Log24

Friday, February 2, 2018

For Plato’s Cave

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:06 pm

"Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners,
inhabiting the cave since childhood, immobile,
facing an interior wall. A large fire burns behind
the prisoners, and as people pass this fire their
shadows are cast upon the cave's wall, and
these shadows of the activity being played out
behind the prisoner become the only version of
reality that the prisoner knows."

— From the Occupy Space gallery in Ireland

IMAGE- Patrick McGoohan as 'The Prisoner,' with lapel button that says '6.'

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Dialogue from Plato’s Cave

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:15 am

At  scifi.stackexchange.com

Why was the Cosmic Cube named the Tesseract 
in the Marvel movie series? Is there any specific reason 
for the name change? According to me, Cosmic Cube
seems a nice and cooler name.

— Asked March 14, 2013, by Dhwaneet Bhatt
    
At least it wasn't called 'The AllSpark.' 
It's not out of the realm of possibility. 

— Solemnity, March 14, 2013

Monday, February 13, 2017

“The Echo in Plato’s Cave” Continues.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The previous post, "Colorful Tales," on the Nov. 28, 2016, death
of one Angus Fletcher, together with the remarks indexed above,
suggest a review from 

The archives of The New York Times  —

"THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE
Literature as a Way of Life

By Harold Bloom
357 pp. Yale University Press. $32.50.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.

A version of this review appeared in print
on May 22, 2011, on Page BR1 of the 
Sunday Book Review with the headline:
'An Uncommon Reader.'"

"By this time, Bloom had burrowed into a cave,
its lamplit forms and shapes merging into
an occult mythos scarcely intelligible
even to other scholars. 'Bloom had an idea,' 
Christopher Ricks said; 'now the idea has him.' 
Cynthia Ozick, meanwhile, called him an 'idol-maker.' 
In contrast to Cleanth Brooks . . . ."

An illustration from "The Echo in Plato's Cave" linked to
in the previous post

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080413-Marabar.jpg

Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves
 

Cynthia Ozick on Bloom —

See also Dharwadker in the previous post and on the Higgs boson.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Entertainment in Plato’s Cave

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

"Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners,
inhabiting the cave since childhood, immobile,
facing an interior wall. A large fire burns behind
the prisoners, and as people pass this fire their
shadows are cast upon the cave's wall, and
these shadows of the activity being played out
behind the prisoner become the only version of
reality that the prisoner knows."

From the Occupy Space gallery in Ireland

IMAGE- Patrick McGoohan as 'The Prisoner,' with lapel button that says '6.'

See also the number 6 in yesterday's posts,
Perfect Number and Perfect Universe.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Plato’s Cave (continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Brighton Rock: Emerging from Plato's Cave

Monday, October 3, 2011

Realism in Plato’s Cave

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:08 pm

In memory of the late combinatorialist-philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota

Excerpts from the introduction to Allan Casebier's

Film and Phenomenology: Towards a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation
(Cambridge Studies in Film, Cambridge University Press, 1991) —

Pages 1-2,  pages 3-4,  pages 5-6.

Cover illustration: Durer's 'Knight, Death, and the Devil'

Cover illustration: Knight, Death, and the Devil, by Albrecht Dürer

Friday, May 1, 2020

The H-State

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:27 pm

Related pure mathematics —

The Escape from Plato’s Cave to . . .

See also Numberland and Walpurgisnacht Geometry.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Cave Shadows

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:22 pm

Brighton Rock: Emerging from Plato's Cave

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ariadne’s Clue

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

IMAGE- The final page of 'Deathly Hallows' is 759.

Related symbolism from Plato’s Cave—

Recall that Ariadne in “Inception” is played by Ellen Page .

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110301-Inception256w.jpg

Show me all  the blueprints.”
— Howard Hughes, according to Hollywood

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Epiphany Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

January 06, 2007
ART WARS: Epiphany

Picture of Nothing
On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
Pictures of Nothing“–

“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself….”

Related material:

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Log24, Aug. 23, 2005:

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–  theological analogy of Son’s procession  as Verbum Patris, 111-12″ — Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S.J., Yale University Press 1957,  second printing 1963, page 162

“So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil’s Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: ‘In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, from Slate‘s “High Concept” department

'In the beginning' according to Jim Holt

“Bang.”

“…Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal….”

For properties of the “nothing” represented by the 3×3 grid, see The Field of Reason. For religious material related to the above and to Epiphany, a holy day observed by some, see Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star and Shining Forth.


Some Context:

Quaternions in Finite Geometry

Click to enlarge.

See also Nativity.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Sunday January 11, 2009

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:24 am
A Minor Metaphor

                     … we know that we use
Only the eye as faculty, that the mind
Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind


Is a landscape only of the eye; and that
We are ignorant men incapable
Of the least, minor, vital metaphor….


— Wallace Stevens, “Crude Foyer”


                                               … So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning
Again and again,
                         while History is unforgiven.

— Delmore Schwartz,
  “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave

For those who prefer
stories to truth,
I recommend the
blue matrices of
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s
Darkover stories.
Bradley also wrote
The Mists of Avalon.

Happy birthday to
David Wolper,
who produced the
TV version of Mists.

Related material:
Diamonds Are Forever

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Sunday November 16, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 am
ART WARS
continued

From Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda:

“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch.”

Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton’s nine was Koestler.

Paperback edition of 'The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World,' by Kati Marton

From another book related to this exodus:

“Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces– an analysis which is geometrical in nature.”

— Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam:

“Riesz’s example is well worth following today.”

Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews.

For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also “geometrical in nature,” see The Pope in Plato’s Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Tuesday June 24, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:01 am
Plato’s Cave, continued:

                     … we know that we use
Only the eye as faculty, that the mind
Is the eye, and that this landscape of the mind


Is a landscape only of the eye; and that
We are ignorant men incapable
Of the least, minor, vital metaphor….

— Wallace Stevens, “Crude Foyer”

                                               … So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning
Again and again,
                         while history is unforgiven.

— Delmore Schwartz,
  “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave


The Echo in Plato’s Cave:

Somewhere between
a flagrant triviality and
a resplendent Trinity we
have what might be called
“a resplendent triviality.”

For further details, see
A Four-Color Theorem.”

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Sunday April 13, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 am
The Echo
in Plato’s Cave

“It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy.”

— Simon Blackburn, Think (Oxford, 1999)

Michael Harris, mathematician at the University of Paris:

“… three ‘parts’ of tragedy identified by Aristotle that transpose to fiction of all types– plot (mythos), character (ethos), and ‘thought’ (dianoia)….”

— paper (pdf) to appear in Mathematics and Narrative, A. Doxiadis and B. Mazur, eds.

Mythos —

A visitor from France this morning viewed the entry of Jan. 23, 2006: “In Defense of Hilbert (On His Birthday).” That entry concerns a remark of Michael Harris.

A check of Harris’s website reveals a new article:

“Do Androids Prove Theorems in Their Sleep?” (slighly longer version of article to appear in Mathematics and Narrative, A. Doxiadis and B. Mazur, eds.) (pdf).

From that article:

“The word ‘key’ functions here to structure the reading of the article, to draw the reader’s attention initially to the element of the proof the author considers most important. Compare E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel:

[plot is] something which is measured not be minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles.”

Ethos —

“Forster took pains to widen and deepen the enigmatic character of his novel, to make it a puzzle insoluble within its own terms, or without. Early drafts of A Passage to India reveal a number of false starts. Forster repeatedly revised drafts of chapters thirteen through sixteen, which comprise the crux of the novel, the visit to the Marabar Caves. When he began writing the novel, his intention was to make the cave scene central and significant, but he did not yet know how:

When I began a A Passage to India, I knew something important happened in the Malabar (sic) Caves, and that it would have a central place in the novel– but I didn’t know what it would be… The Malabar Caves represented an area in which concentration can take place. They were to engender an event like an egg.”

E. M. Forster: A Passage to India, by Betty Jay

Dianoia —

Flagrant Triviality
or Resplendent Trinity?

“Despite the flagrant triviality of the proof… this result is the key point in the paper.”

— Michael Harris, op. cit., quoting a mathematical paper

Online Etymology Dictionary
:

flagrant
c.1500, “resplendent,” from L. flagrantem (nom. flagrans) “burning,” prp. of flagrare “to burn,” from L. root *flag-, corresponding to PIE *bhleg (cf. Gk. phlegein “to burn, scorch,” O.E. blæc “black”). Sense of “glaringly offensive” first recorded 1706, probably from common legalese phrase in flagrante delicto “red-handed,” lit. “with the crime still blazing.”

A related use of “resplendent”– applied to a Trinity, not a triviality– appears in the Liturgy of Malabar:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080413-LiturgyOfMalabar.jpg

The Liturgies of SS. Mark, James, Clement, Chrysostom, and Basil, and the Church of Malabar, by the Rev. J.M. Neale and the Rev. R.F. Littledale, reprinted by Gorgias Press, 2002

On Universals and
A Passage to India:

 

“”The universe, then, is less intimation than cipher: a mask rather than a revelation in the romantic sense. Does love meet with love? Do we receive but what we give? The answer is surely a paradox, the paradox that there are Platonic universals beyond, but that the glass is too dark to see them. Is there a light beyond the glass, or is it a mirror only to the self? The Platonic cave is even darker than Plato made it, for it introduces the echo, and so leaves us back in the world of men, which does not carry total meaning, is just a story of events.”

 

— Betty Jay,  op. cit.

 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080413-Marabar.jpg

Judy Davis in the Marabar Caves

In mathematics
(as opposed to narrative),
somewhere between
a flagrant triviality and
a resplendent Trinity we
have what might be called
“a resplendent triviality.”

For further details, see
A Four-Color Theorem.”

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Wednesday March 28, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:10 pm
Plato, God, Stories

Peter Woit’s latest weblog entry links to a discussion of Plato’s cave and the modular group, which in turn suggests a second look at an entry linked to, indirectly, at the end of Saturday’s Log24 entry: Natasha’s Dance.  This leads to the following:

“To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.”

— Freeman Dyson, “Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight,” The New York Review of Books, issue dated five years ago today– March 28, 2002.

If Dyson’s “recognition” is correct, why should mind and intelligence not be woven into the fabric of the Pennsylvania Lottery?

PA Lottery March 28, 2007: Mid-day 226, Evening 826

The practiced reader of Log24 will have little difficulty in constructing a story based on these numbers.  Briefly, the story is… 2/26 and 8/26.  The way the story was written may “surpass our comprehension,” but the story itself need not.

Those more interested in the writing than the story may consult Edward Rothstein’s piece in the March 26 New York Times, “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.”  There they will find a brief discussion of, appropriately, the Bible’s Book of Numbers.

Saturday, January 6, 2007

Saturday January 6, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm


Picture of Nothing

On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
Pictures of Nothing“–

“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately
about faith, about his faith in
the power of abstraction,
and abstraction as a kind of
anti-religious faith in itself….”

The Washington Post

Related material:

The more industrious scholars
will derive considerable pleasure
from describing how the art-history
professors and journalists of the period
1945-75, along with so many students,
intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old
pre-World War II way,
like Plato’s cave dwellers
watching the shadows, without
knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Log24, Aug. 23, 2005:

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″

— Index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162

“So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil’s Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
‘In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'”

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070106-Bang.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


“Bang.”

“…Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite or
any other form of matter.
They are talking about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal….”

Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”

For properties of the
“nothing” represented
by the 3×3 grid, see
The Field of Reason.

For religious material related
to the above and to Epiphany,
a holy day observed by some,
see Plato, Pegasus, and the
Evening Star
and Shining Forth.

Friday, December 1, 2006

Friday December 1, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:07 am

Day Without Art

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

crucial – 1706, from Fr. crucial… from L. crux (gen. crucis) “cross.” The meaning “decisive, critical” is extended from a logical term, Instantias Crucis, adopted by Francis Bacon (1620); the notion is of cross fingerboard signposts* at forking roads, thus a requirement to choose.

“… given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial— the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, April 28, 1974

“I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial….

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

For some related material from the next 30 years, 1976-2006, see Art Wars.

* “Note that in the original Latin, the term is not by any means ‘fingerpost’ but simply ‘cross’ (Latin Crux, crucis) – a root term giving deeper meaning to the ‘crucial’ decision as to which if any of the narratives are ‘true,’ and echoing the decisive ‘crucifixion’ revealed in the story.”

Wikipedia on An Instance of the Fingerpost.

Monday, October 9, 2006

Monday October 9, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
ART WARS:
To Apollo

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect

To Apollo (10/09/02)
Art Wars: Apollo and Dionysus
(10/09/02)
Balanchine’s Birthday
(01/09/03)
Art Theory for Yom Kippur
(10/05/03)
A Form
(05/22/04)
Ineluctable
(05/27/04)
A Form, continued
(06/05/04)
Parallelisms
(06/06/04)
Ado
(06/25/04)
Deep Game
(06/26/04)
Gameplayers of Zen
(06/27/04)
And So To Bed
(06/29/04)
Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah
(09/15/04)
Derrida Dead
(10/09/04)
The Nine
(11/09/04)
From Tate to Plato
(11/19/04)
Art History
(05/11/05)
A Miniature Rosetta Stone
(08/06/05)
High Concept
(8/23/05) 
High Concept, Continued
(8/24/05)
Analogical Train of Thought
(8/25/05)
Today’s Sermon: Magical Thinking
(10/09/05)
Balance
(10/31/05)
Matrix
(11/01/05)
Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate
(11/12/05)
Nine is a Vine
(11/12/05)
Apollo and Christ
(12/02/05)
Hamilton’s Whirligig
(01/05/06)
Cross
(01/06/06)
On Beauty
(01/26/06)
Sunday Morning
(01/29/06)
Centre
(01/29/06)
New Haven
(01/29/06) 
Washington Ballet
(02/05/06)
Catholic Schools Sermon
(02/05/06)
The Logic of Apollo
(02/05/06)
Game Boy
(08/06/06)
Art Wars Continued: The Krauss Cross
(09/13/06)
Art Wars Continued: Pandora’s Box
(09/16/06)
The Pope in Plato’s Cave
(09/16/06)
Today’s Birthdays
(09/26/06)
Symbology 101
(09/26/06)

Friday, February 14, 2003

Friday February 14, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 am

Matrix Theory

“At the heart of The Matrix, buried under layers of cinema craft, is a meditation on the difference between essence and appearance. It’s a trip into Plato’s cave.”

McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto

Thursday, February 13, 2003

Thursday February 13, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 pm

From Plato’s Cave
(Von Neumann’s Song, Part III)

In this entry we return to the classic words of the Hollywood Argyles as they sing a paean of praise to St. John von Neumann:

He’s the king of the jungle jive.
Look at that caveman go!

This meditation is prompted by a description of caveman life by the functional analysis working group at the University of Tübingen:

John von
 Neumann

“Soon Freud, soon mourning,
Soon Fried, soon fight.
Nevertheless who know this language?”

(Language courtesy of
Google’s translation software)

Picture of von Neumann courtesy of
Princeton University Library 

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