Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Much Ado About Nothing: Chapter 4: Part 1

From the Perspective of Light

In Blake, there are two kinds of opposition, negative and contrary. The contrary to love is hate, the negation is all that which is not love. The principle of negative theology is to leave the practitioner in a cloud of unknowing, which shuts down the left side of our brains so that some revelation can be experienced via the negation of all that which is not God. The right side of the brain sees the world in a very different way than the left hemisphere. The right side collapses all distinctions into an all embracing unity ( Click here for source ) while the left side makes distinctions between this or that thing. The right side of the brain realizes that the consciousness is united to the external world, and in fact extends beyond the body. Therefore to speak of anything in a way which does not contradict itself is largely to only understand half the story. Thus in writing about concepts such as Truth (with a big T) we are compelled to speak in contradictions, because the understanding of left brain, and the understanding of the right brain are necessarily antagonistic, and it is in this antagonism that truths are forged.

"Here, we are dealing with forms of consciousness each of which in realizing itself at the same time abolishes and transcends itself, has for its result its own negation - and so passes to a higher form."
Hegel "Dialectics" from the Science of Logic

How then do we begin to understand a "logic" that has as its end its own abolition? Here's a better question, what is similar about love and hate? They are both passionate expressions of emotion. What is similar between a unity and a division? They both consider the relationship of parts. Most things when scrutinized fully will reveal themselves to be caught up in some contradiction, so if logic fails, as logic must always fail, to come to terms with that which it describes, then all that is left to say is a structural mimicking of an actual event. This, of course, even if true would need to be abolished. Even if no explanation is possible, and no description adequate, writing will always be, for it is a surrogate memory, and a craft that is part art, and part science.

If we believe Hegel, then the author who speaks in contradiction, transcends by abolition, and this too is inadequate, because there are more ways to transcend a thing than self-abolition, and if we think rigorously enough we are not left with a vague notion of dimension, but rather a vague notion of dimensionality, an n-foldedness which is present at every point in space.

When we look at the world around us, we see light bouncing off the magnetic fields of the objects in our view. We don't see the objects themselves, rather, we interpret using our senses. We hear the vibration of molecules, not the molecules themselves. Being able to hear still objects unmoved could be a veritable definition of deafness. Being able to see air would be blindness.

The self-abolishing nature of $This Sentence is False$ abolishes the capacity for universal truth. It speaks of a relativism which itself it undermines, for if there is no universal truth, then there is one universal truth, that there is no universal truth.

Much of my work in dealing with this paradox has been to save relativism from this easy dismissal. I failed. Relativism is dead, but Relativity isn't. Relativity argues that things look different to observers moving at different speeds, and the observation is relative to the observer. So there is a universal truth, things do happen, there is a correct and false answer. There are myriad paths to take that lead to it.

Everything may be fine to God, but I am still allowed to judge when I see an evil act, and I am still allowed to call it evil, and this principle is not based on logic, but rather ethics, principles and fundamentals which I hold dear.

Much of what constitutes Relativity is based in the boundless imagination of Albert Einstein, who road a beam of light all the way to our most pivotal expression of the truth. It may be overturned in time by String Theory, which is attempting to resolve the macrocosm's math with the microcosm, but until that day, Einstein's imagination is the closest we've come to understanding our universe and its fundamental equation, e=mc^2, which sets energy at a symmetry of mass and the speed of light. The equation discusses only three principles, the speed of light, energy, and mass. It predicts that matter is a form of energy, and thus no clear distinction between the two is possible, though we think of energy as a verbal property, and mass as a noun. The constant always describes some relationship.

The mathematics then is a simulation of the real, a description of how these pieces interact and relate to one another. The speed of light is equal to the square root of energy divided by matter. From the perspective of something traveling at the speed of light, time would stop completely, and this brings us back to Blake, who writes at points in his "illuminated texts" from a collapsed temporal framework, ie: from the perspective of light.

From a collapsed temporal framework, things in mutable time would happen simultaneously, the past and future collapse into an expanding present, and presencing is not a matter of things coming into being, but rather being coming into things, at every temporal angle.

Again, to see things outside of the temporal framework mandates thinking in paradox, and paradox (or contradiction, though not all contradictions are created equally) is the modality of that form of reasoning.

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