11/20/24

Phenomenalism and Realism

Quine said he was a physicalist once when asked. Yet he’s also a realist concerning math. I believe people are entanglements in the Higgs field as is all matter. There isn’t anything unless it’s spirit that would outlast the structural change of the field…maybe not even information.

Eventually, like one of those disappearing knots everything returns to two dimension massless waves with probabilities of being somewhere and that may become just space and nothing.

Once after an  abcessed tooth developed I discovered that eating chocolate would make me lose balance and I would slowly fall to the ground tilting left with my mind seeming to break apart into quarters. It was a terrible experience that would go away when my head was on the ground.

That made me aware of the phenomenal temporality of mind.  I went to an orthodontist and got the tooth pulled. The experience disappeared yet I remember.

In late October 2018 I took a 13 foot boat south from Juneau 160 miles with a 2.5hp outboard. Wind and waves came up in Stephens Passage/Taku Inlet and I had to basically surf the vessel across crests and trough side seas for an hour until nearing Slocum Inlet. I prayed all the way across. It was phenomenal. One error and the boat capsizes in cold water, yet it worked out dry. That too made existence seem more phenomenal, comparing analogously a ram entangled in a bush to life entangled in the Higgs Field.

So I have faith in God yet still have interest in ‘reality’ and its nature. Having read Plato as my first philosophy I regard the realm of forms as a kind of template for quanta so far as humans can consider it. I tend to leave the location of data storage for blueprints with God for I have no idea where actual abstract universals would be physically stored in this Universe.

Is Money Necessary for a Philosopher

Philosophers can live like Diogenes and be indifferent to economic concerns while considering that Jesus said not to worry about material things.  There may be a benefit to viewing society without being owned in effect by corporatism or teacher’s unions. Cynics needed a bit of grace to in an era when even a Roman Emperor like Sulla could die from having his guts fall out from worms. If everyone is driving an auto in during the Anthropocene isn’t it better to walk more than average?

Mexican Loss of the West

Mexico claimed the Pacific Coast of North America yet couldn’t defend it’s claim. They had revolted against Spain yet without understanding the dynamic tension between rival claims on the land of the American west.

California was. run by Mexico 24 years before Californians revolted. In the meanwhile in 1836 Russians built a colony at Ft Ross in Sonoma county.The Bear Flag Republic is comparable to the Republic of Texas that revolted too.

https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/spanish-mexican-period.htm#:~:text=The%20Spanish%20colony%20of%20Mexico,won%20its%20freedom%20from%20Spain.

If Mexico had recognized Texas’s indepence the Mexican-American war might not have followed in which it lost the rest of the west except for areas ceded by the Gadsden Purchase. Britain had also sought California yet after the war of 1812 turned its attention further north. Britain contested with the USA to set the boundary. Russia sold Alaska to the USA to prevent it from becoming part of British Canada.

U.S. Grant fired artillery from the second floor of a building on the campaign to Mexico City. The USA could have made Mexico a part of the USA back then. The states are supposed to join voluntarily though. Maybe Mexico should petition to join today and share rem and the 34 trillion dollar public debt.

Biden Intent Seems to be an Upgrade to N.A.T.O. War vs. Russia

 Ukraine has begun using American and English missiles to attack Russia. The President appears to intend to provoke Russia to retaliate against England and the U.S.A. in order to bring N.A.T.O. into the war. I repeat that the President seems incompetent in his job performance or is totally sold out to a Ukraine first policy.

Response from Russia

Seemingly he has no wish to allow the President-elects peace plan to end the conflict to have a chance of seeing the light of day.

update on the missiles




11/19/24

Noah's Flood May Have Happened with Climate Change

I tend to regard the flood story as entirely true. It is consistent with a first civilization located somewhere along the Persian Gulf being catastrophicly inundated by a late Wisconsin era sudden sea level rise. Perhaps that mud brick city state was located on a sand spit or other seaside location where fishing and trade was especially good. People still build in flood prone areas. The sea level was about 200 feet lower in that era. Melting glaciers upstream, climate change, heavy rains, slow moving  typhoons in combination may have drowned the world those people new entirely and taken Noah's vessel upstream toward. Urartu. Ararat was a later Hebrew transliteration of Urartu. A broad flood in the Mesopotamian lowlands perhaps as far back as 12,000 BC is credible for me.

Reason and Emotion

Emotions tend to fade into the background when one discovers that they don’t make a difference to reality physically. Harsh climate, weather, freezing, starvation rough seas, persecution and other forms of challenges can only be overcome intellectually rather than emotionally. The world doesn’t care at all what one’s emotions are, so why have them at all, is a paradigm with a substantive measure of validity.

Perhaps one may allow love of God to be the background emotion for detached reason, and care generally for the good of mankind

Terminated Nascent Dynasty (a poem)

   At the borders of mind
touching matter nothiness is
politicians fading into the jungle
sloppy wet fish
slimy scales slipping in the water
disappearing time entangled with fermions 

  Encounters of interference patterns
meanings in metaphysics
dialectical evolution
unstructured structures compiling purposefully
porpoise diving deep

   Total recall 
of brackets and parentheses
sliding away after filling with glory
walking figure into nuclear sunset
no reason required for substance

   Nameless ballots cast for power
lost to forever
thoughts once counted
were given no date

   Apocalyptic toggle switches
robots serving for middle terms
syllogisms leading to nothingness

   Guts thrown over the landscape
draw respect from the seas

  The sea shall bury the dead.

Do Humans Have Innate Knowledge of God?

Chomsky and Everett’ debated over the question of grammer being innate for humans and didn’t have a decisive outcome.

Maybe it was surpassed by an emergent paradigm. It did at least have few complex concepts strung together in support of unobservable points although one could certainly create various tests for humans and apes.

The way humans apprehend and appearance of God in any form including communication is entirely live and up to God. He has communicated with individuals in different ways history recounts. The book of Jeremiah has a passage where God said that everyone will know him: 31-34″And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord.’ For they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them,” saith the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

In Jeremiah where God said that his people had forgotten him, that probably meant they had fallen away from a right relationship and worship. 15″15 Because My people hath forgotten Me, they have burned incense to vanity; and they have caused them to stumble in their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, on a road not cast up,”. Human knowledge is imperfect and concerns temporal and phenomenal.

One might argue comparably that humans have no innate knowledge of morality or the differences between good and evil. Strong opinions exist on each side.

Some might wonder if humans have an innate sense of the passage of time or if it is simply biological challenges that press that are the real time experience. Then scientist theorize that time be an apparent phenomenon of quantum entanglement and might not really exist. More options on shifting sand.

https://www.thebrighterside.news/discoveries/time-may-be-an-illusion-new-study-finds/

It is more reasonable to start with monism rather than pluralism in the beginning. Algorithms and other parts are pluralistic. If the Universe was initially an existing slum- say, a huge war had left it in bits and pieces, something great might have been built from misc algorithms that whirred and hummed efficiently. The Triune God notably avoids the Monism/Pluralism duality through being one yet three simultaneously. Information of everything possible is reducible to less than zero dimensions at singularity for omniscience in-itself.

Mind, Matter and Analytic Philosophy

Is there an abstract world such as exists in imagination or a Platonic realm of ideas? Alternatively a tie coat.might exist in language to cover the world with solar voltaic paint metaphorically speaking. The point where mind and conscious, abstract thought merges with matter would be insensible and non- sentient. Sentience in the border would discontinue. Quine”s analytic approach is still valid regarding epistemology paradigmata. People do perceive matter in their own way. Matter fir-itself is probably completely dark.

There are some vicious attacks on Analytic Philosophy. I found a reference to APS- the immune syndrome attacks healthy cells. Ad hominems do that; lysergic attacks. Analytic philosophy isn’t psychotic. Ayer should have thought of that as a defense for empiricism. Quine’s reasoning seemed correct on language to me. Ontological relativity and other essays was a great collection. Maybe from the Tarner lectures. The meanings of words have nominal values with use and can evolve or disappear rather than last forever in a realist sense. Kripke had a neo-realist opinion that was reasonable too. Neither were the least psychotic.

Bringing naturalist epistemology into the discussion was helpful. Apparently Quine is credited with inventing the term  I need to read more on that subject and discovered much material. I tend to view the human experience as one of existing within quantum fields providing sensations for sentients composed in them. https://iep.utm.edu/nat-epis/

Quine’s point of view is based on logical analysis of language and ideas about it including the concepts made with language about ‘reality’. I agree that after invalidating empiricism it just left matters there instead of providing a replacement model. Ideas arise in mind rather than in sensations though sensations may  prompt ideas

Charles Sanders Pierce invented pragmatism. C.S. (pronounced purse). He had an interesting life and was fired from a teaching job at Johns Hopkins for marrying a Romani.


There is use of Pierce's scientific method criteria in contemporary applications in programming and tech

 People have commented it is similar to the OODA loop.


On mind Pierce considered ideas to form in a trielectical evolution psychologically.

Perhaps he was influenced by Hegel- that isn't likely though.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#:~:text=So%2C%20as%20it%20turns%20out,greatest%20lower%20bound)%20in%20C.

He ended up living "in near penury". I wonder if the Quine-Putnam 'indispensability argument to categorize math as realist is an example of pragmatic reasoning.

The Drowning Man and World War III

Nietzsche got the idea of eternal recurrence one night walking along the shoreline of Lake Lucerne. He kicked a stone on the beach, a stumbling block as it were, and had his great notion that he had lived the scene and life infinite times before just so. He probably had advanced syphilis at the time and might not have tried to save a drowning man being a superman in his own mind maybe, for being aware of the recurrence and transcendence of morality becoming beyond good and evil. Perhaps a student of 19th century German romanticism was a skeptic until contacted by an operator claiming to be from the future.

https://youtu.be/_h-H3t6nWyw?feature=shared

The operator gave him instructions then returned to his own space-time of origin. The rich person- possibly a woman, man or eunuch sitting on the beach in a splendid chair perhaps brought by porters, may have provided extra motivation for the naked guy to rescue the drowning man perhaps knowing that ten years in the future the drowning man would invent a time travel loophole to the equations of general relativity and send an operative back to 2024 to stop Joe Biden from starting World War III before he left office . The nuclear war created nuclear winter and 5 billion people died.

The frantic unclothed dude swimming in the dark cold water  grasped the drowning man in a headlock from behind and begins side stroking to the distant beach as his strength wanes. The rich guy, seeing that the rescue might not work dives into the fray fully clothed ruining his custom made jimmy chu shoes yet soon grabs both wet rats and pulls them ashore. His 7 foot height let him go 100 feet out yet be able to touch the bottom of the lake that helped ease the intervention.

Ashore he took his basketball and walked away into the starry night leaving the two soaked and gasping men in the sand.



Phenomenalism and Realism

Quine said he was a physicalist once when asked. Yet he’s also a realist concerning math. I believe people are entanglements in the Higgs fi...