Quantum Physics & Truth

I first learnt about Plato’s allegory of the cave when I was in senior high school. A mathematics and English nerd – a strange combination – I played cello and wrote short stories in my spare time. I knew a bit about philosophy and was taking a survey class in the humanities, but Plato’s theory of ideal forms arrived as a revelation: this notion that we could experience a shadow-play of a reality that was nonetheless eternal and immutable. 

Somewhere out there was a perfect circle; all the other circles we could see were pale copies of this single Circle, dust and ashes compared with its ethereal unity.  Chasing after this ideal as a young man, I studied mathematics. I could prove the number of primes to be infinite, and the square root of two to be irrational (a real number that cannot be made by dividing two whole numbers). 

These statements, I was told, were true at the beginning of time and would be true at its end, long after the last mathematician vanished from the cosmos. Yet, as I churned out proofs for my doctoral coursework, the human element of mathematics began to discomfit me. My proofs seemed more like arguments than irrefutable calculations. Each rested on self-evident axioms that, while apparently true, seemed to be based on little more than consensus among mathematicians.

These problems with mathematics turned out to be well known. The mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell spent much of his career trying to shore up this house built on sand. His attempt was published, with his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead, in the loftily titled Principia Mathematica (1910-13) – a dense three-volume tome, in which Russell introduces the extended proof of 1 + 1 = 2 with the witticism that ‘The above proposition is occasionally useful.’ Published at the authors’ considerable expense, their work set off a chain reaction that, by the 1930s, showed mathematics to be teetering on a precipice of inconsistency and incompleteness.  READ MORE...

We Need Mythologies

In 1872, at the age of 28, Friedrich Nietzsche announced himself to the world with The Birth of Tragedy, an elegiac account of the alienation of Western culture from its spiritual foundations. According to Nietzsche, the ancient Greeks had once mastered a healthy cultural balance between the ‘Apollonian’ impulse toward rational control and the ‘Dionysian’ desire for ecstatic surrender. From the 5th century BCE onward, however, Western intellectual culture has consistently skewed in favour of Apollonian rationalism to the neglect of the Dionysian – an imbalance from which it has never recovered.

The primary villain of this story was Plato, whom Nietzsche accused of setting philosophy on its rationalist track. Plato’s immortalisation of his teacher, Socrates, amounted to nothing less than a morbid obsession with intellectual martyrdom. His Theory of the Forms taught generations of philosophers to seek truth in metaphysical abstractions, while devaluing lived experiences in the physical world. Plato’s intellectual revolution, in particular, was born out of the destruction of myth. In his wake, philosophy had been left ‘stripped of myth’ and starved of cultural roots. Modern culture, for Nietzsche, continued to languish in the shadow of Plato’s legacy, still grappling with its ‘loss of myth, the loss of a mythical home, a mythical, maternal womb’.

Seven decades later, at the end of the Second World War, Karl Popper mounted what would become, after Nietzsche, the second-most famous attack on Plato in modern philosophy. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper suggested that Plato had provided Western thought with its first blueprint of the ‘closed society’. In the Republic, Plato envisioned an ideal city that prioritises the harmony of the collective over the freedom of individuals, the preservation of the status quo over innovation, and the authority of intellectual gatekeepers over democracy and truth. The toxic influence of Plato’s political vision, Popper argued, could be traced through the history of philosophy, all the way to Nazi Germany and other forms of contemporary totalitarianism.

Like Nietzsche, Popper blamed Plato for setting Western philosophy on the wrong course. He did so, however, for precisely the opposite reason. Popper’s Plato was no rationalist. Rather, Popper boiled down the difference between open and closed societies to the difference between a culture of criticism and a culture of myth. Plato, as the first and the greatest of the enemies of the open society, had advocated the suppression of free criticism in order to establish an ‘arrested state’, sustained by myths and deception. Pointing to the Republic’s controversial foundation narrative, the Myth of Metals, Popper credited Plato with writing an ‘exact counterpart’ to ‘the modern myth of Blood and Soil’.

Who was right? Was Plato a short-sighted rationalist, who led philosophy astray by unmooring it from a more authentic, mythic past? Or was he a devious mythmaker, who introduced an uneasy current of irrationalism into the citadel of reason? How could he be both? Put differently: was Plato to blame for steering philosophy away from myth, or for bringing it closer to myth?

Neither The Birth of Tragedy nor The Open Society is celebrated today for its author’s fidelity to historical accuracy. Nonetheless, both remain iconic because Nietzsche and Popper were each on to something resonant about the relationship between myth and philosophy, and the curious symbolic role of Plato in our inherited understandings of that relationship.  READ MORE...

Bad People Among Us

 

America has plenty of bad people and some to spare if they ever wanted to relocate to other countries...  I remember the Watergate Hearings and Senator Sam Ervin from North Carolina who made a statement that few remember I suspect that...  "everyone is a little bit oily."

At my age and physical conditioning, I am suspicious of everyone and am glad that my life experiences have proven that to be a good direction to take.

GREED  --  CONTROL  --  POWER

These are the single most important motivational foundation of most all Americans regardless of their positions, rank, wealth, or political affiliations...  it is a mental disorder that afflicts everyone and is inherent in everyone at the moment of their birth, manifesting itself in various stages as we get older and older...  until there is no need to possess it further as it has possessed you...

Those Who Are Afflicted:

1. Parents
2. Clergy
3. Bosses
4. Supervisors
5. Siblings
6. Politicians
7. Spouses
8. Military
9. Law Enforcement
10. Coaches
11. Lawyers
12. Physicians
13. Athletes
14. Actors
15. Musicians
16. Thieves
17. Criminals
18. Chefs
19. Writers
20. Artists

No one escapes the clutches of these 3 words...  its like the holy trinity of existence...  especially here in America where, for a while, our Democracy and Freedoms flourish...  and, as long as we are in possession of our Democracy and Freedoms, so too will we be possessed by:

GREED  --  CONTROL  --  POWER