Wonder

Recently I've been thinking about the time and effort I put into studying the Humanities.  I guess I'd be considered an expert on some of man's greatest thinking, though I feel like I've barely scratched the surface.  I've especially felt a connection with the writings of Aristotle, probably because of his curiosity and insight.  But I think perhaps what I felt connected to was the innate sense of wonder that must have driven him to write so much on so many different topics.  When I started thinking about that, I began to ask myself what happened to my own sense of wonder.  It isn't gone, I've felt it at times flickering on the edge of my consciousness, but it's certainly been subdued.  Certainly one of the lessons I took from St. John's was that there is more to knowledge than simply studying.  My childhood exuberance for studying the scientific returned to me then, as I feel it returning now and, rather than pass it morsels or focus on the humanistic sciences like math and physics, I think I'd like to let it take in a full course meal of the wonder that we should all experience.  Hopefully, while I'm doing that, I'll learn a little more about the feeling of wonder itself.

So the first step is to explore some things that really invoke my sense of wonder.  Today, some videos of whale sharks!  Sorry about the music in this clip, maybe mute the Coldplay.  There are 4 whale sharks in captivity at the Georgia Aquarium in their 5 million gallon Ocean Voyager exhibit.  Certified divers can actually set up an appointment to swim with them and also with manta rays.  While their massive size (about as big as a school bus) is certainly intimidating, they are considered to be very gentle and have been known to playfully allow divers to swim with them.  As a child I was very fearful of deep, open water and especially of large sea creatures.  I think the memory of that fear contributes to my sense of wonder at these animals.

Whale sharks are the largest fish on the planet, reaching over 40 ft. in length.  Their diet primarily consists of plankton, though you can see one consuming small bait fish in the clip above.  Wonder for me seems, at least at the moment, to be a sandwich (philosophically speaking) of fear, fascination, and the kind of detachment that a being so alien to my own inspires.

Anyhow, enjoy the videos.

Interal Monologue Externalized

Trying to organize some different thoughts and such that I've been having so this seems like the right place to put them down to work through. Maybe if you're extremely unlucky I'll actually follow through with working on some of this stuff on here. Anyhow, here's the stuff I've been thinking about.

1) Variant Realities/The Nature of the Real

One of the big projects that I've been expertly putting off is starting work on a novel. I've been putting a lot of thought into what sort of themes I'd want to work through and what kind of story I'd want to tell for quite a long time. The concept has gone through a number of different iterations based on the nature of what I'm interested in and what I've been thinking about. There are a few things that have remained constant about the project though, which I think will actually make it into the final cut. Whatever I write will explore the nature of the real, of the "experience of living", and of ways in which human experience and human thought connect directly to our perceptions (and the actual nature) of whatever reality is.

Needless to say I'm planning to write science fiction, but hopefully in a way that allows it to be considered serious literature. Any good story is about relationships, not only of the characters with one another, but with themselves and with their world. Truly brilliant writers can make the story about its relationship to the reader. I believe that this is accomplished through clever use of archetypal and mythological context (the "monomyth" or "metastory" concept if you will). The use of the comic also seems especially good for this purpose.

2) Light and Color

My continuing mission carries on. Currently I have taken two small side endeavors with respect to light and color. First, I'm reading Einstein's Relativity, because it's both readily available and generally related. While relativity is not specifically about light, it's clearly related and seems like a good way to slowly move toward quantum theories of light. Secondly, I'm reading Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants. Plants are heavily nourished by sunlight, which I find to be fascinating. It seems valuable to investigate them further in that regard.

I'm thinking of starting a terrarium. Oooh.

3) Society, Ethics, and Education

I don't think I'm going far afield when I say that Americans are at best cynical of and at worst untrusting of the government. I think we all expect government officials to be corrupt, greedy, cheaters; that we are unfazed when they turn out to be such. When a politician or public figure does something good, we are surprised, but unmoved because it seems like so little when we consider the extent of the negative in our society. I can't understand why we are accepting of this and why there seems to be so little movement against it.

Greed and selfishness are becoming major problems in our society. The current economic crisis is the result of greed, along with a lack of knowledge on the part of investors and home-buyers. The whole Madoff thing comes from greed. The companies that were bailed out and used that money to pay bonuses and retreats for exectutives (23k in taxpayer spa treatments anyone?) are guilty of it too. What happens in democracy that it stops being about "us" and starts being about "me"? We all do it to some extent, but most people would say that they are not greedy and selfish. My dad looks to the good in people and tells me I'm too cynical about this sort of thing. Is he right? Is it just a few bad apples at the top that cause these problems?

Tell me this: why are we accepting our country's failing morality? I heard a bit ago that an alarming percentage of high school students admitted to cheating on a test at school. An even more alarming percentage of those students said that they felt their personal ethics we acceptable!

Deep in my heart I believe that education has to be the solution to these kinds of problems. I'm not talking about just moral education, but education on the whole. A better system of education could help kids to fulfill their potential, become better citizens, and find more satisfying lives. It has to start with how we teach our kids. Right?

4) Caboose

A while back I made a post about the "Caboose's Mindscape" gag from Red Vs. Blue. I have continued thinking about that and about the relationship between self-perception and the real world. A few weeks ago a buddy said to me that "perception is reality". While I know it's a common idiom, I've been wondering about how true it is, and especially about how it related to the RvB bit. I'm very tempted to hit Burnie up with the idea of doing some "Philosophy of RvB" segments. Not that I think a lot of people would be interested. Anyhow, it'd be a good investigation I think. I'd almost be interested in doing like a recorded roundtable group on it.

5) Growing Up

It's beginning to become troubling how I'm drifting apart from some of be closest friends. I don't really want that to happen. I've been considering the idea that a project of sorts (like what I mentioned above perhaps?) would be just the thing to give us a united purpose. We'll see.


Until All Are One.

Triple the Fun, Part I

It's just about finals and paper time in "St. John's"-landia, which means it's time to start organizing my thoughts to write my oral final proposal and my preceptorial paper proposal. I haven't felt quite as challenged by the material in 'Politics and Society' this semester as I was with the 'Math and Natural Science' segment last semester, however, I also find that my interest was greater in the more challenging segment (thus lending credence to a long-time hypothesis that I perform better when challenged). So there are three assignments that I have to work on, which I guess I will post about in a yet-to-be-determined order. Maybe that will help get my mind going.

1) Short Paper on Hobbes' Leviathan for Tutorial

We throw around the words "political science" pretty easily these days, but it carries with it a suggestion of something more than what we usually mean by it. Leviathan is Hobbes' attempt to construct a reasoned understanding of the relationship between the nature of man and government. Reason is an essential principle for Hobbes, which is evident in the first few chapters of the treatise that discuss science rather than politics. It is by application of reason that we choose to leave the state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short" and form the commonwealth.

Our modern "liberal" minds rebel against Hobbesian government because it seems that it would fall into tyranny quite readily. For Hobbes the sovereign authority must be absolute and unquestioned. When we leave the state of nature to join together in a commonwealth we do so because we fear for our lives. Our natural state is one of war with every other person, struggling with equal strength over resources to which we all have an equal right. In this case, it seems that we are better off in ANY commonwealth than we are in the state of nature. The purpose of the commonwealth is, therefore, to protect the security of the subjects. Maintaining the commonwealth by any means seems therefore to be the essential function of the sovereign. It is through and by the authority of the subjects that the sovereign acts. The Leviathan in question is the body made up of all of the men who place their power in the hands of the sovereign.

For Hobbes, this authority is unquestionable, because the sovereign acts with the will of the subjects once he has their authority. He is empowered with the legislative, which allows him to construct law as he sees fit for the good of the commonwealth. He is the originator of all law, property, and action in the commonwealth as an agent of the subjects, and as such is unquestionable. There is no recourse against his actions or his laws, because anything he does carries the authority of the people. Thus he must act in such a way that protects his interests, as leader, and that protects the interests of the commonwealth so that the Leviathan remains strong and free of the diseases of seditious doctrines that undermine his absolute authority. The prevention of this, for Hobbes, involves educating the people on the laws of the commonwealth and, most importantly, reminding them that the original authority of those laws comes from them via the actor of the sovereign. This would show them that the absolute power of the sovereign authority is their will and is necessary to protect them from a return to the dangers of the state of nature.

Our strong reaction to this doctrine is probably something like an immediate cry of, "Tyranny!" However, as we saw in The Prince and continue to see in Leviathan, and Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government, the ideas are not recommending a specific form of government or governor. The only qualification, it seems, that the sovereign in Hobbes' Leviathan need posess is that he be competent to understand the best interests of himself and the commonwealth and recognize the need for absolute sovereignty. He allows that the government might take one of any number of forms. The goal of Hobbes' political science seems less like a kind of guide to running a commonwealth (how to build a government) and more like a commentary on the nature of governing (what governments should be like).

Hobbes is attempting to present us with an appeal to some essential quality of governance that supercedes the question of the particulars of government. Further investigation into what this essential character is seems like it might prove fruitful and interesting.

And Now For Something Completely Different

One of the frustrating things about the modern world is its focus on specialization. To be fair, this is also one of the strengths of many businesses and organizations in the U.S. The U.S. military, for example, provides a baseline of military training to all soldiers, but then specializes them with significant additional training in their chosen field. There are few businesses where employees are cross-trained on other jobs as a matter of course. I've been thinking about all of this in my search for a new job (unlike many people, however, I still have the old one so I can afford to be a little picky). Our university system operates especially like this, with very focused majors. It is even rare for people to study multiple fields at the graduate level of education. Probably, this has a lot to do with the time it takes for such studies to bear fruit so that you can get paid.

Some of the most notable philosophers in the Western world were so-called "Rennaisance Men". Aristotle studied logic, ethics, politics, biology, and was arguably the first zoologist. Descartes attempted to reason from first principles, through the sciences, and into philosophy. Hobbes began with science and worked through religion into politics. Why did our greatest minds seek to bring together many different areas of thought? Did they see connections that we cannot?

It seems that part of being human might relate to bringing together the diverse parts of the world in ways that make sense. From an individual's perspective, all thoughts, experiences, sensations, and emotions are jumbled together. Although we try to split out the various parts of the world, perhaps it is this internal mixture that is leaking through making us want to fit such varied ideas together.

Personally, I try to remain something of a generalist. I am interested in so many different fields that I find it challenging to constrain my inquiries to one or two. While I'm sure it's impossible to be in expert in more than one, I wonder whether any of them is truly split apart from the others. I think we've shown over the course of time that many "Sciences" are interrelated, and many of the "Arts" are as well. I think we see true genius in those who can seamlessly integrate the two. By directing ourselves toward this interdisciplinary thought we may learn more than we bargained for.

On Friendship

I sent out a bit from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to some of my close friends. If you'd like to follow along it's from Book IX, Chapter 9, from Becker numbers 1169B30 to the end of the chapter.

Nicomachean Ethics spends the first 7 books talking about virtue of character and intellectual virtue. In Book VIII, however, Aristotle begins a discussion of "friendship". To me it's a bit of a non-sequitur, but I think if you take into account what he's seems to be saying about man as a political creature it sort of follows to discuss friendship. Now if you are familiar with this part, he identifies three sorts of friendship: friendship of utility, friendship of pleasure, and true friendship. He identifies different qualities of each and discusses a surprising variety of topics related to them, but I'm interested in where he is heading, rather than any particular specifics of friendship.

In the Sachs translations of Aristotle, there is a lot of reference to "being-at-work", translated from the Greek energeia. What he means by this that I find lacking in other translations of energeia is something like an active condition. Not something you actively maintain, but some part of being that is actively enacting.

Now if, as Aristotle thinks, "thinking" is the primary action of man and the "intellect" (Grk: nous) is something like what we would call the self, why would we need friends? Why should man desire nothing more than self reflection and introspection, which, based on the passage indicated, seems to be the greatest good. Why do we need more than the awareness of being that we have within us?

If this "being-at-work" of self is so important, what is it? How can I share in a friend's awareness that "he is"? Do you suppose Aristotle is somehow right about intellect and the self? Another section that may be helpful to read for this discussion would be Chapter 8, especially the paragraph around 1169A.

The question becomes, "What is it about my relationship with my friend that gives me a greater good than my own awareness of self?"

The Line and the Circle

Okay, so regarding the line of infinite length and the circle of infinite circumference; what do you think? Are they related?

Think about what a circle is, a single line bounding a figure equidistantly from a single point, called the centre. The line itself is, however, unbounded. Do you see a way in which the circle might represent a kind of Little Infinity?

Think about the single straight line. Could this be a way of representing Big Infinity stretching out in both directions for eternity?

Are these two shapes so different though? What would a circle with an infinite circumference look like? Here is a picture of a finite circle:

Note that this picture has no particular size associated with it. The circumference is the distance around the outside of the circle. If this distance were infinite it would be impossible to know exactly where to begin the curve of the circle, precisely because there is an infinite distance the circumference must encompass. Once you begin to curve the circle, the shape would demand that the circle be completed (because all circles are the exact same shape with different radii and circumferences; eg. they are all similar) and therefore finite. The best way to demonstrate this might be to look at a very very very very small part of a circle, which might looks something like this if we zoomed way in on a single point:

This looks an awful lot like a line to me. So now, if a circle is representative of Little Infinity and a line is representative of Big Infinity they seem like they might be very much alike indeed.

Do you buy into this? What do you think? Is this convincing you of something more about infinity? Does it make you think maybe there is something interesting at work here that we need to look at more closely?

For Thought - Your High School Geometry

Remember your High School Geometry?

Remember lines? How they extend in both directions unendingly? They have length, but no width. What sort of thing is a line? What do you suppose an infinitely long line is like? Does it make sense to think or talk about an infinite line?

Now think about circles. What sort of a thing is a circle? What does it look like? If all circles look the same, how big could a circle be and still be considered a circle? What might a circle of infinite circumference look like?

Do you think you see a relationship between these two things? What is the image above a picture of?

Little Infinity

Of the two concepts we are setting out to explore, Big Infinity seems to be the harder of the two concepts to get a hold on, probably because of its lack of visible external boundaries. Perhaps we should start by exploring Little Infinity.

I suggested that one way to model Little Infinity might be to look at all the rational numbers between 0 and 1. How many numbers are there between 0 and 1? We can enumerate them in one fashion as fractions, decimals, or parts of numbers. (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, etc.) How many of these numbers would we say there are between 0 and 1? Does it seem that there is an infinite number of fractional parts between 0 and 1?

Imagine a number line that displays this:

This line is finite in length with distinct boundaries, yet within those boundaries it contains a seemingly endless number of possible divisions. As you approach 0 the numbers seem to get infinitely smaller, and as you approach 1 the numbers seem to get infinitely bigger. With integers like 0 and 1 we can count very easily from one number to the next (0,1,2,3,4, etc.). The next question to ask, then is how we do this with our divisions. What number follows 0? What is the next number after 0 or the last number before 1? What implications might this have for Little Infinity?

You might answer that the number directly following 0 might be something like 0.000...01, such that it is a decimal followed by an infinite number of 0's with a 1 at the end. However, I'm not sure that this means very much at all, since we pretty much arrive at the same problem of being unable to count from 0 to 1. If you believe all of this, it looks like you'll have to accept that there is this thing I have dubbed Little Infinity.

Maybe old Zeno wasn't as wrong as you thought.

If this all seems to be the case, then as you approach 1 from the direction of 0 it seems you could continually come closer and closer without being obliged to count to the number 1. It reminds me of the way some parents might count at their children when scolding them, "One, Two, Two...and a half, Two...and three-quarters..." They rarely reach three and are not obliged to count three because they can continually come closer.

Does all of this make you want to believe in infinity more? What implications does this seem to have for numbers or the number line? What does our investigation seem to say about Big Infinity? Do you think there could be larger and smaller infinities, or is the infinite singular in size?

Big Infinity and Little Infinity

The distinction between what I call "Big Infinity" and "Little Infinity" has been on my mind for a while, so coming back to it now as a starting point for postings seems particularly appropriate. It happens to be pretty central in some of the popular philosophical inquiries these days, which means it's worth getting a clearer understanding of what we mean by "infinity".

What does it mean for something to be infinite? You might answer that it has something to do with endlessness or eternity; perhaps it relates to time or the size of the universe somehow. It seems to me that my very first thought about infinity is "something that goes on forever" or maybe "an amount that cannot be quantified". Either way it seems to have a suggestion of magnitude within it.

"Big Infinity" is the kind of infinity that tries to suggest something that is unbounded on the ends. Infinite space means means space without a boundary at which it no longer continues. If you recall your High School Geometry lesson, you might think of Big Infinity in the definition of a line. Unending in both directions, right? It passes through all of the points that lie on itself.

So it's big. Really big.

In ancient times, the philosopher Zeno is attributed with an interesting paradox, also called the paradox of the arrow. Zeno said that an arrow fired at a target could never actually hit it because it would always cross half of the distance in the approach. By continually halving the distance the arrow would become incrementally closer but never actually hit its target.

This is something like "Little Infinity". Think of all of the numbers between 0 and 1 (0.1, 0.01, etc.) and you have a sense of what Little Infinity represents. The infinite amount of space between two defined boundaries. Tiny differences, minuscule differences, but differences nonetheless.

Start by thinking about bounded and unbounded infinity then. How do you percieve them? Do you believe in them at all? Do you think one makes more sense than the other? What does it mean for something to be infinite?