Ignoramus et ignorabimus!

In 1880 Emil du Bois-Reymond outlined seven "world riddles" some of which, he declared, neither science nor philosophy could ever explain. Concerning numbers 1,2 and 5 he actually proclaimed: "we do not know and will not know."

1. The ultimate nature of matter and force;
2. The origin of motion;
3. The origin of life;
4. The "apparently teleological arrangements of nature," not an "absolutely transcendent riddle";
5. The origin of simple sensations, "a quite transcendent" question;
6. The origin of intelligent thought and language, which might be known if the origin of sensations could be known;
7. The question of freewill;

The fifth one is particularly interesting. Quoting Schrodinger: "we simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation and thought..."

Complain all you want! He may be right...

Despair and Consciousness

"With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness, the more intense the despair...

In case one were to think of a house, consisting of cellar, ground-floor and premier étage, so tenanted, or rather so arranged, that it was planned for a distinction of rank between the dwellers on the several floors; and in case one were to make a comparison between such a house and what it is to be a man -- then unfortunately this is the sorry and ludicrous condition of the majority of men, that in their own house they prefer to live in the cellar. The soulish-bodily synthesis in every man is planned with a view to being spirit, such is the building; but the man prefers to dwell in the cellar, that is, in the determinants of sensuousness. And not only does he prefer to dwell in the cellar; no, he loves that to such a degree that he becomes furious if anyone would propose to him to occupy the bel étage which stands empty at his disposition -- for in fact he is dwelling in his own house.

No, to be in error or delusion is (quite un-Socratically) the thing they fear the least. One may behold amazing examples which illustrate this fact on a prodigious scale. A thinker erects an immense building, a system, a system which embraces the whole of existence and world-history etc. -- and if we contemplate his personal life, we discover to our astonishment this terrible and ludicrous fact, that he himself personally does not live in this immense high-vaulted palace, but in a barn alongside of it, or in a dog kennel, or at the most in the porter’s lodge. If one were to take the liberty of calling his attention to this by a single word, he would be offended. For he has no fear of being under a delusion, if only he can get the system completed . . . by means of the delusion." (S.K.SUD)

Johannes Climacus

"But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you’ve found is the thing you didn’t know” (Plato's Meno)

"To this act of consciousness, the Socratic principle applies: the teacher is only an occasion, whoever he may be, even if he is a god, because I can discover my own untruth only by myself, because only when I discover it is it discovered, not before, even though the whole world knew it....

Now, if the learner is to obtain the truth, the teacher must bring it to him, but not only that. Along with it, he must provide the condition for understanding it, for if the learner were himself the condition for understanding the truth, then he merely needs to recollect....

But the one who not only gives the learner the truth but provides the condition is not a teacher. Ultimately, all instruction depends upon the presence of the condition; if it is lacking, then a teacher is capable of nothing, because in the second case, the teacher, before beginning to teach, must transform, not reform, the learner. But no human being is capable of doing this; if it is to take place, it must be done by the god [guden] himself (p. 14f.)." (Kierkegaard)

According to Plato, knowledge would be inwardly situated. Kierkegaard then questions the way that this knowledge is being extracted. For the first, each human being already knows everything. The teacher only draws it out. For the latter, the problem is that each man must find the teacher who provides the means to come to know.

Kierkegaard assumes God gave the learner the condition for learning (otherwise he would be merely animal) but he has lost it, not by accident, for how can something inferior "vanquish something superior"? Also, since God himself imparted it, it would be contradictory for this condition to be lost due to an act of the god. His conclusion: the learner, "who is untruth", "is [also] polemical against the truth".

"The teacher, then, is the god himself who, acting as the occasion, prompts the learner to be reminded that he is untruth and is that through his own fault. But this state—to be untruth and to be through one's own fault—what can we call it? Let us call it sin".

According to Kierkegaard, the socratic view lacks a concept of sin and all wrongdoing would come from from ignorance meaning that if a man knows what is right, he will do it. He grounds the learner in ignorance due to his own act. He states then that the learner cannot re-acquire the truth by free will but that he should call such a teacher, which is a savior, deliverer, reconciler, and judge. In other words, the learner needs conversion and after that he would become a "new person".


About the picture: "JOHANNES CLIMACUS: THE LADDER TO PARADISE" www.schoyencollection.com/patristic.html

Socrates

Remember the old, hackneyed paradox?

"This sentence is false."

Is it true? Let's suppose it is. So the statement that "the sentence is false" is a true statement. Consequently, the sentence is false actually, not true as first supposed. So the option left is for the sentence to be false. So, its opposite must be true and the sentence is actually true. And the cycle restarts.

The Socratic paradox is an example. "As for me, all I know is that I know nothing..."

The obvious question: how he knows that he knows nothing, if he knows nothing?

Kierkegaard Leap

"And how does God's existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of continuity? Or do we have an analogy to the behavior of the little Cartesian dolls? As soon as I let go of the doll it stands on its head. As soon as I let it go, I must therefore let it go. So also with the proof. As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason that that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there. But this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a contribution of mine. Must not this also be taken into account, this little moment, brief as it may be, it need not be long, for it is a leap." (Kierkegaard)

Kena

The Kena (meaning ‘by whom’) Upanishad, or Kenopanishad has four sections, two of them in verse and the others in prose.

Here are some parts of it:

"The One Power that illumines everything and every one is indivisible. It is the Ear behind the ears, Mind behind the mind, Speech behind speech, Vital Life behind life. The ears cannot hear it; it is what makes the ears hear. The eyes cannot see it; it is what makes the eyes see. You cannot speak about it; it is what makes you speak. The mind cannot imagine it; it is what makes the mind think. It is different from what all we know; yet it is not known either. Those who feel they know Him know Him not. Those who know that anything amenable to the senses is not Brahman, they know it best. When it is known as the innermost witness of all cognitions, whether sensation, perception or thought, then it is known. One who knows thus reaches immortality."

"This is the truth of Brahman in relation to nature and Man. Whether it is the flash of lightning, or the wink of the eyes or the thinking of the mind, the power that is shown is the power of Brahman. For this reason should a man meditate upon Brahman all the time. The sudden Reality that strikes Man as the power behind everything, must be transformed into a permanent Realization."

Life

"My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light." (Millay)

The "channel of confusion"... or maybe our only hope...

"The task of neural science is to explain behavior in terms of the activities of the brain. How does the brain marshal its millions of individual nerve cells to produce behavior, and how are these cells influenced by the environment...? The last frontier of the biological sciences – their ultimate challenge – is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn, and remember."(Eric Kandel)

Fractals and Platonism?

One more piece of our perplexing view of reality.

Is there a purely mathematical, platonic reality where there are no physical restrictions but only mathematical ones? A mathematical reality just "out there"?

The issue here concerns the notions of invention/discovery in the realm of mathematical investigations.

One good example of such notions was given by Roger Penrose: it is called the Mandelbrot set (see the amazing link below taken from Wikipedia). The idea here is that the set was not "invented" by Mandelbrot but was discovered, just like, for example, the CMB radiation or the "planet" Pluto. The set existed (was just "out there") long before anyone knew about it. Also, contrary to what many people believe, the Mandelbrot is not computer "animal". It's simply generated by the iteration of a complex polynomial.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/ba/Mandelbrot_color_zoom.gif

Obvious but nevertheless wonderful

While studying the spin-orbit effect in quantum mechanics, the relativistic effect on both magnetic and electric fields due to a change of reference frames was briefly mentioned. Isn't it wonderful that two static electrons interact via the electrostatic field E only, but when observed from a moving frame suddenly a magnetic field B appears! The electrons do not "care" about whom is observing them, they just "feel" a force and that's it, end of story.

That reminded me of Feynman's famous quote:

"If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it!"

What is nature "trying" to tell us?

The more I think about nature, the more I get dumbfounded.

Think about space for example. Every two points in space can be connected by entangled particles. You just have to prepare your experimental apparatus properly (the same way as thought experiments with light do not restrict relativity to light-related phenomena, entanglement experiments do not restrict our view of space to entanglement-like phenomena). Therefore it seems that our usual concept of distance is weird to say the least! Some food for thought: Is our concept of space merely a cognitive illusion? A figment of our imagination? A state of mind?
What about the character of time: simple relativity tells us that if you maintain that your Now is equally valid as any observer's Now, independent of their state of motion, the set of all Nows encompasses all events in spacetime. In Einstein own words, "...the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent". In other words time is "out there"!

We have sufficient clues from different philosophical investigations that the world as we see, feel, smell, etc (see posting "Things-in-Themselves") is not the world-in-itself. These arguments from modern physics, in a specific way, only confirm such point of view.

Also, is there any connection between these arguments and the non-plurality described by the Vedanta? If time doesn't "flow" (all events occur at "simultaneously") and if any two infinitely distanced points are connected in some way...

About the picture above. Try not looking directly at it.

Things-in-Themselves

This though never ceases to amaze me...

"Kant having established that the 'tree in itself' is not only colourless, odourless, tasteless, and so on, but also belongs entirely to the realm of things-in-themselves which must in absolutely every respect remain inaccessible to our experience..."

The limits of logical thinking?

In "My View of the World" Schrodinger points out:

[...] I do not think that this difficulty (one overall consciousness) can be logically resolved, by consistent thought, within our intellects. But it is quite easy to express the solution in words: the plurality we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies (...) We intellectuals of today are not accustomed to admit a pictorial analogy as a philosophical insight; we insist on logical deduction. But, as against this, it may perhaps be possible for logical deduction to disclose at least this much: that to grasp the basis of phenomena through logical thought may, in all probability, be impossible since logical thought is itself a part of phenomena and wholly involved in them; we may ask ourselves whether, in that case, we are obliged to deny ourselves the use of an allegoric picture of the situation, merely on the grounds that its fitness cannot be strictly proved. In a considerable number of cases, logical thinking brings us up to a certain point and then leaves us in the lurch. Faced with an area not directly accessible to these lines of thought, but one into which they seem to lead, we may manage to fill it in such way that the lines do not simply peter out, but converge on some central point in that area; this may amount to an extremely valuable rounding-out of our picture of the world, and its worth is not to be judged by those standards of rigorous, unequivocal inescapability from which we started out. There are hundreds of cases in which science uses this procedure, and it has long been recognized as justified."

That reminds me of Nietzsche "Will to Power":

"The aberration of philosophy is that, instead of seing in logic and the categories of reason means toward the adjustment of the world for utilitarian ends (...), one believed one possessed in them the criterion of truth and reality (...) The naivete was to take an anthropocentric idiosyncrasy as the measure of things, as the rule for determining "real" and "unreal": in short, to make absolute something conditioned. And behold, suddenly the world fell apart into a "true" world and an "apparent" world: and precisely the world that man's reason had devised for him to live and settle in was discredited. Instead of employing the forms as a tool for making the world manageable and calculable, the madness of philosophers divined that in these categories is presented the concept of that world to which the one in which man lives does not correspond--The means were misunderstood as measures of value, even as a condemnation of their real intention. The intention was to deceive oneself in a useful way; the means, the invention of formulas and signs by means of which one could reduce the confusing multiplicity to a purposive and manageable schema.(...) This is the greatest error that has ever been committed, the essential fatality of error on earth: one believed one possessed a criterion of reality in the forms of reason--while in fact one possessed them in order to become master of reality, in order to misunderstand reality in a shrewd manner..."

Isha

The Isha Upanishad describes of the nature of the supreme being (Ish). It presents a monist perspective of the universe,describing this being as "unembodied, omniscient, beyond reproach, without veins, pure and uncontaminated", one who "moves and does not move", who is "far away, but very near as well" and who "although fixed in His abode is swifter than the mind".
The text then asserts the oneness of the supreme self. "For the enlightened one all that exists is nothing but the Self (Atman)" and asks "So how could any delusion or suffering continue for those who know this oneness?"

"Filled with Brahman are the things we see,
Filled with Brahman are the things we see not,
From out of Brahman floweth all that is:
From Brahman all–yet is he still the same.
Om. Peace—peace—peace."

"Nihil est, quod deus efficere non possit"

"There is nothing God cannot do" (Cicero)

Mathematics

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in."

Sadness

“All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love” (Spinoza)

"Long Live Physics"

"We want to become the ones who create themselves! We must become the best discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists to be creators in this sense,—while hitherto all ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or constructed to contradict it. Therefore: LONG LIVE PHYSICS! ...And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics,—OUR HONESTY!" (Nietzsche)

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”

Amor Fati

“Philosophy (…) is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence. (…) From (…) wandering through ice and wilderness, I learned to view differently all that had (…) philosophized: the hidden history of philosophy, the psychology of its great names, came to light (…). "How much tr...uth can a spirit endure, how much truth does a spirit dare?"—this became for me the real standard of value. Error is cowardice - every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, of severity (…), of cleanliness toward oneself— Such an experimental philosophy (…) anticipates (…) even the possibilities (…) of nihilism; but this does not (…) halt at a negation (…),(but) cross(es) over to the opposite (…)— to a Dionysian affirmation of the world it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection—it wants the eternal calculation:—the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain (…) a Dionysian relationship to existence (…) the amor fati.”

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."

"What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know"

Something to thing about...

"What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing." (Kierkegaard, 1835)

Physics and Reality

I am reading a nice book by Bernard d'Espagnat about philosophy of physics. I really do not think it makes much sense to study physics without understanding how we interpret physical reality.

Here are some highlights:

"I believe that some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered(...) This reality is something that, while not a purely mind-made construct as radical idealism would have it, can be but the picture our mind forces us to form of ... Of what? The only answer I am able to provide is that underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualizable "ultimate reality", not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either. To put it in a nutshell, in this quest I first found that whatever way you look at it the quantum mechanical formalism, when taken at face value, compels us to consider that two particles that have once interacted always remain bound in a very strange, hardly understandable way even when they are far apart, the connection being independent of distance. Even though this connection-at-a-distance does not permit us to transmit messages, clearly it is real. In other words space, so essential in classical physics, seems to play a considerably less basic role in quantum physics.(As a result) some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered."