A Pair of Concluding Unscientific Postscripts for 2019

Happy New Year-

The Question; What is Self?

Self as a word has an old German version like selb, yet I would think self is uncomplicated etymologically and is something like cell- the cel(f) or sel(f) is just the mine(d) associated with the cell (like a brain, prison space or whatever. Self is a word describing (self) awareness location. The word pre-exists by centuries any kind of neurological science or even very accurate philosophical analysis concerning what it is made of. The Latin word for self is 'sui'. Given a couple of millennia that's reasonably close.

Bruno Snell wrote a good book called The Greek Origins of European Thought. He related some of the etymology of language one can discern in ancient Greek. He said that verbs describing actions and events commonly experienced evolved into nouns as an ossification. For example, the action of skidding something might become an eponym for a thing called a skid. I would guess that self evolved the same way as mine or mind and was evolved from practical use by non-philosophers.

On the Question; Why did Jesus reprove one who called him 'Good Master'?

One might actually look at Mark 10:17-18 where the scripture is found. 
17"And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" 18"And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God."

The guy asking the question was speaking to Jesus as a genre of teachers- a "good master". Elsewhere Jesus said to call no one teacher for one has one in heaven, and to call no man father, for God is the father. So Jesus has said in three different circumstances something of an instruction or correction on related topics. He pointed to God instead of mankind in all three instances. 

What may have been a matter of timing directing the public to God, including himself, before the public actually knew he was God. The average soul of that day, and especially the Jews, had no idea about the  triune nature of God. Like the wine commercial, Jesus would release no wine before its appropriate time; and there was a schedule leading to the cross to follow. Mark 8: "27 And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am?

28 And they answered, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets."

Make Law Against Ecoside? - Jane Fonda Might Agree

Ecoside is a terrible thing to work. Destroying species and life on Earth in a health form and quantity happens by degrees. In the Tongass coastal forest of S.E. Alaska evil-doers have got the President's ear to support logging in the only national forest the nation has. In fact the Tongass is the shoreline greenery beyond which is about the only substantial glacier field in North America. Building roads for loggers requires overthrowing the roadless rule prevailing their now. While it is reasonable to build roads in the small cities of the region it is silly to attack the coastal rain forest and allow a legion of loggers, hunters and fossil fuel vehicles access toward contributing meaningfully to planetary ecoside.

probably there should be some national and international laws against acts of ecoside. Those would be acts that contribute substantially to the degradation of the ecosphere, and allowing a spaghetti field of logging roads and further assault on the final lower latitude (comparatively) glacial field of large scale is plain dumb. The President is a New Yorker who just studies economic flow and velocity charts for materials, however ecoside scale activities need be exceptions to the rule of ignorable externalities to profit.

The Congress should get done with the impeachment fiasco and work to defend the roadless rule right away before proceeding to make anti-ecoside legislation and define what qualifies as an act contributing to ecoside and mass extinction of the Holocene era.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/12/31/jane-fonda-friday-fire-drill-tongass-alaska-logging-trump-column/2774414001/?fbclid=IwAR2Dnc0F_Kgdy16x9B0ctgMg_AjIxXaQW1JVWRbsg6wgFbnMQ5pN88wvDsQ

Closed Universe Theory Returns

The cosmology of most of the 20th century had just three basic shapes possible for the Universe; open, closed and static. The stationary theory appealed to Einstein before his general theory of relativity blew it up. Einstein liked the stationary Universe paradigm and an anti-Bohr view of quantum mechanics.

For the latter half of the 20th century, especially after the Hoyle hypothesis of a stationary Universe with new material being injected into it through some unknown cause faded, an open Universe was the prevailing paradigm for cosmology. The Universe was thought to be open and expanding forever. Now a new and solid interpretation of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation has breathed new life into the Universe as a closed structure where a straight line go far enough into space returns to its point of origin in a vast loop. That is what people thought of a closed Universe in the 1950s and 1960s and how it is in the new research.  

https://www.livescience.com/universe-may-be-curved.html

In order to eliminate quantum uncertainty and the all-possible-worldlines before observation paradigm of the Copenhagen interpretation, a Multiverse with all possible positions for every possible particle could exist enabling the entire Multiverse to be static in a sense not usually provided. There could be an infinite number of Universes in each possible stage of its being in an infinite number of variations of infinite universes too.

It may be simpler to conjecture that the mind of God is infinite in all possible ways and that might include His paradigm for the quantity of Universes. Each Universe may be an apparent actualization of thought from God in relativistic form with particle-waves. A static Multiverse or one particular closed Universe that returns to a big crunch could transform in some way to a terminal condition of etherialized particles-mass-energy merging with space-time for-itself like a black hole naked singularity evaporating into extra-dimensions as virtual particles.

Easy 13 Move Blitz Chess Win

To get through slow internet speed I went for a quick, easy win and it worked. Black could have stayed in the game if on the next to last move he had made an escape square for the K-he didn't see that (in 3 minute blitz time pressure).

Alleged CIA Whistleblower Eric Ciaramella Worked in Obama-Biden-Rice Left Wing Collusion?

The news that a C.I.A. analyst who worked for Susan Rice during the Obama administration is supposed to be the whistleblower isn't too surprising. The 33 year old Harvard-Yale guy seems right to work, what Scott Ritter, former nuclear compliance inspector calls "an act of treason" in trying to subvert the President of the United States to benefit the great left-wing blue balloon collusion to take down the Republican capitalist President with the help of Comey F.B.I. leadership of the late Obama era. Of course the spook whistleblower could be another Richard Jewel.

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Eric_Ciaramella

A President of the United States should not be subject to four years of distraction by partisan malcontents seeking to bump him out of employment in the White House. The incessant and well coordinated attacks seem to have no end. Presently House Majority Speaker has taken the unprecedented steps of leading an impeachment movement and withholding the articles from the Senate (who would quickly dismiss the articles) until the Senate can be as jury rigged as was the House of Representatives.

https://www.commdiginews.com/politics-2/eric-ciaramella-brennan-protege-coup-plotter-than-whistleblower-124251/

It is said that Spook Ciaramella coordinated with Lt. Col. Vindeman about the call the President made to the Ukraine President. There is a military-industrial complex that demands conflict leading to the brink of war in Ukraine in order to continue spending on an arms buildup. They hate Russia because they are ignorant morons on Russian history and clueless about the fact that having Russia and Ukraine share Dnepr River frontage for a common border with Ryussia keeping Crimea would allow peace and prosperity to resume the course of flourishing and enable Russia and the U.S.A. to work together to solve the world ecological problems that are emiprical threats to all of mankind.

Because so many Americans are complete idiots it is a simple matter to rebuild the Cold War and reinforce the corrupt Democrat Party agenda to subvert the end of the Cold War that President Reagan brought about with President Gorbachev using the lever of the Ukraine.

Harvard publications have hated President Trump since the 2016 election so its not surprising that one of their alumni sought to take him down where the baloney collusion with Russia to elect Trump Mueller Probe failed. Democrats and Harvard are worse than supporters of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee would have been in President Lincoln later if they could have impeached him after 1861 for some alleged ties at the Harper's Ferry incident.

Karl Popper and Anti-Nationalism; Why it is Wrong Today

Before there were nations there were empires. Nations are an improvement on that. The word 'nation' is a term for a political polity. Actually it could be of any size or composition, or called something else, like 'corporation, fubar, commune or word-factory. I like Karl Popper, yet the paradigm of national socialism (NAZI) is not the paradigm of every nation. That is it is not the sole form of content a nation could take. A nation may be regarded as a polity where people share the same values freely (if it is a Democracy). If there were just one global nation then everyone probably would be forced to share one value system. There are innumerable other problems with one global nation I won't digress into here.

 A nation or a home, an organization or government, a business and any coherent cell need have practical working boundaries in order to exist. One may of course choose anarchist, chaos or anomic values or those of any moral system inconsistent with stable national cellular health. There is wild freedom after all. Some arguments are fit for a particular time, while others-Platonic political paradigms or those of Aristotle, might be regarded as more Universal. Popper's paradigm applied today would be closer to an anti-Semitic, Nazi hatred of Israel, although that position would contradict Popper's sentiments.

Popper was something of a reactionary writer describing the aftermath of the Second World War. He incorrectly assumed that nationalism and populism were the real causes of the war – in addition to race and nationality. In my opinion the causes were original sin and aristocracies of the former Weimar Republic era that wanted a way to get back their lost royal prerogatives. Hitler and the national Socialists were the baby-mama surrogates for them.

Popper was viewing a particular phase of human history; its demographics and evolution and incorrectly saw nations and nationalism as the cause of conflicts. It was far more complex than that. The content or political composition of many nations was inefficient, repressive or unable to play well with other nations in the early 20th century. Today mass communications and travel have changed that. In the present nations are the best political cells where the experiments of democracy can occur. They are something like what the several states were in the U.S.A. at its foundation, where differences were allowed and central government was not completely dominant and repressive of local self-determination.

Nations can defend the citizens from hostile takeover by one adverse global central power; repressive minority power is the usual suspect in the denial of independence, free enterprise and self determination. The threat today is the axis of corporatism and communism that would make proles of everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes

Philosophy Could Be Said to Be...

Could philosophy reasonably be said to search the unknown and consider the structure of the known, with detachment from the structure to the end of revising or adding to structure if useful?

The known is structured, as one might prefer, as in math, and firm processes make up the structure. Alternatively, ossification of philosophical method could be dangerous to philosophical health. The known is inducted from or explained from the unknown, yet the known may also become a composite to which elements of the unknown are added. I won't write anything here about induction of the unknown onto anything besides the known composite.

The idea of the relation I had between the unknown and structures might be better said to be that of Hilbert space to various modal universes within Hilbert Space (like Venn diagram bubbles) with x to the nth elements that could be added or synthesized at the intersections.

The relation between the unknown and structures of various kinds should be fairly abstract initially, with concrete structures and forms differing so much from others as they can. Structures (there is a philosophical branch called structuralism) of various material and social or immaterial field-objects can be very different in actualization whereas the unknown is at some meta-place purely abstract and without form.

 Errors and false leads can assuredly happen. Ossification of method might exemplify some of those ineffective methods. Applying a method inappropriately or exclusively because it is the preferred, ossified method (such as using deductive logic for a problem requiring inductive logic, has happened before.

Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations sought after a way to make philosophy a rigorous science yet phenomenology didn't actually accomplish that, I seem to recall.

Descartes’ Meditations and the cogito passage seems a try at not selecting a pre-existing method to ‘compute’ in with thought. The epistemological work is to know the self from first principles, or the BIOS of self-awareness as it were. He tried to think before BIOS as a sentient CPU of mind.

One might consider the challenges about reality from within and without presented at the 1927 Solvay Conference whereat Einstein had a different point of view than Bohr and Heisenberg on the quantum world and nature of reality. The dispute continues unto the present. A good book about it was published in 2018 (here is a nature article about the book) 
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03793-2

Philosophy perhaps hasn’t a more rigorous scientific methodical approach to solving the unknown that would be better than those used by scientists. Because philosophy covers potentially very diverse fields and recombines them in thought to form novel concepts, where alternatively scientists tend to pursue particular threads of investigation proximally to induct or deduce solutions to particular problems, the methods may not always be similar. Philosophical approaches discover or find things even more than solving particular problems (perhaps).


If the Einstein-Bohm opinion about the quantum world not being the same as the Copenhagen interpretation were correct, the implication is that one solution is the infinite Multiverse could be a hypothetical description consistent with the implications, and that would bring philosophical interest concerning epistemology, theology and so forth of a Multiverse. While science can consider testing and verification of quantum experiments to prove or trace the accuracy of the Allegory of the Cave from the spot on the floor of the Cave, philosophers may pursue any other approach that is possible as well as consider the epistemological and/or theological ramifications of being prisoners chained to the floor of a cave, and if their perception of the cave determines that the cave exists, and who if anyone made it so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes