Plato's Fine Fabric
intricate and connected
wrapped, swaddled
like the baby jesus
hold, held, beholden
the soul's connection strong and true.
A reaching,
longing cherished
woven into something that cares,
supports and washes, over and through
Like a fine fabric,
adornment and containment of focus in caring for our souls.
Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex." - Karl Marx
"Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution." - Robert Zend
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." - Bertrand Russell
"Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation." - C.S. Lewis
early Sunday morning - Oakland, CA - weather is sunny with blue skies, but very chilly
How does one know if one is becoming a philosopher? Are there signs and symptom-like things you get or notice yourself doing? Does waking up crying most of the days qualify? Does feeling like you, your whole self, is becoming transparent qualify? Does feeling like you are losing your figure-ground perspective (in all life aspects mind you!)qualify oneself?
Does talking about yourself in the third person give you entrance in this what-I-would-think-is a highly selective 'club'?
OK - How about feeling like you are connected to most everyone, yet can't seem to quite make any deep, lasting connection with anyone? What about feeling that everything is so damn ethereal?
And last but not least - trying to universalize all your thinking - yup, that's one of the capstones for being a philohead, I would think!
I'm beginning to see the connection between some type of mental illness and being a philosopher :-)
And sadly, I woke up this morning thinking that I had become a philosopher. What's a girl to do?
Pillars:
1. Intrapersonal = What's inside yourself
2. Extrapersonal = Your family, friends, social organizations
3. Vocation/Work
4. Spiritual
So I'm back at my southern home, and on the front porch reflecting on what I feel I'm lacking out here when I'm in the South, and trying to figure out what I'm getting when I'm on the West Coast...what make me happy and feeling more fullfilled...
And I'm looking out over the neighborhood and I'm not seeing people, no one - not a single person. Big yards, bigger houses, single folks riding in their single cars, and I'm suddenly hit by what is lacking here - just PEOPLE, and with the absence of people, most importantly, diversity. There's no people interacting with other people - there is hardly any diverse population base interacting with other diverse populations. The primary socializing places (including diversity) in the South are church, the workplace, and educational institutions (colleges and universities).
I realized that I (and most others?) need their environment to provide the diversity and social interaction within those 4 pillars I mentioned above, to be a complete, wholistic and authentic human being. Aren't we all social creatures? Don't we, developmentally speaking, gain from our (hopefully) richly diverse environment? Isn't passage through the Eriksonian stages highly dependent on a richly diverse social network?
Why do we pay so much attention to the importance of one's environment for infants and children, but not for adults? I think one's social environment, and the effects of it on our development as whole human beings - our attitudes, our values, etc. - is just as important in adulthood as it is for youngsters. Is there diversity in your states/geographical region, in one (or all!) of those 4 Pillar areas?
Well, maybe not CRAZY, just nuts!
OK - so here's the rest of the singulation process - it's pretty much done.
1. Reality as ambiguious space (can be multidimentional space) no movement
2. Classical physics (unidirectional)
Matter comes together with time via observation = Singulation happens!
3. Our reality = normal perception allows for 3 dimensional experience
Arrow of time past ......present......future = as we perceive it in the role of observer
(This is why we can't see into the past, because singulation has happened, so singulation = absolute spacetime
That's why we can't see into the future because singulation HASN'T happened yet.
I had a philosophic revelation yesterday during class. McDermott was handing around books, and one of the them, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition by Andrew Louth, gave me a damn momentous insight about Plato and the meaning (interpretation) of nous.
The whole Introduction discussed the importance of the meaning of the word nous, and how its meaning was more spiritual than intellectual one.
“Nous is usually translated as “mind” or “intellect”. Part of the problem is that neither of these words is as rich in derived forms as the Greek nous (they have, most significantly, no verb)....The most fundamental reason for this is a cultural one: the Greeks were pre-Cartesian, we are all post-Cartesian. We say, ‘I think, therefore I am’, that is thinking is an activity I engage in and there must therefore be an ‘I’ to engage in it; the Greeks would say, ‘I think, therefore there is that which I think – to noeta’.
OMG! What a difference interpretation makes!
Nope. I can't.
Why do I seem to want to either "prove" the singulation process, with some equation, or throw out the spirituality piece?
Sean mentioned the word singulation in class the other day! Wow! He talked about his not believing in the standard concept of "time", because time needed a position and a frame of reference, and physics say that before the Big Bang, there was nothing, so we have no frame in which to place a long time ago, or place something in the future. I think I'm explaining this correctly.
I mentioned that now, due to quantum mechanics, energy did exist before the Big Bang, but it (IMHO) singualted a the moment of the bang, so there was something before, in order to have something after...
I'll have to look up what the physicists say "happened" when the BB occured. So if there was nothing before (like in traditional physics), what came together and what was that thing that happened, called?
This is Erin, March's daughter! She is here in North Carolina visiting! We woke up late this morning and went out to yard sales. She is talking with a slight lisp, so we are calling her Daffy Duck!
Erin
OK - I don't really need to "deal" with the motion part -
For singulation to happen you only need energy or consciousness and time. I think all the other reading I'm doing is confuzing me!
"In the classical mechanics a given object is either a particle or a wave." In quantum mechanics, the emphasis is on the "primacy of measurement", and for me, in the act of observing, we singulate the behavior or properties to become one or another of these properties.
From another SI article speaking about Time - "It arises when theorists try to turn Einstein's general theory of relativity into a quantum theory using a procedure called canonical quantization. The procedure worked brilliantly when applied to the theory of electromagnetism, but in the case of relativity, it produces an equation - the Wheeler-DeWitt equation - without a time variable. Taken literally, the equation indicates that the universe should be frozen in time, never changing."
Well, the process od singulation changes that. Every time energy changes from the wave to the particle or from the particle to the wave, upon observervation, for that attosecond, time stops. Time freezes. Just for that process to happen, and then things resume, under whatever forces or principle the thing now belongs to, or adheres by.
OK - now I need a friendly physicist to write me an equation, so I can test this idea. Any volunteers?
Here's the Wikipedia thing on the Wheeler-De-Witt equation -
In theoretical physics, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is an equation that a wave function of the Universe should satisfy in a theory of quantum gravity. An example of such a wave function is the Hartle-Hawking state.
Simply speaking, the WDW equation says
H |\psi\rangle = 0
where H is the total Hamiltonian constraint in quantized general relativity.
In general the Hamiltonian vanishes for a theory with time scaling invariance.
There is also a diffeomorphism constraint.
10/16/05 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler-DeWitt_equation
I really haven't a clue what all that means - I'm needing some help here!
OK - I'm just going to dump all this stuff out there, mostly from SI articles and Science and Spirit, and then try to relate the Singulation process to it...
'Special relativity theory also states that physical laws are invariant for moving observers, but space and time are not. But if space and time are combined in the proper way, the changes in time due to relativity exactly cancel the changes in space, which results in an "invariant interval" of the combination. "
Schrodinger's cat paradox = symmetry is broken when observer looks at cat
The existance of Level III depends on one crutical assumption: that the time evolution of the wave function is unitary.
Hugh Everett III - many worlds interpretation - mathmatical object called a wave function = according to the cat guy's equation, this state evolves over time that is called unitary.
Wave function rotates in an abstract infinite-dimensional space, called Hilbert Space. This wave function evolves in deterministic manner.
Ol' Hugh predicted that one classical reality gradually splits into superpositions of many such realities...with probabilties in exact agreement with those from the old collapse postulate...This superposition of classical worlds is the Level III multiverse.
Decoherence process = mimics wave function collapse while preserving unitarity.
Most people think of time as a way to describe change.
I think my explaination is an attempt to meld the spirit side with the physics and consciousness parts...
The singulation process is not just where only ONE observer, or just the observer, has an effect - it's a process of two things coming together in that moment when you take a peek in the box to see if the cat is dead or alive (see Schrödinger's Cat). In a way, it is the potential energy of the quantum., it's that stopping of both time and motion that makes reality.
OK - now, the two parts of the process...my dad, Alvin, Dick and I were talking about this today...
IF consciousness is in all things, and if the observer 'looks', which transforms the wave into the particle, that's only the focusing of that consciousness...so I don't think that's right.
What about the soul? Not one's soul, but the soulness of the collective...the glue that interacts with consciousness...
I'm thinking abou that - consciousness and the collective soul, as being the two things, that in an instant, stop time and motion, which that process I'm calling singulation, that reality is created.
Reading and reflecting on Bridging Science and Spirit by Norman Friedman
p. 74 - Friedman is parphasing a point in Briggs and Peat's book Looking Glass Universe..."The timeless order of the wave function is changed into the timed order of the three-dimensional world where real experience takes place. This process is called the quantum mechanical arrow of time. Irreversible time is the result of breaking the symmetry of a timeless order."
New word - SINGULATE
Meaning = to freeze, to identify and make real, to remove time and motion (if only for an instant), a process
Singulation is the process of how a wave becomes a particle, or how a particle becomes a wave.
Through the process of singulation, consciousness and the soul (the ether) make reality.
Singulation is the absence or instant removal, or temporary stopping of, time and motion, in order to make something a reality.
OK - so, imagine the table top of your kitchen table is ether, moving at faster than the speed of light...we see on the table top all of reality and events, past though (Dick said future too, but I'm not sure yet) Jesus's birth, the fall of rome, my birth, your son's wedding, etc. Through singulation, meaning through the observer, ones consciousness interacting with ones soul, there suddenly, in an instant, the motion of all the ether and time stops, and things become a reality, reality that we can experience, so those items become reality, a change happens. What is at work here is similar to to Heisenberg's Uncertainity Principle -
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htm
in that on that table top, we can only see the past events ( I answered the ify part above!) because we can only locate the position (in the past) because the momentum is still too fast.
Another similarity is the Hubble Telescope findings of the Deep Field, of getting energy pictures of the billion years ago old universe -
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/1996/01/text/
We are seeing into the past, that's because our consciousness has singulated that small part of the table top - of the ether, or really, consciousness.
What's the moon in today? Yikes! I know it's full....Here's one way to check = http://www.lunarliving.org/index.shtml
this one works too = http://www.astroprofile.com/2005moonphases.htm
I'm obviously pretty out-to-lunch today...My shuffle is going between Green Day's Americian Idiot and The Stones' Gimmie Shelter...
I'm currently "hunting" intellectually about the relationship (?) between educational philosophy, instructional design, pedagogy, and critical thinking "skills" - I put the skills word in parentheses because they are skills, not pedagogy, actively learned, not underlying thinking framework.
I'm really just exploring all this - some connection is forming, but I haven't quite got there yet...
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/perspectives2005.Jan.htm
that's all for now :-)
List of favorites - (can also be used as a legal 420)...Feel free to recommend your own favs - we have our own taste-testing almost everyday around here - my, what a wonderful place to work!
1. Frango Chocolates - http://www.fields.com/common/fl_frango.jsp Comments: The truffles are to die for - lots of butter and fat in these babies!
2. Unique Origin Varietal Chocolates - GUARANDA, Dark European 71% Cocoa (100% Arriba unblended) Comments: Very deep!
3. Hachez - Cocoa D'Arriba 77% Cocoa Mild Bitter Chocolate Comments: Very bitter, almost too much (maybe 'cause of the high cocoa content?)
4. Valor - Pure Dark Chocolate, 70% (Made in Spain) Comments: OK - just ok, not much to write home about
So I'm thinking that my taste preferences have something to do with the % of chocolate, which I would assume has something to do with the % of sugar or sweetness in them as well...umm...I guess I'll have to experiment more....um!
A web-based program to store and most coolly, SHARE your Favorites links - at least that's what I'm checking out....
http://www.furl.net/index.jsp
Check it out for yourself - and let me know what you think!
So - what's up with feeling funky???
I'm not sure - I'm just feeling this way today...
Main Entry: 2funkyFunction: adjectiveInflected Form(s): funk·i·er; -estEtymology: funk (offensive odor)1 : having an offensive odor : FOUL2 : having an earthy unsophisticated style and feeling; especially : having the style and feeling of older black American music (as blues or gospel) or of funk 3 a : odd or quaint in appearance or feeling b : lacking style or taste c : unconventionally stylish : HIP- funk·i·ness noun
>thanks, M-W Online dictionary - www.m-w.com
In my look-see at other Blogs' I came across this story - it's about Intelligent Design and the teaching of Biology - really an indictment of the whole ID paradigm and how to subvert it through a semi-real process of "research" and inquiry - and it's sharply funny too :-)
Thanks to www.donblake.com - that's where it comes from....
http://www.donblake.com/taogo/archives/2005/05/what_do_sand_st.html
Interesting presentations this year....
1. Drexel University is being a ASP (Application Server Provider) and seems to be doing a good job at both large and small colleges....very competitive, if not downright cheap, on their pricing too.
They haven't posted their presentation yet, but here's a bit about the CIO, John Bielec -
http://www.drexel.edu/dateline/default_nik.pl?of=1&p=releaseview&f=20030106-01
2. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is doing some cool stuff with "flexible templates" - in the Knowledge Media Lab specifically -
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/KML/index.htm
OK - so I'm interested in a LOT of things - teaching and learning w/technology, pedagogy of online instruction, curriculum design, gender issues in education, integral education, free schools, cool technology, and of course other things not directly related to education - knitting, textiles and fabrics, linen production, mandalas, music, brain research, brain tumors... yeah - that's enough for right now...
I'm using this blog to post all the stuff that seems to be pent up in my head - and include lots of links and graphics and clips, so everyone can comment and start a dialogue...your welcome to post and add too.
No spam or impolites please.
