Once I was speaking with my step-father and he told me about how the Buddha attempted to describe the size of an atom by comparing the sizes of things available to the senses, and multiplying that relative smaller size many times. My step-father was convinced that the Buddha knew the size of an atom and had got it in line with scientific knowledge on the subject. Whether or not Buddha got it right in this case I think is beside the point. The point is that the Buddha went no further than this. He described a smallest particle and asserted that it was smallest– atomic. This is not in line with the current scientific attitude. They find a smallest particle and then the race continues to find yet a smaller one.

I believe the Buddha stopped at his smallest particle and looked no further for purely ethical reasons. He was putting a limit over the domain that he would protect with his religion and his dhamma. He didn’t say so, but going further, or smaller, than his smallest particle, as an act of body, speech or mind, puts you outside his protection and his teaching.

Now we turn to the consequences of our splitting the atom– first with mind, then with speech, and finally with body, we put the entire world in danger of going up in flame. In our case, the Buddha’s teaching on heedfulness is in a sense largely unhelpful, because the fear and peril of nuclear war is paralyzing. And yet scientists seem to believe that continuing their inquiry further and further to ever smaller particles would somehow save us, rather than just put us in more danger. I don’t think scientists have anything reasonable on why their pursuits should not just put us in more danger. Danger of poisoning our water, our land, danger of WMD, pandemics. Quantum computers are great, but what about Quantum bombs? News treats scientific “progress” with wonderful possibilities for technologies, but rarely treats the way a new idea can be misused and misinterpreted to serve people who are less well-meaning than the truth-devoted ideal scientist. When will we stop uncritically allowing scientific ideas into our societies?

And the question may be put to the Sangha, whether the threat of nuclear war, which seems rather abstract involving particles I can’t see and causal relations between presidents and cultures of people I am removed from; whether this threat that I may at any time go up in flame or some of my friends may burn, or that my friends might feel the pain of their friends dying in fire, is relevant to the here and now? In other words, is it Dhamma; is it a real threat? Is fear of it justified? It may seem that we should just pay attention to what is before us and pretend that splitting subatomic particles just isn’t, in the present moment, a real problem. If we do that, and end up burning, should we look to our past karma as the cause, and not the strange modern predicament that we hear about on the news? It seems that this is a clear impasse between Buddhism and modern society, and that “what is relevant?” “What is Dhamma?” is actually in question, rather than immanently apparent.

There is no service in denouncing scientists for their actions in creating WMDs, nor is there service in finding fault in Buddhist doctrine in how it helps or hurts us in our current plight.

The serviceable question is what do we do now, that we have irrevocably put ourselves in such a danger that heedfulness, inquiry, and knowledge are no longer unequivocally good.

I believe what we should do is to inquire into where the ethical limits of our knowledge ought to be. Obviously, subatomic particles in isolation, as particles of an atom, should be recognized as an unethical idea. It does not matter if subatomic particles are “true” or “real.” Any lie is “real enough” or has some truth in it, otherwise it would not see the light of day. Realizing that any lie has truth in it is unhelpful, it is a realization that will do more harm than good, even though it is true. In the same sense, a subatomic particle is a terrible lie, or a harmful truth, and, as Buddha must have realized, we must set a boundary against inquiry in this direction. We have enough technology to feed us and care for us. What we need is the sanity to recognize we have enough food (and to start sharing it); to recognize how small is small enough, how much truth us truth enough (and how little truth constitutes a lie), how much heedfulness, inquiry and knowledge is enough, when to speak of truths, and when a truth should remain unspoken, and left outside our motivations for action. After all, using small technical words such as subatomic particle restricts our speech to only a vary small aspect of the world. In other words, it is more unreal than real, less about the world and more about something else.

The wisdom of the Buddha is seen most powerfully in recognizing when he chose to be silent. He was silent on all things except on how to end suffering for oneself. The time to thoughtfully and powerfully set limits on scientists’ ability to invade one’s own thought, speech and acts is overdue. The noises we make should not be an endless refinement of technical language on ever-refined “particles” or “quanta,” but noises that quiet the noise. The sound of the singing bowl is one such noise.

I believe my book is another such noise.

You can reduce two-dimensional space to one-dimensional space by assuming the two-dimensional space is shaped like a spiral, if we don’t have completeness in our number system. This is because any point, on an appropriate number-system, and on, say, a piece of paper, could be described by a single length.

For three dimensions it is also possible, if you imagine a spiral going around a sphere from top to bottom, widening after it circles the sphere and turns around following a similar pattern back up, etc. It is possible to describe any point in 3-space with a single length.

Time is usually the one dimension that can describe everything, but space can be reduced to one dimension too.

“If you’re going to do it over-do it, that’s how you know you’re alive” -Ani Difranco

So we see famous people over-doing it all the time. Published works are generally over-done, or they wouldn’t be published. It falls under the general ailment of American society, seen in abundance in my field of mathematics, that technique replaces everything else. Substance, profundity, immanence, and what actually serves society, is replaced with attention to detail and over-work. And this ailment is ultimately driven by fear. People get convinced that they need attention, they come into the world with a job to do, a job that they’re good at, but because of an environment of competition, they are afraid that they’re work wont get done, because it will get ignored. A lot of things that are over-done don’t matter much. Nintendo? Game of Thrones? “Pro” wrestling? Some things that matter a lot are so over-done that they lose their potency, such as bills that are negotiated in the American government. They get rhetorical names, but their contents are like, I believe the metaphor the media likes is ground up sausage. Look at Obama-era health care bills. They managed to rearrange some things, it did help some people in very important, life-saving ways, and it made the private medical companies’ stocks go up. What was it? I admit I am not enough of a fanatic to find out, and if I were, the burden of communicating what I found would be immense. It was over-done to make it “dark.” People can be more easily manipulated, or forced into their already entrenched dogmas, because they don’t understand what is going on.

Is academia different? I’ve heard it said that academics are basically politicians, I would add that they tend to be more soft-spoken and polite politicians. Social constructivism is an obvious example, obvious because it is honest about being political. Other paradigms are just as political.

I have become convinced there is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been said at least indirectly. The things that really need to be said have been said before, but they need their expiration date renewed. The resistance to it, if its worth saying, will be actually be political, but the arguments will be technical, and if you want to get published while going against the stampeding herd, you have to be meticulous and over-do it. That is why “work” is an unassailable ideal in academia. Just call it “jobs” and you’re a politician.

One very important consequence of this system is that interdisciplinary works get ignored because they cannot follow the techniques of a given discipline as well as narrowly-focused work can.

I think Borge’s comparison of the Argentinian verses the US-American is apt. Borge’s says that to an Argentinian, a book that has received a reward might be good despite the reward, where US-Americans generally go by the New York Times bestseller award or others.

I offer a way out of this situation with two concepts: Bravery and Skepticism.

Skepticism is the attitude that helps the consumer, the path of being.

Bravery helps the creator, the path of doing

When you are doing things, don’t over do them. This takes skepticism as well as bravery. Eventually you have to say “this is not perfect, it is good enough” Care is a kind of fear. When you are careful in your work, you have to know when you are caring too much, when you just have to be brave and stop worrying over your work. That takes bravery because you have to face the attention you are going to get, however little that might be. You have to face a general attitude that works should be overdone and your work “doesn’t count” because it isn’t as meticulous as other works and doesn’t show the right technique. You have to face not getting published, and getting ignored. If you really chose the path of doing, this is hard to face, and it feels like you didn’t really accomplish anything.

But actually it is the only way to really accomplish anything, because instead of pursuing technique you can pursue other things.

People say technology has to be over-done, and we wouldn’t have our wonderful toys without our belief in technique. The drawbacks are obvious but not in focus: gadgets that depend on software that will only be supported for a few years, other gadgets that require specific replacement parts that wont be made for that long. The “designed obsolescence” concept doesn’t go far enough. The reason for all the trash is more embedded in our minds than that. I’d like to ask Darwin if he thinks we’ve won the competition.

Now the audience for your work that is not over-done is the rare skeptic. They are the ones who will recognize that it doesn’t have to be “out-done” with greater attention to detail, beyond its surface appearance. They will see and appreciate substance, immanence, profundity, and how it serves humanity beyond whether it “out-does.”

The skeptic viewpoint seems to point to a way of life where you do not interpret things. They make impressions on the soul, but you do not react by interpreting them.

I think this is not quite right. While it is true that the sweetness of the honey is truth enough for life in general, occasionally something happens that seems unusually significant. My belief is that in those times, such as a death or birth in the family, the event should be interpreted very carefully.

Sometimes, you decide to know, not for any other reason than the impression your soul gives you is that you ought to know. Now, when this happens, deciding to know has to be thought about carefully. For example, say you are cooking dinner for the people at a baby shower. You like some of the people coming and you don’t like others. So you cook a different dish according to who will eat it. It being a momentous occasion it appears to your soul that you ought to interpret what these foods mean, so you decide “the food for the people I don’t like will make them fat” and “the food for the people I do like will warm their heart and give them strength and courage” Now, the danger, as is always the danger when you decide to know something rashly, is that these decisions or interpretations get misused. The people you like eat the food they’re not supposed to eat; same for the people you don’t like. The invention of gasoline got misused, coal powerplants got misused, social constructivism got misused. That is why it seems to the skeptic its better not to decide.

I would differ in saying that deciding on an issue should be done with the utmost care. The example above is less momentous than an actual birth or death. As for my children and the death of my father, I have decided on certain meanings, but it took years of careful thought, and I am still revising my thoughts on what their births/deaths mean, to say nothing about their lives, which is a problem that seems to big to even begin working on, but I have begun. Life is a moving target, that is why it is so precious. If we could really know what it meant, it would signal our death.

This was how I learned I didn’t need a PhD. I remember vividly my advisor giving me permission to interpret, as if that were not something normally done by people. He said “You can interpret” a few times in succession, and it made me angry, but I didn’t show it. Of course I can interpret. I don’t need someone with a PhD to give me permission, and neither does anyone else. This person, who is in a powerful position as an academic disseminating ideas on how to teach physics to students, seems to believe otherwise.

But then sometimes I meet people who have been in love with the English language a long time, and they have entered into some kind of language-game, where each little word “OK” “Right” “See you later” has a fixed interpretation, as if the person doesn’t get to decide what they mean. This is another way that skepticism serves regular people, to help them escape the English language-games, which… how do I say except to quote George Orwell “English is in a bad way” Its not a language to play a language game with.  And if you think poetry is dead, it is simply because English is dead (or mathematics) for you. We need English poets to revive the remains.

As for an action plan, do not seek momentous occasions: wait for them, listen for them, and then, as the impression is such that knowing is required, carefully interpret so it does no harm. How momentous an occasion is depends on the wisdom of interpreter.

I imagine as we approach death smaller and smaller, seemingly mundane events will seem more and more momentous.

—

Death does not speak true

Who, dreaming, says so others can hear,
“I am dreaming”

And someone, dreaming, says only to herself
“It is raining”
When it is raining
(out?).

She does not speak true

Even if her dreams were connected
With the noise of the rain.

And not knowing when I was in a dream, if I were to die
How could the manner of my death speak something true?
Would my death awaken something somewhere:
My daughter would look on my death and think
“He died dreaming”
“He spoke as he died, ‘I am dreaming’”

“Dying, he dreamed something true”

And if dreams speak true, are they a figment of the living?
What dreams in death, after the momentous death, could speak as finally a word,
Even in peace,
Mean as finally a meaning?

What if these were my last words?

—

“A Defense of Poetry Against the Mathematicians” (2019) ISBN 1688505717

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.

For this month I return to my old tricks: speech against entrenched scientific doctrine. It may seem rash, destructive to do this work. One may counter that the indoctrination that is required is equally rash and destructive. I know that the young often have to learn lessons in an unpleasant way. The reason I write urgently about people’s faith in science is because I am basically a skeptic. I believe that holding a belief as absolutely true, without exception, does not create concord. When people are inflexible about ideas there is more fighting among people, within families, communities and internationally, not less. On one hand the people who strongly believe the doctrine cannot abide people who have another mind on an issue, they can’t even talk to them, thinking them beneath reproach. So far a hive mind has not been successfully implemented (and to my mind should not be implemented), no matter how scientific that hive mind might be. On the other hand, the people who can’t bring themselves to agree with a scientific “party line” tend to look down on themselves as well, feeling that it is their fault and they simply don’t understand. Sometimes they seek out alternative beliefs that are just as conceited as scientific beliefs. As a way to counteract solid beliefs, they create other solid beliefs. They believe that not having an equally entrenched belief to combat scientific belief, that is, to merely argue against a scientific belief, is destructive. A basic skeptical idea is that solid belief breeds discord and strife.

One way to see the drawbacks in having overconfidence about one’s knowledge is looking at the concept of “mansplaining.” The basic problem with the concept of mansplaining is it assumes that someone or other “really” knows about something. Often engineers and math buffs love their subject because of a love of the obvious. They want to return again and again to what they think they “really” know, like recounting the gold coins they’ve collected. And the person on the receiving end of this type of personality gets annoyed either because they don’t care to know, or feel that they really know, and the person mansplaining doesn’t “really” know. So we’re in a contest of who knows better. The skeptic completely avoids this contest, because she isn’t sure if anything is”really” known. The only thing skeptics believe, the only thing that keeps skeptics from nihilism, is they acknowledge that there are certain impressions in the present moment; they do not commit to where the impressions come from (external objects, or internal thoughts, or somewhere else), what it is that receives this impression they call the soul, but what the soul is I don’t know. They avoid a philosophical point of view on what these impressions (Greek phantasiai) are. The main goal of the skeptic is Ataraxia, which is peace of mind from not accepting any dogmatic doctrine. By thinking carefully about pro and con of various dogmatic doctrines, effectively counting the gold coins, getting involved in the richness of one doctrine, and then looking at a counter belief, counting the gold coins and richness, the skeptic can’t decide between the two piles of gold, the two doctrines. After doing this type of comparison a lot, the mind in Ataraxia becomes like a fortress, and a mansplainer will have almost no hold on such a skeptic, even if the topic is new. They may observe that the mansplainer appears rather rash in deciding they know so much, but they will not be moved to believe what the mansplainer believes because they have already weighed conflicting beliefs, nor will they be moved to criticize the mansplainer, because the skeptic doesn’t have an alternative belief to defend except what seems or appears to them through the senses/mind in the given moment.

My argument here seems to be an argument against Newton’s laws of physics. That the theory is “false.” However, I am not making the claim that Newton’s laws are false, I am rather asking if Newton’s laws of physics make sense–if Newton’s laws are neither true nor false. Like the person on the receiving end of a mansplainer, I feel merely puzzled, at a loss, unsure if I understand. Unlike people in physics classrooms who in the end look down on themselves deciding “I can’t do physics” or “I can’t do math” I believe anyone taking the position that they can’t make sense of these “laws” is a respectable position to take. This is the reason for the heavy use of the word “Seems.” It may be assumed that “It seems to me” can be added to all of what follows, and everything in this blog.

Newton’s laws of physics are only true in a perfect vacuum. The funny thing is that the basic notion that defines mathematical space, the open set, seems to assert that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum. So, if Newtonian physics were logical, it would have to either abandon mathematical space, which would do away with line and point the way it is used in physics texts, or it would have to abandon Newton’s laws. The problem I’m running into is that the open set, the basic building block of mathematical space is defined by starting with a point, and then asserting that any “neighborhood” (or circle if you like, but circle depends on point and space already being defined) around that point, no matter how small, contains another point inside the neighborhood (circle). It is clear that space must have points in it, but could a point or a really small neighborhood still be considered empty space? It seems to come down to the question: What is a point?

The common understanding is that a point is a place, not a thing, and that it is such a small place that nothing can be in that place, because if something could be there, say the smallest neutrino, to say the least, there would then exist something of no size. Could there be a place (indeed many, many places) where only nothing can possibly be? It seems to be a contradiction in terms. A place is a place where something could be, and if nothing can be in this place, then it is no place at all. If we did away with the idea of a point to define the open set, say we used progressively smaller circles or neighborhoods instead of points…. that would result is a very different understanding of what is a circle or neighborhood, basically what space is would change: this new idea of space would not be ordered by the real numbers because they are defined in space as points. Instead space would have to be ordered by neighborhoods, if at all. This may be possible, and even worthwhile, but for the present it would make mathematical space stand on its head.

If there is a smallest particle, say take the smallest subatomic particle, or whatever, the smallest neutrino, I don’t know, and then take a neighborhood that is smaller than that, it seems then you have a perfect vacuum…assuming you can still locate points in this very small neighborhood.  That doesn’t tell us what points are, but at least we can then say that there are very small neighborhoods of perfect vacuums where Newton’s laws can hold true. But to get to this conclusion we have sacrificed a lot: we have admitted that we don’t know what a point is. It seems that any neighborhood smaller than the smallest particle would have the same problem a point has: it would be a place that only nothing can possibly be in, which seems to be no place at all. Also, we have assumed we know what the smallest particle is.

It is safe to say that we can never know when we’ve found the smallest particle, because there will always be sizes beyond our reckoning.

Finally, it seems we are lucky to find a truly empty space large enough to claim that Newton’s laws are absolute and inflexible truths (in such spaces). Such a space is a situation that doesn’t matter much. In the world of breath and bodies, Newton’s laws of physics are approximations of more or less pragmatic use, not absolute truths. And mathematical space doesn’t seem to make sense either. Neither mathematical space nore Newton’s laws ought to be believed inflexibly as though other ideas are beneath reproach

Science is magic in the same sense that knowledge is power. To say knowledge is power we at least need to know what knowledge is. Not easy. After that it is pretty much impossible to know what power is. For example, to squeeze the problem down as much as we can, take potential energy. Where is the energy? The simple example is a round rock at the top of a hill. It has the potential to roll down the hill. It has this potential because it has not rolled yet, so already we get the idea that power is not, but there are so many other situations that could also create potential energy, so many that potential energy is really impossible to define. Thats just one small part of what power could be. So to say knowledge is power, or even Foucault’s power is knowledge, is very pessimistic. It assumes that power isn’t anything more than what we know about it. How do we know that? We don’t. We just sort of wish our knowledge were that magnificent. Or in Foucault’s case, we wish our power could always be known, maybe by the magnificence of our power.

So science has the same relationship to magic as knowledge does to power. It is silly to say as soon as it becomes a science it is no longer magic. That is merely an uninsightful, semantic argument. But magic could be so much more than what has been reduced to a science. We choose to keep our eyes where the flashlight beam in the dark is shining, maybe because we like to see (know), maybe because the vague, shifting shapes we would see in the dark, if we looked beyond our beam of light, are too frightening.

I was in conversation with my brother many years ago and he was talking about an experiment where social pressure could make people believe that the longer line was the shorter, and the shorter the longer. I believe his point was that when social reality doesnot correspond to physical reality, the social reality is wrong.

I pointed out that other contradictory ideas, for example, that two things can be both alike and different, so a triangle and a star can be alike in being polygons, but different in how many angles they have, is also a contradiction, much like the longer line being the shorter and the shorter, longer. Admittedly they are slightly different because “like” is a two-way relationship while “larger” only goes one way, from the larger to the shorter, but that there is another contradictory relationship that we find acceptable is enough.

Much later my brother argued that paradoxical relationships of likeness and difference can be resolved by making them a matter of degree. Two things are “like” 30% and “unlike” 70%, for example.

The problem with this is that = and ≠ are related to likeness and difference, they are types of likeness and difference. Equality is a type of likeness, and ≠ is a type of difference, and they are used in analysis books to build the concept of number. We can’t have the natural numbers without the idea that 1+1=2. So = and ≠ are prior to matters of degree. To be clear, if = means strictly identity, so two apples are not equal to each other (if they were, they would be both = and ≠). One apple is equal to itself. Now, evoking Wittgenstein, we would not bother to say, or be interested in the slightest in, 1+1=2, if 1+1 and 2 were not slightly different from each other. The same way we never say “This apple is this apple”. One could say that 1+1 is the act of grouping two apples, and 2 is the apples already grouped. Looked at in this way 1+1 ≠ 2 ; 1+1 and 2 do not have the same identity.

Because the same problem of likeness and difference arises with = and ≠, we cannot use degree to solve the problem and use = and ≠ to solve what we mean by degree, that is circular.

It may be that this is related to Buddha’s idea of anatta (not-self). The parts of one’s self do not add up to the self we perceive, yet those parts, we say, are what the self is. Buddha uses exactly this argument about a cart– that no-where in the parts of the cart do we find the essence of the cart: 1+1 does not contain the idea of 2, or as Western philosophers including Kant have noticed, 1+1=2 is synthetic.

This is a good thing. Remember Buddha’s talk of the “Deathless” is beyond duality, beyond death and life, self and not-self. If the concept of identity were defensible, or a duality such as = and ≠ could create a system of numbers that could fully describe reality, there would be no escape, no ascendance to the Deathless.

There is a glaring problem with the popular explanation of gravitational waves.

Consider: An isolated sphere of vacuum space, with no gravity coming from outside it. Now consider two massive bodies suddenly appearing in the vacuum, initially without any motion. According to gravity they will be attracted to each other and collide. Before the collision, gravity is working, but are there gravitational waves?

The basic problem here is that they detected a wave because of a specific situation where black holes were spinning around each other. Take away that specific situation, and there is no telling if gravitational waves are a general property of gravity. So why all the hype? Why wouldn’t scientists mention that the general hubbub is potentially misinformed? My guess is because they need PR stunts just like any political enterprise.

The Sokal Affair was a paper published following postmodern-sounding ideas, but after it was published the author Sokal claimed the article is nonsense. It was a blow to critics of science, and Sokal, in a statement about what he had done, accused the editors of being intellectually lazy for publishing the paper.

Strangely, the whole gravitational waves thing, making an appearance in the movie Interstellar, and found in popular books, (including the “general relativity for babies” book I have read to my toddler a few times) enjoys a lot of popular support but for equally lazy reasons.

The belief that there are universal laws, can they be merely believed? And if you believe them, musn’t you also believe that your belief is not a belief?

Consider:

1) The next statement is true
2) The previous statement is merely a belief

The confusion above makes it clear that the difference between belief and universal truth is not always well defined.

Why should it be that “perception must be understood in terms of knowledge?” Why should it be that, since most people don’t believe that belief and knowledge are the same, it is likely that belief and knowledge are different? Could it be that this belief in knowledge as different from belief is exactly what enforces ignorance? It is dogma that blinds us from the malleability of reality, and what allows others, who supposedly know more or understand more than us, to dominate us.

A claim to know a place is ordinarily a claim to knowledge how (see Ryle), to an ability to find one’s way about in it.” Vol. 3 Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1967 p 347 What kind of knowledge is knowing when? When in the past is remembered, when in the future is prophetic, and when in the present is all kind of knowledge at once, whatever crosses one’s mind or is evident to the senses. Since the only real knowledge is knowledge in the present, knowledge of time is a synthesis of all other knowledge.

I’ll give the last word to Hume.

“…Descartes, who held that assent is a matter of will that can be freely given or withheld, and Hume, who represented us as largely passive in belief, which he conceived as a feeling that we find ourselves with and must put up with whether we like it or not, much as we find ourselves equipped with desires and aversions.”p351 Vol. 3 Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1967

“On Hume’s side is the fact that it seems no more possible to resolve to believe something one actually does not believe than it is to increase one’s height or eradicate one’s distaste for endives by a simple effort of will. What one can do is to fortify or undermine one’s belief in a proposition indirectly by voluntarily concentrating one’s attention on the evidence for or against it.”p352 Vol. 3 Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1967