Time?

Another Sunset, how many more!

      Schopenhauer informed his readers and anyone who listened that the present was the only reality, past and future didn't exist, it wasn't real. Nietzsche, as an example, when it was his turn to be a callow youth was much enamored of Schopenhauer's understanding of will, but he came to the understanding that the old man was too pessimistic, too weak and cowardly to properly embrace the world.

    For Nietzsche a robust mind needed a past and future, the present alone just wasn't enough for a "will to power." Nietzsche was a classical philologist, he was ancient languages and texts. Amongst other things Schopenhauer wrote about the Philosophy of mathematics and logic.

    "So what."

     So what indeed, my fellow Puddle Duck. The answer from my side is that linear thinking will always require a trinity to give it curve, slope and touches of humanity so it might flourish in the answerlessness of the present. Non-linear thinking patterns easily tolerate a single eternal present. 

    Plato made the claim that once the orbits of all the planets returned to their original equilibrium that would constitute the end of a Perfect Year and the beginning of the next perfect year. The issue of how many of our 'so called' years made up an astrological Perfect Year, remained deeply in doubt. Around four hundred years after Plato died Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman Orator and statesman, suggested that Plato's Perfect Year was twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty four of our 'so called' years.

    And here you have to remember that Roman property owning Stoics were generally of the opinion that their perceived order, beauty and perfection of the universe, as well as the occasional actual appearance of the Gods in history suggested that the Gods were Real. Meanwhile back in what remained of Athens, Plato's Perfect Year had taken itself into the assumption that because the universe returned to an equilibrium before embarking on the next Perfect Year the movement and placement of the stars at any one time could be used to predict the future, or what would happened next.

    "What is the point of time."

    Good one. Don't let anyone try to tell you they know what time is. My own position is as unsound as anyone else's. It divides in a more than pompous ass manner somewhere between the disagreement the self important Saint Augustine of Hippo had with Mânâ Rabba of the Mandaeans about the end times and the General Relativity of post classical physics

   Manichaeism reckoned that when you died if you'd been bad you just disappeared into nothing and good riddance, but if you were good your dust would enter the heavens and for the remainder of time you'd be a star, none of this rising from the dead that so appealed to Saint Augustine.

    Einstein's successors still grapple with time. Of their ideas, spacetime makes time more like a navigation point in space. For General Relativity, outside a closed system there is no time - the universe is a closed system. Quantum Physics, the subatomic, views time as a background parameter which is used to track how quantum states change.

   It does seem to me that much further than Physics our Tech Bros cannot go. And yet maybe the magic boxes that come from them will exact from us people the sort of faith that built pyramids.

The monopoly of the Profit Motive

Footwear

    I was a callow youth back when adult judgement was considered respectable. Those were the days when the claim that a split atom would result in free electric for everyone was gospel, pipe smoking voices would go into the conviction that doctors are more valuable than miners, that the dawn of civilization was the Neolithic and any suggestion that the Soviets were experimenting with a machine that would replace the stenographer was absurd.

    In 1983 the United States Government delivered report called A Nation at Risk which warned of a 'tide of mediocrity.' It asked 'reformers' to look at ways to boost academic performance. In the next seven years it became all about the person, self esteem, and the promotion of 'short, positive statements that students and teachers repeat to build confidence, reduce negative self-talk, and create a supportive learning environment.' Then, around 2004 or there about, My Space, Facebook and the waterfall from hell started prowling around feasting on self esteem to the point were even a cat could tell lies about itself.

    It wasn't the soviets who made the machine that would replace the stenographer it was the tragic monopoly of the profit motive.

In the Beginning was the word. Question for Realism?

Dandelion

     The question of realism in the way we think about stuff is a whole bunch of hoo-ha that preys on the difference between what is inside our mind and outside our mind. Of course there is a difference, damn right that chair is real, the Bear in the forest chops down trees or whatever. And yes we people can make things appear real that aren't real, likewise we can make things unreal that are real. 

    Here, in this paragraph, I'll dwell a while on the fate of my soul before suggesting the answer to the direct and irritating question "Do things exist independent of the mind?" is "Yes and No." All of which fails to ask the central question for Realism which is "What relationships are we exploring when we think?"

   Do we invent in our minds a morality informed by social reasons, or are there moral sentences that actually express propositions which refer to objective physical features of the real world? Are there mind independent aesthetic facts! Is Beauty real. And indeed there is a New Age tint to the ideas which emerged from physics and lean into the understanding that a collapsing wave may put our will in direct connection with a universal real. This quantum level entanglement is not so far away from the cause and effect of Descartes who wondered how a non-physical mind causes a physical body to move.

   The "think therefore I am" emotional dependencies that allow minds to cling to increasingly frail myths, are well exemplified by the arguments advanced by the likes of Victorian Naturalist, Aquarium Designer and Adventist Phillip Henry Gosse, who, as slowly the fossil and geological record suggested the world might have been a little more than 6000 years old and might not have been created in six short days and nights.

   The real of spiritual, it's a Protection Racket. 

    

    

The Folly of Realism - Mind Independence

Spider Webs

      Like all of us, Pareto's frustrations with our access to true or at least accurate things was a relationship between his mind and the world. His desire to find new ways of grasping that world, different more perfect paradigms, was no doubt an honest one. He might have been less flexible than some.

    His income came from his work as a civil engineer, he was a corporate executive in the Iron and Steel industry, he was a professor, he had a handsome inheritance. There's no doubt he had the convictions of the ambitious, his political activism on the side of classic liberal free trade, free markets and that whole anti-tariff tapestry of trust in the people to make their own decisions without the apparatchiks of state was much more than a hobby for our prince.

    Prior to 1893, before he drowned in sparkly cynicism, or failure, and moved to Switzerland to find solace in Sociology, Pareto had been a political man, one of the wolves. He wanted a parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage for Italy. He wrote pamphlets, he made speeches, he started an anti-protectionist league in Florence, he ran for office, failed to win an election, became sick and tired of being surrounded by militaristic, interfering, socialist eejits.

    You can look at his work and if you happen to be more like me, a geriatric F-You member of a the back row in good standing, you can see in his work the chauvinism of our body politic. It's a chauvinism that dominates the ruling class, the sort of "I've talked to Moses and the Arc stays" jackassery which if you're like me reaches into and throttles Business Studies, then comes up with the genuinely political idea that "We are the grown ups, they are the naughty children who need to be told what to do."

    Realism as a mind-in-the-world, would certainly agree with Pareto's suggestion that our species was unlogical. It doesn't follow a predictable pattern, odd things happen, odder behaviors follow. Pareto raised the flag of exasperation when he dismissed cardinal utility from his economics, it was pointless, it was that which cannot be uttered because it didn't readily lend itself to number. Ordinal utility, the number of widgets produced and purchased was collectible data. There's no universal solution to the equal sign that follows "I want a tortoise."