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

There are very complex theories. A computer operating system is one of the most complex creations, with more moving parts than a commercial airplane. Airplanes fly, thats nice, but operating systems do something harder: they engage the human mind in every way. There are operating systems for household chores, entertainment, most kinds of work, and social existence. If there were a place for complexity, the internet and its administration would be this place, or non-place. Complexity is what protects our privacy… whats left of it.. in the form of encryption. In this case, and many others, complexity is there almost for its own sake. It is a gatekeeper. The complexity of encryption is not related to the privacy of our homemade pornography starring “me”. Encryption is dark for the sake of being dark. We need this darkness to make fools of ourselves in private. Computers are just embodied mathematics, after all, and mathematics has become the gatekeeper for most things. Science is one of few generalities that claim mathematics is not for its own sake as a gatekeeper. Most importantly, the complexity of mathematics in Science is both the gate and the reality. The reality in our minds: the conversion of ideas to things, and things to ideas. Mathematics is the night sky, the simple darkness in which the universe can play out its complexities. It is at once the mountain one must climb to reach the sky, and the sky itself. The arid peak, from which the world is a map, and new stars can be contemplated. The point of dependence of sky on land, and of land on sky. The recognition of complexity is a simple recognition.

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

Andrew Nightingale asked the question for discussion:

Why is vaccination not identified as a kind of homeopathy? Why are these two things on two sides of a stark dividing line between science-doubters and science-faithful? What makes people unable to make this connection?

Christian G Meyer February 27: Vaccinations are effective. Homeopathy is nonsense.

Andrew Nightingale: The basic principle of Homeopathy is that creating symptoms of a disease will strengthen the body against the disease. “like cures like” This is exactly what a vaccination does. So if one is nonsense so is the other, and if one is effective so is the other, at least sometimes. Your “contribution” has no argument or insight. It is only the regurgitation of the belief I question.… 

Frank T. Edelmann February 27: Dear Andrew Nightingale personally I see no real connection or similarity between vaccinations against COVID-19 and homeopathy. The newly developed coronavirus vaccines have ben thoroughly studied and proven to be highly effective to prevent an infection with the virus. Although there might be some formal similarity between vaccination and homeopathy, the main problem is that homeopathy completely lacks this positive proof of effectivity. As a chemist, I can easily oversee that many homeopathic medications do not contain a single molecule of active ingredient. Thus in my personal opinion it is dangerous to awaken any hope that homeopathy could be helpful in the fight against COVID-19.In this context please see this relevant link entitledIn Germany, a Heated Debate Over Homeopathyhttps://undark.org/2020/03/16/homeopathy-globuli-germany/

Andrew Nightingale February 27: Hello Frank T. Edelmann thank you for the contribution. The article was a good read. There are many things I do not know. My specialty is mathematics, with a duffers bag of philosophy. I can with authority criticize the statistical analysis that is used to establish a causal relationship in a scientific study. As a mathematician, I can say that what you define as the cause, and what you define as an effect, has a great impact on how persuasive the statistical analysis can be. Before we can speak of there being a causal relationship at all, we have to establish what the cause is, that is, what is the thing that causes, and what the effect is. Unfortunately I can only speak as an expert in this narrow frame, and unfortunately, as much as that might pain the certainty of science, we are also in the area of language–whether a community of scientists are successfully talking about a real cause or effect. You say the thing that causes we want to talk about are active ingredients, and I would agree with you, as you know much more about that than I do. What these are can be established, and once it is established, we can do a scientific study to establish a causal relationship for an effect. I have no doubt about the causal relationship between vaccines (the cause) and their effects (immunity to a disease). I am sure so far I have not said anything surprising. But what is the effect? Vaccines do not make you well, they make you sick. They induce the symptoms of a disease. That seems to me to be the same type of effect that homeopathy promises, whether or not they are administered incorrectly into the ear, or manufactured incorrectly with only sugar. IF they contained active ingredients and were administered correctly, like vaccines, there would be no difference, in principle, between vaccines and the principle of homeopathy. Both make you well later because you have induced a lesser sickness. That is my only point, and it is a point regardless of the power of causal relationships established by scientific rigor. It is a point about what the thing that causes is, and what we could call an effect. With that in mind, the proof that homeopathy has scientific backing is vaccines themselves. The problem is not that principle of homeopathy doesn’t make sense. The problem is that the principle of homeopathy seems to be unrecognized for what it is by scientists, and is left to flounder without being regulated in how the medicines are made and administered and studied. Homeopathy is merely in bad shape because it has been ignored. If it were not ignored, there would be no political cost in fighting against it. So again I reiterate, why has it been ignored? Is “like cures like” a principle that we, as scientists, are against politically, not reasonably? If so, is the the political cost to science worth it?

Frank T. Edelmann February 28: Dear Andrew Nightingale many thanks for your detailed response. “Homeopathy is merely in bad shape because it has been ignored.” This is definitively not true for my country, Germany. Many Germans trust in homeopathy. After all, homeopathy was “invented” by the German physician Samual Hahnemann:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_HahnemannHowever, as mentioned in this Wikipedia article, homeopathy is a pseudo-scientific system. Personally I believe that today the popular “like cures like” is just an empty phrase with no scientific background. In this context please see this relevant article entitledLike Doesn’t Cure Like: Homeopathy and Its Fake Medicationshttps://news.itmo.ru/en/news/6478/P.S. This is just my personal opinion which I’m not going to change. Thus we should not engage in any emotional discussion about homeopathy. 😊

Andrew Nightingale March 1Frank T. Edelmann: thank you for the detailed references. I am talking about what “homeopathy,” or some other word if you like, could be, and you are talking about what homeopathy (in this case another word is not appropriate) is now. And I agree with you that the state homeopathy is in now is not acceptable. The article entitled “Like does not cure like” is interesting because its title does not match the evidence that it presents. I believe this is a rhetorical or political move, to attack a principle indirectly by attacking homeopathy in every way it can and not the principle “like cures like” at all. I have no emotional attachment to homeopathy, so if you want we can drop that term now, so that discussion can continue. “like cures like” is definitely an oversimplification, and curing the virus with a vaccine most definitely used a principle similar to “like cures like.” You are right that “like cures like” is scientifically an empty phrase nowadays, because Francis Bacon and before him Galileo made it so, by changing the basis of knowledge by inviting us to “look closer”. Looking closer is good for knowledge, but it also is good for noticing differences better than likenesses, which turn out to be similar to one of Francis Bacon’s Idols. The Idol of the Cave might be the one, that what we see when we look closer is no longer communicable with the words people know, communicable about the “axioms” or general principles we can discuss. Words have been undermined. There is much work and exaggeration on this point of philosophy of science. My point here is that an axiom like “like cures like” is what is curing the virus Covid-19 in the form of vaccines.

Andrew Nightingale added a replyMarch 1Also Frank T. Edelmann thank you for the enjoyable discussion. :)… 

Christian G Meyer March 1: Please take some time (I guarantee, it´s worth every minute and you won´t regret it a second) and watch some (highly informative and highly entertaining) videos of the wonderful former very famous magician James Randi, who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, including homeopathy. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Homepathic dilutions are up to 1:1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.e.g.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jqP_1beVXQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCYvOgBaEY8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMukj31qw1Uhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmOfEoDcjksThere are many more videos available.Decades ago he offered a reward of 1 million USD if someone could prove that homeopathy is effective. The money never has been claimed. He debunked the spoon bender Uri Geller and showed how spoon bending works. It is recommended to read his exciting Wikipedia biography. I was so happy to meet him in 2005 and to spend a day with him. He died in October 2020 at the age of 92, guess from what.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_RandiBy the way, vaccinations have for decades now declared by the CDC as the most effective public health measures ever, far more effective than improving car driving security, working security, anti-smoking campaigns and many other measures. Vaccinations are always Number 1!

Christian G Meyer added a replyMarch 1It is interestig that in old Rome it was recommended to eat the liver of rabid dogs to be protected against rabies – a pre-stage of the rabies vaccine which is used today.… 

Ligen Yu added a replyMarch 1Andrew has presented a very critical question about modern medicine, that is the false causal relationship. What the medical scientists think to be causes may not be the real cause, and what the medical scientist think to be effect may not be the real effect. And that is the root cause of the replication crisis in medicine:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisisGiven the human being as a super complex system, there might be millions of causal conditions that contribute to a medical condition with different weightage, and we really need to pay great caution when we ascertain any scientific causal relationship between a few causal conditions to the medical condition.

Andrew Nightingale added a replyMarch 1I have said enough, and plenty more in my own published work that is related. I hope the discussion will continue without me. Peace!

Has justice has become sense-making? The many senses of the over-worked concept of justice allows it to generally sound like a good idea to the atomized American. Even Bernie Sanders repeats 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 neolibral “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, being 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 persuasive force in politics. For example, right now everyone is worried that the government will fail to raise the debt ceiling which would effectively result in total failure of American governance and society. The cost to those in power would be a complete loss, and American politicians know this, so under the cover of this “crisis,” created by the media, they carry on pursuing their least popular policies.

Media outlets employ Elite People like Anand Giridharadas, who write things for the New York Times and try to make the argument that we shouldn’t listen to just anybody of the

114 percent of Americans now having their own podcast, it is not easy to choose the one with the best title. But I’d go with the journalist Chris Hayes’s “Why Is This Happening?”
(Why do Trump Supporters Support Trump?)
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 here. Not that the New York Times wants 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’ attempt to rhetorically close that space is unhealthy politically. We need synthesis but not to the tune of the elite bringing us more Barack Obamas and Hillary Clintons, which are, 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 Dierdre writes “they are egg and yoke 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/

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.

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