Erudite Criticism of Erudition, Statistics; and Tangents.

Nothing is more significant of the present condition of systematics than the introduction of the hypotheses of ‘elementary disorder’ for the purpose of smoothing-out the contradiction between intellectual postulate and actual experience. The ‘smallest particles’ of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes, but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean probabilities of occurrences.  And thus theory becomes a chapter of the Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical methods.

                Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics being, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident and not to the world of laws and timeless causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the ‘classical’ mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically and under the aspect of Probability – instead of under that of the a priori exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demand – what does it mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves.  …the resort to statistics shows that the force that the tradition regulated and made effective is exhausted.

Spengler, O. The Decline of the West. Pgs 421-2

Direction, fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are things one can do if one likes. These things are work, but the other, (history), is creation. Form and law, portrayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different organs, and their opposition is that in which life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they ‘cognize.’ That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity.

P102

But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and truths differ as time and space, destiny and causality. A fact addresses itself to the whole waking-consciousness which imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts. The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant. The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths. Pilate’s famous question is that of every man of fact.

[“What is truth?” John 18:38]

                It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge – cheap and even blasphemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant, who regards his whole raison d’etre as impugned by it.  Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.

                It is one thing, however to pose problems and quite another to believe in solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and ask questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own questions, he can only believe in the correctness of his answer, and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the meanest savage.

Book II p 12

                It is the extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually tells upon even the most insignificant element in man’s being, that becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from Culture to Civilization.

P 185

For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the despairing self-deception of a soul that may not and cannot rest.

P 187

This is the tragic situation – the inversion of the Hamlet motive – and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity for its own existence… The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual conquest of measurement, and it is therefore obliged to look for the essence of the phenomenon in a system of constant elements that are susceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of which Hemholtz distinguishes motion (using the word in its everyday sense) as the most important.

P 188

                Modern physics, as a science, is an immense system of indications in the form of names and numbers whereby we are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.

                Faith and ‘Knowledge’ are only two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And thus it is the theories and not pure numbers that are the support of all natural science.

                Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s sake is not and never has been more than a delight for little minds. Every savant’s experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that rules the savant’s ideation.

                Every critical science, like every myth and every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the creations of the certitude may be, both in structure and in repute, they are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore, levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up ‘the Truth’ in the place of ‘anthropomorphic’ conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of its author. The statement that ‘man created God in his own image,’ valid for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact.

P 190

How come the quantum? A superposition of a steady-state and a Big Bang, two concurrent realities, the neutral (quantum) thing-in-itself that is mathematics, and the physical (physics) reality of a thing that everyone agrees exists at the same instant, aha! All things in God’s reflection, light in a hall of mirrors playing peek-a-boo through a space-turbine that individuates starterstone.  A crying youth, numb to the cold, serpentine creator that made you eat to survive in superposition to your own hungrier self, left standing outside [Sameside Street], unfelt by unfeeling Poverty’s cruel hand come in the name of Chastity to admonish. A consciousness that spans millennia needeth only peep to set a local system spinning viceward, outracing even light-packets from the golden globule nearest.  The mighty mechanism emitter sends forth a complimentary paradigm dimer of split concurrence.  Who betokens betise?  The lingering bass-base notes uplift my spirits as my spirits are uplifted (a sine of anise liquor sans ice).

“Your Pimm’s cup sir.”

“Doesn’t it come in silver chalice?”

“That would be a pimp cup sir.”

From “Archer”. “The Man from Jupiter”

Light on a wire at constant ‘v’ for velocity, hypotenuses, a third-dimension out of sync with the fourth.  Going forth, however, one proceeds to believe at the outset some point bar-deterministic sarcasm for light-packets that are used to express a theoretically unforeseeable source of all points that are also in their theoretical vastness also ineffable once stated, even in a negative sense, accustomed to normalize peaks and variables to ‘best-fit’ time-tailor a point of exclusive heuristics to a perfectly perfected fine-tuned stopwatch that errs so often to the femtosecond it’s practically always wrong in exceedingly small increments to the ineffable point I shall say to exist at a point thereof.  It’s merely stated potential.

Captain Discrete relies on his own native tongue to count from one to the number after nine to ten in a universal language that is easier to translate via depiction than clairvoyance with a high-degree of certainty that enables me to be validated by myself or someone like me, who is similar to me in my mode of profession or choice of dress.  Statics fit the obvious and conform to pattern more regularly, all else is invalidated infiltrate.  A narcissistic constant, like a genus of flower, I am distracted eternally by the sound of my own voice listening to its own thoughts, into existence with beautiful blood, sweat, and typewriter ink as if I were something special, which I’m not, I’m exactly like all the others, convince yourself of that fact, truth’s alternative prima facie. 

The Kampyle of Eudoxus wavefunction
The Folium of Descartes wavefunction
The Ampersand Aquartic wavefunction
The Cochleoid Transcendental wavefunction

Where are these going?  How far?

4 o’clock skunk, 4 o’clock rabbit:
Why these two particular species arrived
within this area of locality
at this point of periodicity
probability only knows.
My pin-hole camera eyes adjust aperture,
poke settings for this time of night
during this ungodly hour awake.
I’m afraid to ask Nature why, lately
she has only output radial gibberish
that’s timely to comprehend, about
ellipsoidal circumferences and
a pair of animalcules sliding on
a pair of 2D boxes (properly planes)
blocked off by a thing in the third
dimension that the skunk in particular
is unable to pass without tunneling.
When observing the duality of nature,
is it wise to judge the dumb machine?
Can it really tell me anything that
I don’t already know intuitively?
That’s what we’re here to find out:
how to test our crickets of intuition.
So, while the rabbit remains without momentum
within the 2D system made of up 3D walls
(save its wiggling nose and whiskers)
the skunk tries to enter through what could
be a slit between two properties
before deciding on the path of least resistance,
ambling through the driveway gollop chamber
that hereby measures striped animalcules
going the ethereal distances that divide
black from white in an orange, electrified haze.