KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA62 (Mikes)

Commentary 4 (to C1 by Jarvilehto)

? WHOLE HOLES ?, perhaps to be filled in by progress in understanding ?
by Adrian van den Meijden
17 September 2003, posted 30 September 2003

<1>
There are no "wholes" to be made up, except fictions. And then I ? believed ? it was ? found ? on this forum, that authority no longer mattered ? But then perhaps we should begin with Aristotle who instructed us to start with universals, we were only allowed to deduce from to get at the parts. Unfortunately he also used causes. We may as well also ask: what is a universal ? And perhaps we ought to remind ourselves too that "The poet gives to aerie nothing a local habitation and a name", which is much older than Shakespeare. The venture knowledge was started off by poets. That is, after all, a "methodological" principle. And is it not method, as a means to impose order, we should change ? "Anatole realises that the frame of time and space, which has always seemed to be the fundamental map upon which existence itself must be drawn, is as distorted a view of reality as the Mercator projection of the Earth's surface, no less useful, but artificial". [Brian Stableford science fiction, of course]. But then fiction is these days one means to contrive alternative methods to make patterns.

And this my one and only target article here discusses. I may add a comment about "Hamlet's Mill" proposing that Mill to be an older version of Kepler's truncated model of the solar system. Antonio de Nicolas, in a book on the Vedas, One dimensional man, - from the Rg mainly - points out its grammar has three axes, abstracted with Lattice Logic, viz.: Vertical as between no-form or non-existence versus from or existence and two horizontal axes for time and space each. They are actually cycles, as myth prefers it, but no great matter, although the giving of names to the land, as done during mythological times, carries their symbolic imprint. In NZ Cape Maria van Diemen - up North - is where souls are reputed to take off for the other world. That leads us into "the mists of antiquity" from where Aristotle took his ideas and modified them. Alternatively, one other universal would be Cantor's Aleph Null or Caitin's monster numbers, for both of which we run out of words soon enough. Hamlet's Mill, being somewhat wild, woolly and non-linear, as is anything to do with myth, teeter tottered on the brink of acceptability, and has been recently tottering on the acceptable side, owing to some hard work by many people by way of archeo-astronomy.

<2>
Curiously it is usually only after one has mulled over an idea/ experience that one begins to recognise others also mulled it over. The aim of Mereology is to reconcile deduction and induction. Google lists some 5,410 sites, the first of which points out that such things as a centripetal versus centrifugal style were much discussed during Greek times and during the Middle Ages; lots of names provided. A crude comparator is gestalt thinking for which one bears the background or context in mind and from which one can isolate the parts only by verbal contrivancy. I'll take the best known holistic thinker sample, the Buddha, and copy his game rules. B. Nyanaponika, "Abhidamma Studies". Frewin & Co, Colombo, 1949 and Nyanaponika Thera, "The Vision of the Dhamma", Rider, 1986, will do well enough. The rules, oops, methodological propositions, are:

1: Nothing arises from a single cause

2: Nothing happens by its own power

3: Nothing exists by itself.

Now to traverse to Kantor, F.W. Kantor, Information Mechanics, Wiley, 1977, bearing in mind that the Buddha formulates in the negative and Kantor in the positive, something logic readily handles.

1: Information is conserved

2: Information is communicable

3: Information is finitely accessible; {'anywhere in T & S assumed.}

4: The rules of Wave Mechanics apply: {fields are assumed.}

A: Information is proportional to Energy

B: external and internal information with separate representations conform to conservation of information.

I for one cannot find much difference here in the ideas about connectivity of the ALL, between science and the Buddha. Buddh or buddhi means intuition, also a pop concept these days. Buddha is othersided to Descartes and the 14th Dalai Lama allowing both sides to be insoluble. Data and information are ultra-undefined words that might well serve as universals too. Kantor tells us that he can deduce all the parts of quantal thinking from this starting point. What I have cited as A and B are not expressly stated but implicit. Information is also "nothing" until and unless we can contrive a finite means to abstract some, finitely, as made clear by Shannon and Bell's noise, white noise and other kinds.

<3>
Let us also allow were are talking Metaphor, not facts, for which quote: C. Brooke Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor, Secker and Warburg, 1958 F. Merrell Wolff, The Philosophy of Consciousness without an Object, Crown,'83, or take Richard Rolle or of Hampolle his "Cloud of Unknowing". "If you want to get at the unadulterated truth of egolessness, you must once and for all let go your hold and fall over the precipice. -- Hakuin, for a more radical POV. OR, to take the tiger by his shining eyes: Question: "How can I tell if I'm self realized ? Short answer: If you have a 'self' you are not realized yet. Expanded answer: "Self Realized" is an oxymoron. There is no self to be realized". As by Michael McAvoy on AwakenedPerceptions.com. Although it should be more that a SELF has us, but no great matter. Or again, as in the Rg Veda, from a time when objects could still be symbols: "Surya, the sungod, lends his glance to all, so that all may behold him", as a reflexive figure or verb. We cannot have one without the other. "Even though one masters various profound teachings, it is like placing a single hair in vast space. Even if one gains all the essential knowledge in the world, it is like throwing a drop of water into a deep ravine. --Te-shan. This one from a Zen Abbot, and which should suffice to show it as a worldwide notion in antiquity and today. The varieties of unorganised religious experience are mere metaphors. Mystics are not always inarticulate, either.

We should do well when going subjective to enquire who or what "contains", encompasses or projects a given "world" with that Vedic reflexivity, and what it is we should let go off to enquire further. "To discover the Truth in anything that is alien, First dispense with the indispensible in our own vision", from Leonard Cohen

<4>
Most of the radical statements about Quantum Physics were made during the thirties and nothing much since then, except retrenchments to the standard model of the world. "The world of physics is a world of shadows, we were not aware of it; we thought we were dealing with the real world....... Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experiments in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist... I don't like it, and I'm sorry I ever had anything to do with it". Thus Erwin Schrodinger, and I can find you more than over a dozen quotes saying much the same, by QPhysicists. Feynmann tells us it cannot be understood, so we'd better get used to it. Oppenheimer at White Sands, first nuclear explosion, quoted "Brighter than a thousand suns", ascribed to Indra's arrow, from the Mahabharata, so they seem to be well read. Mystae were peerers into mysteries and from thence come most of our ideas about the world. They contrived various means of representation we now treat as dogma and facts.

Since Physics is about matter and our body is made of matter, that too is part of the illusion, together with a bunch of senses to live, move and be in that illusion. One has to re-claim pure experience, without benefit of a self, ego, psyche, intellect and other metaphoric paraphernalia to experience that whole one can nowise tackle analytically. And why not add a theologian to the melee: Aquinas: "In the beginning the creator was infinite so could not know itself. The creator manifested universe to experience finiteness." This implies an unknowing creator beyond abstract and our egos are "experience probes" immersed into a sea of energy we call a UNI-verse. In this context, we are the creators perceiving itself in a more tangible finite way, vide Plotinus "Ye are the gods", and he was taught by the school janitor. Carl Sagan said it well: "Since we are made of star stuff we are the universe trying to understand itself." QED: This gives us "free will" to deviate from pure randomness creating experiences such as cars and computers.

Even god does not know it all, at once and together, perhaps only the bit he has a need of at the time, "god knows... if he knows, .....who really knows?", Rg Veda + should he care to know ? "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (M. Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers), also echoed by or ascribed to A. N. Whitehead. "Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine." K. Godel

<5>
To end up with the logic and grammar thereof. ALL of knowledge consists of closed, specialised enclaves, kept in order by proof and consistency, not to ignore that persistent use of that Aristotelian IS. Reality cannot be so tamed or prescribed to, IT failing an addiction to an identity crisis. What holds this labyrinth together by its centre or central knot, psychologically amounts to ego being in charge of a body, to which it is totally welcome. "Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst into laughter". -- Long Chen Pa, that's Tibetan for you. I will admit it as somewhat quaint to be a real BE-ing, being embroiled in an illusion, but one does get used to it, after that leap across the abyss all, and after which one may as well have a cup of tea, which I am told is good for the immune system.

"People prefer to believe what they prefer to be true." Francis Bacon "The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." - R.W. Emerson

"You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."

" It is not that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." -- G. K. Chesterton

"We cannot see things as they really are until we let go of the idea of a separate self." -- John Daido Loori

Balzac to a chief of police: "Ah! You believe in reality ? How charming. I would not have thought you so naive... Come on ! It is us who make reality."

M Schneider, La Literature Fantastique en France, Fayard '64 "Where does one go when there's no in here and out there, because it's already all there". "TRUTH is for each of us what each of us carves from reality, All communal truths are falsehoods. "Objects are composed of sensory surfaces", "Once we made our choice, the rest follows mechanically"; oops, that was Adrian.

"Why are people called Buddhas after they die?

"Because they don't grumble any more,

"Because they don't make a nuisance of themselves! -- Ikkyu

"We are like someone immersed in water, who complains of nothing to ink. -- Hsueh-Feng

The moment we want to be something we are no longer free. -- J.

And what's the mystery about ? That the ALL is in the all and the all in the ALL. AL-chemy advises us to transform the dross, but keep it handy as it will become useful again after all. The cosmic joke is that after one has removed this ego from the propositional calculus one may have it back again, under a new contractual dispensation.

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Adrian vdMeijden