Mr Ted 03092010
Shadows
Consider Plato’s Cave in which he discusses a man chained to the wall in a cave. In the back of the cave is a fire with men talking around it. From the man’s perspective he can only see the shadows on the wall and hear the echos of the discussion. From these shadows and echos he tries to determine the nature of the fire and the shadows and echos of the men around it. BUT what he knows, but does not understand is that the shadows ain’t real, they are shadows only. This is the brain fart. The failure to accept the difference between reality and the shadow of reality. The failure to recognize that what we see is only a shadow of what we perceive. The hipostatized belief that the shadow IS reality. This is the zeitgeist of mainstream physics today, attempting to use an inappropriate tool, the Calculus, to determine the nature of the universe.
Consider;
Differential calculus IS top down thinking applied to euclidian geometry.
Integral calculus IS bottom up thinking applied to euclidian geometry.
The big hoochie coochie is not Euclidian in nature. It ain’t gonna work.
Consider the following logic tree;
1. The point is the shadow of the line
2. The line is the shadow of the square
3. The square is the shadow of the cube
4. The cube is the shadow of the vector
5, The vector is the shadow of the big hoochie coochie.
1, 2, 3, 4 are totally inside the skull, they are only the mind’s way of making sense of 5. The brain fart occurs at the juncture of the cube and the vector in step 4. IE the cube is a subset of the vector, which is itself a filtered perception of the big hoochie coochie (step 6).
Why can no one smell the brain fart? It stinks like hell. Is everyone really that stupid? This is really simple shit folks. What is wrong? Why is this so difficult to understand? What is wrong with everyone’s minds? Why does this seem so complicated? You’ve got to work the logic both ways. You’ve got to ask the right question if you expect a reasonable answer. Put your rubber ruler back in the desk and start using that marvelous cognitive device you’ve got in your skulls for something besides keeping your ears apart. Refuse to be idiots. Pull your head out of your ass and look around. IT AIN’T REAL. You’re dancing with shadows.
What to do? Dunno
el Loco Gringo 
Comments
From the ‘get-go’ in this reflection on ‘shadows’ the ‘cave’ serves as a fixed reference frame, it provides the totally-uninvolved reference plane (static ground) that allows us to focus our entire attention on the ‘shadows’. without a fixed frame, the change/motion we perceive is spatial and relative (spatial-relational), but thanks to the NOTION of the fixed frame, it is now temporal i.e. we now have the fixed reference to allow us to describe change in terms of ‘that which was over there on the cave wall is now over here on the cave wall. now it is a hocus-pocus game of ‘locus-motion’ as if by ‘forms’ we have liberated from space, to which we impute ‘persisting identity’. if we are interested in plate-tectonics then we can’t use the cave wall because it is continually being recycled and in fact, everything in the universe seems to be ‘in flux’. but that doesn’t bother us in our hocus-pocus loco-motion game because, as nietzsche observed, our rational world view is anthropomorphism. we construct it on the basis of our human situation, our relative size and visual viewing capability and force fit everything else to it. as short-period life-cycle terrestrials, we have such stuff as slowly transforming cave walls and nearly-solid (to us) ground we can anchor reference frames on so that rather than acknowledging we are in a spatial-relational flux, as our own EXPERIENCE (before we impose our simplifying petrifying imputations on long period lifecycle stuff) informs us is the primary nature of the world dynamic, we can use (euclidian space) reference frames to notionally freeze the long-period aspects of the fluid-energy-flow universe to segregate them from those things that move in shorter cycle-times, at speeds easily captured by our human visual sensing capabilities. that is, instead of the world moving, we impute motion to the shorter-period visual forms, and make believe that their motion is ‘all on their own’. we are therefore, as kepler suggested, in contradiction with our own opinion. i suppose that is what might also be called ‘a brain fart’.
your logic points 1 – 4 are to do with ‘geometry’ and the ‘invariable solids of geometry’ which are unproven, a priori prejudices that have nothing to do with the ‘real world of our experience’ apart from convenient tools for describing something intrinsically more complex. ‘local solid bodies’ with persisting identity are meaningless in a fluid-dynamic world, but when we impose ‘geometry’ on dynamic forms in our fluid world, we let them take on the absolute local existence properties of ‘the invariable solids of geometry’. i suppose your point 5, the ‘vector’, is where that system of local geometric structures ‘hits the wall’ so-to-speak. in the case of those visible dynamic forms in the flow we have notionally made over into ‘local material bodies’, we now have to attribute ‘vector direction’ to them. and, of course, in the case of organisms, that means we have to impute to them some internal processes and purposes to notionally drive the notional ‘directedness’ that we imputed to them when we took them out of the flow and re-housed in an absolute fixed reference frame, which made it appear as if they had ‘their own motion’.
a western human likes to believe that he has his own ‘local agency’. the western farmer likes to believe that he is the first cause source of the crops ‘he produces’ (forget the soil and sun and water and air), rather than acknowledging that he is himself a crop that is in the habit of feeding on his fellow crops, in the manner that a fish feeds on plankton, while the largest fish eventually sink to the bottom and are fed on by the marine ecosystem itself (the spatial cycling). there is no ‘top’ of the food chain (it is now called an interdependent ‘food web’) and if there were, all the bacteria and the plankton would by-and-by all be moved up into whale-meat, emptying the oceans of bacterial, plankton, algae etc, but the bacteria and the plankton re-cycle whale-meat so the ‘top of the food chain’ could as easily be seen as the bottom, and while what’s on top looks big and solid like a whale, it derives this appearance in the same way as does the continent, that part of a circular lithic convection current that our eye imputes to be ‘on top’ because of our the limited observational period of our observing eye. of course man can look at the continental rocks on the surface and surmise that they were previously in the subsurface, but he is not going to let that interrupt his practice of imputing ‘local object status’ (invariable solids of geometry status) to the part of the circular flow he is standing on, which he objectifies as a ‘continent’, in which he claims there are caves and cave walls that draw persisting identity from the persisting identity that he gives to ‘the continent’, as is convenient for him due to his relatively limited period (frequency) of gathering in the flow that is subsumed by his being regathered into other gatherings in the flow.
so after vectors we need tensors (point 6?) which address patterns of vectors in the manner that ‘field flow lines’ (like the lines implied in the pattern of magnetized iron filings on a piece of paper under which a magnet sits), where the (curved) ‘line’ direction is continually changing and the line density is continually thickening and thinning, and the vector now shows itself to be the tangent to the curved field-flow-lines; i.e. the secondary artefact of differential calculus applied to curved space. in biology, this is the equivalent of putting the dynamics of ‘community’ in precedence over the dynamics of individuals as the evolutionary ‘sourcing force’ (spatial-sourcing over local sourcing), as experiments/studies of the evolution of multispecies microbial communities show is the case.
how complex can we make ‘local object-based’ structures in ‘time’ and ‘space’? not complex enough to ever get to ‘fluid-dynamics’ aka ‘resonant-energy-charged-spatial-relational dynamics’. the fixed euclidian reference frames and the ‘invariable solids of geometry’ are ‘shadows’ that exist only in our minds. we superimpose these on the gathering forms in nature, apply some definitions and labels, invent some internal processes and purposes and thus make believe they are ‘in-their-own-local-right’ ‘powerboats’ that run about independent of the flow they are included forms in. we do it with hurricanes and we do it with humans.
so, not to disagree with your overall thrust, but with respect to your statement;
“The brain fart occurs at the juncture of the cube and the vector in step 4”,
i would say that the brain-fart occurs when we accept, without reservation, the solidity of the cave that the observer is situation in. there is nothing in fluid nature that can be accepted as a fixed frame so as to speak of things within it as moving relative to it, such as ‘shadows on the cave wall’, and or, the people around the fire.
as carlo rovelli observes in ‘quantum gravity’;
“In Newtonian and special relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities – particles and fields – what remains is space and time. In general relativistic physics, if we take away the dynamical entities, nothing remains. The space and time of Newton and Minkowski are reinterpreted as a configuration of one of the fields, the gravitational field. This implies that physical entities – particles and fields – are not all immersed in space, and moving in time. They do not live on spacetime. They live, so to say, on one another. It is as if we had observed in the ocean many animals living on an island: animals ‘on’ the island. Then we discover that the island itself is in fact a great whale. Not anymore animals on the island, just animals on animals. Similarly, the universe is not made by fields on spacetime; it is made by fields on fields.”
the cave is the belly of the worm that is animated and created by the vortex in the flow-field, ‘la cause excitatrice’ and ‘les fluides incontenables’ of Lamarck.
emile
Yup! My, you sure can flesh out a skeleton concept nicely – el Loco Gringo
But I am a crazy old man, who was right all along, Crazy all along too.
walt
Trackbacks
[Hi Walt,
I like your site. It reminds me of a crazy old man, who was right all along.
The right way way of living, is the right way of living.
It’s true, dementia occurs in those that who do not use their brains. The brain says “well, your not using me any more”, so starts shutting down components to use energy elsewhere.
Are you currently living as a freeman?
Jonothon
Yup!