32.1 The whole business of
consciousness is ‘projection’.
32.2 So mankind was more or less from the
jump condemned to pursue an empirical path that
sought an empire of human possibility at the
expense of all other creation.
32.3 And so by current apocalyptic measure
it’s the mathematical sciences that have rushed us
to this sad or happy denouement depending on your
temperament.
32.4 The substitution of prophecy with
statistics only exacerbated and accelerated the
problem.
32.5 Turning time into a dimension of space
did nothing to ameliorate planetary dissolution.
It abetted in accelerating it. The calculus and
special relativity simply privileged physical
objects as ‘objects’ of prediction whereas
prophecy had not privileged such questions.
Trajectories, orbits etc. remain a privileged yet
utterly limited subset of prophecy, all the
mathematical sciences can provide of the larger
questions such as those in the misguided relics of
alchemy and astrology.
32.6 I hasten to add that both alchemy and
astrology played key roles in the rapid
advancement of the physical sciences and
mathematical physics.but those parts which did not
conform to experimental and mathematical rigor
were discarded and as the far as the conformal
epistemology was concerned rightly so.
32.7 Mathematics serves as an astringent
and a solvent cleansing and leaving behind only a
bone white material culture.
32.8 Mathematics restricts and impels the
mathematician. Within mathematical epistemology
numbers can’t lie. It’s numerical fungibility that
leads one to consider mathematical laws as
universal. If a calculation does not achieve an
expected or desired result, the error must lie
with a less than rigorous and fungible denouement
of nature. Nature is sacrificed for number.
32.9 Thus mathematics is imbued with a kind
of amnesty from failure and moral prescript.
Numbers can’t lie. They appropriate nature and in
this take precedence because nature reduced to
numbers is less resistant to small aggregates of
discovery.
32.10 But that’s not initially at issue
here. The first question is “Is there something
inherently destructive in using mathematical
processes and the mathematical sciences to express
natural processes.” Given the confluence of the
500 year acceleration of the mathematical sciences
and the concomitant degradation of the
environment, a connection is unavoidable. The only
question is at what level does this connection
occur? Does this degradation and destruction take
place at the level of the mathematics used in the
sciences?
33.1 So what about the internal combustion
engine?
33.2 What about it?
33.3 On the one hand it is one of the
technological innovations most responsible for the
rapid rise of our progressive material world.
33.4 It is also one of the main
technologies responsible for planetary
dissolution.
33.5 Is this a trade off or a fait
accompli? The confusion of prophecy in the
narrowly industrialized scientifically
mathematicized sense ,for example, with a relative
and local, epochly short term prosperity enjoyed
by a relative few, and its wider sense for example
biblical prophecy would suggest the latter is at
work here. The prophecy of the mathematical
sciences turns out is an apocalyptic prophecy of
planetary denouement.
33.6 Though in every day life not normally
thought of this way, the internal combustion
engine is dependent in its entirety and in all of
its facets and features upon the mathematical
sciences. Again with the goddamned “ne plus
ultra.” But how? The internal combustion’s social
context was as savior for all of one hundred
years. So much for the universality of the
mathematical sciences as regards epochs of time.
33.7 How about space? Finite. Unless you
believe the blither about terraforming and
self-reproducing automata. Resources.
Finite.Unless you carry in your foolish heart a
belief in the sciences that makes a belief in an
all powerful deity appear sane and
rational.
33.8 One might say, it’s not a simple
choice. Ala Gross and Levitt we now to understand
the destructive nature of burning fossil fuels and
we will endeavor to find alternative fuels.One
might say, there is now enough anxiety around the
onward rush of planetary dissolution to create a
pantheon of deities based on the mathematical
sciences e.g. wind power, solar power, terraforming,
nuclear power, etc., all with their little
multinational altars.
33.9 But are fuel sources the central issue
here? Or is it the paradigm reflected in the
infrastructure that necessitates/habituates the
travel and transport of human beings and goods
over greater and greater distances? And what does
this habituation involve to right itself?
Certainly not technological tweaking.
33.10 The earth is finite after all.
Shouldn’t this finitude have given pause early on?
How could the mathematical sciences with their
precise measurements not have detected that
western exploitation was out of all proportion and
the planet was threatened.
33.11 At least one alchemist was hip to the
problem at least its pan-cultural dimension. (No,
not Newton though he did predict the end of world
in the year 2060.)
“The helmsmen of explorations have
discovered how to disturb the peace of others, to
profane the guardian spirits of their countries,
to mix what prudent nature has separated, to
redouble men’s desires by commerce, to add the
vices of one people to those of the other, to
propagate new follies by force and set up
unheard-of lunacies where they did not exist
before, and finally to give out the stronger as
the wiser. They have shown men new ways, new
instruments, and new arts by which to tyrannize
over and assassinate one another. Thanks to such
deeds, a time will come when other peoples, having
learned from the injuries they suffered, will know
how and be able, as circumstances change, to pay
back to us, in similar forms or worse ones, the
consequences of these pernicious inventions.”
-- Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday
Supper, 1584
The
prophetic ring is unmistakable.
33.12 No. Everyone is not the same no
matter how many times you assign them the same
number.
33.13 You might say the sciences were and
are taking into account planetary limitations by
refining the technologies that they foster. I
might say that in a few cases these scientific
advances have postponed planetary dissolution
while in most others they have accelerated it.
33.14 But it’s not knowing which technology
is ultimately harmful and which is not that is the
moral dilemma central here. Yet, this is merely a
way of discerning what Vandana Shiva and others
describe as Unanticipated Consequences. Such
discretions are confined to the relatively short
term.
33.15 We face apocalyptic questions here.
And moral and ethical consequences arising from
the mathematical sciences’ supposed utterly amoral
and objective tools and process. What’s more we
get the arrogance of universality shoved into our
faces even as the mathematical sciences rush from
one solution to another to staunch the end of the
world that their earlier ‘universals’ created.
But, unlike the scientific community, we will not
stoop to the slightest whiff of theological
pomposity here.
34.1 By current apocalyptic measure of the
Gross and Levitt kind, the demiurges of the
mathematical sciences are the only ones who
measure up to the dissolution of the planet.
34.2 Yet, here a great leap outside of the
western epistemological box is required. A leap
not confined to the usual rhetorical blither
perfectly suited to kiss the wand of the current
dominant epistemology.
34.3 The mathematicians themselves are not
entirely the ones driving this rush toward
apocalypse.
34.4 The darling of positivists,
mathematicians are constrained by what numbers can
reveal. To work outside the strict rules of
mathematics, would be not perform mathematics at
all. Like any game the rules for mathematics are
homogeneous and this also forms the foundation of
the epistemology of mathematics.
34.5 Complex methematcial solutions have a
narrative, unfolding quality. But a narrative
constrained by Universal Laws. Neil DeGrasse Tyson
has said “Mathematics is the language of the
universe.” In the lay world as in the sciences
this statement is very nearly ‘universally’
accepted as true ex cathedra. A box no one thinks
outside of.
35.1 Mathematicians can only perform mathematics
within the constraints of mathematical laws. As
Godel might say, we’re purposely invoking the
tautological here because such power over and
restraint upon mathematicians lays much of the
ethical and moral responsibility for planetary
dissolution at the feet of mathematics itself.
What else do the mathematical sciences have but
these ‘universal’ constraints called ‘laws’? And
as Roger Penrose says this leads to “conflating
reality with lawfulness.” Or in the case of the
mathematical sciences confirmed by DeGrasse
Tyson’s cheerleading conflates reality with
mathematics.
35.2 What do we have under the tutelage of
the mathematical sciences? A collapsing planet.
35.3 Applying a moral/ethical dimension to
mathematics itself and the mathematical sciences
will have an alien ring to most westerners even
the bible thumpers. To much of the developing
world which has received and absorbed so much of
western epistemology through the sciences, often
the scientific West’s weaponry, such confusion
concerning numbers carries no weight at all moral,
ethical or otherwise.
35.4 Why? To anyone whose formative
cultural experience lies outside the epistemology
of the Western mathematical sciences, the Western
experience seems to be little more than a means to
an end. So it is perhaps no surprise that
that ‘end’ as say Vandana Shiva might frame it,
involves the very end of planet on which they
exist. Often minority cultures have viewed the
arrival of the West as the end of the[ir] world.
Their prophecies were neither wrong as regards
their own culture as well as its object, Nature
itself.
35.5 The linguist Benjamin Whorf wrote:
“I find it gratuitous to assume that a
Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the
cultural ideas of his own society has the same
notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time
and space as we have, and that are generally
assumed to be universal. In particular he has no
notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing
continuum in which everything in the universe
proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future into a
present and into a past .... After a long and
careful analysis the Hopi language is seen to
contain no words, grammatical forms, construction
or expressions that refer directly to what we call
'time', or to past, present or future ...". Whorf
(1956b:57)”
35.6
Whorf’s approach is an affront to the mathematical
sciences claims of universality. To further claim
that the so-called objectivity, ‘numbers never lie’
bias of the mathematical sciences is not at the root
of such prejudice and open hegemony is ludicrous.
35.7 The hegemony of the West relies on its superior
notion of how the world is and their mathematically
based canards of universal application. You can even
hear celebrity knuckleheads like Stephen Pinker
decry Whorf’s position in an effort to keep the Hopi
and their culture on the reservation.
36.1 The acceleration of mathematical
sciences and technological progress and its
exploitation that has brought about the advanced
stages of the dissolution of the planet coincides
with the contributions of the mathematical
sciences, This gives it its arrogant, undeniable
‘ne plus ultra’.
36.2 This has moved from prophecy to become
a trivial, overtly obvious observation.
36.3 Given our available epistemology, what
we seek to know here is ‘how’ such a mere 500
year, lightning coup de grace on life on earth
itself was dealt by its purported greatest
advancement.
36.4 ‘How’ did the mathematical sciences
approximate a spiritual Armageddon with science’s
physical manifestation. Hysterical religious
nihilism in the West where the mathematical
sciences gained as the ascendant epistemology, is
currently at its most virulent stage largely
induced by a science and technology induced
millennialism. The irony here is best left to
literature.
36.5 Is this due to some quasi-mystical
origins attributed to mathematics whereby religion
and the mathematical still somehow coincide? No.
This is a dead end. (I have received millennial
screeds over the internet with absolutely no sense
of the mathematical science which made their
communication possible. I have yet to have one
screed communicated through the aether without
benefit of some such technology). The irony here
belongs to the stand up comic.
36.6 Error is a component of discovery. And
the whole business of consciousness is projection.
36.7 So for mathematics to be labeled a window
onto the universal, the universe must be a priori
known through the consciousness in its
entirety. Since this is not the case, error
follows. And when the error(s) are global…
37.1 When we say “the whole business of
consciousness is projection” we appear to invoke
notions of emission optics held by some ancient
Greek philosophers most notablt Plato.
37.2 ‘Consciousness’ is not restricted to sight.
However, sight (and light) symbolize
‘consciousness’ in Western epistemology as well as
a relativist perspective.
37.3 Aside from questions of optics, the
mathematical sciences relive the need for light
when making observations. This is another base
canard in the West’s arsenal of universal
principles and applications.
37.4 Aside from relating to the tools at hand, the
mathematical sciences can be done in the ‘dark so
to speak. This produces marvelous phantasms like
quantum paradox, string theory and
multi-dimensional universes out side the visual
grasp of our tiny little brains.
37.5 Are the mathematical sciences simply a round
about way to have new religious experiences?
37.6 Just funnin’ with ya. But?
38.1 Mathematics is asensuous. Though, not all
mathematicians are without sensation, despite
their caricature in popular literature.
38.2 Mathematics needs no eyes. In this sense it
is ideally suited for Plato’s cave. According to
Plato's Socrates, the shadows are as close as the
‘prisoners’ of the Cave get to viewing reality.
Mathematics broaches no such restraints.
38.3 Mathematics doesn’t know what it means to
blink, to consider its efficaciousness outside of
its own game. Light is not formative to its
epistemology except on its own mathematical terms.
38.3 With the mathematical sciences even optics
becomes Eyeless in Gaza. Utterly instrumented.
39.1 “To Nature laws are fugitive.
Tactical dependencies
described as certainties
[which] Reveal their habituation.”
Parcelli – Tale of the Tribe
39.2 Or Adorno and Horkheimer on the Higgs Boson.
"The great dream of the end of History is the
utopia of causal systems...Just as the dream of
genesis
was the utopia of classifying systems." wrote
Michel Foucault.
40.1 The mathematical sciences are formative for
western culture. After all, they are the ‘Ne Plus
Ultra’.
40.2 You’d be hard pressed to blame the end of the
world on contemporary western poetry as rotten as
its current product is. No one speaks of the
science of poetry. And for good reason.
40.3 You will hear occasionally the phrase the
‘poetry of science.’ But this is simply due to a
lack of discernment among the scientific community
and the public at large.
41.1 Mathematics qua mathematics was not always
immune from ethical and moral judgements
41.2 That is to say it was not always immune from
history.
41.3 ‘Disciplines’ such as alchemy, numerology,
astrology etc.and their framework of metaphysics
once comprised the science of their times and
contributed considerably to the modern amoral
mathematics that we accept today.
41.4 The mathematical sciences would say they,
through mathematical rigor, that they have
eliminated most of the tenets of the above
pseudo-sciences by simply demonstrating their
historical errors. Our current state of scientific
mathematical progress has led us to a more angelic
moment.
41.5 Mathematics may appear immutable and immune
from any moral precepts but certainly many of the
discoveries of mathematical sciences have led to
technologies that can at best appear as a
necessary evil. An example is nuclear weapons.
41.6 Many people quite rightly protest the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. Even governments
such as the US and Russia paid lip service to the
dangers of such devices even as they created them,
a clear sign of pathology.
41.7 Many people condemn nuclear weapons on purely
moral and ethical grounds.
41.8 But then why do they never condemn the
mathematics and mathematical sciences that made
nuclear weapons possible in the first place?
41.9 When did ‘ahistorical rationalism’ become
possible? How can history become ahistory?
41.9 This is easily traceable back to the sad
condition of Western epistemology or how
westerners are capable of knowing the world.
50.1 Whenever I broach this topic with anyone with
a western mindset I immediately hear about all of
the marvels of technology and how could I consider
living in a world without them. For one, I care
enough to realize that such a world is not
possible. Fantasies have no place here.
50.2 One of the popular replies a couple of years
ago was how the devices of so-called social media,
allowed groups like nuclear protesters to plan
protests and gather more effectively.
50.3 This would be a classic example of the zero
sum game if the power ensembles on the two sides
were equal.
50.4 But the indisputable fact is that mathematics
and the mathematical sciences are clearly arrayed
on the side of governmental and, more importantly,
corporate power. With materialism, altruism is
always baggage.This is a lesson long buried in the
dialectical adipose of western epistemology,
scientific, ethical or otherwise.
50.5 To a slightly different, more real time
induced and experienced mindset, the consequences
of this alignment would be not only oblivious but
smack of apocalyptic inevitability.
50.6 Take alchemy, the chemical creation of gold
from base elements.Though still practiced by
Newton and others, it began to find disfavor about
the time of the age of discovery.
50.7 The so-called Age of Discovery, Age of
Exploration, Age of Exploitation, Imperialism,
Colonialism, 500 Year Apocalypse etc., call it
what you will, it was largely predicated on the
search for gold.
50.8 Why would alchemy not thrive? Was it in
disrepute? Would someone of the stature of Isaac
Newton have pursued it in the 17th Century if it
was? Columbus had all but drained the Caribbean
basin of gold by 1530 but by the 17th Century the
search for gold had greatly expanded and at times
been hugely more profitable.
50.9 Newton wrote over a million words on the
subject of alchemy. His papers on alchemy were
re-discovered in the mid-20th century. It is now
obvious that the inspiration for Newton's laws of
light and theory of gravity came from his
alchemical work.
50.10 Shouldn’t Newton’s ancillary discoveries
share some of the scrutiny on the historically
ethical grounds that alchemy does. No doubt many
of their principles and precepts remain
alchemical. If they are ontologically wrong why do
we perceive them in the West as being
conformally/mathematically correct?
51.1 Does planetary dissolution at the hands of
the mathematical sciences mean that modern
mathematics is ‘wrong’ in some fundamental way? Is
it evil? So what if we no longer have an
environment on which our species might
proliferate. Perhaps, its good riddance to bad
trash.
51.2 Whorf might suggest we investigate
other cultures concepts and uses of number and
mathematics with the proviso that we will come
away with no knowledge of the ‘other’ but perhaps,
as an optimist might insist, a fresh knowledge of
ourselves.
51.3 Of course, given the hegemonic nature of
western epistemology such a hope is mere illusion.
We have all witnessed the wars of aggression by
the United States in the latter half of the 20th
century, the losing battle between sustainable
superstition and the apocalypse of fetishized mass
production.
52.1 At this point, I think it is important to
remind the reader that "By its very nature
formalism prohibits any possibility of giving
meaning to 'which photon is which.'
52.2 Does such a criterion for being not suggest a
more fitting epistemology for an ant than a man?
The ‘masses’?
52.3 Is such extreme homogeneity a reality or an
illusion?
52.4 Don’t even our most ubiquitous notions of
time and space suggest that such a homogeneity, a
sameness, can only be an illusion? Don’t our most
basic notions of liberty suggest the same?
52.5 If therefore, formal systems such as those
which command the mathematical sciences operate
from the position of illusion are they not doing
harm to reality?
52.6 Might not one say they are substituting a
heterogeneous reality with a formal, homogeneous
illusion?
52.7 Why?
52.8 One might suppose it is because a
heterogeneous reality is rather unyielding to a
mathematically scientific ‘progressive’ agenda.
52.8 ‘Progress’ especially as understood in the
western industrialized sense, functions best for a
few when the conditions are homogeneous, when
workers are treated as ants as the cliché might
go. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific
Management springs to mind as do modern
motivational speakers.
53.1 But Taylor and carney barkers like Joel
Osteen and Rick Warren are simply consequences of
the deep conformity required of nature from the
epistemology of the mathematical sciences and
imposed upon the individual. They would be
laughable parodies if not for the millions of
lives they destroy.
53.2 But still they fall far short of planetary
dissolution.
53.3 The mathematical sciences and their carney
barkers have brought the whole planet to its knees
by the conformal illusion required by the
mathematical sciences.
54.1 ‘Sustainable superstition’? If superstition
equals religion can it therefore be assumed that
planetary stability is an unintended consequence
of religion? Doesn’t tradition have stability as a
built in feature?
54.2 Since mathematics, in its headlong rebellion
against infinitely variable nature, adheres to the
tenets of neither religion nor tradition does it
therefore contribute to instability?
54.3 Infinite variability simply is stable.
Mathematical reduction introduces localized chaos.
54.4 How does the infinitely variable support
stability and tradition? Because only with the
imposition of mathematical formalisms do they appear
to be at odds with one another instead of one and the
same.
54.5 Though true, such propositions such
as 53.3 and 54.4 have been disappeared.
54.6 Prayer never worked as nature intended? But
is religion and more broadly tradition the manner
in which Nature protects itself from the human
species as plant produces a toxin to ward off
hungry predators?
54.7 The function of religion may be simply to
keep mankind ignorant, to prevent us from becoming
so smart we do ourselves in and take the entire
planetary ecosystem with us.
54.8 But there are problems with this approach.
Americans consume (or should I say waste) 25% of
the world’s resources per annum with only 4% of
the population. America bills itself as a
Christian nation. Policies intended to create
sustainability are shunned by a majority of the
population and by a vast majority of American
Christians. The materialism driving these ironic
results even goes so far as to ignore, mock and
parody the core beliefs of Christianity itself.
54.9 Thus, Christianity is little more than a
harbor for buffoons and hypocrits. Fundamentalist
Christians, who purport to believe the earth was
created by god in 7 days 6000 years ago, depend on
fossil fuels discovered by geologists who, in
order to be geologists at all much less ‘find’
oil, must study an earth that is several billions
of years old and that the oil itself is dead
organic matter which has taken hundreds of
millions of years to become today’s crude.
Otherwise no oil industry.
54.10 Christians avail themselves of technologies
that demolish claims made in the bible. Further,
when historically reverse engineered, the
suggestion that god had any role whatsoever in
their creation becomes laughable.
54.11 That such a set of idiotic conundrums would
arise in the Christian west is not surprising.
Christianity can hardly be expected to adapt to
its own actualizing epistemology and remain
consumption’s harlot.
54.12 Christianity has just a faint echo of
‘sustainable superstition’ left in its blood
quenched, sin riddled, and consumption enslaved
body. Otherwise it is the twisted wreckage of
belief contorting itself to conform to a corporate
ethos tied to an ill-fated epistemology with the
mathematical sciences at its core.
54.13 Of course, the non-materialistic origins of
Christianity, like all aboriginal beliefs,
comprised a sustainable superstition that was more
in harmony with Nature, certainly more in harmony
that the mathematical sciences.
54.14 With the terms culture and tradition thrown
in, ‘sustainability’ is presently anecdotal and,
realistically, will remain as such to the very
end. However, for many in the west it has proven a
pleasant if somewhat pedantic alternative.
55.1 The mathematical sciences would counter that
it is they who have revealed Nature to the rest
iof mankind. After all, what aboriginal culture
split the atom revealing an endless gaggle of
subatomic particles and discrete interactions?
55.2 This however requires an entirely new
approach to Nature. The mathematical sciences
require a far more complex and problematic
relationship with Nature.
55.3 Wordsworth writes in his poem ‘The Tables
turned; An Evening Scene, On the Same Subject.’
“Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.”
55.4 This is precisely what the mathematical
sciences do. But they have gone beyond such
substitutive acts to actually construct their own
Nature or more accurately natures.
56.1 Of course, this paper is much ado about
nothing. It merely posits, ipso facto, that the
planet is doomed. All the author need to do now is
construct a world dominated by one or two
mysteriously discrete yet random, all powerful
phenomena and a busty heroine or two, and we can
call it science fiction.
56.2 There is a pipe, the kind of which one
smokes.
56.3 There is the image of a pipe the
phenomenological nature of which is explored by
Magritte in his "La Trahison des Images" ("The
Treachery of Images") (1928-9) or "Ceci n'est pas
une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). Magritte quite
sensibly observes that an image of a pipe is not a
pipe. Likewise a description.
56.4 Then we come to numbers. Counting pipes or
images or descriptions of pipes is one option.
56.5 Using binary number systems one is now able
to build most components of a plastic gun using a
3-D printer.
56.6 But does even this extreme device violate the
protocols of actuality, image and number? The
answer is no.
56.7 The plastic gun in its new pseudo-embodiment
becomes an actual object.
The image is the photo in the newspaper. The
number is the binary blueprint.
56.8 Could such a blueprint suffice to create a
human?
56.9 We’re all aware of the negative impact
inorganic polymers aka plastics have on the
environment. And wouldn’t a plastic gun generated
on a 3-D printer be very popular among a gun
happy, American population. Wouldn’t we soon be
faced with a ‘grey goo’ of cheap plastic firearms?
56.10 But could such a blueprint suffice to create
a human or some reasonable estimate of a human?
56.12 Remember John von Neumann’s statement “Full
knowledge of the object is not requisite, but only
those quantities we believe to exist.” Certainly
under these conditions a binary blueprinted
‘human’ is possible, even likely given enough
time. Let’s not forget, Von Neumann wrote The
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. He wasn’t
particularly fond of mankind in its present
formulation.
56.13 So if humans are ‘automata’ according to Von
Neumann it’s a go when it comes to ‘reproducing’
ourselves. If not: Well, thanks to inorganic
polymers and a myriad of other factors, we won’t
be around long enough to witness our own
self-replication anymore than we will be
privileged to see our technocrats destroy other
planets through terraforming.
57.1 For Von Neumann and the mathematical sciences
in general the prime actual is ‘number’ not the
‘ding an sich’. Number is the building block of
the actual, ergo it has primacy.
57.2 With this simple and obvious proviso all
non-discrete existence is reducing to a discrete
numerical context and all non-discrete entities
until rendered discrete are diminished in their
moral and ethical value.
57.3 A new ethics and morals based on the
qualities of numbers arises. All of society and
Nature become quantized for the sake of this new
morality. This fresh ethics based on discrete
systems. It’s both a social engineering project
and a series of projects to adapt Nature to
number.
57.4 Enormous dam projects such as those taking
place all over China are macro-examples of both
social and natural engineering creating a new
numerological ethics of ‘consumption’ if you will.
At the major engineering project level value
judgements get quite crude, displacing tens of
thousands of people and destroying dozens of
infinite variable, interlocking ecosystems only to
create an infinite number of new infinite unvetted
variables.
57.5 The Mathematical sciences are simply forms of
Sisyphus-like, life-denying
vetting.
58.1 Is Alfred Korzybski’s famous statement that
the ‘the map is not the territory’ relevant here?
58.2 Hardly. We have two categories, the customary
territory that Korzybski assumes and the
mathematical ‘territory’ which has replaced much
of the actual world with its more ‘precise’ e.g.
‘stark’ numerical estimate.
58.3 How can an ‘estimate’ be more precise, more
accurate, than the real thing? Because it is more
utile, pragmatic and fungible. Its outline is
stark. It more readily yields to mathematical,
scientific and technical mastery.
58.4 Inconvenient variables which run to infinity
in Nature can be avoided and buried under layer of
mathematical layers like the construction of a
plastic gun.
59.1 Universally, the ‘discoveries’ of the
mathematical sciences are merely anecdotal. In a
macro sense this makes Unintended Consequences a
constant occurrence. No wind turbine ever intended
to slaughter bats and birds. But they do and, in
the short run, this seems a small price to pay for
a cheap energy source until insects, intended as
food for birds and bats, devour you.
59.2 And when wind turbines cause a rise in
surface temperatures on the earth, an Unintended
Consequence has been scientifically verified. This
verification is like Gross and Levitt’s Dr. ____
in the laboratory who is guilty of killing his
dear, dear Mama Nature through global climate
change and, co-incidentally, revealing without the
least sense of irony or tautology that they are
Dr. ____, the confessed killer of dear Mama. You
only know we killed Mama because we told you we
did. Funny stuff. N’est pas? As though Inuits
don’t have eyes.
60.1 Korzybski’s distinction is still around but
as an anachronism of our daily lives. K’s
distinction has no impact on the mathematical
sciences.
60.2 Such common sense is alien to the
mathematical sciences. Layers of mathematics have
obscured the underlying ‘territory’. Nearly every
mathematical territory or topology is a
description, proscription or prescription for
another mathematical pseudo territory or topology.
“Similarly, we can say here that the statistics
are not the player,” wrote a baseball
cybermetrician who, for all of his mathematical
nuance, had not lost his common sense much less
his mind. But not so John von Neumann or Marvin
Minsky or Ray Kurzweil who all seem to have lost
their minds in their machines and are as devoid of
mere common sense as they are human understanding,
simultaneous pure products and G&L type
creators of the mathematical sciences.
61.1 There exists two uncertainties of a different
order of magnitude than that uncertainty that
drives the angst of statistics whether we’re
concerned with the Monte Carlo Method or, say,
John Cage’s notion of chance and the I-Ching.
61.1 Statistics requires parameters in order to
produce calculations, results. Its expression for
chance is finite.
61.2 Quantum’s chance is perceptual. It is at odds
with our everyday experience.
61.3 Nature, of which Quantum is presumably part,
used to be our standard for the actual even though
it operates through infinite variability which
defies notions of statistical chance and
mathematical scientific utility.
61.4 As far as the mathematical sciences are
concerned, Nature’s great curse, and this includes
what we call human nature, is its infinite
variability. It resists being reduced to a set of
mathematically conformal set of principles.
This resistance will not be tolerated any more
than peasant resistance in developing countries or
worker resistance both of which are reflections of
humanity in opposition to science and technocracy.
This is a result of treating economics as a
science and amounts to enslavement in a variable
deficient world.
61.5 But it’s a limited variable, one epistemology
world now. Our trajectory is set.
61.6 There is no clearer example of this than the
desperate macro-solutions of geo-engineering.
These ‘solutions’ can best be described as
cinematic in the most darkly risible sense of the
word. The popular art forms of comic books and
anime are perfectly suited for the expression of
the global equivalents of slipping on a banana
peel or getting smashed in face by an errant two
by four. Geo-engineering is the Keystone Cops or
Stephen Seagal of universal comic solutions way
above their pay grade
62.1 Such ‘solutions’ since they have enormous
appeal to the greed and blood lust of the new
robber baron class, will not only greatly
accelerate planetary demise but also drown out any
research or study into the fundamental
deficiencies of the ‘mathematical sciences’.
62.2 Thus, the notion that planetary demise is
inevitable is grounded in history and the
epistemological foundation of the nature of
western man. It’s where realism sees nihilism’s
headlight at the other end of the tunnel. To
presume otherwise is to again take on the things
of a toddler.
62.3 And the geo-engineering that industry
supports is, of course, an admission that global
climate change exists. We can make a profit ergo
we’ll admit to the validity of global climate
change in the name of stopping it. We caused it.
We’ll stop it. Not while the mathematical sciences
is the only approach. And there currently exists
no other. Nor is any other allowed to exist.
62.4 But another historical element is at play
here and that’s the global nature of the
solutions. This is an historical first because the
threat is an historical first. It may have
happened before when mankind did not exist. But
it’s happening again and it’s threatening to
render mankind the briefest of asterisks in
Earth’s existence. If Barrow and Tipler’s
Anthropological Principle is correct they should
have the interlocking formulae here and now
confirming man’s demise. Isaac Newton, as was his
way, was quite precise --- AD 2060, or 47 years
from this writing, was the year he gave for the
end of the world. 90% of Newton’s writings were
theological in nature. How did Harold Camping miss
this one? The answer: He wanted to get paid.
63.1 Two seemingly unrelated words underlie the
modern western view of mathematics and the
mathematical sciences. They are ‘fungible’ and
‘discrete’.
63.2 But how can a number be both fungible and
discrete? After all doesn’t ‘fungible’ suggest a
manifest flexibility. And doesn’t ‘discrete’
suggest something sealed off unto
itself?
64.3 But upon reflection an object must be
‘discrete’ if it is to be fungible. It must be
readily countable. Discrete is Western
epistemology’s first break with quality for
quantity. The word ‘value’ too makes a rather
severe paradigm shift toward the material with
this simple cultural gesture.
64.4 Numbers are our tools for discretion. Once an
object is discrete, it is readily available as
fungible. Quality becomes adjectival on its way to
anecdotal.
64.5 Anything being treated in a fungible and
discrete that is mathematical manner is beyond
moral or ethical judgement.
64.6 We can still speak of seven cardinal sins.
But any notion that the number 7 has intrinsic
value beyond a simple counting device is likely to
be long discredited. In numerology, “The 7 knows
that nothing is exactly as it seems and that
reality is often hidden behind illusions.” The
mathematical sciences find such speculation
useless and laughable.
64.7 What’s operational here is that everything be
interchangeable that is fungible. And only a
discrete object can be fungible.
64.8 Nature is not discrete. Nature is holistic.
therefore human nature is holistic, that’s why
answers to moral and ethical questions remain so
elusive while in physics, with the advent of a
faux Higgs boson we now know everything about the
physical universe in perpetuity. .
64.9 The whole business of consciousness is
‘projection’. Consciousness is the apparatus for
discretion. Its limitations require the fungible,
a condition which not only does not exist in
Nature, but is contra naturam.
65.1 Geo-engineering would not be necessary
without the age of discovery and the
“mathematization of science that accelerated after
Galileo and Newton, and is now the sine qua non,
if not the ne plus ultra of rational knowledge
creation and validation, replacing the previously
satisfactory mechanical and 'embodiable' forms of
proof.”
65.2 Geo-engineering, with its tacit
acknowledgement of planetary dissolution even when
that acknowledgment is for venal reasons that
would otherwise deny the existence of e.g. global
climate change, has driven home the planetary
scope of the problem that has been in rapid
metastasis since the Age of Discovery,
Colonialization, Imperialism and the acceleration
of its primary tool, the mathematical sciences.
66.1 This is the moment ahistorical
mathematization shares an ahistorical moment with
its species. And to remove the species from
history is to remove it from morality.
66.2 It’s not simply that turning time into a
dimension of space suggests to the culture that
accomplishes such a feat that all other cultures
operate from a perspective of delusion. In this
process the denatured, ahistorical culture loses
its ability to act morally and ethically toward
‘the other’ without the other first submitting to
its alleged superior universal laws.
66.3 This, of course, in a species sense has been
a characteristic of human dominance for millennia.
But now there is the belated realization that it
has been inflicted upon the Natural World itself.
66.4 Many of the laws of physics may indeed be
universal. But it’s not the Universe that is being
degraded.
66.5 Given the rapid planetary dissolution we
experience all around us, we might conclude that
mankind is not obeying its own ‘universal laws’.
But such an observation would be wrong. He must be
well within this paradigm of ‘universality’ of the
mathematical sciences, otherwise there would not
be the so-called scientific and technological
advancements. Such ‘advancements’ need no reprise
here.
66.6 This results in the logical conclusion that
the ‘universal laws’ unearthed by the mathematical
sciences resulted in bringing the planet to the
brink of an apocalypse, an uncapitalized
apocalypse that theology was helpless to imagine.
66.7 All that theology and religion can offer is a
more sustainable ‘superstition’, so pitiably
regressed is the species on both counts.
Syllogism Part 1 appeared
in
FlashPoint 15
Syllogism Part 2
appeared in
FlashPoint 16
Syllogism Part 3
appeared in
FlashPoint 16
