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: Knight, Death, and the Devil, by Albrecht Dürer
From the Los Angeles Times yesterday—
"Chess player Elena Akhmilovskaya Donaldson sits
in deep concentration at the U.S. chess championship
in Seattle in 2002. (Greg Gilbert / Seattle Times /
January 5, 2002)"
Linda Shaw, Seattle Times :
"Elena Akhmilovskaya Donaldson, who was once the world's
second-ranked women's chess player and eloped in 1988
with the captain of the U.S. chess team when they were both
playing at a tournament in Greece, has died. She was 55.
Donaldson, who earned the title of international women's
grandmaster, died Nov. 18 in her adopted hometown of Seattle…."
From the Log24 post "Sermon" on the date of Donaldson's death,
Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012—
"You must allow us to play every conceivable combination of chess."
— Marie-Louise von Franz in Number and Time
An October 2011 post titled Realism in Plato's Cave displays
the following image:
Cover illustration: Knight, Death, and the Devil,
by Albrecht Dürer
George Steiner and myself in Closing the Circle, a Log24 post
of Sept. 4, 2009:
“Allegoric associations of death with chess are perennial….”
"Yes, they are."
For related remarks on knight moves and the devil, see
today's previous two posts, Knight's Labyrinth and The Rite.
(A sequel to the previous post, "What's Up?")
From a search in this journal for "Theories of Truth" —
"According to a platonist about arithmetic,
the truth of the sentence ‘7 is prime’ entails
the existence of an abstract object , the number 7.
This object is abstract because it has no spatial
or temporal location, and is causally inert."
— Alex Miller in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Causally inert? " . . . See Maori Chess.
From https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/…
|
A Few of My Favorite Spaces:
The intuition-challenging Fano plane may be By Evelyn Lamb on October 24, 2015
"…finite projective planes seem like |
For Fano's axiomatic approach, see the Nov. 3 Log24 post
"Foundations of Geometry."
For the Fano plane's basis in reality , see the eightfold cube
at finitegeometry.org/sc/ and in this journal.
See as well "Two Views of Finite Space" (in this journal on the date
of Lamb's remarks — Oct. 24, 2015).
Some context: Gödel's Platonic realism vs. Hilbert's axiomatics
in remarks by Manuel Alfonseca on June 7, 2018. (See too remarks
in this journal on that date, in posts tagged "Road to Hell.")
"Though realism is excellent rhetoric, maybe the best,
in a purely technical or instrumental sense,
that cannot be an adequate reason to accept it
as a serious intellectual position. In its tropes of
Death and Furniture we see a rhetoric that refuses
to acknowledge its own existence; a politics that
can claim a critical-radical credibility only by
the selective use of its opponents' analytic tools;
and a theology which is deeply conservative and
seeks nothing less than the death of disruptive,
disturbing inquiry. While tedium, good taste, political
and moral sensibility will properly determine what
sorts of given realities are thought worthy of inquiry,
those considerations are no grounds for promoting
a realist ontology for social science, nor any other
science, nor for rejecting relativism. On the contrary,
relativism is social science par excellence . . . ."
Loughborough University
— Edwards, D., Ashmore, M., and Potter, J. (1995),
"Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics and theology
of bottom line arguments against relativism,"
History of the Human Sciences , 8, 25-49.
Related material:
Platonic realism in this journal, yesterday's post Ripples, and …
Gravity's Shadow , 2004 —
Gravity's Ghost , 2010 —
See also an "Inception"-related object —
On St. Andrew's Day.
A Connery adventure in Kuala Lumpur—
For another Kuala Lumpur adventure, see today's update
to "In Defense of Plato's Realism"—
The July 5, 2007, post linked to
"Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star."
For related drama from Kuala Lumpur, see
"Occam's Razor, Plato's Beard."
"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."
This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .
Today's New York Lottery—
A quote suggested by the UD post—
"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."
— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut
Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—
(Click images to enlarge.)
Cool Mystery:
Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."
As for the midday numbers—
For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).
For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.
From math16.com—
Quotations on Realism
|
The story of the diamond mine continues
(see Coordinated Steps and Organizing the Mine Workers)—
From The Search for Invariants (June 20, 2011):
The conclusion of Maja Lovrenov's
"The Role of Invariance in Cassirer’s Interpretation of the Theory of Relativity"—
"… physical theories prove to be theories of invariants
with regard to certain groups of transformations and
it is exactly the invariance that secures the objectivity
of a physical theory."
— SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 42 (2/2006), pp. 233–241
Related material from Sunday's New York Times travel section—
Richard J. Trudeau, a mathematics professor and Unitarian minister, published in 1987 a book, The Non-Euclidean Revolution , that opposes what he calls the Story Theory of truth [i.e., Quine, nominalism, postmodernism] to what he calls the traditional Diamond Theory of truth [i.e., Plato, realism, the Roman Catholic Church]. This opposition goes back to the medieval "problem of universals" debated by scholastic philosophers.
(Trudeau may never have heard of, and at any rate did not mention, an earlier 1976 monograph on geometry, "Diamond Theory," whose subject and title are relevant.)
From yesterday's Sunday morning New York Times—
"Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and 'news stories' that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories…."
— Drew Westen, professor at Emory University
From May 22, 2009—
|
The above ad is by
Diamond from last night’s
|
|
For further details, see Saturday's correspondences |
The above is the result of a (fruitless) image search today for a current version of Giovanni Sambin's "Basic Picture: A Structure for Topology."
That search was suggested by the title of today's New York Times op-ed essay "Found in Translation" and an occurrence of that phrase in this journal on January 5, 2007.
Further information on one of the images above—
A search in this journal on the publication date of Giaquinto's Visual Thinking in Mathematics yields the following—
|
In defense of Plato’s realism (vs. sophists’ nominalism– see recent entries.) Plato cited geometry, notably in the Meno , in defense of his realism.
|
For the Meno 's diamond figure in Giaquinto, see a review—
— Review by Jeremy Avigad (preprint)
Finite geometry supplies a rather different context for Plato's "basic picture."
In that context, the Klein four-group often cited by art theorist Rosalind Krauss appears as a group of translations in the mathematical sense. (See Kernel of Eternity and Sacerdotal Jargon at Harvard.)
The Times op-ed essay today notes that linguistic translation "… is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well."
The list of four-group transformations in the mathematical sense is neither long nor complex, but is apparently profound enough to enjoy the close attention of thinkers like Krauss.
Death of a Nominalist
“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.” –Ernest Hemingway
(The Hemingway quotation is from the AP’s “Today in History” on July 21, 2007; for the context, see Death in the Afternoon.)
Today seems as good a day as any for noting the death of an author previously discussed in Log24 on January 29, 2007, and January 31, 2007.
Joseph Goguen died on July 3, 2006. (I learned of his death only after the entries of January 2007 were written. They still hold.)
Goguen’s death may be viewed in the context of the ongoing war between the realism of Plato and the nominalism of the sophists. (See, for instance, Log24 on August 10-15, 2004, and on July 3-5, 2007.)
Joseph A. Goguen, “Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology” (pdf):
“Before introducing algebraic semiotics and structural blending, it is good to be clear about their philosophical orientation. The reason for taking special care with this is that, in Western culture, mathematical formalisms are often given a status beyond what they deserve. For example, Euclid wrote, ‘The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.’ Similarly, the ‘situations’ in the situation semantics of Barwise and Perry, which resemble conceptual spaces (but are more sophisticated– perhaps too sophisticated), are considered to be actually existing, real entities [23], even though they may include what are normally considered judgements.5 The classical semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce [24] also tends towards a Platonist view of signs. The viewpoint of this paper is that all formalisms are constructed in the course of some task, such as scientific study or engineering design, for the heuristic purpose of facilitating consideration of certain issues in that task. Under this view, all theories are situated social entities, mathematical theories no less than others; of course, this does not mean that they are not useful.”
5 The “types” of situation theory are even further removed from concrete reality.
[23] Jon Barwise and John Perry. Situations and Attitudes. MIT (Bradford), 1983.
[24] Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Harvard, 1965. In 6 volumes; see especially Volume 2: Elements of Logic.
From Log24 on the date of Goguen’s death:
Requiem for a clown:
“At times, bullshit can only be
countered with superior bullshit.”
This same Mailer aphorism was quoted, along with an excerpt from the Goguen passage above, in Log24 this year on the date of Norman Mailer’s birth. Also quoted on that date:
Sophia. Then these thoughts of Nature are also thoughts of God.
Alfred. Undoubtedly so, but however valuable the expression may be, I would rather that we should not make use of it till we are convinced that our investigation leads to a view of Nature, which is also the contemplation of God. We shall then feel justified by a different and more perfect knowledge to call the thoughts of Nature those of God….
Whether the above excerpt– from Hans Christian Oersted‘s The Soul in Nature (1852)– is superior to the similar remark of Goguen, the reader may decide.
In Defense of
Plato’s Realism
(vs. sophists’ nominalism–
see recent entries.)
Plato cited geometry,
notably in the Meno,
in defense of his realism.
Consideration of the
Meno’s diamond figure
leads to the following:
Click on image for details.
As noted in an entry,
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star,
linked to
at the end of today’s
previous entry,
the “universals”
of Platonic realism
are exemplified by
the hexagrams of
the I Ching,
which in turn are
based on the seven
trigrams above and
on the eighth trigram,
of all yin lines,
not shown above:
K’un
The Receptive
_____________________________________________
Update of Nov. 30, 2013:
From a little-known website in Kuala Lumpur:
(Click to enlarge.)
The remarks on Platonic realism are from Wikipedia.
The eightfold cube is apparently from this post.
The previous entry linked to an entry of June 2002 that attacked the nominalism of Stanley Fish. Here is another such attack:
| From “Stanley Fish: The Critic as Sophist,” by R.V. Young, in Modern Age, June 22, 2003:
In one of the definitive works of conservatism in the twentieth century, Richard Weaver designates the rise of nominalism as a critical turn in the emergence of the intellectual and cultural disintegration associated with liberalism, which it is the business of a reviving conservatism to contest: “The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.” It is nominalism that provides the intellectual foundation– if a paradox may be hazarded– for the attack by Fish and numerous others (their name is Legion) on the very idea of intellectual foundations:
(4). Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago and London, 1948), 3. R.V. YOUNG is Professor of English at North Carolina State University and author of At War With the Word and Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (2000). |
Simon Blackburn on
Plato and sophists,
realism and nominalism
(previous entry)
ART WARS continued
| Now
In memory of “Now, we are seven.“ Related material: Log24 for 6/6/6 |
A Little Extra Reading
In memory of
Mary Martin McLaughlin,
a scholar of Heloise and Abelard.
McLaughlin died on June 8, 2006.
"Following the parade, a speech is given by Charles Williams, based on his book The Place of the Lion. Williams explains the true meaning of the word 'realism' in both philosophy and theology. His guard of honor, bayonets gleaming, is led by William of Ockham."
A review by John D. Burlinson of Charles Williams's novel The Place of the Lion:
"… a little extra reading regarding Abelard's take on 'universals' might add a little extra spice– since Abelard is the subject of the heroine's … doctoral dissertation. I'd suggest the article 'The Medieval Problem of Universals' in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy."
Michael L. Czapkay, a student of philosophical theology at Oxford:
"The development of logic in the schools and universities of western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries constituted a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. But no less significant was the influence of this development of logic on medieval theology. It provided the necessary conceptual apparatus for the systematization of theology. Abelard, Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas are paradigm cases of the extent to which logic played an active role in the systematic formulation of Christian theology. In fact, at certain points, for instance in modal logic, logical concepts were intimately related to theological problems, such as God's knowledge of future contingent truths."
The Medieval Problem of Universals, by Fordham's Gyula Klima, 2004:
"… for Abelard, a status is an object of the divine mind, whereby God preconceives the state of his creation from eternity."
(based on Weyl's Symmetry):
"… for then we would know
Hobgoblin?
Brian Davies is a professor of mathematics at King’s College London. In the December Notices of the American Mathematical Society, he claims that arithmetic may, for all we know, be inconsistent:
“It is not possible to prove that Peano arithmetic is consistent”…?!
Where did Gödel say this? Gödel proved, in fact, according to a well-known mathematician at Princeton, that (letting PA stand for Peano Arithmetic),
— Edward Nelson,
Mathematics and Faith (pdf)
Remarkably, even after he has stated correctly Gödel’s result, Nelson, like Davies, concludes that
I prefer the argument that the existence of a model ensures the consistency of a theory.
For instance, the Toronto philosopher William Seager writes that
The relationship between consistency and the existence of a model is brought home by the following weblog entry that neatly summarizes a fallacious argument offered in the AMS Notices by Davies:
Consider the following list A1 of axioms.
(1) There is a natural number 0.
(2) Every natural number a has a successor, denoted by S(a).
(3) There is no natural number whose successor is 0.
(4) Distinct natural numbers have distinct successors: a = b if and only if S(a) = S(b).
(5) If a property is possessed by 0 and also by the successor of every natural number which possesses it, then it is possessed by all the natural numbers.
Now consider the following list A2 of axioms.
(1) G is a set of elements and these elements obey the group axioms.
(2) G is finite but not isomorphic to any known list of finite simple groups.
(3) G is simple, in other words, if N is a subset of G satisfying certain properties then N=G.
We can roughly compare A2 with A1. The second axiom in A2 can be thought of as analogous to the third axiom of A1. Also the third axiom of A2 is analogous to the fifth axiom of A1, insofar as it refers to an unspecified set with cetain properties and concludes that it is equal to G.
Now, as is generally believed by most group theorists, the system A2 is internally inconsistent and the proof its inconsistency runs for more than 10000 pages.
So who is to deny that the system A1 is also probably internally inconsistent! Particularly since Godel proved that you can not prove it is consistent (staying inside the system). May be the shortest proof of its inconsistency is one hundred million pages long!
— Posted by Krishna,
11/29/2005 11:46:00 PM,
at his weblog,
“Quasi-Coherent Ruminations”
An important difference between A1 (the set of axioms of Peano arithmetic) and A2 (a set of axioms that describe a new, unknown, finite simple group) is that A1 is known to have a model (the nonnegative integers) and A2 is not known to have a model.
Therefore, according to Seager’s argument, A1 is consistent and A2 may or may not be consistent.
The degree to which Seager’s argument invokes Platonic realism is debatable. Less debatable is the quasireligious faith in nominalism proclaimed by Davies and Nelson. Nelson’s own account of a religious experience in 1976 at Toronto is instructive.
— Edward Nelson,
Mathematics and Faith (pdf)
Nelson’s “Mathematics and Faith” was written for the Jubilee for Men and Women from the World of Learning held at the Vatican, 23-24 May 2000. It concludes with an invocation of St. Paul:
— Edward Nelson,
Mathematics and Faith (pdf)
Belief in the consistency of arithmetic may or may not be foolish, and therefore an Emersonian hobgoblin of little minds, but bullshit is bullshit, whether in London, in Princeton, in Toronto, or in Rome.
Bond
USA Today on last night’s White House dinner:
“In his toast, Bush said the royal visit was ‘a reminder of the unique and enduring bond’ between the two countries.”
| From Log24, July 18, 2003:
The use of the word “idea” in my entries’ headlines yesterday was not accidental. It is related to an occurrence of the word in Understanding: On Death and Truth, a set of journal entries from May 9-12. The relevant passage on “ideas” is quoted there, within commentary by an Oberlin professor: “That the truth we understand must be a truth we stand under is brought out nicely in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength when Mark Studdock gradually learns what an ‘Idea’ is. While Frost attempts to give Mark a ‘training in objectivity’ that will destroy in him any natural moral sense, and while Mark tries desperately to find a way out of the moral void into which he is being drawn, he discovers what it means to under-stand.
This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom, where opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way we understand argument.” — “On Bringing One’s Life to a Point,” by Gilbert Meilaender, First Things, November 1994 The old philosophical conflict between realism and nominalism can, it seems, have life-and-death consequences. I prefer Plato’s realism, with its “ideas,” such as the idea of seven-ness. A reductio ad absurdum of nominalism may be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under Realism: “A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false….” The claim that 7 is not prime is, regardless of its motives, dangerously stupid. |
The New York Lottery evening number
for All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, 2005, was
007.
Related material:
Entries for Nov. 1, 2005 and
the song Planned Obsolescence
by the 10,000 Maniacs
Antidote to Atiyah
In a recent talk, "The Nature of Space," Sir Michael Atiyah gave a misleading description of Plato's doctrine of "ideas," or "idealism." Atiyah said that according to Plato, ideas reside in "an imaginary world– the world of the mind," and that what we see in the external world is "some pale reflection" of ideas in the mind.
An antidote to Atiyah's nonsense may be found in the Catholic Encyclopedia:
"So it came to pass that the word idea in various languages took on more and more the meaning of 'representation,' 'mental image,' and the like. Hence too, there was gradually introduced the terminology which we find in the writings of Berkeley, and according to which idealism is the doctrine that ascribes reality to our ideas, i.e. our representations, but denies the reality of the physical world. This sort of idealism is just the reverse of that which was held by the philosophers of antiquity and their Christian successors; it does away with the reality of ideal principles by confining them exclusively to the thinking subject; it is a spurious idealism…."
Atiyah contrasts his mistaken view of Plato with what he calls the "realism" of Hume. He does not mention that Plato's doctrine of ideas is also known as "realism." For details, see, again, the Catholic Encyclopedia:
"The conciliation of the one and the many, the changing and the permanent, was a favourite problem with the Greeks; it leads to the problem of universals. The typical affirmation of Exaggerated Realism, the most outspoken ever made, appears in Plato's philosophy; the real must possess the attributes of necessity, universality, unity, and immutability which are found in our intellectual representations. And as the sensible world contains only the contingent, the particular, the unstable, it follows that the real exists outside and above the sensible world. Plato calls it eîdos, idea. The idea is absolutely stable and exists by itself (ontos on; auta kath' auta), isolated from the phenomenal world, distinct from the Divine and human intellect…. The exaggerated Realism of Plato… is the principal doctrine of his metaphysics."
Atiyah's misleading remarks may appeal to believers in the contemptible religion of Scientism, but they have little to do with either historical reality or authentic philosophy.
“Heaven is a state,
a sort of metaphysical state.”
— John O’Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938
“Mathematical realism holds that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind. Thus humans do not invent mathematics, but rather discover it, and any other intelligent beings in the universe would presumably do the same. The term Platonism is used because such a view is seen to parallel Plato’s belief in a “heaven of ideas”, an unchanging ultimate reality that the everyday world can only imperfectly approximate. Plato’s view probably derives from Pythagoras, and his followers the Pythagoreans, who believed that the world was, quite literally, built up by the numbers. This idea may have even older origins that are unknown to us.” — Wikipedia
Related material:
In memory of Jesus of Nazareth,
the “true vine,”
who, some historians believe,
died on this date:
The Crucifixion of John O’Hara.
In memory of the Anti-Vine:
See Dogma and
Heaven, Hell,
and Hollywood.
Related material:
and
Thursday, December 26, 2002:
Holly for Miss Quinn
Tonight’s site music is for Stephen Dedalus
and Miss Quinn, courtesy of Eithne Ní Bhraonáin.
|
Miss Quinn |
Holly |
Eithne |
Realism
In memory of Humphrey Carpenter:
"Aslan's last words come at the end of The Last Battle: 'There was a real railway accident […] Your father and mother and all of you are–as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands–dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.' The final paragraph of the novel, which follows these words, functions as a coda; it is full of the conventions which signal the wrapping up of a story. This direct speech is the true climax of the Chronicles. Aslan is given the last word in these quiet but emphatic lines. He is the ultimate arbiter of reality: 'There was a real railway accident.' Plato, in addition to the Christian tradition, lies behind the closing chapters of The Last Battle….
'It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!' "
— Joy Alexander, Aslan's Speech
See also From Tate to Plato (Nov. 19, 2004), Habeas Corpus (Nov. 24, 2004), and the Log24 entries of last Friday through Sunday.
Realism in Literature:
Under the Volcano
Mexican Volcano Blast
|
Here are 3 webcam views of the volcano. Nothing to see at the moment.
Literary background:
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano,
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star,
and, as background for today’s earlier entry on Platonism and Derrida,
|
For more on Plato and Christian theology, consult the highly emotional site Further Into the Depths of Satan: “…in The Last Battle on page 170 [C. S.] Lewis has Digory saying, ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.’ Now, Lewis calls Plato ‘an overwhelming theological genius’ (Reflections on the Psalms, p. 80)….” The title “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” along with the volcano readings above, suggests a reading from a related site: Gollum and the Mystery of Evil: “Gollum here clearly represents Frodo’s hidden self. It is ‘as if we are witnessing the darkest night of the soul and one side attempting to master the other’ (Jane Chance 102). Then Frodo, whose finger has been bitten off, cries out, and Gollum holds the Ring aloft, shrieking: ‘Precious, precious, precious! My Precious! O my Precious!’ (RK, VI, 249). At this point, stepping too near the edge, he falls into the volcano, taking the Ring with him. With this, the mountain |
In the above two-step vignette, the part of Gollum is played by the author of “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” who called C. S. Lewis a fool† “that was and is extremely useful to his father the devil.”
† See Matthew 5:22: “…whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”
Hideous Strength
On a Report from London:
Assuming rather prematurely that the body found in Oxfordshire today is that of David Kelly, Ministry of Defence germ-warfare expert and alleged leaker of information to the press, the Financial Times has the following:
“Mr Kelly’s death has stunned all the players involved in this drama, resembling as it does a fictitious political thriller.”
— Financial Times, July 18,
2003, 19:06 London time
I feel it resembles rather a fictitious religious thriller… Namely, That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. The use of the word “idea” in my entries’ headlines yesterday was not accidental. It is related to an occurrence of the word in Understanding: On Death and Truth, a set of journal entries from May 9-12. The relevant passage on “ideas” is quoted there, within commentary by an Oberlin professor:
“That the truth we understand must be a truth we stand under is brought out nicely in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength when Mark Studdock gradually learns what an ‘Idea’ is. While Frost attempts to give Mark a ‘training in objectivity’ that will destroy in him any natural moral sense, and while Mark tries desperately to find a way out of the moral void into which he is being drawn, he discovers what it means to under-stand.
‘He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him-something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.’
This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom, where opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way we understand argument.”
— “On Bringing One’s Life to a Point,” by Gilbert Meilaender, First Things, November 1994
The old philosophical conflict between realism and nominalism can, it seems, have life-and-death consequences. I prefer Plato’s realism, with its “ideas,” such as the idea of seven-ness. A reductio ad absurdum of nominalism may be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under Realism:
“A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false….”
The claim that 7 is not prime is, regardless of its motives, dangerously stupid… A quality shared, it seems, by many in power these days.
Rebecca Goldstein
at Heaven’s Gate
This entry is in gratitude for Rebecca Goldstein’s
excellent essay
in The New York Times of December 16, 2002.
She talks about the perennial conflict between two theories of truth that Richard Trudeau called the “story theory” and the “diamond theory.” My entry of December 13, 2002, “Rhyme Scheme,” links the word “real” to an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that contains the following:
“According to a platonist about arithmetic, the truth of the sentence ‘7 is prime’ entails the existence of an abstract object, the number 7. This object is abstract because it has no spatial or temporal location, and is causally inert. A platonic realist about arithmetic will say that the number 7 exists and instantiates the property of being prime independently of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on. A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false…”
This discussion of “sevenness,” along with the discussion of “eightness” in my December 14, 2002, note on Bach, suggest that I supply a transcription of a note in my paper journal from 2001 that deals with these matters.
From a paper journal note of October 5, 2001:
|
The 2001 Silver Cup Award Glynis Johns is 78 today. “Seven is heaven, “There is no highway in the sky.” “Don’t give up until you See also page |
Added 12/17/02: See also
the portrait of Rebecca Goldstein in
Hadassah Magazine
Volume
78
Number 10
(June/July 1997).
For more on the Jewish propensity to
assign mystical significance to numbers, see
Rabbi Zwerin’s Kol Nidre Sermon.
For the significance of “seven” in Judaism, see
Zayin: The Woman of Valor.
For the significance of “eight” in Judaism, see
Chet: The Life Dynamic.
For the cabalistic significance of
“Seven is heaven, Eight is a gate,”
note that Zayin, Seven, signifies
“seven chambers of Paradise”
and that Chet, Eight, signifies
the “gateway to infinity.”
For the significance of the date 12.17, see
Tet: The Concealed Good.
Rhyme Scheme
"The introduction of Charge-Coupled Devices (CCDs)
has dramatically changed the methods
astronomers use to view objects."
— Santa Barbara Instrument Group, Inc.
"They should have sent a poet."
— Jodie Foster in the film version
of Carl Sagan's Contact
|
"Say 'Abba,' Abba! CCD! — Rhyme |
On the question of what reality is:
"Under what circumstances do we think things are
real? ….
This question speaks to a small, manageable problem
having to do with the camera and not
what it is the camera takes pictures of."
— Erving Goffman,
Frame Analysis, An Essay on
the Organization of Experience,
Harper & Row, 1974, p. 2
For Mary Shelley, on her birthday: A Chain of Links The creator of Frankenstein might appreciate the following chain of thought. Lucifer.com Lucifer Media Corporation Lucifer Media Sites The Extropy Institute: International Transhumanist Solutions Why Super-Human Intelligence Would Be Equivalent To Precognition, by Marc Geddes:
"Consider the geometry of multiple dimensions as an analogy for mental abilities… …if there is a 4th dimension of intelligence, to us ordinary humans stuck with 3 dimensional reasoning, this 4th dimension would be indistinguishable from precognition. Post-humans would appear to us ordinary humans as beings which could predict the future in ways which would be inexplicable to us. We should label post-humans as 'Pre-Cogs.'
In the Steven Speilberg [sic] film Minority Report, we encounter genetically engineered humans with precisely the abilities described above."
Internet Movie Database page on "Minority Report"
IMDb page on "Minority Report" author Philip K. Dick
IMDb biography of Philip K. Dick, where our chain of links ends. Here Dick says that
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
On the other hand, Dick also says here that
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
These two quotations summarize, on the one hand, the cynical, relativistic nominalism of the postmodernists and, on the other hand, the hard-nosed realism of the Platonists.
What does all this have to do with "the geometry of multiple dimensions"?
Consider the famous story for adolescents, A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. The author, a well-meaning Christian, tries, like all storytellers, to control her readers by controlling the meaning of words. The key word in this book is "tesseract," a term from multi-dimensional geometry. She insists that a tesseract has mystic properties and cannot be visualized. She is wrong (at least about the visualizing).
See The Tesseract: A look into 4-dimensional space, by Harry J. Smith.
See also the many revealing comments in Harry J. Smith's Guestbook.
One of Smith's guests remarks, apropos of Smith's comments on St. Joseph, that he has his own connection with St. Augustine.
For a adult-level discussion of Augustine, time, eternity, and Platonism, see the website Time as a Psalm in St. Augustine, by A. M. Johnston.
See also the remark headlining Maureen Dowd's New York Times column of August 28, 2002, Saint Augustine's Day:
"I'm with Dick."
Whether the realist Dick or the nominalist Dick, she does not say.
As for precognition, see my series of journal notes below, which leads up to two intriguing errors in an Amazon.com site on the "Forbidden Planet" soundtrack. The first two audio samples from this soundtrack are (wrongly) entitled "Birdland" and "Flamingo." See also the West Wing episode rebroadcast on Wednesday, August 28, 2002,
C. J. Cregg (Allison Janney), who models a black Vera Wang dress in that episode, has the Secret Service codename Flamingo.
"…that woman in black She's a mystery She's everything a woman should be Woman in black got a hold on me"
(Foreigner 4 in my August 28 note below)
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