Oct 18
Stephen – thank you for your last two e-mails (oct 17, 7:0t & 7:07). I am sorry to hear you’ve had computer problems. Reading your work is an experience similar to that which happened when I first discovered the Canadian golfer, Moe Norman. Moe probably could be described as possibly someone with Asperger’s syndrome and displaying the skills of a savant. His brain was wired differently than that of most people. I suspect both you & I are in such a category, only in different ways. I am the opposite of a savant. You may have more skills.
    I believe Moe Norman was the greatest golfer who ever lived because he had perfected a golf swing based on mathematics and science. However, because Moe did not think and act like so-called, ‘normal’ people, he was rejected by the golf establishment until late in his life, when a golf pro named Shankland began to champion Moe’s wing.
    I cannot understand your pradigm of the universe. I do not know if it is brilliant or nonsense. As Spinoza says, reason is just a stepping stone to understanding and understanding is…”purely passive; it is an awareness, in the soul of the essence and existence of things, so that it is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing, but it is the thing itself that affirms or denies in us something of itself. (Short Treatise on God, Man & TheWell-Being, p. 82 Shirley ed. Spinoza’s Complete Works).
    Or as Wittgenstein says, ‘understanding is not a mental event but rather awareness that now I know how to go on. When I read your work, I failed to understand how to go on. This does not mean your work is wrong, but rather that I have lost my way in your abstract presentation. I like much of what you say but I find no diection for action in your words.
    One of the reasons for this state is the ahistorical nature of your presentation. You reject all of the history of ideas that precede your own, of the paradigm. Showing the error of the ideas of physicists is okay but just to reject them by labels such as ‘abstractionist paradigm,’ is not useful.
    While I am countering a normally-accepted paradigm in the theory of knowledge, I am putting my counter in a context o the history of ideas that can be followed through the past in the ideas of Euclid, Aristotle, Spinoza and Boole and presently in the ideas of Lloyd and Damasio. (This is how my brain is wired, and, I believe it could be as a skill in entangling ideas of what Spinoza meant as science).
    Second I am a firm believer in Occam’s Razor, that if an idea cannot be said in simple terms, then I really do not understand how to go on.
    So I am asking two things from you so that I can understand your paradigm; 1) Give it a historical context and 2) Make it simple enough that I can know how to go on with it.   I am reversing one of your aphorisms in the very interesting comments of Oct 17, 7:05: “Reality-Theory-Hypothesis.” I will not take time to discuss yur other aphorisms but I find them fascinating. Some I agree with, some I don’t, but this again may just be a problem of understanding, i.e. how to go on.
    The thing about Moe Norman is that while his explanations may have seemed abstract, his actions were simple and easy to understand and follow. I wish this for both you & I.
In friendship, Dick
Posted in Comment | No Comments »
Oct 6

Re: “By your lack of response, I assume that you’ve put me in the ‘crazy person’ category.
   
    Obviously you have mistaken me for an academic.  I like to make a distinction beween ‘academic’ and ’scholar.’ Academics tend to critique everything from their own paradigm of knowledge, rather than understand.
    Scholars pursue understanding, even if it overthrows an accepted paradigm.
    To understand your theory of emissions would take a long more time than you have given me. I have been working on the seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, for over ten years and I am just beginning to understand his theory of knowledge.
    Seth Lloyd (Programming the Universe) says that “…the more original and imaginative the paper that I submit, the more quickly and harshly it is rejected.” (p3). This is in a chapter that was left out of his book, because it was too technical. This is all online, Chp. 7, Director’s Cut: It From Quibit).
    Since you appear to be rejecting most of establishment physics, you must expect ‘harsh rejection’ and being put in a ‘crazy person’ category. Do not expect otherwise. But also, DON’T GIVE UP!’
    Spinoza divided knowledge into (1) opinion (2) true belief or reason and (3) science. Most people operate by just opinion, including many academics. True belief is just a thing of reason that is a stepping stone to understanding. Science, for Spinoza is what the ancient Greeks called, ‘demonstration,’ or reason living inside of us, not external observation.
    Spinoza called this phenomena, ‘intuition’ but, as Wittgenstein says, this word is an ‘unnecessary shuffle.’ I believe what Spinoza meant by science is best represented by Seth Lloyd and Antonio Damasio’s works. Lloyd says: “…entanglement is responsible for the generation of information in the universe (Programming, p. 119). Damasio describes ‘feelings’ as a superposition of body and cognition. (Descartes Error pp. 143-147).
    Understanding is the logic of the universe that lives within our ability to think and act.
    I do not understand your work yet but I am willing to pursue your idea of paradigm. I do however, wish you would do more showing why establishment physics is wrong than just to state that it is.
    Also, as a philosopher strongly influenced by Spinoza’s and Wittgenstein’s critique of abstract thinking, I find your very abstract critique of the ‘abstractionist paradigm’ as Wittgenstein would say, ‘bewitching.’  This is not a critique of your ideas but of your methods of presenting them.
    Spinoza said, “Some things are in our intellect and not in Nature; so these are only our own work and they help us to understand things distinctly. Among these, we include all relations which have reference to different things. Thse we call ‘beings of reason.’ (Collected works, Edward Curley trans. Vol 1, p. 92.
    As you can see, I am a philosopher with a strong interest in science but not a physicist. My critique is only about being clear and distinct in your presentation, not a critique of content.
    Continue your work.
Dick DeShaw

Posted in Comment | No Comments »