Definition of reality: all combinations of matter (i.e., that which can be directly sensually perceived by human beings) for which some definition obtains that will specify the thing defined to at least 99.99% of those to whom it is told.

Definition of truth: any statement that describes reality without contradicting standard logic, or  any definition of a portion of reality that at least 99.99% of those knowing it agree on, or including anything  supernatural, which 99.99% of those with at least ten years experience in the field involved accept as 99.99% certain of being valid.

There is also possible truth, which is a statement satisfying all the requirements of truth except that fewer than 99.99% of those with at least ten years experience in the field involved accept as 99.99% certain of being valid.

Definition of error:  any statement that describes reality but contradicts either standard logic, or some definition of a portion of reality that at least 99.99% of those knowing it agree on.

Metaphysics is any statement that describes reality without contradicting standard logic, or  any definition of a portion of reality that at least 99.99% of those knowing it agree on, and includes something  supernatural.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Too worn-out today, who knows why, to have anything for this entry but an opinion.  It’s the one in my title.  I believe that every question will result in one of three answers: a rational answer, a failed attempt at a rational answer, and a willfully false answer.  The first will come about when someone intelligent uses reason on a question that proves tractable.  The second will come about either when person of limited intelligence is unable to use reason on a tractable question, or when an intelligent person uses reason on a question that proves untractable–because the person lacks the intelligence or knowledge to deal with it.  The third will come about when a person consciously or unconsciously needs it to be to his liking much more than he needs it to be true, so he does not use reason on it.

A good example of the latter is the answer of many to the question, “What is poetry?”  Some poets need this answer to be “something too sublime to be defined,” because that seems to them to raise them to the level of supreme priests of some sort, wise in the ways of secrets beyond the ken of the uninitiated.   Others need it bo be “something too vaguely defined not to apply to just about anything,” which allows anyone to call himself a poet, which will gratify a egalitarian, and win him followers since those happy with criterialessness are always much more numereous than those who are not.  Finally, many will need it to be beyond reason because they are deficient reasoners, so don’t want reason to be consider of any real value.

I’ve left something out of this discussion: the fact that ost people concerned with the question of what poetry is, are really concerned with the question of what a moving poem is.  It is that which they claim reason can’t begin to explain.  But I am sure it can be.  I feel fairly confident that I’ve done it–essentially as something that causes pleasure in certain inter-related parts of the brain, a sort of poetry center that neurophysiologists will eventually pin down.  I have detailed ideas as to exactly what will cause that center to experience pleasure, too: in brief, a text, with or without averbal matter, that qualifies as a poem by my definition (i.e., a text with a certain percentage of flow-breaks), that is neither too familiar or too unfamiliar to the person encountering it.

Similarly other supposedly beyond-reason things like love and hatred can be similarly explained rationally by the existence of love and hatred centers.

That it is sometimes extraordinarily difficult to find an answer to a question does not mean that reason will never find an answer to it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The sentence below this one is false.

The sentence above this one is true.

What can we now say about the two sentences above?  That, if we dispense with the false true/false dichotomy, neither is either true or false: each is true/false or paradoxical.  Parodoxes are inevitable in any human language, which in my thinking includes the language of mathematics and all the sciences.  It seems to me they never occur in nature.  That is, nothing in reality except our attempts to describe is ever paradoxical.  Hence, two parallel lines can meet each other in Non-Euclidean geometry, but not in the real world.

An aside: I’ve always wondered at the fact that many intelligent people with scientific backgrounds find the idea that parallel lines that meet will exist if the universe were the surface of a sphere.  Only in geometry.  In the real world nothing that has less spatial dimensions than two can exist.  Start drawing a line on your universe as the surface of a sphere and your first tiny dot with burst out if it on both sides.

Related to this absurdity is the idea of curved space.  But that’s just an absurdity of expression–saying, for instance, that a curving ray of light curves due to the effect on space of gravity rather than due to the effect of gravity on it.

It applies, too, to the idea of transfinite numbers.  The idea behind that, according to George Gamow is that you can’t form a list of infinitely-repeating decimal fractions that contains them all as shown by the fact (and this is true) that if someone brings up a fraction he claims is not on your list, giving you the first ten digits, say, and you show him it is on your list, he can show it isn’t by showing you the eleventh digit on his is different the eleventh digit on yours,  or–in the one in ten chance thatthe digits match, that some other later digit on his fraction is different from the one in that spot on yours.

But that procedure can work oppositely: you can make a list of all possible decimal fractions including infinitely-repeating ones and challenge him to find an infinitely-repeating decimal fraction of a given length that’s not on your list.  If you take all the integers in order, reversed, and make them infinitely-repeating decimal fractions by putting a point in front of each one as here:

.1 .2 . . .  .9 .01 .11 .21 . . .  .91 .02 . . .  .99 .001 . . .

he will not be able to give you any decimal that you can’t immediately indicate the location of on your list of a decimal fraction matching whatever string of digits he gives you.  Say it’s 00958746537 . . .  That will be the 73564785900th number on your list.  He can’t then say his number’s twelfth digit is different from your number’s because you can honestly say you don’t know what your number’s twelfth digit is.  But that his second number can be as easily found as his first.

So you have two true statements about mathematics that contradict each other.  I say they are therefore true/false statements, or paradoxes.

I don’t believe any real object can be infinite.  Space may be said to be, but it doesn’t exist, in my philosophy.  But I doubt that there’s any way of testing the truth of what is just my opinion.

Note to anyone concerned about my health: I managed to get through a stress test yesterday without having a heart attack or stroke.  I’m now wearing a heart monitor that will come off in three hours, at ten a.m.  I felt peculiar a few times while wearing it.  I hope they don’t turn up as problems on the monitor’s record.

I had trouble walking properly on the stress test treadmill.  My doctor and the woman overseeing me got quite frustrated.  I felt incredibly stupid.  I think I know what happened: there are rails to hold onto that I couldn’t grip without slightly stooping because I’m tall but have the arm-length of a 5′ 9″ white man, so I felt very awkward–until I just let my fingers touch the rails.  I also tried too hard because I thought I was going to be tested with stress.  When it was over, I asked why they’d never speeded it up.  No stress at all except the stress of feeling physically incompetent.

Hmmm, my spell-checker doesn’t like “speeded up.”  But surely “sped up” is not correct.  Weird.  I’d automatically say, “I sped home,” not “I speeded home.”  But that’s great.  The language should be crazy–as long as it tries for maximal stability.

I have opined on occasion that people who can remember rules of usage like sped/speeded may be use them to show their superiority to those who can’t–in other words, the lay/lie distinction that I hold to, for example, I hold to partly to show I’m not low-class.  But I hope my main reason is that I like ways to break out of universal rules as a literary artist.  I do believe in social classes, though.  It slightly simplifies relating to people, which is incredibly complex.  Not that my believing in it matters since a classless society is impossible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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I don’t have anything for today so will philosophize.  I’ve been going over what reality is.  Latest axioms:

Subjective Maxolute Reality (that reality whose existence comes closest absolute certainty): my mind plus all that it can directly experience through my body’s sensors.

Subjective Probsolute Reality (that reality that exists beyond reasonable doubt): the constituents of maxolute reality according to logic (pure rationality), and is not contradicted by anything I know about maxolute reality.  It is not necessary for it to parallel what I know to be maxolutely real, but it helps.  Others’ minds, for instance.

Objective Maxolute Reality: That portion of my maxolute reality that (I believe) a majority of others accept as mazolute reality.

Objective Probsolute Reality: That portion of my probsolute reality that (I believe) those (I consider) knowledgeable about the portion involved agree with me about.

Metaphysical Reality: Anything outside the above realities; fun to think about, but irrelevant

Note: I’m sure some real philosophers have written things similar to what I just have.  My way to understanding, though, is (primarily) to go as far as I can on my own, and then check with others.  I say “primarily” because I also unmethodically read and listen to others.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 28th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.