Category Archives: Physics

χαίρετε, τέκνα Διός, δότε δ᾽ ἱμερόεσσαν ἀοιδήν.
κλείετε δ᾽ ἀθανάτων ἱερὸν γένος αἰὲν ἐόντων,
οἳ Γῆς τ᾽ ἐξεγένοντο καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος,
Νυκτός τε δνοφερῆς, οὕς θ᾽ ἁλμυρὸς ἔτρεφε Πόντος.
εἴπατε δ᾽, ὡς τὰ πρῶτα θεοὶ καὶ γαῖα γένοντο
καὶ ποταμοὶ καὶ πόντος ἀπείριτος, οἴδματι θυίων,
ἄστρα τε λαμπετόωντα καὶ οὐρανὸς εὐρὺς ὕπερθεν
οἵ τ᾽ ἐκ τῶν ἐγένοντο θεοί, δωτῆρες ἐάων
ὥς τ᾽ ἄφενος δάσσαντο καὶ ὡς τιμὰς διέλοντο
ἠδὲ καὶ ὡς τὰ πρῶτα πολύπτυχον ἔσχον Ὄλυμπον.
ταῦτά μοι ἔσπετε Μοῦσαι, Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι
ἐξ ἀρχῆς, καὶ εἴπαθ᾽, ὅ τι πρῶτον γένετ᾽ αὐτῶν.
ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ
ἀθανάτων, οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου,
Τάρταρά τ᾽ ἠερόεντα μυχῷ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης,
ἠδ᾽ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι,
λυσιμελής, πάντων δὲ θεῶν πάντων τ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσι νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν.
ἐκ Χάεος δ᾽ Ἔρεβός τε μέλαινά τε Νὺξ ἐγένοντο:
Νυκτὸς δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ Αἰθήρ τε καὶ Ἡμέρη ἐξεγένοντο,
οὓς τέκε κυσαμένη Ἐρέβει φιλότητι μιγεῖσα.
Γαῖα δέ τοι πρῶτον μὲν ἐγείνατο ἶσον ἑαυτῇ
Οὐρανὸν ἀστερόενθ᾽, ἵνα μιν περὶ πάντα καλύπτοι,
ὄφρ᾽ εἴη μακάρεσσι θεοῖς ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί.
γείνατο δ᾽ Οὔρεα μακρά, θεῶν χαρίεντας ἐναύλους,
Νυμφέων, αἳ ναίουσιν ἀν᾽ οὔρεα βησσήεντα.
ἣ δὲ καὶ ἀτρύγετον πέλαγος τέκεν, οἴδματι θυῖον,
Πόντον, ἄτερ φιλότητος ἐφιμέρου: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Οὐρανῷ εὐνηθεῖσα τέκ᾽ Ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνην²

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus³. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽].

First of all Chaos came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean”⁴

This is the beginning of the Hesiod’s Theogony, the birth of the gods, the an-archic, origin of origins, written around 700 BC, more than 2700 years ago. Hesiod was a poet and a contemporary of Homer. The Theogony was probably influenced by Hittite and Babylonian cultural trade influences which were known to have happened a few centuries earlier.⁵ The Theogony was an early and important influence on latter Greek thinking. The traditional understanding of chaos is that it is the separation of the earth and sky. Cornford⁶ and Kirk and Raven⁷ understood the cosmogonic, mythopoeic Theogony as another telling of the Babylonian⁸ and Hebrew⁹ cosmogony with regard to the separation of earth and sky.¹⁰ Both of those cosmogonic accounts refer to a separation of the earth and sky at the beginning of creation. The Babylonian and Hebrew accounts start with a propositional statement of assertion, apophantis, about cosmogenesis (i.e., In the beginning God created the heaven the earth). However, the Theogony starts with Hesiod’s interrogative, the openness of his question to the Muses.

Hesiod asks a question of the Muses. The Muses are female goddesses. They are the birth, origin and keepers of art and knowledge.¹¹ Hesiod asks which of the gods was the first that “came-to-be”. A conundrum is embedded in Hesiod’s question. Namely, how can the first come to be? The Muses were fond of play and gaiety. As such, they reply in kind to Hesiod that “truly” and “verily” the first, Chaos, came-to-be. In the very first reply to Hesiod, the ‘truth’ is at play in the Muses. The Muses here are speaking as one even though there are nine Muses. Even in this, there is already play of the ‘one and the many’, harmony and cacophony, the doubling of the signature¹². What is more, Hesiod’s question preconditions the answer given by the ‘one and the many’ Muses. Hesiod asks, “from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]”?

Let’s take a closer look at the Muses reply to Hesiod…

First of all Chaos came-to-be

ή τοι μεν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’;

Etoi men protista Xaos genet’;

The gist of the words is:

ἤτοι – now surely, truly, verily¹³

μέν – indeed, of a truth¹⁴

πρώτιστα – the very first¹⁵

χάος – chaos, gap, yawn (as wide open), void¹⁶

γένετ’ – come into a new state of being¹⁷

‘The very first’, πρώτιστα (protista), comes from the Doric-Aeolic dialects of ancient Greece. It was also used in Hesiod’s era known as the Poetic or Homeric. The Aeolic dialect is more archaic than the Attic-Ionic dialect used by later Greek philosophers. Just as we have many words in English that come from older languages, the language of ancient Greece also comes from older languages and a confluence of dialects (for a more detailed discussion of ancient Greek dialects and philosophers see Appendix A, Part 1). Πρώτιστα (protista) here is an adjective, singular, feminine and nominative¹⁸ of protistos, the very first, superlative of protos, first. It is where we get ‘proto’ as in prototype.

Chaos (χάος) is the Greek word χάος. It is not confusion, un-differentiation or an unbounded space or place.¹⁹ It is a gap, yawn, breach, separation or void. As such, it implies radical differentiation. However, it is not space as later philosophers thought it to be. Kirk and Raven made the case that chaos as space, water, or disorder was not Hesiod’s idea but a later notion in Greek philosophy.

Three interpretations may be rejected immediately: (i) Aristotle (Phys. I, 208 b 29) took it to mean space. But this concept is much later than the Theogony, occurring first, probably, in Pythagoras, then more clearly in Zeno of Elea, and most clearly in Plato’s Timaeus. (ii) The Stoics followed Zeno of Citium (e.g. SVF I 103), who perhaps took the idea from Pherecydes of Syros (DK 7BIa), in deriving xaos from χέεσθαι and therefore interpreting it as what is poured, i.e. water. (iii) The common modern sense of chaos as disorder can be seen e.g. in Lucian Amores 32, where Hesiod’s xaos is interpreted as disordered, shapeless matter. This, again, may be Stoic in origin.²⁰

Yένετ’ (genet’) is a verb, 3rd person, singular, middle voice used from the early Homeric and Ionic eras. The middle voice is not in modern Greek or modern languages. It denotes a mutual and simultaneous reciprocity of the subject acting on and being acted upon by something or someone. The middle voice only survives in a few languages other than ancient Greek such as Albanian, Bengali, Fula, Tamil, Sanskrit, Icelandic and Swedish. In this case γένετ’ denotes chaos acted on being and chaos was acted upon by being in the phrase ‘came to be’. Yένετ’ comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being²¹ – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός (genetikos), “genitive” and that from γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”).²² Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’. Yένετ’ and archê will become important concepts for ancient Greek philosophers a short time later (this will be discussed more later in the series).

The Muses tell us that being does not arise from ‘the one’ or from an unchanging, unmoved singularity as in monism nor even from a plurality. Being or ‘isness’ refuses consolidation, summation, absolute closure as given in some metaphysical ‘One’ or some synthesis of being and non-being (or nothingness). The Muses tell us that the gap, radical differentiation came to, acted on, ‘isness’ and that the gap, radical differentiation came upon, was acted upon, by ‘isness’. One important consequence of this is that at the beginning of the ancient Greek quest for phusis, for being, radical differentiation requires otherness first for being. Likewise, otherness is acted upon by being. However, the action upon otherness is a retreat; it is not an equivocal reciprocity which reduces to the same. It is not some kind of Hegelian ‘lifting up’ of the abstractions of being and nothing (aufhebung) into becoming and thus, concrete determinacy from abstraction.²³ This effect on otherness of being is privation, a withdrawal which eludes presence, form and idea. This notion of privation is key to understanding the struggle (polemus, strife, war) at work inside ancient Greek thinkers. Becoming is given by differentiation and radical otherness which cannot be brought fully to presence. Otherness is accentuated²⁴ and highlighted by being in its absence, both abstractly and concretely, in theory (θεωρία) and practice (πρᾶξις), in seeing and acting in its relentless refusal of being.²⁵

The Muses, in notably un-myth like language, do not declare a god as the first. Instead, in one voice they playfully undue their unison by first directly answering Hesiod’s question that chaos was first. The unity of the Muse’s voice is undone in their answer of the first, the primal lack of unity and presence. Chaos in this case is given as differentiation without prerequisite. The gap, separation, breach or void begs the question – between what? What does chaos hold open or serve as a gap? For traditional scholarship, the answer is earth and sky. However, the noted scholar Mitchell Miller points out:

What is it, however, that the coming-into-being of Chaos differentiates from what? It is clear that one side of the gap is ‘broad-breasted earth’, which comes to be ‘next’, immediately after Chaos. What is the other side? Cornford’s response is to look outside the text, on the one hand to cosmogonic myth in a host of archaic cultures, on the other hand to sixth and fifth century Greek poetry. In the latter, in particular in Ibycus, Bacchylides, and Aristophanes, he finds uses of xãow to refer to the space between the upper sky and the ground, the space through which birds fly. In the former, especially in Hebrew and Babylonian myth, he finds stories of the formation of the world through an original separation of earth and sky. And so he proposes that the coming-into-being of Chaos is the separation of earth and sky.6 Does the text support this possibility? Cornford finds both corroboration and apparent resistance. Self-evident corroboration, he thinks, is offered by line 700, where, he asserts without argument, xãow ‘denotes the gap or void space between sky and earth’. But the text, he recognizes, appears to resist his interpretation at lines 126-127 [in the Greek text cited above]: there, only a few lines after telling of the coming-into-being of Chaos, Hesiod tells how ‘earth first bore…starry sky’. If, as he presumes, Chaos is ‘the gap separating heaven and earth’ and it ‘has already come-into-being’, there should be no need for earth to go on to beget sky; that begetting ‘duplicates’ the coming-into-being of sky that must have already occurred with the coming-into-being of Chaos.²⁶

Chaos is a differentiation but of what? No typical poetic trope is given by the Muses in their direct answer. The Muses state plainly that the very first was chaos. Then, with deference to the question they add to “First of all Chaos” with “came-to-be”, genet’. Hesiod is asking for the first, how it came-to-be (genet’), and they tell him chaos but with the same supplement in Hesiod’s question, genet’. The wisdom of this statement is along the lines of “First of all Chaos”. How can chaos come-to-be if it was first? Isn’t this a contradiction? Contradiction would not bother a Muse. However, what would bother a Muse is mere contradiction; so boring. Instead, a deeper thread, a secret meaning was always more fun for a Muse. Perhaps, what they were implying is not only what was first, what had no prior origin or birth, but what ‘come-to-be’ is. ‘Come-to-be’ is becoming. Becoming must always come from difference. Difference ‘first’ allows the possibility for determinateness. The possibility for determinateness is the gap, the opening, which makes becoming possible. Instead of the one and many voices of the Muses giving one answer to Hesiod, they give him two in one…now that is more like a Muse. The Muses are not contradicting themselves or giving an infinite regression but giving Hesiod the answer he wants and more. The answer has exceeded the expectation of the question as it MUST since the question marks a limit to what an answer should be (i.e., does ‘what was the first’ ask for a chicken or an egg and how would the answer ever decide the question?). Instead of a declaratory, apophantic, answer, the Muses transcend the limits of the question with a double answer which the Muses testify to as “now surely, truly, verily” “indeed, of a truth”. Additionally, according to Miller²⁷, Hesiod had no way, given the tools of his mythopoeic language, to think the ‘first’ without a coming-to-be. Additionally, the lapse of the mythopoeic style in this one phrase was not a necessary lapse. Hesiod could have written this in a form more true to the overall style of the poem but he didn’t. This can either be ignored as an omission of Hesiod (or an addition of someone else) or intentional and a mark of an emphasis of some type. Even today, when a song or poetic interlude is stated directly and plainly, without the trappings of the current style, it is meant to bring atypical attention to what is stated.

Could it be that the very first, the beginning (archê) Hesiod asks for, is always incomplete, determinate but without specific determinations to come-to-be…to came-to-be…to evoke chora (khora or chora; χώρα, clearing, opening);²⁸ the evocation gestured in the written supplement – “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Autar epeita first gives later, the temporal (sorge), the chora of becoming (genet’)? The gaping void requires, necessitates, determines, place (chora), generation (origin), birth, response (the evocative) and temporality. The chaos differentiates but without anything to differentiate, the opening of difference is broken on the disjunctive, “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Drew Hyland makes this remark about autar epeita:

With the autar epeita, Hesiod emphasizes the very separation from the subsequent comings-to-be of earth, Tartaros, and eros. Autar, according to Liddell and Scott, means “but, besides, moreover” and is employed “to introduce a contrast.” Epeita, in turn, means, again quoting Liddell and Scott, “when in strong opposition to the former act or state, with past tenses, `thereafter, afterwards.””‘ Since autar establishes precisely such a contrast with the preceding, I have altered Miller’s translation slightly to try to bring out that contrast; hence my “but then afterwards …” rather than Miller’s less strong “then next.” My point, then, is that not only does Hesiod say “First of all Chaos came-to-be”; with the emphatic autar epeita he clearly distinguishes the coming-to-be of Chaos from what comes afterwards: earth, Tartaros, eros, and then gradually the rest of the articulated cosmos.²⁹

Autar epeita is not generative. Earth, Tartara and Eros are not born from chaos. If the Muses meant ‘born’ they could have used a form of genet’ or γόνος (gonos; that which is born, begotten, child, offspring). The “strong opposition” Hyland writes of does not join what follows but demarcates, refuses the cause and effect of progeny, with what follows. Hesiod’s chaos is not-yet temporal. Temporality begins for the Muses with autar epeita not as later Latin history suggested with Cronus.

It is important that in one of the most important accounts at the dawn of ancient Greek philosophy, how being came to be was answered by the jesting Muses in a rare directness, a full moment (kairos), as radical disjuncture, as chaos. Before logos (where we get our word logic) we find the question of origin, of beginning, is anarchy (an-archê, ἀν-αρχία; no origin). Anarchy founds origin from the impossibility of origin. Origin must generate (gene) being in the absolute void of chaos, the gap. ‘Coming to be’ is not completed in logos but left open by chaos. Ancient Greek philosophy must ever after be read from the riddle of origin. Origin must be said from logos which, in its fullest moment, undoes and erases itself as chaos, an unbridgeable gap. Only in this unsettled and unresolved footing does ancient Greek philosophy acquire its richness and dislodge itself from final closure. In this way, being is held open as existence. Phusis is not closed off by some reductive, anthropomorphic mythos but becoming is first opened by chaos, a radical alterity, a gap generative of inquiry, of logos. History and temporality find their start in “but then afterwards” from the face of what undoes it not from some absolute but from groundless suspension over the void (as Heidegger might suggest). Anarchy is not evasion from rule and domination as Latin later postulated and forever embodied it in the metaphysic of individuality, but in the suspension of finality or origin. Existence is never complete. Completion or fulfillment (telos) can never be final because origin can only cover over its chaotic lack. Existence cannot resolve itself as idea (eidos, the form or appearance of things); not even as ‘it’. The notion of phusis as ‘it’, as third person neuter, can only supplement an unsolvable riddle, a Gordian knot, which can only untie itself by tying another knot. The Idea can only be, always and already, a “but then afterwards” which fills the gap, the yawning gap that must withdraw from sight and appearance. In this riddle, play of the Muses, ancient Greek thought attained astounding depth and richness which both posed and opened the question of appearance and being, phusis and ‘beings as such’ or ‘first cause’ (arche) later in the Latin era called metaphysics.³⁰ The priority of metaphysics for Aristotle was a priority of ontos–ology (the logos or study of being) over idea and appearance. Idea must forever be inchoate in origin and finality, perhaps shadows thrown on cave walls from Forms which can only dance over the void, eternally supplementing themselves from desire, Eros, the in-between of mortal and immortal; this radical otherness which cannot take the Form of a modern ‘it’ nor even an idea (the appearance of) of chaos but can only face us in the other. The good beyond being, the disjunction of the primacy of ontology and the impossibility of the never ending supplementation of the Idea can only ‘be’ in the face of the other which has no origin or completion in our gaze and yet, cannot be ignored.

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

_________________

¹The series on the Pre-Socratics relies heavily on THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH A SELECTION OF TEXTS, BY G. S. KIRK & J. E. RAVEN, PUBLTSHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W., American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York , N.Y., CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1957 and Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being, Walter A. Brogan, Kindle Edition and Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, First of all Came Chaos, Drew A. Hyland, Kindle Edition.

²See Link

³See Link

⁴Hesiod, “Theogony”, Translated by Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition; For text see Link, Hes. Th. 115 to 135;

⁵See Robin Lane Fox’s Travelling Heroes and Walcot’s Hesiod and the Near East

⁶The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), later reformulated in Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophic Thought (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1971)

⁷G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). Restated and reaffirmed in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

⁸See Link

⁹See Link

¹⁰G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section “SEPARATION IN NON-GREEK SOURCES”, page 33-34

¹¹See Link

¹²John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), see the Prologue; Also Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1988)

¹³See Link

¹⁴See Link

¹⁵πρώτιστα – adj sg fem nom doric aeolic poetic – Link, πρώτιστ-ος, η, ον, also ος, ον h.Cer.157:—poet. and late Prose Sup. of πρῶτος,

A the very first, Il.2.228, 16.656, Od.19.447; πολὺ π. Il.2.702, Od.14.220, etc.; ὁ π. χρόνος, opp. ὁ ἐνεστώς, PEleph.10.4 (iii B.C.); principal, primal, θεὰ π. Νύξ Phld.Piet.14; αἰτία Procl.Inst. 12; τῶν φύσει κρειττόνων π. ὁ δημιουργός Hierocl. in CA3p.424M., cf. Iamb.Comm.Math.4, al., Dexipp.Fr.32(b)J., Agath.3.2: neut. πρώτιστον as Adv., first of all, Od.10.462, 20.60, al., Pi.N.5.25, B.8.11, Ar.Lys.555, D.43.75, Antiph.98: also pl. πρώτιστα Il.1.105, Od.3.419, Hes.Op.109, A.Fr.195, S.OT1439, El.669, Ar.Pl.792; ἐπειδὴ π. now that, Alc.15.7; ὅτε π. when aforetime, Call.Aet.Oxy.2079.21; especially, principally, π. ἁλίσκεται ἐνταῦθα τὸ ὄψον Str.12.3.19: also τὸ π. E.Supp.430; τὰ π. Od.11.168. –
Link

¹⁶See Link

¹⁷γένετ’ – verb, 3rd person, middle voice used from the early Homeric time. It comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being (see Link) – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός [genetikos], “genitive” and that from Ancient Greek γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”). Link, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁, Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’.

¹⁸See Link for information on the Greek grammar.

¹⁹
‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, See Link (pdf)

²⁰G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section ” 4. THE HESIODIC COSMOGONY, AND THE SEPARATION OF SKY AND EARTH”, page 26-27

²¹See Link

²²See Link

²³Consider Hegel’s beginning in The Logic where he states: “Pure Being makes the beginning: because it is on the one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate; and the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined.” See Link, Section 86. This beginning is very different from the Hesiod’s beginning where pure ‘isness’ does not begin as indeterminate immediacy but contrarily ‘isness’ begins as differentiation, a gap, which begins as differentiated. The differentiation here is not yet mediated in Hesiod. Remember that in Hesiod’s cosmogony, meditation only starts after the phrase ‘but then afterwards”. Pure thought as idea (eidos) does not yet appear or take form in Hesiod’s ‘first’. Mediation does not lead to determinacy for Hesiod but determinacy leads to mediation. This is an important distinction which may have led the entire Hegelian genius astray. It certainly deserves consideration at a minimum as, if nothing else, an important difference in Hegelian wissenschaft and post modernism with thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas.

Consider this a little latter in the same section:

When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeterminateness: for we cannot determine unless there is both one and another: and in the beginning there is yet no other. The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being. It is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination: it is only and merely thought, and as such it forms the beginning. Essence also is indeterminate, but in another sense: it has traversed the process of mediation and contains implicit the determination it has absorbed.

In Hesiod’s beginning there isn’t “the other” but otherness. Not long after Hesiod the struggle began to wrestle with precisely what Hegel is articulating. One answer the Eleatics came up with is that in Hegel’s words “we cannot determine unless there is both one and another”. Therefore, the Eleatics came up with ‘the One’. Hegel believes that they erred in naming this being, “they went too far”, When Hegel states, “The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being” he initially states that the indeterminate is not some “featurelessness reached by abstraction” but then goes on to tell us about “the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all”. Wouldn’t this require that the “original featurelessness” has also been arrived at by featurelessness abstraction? Would it be sacrilege to suggest that at minimum the “original featurelessness” is made up of language and words which may hint a kind of yet another form of “featurelessness reached by abstraction”. This subtle circularity denies in order to reaffirm albeit more seductively. In any case, the logic of determination without one or another is certainly compelling and it is understandable how one might be lead from here to monism or immediacy. However, the inability of even the word ‘immediacy’ to divest itself of language and therefore mediacy and abstraction violently forces a conclusion which cannot be sustained by virtue of its own terms. Hegel’s immediacy can never be what it assumes something other than language and thereby escape the hermeneutical circularity of language. This impossibility should be preserved in thought not replaced with yet another supplement, a façade or appearance, which has the effect of relieving this absurdity (i.e., immediacy). In the Muse’s refusal to resolve chaos as first undifferentiated but instead differentiated without “both one and another” a questioned is opened which, depending on decision, can either be nonsense or some other (Latinized chaos as disorder or the Greek notion of gap).

²⁴…could we say with Kierkegaard accentuating passion to the infinite …

²⁵When determination is derived, it becomes dependent on its determinate whether it is ‘immediacy’, abstraction, etc. When determination is differentiation before ‘objects’, the notion of the other does not depend on derivation but upon, as Levinas might suggest, ‘Ethics’. Levinas might suggest borrowing from Plato’s ‘the good beyond being’ as the good otherwise than being (note the radical disjuncture).

²⁶‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, page 5

²⁷“…what is remarkable is not that Hesiod says of Chaos that it genet[o], ‘came-to-be’ or, connotatively, ‘was born’; he has little choice. Rather, what is remarkable is that, in face of the assumption that what ‘comes-to-be’ must have a parent, he holds back from naming one and instead declares Chaos to have come-to-be ‘first’.” See Link (pdf, page 21-22)

²⁸John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)

²⁹Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (p. 13). Kindle Edition, page 13

³⁰See Link

A Day in the Life of a Groundhog

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I have been thinking about the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TIQM) lately. My BS in Electrical Engineering gave me some background in physics. I have also tried to follow some of the current discussions in physics and astronomy. However, I am just an amateur in physics. That being said, I think the discussion of advance and retarded waves in physics and quantum mechanics has some interesting possibilities. As most are aware, light has been thought of as both a particle and a wave. It seems to have characteristics of both. In particular, one advantage of the particle analogy is that we think of a particle as something solid, as denser. If something hits the front of a solid object, we think of the force as being efficiently transferred quickly to the back of the solid. On the other hand, we think of the wave analogy as something cushier, more amorphous, as less dense. If something hits the front of a wave we think of a certain kind of compression factor to the collision, the force of the collision gets distributed and diluted more into the flexibility and dispersion of the ‘wave objects’. It is more like hitting a concrete wall in our car as opposed to a rose bush. The odd thing about the light wave is that it appears to have both of these characteristics, particle and wave. What this means is when a photon of light ‘hits’ something it hits it like a wave but the source of the wave also gets ‘hit’ with something like waves before the collision (called advance waves) and after the collision (called retarded waves). This means that the source ‘feels’ the effects of the collision before the main amplitude, or strongest force of the impact gets to the source. So, like a solid in an impact, there is some advancing ‘premonition’ that an impact is going to occur in the source prior to the source getting ‘hit’ with the big one so to speak. The ‘big one’ is really just the result of the highest magnitude force line hitting the source; where the resultant inference force lines get more intense and closer together when they reflect back to the source. Well, actually this is the way a solid experiences a collision to. It is just a matter of magnitudes that changes but the common sense notion that the solid ‘knows’ faster than the wave that an impact is occurring is a fallacy. Actually, both the solid and the wave know in advance of the major magnitudes of the collision that a collision is imminent. These ideas are a part of physics called standing waves. Another way to think about it is two bicyclists heading directly towards each other. Air waves are being compressed directly in front of the direction of travel for each bicyclist and expanded behind the direction of travel of each bicyclist. Just before the bicyclists actually collide the advance waves are colliding; what we might call potentially colliding. After the collision, the trailing waves also collide which we could also call potentially colliding. So, we have a potential colliding ahead of, or in the future of, the actual collision and a potential colliding behind, or in the past of, the actual collision. So what are waves?

We can think of waves as energy fields or potential probabilities of finding higher and lower energies in ‘fields’ of a plane or better, ‘fields’ of a cube or even better, ‘fields’ of a cube where the ‘fields’ are changing in time, pulsating. In quantum mechanics (QM) we may think of the these ‘fields’ as the probability of finding an electron in a ‘field’. We could also call this a cloud or a potential energy field. Now, in QM we say that these fields are discrete or quantums. In other words, we do not see an analog kind of ‘energy clouds’ in one potential field ‘bumping’ or ‘merging’ into adjacent ‘energy clouds’ of another potential field. This does mean that it does not happen, only that we cannot detect any interaction in-between the quantum fields. We say there is zero probability of finding an electron in-between two quantum shells. Now, the inability to detect pre or post waves or in-between energy fields leads to something we call stochastic. Stochastic means there is a certain kind of randomness in a probability event. In other words, when we are thinking of which energy field or cloud we are going to find an electron around the nucleus of an atom we know the discrete shells where we may find the electron and we know the probabilities of where we are more likely and less likely to find the electron in discrete energy shells around the nucleus but we do not know exactly which shell the electron will be in. Therefore, we must put up with a certain amount of randomness in our equations which cannot be resolved or specified in an exact quantum location. We call this indeterminate but not absolutely indeterminate only relatively indeterminate within some probabilities. This is called stochastic. Physicists are not totally comfortable with this mushiness. This mushiness in the fundamentals of physics is called non-causal or acausal. Cause is another common sense notion that if something happens, an event, something else must have caused it. However, if you see something happen and then you have to admit that there is no cause that we know of, you are getting into the most dreaded topic of every physicist… magic, religion, superstition, mystic, hocus pocus or as Newton called gravity, action at a distance. This kind of metaphysical attack on science goes right to the core of the ‘truth’ of science and can, potentially, get a bad reaction if suggested in the presence of a scientist. Be that as it may, there are theories that try to find a causal relationship in QM. Einstein comes immediately to mind with his unified field theory; but, there are others which are more current.

First, one important point to make here is that we have been thinking of standing waves as a spatial metaphor. This is fine for visualizing how waves and interference waves may interact but there is one more hiccup we need to add to our metaphor, time. Now we know that time and space is a continuum. When we say this, we are really saying that time and space is really the same ‘thing’ just as energy and mass is the same ‘thing’ and the wave and particle of light is the ‘same’ thing. What we mean is that the common sense notions we have of these ‘things’ share some characteristics with their metonyms. Let’s just say that all these ways of thinking allegorically aid our understanding but they are merely aids not the ‘thing-in-itself’ as Kant may tell us. Even the language of math which is much more precise is STILL a language albeit, a shorthand, exact language but it is not the thing-in-itself. Ah, but this gets us into the dreaded ‘philosophy’ doesn’t it? In any case, because we know that space and time are relative to each other we cannot say that waves only apply to space. We also have to think waves in terms of time. What does this mean in terms of our present discussion?

Well, instead of ahead of or behind, advance or retard, we are now left with in the future and in the past…wow. What we are suggesting is that the future comes towards us before presence or the present and the past comes from behind presence or the present. We encounter time as waves. We may call the future and the past potential but we tend to want to add an additional qualification to this, the past, we think, already happened. This has been called the arrow of time in physics. We think of the past as the ‘dead’ past as it already happened and it can’t be changed, right? Well in physics this additional quality is not such a given as you would suspiciously suspect. In physics, if something is acausal it cannot be reversed. An event that has nothing which definitely led up to it to cause it to occur cannot be reversed because we do not know what the exact mechanism is which allowed it to happen in the first place; it was stochastic. Perhaps, we can say something about the future because we have probabilities which can guide our predictions but the past is a total void once it has happened; we got here but we do not exactly how we got here. If we understood the mechanism of how we got here it may be possible to reverse it and, in this case, go back in time.

Currently, the way we ‘go back in time’ in physics is to look at all the effects of an event and knowing how things interact, abstractly put this knowledge together to come up with a theory or understanding of the event that must have happened for the effects to be what they are. If we look at an explosion and see all the pieces flying apart we can analyze all the forces that are acting on all the pieces to understand the trajectory of the pieces and therefore, abstractly reverse the trajectory to find the original object that blew apart. This is what particle accelerators do for scientists. They can determine what objects must have been in the past based on what they see in the present. Now, this is not the same as actually going back in time but the information is reversible. In other words, information is retained in the explosion we cited above. We can go forward and backward in time and find informational causal relations in both directions. This seems to be a unique characteristic of information we do not find in what we call ‘the real world’. Ah, but physicists think the ‘real world’ is for amateurs anyway. In any case, there is some kind of difference, we think, between information and an ‘event’. Even though ‘an event’ is still a linguistic metaphor for the thing-in-itself we are content to leave it there…unless we are a physicist or philosopher.

Let’s suppose that we could come up with a math which we cannot find an actual ‘thing’ in the ‘real world’ that corresponds to it (ah, but why let trivial matters get in the way) but would explain QM in a causal way. Yes, you guessed it, there is such a thing in physics. It is called transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TIQM). Let’s suppose that we have a transmitter we will call a source and a receiver we will call a sink. The source radiates energy fields which pulsate in a wave like fashion towards the sink. The sink is not a black hole, empty void just ‘receiving’ as common sense might dictate. The sink is actually a transmitter to. The sink transmits a weak energy field and looks for any interference in the field to detect any other electromagnetic field which may have changed its original radiation pattern. If it detects this interference pattern it decodes it and decides what kind of other electromagnetic field must have been present to distort the sink field as it detected. All sensors are receivers of some type or another. To get back to the standing wave metaphor, look at this diagram of our transmitter (TX) and our receiver (RX).

As the transmitter pulses electrons or pulsating fields of potential energy the receiver does as well. The waves are compressed ahead of the direction and expanded behind the direction of flow. This is due to the speed of light. Remember, as you get closer to the speed of light length contracts, gets shorter, and time dilates, gets slower. Therefore, ahead of the pulsating energy field of the transmitter and the receiver the peak amplitudes of the waves appear to compress as they move towards each other near the speed of light and they appear to lengthen as they appear to move slower behind the pulsating energy field. From the relative perspective of the collision point of the two fields, the waves in front are appearing to slow down to get shorter relative to each other and the waves in back appear to get longer relative to each other. From a time perspective of the collision point, the waves are coming from both sides of you faster as they get closer to you and trailing off in waves that appear to be moving away from you slowly. Remember the ‘waves’ are really higher amplitude potential fields where we are more likely to find electrons and the spacing between the waves are related to their quantum shells. When the two approaching waves collide TIQM calls this a transaction. When the two waves collide they generate their own set of interference waves. The interference waves after the transaction will look like the original waves. The interference waves will contain the same amount of energy as the two original waves which collided. Even in the interference waves, there will be waves which proceed ahead of the collision point and behind the collision point. This happens for both the transmitter and the receiver. The shell of the transmitting wave which collides with the transmitted wave from the receiver generates a collision wave which races towards the receiver and back towards the transmitter where it originated. The resultant wave which heads towards the receiver is called the offer wave and the one which goes back to the original transmitter is called the confirmation wave. The confirmation wave informs, provides information to the original transmitter that something happened in its electromagnetic field and likewise the offer wave conveys to the receiver that something happened in its radiated electromagnetic field. Also, remember that this happens in both directions as the receiver is really a transmitter itself. What this actually means is that the transmitter and the receiver are both sources and sinks. We can also think of sources and sinks as emitters and absorbers.

Quantum energy always wants to return to a balanced state. Now in QM there is a sort of bubbling, gurgling steady state of particles thought as coming into and out of existence by some which underlies physics, the universe or more interesting what the ancient Greeks called phusis (more on that in the philosophy series). A balanced state is when all the unbalanced energy finds absorbers. This does not mean the energy disappears. It means the energy settles down within certain boundary conditions. Quantum energy is always ‘moving’, if you will, which is why it does not take much to push it out of its boundaries. However, when the push and shove are over it wants to settle down in a kind of randomized ‘bubbling’ and ‘gurgling’. These metaphors may be a bit colorful but they really indicate an absorber state where, relatively speaking, no one is pushing anyone else around too much. The emitter is the hell raiser in the bunch. The emitter gets everyone all worked up and in a pissing contest like drunken rednecks at a bar. Anyway, what is interesting is that the emitters are always getting advance notice of this ruckus from their own confirmation waves. When it comes to time-space continuum this really means that the emitters know ahead of time, in the future, that the ruckus is going to happen (like the wives of the drunken rednecks knew when their husbands left the house). In this way, TIQM tries to set up a causal connection to QM. If there really is a causal connection and we understood the mechanism, so to speak, we could perhaps reverse time at will. The downside of this is that this would also imply determinism.

In theology, determinism as thought by Calvin meant that some people were predetermined to go to heaven by God and some were predetermined to go to hell by God. Some folks objected saying that this could not be a God of love. The Calvinists simply used God’s answer to Job to respond and said, who are you to question God? If the big dog wants to predetermine and also wants to call that love, get over it; in any case, so much for freedom if TIQM is right. However, the upside or as Nietzsche called it, the great nausea, is that since everything can easily go forward and backward in a deterministic, causal fashion we will probably do it again, and again, and again, and again, ad infinitum. The only thing is how you do it, with fervor and zeal or hating every minute of it. Well, it does not matter since, as Groundhog Day showed us, you will get to do it both ways…forever. Ok, now that I have made your day maybe you want a scotch, I sure do.

Check this out if you want the unabridged version.

A Thought Experiment with God’s Particle

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I have been trying to understand what all the fuss is about with the Higgs-Boson. In college, my Electrical Engineering curriculum did include three classes in physics and three classes in calculus. However, this has not been of much use to me with my research into the Higgs field. The lay person’s articles I have read try to use metaphors but I have found them a bit trite so I thought I would take a whack at it with my own thought experiment. If you are a serious minded person I would advise you not to read this as, at best, it is probably a geeky, feeble attempt at entertainment so save yourself the aggravation.

Let’s suppose there is a bubble. This bubble is not anywhere or at any time since the bubble itself creates time and space. For old times’ sake, let’s suppose this bubble is called ether. The ether is not consistent through the entire bubble. It has irregular pockets of more concentrated ether, less concentrated ether and even pockets of no ether at all. The ether is a very odd substance. It can be very different depending on what you are. It can be quite sticky and gooey or it can be quite thin like air or like the vacuum of empty space or even not noticeable at all depending on who you are. Let’s suppose you are moving infinitely fast. You would not see the ether at all and nothing in the ether would see you. You would have no footprint in the ether, no mass, and no noticeable effect whatsoever. From someone’s perspective in the ether, you would not exist; you would be nothing. From your perspective, the ether would be totally unified in everything else that you saw. Any and all forces in the ether or outside the ether would be unified, the same force. We could say that everything was totally symmetrical, super-symmetry. Of course, an observer in the ether would see various forces. Perhaps the observer in the ether might have an intuition of the nothing outside of the ether but it would only be at best a hunch with absolutely no objective evidence.

Now, suppose you could slow down enough so that the ether barely existed for you, a bit like the vacuum of space. At this point, the perfect symmetry you were in would be broken by the bare existence of the ether. Suppose you were still going fast enough so that the ether offered no resistance to you but there was a bare distortion of the time and space in the space you were in. However, remember that the ether is not uniform and consistent in the bubble. Therefore, whenever you contacted more sparse ether or none at all, the minimal distortion of time and space of the ether would disappear and you would be going infinitely fast again. The distortion of the ether would have an effect on anything in its reach. However, since you a traveling through pockets of sparse ether or not ether the minimal distortion of time and space would be effected. Since the lack of ether you moved into was nothing, the ether could not follow you into nothing. No trail of ether into the nothing that you entered could be seen from inside the ether since ether cannot be ‘in’ nothing. You would look like the starship Enterprise going into warp drive as you entered the boundary of the nothing, hyperspace or better yet hyper-inflation [big bang]. What someone inside the ether would see of you would look like a hole, not even a dark hole, just a hole. Now let’s suppose you had a whole lot of friends doing the same thing you were doing. Someone inside the ether might look at you and your friends and see something like holes but without darkness in the hole merely many distorted pockets of time and space that effected things in the ether. The holes would have no color that could distinguish it. The observer would just see the uniform color of the ether at its boundary. The only way the observer might notice the holes would be to detect odd behavior around the holes. They might call this odd behavior dark energy. It would be noticeable because it would not attract anything in the ether into the hole but repel everything away from the hole. Since things can only exist in the ether, things would be pushed away from the lack of ether. It might even have a counter effect to big objects that sink into puddles of ether and pull things behind them such that it would oppose this attraction and keep things in relative equilibrium so something massive would not pull the universe into the miry ether bog along with it.

Now, let’s suppose you slowed down more so that as you moved through the ether, the ether acted more like air. You would make air waves of sorts as you transverse through the ether. These waves would be more severe distortions of time and space. However, while the ether boundary reacted to your motion with waves, these waves do not act like normal waves. Because you were still moving very fast, much faster than 186,282 miles per second, you would look from inside the ether as if you were accelerating if you could be seen [which you can’t]. The waves or more severe distortions of time and space would not be equally spaced as they reached the boundary of the ether, sort of like a shore, they would catch up to each other as they neared the shore. However, the observer in the ether could not see this. What the observer can see is the shore, the boundary of the ether, where all the incoming very odd waves would finally converge and reinforce each other’s wave amplitudes infinitely such that they would appear to actually stop just at the ether boundary. Because you looked like you were accelerating from someone observing within the ether, the effect of this would be to allow the waves to catch up to each other and pile up from your motion at the ether boundary. The piling up of ether waves at the boundary would not have any mass at your current speed only severe distortions of time and space. It would be limited by the ether to 186,282 miles per second at the boundary. If someone were watching this from within the ether it would look like light. The wave would be time and it would be stopped at the boundary, the speed of light, but started again as the wave slowed more and moved toward the observer in the ether.

Now, let’s suppose that you slowed down even more while still moving faster than the speed of light. However, now infinitesimally small waves would crest over the light barrier and make tiny ripples in the ether that an observer in the ether could detect. These tiny ripples showed up as very small amounts of mass. To the observer in the ether, the mass would look like a particle or a wave depending on what the observer was looking for but, this is weird so let’s take a step back. Remember that you have a whole lot of your friends doing the same thing as you are doing. This means that all these spillover waves are clashing into each other producing a very frothy, bubbly mix of ether waves. Since some of your friends are shaped differently than you, the infinitesimally small, spillover waves would have different masses, shapes, spins, colors, strange characteristics, etc. as they chaotically crash into each other. Let’s say that you and your friends were really string shaped. The strange little masses that resulted from your slower speed waves in the ether might be perceived as a little piece of the string. The observer in the ether might think the resultant wave was a very tiny, sub-atomic particle like a quark or a lepton. Of course, you would know that you were not a tiny dot. You would know that the tiny particle representation of you that the observer saw was really only one little, tiny part of the string that you were. However, the observer in the ether could not see outside of the ether, outside of time and space so the observer would just think you and your friends were just tiny dots the observer called particles, tiny masses moving with momentum through the ether.

Let’s also say that you and your friends went right through the more dense part of the ether so that the observer would only see tiny particles come into and out of the ether existence. The observer would think that these tiny particles were rather quirky and random. However, let’s suppose some of your friends that had other shapes and sizes got stuck in the ether. Your stringy friends might get stuck at their ends or in the middle somewhere. They may even get stuck in two places so that the observer would see two dots or particles that appeared to be entangled with each other. The observer would see that whatever happened to one particle would instantly happen to the other particle even if the particles where on opposite sides of the ether universe. Whatever happened to one particle would happen to the other particle much faster than the speed of light. If your string friend was spinning one direction, the observer would see one particle spin clockwise and the other particle spin counter clockwise from the same string. If the observer changed the spin of one particle, the spin of the other particle would instantly change direction. If one particle was annihilated, the other particle would also instantly be annihilated. What the heck? They must be part of the same thing even though they look like two or more different things to the observer. If the observer looked for the tiny mass being moved around with momentum the observer would see it. However, if the observer was trying to see the waves in the frothy, gurgle of ether they could see the waves produced by you and your friends but the particle mass moving with momentum could not be observed at the same time. It is almost as the ether ‘knew’ what you were looking for and gave it to you. This would be one of those goofy characteristics of the ether. Some have even suggested that there might be other ether bubbles that behave very different from the ether in the observer’s bubble that you and your friends, these strings, might also move through…weird, huh? They call them parallel universes.

Now, remember the holes, the dark energy? What if our string friends that the observer sees as dot particles that punctuate the ether does something odd at the boundary of the more dense ether and the less dense ether. What if the strings, hyper-accelerated at the boundary where the ether gets thin or there are pockets of no ether, invert the mass the observer sees of the particle into a negative mass? In other words, instead of a tiny portion of the waves spilling over into the observer’s ether, the inability of the wave to spill back over into the nothing would create a kind of mass hole, a mass that is not positive but negative. Negative mass would be the trail of hyper-expansion just before the string particle passes out of existence at the boundary of the ether. The negative mass might repel rather attract inside the ether. Positive mass in the ether is an attractive force. Perhaps we could call this negative mass ‘dark mass’? Perhaps the dark mass would look like scaffolds, a trellis that the vine of the universe grows on, because it demarcates the thinning of the ether and even the lack of the ether at the pockets of nothingness.

The ether also has some other odd behavior. Remember the waves that created time and space? Let’s suppose that nothing could ever be lost in the ether, no information could ever be lost. Therefore, everything that had ever happed was still stored somehow in the ether. Now, let’s say that the ether had the very odd effect of only allowing some waves to combine. Remember that all your string friends have different shapes and sizes that result in waves with different masses, shapes, spins, colors, strange characteristics in the ether. Well, the ether has this strange but very specific ability to let certain very exact and particular waves combine to form combinational sub-atomic particles. Once combined, the ether might allow some of these combinational sub-atomic particles combine to make ever bigger particles called atoms. Moreover, atoms could also combine to form things; things like stars, planets, galaxies, animals, humans, trees, rocks…you know. Perhaps one way to understand the way the ether does this is to think about cells and viruses. Cells have keyholes that only very specific viruses have the key to open. If there is a key/keyhole match the virus is allowed to combine with the cell. What makes them combine?…a force. Different forces are also part of the key/keyhole match. Some particles are held together with very strong forces while others are held together with weaker forces. As things get bigger from quirky sub-atomic particles to atoms to very large things like solar systems different forces act on the different bodies with attractions that are electric and magnetic and also repulsive as when opposites do not attract. As bodies get really large the very large masses settle into the ether and make massive ruts and bogs in the ether that smaller masses tend to fall towards with an attraction that is absolutely gravitational. However, since everything is wanting to move where its own momentum is moving it, some bodies such as planets may not fall directly into the very large mass but circle around them as planets around a sun or moons around a planet. Of course, since ether is wacky by definition some masses are so extremely large that they poke a hole in the ether and other masses fall right into them like a nasty black hole. They might go out of existence as defined by the ether and into nothing.

In any case, forces are not some spooky action at a distance but might have very little, tiny sub-atomic carrier particles that carry the force through the frothy, gurgly mix of ether. The forces and their carriers are also part of the key/keyhole that helps things combine or keeps them apart. For example, cooper atoms have particles called electrons in shells. In the most outer shells electrons are held together with a weak force so they are easily knocked out of the shell. In a cooper wire, the electrons can be knocked out with an electric of magnetic field at one end of the wire. The electrons bump into atoms further in the wire and knock out their electrons. A chain reaction is setup that propagates all the way through the wire at a very high speed. This is called current. All forces are thought to have carrier particles that allow forces to move through the ether. Even the ether is thought to have carrier particles. The carrier particles are called the Higgs-Boson. When these odd combinational waves in the ether break down, masses become energy. When the waves combine, energy becomes masses.

Ok, remember that the ether remembers ALL. Let’s say that the observer in the ether has partially discovered how to decipher some of the information in the ether. The observer has figured out that by looking back to the beginning of the memory, very far out into space, towards the beginning of the universe, the observer can see forces merging into each other. As the observer looks into the stored memory, the observer sees that the way key and keyholes worked to combine things changed with the way forces changed as they combined with each other. Very odd things like quasars that could never exist in the observer’s time were massive accumulations of particles and energy that could not exist in the observer’s time or space. Even further back, some kind of particle plasma made spooky shapes sort of like the Northern Lights. Even further back some empty space where the ether was super concentrated seemed to propel everything out in hyper-expansion from a single point. Some have called this point a big bang but since no one was around to hear it…well, you know. In any case, remember the beginning of this silliness? Remember, “Any and all forces in the ether or outside the ether would be unified, the same force. We could say that everything was totally symmetrical, super-symmetry”? Well, that is where we started, isn’t it?

Thoughts of Dread

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Re-reading Blanchot’s essay “From Dread to Language” and thinking of Kierkegaard’s concept of Dread there is a feeling I have of self-obsession. Dread is the ultimate solipsism. Exteriority abandons oneself in Dread and leaves one in a state of irrecoverable and unsalvageable narcissism. The impending doom of an absolute immediate moment that cannot be intervened, mediated away and requires the blank death-like stare of Medusa’s face. Nothing can emerge from Dread and nothing can escape its orbit. Its event horizon refuses meaning, love, concern…otherness. It encapsulates and seals in tomb-like devotion. It is the mark of Death. Life requires that one escapes and flees in the face of Dread; that one is not swallowed into its catacombs. In Dread, life dreams. In the face of Dread, life requires awareness, movement away-from, emersion in otherness.

Dread, while incapable of exteriority, mimics absolute exteriority. It is as if the gaze of Dread paralyzes and stupefies while only bare consciousness is imprisoned in concretized death. The eyes cannot even blink only behold the site of Dread in emptiness. When life is encapsulated in death movement is always from without. As a marionette, movement is hollow and initiated as pure externality. When inwardness is raised to the infinite in Dread its absolute emptiness is exposed, raw and abysmally hollow. The result of absolute inwardness is absolute exteriority, mechanical, Frankenstein-like. It is the tornado-like act of god that can only consume itself, without ever knowing an end, as pure dread. Dread is all and in all, unabashed and without form. Form is the refuge life would take in the face of Dread. Form flees from formlessness. Life must always rise from the bog of Dread. The moment of mechanical exteriority must create a silhouette, a form. Thus language, meaning and sense must usher one from the gaze of Dread. The escape must create world, history…a shadow of the mechanical exteriority that faces it. In this then is the interlocutor, the mediation…the drunkenness of oblivion.

Oblivion here is not abstract extinction. It is release from ill y a, the meaningless background noise of existence. It is the moment of breath, the sacrament of defilement. It raises the exteriority imposed by Dread into a false god, a simulacrum of its tormentor. In this way life can ‘face’ Dread, get a handle on it, and make it other than what it is…bare ‘isness’. With this then is the third person.

The third person is the narrator, the voice of god, the chorus of tragedy. The third person is not a he or a she but an ‘it’. It is the oracle that gathers and holds. It sanctifies by stealing away the moment of Dread. It is the neuter, the thing. It truncates the absolute emptiness of dread into an abject object. As ‘suchness’, the thing resonates and glimmers in effervescent release. Life therefore becomes the retreat from the stymied death of Dread.

In all this a map is traced of syntax and semantic, infinite orthogonality…the trace the can never be untied from the knot of existence. It can only be reaffirmed in its obscurity. This then is oblivion.

At this point Levinas might take a turn. Could it be that the gazes of Dread is none other than the face of the other. The other not as something I know or am familiar with but as the puppeteer the marionette can never know, shed light on, see and perceive. Why must Dread get its birth from nothingness and self-petrifaction? If Levinas is right, the absolute alterity of the other that can never be ‘mine’ or even recuperable as in ‘my’ time, a temporal ecstasies, take on the truncated form of a thing, can make Dread the expression of absolute impotency, infinitely more passive than passivity. The negativity of form yet rests on form. However, the notion of alterity that Levinas may be hinting at may only show itself as an unnoticed breeze through autumn’s fall, the sadness of my love’s passing, a ghostly clearing in the wood where sun-filled rays go unnoticed. In the excess, the abundance of this alterity a glimmer of grace eclipses the gaze of Dread, a still small voice that easily goes unnoticed plays around the moment of death…and children play while Dread takes its last breath.

With regard to a discussion on causality…

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My initial post to a question about causality…

One thing that comes to mind is Schrödinger’s cat. Determinations are made by the act of observation that preclude certain results and determine causal outcomes. Could we think of the “box” as determining the result?…perhaps better to think of the observer as predisposing physics towards his expectations – quite a murky business in any case.

After the deserved critcism of being too “poppy” I expanded the explanation…

Yes, perhaps a bit “poppy” in my brief post but the mystery remains. Speaking of the observable disorder in molecules Schrodinger writes, “But whether any particular molecule, supposing you could follow, its course, will be among those which have reacted or among those which are still untouched, he [the chemist] could not predict. That is a matter of pure chance. This is not a purely theoretical conjecture. It is not that we can never observe the fate of a single small group of atoms or even of a single atom. We can, occasionally. But whenever we do, we find complete irregularity, co-operating to produce regularity only on the average.”

“What Is Life”, pdf page 27

http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

It is a bit of a wishful leap to suggest that the phenomena that Schrodinger observed on the quantum scale has been “explained”. His supposition was that order arises out of chaos (peros from aperion) not unlike the thoughts of Plato, I might add.

I would submit that the slit experiment can actually strengthen my rather anemic response. When individual photons are emitted through two slits (or more) to the photographic film, the apparent simultaneity of the photon passing through both slits introduces an uncertainty that has yet to be explained. While Schrodinger referred to this “mystery” as entanglement, Heisenberg addressed the wave particle duality in his “uncertainty principle”. Subatomic particles incessantly pop in and out of existence in a way that disallows determinism and can only be explained statistically with essential and inherent uncertainty.

Forgive the indulgence but according to the Copenhagen Interpretation (not pop) if you never measure the x-spin (box, i.e., Schrodinger) of an electron, it will never jump to an eigenstate of x-spin and thus will have a 100% probability of y-spin (a contradictory state). The conclusion is that observable results depend on whether the electron is in an indeterminate state or determinate but unknown state. Indeterminate states are not just determinate states we have no knowledge of. Physical objects actually behave differently depending on whether their states are unknown or indeterminate.

One need look no further than quantum entanglement, the spooky action at a distance that Einstein despised and tried to refute with his EPR paradox only to end up showing the non-classical characteristics of the measurement process.

A Couple Quotes:

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

Niels Bohr

I think that I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Richard Feynman

I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

Erwin Schrödinger

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Category Archives: Physics

Philosophy Series 4

A Day in the Life of a Groundhog

A Thought Experiment with God’s Particle

Thoughts of Dread

With regard to a discussion on causality…