Thinking About Logic and Rationality

Thinking about Logic and Rationality: Thoughts on a book by Robert Hanna "Rationality and Logic," MIT Press Jack Leissring, Santa Rosa, CA

This effort results, it seems to me, from my reaction to a response from Robert Hanna. Thus a true dialectic and also a manifestation of what happens (to me) at an intersection with a life event. As I have considered his ideas, now for many years, the chance discovery (!) of a little book by Roger Poole titled: "Towards Deep Subjectivity" changed my understanding of the world in significant ways. Poole focuses upon the events of the 'Sixties' a time when as Andre Gregory says, in the libretto to "My dinner with Andre: " In fact, it seems to me quite possible that the nineteen sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished."

In short, Poole's assertion suggests that "objectivity" is a will O the wisp, an hopeful, but imaginary state of being, difficult--nay, impossible to prove the existence of. Poole also appears to describe the activities--the processes--which go on in any encounter with the 'world.' My younger days imagined this as a Darwinian algorithm, inserted through time and experience into the animal (and amazingly, the plant) to protect it from predators or from unexpected potentials. The encounters yield ethical or moral responses, responses which form the shape of our actions and reactions. Poole demonstrates this using photographs of historical events--again, one picture and the myriad words.

The list of philosophers chosen by Hanna in his book "Rationality and Logic," (MIT Press) conforms to my own in many ways, while I might add George Lakoff (Mark Johnson and Rafael Nunez) to Chomsky, Quine, because of his association with Ullian and his little book: "The Web of Belief," other early Greek thinkers added to Aristotle, and Goethe to Kant.

Kant has always been a problem for me; no, not Kant the writer/man, but the effluvia, the crowd of loyalists who appear to surround an idea of him. Strangely Christ-like and likely as much a fable as Christianity. Yet, I don't know. Do we humans have a tendency to adoration? Was Levi-Strauss correct in describing our triangular tendencies: to place at the apex the tribal leader as the rest of the tribe occupy the area of the triangle?

Let me see if I can 'diagram' the path that has led to here--to this essay whose end-point I cannot foresee. Bob Hanna, an academic philosopher with a host of admirable characteristics, teaches and writes from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a writer whose style very much appeals to me; in the truest meaning of the idea that surrounds a dialectic. His writing implies that the reader is sitting across from him in a coffee shop and they are having a conversation. Would that other academics adopt such a form, the world would be a better place.

Hanna confesses what he is and is not: "I am a philosopher who by virtue of a deep interest in human rationality is also deeply interested in logic and cognition, I am neither a professional logician nor a professional cognitive psychologist. So I want to make it very clear in advance that I am drawing and relying even more heavily than is usual for philosophers on the theoretical expertise of others." Because Hanna's book is titled: "Rationality and Logic," MIT Press, 2006, I make here the assumption that by rationality in a sentient human he means that this person (or animal) is acting/behaving because of reasons to do so. I must say if that is his definition for the word, then we are off to a bad start: there are countless individuals who are guided by nonsense. So let me assume Hanna means that the person (or animal, or plant!) is acting rationally if a reason is based on strong evidence--in short empiricism.

Hanna also abstracts from diversity: Goya (the artist) and Pascal (the thinker). I must describe myself here: at one time I had strong attractions to a life of academic science--medical science. Even in medical school my tendencies were towards attempting to answer questions raised by biological observations. Before graduating from medical school in 1961, I had completed four "significant" papers that concerned some of the earliest forays into immunology, both animal and human. The papers won me a Borden award for undergraduate research, so, there was, at least, potential. Rites of passage included internship, movement of mind and body to another geographic place, an awakening to the "sixties" in California, quite next to where it was happening in Berkeley, and finally entering the hallowed halls of Stanford, where I spent the next four years learning and watching what was the essence of academia. 'Nay nay' I said to myself. While the possibilities were enticing, and, I could see myself at least in a rank amongst the professors and teachers, there appeared a shadow between what I felt myself to be and what the constraints of place and group seemingly demanded. The ideation was pure metaphysical. So, I never did the experiment and I admit I acted upon a form of rationality and logic in forming my choice. Of course there was the ghost of Poole looking over my shoulder as I must have made my ethical and moral choices from the encounter with this academic world I was watching.

As they say: " Things happen." The empiricist in me sees now, almost 65 years later, that I must have, in my own way, done the experiment and generated a life that was both (apparently) satisfactory, much larger than a life constrained to academia, quite rich, filled with joy, disappointments, love and fear, but definitely focused upon several "non-academic' parts of the world: art, music, architecture, and thinking.

It is apparently "thinking" that brings me to this essay, for what I think about is usually the question "why?" It started very early if memory serves--and memory itself is part of the thinking processes and the attempts to understand things. I would like to know "why" everything happens. This may be a wish that can never be known, for it fits into the ideation of a grand theory of everything, an idea that many of the modern theoretical physicists hope to achieve. Let me also at this point introduce another member of the group of advisors of whom I spoke earlier: Harry G. Frankfurt, a philosopher from Princeton who wrote a little book of significance: "On Bullshit." Included in the early part of the book is this: "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share." I imply nothing by this inclusion, and yet. . .

So, I intend to wander through the woods, so to speak, of "Rationality and Logic" and to see if I may have wandered awry during my life of whatever it has been. Indeed, I should say I will be wandering the pathway of the labyrinth of rationality and logic and will have something to say, probably too much, about what I am currently accepting as my position in the web of belief.

It is clear to me that my place in this world is dependent upon a foundation, just as a building depends upon its foundation roots to achieve its being. I may have discussed most of these things that I am about to revisit in the form of a large series of books that I have written and published--currently 41 to date. Of course I took my own path as I have done with almost everything; I was not interested in the capitalistic/monetary rewards, rather, I imagined these books as a way to clarify my thinking, to create an object of artistic worth, and to place somewhere my "self" in a position where it could be studied, were that of interest to anyone, but mainly for my sons.

Today, while thinking about this project, I recalled a movie once watched that concerned a woman teaching in a university who adopted the point of view that it was not necessary to study the ancients: the Greeks and German philosophers and writers, but that one could start more recently; she believed the result would be the same.

This is an intriguing idea. Google, which seems to have devolved into another profit-based tool, has lost its ability to search for arcane and curious entities: my attempts at describing my goal resulted in useless outpouring. I thus asked my movie buff friend. We shall see who wins this one.

Let us adopt for purposes of this discussion--for I feel as it I am having a discussion of sorts with you and Bob Hanna--the accuracy of the assertion (mine) that the study of philosophy is the history of ideas. Let us also accept the assertion that each of us is grounded in some way by exposure to dogmatic influences in the form of what we accept as our education. Those who attend primary schools sponsored by religions are taught the tenets of those religions. Bob Hanna, in a response to a critique I made about Zeno's Paradox used the following phrase: "I completely agree! that the Logical Empiricists' conventionalist theory of logic--& that's what you would have been taught as an undergraduate--is nothing an empty game;" I want to focus on the implications of the phraseology for it coincides with some of the ideas I am discussing here. The phrase "would have been taught," carries with it the potential that "I would have learned." And yet, because of my nature--a sceptic, I in fact accepted A. J. Ayer's (1937) point of view through my own study: Dr. Ramsperger, taught the course at Wisconsin (Madison) and who wrote the text "Philosophies of Science" (Crofts, 1942) which was used to some extent in the course. Even as early as 1942, Ramsperger described his view that "Logical Positivism" had run its course.

Here, I include the opening remarks from Ramsperger's book: "Philosophies of Science," Croft, 1942: "IT IS FORTUNATE for mankind that it is possible to have knowledge without being clear as to what knowledge is. If the scientific conclusions by which we direct our lives had to wait upon the philosopher's assurance that they were based upon the correct theory of knowledge, that the subject matter dealt with is real, and that certain postulates such as causal de­terminism are justified, man would probably have perished from the earth while science awaited its philosophical cre­dentials. There can be science without a philosophy of science.

Nevertheless, the inquiring intellect desires not merely to know, but also to understand what knowing is; and it is not unlikely that a scientist will make advances in his particular field as a result of clearer insight into what science is. As for those who are not specialists in science, but who wish to take advantage of anything that science has to offer toward achiev­ing a desirable way of life, it is important that the nature of scientific knowledge be not misunderstood. That is why those who are not professional scientists, as well as those who are, may profit from a study of the philosophy of science. If spec­tacular scientific advance has not been accompanied by a corresponding achievement in human values, the lack of an adequate philosophy of science may well be largely responsi­ble.

The philosophy of science is not a synthesis of the results of the various sciences. When theories are formulated which bring into one system the less comprehensive laws of separate sciences, it is the scientist who formulates them, not the philos­opher. Neither is the philosophy of science speculation about possible answers to unsolved problems at the frontiers of science. Here too it is the scientist who is in a position to frame suitable hypotheses, capable of being tested by scientific meth­ods. A book on the nature of scientific knowledge and the rela­tion of knowledge to human values need not, then, require of the reader advanced knowledge in the different fields of science and mathematics; only so much acquaintance with scientific methods and results is presupposed as will suffice for an understanding of typical scientific statements or laws cited to illustrate the philosophical issues under discussion. In many books purporting to deal with the philosophy of science —especially those written by professional scientists—the philo­sophical issues tend to become lost because their authors try to get in a survey of all the sciences or their history, or an account of the more startling recent developments.

In the present book the emphasis is upon the philosophical interpretation of science and only enough scientific exposition is introduced to give the argument adequate illustration. Only a few technical terms, either philosophical or scientific, have been found necessary. Consequently the book should be in­telligible both to students in philosophy of science courses, who come to the subject with varied scientific backgrounds, and to scientists and others interested in the nature of scien­tific knowledge and its function in society.

Different interpretations of science are discussed, but cer­tain points of view are definitely favored. In epistemology and theory of reality a relativistic position is defended. My general philosophical outlook has been considerably influenced by Professors E. B. McGilvary and A. E. Murphy. On ques­tions of value and the social implications of science a scien­tific humanism is favored as against any form of supernatu­ralism."

And yet, in my understanding of the events that followed upon Ayer's youthful (I think he says about himself) enthusiasm, if accepted in its 'pure' form, that philosophical position would have ended most of philosophical discussions. Viewers from the outside of academic philosophy, like Mencken, who was blessed with a biting but often accurate tongue, wrote that most philosophers simply talked about other philosopher's ideas (and their own) and most of it was twaddle.

Well, there seemed (to me) to be a dangerous rift in academic philosophy were the Positivists to win the battle: what would the philosophers talk about that was not nonsensical in the view of the LP's?

I'd like to return to my movie metaphor, above. If philosophy be the history of ideas; history, too, qua history, must be a prime example of metaphysics, there being no way to restart the time lines and test the conclusions of historians. Historians, then are adept at generating fables that may or may not have any relationship to actual events: I offer the Christian religions as the prime example of a fable that carried a kind of truthiness into what should have been finished with many years ago. A favorite philosopher of mine, R. G. Collingwood tried to help the historians via his book:" The idea of History," 1946.

But this is what we are--we humans; we seem to love fables. Rail against that and one is screaming at the waves of the ocean to halt.

So it is likely no-one will accept this, but I say even the study of the ancients--in the view of this now fabulous-until-discovered movie--cannot be a true dialectic; we can't have a discussion with Kant or Aristotle or Heidegger or Goethe. We are forced to make-up our impression of these historical figures based upon what they (allegedly) said and what others said about them. Is that a scientific vector? It may be as good as it can be, but it does indeed raise the validity of our imaginary movie teacher who questions whether we need concern ourselves with the ancients.

In some ways, by avoiding them, we start with a firmer foundation. For let me again return to the architectural metaphor: we have learned the things that concern the ideation of a few thinkers years ago, through rigorous experimental study. And while even the strongest of the foundation stones might be cracked at some future time, this is the best we have. Would my currently imaginary teacher be correct in avoiding study of (say) the four men I mentioned a paragraph ago? For me, it is fun to 'think' about the four and many others, but/and do I believe (see Quine) they owned a correct 'world view' at their time? And it seems that what each of us, those who think about it, does is gather an increasingly sturdy form of foundation upon which we each built our world view. I've said all this before, many times in emails, books, essays and such, and I have not deviated far from this view. Schrodinger definitely helped us by pointing out why most of us do not separately define our world view, rather we employ that world view in our very actions. In his words: "The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture."

With that startling observation please follow me further. I do the following because it seems foolish to re-invent something that I have already generated in a slightly different form. I will include two recent essasy, similar in scope and minimally different in aim and apologize to those who took the time to read these before this essay appeared.

I shall include some of Hanna's text here and make my comments, but my world view is better described in the connected essays. Robert Hanna: "logic is cognitively constructed by rational animals and that rational human animals are essentially logical."

"logic is intrinsically psychological, and that human psychology is intrinsically logical."

"logic is true, whereas empirical psychology deals only with human belief."

"In my opinion, the view that logic and psychology are fundamentally at odds with one another could not be more mistaken.

"So much for a preliminary internal characterization of the science of logic. But what about the specifically philosophical question about the nature of logic? My answer is that the nature of logic is explained by the logic faculty thesis: logic is cognitively constructed by rational animals."

"So, to put my first central claim yet another way, logic is cognitively constructed by all and only those normative-reflective animals who are also in possession of concepts expressing strict modality."

"Put historically, this is the Humean conception of rationality, according to which “reason is the slave of the passions.”

"rational human animals are essentially logical animals, in the sense that a rational human animal is defined by its being an animal with an innate constructive modular capacity for cognizing logic, a competent cognizer of natural language, a real-world logical reasoner, a competent follower of logical rules, a knower of necessary logical truths by means of logical intuition, and a logical moralist. This is what I call the logic-oriented conception of human rationality."

"So if I am correct about the connection between rationality and logic, it follows that the nature of logic is significantly revealed to us by cognitive psychology."

"Wittgenstein pregnantly remarks in the Tractatus that “logic precedes every experience—that some thing is so." "Wittgenstein equally pregnantly remarks in the Investigations that: [I]f language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so."

"Chapter 3 deals with a deep problem called the logocentric predicament, which arises from the very unsettling fact that in order to explain any logical theory, or justify any deduction, logic is presupposed and used—so logic appears to be both inexplicable and unjustified."

"In chapter 4, I argue that human thinking conforms to what I call the standard cognitivist model of the mind, a model which has its remote origins in Kant’s transcendental psychology and its proximal sources in Chomsky’s psycholinguistics. This model includes representationalism or intentionalism, innatism or nativism, constructivism, modularity, and a mental language or language of thought."

My general response to these introductory statements by Bob Hanna (to his book "Rationality and Logic," MIT Press, 2006) starts with a story. When my son began his educational journey he rooted himself in the 'department of psychology' at UC Berkeley. During his journey there came events which appeared to make the word 'psychology' unutterable in polite academic circles, so there occurred a scramble to rename university buildings to something less questionable. A variety of names was employed ranging from 'neuroscience' to his current place at UCI: Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND). In that same period of time shifts in the understanding of the relationship between body and brain were undergoing changes as were studies asking about the relationship between emotion and brain and body. Was this a Kuhnian paradigm shift? Well in a way it was. Lakoff, originally a student of Chomsky and also of mathematics announced his departure from Chomsky with his first book: "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things," University of Chicago, 1987. This was his first foray into semantics and possibly his new direction into ideas concerning Embodied Minds. Ranging broadly through concepts of metaphor and mathematics he has convincingly showed that our (human) ideas of metaphor and mathematics result from the one-ness of the brain/body connection. If Lakoff and Nunez are correct, their book:"Where Mathematics Comes From," published in 2000 by Basic Books argues that conceptual metaphors generate our concepts of mathematics, algebra, and logic.

It is clear to me that for most of the scientific community whose educational experiences were formed when extensive learning in mathematics was necessary for advancement towards higher degrees and related needs. The theory of mathematics taught to most students is based upon what Lakoff and Nunez call the Romantic View of Mathematics. In their book they demolish this fable: "From a scientific perspective, there is no way to know whether there are objectively existing, external, mathematical entities or mathematical truths. • Human mathematics is embodied; it is grounded in bodily experience in the world. • Human mathematics is not about objectively existing, external mathe­matical entities or mathematical truths. • Human mathematics is primarily a matter of mathematical ideas, which are significantly metaphorical in nature. • Mathematics is not purely literal; it is an imaginative, profoundly metaphorical enterprise. • There is no mathematics out there in the physical world that mathe­matical scientific theories describe." Think, for me, for a minute, about these ideas. First the declarations above are scary to one who has placed his future in the hands of Romantic Mathematics. This would of course include every theoretical physicist in the world whose cartoon figures usually display an enormous blackboard with equations chalked upon it.

Goethe saw this early: "Men, with their figures, do contend, their lofty systems to defend." In the attached essay your will find a pyramidal scheme that is meant to demonstrate that the edifice of science finds its base--its foundation--in mathematics. There is a second cartoon that shows the idea that all of these ideas: scientific, philosophical, literary, metaphorical, poetical, ad infinitum comes from the human embodied mind--let us now call that the human. Therefore as the philosophers argue about logics and the physicists about multiple worlds, if this view becomes adopted widely the future becomes much less a predictable place. If we can make-up logics and maths and fictional science, we can make up anything.

While all this was going on a large number of 'neuroscientists' and their familiars were discovering things about the brain/body that, as Hanna foresaw, needed to be re-invited into the realm of philosophy. He says: "First, the philosophers must reopen their door and civilly invite the psychologists back in." But it no longer was it psychology, in the interval it had morphed into a real science, and a real science by any other name would smell as sweet.

In the concatenated essays there will be found references to Feynman, the physicist whose descriptions of the scientific method given in a lecture at Cornell in 1964 and by book: Feynman, Richard (1965), The Character of Physical Law, Harper and Row, New York, NY. Feynman's quotes are intensely germane and brief, showing the world what is the difference between metaphysical theory and potential truth.

I do not know what might happen if the discoveries of the cognitive scientists, the embodied mindists, and the emotionalists are taken seriously. I suspect there will be a shift, be it paradigmatic or a slight change in vector, I know not.

Here follows my promised essays:

A PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: AFTER 65 YEARS John Cother Leissring, MS, MD Santa Rosa, CA jclfa@sonic.net www.jclfa.com; www.jclfineart.com; www.jack-leissring.info

This is a retrospective and comparative analysis of the relationship of philosophy to scientific endeavors in general, to physics and medicine specifically. I intend it as a comparative and analytic inquiry, focally annotated, into the writings by scientists from several specialities: cognitive linguistics, philosophy and theoretical physics. This is a broad inquiry into the role of philosophy in the work of scientists; given that the origins of science and philosophy share similar intentions, in the opinion of many, the scientists have left the study of philosophy to the philosophers. The discussion is also a lament about the state of theoretical physics today and offers an explanation for this state of being.

The true method of knowledge is experiment. William Blake (1757-1827)

In 1955, as a student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, philosopher of science, Dr. Albert Ramsperger1, warned that scientists had left the philosophy of science to the philosophers. Scientists, he said, did not properly question their processes, their motives, their actions. A split developed on the pathway to knowledge with scientists taking their road and the philosophers, theirs. The diversion is important; it shows itself today in the sad state of physics with its wild theories; it also shows itself in philosophy where important ideas are dissembled, forgotten or ignored. Both are mutually exclusive echo chambers for their membership.

In the 65 years since I was a willing and thoughtful participant in understanding the meaning of ‘the philosophy of science,' new fields of study have emerged. The most significant concerns the nature of mind/brain; the picture of what is a human.

In 1936, there arose some dissenting reactions to opinions expressed by philosopher A. J. Ayer. His book, “Language, Truth and Logic,”2 is an essential exploration of philosophical errors. The book was reprinted in 1990 with new introductory remarks by the author. He admits, a youthful exuberance but feels no need to make changes in the book itself. I imagine him as the little boy who asked philosophy why the emperor has no clothes. Ayer lived within a family of philosophers and intended to live his life there. His subsequent life in philosophy describes his personality as much his intellectual tenets.

The family of philosophy does not differ from any other family. There are real and implied dominant figures, a kind of philosophic fiefdom. H. L. Mencken who knew how to turn a phrase and was a deep and intelligent thinker—a fact true of many intelligent but unlettered persons; he did not feel the effects of predefined knowledge. The educational process defines the ‘lore,’ fencing it in as if established truth. One travels the educational path by emulating or parroting the teachers who profess their opinions, often disguised as what they call facts. The panorama of pedagogical action has an old and established formality that is difficult to overcome. As long as the consumers of the educational product continue to demand persons with “degrees,” the error will continue. The reality is that neither the educational details nor the knowledge owned at graduation have any particular value to the industry who accepts the graduate. The degree process resembles a hurdle over which the student must travel attesting to his tenacity.

Mencken sees the state of philosophy in this way: “Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it . . .” The realm of philosophical writing resembles this; it is accurate. What is disturbing is the tendency to assign meaning to statements made by long dead persons where there can be no way to discern what the writer/speaker might actually mean. The English barrister and writer, Owen Barfield understood this problem; his book: “Speaker’s Meaning,”32 is an invaluable stimulus. The inability to inquire of writers who have been given ascendant positions, from whom movements have resulted: Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Plato, the Bible, whomever, makes fable of their writing. To canonize rhetorical pronouncements is a human tendency, a quality of human nature, but at best it devolves to opinion or belief. The admiration shown might be re-defined as historical curiosities, extracted from philosophical lore; it is an error to cast them as foundational. The proposals of canonized authors can simply be noted as ideas. Philosophy is the history of ideas. It is for each person to decide if the foundation of historical thinking, commonly celebrating ‘historic’ individuals, forms the proper base for the structure.

How this might be done is a problem. I often try to understand the lore of the past, to imagine how it could be that the “great” universities were established as theological schools, that is to say, using Ayer’s definition, the study of nonsense. I don’t doubt that when confronted with the problem of demonstrating non-existent entities such as gods or angels or ‘God,’ some doubt must have arisen in some minds. Doubts were concealed by clever rationalization; the erection of tautological constructs which depended upon the acceptance of an illogical posture: faith.

The cleverness with which the religious/church leaders and acolytes rendered the absurd into accepted ‘reality,’ must be given high marks; the proposals introduced, which are the very essence of metaphysical provenance, have lasted long amongst humans. The outcome: continued combat of dissenting ideas and a dark shadow over the world. The secondary losses from such fantasies produce only rare individuals who try like “chicken little” to declare the sky is falling. I would place myself in that group along with Dawkins, Harris and others, and still I realize, because of my befuddlement when I find that persons, from my childhood, with whom I spent so many delightful hours, have become, in the interval, dogmatic believers of the absurd.

Yet, I do not see these old friends differing significantly from myself in thinking ability; I must attribute to them something else. Surely the history of ideas is not limited to philosophy. A theoretical explanation for some process can become a rallying phrase for another process. The ideas of Sigmund Freud have, like those of Marx, become embedded into the fabric of human thought. The simple demonstration by Pavlov that exposing a dog to the sound of a bell could induce salivation caused thinkers like Aldous Huxley to warn against the tyrannical potentials of the conditioning process in his novel: Brave New World.”3 The nephew of Freud, Edward Berneys4 took the canon of his uncle as a method to cause people to change their minds about things, to accept, for example in 1940, smoking by women, to sell dish soap, to establish the processes of marketing in which we are now entangled. In his obituary, he was described as “the father of public relations” The “pop-ups” we fight on our computers and “smart phones,” are the result: the influences of the Berneysian hucksters. If financial success is a metaphoric marker, salespersons come-out on top. Replace financial success with, say, academic success and metaphor holds. Political success! The ability to induce others to buy things. To convince them, is a quality some intrinsically possess; I doubt if it can be taught. The gifted thus can transmit zeal, body language, acting, mendacity and more. Hitler could do it, Trump can. All the world’s a stage, said Shakespeare, and so it is.

In the history of ideas, those proposed by A. J. Ayer represent an important starting position for dealing with science, here meant as the methods of science. So although I am loath to canonize, those elements of philosophy which directly affect science are carefully rendered in his book: “Language, Truth and Logic”. I will try to summarize the basics: ideas or proposals or theories exist in two forms: analytical and synthetic. Such is the lore of philosophical lexicon, and we are stuck with it. Analytical propositions are proposals or ideas based on tautologies. They cannot be tested. They meet the lexical definition of metaphysics. They have no role in the “real world.” Ayer has pejoratively called such ideas: nonsense. Synthetic propositions or ideas or theories concern themselves with the real world and are based upon deduction from established theories (facts) or are proposals delivered for testing. The physicist Richard Feynman, in a lecture given in 1964 in Ithaca, NY, defined science this way: “In general, we look for a new physical law by the following process. First we guess it. Then compute the consequences of the guess to what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. It is true one has to check a little to make sure that it is wrong, because whoever did the experiment may have reported incorrectly, or there may have some feature in the experiment that was not noticed, some dirt or something; or the man computed the consequences, even though it may have been the one who made the guesses, could have made some mistake in the analysis.

You can see, of course, that with this method, we can attempt to disprove any definite theory. If we have a definite theory, a real guess, from which we can conveniently compute consequences that can be compared with experiment, then in principle we can get rid of any theory. There is always the possibility of proving any definite theory wrong; but notice that we can never prove it right. Suppose that you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences, and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simply not proved wrong. In the future you could compute a wider range of consequences, there could be a wider range of experiments, and you might then discover that the thing is wrong. That is why laws like Newton’s laws for the motion of planets last such a long time. He guessed the law of gravitation, calculated all kinds of consequences for the system and so on, compared them with experiment—and it took several hundred years before the slight error of the motion of Mercury was observed. During all that time, the theory had not been proved wrong, and could be taken temporarily to be right. But it could never be proved right. . .”5

That excerpt describes perfectly the nature of synthetic proposals/theories. In spite of his standing as a theoretical physicist, Feynman sometimes occupied fuzzy areas founded upon mathematics. His analogies with symbols and diagrams, like analog clock faces, provided him with a means of picturing processes, yet they were analytical in nature; the analogy does not hold for binary clocks. Feynman’s life was interesting and quite richly diverse.6

Once many years ago, I entered a retail store on the wall of which was a most remarkable statement. The statement concerned the idea of belief. I jotted the words down and later learned from the New York corporate offices that its origin was a publication by two philosophers: W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, under the title: “The Web of Belief.”7

The idea the authors present is simple. All beliefs are interconnected (like a web or pantograph) and we choose them for a variety of reasons. Some come as empirical knowledge—we test the world and the outcome becomes a belief. Other non-empirical ideas come at different and delicate times in our lives. These ideas are revealed stuff—religion is a biggie. The revealed material, often coming from statured individuals has favored status—it exists as if behind one-way glass. The beliefs arise in families, in religious exposure and training or from the radio or TV. These ideas cannot be changed, not readily. It is for each of us to see which of those ideas we hold are of that type. Can we rid ourselves of them?? Not easily.

I became quite enthused about this book title, and expanded the phrase in my mind as a possible explanation for much of human behavior. The book is useful, but it suffers from being the guidebook for a course of study; it adopts the pedagogical stance, with questions at the end of chapters. That annoyed me. But I found things of value in the book and took them to form my version of the Quine/Ullian proposals. In doing so, I describe the process one uses to internalize ideas from outside sources: writing, other humans, classroom work. We tend to make those ideas our own. This describes the history of philosophy. Internalized information, no-matter where it originates, creates, for each of us, what we accept as knowledge, and like a web, it connects to every other bit of information.

A departed friend thought about “information, his field of study while in University. It was his view that the English word: Information, described a process: the subject, information, was in the process of being formed. The subject of thought, the gaseous thing, the idea, the imaginary event or thing that was “seen” in the mind’s eye, in the thought bubble of the cartoonists, was in the process of being formed. Because it was malleable, it might be transformed into something else by other influences. Knowledge, information, data, was always in motion. A valuable proposal.

To get back to my childhood friends who now appear to me as ridiculous in their acceptance of the dogma of their religion, who attribute powers to nonsensical entities, who explain matters such as global warming to the powers of the god in which they faithfully believe, who have transmogrified in some bizarre way into persons with whom I can no longer have a meaningful conversation, who have become opposing champions of the scientific method—the search for knowledge. I ask how this happened, and I imagine the following: if Pavlov and Huxley are correct, and these friends, for social or other reasons attend weekly-regularly their “church,” then in the intervening seventy years or so, they have been potentially exposed to 52 X 70 events which exposed them to the lore of the church including the sermonizing. I understand that there are some Catholics who attend “mass” daily and for whom this equation is 365 X 70 events. This is akin to Pavlov ringing the bell before his experimental dog, causing the poor beast to salivate, but not for food. The outcome of such religious conditioning cannot be nil. In the 1960s we called this brain washing. I’ve experienced this; I can still remember and repeat silly phrases from childhood radio advertising, for example: LSMFT: “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” That remembrance did not come from nowhere. Rinso White! “Ivory Soap is 99 and 44/100 percent pure. It Floats” So went the Proctor and Gamble phrase, one that originated in 1895 and pummeled me through my growth years. It is still stuck in my memory.

Expand, then, the “church/family” influence into ‘news’ sources, television sources; all are echo chambers, repeating the same often mendacious pronouncements. I have seen otherwise normally intelligent persons become influenced by the daily babble of such as Fox news, Limbaugh, whomever. The outcome is predictably inevitable. By all means, re-read “Brave New World.”

To disentangle the web of philosophy, to understand “the Philosophy of Science,” it will be necessary to confront important qualities of thinking to understand what is called “Mind.” Mind must be what those who ask about consciousness seek. Consciousness takes several metaphorical poses. Some thinkers, like Joseph Campbell21 attribute to non-human entities a kind of consciousness, as when he describes the phototropism of the flowers in his lanai in Hawaii, always pointing themselves towards the sun. If one can go to botany in metaphor, why not take from biology elements of an individual cell? Isolated cells have been shown to possess periodicity, to have internal clock-like behavior which perhaps reflects the inner clock of the human, the quotidian reaction to the earth and its relationship to the sun and the universe.

Humans, animals and plants in our earthly environment are the only forms that could result from such an environment. There is no top-down design for this. Darwin is correct.

Well, the potentials are great and are limited (only) by the mind of humans. The mind of humans may be constituted to ask questions. Questions, problems, answered for some by faith and for others, like myself, by a desire to know. This implies a desire to know everything. Can this be possible? Kerouac has poetically described: “there are so many things because the mind breaks it up.”8

In my education, I became first a physician and then a specialist in the study of disease called pathology. Amongst the subdivisions, generated by this specialization, was the field of clinical pathology, another phrase for laboratory medicine, which is another phrase for what patients learn to know as the taking of and study of blood samples, urine samples, biopsies, and stool samples. Both patients and physicians rely upon laboratory medicine to define what is normal. There are philosophical and scientific obstacles to overcome in order to understand what ‘normal’ means. I would like to describe to you the problems:

Throughout development, humans are faced with a serious question: Am I normal? While for some this question is a constant worry starting in childhood, for others it concerns only aspects of their health. W. H. Auden expressed doubt: “Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.” In many respects that is true. While it is essential that a practitioner of medicine know what a body free of disease ought to look like, there is always uncertainty. As technological progress is made artificial means of probing the body take precedent; the specialties of radiology and cardiology are prominent in this. But the relationship of the individual patient to the practitioner of any area of medicine and the laboratory specialist is one where the philosophy of science intersects with the science of medicine. The practitioner inquires of the clinical pathologist the state of a requested examination of a sample taken from his patient. The question implicitly asks: is this sample from this patient normal? This sounds like a completely reasonable question and is asked in that context probably at each visit a patient makes to her physician. In general, the requesting doctor is asking no philosophical questions about the test s/he is requesting and yet the absence of such inquiries is fraught with problems.

How does the referring doctor know what is normal for his patient? How does the clinical pathologist know what should be normal for the specimen taken from the patient? It is this arena where the conflicts between science and philosophy take place. Let us say the referring physician requests a test for some chemical element of the patient’s blood, say calcium. Elemental calcium is not sought; it will be a salt of calcium. The laboratory to which the patient is sent will undergo a series of steps to test for this substance. At this point the laboratory faces several questions: what is the status of the patient? That is, has the person been exercising recently?, fasting?, expressing disease apparently unrelated to the test “calcium?, are the veins of this patient accessible?, does the laboratorian know how to obtain a proper sample? is the sample collected in the proper container? has the sample been altered by contamination with damaged red blood cells? And many other matters to consider.

When this sample is obtained and properly marked and identified as originating in the patient in question, it is moved to the laboratory where proper handing is essential. For example, some hospitals use pneumatic tubes to send the specimen, which can have hemolytic effects, the sample may be carried by vehicle and subjected to heat or cold. But when finally received by the laboratory it faces again proper identification and actions. The sample might be erroneously identified or the separation of cells from the serum or plasma can be in error. Eventually a serum sample from this patient is prepared ready for analysis. The method of analysis is dependent upon the capability of the lab. There are a variety methods of determining the absolute amount of calcium salt in that serum specimen. These range from chemical analyses to methods of spectrographic testing, either emission or absorption spectroscopy. Chemical analysis employing analogous endpoints can also be used. All of these are dependent upon a background of analytic reports which discuss specific problems with each method. The method chosen depends upon the laboratory director’s interests and knowledge.

So the result has been obtained. How does one know if this value is “ normal?” The way this is achieved is a serious philosophical problem. Before I bring-up Karl F. Gauss, I wish to introduce another harmful philosopher: Plato. Plato, whose name was Aristocles, lived approximately 427-347 BCE. Personally, he was an Aristocrat, a snob, a bigot, and a man with limited perspective. He is the original idealist, one who believes that there exists in the world a ‘perfection’ to which all else must be compared. Thus, he introduced to planetary motion the idea of the perfect circle which hampered thinking until the observations of Kepler and Brahe. Plato adversely affects many to this day. Karl Friedrich Gauss lived 1777-1855. He was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He proposed the ‘law of errors,’ which had its unfortunate effects upon science since that era.

The “law of errors” can be stated this way: If repeated measures are made on the same physical object, the distribution of the random component can be well approximated by the following curve:

Please note that the idea of Gauss was to show that if one took a ruler, for example, and measured carefully the length of an object and recorded each measurement many times the recordings would show a pattern of distribution of length that would correspond to the above curve.. That is fine for measuring the height or length or weight of any object—always the SAME object, but its does not apply to distributions of measurements in groups of humans. Each human is different and unique; to lump a group of “so called” healthy humans and take from each a measure of a specific serum chemical, all things being equalized as noted above, the result is not Gaussian, and the question of estimation the ‘mean’ and ‘standard deviation’ does not arise.

Regrettably, many medical students graduate from their medical school firmly convinced that if a sample is large enough, the distribution will be “normal” (Gaussian) regardless of the measurement under study, and that 95% of the measurements will be included in plus or minus two standard deviations from the mean-the middle..9

The distributions in healthy persons are not Gaussian. Once we discard the idea that the distribution of values in healthy persons is Gaussian, the question of estimating the mean (normal) and standard deviation, does not arise.

And yet, these erroneous ideas are stuck into medicine like mathematics is stuck in theoretic physics (see below). The result is that medical science has perpetrated and continues to use erroneous data this way. In 1927, Henry Louis Rietz wrote “the followers of Gausss retarded progress in the generalization of frequency theory. . . In the decade 1890-1900 it became well established that the normal probability function is inadequate to represent many frequency functions which are seen in biologic data.”10

In 1946, H. Cramer wrote: “Everybody believes in the law of errors (Gauss), the experimenters because they think it is a mathematical theorem and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact.”11 The recycling of erroneous ideas was referred to by A. V. Whitehead as the “Cross sterilization of disciplines, The bolstering up of arguments in one field with doubtful and imperfectly understood inferences made from another.” This in a nutshell observation readily describes the plight of theoretic physics. In fact Feynman, the physicist confessed not knowing the meaning of the theories of physics and simply resorted to calculations. There is something that must be satisfying to humans about performing the acts and rules of mathematics, and when we study the book by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder,12 we will often find her referencing to the “beauty” of mathematics. And it is here that I suspect the work of Lakoff and Nunez shows its potential for shifting paradigms. To philosophers, the normal is defined by observation; among scientists it is widely believed that the statisticians have proved that the normal is X = +/- 2 S. D.”

What, then, is normal for these entities engaged in demonstrating a value of the calcium in the patient’s serum? We can try some definitions by resorting to lexicon: for some it is the average, thus meeting the arithmetical mean, for others it is a place about midway between extremes, and/or synonyms for average include mean, median and norm. Definitions of normal include “authoritative standard,” (whatever that might mean), or conforming to natural law, or finally, average; as a set of standards usually derived from the median achievement of a large group. “Normal” also connotes habitual or average or values that tend to cluster around a central point. The implication includes the opposite: abnormal when the clustering spreads further from the central tendency. We use the term normal in several senses: conformity to a type, the “quality” of a value, or as a moral judgment. But what does this discussion demonstrate to us for the purposes of understanding what the patient, the laboratory and the referring physician might understand about the result of the test?

Aside from results of testing, say of calcium, and attempting to discover whether the person’s value of calcium is indicative of any disease process, we find that further investigations of the role of calcium in the serum is understood as the process by which this element is carried in the blood stream. For example high levels of calcium can be found in association with high levels of protein, mainly albumin, which is one of the components of serum, so that an unusually high level of calcium, other things being again equal, might move one to examine the levels of serum protein.

Well, we are still far from a satisfactory definition of normal as regards this particular chemical test we have chosen to examine. We have tried to employ mathematics and find it in error. Similarly the statistical mathematician, defined by some as a person who tells you in statistics what you have told him in data, simply cross sterilizes the field by applying methods to the data. This is also erroneous.

If we try to think about any value of language that uses the word normal in its context, we might find that lurking somewhere in our understanding is an association with something called quality. If this has any validity, one might say, for example, that a person living a life of “quality” (yes, I am stuck here with a new requirement , a new definition), and that person is free of complaints about specific symptoms as concerns her body and mind, that this individual might somehow be described as in harmony with his life. Thus, a value of any given blood chemical might be considered proper for that person. Thus, in this person, who is in harmony with life, has a value of serum calcium = X. Is that a proper means of determining normal?

We find that throughout the history of medicine, study of certain molecules in the group of individuals who claim to be in ‘harmony with life’ when studied produce a “mean” or “average” or “normal” distribution which one might accept as normal for persons of that kind. For example, in the 1960s it was accepted that the level of cholesterol in the blood was normal if around 330 mg/dl. Subsequent questions raised by some who study diseases of the heart and blood vessels asked if this level was “ideal.” Was this the average concentration for all? What about groups which would later develop diseases of the heart and blood vessels. Not arguing at this time with the beliefs of the researchers—and there is ample reason to argue with their conclusions about the role of exogenous cholesterol on the body—it was found that the level of cholesterol should be lowered to less that 200 mg/dl. and the idea of a ‘normal’ or average level be discarded in favor of an ideal level. Plato again.

The outcome of all this was good news for the population groups in question. The development of better understanding of diet and its effects upon life resulted in a significant decrease in deaths due to heart and blood vessel diseases.

The end of this story is somewhat difficult: try as we may, we cannot come up with anything like an absolute definition of normal, from a scientific perspective. Therefore, we remove any individual from the Gaussian distribution curve and from the errors of statistics, which willy-nilly place her test results wherein her risks are defined by X = +/- 2 S. D.

Putting all this together might result in defining a normal person as one who is in harmony with existence and who has no specific complaints. It might be possible to say that the only criteria for ‘normal’ for any person is herself.

There are a myriad of questions and difficulties that concern the science of medicine. The current methods of delivering medical care are problematic; its diversion from philosophy can be serious, which I have hoped to show in the foregoing. I cannot avoid a personal observation: I became a medical drop-out; 20 years ago, I quit after almost fifty years of medical study. I see today that the interface between patient and doctor has been seriously altered; the interfering device is a computer screen on which is displayed,data, which the physician commonly accepts as real information, true information, factual information. Obviously this is fraught with problems. The traditional ways of learning about a patient—deeply embedded in medical history—are likely gone. Medicine is not pure science. It relies upon interaction between an observant physician and a willing patient. There are interactions which are non-verbal and which demand seeing the patient as a whole. This process is disturbed now and the consequences we will learn of later.

Trends and preferences swing us, sometimes wildly. We are now in the era of STEM, an acronym for “Science,” “Technology,” “Engineering,” and “Mathematics.” This mantra is being shouted almost to the roof-tops as if it potentiates some form of break-through. I have no specific or testable theories on why this may be so, and I shall dip into nontestables—ie. metaphysical speculation. There is something amiss because of the “smart-phone,” and other forms of hand-held devices. There is an incredible proliferation of what some call information, on the one hand, and the compression of thought into short groups of words, on the other. Without language there is no silent but verbalized thought; by minimizing word use, depth of knowledge and the breadth of understanding are punished. Here, the novelist becomes the guide: a theater, as in the Greek era, can demonstrate human frailties and dilemmas. And, too, the novelists: surely Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and Orwell’s 19843 are worthy of thoughtful analysis today. An aside: I find I "think" in pictures, not words. I have known others who claim the same, so language might not be essential for some kinds of thinking.

Yet, that analytic action will be undertaken by only those who are intrinsically aware or who are somehow directed towards analysis. I am writing this at a time when we are stuck with a president who was not democratically elected, who, with his loyalists, stole the presidency and who comes-off as a rather stupid man. But he owns sufficient charisma to maintain. We see parts of him in the Caesars: Nero and Caligula and in the evil Livia. To understand this requires a willingness to read, not tweety squibs of aphorismic babble, but to read in depth. Who will do this today?

It might seem that I am escaping from the propositions of the first paragraph: the consideration of the separation of science and philosophy. As I ponder this problem, I imagine the value of the novelist who presents in a theatrical fashion potentialities of behavior and the actualities of being. I hold high the message by Hermann Hesse in “Magister Ludi,” the “Glass Bead Game,”41 and the observations of Walker Percy in his book: “Lost in the Cosmos, The last Self-help book.”33 Hesse shows us what can happen if we lose perspective and become obsessed with a meaningless endeavor. Games can be played at many levels—disinterested neophyte to compulsive madness. One need not look too far for similarities: the card game of bridge, scrabble, Mah Jung, poker, man-made diversions often taken to extremes. Walker Percy tries to explain this behavior as a form of leaving, a transcendence, an escape from the day-to-day boredom of human and family life into a rarified world of thought. We see mathematicians, physicists, and biological scientists shifting themselves to places inaccessible to common humans, The distancing can and does cause sociological disorder; attempts to return to the prosaic life from which they flew can result in loss of humanity. The quotidian becomes their hell on earth.

Here we have the problem of explaining, perhaps explaining away, why we do what we do. We end-up relying for explanation through metaphysics, those parts of philosophy which are intrinsically meaningless—unprovable, untestable. We all do it, in one way or another. See my book: the Mystique of Metaphysics.13

I quote the writer/artist/polymath Michael Ayrton (1921-1974) “I think one of the reasons why we’ve come away from self-evident truth arises out of the ideas of the Enlightenment, and of the Cartesian philosophers in the 18th century, who made assumptions; because science is developed on the basis of causality, of what a thing is and not of why it should be—teleology——what the ancient fathers of the church were much more concerned with, we have lost the ability to see that the simple solution is not necessarily the solution. . .”14

Faux Science: Perhaps Goethe was correct when he wrote: ‘everything is metaphor,’ for emulation begets status if only conditional. I mean by this that copying the forms of a process gives credence to the copy; if it looks like a science perhaps it is a science. One of my favorite philosophers, R. G. Collingwood, attempted to analyze the nature of history—that is, scholarly writings on historical events or persons. His book on the subject is: “The Idea of History”34(1946), which proposed history as a process in which one relives the past in one’s own mind. Only by immersing oneself in the mental actions behind events, by rethinking the past within the context of one’s own experience, can the historian discover the significant patterns and dynamics of cultures and civilizations. While this idea is meritorious, it points to the subjectivity of the discipline. Yet, in the view of the philosopher Roger Poole35, subjectivity is the only process available to humans. He suggests that at each encounter with reality a person makes an ethical or moral decision dependent upon the individual’s nature, education, background, attitudes. In Poole’s sense, objectivity is a myth, a will o the wisp, metaphysical nonsense. The Princeton philosopher Frankfurt in his little book: “On Bullshit,”36 attempts to differentiate bullshit from outright lying. As he describes it, “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever cir­cumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obliga­tions or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled— whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others—to speak exten­sively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his coun­try’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibil­ity, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.”

But even when a person is adept at gathering data—perhaps in the parlance of Norman Mailer: “factoids,” and skilled at writing, the depth of knowledge is perforce finite. One whose life is that of a contributing writer/critic is caused to be a position of relative bullshit casting; the demands of publication and the limitations of a varied field of knowledge require this. Thus, the reader is commonly in the position of accepting a degree of bullshit simply because of the nature of critical writing and the limits of human ability.

That is not to say that we do not get pleasure and value from some critical writing, but it is, I believe, essential to realize that the writer is presenting subjective opinions. While this could be considered a continuous regression towards the mean of nihilism, nonetheless one can usually detect the flavor of subjectivity and, therefore, experience doubt. Maybe it is simply another form of entertainment where we buy magazines and books for the purpose of making the periods of daily life more interesting, more satisfying. Yet, that suggests the choices made by the reader tend to be agreeable proposals. It is the echo chamber, the hall of mirrors, we tend to occupy.

The philosopher, Jerry Fodor tried to understand the “why” of this echo chamber idea. Quoted in Steven Pinker’s book: “The Language Instinct,”15 the following was synthesized and restated for the purpose of this paper: “ Fodor begins:..I think that relativism is very probably false. What it overlooks, to put it briefly and crudely, is the fixed structure of human nature. Fodor’s words are in quotes.

1. What we know determines what we see; we interpret what we expect to see or feel in the light of our knowledge. [“cognition saturates perception”]

2. Our theories, which are plausible generalizations we make from observations, determine how we perceive experimental results. In effect interactions #1 and #2, become self-fulfilling. [“one’s observations are comprehensively determined by one’s theories”]

3. Values, guiding principles or ideals, are determined by one’s cultural milieu. The act of placing “holy water” on ones forehead is incomprehensible to an atheist or a Buddhist. [“one’s values are determined by one’s culture”]

4. One’s science, one’s general knowledge, is directly related to social rank. Social rank tends to reflect genetic or sociobiological conditions, and repeats the value the specific society in question places upon knowledge and truth. [“one’s science is determined by one’s class affiliations”]

5. One’s knowledge of how things work, the epistemology of existence, depends upon how the words are strung together in the language employed for describing this (to oneself and others). [“one’s [absolute presuppositions] are . . .determined by one’s syntax (language)”]

Because perception is saturated by cognition, observation by theory, values by culture, science by class, and beliefs by language, rational criticism of scientific theories, ethical values, world views, or whatever can take place only within the framework of assumptions that—as a matter of geographical, historical, or sociological accident—the interlocutors happen to share.15

This aspect of human nature is a dark shadow.

Studying a critical review of several books about Abraham Lincoln by Adam Gopnic (which appeared in The New Yorker, September 28, 2020, I find that I enjoyed Gopnic’s prose and yet I question how the writers of the reviewed books know, even quasi-scientifically, facts about Abraham Lincoln. It is a given that history of this kind is intrinsically metaphysical, it expresses the author’s presuppositions. It is a truism that most of us like to believe that we are able to see another human for what s/he is. This is the subjective interface referred to by Roger Poole. We make ethical and moral decisions about other humans all the time. The writer Walker Percy once asked: “One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second’s glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.” I wonder if someone like Trump ever sees himself as others see him. Thank you Bobby Burns.

Intelligence/ability ranges over all life style choices: philosophers and physicists are not privy to special status. How, then, is a career choice determined? I assume it’s causality which reflects all aspects of human development to include social, familial, genetic, experiential causes. Yet it appears that society at large gives, at differing times in history, preferential status to some careers and denigrates others.

Let’s talk about world views. Schrodinger.[infra]

Novelists help us understand those historical periods when it was common to treat children differently depending upon their sex and their position in the birth order. There was likely a “reason” for this, though it is hard to understand today. The status of the female child was in historical times subjacent to the male and the status of the female today remains difficult. Do we explain these things by habit, by logic, by decree? However they be analyzed they are problems. And, given that intellectual capacity ranges and is distributed in all of these categories, it seems surprising that the status quo was accepted. And it is the “why” of this phenomenon that becomes the necessary question.

So it is that originating from a putative family unit, the offspring emerge, like butterflies from their chrysalis to become philosophers, novelists, mathematicians, physicists, mechanics, engineers, poets, theologians. All of these I say own an intellectual capacity somewhere along the distribution curve metaphorizing that quality, so they present to the world degrees of intelligence likely comparable to any imagined or examined distribution.

In that distribution lies a spectrum of choice. There are academics who study choices. Pure determinism I place on the back-burner. The result of such studies shows differing qualities of interest or intention. The poet may have minimal interest in mathematics, yet be quite capable of mastering its rules. Choices. Only those appear important.

The psychologist Michael Moscolo presents a summary of his proposals concerning conscious agency and the following abstraction from his paper: “Is it possible to reconcile the concept of conscious agency with the view that humans are biological creatures subject to material causality? The problem of conscious agency is complicated by the tendency to attribute autonomous powers of control to conscious processes. In this paper, we offer an embodied process model of conscious agency. We begin with the concept of embodied emergence – the idea that psychological processes are higher-order biological processes, albeit ones that exhibit emergent properties. Although consciousness,experience, and representation are emergent properties of higher-order biological organisms, the capacity for hierarchical regulation is a property of all living systems. Thus, while the capacity for consciousness transforms the process of hierarchical regulation, consciousness is not an autonomous center of control. Instead, consciousness functions as a system for coordinating novel representations of the most pressing demands placed on the organism at any given time. While it does not regulate action directly, consciousness orients and activates preconscious control systems that mediate the construction of genuinely novel action. Far from being an epiphenomenon, consciousness plays a central albeit non-autonomous role in psychological functioning.”17

Mascolo imagines the means whereby conscious agency becomes a choice-making element of humans without attributing to any specific quality along the human spectrum. This is an explanation without testable end-point, yet is helpful to dislodge the invocation of extra-human influences. Perhaps only that.



It is necessary to explain certain human qualities that remain difficult and mysterious. How should it be that chemicals, including those produced by the human being, produce changes in human consciousness? The effects of products of the ductless glands such as estrogen and testosterone undoubtably influence behavior—the literature supports this. Psycho-active drugs and medications induce well-described conscious/psychic activities. We know few substantive facts about hypnosis, yet there is a large library of reports suggesting the phenomenon can result in marked alteration of specific physiologic reactions: pain, for example. It is claimed that under hypnosis, surgical operations can be performed, physiologic functions can be altered: heart, rate, blood pressure.31 Thus, by focusing only upon certain categories as presumed examples of ‘humanness,’ we are perhaps fooled into explanations that are certainly incomplete. If intrinsic and extrinsic chemicals can induce changes in behavior, what then of external influences?

We thank Pavlov for the idea of conditioning without giving implications of ‘conditioning’ the required thought. Aldous Huxley did; we tend to forget him despite the significance of “Brave New World.” Thus we tend not to find, nor form, possible explanations for certain human actions or we ignore the implications examining the influences of processes which a given individual might undergo.

I say this is particularly important in the era of now, where we see a unique avalanche of data and information impinging upon us; for reasons of preference the populus divides itself into groups that are intrinsically competitive.

The Psychiatrist Ronald Smotherman suggested that the “purpose of the mind is to be right.”18 That is teleology, in science, not allowed. Purposiveness in nature raises the idea of a quality of being towards which an organism aims; this is a sweet idea but fuzzy. If one changes the idea to this: When the mind/brain has made a decision, it forever holds that decision as correct. It does everything in its power to retain that decision, even to the disadvantage of the body it serves. If the mind/brain is the guiding element of a person’s existence, this need to be right about choices and decisions becomes seminal. Having to be right may in the end lead to destruction of the body the brain protects. Sunni Moslems must be “right” about their beliefs and are in opposition to Shia Moslems, creating thereby, conflict, war, destruction. The Catholics oppose the Protestants, Lutherans say they are right. Everyone opposes the Jews. Each of the groups believes it is right.

And, so it goes.

But I speak here mainly of religious beliefs, which I have shown elsewhere to be nonsense—in a philosophic sense. I can equally entertain descriptions of strongly held beliefs in academics of many sorts: physicists, philosophers, writers. Does the physicist have a choice? One whose educational history includes a deep exposure to mathematics, mathematics that is so rich with the belief it is the study of a quality of the universe, something “out there.” This is educational conditioning and assures the physicist’s explanation, her reality. It becomes his world view. What if mathematics were a tautology, a game, a made-up process, a deep metaphor? What would be then the nature of physics—theoretical physics? Dangerous question.

George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez examined the origins of mathematics and conclude mathematics to be a reflection of the “embodied mind/brain.” Their book: “Where Mathematics Comes From.”19 is an essential source to discover the nature of the mathematical processes embodied in the human brain. The implications of this knowledge are important; they directly effect the whole of physics which bases itself—the theoretical parts of physics—upon mathematical “truths.” These truths, which in the light of Lakoff/Nuñez are merely the world views of the person who uses mathematics as her guide. We will examine the conclusions of Lakoff and Nuñez later in this book There are cracks in physics, to be sure, and they are widening as a larger number of practitioners question the validity of mathematical analogy. This should be obvious to anyone who considers common claims of mathematics, such as time reversal and symmetry. Time does not go backwards. Time breaks things, it does not repair things.

This amazing loss of perspective as regards theoretic physics, I say is also present in logics, in theories of behavior, theories of music, theories of history, theories of literature, theories of religion—everywhere.

I have reported this personal experience elsewhere, but I admit to having believed myself to be “in love,” with a young woman when I was about 18 years of age and a new student at the University. She, a “catholic,” and I with no religion, urged that I undertake “religious instructions.” I was moved to do so and met weekly with a young priest in Milwaukee for an hour or so. During one of the sessions, I, still not convinced, asked him “what if all this story you are telling me is a fable? He replied that “Then my life will have been wasted.”

The suggestion by Dr. Smotherman comes full here. A belief preferred by the mind influences the whole life of the body. It’s a nice story; Sir Francis Bacon said: We believe to be true what we prefer to be true.”

In an era of unhinged politicians it is possible to become influenced and lose perspective. Yet I describe my own limited accession to what is currently defined as news by most people: I suspect that an early influential book I discovered on my Grandfather’s bookshelf when I was about 14 or 15 had much to do with my consequent life. The book, still in print, is titled: “Think for Yourself,” by R. P. Crawford,193737. The book has the configuration of a “self-help” book which includes blank pages where one is urged to write thoughts. When I return to the original volume I see my youthful writing. The methods pushed by the author to examine one’s own ideas must have stuck with me, for since then I tend to be very critical, questioning, about rhetorical pronouncements. I would try to describe to you a “movie” I run inside the cartoonist’s thought bubble that is my mind in action. For example the problem of TV formats: when I see a talking head on a TV screen, I try to see the stage set-up with the cameras and the carefully placed monitor which the head is reading and the mouth is parroting. All the while I am asking “how do you know this?” “who wrote that stuff you are reading?”and also imagining the source of the monitor writing to be someone else whose motives we cannot discover. In effect what I perceive is simply a play-act which is aimed at convincing me (and the other viewers) of some rhetorical babble. While I disdain the human tendency to give importance to historical individuals whose motives are impossible to test, I do appreciate and recommend the dialog by Aristotle on the agenda of rhetoric.20

These ideas are germane today, especially since I am writing this in the midst of the most incredible rhetorical buffoonery the world has witnessed in modern and post-modern times: The “so called” presidential debates. They are laughable, and yet fearsome as well, for as in Aristotle’s view the listener is a part of the process; we have already shown that reason or fact does not alter fixed ideas. We are stuck with the parable of the unclad emperor and the little boy.

As I think back over the important years of my educational development, I note that through all of the University experience (9 years) there was no television in my life. Marriage brought another possibility, yet I cannot remember any effect it had on me. When I was in post-graduate training, my residency, there was a tiny TV in my wife’s sewing room, but it had little influence. That same configuration followed into my years in Santa Rosa (CA). The house had three tiny sets, two in the kid’s room and one in my wife’s sewing room Again, little influence. My final heave-ho to the television experience occurred after my divorce while living with a woman whose life was focused upon the TV. So intrusive was that experience, I thereafter completely shunned it. When this relationship ended so also did the subscription to newspapers, etc. Thus, since about the 1980s I have been in my “news-free” bubble. I can attest to the so called ‘grapevine’ metaphor, for I am generally as aware of significant happenings as anyone else; but the awareness comes without Pavlovian influence. I emphasize the conditioning aspect of the kinds of influences which are begotten by audio-visual experiences. I had a friend who spent much of his time on the road as a pharmaceutical representative. It turns out that he spent every day listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and as our conversations evolved, it became clear to me that he was going off the edge and would parrot the babblings of this influential talker. He moved himself from building computers, which was the magnet that attracted him to me, to become an avid gun collector!

And so it goes.

I am describing in my personality a definite attraction to doubt, to questioning. There is a serious problem with definitions, for one needs to know, in any dialectic, the user’s definition, which may be hidden or concealed. So to say I am a skeptic might mean to a variety of readers/listeners a variety of differing qualities. It is advantageous to move away from rigid positions (intellectual, argumentative) to use the idea of tendencies. Urges, motion towards a point. The metaphor in mathematics is asymptote. A process. That I use this process metaphorically and routinely is clear to me as is the absence in many others.

In psychology there are attempts to study and understand the development of the personal “self.” This process is what I am talking of as regards my self. The literature is fairly comprehensive and occasional clues are gotten from interesting sources.

So take "myself" as a potential study. My parents divorced when I was 18 months of age and I went with my father to be raised by his parents, my grandparents. This history in itself bespeaks of potentials: loss of a mother to be replaced by a grandmother. Awareness? Does an infant at age 18 months have awareness? The only way to study that is be an 18 month-old infant and somehow express that awareness. I do not know, but I do suspect that I was made aware of this alteration in the proscribed and possibly biologically determined usual state of affairs for Western, American, non-religious, family units. Just as with my former friend and his conditioning by Limbaugh, I might have been conditioned in a different environment by religious influences beyond my own choices. One could call this unrequested religious indoctrination a form of child abuse; there exists no dialectic for inquiring whether a child desires to be influenced by the dogma of the family religion. Fortunately for me, there was none.

Yet in a recent study that appeared in BRAIN – Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience, Volume 9, Issue 1 (February, 2018), ISBN 2067-8957, titled: Self-Regulation in Critical Thinking Skills of Buddhist Teenagers for Solving Problems in Indonesia, the influence of the Buddhist teaching, children are taught early to be independent and self regulating, to employ critical thinking at many levels. The study concludes Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that self-regulation in critical thinking skills on Buddhist teenagers plays a significant role in solving problems.

This is not a controlled empirical study, yet the attempt is of interest and useful. The study is rich with metaphysical speculation and only sparsely influenced by substantive and tested inquiries. It fits, thereby, my understanding of the role metaphysics can play in intellectual pursuits; the very fact of speculation can lead to potential realms of study. So, to this extent, metaphysics when not taken for reality, can have the power of movement, the ‘tendency towards.’

I observe that certain individuals who leave school early often survive to make important world contributions; for example, Michael Ayrton, painter, sculptor, wit, writer, critic stage designer, sculptor, polymath: “He left school at 15 and never learned the dry division between the critical and the creative faculties which is the bane or our intellectual life.”42 Ayrton influence upon me has been seminal. His work appeals from an emotional and intellectual position. The metaphor of Daedalus and the mythology of Daedalus’ life, fit well into my own life. Daedalus is the “maker” of all things, and while I do not claim Daedalian gifts, I have been a “maker” all of my life—the list of projects is long and old—it begins before my twelfth birthday and continues to yesterday (today).

Joseph Campbell in his interview with Bill Moyers describes an essay by Schopenhauer (one of my Grandfather’s favorite writers): CAMPBELL: “That’s right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. It’s a magnificent idea—an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.21

Is this how it all works? A grandfather with intellectual leanings towards Schopenhauer, a book by Crawford on his book shelf urging independent and critical thinking, a father whose love and respect I always felt—I was never once punished corporally. True, I was like the movie: “My Life as Dog,” in that I came along with his life no matter the effect upon me. But my independence managed to defeat the process—and I was but a young child when I accomplished this destruction of a bad marriage.

And, so it goes.

A question I might ask at this point: “Does “science” [here I place the word in quotes, for one is faced when using a word—any word—with the meaning meant by the user.] This is not a trivial matter. Wittgenstein as a philosopher and Barfield as a careful observer (barrister by trade) demonstrate to me that words are tricky, that within any dialectic there looms an atmosphere of uncertainty. If we are talking about refrigerators and I have in mind a miniature type and you the great double-door type in your kitchen, then when I say: “Set the refrigerator on the table.” The competing thought bubbles mutually conflict making understanding impossible. When a physicist speaks of a lepton or quark, items that have never been seen and which are represented to the physicist only as end-points emerging from mathematics, then I say we enter the realm of metaphysics and that these entities to a physicist are “absolute presuppositions’*; the comparative with theological and religious ideation presents itself.

The difficulties at this place in time and in the history of ideas are worth examining. I have elsewhere attempted to present this case in the form of an essay, which I have included in at least one book (The Mystique of Metaphysics) and its inclusion here has value.

And it is at this point where a subject of interest to me comes forth: no matter whom the subject, the development of the subject’s essence/being/personality needs be examined. The range of theories concerning human development, human potential, in short, the psychology of the individual are many. A scientist might ask the question: How? How did this person come to be at the point in time being examined?

The kaleidoscope of possibilities presents itself; ‘one pays for the ticket and makes her choice.’ What about the choosing one? Need we examine motivation there as well? Of course. In my lifetime hosts of theories wax and wane: psychologists apply Pavlovian methodology, those in the camp of E. O. Wilson unfurl the banner of sociobiology, some philosophers invoke absolute determinism, others, ‘free will.’ And so it goes. If one considered Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” simply as a story, its potentialities are diminished. What if one instead considers the consequences of repetitive conditioning, a whole series of possibilities is revealed. I often laugh at my retention for some 75 years the jingles of ads heard on the wireless/radio: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, Smoke Cools, Ivory Soap is 99 and 44 one-hundreds percent pure: it floats. Are those foolish phrases different in kind from “Now I lay me down to sleep. . .” or “Our Father , who art in Heaven. . “ ? I am asking you to think about that. To think about the source of your jingles, prayers, beliefs, your “absolute presuppositions.” *

If you are following this, and if you are an engineer or physicist—or even some kind of clinical pathologists, then I ask you to try to remember why you claim that mathematics is a feature of the cosmos—the universe. It (mathematics, pure and applied) is “out there in the universe” somewhere and you/we are finding it. Remember the requirements for graduation: in engineering it is rigorous mathematical training; in physics and cosmology, it forms the absolute foundation of the study. And, just as I find myself trapped by Rinso White jingles, so too you find yourself relying upon what George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez call “the romantic concept of mathematics.” Just to emphasize what Lakoff and Nuñez suggest, here is their summary.

The Romance of Mathematics (what most scientists believe) •Mathematics is an objective feature of the universe,· mathematical objects are real; mathematical truth is universal, absolute, and certain.

•What human beings believe about mathematics there­fore has no effect on what mathematics really is. Math­ematics would be the same even if there were no human beings, or beings of any sort. Though mathematics is ab­stract and disembodied, it is real.

•Mathematicians are the ultimate scientists, discovering absolute truths not just about this physical universe but about any possible universe.

•Since logic itself can be formalized as mathematical logic, mathematics characterizes the very nature of ra­tionality.

•Since rationality defines what is uniquely human, and since mathematics is the highest form of rationality, mathematical ability is the apex of human intellectual capacities. Mathematicians are therefore the ultimate experts on the nature of rationality itself.

•The mathematics of physics resides in physical phenom­ena themselves—there are ellipses in the elliptical orbits of the planets, fractals in the fractal shapes of leaves and branches, logarithms in the logarithmic spirals of snails. This means that “the book of nature is written in math­ematics,” which implies that the language of mathemat­ics is the language of nature and that only those who know mathematics can truly understand nature.

•Mathematics is the queen of the sciences. It defines what precision is. The ability to make mathematical models and do mathematical calculations is what makes science what it is. As the highest science, mathematics applies to and takes precedence over all other sciences.

Only mathematics itself can characterize the ultimate nature of mathematics.

Their careful study suggests something entirely different from this romantic idea. And I present one summary of their conclusions: The Romance of Mathematics Disconfirmed

From a scientific perspective, there is no way to know whether there are objectively existing, external, mathematical entities or mathematical truths.

•Human mathematics is embodied; it is grounded in bodily experience in the world.

•Human mathematics is not about objectively existing, external mathe­matical entities or mathematical truths.

•Human mathematics is primarily a matter of mathematical ideas, which are significantly metaphorical in nature.

•Mathematics is not purely literal; it is an imaginative, profoundly metaphorical enterprise.

•There is no mathematics out there in the physical world that mathe­matical scientific theories describe.

Is human understanding of its place in time increasing? Is the idea behind embodied, metaphorical aspects of the brain/mind a theory that can be studied empirically? For if this view is only another metaphysical diversion, one is not likely to improve on thinking forms that have constituted theology and religion. The world “view” here is significant. The physicist/thinker Irwin Schrodinger answered his question: “The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.”22

I found this statement intellectually thrilling. I of course tried to emulate it in pictorial form as you can see in the essay uploaded to Academia.edu: "Time Regained.” What the statement says to me is this: one sees, thinks, believes, promotes, asserts, depending upon that particular system of ‘belief’ that constitutes the individual’s understanding of how the world works. A person presented with a daily or weekly diet of religious dogma or religious lore, sees the world contained in those explanations. For a secular mind, one might be moved to ridicule anyone with mysterious beliefs, yet how different is the religiously dogmatic world view form the physicist whose dogma and lore are founded in the romantic view of mathematics?

I tend to think in images and so I present a couple here, hoping to illustrate my point.: The imaginary pyramid of Physics I show resting on a foundation of the “romantic view of Mathematics.” The physical building/entity can be imagined as a structure which places all of its weight upon a firm foundation which is composed of the romantic ideas of mathematics, namely that mathematics is “out there” in the universe and we have and are continuing to discover it. The engineer and physicist believes in this foundation and continues to add to the structure of the speciality ‘believing’ that the foundation will hold.

I say it is possible that this foundation is an imaginary ideal with features akin to entities like “angels” or “holy ghosts” in religious dogma. Simply, in the words of the philosopher, A. J. Ayer: nonsense. If the world views of some thinkers is changing and expanding possibilities which are based upon advances and knowledge gained in what we now call neuroscience or the study of mind, I say it is also expandable to the idea that the mind and body are one entity and that all of our view of the “world” originate within this thing: the human. This boils down to something some may find it difficult to swallow, but the end point seems to me to be something like: “our explanations are like games, they have rules made by humans and the explanations we offer found in the observation by Schrodinger that the explanations are our world views. In literature, this becomes the “Glass Bead Game” of life. Some play it with religious tautologies, others with logical tautologies, but all are somehow based in a system of belief that can be described as each person’s world view. Individual world views fuse and become group world view or group think.

And so it goes. Could it be imagined in another way?:

Here, the foundation has changed from the romantic view of mathematics to the possibility that this entire structure of—here as physics—is now based upon the human, namely the human brain/mind.

Think about that.

The artist and thinker Michael Ayrton became interested in the idea of the maze. In his words, “The maze contains, I think, almost every possible humane reference. How it had happened to me originally was that I simply stumbled into it entirely by accident north of Naples where a sense of genius loci came out at me. I discovered two things: one was that in the rock of the Acropolis of Cumae the human Sybil spoke through a curious labyrinthine series of passages of great antiquity—what Virgil called 1000 mouth ways through which she spoke—and in the very same place Daedalus according, to the Aeneid, had landed on his flight from Crete. This was in 1956 and I have been almost totally committed to the maze as a concept, not to the exclusion of everything else, but, very nearly, in that everything tends to fit into the maze for me since. I think that the maze is fundamentally a model of the human being and the human condition. If you consider what primitive man must have seen when he first cut open his enemy, he would have discovered a totally incomprehensible series of intricate coils and passages which have no purpose. Perhaps at a slightly later stage he would have imagined that this is where children came from, and with a red cord from the mother to child, which came to be Ariadne’s thread which led Theseus to freedom. Therefore it is as old as that and as mysterious as that. In my view, what people do, in making images and rituals and works of art, is to make models in order to be able to identify themselves in relation to their environment—where they live. From that springs the assumption that the Earth itself is the producer of living creatures and therefore the mother hence mother Earth and that man is always tended to make models of himself in relation to the Earth itself; this is the beginning of the idea about the maze. The maze can be a symbol, an emblem or even just a sign, but it’s so continual since Sumerian times in its use and reconstitution and continuing existence that it seems to me just the sort of seminal image of the model of the journey through life and the human condition itself.”14

Ayrton speaks of two kinds of traditional mazes: There is the penitential maze found in churches—there’s one at Chartres and one in San Francisco. The idea is that you go round on your knees as a penance for not journeying to Mecca or Jerusalem and if you follow the path it takes you to the center: the “Ciel.” Your trip through this kind of maze is preordained and certain. The other maze, the one Ayrton feels is the model for the journey through life, is the error maze. There are blind cul-de-sacs and intersections where one might go in the wrong direction, places where one is not sure of what steps to take next. Seems that this is the kind of model that would describe, to most of us the, journeys we take.

Finally, I offer the tale told by Joseph Campbell to Bill Moyer, where one’s life in retrospect appears to be a series of logically inter-connecting events and the life as a whole becomes understandable although often it differs significantly from the journey we had planned.

Many ways to live and be. No one knows the “why” of it; ‘science keeps aiming at the “how.” The “why” would be teleology and therefore a “no-no” in usual intellectual spheres. Yet the why is a valuable question and useful to ponder at times. I am thinking of a why question that differs from causality; the scientist might claim that by knowing the step-wise progression to ‘how,’ one is also discovering the ‘why.’ I am not so sure that is true. Think about that.

A recent book by Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder serves as a example of the diverting separation of Science and Philosophy. The title of the book: “Lost in Math,”12 suggests the inner content. To me it comes-off as a lament and my impression of the book suggests that she is writing to convince herself that she is on the right path. I say she has come like Dante, to be lost in a dark forest. She has spent the important years of her adult life as a physicist. She both describes the nature of her academic career and also compares that career with the careers of significant individuals who have made contributions to theoretical physics over the past 30-40 years. By asking basic questions of her fellow physicists, she attempts to find answers to her own doubts. The sub-title of the book: “How beauty Leads Physics Astray,” is a clue to her unstated and unexamined view of mathematics. What we see presented to the reader is a list of well known academics all of whom share with Hossenfelder the same mathematical conditioning. The conditioning I refer to is the years of intense study of mathematics underlying which is a belief that math somehow is a function of the universe in the sense that it is being ‘discovered’ from “out there somewhere.”

What the author is showing us is, of course, the “Romance of Mathematics” (q.v.) so described by Lakoff and Nuñez. Their book represents an almost synthetic proposition (philosophically speaking) and demonstrates the emergence of potentially factual evidence—at least as equal to the propositions of theoretical physics—from the soft science of psychology and linguistics. The problem of how to demonstrate empirically the precesses of the brain which result in language is daunting and may never achieve satisfactory “proof.” However, as Ayer pointed out in his book “Language, Truth and Logic,” one may be allowed to postulate somewhat softer evidences for what is. It seems to me that when one considers the nature of those studies upon which theories are based, music, language, religion, that the picture that emerges suggests origin in the human brain. That this brain is connected to the body is obvious, although the influences of Cartesian thinking remain. So when one notes that there are theories of music/harmony, theories of language, theories of religious beliefs the sociobiological implications are immense. While all of the ideas presented in E. O. Wilson’s important test: Sociobiology, are not concretized, the over-all influence of the book is seminal. Shrödinger in his monograph” Mind and Matter,” [this is part of his book, “What is Life, the Tarner Lectures, Cambridge, 1956] makes an interesting and value-rich statement:. He observes: “The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.” What he is saying, I suspect, is that what one believes, teaches, promotes, and lives is the quotidian acceptance of the ‘meaning of life’ to the individual and that is based upon biological and social effects, which of course includes the conditioning so stressed by Pavlov.

What humans appear to be stuck with, then, is this entwined nurture/nature series of processes leading to whatever we may become at any given point in life. Current investigations of ‘human development” are just now happening. They are contributing to new ways of understanding how humans come to be. Soft science, for sure, but the results suggest certain tendencies. As humans chop their existences into smaller and smaller units, perhaps this is all we can expect until the day that the analogy between neuron synapse axon action is valid.

Here I diverge to make critical statements about items in Sabine Hossenfelder’s book: “Lost in Math.” I consider these quotes and my criticism thereof to be useful in attempting to understand the present-day character of the philosophy of science. Page references are to her book.

“Evidence for the gravitational pull of dark matter has piled up, so we are sure it is there.” p 5 I present you with the likelihood that this assurance is founded upon mathematics, and so it goes.

“Our task as theoretical physicists is to develop the mathematics to either describe existing observation, or to make predictions that guide experimental strategies. Using mathematics in theory development enforces logical rigor and internal consistency; it ensures that theories are unambiguous and conclusions are reproducible.” p 7 Well here is the problem in a nutshell. There comes the admission that mathematics is the engine which runs the theoretical guesses and further that the internal consistency is based upon logic. If it were to be found (as I believe it to be so) that both mathematics and logics are human inventions, the whole matter collapses into a tautological game. The ghost of Herman Hesse appears. Remember that “. . .the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.” All analytic propositions, according to Ayer–and I agree he is correct–are devoid of any information about any matter of fact.“They are entirely devoid of factual content. And it is for this reason that no experience can confute them.” Further, they “tell us only what we may have said to know already.” Poincare agrees: “If all the assertions which mathematics puts forward can be derived from one another by formal logic, mathematics cannot amount to anything but an immense tautology.” Ayer emphasizes this: “. . . those theorems which fill so many books serve no other purpose than to say in a round-about fashion “A=A”23

“Instead, new particles must be waiting to be discovered.” p. 11 This necessary future only exists because mathematics tells her so.

“In our search for new ideas, beauty plays many roles. It’s a guide, a reward, a motivation. It is a systematic bias.” p.10

The author is hinting at some kind of natural tendency of humans to apply personal criteria to their theoretic work. What this statement offers to me is a suggestions that “beauty” resides in the human. The mind/body unit makes, per Roger Poole, ethical and moral decisions at every new encounter with the world. Thus beauty is an aesthetic. Aesthetics forms a major subunit of art appreciation. Therefore I suggest the ideas of R. G. Collingwood to be of value in his book: “Principles of Art?” [Robin George Collingwood Oxford University Press, 1958.]

“Dirac took to the blackboard and wrote: “Physical laws should have mathematical beauty.” p. 21 See above note. The house of mirrors of physics is widespread.

“Just keep in mind that whenever physicists refer to particles, they actually mean a mathematical object called the wave function, which is neither a particle nor a wave.” page 50 You see where this is heading: mathematical propositions are devoid of any information about any matter of fact.

“Yes, but is it real?” you want to know. Uh-oh.Depends on whom you ask. Some of my colleagues indeed believe that the math of our theories, . . . is real.” p. 52 From the above and the historical studies of belief, I conclude that this statement demonstrates an overlap of similar magisteriae: physics and religion appear as one. I suspect this is what Roger Penrose was inferring in his 2016 book:”Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe.”38 Well, if it looks like a duck.

“The answer is fairly simple. We use all this math to compute the outcomes of experiments, and these calculations correctly describe observations. That’s how we know the theory works. Indeed, that’s what we mean by “the theory works.”Yes, it’s abstract, but that we merely see detector readouts and not the particles themselves is an irrelevant inconvenience. The only thing that’s relevant is that the math gives the right result.” p. 54 Wow! What an amazing mixture of beliefs: the belief in mathematics (romantic belief), the belief in the reading of an electronic detector which is itself dependent upon computer code and detectors in multimillion dollar constructions upon whose actions the researcher is compelled to believe. It remind me of Magester Ludi—the ‘master of the game. Perhaps this is the reason Lewis Carroll (Dodgeson the mathematician) wrote the Alice books: he was not so sure. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“but we can never prove any math to be a true description of nature, for the only provable truths are about mathematical structures themselves, not about the relation of these structures to reality.” p.74 Well, she knows the lore and yet seems undeterred by it. She is saying the tautology of math is self-contained. I am saying tautologies say nothing about the real world.

Dr. H tells us quantum mechanics “. . .starts with the wave function. The wave function is the piece of math which describes the system you are dealing with.” p.120 I seem to be beating this horse. As the physicist confirms that she is dealing with the products of math (a tautology) she then reasons from this to describe a fantasy world that no-one can see. It is a safe endeavor: like the church philosophers whose fantasy includes angels, ghosts and spooky lives after dying. Yet is sounds so much like a game—complicated to be sure and the master of the game must be very skilled at playing, and yet. . .

“According to the Copenhagen interpretation. Quantum mechanics is a black box: we enter an experimental setup and push the math button, and out comes probability.” p. 125 The condensation of beliefs is startling. Each encounter we have with the theorists shows us another stone in the foundation of physics: a math stone. This book is for me a return to Dr. Ramsperger’s classroom where my class thesis was on Richard von Mises book: “Probability, Statistics and Truth.”29 I suspect that because von Mises was a philosopher, first, his lore has been omitted by the pedagogues of physics. Thus the wide split.

As I consider this book and the author’s admiration for the academics she visits and interviews, I think about the tendency humans have to award prizes and to rank persons on a scale of value of some kind. For me, this tendency was best explained by Claude Levi-Strauss who sees our biological origins as members of tribal groups. He considers the shape of the triangle as important, for at the apex sits the tribal leader with the members placed in the triangular area, just like a movie theater, a lecture hall, a TV screen. Thus, it would seem that award granting is some form of recalled behavior, attributing to the leader, at the apex, qualities such as knowledge and advice. Perhaps even commandments. Seen in this light, many explanations for difficult to understand activities becomes clearer: those who watch Trump by TV might have a biogenetic memory of their tribal essences. And, so it goes.

“Well we’re all wired the same way, more or less, I say. :And why should this sense of beauty be relevant for the laws of nature?” page 151 Why not. It is we who are defining the laws of nature and if we are all wired the same way, more or less, then why not look into the origin not only of mathematics, but also our “universe” view?

“. . .research shows we consider a statement more likely to be true the more often we hear of it. It’s called attentional bias, or “Mere exposure effect.”page 157 She has that right. Pavlov steps into the room and I hear the voice of Hitler, too: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Adoph Hitler

“We can’t measure this, because the gravitational pull of an electron is too weak, but that doesn’t matter—a theory should be able to answer questions unambiguously regardless of whether it can be tested.” page 179 Hmm. A physicist lost in the world of analytical propositions, it would seem. As far from Feynman as one can get. The comparative with religion is inescapable.

“In preparation for the Munich conference, Joe compiled a list with mathematical evidence that speaks in favor of string theory. His list I note fits well with the aspects of beauty . . .” page 181 Another example of a colleague’s world view.

“Math had revealed another connection and this wasn’t only unsuspected but also unwelcome.” page 186 If the theory says that only 20 angels can stand on the head of a pin, it would be unwelcome if only 10 could so stand.

“If you’re in the Middle West USA and your whole life and your community is built around the church, and a scientist comes along and says: “Get rid of this,” then they better have a very solidly based argument for what they say. But David Hume already said 250 years ago that science cannot either prove or disprove the existence of God. He was a very careful philosopher, and nothing has changed since then in this regard. These scientists are sloppy philosophers.” page 214 No Dr. H, they are not philosophers at all. They left philosophy to the philosophers and had they not, they would realize that the idea of “God” is a metaphysical concept and has no relationship to reality. There exists no empirical test of the existence of nonsensical constructs. Thus, the scientists are both right and wrong.

Economist Paul Krugman: “The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive looking mathematics, for truth.” page 224 Well said and it applies to many areas.

“Math keeps us honest, I told you. It prevents us from lying to ourselves and to each other. You can be wrong with math, but you can’t lie.” page 233 Wonderful wish. But the reality is somewhat different, seen by Goethe, long ago: “Men with their figures do contend their lofty systems to defend.” It is a long-time problem and not getting closer to solution.

So I have so far attempted to examine one physicist’s concerns about theoretical physics. Karl Popper, usually classified as a philosopher and sub-categorized as a philosopher of science (the method), added a post-script to his book: The Logic of Scientific Discovery. This was printed as a separate text: “Karl Popper: Quantum theory and the Schism in Physics.”24 Several observations made by Popper are well worth remembering. You might recall Dr. Hossenfelder’s (and the group of fellow physicists she interviewed) saying that “Using mathematics in theory development enforces logical rigor and internal consistency; it ensures that theories are unambiguous and conclusions are reproducible.” Kant asserted that there are no ‘laws” of nature, that they are products of the human mind. Popper’s version of Kant is as follows: “Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it tries—with varying degrees of success—to impose upon nature laws which it freely invents.” This underscores the basic problem with theoretical physics: its reliance upon mathematics. The physicists fail to question the origin of the mathematics itself. They simply accept it as a universal. Popper often strongly disagrees with the unruly ways physicists use mathematics, for one example, von Neuman’s rendering of probabalistic methods into deterministic ones. The book is rich with points where Popper disagrees with theories (he calls them concepts) which have (apparently) been nailed in place by Schrödinger, Eckart, Bohr, and many of the fabled physicists related to quantum theory. It requires study and is worth this effort. Popper has an interesting view of the role of metaphysics in physics: He actually proposes a "metaphysical programme” and quotes the Ionian cosmologists: "Everything is a propensity.” Or in the terminology of Aristotle we might say: “To be is both to be the actualization of a prior propensity to become, and to be a propensity to become.” He presents his idea of the “metaphysical programme” as a dream, a picture, not a testable theory. Like the philosopher Collingwood, he allows for some value in metaphysics: the process is self-revealing of one’s beliefs and presuppositions and it might lead to real testable propositions, he suggests, moving the analytical (tautological) to the synthetic (testable). In his writing he reveals himself to me as a kind man without a dogmatic bent. He argues against the dogma of Heisenberg and the “collapse of the wave packet.” He feels that we have not exhausted the ideas of Einstein, who by his own admission could not longer understand theoretic physics because of the mathematics. A telling remark.

Bertrand Russell, was a ‘doyen’ of philosophy and a corner stone in the foundation of logic (with Whitehead). In 1912, he wrote a book titled: “The problems of Philosophy.”39 He considered a group of questions. The topics in his book, considered in depth, are a list of chapter headings, each brought to a conclusion: Appearance and reality-can we be sure?, The existence of matter and its nature, What is Idealism and how does it affect one?, How does knowledge by acquaintance differ from knowledge by description? Can we rely upon another’s description?, What is inductive reasoning and how is it developed?, Can one trust one’s knowledge of general principles of the world?, Is a priori knowledge possible?, Are there universals in the world?, What is intuitive knowledge?, What is the difference between truth and falsehood?, Can we reliably differentiate among knowledge, error and opinion?, What are the limits of philosophical knowledge?

Russell concludes with a teacher’s disposition: ”Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions them­selves; because these questions enlarge our concep­tion of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagina­tion and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”

It has been a long time since the urge to high good has seen the light of day. Such a statement in today’s world would not only look foolish, but inconsistent with the exposed attitudes of the masses. If any physicist contemplates high goodness, then let her think about that.

I wish to place into context the goals of Richard von Mises whose often reprinted and seminal book: “Probability, Statistics and Truth” 29 is an important reference text of any thoughtful scientist. In the third preface the author describes his goals: “It is brought out repeatedly in this book that the word ‘probability’ has a meaning in everyday language that is different from its quantitative meaning in probability calculus. Some authors with metaphysical leanings have sought to build a separate theory on this other meaning of the word. Such attempts, namely, the study of questions of reliability or plausibility of judge­ments, of propositions and systems of propositions, are justified as long as they remain within certain limits. However, as soon as numerical values are attributed to these plausibilities and used in calculation, one has either to accept the frequency definition of probability (as is done by some authors) or to fall back on an a priori standpoint based on equally likely cases (as is done by others). The stated purpose of these investigations is to create a theory of induction or ‘inductive logic’. According to the basic viewpoint of this book, the theory of probability in its application to reality is itself an inductive science; its results and formulas cannot serve to found the inductive process as such, much less to provide numerical values for the plausibility of any other branch of inductive science, say the general theory of relativity.” In the view of this present study, it is obvious that the physicists have avoided von Mises’ studies and conclusions.

I may have shot my wad, so to speak. The direct comparison of the ways and means of physical scientists with reality on one hand and whatever might be philosophy on the other is more or less complete. I do not intend to parrot the whole history of ideas crammed into a container called philosophy

However, I want to return to my first reasons for starting this paper. Dr. Ramsperger’s book: “Philosophies of Science,” was published in 1941; the problems for the science of physics were just beginning. In Ramsperger’s words: "It is fortunate for mankind that it is possible to have knowledge without being clear as to what knowledge is. If the scientific conclusions by which we direct our lives had to wait upon the philosopher’s assurance that they were based upon the correct theory of knowledge, that the subject matter dealt with is real, and that certain postulates such as causal de­terminism are justified, man would probably have perished from the earth while science awaited its philosophical cre­dentials. There can be science without a philosophy of science. . . . If spec­tacular scientific advance has not been accompanied by a corresponding achievement in human values, the lack of an adequate philosophy of science may well be largely responsi­ble.. . . Different interpretations of science are discussed, but cer­tain points of view are definitely favored. Several titles are recommended: A. J. Ayer’s “The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge” and Bertrand Russell’s “An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.”

Ramsperger continuing: "The point to be noted is that in a formal deductive system of reasoning, whether in mathematics or in logic, the premises are not open to question, because of their being mere defini­tions or, as in mathematics, postulates adopted more or less arbitrarily for the sake of the argument. Then the conclusions likewise are not open to question, but they are not necessarily true of nature; they are certain only within the set of proposi­tions between which the logically necessary relations hold.” He is saying that mathematics can say nothing about the real world.

“Rationalistic philosophers, being partial to the certainty that is to be found only in deductive systems, sometimes persuade themselves that definitions and axioms express eternal truths about reality. Operating upon these with the rules of logic they build for themselves a world of pure thought, a Platonic heaven into which they may withdraw to escape the insecurity that marks every step of the path through natural events.” The ghost of Plato again.

“But philosophers and mathematicians are also natural crea­tures, with needs to be satisfied besides the desire to build logi­cally unimpeachable systems of thought. Hence, if logic is to be more than an intellectual pastime, inferences drawn must foreshadow the outcome of natural processes. The correctness of one’s logic is not enough to guarantee this; the premises must be true to natural fact and only an empirical examination of nature will reveal whether they are so. This does not mean that the scientist does not make use of deductive reasoning. There is, for example, a logically necessary relation between the laws of astronomy and the consequences implied by them. The laws of mechanics, together with data about the position of the moon and other heavenly bodies at a certain time, may be formulated as premises which necessarily entail the con­clusion that the moon will be eclipsed at a certain time. The difference, then, between the mathematician or logician and the scientist is not the use of a different kind of inference from premises to conclusion; the difference lies in the fact that conclusions about nature—about matters of fact—are not, like those of pure mathematics or logic, concerned merely with the connection between premises and conclusion.”

Wittgenstein, Lupasco, Hesse, Brenner, Galileo and the GUL*

“What the #$*! Do We Know?” is a movie I have not seen, nor will, but, I have sufficient second-hand reporting to lead me to repeat a guiding proverb that has been useful through the years, which is: “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” My Grandmother used to warn me with one of her own: “smarty had a party and nobody came.” Just being smart, or owning scholarship in a complex subject, does not guarantee popularity. It is evident in democratic societies, smartness, I.Q., intelligence, are not the qualities sought in leaders. They tend to be negative traits; few leaders have been known for intelligence. A little knowledge may be dangerous to those who act upon it, but carrying a of light burden of intellect can lead to the White House. Not underestimating human intelligence can lead to riches, as Mencken reminded.

The drafters of the screen play for this film are definitely not smart, but, as if to prove grandma right, the film is definitely popular. The film makers are apparently “new agers” who generally avoid factual knowledge yet, who, in this film make broad interpretations from a popular view of quantum physics, with all its strange effects reported in the daily press. The producers are seekers of spiritual, metaphysical guidance, guru worshipers, faith-ists. A major influence for the film comes from, J. Z. Knight, a real person, who claims to ‘channel’ a 35,000 year-old warrior named Ramtha (the enlightened one). Her followers include folks from the entertainment industry, successful (i.e. rich), but not known for intellect: Linda Evans, Don Johnson, Shirley McClain. The film weights its science with interviews with ‘experts,’ mainly in physics. Picked-out from the mathematical metaphors and oddities that constitute present-day quantum physics, is a sort of Buddhist view of reality. It is a mixed salad sampled from the constituent parts of a quantum picture of reality: energy fields, imaginary particles, empty space, entanglement, connectedness, enigmatic mathematics, and strings, served-up dressed with an idea from Kant: what we perceive is what we create. From these as a premise, impossible logical leaps are made. In the end, the heroine is induced to shun modern science, in her case pharmacology, and to stop taking her prescription drugs. It is a replay of the ‘end of the world’ phenomenon, as when, for only one recent example, hundreds of followers of Herbert W. Armstrong’s world-wide Church of God suffered a serious blow when the end failed to begin in January of 1972, as Armstrong had predicted, disappointing many people who had given most of their assets to the church in the expectation of going to a place called Petra, where such worldly possessions would be useless.*

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the son of a wealthy Viennese businessman, was trained initially as a mechanical engineer, but studied with one of the leading philosophical gurus of his day, Bertrand Russell, later, all but dropping him, after he had apparently exhausted his personal philosophical searches. He finally concluded that logic and philosophy were mere games. His contributions to human understanding, to what constitutes knowledge, however, are invaluable. I am reminded of his observations often as I see the difficulty of coming to understand what another person is actually asserting. Like Wittgenstein, I find that most human problems involve misunderstandings and errors in interpretation, commonly syntactical matters.

This conclusion is a kind of reductionism on Wittgenstein’s part, to be sure. He lived as complex world views were often reduced to formulae. Russell, too, was a child of the modern scientific era, one which was heralded by Einstein. What school child today cannot find some meaning in E= MC2? If the world might be somehow ‘reduced’ to a formula, perhaps logical problems might be solvable and reduced to symbol; such was the road traveled by Russell and indeed, improved upon, by Wittgenstein but finally rejected by him as a game.

The seeming connectedness of all things human is, perhaps, another Kantian matter. However, when things change, historically, all regions of human activity move, as if connected like a multi-element pantograph or web. For example, the fine art of the year that Einstein published his five startling papers,1905, found soft-witted Victorian expressionism exchanged for polished bronze eggs, by Brancusi, reduced to stark monochromatic squares by Malevitch, transformed to formulaic color theories by Mondrian, and soon enough music was to be gutted of shape by Schönberg. I suspect that the cyclic sense of history, once more strongly held than now, has a speck of validity; it is not unlikely that we shall see forms of everything that has come before, again.

Surely, we are again finding a rise in religious fundamentalism in many parts of the world, a rise reflecting the usual suspects who ride the fringes of society and thought. At base, childish ideas turn out to be the most appealing. Who among us would not opt for a tooth fairy or a Santa Claus (or a god) if all that was necessary for reward was being “good” or losing a replaceable tooth? Pascal Boyer tells us that these childish ideas, e.g. religion, are natural, in the sense of ‘human nature.’ Edward O. Wilson also concluded this. There is no form of scientific proof, which if presented to society, could convince the world of the absurdity of religious belief. Indeed, faith seems on the rise, if only in the news media, hopefully only there. Hopefully, for there has been no activity more devastating to humanity than those taken in response to religious beliefs.

The absurdity of the movie which began this diversion can be easily shown, however, neither science nor logic will budge faith which is the standard-bearer of the absurd. To reduce all of existence to quantum physics as its explanation is no better than saying a turtle that holds-up the world and it’s turtles all the way down. When you try to solve a problem involving human behavior, you do not ask a quantum physicist. The physicist might be helpful in ways not thought of, but a fight over property will likely involve a lawyer, a judge, the law and other humans. You ask a pharmacologist or organic chemist for a certain chemical product, not a quantum physicist, nor do you buy some time on a particle accelerator. The chemist, the lawyer, the judge, you yourself may know that the table you are using to write a letter is almost totally empty space, however, you do not act upon this belief by worrying about your coffee cup falling to the floor. We can live-out our lives without a moment-by-moment concern that two objects will occupy the same space at the same time or that somehow the pen I hold in my hand somehow “knows” (is entangled with) another pen in the hand of another anti-me somewhere across the universe. This is true even if quantum mechanics and mathematical metaphor tells us they are possible.

We just don’t go there because most of us know that in the world where we really live, when we test these marvelous possibilities, we find they don’t pan-out. Empiricism helps us return from Oz to where we are.

Yet, I do not wish to throw a damp towel on creative fire. There is nothing like imagination to infuse us with searches for certain kinds of improvements. I choose not to discuss the ultimate value of what we understand as progress; surely most of us are not ‘happier’ today than humans were in ancient Rome or Athens. Nor am I happier today emerged from a childhood where my household received ice, coal and milk from horse-drawn carts. We just have better technological solutions to some of our needs. Also, as science moved from Aristotle through Ptolemy and Kepler to Hubble, we found that each of their ‘scientific’ theories work (or can be made to work) as long as the underlying belief system is unchanged. Although the following statement by Wade Rowland has the ring of a religious apologist, it nonetheless has some validity: “Kepler’s fruitful career also demonstrates that not just scientific but religious and mystical hypotheses as well can be profitable in exploring the world and developing instrumentally useful knowledge. His experience highlights the fact that when useful knowledge is derived by inquiry inspired by a given hypothesis or methodology it is by no means safe to assume that this demonstrates the truth of the hypothesis–it testifies only to its utility. True conclusions, as Aristotle knew, can be drawn from false premises.”

There is often something prescient about the Nobel committee that confers to those rewarded a correct, often singular and valued, position in the stream of human knowledge. Hesse was for me, as he was for so many of my time, a spiritual guide, a reminder of another current of existence, softer and running parallel with the day-to-day world with which we struggled. It was for the book “Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game” that Hesse received the Nobel prize. There is barely a day that goes by where, with this tome as a metaphor, I do not see something I would likely have missed had I not read it. How true it is that we so often become entranced by an idea, a belief, a motto, a jingle or ‘sound-bite,’ and we forge from that source a life, never allowing our eyes to wander, to question, to stop.

I suspect that Wittgenstein allowed his eyes to look elsewhere. We know that he tried a variety of ‘lives.’ His life could be characterized as, depending upon our prejudices, escapist, psychologically flawed, odd, noble, pure, reactive, bizarre. I know that had I not been drawn to his work, I might not have had the ability or courage to see how different things appear from even minutely differing points of vision.

Joe Brenner, organic chemist and philosopher, was intrigued by the philosophical logic of the almost completely unknown Franco-Romanian Stéphane Lupasco. His book, Logic in Reality, describes a concept of a new form logic based upon the ideas of Lupasco.26 Lupasco’s novel framework grounds logical principles in basic physics. Lupasco grounded his system in 20th Century science - the quantum mechanics of Planck, Pauli and Heisenberg, developmental biology and cosmology. Lupasco proposed that the dialectical characteristics of energy - extensive and intensive; continuous and discontinuous; entropic (tendency toward identity or homogeneity - 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) and negentropic (tendency toward diversity or heterogeneity - Pauli Exclusion Principle) - could be formalized as a structural logical principle of dynamic opposition, an antagonistic duality inherent in the nature of energy and accordingly of phenomena, including information, propositions and judgments, etc. - a dialectics. The key Lupasco postulate is that every phenomenon, element or event e is always associated with an anti-phenomenon, anti-element or anti-event non-e, such that the actualization of e entails the potentialization of non-e and vice versa, alternatively, without either ever disappearing completely. The point of equilibrium or semi-actualization and semi-potentialization is a point of maximum antagonism or “contradiction” from which, in the case of complex phenomena, a T-state (T for “tiers inclus,” included third term) emerges, resolving the contradiction (or “counter-action”), as proposed by Nicolescu, at a higher level of reality.

The logic that describes this picture of reality is a logic of an included middle, consisting of axioms and a set of rules for determining the dynamic state of the three terms involved in a phenomenon. (I use the term “dynamic” in its physical sense, as related to real rather than to formal change, e.g., the facility of changing rules or conclusions.) In the Lupasco formalism, the reciprocally determined values of the degree of actualization A, potentialization P and T-state T replace the truth values in standard truth tables, permitting a non-truth-functional semantics. The term “transconsistent” is preferred for this logic since all three axioms of classical logic are modified. This logic contains that of the excluded middle as a limiting case, approached asymptotically but never instantiated except in simple situations.

Opposing aspects of phenomena that are generally considered independent can be understood as being in the dynamic relationship suggested, namely, as one is actualized, the other is potentialized. Problems due to the assumption of an absolute independence or separation between terms (e.g., local/global, part/whole, set/member of set, knower/known, rational/irrational, etc.) can be approached from this standpoint. For Lupasco and Dummett, our world is not the “sort of world in which the distributive law, the law of the excluded middle or double negation holds”.

These theories, while satisfyingly tautological, and possibly finally descriptive of what might go-on in human interaction, suffer most from a metaphysical quality that would seem to place them beyond the studies of empiricists. There is no way to test such assertions

In the end, it will be humanity’s solution that will out. Humanity already has a GUL and when they find it necessary, they use it. Otherwise, they don’t. GUL: Grande Unified Logic

Re/ Joe Brenner, a response to reading one of Joe’s essays:” I find it tantalizingly interesting that a book I am re-reading—Philosophy in a New Key—by Suzanne Langer40 seems to describe what is happening in Brenner’s writing. She says the brain uses symbols (words) to find meaning (and to thereby transmit understanding of meaning to others (who speak the same language)). She then begins to trace the origins of mythology, which she says precedes or underlies language (is at another “level”) and depends upon imagery, imagination, and similar, and which cannot be readily translated into language. It might be that you are oscillating between rationality and formalism and this inner, deeper, imagery which you seem to earnestly hold up to “reality” to find agreement (or meaning?). For it is clear, at least to me, that you would have difficulty explaining your theory to a child or a simple person. It is not like when you write a poem or a Haiku, where your meaning and intent are clear. Rather, you embrace arcane and extremely uncommon words, some of which are clearly Humpty-Dumpty-like, to display your ideas, making the reading of your writing a kind of detective experience. That being possible, then you might find that there are some Clueseau’s out there who solve the mystery their way: “Does your dog bite?”

“You also reveal this Langeresque idea by asking at the end of your consciousness lecture: "It is one of my key objectives to further this work is to find mathematical formalizations of the systems aspects of LIR that would render them both more accessible and more rigorous. I would be grateful for suggestions along these lines.” If it is possible that your theory is located as an image in your mentation, and, as it seems to me, you find it difficult to raise it into symbolic language (words). Perhaps you believe that using another symbolic form (mathematics) would render it into transmittable “meaning.” I don’t think it will.

Adam Kirsch, writing for the New Yorker described Wittgenstein:25 “In the summer of 1918 Wittgenstein completed his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which was published in 1921. Today, it is Wittgenstein’s later work that commands the most attention, but the “Tractatus”—a brief, dense book that, like Euclid’s treatise on geometry, takes the form of a series of numbered propositions—magnetized readers from the start with its radical ambition. It aimed to tear Western philosophy up by the roots, just as revolutionaries on the left and the right were doing to societies all across postwar Europe.

For Wittgenstein, the renovation of philosophy had to begin with language. Since the Greeks, Western thinkers had tried to understand the world using terms such as “being” and “becoming,” “substance” and “essence,” “real” and “ideal.” But these abstractions gave rise to complicated arguments that went around and around, never reaching any definite conclusion. Now, in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory were redrawing the map of reality in ways that could be verified by experiment and given precise mathematical expression. In an age of triumphant physics, did philosophy still need to bother with metaphysics?

By declaring the answer to be no, Wittgenstein set modern thought on a new course. For the analytic philosophy he helped inspire, many of the discipline’s traditional problems are actually just misunderstandings, based on an erroneous use of language. What philosophers need isn’t profundity but clarity: as Wittgenstein says in the “Tractatus,” “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.”

This way of thinking about language—what it means, what it can grasp, and how it should be used—became the particular obsession of the Vienna Circle, a group of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers who met regularly from the mid-nineteen-twenties to the mid-thirties, mainly at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Vienna. The best known of its dozen or so core members are the logician Rudolf Carnap, the sociologist Otto Neurath, the mathematician Kurt Gödel, and Moritz Schlick, who turned to philosophy after earning a doctorate in physics under Max Planck, the pioneer of quantum theory. These thinkers and their students helped set the agenda for postwar academic philosophy in Britain and America, where most of the Circle’s members ended up teaching after they fled the Continent in the thirties. Taking its cue from the “Tractatus,” the Vienna Circle sought to make language as precise and rigorous as a mathematical proof. The English philosopher A. J. Ayer, who studied in Vienna and helped popularize the Circle’s ideas, summed up its definition of the purpose of philosophy: “to dispel those confusions which arise from our imperfect understanding of certain types of sentence in our language.”

Kirsch’s views were related to a different theme: how did Naziism and philosophy interact? There is much to be said about examining language as a propelling aspect for the emergence of Naziism. Recollecting the tenets of Aristotle and his presentation of the uses of rhetoric, we come to Wittgenstein himself, whose best examples in my opinion, demonstrated without creating a syllogism of it, the errors one can experience in using and understanding words in multiple ways. It is in the lectures of 1932-35 one finds the essence of Wittgenstien’s proposals. No didactic urges here, simply, he presented to his students the series of statements which demonstrated without further elucidation his observations about language.30

The history of the science of linguistics today converges with the neuroscientific theories of mind and brain. The linguists have tended towards a version of psychology, which itself is now fragmented among those who study human psychological matters and those who attempt to find in neurons, axons and impulse potentials, the answer to what is human. Most understand that it was Noam Chompsky who postulated intrinsic aspects of language, syntax pre-existing in human brains. And it is the linguistic studies of Lakoff and Nunëz which have led to a shift in understanding what role mathematics might play in any human endeavor. Like Gallileo’s translocation of geocentricity to the sun in understanding our solar system, Lakoff and Nunëz successfully showed that the romantic view of mathematics, that is to say, that mathematics is a function of the universe and exists somewhere “out there” is incorrect and that the origins instead are the human being. There are other important destroyers of cherished beliefs, and not only in the metaphysical world, but in the world of language. We can thank Benjamin Whorf for his studies of the language of the Hopi and Navaho which show, as pointed out by Wittgenstein, language is a structural mold on which we place our words and therefore our thoughts. As Coleridge said: “Few and unimportant would the errors of men be, if they did but know, first what they themselves mean; and secondly, what the words mean by which they attempt to convey their meaning.” Thinking is performed using words, that the words mean different things to different groups of people must become obvious.

Peter Farb, in an essay in Horizon Magazine in 1968 asks: How do I know you mean what you mean?” A powerful question, and one that needs to be thought about by all of us, but in particular, the theoretical physicists. Benjamin Lee Whorf of Hartford, Connecticut, started publishing the results of his intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Whorf’s brilliant analysis of Hopi, which demanded about eight years of hard work, placed the old folk beliefs about language and culture on a scientific basis; it also supported the idea that man is a prisoner of his language. Whorf stated that the structure of a language “is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. . . . We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.” When Whorf died in 1941, only forty-four years of age, he had hardly begun work on the book he had hoped to write about his discoveries. But he did leave behind him some very articulate essays in a number of scholarly journals. They were collected in one volume and finally published in 1956 as “Language,Thought, and Reality.”27 Since the book’s publication Whorf’s influence has spread from a small group of linguists to specialists in such fields as anthropology, psychology, and sociology. His views are widely discussed in communications theory, in the new field of “ proxemics” (man’s use of space), and in the behavioral sciences;and his methodology has had a great influence on the whole field of structural linguistics.

In that same issue of Horizon Plama Perera submitted an essay titled: “The View from Babel Or: Benjamin Lee Whorf revisited,” In which we discover that the gift of languages can be a dubious blessing. Born in India, she acquired skills in many languages and in this essay she describes many of the problems faced when trying compare thinking in one language with thinking in another. In the article by Peter Farb, he quotes studies that show that thoughts in one language do not easily transfer to another. I have had experiences with trying to understand instructions given for an electronic device made in China. The instructions were apparently translated using lexical definitions in English for words or ideographs in Chinese. Thus, an electronic connector meant to send electronic signals out from the device became “a faucet,” and a connector meant to accept electronic signals—ie. input—became translated as “mouth.” This is a curiosity with serious implications, for even this minor demonstration shows the imprecision with which ideas or concepts are held by persons with different languages. I think that students of literature know this well: it is an error to believe that translation from one language to another is perfect. I recall articles written by translators working for the United Nations which confess horrendous errors in trying to transfer ideas from one language to another. “I suppose the scholars of the Septuagint could at least be said to have started something big when they mistranslated the Hebrew word for “young woman” into the Greek word for “virgin” coming up with the prophecy: “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son...”28

Theoretical physicists commonly use words the meaning of which differs seriously from their intention. I say this about some examples such as “leptons, hadrons, quarks” and others. Even the more common word electron is couched in seriously misleading usage. Some have used the word “particle” as synonymous with electron (or quark, or hadron, or lepton) where in fact a particle in the sense humans use that word differs completely from the physicist’s understanding of what it might mean. One view is that it is a mathematical potentiality, or perhaps a local gathering of energy, or a multitude of differing definitions, none of which present a word which can be used in thinking about problems of reality. Using Wittgenstein as a guide, a physicist might glibly talk about interaction of particles and convey to a reader or listener a possible picture of what the interaction might look like. But I say the physicist errs in reducing the actual definition of, e.g., a quark to the word or symbol which s/he hopes to represent. Thus, two quarks interact so and so should actually be said this way: two electronic impulses shown on a phosphorescent cathode ray tube in the year 2012 after their generation from a large computing device using code that humans devised to show the effect of bombardment in a multimillion dollar accelerating machine interact so and so, in theory. By reducing the reality of the fact that a quark as such (implied as if it were a thing or “particle”) is just another thing, like a marble kids play with an in the game of “marbles,” a seriously false view of reality emerges. For the physicist who is thinking about that imaginary “thing” the problem is serious., I say, s/he thinks improperly. Rather, each time one physicist describes to the world or to herself the interaction s/he imagines, s/he should repeat the real-world description of the implied entity.

Whether this will improve the thinking about current theoretical physics is not known, but if we harken to Einstein’s method, which involved pictorial images of experiments—thought experiments—there may be some value in this homage to the great thinker. Recall, again, that he complained of not understanding physics any more because of the mathematics.

If the physicists were to examine the ideas of Lakoff and Nunëz, to attempt to discover whether their own ideas about mathematics are correct, some progress in thought might be made. Mathematics is useful, without doubt, but as a means to understand and describe reality, I fear it fails. Therefore I say that the divergent pathways taken by philosophy and science (and all of the pseudo sciences as offshoots) need to become re-united within the minds of both scientists and philosophers, A new holism is what I propose.

The word science etymologically relates to knowledge as does philosophy, which additionally implies an emotional tie to wisdom in its Greek origins. Perhaps there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. It is hard these days to recognize knowledge. We are continually bombarded with lies, nonsense and bullshit, it takes enormous effort to ferret-out the “facts.” Mostly we get factoids. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a factoid as a brief or trivial item of news or information and as an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. The term was coined by American writer Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.

The split between what we commonly know as “science” and what we define to ourselves as “philosophy is real. Both endeavors have left important questions to the other.

After this ponder into knowledge and wisdom I recommend what was recommended to me when I discovered the idea at age 15: “Think for yourself!”

References: 1. Ramsperger, Albert G., Philosophies of Science, F. S. Crofts and Co., New York, 1942

2. Ayer, A. J., “Language, Truth, and Logic, Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 1991 ISBN 0-486-20010-8

3. Huxley, Aldous, “Brave New World,” Chatto and Windus, 1932

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

5.http://www.openculture.com/2012/08/the_character_of_physical_law_richard_feynmans_legendary_lecture_series_at_cornell_1964.html

6. The Feynman Lectures on Physics including Feynman’s Tips on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands 2005

What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Phillips Feynman, Ralph Leighton, and Richard P. Feynman Paperback - Jan 2001

7. Quine, W. V. and Ullian, J. S., The Web of Belief, Random House, 1970, ISBN: 978-0394302324

8. Jack Kerouac: Mexico City Blues: 176th CHORUS The reason why there are so many things Is because the mind breaks it up,

9. L R Elveback, C L Guillier, F R Keating Jr, Health, normality, and the ghost of Gauss, JAMA, 1970

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Rietz]]

11. Cramêr, H. Mathematical Methods of Statistics, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, p 232.

12. Hossenfelder, Sabine, Lost in Math, How Beauty Leads Physics Astray Basic Books; 2018

13. Leissring, Jack, The Mystique of Metaphysics, Aristotle to Frankfurt, J. C. Leissring Fine Arts Press, 2020, ISBN:978-0-9908931-7-2

14. Ayrton, Michael and Menuhin, Yehudi, The Gift of Legends, BBC Radio Series Audio Tape, ca 1970

15. Pinker, Steven, “The Language Instinct,” How the mind creates the gift of language, Morrow, 1994,

16 The NewYorker, September 28, 2020.

17. Mascolo, M. F. and Kallio, E., Beyond free will: the embodied emergence of conscious agency, Philosophical Psychology, 2019, v. 32, No. 4, pp 437.

18. Smotherman, Ron, Winning Through Enlightenment, Context Publication, 1979, ISBN: 978-0932654014

19. Lakoff, George and Rafael Nuñez, Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being, Basic Books, 2001, ISBN: 978-0465037711

20. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/index.html#means

21. Campbell: https://billmoyers.com/series/joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-1988/

22. Schrödinger, Erwin, What is Life?, Cambridge Press, 1967, pp90-165

23. 18. Poincaré, Jules Henri: quoted in Ayer, A. J., Language,Truth and Logic, see ref: 2.

24. Popper, Karl, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, Routledge, London and New York, 1982, ISBN: 0-415-09112-8

25. 10/17/2020 Philosophy in the Shadow of Nazism | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/philosophy-in-the-shadow-of-nazism

26, Brenner, Joseph, Logic in Reality, Springer, 2008, ISBN: 978-1402083747

27. Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought and Reality, MIT Press, 1964, ISBN: 978-0262730068

28. Hofstadter, D and Dennett, D, The Mind’s I, Basic Books, 2001, ISBN:978-0465030910, p 128

29. von Mises, Richard, Probability, Statistics and Truth, originally published by Springer in 1928 and in a third edition in 1951 (definitive). the present edition is the Dover edition ISBN 978 0 486 24214-0

30. Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932-1935, ISBN: 978-1573928755, https://www.amazon.com/Wittgensteins-Lectures-Cambridge-1932-1935-Philosophy/dp/1573928755]

31. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.496.9459&rep=rep1&type=pdf

32. Barfield, Owen, Speaker’s Meaning, Barfield Press, UK, 2011, ISBN: 978-0956942302

33. Percy, Walker, Lost in the Cosmos, Picadore, 2000, ISBN: 978-0312253998

34. Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1994, ISBN: 978-0192853066

35. Poole, Roger, Towards Deep Subjectivity, Harper and Row, 1972, ISBN: 978-0061316760

36. Frankfurt, Harry G., On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBN: 978-0691122946

37. Crawford, R. P., Think For Yourself, Whittesley House, London, 1937

38. Penrose, Roger, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, Princeston University Press, 2016, ISBN: 978-0691119793

39. Russell, Bertrand, “The Problems of Philosophy,” Oxford University Press, 1912. ISBN: 978-1-61427-486-5

40. Langer, Susanne, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, Harvard University Press, 1996, ISBN: 978-0674665033

41. Hesse, Hermann, Magister Ludi, Important Books, 2013, ISBN: 978-8087888384

42. Michael Ayrton, “A Question of Mirrors,” BBC Radio, ca. 1974-5; transcription of taped broadcast.

Digital Object Identifier: 10.5281/zenodo.7595541 _________________________________________ On Philosophy: 2023

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Anais Nin

"It is a failing common to a good many contemporary metaphysical theories that they can be applied to all things except themselves but that, when so applied, they extinguish themselves; and experience has taught me that, when men are really attached to such a theory, most of them will, after this has been pointed out to them, continue nevertheless to apply it to all things (except it itself)."1 Owen Barfield

Unziker's,2 Penrose's,5 and Baggott's3 books (titles and references below) aim their criticism at the state of being of physics today, one which depends less and less upon reproducible experiments (who is going to build a second Hadron Collider?) and relies more and more upon a tautological mathematics which, like Schrodinger's world picture, it is often forgotten, is also an invention of man(kind), and, in which, that mankind cannot be found — because it is itself that invention. Lakoff and Núñez's book: Where Mathematics Comes From4 is valuable here. And, I am a philosopher by choice, in that I choose to employ the guiding ideas of 'a love of knowledge,' — an appropriate etymology of philosophy, the word — to my own understanding of the world. As someone has said of art: "All the past, up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it." Robert Henri. In truth, everything is your legacy.

One of my irritations about a common approach to philosophy is the tendency to focus on the recorded ideas of a small number of dead persons, commonly giving to them, through the magic of thought, characteristics and features they may not have owned. But worse than that is the sensation of worship, a religious quality; the dead writers become god-like in their significance. There can be no exchange with the dead writer, no dialectic; we are stuck with interpretations and preferences, beliefs. H. L Mencken brought this down to earth by saying: "Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself." It seems true that the argumentation of academic philosophy consists largely of references to other philosophers, in one way or another. But other philosophers, or other individuals are, in my view, stepping stones we use to form the pathway to what becomes our personal 'world view.' And this understanding of how the process works is just another doorway to the realm of belief; beyond this door is world of bizarre ideation, of which probably not much can be done.

Erwin Schrodinger, better known for his cat, wrote a delightful book titled: Mind and Matter,6 1959 in which his thesis asserted that it was man(kind)'s mind that became aware of the cosmos perhaps only 100,000 years ago, and that mind, in effect, created the universe we accept as our world picture. But, he says, is it not interesting that no-where in that world can we find the mind (or the self) that created it. He says: "The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture."

Own Barfield: "Science deals with the world which it perceives but, seeking more and more to penetrate the veil of naive perception, progresses only towards the goal of nothing, because it still does not accept in practice (whatever it may admit theoretically) that the mind first creates what it perceives as objects, including the instruments which Science uses for that very penetration. It insists on dealing with ‘data’, but there shall no data be given, save the bare percept. The rest is imagination. Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is, not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity."1

Barfield continues: "The difficulty lies in the fact that, outside poetry and the arts, that activity proceeds at an unconscious level. It has to be dug for. I have said that in the business of law the logical faculty operates more externally, at a slower pace and in a realm of voluntary effort which makes its elusive operation easier to detect. This is also true of the business of poetry. But here the problem is, no longer to proceed from life to thought, but to start from thought and move from there back to life. If law is the point where life and logic meet, perception is the point where life and imagination meet. But the point is out of sight — though not out of mind. Consequently, if men are ever to grow aware of it, they must start, in this case, from the other, the more subjective end. And I maintain that, just as the study of law was once a valuable exercise for other purposes besides the practice of law, so today the study of poetry and of the poetic element in all meaningful language is a valuable exercise for other purposes than the practice or better enjoyment of poetry. The secondary imagination can be our pointer to the primary. I do not say it is the only pointer, the only exercise that can lead to the desired end, namely, awareness of the part played by the imagination in perception, and by the individualized imagination in knowledge. I say it is a valuable one. To write poetry, said Wordsworth, a man must ‘loaf and invite his soul’. I say nothing of the ethics of loafing, but it is certain that a man cannot understand what poetry is without inviting the soul, or in the words of Locke already quoted, reflecting on what passes in his own mind. Empiricists who question the mind’s existence should not logically refuse to try the experiment. The best way to convince yourself that there is a world of inner experience is to explore it."

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Thoreau

"Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit." Guillaume Apollinaire

1. Own Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, Wesleyan University Press, 1984; ISBN 978-0819560261, 2nd Edition.

2. Alexander Unzicker and Sheilla Jones, Bankrupting Physics: How Today’s Top Scientists Are Gambling Away Their Credibility, Palgrave Macmillan, (288p) ISBN 978-1-137-27823-4

3. Jim Baggott, Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth; Pegasus Books, 2013; ISBN- 978-1605984728

4. George Lakoff, Rafael E. Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being; Basic Books, 2000; ISBN-978-0465037704

5. Roger Penrose, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe; Princeton University Press, 2016; ISBN-978-0691119793

6. Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1959

Jack Leissring. Santa Rosa, CA, www.jclfa.com

Jack Leissring.
Santa Rosa, CA,
www.jclfa.com