Saturday, August 19, 2017

Complex Simplicities 1111



  One of the great fallacies of science has been that the universe which by definition, must include our experience of it, can be reduced to a relatively few comprehensible equations.  The search for these equations is The Holy Grail of the scientific method.  The operating principle here is that whatever be the truth, it can be discovered through a process of simplification through abstraction, the extraction of the abstraction is how a formula is defined. Take the speed of light, for example. Einstein, in a moment of momentous inspiration, defined a simple equation that predicts ALMOST any and all of the measurements  made since then, of the speed of electromagnetic waves made from any location which is moving at any speed in a vacuum, and determined it would always be the same. The speed of light is a constant throughout the universe, from any point of view. What could be more simple than that? This equation is the essence of simplicity. But it's not, not at all. 
  What makes his equation incomprehensibly complex, is that Einstein includes the concept of "point of view" and no one has a clue about how or why a point of view comes to be. The perception and registration, the measurement of light itself as conscious awareness of something in motion, is the product of innumerable unknown factors, the most mysterious of these being whatever and however  consciousness of a point of view itself is orchestrated as such can only happen in a mind. A mind, any living  mind is sophisticated and complex beyond estimation.  Can we call something simple that has a component which is incomprehensibly complex?

   Physical laws, any laws, can be seen as organizing principles. But whatever we  perceive as a moment of reality which  we wish to understand in it's totality, this understanding must include the mechanisms that produce consciousness  and awareness of a point of view. These mechanisms are a complete scientific mystery. A moment of reality as experienced in a human mind, and I know I can only speak with any degree of certainty about  how I experience my own mind, as only can anyone else, is incomprehensibly sophisticated and complex, composed from one moment to the next as a nexus of cross referenced perceptions each of which is both a thing unto itself and a symbol of something else.

   There are many kinds of languages or semantics, each with their own syntax or grammar, that all influence the meaning and relevance of each component of a moment of any kind of awareness I experience. The mind is orchestrated with many kinds of instruments, senses, playing different melodies all at the same moment in time, from one moment to the next, each moment having the potential for the appearance of a new and previously unheard or unseen perception or sensation, thought or idea which can be of such intense significance, it changes the meaning and value of everything previously experienced.  
   Any one can experience an overwhelmingly intense shift of significance and perception, that has life changing potentials,  for  ten or twenty minutes, after a few  tokes of DMT! Longer though perhaps less intense experiences can be had on LSD or Magic Mushrooms, etc, etc.
   People informed they have a life threatening disease change in ways unpredictable to  themselves. 
   In addition to this, there are many more than five senses and I doubt we all have the same number if this can be quantified or  qualified accurately at all. The paradigm of fives senses was another example of an attempt to simplify the complex, the fives senses supposedly being the only means by which we become aware of our environment. Well the body is an environment unto itself and there are senses that tell us what is happening to it, that go far beyond  the five we are taught of in grade school.
    Hunger and thirst, motion and a sense of equilibrium, sexuality and the emotions themselves are all senses that represent conditions and situations which have to do with our welfare and the successful realization of our nature. Also, some people see color in their mind when they hear sounds, and I for example feel intensely sensations of pleasure that move through different parts of my body when I look at anything at all in motion. The cross reference of sound and color, motion and sensations of pleasure are just examples of what makes for a different kind of awareness, which makes all generalizations suspect concerning the mechanics of human experience.
   And who can say with certainty that information doesn't arrive into our minds by means of which we are presently completely unaware? There  is already statistical proof that people can predict intense emotional fluctuations before they know the reason for what they are feeling.
   The word organizing can be misleading as the simplest apparent description of an organizing principle reduced to a formula is inevitably simplistic. "Put one stone on top of another!" "Drive on the right side of the road, which can be the right or left, depending on where you are!" Once one conceives or adopts an organizing principle and makes of it a Law, one achieves a simple but only simplistic utilitarian understanding of what one is looking at, that may suffice to put one's mind to rest in that now one can predict what will continue happening to some degree, but any decree that one now completely understands reality can only be the denial of  one's inescapable ignorance and innate inability to hold in the mind, the greater reality that orchestrates it.  The mind is not organized, it is orchestrated like a symphony where sound comes and go for reasons even the composer may not know.
   When speaking spontaneously, one cannot predict with any degree of certainty the word that will appear in one's mind and then mouth, seven or eight words ahead, nor one's tone of voice or the sensations one will feel as each word or phrase  comes together, and words always come with sensations or feelings of which we are aware or not. We don't know the orchestrating principles of how and why our own mind comes together from one moment to the next the way it does, and without our understanding the "how and why" of our own minds, what can we truthfully say we know of  reality itself?

     It is true however, that within the confines of a designated context which excludes that which we cannot measure or know how it comes to be, like Einstein, who left out of his equations any equations that explain how a point of view comes about, we can discern patterns governed by organizing principles the description and definition of which serve a utilitarian purpose.

This is how we have technology that  we don't really understand the workings of.

It wasn't long ago that in what was then modern science and is now obsolete theory, all matter was composed from fundamental building blocks called atoms, the simplest of which is composed from a relationship between three different kinds of  particles, protons, neutrons and electrons. Today there is a menagerie of sub atomic particles with different qualities that pop in and out of existence for reasons no one knows, nor does anyone really know where they are at any given instant. They are spread all over an infinite space and are affecting each other in ways that can't be predicted except as probabilities and defy what should have been the limitations of the speed of light.  To make things even more complex, the future might be affecting the past and these particles are really waves and vice versa depending when and whether one is looking at them with a measuring instrument they somehow know is there even when it isn't turned on.

The universe isn't behaving the way it should be per the laws of light and gravity, it is expanding now faster than it did in the past.

Simply put, the more observations are made and the measurements recorded, things are getting ever more complex and anomalies are explained away with  ever more sophisticated theories  that seem to  seek no other purpose than to save face.

Despite the growing recognition that scientific theory doesn't really explain reality at all, advances in technology are having effects on the mind of mankind, in that the amount of information a person is exposed to affecting the intellect and emotions  must be having an effect on the sense of time. Question? Could this be affecting the speed of light? Light is information and information only has meaning in a mind and no one knows how a mind comes to be, what ever it is, nor how it does whatever it is doing.  Things are only simple when described in arbitrary contexts that are defined by purpose. We know how to achieve purposes but we don't really know the answer to why anything is the way it is.

Ever more information is processed in ever shorter lengths of duration and the dopamine economy of the brain of those exposed to the internet must be having an effect on behaviors in unpredictable ways.

Now a self evident fact of nature is that it evolves towards ever greater sophisticated complexity, adores adornment, and creates elaborate multi faceted interactions, culminating in a human brain which seems to be producing our experiences which are aesthetic in nature and happen in our mind. The mind and the brain are not the same thing. They seem to be  related in mutual influence but no one has a verifiable clue how. Like particles, our thoughts  and conceptions and sensations and perceptions appear out of no where that you can point  a finger at and are gone, sometimes to come back again and again and sometimes to sink into oblivion.

Now let me say this, the mind need not be an enigma as a metaphysical phenomenon once we agree on it's purpose. Survival is not a good answer for many reasons. People who have no creative purpose lose interest in survival. Creative purpose can't exist just to attract sexual  partners for the reason of procreation because homosexuals are sometimes extremely creative and live happy fulfilling lives sans procreation. If a theory doesn't explain all the phenomenon it is supposed to, it needs to be trashed as a universal constant because it obviously isn't.

It is time to start answering the question WHY?  scientifically,
which means Philosophy is King, after all.

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