A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

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Sy Borg
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

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Sorry Gary but I can't read your reply because trying to read large tracts of text on a screen without paragraph breaks gives me a headache.
Gary_M_Washburn
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

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Where did you go to school? Trump U?
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Count Lucanor
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

Post by Count Lucanor »

Washburn:

The key question will be: what is the relation between mathematics, philosophy and empirical sciences? Do they all deal with magnitudes, relations, or both? As you seem to propose, finding contrariety in mathematical systems (for example, in calculus) implies transposing the difficulties of its reasoning to the field of logic and science. The objections in mathematics, however, are related to magnitudes (quantities), not to relations. Modern logical systems, as presented by Russell, somehow made a connection between mathematics and logic, but only because they dealt with relations, not with magnitudes. Russell's atomism depends on things with qualities and their relations. So long, Berkeley! we moved to the qualitative field.

Your views in general are not against the current these days. It could all be a problem about the language we use and that relations are just semantic constructions that are not directly representative of the concrete realities of the world, so these concepts can be "deconstructed", shown to be mere antinomies of reason. I recall a famous quote from Nietzsche:
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...
I always admit that even as a rationalist, one must have some Nietzsche by one's side as safeguard for reason getting carried away. As I said somewhere else, the idea of the neutral scientist, doing his unbiased job for the sake of truth, is an illusion. Who can deny the pleasures of having our thoughts discovering the internal relations of things? Behind the domination of nature, isn't there a desire to rule? And so, the cold and inert codes of numbers and magnitudes are not capable alone of describing the world. It requires perspectivism, interpretation, and so we land in discourse, of which we cannot escape. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte. That's fine as a critique of the system that turned Reason against itself, but let's not get carried away ourselves, let's not raise irrationality as the new Reason. I declare myself in rebellion against the project of undermining all certainties, the cult of paradox, which I think is another form of anti-realism arising from good old Idealism. No wonder why you think Plato is the greatest philosopher.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

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Contrariety is not a finding, its a dynamic to any system that would exclude it. Your convictions change whether you recognize this or not. But the more rigorous the effort the more completely real the change. If we differ in our convictions there will be differences in our terms (as there always is of both). Whether we try to unify our convictions or compete in them, the contrariety in those terms only comes to a moment of rigorous, or most completed change, where that contrariety between us complements the contrariety each alone is to a continuity of reason that can never be complete in any of its terms. We may never come to win out over each other, or unify into a conceptual bloc, but we do indeed come to so alter the terms of our meeting that we can recognize each other and discuss what is real without despairing that only the winner owns his terms or that agreement confounds our individuality. The moment complementary in that more completed change (contrary to the continuity of time) is more completed what time really is than the ends of time ever cold be complementary to each other. There is no complementary termini to time. Time is no one.

I am very fond of Russell for his politics, especially in his later years. But what you report as 'qualities' are really just another mode of quantities. The gobbledegook of his major thesis proves this. As if language were amenable to fixed values! It is precisely the incapacity of any such effort, to exclude contrariety (uncompleted as of sameness as of difference) that generates all terms, and the discipline generating change as much within each of us alone as between us that generates our capacity to discuss our differences as it does of our separate powers of private reasoning. But this is hardly relativism. It explains how our terms evolve and derive the capacity to engage in the discipline through which we can really come to understand each other. A quality is not a thing or a geometry. A triangle may have some 'quality' that relates to a square, a Wen diagram may map out categories, but there is nothing properly qualitative there, and in fact such 'relations' eliminate what quality really is. The worth of time is that there is no ends enclosed its completeness. Only the act of the contrary term left its complement with the rigor of recognizing its loss in the moment of the differed term of its own conviction is any recognition of the completest term of time. That act and that response (that responsibility of recognition) is, if anything, the least relativist event. It is not a relation, a system of oriented division. It is a quality, a moment of worth and being worthy, insofar as the terms of that act and that response are available to us and engaged with due discipline. But that act is of departure, not competition, and that response is of recognizing worth of which it itself is unworthy. And this means that there is nothing as worthy of moment that can be extended from it by any competing or cooperating system. There is nothing inside the text.

You clearly share the conventional view of Plato. Have you read him? I find that most 'authorities' are really reading Aristotle, who Plato thought incompetent. It's all too easy to read along and miss the pivotal moments where Plato overturns all the impressions he, or his character, has built up to that point. But I can accept that many object to reading such stunning reversals. Even so, no earnest reader can deny that the fundamental theme of all his work is the dynamic character of the people engaged is supposing they are holding ideas consistently. It is from Plato that I got the notion that disciplined reason is its own dynamic, expressed more in its moods than in it views.
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Sy Borg
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

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Gary_M_Washburn wrote: December 9th, 2017, 3:40 pm Where did you go to school? Trump U?
In truth, reading online is not the same as reading hardcopy. Anyone educated in web accessibility and readibility knows that paragraph breaks are necessary for effective online communication. Being autistic, trying to read such things physically gives me a headache, so it's not even worth tying for me. You'd think a few para breaks in consideration of readers would not be much to ask.

I sure don't appreciate your unwarranted assumption and unprovoked nastiness and as such you have just earned yourself your first forum warning. You have one left.
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

Post by Count Lucanor »

You seem to be talking dialectics, which appeal a lot to me. I wouldn't be in these forums, contrasting each other's views, if I didn't think it would produce something better than my current views. I endorse the negativity of dialectics in the general sense that everything is dynamic, nothing is static, and to capture the nature of reality is to follow the movement of its constituents parts from one stage to another, by the explosion of their internal contradictions. "Everything seems pregnant with its contrary". And yet, Hegel's dialectics (and by extension, Plato's) had to be turned right side up. The principle of sublation, I think, prevails, which means reason does not end, but realizes its potential.

With regards to Plato and ancient philosophy, all I really care is its ontology, since the inquiries about tools and methods were in their infancy. So Aristotle's down to earth approach to the nature of things and their classification is fair enough, and compared to Plato's, is brilliant. Not to say that Plato wasn't great, either.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
Gary_M_Washburn
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

Post by Gary_M_Washburn »

Greta,
I was not aware that you have autism, nor that you thought I was addressing you. If I had known that I would have tried to tailor my post to what I know of the character of your interest. When receiving a rebuke about my posts that shows no effort to grasp it I do get intemperate. Again, this occurred because I did not know of your difficulty, nor of your interest. I thought I was responding to another one or two participants here, and in fact I did apologize for the length of the posting in question, at its conclusion. I was not intending to be uncivil.

Count,
In Plato's Lysis a child asks Socrates to help him make Lysis his friend, and so Socrates takes him and the others on a discussion of what friendship is. They cover all the usual themes and a few less traveled ones, but the dialogue ends with Socrates shouting to the boys, as the group breaks up, 'we still haven't discovered which one is the friendship'. But that's the answer. The friend is not this one. It's always not this one. And so we can't find it or hold onto it. Or even know it. We have to be part of the friendship to be the friend, or, rather, not the friend, because it is always not this one. In a proposition, which, subject or predicate, is the 'is'? Friendship is intransitive. Its 'is' is neither this one nor that one. Because it is nothing, by itself, to be 'the friend'. Neither one is the friendship. Reality is not a spectator's sport. Neither the red apple nor its being red is 'redness'. There is an activity, not a state of being or logical relation, going on here.

Socrates does not cross-examine to make his interlocutor look stupid. He does it to give him a chance to show his character by evolving his views in the face of the discipline of reasoning it out. Even if reasoning primarily, overwhelmingly, expresses a conservation of terms, any differing of them at all is more formative and decisive of them than all the inferences that tend to conserve our views. Imagine a dictionary in which every other entry changes as we focus on any one. Reality is like this, and, somehow, call it dialectic, we do mange to keep up with the changes, even as we deny them. If you don't like Berkeley, you might like Hume. Bring him up to date and you might be getting closer to my way of thought, though his view was still stubbornly unilateral, something Plato showed us how to escape two millennia earlier.
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Re: A Correct but Forbidden Theory of the Nature of Life

Post by Sy Borg »

Cheers, Gary. I appreciate your reply.
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