Philosophy in the Elements

By Garrison Clifford Gibson

During the course of two years living outdoors in Alaska Garrison Clifford Gibson wrote philosophical essays on cosmology and Christianity considering how spirit and the Universe are reconciled with reason. The author's interests reading popular cosmology, the Bible, philosophy and history yielded construction of a synthesis of logic, epistemology, philosophy of language and the gospel into a world view examining transcendence of mass and energy through the Spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781105883415

Book preview

Philosophy in the Elements

Philosophy in the Elements

Copyright

Philosophy in the Elements

©2012 Garrison Clifford Gibson

All Rights Reserved

I.S.B.N 978-1-105-88341-5

The Essays

Introduction

Writing these brief philosophical essays while living in a tent in Alaska 2010 through 2012 on my usual interests in Christianity, cosmology, language, logic, history and what people think about those issues and how they conflict, harmonize, contrast and function in the drift of time, science, learning and social flow was challenging with the economy being off and the weather below freezing for several months at a time periodically. Breaking a computer screen in a sleeping bag, experiencing moose and people kicking my corner tent poles now and then and reading many fine books from local libraries made for a learning experience.

I believe that most of humanity are generally going in the same direction and have the same goals. They live within a space-time stream of experience and jostle one another politically and socially in order to obtain what they want-even if it is the power of clumping several thousand or millions of people together with them in their journey downstream for whatever reason. The logic of the flow-to maximize the general environment and to accomplish the best individual maximization of potential with the least amount of friction and chaos may seem a reasonable way for the individuals moving through to proceed however that seldom is the prevailing political philosophy in theory or application.

The tangled bank of confusion that was Darwin's idea about evolution becomes a political modus vivendi for political governance of the global banking system while so many have trouble understanding that God does not share the limit of knowledge that humanity has at any given moment in history.

Content

Jesus Christ and the Question of Home

June 19, 2012 05:30 PM EDT

In the aftermath of the home mortgage crisis millions of Americans experienced the insecurity of loss of home equity. If not all became homeless living upon the streets or in the forests, many became renters or sharers of dwellings-with-others. The Lord Jesus Christ expressed his own station in life regarding dwelling.

Matthew 8:²⁰ "And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head."

The Lord Jesus did not have a customary location that was his home. That makes a lot of sense for God, yet it is difficult a humanity that is very property and security oriented.

Animals generally have a 'home', den, borough, nest, hole, cave, reef, shell or such in which they find life more comfortable and secure. The cunning fox has a place to return to with Kentucky Fried Chicken while the birds have the sky for a house and a nest for their bed. Jesus Christ was not limited to such a geographic center as is most of humanity, and neither should he logically with monistic oneness with all that could exist as His heritage.

Today one might expect that the government could mediate a little the housing crisis in the U.S.A. by giving favorable tax and energy benefit reinforcement to small eco-niche integrated homes with large healthy eco-yards as wild as possible for low price with mortgages that cannot be traded on global commodity exchanges where they may become owned by the ones destined to exist for eternity in hell.

Troubles of Atheism With Logic

June 15, 2012 01:04 PM

I have recently been reading Eco's 'Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language'. It is a book very well worth reading and should be a choice for the book of the month here. The ontology of language (that should be plural) that Quine wrote about is supported well by Eco's description of language semiotics.

Language is of course represented by signs. Signs have meaning. Meaning tends to derive from referral to objects, yet not necessarily. In fact the more abstract removal from direct experience life becomes the more it is regarded as reflecting intelligence. Today news brought the story of alleged Neanderthal Art and opposition to the idea that Neanderthals had that level of abstract reasoning. The conceit of humans is that art is an exclusive human activity-one doesn't expect that from chimps for example though listening to the news media I might take exception to that.

Metaphor is an abstract art as is metaphysics. Eco helpfully recounts the history from Aristotle through the Middle Ages to at least the 1980s of language theory. One finds the classification of ideas, words, objects and so forth by Aristotle and later Porphyry into genus, species and etc as a hierarchialization of descriptions, meanings and relationships that was important to philosophers over the ages. Yet we find that the hierarchialization of signs and meanings breaks down. Eco describes the failure of dictionary definitions to have a valid hierarchical structure of words and meanings as a result of the need to explain each word used in a term with other words that again need to be explained by other words. Eventually an encyclopediazation of descriptions supplants the validity of dictionaries.

W.V.O. Quine wrote a book named 'Ontological Relativity', and at least so far as I have read in Eco's book, that is the consequence of language and signs that are fundamentally no more than descriptions and descriptive fields. The vast non-linear web of word-meanings allows formation of local lexicons or ontology that are valid only so far as they go-as they are used. That is a reason why logical formulations can be contradictory and yet valid potentially-the meanings of the terms in propositional usage may differ making formulations such as if P then Q true sometimes and false in other given the same values for P and Q.

If language and semiotics is a network of differentia, describing God with differentia is an implicitly difficult effort unless it is a real individual such as Jesus Christ; that is simply the nature of language. One wants to place God on a Prophyrian tree chart as a substance or quality, mortal or not mortal yet the nature of language is such that even with Kripke's rigid designators temporality would tend to erase the meaning with the drift of time from the Baptismal bestowing of meaning to on word.

It is notable that Adam appeared after the creation of the world to name every animal rather than before. Mankind needed to develop abstract reason a little before naming the things it encountered with more than grrs and yikes.

It isn't likely that any human logic has the linear rigid designators needed to describe God in order to refute the concept of the existence of God logically. One can appeal to ignorance and say that that which cannot be expressed cannot exist-it works well implicitly for the worm and even the chimp yet of course that thought never occurs to either perhaps.

The neo-Platonists gave quite a bit of thought to the ideas about hierarchical classification of material things and immaterial ideas arising from the One. The One is the inexpressible, immaterial creator or emanator of all things-what Christians such as myself like to call 'God'. The nature of words in the modern context makes refers to metaphysical or trans-physical ideas problematic yet also more possible because of the appearance of cosmological theories that support such logical speculations.  The One is logically possible for individuals to consider even if inaccurately.

I have given some thought in recent time to the question of how monism can transform into pluralism logically, regarding cosmology. The question of The One (God) issuing a Universe of plural forms is ponderous regarding logical method for differentiation.

One knows that Leibniz inferred that the quantum world is constructed from one-dimensional section called monads-with some being two dimensional, and that these sections of Spirit comprise the 'matter' of which everything else arises, yet we might one where the monads came from-at least I did.

If one imagines a circle as 'The One' existing in the beginning, as an example of monism, it is easy to regard the 'nothingness' inside and outside the circle as important. The circle might have been a dot to start with-yet of course its only a visualizable paradigm for comprehending a little of the character of monism creating pluralism.

With the existence of the circle of any relative size it is possible to imagine the omniscient One emanating a sinusoidal wave around the circle of a select size, and from that a succession of smaller waves perhaps graduating toward the center of the circle with the important nothingness or spacing allowing the formation of structure.

Of course these structures might be compared with quantum structures of strings, membranes, quarks or larger particle-waves. Yet it is the geometry of the generation of the continuous yet distinct structures within the circle that is of most interest, for one can visualize that the monism continues concurrently with the creation of pluralism.

One can imagine that the order of appearance of the structures might be construed as time, with the spacing or intervals in order of appearance and distance, relative scale and form of the structures comprising space and the scale of space.

The structures instead of being in just two dimensions can occur in three, four or N dimensions as then purpose of The One finds it useful. In a four dimensional hyper spherical Universe with structures arising within and without it is easy to imagine that even more complex dimensional regions could travel in different directions of space and time toward the one circle of origin or 'outward' toward the center of the circle while the original line might itself not be absolutely stationary and may even transition into being part of the structure-for-itself.

The philosophical problem of how one substance or one Spirit might generate pluralism along with nothingness and the variety of different forms may be approached from another slightly different way. The initial Spirit might be able to thin out or decrease its substance somewhat and create a comparative being and nothingness even though nothingness does not actually exist. Then the variety of structures of pluralism created with quantum relationships of scale of energy or mass could proceed.

There is obviously no definite limit to the number of structural 'universes' that the pluralism could issue as the scalar field characteristics are contingent upon the will of The Spirit.

Eco’s ‘Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language’ gave an illustration of the classification of words and meanings with a hierarchical branch structure with hyponyms and greater hyponyms arising unto the top wherein one might find general, universal concepts. That obviously suggested to me the idea that the universal One might in a comparable way issue a variety of forms through structures of pluralism.

Within the pluralistic structure not only might forms arise with definite complex structures generated by the one that yet remain within monism, it might be possible for the One to design the emergence of forms or intelligence from the context of the structures-perhaps intelligence of sentient beings arising from matter might be an example. Photons too are I believe emergent quanta of an electro-magnetic field.

The Earth in a Sweet Spot of the Solar System, Galaxy and Universe

June 11, 2012 02:35 PM EDT

The Earth and the solar system rest in a special location of a remote spiral arm of the galaxy far away from the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy where thousands of stars are drawn to their destruction. The special locations that can let biological life form on planetary surfaces must be far from the lethal x-rays and chaos of turbulent gravitational force in regions with densely packed clumps of stars and interstellar gas. The Earth’s location is a special place called a galactic habitation zone, and the Earth’s size and distance from the sun and its intense heat let’s life have time to be and become.

The visible Universe may be about 46 billion light years in size, yet the size of the Universe itself is unknown. It is believed that the Universe inflated faster than light for a split second like a balloon in the first moments of its existence or that it grew quickly in some other way letting all of its locations have equal claim to be the center of the Universe since they were all locations equally distant from the space-time origin. When one looks out into the night sky through the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope and other deep field observational devices capturing light images going back to more than 13 billion light years of time the special, equally important locations of everyplace though a kind of nowhere-Utopia- were all essential for the subsequent history of the Universe that is our human heritage.

The philosopher Leibniz inferred that the foundational structure for atoms and matter is the monad; one and two-dimensional spiritual segments that allow formation of larger structures that seem to be matter and energy in larger phases. That concept is not much different from the philosophical paradigm for membrane and string theory. At the heart of matter and of its equivalent energy the unknown and uncertain reposes within a monistic mystery of One that gives rise to the appearance of a pluralism of quantum components and forms.

That mysterious philosophical paradigm of The One and the many is not inconsistent with belief in God and the Son Jesus Christ as creator of space-time and life on Earth through a phenomenal process. Consistent with evolution or a progressive history of the cosmos are transcending ideas for time and interpolation by the Lord of intelligent beings within any location in space-time of the Universe. God transcends the matter-energy emergent evolution with its General Relativity and Special Relativity characteristics that make time for-oneself the center of experience. Time may be dated from the inflation or membrane expansion of the Universe at time=0 in which the beginning of the Universe is regarded as its center, yet the center of that time equally developed to every place in the Universe existing today, for space and time are united and indivisible phenomena.

God as progenitor of energy-matter and/or space-time is not subject to his project and its space-time that floats downstream like a boat on a river that is part of the river itself. God is the intelligent designer of the Universe with every place in space-time meaningful at adapted to its physical circumstance.

Human Transformation of the Planetary Ecosphere

June 10, 2012 06:24 PM EDT

Scientific American posted an entry on a Nature article on human transformation of the planet's environment. At least 43% of the ecosphere has been remade (into less ecospherically productive) for human purposes.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=are-we-pushing-the-planet-to-the-br-12-06-10

This reminds me of Diamond's book on how societies can bring about their own end through environmental collapse... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

This sort of thing is a variation of the Dodo bird syndrome/aka fossil fueled vehicles going around in circles as a kind of economic-intellectual autism; the economic methods degrade or consume environmental resources until social economics aren't sustainable. Perhaps one of these economic collapses will emerge like a newly isolated tropical island with a cut off population imbalanced environmentally and consuming everything existing in panic like locusts.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-dodo.htm

The paradox is that in that future planet of the apes with the statue of liberty cut down to size on the beach the apes will turn out to have been humanity itself- especially the political leaders and broadcasters. Free at last with no survivors it might be a peaceful empty world and the federal debt will disappear too.

http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/31968/InTech-Human_altered_mesoherbivore_densities_and_cascading_effects_on_plant_and_animal_communities_in_fragmented_tropical_forests.pdf

Why Atheists Have Difficulty Contemplating Monism and Monadology

June 05, 2012 01:45 PM EDT

I've written and read on the Internet more than a little, and commonly atheists a priori deny (categorically) any paradigm with Spirit or God in it as valid. In writing about monads and fundamental monism it is reasonable to consider spirit.

Monism with spirit at its heart tends to be arbitrarily opposed by atheists. The argument is given sometimes that spirit cannot be observed and therefore cannot exist, and one returns to that paradigm of needing to prove that something is materially observable or capable of being inferred from matter in order to potentially exist. That in despite the question being about what mass-energy-substance is in-itself.

I think that Leibniz might have named monads from the idea of monism. They were postulated to be one-dimensional or two-dimensional spiritual phenomenalities I seem to recall. With just a tiny potential for reason they could be assembled into the plurality of forms that make up the 'physical' universe. One virtually needs a theological background to contemplate philosophically how God who is pure spirit could create little 'bits', monads, strings or whatever without quantifying His substance in some kind of structure with dimensions, yet of course Plotinus believed that God (Plotinus called God 'The One') had no need of physical dimensions or scale as might a Universe.

One can consider a quantum cosmology of course, yet regarding the nature of spirit donating form through possible monads it is difficult to say. Believers might regard God as capable of all kinds of things beyond the capacity or limits of either human minds or quantum structures that contain or channel energy (whatever it is for-itself in basic quantum denoument).

It is a paradox that the reasonable ideas of Leibniz on a philosophy of monads would be too often considered silly or heretical today by 'modern' 'enlightened' atheist 'philosopher' that have signed off simply on the materialism of Darwin and the meaninglessness of Dewey. Certainly physicists must search for proximal quantitative relationships for mass, energy and space, yet philosophers should be free to consider cosmology generally from a number of perspectives, forming of course opinions and making logical investigations where it seems worthwhile.

Leibniz actually invented mathematical logic and never published it. He tossed it in a drawer and his work was discovered long after his death. The philosophy of logic is a phenomenal construct itself, and even atheists ought not give up contemplation of paradigms of creation by the Spirit of the phenomenon of mass and energy. Perhaps logically they must yield that point as unbelievers-I haven't thought about that too much being of faith myself.

Leibniz, Quanta and Extra-Dimensions

June 04, 2012 03:34 PM

I would like to reply to that point about monads insofar as how it is comparable to membrane and quanta within the string theory paradigm as I understand it generally.

With the development of math such as finding the square root of minus one useful on Cartesian X-Y graphs so negative numbers can be plotted, and with the development of the graph in three dimensions rather than just two useful for placing coordinates in real space and with the addition of non-visualizable extra-dimensions on such theoretical spaces up to 256 dimensions or more perhaps it is possible to construct 10 dimensional hypothetical structures.

As I understand it, things such as Calabi-Yau space of extra dimensions help with structuring or channeling quanta of energy.

When light quanta was shown by Einstein in his Nobel prize winning of 1905-the photo-electric effect, and with the previous discovery that energy from atoms existed in fixed quanta levels physics progressed toward further discoveries in quantum mechanics all the way up to the strong forces and later quarks. The philosophical nature of the quantum structures is easier to explain with extra-dimensional structures in which energy can exist, pass or emerge in just select locations.

The strong force is a good example with its three quarks that bond stronger as they try to move apart, and there are actually something like 9 quarks in groups of three I seem to remember reading in 'One to Nine'.

Magnetism has positive and negative poles yet it is probably because the field flows in just one direction in one side and out the other. It may be that all energy flows in such a way with the dimensions that it flows through large and small determining how much quantity of energy is permitted, where it can exist and in what way.

Though monads or membranes, strings or such may be the smallest presently known units of energy, it is not at all certain that they or any other mapped observation of quanta of energy are the minimal state. It seems that the smaller the energy unit is, or the closer to the underlying field whatever it is, the stronger is the bond that keeps it together, perhaps because the twist that enables it to loop in upon itself as a structure is the most basic.

Leibniz has spiritual monads or one dimensional membranes as his basic quanta, yet philosophically I wonder about the fundamental paradox of monism and pluralism. I understand that God is a spiritual Being yet He is able to issue a pluralist field through various mysterious ways.

For the benefit of the hardened atheists out there I must stipulate that an undifferentiated monism that allows itself to become something that appears to be pluralist in the form of strings, membranes, quarks and so forth is a paradigm for itself standing even without regard to atheist opinion, if it exists. It is a philosophically interesting conjecture to me at least...

Why does an undifferentiated 'energy' become pluralist in various forms?

Those forms are without real or meaningful time as G.R. and S.R. point out. Time is a phenomenon of energy-mass formations locally without and absolute direction except perhaps in relation to larger macro-structural space-time formations such as the hypothetical Universe and its expansion 13.7 billion years past. Time, as Tillich noted, would be in 'The Eternal Now' for the basic monistic field although the temporal progression of local time varieties of phenomenality arise and flow perhaps comparable to the solar flares while the sun itself goes on for billions of years-yet for the fundamental field that time paradigm is a non sequitur.

The Social Explosion of Symbols/Metaphor

June 21, 2012 12:27 PM EDT

Reading through a fine text on the philosophy of language recently I arrived at a chapter on symbols and metaphor. Words exist in a kind of temporal continuum of a discrete nature with lexicons as a kind of ontology illuminated like a nebula from the formation and forces of a dust cloud-perhaps even unto the miniature scale of strings or monads. Symbols are one way of creating semiotic tokens or indicators of larger meanings or formations of word meanings.

Metaphor too has a similar process. One might be a liar if one's metaphor is taken literally. An example is saying that a basketball player is a tiger on the court, or a lion when the public plainly can see that he is a human being. The meaning of symbols and metaphors is in relation to something else not implicitly contained in the symbol or metaphor. Like most words that aren't onomatopoetic, symbols and metaphors comprise a kind of abstract address for the object of described.

Social metaphors and symbols may arise that have a given meaning and value to which other people dissent. A political revolutionary may bring the explosion of a metaphor into the social lexicon or reformer-the symbol of the metaphor-perhaps a hammer and sickle may herald the arrival of the creative destruction of the existing social order. Interpretation of the symbol may be positive or negative, as might the social effects of the deeper forces supporting the power criterion of the symbol or metaphor.

For social dissidents the formerly explosive symbol may become kitsch-a paradigm for bad or obsolete things. Alternatively a symbol may arrive and fizzle failing to detonate efficiently generating stagflationary political anomie. Atheist dissidents to Christian symbolism have for decades attacked Christian symbolism in order to neutralize the value. One example is that of the symbol of the fish on bumper stickers followed with a fish being eaten by a larger fish. The Christian concept of God providing creatively as Jesus so often did for his disciples is attacked with the nullification of economic providence in leftist American circles.

On Two-Dimension Semantics

June 11, 2012 05:11 PM EDT

An entry today into the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is that of two-dimensional semantics. It's an interesting entry since I have recently been reading Eco's book 'Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language'. I also have an interest in Quine's works such as 'Ontological Relativity'. So it is easy enough to regard language meaning and the signs to represent it as one dimensional, two-dimensional or multi-dimensional in regard to addresses or locations for the word unit or meaning unit components.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics/

Apparently two-dimensional semantics is a way of charting words or phrases-perhaps signs-with multiple meanings, contingent meanings and etc. One obviously can use a bi-conditional context for an example of a word having one meaning or another. If A then B equals C...

Words are themselves signs, and signs seem to have an even more basic existence. Words can be reduced to simple codes-one letter or one number as an example of their nature as signs in many-lettered words with phonemes and morphemes.

One of the reasons for semiotics and semantic researches is that in areas such as Europe where many languages are spoken making a chart of the inter-language values and structures in regard to past and present use and origins such as in ancient Ukrainian, Sanskrit or German is that the levels of meaning for words within their context of use inevitably needs becomes formalized in translations. If there were just one global language perhaps the work on formal logic, semiotics and semantics might not be so plentiful.

My belief presently is that words as units can be reduced to any sign such as in computer logic of o's and 1's-binary code, or in Samuel Morris' code, and that the language signs exists within an architecture mapped by linguists and philosophers of language. It can have a multi-dimensional structure perhaps in order to create an inter-language context more simple to structure, yet any construction of word-unit meanings becomes meaningful only to those using it with their own meaning-content interpretation structure that may be standardized or not.

Words seem to be addresses for meanings that exist within a given ontology. Meanings like words are phenomenal and of value for live users. The philosophical questions about the reality of reference objects such as 'green leaves' is another field for itself. Green is a color created in the human mind by the neurological atomic structure that prefers wavelengths making green, blue and yellow psychological phenomena when given wavelengths of photons impacting things regarded as 'green leaves' bounce off and hit the eye and optic nerve of an observer of 'green leaves'.

If human brains were changed so that 'green' stimulus was changed to red and the ability to make the phenomenon of 'green' appear in the human mind no longer existed then the meaning of green would not exist in the same way within the ontology of human users.

Monism and the Creation of Pluralism

June 13, 2012 04:43 PM EDT

I have given some thought in recent time to the question of how monism can transform into pluralism logically, regarding cosmology. The question of The One (God) issuing a Universe of plural forms is ponderous regarding logical method for differentiation.

One knows that Leibniz inferred that the quantum world is constructed from one-dimensional section called monads-with some being two dimensional, and that these sections of Spirit comprise the 'matter' of which everything else arises, yet we might one where the monads came from-at least I did.

If one imagines a circle as 'The One' existing in the beginning, as an example of monism, it is easy to regard the 'nothingness' inside and outside the circle as important. The circle might have been a dot to start with-yet of course its only a visualizable paradigm for comprehending a little of the character of monism creating pluralism.

With the existence of the circle of any relative size it is possible to imagine the omniscient One emanating a sinusoidal wave around the circle of a select size, and from that a succession of smaller waves perhaps graduating toward the center of the circle with the important nothingness or spacing allowing the formation of structure.

Of course these structures might be compared with quantum structures of strings, membranes, quarks or larger particle-waves. Yet it is the geometry of the generation of the continuous yet distinct structures within the circle that is of most interest, for one can visualize that the monism continues concurrently with the creation of pluralism.

One can imagine that the order of appearance of the structures might be construed as time, with the spacing or intervals in order of appearance and distance, relative scale and form of the structures comprising space and the scale of space.

The structures instead of being in just two dimensions can occur in three, four or N dimensions as then purpose of The One finds it useful. In a four dimensional hyper spherical Universe with structures arising within and without it is easy to imagine that even more complex dimensional regions could travel in different directions of space and time toward the one circle of origin or 'outward' toward the center of the circle while the original line might itself not be absolutely stationary and may even transition into being part of the structure-for-itself.

The philosophical problem of how one substance or one Spirit might generate pluralism along with nothingness and the variety of different forms may be approached from another slightly different way. The initial Spirit might be able to thin out or decrease its substance somewhat and create a comparative being and nothingness even though nothingness does not actually exist. Then the variety of structures of pluralism created with