Can we derive the properties of complex entities from the particles or lesser entities from which they are built or from which they grow? The modern man tends to answer, “Yes,” even when he’s an accomplished thinker in a field which involves higher level analysis of empirical or abstract knowledge. This idea, underlying various sorts … [Read more…]
I’ve written of the desirability of using tensor-type thinking in qualitative fields where there is, even in principle, no way of particularizing the tensor equations to equations which could actually be used to calculate numbers. A reminder: by intelligent use of tensors (call it reasoning in more abstract spaces by way of differential geometry if … [Read more…]
There is likely a tendency for scientifically literate laymen, such as myself, to think of quantum effects in terms of the forces and particles of interaction, of potential, rather than in terms of what some might label `brute matter’. Miracles of scientific measurement and experimentation are almost to be expected nowadays and, lo and behold, … [Read more…]
I’ve written in the past that we can think, with proper qualifications and definitions, of physical matter including our bodies as being frozen soul: see Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies for a recent essay discussing that claim. This language of “frozen soul” is another way of thinking about the spectrum of created being: God manifested … [Read more…]
While examining samples of moon-dust, scientists discovered the stuff is a bit unusual, even by the standards of those who study ethereal stuff and relationships on a regular basis. Moon-dust, seemingly macroscopic stuff, shows quantum properties of the sort usually found only in such entities as individual atoms or subatomic particles. It seems that some … [Read more…]
I’ve often claimed that more particular, more concrete forms of being are shaped from more abstract forms of being, themselves tracing back after some number of stages to the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation. In the spirit of meta-physics as properly conceived, in my opinion, by Aristotle and some of his … [Read more…]
What do you do with a frozen soul? You could lick it because, speaking in general terms, a Popsicle is as much a piece of frozen soul as a human being is. And so are rattlesnakes and monkeys and rocks hurtling through space. You can also saw frozen soul, beginning the process of making a … [Read more…]
I’m finishing up with that profound and profoundly frustrating work by William James, The Meaning of Truth. He claims: It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms. [page 165] No, but, once again, his error carries more insight than the truest thoughts of … [Read more…]
I’ve written several times about my opinion that William James held back from the full implications of his teachings or, at least, held back from a viewpoint that would have led him to a plausible conjecture of some sort of fullness of knowledge, however impossible the complete realization of that full knowledge. James saw how … [Read more…]
William James made a claim which should be very disturbing to those who hold mainstream views of the nature of truth: The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a … [Read more…]