SOS – Science or
Superstition? en français auf deutsch
The following is a list of common ‘superstitions’ in
the form of idealized ‘objectified’ entities
whose existence is contradicted by experiential evidence. Since a common definition of ‘superstition’
is “a notion maintained despite evidence to the
contrary” (Webster’), much of our western ‘scientific thought’ falls
into this category, creating the conditions for ‘incoherence’ and
‘dysfunction’. The physical reality of the existence of objectified entities, as
contrasted with spatial-relationships tends to be taken for granted in our
western culture, but ‘objectification’ is an idealizing
that we superimpose on our experiencing of nature that has ‘escaped’ (bypassed)
validating scrutiny [1] in pre-relativity,
pre-quantum-theory scientific models such as mainstream scientific thinking and
the thinking, in general, of the educated western public. (A more detailed elaboration is appended
following the list of ‘superstitions’).
‘Undulative features’ in the common living
space dynamic belong to the common living space and having our science
synthetically objectify them may create ‘object-i-fiction’
models for science, but will have no authority over the dynamics of nature.
Since the objectification of our experiencing of nature has
bypassed scientific validation, it
can be seen as an over-simplified ‘object-i-fiction’
and our persistence in maintaining these object-i-fictions
[idealizations that depend upon
absolute material bodies in absolute containing space (Euclidian space)] in
spite of evidence to the contrary amounts to ‘superstition’
The following superstitions or ‘object-i-fictions’
arise in the manner of Ptolemaic epicycles, to keep our traditional
oversimplified idealization-based
scientific models ‘hanging together’;
Superstitions and Object-i-fictions in our
Scientific Worldview;
The existence of the temporal
past: This cornerstone object-i-fiction of
mainstream scientific thinking contradicts evidence that our world transforms
in the continuing ‘present’. We are
meanwhile, in the western way of thinking, so accustomed to objectifying the
past and the future that we tend to confuse them (idealizations)
with the reality of our natural
experiencing of the ongoing transforming space we are included in. We allow ourselves to be disproportionately
influenced by one of our senses, ‘vision’, which gives us the sense of a
temporal sequence of realities
recorded in picture-frames. When we
re-examine these ‘snapshots’, whether in our minds-eye or through photography,
we tend to think of the ‘party’ or the ‘school days’ in terms of actions that
had a beginning and an ending; i.e. as ‘events’ or epochs that occur in a
temporal sequence. Our living
experience, however, is continuous-in-the-present and it deepens, extends,
enriches and the latter experiences seem to include the former rather than
being experienced as a ‘new epoch’; i.e. each new experience enriches and
deepens the former experience, something which doesn’t show up in the visual
record. We cannot capture our experience
in a photograph, we can only capture ‘what we are
presently doing’. This particular
‘superstition’, belief in the existence of the past, arrives from our
‘self-centeredness’ or ‘ego’; i.e. if we consider ourselves included in the
evolving worldspace then there exists no past, but if
we consider ourselves to be absolute entities, then we can use our own
life-cycle as a time-scale with a beginning (our birth) and an ending (our
death) and ‘timestamp the world’ based on our notion of absolute existing.
Photographs and visual imagery can be snapshotted
one after the other in sequence but our felt experience is not like our vision. And as Wittgenstein said of language (word
images) it is ‘single issue at a time’.
The atmosphere is continuously transforming; i.e. it is a space that
evolves in the continuing present yet features within it, such as the
hurricane, ‘catch our eye’ and while they are only an undulation within a
continuously evolving space, we ascribe to them a continuing existence of their
own and it is this ‘existence’ (‘objecthood’) that we
endow these features with that give us the sense that they have temporal duration;
a past, present and a future and therefore that there must be a past, present
and future that they live in. But ‘objecthood’, the existence of discrete things is an idealization that is contradicted by our experience;
i.e. objecthood is simply bestowed by us on emergent
forms in the transforming spacetime continuum. Without ‘objects’, there is no ‘persistence
of objects’ which gives us the sense of ‘temporal duration’ which gives us the
sense of past, present and future; i.e. without objects everything is
spatial-relational transformation in the continuing present. No one has ever found an ‘object’ that exists
in its own right independent of the spatial-relational transformation
(evolutionary dynamic) everything is included in, therefore there is nothing
that persists (‘everything is in flux’ as Heraclitus
said). And if no ‘thing’ persists, then
there is nothing with a past, present and future; i.e. the existence of the
past is pure ‘idealization’ tied to
‘object-i-fiction’ and is contradicted by our natural
experience.
The existence of
inner purpose : This idealized source of guidance of human behaviour plays a
role like that of an epicycle in Ptolemy’s earth-centric model of the universe,
to make an over-simplified model ‘hang together’. The oversimplified model in this case is the
Euclidian model wherein idealized-as-absolutely-existing
discrete material objects ‘populate’ an idealized-as-absolutely
existing containing space, … a framework which leaves no room to explain
dynamics other than in terms of the behaviour of material bodies which, in the
case of the material body known as a ‘human’ demands that the source of the
human’s behaviour must derive from the internals of the human (in this way,
decoupling the behavioural sourcing of the individual from the influence of the
space he is included in). In relativity,
the superstition of ‘inner purpose’ as the driver of individual behaviour gives
way to ‘spatial-relationship’.
If this sounds crazy and you are thinking; ‘It is obvious I
have inner purpose’, consider what you are assuming by ‘I’. If you are to the worldspace
you are included in, like the hurricane is to the atmospheric space it is
included in, then everything about you is ‘relative’ even though this
relativity allows you to be unique (due to your unique situational inclusion in
space). If your behaviour is relative
to the space you are included in, then there is no need to postulate ‘inner
purpose’ as the source of guidance for one’s behaviour, one is then like the
sailboat in a windy space, shaping and letting oneself be shaped by the windy
space to both power and steer oneself.
The existence of
individual memory: As we navigate
busy freeways, crowd dynamics and social dynamics, we put our movements in the
service of sustaining harmonious flow in the shared space that we are included
in. This is a situation wherein we move
under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence and it is not solvable in
terms of ‘what an individual does’ (the mathematical ‘three-body problem’). Thus we cannot have a memory of it in terms
of ‘what we did’, but we can, collectively, ‘get better at it’, and this
implies a kind of memory which is suggested by “the structure of the
organization is a record of the embodied know-how’ (complex systems). ‘Learning organizations such as ‘hockey
teams’ and ‘rugby teams’ (and honey bee cell-building teams) etc. evolve their
collective technique on the basis of sustaining spatial-relational
resonance/harmony, but this cannot be reduced to ‘what things do’ and/or
‘memories’ of what I did or ‘what things do’.
It is understood in terms of how one complements the developing geometry
of space one is included in, so as to sustain harmony etc. This kind of ‘know-how’ is embodied
(remembered) in the evolving collective dynamic itself; i.e. it is remembered
in the evolutionary dynamic. The
individual taps into this by putting one’s actions in the service of sustaining
a harmonious flow-dynamic; i.e. by ‘giving oneself up to the collective
evolutionary dynamic one taps into the developing memory embodied in the
spatial relationships.
The notion of ‘memory’ as a personal archive of stored
knowledge that informs the ‘inner purpose’ so as to calculate behaviour in a
SIDA cycle manner (sense, interpret-decide-act) is not REALLY memory, in terms
of the memory of experience, it is instead a reductionist
codification of ‘what things do’. We
could use artificial intelligence to collect and archive such knowledge and
build a robot with ‘inner purpose’ in the form of a computer program that
calculates behaviour, based on it, … but it is not ‘memory’ in the sense of the
‘memory of experience’ which is NOT individual in nature. In the same sense as one cannot capture
‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’, since these are mutually shaping, …
one cannot have an individual memory of an innately two-sided (individual
asserting-spatial accommodating) experience.
A memory is like a word; “it is absolutely
impossible for one person, but becomes a reality
for two. The word is direct expression
of the historical nature of human consciousness.” --- Vygotsky
Meanwhile, the notion of ‘individual memory’ is demanded by
the Euclidian model which portrays physical dynamics as a temporal causal
construction perpetrated by asserting material agents. The causal model assumes that the immediate
future is constructed from the immediate past [2] thus there is no room for
‘recessive’ nonlocal memories from the remote past to
permeate the construction of the future from the immediate past, except by idealizing an archive of knowledge accessible to the
individual. ‘Genes’ and ‘individual
memory’ supply an epicycle-like ‘patch’ to the causal model whose simplicity
leaves out the capacity to account for the nonlocal
and remote past (evolutionary past) from influencing the ongoing developments
in the continuing present (where the future is constructed from the immediate
past); i.e. relativity with its spacetime that
evolves in the continuing present ‘has no past’ and therefore no individual
memory of ‘the past’. The past and the
future are built into the present.
Rationality demonstrates
human individual’s capacity for fantasising, however, as is demonstrated by the
‘replicants’ in the film ‘Bladerunner’
who have been individually ‘programmed’ with made-up pseudo-memories of being
brought up en famille and come to mistake the
deliberately infused ‘memories’ for their evolutionary past.
Every time we come down the onramp and enter a busy traffic
flow, we ‘improve’ our ability to ‘slip in harmoniously’. Of course it is not really ‘our personal
ability’ but instead that property of dynamical collectives known as
‘resilience’ (fault-tolerance) which subsumes potentials for dissonance prior
to their actualization. This is the capacity of a collective that
give their own behaviours up to the sustaining of harmony. Would we then say that we ‘remember our first
and subsequent experiences of entering the traffic flow via the onramp? Such experiences are innately relational and
ongoing. Déjà vu is not the equivalent
of ‘déjà senti’ (already felt) since ‘already felt’
can apply to our inclusional experiencing in the
evolving space of the continuing present.
That is, what we saw previously is ‘in the past’ because ‘things no
longer look like that now’ but ‘what we felt previously is part of our
continuing life experience within the evolving space-time continuum. The visual perception context of ‘déjà vu’ is
temporal sequential as in the frames in a movie film while the sentient
experiencing of ‘déjà
senti’ is inclusionally
nested as in the geologic layering of the earth (experientially, it is old and
young at the same time).
The existence of
nation/national dynamics: Nations
do not exist in nature but only as idealizations
in our mind (legal/political concepts whose existence depends on common
accord). The Soviet Union existed
pre-1991 and in that era we spoke of ‘what the Soviet Union did’, but the
Soviet Union only exists as an ideal, a notional closed space bounded by
imaginary lines, not as an physical entity capable of behaviour in the natural
sense of behaviour. Post – 1991 the Soviet Union no longer existed and people no longer talk
about it as doing things. It stopped
existing when people stopped believing in it (when it stopped believing in
itself) since it was only an idealization
in the first place. To say that a nation
is responsible for certain actions and accomplishments is superstition, the
same sort of superstition as saying ‘hurricane katrina’
or ‘el niño’ was responsible for destruction rather
than spatial turbulence in a common transforming space which cannot be broken
down into a temporal sequence of causal effects perpetrated by particular
assertive agents. National dynamics are
undulations in our world dynamics that have become ‘objectified’ (given a
‘local center’ along with an ‘internal purpose’.) but which are nevertheless
innately relative.
History (e.g. of a
nation, thing, organism): As in the case of ‘nation’,
the existence of any ‘thing’ which we say is the ‘cause’ of certain results is
a superstition. The natural history of the world (the evolutionary dynamic
which is spatial-relational) is one thing but the history of a nation is quite
another since ‘nation’ is an idealization
rather than ‘real’ and thus to speak of the ‘action of a nation’ and to speak
of ‘the history of the nation’ in terms of an ‘idealized
entity’ as being the author of action, is superstition.
There is certainly ‘evolutionary history’ and ‘evolutionary
time’ in the case of a transforming space wherein ‘everything is in flux’ but
there is no way to mix and max the idealized
notion of a ‘nation’ with the world evolutionary dynamic and credit the
‘nation’ or ‘thing’, or ‘organism’ with a ‘history’. It is self-deceiving superstition. We can speak about the history of the world
in terms of all of the nation-idealisms
which we created which lasted as long as we agreed to believe in them, but once
we start speaking about ‘how it developed’ we may as well be talking about a
small rectangular area on a developing embryo and what its locally centered
history is; i.e. the history of a notional subdivision within a transforming
space makes no sense ‘in reality’
since it ignores the system’s inextricable inclusion within a global suprasystem.
The problem in this case and in general is that we cannot
truly break ‘objects’ (a ‘nation’, a ‘thing’, an ‘organism’) out of the flow
and describe their historical development as if it were ‘theirs’. However a notional ‘object-entity’ develops
is mutually shaped by the accommodating quality
of the hostspace it is included in. To describe its development as if
in-its-own-right (as in ‘the history of a nation’) is like writing a resumé since it is an account of ‘hitting’ out of the
context of ‘fielding’.
Microbes as the
‘cause’ of ‘illness’: Pathogen-causation theory in general (e.g.
‘terrorism’) is made problematic by what Donald Rubin (Harvard Medical
School) calls ‘the
fundamental dilemma of causality’;
i.e. if X causes Y to go to Y’, how do we know that it was X that caused it and
not something else since now that Y has been moved to condition Y’ the
experiment cannot be repeated to see if P might have caused Y to alter to Y’. For example if the patient is given an
antibiotic to ‘cure’ his illness and the patient recovers, we say that the
antibiotic caused his recovery. But he
might have recovered without the anti-biotic yet we can never know whether or
not another X’ (the chicken soup, the caring nurse) might not have driven Y to
Y’ since we cannot return the patient to his virgin condition Y to check it
out. This is particularly problematic
if the patient dies. The way we ‘get
around this’ is to say that all people are more or less the same, so we shift
causality to a statistical basis
(unlike eastern medicine where everything orients restoring balance in the
individual). But we know that the
conditions in the host space of the individual human body can vary, not only with
the makeup of the particular person, but also with the ambient conditions
(hot/cold, humid/dry etc.) which can stress the dynamic equilibrium sustaining
body processes leaving new and particular exposures. As Nobel laureate in biochemistry Albert Szent-Gyorgi observed; we say that a person’s death was
‘caused by pneumonia’, but the person would likely never have come down with
pneumonia without having caught a cold and might never have caught that cold
without having let his vitamin C level drop to a low level. Meanwhile over 100 different bacteria and
viruses have been identified as causing pneumonia.
Clearly, the evidence points to Stephen Jay Gould’s premise
(which is essentially ‘relativity’) that ‘there can be no assessment of
‘hitting’ out of the context of ‘fielding’, meaning that the source of
‘illness’ equates to ‘destabilization’ or ‘unbalancing’ rather than to
pathogenic cause. The over-riding
influence of ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’ [3] (Chaos Theory)
also points to ‘resilience’ (ability to sustain spatial-relational
resonance/harmony) and ‘disequilibrium’ (inability to sustain
spatial-relational resonance/harmony) to underly
‘health’ and ‘illness’ rather than the over-simple ‘all internal parts working
correctly’ for ‘health’ and ‘some internal parts damaged by the attack of
pathogens’ for ‘illness’.).
Criminals as the
‘cause’ of ‘crime’: The causal reasoning here suffers from the same
difficulty as the pathogen-causation theory that deals with microbes. Our real-life experience informs us that the
dynamics of collectives have a spatial-relational resilience, whether we are
talking about traffic flow or heated discussion at the dinner table. We say that X causes injury to Y, taking Y to
the condition Y’ (death, missing an eye etc.) but we know that under
alternative conditions, the same X might not have ‘caused’ the injury to Y due
to different ‘fielding’ conditions; e.g. Y might have ‘backed off’, P and Q
might have seized X before he could do the damage, X might never have been ‘cornered
by the crowd’or ‘humiliated’ etc. in such a way that
he was put on a collision course with Y.
Resilience on the part of a traffic/crowd flow collective can be highly
developed, inducing sustained spatial-relational resonances that subsume the
actualizing of conflict potentials
prior to their actualization.
Our experience provides plenty of evidence to show that
‘cultivating resilience’ is not the simple opposite of ‘eliminating
cause’. Svent Gyorgi’s point was that cultivating the resilience of the
body hostspace dynamic by sustaining the level of
trace chemicals such as ascorbic acid subsumed the potentials for
destabilization prior to their actualization
(e.g. more than one hundred microbes can be responsible for pneumonia in a body
hostspace prone to destabilization, and similarly,
many individuals in a tense crowd situation can be at their ‘breaking point’
with respect to their potentials for violence.
In both cases it is possible to lower the tensions so that the threshold
for destabilizing conflict is subsumed prior to its actualization. This lowering of the tensions is not through
assertive actions but in knowing how to back off so as to spatially accommodate
and subsume the tensions/conflict-potentials prior to their actualization..).
If motion is ‘relative’ then we cannot realistically split apart ‘hitting’ and ‘fielding’
(assertive action and spatial accommodation).
In a community hostspace we have a collection
of individuals who move relative to one another (i.e. as in the solar system
they move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence). In this ‘relative motion’ view, we cannot
speak of an ‘individual source of causation’, only in terms of the emergent
conflict within the collective hostspace dynamic
(e.g. the ‘flow-dynamic’ in traffic which is spatial-relational in
nature). In order to speak of an
individual source of causation, we must invoke the notion of ‘absolute motion’
of the individual, and with this, the notions of an absolute self-center,
absolute material existence and the idealization
of ‘inner-purpose’ (individual ‘intent’ out of context of the spatial
relationships in which the individual is included, which in turn invokes the
notion of ‘individual memory’).
Pathogen-causation theory, then, is dependently underpinned
by ‘superstition’, by idealized
concepts that are contradicted by evidence coming from our real-life
experience, and thus scientific thinking which upholds pathogen-causation
theory is not ‘science’ but ‘superstition’.
Biogenetic/internal
cause of individual ‘mental illness’): The incidence of what we call
‘mental illness’ is on the rise, having increased from one per thousand of
population in 1750 to five per thousand in the present, in spite of massive
interventions with drugs. E. Fuller Torrey (The Invisible
Plague) claims that ‘insanity is a disease’ that is likely CAUSED by a
virus that we have not yet isolated and he cites William Farr as follows;
“Such a disease, which disorders
the senses, perverts the reason and breaks up the passions in wild confusion;
which assails man in his essential nature --- brings down so much misery on the
head of its victims, and is productive of so much social evil --- deserves
investigation on its own merits, by statistical as well as other methods.”
---William Farr, Report upon the Mortality
of Lunatics, 1841
Others maintain that ‘mental illness’ has biogenetic and
biochemical origins, … more theory which puts the ‘cause’ of ‘mental illness’
in the interior of an idealized
center-based, independently existing entity.
Meanwhile, the notion that ‘mental illness’ is a disease has
been strongly contested and evidence shows that it is more like ‘cracks’ in the
resilient structure of our society; i.e. it is owned by the social hostspace dynamic rather than by the individual (i.e. it is
‘relational’ in origin rather than being sourced from within the internal
biochemistry and biogenetics of the individual).
For example, the incidence of schizophrenia amongst blacks
in England
is five times the incidence rate of whites and five times the incidence rate of
blacks who reside in predominantly black communities (hostspaces). This is evidence in support of the
spatial-relational origins of ‘mental illness’ which parallels the evidence
supporting the spatial-relational origins of criminality
and medical illness cited in the above ‘superstitions’. Evidence further shows that those who
recovery from psychosis through ‘group therapy’ (an empathic local social hostspace) and are deemed ‘better’ and thus ready to return
to society, often find that THEIR problem recurs in the stressful social space
of the community at large. The evidence
once again points to the fact that ‘hitting’ (going crazy) and ‘fielding’
(craziness inducing hostspace) are two aspects of a
dynamical one-ness that cannot in reality
be ‘split apart’, as the principle of relativity suggests.
E. Fuller Torrey’s efforts to
apply ‘pathogen-causation’ theory to ‘mental illness’ would, as in criminality and illness, OCCLUDE any DIRECT role for the
quality of the hostspace
in the sourcing of the instability.
That is, the pathogen-causation theory incorporates a machine-like idealization of the dynamics wherein the ‘environment’
only plays an indirect role which puts the individual in opposition to the
environment and thus there may be greater incidence of ‘breakdown’ in
individuals in a ‘difficult environment’, the idealization
that ‘breakdown’ within the individual is responsible for ‘the ‘malfunctioning’
or ‘abnormality’ is nevertheless retained. The pathogen-causation theory divides the
population into two categories of individual (those that break down and those
that do not break down) and assesses ‘hitting’ separately and out of the
context of ‘fielding’ as in the idealization
of ‘the sound of one hand clapping’.
In nature, we could not say that the storm ‘gets angrier’
and becomes a ‘hurricane’ and then sets off on a destructive rampage; i.e. that
would be an idealization that
personified the undulation in the fluid fabric of the atmosphere as an ‘independent
entity’ whose behaviour pushes forth from its own center of self driven by its
‘inner purpose’. We could not say this
since the evidence from our experience is that the hurricane is nonlocal in origin and its center is not ‘ITS’ center but
is ‘inference’ that originates in space-based flow-dynamics, and of course the
need for the notion of ‘inner purpose’ dissolves with the acceptance of the
relative and therefore nonlocal nature of the
phenomenon. This geometric
representational alternative is always available and arises from the principle
of relativity of motion.
We cannot say, realistically,
that ‘the earth rotates’ since the origins of the earth’s motion are nonlocal and its centricity as well is nonlocally
inferred. It is by our own ‘prejudice’
[1] that we impose ‘object-hood’ on features that belong to the supraspace they are included in and thenceforth idealize their behaviour as springing forth from the
center of themselves driven by some inner purpose.
This object-i-fiction flies in the
face of evidence to the contrary derived from our real-life sensory experience
(it is our visual perception where the shortfall lies that encourages us to
believe that ‘the earth rotates’ but our sensing as an included inertial
element within a gravitational field informs us of our inclusion within a hostspace dynamic that also includes the earth and thus the
rotation of the earth has origins which are more extensive and nonlocal than the ‘centeredness’ suggested by our visual
perception which sees ‘the earth
rotating’).
Thus by this same unnatural subordination of our
inertia-guided relational sense of inclusion in the field-flow of gravity, to
our visual perception which suggests that ‘things move’ in their own
independent right, we sustain the ‘superstition’ that ‘mental illness’ is
something that arises within the individual in the manner that ‘rotating’ is
something that arises in the earth; ergo ‘the earth rotates’ and ‘the
individual is mentally ill’.
Evolution of the
organism: The problem of breaking
the organism out of the world dynamic and ascribing ‘behaviour’ to it in the
context of such behaviour pushing out of its center guided by its ‘inner
purpose’ is the same as is the case with the nation; i.e. it is an idealization that is contradicted by the evidence of
our natural experience. Just as the
nation is simply our idealization
that comes and goes according to our subjective belief in its existence, so it
is with the ‘organism’ and so it is with all ‘independent objects’ that we
subjectively ‘extract’ from the spatial dynamic in which they are included and
credit them, as Gould says, with the capacity to ‘hit’ out of the context of
the spatial quality of ‘fielding’
whose accommodating receptiveness or resistiveness
amplifies, attenuates and otherwise shapes the actualization
of assertive ‘hitting’ potentials, and out of the context of which one cannot
realistically talk in terms of the
‘hitting’ or assertive aspect of dynamics that actualizes.
We are deceived by our visual perception which picks up on ‘schaumkommen’ as schroedinger
refers to matter and its dynamics, mere ‘appearances’ of undulations in the
fabric of space, and makes them over into ‘persisting things’ (things that
‘exist’). Since we objectify these
undulations in space called ‘material entities’, equip them with a center of
their own and an inner purpose to drive their now-independent behaviour, … we
are then ‘reconstructing realty’ from an artificial base upon which we now
build more superstitions such as ‘organisms evolve’ when there is plenty of
evidence to the contrary; i.e, that ‘space evolves’
and that the undulations in the flow-stuff of space interdependently
CO-EVOLVE. As has been discussed above,
the idealisms of ‘individual memory’
and ‘genes’ have been formulated so as to make our over-simplified reductionist representations of natural phenomena ‘hang
together’; i.e. the evolution of the organism is another ‘superstition’ that is
being treated as a ‘scientific truth’.
* * *
The above list of ‘superstitions’ (thus labelled in
accordance with webster’s dictionary which defines
superstition as “a notion maintained despite evidence
to the contrary” ) are all currently accepted as ‘scientific truths’
which persist in spite of increasing evidence to the contrary, and thus qualify as ‘superstitions’.
The rigid and absolutist idealizations of science such as pathogen-causation and
‘organisms evolving’ are evidently and manifestly ‘superstitions’.
Discussion on the source of superstition in science;
According to modern physics, there is no absolute
distinction between a material object and the space (energy field) it is
included in; i.e. material objects are local (complexly configured)
concentrations of energy within a common energy field (the gravitational field). A moving object is therefore equivalent to
the relative movement, within the field, of the concentrated energy
configuration and since the energy field (otherwise known as ‘space’) is a
dynamical unity, ‘motion’, which we have been used thinking of as ‘something
produced by material objects’, now becomes ‘transformation of space’ in terms
of relative spatial relationships.
Incorporating this ‘relativity’ in our deliberate (rational)
mental modeling of the world requires that we ‘pull back’ from any ‘hard
dependency’ on the visual notion of discrete ‘things that exist’ and from
thinking of dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’. In the place of ‘local things’ (closed form
objects with centers) capable of ‘their own behaviour’, we have a-centric and
non-locally inferred flow-forms with the geometry of whorls within fluid flow,
as with hurricanes in the atmospheric space-flow. In the evolutionary dynamics of space, in
place of ‘cause-and-effect’ with its notion of ‘outcomes’ that can be
attributed to the assertive actions/transactions/interactions of discrete
bodies, we have the ‘relative’ situation wherein the actualizing
development of the asserting flow-form and the accommodating ‘give’ of space
are conceived of as two different dynamics invented in the observer’s mind (idealizations) for his intellectualizing
convenience rather than being ‘real’ (as in the case of the hurricane with
atmospheric space, the ‘real’ dynamic involved is transformation of the
fluid-dynamical space and it is only for the convenience of discussing this
transformation that we impose ‘objecthood’ on the
hurricane and sythentically endow it with ‘its own
center’ and ‘its own assertive behaviour.
This idealized
objectification gets us into trouble in our description of evolutionary
dynamics in the manner described by Stephen Jay Gould in ‘Full House’ where, as he puts it, we cannot credit responsibility
for ‘hitting results’ to the batter in baseball, without at the same time
taking into the account the ‘fielding’ (the receptive or resistive
accommodating of the space he is included in).
In our relative reality,
‘hitting’ and ‘fielding’ (individual asserting and the accommodating ‘give’ of
space) are really one dynamic (spatial transformation) which we as observers
split into two for our own mental modeling convenience.
That is, from the new ‘field’ perspective, ‘material
entities’ can be seen as ‘idealized’
objects; … abstractions which we psychologically impose on our mental models of
reality but which are not imposed on
nature. Henri Poincaré spends considerable time on
making this point his three core works on the ‘philosophy of science; Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science and Science and Method. This ‘idealism’
(‘objectification’) leads us to construct a pseudo-reality
based on ‘what things do’ wherein we attribute causal responsibility to
material objects for emergent developments within an absolute pseudo-reality, the familiar scientific pseudo-phenomenon we
refer to by ‘causality’ and
‘determinism’.
Poincaré speaks to this issue in
terms of a shortfall in our visual perception relative to our somatic sensory
experience (spatial awareness). For
example, from a position in space (e.g. in a nearby orbit such as if we were on
the moon, the earth VISUALLY appears to ‘turn’ (to ‘rotate on its axis’) but to
say that ‘the earth rotates’ is to attribute such movement to the earth itself
when we know that if our scientific inquiry ‘drills down’ (analytically,
reductively) into whatever is included in our field-of-view, we will never find
the answer to the ‘movement of the earth’ since it is relative to the
collective dynamic (solar system hostspace or ‘fieldflow’ dynamic) that we (the observer) are also
included in. To attribute the earth’s
rotation ‘to the earth’ would require imposing the assumption that space is
absolute; i.e. that ‘the earth is turning and space is staying still’ which we
know is an absolute form of idealization
that goes beyond validation by our
experiencing of nature. (N.B. While our visual sensing induces us to attribute to
the earth itself the behaviour of ‘rotating’, our somatic faculty of
spatial-relational balance wherein we sense our movement relative gravitational
field space imposes no such idealized
local centralization of behavioural
sourcing; i.e. our somatic awareness of being situated within a field dynamic
does not ignore that fact that both we, the observer, and the targets of our
observing are included within a spatial-relational dynamic.)
As Poincaré remarks, while this
imposing of idealized ‘objects’ that
exist and move independently of space, and this absolute space that exists
independently of objects, provides a reference framing that makes the movement
of objects appear to be ‘absolute’ (makes object behaviour appear to be
‘independent’), this imposed absolute space is very unlike the space of our
experience, and is in fact the most simple geometric idealization
of space that we can come up with [4]..
Scientific thinking has been pervasively based on the
pseudo-reality constructed from the
behaviour of idealized absolute
(independent) material objects and idealized
absolute space, even though the evidence is abundant that this idealized reality
does not reconcile with the reality
of our natural experience. Since
‘superstition’ is “a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary” and
since there is plenty of evidence that contradicts the notion of reality in terms of idealized
absolute (independent) objects that populate an idealized
absolute space, the implication is that our scientific world view, … at least our scientific worldview based on discrete material
entities,… is superstition.
Rather than discrete material entities being the basis of
dynamical behaviour in nature, THE EVIDENCE INSTEAD points to these entities being ‘undulations
in the fabric of space’ and thus not separate from space itself but
features within a space that is transforming in the continuing present (a ‘spacetime continuum’); e.g;
[It was proposed that matter
substance, mass and charge, did not exist but were properties of the wave
structure. Wyle, Schroedinger, Clifford, and
Einstein were among those who believed that particles were a wave
structure. Their belief was consistent with quantum theory, since the
mathematics of quantum theory does not depend on the existence of particle
substance or charge substance. In short, they proposed that quantum waves
are real and mass/charge were mere appearances; 'Schaumkommen'
in the words of Schroedinger. The reality of quantum waves, as suggested by Cramer
(1986), supports the original concept of W. K. Clifford (1876) that all matter
is simply "undulations in the fabric of space."]
Since modern physics presents us with evidence of the
proposition that ‘space’ or ‘field’ is more fundamental than matter and
relativity suggests that we must think of space in the non-euclidian
geometry terms of a space-time continuum, the attribution of ‘life’ and
‘consciousness’ to individual material objects such as human beings is
problematic, or in fact, by the above definition, ‘superstition’. That is, the objectification of ‘waves
structures’ or field ‘flow-forms’ is an idealization
of the same type as is the objectification of flow-forms such as ‘hurricanes’
in the field-flow atmospheric space.
While these flow-forms appear VISUALLY TO THE OBSERVER to have
behaviours that are sourced from their ‘centers’, … it
is a misnomer to say ‘THEIR’ center since such centers are nonlocally
inferred in the manner of ‘undulatory features’
within a continuous undulating space rather than ‘existing’ in-their-own-right
in an absolute sense.
Just as ‘epicycles’ were introduced into the earth-centric
Ptolemaic model of the heavens to ‘make it hang together’, we are forced to
invent similar ‘fixes’ to keep our idealized
absolute Euclidian space and ‘locally-centered’ object mental model ‘hanging
together’.
For example, if a human object is idealized
as ‘independent’ then we come up with the idealization
that its behaviour issues forth from ‘its center’ driven by its own notional
‘inner purpose’. These idealizations, that individual human behaviours issue
forth from ‘the center’, shaped by ‘inner purpose’ are merely ‘what is needed’
(intellectual contrivances) to explain movement in non-relative (absolute, idealized) terms of being ‘independent entity based’.
But nobody knows where ‘the inner purpose’ is located, for
example, or where, exactly, is ‘the center of a person’ (a ‘center’ is the
property of a geometric object so that we must first ‘geometrically objectify’
natural flow-forms, an idealization
that is equivalent to, as John Stuart Mill says, ‘decreeing’ the independence
of the entity).
Furthermore, once we start constructing pseudo-realities from a foundation of absolutely existing
things in absolute space, we are dependent upon the notion of absolute time
since ‘absolute time’ and ‘absolute spatial location’ co-define ‘motion’ in
terms of the trajectory of spatial displacement of the center of the material
entity. And once we are dependent on
‘time’ and ‘entities’ this leads to the notion of the ‘beginning of existence’
of an entity and the ‘end of existence’ of an entity.
We don’t have this ‘existence’ problem in the case of
continuing flow; i.e. in the case of atmospheric space flow-dynamics, they are
ongoing and the ‘hurricane’ is an emergent ‘form’ within the flow. In other words, it is ‘an undulation in the
fabric of atmospheric space’ that ‘catches our eye’ and ITS so-called
‘existence’ is determined by when we, the observer, begin to notice it, and
impose a name on it etc. and likewise its cessation of existence comes when we
can no longer ‘see it’; i.e. when this undulation in the fabric of space
quietens down to the point that we can only see the space it was included in,
as if its asserting energy was absorbed by the space it was included in. The reality
and existence of what we call ‘material bodies’ then,
is purely subjective ‘schaumkommen’
(‘appearances’). The evidence supports
our accepting, as the primary reality,
the continuously undulating field-space which is characterized by
spatial-relational (evolutionary) emergence and re-absorption of purely
relative undulatory flow-forms. We needn’t have, as Poincaré
notes, ‘named’ the transient feature and by doing so non-relatively
(absolutely) ‘declared ITS existence, ITS center, ITS behaviour since it is a nonlocally inferred a-centric transient form in the flow
analogous to the hurricane in the atmosphere that happens to ‘catch our eye’;
i.e. it is ‘space’ that owns its own undulatory
features and their behaviours and we cannot, except by superstition, since all
evidence is to the contrary, transfer this ownership to the features themselves
and make them out to be ‘independent’.
* * *
[1] “So [since
the problem of certainty in identity such as A=A is handled, in Euclidian
geometry, by invoking he notion of invariable solids] “objects” are implicitly
assumed to be invariable bodies. Therefore the axioms of geometry already
contain an irreducible assumption which does not follow from the axioms
themselves. Axiomatic systems provide us with “faulty definitions” of objects,
definitions that are grounded not in formal logic but in a hypothesis — a
“prejudice” as Hans-Georg Gadamer
might say — that is prior to logic. As a corollary, our logic of
identity cannot be said to be necessary and universally valid.
“Such axioms,” says Poincaré, “would be utterly
meaningless to a being living
in a world in which there are only fluids.” --- Vladimir Tasic,
[2] "First, with respect to time [the first foundational
approximation of classical mathematical physics]. Instead of embracing in its
entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect
each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state
of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly
influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to
this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena,
we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation
; for the laws of Kepler, we substitute the
laws of Newton."
--- Henri Poincaré,
Science and Hypothesis
[3] "A very small cause
which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail
to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly
the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we
could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding
moment. but even if it were the case that the natural
laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial
situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding
situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we
should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws.
But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial
conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in
the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes
impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon." --- Henri Poincaré,
Science and Method
[4] "One geometry cannot be more
true than another; it can only be more convenient. Now, Euclidian
geometry is, and will remain, the most convenient: 1st, because it is the
simplest, and it not so only because of our mental habits or because of the
kind of direct intuition that we have of Euclidian space; it is the simplest in
itself, just as a polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polylnomial of the second degree; 2nd, because it
sufficiently agrees with the properties of natural solids, those bodies which
we can compare and measure by means of our senses." ... "For here the
mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us clearly
understand that while these laws are imposed on 'our' science, which otherwise
could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature." --- Henri Poincaré,
Science and Hypothesis
Main Entry: su·per·sti·tion
Pronunciation: "sü-p&r-'sti-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English supersticion, from
Middle French, from Latin superstition-, superstitio,
from superstit-, superstes
standing over (as witness or survivor), from super- + stare to stand
-- more at STAND
1 a : a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the
unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation b :
an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God
resulting from superstition
2 : a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary