12/6/09
How Long After Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan Can A Puppet Governent Exist Without Collecting Taxes?
Such a point of reference must be at least equal in quality to U.S. Government budget planning that reasonably sees a reversal of deficit spending economics after the total is 21 trillion dollars. That can be our example for a reasonable point of reference. An example is the deployment of 30,000 more troops to prop up a puppet government that will have broad support in 18 months when the troops are withdrawn (that sounds like a banking procedure-deposit with loans then withdraw). In 18 months the puppet government of Afghanistan will have large taxation authority able to gather all of the people of Afghanistan together to tax them enough to pay for the government and a large military able to defeat the Taliban insurgency that will arise when U.S. troops withdraw. Now that sounds reasonable.
Does Philosophy Need A Reasonable Point of Reference?
If 'a philosophy' needs a 'reasonable point of reference' it does sound important. Physical theories may have no reference points for a time, but only abstract and non-testable criteria for some time, that might be removed later. Cosmological theories may be set in a hundred of extra dimensions and be just conjecture in the mind of brilliant mathematicians and physicists, while philosophical work needs a reasonable rather than an extravagant or silly point of reference. Such a point of reference must be at least equal in quality to U.S. Government budget planning that reasonably sees a reversal of deficit spending economics after the total is 21 trillion dollars. That can be our example for a reasonable point of reference. Another example is the deployment of 30, 000 more troops to prop up a puppet government that will have broad support in 18 months when the troops are withdrawn (that sounds like a banking procedure-deposit with loans then withdraw). In 18 months the puppet government of Afghanistan will have large taxation authority able to gather all of the people of Afghanistan together to tax them enough to pay for the government and a large military able to defeat the Taliban insurgency that will arise when U.S. troops withdraw. Now that sounds reasonable.
Philosophical work, unlike physical cosmology requires a higher standard that we can take from the U.S. Government economic and environmental planners. Philosophers need at least one reasonable point of reference to start with. Personally I like Oprah for that, and then just go on to symbolic logic or whatever. W.V.O. Quine in 'Methods of Logic' just took apart the construction of logic making it easy to construct language, of course he didn't have an Oprah endorsement as a reasonable point of reference. Who will the reference be for a definition of reasonable here anyway.
Romanticism cannot be the alternative obviously. Corporatism is an effort to collectivize a society over which they might rule for point of profit. Individualism and individual legal rights are eschewed by corporatists as troublesome remnants of democratic tendencies. It is better to bundle everyone as a collective class without rights as individuals and then decree what each class is entitled to-even communist can agree with that reasonable point of reference. Since we eschew collectivism as a legal concept and admire private property in order to pursue individualized and copyrightable private intellectual capital acquisition ventures it is good to return to other points for consideration on the topic of our inquiry presently.
Philosophy is an effort of thinking about reality and truth. The love of wisdom isn't restricted to a pre-defined anything-referrals or whatever we may posit as some primordial essent of ground of being such as the Nazi Head of Education for some time in the 1930's sought in his book ' Being and Time'. Sein und Zeit is a brilliant work on the philosophical topic of phenomenalism. Heidegger resigned his post before the war- comprehended what the Nazis were or were becoming, and retired to a hut to pursue his philosophical investigations on the nature of language and perceptions of reality. There are no fundamental preconditions in the vocation of a philosophical investigations that are not malleable to construction as new synthetic compositions or for reconstruction within existing lexical criteria.
Language are historical evolved sets of meaning-units socially comprehensible and of use for communication. Philosophy often seeks to move beyond that pre-set language and look to the deeper meaning of things in themselves. Some are skeptical that such philosophical research regarding things perceived for-themselves can be known. Many phenomenal or perceived things exist as specialized experiences for human or other sentient life, as if they were conditional, contingent things that would disappear without being regarded by humans.
Consider a form of advanced computer virtual reality unit that could be placed over your head and that would allow you to perceive just those aspect of reality that were selected by some electromagnetic spectrum selector, and then reformed by a computer program into some completely fictional alternative construction for visual perception by the human wearing the head unit. The perception of that view of reality, if consistent and given to all other human beings with the same filter and reprogramming would present patterns and forms recognizable by all, yet of course the perceived views would not exist in nature but instead only in the common experience of the viewers of the analog reality. The reality would be derived from things known by the raw data acquisition system yet presented to each human without giving any idea of what reality looks like for itself.
Such a unit and program logic might provide a certain level of resolution to the viewer-experiencers. Philosophically, out own cognitive and neurological inheritance may provide something like that artificial experience naturally. The structure for cognition provided by our innate human sense organs and brain reasoning structure create a kind of sentient objective awareness of our own natural interpretation of the heterodox otherness of the material Universe-if we may call it material at least nominally.
Philosophers must regard such things as exist. Probably people considering relationships between things before they understood the concept of number-even 'one' may have been an underused term at some point way back in then past.
Humanity was born in the stream of change and given flow of space-time that Heraclitus said that we can never step in to twice. Like Moses we were cast into that ever changing yet eternally one stream flow in a human being basket of integrated thought experience with nature. Our own experience of life is of the same one continuous flow co-existing with our own lives and being always to become part of the present and future. Our own unified experience of being is the origin of our ground of philosophical endeavors from which the effort at understanding all must flow.
Such active personal tributaries of inquiry into the overall compilation of the nature of existence is a kind of human wonder. We wonder if our ideas accurately correspond to accurate accounts of how things really are in themselves. With some certainty we believe that reality is far deeper than even profound yet nominal physical cosmological research can enlighten us about. The division of the world of p0henomenal apperception into a microcosm of quantum mechanics following logic brings the investigation for a physical etiology like the inquiry of reverse mitosis to the cellular origin of the primordial membrane of zero dimension. Sure and begorrah it must have then expanded. For we are certain that all things originate with thermodynamic change and generally of cyclical and pervasive physical patterns and structures understandable through analysis, research, and so forth. If God is plural and had neither a singular origin nor was originally singular, we must be able to relate or negate such conjectures because we would have a hard time reconciling such considerations with our present human condition if we did not, right?
Philosophers, unlike some others working at fixing plumbing for instance, may consider experience and phenomena from many approaches and avenues of inquiry. Reasoning to the truth comprises analytic and synthetic thought, yet if the world is a creation of the One, it may require neither objective references, as is advocated by certain mystics such as in the book on knowing God 'The Cloud of Unknowing' while alternatively it may involve entire sets of experience or phenomenal deliberations upon such that is transcending number as either one, two, five a dozen etc. A philosophy rather that being an objective product for marketing to the masses is, for some philosophers at least, a living way of being. If an angel of God approached one with some communication, then the subjective experience would not be subject to delimitation as either subjective or objective, for such is the nature of human perception of reality, and in such a problematic realm of being is the quantum reality of space-time to a certain extent. We must await the quantization of virtual particles before the Big Bang in a vacuum before the inflation to know if the number is one or infinity.
There are additional approaches to consider regarding the nature and quantity required for 'reasonable points of reference'. The Vienna Circle of philosophers including Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, Gdel and many others led to logical positivism and empiricism. Quine of course later destroyed empiricist premises in his 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. The Vienna Circle tried to establish a principle of verifiability, or the inverse principle of falsifiability into extensional or scientific statements about the world. They hoped to eliminate metaphysics and reduce philosophical thought to rigorous science. Wittgenstein's analytic philosophy and investigation into the philosophy of logic led him to assert that the 'meaning of a sentence is in its verification'.
One point of verification or falsifiability will not make any scientific statement necessarily true. Philosophers such as Popper found science to be a more intuitive process with dead reckoning combined a variety of methods as it deems useful to form a falsifiable hypothesis. We cannot however say that philosophy must necessarily be scientific nor that the inability for some to form falsifiable hypothesis regarding analytic, mathematical structures means that it cannot be done, or that mathematics and logic have no a priori similarity to the fundamental structure of the quantum mechanical universe of which human beings are a part.
If we regard language itself as a word and referent linguistic composition, then obviously any lexicon must have at least one word. Yet we are not considering philosophy to be such a fundamental verbal construction as that, but something of a higher order structuring of words to produce meaning. Perhaps Zen may ideally have no referents, yet Western philosophy also has an ideal of becoming One with the will of God. Perhaps that too is philosophical, yet we still cannot positively assert any particular number of referents as in some way being fundamental to philosophical constructions. A reasonable point of reference is a little vague itself. Einstein's theories of relativity did not seem very reasonable in its first publication to most people.
In the Perennial Book of Sophistry we can discovery the listing for 'requisite philosophical points of reference' under sub-heading auxiliary B-29 article 13F; On the Requirement that All Philosophies Must Have Initial Verifiable and Subsequent Points of Reference'.
I will stipulate that I only briefly perused this expensive reference book. Even an annual subscription to it's supplements costs more than I can afford (998 Euros per year), so haven't referenced the current update, yet public libraries have the 2009 philosophers guidelines that at least mention the reference book in credited citations ex libre.
Maybe a philosophy can start without a point of reference and hope to find one. They could be like Cartesian coordinates or g.p.s. points. Personally I believe that is one is sailing in the Adriatic then it would be on the port rather than the starboard side.
'A philosophy' hasn't necessarily got a definition of a point of reference to build in, nor certainty if it should be included free as software to start with. Inclusion of a point of reference after the start of a philosophy would present the problem Hume had with cause and effect investigations I would think. That can be very troubling.
If we included several reference points such as 'north of the Peace River and west of Athabasca' will we get deserved credit for it? Philosophies apparently can be favorably compared with cartography. Keeping that in mind you might get illustrations done too for illuminated manuscripts. Every philosophy needs a good cartoonist for large-page graphic philosophy books.
We must return from the lofty realms of cumulus philosophy with its Irwin Correys to more mundane issues concerning the effort to increase human wisdom.
'The kingdom of God is within you', Our Lord said. We need not run to where the vultures have gathered to find our point of reference. Faith surpasses understanding, and God brings one to awareness of His righteousness rather than vice versa.
A philosophy is usually done by a human being. Some humans consider themselves as comprising their own point of reference, yet we will consider that of computers. Does a computer need a reasonable 'point of reference' when making 'a philosophy'? Can we imagine then right ingredients of a completely abstract philosophy without reference points off-line?
A computer needs a good encapsulating box to live in...something like a homeless person or a billionaire, yet billionaires may have several big boxes to live in and so their point of reference could be multiple boxes and variable. In fact the spaces could be considered to be abstract boxes or encapsulating spaces for such a one as has many potential boxes of habitation. The homeless guy with a cardboard box to live in might have just one point of reference, yet if making a philosophy that would be a good place to start. If it were me I would use a magic marker because they work good for writing on cardboard. Yet we were on the subject of computational points of reference for computer philosophies.
Well, can a computer actually have a philosophy? It has no internal point of reference besides egalitarian data storage binary bits. Quantum computers may have more than binary bit states of information content storage yet they would all be the same value for a point of reference. The point of reference would be the one central processing unit them. The entire abstract group yet real collection of all of the storage unit bytes are the point of reference, Maybe every thinking thing has its own self as a point of reference.
Computers don't think of course, so self awareness is its own point of reference that seems to arise from the brain's complex bio-chemical neurons and synaptic procedures. It differs from the neurons and chemicals for-themselves obviously in that they aren't self aware. Self-awareness needs no point of reference though; it is for-itself aware before self-reference.
Computers function in producing information without ever having a self-awareness. I believe they could even be programmed to produce a philosophy paper or thesis without ever realizing they had done so. It would actually be the writer of the program that had produced the philosophy paper instead of the computer. Computers we shall conclude have no points of reference meaningful to themselves. They also have no self.
Human beings can create many things that we might call 'a philosophy'. I would guess that a painting of abstract expressionism could be considered to be a philosophy in some cases. Then we would ask the perennial question is it abstract or representational? Could it be both simultaneously?
Must a philosophical quest or supposition be about something found in what used to be considered to be the empirical world? Are entirely analytic philosophical activities that are about thought not philosophical because they don't refer to things outside the mind? Then do we exclude brilliant algebras and group theories from being 'philosophies' because they are exclusively analytic?
What if analytic-synthetic combination of things occur in actuality. If Quine's ideas about empiricism are right then thought can be considered as epiphenomenalism in space-time. It is the only part of space-time that we understand directly as it is present in our mind. Must we believe that our own thoughts are a little alien from our self-awareness, that they are passing through our minds like cleverly assembled data bits temporally just to be forgotten soon after? Computers lack the self awareness capacity yet process the information without it. Humans are watchers on a premonitory of the sunrises and sunsets of the world of ideas that passes before their awareness. Will creates it's own content of experience interactively with the Universe providing the quarking components of self. In the midst of the concatenated experience we do not create permanent points of reference, and few or none are given to us. Time and space remove either our selves or the objects of our experience from experience. Philosophical activity may be a pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, yet Socrates said that he knew that he knew nothing. I agree. Faith is the best we can do. One may have faith without an immediate point of reference. We find such a hypothetical, metaphysical object obscurantive to the nature of philosophical inquiry.
Philosophers tend to use their natural logic in a somewhat more disciplined way than do most people. They may construct a theory of everything or just a theory about thought. Language and logic have themselves been the subject of philosophical investigation as well as the nature of the material or spirit perceived by the mind. When one strips down the methods of logic and language to its bare essentials we have an opportunity to process data that may be presented to mind and reasoning a little more constructively. There may be ten-thousand 'points of reference' or perhaps just one (although that would be a very monistic criterion making the observer or user of one reference point something of a passive partner to the one point of reference perhaps).
Cognitively we are philosophically challenged to find any 'external' reality of such a super-real character that it is a transcendent reference base. Einstein's theory of relativity transcended Newton's concept of absolute space and left us with a space-time in relationship to other points. Of course we may leapfrog over that and assume that the mass-energy field has an absolute time position value in the reference frame of the Universe from time=0 at the inflationary era. Perhaps alternatively time does not exist but is transcended by energy-mass form criteria. We find the Universe in primordial uncertainty.
Referred to points may be suitable for a particular set theory, yet of course we would prefer more than one point if we hoped to construct something meaningful. In systems of relativity at least three points of reference are required for directions of motion to be established. In language, one referent would be a one word vocabulary. Primordially even apes accomplish more than that with recognizable grunt referent meanings. The challenge for linguistics is to denote specific lexical ontology referents amidst others. Philosophically the challenge may be to reduce the possible plethora of words and objects to primary structures of meaning. Martin Heidegger pursued language in such a way looking for 'essents'. Modern analytical philosophers may exploit some of the ontological references of science for their cosmological criteria as well as neurological foundation for thought similes to epistemological phenomena subjectively.
Unreasonable points of reference are a little hoary, so we prefer reasonable ones if we are compelled to choose. So one must make a reasoned reasonable point to have a philosophy and eat it too, as if it were a cake. How might one argue with such fell logic as that? I think we must try.
A philosophy as an objective thing in itself seems something of a trivialization of the activity of the pursuit of wisdom. Yet moderns like to have sound bite reasoning and packaged products such as 'a philosophy' and then describe the contents it must have to be a marketable product. It needs a point of reference, and the point of reference must be reasonable. We cannot say who the judge must be of whether or not a particular point in a philosophy is reasonable or not. Certainly in ecclesiastical history there were those that de facto stipulated that 'a philosophy' was heretical and the authors would be burned at the stake or given unto the inquisition. At least Galileo learned to mind his p's and q's and was spared be burned at the stake. He knew when to assert a reasonable point of reference and when to kow-tow to the communist party ideologues of the day (a Chinese former communist professor was just given a ten year prison sentence for forming a political party. Only one party is reasonable in China).
We like to believe that in the many fields of philosophy including political philosophy virtually any approach regarding the mind or matter, spirit or social order, mass or energy might be taken with potential for good results. The French philosopher Descartes intentionally dispensed with any conventional points of reference in his quest to understand existence. His existential doubt was a result of the will to found philosophical knowledge upon first principles-things or ideas he could regard as direct knowledge in personal experience as true. He had no 'point of reference'. Cogito ergo sum was self-standing or self-evident. At least he believed it was and that belief advanced philosophy significantly.
Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist researches expanded French philosophical rationalism beyond the a priori, analytic thinking efforts of Descartes. Sartre's existentialism made the entirety of experience a self-aware cognitive field that was all that might be known. He recognized the heterodox nature of experience with the existence of other's in the cognitive event. The Critique of Dialectical Reason was an effort to describe the concatenated nature of that experience.
If one has a reasoning mind it is important to keep free the criteria of investigation with which one might construct a philosophical lexicon of ideas. If one doesn't have a reasoning mind then find a point of reference and make that your philosophy. Be an elephant that grasps hold of the tale before thee and waddle along to the beat of the same drummer booming through the speakers of your brain housing unit. Otherwise break down those ideas into workable size and use a little symbolic or even classical logic to analyze the meaning they have. Remove all of the adjectives and such to get to the salient proposition if it may be approached that way. Determine like Hume did what is sophistry and what isn't. Determine what is actual rather than some sort of actually meaningless metaphysics or passing the buck refer to a point of reference next that is just one of an infinite series of points in some order along a meaningless path of unnatural numbers representing computer generated phrases. Think for yourself but read those great ideas worth learning in order to not reinvent the wheel each day.
Philosophy is more than an epistemology or theory of knowledge. A theory of knowledge is implicitly referential to something other than the immediate self-awareness; that is it must explain itself preferably within its own terms and context. Of course to do so is in a way self-defeating. Theories of knowledge naturally tend to be propositional ontologies other than self. If one is referring to a theory of knowledge as a theory of mind, which one presumably has, then it must always be a kind of alienation of idea as experience from self. It is a reductionism from mind to an ossified phrase and inert, or dead.
A point of reference does seem to a prior assume that points exist, and that a particular point-do we mean geographic or linguistic coordinate reference points- has some ordination from which all other inferences and deductions are made. A philosophy would seem in this context to be contingent upon a prime meridian for meaning, placing the meridian at a higher level than the egalitarian context of the rest. One may reasonably assume certain axioms within any given ontology to induct and construct the remainder of the composition members of the element set. In matters of life and experience referring to the world as it appears we find it improbable that a single reference point-a most obscure assumed premise-might adequately serve to anchor a theory of either monism or pluralism. it is instead a kind of social myopia that fails a criterion of pragmatism.
W.V.O. Quine's 'Word and Object' and 'Ontological Relativity' of course are linguistic and logic based philosophical analysis of the meaning of language and of how it is used. It especially considers how the philosophical uses of language and symbolic logic are structured. Life itself has a self-standing reality about which people talk. Talk and words to refer to present and not present things or events are primordial in the history of mankind. Perhaps one-hundred thousand years ago more or less simple human languages existed. Language has as many objects or referents potentially to talk about as there are objects in the Universes of experience and imagination. Words refer to objects. It is a wonderful fact that words can refer to themselves. They are address points of meaning. The Universe itself is the one primary referent, and of course we include ourselves within this Universe. Human beings even refer to their own being, and self, in self-reference.
Philosophically we prefer to consider knowledge of what is experienced, and of knowledge beyond one's personal being, and of course of existing at all as activities or investments of our time worth the pursuit. Some element of wisdom seems to exist in learning all one can about life. Of course we also pursue these most general yet intimately important of concerns is philosophical activities. Philosophy is a method of inquiry. Knowledge continually should advance without ever reaching a conclusion in some sort of omniscience.
Theologically our interests are developed in learning about the Ultimate Designer of the Universe1 and of any potential other Universes. In such concerns our metaphysical inquiry becomes an alternate ontology rather than the self-evident one into which we are born, live and die.
It is somewhat fashionable nowadays more than a 150 years after Darwin's theory for many in society to regard themselves as liberated from hoary church dogma of creation. So many were oppressed by corrupt ecclesiastical neo-theocratic relationships with feudal lords that history did not refer sufficiently to the role that the Catholic Church played occasionally in opposing rising national imperial powers. Following the Inquisition such neglect was perhaps well deserved in the popular realm. At any rate following the Darwinism many were concerned that the disbelief that a scientific explanation for the origin of the species could not be anything besides a contradiction and even a negation of the Genesis story of creation. The last forty years have shown us that a theistic evolution of the Universe is consistent with the Bible, yet without modern scientific knowledge there were few that could interpret the book of Genesis in such a light.
The 'incredible lightness of being'; the giddiness of disbelief in God was feared by some authorities as leaving mankind rootless and adrift in a meaningless mechanical Universe. Of course the assumption that the Universe as it is cannot be a self-evident ground for being philosophically grounded isn't too valid. Cicero's natural law and a myriad other systems are able to provide an ordination for morality inferred from the criterion of being in-the-world. Kant's categorical imperative is a deontological inference from logic and being. Kant believed in God yet his moral law is axiomatic.
The 'point of reference' a mariner might have wanted in the era before the invention of the compass isn't too applicable to philosophy. The Universe of experience exists for-itself; the 'reference' is all around us. We believe also that God exists transcendentally though we have no material point of reference for that faith. The ungrounded with hysterical 'philosophies' requiring a 'point of reference' have existed throughout history even before Darwin or the reformation. The Dionysian choice may itself become an ethic for a majority of ruling elites. A point of reference is no assurance of the existential validity of a particular philosophical ontology.
Philosophers did not first invent an a priori language such as found in Descartes cogito and then construct reality from it; they simply have tried to learn more and more about the actual world experienced. Perhaps some could miss it. Take the first right...
Philosophical work, unlike physical cosmology requires a higher standard that we can take from the U.S. Government economic and environmental planners. Philosophers need at least one reasonable point of reference to start with. Personally I like Oprah for that, and then just go on to symbolic logic or whatever. W.V.O. Quine in 'Methods of Logic' just took apart the construction of logic making it easy to construct language, of course he didn't have an Oprah endorsement as a reasonable point of reference. Who will the reference be for a definition of reasonable here anyway.
Romanticism cannot be the alternative obviously. Corporatism is an effort to collectivize a society over which they might rule for point of profit. Individualism and individual legal rights are eschewed by corporatists as troublesome remnants of democratic tendencies. It is better to bundle everyone as a collective class without rights as individuals and then decree what each class is entitled to-even communist can agree with that reasonable point of reference. Since we eschew collectivism as a legal concept and admire private property in order to pursue individualized and copyrightable private intellectual capital acquisition ventures it is good to return to other points for consideration on the topic of our inquiry presently.
Philosophy is an effort of thinking about reality and truth. The love of wisdom isn't restricted to a pre-defined anything-referrals or whatever we may posit as some primordial essent of ground of being such as the Nazi Head of Education for some time in the 1930's sought in his book ' Being and Time'. Sein und Zeit is a brilliant work on the philosophical topic of phenomenalism. Heidegger resigned his post before the war- comprehended what the Nazis were or were becoming, and retired to a hut to pursue his philosophical investigations on the nature of language and perceptions of reality. There are no fundamental preconditions in the vocation of a philosophical investigations that are not malleable to construction as new synthetic compositions or for reconstruction within existing lexical criteria.
Language are historical evolved sets of meaning-units socially comprehensible and of use for communication. Philosophy often seeks to move beyond that pre-set language and look to the deeper meaning of things in themselves. Some are skeptical that such philosophical research regarding things perceived for-themselves can be known. Many phenomenal or perceived things exist as specialized experiences for human or other sentient life, as if they were conditional, contingent things that would disappear without being regarded by humans.
Consider a form of advanced computer virtual reality unit that could be placed over your head and that would allow you to perceive just those aspect of reality that were selected by some electromagnetic spectrum selector, and then reformed by a computer program into some completely fictional alternative construction for visual perception by the human wearing the head unit. The perception of that view of reality, if consistent and given to all other human beings with the same filter and reprogramming would present patterns and forms recognizable by all, yet of course the perceived views would not exist in nature but instead only in the common experience of the viewers of the analog reality. The reality would be derived from things known by the raw data acquisition system yet presented to each human without giving any idea of what reality looks like for itself.
Such a unit and program logic might provide a certain level of resolution to the viewer-experiencers. Philosophically, out own cognitive and neurological inheritance may provide something like that artificial experience naturally. The structure for cognition provided by our innate human sense organs and brain reasoning structure create a kind of sentient objective awareness of our own natural interpretation of the heterodox otherness of the material Universe-if we may call it material at least nominally.
Philosophers must regard such things as exist. Probably people considering relationships between things before they understood the concept of number-even 'one' may have been an underused term at some point way back in then past.
Humanity was born in the stream of change and given flow of space-time that Heraclitus said that we can never step in to twice. Like Moses we were cast into that ever changing yet eternally one stream flow in a human being basket of integrated thought experience with nature. Our own experience of life is of the same one continuous flow co-existing with our own lives and being always to become part of the present and future. Our own unified experience of being is the origin of our ground of philosophical endeavors from which the effort at understanding all must flow.
Such active personal tributaries of inquiry into the overall compilation of the nature of existence is a kind of human wonder. We wonder if our ideas accurately correspond to accurate accounts of how things really are in themselves. With some certainty we believe that reality is far deeper than even profound yet nominal physical cosmological research can enlighten us about. The division of the world of p0henomenal apperception into a microcosm of quantum mechanics following logic brings the investigation for a physical etiology like the inquiry of reverse mitosis to the cellular origin of the primordial membrane of zero dimension. Sure and begorrah it must have then expanded. For we are certain that all things originate with thermodynamic change and generally of cyclical and pervasive physical patterns and structures understandable through analysis, research, and so forth. If God is plural and had neither a singular origin nor was originally singular, we must be able to relate or negate such conjectures because we would have a hard time reconciling such considerations with our present human condition if we did not, right?
Philosophers, unlike some others working at fixing plumbing for instance, may consider experience and phenomena from many approaches and avenues of inquiry. Reasoning to the truth comprises analytic and synthetic thought, yet if the world is a creation of the One, it may require neither objective references, as is advocated by certain mystics such as in the book on knowing God 'The Cloud of Unknowing' while alternatively it may involve entire sets of experience or phenomenal deliberations upon such that is transcending number as either one, two, five a dozen etc. A philosophy rather that being an objective product for marketing to the masses is, for some philosophers at least, a living way of being. If an angel of God approached one with some communication, then the subjective experience would not be subject to delimitation as either subjective or objective, for such is the nature of human perception of reality, and in such a problematic realm of being is the quantum reality of space-time to a certain extent. We must await the quantization of virtual particles before the Big Bang in a vacuum before the inflation to know if the number is one or infinity.
There are additional approaches to consider regarding the nature and quantity required for 'reasonable points of reference'. The Vienna Circle of philosophers including Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, Gdel and many others led to logical positivism and empiricism. Quine of course later destroyed empiricist premises in his 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. The Vienna Circle tried to establish a principle of verifiability, or the inverse principle of falsifiability into extensional or scientific statements about the world. They hoped to eliminate metaphysics and reduce philosophical thought to rigorous science. Wittgenstein's analytic philosophy and investigation into the philosophy of logic led him to assert that the 'meaning of a sentence is in its verification'.
One point of verification or falsifiability will not make any scientific statement necessarily true. Philosophers such as Popper found science to be a more intuitive process with dead reckoning combined a variety of methods as it deems useful to form a falsifiable hypothesis. We cannot however say that philosophy must necessarily be scientific nor that the inability for some to form falsifiable hypothesis regarding analytic, mathematical structures means that it cannot be done, or that mathematics and logic have no a priori similarity to the fundamental structure of the quantum mechanical universe of which human beings are a part.
If we regard language itself as a word and referent linguistic composition, then obviously any lexicon must have at least one word. Yet we are not considering philosophy to be such a fundamental verbal construction as that, but something of a higher order structuring of words to produce meaning. Perhaps Zen may ideally have no referents, yet Western philosophy also has an ideal of becoming One with the will of God. Perhaps that too is philosophical, yet we still cannot positively assert any particular number of referents as in some way being fundamental to philosophical constructions. A reasonable point of reference is a little vague itself. Einstein's theories of relativity did not seem very reasonable in its first publication to most people.
In the Perennial Book of Sophistry we can discovery the listing for 'requisite philosophical points of reference' under sub-heading auxiliary B-29 article 13F; On the Requirement that All Philosophies Must Have Initial Verifiable and Subsequent Points of Reference'.
I will stipulate that I only briefly perused this expensive reference book. Even an annual subscription to it's supplements costs more than I can afford (998 Euros per year), so haven't referenced the current update, yet public libraries have the 2009 philosophers guidelines that at least mention the reference book in credited citations ex libre.
Maybe a philosophy can start without a point of reference and hope to find one. They could be like Cartesian coordinates or g.p.s. points. Personally I believe that is one is sailing in the Adriatic then it would be on the port rather than the starboard side.
'A philosophy' hasn't necessarily got a definition of a point of reference to build in, nor certainty if it should be included free as software to start with. Inclusion of a point of reference after the start of a philosophy would present the problem Hume had with cause and effect investigations I would think. That can be very troubling.
If we included several reference points such as 'north of the Peace River and west of Athabasca' will we get deserved credit for it? Philosophies apparently can be favorably compared with cartography. Keeping that in mind you might get illustrations done too for illuminated manuscripts. Every philosophy needs a good cartoonist for large-page graphic philosophy books.
We must return from the lofty realms of cumulus philosophy with its Irwin Correys to more mundane issues concerning the effort to increase human wisdom.
'The kingdom of God is within you', Our Lord said. We need not run to where the vultures have gathered to find our point of reference. Faith surpasses understanding, and God brings one to awareness of His righteousness rather than vice versa.
A philosophy is usually done by a human being. Some humans consider themselves as comprising their own point of reference, yet we will consider that of computers. Does a computer need a reasonable 'point of reference' when making 'a philosophy'? Can we imagine then right ingredients of a completely abstract philosophy without reference points off-line?
A computer needs a good encapsulating box to live in...something like a homeless person or a billionaire, yet billionaires may have several big boxes to live in and so their point of reference could be multiple boxes and variable. In fact the spaces could be considered to be abstract boxes or encapsulating spaces for such a one as has many potential boxes of habitation. The homeless guy with a cardboard box to live in might have just one point of reference, yet if making a philosophy that would be a good place to start. If it were me I would use a magic marker because they work good for writing on cardboard. Yet we were on the subject of computational points of reference for computer philosophies.
Well, can a computer actually have a philosophy? It has no internal point of reference besides egalitarian data storage binary bits. Quantum computers may have more than binary bit states of information content storage yet they would all be the same value for a point of reference. The point of reference would be the one central processing unit them. The entire abstract group yet real collection of all of the storage unit bytes are the point of reference, Maybe every thinking thing has its own self as a point of reference.
Computers don't think of course, so self awareness is its own point of reference that seems to arise from the brain's complex bio-chemical neurons and synaptic procedures. It differs from the neurons and chemicals for-themselves obviously in that they aren't self aware. Self-awareness needs no point of reference though; it is for-itself aware before self-reference.
Computers function in producing information without ever having a self-awareness. I believe they could even be programmed to produce a philosophy paper or thesis without ever realizing they had done so. It would actually be the writer of the program that had produced the philosophy paper instead of the computer. Computers we shall conclude have no points of reference meaningful to themselves. They also have no self.
Human beings can create many things that we might call 'a philosophy'. I would guess that a painting of abstract expressionism could be considered to be a philosophy in some cases. Then we would ask the perennial question is it abstract or representational? Could it be both simultaneously?
Must a philosophical quest or supposition be about something found in what used to be considered to be the empirical world? Are entirely analytic philosophical activities that are about thought not philosophical because they don't refer to things outside the mind? Then do we exclude brilliant algebras and group theories from being 'philosophies' because they are exclusively analytic?
What if analytic-synthetic combination of things occur in actuality. If Quine's ideas about empiricism are right then thought can be considered as epiphenomenalism in space-time. It is the only part of space-time that we understand directly as it is present in our mind. Must we believe that our own thoughts are a little alien from our self-awareness, that they are passing through our minds like cleverly assembled data bits temporally just to be forgotten soon after? Computers lack the self awareness capacity yet process the information without it. Humans are watchers on a premonitory of the sunrises and sunsets of the world of ideas that passes before their awareness. Will creates it's own content of experience interactively with the Universe providing the quarking components of self. In the midst of the concatenated experience we do not create permanent points of reference, and few or none are given to us. Time and space remove either our selves or the objects of our experience from experience. Philosophical activity may be a pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, yet Socrates said that he knew that he knew nothing. I agree. Faith is the best we can do. One may have faith without an immediate point of reference. We find such a hypothetical, metaphysical object obscurantive to the nature of philosophical inquiry.
Philosophers tend to use their natural logic in a somewhat more disciplined way than do most people. They may construct a theory of everything or just a theory about thought. Language and logic have themselves been the subject of philosophical investigation as well as the nature of the material or spirit perceived by the mind. When one strips down the methods of logic and language to its bare essentials we have an opportunity to process data that may be presented to mind and reasoning a little more constructively. There may be ten-thousand 'points of reference' or perhaps just one (although that would be a very monistic criterion making the observer or user of one reference point something of a passive partner to the one point of reference perhaps).
Cognitively we are philosophically challenged to find any 'external' reality of such a super-real character that it is a transcendent reference base. Einstein's theory of relativity transcended Newton's concept of absolute space and left us with a space-time in relationship to other points. Of course we may leapfrog over that and assume that the mass-energy field has an absolute time position value in the reference frame of the Universe from time=0 at the inflationary era. Perhaps alternatively time does not exist but is transcended by energy-mass form criteria. We find the Universe in primordial uncertainty.
Referred to points may be suitable for a particular set theory, yet of course we would prefer more than one point if we hoped to construct something meaningful. In systems of relativity at least three points of reference are required for directions of motion to be established. In language, one referent would be a one word vocabulary. Primordially even apes accomplish more than that with recognizable grunt referent meanings. The challenge for linguistics is to denote specific lexical ontology referents amidst others. Philosophically the challenge may be to reduce the possible plethora of words and objects to primary structures of meaning. Martin Heidegger pursued language in such a way looking for 'essents'. Modern analytical philosophers may exploit some of the ontological references of science for their cosmological criteria as well as neurological foundation for thought similes to epistemological phenomena subjectively.
Unreasonable points of reference are a little hoary, so we prefer reasonable ones if we are compelled to choose. So one must make a reasoned reasonable point to have a philosophy and eat it too, as if it were a cake. How might one argue with such fell logic as that? I think we must try.
A philosophy as an objective thing in itself seems something of a trivialization of the activity of the pursuit of wisdom. Yet moderns like to have sound bite reasoning and packaged products such as 'a philosophy' and then describe the contents it must have to be a marketable product. It needs a point of reference, and the point of reference must be reasonable. We cannot say who the judge must be of whether or not a particular point in a philosophy is reasonable or not. Certainly in ecclesiastical history there were those that de facto stipulated that 'a philosophy' was heretical and the authors would be burned at the stake or given unto the inquisition. At least Galileo learned to mind his p's and q's and was spared be burned at the stake. He knew when to assert a reasonable point of reference and when to kow-tow to the communist party ideologues of the day (a Chinese former communist professor was just given a ten year prison sentence for forming a political party. Only one party is reasonable in China).
We like to believe that in the many fields of philosophy including political philosophy virtually any approach regarding the mind or matter, spirit or social order, mass or energy might be taken with potential for good results. The French philosopher Descartes intentionally dispensed with any conventional points of reference in his quest to understand existence. His existential doubt was a result of the will to found philosophical knowledge upon first principles-things or ideas he could regard as direct knowledge in personal experience as true. He had no 'point of reference'. Cogito ergo sum was self-standing or self-evident. At least he believed it was and that belief advanced philosophy significantly.
Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist researches expanded French philosophical rationalism beyond the a priori, analytic thinking efforts of Descartes. Sartre's existentialism made the entirety of experience a self-aware cognitive field that was all that might be known. He recognized the heterodox nature of experience with the existence of other's in the cognitive event. The Critique of Dialectical Reason was an effort to describe the concatenated nature of that experience.
If one has a reasoning mind it is important to keep free the criteria of investigation with which one might construct a philosophical lexicon of ideas. If one doesn't have a reasoning mind then find a point of reference and make that your philosophy. Be an elephant that grasps hold of the tale before thee and waddle along to the beat of the same drummer booming through the speakers of your brain housing unit. Otherwise break down those ideas into workable size and use a little symbolic or even classical logic to analyze the meaning they have. Remove all of the adjectives and such to get to the salient proposition if it may be approached that way. Determine like Hume did what is sophistry and what isn't. Determine what is actual rather than some sort of actually meaningless metaphysics or passing the buck refer to a point of reference next that is just one of an infinite series of points in some order along a meaningless path of unnatural numbers representing computer generated phrases. Think for yourself but read those great ideas worth learning in order to not reinvent the wheel each day.
Philosophy is more than an epistemology or theory of knowledge. A theory of knowledge is implicitly referential to something other than the immediate self-awareness; that is it must explain itself preferably within its own terms and context. Of course to do so is in a way self-defeating. Theories of knowledge naturally tend to be propositional ontologies other than self. If one is referring to a theory of knowledge as a theory of mind, which one presumably has, then it must always be a kind of alienation of idea as experience from self. It is a reductionism from mind to an ossified phrase and inert, or dead.
A point of reference does seem to a prior assume that points exist, and that a particular point-do we mean geographic or linguistic coordinate reference points- has some ordination from which all other inferences and deductions are made. A philosophy would seem in this context to be contingent upon a prime meridian for meaning, placing the meridian at a higher level than the egalitarian context of the rest. One may reasonably assume certain axioms within any given ontology to induct and construct the remainder of the composition members of the element set. In matters of life and experience referring to the world as it appears we find it improbable that a single reference point-a most obscure assumed premise-might adequately serve to anchor a theory of either monism or pluralism. it is instead a kind of social myopia that fails a criterion of pragmatism.
W.V.O. Quine's 'Word and Object' and 'Ontological Relativity' of course are linguistic and logic based philosophical analysis of the meaning of language and of how it is used. It especially considers how the philosophical uses of language and symbolic logic are structured. Life itself has a self-standing reality about which people talk. Talk and words to refer to present and not present things or events are primordial in the history of mankind. Perhaps one-hundred thousand years ago more or less simple human languages existed. Language has as many objects or referents potentially to talk about as there are objects in the Universes of experience and imagination. Words refer to objects. It is a wonderful fact that words can refer to themselves. They are address points of meaning. The Universe itself is the one primary referent, and of course we include ourselves within this Universe. Human beings even refer to their own being, and self, in self-reference.
Philosophically we prefer to consider knowledge of what is experienced, and of knowledge beyond one's personal being, and of course of existing at all as activities or investments of our time worth the pursuit. Some element of wisdom seems to exist in learning all one can about life. Of course we also pursue these most general yet intimately important of concerns is philosophical activities. Philosophy is a method of inquiry. Knowledge continually should advance without ever reaching a conclusion in some sort of omniscience.
Theologically our interests are developed in learning about the Ultimate Designer of the Universe1 and of any potential other Universes. In such concerns our metaphysical inquiry becomes an alternate ontology rather than the self-evident one into which we are born, live and die.
It is somewhat fashionable nowadays more than a 150 years after Darwin's theory for many in society to regard themselves as liberated from hoary church dogma of creation. So many were oppressed by corrupt ecclesiastical neo-theocratic relationships with feudal lords that history did not refer sufficiently to the role that the Catholic Church played occasionally in opposing rising national imperial powers. Following the Inquisition such neglect was perhaps well deserved in the popular realm. At any rate following the Darwinism many were concerned that the disbelief that a scientific explanation for the origin of the species could not be anything besides a contradiction and even a negation of the Genesis story of creation. The last forty years have shown us that a theistic evolution of the Universe is consistent with the Bible, yet without modern scientific knowledge there were few that could interpret the book of Genesis in such a light.
The 'incredible lightness of being'; the giddiness of disbelief in God was feared by some authorities as leaving mankind rootless and adrift in a meaningless mechanical Universe. Of course the assumption that the Universe as it is cannot be a self-evident ground for being philosophically grounded isn't too valid. Cicero's natural law and a myriad other systems are able to provide an ordination for morality inferred from the criterion of being in-the-world. Kant's categorical imperative is a deontological inference from logic and being. Kant believed in God yet his moral law is axiomatic.
The 'point of reference' a mariner might have wanted in the era before the invention of the compass isn't too applicable to philosophy. The Universe of experience exists for-itself; the 'reference' is all around us. We believe also that God exists transcendentally though we have no material point of reference for that faith. The ungrounded with hysterical 'philosophies' requiring a 'point of reference' have existed throughout history even before Darwin or the reformation. The Dionysian choice may itself become an ethic for a majority of ruling elites. A point of reference is no assurance of the existential validity of a particular philosophical ontology.
Philosophers did not first invent an a priori language such as found in Descartes cogito and then construct reality from it; they simply have tried to learn more and more about the actual world experienced. Perhaps some could miss it. Take the first right...
12/2/09
Vietnamization of the War in Afghanistan
The Vietnamization of the Afghan War; President Obama Chooses a New ARVN Approach
On December the first, two-thousand nine, President Obama announced his long considered new policy for Afghanistan. The policy was an excellent political choice well tested by the brilliant inventor of the strategy, Richard Nixon. like his Presidential forerunner President Obama is planning to Vietnamize the Afghan war . President Nixon's Vietnamization policy to boost up the war while simultaneously withdrawing troops during his first term of office secured the largest landslide victory in U.S. history in 1972. President Obama's troop surge of 30,000 U.S. troops to make the total for Afghanistan 100,000 will be augmented by another 10,000 NATO troops in theory. President Obama's strategy to just borrow another half trillion dollar the next four years to fund the Afghanistan mission is certain to be popular with the military industrial complex as well.
President Obama, like Richard Nixon needs to expand the war in preparation for withdrawal.. Bombings in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam accomplished that purpose in the Vietnam war--Obama has decided to forego more bombing from the air and simply saturate Afghanistan in order to deter the 100 Al Qaeda troops-terrorist hidden in training there. The Taliban will be prevented from taking control of the corrupt central government--a vital investment by the United States in assuring that a puppet government can continue to exist after a U.S. troops withdrawal.
Afghanistan of course hasn't had a central government for most of its history. It is a poor rural high valley country with customary local rule by tribal authorities and strong men. Creating a strong central government may make it easier for corrupt dictatorships to rule over all of Iraq with greater efficiency in the future. Thus the comparisons of the Vietnamization of Iraq to the Vietnamization of Afghanistan are unfair--for Iraq is the nation with the most ancient history of central government while Afghanistan is a history without one. In fact much of the fierce Afghan resistance of foreign forces and central governance is an expression of the traditional rural hatred of oppressive governments seeking to increase there power.
There is a story about a Viet Cong recruitment tool in South Vietnam. The Viet Cong merely needed to explain to the rural people that they would be resisting the payment of taxed to Saigon. It was a sure way to win at least neutrality. Some opponents of the President's Vietnamization of Afghanistan policy have suggested that it might be better to be on the exterior lines supporting rural Afghanistan with clandestine support and pay benefits for far less overall cost then is presently scheduled. They would let the Taliban assume power in the cities and support a guerrilla resistance to attack them the next decade with occasional air support.
Others suggest that expanding the war into Pakistan would be a more Nixonian synthesis of the best of Johnsonian escalation with a simultaneous withdrawal strategy-plainly combining the best of L.B.J and ‘Dick’ Nixon’s war straggles is a kind of imitative brilliance that may bring the largest re-election victory in U.S. history. The only down side to the plan is that during the LBJ and Nixon years unemployment was quite low in the United States. Richard Nixon dealt with inflation with wage and price controls. President Obama is steadily increasing U.S. national debt to create a protracted supine national economic negotiating power for the people in order to assure that corporatist new world order design are advanced with least national resistance. He can stimulate an influx of cheap migrant Mexican labor any time the economy of the United States because good enough that the people become ‘uppity’ and consider increasing the taxes of the rich and trans-national corporations.
Nandering nabobs of negativism may dislike the Vietnamization of the Afghanistan war--rest assured that the war will continue long after President Obama has entered his second term at a cost of at least 50 billion dollars a year. There is no actual intelligence function in the White House or State Department that could imagine alternate, efficient and less costly methods of securing New York from destruction by covert terrorist mission planned abroad. President Obama may have the opportunity to expand the war into neighboring Iran in order to roll back reactionary Iranian ground forces angering by a U.S. strike to destroy Iranian nuclear weapons production at nuclear enrichment facilities plus. Plenty of opportunities for military glory shall abound and none for David Stockman style cost cutters and intelligent political-military strategists.
Afghan tribesmen have resisted foreign forces fighting in the high country for more than 30 centuries and so they shall continue that despicable lifestyle for perhaps the next two years more. Some prefer piece of course, yet with a majority of U.S. investments of a military sort that is a kind of violent social hallucination the prospects for a long range transformation of Afghanistan into a Euro-American N.A.T.O. friendly entity are dim, for they shall have an insufficient infrastructure to maintain the expense of a large central government authority independently of continued U.S. infusions of cash borrowed from China.
One day U.S. military actions will decrease through troop withdrawals as we await the thriving Afghan national economy to turn up its engine of opium production to enrich the government and pay for state dinners for western dignitaries. Then as the economy falters for lack of infrastructure innovation and development we shall send in more military forces borrowing cash from China to end the anarchy and terror of violence once again. That is going Richard M. Nixon one better.
On December the first, two-thousand nine, President Obama announced his long considered new policy for Afghanistan. The policy was an excellent political choice well tested by the brilliant inventor of the strategy, Richard Nixon. like his Presidential forerunner President Obama is planning to Vietnamize the Afghan war . President Nixon's Vietnamization policy to boost up the war while simultaneously withdrawing troops during his first term of office secured the largest landslide victory in U.S. history in 1972. President Obama's troop surge of 30,000 U.S. troops to make the total for Afghanistan 100,000 will be augmented by another 10,000 NATO troops in theory. President Obama's strategy to just borrow another half trillion dollar the next four years to fund the Afghanistan mission is certain to be popular with the military industrial complex as well.
President Obama, like Richard Nixon needs to expand the war in preparation for withdrawal.. Bombings in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam accomplished that purpose in the Vietnam war--Obama has decided to forego more bombing from the air and simply saturate Afghanistan in order to deter the 100 Al Qaeda troops-terrorist hidden in training there. The Taliban will be prevented from taking control of the corrupt central government--a vital investment by the United States in assuring that a puppet government can continue to exist after a U.S. troops withdrawal.
Afghanistan of course hasn't had a central government for most of its history. It is a poor rural high valley country with customary local rule by tribal authorities and strong men. Creating a strong central government may make it easier for corrupt dictatorships to rule over all of Iraq with greater efficiency in the future. Thus the comparisons of the Vietnamization of Iraq to the Vietnamization of Afghanistan are unfair--for Iraq is the nation with the most ancient history of central government while Afghanistan is a history without one. In fact much of the fierce Afghan resistance of foreign forces and central governance is an expression of the traditional rural hatred of oppressive governments seeking to increase there power.
There is a story about a Viet Cong recruitment tool in South Vietnam. The Viet Cong merely needed to explain to the rural people that they would be resisting the payment of taxed to Saigon. It was a sure way to win at least neutrality. Some opponents of the President's Vietnamization of Afghanistan policy have suggested that it might be better to be on the exterior lines supporting rural Afghanistan with clandestine support and pay benefits for far less overall cost then is presently scheduled. They would let the Taliban assume power in the cities and support a guerrilla resistance to attack them the next decade with occasional air support.
Others suggest that expanding the war into Pakistan would be a more Nixonian synthesis of the best of Johnsonian escalation with a simultaneous withdrawal strategy-plainly combining the best of L.B.J and ‘Dick’ Nixon’s war straggles is a kind of imitative brilliance that may bring the largest re-election victory in U.S. history. The only down side to the plan is that during the LBJ and Nixon years unemployment was quite low in the United States. Richard Nixon dealt with inflation with wage and price controls. President Obama is steadily increasing U.S. national debt to create a protracted supine national economic negotiating power for the people in order to assure that corporatist new world order design are advanced with least national resistance. He can stimulate an influx of cheap migrant Mexican labor any time the economy of the United States because good enough that the people become ‘uppity’ and consider increasing the taxes of the rich and trans-national corporations.
Nandering nabobs of negativism may dislike the Vietnamization of the Afghanistan war--rest assured that the war will continue long after President Obama has entered his second term at a cost of at least 50 billion dollars a year. There is no actual intelligence function in the White House or State Department that could imagine alternate, efficient and less costly methods of securing New York from destruction by covert terrorist mission planned abroad. President Obama may have the opportunity to expand the war into neighboring Iran in order to roll back reactionary Iranian ground forces angering by a U.S. strike to destroy Iranian nuclear weapons production at nuclear enrichment facilities plus. Plenty of opportunities for military glory shall abound and none for David Stockman style cost cutters and intelligent political-military strategists.
Afghan tribesmen have resisted foreign forces fighting in the high country for more than 30 centuries and so they shall continue that despicable lifestyle for perhaps the next two years more. Some prefer piece of course, yet with a majority of U.S. investments of a military sort that is a kind of violent social hallucination the prospects for a long range transformation of Afghanistan into a Euro-American N.A.T.O. friendly entity are dim, for they shall have an insufficient infrastructure to maintain the expense of a large central government authority independently of continued U.S. infusions of cash borrowed from China.
One day U.S. military actions will decrease through troop withdrawals as we await the thriving Afghan national economy to turn up its engine of opium production to enrich the government and pay for state dinners for western dignitaries. Then as the economy falters for lack of infrastructure innovation and development we shall send in more military forces borrowing cash from China to end the anarchy and terror of violence once again. That is going Richard M. Nixon one better.
11/27/09
Sarah Palin, 2012 and Pipelines of Global Warming Disaster
Sarah Palin was a fairily large fish in a small pond in 2008. Senator John McCain was probably happier running with an attractive younger women than with some crusty older guy. Former P.O.W.'s and combat pilots can get a little cranky--Sarah was likely a more agreeable candidate and would attract X voters.
Presidential Candidate needed someone that wasn't ugly to draw voters away from the charisma of the Obama candidacy and the voice with rising intonation at the end of paragraphs.
Palin's success as the first X governor of Alaska was a good choice for the Republican party in that state a little disenchanted with another term as Governor for former U.S. Senator Frank Murkowsky who had appointed his daughter to fill the seat he vacated. Alaska only has a population of 600,000 plus and several governors have been elected from small town backgrounds. If one is quite ambitious and gets some meaningful politically correct qualifications its not too difficult to achieve state office in the right circumstances. Sarah Palin's family of origin was a fairly well established set giving her a good platform for a college degree and political ambitions a chance for fulfillment. Personally I believe that confidence in public speaking an an acceptable demeanor is about all that's required for the post of state Governor. I do not believe that a record as being a governor is a sufficient qualification nor requirement for being a president of the United States.
A U.S. President should be nationalistic and very well read in global history. He or she should have well developed ecological economic theory. To return to Sarah Palin however...
Palin has no ability to mechanically separate her own interests at all from trans-national corporate fossil fuel interests evidently. I will criticize her trans-Alaska and Yukon Canada pipeline policy in order to convey an idea of why her devotion to oil is wrong. She has little ability to develop a non-transnational political philosophy that would benefit American citizens and the environment as first priorities.
A Sarah Palin plan to devastate a wilderness and create more global warming infrastructure is a consequence of an importunate Alaska natural resource domination by foreign and trans-national corporations that control state politics with intense monetary and political, if not intellectual capital. Far too many accept the natural payout without considering the effects upon the future of state and national independence. An anarchic industrial drift is not in some way a better form of capitalism though its sycophants might say so. When the fossil fuel era has outlived its environmental usefulness the green still inertially rolls on.
Unfortunately the oil industry’s wealth and power determines adversely the direction of the state’s energy development for they can buy political influence and fealty to their in some cases royal personages. For non conformists the choice economically may be to be set adrift on icebergs alone in a global warming era. In order for the extreme foreign influence to be reduced in Alaska, and reduce the adverse Alaskan national influence upon national economic policy such that it could be recovered into democracy serving the real interests of U.S. citizens rather than elite, aloof trans-nationally wealthy corporate interests, state politicians would need to fund alternative energy developments in Alaska such as wind generators to power municipalities such that they are less reliant upon corporate oil profit sharing.
Alaska’s extreme reliance on oil development continues to determine nit’s political and social policy. Concatenated such policies nationally are making the United States a kind of corporate overflow contingent holding tank. Far too much U.S. economic development is supported by federal policies actualizing foreign investment rather than national investment.
In a state like Alaska with fewer than 700,000 people and twice the size of Texas in area, with many resources, the fossil fuel retardation into critical decades of alternative social and political development is a corollary of the corporate neo-authoritarian tendency to repress and punish through dismissal political expression of a non-corporate agenda. The democracy in Alaska independent of corporate oil policy is moribund. When government policy is to reinforce with its income and allegiance foreign and trans-national oil corporations, when media broadcasters target dissenting political opinions on environmental issues as communist-when the issue of economics and political ideologies are entirely separable, the specious political philosophical reasoning becomes evident.
Writing is simply one way that democratic opinions may be expressed. A democracy’s strength is in diverse real opinions rather than in a toadying to a single industrial domination. The rights of semi-pro writers to express opinions is equal to that of any corporate broadcasting communications, who are more socialistic organizationally than any of the oppressed environmentalists they seek to starve into submission or exile for recognizing the adverse effects of large scale fossil fuel pipelines corrupting wilderness areas.
China recently announced that it plans to get 40% more energy from increasing efficiency or present resources recently. Increasing efficiency environmentally rather than crass, vast sprawls of pipelines is what the United States needs to work upon as well. Without being a global environmental leader with a stable population and an increasingly healthy infrastructure with the well being of all citizens minimally reinforced at least the future of the United States as a global example or role model isn’t bright.
A Palin candidacy for President in 2012 would be the best way Republican's could guarantee a re-election of an Obama administration. President Obama seems set to expand the war in Afghanistan for the remainder of his administration at significant cost until 2012. Voters will want a change though he assures inn 2011 that 'the job will be done then'. Probably the 12th Imam will return and draw the attention of the Taliban away from continuing hostility to the Afghan government in 2013.
Presidential Candidate needed someone that wasn't ugly to draw voters away from the charisma of the Obama candidacy and the voice with rising intonation at the end of paragraphs.
Palin's success as the first X governor of Alaska was a good choice for the Republican party in that state a little disenchanted with another term as Governor for former U.S. Senator Frank Murkowsky who had appointed his daughter to fill the seat he vacated. Alaska only has a population of 600,000 plus and several governors have been elected from small town backgrounds. If one is quite ambitious and gets some meaningful politically correct qualifications its not too difficult to achieve state office in the right circumstances. Sarah Palin's family of origin was a fairly well established set giving her a good platform for a college degree and political ambitions a chance for fulfillment. Personally I believe that confidence in public speaking an an acceptable demeanor is about all that's required for the post of state Governor. I do not believe that a record as being a governor is a sufficient qualification nor requirement for being a president of the United States.
A U.S. President should be nationalistic and very well read in global history. He or she should have well developed ecological economic theory. To return to Sarah Palin however...
Palin has no ability to mechanically separate her own interests at all from trans-national corporate fossil fuel interests evidently. I will criticize her trans-Alaska and Yukon Canada pipeline policy in order to convey an idea of why her devotion to oil is wrong. She has little ability to develop a non-transnational political philosophy that would benefit American citizens and the environment as first priorities.
A Sarah Palin plan to devastate a wilderness and create more global warming infrastructure is a consequence of an importunate Alaska natural resource domination by foreign and trans-national corporations that control state politics with intense monetary and political, if not intellectual capital. Far too many accept the natural payout without considering the effects upon the future of state and national independence. An anarchic industrial drift is not in some way a better form of capitalism though its sycophants might say so. When the fossil fuel era has outlived its environmental usefulness the green still inertially rolls on.
Unfortunately the oil industry’s wealth and power determines adversely the direction of the state’s energy development for they can buy political influence and fealty to their in some cases royal personages. For non conformists the choice economically may be to be set adrift on icebergs alone in a global warming era. In order for the extreme foreign influence to be reduced in Alaska, and reduce the adverse Alaskan national influence upon national economic policy such that it could be recovered into democracy serving the real interests of U.S. citizens rather than elite, aloof trans-nationally wealthy corporate interests, state politicians would need to fund alternative energy developments in Alaska such as wind generators to power municipalities such that they are less reliant upon corporate oil profit sharing.
Alaska’s extreme reliance on oil development continues to determine nit’s political and social policy. Concatenated such policies nationally are making the United States a kind of corporate overflow contingent holding tank. Far too much U.S. economic development is supported by federal policies actualizing foreign investment rather than national investment.
In a state like Alaska with fewer than 700,000 people and twice the size of Texas in area, with many resources, the fossil fuel retardation into critical decades of alternative social and political development is a corollary of the corporate neo-authoritarian tendency to repress and punish through dismissal political expression of a non-corporate agenda. The democracy in Alaska independent of corporate oil policy is moribund. When government policy is to reinforce with its income and allegiance foreign and trans-national oil corporations, when media broadcasters target dissenting political opinions on environmental issues as communist-when the issue of economics and political ideologies are entirely separable, the specious political philosophical reasoning becomes evident.
Writing is simply one way that democratic opinions may be expressed. A democracy’s strength is in diverse real opinions rather than in a toadying to a single industrial domination. The rights of semi-pro writers to express opinions is equal to that of any corporate broadcasting communications, who are more socialistic organizationally than any of the oppressed environmentalists they seek to starve into submission or exile for recognizing the adverse effects of large scale fossil fuel pipelines corrupting wilderness areas.
China recently announced that it plans to get 40% more energy from increasing efficiency or present resources recently. Increasing efficiency environmentally rather than crass, vast sprawls of pipelines is what the United States needs to work upon as well. Without being a global environmental leader with a stable population and an increasingly healthy infrastructure with the well being of all citizens minimally reinforced at least the future of the United States as a global example or role model isn’t bright.
A Palin candidacy for President in 2012 would be the best way Republican's could guarantee a re-election of an Obama administration. President Obama seems set to expand the war in Afghanistan for the remainder of his administration at significant cost until 2012. Voters will want a change though he assures inn 2011 that 'the job will be done then'. Probably the 12th Imam will return and draw the attention of the Taliban away from continuing hostility to the Afghan government in 2013.
11/25/09
Ideas of a Spritual Unified Field Theory
Yes, I believe that a faith based spiritual field may underlie all of the apparent quantum mechanical concatenations that comprise the field we humans interpret through cognitive facilities as a spatial universe set in time. It is a wonderful appearing Universe with ever increasing mystery isn't?
Since Albert Einstein's general relativity was issued with ten or more equations from which physicists might extrapolate the expansion of a Universe eventually humanity has returned to the future of what a Universe is such as might Parmenides or Democratis have considered. We can consider with Leibniz a spiritual monad universe that has been issued an initial endowment of one dimensional windowless monads or membranes of one dimension from some kind of perturbative vacuum in a pre-big bang era.
Why did virtual membranes issue such as we might consider one dimensional strings to be of two dimensions? Why were they set apart in various intervals, and why was space arranged without initial time or nominal scale at all such that it might scale up/change? These seem illusory characteristics in some way; as insufficiently contemplated metaphysical paradigms for cosmological boundary conditions de novo.
Not being much of a mathematician as might have liked and a little better logician, I must speculate about the limitations and application of the calculus of Newton and others in the context of extra-dimensional investigations. Recently I ran into the logical philosophy of Arthur Prior and tense logic. It seems quite a little like algebraic group theory and matrices with contingent and temporal, logical ordered relations. So what if our cosmological speculations are contained in such intervals and units of reasoning as cohere within the phenomenality of being and nothingness that forms so much of our theoretical knowledge in abstract reasoning?
What if a continuum of undifferentiated basic correct perception is required to understand a concatenated series of apparent temporal relations that are perhaps just apparent and contingent upon the order the entirety is woven together as one and perceived from as a frame of reference?
Petr Horava from UC Berkeley has developed a theory of quantum gravity described a little in the Dec. 2009 issue of Scientific American. What if his possibly statistically derived calculus of cosmological field equations uniting the major and the minor aspects of the evident universe are bound up in the unknown quagmire of Priorian-Killing Group symmetry contingency complications? Because human observers are now familiar with perceiving the knowable universe in a set major cognitive premise the minor mathematics of the major-minor space-time unification become subject to separability as a working parameter in order to fit the known facts together.
That is what I meant by my limited mathematical knowledge-to what extent are Lie and Killing group mathematics unified consistently with infinite yet renormalizable dimensions of Priorian Tense logical contingence matrices? Obviously the uncertainty of the quantum worlds would be usefully modeled in contingent, simultaneous in temporal orders and actualizations such as found in all possible worlds modalities constructed with Priorian logic. A calculus of simultaneously infinite contingent logical orders may be a necessity for portraying a Universe that is recurrent or with any finite boundaries at all that a theory might infer.
A finite or infinite Universe has logical parameters consistent with mathematical representations of it. An it may be that the essential unit theory of any representation mathematically or logically of a Universe is limited itself in consistence with the capabilities of reason.
I liked Gasperini's book 'The Universe Before the Big Bang' and not least for his concluding comment that he believed God created the pre-Big Bang era. There is much room for upgrading of the speculations of Plotinus, yet I wonder about that logic of tense (temporal) order as a half of a calculus of contingent intervals of being and nothingness that leaves no more out of the intervals of the theory than whatever space-or time, Spirit or limited knowledge contrasted with omniscience places therat. Redundant and overlapping scales of space-time and energy between intervals of issued actualities may complicate making accurate calculations of what lies within and without the major and minor physical lines of being.
Since Albert Einstein's general relativity was issued with ten or more equations from which physicists might extrapolate the expansion of a Universe eventually humanity has returned to the future of what a Universe is such as might Parmenides or Democratis have considered. We can consider with Leibniz a spiritual monad universe that has been issued an initial endowment of one dimensional windowless monads or membranes of one dimension from some kind of perturbative vacuum in a pre-big bang era.
Why did virtual membranes issue such as we might consider one dimensional strings to be of two dimensions? Why were they set apart in various intervals, and why was space arranged without initial time or nominal scale at all such that it might scale up/change? These seem illusory characteristics in some way; as insufficiently contemplated metaphysical paradigms for cosmological boundary conditions de novo.
Not being much of a mathematician as might have liked and a little better logician, I must speculate about the limitations and application of the calculus of Newton and others in the context of extra-dimensional investigations. Recently I ran into the logical philosophy of Arthur Prior and tense logic. It seems quite a little like algebraic group theory and matrices with contingent and temporal, logical ordered relations. So what if our cosmological speculations are contained in such intervals and units of reasoning as cohere within the phenomenality of being and nothingness that forms so much of our theoretical knowledge in abstract reasoning?
What if a continuum of undifferentiated basic correct perception is required to understand a concatenated series of apparent temporal relations that are perhaps just apparent and contingent upon the order the entirety is woven together as one and perceived from as a frame of reference?
Petr Horava from UC Berkeley has developed a theory of quantum gravity described a little in the Dec. 2009 issue of Scientific American. What if his possibly statistically derived calculus of cosmological field equations uniting the major and the minor aspects of the evident universe are bound up in the unknown quagmire of Priorian-Killing Group symmetry contingency complications? Because human observers are now familiar with perceiving the knowable universe in a set major cognitive premise the minor mathematics of the major-minor space-time unification become subject to separability as a working parameter in order to fit the known facts together.
That is what I meant by my limited mathematical knowledge-to what extent are Lie and Killing group mathematics unified consistently with infinite yet renormalizable dimensions of Priorian Tense logical contingence matrices? Obviously the uncertainty of the quantum worlds would be usefully modeled in contingent, simultaneous in temporal orders and actualizations such as found in all possible worlds modalities constructed with Priorian logic. A calculus of simultaneously infinite contingent logical orders may be a necessity for portraying a Universe that is recurrent or with any finite boundaries at all that a theory might infer.
A finite or infinite Universe has logical parameters consistent with mathematical representations of it. An it may be that the essential unit theory of any representation mathematically or logically of a Universe is limited itself in consistence with the capabilities of reason.
I liked Gasperini's book 'The Universe Before the Big Bang' and not least for his concluding comment that he believed God created the pre-Big Bang era. There is much room for upgrading of the speculations of Plotinus, yet I wonder about that logic of tense (temporal) order as a half of a calculus of contingent intervals of being and nothingness that leaves no more out of the intervals of the theory than whatever space-or time, Spirit or limited knowledge contrasted with omniscience places therat. Redundant and overlapping scales of space-time and energy between intervals of issued actualities may complicate making accurate calculations of what lies within and without the major and minor physical lines of being.
Tense Logic; Prior and Kripke--are worth the time to learn about
Logic in science has an ancient lineage; Aristotle was the world's first formal logician (he invented classical deductive logic) as well as one of the best early philosophers of science. He took the rational metaphysical ideas that Plato presented and inductively applied them to form a classification of cosmological ontology. Forms and genera and the presentation of matter in time were thoughtfully considered. That process has continued over two and a half millenia.
Symbolic logic was invented in the 19th century. It is true that Liebniz invented a symbolic mathematical logic, yet it wasn't published in his lifetime nor for a lengthy time after his death. There is a history of productive philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. Bertrand Russell and Allan North Whitehead wrote 'The Principia Mathematica' early in the 20th century. Logical structures representing abstract possible forms are a logical method to consider how the physical world is constructed to-especially at the quantum mechanical level. When structures become to small to observe-or perhaps too large, it is logical reasoning processes including math advances that must be developed to probe the way thing might be. Some philosophers such as Arthur Prior have even investigated the relationships of contingence within logic to a substantial extent. It seems a paradox that a hypothetical entity that is purely logical could have anything besides a nominal contingent existence, and could form a logical basis for representing real contingent relations.
It is rather amazing that Saul Kripke was in high school, or just out when he published A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic'. Kripke had neen influenced by Arthur Prior-basically the inventor of tense logic.
http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/prior/
Tense logic developed by Prior and later others in the 1960's established the logical relationships of temporal order. It was useful not only for computing logic but brought in the modal logical relationships of hypothetical worlds. Kripke developed a matrix approach to possible worlds, and I would think that ontologies of temporal based modal logic assume discrete values of units logically consistent and able to be falsifiable as existing or non-existing sates as trivial as that might be to remark.
Matrix and group mathematical representation of fields in multi-dimensional time contexts have obvious values in forming cosmological theories. The tense logic of prior may have had some kind of use in cosmology, and even String or M-theory-I must say that the topic exceeds my present reading. I have only recently discovered Prior and tense logic, and look forward to reading more in the field.
Prior believed that logical formalism-the idea that logic is valid only, or mostly as an intensional, analytical phenomena , isn't valid. His approach of renormalizing intentional logic with the Universe may have been a method drawn from an assumption tat knowledge of the world's physics and time can only be known contingently so therefor logic must apply functionally if knowledge is to have any valid human foundation.
Logic is basically perhaps limited to ordering relations between existent and non-existent states as well as descriptions of their intervals and scale. Space-time events logically represented may be inconsistent with the potential physical relationships of physically concatenated elements. If such is the case then logical induction may be more difficult.
Given space-time fields of science the discovery of logical relationships is necessary for knowledge. Readings in Prior and of the mathematics of M-Theory such as may be made simply explained (really) promises interesting ideas for metaphysical contemplation, as well as tools for science.
Symbolic logic was invented in the 19th century. It is true that Liebniz invented a symbolic mathematical logic, yet it wasn't published in his lifetime nor for a lengthy time after his death. There is a history of productive philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. Bertrand Russell and Allan North Whitehead wrote 'The Principia Mathematica' early in the 20th century. Logical structures representing abstract possible forms are a logical method to consider how the physical world is constructed to-especially at the quantum mechanical level. When structures become to small to observe-or perhaps too large, it is logical reasoning processes including math advances that must be developed to probe the way thing might be. Some philosophers such as Arthur Prior have even investigated the relationships of contingence within logic to a substantial extent. It seems a paradox that a hypothetical entity that is purely logical could have anything besides a nominal contingent existence, and could form a logical basis for representing real contingent relations.
It is rather amazing that Saul Kripke was in high school, or just out when he published A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic'. Kripke had neen influenced by Arthur Prior-basically the inventor of tense logic.
http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/prior/
Tense logic developed by Prior and later others in the 1960's established the logical relationships of temporal order. It was useful not only for computing logic but brought in the modal logical relationships of hypothetical worlds. Kripke developed a matrix approach to possible worlds, and I would think that ontologies of temporal based modal logic assume discrete values of units logically consistent and able to be falsifiable as existing or non-existing sates as trivial as that might be to remark.
Matrix and group mathematical representation of fields in multi-dimensional time contexts have obvious values in forming cosmological theories. The tense logic of prior may have had some kind of use in cosmology, and even String or M-theory-I must say that the topic exceeds my present reading. I have only recently discovered Prior and tense logic, and look forward to reading more in the field.
Prior believed that logical formalism-the idea that logic is valid only, or mostly as an intensional, analytical phenomena , isn't valid. His approach of renormalizing intentional logic with the Universe may have been a method drawn from an assumption tat knowledge of the world's physics and time can only be known contingently so therefor logic must apply functionally if knowledge is to have any valid human foundation.
Logic is basically perhaps limited to ordering relations between existent and non-existent states as well as descriptions of their intervals and scale. Space-time events logically represented may be inconsistent with the potential physical relationships of physically concatenated elements. If such is the case then logical induction may be more difficult.
Given space-time fields of science the discovery of logical relationships is necessary for knowledge. Readings in Prior and of the mathematics of M-Theory such as may be made simply explained (really) promises interesting ideas for metaphysical contemplation, as well as tools for science.
11/23/09
The St. Novilistricka Plan
Before traveling north for then winter to look for work, I finished a brief science fiction novel in about four weeks. The book is named 'The St. Novilistricka Plan'. I took about four weeks to write the somewhat philosphically obtuse work. It could use a second draft obviously and topped out at maybe 30,000 words, yet I felt it worth the effort and enjoyed the composition quite a bit.
The book is about the philosopher from the University of Mars Patrick Voevoda's continuing extra galactic existential ventures--this time to recover his lost girlfriend--Lush who disappeared innocently enough. Perhaps he is a little like Sherlock in that regard, attempting to infer her location from the available evidence, yet of course perpetrators abound to complicate the issue.
The book is about the philosopher from the University of Mars Patrick Voevoda's continuing extra galactic existential ventures--this time to recover his lost girlfriend--Lush who disappeared innocently enough. Perhaps he is a little like Sherlock in that regard, attempting to infer her location from the available evidence, yet of course perpetrators abound to complicate the issue.
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