Sunday, April 25, 2010

When the Music Stops (Round Rivers and Riverworlds)


When the Music Stops (Round Rivers and Riverworlds)
Staring out of a window from a coffee shop, Wheaton, Grand Rapids, on the desk a book of religion or philosophy (thank you New Ways Forward blogspot

Today, when I think about these new ways to see physics and the underlying philosophy of it I enter the philosophic part of creative speculation again. That is I had no new math or particle ideas but the old ones came up again from philosophy.

So the question, the burning one is for many of us, what happens when the music stops? I went back to reading the skeptic Martin Gardner again to compare his views of these issues- specifically about things like immortality, chronons, and Tarski's metalanguage over pragmatism. I got more out of the reading because I had learned a little more since last years casual reading, perhaps an emergent property that cannot reduce things to molecules.

But here I am also talking about the ideas of souls and identity- from Heisenberg's lattice of points in a quantum discrete space to all the underlying philosophy and science fiction of what happens when the music stops and is the pattern immortal.

If there is a universal grammar then clearly we assume a correspondence theory of the objective world relating to what our consciousness is and in that case can we really understand things by the appeal to metalanguage or to mathematics for that matter?


But to bring this home, my statements lately on the galaxy models and other sorts of physics related to holography and the reading of Rowlands book, actually have an almost religious underlay which quite clearly was used in the entertaining stories from science fiction. Science fiction is about the future possible but the metalanguage involved has to be one of mathematics and philosophy- I disagree then that pragmatism and its utility cannot be a metalanguage of itself in the learning by doing- nor that our soul as an essence or higher thing is not a possibility- so against Gardner's honest work I cannot agree that saying the issues are just a matter of verbal, of linguistic confusion, really makes a clear logical case?

Still, Gardner collects in his theism at a distance, a great deal of ideas about if and what is immortal. One of them was a science fiction where there is a world called Riverworld where all the souls come back to be twentyfive to that river where they might die by accident but in some mind of or memory of God just show up somewhere along the river again. But is this not the Loxidrome of Riemann's sphere and if the space itself can contain in a few bits the memory of all the infinity of numbers- and ultimately after the living or the effort this an instantaneous and non-local thing the messages and the messengers in a sense by nature preserved is the unclear definition of what is unique about us or the clone or duplication of the innumerable us not a clear issues of the underlying model of physics and philosophy? In my almost religious mythology My Spheredream hero walks down an endless beach for his journeys from zero to infinity and back again- but the story came after the model and the model came from events and places and people of my living.

Now the round river is in Aldo Leopold's book- yes, almost like the lumberjack put on to the newbie stories here in the north woods. But the disc can spin and the water if not in some Escher sense of flowing up and down by some trick of space coincident and cross eyed, it does flow around. Again, both models seem intimately related to the math and the chiral things and the absolute value only of things in this world like the atoms and galaxies. God the Creator then could make Riemann's geometry without Riemann.

Well, the billions of times the quantum flux creates and annihilates the universe unto the chronons of the Buddhist world- if in a higher sense the necessity of vanishing is the key to new birth- is not in a sense our new birth a vanishing?- but this sort of thing was thought about and talked about centuries ago- or was it but yesterday my friend when on some walk of contemplation you saw such thoughts pass by you like the geese flying above to the north or south poles of higher hells and heavens and perhaps startled or amazed or afraid let the thoughts pass while you enjoy what seems unique but not alone your path and walk through life.


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