Knowledge, The Universe, and Everything: What I Know and What I Believe

By Marty Price

This book matches its title: it reflects the lifetime I have spent exploring human thought and the beliefs that appear, from our words, to motivate us. The book details my understanding of the Universe in which we live and my place in it, based on my attention to the history of literature, philosophy, and science. My thesis is based on the evolution of human ideas. My approach is personal, plain language, and easily accessible.
I speak, in very general terms, about social history and that evolution of ideas. I speak, in personal terms, about my aesthetic values. I speak extensively about ethics and our obligations, one to another, as we experience each little life of ours.
Within this book, one should find some words well worth the effort of reading, words that should inspire thought and reflection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312688841

Book preview

Part 2A: Life and the Physical Universe

The Western tradition is rich in knowledge of the physical world. I attribute this richness to our systematic development of analogy. It is common to think of analogy as the source for metaphor and its related products {simile – the firetruck is red as an apple; symbol -- the new Mississippi flag symbolizes the state in which I live; the old one prominently and deliberately symbolized the residual racism of its past; and allusion -- I may make reference to the Collective Unconscious alluding to the psychological theories of C.G. Jung.} Analogy and metaphor, however, are much more than literary devices; they are patterns of creative thought.

Practical, applied use of analogy – to create categories, to apply categories, to use deductive and inductive logic – long predates the famous Greeks. It predates what we term ‘civilization,’ as hunter/gatherers have used it from the first awakenings of what we term ‘conscious thought.’ Neil Gaiman’s The Mushroom Hunters beautifully illustrates the likely identity of the first scientists – gatherers who learned and remembered what foods were good, which were marginal, and what plants were poisonous as well as how to prepare otherwise marginal or even dangerous dishes to turn them into good food. Science begins as we begin to consciously utilize our environment.

It is the Greeks we credit, correctly or incorrectly, for moving inductive and deductive thought beyond the realm of the practical and into the airy realms of ontology, and perhaps ethics and aesthetics. Histories of Western philosophy generally begin with Thales of Miletus, judged the ‘first philosopher,’ the one who advanced, rationally, the claim that the primal substance was Water – after all, water exists and thrives in all three forms which matter takes: solid, liquid, and gas. It was a logical claim, not a metaphoric claim as is found in myths.

Such were the beginnings of formal deductive reasoning: deductions, the syllogism, all the wonders of mathematics. Deductive reasoning allows the systematic application of the attributes of categories to their individual members. Mathematics creates a formal system of organization, with its truths purely derived from formal organization; one plus one always equals two because the definitions of one and two render the conclusion a given. A change in definitions (to a base 2 system) creates the result 1 + 1 = 10, equally a given and constant conclusion. Mathematics lies in the airy realm of abstraction – and has sent many philosophers off into Plato’s Realm of Forms, where the triangle and its friends replace the gods. Applied mathematics can be used to build a tremendous amount of good science, including – as was managed from the equatorial regions almost 2000 years ago -- an accurate measure of the circumference of the Earth.

However, the development of excellent formal tools does not in itself always produce valid results. A distrust of the senses compounded by misapplication of formal paradoxes left the Greeks weak in inductive method. Willingness to formally define the steps by which instances could be used to build categories was limited. Certain philosophers became convinced that Achilles could not catch the tortoise (in logical terms, of course; in real world terms Achilles had long scooped up the tortoise and was carrying it off to make turtle soup).

As a result, systematic experimentation was not consistently developed. Blather like the notion that a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter one persisted. Well, it’s logical, or presumably so Aristotle spoke. No, it is not logical. The object falls ten times as hard, not ten times as fast, but it seems no one ran the simple experiment to find out. An unexamined ‘truth,’ whether true or false or something in between becomes dogma, mere dogma – nothing more.

The unfortunate consequence was that the moments of blather persisted on roughly equal footing with the good science into the Western Medieval world, a world where intellectual distrust, bizarre religious passion, and religious orthodoxy limited human understanding. Plato and Aristotle persisted, their words admired, but they persisted alongside the words of ‘saints’ whose ravings at times dwarfed the nonsensical spoutings of the acknowledged ‘mad.’ Their philosophical musings were too often enshrined alongside theological pronouncements rather than subjected to the rigors of intellectual inquiry. Extraordinary Medieval philosophers wrote and said wonderful things; yet those beautiful things were too often obscured by a dogmatic shell, a notion that wrong inquiry led one into heresy and condemned one to perdition.

Ontologically, the inquiries of the Greeks produced wonderfully rich ideas. The thought that the primal elements were earth, air, fire, water, and aether is more than useful, as the four states of matter are solid, liquid, gas, and plasma (fire). Aether has had its place in modern science, lost its place, and still holds vestiges of existence in each reference to ‘the fabric of space’ that accidentally creeps into current scientific explanations. The Greeks battled with the great issues of stability and change, Democritus giving us atomi and Heraclitus a too-often neglected apprehension of flux. Empedocles can be credited with that ‘earth, air, fire, and water’ standard four, and also, anticipating the Hegelian dialectic, with the sense of dualisms composed of conflicting opposites as he offered the notion of ‘love versus strife.’ (He also imagined himself a god and jumped into a volcano, which contributes measurably to my own conclusion that self-styled bodhisattvas of any tradition suffer brain clogs composed predominantly of moose manure.)

With the unfortunate tortoise in the cooking pot, philosophers sat down with Achilles to inquire about the nature of time – and reached, I fear, what I would term poor answers.

So, the Greeks gifted the Western world mathematics, logic, and more than a little ‘real world’ knowledge. What was left out? The means to systematically collect and organize empirical data: inductive reasoning. In the Western world steps toward good science probably start with folks like Roger Bacon; even alchemists of considerably less reputation and credibility than he attempted experiments. It is Francis Bacon, chronologically a dash later, who we credit with fully conceiving procedures for inductive reasoning.

Do categories have some magic existence in the Realm of Forms? Sorry, Plato, but no. Sorry, Hart Crane, but mathematically beautiful as the arc of a suspension bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, may be, it is no more an image of the Divine than is a fractal-messy coastline with its Earthly (still Divine) existence. At least if we give attention to history and our development of specific categories, we find a solid ‘no’ to the depiction of the Mathematician’s Paradise. Categories do not even have the natural relationship with their constituents stated by Aristotle. Instead, they are products of human thought, of analogy and metaphor. Some have said ‘we create the gods’; it might be even better to say we create the Realm of Ideas (or at least our understanding of ideas). Via our mental structure we create/discover the Collective Unconscious. All we know of the Universe we have learned through our senses as applied by our mental lens. All we know of the Beyond (as I stray into personal mysticism, asserting there is a Beyond) we know within the limitations of our mental design.

Categories are the means by which we take analogic items (Zathras and Mira, by category my border collie and my Aussie shepherd) and gather them, accurately or inaccurately, into groups (those greater categories, dogs and herding dogs). Dog, as a category, works oh-so-well and the relationship of dogs is borne out by DNA studies; likewise is the relationship of the house cat and the lion. But there are the dinosaurs: the creatures lumped as ‘dinosaurs’ ever since those first discoveries of big old bones include three distinct groups. There were reptilian, cold blooded creatures like brontosaurus; there was a group rather more bird-like than reptilian; there was a group contemporary scientists judge as direct ancestors to birds. Warm-blooded creatures, some with feathers, were lumped with ‘thunder lizard.’ It might be funny, but it is also a reminder of how science works. Inductive reasoning is flexible. Inductive reasoning, properly employed, is self-correcting. While the discoveries began with ‘old, big boned things that we think are reptiles,’ it has advanced to the present level of knowledge; we no longer think of dinosaurs as a single group of oversized reptiles; theories are amended or replaced as data is added. Categories are corrected as details emerge.

Scientific method, when used with integrity, is wonderfully self-correcting. First evidence may warrant one conclusion: thereby a category or a valid scientific theory is created. Further evidence may amend the category or alter its placement regarding other categories. Further evidence may amend a theory or overthrow it entirely, leading to its replacement by a new theory. Newton’s laws have not been rendered invalid by modern theories of relativity; instead their place has been circumscribed. We have limited the context in which they can be applied, refined their place in our understanding of the Universe. The Michaelson-Morley interferometer experiment overthrew the notion that the Earth was traveling through aether, forcing the forging of new theories of the cosmos, but certainly did not void Newton’s valid, evidence-backed claims regarding gravity and inertia. Objects on Earth continue to fall with an acceleration rate of 32 feet per second per second, just as they did before Albert Michaelson flashed some photons against a mirror.

As regards ‘scientific theory,’ I am inclined to accept Karl Popper’s definition: a falsifiable claim based on significant real evidence and so far judged valid (valid means both valid in form and not falsified; a scientific theory must be falsifiable; a valid one is a falsifiable claim which evidence has not rendered erroneous). While evidence is still inadequate the claim is termed a hypothesis, that is, a learned conjecture, a direction requiring further exploration. As for the dividing line between a hypothesis and a theory, that is a matter of judgment – for further study is requisite in either case; science never says I’m done; it’s time for bed. A theory is truth to the best extent which it can be known, but that does not make it complete or perfect. Nothing is. I, as I insistently refer to the Big Bang hypothesis rather than theory, am making a judgment based on presence of evidence, a personal claim that the folks in the field