“Objective Thinking” and Astrology

For a good primer in “Objective Thinking” read anything by Richard Dawkins in the last 20 years.  “Objective Thinking” is a belief system in which you:  prove what someone else believes cannot be proven, choose to believe its opposite, and condemn as irrational anyone who disagrees with you.  

 For example, imagine a photographer forgets to take his lense cap off.  He claims that the reason the photo is black is that the room was too dark.  Someone proves that the photo is a photo of the back of a lense cap.  At this point, an  “objective thinker” will use the fact that a camera had his lense cap on to “prove” that the room was lit.  If the photographer argues, the “thinker” will then use this irrational refusal to accept the fact that he left the lense cap on as more proof that the room was lit.

Given that scenario, “objective thinking” is not completely irrational.  The photographer has reason to lie, and, as the highly evolved bullshit detectors we are, we can safely assume that he will.  But what if the photographer has no personal knowledge of the truth? (IE he used a remote or set a timer.)  He may even be lying - he could assume he screwed up and be trying to cover his own ass.  The fact that he is “lying”, however, does not prove anything if he in fact has no way of knowing the truth himself (except that you should probably not pay/tithe him.)

Astrology is always an easy target for “Objective Thinkers”.  I don’t “believe in it”, per se, but I have noticed that sun/moon signs tend to be more accurate than they should be according to statistical chance.   Approached with this data, an “Objective Thinker” will generally make reference to three things: many, many studies proving confirmation bias/forer effect,  a double-blind study disproving astrology, and the fact that they cannot imagine any possible scientific basis.  Since I prefer to see myself without quotes, I actually looked into these things.

A Haiku

I like it when my science and art readings match up for the day. 

Robin Hanson wrote:

I’ve been sick, so watched tv more than usual. Watching Journey to the Center of the Earth, I noticed yet again how folks seem to like adventure stories and games to come with guides. People prefer main characters to follow a trail of clues via a map or book written by someone who has passed before, or at least to follow the advice of a wise old person.

From A Softer World:

I

I suppose science articles are Hanson’s cool stickers:

For example, as an adolescent I seem to have deeply internalized the idea of great scientists/visionaries as heroes. I long judged my efforts by their standards – what would increase the chance that I would become such a person, or be approved by one. Marching to the beat of this unusual status audience drummer often led me to “non-conform” by doing things that less impressed folks around me. But I very definitely wanted to impress someone.

Anyone looking at hipster knows non-conformity is in no way a literal term.  By Hanson’s explaination,  I think I try to conform to please and fit in with the ideal me I plan on being one day.  Now, where that idea of me came from… that’s many other conversations from now.

An Ode to Settling

A tsunami away, in a world less perfect,
one more butterfly flapped its wings:

Our idols fell,
the waters rose,
no more roads to the horizon showed.

With competent grace, we took our place.
Knowledge of now, to light each face.

And in the end no hope was gone,
though you, no longer, were strung along.

Without a beating sun to chase,
the horizon had to be replaced.

You and I, each other faced,
our future failures, now erased.

Our dreams are nothing but fears we’ve chosen.
Dreaded, like a mirage, if you close in.

The love you had, it failed to stretch
when pots of gold, you tried to fetch.

But gathered into a nearby shelter,
Love had the strength to play any hand t’was dealt her.

I hope your hearts a bigger place,
Without the clutter of jack through ace.

Deathground Strategy

Every moment is a conquest,
Every second with you a battle won.
Every touch on your back, every bite on your lips,
The movement of troops on their dying day.

I hold you up, you push me back.
I hope you fall and pull me in.

A choice, a gamble,
A calculated risk of everything I will ever be.
I seek the deathground, the place of no retreat,
You against me, all else only the terrain that presses us together
towards the final battle, the ultimate struggle
from which only “one” can emerge.

Heidegger and Pooh

“Okay, Okay!” you say.  Perhaps you’ll buy that Heidegger ripped off the Tao Te Ching… but Winnie-the-Pooh!!!

Well, consider this.  The Tao of Pooh begins with an imagined discussion of the absolute lack of Eastern philosophers in the West.  The author then explains to his friends that we do have a great work of Eastern philosophy, Winnie-the-Pooh.

Pooh is the embodiment of “The Uncarved Block”, or P’u.  Heidegger has his unused chalk (IM 23) .  If you don’t see the similarities just yet you’ll have to wait for another post.

But consider this: Being and Time was published in 1927.  Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926 and When We Were Very Young, a collection of poems in which Pooh first appears, was published in 1924.

Now, consider Newton and Leibniz, then read Art and Physics  and get back to me.

Stances and Dances

I know I come off as a complete ass here.  But I do it for your benefit.  Perhaps I believe in arrogance as a form of self-depricating humor.  Hell, I just included my own poem with the Tao Te Ching and the writings of Heidegger. Anything for the sake of communication.

So, in short, I’ll excuse myself with a poem:

MASQUERADE

My Mask is made to bend,
And with your strikes, shift.
In the end, will I have chosen well?
Will you have found me, lying inside?
 
Or, when all is said and done
will there be nothing left
but the empty suit of armor that you sought to destroy.

Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics

“Only poetry is of the same order as philosophical thinking, although thinking and poetry are not identical.”

“[W]e seek to win back the intact naming force of language and words; for words and language are not just shells into which things are packed for spoken and written intercourse.  In word, in language, things first come to be and are.”

         – Martin Heidegger (Introduction to Metaphysics, pp 20, 11)

“Naming is the origin
of all particular things.”

        – Tao Te Ching (p 1)

In Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, the author (also a lawyer) “Reinhard May demonstrates that Martin Heidegger drew upon German translations of Chinese Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics for some of the major ideas of his philosophy. May also shows how Heidegger’s appropriation of East Asian modes of thinking continued through conversations with Chinese and Japanese scholars over many years.”

May’s scope, however, is limited: “Ultimately, a deeper understanding can be attained, and the insights gained here elaborated, only by way of a comprehensive and detailed exegesis of both texts, which cannot be attempted here. Our investigation concentrates primarily on answering the question of influence posed at the beginning, and will thus have to tolerate gaps in the interpretation.” (p 60)

This is where I wish to begin. 

But not just with the comparison.  This blog is not meant to be “scholarship about Philosophy”, to borrow Heidegger’s description of most philosophy academics, but an attempt at Philosophy itself.  I first picked up Introduction to Metaphysics last weekend.  I was immediately struck by how similar it was to the first two poems of the Tao Te Ching.  Heidegger wasn’t merely influenced by Asian thinking; the Tao was Heidegger’s introduction to metaphysics!

Certainly Heidegger mucks it up, but it is his geometry.  Much of the first chapter, “Fundamental Question of Metaphysics”, is Heidegger trying to posit in pages what the Tao expresses in lines.  I do not say this to accuse Heidegger of plagiarism, however.  I say it to credit him with it.  The transmission of ideas is fundamental to whatever it is that we are.  Heidegger’s muck turned the water of Taoism into a dry, dusty substance that could be processed by the sieve-like minds of Western thinkers.

This is why he is one of the premier thinkers of the 20th century: he reconnected Western and Eastern thought, and just in time for quantum physics.

And this isn’t some accomplishment I’m foisting upon him; he claimed it.  Heidegger states that Western thought derailed after Aristole, when the Greek word for Nature was translated into Latin.  The original was phusis, a word he often translates as “the sway”, a word that allows for beings emerging out of themselves and going back into nothing, a word not only in harmony with the idea of the Tao and its relation to nature, but in harmony with the behavior of quantum particles, with fields.  With Particular things being drawn out of the Tao by a quantum observer coming into contact with their names…. but I get ahead of myself.

The Latin usurper, natura, means “to be born”, as in to be born out of something.  This word is much more in harmony with Newtonian physics and ontological “proofs”, with the scientific method.  To Heidegger, this change in the naming force was the source of the deformation and decline of Western thinking.  Furthermore, Heidegger believed that the Greeks attained their understanding not through scientific thinking, but through poetry and thought. (IM pp 10-11)

Which brings me back around to what this blog is about and why I recognized the Tao in Heidegger.  These are the very ideas I have been exploring over the last few years.  To me, they are what “Mastering Reality from a Distance” is about.  I don’t claim to know anything about Heidegger, but his subject matter is something I have been mucking about with in my own head for a long time and he is the perfect puppet to pull with my own tangents. Welcome to the show.

So, in sum, here are some of the related subjects I wish to explore further:

Naming the Animals – Our job as humans according to Genesis, our job as scientists filling out the bestiary of everything observable, our job as quantum observers creating reality- the power of originating particular things. 

The Tao as the nexus of Being, Nothing, and phusis.

Philosophy as the edge of reality, expanding like light speeding away from the Big Bang (or Big Bump), defining and diffusing Consciousness (Diffining? :P ) and leaving techne in its wake, the coral with which we build. With reference to  Leonard Shlain’s Art and Physics and E.O. Wilson’s Consilience.

Insanity as the natural reaction to literacy, as catalogued by Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet versus the Goddess, and why it makes perfect sense that Heidegger was a Nazi.

Perhaps I’ll also be comparing Heidegger to Jesus, or at least referencing the gospel of John.  I’m not sure; I haven’t read Being and Time yet.

Mastering Reality from a Distance

This is the spot where music goes

but only words can flow.

Falling, fluttering, slamming, splat.

Controlled descent: Fleeting.

Beaches of coral and seas of truth,

Let me find the shape. Let me mark it true.

May my words fall,

hurtle downwards

with great hopeless Hope.

May they strive

to hit, to break, to fail,

to explode upon the unsayable

and in dying spread their wings,

covering to uncover

that what you must seek to find,

and, in ending, grow to be

nothing but the exoskeleton

of that which says

I am.

A bit about Beginnings

I’ve completed a major leg. 

I’ve always been anti-”philosophy student”.   But I’ve always thought about and danced with the issues that philosophy tackles.

This is blog is based on the … well, culmination is definitely not the word, but definitely the something of a something I’ve been on my entire life, but for the most part this blog is to be the skin-muscle-bone press of a Particular step I’ve been taking for the last 3 years.

This step started in the middle of my law school education.  One of the great benefits of going to school in New York City is that the United Nations and other various groups are right down the street.  I took advantages of this by going to as many talks as I could get off my ass to go to.

One in particular was Bob Barr speaking on the 2nd amendment, introduced by his good friend and colleague Nadine Strossen, the then president of the ACLU.  At the end of this talk I learned three things: Nice, young NYC Jewish boys could appreciate the work the NRA does if  explained properly, I needed to take a class with Nadine, and I needed to read Ayn Rand.

Bob Barr spoke at lengths about The Fountainhead, and how he sees individual liberty and self-determination to be at the heart of the 2nd amendment.  For the twelfth time in my life I felt uneducated for not having read this book, for good or for ill.

So that and the Tucker Max reading list started a frenzy of reading, a frenzy on three fronts:  Sci-fi/philosophy (especially from Ayn Rand, Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, and Dan Simmons Hyperion series), Evolutionary Biology/Psychology, and Internet marketting/Web 2.0.   It concluded recently with the works of Leonard Shlain, the Tao Te Ching, and Heidegger.

I’m sure many of you cringe when I call Ayn Rand a philosopher.  At this point I believed that anyone who had anything true to say about the human condition would express it in a story.   To explain: I’ve read a lot about “Gnosticism”.  I am not a Gnostic in fact, but perhaps may be in spirit.  In “Gnosticism”, Stephan A. Hoeller (who looks like a warlock) makes the point that the Greeks had two words for “to know”.  One was for chemistry type knowledge, knowledge that could be imparted exactly.  The other was “to know” as in to know a person.  (I’m more familiar with this in Spanish.)  It is the second, however, that is used for spiritual knowledge and this knowledge can only be imparted through story.  I agree.  I’m pretty sure Heidegger would agree too (secretly), but that is a subject for subsequent posts.

This is also when I started writing poetry again.  And through literature and the lyrical exegesis of my soul’s reeling I came to stand on a certain foundation.

I will begin with the First (as my second post.).  It is something I was doing then and have always been doing.  It is something I have perhaps failed to do and can now point at.