Creative Philosophy and Science

Creative Philosophy and Science (an email sent to one of the more prolific and creative minded blogs I follow)

Hi, philosopher,

I have followed some of your blog, Intangible Materiality, for some time now and I found today's posting rather interesting. And this passage especially from the previous post:

For all I know our universe is a soap bubble floating from the pipe of some young girl, on a breezy summer day whose trajectory is as circular and yet unchanging in it's transformation as the sentience that invented the effects of the wheel for us, to contract space and time as an illusionary effect, when on the surface of our planetary home. It all may be a matter such as play, whether it is the marking of rune stones or the isolation of astronauts floating in the ether. We play at discerning purposes on our own terms.

For my rather mathematical musings have reached a high fever pitch where I must retreat back awhile into philosophy. The universe becomes rather diffuse and makes less sense and yet it is and what we are does also as we understand more. The concerns in your paragraph, by synchronicity or perhaps indirect dialog, are those I am addressing lately about space and dimensions. While I admire Coxeter for example it is certainly not clear to me that we can have a blanket statement with clarity like his "There is nothing mystical about the fourth dimension" At the very least this closes our minds to a wider view of mathematics and physics that can be useful and make progress for our survival and sanity.

The idea of circular motion and spheres and a finite world is Aristotelian, Aquinas and so on as science and philosophy- religion and art finds our own terms of , as you say about purposes as the pendulum swings. Of the three traditional proofs of God- here we find ourselves repeating in echos that of Teleology. How can the assuming of the finitude of the world only not invoke Prime mover up from the Infinite, Ontological perfection from the chaos of the zero or infinity- that there is more than what is the now of our being? And the cosmological argument, the infinite regress, may not save the day either no matter what the looping of space and infinity.

So, God is the great inertial system in one frame of reference sense and as with the science an ideal, an assumption made as simple as possible but not simpler as Einstein remarked- and yet can we make it any simpler? The idea of God also fulfills the stated need of physics for an independent and neutral background.

I felt the desire to write you, blog to blog, for to ask why and what it was that lead you to also shout into this space of human vastness that is not wise enough to be aware on the surface of things of the significance of the message and insight you bring.

I remembered myself this morning as a young child- and though it is a relative thing, we not outside the perception or rise and fall and peaking of the perception of ourselves that intellectually I should consider that what some recently say- that I am genius. I scoffed at the idea of what is something maybe by accident and default around ill and squandered lives- but if something like the insight of Riemann is genius then by that definition my epiphany as that child begging his grandmother to visit at night the travel agency near the costume and magic shop to stare at the celestial globe of the stars.

How can it be, having learned to draw a pretty accurate map of the world and its major cities, that all the stars could be placed on a globe- especially if when asked what holds up the moon the adults said a rope- and where did it end? My mind expanded and the space closed around itself and each star was as if an intelligible coordinate in an intelligible system. Of course it was not all the stars but did early Greece know better, or Einstein of that beyond the Milky Way? Sometimes less knowing gives us room to grow and breathe. No doubt the stars are relaxed analogs to cities, the clouds and seas and mountains of time as space the expanding bubbles of our dreams.

New Scientist reports of a vital new electronic cusp that records rather nerve like the previous potential reached of voltage in an electronic circuit. For those who see the world as a computer I ask what sort of computer? The vague quantum ones? The gears with teeth in their complex arrangement that measure the tides? Or perhaps this sort of circuit where we struggle to reach our potential and learn, have the memory that also establishes the relaxed causes of goals of the teleology? Einsteins uncomfortable with the Now. Is the universe that close to the design of our brains and mind?

I remark also the other interesting thing near the magic shop, a blue neon sign with some stick figure cubes selling ice- perhaps this too a clue to design and thermodynamics.

With respect and great sincerity,

The Pe Sla, nobody really, that is any more than what we all can be and are. But like the dreams of string theory you are also on one of the mountaintops waving to me as we look for more and perhaps a unified theory above the fog.

* * * A further thought later:

If the consensus is that the universe as the Omega reasoned absolute of being and this known without bounds the God by His parts (Spinoza) that God cannot know Himself on this intelligent level- that Kant applies this to our human psyche (but is that not some stated goals of the sense of self and ego in Eastern Philosophy?) then why do we insist on rigid dogma as to what the world is, a dual aspect or not? Rather the more relative diffuse accepting all inputs is more creative and profitable with due respect for our traditions (not the classification of the elect neglected or decided by God of the fate of those predetermined thus the always possible inhumanity of men to men the state of things we cannot assume fades away even with vast resources of reason. We can to a great degree know ourselves and heal ourselves given the freedom of non-necessity in philosophy.

I add here a remark on facebook I posted as to what I was thinking:
L. Edgar Otto
After the more intense look at recent physics I have to face philosophy again- but I am not sure anyone knows the answers we seek- but one thing for sure in the clouds of society and government and our hearts work- I begin to know what is arbitrary bs when I see it. It might help if we could see how each of us individually deals with all this.

You see, the last few days I feel this way of seeing the world in such a generality and knowing at a distance steps others are going through- art as revolution or for arts sake we poets of the endless adds in the media that seem not to apply to most of us, and to liberal and conservative talk radio where being interested in living and caught up in the race, and with the responsibility for children, and the changing of technology and generational differences and attitudes, I like anyone else at a certain level of trials or comfort do revisit our past incarnations of moods of understandings and confusions. But such a conception does give me a more civilized idea of what this cloudy intelligible but inexplicable world is and one that fits better with the idea of who we are and what we can do and in the end how to at least while the living understand our own diffuse and measure of our sands of time and place on the globe of depth and extent of our dreams of which we really need not make a myth or story as we are in and transcending the globes of the
story and making sense of the time and place in natural space we seem to be within.

And I was a wee tired this morning otherwise, and without an especially strong drive to just post for the sake of posting nor for the newness sought, that I would have not posted things today in this form but imagined the start of a poem of the same title which began perhaps like this: Your standing on the turtles on turtle will not make you fall nor save you, not that you are shows you being can ever reach some perfection and remain aware without transcending perfection, nor that you have goals to define what is beneath the art of you raiment that what you are in the memory of this world or God can be sustained somewhere and when beyond transcendence, the good.
But the hour is late for this brief wind a little while with you- another failed star where no such stars are possible his stuff of light...You are here still beyond the accident of he transcended and I begot and after the great effort to break the falling rock that it needs never come together again to destroy our dreams I hear and understand you who searched for a universal mind and banished evil as the destroyer of death as well the creator- that we will not find it in religion alone, for some things beyond belief are also beyond our ignorance, But it does not have to be that anything in the cloud of our being in only our personal hardship- I too weep for those who tried to fly so high and fell as much for those lost in the maze.
* * *
guess it came out different anyway as I apparently am composing this now... or in some sense beyond the child punching a hole vertical to the Riemann sphere and thus his mind between zero and infinity our thoughts always there enfold no matter what the epiphany of the time and place and moment in the many wonders of this world? And I thought, peacefully independent and in the periphery, my dreams were only those as my old instars done in the original sins of isolation.