orbs for
aspects. How could such diversity ever mirror people ?
In order that a client goes to a particular astrologer, he or she would
probably have to somehow feel mirrored, maybe less in the astrologer,
but rather that the astrologer would resemble a desired solution ? A
client might come from an environment where mainly the Koch house system
would be used. Should an astrological counselor now rather keep using
her or his favorite house system, or in this case rather use Koch houses
? Or both ?
Koch houses would probably better fit the environment of the client,
would thus rather mirror where the collective brains around his or her
environment would want to move the client to. Conversely, the individual
has likely still also a free will, in order to at least be able to
switch surroundings, sort of like changing the "tribe” into a cultural
environment with a different house system, where then maybe different
collective brains could make a rather more desired life possible. Hence
also here client and astrologer would have fundamentally much room to
move, to "gladly do that which they must do”.
Certain methods and views in astrology would be quite generally valid,
other methods only in surroundings where they would have supporters.
This would then often be quite similar to going to a general
psychologist of a certain school of thought or to a priest of a certain
religion. Also there a lot would often only help if it "fits” the
client.
Summary
This has thus far been quite a conservative approach to these things,
resp. it was conservative concerning the physical assumptions, thus for
example without natural communication channels between brains at large
distance, short, entirely from the viewpoint of the current state of
natural sciences.
This resulted roughly in the following picture, which seems to be
qualitatively plausible, but, of course, so far quantitatively, and
whether it is correct at all, remains formally unproven: There would be
collectives of two and more brains with independent thoughts, wishes,
dreams, feelings, etc., and these would influence the fates of people on
earth. A direct influence of planets and stars would however not
immediately exist; in particular, there are clear indications that the
majority of causes of astrology would be purely located in views down on
earth, but would often also be helpful in living together every day.
Tiny outlook
Even if the earth soul, as defined further above, could sometimes be
completely wrong, like with Pluto as a planet, it could still have
mirrored certain laws of the cosmos, even some which are not known or
conscious to anybody, similar to how a person who can ride a bicycle has
unconsciously mirrored physical laws into her or his brain.
How it appears at the moment, the milky way is not buzzing with planets
with intelligent life on them, which would emit radio signals, etc. Is
thus the architecture of our own solar system so special that in it also
part of the secret of life reflects ? Without a relatively large moon
for such a relatively small planet as earth, the earth’s axis would not
be stable and life would presumably never have emerged.
Quantum mechanics knows entanglement of quantum states even across great
distances, as, for example, in the well-known thought experiment of
Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (short EPR). Especially in the "New Age”
movement there are many approaches in which the whole world would be
interconnected that way, without, however, getting fully specific. Or
Jung, who at the beginning of the 1950s, at that time often in close
contact with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, postulated the concept of an
"acausal synchronicity”, was probably also substantially influenced by
thoughts about such quantum effects.
This is a wide field, where I could add quite few more things. Let it
suffice here, that you could then also explain oracles more easily,
hence events where randomness appears to take part, as with Tarot cards
or with the coins or yarrow stalks of the Chinese I Ching. Because
otherwise collective brains would "only” have a possibility to influence
things by focussing the people involved in the oracle after the random
outcome on certain aspects of the oracle text, but there would then be
now way to influence the result of the oracle itself.
There would be still another, very simple fundamental explanation for
things which resemble each other in big and small sizes or at the same
size at different places, namely that the same laws of nature could
bring forth similar structures even without immediate connections. This
concept is called self-similarity. For example in the "Mandelbrot set”,
a mathematical figure that results from a simple equation, you can find
the same structure not only in the large whole (left image), but also
many times in very similar, smaller form, if you zoom in at the border
(example to the right).
[image]
A practical idea regarding how to deal scientifically with collective
phenomena: Instead of trying to want to understand them analytically,
maybe just try and see if they can maybe be mirrored in artificial
neural networks? Hence, for example, feed a neural network with data
that emerged at known times at known places, so that you can also derive
astrological information. If such a neural network would then become
able to derive the creation time of undated data, or at least limit
times significantly, that would be a proof of astrology.
A key assumption in astrology, namely that the situation when something
starts, like a human life, an organisation, a country, etc., would shape
its fate, could apparently not be directly derived as a physical effect
in any of the explanations proposed here. Could a key element maybe
still be missing ?
This article has essentially emerged in the first week of October 2018.
noname wrote:
> pi wrote:
>
>> To be exact, philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language. -- Ludwik Wittgenstein
>
>Gobbledygook. Witty has the idea that language has something to do with
>something but clearly he ain't got it all figured out.
At times it obvious to me how language distorts m'eye world
view sewing two speak, with its subject/predicate-object sentence
structure it sentences me in English to have nouns and verbs.
With its pronouns and interrogatives it presumes mulch.
- going unnoticed all too, of'ten-k enuf ...
pi wrote:
>Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything. -- Gottfried Leibniz
>
>To be exact, philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language. -- Ludwik Wittgenstein
>
>Actually, modern math is the long sought after, perfect language for philosophy.
>
>Technically, math is a formal ontology.
>
>So much for exact philosophy.
I've not looked at the website yet, yet Zen
occurs exactly now, to be precise and
at the same time, to speak of it
a mite bit knows better.
- as if a mite bit could know a Ting, oar three
Alain provided:
>exactphilosophy.net
I've bookmarked the site and skimmed it briefly.
>Snapshot of core content (without "artemis" articles) of 1 Nov 2018.
>
>Notable additions:
>
>* A somewhat formal definition of "movement outside"
> and generally the core content revisited ("way")
>* Jung's psychological types and "in/out"
>* Empedocles and the elements taken literally: Zeus as the root of
> fire, Hera of earth, Hades of air and Nestis of water
>
>* Artemis articles:
> - Paradoxes (5 articles)
> - How astrology might really work (also in German)
> - USA/CH, Sedna, Original ideas in ...
>
>© 2002-now Alain Stalder
So far, there is too much information for me to process,
me being a subsystem of the whole process-thing going on.
>Welcome
>
>I present a way of looking at the world here. That way or idea is not
>something that can be proven.
As pi may have pointed out, how exact can it be then, may be
a kind of a question one could ask the ore as it knots.
>But some of the fruits it contains might
>be considered for tending to, grow and become part of existing systems
>of thought.
Fruits, nuggets, systems of thought stream and run like rivers,
or trains at times when on track or tracks of reasons being.
>Just click sequentially through all menu items on the left, like reading
>chapters in a book, and take your time, or go to 'artemis' for every-
>and nothing...
I can't click using this newsreader. At the website, clicking works.
>I am a physicist (*1966 in Zürich, Switzerland) and am doing this as a
>hobby.
Newsgrouping, here, is a form of fun for me. A hobby horse
of sorts of course to horse a round on a merry go going.
>Alain Stalder
>
>--
>
>way
>
>After defining elements from immediate perception of the world, inspired
>by Kant and Schopenhauer, I relate these elements to physics, the
>ancient Greek elements, and to the 8 trigrams of the Chinese I Ching.
>
>--
>
>space and time
>
>Imagine that you have just now started to look at the world.
Okay.
>[image]
I don't see an image, here, in this newsgroup.
>One of the first things that you notice is space.
Aye. The space on or in which all the words appear,
and which is between all the lines, between the words,
within and between the letters in the words. Like. Totally.
> There is you and an
>outside world that you can see,
Meaning, to me, a body, out of which vision goes in
to the world which is, not me.
> and you can see more than one thing.
To differentiate the world in to being, beyond the one,
beyond the two and the three, to being wan-wu, the 10k-things
can be how all things appear when taught to sew dew.
I don't know, now, how a newborn sees the world.
If a brand new baby sees, cognizes, without names, 10k-things.
>What separates you and what you can see, and what separates the
>different things that you see, is space in its most immediate
>definition.
Distances exist. Between so-called, things.
To say, all distances are, in sum, one thing, Distance,
could be said. That might make for a point.
>Then you also quickly notice that some things move and others do not.
>This is time, again in its most immediate definition, as motion or being
>at rest.
Ah. Time. Time to give this a rest.
- for now ...
noname: Math is limited
Right. Math is like an 8 bit computer, the Universe ain't even a computer and God alone knows what it is.
pi
Alain had posted:
>space and time
>
>Imagine that you have just now started to look at the world.
>One of the first things that you notice is space. There is you and an
>outside world that you can see, and you can see more than one thing.
>What separates you and what you can see, and what separates the
>different things that you see, is space in its most immediate
>definition.
A thought of how space is not necessarily three-dimensional
happened to occur to me a bit ago.
I'm so used to taking 3D for granted it goes without saying
and to say space might be thought of as more, or less, of
greater or fewer dimensions isn't usual.
If four or more dimensions are required to explain, say,
quantum tunneling, or non-locality, that might be another grid.
>Then you also quickly notice that some things move and others do not.
>This is time, again in its most immediate definition, as motion or being
>at rest.
Being in motion or at rest, relative
to some other object or objects might be objected too.
At rest, asleep in a car or a plane, moving
at the same time a human body might be two
times the number of times it could be
if it were only either/or.
>Things can rest or move outside and inside the mind.
Something that moves outside my mind, beyond
my awareness of it, or that is at rest, relative to some
other, so-called, thing, might very well go unnoticed by me.
Inside my mind, what moves,
what moves me, what kind of a so-called, thing,
moves or doesn't move, emerges as a quest-
ion of sorts, charged for a spell.
>Thus there would a
>priori be 4 different kinds of things: What moves outside, what rests
>outside, what moves inside, and what rests inside. Let me call them
>elements and give them the following names: emo, ero, emi and eri.
This is getting complicated.
Chuang Tzu once spoke of how he was born
at the same time as heaven and earth and
all of life is one. That being so, he wrote,
having said that, he went on to speak
of how already there are two and
three, aside from the one. Then
he said to go beyond three
requires an accountant,
and better to stop.
>emo moves outside
>ero rests outside
>emi moves inside
>eri rests inside
So, what moves, inside (my mind), thoughts,
perhaps in words or flickers of images, sort of,
are or is, emi. And on rare occasions, perhaps
going unnoticed, without moving, inside, is eri.
Eri might be the place to be, at a point, still.
Kinda like at the center of a circle, for example.
The hub is mentioned at times in Taoist jargon.
Thirty spokes are spoken of. Moving out from there,
to the circumference, at the edge, going right or left,
an endlessness was found to be possible, going round.
>Using a camera, emo and ero might be defined as the difference between
>two images taken shortly after each other. Differing pixels would be
>emo, same pixels ero. For example, a ball that rolls down a slope would
>itself not be emo as a physical object, but emo would be the area the
>ball spawns between the two images (excluding the middle if the ball is
>uniformly colored).
I can imagine the image at the website.
>leads
>
>Some literature quotes, ideas and different points of view. Always also
>see 'artemis' for eventually articles that may expose some topics in a
>more contemporarily amenable way.
I've not visited, 'artemis' yet.
>* Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason. 1787.
>
> In the early chapters, Kant discloses that some observable things
> cannot be isolated from the self, but instead appear to be themselves
> a priori necessary for thinking and observation. These a priori
> concepts include space and time in their immediate sense - the
> structure in which things appear in the mind and seem to exist outside
> of it.
Carving and chopping, to it there may be no end getting round.
Uncarving, not felling the tree, allowing one to stand, simply put, pu
is a word used at times in places, evoking spacetime and yet.
>* "By means of the external sense (a property of the mind), we represent
> to ourselves objects as without us, and these all in space. Herein
> alone are their shape, dimensions, and relations to each other
> determined or determinable. [...]
Unless they can't be determined
and happen to be undeterminable.
Without a name, one may wonder, what,
assuming a so-called thing is a what, is that,
where the word, that, means, a phenomenon.
Language might dictate objects exist
and I object to that structure at times
as it conditions a mind to think along lines
of reason which are not always reasonable.
>Space is not a conception which has
> been derived from outward experiences. For, in order that certain
> sensations may relate to something without me (that is, to something
> which occupies a different part of space from that in which I am); in
> like manner, in order that I may represent them not merely as without,
> of, and near to each other, but also in separate places, the
> representation of space must already exist as a foundation.
Hmm. Maybe. Sounds a bit ontological. An axiom of sorts.
Space, as a presumption, could be taken for granted.
As a mathematical tool, a grid, a construction of sorts,
used to explain, location, location, location, okay.
Without language, a wonder occurs.
Without words, a body may move or not, relative
to some other speechless happenings which happen.
> [...] We
> never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the
> non-existence of space, though we may easily enough think that no
> objects are found in it." (translated by J. Meiklejohn)
At this point, a singularity appears.
It has zero dimensions. It is the non-existence of space.
It's the non-existence of time also. It could be called, Wu,
Nonbeing, Nothing, Emptiness at its peak, Wu Chi or Wuji.
Beginning with this point, originally, of origin, so to speak,
space and time, or spacetime, may be constructed.
Given: all the mass or energy, or, massenergy,
in order to match spacetime, gravity is invoked as wells.
Yet at this point, all is well. There is only one well.
It's the gravity well from which massenergy emerges
taking spacetime along with it, inflating the one from which
there appears to be three, so-called, things.
>* "Time is not an empirical conception. For neither coexistence nor
> succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did
> not exist as a foundation a priori.
Time and space, as two different, reifications, occur.
Once set in they cement their selves, as if they had selves,
in to mind and most minds don't mind them if they dew.
> [...] With regard to phenomena in
> general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to
> ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well
> represent to ourselves time void of phenomena."
I like to think I hear and see what's being said.
As if there were an I, sewing two speak.
>* If I can imagine something, is it then really inside of me?
The image may be, presumably, inside a cranium.
Whether one's skull is inside of what one calls one,
one may or may not call that portion an inside of one.
The unicorn in m'eye-mind, at present, exists.
If the word, me, means, a head-space, and if
the unicorn is inside there and then it vanishes
a quest ionizer of sorts may wonder from where
did it arise and to where did it go, as if there
was a where, as the interrogatives tend
to induce far flung n'oceans being.
> Isn't
> there already a separation (space) between me and what I imagine?
If one cares to carve and chop, to slice and dice,
then, a rhetorical quest ion may be found spinning
its way in to being out of nonbeing.
> Such
> an extreme definition of self or inside would mean that the self
> cannot have any (consciously accessible) attributes, no memory etc.,
> because any such attribute of the self would be something that can be
> considered by the self and would thus, by definition, not be part of
> the self...
Tribbles arise when the chop-oh-matic is used.
And then they multiply as they get divided.
At times they grow where no tribble ever went.
Spinning for a spell, then and there they are.
>* This definition of self reminds of the Tao ("way") in Taoism. Lao Tzu
> starts the Tao Te Ching with "The Tao that can be Tao'ed
> (trodden/spoken), is not the real (unchanging) Tao".
When Cook Ting carved oxen, his Tao was real, real
enuf to impress the guy watching him and hearing
what Ting was pointing to with his vorpal edge.
Going from not carving to carving the bull
tends to be endless fun and yet here
is another point where it ends.
- until it begins again ...
Alain continued in his 1650 line post with:
>* The definition of emo as the difference between two images is from
> September 2018. Before that I would often consider, say, a ball itself
> (or at least its visible surface) as ero, as long as it would rest,
> and as emo, when it would be rolling. That overall view still shows a
> bit in the first drawing above.
>
> The concept of a "ball" is a priori much more complex than comparing
> two images, which becomes evident once you try to program computers to
> recognize (3-dimensional) items on 2-dimensional images. How a concept
> like a "ball" comes to be in the mind appears to require a lot of
> interaction with the environment (typically quite early as a child),
> and in the end it is philosophically not so clear whether a "ball" is
> rather a natural thing, something that objectively exists, or rather a
> useful cultural abstraction of reality, copied from others. See also
> e.g. Kant or Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
TTC 1.2 might be viewed as speaking of names. Ming.
Ming are ming. Names name. Yet whether there is a, chang ming,
or a name is able to name one or more if there is or are, chang ming,
could be a tribble of sorts.
> The new definition of emo<-->ero is more fundamental, even though it
> reminds of the shadows in Plato's Cave. Thus it might a priori be
> better suited for such a fundamental concept as elements are. But,
> without having explored where different definitions lead, settling on
> just one may be a bit early.
Chopping up a post, or a video, is fun for me.
It's difficult for me to not do what I'm doing now.
Natural things, like a round rock, able to be rolled,
could be called a ball. The thing, a noun of sorts,
is produced by language in the use of language.
For a child to get a gestalt, be on the ball to that extent,
to know a ball from a rock and to roll one may take a bit,
maybe eight bits, maybe a gazillion bits, of doing.
To extract a child from all else, all-else, can be a mother.
TTC 1 goes on from 1.1 and 1.2 to name what may be named
Being and Nonbeing. Being could be called the mother of 10k-things.
If one desires, always wanting, one may observe outlines.
Without desire, empty of such a mode, one may be in line,
on the ball, with one and all, so to speak.
- at this time ... and places me ...
Alain wrote:
>* How would rest/move be defined for other senses than vision?
Wu and yu return again, in Taoist terminology. TTC 1
may suggest they're two sides of a singlular Tao.
Without sound and with sound, for hearing.
Calm, a lake sits, without moving, in silence.
With moving, waves ripple and lap at the shore.
Inside the head, between mine ears hearing thoughts
streaming, evaporating, condensing, rolling along
at times it's clear, without any are few and far between.
Touching on feelings, to sense within, my heart, a pulse
or be unaware of how body processes go and are, breathing,
having a tummy full or empty, an ache or to be without any.
Touching a ball, rolling one along, the sense of that rounds
or a cube of a pair of dice, one may feel any number of sides,
their clicking and clacking in a hand. Rocking a boat or a chair,
many ways to sail through the air and feel it, then and there,
outside or inside, both, and neither when not paying attention.
To smell or taste, inside the mouth, having bad breath or a mint,
smells and tastes might move or not move me to burp and recall
having eaten barbecue, or nothing at all.
> How would eri and emi be measured inside? Would the only "objective"
> way be to measure brain activity outside? Would that be fundamental
> enough in this context?
If it's a Taoist context, I've forgotten what eri and emi mean.
What a smell smells like or a taste tastes like, the word, like, as,
compares, just as with feelings and hearings, ring sings in my ears.
When wax builds up and differences appear to me, to be, objective,
if another is able to hear and feel a bell ring, outside, how it feels
and sounds to him or her, inside, might be beyond measure.
A symphony might move me, just as classical rock, or folk music may.
How the sounds sound, the chords progress, emotions wave.
I'm not sure why an objective measure would be made.
- unless there kneads be
Alain ended a space and time page with:
> Could the self (observer) be measured?
Semantics might enter a picture.
If the self (observer) is defined as the witness,
detached consciousness, it might be a point.
Observation points vary.
At the same time, a point has zero dimensions.
Watching, being aware, of senses sensing, a point
of awareness may shift a bit in a horse's mouth.
When there are five horses, and only one
mouth, two ears and eyes a nose knows
to a point where the measure meant.
The observer could be a nerve ending.
When attention, awareness, consciousness is made
at or paid to the big or little toe, there it is, at that point.
Without electrical signals transmitted, awareness, be it
an image in the visual or auditory or some other cortex,
networked via chemical wave might function to no end.
One self (observer) might note how an arm went to sleep
and there are no feelings there, or on the tip of one's tongue,
about to say something, when words escape, going nowhere.
>* Would a female observer also consider what is seen as not being part
> of herself or would she rather tend to identify with what she sees?
If witness-consciousness, awareness, is identical in all organisms,
if all there is, is consciousness, then it's the same self (observer)
seeing, feeling, hearing, being all in all among the many. One
point points. It points out and points in. A pointed point.
Moving at light-speed, immediately it is, as the field flowers,
without moving it arrives. Spacetime, space and time, instantly
in no time, one arrives and here it is. Again and again. Pointing.
> (Is the own body part of the self? And lovers, family, friends, house,
> garden, etc.?) In other words, is the distinction between in and out
> hard or soft (gradual)?
Identifications might be sudden, and go without notice.
A mother and child might be felt and known as not-two.
Giving birth, an attachment may continue and never cease
except when apron strings are cut, or a mother doesn't care.
When the word, my, modifies a noun,
a self (observer) may or might not notice
how identity has shifted a bit in a mind
and might or may not mind.
>* What about sleep, dreaming, trance, drunkenness? Why only have a fully
> conscious observer?
Fully is a fun word. Over and over flowing a sub-
conscious observer surfaces, time and time again,
here and surpises me by what gets writ by fingers
typing words on a screen. As if in a dream or trance
mode, sober, such as now at three in the morning or
four, in the afternoon, Chuang-tzu, the book's pass-
ages move me as well as when drunk on words.
Now, looking at the clock, outside in the room here,
it's time to end this post and move without moving
on to the next page, or do or not do another, noun.
- a thing else, a verb, aye
Thanks a lot for all the feedback, greatly appreciated.. :)
Some things where I feel like commenting on right now, others maybe
at some other time, or maybe not, just contemplate, maybe...
But thanks again :)
{:-]))) wrote:
: I don't know, now, how a newborn sees the world.
: If a brand new baby sees, cognizes, without names, 10k-things.
I personally have a memory of a memory of the first image I saw at
birth. The original memory would be from birth, the secondary from the
age of 3 or 4, when I first started to have a conscious mind. By the age
of 5 or so, I was not so sure about the original memory any more, but
still remembered that I had that memory at 3 or 4. The memory was what
must have been the ceiling in the room I was born, white with lights, I
guess rather long lights.
In that sense, if such a memory of a memory can be trusted, I guess
already then there was an "I" that was perceiving/observing the world
and very likely also with an inner imaginary world. Maybe?
But yes, in contemporary scientific view, a lot kicks in specifically
after birth, and as far as I know how exactly the brain develops is hard
to separate from the environment, so...
{:-]))) wrote:
: >I present a way of looking at the world here. That way or idea is not
: >something that can be proven.
:
: As pi may have pointed out, how exact can it be then, may be
: a kind of a question one could ask the ore as it knots.
I am not sure if the words are so important. Literally exactphilosophy
would mean something along "exact love of wisdom" (three things).
I like the Groucho Marx quote (probably said in a sketch):
"Those are my principles; if you don't like them, well I have others."
Is "exactphilosophy" more like yin-yang than just "philosophy", maybe,
because "exact" contrasts "philosophy", balances the opposites, gets
things "rolling" in cycles, maybe, without destroying much of the 1?
{:-]))) wrote:
: Newsgrouping, here, is a form of fun for me. A hobby horse
: of sorts of course to horse a round on a merry go going.
Here's another article from my website, about the origins of "Dada",
and modern art with "readymades" / "objects trouvees" / etc. A dada
in french is the same as a hobby, also going back to horses.
For all that it appears, all of the "billion $ industry" in modern
art goes back to a joke by Marcel Duchamp et. al. for April 1, 1917...
And, quoting Hugo Ball about dada from the article:
"The child's first sound expresses the primitiveness, the beginning at
zero, in our art. We could not find a better word."
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/dada-and-duchamps-fountain.pdf
(Also available in French and German)
--
Dada and Duchamp's Fountain
[image]
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/fontainebleue.jpg
Duchamp's 'Fountain' has a very direct relation to Dada: A 'dada' in
french is a horse in children's language, also rocking and hobby horse
and hobby, and appears in 'à dada sur mon bidet', the french version of
playing gee-gees, and 'bidet' is a little horse, as well as the sanitary
fitment, which strongly resembles Duchamp's 'Fountain', not least
because of the usual meaning of 'fountain'.
Details
(For many facts surrounding Duchamp's 'Fountain', see "Pilfered
Pissoire? A Response to the Allegation that Duchamp Stole his Famous
Fountain", Jesse Prinz, artbouillon, 20 Nov 2014.)
The name 'Dada' for the art movement originated in 1916 in the Zü̈rich
flat of Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings in company of Richard Huelsenbeck
(Huelsenbeck, transition, No. 2 (May 1927), pp. 134-135):
I was standing behind Ball looking into the dictionary on his knees.
Ball's finger pointed to the first letter of each word descending the
page. Suddenly I cried halt. I was struck by a word I had never heard
before, the word dada.
'Dada,' Ball read, and added: 'It is a children's word meaning hobby-
horse'. At that moment I understood what advantages the word held for
us.
'Let's take the word dada,' I said. 'It's just made for our purpose.
The child's first sound expresses the primitiveness, the beginning at
zero, in our art. We could not find a better word.'
Independently of whether things took part exactly that way, the primary
association of Dada seems to be with the french 'dada', which is
children's language for horse, including rocking and hobby horse, and
figuratively also means hobby.
The nursery rhyme 'à dada sur mon bidet' corresponds to the english 'to
play gee-gees', hence where a child "rides" on the thighs of an adult.
The word 'bidet' stands originally and until today for a kind of little
horse. Today's better known meaning as a sanitary fitment with some kind
of "fountain" in it, originates from its original appearance that
resembled a little horse, for example in 'La toilette intime ou la fleur
effeuillée' by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845):
[image]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABoilly_La_Toilette_intime_ou_la_Rose_effeuillée.jpg
Duchamp had submitted 'Fountain' with help from his friends towards 1
April 1917 for the New York art exhibition. For all that it appears as
Dada in the sense not least of the french 'dada'.
Alain asked, perhaps rhetorically:
>How would a virtual particle mediating the force of gravitation between
>sun and earth “know" that it should “not stop" at the moon in between ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztFovwCaOik
As I understand the paradigm, virtual particles are not real
other than being mathematical entities.
Trying to make philosophy scientific, exact,
to make metaphysics physics, might be doomed
once it crosses a line drawn on the surface
of a water table having no legs
yet which stands still
in a well being.
- for a time being, eternally ...
{:-]))) wrote:
: As I understand the paradigm, virtual particles are not real
: other than being mathematical entities.
Has anybody ever seen a (non-virtual) electron or neutrino, and so on?
All of these things are mental constructs that, combined with logic
(math), are mapped to immediate experience. There is no fundamental
difference between a virtual particle and a real particle, especially as
virtual particles would mediate forces, and how would you measure
anything without forces, anyways?
But, let me rest things from my side now...
Alain wrote:
>Thanks a lot for all the feedback, greatly appreciated.. :)
You're more than welcome. Lotsa food for thought at your site.
>Some things where I feel like commenting on right now, others maybe
>at some other time, or maybe not, just contemplate, maybe...
>
>But thanks again :)
Another thought occurred a bit ago, not sure if I can recall it now.
It had something to do with, oh yeah, dimensions. Are they real.
It's compelling for me, having been conditioned to think of three,
as if the three of space are real. This has returned again and again
in terms of something like a vector space, as the bird flies, given
a direction and magnitude, more spherical than cubic.
And while four or more may, explain, how quanta,
so-called, particles, points that ripple in a field, travel
and may be entangled, to say the dimensions are real,
aside from providing a scaffold, a gird, work to explain.
The numbers called rational and irrational are real.
The complex involve the imaginary and quaternions baffle me.
Some say Nature speaks using mathematical language
or languages, if she speaks in many if not with a forked
tongue in varoius Ways. I'd tend to say nay, or neigh,
going for a ride on m'eye dada rocking out.
>{:-]))) wrote:
>: I don't know, now, how a newborn sees the world.
>: If a brand new baby sees, cognizes, without names, 10k-things.
>
>I personally have a memory of a memory of the first image I saw at
>birth. The original memory would be from birth, the secondary from the
>age of 3 or 4, when I first started to have a conscious mind. By the age
>of 5 or so, I was not so sure about the original memory any more, but
>still remembered that I had that memory at 3 or 4. The memory was what
>must have been the ceiling in the room I was born, white with lights, I
>guess rather long lights.
>
>In that sense, if such a memory of a memory can be trusted, I guess
>already then there was an "I" that was perceiving/observing the world
>and very likely also with an inner imaginary world. Maybe?
Well, there was the perception, and the memory.
Whether there was a self-consciousness, if you were
aware of being aware might require another level of learning.
If you knew you knew you were seeing lights, long lights,
then your epistemology was already there, in place,
but to know that you know that you knew
could involve a stack of turtles going
down a rabbit whole and one or
two elephants on top of a heap.
>But yes, in contemporary scientific view, a lot kicks in specifically
>after birth, and as far as I know how exactly the brain develops is hard
>to separate from the environment, so...
Children are taught, da, and ma, means, a face.
Daddy being a horse with a kid on his leg.
Mamma being a being near and dear.
Without knowing the names, nouns, of people, places and things,
without knowing how to differentiate, actions, verbs, and
then to conjugate them, to have singular, plural,
senses of time and such knots.
Knots, neural, physical, nets where waves of electrical
and chemical reactions ripple in a field of consciousness
might be all tied up, for a spell, and then vanish.
>{:-]))) wrote:
>: >I present a way of looking at the world here. That way or idea is not
>: >something that can be proven.
>:
>: As pi may have pointed out, how exact can it be then, may be
>: a kind of a question one could ask the ore as it knots.
>
>I am not sure if the words are so important. Literally exactphilosophy
>would mean something along "exact love of wisdom" (three things).
>
>I like the Groucho Marx quote (probably said in a sketch):
>"Those are my principles; if you don't like them, well I have others."
I like Marx and his brothers, also Marx.
Also could have been the name of the fifth
any of the three or four were drinking from.
Context is am emperor and semantics a stick in the mud.
The stick measures how high above, and how deep it is
might go beyond knowing unless one was the one
who stuck it in the mud, once, at a time.
>Is "exactphilosophy" more like yin-yang than just "philosophy", maybe,
>because "exact" contrasts "philosophy", balances the opposites, gets
>things "rolling" in cycles, maybe, without destroying much of the 1?
>
>{:-]))) wrote:
>: Newsgrouping, here, is a form of fun for me. A hobby horse
>: of sorts of course to horse a round on a merry go going.
>
>Here's another article from my website, about the origins of "Dada",
>and modern art with "readymades" / "objects trouvees" / etc. A dada
>in french is the same as a hobby, also going back to horses.
>
>For all that it appears, all of the "billion $ industry" in modern
>art goes back to a joke by Marcel Duchamp et. al. for April 1, 1917...
>
>And, quoting Hugo Ball about dada from the article:
>"The child's first sound expresses the primitiveness, the beginning at
>zero, in our art. We could not find a better word."
>
>https://www.exactphilosophy.net/dada-and-duchamps-fountain.pdf
>(Also available in French and German)
Thanks for the links!
- learning and forgetting, riding m'eye cycles h'ear and then again...
On 11/3/18 8:34 AM, {:-]))) wrote:
> I like Marx and his brothers, also Marx.
> Also could have been the name of the fifth
> any of the three or four were drinking from.
"I refuse to join any party that would have me as a member." -- Karl Marx
--
https://twitter.com/LinuxGal
On 11/3/18 7:49 AM, {:-]))) wrote:
> As I understand the paradigm, virtual particles are not real
> other than being mathematical entities.
Virtual particles are real particles but they exist only very briefly as
part of the quantum jitter on the subatomic scale.
--
https://twitter.com/LinuxGal
Alain wrote:
>{:-]))) wrote:
>: As I understand the paradigm, virtual particles are not real
>: other than being mathematical entities.
>
>Has anybody ever seen a (non-virtual) electron or neutrino, and so on?
Good point.
I've seen what are purported to be atoms.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/atoms-close
Photons might be seen by an eye, but, I've heard it takes a few,
maybe half a dozen or so, for the nervous system to register them.
When a single photon hits some kind of a plate,
it might result in a dot a counter counts on during an experiment.
I guess it's the same when electrons are said to make wave patterns.
>All of these things are mental constructs that, combined with logic
>(math), are mapped to immediate experience.
In a cloud chamber, traces of interactions may appear to magnify
what is thought. Thought thought to be involved. Involved
in a magnificent project to project projectile-like
little packets of energy, quanta, amounts
of ripples in a field in the chamber.
>There is no fundamental
>difference between a virtual particle and a real particle, especially as
>virtual particles would mediate forces,
Fundamentally, if the virtual particles are contrivances unlike
so-called real or actual photons, then there must be a difference,
and possibly more than one difference.
> and how would you measure
>anything without forces, anyways?
Geometry?
If gravity-mass, or gravity-energy, warps space-time,
and is said to be different in some fashion of thought from
space-time, using Newton's paradigm, maybe it's a force
while with Einstein's it's not a force but more of a curvature.
>But, let me rest things from my side now...
Without carving, yet still with names, gravity is mass which is
space-time as there is only one phenomenon that waves, wells,
and is that which is all-things. People lump and split it, spit it
out at times, call it up at times, and it might take space,
or a wall of some sort if it's a noodle being cooked
to see if it sticks to some other thing.
- ruminating food for thought forms
linuxgal wrote:
>On 11/3/18 8:34 AM, {:-]))) wrote:
>
>> I like Marx and his brothers, also Marx.
>> Also could have been the name of the fifth
>> any of the three or four were drinking from.
>
>"I refuse to join any party that would have me as a member." -- Karl Marx
Once up on a time, at a party, there was an other place
at the same time where goings on were going on.
Also Marx, the famous fifth, which could have been gin
during a card game, a shaggy dog suddenly walked in on
the party which was going on on top of the water.
How many ons were on one that day was a maze
of zingers that kept on zinging for a time being.
Meanwhile, an eternal being looked on.
- as the present unfolded
linuxgal wrote:
>On 11/3/18 7:49 AM, {:-]))) wrote:
>
>> As I understand the paradigm, virtual particles are not real
>> other than being mathematical entities.
>
>Virtual particles are real particles but they exist only very briefly as
>part of the quantum jitter on the subatomic scale.
Thanks. You at times help me to gain a better standing under
Wittgenstein's ladders moving from rung to wrung.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle
<< The term is somewhat loose and vaguely defined, in that it refers
to the view that the world is made up of "real particles": it is not;
rather, "real particles" are better understood to be excitations of
the underlying quantum fields. Virtual particles are also excitations
of the underlying fields, but are "temporary" in the sense that they
appear in calculations of interactions, but never as asymptotic states
or indices to the scattering matrix. The accuracy and use of virtual
particles in calculations is firmly established, but as they cannot be
detected in experiments, deciding how to precisely describe them is a
topic of debate. >>
I like to ponder how a wave is able to collapse at a point
where in and out of its own self it expands spherically
frequently and its amplitudinal volume varies.
Unless it's not a sphere of sorts but more of a plane ripple.
- reminds me of wine as wells, in a bottomless bottle
On 11/4/18 4:21 AM, {:-]))) wrote:
> Also Marx, the famous fifth, which could have been gin
> during a card game, a shaggy dog suddenly walked in on
> the party which was going on on top of the water.
>
> How many ons were on one that day was a maze
> of zingers that kept on zinging for a time being.
>
> Meanwhile, an eternal being looked on.
Is this another one of your shaggy god stories?
--
https://twitter.com/LinuxGal
On 11/2/18 4:08 PM, {:-]))) wrote:
> A thought of how space is not necessarily three-dimensional
> happened to occur to me a bit ago.
One day you will stumble upon the holographic principle and it will blow
your mind.
--
https://twitter.com/LinuxGal
linuxgal wrote:
>On 11/4/18 4:21 AM, {:-]))) wrote:
>
>> Also Marx, the famous fifth, which could have been gin
>> during a card game, a shaggy dog suddenly walked in on
>> the party which was going on on top of the water.
>>
>> How many ons were on one that day was a maze
>> of zingers that kept on zinging for a time being.
>>
>> Meanwhile, an eternal being looked on.
>
>Is this another one of your shaggy god stories?
Of course of course said Mister Ed to who'd a thought
thought it could be one of those and then again.
You've given me a term, a jar gone that never was that was
until the name named it for what it was, going where
it was known by many an Enterprise and then
tribbles kept on multiplying like wabbits.
- heh, heh, heh, heh, heh ... shhhhh
linuxgal wrote:
>On 11/2/18 4:08 PM, {:-]))) wrote:
>
>> A thought of how space is not necessarily three-dimensional
>> happened to occur to me a bit ago.
>
>One day you will stumble upon the holographic principle and it will blow
>your mind.
One day, going to pick up the Fiat from the shop, where it had been
lifted up and it kept on going up and down on the lift where it was,
I did stumble. I did. I did. And it was on the side walk where,
maybe it was that I was jogging but, no matter, there
I was, falling, falling down and, catching my, a,
ahem, self, as it were, by the wrist watching
the physical body falling, aye, there and
then, emerging from the fall stood up
and once more was on m'eye Way
to pick up the Fiat that, yes,
needed fixing again.
Plus, the mechanic-owner's name was, yep,
except it wasn't yep, it was Tony of all names.
He was, and still is, Italian and trained by the factory
so he knew basically pretty much all about the Fiats.
Did I ever tell you about the Fiat?
- oh what a mother of a car it was, kinda sorta
On Friday, November 2, 2018 at 5:02:20 AM UTC-6, undifferentiated wrote:
> noname wrote:
> > pi wrote:
> >
> >> To be exact, philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language. -- Ludwik Wittgenstein
> >
> >Gobbledygook. Witty has the idea that language has something to do with
> >something but clearly he ain't got it all figured out.
>
> At times it obvious to me how language distorts m'eye world
> view sewing two speak, with its subject/predicate-object sentence
> structure it sentences me in English to have nouns and verbs.
>
> With its pronouns and interrogatives it presumes mulch.
>
> - going unnoticed all too, of'ten-k enuf ...
English is not language, it's English.
On Friday, November 2, 2018 at 12:23:22 PM UTC-6, pi wrote:
> noname: Math is limited
>
> Right. Math is like an 8 bit computer, the Universe ain't even a computer and God alone knows what it is.
>
> pi
I think god doesn't yet know what s/he is, since it's becoming, and we are all
participating to not much good effect.
On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 19:13:12 -0800 (PST), noname wrote:
>On Friday, November 2, 2018 at 5:02:20 AM UTC-6, undifferentiated wrote:
>> noname wrote:
>> > pi wrote:
>> >
>> >> To be exact, philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language. -- Ludwik Wittgenstein
>> >
>> >Gobbledygook. Witty has the idea that language has something to do with
>> >something but clearly he ain't got it all figured out.
>>
>> At times it obvious to me how language distorts m'eye world
>> view sewing two speak, with its subject/predicate-object sentence
>> structure it sentences me in English to have nouns and verbs.
>>
>> With its pronouns and interrogatives it presumes mulch.
>>
>> - going unnoticed all too, of'ten-k enuf ...
>
>English is not language, it's English.
English, as a word, could be an adjective.
As in, the English language, as it modifies a noun.
Language, as a thing, might be thought.
Thought to be a thing. And yet.
Some things go further and some farther.
By the foot, pound, wings, streams and other things.
Nouns, nouns, every where are nouns.
- speaking volumes them, as if volumes were a verb
On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 19:15:26 -0800 (PST), noname wrote:
>On Friday, November 2, 2018 at 12:23:22 PM UTC-6, pi wrote:
>> noname: Math is limited
>>
>> Right. Math is like an 8 bit computer, the Universe ain't even a computer and God alone knows what it is.
>>
>> pi
>
>I think god doesn't yet know what s/he is, since it's becoming, and we are all
>participating to not much good effect.
One time, on an ego-trip, the Tetra who
was a Grammaton at the time said, four letters,
t'hat shall be as it shall be and sewn it was.
Got sewn on its head it did.
And kinda stuck.
- for the time beings ...