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