Irony and Human Knowledge

The book of Genesis is arguably the most influential work in human history. It has influenced innumerable intellectuals and ordinary people. Yet ironically it has largely been misunderstood.

Especially interesting as an illustration of the double-edged nature of knowled regarding bomb making knowledge yesterday was a suicide bomber detonating him or herself (or indeterminate in the midst of sex confirmation evolution) at an Ariana Grande music concert in England killing more than 22 people. Knowledge is dangerous yet human life is dangerous, as is virtually all animal life. The three stooges with uncertainty on how to use or configure what-they-know.

Ferdinand Christian Baur was the founder of the high form of Biblical criticism at Tubingen and was influenced by 'Kierkegaard's dialectic' (ref. Wikipeda). Preaching or providing one's opinions about the state of worldly affairs and/or religious concerns is of the essence of irony.

And that too is why it is ironic that the largest paradigm for human existence at its traditional genesis is misunderstood. Adam and Eve were cast out of an atemporal existence not subject to space-time entropy and then were cast out into-the-world. Apparently they existed apart from the space-time Universe. Only after the fall did they receive the containment corrections for original sin. Human mortality and the paradigms for animal existence in the Universe were where Adam and Eve as souls were sent. That is, the physical existence of being human and like animals requirement to metabolize is the context for original sin.

Thus what's wisdom to man is foolishness to God, and one may only be saved through faith. One may knock oneself out with the greatest quest for knowledge and still end up as simply human and isolated from God in the material, human condition. 

The state of the Christian church in Europe since the second century has always been an important part of civil society by increasing degrees. The church-state relation concerned empire and counter-empire, reform and counter-reform. Human development occurred within the church in Europe inseparably until recent times, as well as in parallel cultural establishment. Human knowledge and the body of thought that comprise the history of ideas continues as a fire growing from its earliest days possibly in the Balkans circa 7.2 million years b.p. where mankind may have branched off from big apes according to recent scientific reports.

Church establishments like all cultural establishments and organizations tend to seek to expand. Perpetual revolution or creative destruction seems to be the nature of governing and organizational establishment even if within a conservative evolutionary rather than a violent paradigm. Christians probably need to use irony such as Kierkegaard employed to be able to take the gospel of Jesus Christ for itself rather than as given by an established organizational hierarchy with goals virtually indistinguishable from those of any acme organization to sustain the standard of living of its members.

The human quest for knowledge will continue until the age of the gentiles is fulfilled.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/god-cosmology-and-nothingness-theory-and-theology-in-a-scientific-era/ebook/product-22947558.html (free download)

Socrates and Subjective Truth

As a practical matter; stones don't think and people do. Digital recorders and parrots can repeat what they hear without belief or knowing what the meaning is. People just existing as part of a social order may live without thinking much about why anything is the way it is either. Socrates wanted to stimulate people to think critically and to develop their own reasoning capacity, although it may have been because he was secretly symathetic to Sparta's form of government (much more like that of 'The Republic' than Athenian democracy. Free thought requires that one determine what is true or not for-oneself rather than blindly repeating what one has been told.

Subjectivity and truth are different concepts. Socrates sometimes found truth and subjectivity coinciding, sometimes not, perhaps. Modern philosophy makes retro-interpretation of Attic paradigms a little challenging. There wasn't a philosophical field of epistemology Socrates could use to compare and contrast his ideas..

Truth theory for example. There are many of them. I prefer the correspondence theory or the truth assignments practices of propositional logic. One may make up a truth table and assign various conditions such as true or false,being or nothingness to the sentence and clusters of sentences of it and test variables or constants of it for consistency etc.

I believe Socrates great contribution is that of being the founder of analytic philosophy along with Plato and Aristotle. Particulars and Universals in word and ideas, forms and a realm of forms; that was genius. Kierkeguaard's role in developing irony and subjectivity occurred in a different poltical-historical context yet is comparable favorably to that of Socrates-even more so as the political dangers were probably greater internationally. Kierkeguaard can't be credited with founding the practice of subjectivity for individuals yet he was modern popularizer of it. His writing such as Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death are I think, his great contributions.

On Socrates other notable features concerning subjectivity and individualism of which he is extolled so commonly ( I recall encountering that even in elementary school world history), I believe people don't regard his historical paradigm well enough. He was a combat veteran of the Peloponnese an war and might have had a little PTSD. He seemed more than a little stoic in the modern sense. The Republic described by Plato really resembles a philosophers ideal dream of Sparta transformed.

Supposedly Socrates twice saved the life of the brilliant Alcibiades during the wars. Before Alcibiades defected to the Spartan League he chiseled the noses off some of the Gods of Athens. The war ended only in 404 B.C. and Socrates was executed in 399. His efforts to corrupt youth exteded to seeking support for the restoration of oligarchy apparently. That is what is called sedition now days.

Socrates must have been a little torn by the comparative political systems of Sparta and Athens. His inner voice or Daimon might have been a deeper balancing thought speaking to him for clarification. Although Socrates evidently did believe in God, it was an unknown and transcendent God for him that Christians might identify with as being omnipresent.

A substantial part of the subjective-objective truth paradigm has been resolved by analytic philosophy (e.g. Kant (The Critique of Pure Reason) Strawson (Individuals), Quine (The Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Word and Object). Yet for Socrates and later Kierkegaard there was so much virgin philosophical turf to plow that it was more than a lifetime task developing the terms and paradigms for individuals and society. Sartre wrote that his Existentialism was a continuation of the French rationalism of Descartes insofar as it examined thought from first principles of cogitation and self-reflection. Yet the idea of criticizing social constructions and ossified praxis (Sartre's term) formally was virtually non-existent in Socrates day outside the writings of Hebrew prophets (i.e. Isaiah).

It is useful to have social roles that people can easily fit in. Socrates wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living though, and if one is to find Christ in a non-Christian culture that is certainly true. It is also true if one has an undesirable social role and wants to get out of the gutter as it were being exploited by Jobba the Hut. In the U.S.A. 11 million jobs in retail are expected to disappear to robots the next 10 years. The unemployed keep finding it harder to find anything meaningful to do for earning a living. Stability can be good, yet in ancient Athens the contrast between unchanging social forms and radical change that would be brought by Alexander, Macedonians and subsequent hordes of new pagan gods was like a calm between the past and the perfect storm and giant waves of the future.

Von Trump Plan to Cut Food Stamps a Bit Too Much

Finding work for the elderly is difficult. The socialization of youth and cultural insensitivity may preclude an amicable work environment. If reasonable work is actually available few would not prefer to have the cash rather than to subsist on food stamps. And children receiving food stamps don't have opportunities to work in sweatshops 20 hours a day anymore due to oppressive legislation passed in the 1920s.

Even so children and the elderly take half of the food stamp budget and President Trump wants to cut that 25%. Everyone needs to tighten their belts while the 1% get tax cuts and 62% of the national income of course, yet I feel the food stamp program should be reduced no more than 15%.

https://qz.com/988864/federal-budget-2017-trumps-budget-would-cut-200-billion-from-food-stamps/

I worked for a while with a federal jobs program for the elderly 20 hours a week being unable to find any other work. Actually I learned a lot in those 20 hour position working for a while in the State of Alaska archives and in a start up non-profit in Texas. There are interesting things to learn that don't pay anything of course. I finished an M.T.S. program except my thesis wasn't conservative enough for a particular theological seminary so I just let that go. The history and theology was fascinating though. I have found a good course intro in logic via Stanford and a course in Denmark of Soren Kierkegaard for free at http://www.coursera.org

 My A.A. and B.A. degrees being useless, and an automobile required for work as a painter-if anyone would even hire a 62 year old to climb 24 foot extension ladders and trim buildings. I believe many people have worse time finding employment as they get to be over 55. Millions just struggle on without substantial work as best they can until retirement age because the U.S. Government never had the creative capacity to provide real incentives and tax policies that would prioritize hiring those out of work longest, the most poor and the elderly.

Government doesn't take realistic jobs for citizens seriously enough at all.

Human-Big Ape Divergence May be of Macedonian Orignin

An interesting new scientific report indicates that the earliest divergence of the future human line from that of big apes may have happened in the Balkans-my guess is Macedonia, about 7.2million years ago.

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-scientists-million-year-old-pre-human-balkans.html

The Mediterrainian Sea was dried up at the time and the dry seafloor about as hot as hell. Wise apes moved away a little to friendlier climes on a savannah in Southern Europe. A bit higher altitude would have been good for big apes seeking to beat the heat.

Not until much later when national boundaries were formed did the human line really find itself able to focus on good technological progress such as powering 3000 fork lifts at Wal-Mart distribution centers with fuel cells and to consider how God could have issued a Universe from a zero-dimensional brane or string infinitely small.

Enes Kanter Should Seek Costa Rican Citizenship

N.B.A. star Enes Kanter should be given political refugee status from Turkey for a couple of years obviously, yet he should seek Costa Rican rather than the U.S. citizenship that he wants. U.S. citizenship isn't all that its cracked up to be anymore.

https://www.si.com/nba/2017/05/22/enes-kanter-press-conference-american-citizen-hopes

Right off one should suspect the reason of any guy that wants to take citizenship in a country with homosexual marriage and a public debt of just 81 billion dollars short of 20 trillion. Costa Rica is a nice country with a few good volcanos and wonderful beaches without a lot of military issues abroad.

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Turkey is a nation that few would want to be live in; heck, they even have N.P.R. reporters there, yech! So its easy to understand that being persecuted by his homeland the N.B.A. players views the U.S.A. as better. Actually the U.S.A. has been in decline since Ronald Reagan left office.

Democrats are the nag half to Republican husbandry. SInce Teddy Kennedy's brain was warped by a tumor the party lost any sort of reposnsibility and just b'itches out of office and piles up debt when in. Republican of the 1% don't actually care if the 1% gets all the national income though they can't say so. It was the responsibility of the 'Crats to keep the budget in order for the people, and as mentioned above, they lost their minds about 1992. The nation's federal budget brain is on permanent vacation.

When his playing days are over Mr. Kanter would have no problems being a U.S. resident if he choose since he is likely to be a millionaire if he doesn't bling it all away in Las Vegas. Yet getting a good fishing boat and taking internet college courses from a remote mountain hut my be kind of a fun lifestyle. He might even get into Costa Rican politics.

Christian Evolution

Has Christianity evolved to present its message suitably to the language of the day?

I would point out that many of those new Bibles are written in the vernacular for ordinary people. That was even the case with Gutenberg, and the Good News Bible, KJV etc. The protestant reformation was an upgrade to suit believers of the day. Evolution can have many varieties of meaning not all of which are bad or that include atheism, falsehood, corruption of true interpretations of scripture etc. Even the Catholic church has mostly stopped reading mass in Latin for the congregation. Not all religions in history have changed though. Even so one recalls Paul's ability to adapt delivery of the gospel to various audiences; and the way the gospel books themselves were written differently in tone for different readers by different authors. Though math has evolved the Pythagorean theorem remains true as does Euclidean geometry.

Evolving the delivery of a message does not require corruption of the meaning of the message itself.

Kierkegaard, Socrates and Aporia

Quite a bit to think about regarding aporia. The idea of losing one’s self (going a bit beyond just emptying ones’ thought of preconceived ideas) is important in the Bible (those who save their lives shall lose them and vice versa) and in other fields such as Buddhism and with the idea of emptying the mind entirely. Yet the aporia of Socrates for me runs into a different sort of problem; that of criticism of an existing order, or external social structure, that is a common human experience for several reasons.

Socrates was gifted at criticism, yet he did so for a purpose. I must say that Russell’s criticism of Socrates during W.W. II where he said he was a fascist has influenced my ideas about Socrates such that instead of simply regarding him as being a revered and wise philosopher he was a supporter of the restoration of oligarchy and an opponent of democracy and the common man as a political peer.

The Republic of Socrates is the cause for Russell’s criticism I suppose. The two philosopher guardians of the state are virtually dictators, though benevolent ones. IMO Socrates derived the Republic as an abstract of Sparta, and Sparta was an enemy of the Athenian democracy. Socrates was charged with corrupting youth-a true charge insofar as he was trying to persuade them to support the restoration of oligarchy. So he was an actual enemy of the state in a political sense.

I won’t go too far here into the rights and wrongs of Socrates in regard to his political position. Yet his daemon in more interesting; that idea of innate ideas being brought out. Logical ideas such as those of Pythagoras could be elicited from anyone with help, as logic may be an innate paradigm for thought. It turns out that the realm of forms may be deeply consistent with quantum cosmology and standard forms for mass and energy. Maybe Plotinus' paradigm of The One allowing The Intelligence to issue the forms from a zero dimensional membrane (modernized) is entailed in the Republic.

Returning to aporia as a critical method and approach to making new idea happen. I believe that invention and redesign of anything can occur after taking things apart in the abstract and reassembling them with additional elements.

I look forward to the introduction of Hegelian elements in the course since Kierkegaard didn’t seem to like Hegel’s work at all. Aporia however as a negation of existing beliefs will forever be popular; even Marxists use it interacting with capitalist ideas. Negative criticism can be applied to anything as an analytical tool. I think what one does with it, is subjective, although one may be drawn by a calling of some form, in a way in following the will of the good.

Anchorage Spends Oodles of Money Moving Snow; Good Sense or Not?

In a way, spending a lot of money to move snow in Alaska is the sort of thing people with too much disposable income might go about. The sidewalk for pedestrians along the Old Seward hwy is often recovered by snow plows just after it's cleared-not a lot of co-ordination. Fuel cell tech has advanced quite a bit (ref. Ballard.com) and the state should have a fuel cell and hydrogen production depart. to deploy and apply new tech to solve old issues such as melting snow where money goes down the drain. Rural villages could use fuel cell products too.

http://www.fuelcellstore.com/ http://www.ahasvc.org/page13.html https://www.norwall.com/products/Generac-Commercial-150kW-(Alum)-NG-240V-Single-Phase.html?cid=google_feed&dfw_tracker=6374-QT15068ANAC&gclid=CLL_zKfV_9MCFcKOfgodCTwCdA 

When the money is gone, at least new hardware should remain. Snow can be made into hydrogen for fuel cell power as may propane.

In comparison to 100% loss of investment removing moving snow with present methods and technology it should be simple to find a reason to innovate new adaptive means. One could charge drivers a user tax for driving winter highways for example. And there is something to say about preferring snow machines over wheeled vehicles. Even hybrid snow machines. 

R.O.I. data...

http://ballard.com/files/PDF/Backup_Power/BUP_EmrgncyEcon_EGen_091712-01.pdf

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/01/f28/fcto_2015_business_case_fuel_cells.pdf

http://www.fces.de/assets/EuroHeat+Power_Vol.11.pdf

Fuel cells can run on water-hydrogen or propane of which Alaska has plenty of each. City buses could be powered by fuel cells too synergizing saving for transit fuel, and snow plows could be fuel cell powered as are some trucks.

Someone always has to pay for product though. The city and state should buy more efficient combo-plates designed by better energy-chefs.

The Government-financed study lists 50 corporations using fuel cells and describes it as of 2015 as a 2 billion dollar business. Governing Luddites have always resisted progress. Negative engineering seeking ways to make things not progress is characteristic of a can't do national spirit helped along by the Clinton-Obama people.

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/01/f28/fcto_2015_business_case_fuel_cells.pdf

Defending the economic energy establishment is a conservative bet on what people want. One can only go so far in giving away good ideas. The future ain't like it used to be. Alaska can be profligate with oil revenues , pollution causing, stagnate and on a par with second world nations in the energy sector, and i won't lose sleep over it.

Doomsday Seedvault and Genomic Samples SHould Be Off-Whirld 2

The flooding of the global seed-vault at the most northerly of Earth city locales (at Svalbard) due to global warming accentuates the real value in locating a second facility on the moon or Mars where it would stand a real chance for survival. It should additionally have genome samples from all of the world's organisms so that they might be duplicated too because of other anthropocene era insults to life bringing the present mass extinction.

Science and space programs could use a targeted facility on the moon and MArs for storage and for research. The life vaults could also serve as material for adapting Earth life to lifeless worlds and moons around the solar system

The melting of permafrost was well-known decades ago and lots of other problems may arise. People tend to underestimate the power of their own advancing destruction of the ecosphere and changes of climate factors.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/19/15664298/svalbard-global-seed-vault-norway-doomsday-climate-change

A Note on Truth Assignments

Truth assignments are a tool from propositional logic wherein certain constant values are stipulated to be true. Theologians tend to differ in truth assignments to literal values of word-concepts from the Bible, as do critics. Relational operators between literals would I think be regarded as constants in meaning for-themselves. The possible degrees of relational operators tend to be viewed in terms of n-dimensional spacetime. Thus conventional logical operators in sentences representing various structures could be made inaccurate in assigning truth value, even theoretically, to quantum mechanical topologies.

In a Stanford Intro to logic course (free) there is a sentence I will quote; "Note that, for a propositional language with n proposition constants, there are n columns in the truth table and 2ⁿ rows."

I like the idea of Cantor's trans-finite sets criterion of some infinite sets being greater than others (e.g. the set of all natural numbers is greater than the set of all odd natural numbers) being applied to truth tables. Spatio-temporal thinking, descriptions of truth assignments for theoretically real quantum structures of n-dimension quanta and fields.

associative principle in group theory:     For all a, b and c in G, (a • b) • c = a • (b • c).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)

Symmetry of a dihedral group: r1 (rotation by 90° right) att.Timothy Rias-publlic domain


So one gets to mathematical formulae used for topology, string and brane theory, indexes and M-Theory wherein group structures can be cloned representationally or models

"a topological invariant g associates to each surface a number" http://www.bourbaphy.fr/dijkgraaf.pdf

                                                       g: {surfaces} Z  >= 0                                 

Index(D) = dim Ker(D) − dim Ker(D*) = Tr(e^−tD*D) − Tr(e^−tDD*)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atiyah%E2%80%93Singer_index_theorem

{particles}⊂ {branes}⊂ {strings}