The election of Hamas to place a terrorist organization in charge of the government is not an entirely novel experience. It has happened before that terrorists have risen to power to rule the people. After this letter I will repost a related letter on the Shia-Sunni phenomena from last year. There are a few interesting points of politics occurring presently that involve some American interest. It is easier to understand the player positions when the leaders have simple names that are cliché’s or representative. With Yassir gone its not so simple with individual Palestinians of course, yet Hamas or violence makes their plan self-evident. CEO Eiger of Disney/ABC somehow enticed Apple CEO Steve Jobs to become Disney’s majority shareholder, and so some must wonder if he will continue to support the Disney Fag Days at the Florida themes Park? The state of Israel has tougher decisions.
Games theoreticians will have a field week with options Israel has for addressing the Palestinian problem in the control of a terrorist entity dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The Gaza Strip is right sidled up to the Southern border of Israel, and recently they were given control of the Egyptian border crossings. One should have foreseen the rise of Hamas to power years ago of course, as the Palestinians gaining a solid physical base close in would make the effort of flooding the area with as many weapons of mass destruction as possible.
The United States is concerned about the Iranian attempt to develop the bomb and become a member of the global assured destruction policy (Gad) or the need to not be able to resort to gun plane diplomacy when needed. Yet is the administration taking the Iraq political situation into account, and attempting to contemplate how Iraqi Shia would react to destruction of Iranian nukular plants by American or Israeli military forces?
Scientific American’s present issue has a fine article on building two styles of nukular weapons that will at least give amateur bomb builders a good place to start. Scientific American pointed out that enriched uranium could be used to make a nuke with less than 100 grams that are available for theft or trade at more than 135 nukular facilities worldwide. Of the two types of bombs modeled on those of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Nagasaki bomb requires the least amount of enriched uranium to build, while the Hiroshima bomb is probably simpler to build yet requires a bit more fissile material.
From watching American public television most people know that a Nagasaki type bomb needs an implosion created by packing the uranium into a perfectly symmetrical, rather thick layer of plastic explosive such as semtex and with a serial wired instantaneous blasting/cap-det cord wrap. The Nagasaki bomb seems a bit tougher to build…with one piece of uranium packed and propelled to strike a larger clump of uranium making a blast. Though some wish to deny the existence of Suitcase nukes, the same public television show on nukes has plutonium in a cylinder nuke that was no larger than 18 inches by 7 inches…it was more of an attaché nuke. Yet that sort of device would have been very restricted, and given through tech transfer only to the Communist Chinese perhaps.
If the Bush administration considers blasting Iran’s nukular facilities, it may disrupt a primary source of nukular material production, yet it could also aggravate the situation and create sympathy amidst radical Muslims that hate being ruled by computer instructions from outsourced plants in China and India contracted by third parties. Some wealthy terror symp could purchase via political or even criminal bribery some enriched uranium and pass it on to undesirable elements, perhaps event violent Hamasinians, to wreak havoc upon Israel or Washington DC.
Israel’s many options with the takeover of the Palestinian authority by a terrorist organization that is in de facto default on all of the prior peace agreements, include retaking all of the land given to the Palestinians under the obsolete agreements and refilling the areas with safe settlers that are trustworthy. Yet that could stimulate an intafadah and new rounds of hate that even anti-hate crimes laws won’t stop, so Israel instead will want to try to entangle the Palestinians in prosperity that brings moderation as comfort creeps over the lifestyle of fatalist self-detonation with a Kamikaze headband when gloriously possible. Israel may also seek to target the Hamas leadership if it meets in their ‘Congress’, or perhaps Mr. Abramov could be released if in stir to lobby the worst of Hamas with free junkets abroad, good food and whatever else worked so well in the District of Columbia.
The Hamas if in charge of a neo-sovereign state might funnel terror payments here and there, and without oil ‘food’ will not work to train them off the low-cost semtex method of negotiating. The election of Hamas may be a consequence of Bush pressure upon Syria and Iran, and was a good tactical move, if one prefers stupidity, or perhaps necessary violence and force as the only realistic method of doing things in the middle east, to peace, prosperity and higher education such as one would imagine might rationally develop.
One must consider the pressures of decay that beset the west in the form of amoral abortions and bills to compel homosexual culture upon the masses, perhaps through devilwood brainwashing in movies, computer animation propaganda, or even corporatist favoritism of amorality as a way to have more spineless masses of consumers to rule. If only the Muslims were not possibly damned infidels on their way to eternal hell because they don’t believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, they might not be such a bad bunch of people if they had perfect democracy with liberal rights and justice for all, did not repress people in crude forms of decadent tribalism mushroomed into ‘modern’ states and so forth. Neither Iran north the west has achieved moral and political perfection or anything remotely close, and it is rather disgusting to the idealists amongst us.
It seems unreasonable that Iran should want a nuclear force de frappe to prevent gun plane diplomacy by the adventurer fossil fuel class in government perhaps. Yet America’s role with Iran should be very briefly reconsidered here. It must be remembered that it was all the Brits fault that Iran’s democratic ruler was deposed for the Shah, some have said, because he wouldn’t give the Brits all the oil profit they wanted. The United States of course blundered badly in supporting the Shah with his evil torturers in a secret police force that was internationally terrorist and sadistic. The United States supported an imperial government that resembled that of Ivan the Terrible perhaps with the peacock throne perhaps like that of one of the tsars I saw in Helsinki long ago with talons on the handgrips. A government that supports torture of the people isn’t worthy of existence obviously.
Because the United States was the Shah’s main supplier of advisers and weapons, the revolutionaries considered the U.S. Government it’s main foreign oppressor and they were right. It would be a good thing if the U.S. Government could admit it was wrong for a change instead of pretending that it always makes the right decisions. The choice to support the Shah was a tactical one that developed as a result of regional and global strategy to gain allies to fight the global communist line-up of states. The decision in that context might have been correct, but in the post-cold war context it was entirely wrong. Starting with an apology to Iran for support of the Shah’s government would be a good place to start.
The United States of course hasn’t got a pragmatist like Ronald Reagan around to flank pride and stupidity with secret Iran-Contra or hostages for weapons deals of course, and Mr. Reagan also new that Keynesian economics of stimulating deficit spending has its limit too, unlike the present President that ‘only’ borrowed 350 billion for a federal deficit last years and how much more to pay the interest on the federal debt (maybe 400 billion?). The hostage crisis was the most famous event that had less than four or five casualties in recent American history, and its possible that Iran’s revolutionaries did support terrorism against an America at ‘cold war’ with them...but the taking of the hostages was a logical development sort of like the French storming the bastille perhaps during their revolution without the Jacobean head-chopping of course. And that raises the question of interest to me…why is it the United States fears Iran, or hates them, or whatever? It would be good if someone would explain it publicly because I really don’t understand that point.
Is the administration in possession of substantive secret information that Iranians are ‘out to get them Americans’? Is the meaning phonetically ‘I Ran’ like a red flag for the bull of foreign policy so far as to overcome right reason? If that is the case when they bomb Tehran or wherever if needed maybe they should drop some energy bars made and Alaska water with vitamins and flavor too.
*****************
In the Middle East tribal affilliation had been more important than any other perhaps until terrorist affiliations or plastic explosive empowered 'gangs' became social organizations with an inertia for-themselves. Democracy had virtually no historical reality in the region before the formation of the State of Israel. The Ottoman Empire ruled more than 400 years followed by an occupying British Imperial power of a beneficial nature for a time. Simply creating a democratic concept in the political thought of the majority of Iraqis which are the Shia and Kurds will be a remarkable improvement for-itself.
The Soviets of course tried to support various communist party start-ups in Iraq unsuccessfully, and Saddam Hussein liquidated its entire membership long ago. Iraqi political structures have tended to follow authoritarian lines with a basic impossibility of implementing democratic dissent. Saddam Hussein's rise to power grew with support from Syrian Baathists and his own Tigriti familial association that supported an infrastructure of ethnic/religious relatives. The Sunni influence for Saddam Hussein was minimalized and subordinated to his Baathy socialism made by Afflack in Syria early in the 20th century. It's pan-Arabist philosophy of secularism made it easy for Hussein to purge everyone outside of his own party. in that regard he was rather like Adolph Hitler and the Nazi S.A. of which Arnold Swarzenagger's father was a member that broke heads and liquidated dissidents in order to consolidate Adolph's rise to power. Iraqi's in a post constitution rejection by Sunni voters era will still have a majority in power yet one without as much legal protections for the Sunni minority which chooses to allow al Qa'eda to defend its own interests synergizing with the Saddam Hussein pre-war trained suicide bombers and Syrian terrorists that are perhaps in surplus after the partial expulsion of Syrians from Lebanon by the United States this year. Sunni terrorists in al Qa'eda and Sunni suicide bombers working for a post-defeat ghost infrastructure of Saddam Hussein's Baathy Party based on tribal and affiliated sympathetic tribal power in Faluja and the Tikrit area essentially have antipathetic political goals though each likes to blow opfor members to smithereens.
Even so, with an actual government in Iraq able to increase its military and political authority, and to offer benefits, privileges and real power to those that participate, the inducements for Iraq's Sunnis to become members of the Iraqi government will be substantive enough to draw more and more to join it and perhaps eventually agitate for more sovereignty and authority for Sunni federal rights they will lose by voting down the Iraq constitution October 15, 2005. The issue has been of changing allegiances has been mathematically demonstrated in the well-known prisoner's dilemma and diner's dilemma.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/playground/pd.html
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PrisonersDilemma.html
http://www.cli.org/DRJ/unscrup.html
11:48am Oct 7, 2005 EDT (#1705 of 1706)
Shia and Sunni in sectarian liturgical and doctrinal practices certainly will need to develop more tolerance. Yet democracy is essentially about societies letting individuals coexist within metastructural paradigms in law that permit a state to function and to guard equal rights in the law while permitting individuals and organizations to pursue their own enlightened self-interests fulfillment. It is the remedy for a fractious society. Saddam Hussein believed the right way was in blood, death and terror...some of which continues in Iraq after his arrest by co believers in that method of rule through terror.http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/religion-shia1.htm
...quote follows...
"Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Persian and the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, had taught and preached in Najaf after being exiled from Iran by the Shah in 1964. Khomeini's presence in Iraq had an impact on the Shia political movement in Iraq, but his influence in that movement was overshadowed by that of Sayyid Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, a native Iraqi and an Arab. The Iraqi Shia later became supporters of the al-Dawa and al-Mujahidin parties. The al-Dawa party was guided by the philosophy of Iraqi Shia Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a leading figure in the Shia Islamist movement until his execution by the government in 1980.'
Repression of the Shia of Iraq is at the core of authoritarian history in Iraq. Because the Ottoman rulers were Sunni they feared the vast numbers of Shia in Iraq and placed Sunni rulers in power. The article cited above mentions that the policy of Sunni rulers continued during the British era and onto the Baathy era. The British also were concerned about a Shia majority and their potential to ally themselves with Iran. It appears that the U.S.A. hasn't made that same mistake so far. The article also mentions that many Arabs converted to Shiism, and that Iraqi Arabs tended to place their Arab identity before that of their loyalty to Shiism, which of course follows the Middle Eastern trait of tribalism with tribal laws. The closure related one is the more violence one is justified in using, or obligated to use against one's that harm one's relation(s). Modern technological instruments like cell phones tend to overcome much of the more traditional hierarchical power structures that supported tight affiliations in tribal political elements. Economic structures of the industrial and post-industrial era with their international basis also tend to undermine the insularity required for pure tribalism and economy historical based on animal herding and farming. I think the prospects for international trade and commerce can be good in Iraq, especially if Iranian Shia can find a way to develop a populism in politics that permits free trade yet denies authoritarianism in whatever form from traditional dictatorship to neo-corporatism and so forth.http://www.dawn.com/2005/09/19/int1.htm
'Shia Want Tough Sunni Stand Against Zarqawi' Iraq’s 4.5 million Kurds are mostly Sunni but are not Arab...and they rejected the idea that Iraq should be an Islamic state.
http://www.dawn.com/2005/08/07/int7.htm
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html
1/25/06
Theory Explaining Broadcaster's Doom, Decay and Treason
Broadcast station mass communication power is a prop up corporatist syndicalist sniper’s coward tower of oppression occasionally targeting usefully repressible individuals and usually rave brainwashing programming the masses behind a screen of corporate invulnerability and trans-border unaccountability advancing as a sedulous crud of termites and winged fire ants infiltrating foreign conquest of the nation within its global walls.
Mass broadcast corruption of individual privacy, individual development and national political determination through pervasive psychological conditioning, pervasive corruption, volatile instantaneous political conditioning reinforced ad infinitum has coincided with a dramatic downward slope of the nation’s comparative economic and educational standing in the world. Inventiveness has also tended to become soaked up by the corporatist establishment because of the erosion of individual liberties and security. False conservativism and liberalism ensnare the public in ‘civil rights’ efforts that remove the liberty to associate with people of similar behavioral choices. Conservatives outsources the nation’s future to global infrastructure development preferentials, and Democrats plead for homosexual civil rights as a special class. They may already be included within the protection of the American Disabilities Act if homosexuality is a physical malady any way, and if it is correctable then it is plainly a behavioral choice that other citizens should not be forced to become conditioned by.
The broadcast media intensified its drive into serialized propaganda and terrorism in the 1990’s as a jimbo airbag of treason floating over the electorate reflecting globalist values of amoral conduct anarchizing personal political effectiveness to force national self-interest beneath the blinging plates of corporatist globalism. The General Accounting Office noted that in 2004 the United States had a federal future budget commitment including liabilities of 43 trillion dollars. Average 24 to 30 year olds have more than 5000 dollars of credit card debt in the U.S.A. The happy idiots at Nazicar are trying to get more foreign cars on the track since America doesn’t sell a majority of even its own auto’s to the car-buying public in the U.S.A., and the nation’s inflexibly ossified approach to economic management has constructed inadvertently a doom, decay even eventual outsourcing of the capitol south of the border or east to Beijing if the debt’s become due and war ensues to erase it all and start afresh with a new national name.
The corporatist treason corollary is a principle way of subverting American nationalism that perhaps was accelerated by anarchist opportunists returning from maladjustment in the Vietnam Conflict. Corporations are the global middle term that ca hook up foreign governments with the U.S. government to coordinate policies not in service of the national interest. While capitalist can do best internationally taking advantage of legal international transcendence, the nation’s interests is not served by prioritizing global development over national development except within maintaining peaceful relations through treaties and in maintaining the health of the common environment of the planet. Of course a humanitarian concern for relieving foreign peoples from suffering should concern a just democracy, yet development of Chinese and India economies to dwarf that of the United States can not be demonstrated to serve interests of national security or the economic war to retain independence.
The United States should not be isolationist or inhibit global corporate activity, yet the government should serve national rather than global interests, and like M.I.T.I. in Japan it should seek to support industries that create relief from trade deficits or reliance upon foreign energy sources and technology. Educational competition requires that immigration be reduced from illegal sources so as to retain the advantage of a one language culture while offering foreign language instruction. The federal government should seek to support zoning changes that retain biota within developments, that lower the cost of homes that eliminate Co2 emission from reducible sources, that encourage personal savings and invention that allows individuals to have a safe, low-cost way to apply for U.S. Patents via computers etc.
Mass broadcast corruption of individual privacy, individual development and national political determination through pervasive psychological conditioning, pervasive corruption, volatile instantaneous political conditioning reinforced ad infinitum has coincided with a dramatic downward slope of the nation’s comparative economic and educational standing in the world. Inventiveness has also tended to become soaked up by the corporatist establishment because of the erosion of individual liberties and security. False conservativism and liberalism ensnare the public in ‘civil rights’ efforts that remove the liberty to associate with people of similar behavioral choices. Conservatives outsources the nation’s future to global infrastructure development preferentials, and Democrats plead for homosexual civil rights as a special class. They may already be included within the protection of the American Disabilities Act if homosexuality is a physical malady any way, and if it is correctable then it is plainly a behavioral choice that other citizens should not be forced to become conditioned by.
The broadcast media intensified its drive into serialized propaganda and terrorism in the 1990’s as a jimbo airbag of treason floating over the electorate reflecting globalist values of amoral conduct anarchizing personal political effectiveness to force national self-interest beneath the blinging plates of corporatist globalism. The General Accounting Office noted that in 2004 the United States had a federal future budget commitment including liabilities of 43 trillion dollars. Average 24 to 30 year olds have more than 5000 dollars of credit card debt in the U.S.A. The happy idiots at Nazicar are trying to get more foreign cars on the track since America doesn’t sell a majority of even its own auto’s to the car-buying public in the U.S.A., and the nation’s inflexibly ossified approach to economic management has constructed inadvertently a doom, decay even eventual outsourcing of the capitol south of the border or east to Beijing if the debt’s become due and war ensues to erase it all and start afresh with a new national name.
The corporatist treason corollary is a principle way of subverting American nationalism that perhaps was accelerated by anarchist opportunists returning from maladjustment in the Vietnam Conflict. Corporations are the global middle term that ca hook up foreign governments with the U.S. government to coordinate policies not in service of the national interest. While capitalist can do best internationally taking advantage of legal international transcendence, the nation’s interests is not served by prioritizing global development over national development except within maintaining peaceful relations through treaties and in maintaining the health of the common environment of the planet. Of course a humanitarian concern for relieving foreign peoples from suffering should concern a just democracy, yet development of Chinese and India economies to dwarf that of the United States can not be demonstrated to serve interests of national security or the economic war to retain independence.
The United States should not be isolationist or inhibit global corporate activity, yet the government should serve national rather than global interests, and like M.I.T.I. in Japan it should seek to support industries that create relief from trade deficits or reliance upon foreign energy sources and technology. Educational competition requires that immigration be reduced from illegal sources so as to retain the advantage of a one language culture while offering foreign language instruction. The federal government should seek to support zoning changes that retain biota within developments, that lower the cost of homes that eliminate Co2 emission from reducible sources, that encourage personal savings and invention that allows individuals to have a safe, low-cost way to apply for U.S. Patents via computers etc.
1/17/06
Footprints, Cosmology and Biblical Association
Scriptural association of the Genesis cosmogony with contemporary scientific cosmology is an interesting and informative practice for amateur theophysicians’ research. One hopes that the investigations are within the will of God and teleologically correct and even blessed—a word from old English meaning sprinkled with blood…an etymology from the words bleed and bled, in this case from the atoning, redeeming blood of the Lamb of God Jesus Christ.
The physics of God in creating the Universe will always be beyond the ken or understanding of humanity at some point, because it is unlikely that God actually has a need for a specific finite physics other than his will. Humanity thirty four hundred years ago would not have been able to comprehend any sort of modern multi-dimensional quantum mechanics that are represented in present micro-cosmological theories, and they are at best temporal phenomenal descriptions of a limited presentation of a pluralistic character useful for-humanity. The physics of creation given for people of such simple understanding thousands of years ago would need then to be non-specific yet truthful and yet given in such a way as to be consistent with later technical scientific investigations.
A part of scriptural association is of course to understand the contextual and historical origin of the book of Genesis as best as possible. The earliest written fragments of Genesis believed to remain in direct continuity are posited to have been written by the J or Jehovist writer during the reign of Rehoboam approx. 975 B.C.
Jews (in old English ju was another word for ‘you’ which gives Martin Buber’s I/ Thou a different shade of meaning) gained literacy during Egyptian captivity yet had a non-scriptural worship tradition retroactive to the era of Abraham. Following the Exodus the worship tradition may have begun accumulating some written fragments, yet the acts of the Jews in the desert and in Israel until the time of Rehoboam were perhaps largely priestly, liturgical, rule based and with a limited number of discrete written historically valid ‘papers’.
The flood story would possibly have been within the knowledge of the Jewish tradition dating back at least to the time of Abraham in Ur before 2000 B.C. The tales of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian/Sumerian/Akkadian flood story with Utnaphishtim have been discovered in cuneiform tablet fragments as old as 2200 B.C. Avrm or Abraham would have known of the flood story and interpreted it within the geo-values of that era in which world probably referred to the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain. After Exodus the Jews probably encountered creation and flood stories from Syria as well as Babylon and other of course Egypt, and were of an informed position when correlating that with what information they received through direct inspiration of God.
The J writer may not have included the entire present book of Genesis originally, instead redactors from the P or Priestly writer to those in or following the Babylonian captivity in the 7th century B.C. may have put more of their historical written materials into the book of Genesis with the loss of their Temple worship at Jerusalem.
Scriptural association with contemporary physical cosmological concepts may benefit from better comprehension of ancient historical element that pertain to the composition of the book of Genesis such as cultural anthropology, history and religious and language developments. The representative language of Genesis should not perhaps be simply naively interpreted into today’s paradigms of science, yet if so the paradigm is remarkably similar to general parameters of evolution.
The prose poem ‘Footprints’ has as a subject paradigm analogy of the relational role Jesus Christ/God has to mankind. The redeeming presence of Jesus Christ is transcendent and ‘lifts’ one out of the mundane or extreme secular roles and relationships that rule, sometimes inflexibly or with oppression, the secular world of human social reality.
‘Footprints’ is about relationships and not about economics or politics. Some purely corrupt secularists tend to interpret everything within a Marxist materialist paradigm and misunderstand how any Christian could believe in a power of God to transcend worldly relationships. In old English ‘hebban’ meant ‘to lift’, obviously the writer of ‘Footprints’ analogized the power of Jesus Christ ‘to lift’ the troubled soul on the beach walking with God out of the mundane and practico-inert through the relationship of faith or even epiphany. ‘Hebban’ may be a cognate of a world for ‘heaven’ incidentally, yet for the cosmologically naïve or unsophisticated people of ancient Israel to lift ‘up’ would have been as good a concept for heaven’s location as anyplace. That is heaven is a place away from the gravitationally bound, temporal world of oppression, pain and death, regardless of its locale in some better place or Utopia of God beyond this world or even Universe. If it was located in an extra-dimensional alternative universe humanity then and now would not comprehend the physics of it, which are inevitably ever beyond any comprehension by a sentient being other than God.
When such gross errors of misunderstanding exist even of a modern work such as ‘Footprints’, it is easy to understand that errors of context and meaning of ancient materials in Genesis are as likely to occur.
The physics of God in creating the Universe will always be beyond the ken or understanding of humanity at some point, because it is unlikely that God actually has a need for a specific finite physics other than his will. Humanity thirty four hundred years ago would not have been able to comprehend any sort of modern multi-dimensional quantum mechanics that are represented in present micro-cosmological theories, and they are at best temporal phenomenal descriptions of a limited presentation of a pluralistic character useful for-humanity. The physics of creation given for people of such simple understanding thousands of years ago would need then to be non-specific yet truthful and yet given in such a way as to be consistent with later technical scientific investigations.
A part of scriptural association is of course to understand the contextual and historical origin of the book of Genesis as best as possible. The earliest written fragments of Genesis believed to remain in direct continuity are posited to have been written by the J or Jehovist writer during the reign of Rehoboam approx. 975 B.C.
Jews (in old English ju was another word for ‘you’ which gives Martin Buber’s I/ Thou a different shade of meaning) gained literacy during Egyptian captivity yet had a non-scriptural worship tradition retroactive to the era of Abraham. Following the Exodus the worship tradition may have begun accumulating some written fragments, yet the acts of the Jews in the desert and in Israel until the time of Rehoboam were perhaps largely priestly, liturgical, rule based and with a limited number of discrete written historically valid ‘papers’.
The flood story would possibly have been within the knowledge of the Jewish tradition dating back at least to the time of Abraham in Ur before 2000 B.C. The tales of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian/Sumerian/Akkadian flood story with Utnaphishtim have been discovered in cuneiform tablet fragments as old as 2200 B.C. Avrm or Abraham would have known of the flood story and interpreted it within the geo-values of that era in which world probably referred to the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain. After Exodus the Jews probably encountered creation and flood stories from Syria as well as Babylon and other of course Egypt, and were of an informed position when correlating that with what information they received through direct inspiration of God.
The J writer may not have included the entire present book of Genesis originally, instead redactors from the P or Priestly writer to those in or following the Babylonian captivity in the 7th century B.C. may have put more of their historical written materials into the book of Genesis with the loss of their Temple worship at Jerusalem.
Scriptural association with contemporary physical cosmological concepts may benefit from better comprehension of ancient historical element that pertain to the composition of the book of Genesis such as cultural anthropology, history and religious and language developments. The representative language of Genesis should not perhaps be simply naively interpreted into today’s paradigms of science, yet if so the paradigm is remarkably similar to general parameters of evolution.
The prose poem ‘Footprints’ has as a subject paradigm analogy of the relational role Jesus Christ/God has to mankind. The redeeming presence of Jesus Christ is transcendent and ‘lifts’ one out of the mundane or extreme secular roles and relationships that rule, sometimes inflexibly or with oppression, the secular world of human social reality.
‘Footprints’ is about relationships and not about economics or politics. Some purely corrupt secularists tend to interpret everything within a Marxist materialist paradigm and misunderstand how any Christian could believe in a power of God to transcend worldly relationships. In old English ‘hebban’ meant ‘to lift’, obviously the writer of ‘Footprints’ analogized the power of Jesus Christ ‘to lift’ the troubled soul on the beach walking with God out of the mundane and practico-inert through the relationship of faith or even epiphany. ‘Hebban’ may be a cognate of a world for ‘heaven’ incidentally, yet for the cosmologically naïve or unsophisticated people of ancient Israel to lift ‘up’ would have been as good a concept for heaven’s location as anyplace. That is heaven is a place away from the gravitationally bound, temporal world of oppression, pain and death, regardless of its locale in some better place or Utopia of God beyond this world or even Universe. If it was located in an extra-dimensional alternative universe humanity then and now would not comprehend the physics of it, which are inevitably ever beyond any comprehension by a sentient being other than God.
When such gross errors of misunderstanding exist even of a modern work such as ‘Footprints’, it is easy to understand that errors of context and meaning of ancient materials in Genesis are as likely to occur.
1/6/06
A reply to post about Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee is an interesting historical figure, and your comments are somewhat paradoxical at least for me, an perhaps a bit biased too in a way that misses the salient features of what most people believe the American Civil war 'was about' regardless of if my 'concept' of what the causes of the civil war were 'qualify as such'.
****
Character references for Robert E. Lee perhaps could not be made to support the thesis that he was a loyal federalist and was a fervant Virginian patriot that also felt more in common with any state that supported slavery as a matter of coincidence, yet it would be disingenuous to advance the notion that in the absence of slavery in the southern states the confederacy would have been formed in order to have the opportunity to war upon the northern states.
***
Alternatively Robert E. Lee, in spite of being 'just' a Virginian patriot perhaps with a strong admiration for George Washington, might have felt that by falsely leading, or rather misleading the south into a series of nominal defeats he could keep the union together. Mr. Lee perhaps was aware or believed that some die-hard supremists, firmly established would not yield ground without a fight.
***
In considering these people, it is interesting to compare them with the present generation that outsources, globalizes, decays national infrastructure and loses comparative advantages in education, transport, fuel technologies and so forth while building a vast budget deficit. That generation seems to have little regard for national energy indendence, nor for the U.S. environment, it's borders and etc. in their willy nilly abandonment of democratic conservatism for a pure liberal economic globalism that jettions any sort of meaningful patriotism at all-Adam Smith did not feel it very necessary to state that national interests are to be served by capitalism instead of displaced by capitalism.
*****
I appreciate your taking the time to respond to this point about history however; many would have no interest at all. In my recent bike journey through Virginia I crossed a place of a battle between Grant and Lee at a railroad junction north of Richmond that Lee sought to hold, and that Grant wished to take returning from the 'wilderness campaign' in order to facilitate logistics and personnel supply objectives. Encountering extensive defensive earthworks/bunkers manned by Lee's forces, Grant quit the battle after a couple of assaults and moved on to ward the Chesapeake some dozens of miles distant for maritime resupply I believe.
****
While General Lee may have learned from his mission as a member of Scott's march to Mexico City during the Mexican War (?), the earthworks use and value for defender's advantages were not lost on Grant. In recent reading of the third battle at Ypres during 1919, the author-a Mr. Wolfe, made the valid point that the planners of the First World War campaigns failed to learn from the past about how to deal with the new weapons that plagued the infantry and slaughtered cavalry from defensive position that even artillery had difficulty penetrating. The trench warfare went on 4 years of course, and countless lives were lost by the millions as offensives could not pass defensive earthworks.
****
Eventually it was discovered that tanks on dry ground might break through the lines of machine guns and pill boxes, but General Haig nearly to the last believed the right method was human wave assaults following days of artillery bombardment, gas attack etc to gain some ground and eventually horse cavalry could plunge through and flank the enemy wreaking havoc. Fifty years after the American civil war the best Generals of the non-American participants of world war one could not learn the simple lesson that Ulysses Grant learned quite swiftly in a couple of days. I think he was a much better general than General Lee, who had no reasonable plan to stop the northern industrial or manpower capacity, and instead relied on domination of poor whites and enslaved blacks to prop up an elitist ruling class that sought to retreat not only from the union but from the global war on human slavery and serfdom, which had each become fully eclipsed by industrialization, communications, transport and political advances that could not allow subjugated humanity to be a drag on people better off attempting to win their rights civilly against wealthy corrupters of capitalism that sought to transform it into an anti-democratic monopoly as conservative as monarchy if it were possible.
****
If I recollect Robert E. Lee attended West point, which was an American institution, and hence he might have had a bit of loyalty toward the union sufficient to overwhelm his tendency toward treason or sedition rather if he had been a bit more inclined toward humanitarianism.
Today the Department of Defense has a British HQ'd company building the Bradlye Fighting vehicle, and elements of the joint strike fighter and much more. The DOD has a major premise that defense implements should be built in America, and in a global environment in which Boeing sells jets to Asia instead of to Europe by a factor of 4 to 1, and cell phones are global and cheap, the natural self-interest of liberal capitalists is to invest abroad and create a global sales and production market minimizing the U.S.A. to one puny element albeit with a lot of history and fairly well of people flooded by immigrants. The government unfortunately doesn't invest or encourage sufficient investment in national infrastructure and technologies that liberate America from foreign debt. The role of the government is to keep the nation from freign indebtedness and corrupting permanent foregin alliances that negatively impact sovereignty. Perhaps Mr. Lee's sort of sedition is obsolete in the modern global social structure moving toward one dictatorship of Satan (a Christian point of view), or at least of a proletariat with an elite cadre of corporatist leadership in a warming world-who can say--yet at least Robert E. Lee was aware of his sedition I should think, and of the implicit pimping of human life that ownership of others entails.
****
One might find legal arguments about the causes of the civil war not coincident with the actual causes, and then argue that some abstract desire for secession by an American state was going to be tested in the laboratory of war and death as id Mr. lee were some sort of satanic lunatic, instead of a strong supporter of slavery and a ancient southern oligarchy that sought to retain it's traditional domination of black slaves through terror. Of course I am not an authority by any means on the civil war, and just clep exam'd American history I without studying for it, having received the general American education and occasional forays into that subject.
****
As a citizen of the far west the civil war was of course far removed, and more recent history in addition to that of the Nez Pierce and other native groups, George Vancouver, Yamamoto, Jedediah Smith, the Boeings and other individuals of note were of more historical interest as far as they had been prominent in local history instead of the Lee's and others of the failed confederacy. In the state of Washington though, cherry pie was highly valued on Washington's Birthday.
****
Character references for Robert E. Lee perhaps could not be made to support the thesis that he was a loyal federalist and was a fervant Virginian patriot that also felt more in common with any state that supported slavery as a matter of coincidence, yet it would be disingenuous to advance the notion that in the absence of slavery in the southern states the confederacy would have been formed in order to have the opportunity to war upon the northern states.
***
Alternatively Robert E. Lee, in spite of being 'just' a Virginian patriot perhaps with a strong admiration for George Washington, might have felt that by falsely leading, or rather misleading the south into a series of nominal defeats he could keep the union together. Mr. Lee perhaps was aware or believed that some die-hard supremists, firmly established would not yield ground without a fight.
***
In considering these people, it is interesting to compare them with the present generation that outsources, globalizes, decays national infrastructure and loses comparative advantages in education, transport, fuel technologies and so forth while building a vast budget deficit. That generation seems to have little regard for national energy indendence, nor for the U.S. environment, it's borders and etc. in their willy nilly abandonment of democratic conservatism for a pure liberal economic globalism that jettions any sort of meaningful patriotism at all-Adam Smith did not feel it very necessary to state that national interests are to be served by capitalism instead of displaced by capitalism.
*****
I appreciate your taking the time to respond to this point about history however; many would have no interest at all. In my recent bike journey through Virginia I crossed a place of a battle between Grant and Lee at a railroad junction north of Richmond that Lee sought to hold, and that Grant wished to take returning from the 'wilderness campaign' in order to facilitate logistics and personnel supply objectives. Encountering extensive defensive earthworks/bunkers manned by Lee's forces, Grant quit the battle after a couple of assaults and moved on to ward the Chesapeake some dozens of miles distant for maritime resupply I believe.
****
While General Lee may have learned from his mission as a member of Scott's march to Mexico City during the Mexican War (?), the earthworks use and value for defender's advantages were not lost on Grant. In recent reading of the third battle at Ypres during 1919, the author-a Mr. Wolfe, made the valid point that the planners of the First World War campaigns failed to learn from the past about how to deal with the new weapons that plagued the infantry and slaughtered cavalry from defensive position that even artillery had difficulty penetrating. The trench warfare went on 4 years of course, and countless lives were lost by the millions as offensives could not pass defensive earthworks.
****
Eventually it was discovered that tanks on dry ground might break through the lines of machine guns and pill boxes, but General Haig nearly to the last believed the right method was human wave assaults following days of artillery bombardment, gas attack etc to gain some ground and eventually horse cavalry could plunge through and flank the enemy wreaking havoc. Fifty years after the American civil war the best Generals of the non-American participants of world war one could not learn the simple lesson that Ulysses Grant learned quite swiftly in a couple of days. I think he was a much better general than General Lee, who had no reasonable plan to stop the northern industrial or manpower capacity, and instead relied on domination of poor whites and enslaved blacks to prop up an elitist ruling class that sought to retreat not only from the union but from the global war on human slavery and serfdom, which had each become fully eclipsed by industrialization, communications, transport and political advances that could not allow subjugated humanity to be a drag on people better off attempting to win their rights civilly against wealthy corrupters of capitalism that sought to transform it into an anti-democratic monopoly as conservative as monarchy if it were possible.
****
If I recollect Robert E. Lee attended West point, which was an American institution, and hence he might have had a bit of loyalty toward the union sufficient to overwhelm his tendency toward treason or sedition rather if he had been a bit more inclined toward humanitarianism.
Today the Department of Defense has a British HQ'd company building the Bradlye Fighting vehicle, and elements of the joint strike fighter and much more. The DOD has a major premise that defense implements should be built in America, and in a global environment in which Boeing sells jets to Asia instead of to Europe by a factor of 4 to 1, and cell phones are global and cheap, the natural self-interest of liberal capitalists is to invest abroad and create a global sales and production market minimizing the U.S.A. to one puny element albeit with a lot of history and fairly well of people flooded by immigrants. The government unfortunately doesn't invest or encourage sufficient investment in national infrastructure and technologies that liberate America from foreign debt. The role of the government is to keep the nation from freign indebtedness and corrupting permanent foregin alliances that negatively impact sovereignty. Perhaps Mr. Lee's sort of sedition is obsolete in the modern global social structure moving toward one dictatorship of Satan (a Christian point of view), or at least of a proletariat with an elite cadre of corporatist leadership in a warming world-who can say--yet at least Robert E. Lee was aware of his sedition I should think, and of the implicit pimping of human life that ownership of others entails.
****
One might find legal arguments about the causes of the civil war not coincident with the actual causes, and then argue that some abstract desire for secession by an American state was going to be tested in the laboratory of war and death as id Mr. lee were some sort of satanic lunatic, instead of a strong supporter of slavery and a ancient southern oligarchy that sought to retain it's traditional domination of black slaves through terror. Of course I am not an authority by any means on the civil war, and just clep exam'd American history I without studying for it, having received the general American education and occasional forays into that subject.
****
As a citizen of the far west the civil war was of course far removed, and more recent history in addition to that of the Nez Pierce and other native groups, George Vancouver, Yamamoto, Jedediah Smith, the Boeings and other individuals of note were of more historical interest as far as they had been prominent in local history instead of the Lee's and others of the failed confederacy. In the state of Washington though, cherry pie was highly valued on Washington's Birthday.
12/30/05
Intelligent Design is Smarter than Dumb or No Design
Intelligent Design is Smarter than Dumb or No Design Complexity such as might be found in quantum mechanics, and human lack of understanding of it entails no necessary correlation to God’s construction of the universe, nor does it especially provide necessary certainty about the actual order of assembly and composition that the universe has for-itself.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle seems a needed premise for freedom of range of motion, and uncertainty seems a needed element as far as human consciousness goes, or rather subjective epistemology of the species, if they aren’t to be omniscient themselves. Absolute certainty tends to be an attribute of omniscience, and the entire epistemological subject harkens back to the monism/pluralism researches existing from the era of pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides to the more modern metaphysician F.H. Bradley.
In reading more of a book by the philosopher Dembski on complexity and specialization in design, or intelligent design, I have gained a better idea of what intelligent design means from the point of view of the contemporary philosophical researchers in that area. For one thing I believe that Intelligent Design is a definite scientific hypothesis. The search for intelligent designs in nature can be approached scientifically an on an empirical basis. Determining if the hypothesis has valid observational evidence correlations is another matter for scientific investigation.
Dembski rightly pointed out the criteria used by SETI or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as an example of a search for intelligent design. If intelligent design does exist anywhere in nature that is observable, then it would be rash and ignorant to disqualify a priori any possibility that it could exist. Intelligent design may exist not only as a consequence of one cause within the logic of necessity or modal logical of course, but might instead have been caused by extra-terrestrials or even human beings from the future or past I suppose. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to conceive of nanoparticle manipulation of material structures of the Universe on a large scale for purposes of war or peace. Even now a wave of nano-particles from another galaxy could be enroute to the Milky Way to attack and convert it like yeast into alcohol into some form that would have profit potential for intergalactic holiday shoppers.
Intelligent design as a philosophical criterion can be researched from a number of perspectives, including that of the anthropic principle and the fine-structure constants of the Universe. M-Theory provides a many universes natural selection alternative to the unique phenomenality of this one Universe of course, yet natural selection is difficult to demonstrate in biology as the causative agent for evolution if one tries to pin it just onto d.n.a. or cellular membranes perhaps...that is, so far as I know as a non-biologist, it is still possible that natural selection hasn't a proven technical history in biology that plainly accounts for the development of all life and it's permutation. Instead it may be that natural selection and neo-Darwinism has an historical inertia that isn't adequately filled in by scientific facts, and alternatively people provide straw man arguments about creation and a short-lived 10,000 year old universe as the alternative giving the preponderance of evidence decision to the neo-Darwinians.
Cosmology though is a fascinating subject for research, and I think one must be careful about making extrapolations for intelligent design on the basis of selected physical facts, and also not to use selected facts as evidence for a dumb design of the Universe.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle seems a needed premise for freedom of range of motion, and uncertainty seems a needed element as far as human consciousness goes, or rather subjective epistemology of the species, if they aren’t to be omniscient themselves. Absolute certainty tends to be an attribute of omniscience, and the entire epistemological subject harkens back to the monism/pluralism researches existing from the era of pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides to the more modern metaphysician F.H. Bradley.
In reading more of a book by the philosopher Dembski on complexity and specialization in design, or intelligent design, I have gained a better idea of what intelligent design means from the point of view of the contemporary philosophical researchers in that area. For one thing I believe that Intelligent Design is a definite scientific hypothesis. The search for intelligent designs in nature can be approached scientifically an on an empirical basis. Determining if the hypothesis has valid observational evidence correlations is another matter for scientific investigation.
Dembski rightly pointed out the criteria used by SETI or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as an example of a search for intelligent design. If intelligent design does exist anywhere in nature that is observable, then it would be rash and ignorant to disqualify a priori any possibility that it could exist. Intelligent design may exist not only as a consequence of one cause within the logic of necessity or modal logical of course, but might instead have been caused by extra-terrestrials or even human beings from the future or past I suppose. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to conceive of nanoparticle manipulation of material structures of the Universe on a large scale for purposes of war or peace. Even now a wave of nano-particles from another galaxy could be enroute to the Milky Way to attack and convert it like yeast into alcohol into some form that would have profit potential for intergalactic holiday shoppers.
Intelligent design as a philosophical criterion can be researched from a number of perspectives, including that of the anthropic principle and the fine-structure constants of the Universe. M-Theory provides a many universes natural selection alternative to the unique phenomenality of this one Universe of course, yet natural selection is difficult to demonstrate in biology as the causative agent for evolution if one tries to pin it just onto d.n.a. or cellular membranes perhaps...that is, so far as I know as a non-biologist, it is still possible that natural selection hasn't a proven technical history in biology that plainly accounts for the development of all life and it's permutation. Instead it may be that natural selection and neo-Darwinism has an historical inertia that isn't adequately filled in by scientific facts, and alternatively people provide straw man arguments about creation and a short-lived 10,000 year old universe as the alternative giving the preponderance of evidence decision to the neo-Darwinians.
Cosmology though is a fascinating subject for research, and I think one must be careful about making extrapolations for intelligent design on the basis of selected physical facts, and also not to use selected facts as evidence for a dumb design of the Universe.
Free Will and Determinism are Compatible
One can write about innumerable degrees and meanings of freedom as well as of will. Obviously will seems to indicate for-itself a sort of implicit determinism to enact beliefs or ideas exclusive of random chaotic subjective experience, so in that regard free will is reliant upon a self-determinism that may or may not be contingent upon anything else.
Having read the Tractatus logico philosophicus long ago and moved on to other works in logic and language including Witt's Blue and Brown Books, and works of Strawson and Quine, I appreciate the notions of words and means and their relations to forming expressions that convey ideas about what people mean in words. That is I intend to say I don't want to get too technical and hung up on Kantian noumenon, or empiricist dichotomies with analytic philosophy and the relation of words to objects. Instead I am content for now to just let a sort of perennial philosophical naive realism serve as the context in which I will discuss will and determinism. In fact I don't intend to go too far into the subject here because of time limitations in a public library.
Free will perhaps might be added to the entire notion of what freedom is, and one might fairly include biblical references from the new testament on that subject, yet of course there are those with inherent bias against 'religion' or 'theology' and on the premise that the logos or word of God is Jesus Christ, they would 'a priori' exclude discussion of the Truth...oh well...to return to a plain naive empirical ground for discussion of what freedom means in order to determine if it's addition to the word 'will' in a phrase has any meaning.
Will is an aspect of consciousness or sentience rather than attribute of inanimate objects. When one posits 'does one have free will' it must needs be a relational concept...'does one' have free will in relation to some choice a or b, some non-choice, some activity or inactivity, or is one the prime mover of oneself in relation to the subjective being that one is as a Universally contingent being (one could not after all exist before the Universe (only Jesus claimed that, sort of, when he said before Abraham was, I am') and instead must exist contingently grounded within the existing non-self universe.
Does one have 'free will' in relation to other social persons, or in relation to the Universe and inanimate objects, or in relation to a pre-determinism within a theophysical or teleogical context? These are some of the possible relational contexts of free will...including the obvious 'Can one travel to Mars next week, or travel to the past of far into the future right now?
In reading a science news article December 17, 2005 I was impressed by an article on infinite minimal surfaces that mathematicians have modeled. A two-sided helix is one such.
http://www.msri.org/about/sgp/jim/geom/minimal/library/helicoidg1p/index.html
These helixes have an obvious resemblance to d.n.a. models and thus the minimal structures and perhaps evolution that they might take, yet they also comprise as minimal structures some of the forms such as a saddle shaped universe that cosmology might present. Interestingly cosmological shapes and minimal structures might fit in a paradigm with d.n.a. structures, yet biological evolution, dimensions represented in math and so forth offer a sort of deterministic paradigm based on boundary "conditions' perhaps?
Boundary conditions or parameters of being seem to implicitly entail set values that pre-determine possible ranges of 'will', conditions of being and such for both sentient and non-sentient existents.
The Higgs Field that is posited to have pre-existed the big bang or inflaton as an infinitesimally small field in perfect balance that became out of balance through quantum uncertainty and expanded at superluminal speed for 10-35th second is posited to have set the initial boundary conditions for the later locations of clumps of matter that became the galaxies of the Universe and I suppose the minimal surface shape segments cut out of infinite surfaces metaphorically speaking that phnomenalize as d.n.a. helixes.
I suppose it might seem that free will or life is supported by determinism, yet one still has all these unsolved initial boundary conditions that Christians such as myself like to attribute to God based on the scriptures such as one finds in Genesis and 'let there be light'. In the initial Higgs field what set of boundary parameters allowed that quantum uncertainty to exist as a facet of the uninflated 'universe'?
Uncertainty is a necessary aspect of free will, and perhaps of determinism too, if one takes Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' as necessary reciprocals of one another. The uncertainty principle appears as well to be an unavoidable compliment of quantum mechanical forms for the location of minimal forms of mass 'existing' or seeming to exist for observers in-the-Universe.
A particle or string seems to collapse upon observation to a speed or location yet not each from an infinite number of possible unobserved locations. Each particle seems to have a property of being quantum entangled with another poarticle at a distance in a spooky way allowing 'information' to be transferred faster than light. The grounding of particles seems ultimately to be beyond Planck length sizes on the smaller, unobservable side and so the infinities in relativity theory and quantum mechanics that are eliminated when they are formed together into a functioning 'string' super-theory transfer the mechanics mathematically into an observable range of smaller alternative 'dimensions relying on theory, or eliminate a dimension or two and posit the world as information in fewer dimensions that seem like more. The infinite minimal surface conditions or analogues of D.N.A. helixes and perhaps curved space-time in an Einstein Desitter universe of a saddle shaped seem deontologically selected for temporal use by sentient human beings (oopps! sorry about that anthropic principle interpolation here) to usefully ponder while in existance and thinking about cosmological and philosophical topics.
Ranges of freedom are of course contingent, or within the problem of the criterion as Roderick Chisholm put it, in fields of motion and perhaps will. The relation of human will or conscious thought to various inhibiting or influencing factors are obviously useful to consider. In the range of logic or math one may strike similar elements from lateral sides in order to simplify, and one may in a sense strike the Universal criterion of determinism/indeterminism for humanity from social and subjective or individual relations without damage at that level...inately all human beings have either natural determinism or indeterminism regarding free will (Jesus offers salvation from that 'original sin' and allows one to overcome the natural determinism of a fallen universal criterion beseting humanity with temporality and such). Social freedom and the freedom to overcome natural challenges in the environment are proximal concerns regarding human free will(the Republican leadership seems to fail environmental intelligence presently-Science News reports the Greenland glaciers are doubling their melting rates over a few years, and of course polluting the oceans can be much more difficult to clean up than air pollution--the oceans can stay polluted hundreds of thousands of years perhaps).
One can consider if one has free will if someone has one in 'chains', or if the media target one as an individual and persecute making a mockery of the constitution and the 'quaint' notion of a society living by laws equally applied to all. Speaking of which, is the Presidents advocay of torture, torture prisons abroad, and wiretaps on Americans without substantive congressional and judicial oversight a good way to promote U.S. constitutional and democratic values? Even if their is a terrorist dangers a good communicater ought to be explaining that but equally and convincingly expressing the vital need for a free and just democratic society and not some sort of intimidating corporatist entity. Japan's stock market is 70% owned by corporations, and individuals have very little to say about the real directions of what is in some senses a neo-corporatist state that the U.S. administration seems to want to emulate in several ways as ift has a sharing and caring economic relationship with socialist neo-authoritarians in China.To finish this up, determinism is contingent and yet necessary in several different relationship protocols of being, yet at every infinite level of micro and macro cosmology there seems to be an essential reliance on uncertainty, with being starkly accompanied by non-being, and of course non-being, non-space, and such difficult concepts can't be actualized within the criterion of being.Determinism and indeterminism coexist like being and nothingness, the temporal and the eternal, and perhaps anisotropic directions of time with physically reverseable or isotropic field theories as imaginable yet unrealizable possible circumstances.
Having read the Tractatus logico philosophicus long ago and moved on to other works in logic and language including Witt's Blue and Brown Books, and works of Strawson and Quine, I appreciate the notions of words and means and their relations to forming expressions that convey ideas about what people mean in words. That is I intend to say I don't want to get too technical and hung up on Kantian noumenon, or empiricist dichotomies with analytic philosophy and the relation of words to objects. Instead I am content for now to just let a sort of perennial philosophical naive realism serve as the context in which I will discuss will and determinism. In fact I don't intend to go too far into the subject here because of time limitations in a public library.
Free will perhaps might be added to the entire notion of what freedom is, and one might fairly include biblical references from the new testament on that subject, yet of course there are those with inherent bias against 'religion' or 'theology' and on the premise that the logos or word of God is Jesus Christ, they would 'a priori' exclude discussion of the Truth...oh well...to return to a plain naive empirical ground for discussion of what freedom means in order to determine if it's addition to the word 'will' in a phrase has any meaning.
Will is an aspect of consciousness or sentience rather than attribute of inanimate objects. When one posits 'does one have free will' it must needs be a relational concept...'does one' have free will in relation to some choice a or b, some non-choice, some activity or inactivity, or is one the prime mover of oneself in relation to the subjective being that one is as a Universally contingent being (one could not after all exist before the Universe (only Jesus claimed that, sort of, when he said before Abraham was, I am') and instead must exist contingently grounded within the existing non-self universe.
Does one have 'free will' in relation to other social persons, or in relation to the Universe and inanimate objects, or in relation to a pre-determinism within a theophysical or teleogical context? These are some of the possible relational contexts of free will...including the obvious 'Can one travel to Mars next week, or travel to the past of far into the future right now?
In reading a science news article December 17, 2005 I was impressed by an article on infinite minimal surfaces that mathematicians have modeled. A two-sided helix is one such.
http://www.msri.org/about/sgp/jim/geom/minimal/library/helicoidg1p/index.html
These helixes have an obvious resemblance to d.n.a. models and thus the minimal structures and perhaps evolution that they might take, yet they also comprise as minimal structures some of the forms such as a saddle shaped universe that cosmology might present. Interestingly cosmological shapes and minimal structures might fit in a paradigm with d.n.a. structures, yet biological evolution, dimensions represented in math and so forth offer a sort of deterministic paradigm based on boundary "conditions' perhaps?
Boundary conditions or parameters of being seem to implicitly entail set values that pre-determine possible ranges of 'will', conditions of being and such for both sentient and non-sentient existents.
The Higgs Field that is posited to have pre-existed the big bang or inflaton as an infinitesimally small field in perfect balance that became out of balance through quantum uncertainty and expanded at superluminal speed for 10-35th second is posited to have set the initial boundary conditions for the later locations of clumps of matter that became the galaxies of the Universe and I suppose the minimal surface shape segments cut out of infinite surfaces metaphorically speaking that phnomenalize as d.n.a. helixes.
I suppose it might seem that free will or life is supported by determinism, yet one still has all these unsolved initial boundary conditions that Christians such as myself like to attribute to God based on the scriptures such as one finds in Genesis and 'let there be light'. In the initial Higgs field what set of boundary parameters allowed that quantum uncertainty to exist as a facet of the uninflated 'universe'?
Uncertainty is a necessary aspect of free will, and perhaps of determinism too, if one takes Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' as necessary reciprocals of one another. The uncertainty principle appears as well to be an unavoidable compliment of quantum mechanical forms for the location of minimal forms of mass 'existing' or seeming to exist for observers in-the-Universe.
A particle or string seems to collapse upon observation to a speed or location yet not each from an infinite number of possible unobserved locations. Each particle seems to have a property of being quantum entangled with another poarticle at a distance in a spooky way allowing 'information' to be transferred faster than light. The grounding of particles seems ultimately to be beyond Planck length sizes on the smaller, unobservable side and so the infinities in relativity theory and quantum mechanics that are eliminated when they are formed together into a functioning 'string' super-theory transfer the mechanics mathematically into an observable range of smaller alternative 'dimensions relying on theory, or eliminate a dimension or two and posit the world as information in fewer dimensions that seem like more. The infinite minimal surface conditions or analogues of D.N.A. helixes and perhaps curved space-time in an Einstein Desitter universe of a saddle shaped seem deontologically selected for temporal use by sentient human beings (oopps! sorry about that anthropic principle interpolation here) to usefully ponder while in existance and thinking about cosmological and philosophical topics.
Ranges of freedom are of course contingent, or within the problem of the criterion as Roderick Chisholm put it, in fields of motion and perhaps will. The relation of human will or conscious thought to various inhibiting or influencing factors are obviously useful to consider. In the range of logic or math one may strike similar elements from lateral sides in order to simplify, and one may in a sense strike the Universal criterion of determinism/indeterminism for humanity from social and subjective or individual relations without damage at that level...inately all human beings have either natural determinism or indeterminism regarding free will (Jesus offers salvation from that 'original sin' and allows one to overcome the natural determinism of a fallen universal criterion beseting humanity with temporality and such). Social freedom and the freedom to overcome natural challenges in the environment are proximal concerns regarding human free will(the Republican leadership seems to fail environmental intelligence presently-Science News reports the Greenland glaciers are doubling their melting rates over a few years, and of course polluting the oceans can be much more difficult to clean up than air pollution--the oceans can stay polluted hundreds of thousands of years perhaps).
One can consider if one has free will if someone has one in 'chains', or if the media target one as an individual and persecute making a mockery of the constitution and the 'quaint' notion of a society living by laws equally applied to all. Speaking of which, is the Presidents advocay of torture, torture prisons abroad, and wiretaps on Americans without substantive congressional and judicial oversight a good way to promote U.S. constitutional and democratic values? Even if their is a terrorist dangers a good communicater ought to be explaining that but equally and convincingly expressing the vital need for a free and just democratic society and not some sort of intimidating corporatist entity. Japan's stock market is 70% owned by corporations, and individuals have very little to say about the real directions of what is in some senses a neo-corporatist state that the U.S. administration seems to want to emulate in several ways as ift has a sharing and caring economic relationship with socialist neo-authoritarians in China.To finish this up, determinism is contingent and yet necessary in several different relationship protocols of being, yet at every infinite level of micro and macro cosmology there seems to be an essential reliance on uncertainty, with being starkly accompanied by non-being, and of course non-being, non-space, and such difficult concepts can't be actualized within the criterion of being.Determinism and indeterminism coexist like being and nothingness, the temporal and the eternal, and perhaps anisotropic directions of time with physically reverseable or isotropic field theories as imaginable yet unrealizable possible circumstances.
Sartre's Philosophical 'Labels' and Dostoyevsky's Method
Sartre disavowed the term 'existentialism; as a description for his philosophical activity. Instead Sartre seemed to describe his philosophical activity as continuing the tradition of French rationalism such as that of Rene Descartes. It is logical if one stops to think about it. When one has a purely subjective frame of reference for experience ultimately, inclusive of all scientific or 'empirical' paradigms that purport to be more objective, rational examination, rational deliberations about experience, rational deliberations about what one experiences even seem the reasonable thing to do philosophically speaking.
****
It is possible perhaps to classify areas of experience and thought into various regions such as epistemology, and also to classify philosophical realms of experiences and thought about the extended phenomenon of experience as physical cosmology or even metaphysics, yet obviously all experience even of astrophysics and speculations about M-Theory are personally, subjectively experienced if at all.
****
Instead of debating about the reality of other minds, or conjecturing about the ultimate nature of matter and experience such as in realist schools of thought versus idealist Sartre simply described what is was actually experienced phenomenally for-himself.
*****
Later of course Sartre went beyond his tome 'Being and Nothingness’ and 15 years later published the 1000 page approx. "Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Whereas the first, rather revolutionary philosophical work reaching popular scales of the 20th century (I'm excluding technical philosophical works or even 'philosophical' works such as Einstein's pieces on special and general relativity) essentially examined personal subjective experience and the words or terms used to describe the subjective phenomenology of mind were elaborated, in the second work Sartre described social levels of individual experience within a collective setting. The book is not a socialist polemic of course; rather it describes how subjective minds interact in settings such as an automobile factory. As far as sequels to brilliant works go, it is not a disappointing effort at all.
****
Sartre's fiction works such as the freedom novels are quite good too. One should not underestimate the quality of J.P. Sartre's fiction...it's quite brilliant. Yet if one wants to discover a period novel equal to Dostoyevsky's 'Brothers Karamazov' or perhaps 'The Idiot' (especially useful with recent U.S. administration tendencies toward neo-corporatism) I recommend Stendhal’s book 'The Red and the Black'. The 'Red and the Black' is perhaps like 'Crime and Punishment' with a more sensational ending...it should be recollected that 'Crime and Punishment', while an excellent psychological novel, is more of an incitement of Tsarist structured poverty and conditions that led poor would-be college graduates to perpetrate senseless crimes for profit than it is about Russian criminal phenomena and the corrections system of the era. One might expect 'Crime and Punishment' to be something like Solzhenitsyn’s 'Gulag Archipelago' but of course it isn't. I believe that Dostoyevsky's major contribution isn’t to a philosophical movement of existentialism but to the art of literature and omniscient narrative.
****
It is possible perhaps to classify areas of experience and thought into various regions such as epistemology, and also to classify philosophical realms of experiences and thought about the extended phenomenon of experience as physical cosmology or even metaphysics, yet obviously all experience even of astrophysics and speculations about M-Theory are personally, subjectively experienced if at all.
****
Instead of debating about the reality of other minds, or conjecturing about the ultimate nature of matter and experience such as in realist schools of thought versus idealist Sartre simply described what is was actually experienced phenomenally for-himself.
*****
Later of course Sartre went beyond his tome 'Being and Nothingness’ and 15 years later published the 1000 page approx. "Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Whereas the first, rather revolutionary philosophical work reaching popular scales of the 20th century (I'm excluding technical philosophical works or even 'philosophical' works such as Einstein's pieces on special and general relativity) essentially examined personal subjective experience and the words or terms used to describe the subjective phenomenology of mind were elaborated, in the second work Sartre described social levels of individual experience within a collective setting. The book is not a socialist polemic of course; rather it describes how subjective minds interact in settings such as an automobile factory. As far as sequels to brilliant works go, it is not a disappointing effort at all.
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Sartre's fiction works such as the freedom novels are quite good too. One should not underestimate the quality of J.P. Sartre's fiction...it's quite brilliant. Yet if one wants to discover a period novel equal to Dostoyevsky's 'Brothers Karamazov' or perhaps 'The Idiot' (especially useful with recent U.S. administration tendencies toward neo-corporatism) I recommend Stendhal’s book 'The Red and the Black'. The 'Red and the Black' is perhaps like 'Crime and Punishment' with a more sensational ending...it should be recollected that 'Crime and Punishment', while an excellent psychological novel, is more of an incitement of Tsarist structured poverty and conditions that led poor would-be college graduates to perpetrate senseless crimes for profit than it is about Russian criminal phenomena and the corrections system of the era. One might expect 'Crime and Punishment' to be something like Solzhenitsyn’s 'Gulag Archipelago' but of course it isn't. I believe that Dostoyevsky's major contribution isn’t to a philosophical movement of existentialism but to the art of literature and omniscient narrative.
Dostoyevsky after writing 'Notes from the Underground', a sparse first novel, may have named his second work 'Crime and Punishment'; a ponderous and official sounding title, in order to avoid the state censor and to allow a certain liberal approach to sympathy with urban Petersburg living and social structures, exposing the meanness, rudeness and social conditions of the time. His later 'Brothers Karamazov' has the full-fledged writer's brilliance that 'Crime and Punishment' eclipses 'Crime and Punishment', while Stendhal’s book mentioned above has an ending advantaged by going Dostoyevsky one better.
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