In the blizzard of the morning
the light cries
glistening streams of tears
down the face of the water.

A liquid sun multiplies
on the surface of the ocean
of stars.

There is something dancing there,
a whispering force, a space,
a promised land smaller
than the tiniest seed.

Meanwhile, in the world of Radiance,

stars fizzle out
before their midwife clouds.

everything is a cloud
electron clouds veil the center of the atom in my mind.

The lightning bug (or do I mean lightning bolt?), 
the difference between those two words... but now it is too late—

the crack in the sky
was not so dramatic after all.

"there is a hole," says Godel to Winnie the Pooh, "an incompleteness."

find a hole, even in the encroaching mountains,
Tear the time-space continuum
a new ring of fire.

don’t look for belief.

every act of communication

is divine.

In an alternate universe I lost my way

in sizzling neon lights.        they leave ghosts in my eyes.
The soothing burn of whisky.

feminine silhouettes cast by burning "open" signs,         my mind dies little deaths.   
they walk in reckless trance. 
A human lumbering, lurching towards another's flesh 

The uglier I get, the more beautiful everyone else becomes.

Oh Death, the seductress! 
She will feel the sting in a feather—
penned tattoo 

of a thin moon.

Fight me; O Death
I belong to combat.


lust is a leprosy; we hold our wretched skin to the fire for some comfort in pain. 
There is worse than pain, dear one. 

caught in the mind's cobwebs 
where pain becomes a helper

Come to me, lost soul, 
For I am the absence of truth, and I will hold you.

The mind needs truth like the body needs medicine.  

my tongue           a runway           for flies

First they look where the earth is overturned
They look for artifacts in excavations and burials.

They look on the surface of the land and sea
The multitude of tiny many-colored lives.

The clouds ask each other, and clouds move obtusely
Changing their questions constantly.

The clouds turn and ask the unconquered stars
And, secretly, the stars listen.

The parallel postulate was found to be optional when non-Euclidean geometries came under earnest exploration. This was a paradigm-shift, and a breakthrough in mathematics, yet historically people often found it to be a failing in mathematics to the point where, too late in the game, great mathematicians such as Lagrange were still trying to prove the postulate. The reason we wanted Euclidean geometry to be true is it reduces space to a quantifiable reality, so that at the moment of breakthrough, the favorite non-Euclidean geometries could be translated into Euclidean geometry using a metric. Now, we can have very strange kinds of vague metrics for gauging distance. The basic difference in these early non-Euclidean geometries was that there could be more than one parallel line going through the same point, with respect to another line. In other words, the parallel postulate was false for these other geometries.

Euclid himself was so exceedingly careful in intellect that he kept the parallel postulate out of his exposition of geometry, out of his innovative axiomatic form, until he felt it was absolutely necessary. This means that the beginning of Euclid’s first textbook is true in all geometries, and is called “Neutral Geometry.” These precious first theorems are universally true, but this was just not enough for Euclid or his line of mathematicians. They wanted more to be true, so, perhaps under the weight of his contemporaries and ancestors, Euclid abandoned his misgivings about the postulate and asserted Euclidean Geometry as universally true.

How did he make this assertion? You could say his assertion was existential. He asserted that there is only one line through a given point with respect to another line in the same plane. He made this choice out of what we now know to be many options. I may be talking about free will, but not quite. I am sure Euclid believed his books to be about something true, and only his work failed, not reality. He was somehow persuaded or convinced that the parallel postulate was the right choice, and not without examples to the contrary. Geometry on a sphere is not Euclidean: you can have a triangle with three right angles using the line at the equator and two lines going through the north pole. We didn’t know the world was round back then you say? Some scholars back then did, since its circumference was being estimated by scholars as early as 2,000 years ago in Alexandria. Aristotle’s model for the Earth is inconsequentially different from a sphere, though the model appeared flat. Aristotle instructed Alexander the Great to conquer to the edge of the world and, by continuing, he’d end up back in his home eventually. Now, scientists seem to agree that gravity bends space out of shape, and is not Euclidean. The debates of brilliant minds back then, as well as now, were varied, of course, and the over-simplifications from our compulsory education about flat-Earth vs round-Earth, Euclidean vs Non-Euclidean are stark, foolish and in service of the illusion of progress.

The thing to notice is that the alternatives between Neutral Geometry and Euclidean Geometry was a kind of pluralism of parallel lines through the given point, and with respect to another line. This gave rise to a pluralism of quantifying or qualifying distance. Similar to asserting that the only alternative to Being is Not-Being, and the vagaries of cloud-gazing was out of the question. Now we have whole specialized languages to describe the gap between Being and Not-Being: such as psychological hallucination. Leaving out the modern hallucinations of distance, and the looming history of the field of number theory (eventually abandoned by the Greeks, and later connected to geometry in Descartes), how do we choose between these options? Enter Rhetoric, left stage.

Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric was that it was an Art of persuasion, not a Science, even though the above shows how deeply dependent Euclid was on Rhetoric.

So, when I say that Rhetoric is the stuff that connects our planet with the “universe” (another overly-ambitious grab-word from Science), I mean it scientifically, in the Art of choosing how to define distance, because the most important practice of Science, that gives it its importance, is this territory-grabbing from Rhetoric. And Rhetoric is merely the guard of its master: Poetry. In this essay, I have shown how Rhetoric orients people in understanding the gaps between disciplines. Rhetoric is a way of understanding things: the Sciences, Philosophy, and even translation and other parts of Poetic discourse.

Once upon a time there was an emperor who really loved clothes. He wore clothes when he woke up in the morning, then before breakfast he changed his clothes, then before lunch he changed his clothes again, and before dinner and before bed. Then, In the middle of the night, he made instructions to wake him up so he changed his clothes again and went back to sleep.

The clothes manufacturers were making a lot of money from the emperor. A pair of skilled thieves saw an opportunity, and made a plan. They presented themselves to the emperor as master clothiers and told him they would make clothes so fine that crude people could not see them. Indeed, only those worthy of their profession would be able to see the clothes. They called the outfit “Mathematics.”

The emperor was overjoyed by the prospect of such a fine set of clothes, and gave the thieves the royal clothier’s workshop, all the silk and golden thread they would need, and of course the fee was extravagant.

Now the thieves went to work. They moved the looms, but the looms were empty, they threaded needles with no thread, and all the expensive cloth and thread was hidden in their sacks in the back of the workshop and transported to safety every night.

After a while the emperor decided they had done a lot of work by now, and sent the royal poet, a man who was uncommonly wise, to go check on the thieves’ work. The royal poet entered the workshop and asked to see the thieves work. The thieves behaved as though they were presenting fine clothes, but they had not clothes in their hands. They were showing him nothing, and the wise man decided the thieves were thieves, but these were very skilled thieves indeed. They described every feather of every crane in flight, the color and shape of every blossom, and the intricacy of patterns. Unfortunately, the wise poet was persuaded that the clothes were real, and that he was unworthy to be the Royal poet of the emperor.

He began to sweat, because he would surely lose his life if the emperor knew his poet was a fraud. “Oh what fine clothes these are. Yes these clothes, “Mathematics” as you call them, reveal patterns that show such intricacy, they go beyond my 4-dimensional imagination.” The thieves smiled in just the right way, and nodded with just the right amount of satisfaction so as to continue fooling the wise man. They were indeed most clever thieves.

The Royal Poet returned to the emperor and lauded the “Mathematics” clothes to the highest degree, and made sure to persuade the emperor, although he had no idea what the “Mathematics” clothes looked like.

Finally the thieves announced the “Mathematics” clothes were finished before the emperor. And offered that the Emperor should arrange a parade and show the “Mathematics” clothes to all his subjects.

The Emperor did just that, and when the thieves showed him nothing at all, and described the “mathematics” clothes, the Emperor was no match against the thieves description and the confirmation of the Royal Poet.

The Thieves helped the emperor to put on the “Mathematics” and the parade began. Everyone was looking at the emperors private parts and cheering as best they could, throwing flowers petals confetti, sweating at the problem of not being worthy of their various professions. It looked like every professional was going to have to wear “Mathematics.”

Luckily for everyone, there was a tradition in this part of the world of listening to children. There was a common folk belief that children were close to the Source of all people; sometimes children could say things that were very important, even more important than the emperor himself, or so they thought.

And in an lull of the fake excitement, a child burst in front of the parade and said with glee “The Emperor is naked, I can see his mushroom!”

Everyone realized the child spoke the truth and the emperor had been fooled. The thieves were long gone by then, but before they left they explained the clothes to some foreigners, who also believed the thieves, and now there are parts of the world, who don’t listen to children, and walk around naked.

You are a part of my home
We bond sometimes when I find you.
This life, you were on the edge the universe
I walk to you, so I can be with a piece of my home
Then I have to leave
Because my home broke
My home grew and shrank
It changed forms
I see a piece of my home in that cloud
I try to be there, drifting, changing
Until my home is not there anymore
And I must walk to find another piece
I do this drifting
To keep my heart whole
My heart is mended, as long as I walk
in search of a glimmer that was part of my home

As a child I was interested in the word few. I was not interested in figuring out exactly what it meant; instead I was interested in understanding its potential. What could it mean? I enjoyed playing with modifiers such as “quite a few” which seems to mean the opposite of its intended meaning: the word few supposedly comes from the PIE pau- and from there the word paucity derives. It means a small but numerous number. It means “many, yet not many” to put it without delicacy. “Quite a few” seems to increase the “numerousness” of the number involved in few, but maybe it only emphasizes the importance that it is not only one or two…?

I remember thinking about this, and smiling. This word made me happy. When I came to college, however, I learned from my friends that the word few meant exactly “three.” I did try to argue that the word was meant to not be exact, but there was a certain force in the precise claim, and no-one listened to me. Interestingly, the word few is related to puerile. (the etymology is coming from etymonline.com) My arguments might have sounded immature to the ears of my friends. What use is a word if we don’t know exactly what it means? And if I don’t know exactly what it means, and this other person says he does, why should they listen to me?

My reaction was suppressed anger. By the time I was in college I was used to this sort of thing. I had a certain joy when people used a turn of phrase or said things that had a lot of possibility (especially when the speaker was a mathematician), and it seemed everyone else frowned on this joy. Maybe my feeling was stupid, or immature, or even evil, but I buried the determination to make the argument for a less determined definition of few, and many other things, in the face of everyone who thought they knew so much. It felt like such a small, trivial thing. But it was one of the last things I enjoyed about language at Earlham, where writing was paramount. Why couldn’t we have at least one vague word, a word about not knowing the exact number of things, but still being able to to communicate the information that it was more than two, yet not very many. Wasn’t that something we ran into all the time? Or were we supposed to count everything before we spoke? My reaction was far from laziness. I perceived this difference in my ideas, really in my temperament—what made me happy, as something I was going to struggle with my whole life, and correctly so.

Of course the word few does not at all mean “three.” Even though I did look it up at the time, (and the dictionary I consulted did say the word few meant exactly three, much to my dismay), I have been to several other sources years later. And written a book defending vague language, to a mathematical audience. The struggle continues… but at least I’ve got my finger on the problem now.

Tycho Brahe used mathematical and scientific instruments, some of them newly invented, to correct ancient astronomical measurements. But his main tool was an aura of faithful observation. He thought he could explain the movements of the stars in an objective way, and that was his rhetorical position from which he made his observations. It is a rhetorical position, because there is no scientific basis for believing our observations are objective, no matter how mathematical they are, unless the earth is an immovable point in the center of the universe. If the earth is spinning and in motion, until we completely understand how it is moving, we wont understand our own observations. I am merely referring to Einstein’s theory of relativity: there are no unmoving points of observation, and so all of our observations are relative. If we understand the movement of the Earth (or a satellite like the moon) completely, then we can mathematically compensate for that motion to obtain objective measurements. How are we going to completely understand the movement of the Earth? By recording its movement from the point of view of the stars, of course. And how to we know what the point of view of the stars is? by recording their movements from the vantage points available to us: the Earth. You can see the circularity here. We can’t record the movement of the Earth without understanding the movement of the stars, and we can’t record the movement of the stars without understanding the movement of the Earth. Unfortunately, without records of either the Earth or the stars to begin with, we can only make guesses of understanding, and see how they match up with our faulty observations and records.

Where does that leave the shift from an Earth-centered universe a solar-system that moves in a universe with no center? It leaves us knowing less than we knew in Aristotle’s time. We can fly into space and make some impromptu observations of the earth spinning, but how do we know it isn’t us that is spinning so that the stars are more still, making the earth appear to spin? We would have to know how to be perfectly still in space to know how things are moving, but we can only know that relative to other things like stars or planets, so we don’t even know if one day we will shift back to an earth-centered model of the universe.

The usual argument scientists make against this type of reasoning is to make things more complex, as though that will wash away these doubts. It doesn’t really do that except rhetorically. It must be admitted, at least until we have found a point in the universe that doesn’t move, that the modern scientific models of the universe are based ultimately on rhetoric, whether it is a rhetorical air of faithfully measuring things, the rhetorical air of using mathematical symbols and formulas instead of words, or the rhetorical air of claiming that to know more is to have a more important opinion than others, so that a simple-minded analysis like mine is unimportant.

All these postures are rhetorical in foundation and nature, and so there is not much reason to draw a stark line between people who believe this or that thing, and use this as a cause of belittling, hating and shaming people (this runs the spectrum of issues such as anti-vax, flat-earthers, or whatever else). Scientific ideas are just ideas, including the our geometric or numerical ideas of space and time, and our ideas of logical reasoning, which are also fundamentally rhetorical. When Bernie Sanders says something in the order of poverty being a contradiction in the richest country in the world, he is mainly referring to a failure of Americans to think rhetorically. Instead the way to persuade people is to make logical claims, or so we believe nowadays, and this is a deep and purposefully fostered flaw in the political process in the USA. In this, the scientific community and their rhetorical posturing does us a disservice.

I am extremely fond of Borges talking about the attitude of Argentinians on literature, and his comparison with the corresponding attitudes in the USA. According to Borges, Argentinians tend to think a book that won a literature award might still be a good book, in spite of the award. Of course, this attitude is quite out of the question in the USA, where everything needs official publication, awards and certifications, and certifications of certifications, that let other people tell us who to trust and who to listen to. This Argentinian attitude towards books (and ideas) is basic to a society that is not thought-controlled.

the mosquito
With only the tiniest scrap of love
makes so much life
so much pain, hunger yes
but life, free life on the wind
Because we all need a whining reminder of freedom
For their resilience I am grateful

And the cockroach
Who carries on no matter what
And carries on well, preserver of life
Persistence in the ordeal of life, the sufferer
Because we are all sufferers
For their will I am grateful

And the spider
Who understands power better than any
The fierce trapper, the relentless
She who knows the ways of extracting our very life essence
She can teach us
She is not finished teaching us
For her wisdom I am grateful

The worm
Who’s blindness is a gift in the darkness
Who can breath with his very skin
Where there is no air, only earth
The worm is the body incarnate
Because our bodies are a gift
For their bodies I am grateful

The virus
The virus is the word itself
How is that so you ask?
Ask the virus, and it will point you to how it does things
Because it spreads like fire
And causes unrest, dis-ease, dissatisfaction
It is because the word spreads that it can shape the world
Sperm is a virus, did you not know?
Without the virus we would not be awake at all, not even to dream
Neolibralism was a dream, and the virus shook us, will we wake?
It is because of the virus we can do good, we are goaded awake
For this awakening, I am grateful

Female/Male is the Yin/Yang of the West. The Tao Te Ching includes a system of description that is basically the binary number system endowed with the meanings of Yin (0) Yang (1), mingling, so “100” is “Yang, Yin, Yin” and has certain intuitive meaning.

The Western Female/Male shows how reducing the world to binary fails: take the terms Manly Female (10), Womanly Female(00), Manly Man(11), Womanly Man (01). And then: Girlish Manly Female (010), Girlish Womanly Female, Girlish Manly Man, Girlish Womanly Man, etc.

What I want to show is how more and more people fall through the cracks as the system becomes more exhaustive. When you get to three digit precision, most people wont identify with any of the terms like “Girlish Manly Female,” etc.

So exhaustive language, precise language, cuts out more and more of reality as “off topic” and people who are too sensitive about what is or isn’t relevant become debilitated when trying to make connections or make sense of the senses (including the sensation of ideas by the mind).

The debilitation of the mind, and the way precision language makes people fall through the cracks of technical terminology (diagnoses, identities, etc) are precisely why they are uplifted by the powerful oligarchs of the USA. Precision language is in no way superior to everyday, or poetic language, except that if you show yourself as someone who follows the rules of mathematics (equivalent to “understanding” “accepting” the rules of mathematics) you’ll get funding, or get published, or pass whatever gate you are trying to pass. It doesn’t really matter what the term “micronutrients” means, what matters is that it is very precise, and by being hypnotized by it, you cut out the rest of the world from view.

The liberal dream of inclusiveness can’t be achieved by a process of refinement of language or symbols, quite the opposite is achieved. The functional use of words is to reduce people’s desire for worldly things, by turning the things into concepts first. Bertrand Russell said that knowing the origin of the word for a fruit increases his enjoyment of the fruit. He is mistaken. The enjoyment he feels comes from removing the enjoyment of the fruit, and replacing it with a different enjoyment of the knowledge of words, which is less visceral, and easier to let go of. This is the way that words are beneficial and useful. If you want to enjoy a person, you suspend judgement in terms of concepts and practices. You suspend the need to know facts that can be expressed with words. In the same sense, as Feyerabend mentions, of the ancient belief that counting people endangers them.

People often find friendship nowadays by feeling that their friend knows the same things he knows. It is a measure of the persons integrity and worth as a person that they have faithfully studied science fiction or some other part of culture. Unfortunately this form of love and companionship is much less than the enjoyment of a person you can have when you don’t need to know that they know the same things. Reviewing shared knowledge of concepts is a way of reducing a felt bond with a person, not increasing it. In a way, we are all going to die, so this pessimistic approach to relationships might be ultimately the right way to go. We are all subject to separation in this world, but that does not mean we shouldn’t fight against this tendency. Success as a human family is not measured by our knowledge of one another, quite the opposite.

The value of the intuitive feelings about Yin and Yang are that they are expansive in an ineffable way, so that they reach the irrational by including each other, and everything else. Male and Female may be able to join in sex. Sex is the kind of irrational and mystical union that we can know the most about. Knowing is at best unimportant, when it comes to irrational wisdom and mystical union. More likely, knowing with concepts and names is destructive to union between man, woman, black, white, gay, straight, etc

Our union is not found in the cracks between these concepts, it is found in the space that makes the view of concepts and their boundaries possible.

Has justice become sense-making? The many senses of the over-worked concept of justice allow justice to generally sound like a good idea to the atomized American. Even our best politicians repeat the term Justice, as if forgiveness and mercy were the irrational ways and means for religion. (separated from matters of the state)  I think Americans in their deep mind control bubble crave sense-making. They are confused, afraid and overworked. Their “education,” their language, their intellectual preoccupation with sex (including gender), are all reductionist. I generally try to approach this problem by looking at the logical positivist project to refine language and how that reduces larger things like houses, feelings, and communities into talk of a smaller, more atomized reality. So I focus on vagueness in my work because people in America badly need a way to synthesize information, houses, feelings, communities, etc. The effect of the English language is felt in everything else.

But vagueness is the linguistic approach; how to move to a political approach? I think people lean on some products of the Social Sciences to conceive the neoliberal “individual” and contrive a linking of hands with others to form a political community, the same way electrons link atoms, and the mind senses a great synthesis of atoms into a house. Even if that same mind doesn’t believe in things anymore, because we are told that everything is actually atoms, or subatomic particles, or quanta, etc. I originally approached the problem linguistically because it seems more fundamental. Justification using pseudo-scientific “experiments” with statistical language dominated the Social Sciences for a long time. The linguistic style of statistics was the persuasive force, though now, qualitative research diminishes that force somewhat. In any case the view that mathematics and therefore statistics are languages incited me to offer vagueness as a recognized form of synthesis.

Vagueness, although a very useful and widespread linguistic device, is not appropriate for politics and the Social Sciences that study politics. Media is the compelling force in politics. And it should be persuading people, not compelling us the way we got used to in our math classes.

The problem isn’t that Americans lack meaning, it’s that they’ve been told which meanings are permitted. Media outlets employ Elite People like Anand Giridharadas, who is still a thing and wrote things for the New York Times to try to make the argument that we shouldn’t listen to just anybody of the

“114 percent of Americans now having their own podcast, …
Were there a German word for emotion-question (and it turns out there is), that title may be our era’s Gefühlsfrage. As people reel from crisis to crisis, outrage to outrage, this Gefühlsfrage hangs in the air and creates space for writers.”

The urgent desire to regroup our atomized communities and our podcasts to the tune of the New York Times is evident in the past. Not that the New York Times wanted us to really regroup, just enough for us to keep coming to them for their information-framing. Actually, we need space for the common writer, and Mr. Giridharadas attempted to rhetorically close that space, which is unhealthy politically. We need synthesis but not to the tune of the elite who brought us more neoliberal presidential candidates which were, unfortunately, the optimistic outcomes.

For the common human’s politics, instead of academic disciplines, we need another term/concept for synthesis. Justice seems to be the general answer to the Gefühlsfrage, but what is justice? Not a question I am prepared to answer, but I will make a guess that it is what is best for the state, in the same way we have an idea of what is best for ourselves, we extend that to the state, and that is justice.  One of the oldest senses of justice was “Eye for an eye” which involves taking action in a symmetrical way to how we have been wronged. To some of us, justice means: if there is a problem, if we have been wronged, the “answer” is an action that hurts the wrong-doer in like kind. This kind of justice is obviously unachievable, there are many wrong doings that have no symmetrical punishment (unless you are completely taken in by capitalism: How much is unjustly getting cancer worth? Being cured of cancer?), but I think this old, violent, barbaric definition of justice resonates with the beleaguered people of America.

Americans feel wronged, and justice is how to act on the world so that it makes sense, a very material sense. Justice is the proposed answer. Just look at the amount of work in a court case to accomplish a minuscule amount of worldly justice. It is plainly not worth it except for the most grievous acts, even so, there are too many severe injustices. Any real-world event is too complex to set “right”, and only the ones that get attention are addressed, so every thought on how we have been wronged is clamoring for a like or a share, etc. What is the goal of Justice? We get one thing right, after great outcry, what next? There are too many things wrong, and that is the way it will always be.

American “education” can be found especially in American movies, where a keen sense of justice is fed with powerful images and stories, drawn from previous cultural mythologies and reframed to raise Justice to the highest political ideal. Once we are educated in this way, there is a terrible, schizophrenic dissonance between the expectation of Justice and the reality of American life. This causes a great deal of pain for the common human. Everyone’s individual fight for “Justice” feeds everyone’s own concept of being wronged, and Justice, even more.

For politics, I would propose another concept that does no cutting out of people’s eyes: the concept is Rhetoric, and in this case, I direct you to Deirdre McCloskey‘s works. Western philosophy tries to block up rhetoric as something for the sophist who isn’t interested in the truth, as if the truth and its persuasiveness could be separated. There is no separating Truth from its natural sweetness (and Dierdre agrees, read her wonderfully brief book on writing!). Here Deirdre writes “they are egg and yolk in a scrambled egg.” or “their differential equations are nonseparable.” Sweet language, such as poetry, expresses the truth best (not mathematical or statistical language).

In my next essay, I attempt to demonstrate the presence of rhetoric in logic, since logic is the foundation of mathematics. I will defend rhetoric against the statisticians, and attempt to show how rhetoric binds and surrounds, synthesizes, the worlds of ideas.

Related: https://questionsarepower.org/2014/09/08/the-valid-logical-argument/

There is a strange problem with ancient Skepticism, or Pyrrhonism, as it is described by the best authority, Sextus Empiricus.

I have to confess that several features of this account of how the Skeptic will achieve ataraxia and happiness through epoche [suspension of judgement] are very puzzling…Now the so-called “Modes of Epoche” give us an overview of the kinds of considerations that supposedly lead the Skeptics to adopt a pattern of life in which they live by the appearances and do not believe any assertions or theories about an external world. But it is striking that all but one of these Modes are concerned with questions having no immediate relevance to the domain of values; instead they have to do with such questions as whether the honey is really sweet, whether there really are invisible pores in the skin, whether things really have the shapes they appear to have, and so on. Only Aensidemus’s tenth Mode offers the sort of considerations that presumably bring the Skeptics to epoche as to whether things or actions are good, bad, or indifferent. Yet when (at PH 1.27f. and much more fully in M 11) Sextus gets down to the business of explaining in detail how epoche about the external world leads to ataraxia and happiness, he considers only value judgements. The Skeptic gives up any belief that judgements about good and evil have objective validity, and through his epoche in this limited area he achieves his ataraxia. Not even a hint is given of how the state of epoche on such matters as are considered in most of the Modes contributes to peace of mind. For these kinds of case we are left to conjecture that the relevant discomfort is perhaps the kind of frustration a biological scientist might feel at being unable to find the cause of cancer, or a physicist might feel at being unable to find a unified theory for all types of force.”p75-76 Mates 1996

Sextus Empiricus neglected to explain how scientific knowledge seems to be opposed to rest and peace of mind. I have already discussed that “science” (which has become too general and ambitious a word) uses as its ultimate concept that of work. Heidegger argues that it is work that prevents questioners from getting a word in edgewise. They are always “working on it” and, for now, we should content ourselves with the marvelous achievements we have, and not ask so many questions that they stop working.

It is exactly the Skeptic’s situation that asking questions has won out as the dominant attitude over any entrenched scientific doctrine. There are some opponents of Skepticism that say such an attitude amounts to paralysis, and if not paralysis then to behaving eccentrically, and if not that then at least a Skeptic would speak strangely. Sextus deals admirably with these objections in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism.

Further, we are told in several places (e.g., PH 1.191, 194, 207) that the Skeptic uses language (katachrestikos) “loosely” and does not join the Dogmatists in fighting over words or in seeking to use them with philosophic precision (kurios). In view of this we may conjecture that a sophisticated Pyrrhonist, following the ancient maxim of lathe biosas (“live in such a way as to escape notice”), would also be inclined to follow the advice to “think with the learned, but speak with the vulgar.””p72 Mates 1996

The way the Skeptic uses language is related to the problem at hand: how to show that scientific work is not conducive to rest and peace of mind, or of leading a happy life. How? Sextus says at the beginning of his Outlines  that

if the theory is so deceptive as to all but snatch away the appearances from under our very eyes, should we not distrust it in regard to the non-evident, and thus avoid being led by it into precipitate judgements?” p92 Sextus in Mates 1996

The Skeptic takes appearances as not open to question, so they are not nihilists. And they question doctrines that attempt to undermine appearances. Take the famous example of Sir Arthur Eddington (1928) on the term “solid.” As a scientist, he argued that a common table is not actually solid, because it is mainly made up of empty space. This goes against the table’s appearance of solidity, and was famously rebuked by Susan Stebbing (1937), who said that tables are things that help us know what we mean by “solid.” From a pragmatic point of view, a table is solid,

but Mates points out a problem with Skeptics in siding somewhat with the pragmatic use of words. He points out that at first we learn to say “the honey is sweet” and that is the correct and normal way of using language, while the Pyrrhonist would, at least a little later, assert that it merely appears to be sweet, and since this is not the way a child would normally use language immediately, it is a kind of abuse of language. To be more precise, Mates’ problem is that he thinks “the honey is sweet” and “it appears that the honey is sweet” are meant differently by a child. What exactly does a child means when she says honey is sweet? I would bet that the child is referring to an appearance, not a property of an external reality beyond such appearance, independent of a perceiving mind. The added word appears is merely a clarification for realists, not a modification of what a child means or how she uses language.

In other words, we were not born with the distinction between Berkleyan idealism and naive realism, and both suffice for the purposes of the child saying the honey is sweet. Indeed, that is the only way to really “go by appearances” as a child does, by experiencing the sweetness of honey without bothering about the realism or idealism (or both, or neither) of its appearance.

This leads directly to the central point that a scientific attitude is not a way that leads to very much happiness. When we study honey with a microscope so that we “know” things with the eye or with the mind about honey, so much that when we taste honey all we think about are these concepts and sights, not the taste, we miss the enjoyment in knowing the truth of this appearance of sweetness. Applied to our lives in general, the scientific attitude will quickly make us miserable. The way to know about the sweetness of honey is not any other way than to taste it yourself. Maybe an equivalent to a microscope can be invented for the tongue, and that would yield interesting, if warped, results, but is the world more enjoyable if we walk around with telescopes attached to our eyes?

Also maybe the difference between a scientist and a happy person is not so clear as this example, for take a wine connoisseur who can identify all the qualities of all the flavors of any particular wine. The question then becomes: does a wine connoisseur enjoy wine better than someone who is just really good at paying attention to taste and doesn’t know anything about wine or its ingredients?  The answer, under the economic principle of diminishing returns, is a resounding no. The wine connoisseur has tasted so many wines and has remembered and analyzed it so well that they do not enjoy it as much as they used to. In effect, they get burnt out, and the pleasure diminishes. The pleasure diminishes for the Pyrrhonist too, (it is doubtful she will taste wine as many times as a connoisseur) and she may learn to taste wine better, but the pleasure diminishes in a different way: the Pyrrhonist returns to ataraxia or dispassion and peace of mind because there is no identifying with or grasping for any “being,” there are only appearances. Without their external reality appearances are like water flowing through your fingers. Grasping after it is obviously futile. The Skeptic believes appearances are states of their soul, not external objects. So there is nothing to know more about, no endless searching to know and enjoy a tiny new thing about wine.

But this is the same with language use. The person who really enjoys language is not the analyzer-knower type, but the one who can appreciate vagueness. The person who enjoys the word solid uses it for a table, not a tiny particle. Not that particle is any less poetic than table: particle is still infinitely large compared to the infinitessimal, and the infinitessimal, which may escape being poetic, emerges as a piece of mysticism.

I hope this clears up Mates exasperation about Sextus not going into detail on why a scientist trying to cure cancer would not be as happy or have as much peace of mind as a Skeptic who has cancer. If the scientist didn’t have at least some skeptical approaches to life he would not taste honey, or feel the solidity of the world around him. The appearances of art would not be felt by him. Would you rather be him or the skeptic?

Of course, the idealized scientist doesn’t usually happen, and most scientists and other specialists move from their work to a more skeptical attitude at home or outside work. With a very flexible mind, a scientist could still be mostly a happy person. So this message is more for science education and communication. I had to argue with my mom that the things she sees in day to day life were more real than invisible particles. Sometimes people can’t live the skeptical life until they have reached the forefront of research in an area, just to confirm that appearances are just as good or better than the truths found in research. (example: me) I have to argue with my students to see the world of appearances. There have been projects such as logical positivism with a goal to make general language use more analytical and scientific. So the relevance of this argument has more to do with taking away the authority of the scientist to “discover” things that don’t appear to us, and giving appearances back to regular people, even if that makes the job of the scientist less valued and harder to communicate. We should educate and communicate with science in a way that empowers regular people and makes them happy, that is more important that the work of science.

The goal for today is to prove that magical thinking is rampant in mathematics. First of all lets define magical thinking. I would say that magical thinking is a kind of metaphorical thinking, as in the metaphor “My heart is the sun” only with the added idea that writing these words/making the metaphor exerts towards making the metaphor true to some degree or in some sense. Magical thinking is the claim that saying “My heart is the sun” actually warms my heart.

Now the way that mathematics uses magical thinking is to start with a metaphorical idea of difference. For example, the difference between a “raven” (1) and a “writing desk” (2) metaphorically (not actually) is the difference between the “north star” (3) and the “form of thinking called questioning” (4). It is fairly intuitive that the difference between (1) and (2) is different from the difference between (3) and (4), but mathematics amalgamates all differences together into one concept with metaphor. And it is a particular kind of metaphor that asserts that difference actually works that way.

Even though 3 and 5 are less different (2) than 3 and 9, (6), these differences are not taken into account in the traditional mathematical symbol for difference, the .  Traditionally 3 5 just as much as 3 9, so the identity of difference, , is enforced.

Mathematics asserts an ultimate concept “Difference” that is universal—it works for any situation where there is difference, making any difference “complete” and it does so by metaphorically joining disparate differences. Hence, it falls under my definition of magical thinking.

I am doing the opposite of what Derrida did with his Différance. Derrida added senses to difference, or conflated, allowing it a history and to belong to language, I am suggesting that we subtract, or better divide utterly Difference into differences.

The rest of the sciences follow suit, of course, since mathematics is the language of the sciences. My advisor for my M.S. in mathematics once said “Mathematics is the Poetry of the Sciences.” I would add that Mathematics tends to obfuscate the surprisingly obvious; it is a process that converts potential knowledge into actual knowledge. Poetry deals with knowledge that is naturally obscure, so that beautiful language can be mysterious, profound, even terrifying.

People often think that vagueness is bad, a kind of darkness that can never be fully dispelled, while distinction is hailed as the clarifying answer to vagueness. Here is how the reverse is also true: Vagueness is the light and distinction a darkness.

The distinction I pick is not random, but an important part of all other kinds of logical distinction—the distinction between the “if, then”: “→” and the “conclusion” symbol: ⊢. ⊢ is ambiguous, however, and can mean other things such as assertion that a proposition is true and not just being named, or to assert in a metalanguage that the following is a theorem in the object language. Used in our sense here, the good property of the “→” is “true” and the good property of the “⊢” is “sound”. The distinction goes back to Aristotle. The main point is that if we do away with this distinction, call these two symbols the same, an interesting insight can be made—that a sound argument:

A
A→B
⊢B

Can be represented without the ⊢ as follows: [A AND (A→B)] is logically equivalent to [A AND B], so that the conclusion [A AND B]→B is merely a deduction of A from [A AND B]. Allowing a vagueness between → and ⊢ reveals what logical deduction is—it is a cut from a larger whole, e.g. logical deduction is the act of drawing a distinction from the larger [A AND B]. With the introduction of the distinction between → and ⊢ this is concealed:

A
A→B
⊢B

cannot be collapsed into [A AND B]→B. As promised, vagueness reveals and distinction conceals, but not just any concealment, here we have a concealment which allows distinction to reveal, since this distinction is at the root of any further logical distinction.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.