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GaryCGibson : Jesus Christ and deconstructionists on December 2, 2006I am a Christian. I appreciate various paradigms or constructions as people are wont to say nowdays of intellectual frameworks. Linguistics are interesting too of course, yet it is usefu; for philosophers not to permit language use to slip into a swamp of utter meaninglessness or truthlessness about the given world or universe of experience.
Science means knowledge of course etymologically. Discovering the veracity or truth of knowledge has been a philosophical activity before Socrates formalized the activity as Plato wrote. -
GaryCGibson on April 10, 2006Science is good, intelligence is good, Christianity is good and even dreaming is good...yet one must be careful about anything 'supernatural' its mostly corrupt.
Many philosophical questions are explicable within plotinus' paradigm of The Soul (the universe) in that everything in the universe is imperfect, even thought is imperfect attempting to discover what it doesn't know. The One is absolutely perfect and doesn't even think nor contain time or temporal ekstasis. (Sartre's use of a greek term)
McKenna and Page's version of The Enneads by Plotinus is available for free online. I believe dreaming about flight is anyone's way of trying to be free. Some Americans still admire the frontier ethic, yet the rest of the planet may be more cynical and cut to the front of the line minded. One can easily go from cosmology metaphysics and Christianity to politics or corporatism as a topic for discussion. -
GaryCGibson on April 10, 2006I'm not sure that you know what 'my version' of science is? My ideas about contemporary science and scientific method are fairly contemporary. I haven't claimed to have invented one of my own.
One may have lots of skill at math, learn lots of physics, learn technical equipment, read what other scientists have done historically and presently, survey what has been discovered and why it believed to be true and that is a gist of science. Epistemology and philosophy are different, and not useless information. Dead reckoning and various sorts of judgments about existence and metaphysics based on various premises aren't invariably invalid because they aren't scientific.
One may philosophize about scientifically validated knowledge and guess or opine about if its true forever or for some short period of time, and consider questions such as shannon entropy and conservation/loss of information from black holes, if the Universe expands forever and the physical structures are broken down, if the stelliferous era ends and cold dark matter prevails...is information lost violating the conservation of energy.
Those are technical questions. My eyes haven't seen the light from the neo-proto universe but telescopes have, in theory, if one can trust a 13 billion year red shifted pack of photons, and if one regards relativity as settled regarding how space has affected the photons, and if one doens't believe some sort of quantum mechanical substitution of travelling photons hasn't happened or extra-dimensions haven't effected the energy travelling in some unknown way one may have some information to use an an element in forming an opinion about a certain post-inflaton aspect of this universe.
If one reads about Plotinus and the neo-Platonist view of the creation one can place the entire paradigm of contemporary cosmology neatly within it--its in the realm of The Soul, not in the realm of The Intellect and not in the realm of The One. That sort of transition or theoretical association is a bit more obscure obviously, and if one hasn't an interest one wouldn't have read formal or modal logical and considered how sundry biblical staments consist in relation to neo-platonist worldview of the cosmos.
If it hasn't already been considered, I'd like to point out that Martian ice could be melted and used for cosmic ray water 'insulation (five meters thickness needed) within a triple-walled shelter 'igloo' for Martianaut housing
Poetry is just poetry however. I don't want anyone to think I'm trying to do quantum computing, research d.n.a. in crystals that scientists can use to study ancient fossillized genetic materials or whatever. With depth in history and philosophy at a bachelor's level, and reading science when I can between bike trekking or house painting I can't get very deep into research. Trying to economically escape from the U.S.A. after ten years of labor unsuccessfully trying to get a sailboat (seven failures) and return to Alaska to photo and write poetry about vanishing wildlife or whatever I just don't work at Intel dusting chips nor burn scientific papers about turning Venus into a super-computer.
Perhaps the idea you have about what my 'interpretation' of science is begin with the poems posted here. You should know that these are simply poems and not scientific postulates. They aren't in such a form nor are they intended to be.
Aristotle believed that poetry was about the 'possible' instead of the factual or historical. Because I read in an interdisciplinary way and am not always writing about history I may well take elements of philosophical thought, writings from Plato or Heraclitus to Duns Scotus, Thomas Acquinus, Parmenides, Hegel, Kant, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Quine or Strawson, Wittgenstein or Whitehead and relate them to Frege, Kerkeguard, Diraq, Pauli, Swarzhchild, Einstein,Green, Witten and so forth, and perhaps combine them with Christian ideas and poetic concepts and styles. The effort is to describe metaaesthetics perhaps with the help of science, not in substitution for it.
The ingrediants or background reading and writing any poet or even philosopher may have can be substantial. Perhaps one must prioritize it and attempt to write about what one believes is true about the universe instead of what is just 'scientific'.
Matters of revelation such as the Bible provides aren't matters of science though debatably some may find scientific support for the book of Genesis or whatever; The Big Bang hypotheis as a modal logic parallel of the 'Let there be light' sudden existence of light. In my book Creation and Cosmos; The Literal Values of Genesis' I tried to show some of the paralell paradigms, and the literal values I refer to are time literals or unknown bound variables with figurative time parameters. I wasn't trying to do science.
You may be interested in reading a review in Scientific American page 98/100 on 'Beyond the Standard Model' about three books that review cosmological theories of everything beyond the standard theory.
On the problem of infinities I believe they remain infinite. Some infinities may be reduced or eliminated through various equations or discoveries, and that highlights the point that some infinities don't exist but are instead hypothetical infinities.
On the subject of cosmology which I like reading about one may find all sorts of interesting theoretical structures, and philosophically meta-physics structures have interesting conjunctions sometimes with that of cosmological researches. Physics uses theoretical structures also to try to find various ways of 'fitting' what is known into more complete structures. Logic and modal logic may create structures that can be inductive models based on necessary consistency. One may apply that principle with theology and Biblical researches too.
On the subject of creationism there is much unclarity about what is meant by that, and what the Bible actual means is different than what one wants it to mean. many examples exist.
In reading Bruce Vawter's simultaneous analysis of the four gospels he raised the point about Jesus feeding the five thousand. The Bible doesn't actual say how the bread was multiplied with the fishes, people may assume it does. When Jesus healed the cripple at the pool of Bethesda there is a possible scribal interpretation that the pool bubbled at a certain time each day as it was stirred by angels. Vawter believed that point about the bubbling water being stirred by angels wasn't written by the apostles but by a later 'enhancer'. You may know that the Gosple according to Judas Iscariot was released recently...perhaps some of the city of Iskar (Iskariot) wanted to regain poltical correctness so they turbo-charged a version of a gospel for their own benefit.
Actually I have a sort of post-creationist view of the Genesis account such that it can include virtually anything cosmologists discover within it. If you have an e-mail address I will send you a pdf version of my book 'Creation and Cosmos; The Literal Values of Genesis' so that you could have an idea of what I thought about it before I read Plotinus and considered the Bible more.
Following is a post on end-times and political structures that I wanted to post. Thanks for your interest on the stuff above...Gary C Gibson. Send a message here if you'd like the book as an attachment... one@garycgibson.us
Does a Hierarchical Priesthood of the Temple Sort lead logically to the Anti-Christ in The Temple?
In the world today corporatism is a political force making a new world order. In Christian end-times scenarios the anti-Christ will reign in The Temple in Jerusalem, and a sort of new world order perhaps within the global paradigm of a ‘Babylon’ like world trading power will perhaps consolidate religions within its bureaucratic power structure.
The National Geographic’s article on 20th century genocides noted that China under Mao eliminated 30 million to the need for political cleansing. China with communism moving toward corporatism with the cooperation of opportunistic foreign investors such as find favor with the Bush administration may vie with other post-civilization powers to control the thought and will of mankind.
The United States congress has sought to control its borders that have allowed in more than 16 million illegal aliens since the Reagan administration. In a more orderly era legal immigrants arrived in the United States through Ellis Island, while today they protest by the millions to cut lines and demand ‘compromises’ that give them full citizenship rights even if gradually. The Senate considers a compromise in such a way as to decide to give a burglar the jewelry, the gold, or citizenship instead of contemplating law enforcement. The right of sheer force to take over the political deliberations of a foreign nation isn’t new.
Africa has been beset by national and tribal wars, 26 million Africans have HIV and Rwanda had an 800,000 person genocide occurring over three months while the international community turned aside perhaps because of the ‘complexity’ of becoming involved. A ‘minor’ democide is still in progress in Darfur. The Democratic Party of the United States casts aside the 200,000 murders of Saddam Hussein’s government, chemical war on Kurds and elimination through avoidable neglect of 300,000 to 100,000,000 innocent Iraqi ‘vulnerables’ as in Ted Turner’s words something ‘that wasn’t worth it’. Decision’s of what interventions to stop wars are ‘worth it may be another difficult yet problematic aspect of 21st century hierarchical structures with an overweening ambient background of broadcast rave an irrationality that serves corporatists purposes by elimination of the weak and of potential rival forms of government such as democracy.
A Temple priesthood, tithed and closely supporting the Absolute monarch of a nation has been a fact in the world even tough Jesus Christ sought to eliminate it with the ultimate sacrifice of Himself and to establish an egalitarian ‘Priesthood of Believers’. Jesus predicted the temple would be destroyed within a generation (it was), and the Temple priesthood considered Jesus such a threat that they found him ‘blasphemous’ and worthy of crucifixion. The Temple Priesthood lingers on in Christianity simply through tradition, inertia, greed and the technological difficulties through history of creating a non-communistic close association of believers. In pre-industrial era farmers would have found such assembly more difficult than today’s mobile urban generations.
A priesthood of believers would become a sort of Special Forces power wresting freedom of thought from too closely associated with politicians and worldly economic powers hierarchical commercial priests. God probably doesn’t perform miracles on a regular time schedule like a Cepheid variable or old faithful geyser during a weekly two-hour entertaining performance of ‘worship’…then again perhaps he does (skeptically). Well meaning Christians working as commercial priests may feel a need for production or sensationalism that would not exist if they were simply elders with circles of Christian associates that had entered into God’s rest and were always in contemplative worship working supportively in the world to meet the needs first of themselves as believers and evangelizing larger social groups.
While it is possible to imagine circles of twelve souls gathered with a five minute timer for each to sermonize, evangelize or discuss meaningful issues once a week, it is also possible to imagine such groups scanning each other for rtv devices implanted within their personal articles or themselves, or consider if biometric cards or rtv devices placed into illegal aliens that would treat them as cattle would be anti-Christian.
The Ottoman Empire was formed by Osmanli tribal shepherds that became shepherds of men and made janissary units of Christian European captives into slave soldiers that were the best fighters in the world. Corporatist powers today may consider people as cattle to be herded, as could a hierarchical priesthood perhaps of any denomination working closely with global corporate board executives begin to seek to ‘herd’ the global population into their cattle stalls of control. A priesthood of believers would oppose such corporatist power with a Green Beret quality instruction in democratic Christianity wherein people associate in modest peer grouping always working to grow in the faith and true knowledge of God and the Bible. The hierarchical priesthood/corporatist neotheocratic market tyranny may place its CEO into the Temple Offices as absolute Dictator, or perhaps it could simply be a Muslim mullah’s move up the Dome of the rock as Super-Duper Mufti in some distant corporatist permutation of global political alignments.
Edited on Apr 13, 9:01 because 'Siloam to Bethesda'. -
stoneage on April 8, 2006We each take from what we read, what we will. Karl Popper is known for making his argument against (however I believe for) science with his notions about a theory becoming “falsifiable”. He made a specific argument about science. I have no problem with your belief in Jesus or even creationism I simply disagree with your interpretation of science and I am not alone. I am familiar with Chomsky and Brian Green both are scholars in their fields. Perhaps you would like to read Steven Pinker, I think you would find his work very interesting. If I am not mistaken he holds the same post that Chomksy once held. At any rate I hope your injury heals quickly so that you may continue on your research. As far as Jesus goes I do my best to behave an a manner proscribed by the thoughts of Jesus even though I am an agnostic.
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GaryCGibson on April 8, 2006Karl Popper made a comment that rationality cannot be proven, you just know what it is. Popper was writing about politics and the fascists, and denied their assertions of rationality in a political system.
Rationality may actually be considered in the abstract as a modal logic system that knows itself and its limits. Logic and reason are also subject to Cantor's universal set theory including itself disquallifier. Intellectual logic may interact with the material universe making supposition and such, yet it would realize the limits of the criteria and what comprised rationality specificly. Euclid for example would have been in error and he gone beyond his sum of interior angles of a triangle theorem to assert that no non-Euclidian geometry could exist. A Hohokam indian speculating about catching rainwater in an induction runoff system would have been in error if he had said further that population flows live or die on successful invention of water collection runoff systems by human design. Many on both sides of the issue fail to understand what reason and humanism are as well...the comfortable mostt often fail to understand compassion, and the decadent fail to understand the inhumanism of depravity.
At the end of this post I will write post a comment about Chomsky and the war in Iraq. it isn't a brilliant post and was written in a chatroom yet it supports the notion that perfectly comprehensive definitions of various subjects may be advanced based on faulty premises.
On the notion of 'what is truth' such as Pontius Pilate asked rhetorically of Jesus Christ (its interesting that the 300 ad circa Gospel according to Judas Iscariot or perhaps Judas of Iskar was released in time for Easter) I of course belief that Jesus Christ is truth, that He is of The One such as the Bible and plotinus set forth. In a worldly sense I rather prefer P.F. Strawson's logic-based definition of truth in his disquotation theory. Truth is an abbreviation of saying that such and such are so. That is truth is a short way of saying that A exists and B exists and c exists and d exists ... when someone asks if the alphabet has 26 letters one can say 'yes that's true'.
Some of the points you've made each have much possibility of reply, yet my time isn't unlimited circumstantially. i'd seperated a shoulder, was getting it healed and crashed on a bicycle today, this public computer is of an hour's duration.
Cosmology may well not have any advanced truth. I wrote a brief collection of essays on the Bible and cosmology available at www.lulu.com/GaryCGibson . In further developments in cosmology some very technical observations of the early universe through telescopic means confirming its age at 13.7 billion years, and accounting for the first fractions of a second in which it is posited to have expanded from sub-atomic size to grapefruit size at faster than light speed has been advanced. M-Theory or super-string theory has received some more support and the percentages of matter, dark matter and dark energy have been hypothetically confirmed. Dark energy comprises more than 70% of the Universe and it isn't even known what it is.
'Evolution' is a word term describing aspects of change in the material world. I believe that evolution theory is contained within the book of Genesis paradigm, but without reading the Enneads of Plotinus it is difficult to have an understanding of the neo-Platonist schema of the Universe. There is a free version available By McKenna and Page on the internet...yet 'The Essential Plotinus' by O'brien is probably available at amazon.com for two dollars and it has a better, modern translation.
Brian Green's books 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' and The Elegant Universe' are also worth reading.
Noam Chomsky may have an unbalanced linguistic approach to political and historical analysis.Not uncommonly academic specialists have too narrow a view making extradisciplinary applications. Brilliant linguist that he was the associations made in the 50's and 60's between psychology and linguistics tended to bring an anthropological paradigm to Epistemological criteria that disregarded the content of human history and political thought as well as institutional development. Subjective points of view about politics based on experience and education are unavoidable unless one wants to accept a priori an alienated and ultimately irrational party manifesto criteria explaining the way things are, and there may not be such a 'thing' as a 'balanced' political point of view anyway.
It is possible to debate the moral ranking of personal egoism versus democracy or authoritarianism perhaps, and even to synthesize various elements to find a utilitarian 'greatest good for the greatest number', have everyone agree on something andn then discover that it was wrong anyway.
One of my pet peeves is academic specialization that brings a non-holistic analytical paradigm to global politics emplacing inadequately based premises to serve faulty conclusions. That sort of palaver works well in providing explananda to second world peoples without a surfeit of quality independent scholarly researchers.
It is common that philosophy and history are cast aside by social commentators providing their analysis of politics and national groupings. Russell created a term 'the complete complex of compresence' that would have referred to everything that exists at any given moment. The complexity of time vectors and structural relations of the world, the thought of individuals and geophysical potential for the Earth and its locales are difficult to concatenate within a narrow linguistic-political paradigm.
Chomsky is correct of course in noting that politicians develop rhetoric of a novel nature to justify activity toward political ends. Obviously Chomsky would have read Sartre's writings about Algerian colonialism and 'The Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Chomsky may not have read Turner or Steele, may not be an expert on the history of metallurgy or invention, and perhaps isn't aware sufficiently of Toynbee's writings on civilization's progress and how since Mussolini Corporatism has become an increasing global force.
Noam Chomsky has made many fine remarks about language and fewer about logic, yet his interpolations into the western politic have decreased in value as his approach has failed to achieve even the level of Ralph Nadir's constructive engagement with the politics of the United States. Noam Chomsky is a fine rogue scholar that doesn't seem to even take sufficient science into his political paradigms nor turn the corner himself into entering the political arena in order to make actual changes through leadership in important economic and environmental areas that are a direct axis of power for political activities and rhetoric.
Noam Chomsky must have a good awareness of population dynamics and the limits of growth on Earth within the fossil fuel and rectilinear housing paradigm. given the parameters of Rousseau's Social contract that such exists to guarantee the individual rights of all, the declaration of impendence differed from the social contract in finding the rights inalienable and given by God rather than completely alienable and given by a social contract that is invalid if any are excluded. Many neo-socialists today bog themselves down in such interstitial concepts and fail to see the forest for the trees--avoiding totalitarianism yet accomplishing vital political activities should be the right goal for most nations, though of course each differs in it's prioritization of its agenda items.
Maurice Mearleu-Ponty and others developed a more phenomenological approach to social paradigms that is fine and good if one is a French State shattered by war with a history of ineffective government making wrong decisions. Necessarily the people tend to cluster together for mutual support as best they are able under the hurricane winds of power politics that beset the European Continent in the 20th century. Sartre perhaps began his existential analysis from a dual phenomenological and rational approach, yet unlike Chomsky who seems so far as I know to continue to retain a phenomenological basis for political actions rather than an historical with a large history of practico-inert social content in back of the present.
... Chomsky and others including the Venezualian dictator Hugo Chavez would do better writing science fiction political novels setting forth their dystopian or alternatiuvely utopian visions rather than just collecting political tithes from the people for occupying powerful social situations. Toynbee noted that civilizations fail sometimes becoming ossified and unable to change. Modern mass society in relying on fossil fuels and rectilinear housing cannot well change overnight and is making dangerous social catastrophe buildups perhaps.
Monolithic domes have an effective r value for insulation of over a 100, can survive hurricanes and cost 60$ per foot. Building large numbers of domes that use no net energy for lighting or heating/cooling beyond what the home power wind generators, fuel cells, solar panels and such can produce would be a revolutionary social adpatation.
www.monolithic.com/gallery/homes/
www.kansaswindpower.net/Wind_generators.htm
Saddam Hussein and his oil-heavy Baathist political party achieved power through terrorism and during the sanctions era allowed perhaps a million innocent, vulnerable civilians to perish. That democide could not be allowed to continue and the Clinton administration as well as the United Nations were not able to address it adequately. Those dead innocents that starved or died from lack of medical drugs or treatment (so it was reported) were not junk to be swept under the international rug of population control.
Human sin and greed evidently is so pervasive that President Bush felt it necessary to lie to the public to have the opportunity to end the Hussein regime. Before the war the U.N. had every opportunity to just vote to call it a day and turn Hussein loose to wage chemical war or attack whatever neighbor nation he liked, and in the United States at least it would have been a survivable specticle. For some reason the U.N. wanted to keep the sanctions going perhaps because the food for oil program was providing kickbacks to international politicaians from various nations.
There were three basic choices regarding Iraq and none were good
1) End sanctions unilaterally
2) Continue sanctions indefinately
3) Militarily remove the regime (which was non-compliant with U.N. terms of surrender from the prior war)
Today Iraq politicians cannot even vote to have a seated government, fair and equal shares of oil for all the people of Iraq, an Air Generator or solar panel for each Iraqi, experimental evaporation/condensation Desalinization canals or high altitude hydroponic gardening...what can such people do to have free and easy voting tickets with a lottery ticket stub on the reverse side giving prizes to voters such as free tuition at college?
Edited on Apr 13, 8:59 because 'Quine to Strawson'. -
stoneage on April 6, 2006We have yet to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. I am fond of the work of the late Karl Popper and I have seen no evidence which makes me doubt his conclusion that nothing can be proved “true” all that science does is to remove the falsity. I believe that relatively and quantum physics work up to a certain point, just as Newton’s theory still works up to a certain point. Each advance in theory gives us a better picture of the universe, but string theory is simply working on the obvious limitations of older theories. I have heard the ideas about the”impossibility” of life via evolution alone, perhaps there is some greater power at work but that has not been proved. A connection to Christianity or even the Bible is a far reach. Buddhist philosophy is a much closer match but then it is a general very nonspecific view, full of transcendental observations seen over and over in the history of humanity. Chaos theory and Cantor only open the possibility of infinite dimensions and infinite algorithms always beyond our grasp. Science is not good or bad and it is simply misused when one starts with an a priori like God created the universe. Hey, I like this discussion so don’t think I am being a shit. Some of the things you talk about are not part of what I have read, so you may provide me with new information and research topics.
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