POETICKS » Philosophy

Entry 213 — More Really Intellectual Chatter

Bob Grumman — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:23 +0000

Re: egotomic reality or the least possible full-scale universe, it serves nicely as the basis of practically any religion you want to believe in. It can have a God, maybe even an omniscient one, so much more able to expand than other egotoms that it could come into contact with all other egotoms and push them where it wanted to. I can’t see how it could be omnipotent, though, for there should always be uncovered parts of egotoms they could use to do something on their own.

No God is in my own egotomic reality because it’s more elegant to think of all egotoms as equal but slightly different from one another, and nicer. On the other hand, I like the idea of demi-gods–egotoms slightly superior to others, me, of course, being one of them. Being the greatest of them, in fact! Such an egotomic reality would explain why it does seem that perceived reality consists of a number of material entities ranging from the nearly infinitesimally simple–and able to effect perceptual reality–to extremely complex entities like you and I who seem able to effect perceptual reality relatively greatly.

It seems likely, if something like egotomic reality exists, that non-living entities are not manisfestations of egotoms, but perceived matter rather than real matter. Put oppositely, I’m saying only living creatures and perhaps carbon atoms are egotomic, everything else being part of some egotom’s semblance to us. Simple example, the egotom that I’m aware out of touches egotom 539,750 at location 3. Wait, I need to start being more precise. Location 3 of the egotom I’m aware out of touches location 87 on egotom 539,750. As a result, I perceive my friend Ed, who is aware out of egotom 539,750 and his awarenessless clothes, shoes, scent of his after-shave lotion, and three square feet of the floor he’s standing on.

I like that better than a perceptual reality all of whose quarks, or whatever entities are the true atoms of our universe, have an awareness. (I say there are such things as the smallest entities in this universe even though it could as well consist of infinitely divisible entities and remain as simple because I don’t like infinity and won’t allow it on the premises.)

Good and Evil fit easily into any religion based on egotomic reality, Good being orderliness, Evil being disorder, as they are in most religions. This contradicts my belief that in perceptual reality, the Good is a balance between excessive order (boredom) and excessive disorder (confusion). So my egotomic religion supposes that once an egotom achieves stability at more than eighty percent, say, of its locations, it experiences pain and shivers its surface out of near-stasis, and begins again to seek eighty percent stability, but not a jot more. I think this condition may be a necessary one even for an egotomic reality at its simplest. Otherwise, total stasis might occur. Great for Buddhists but–well, it’d be Nirvana, or everlasting near-infinite happiness–which my irrational human brain doesn’t like although it’d have to be the best possible state. Ah, in that case, time being infinite (the one infinity I’m compelled to accept), egotomic reality would have already achieved total stasis and I wouldn’t be writing this.

It wouldn’t be fair to the egotoms on the outside of the egotomic universe, for they would have exposed locations.

As I’ve mentioned in my other writings about the versions of universe I’ve hypothesized that allow for a form of re-incarnation (here it would be egotomic continuation sans memory), a wonderful result of the existence of such a universe is that it gives one a rational reason for trying to make the universe better, to wit: by doing so you will make it better for you the next time you are a human being. You will also make it better for others, which will make them more likely to be nice to you then, too. I like that much better than your doing your best for others in order to escape damnation. I can’t conceive of any universe run by an entity that would punish anyone for anything since one can’t help the body something gave him, and because there are so many easier ways for omnipotence or even extreme immortal power to deal with harmfully defective entities, like isolation.

I think that may be all I have to say about egotomic reality. Surely it should make me famous. It’s as interesting as Jung’s baloney and makes more sense. It won’t. But if a world-religion is derived from it, I hope they give it a good name. Not “Grummananity.” I like “Bobbianity,” though.

Entry 212 — The Simplest Final Universe

Bob Grumman — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 00:00:52 +0000

After rambling through yesterday’s entry, I remembered that the main thing I had wanted to discuss was my theory of a primary universe. I’ve chattered about it before here. I haven’t change it any, though I’ve added details, I guess. What interests me now about it, though, is that I believe it is the simplest possible universe that can exist. That, I think, makes it a significant contribution to the study of what existence ultimately is, whatever branch of philosophy that is. (By “universe,” incidentally, I mean all of existence.)

Initial assumption: that the universe consists of nothing but space, or emptiness (not the thing with properties that modern physics takes space to be), and egotoms. “Egotom” is my coinage for the awareness each of us finally is, and which each of us thinks he calls “I” or “me.” He isn’t: his brain is calling his body that. But, at the time, one’s egotom coincides with one’s body. All of which is irrelevant to this discussion but I have a tendency–I mean, my brain has a tendency–to go off on tangents.

An egotom is permanent. Its ultimate size is very small, say about as small compared to a period as a period is to what current science says this universe is. But it can expand to become possible as large as our universe is said to be, or larger, though not infinitely large. Most egotoms are far larger than they are at their smallest.

An egotom has two properties: materiality and awareness of other egotoms. Its materiality allows them to touch neighboring egotoms, its awareness to sense the contact. An egotom automatically moves toward anything it touches, in effect trying to maximize the area of contact. This results in egotoms pushing each other around and continually changing shape. If it pushes hard enough, an egotom can protrude from the mass of egotoms that the ultimate universe (the universe under the one we know as human beings) is. It will continue to move in the direction it has ben moving in, but only for a certain time period. At the end of that time period, it will move in an direction opposite to the one it has been moving in. Hence, the ultimate universe will never fragment.

Besides its ability to sense other egotoms, an egotom has an evaluatory sense. It is happy to the degree that it attains stability, unhappy to the degree that it fails to. The rest of the universe it will experience in accordance with what egotoms it is in contact with and where it is in contact with each. It will “perceive” this experience in many possible ways, perhaps an infinity of ways, one of which is the way each of us is now perceiving it. For instance, an egotom in contact with egotoms 2,6 and 908 at points 77, 423 and 888,746 may perceive existence at that moment to be what a human being experiences in a rowboat drawing close to a beach on Long Island one summer. A slight change in where egotom 6 touches it may change its experience to hearing a seagull. Etc.

Space is infinite. It has to be unless what it’s in is. Simplicity requires minimization of the number of terms in an explanation. So space is infinite.

This description of the ultimate univers explains everything, as far as I can see. That doesn’t make it true. Nothing can do that, or make it false. It’s just the description of the universe that accounts for everything using the least unexplained objects and characteristics of objects.

To complicate it to make it fit what I as a human being want to feel it does, I add that each egotom innately prefers certain egotoms to others, and uses more of its energy to get in and stay in contact with those eogtoms and ways from other egotoms. That allows love of a mother and others to dominate an egotom forever, which my brain considers a nice idea.

I also like the idea of my egotom’s being better able than any other eogotom to understand existence in detail–which being in contact with a maximun number of other egotoms would be.

This is metaphysics, needless to say. It does not negate the quest to understand this secondary universe of ours, for that can be thought of as simply how we experience our egotom’s under-quest to understand its existence. That is, both our this-world-quest and our ultimate-universe-quest are going on simultaneously, so I can think of my investigation of quarks as simply a marker for my egotom’s simultaneous spreading over egtoms 487 and 836.847,008.

Entry 121 — Definition of Scientific Account

Bob Grumman — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:30 +0000

Many of my thoughts and hypotheses keep getting hammered for being unscientific, including my poetics (which I consider definitely scientific, which is why so many poets hate it). So, here once again, although newly formed, is my definition of what a scientific account of some aspect of reality is:

An account of some aspect of reality is scientific if it satisfies the following four criteria:

1. It contradicts no law of nature held by the consensus of intelligent, informed observers.

2. Data accepted by the consensus above as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to support it.

3. No data accepted by the consensus above as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to refute it.

4. It is falsifiable.

Note: satisfying the four criteria only makes an account scientific; it doesn’t necessarily make it valid or of any importance. Moreover, it will always be temporary since new data can always show up.

Because many highly regarded accounts of aspects of nature do not satisfy my four criteria but are accepted by a great deal of experts in the fields they are concerned with, such as physics’s big bang theory, which some facts contradict (the ones requiring the further hypothesis of the existence of unobserved “dark matter”) and which breaks certain laws of nature (the ones requiring such certain laws of nature to be different when the big bang occurred), I also have a definition of what I call “Near-Scientific Accounts.”

An account of some aspect of reality is near-scientific if it satisfies the following four criteria:

1. If it contradicts a law of nature held by the consensus of intelligent, informed observers, the same consensus agrees that some end-around (like dark matter) is plausible.

2. Data accepted by the consensus above as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to support it.

3. If some data accepted as factual can be shown by standard logic directly to refute it, experts agree that some end-around is plausible.

4. It is falsifiable.

An account of some aspect of reality that is neither scientific nor near-scientific is unscientific.

Okay, in a few hours I should be an a Greyhound bus on my way to South Carolina. I hope to post at least once from there. If not, expect a new entry around April Fools’ Day.

Entry 59 — Degrees of Absolutism

Bob Grumman — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:55:52 +0000

Just a few unexciting Philosophical Thoughts today, just to record them somewhere.

There are, in my opinion, four or more kinds of absolutes:

1. Philosophical–an absolute 100% certain, usually by definition–e.g. 1 + 1 = 2. Not applicable to the physical universe.

2. Scientific–an absolute not 100% certain (in the universe as we know it perceptually) but so close to it as to be effectually an absolute with regard to the nature of the universe–e.g., Newton’s laws.

3. Historical–an absolute about what happened in the past not as certain as a scientific absolute but certain beyond rational doubt-e.g., that Shakespeare was the author of the works attributed to himm and Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.

4. Literary-Critical–an absolute about the meaning of a literary work less certain than a historical absolute but certain beyond reasonable doubt–e.g., Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” is about Psyche and Nostrodamus’s writinghad nothing sane to do with the current political situation in the middle east.

I term absolutes 2 through 4 “effectual absolutes.” I believe an effectually absolute explanation of everything is possible. All that is needed is suffcient data.