Socialism: A New Set of Posts

There is no getting away from it!

Yet, once more, the steady series of news comments and arguments that have been posted on this blog on Socialism, have clearly not been urgent enough to energise our readers to adopt new political positions. Yet, we know that bloggers from 120 countries have accessed our stuff, and that the socialist postings have been the most successful in getting serious numbers of hits.

This short collection of papers is a new and different attempt to elicit a more active response. It includes the following:-

1. Understanding Reality (posted below)
2. “Democracy” and the Rule of Law
3. Democracy: Services to and Control by the People

A response would be greatly appreciated. We get indirect evidence in terms of the numbers of hits, what they are looking at, and which countries they are from, so that we have recently traced important spurts in access to the Ukraine and Poland, but we really also require both positive and negative responses to our postings, to judge whether our objectives are in any way being fulfilled.

So, there are facilities at the end of each and every posting - tell us what you think!

Understanding Reality?

Everybody does it – whether they are aware of it or not!

From the football supporter with his pint to the University lecturer with his publications, all of them, one way or another, try to make sense of the world they live in. They may severely limit what concerns them, or “tackle-the-lot” with some general conclusions, but no one is immune!

We, as a species, (and that means every single one of us) need to understand. It is why we are called Homo Sapiens – Thinking Man.

It is, and always has been, our main, if not our sole, weapon and tool: we can think, and naturally, therefore, attempt to solve problems, whether it is beating the offside trap or defining the nature of an electron.

So, though the majority of people could not profess to be philosophers, they actually are, whether they like it or not! They, most certainly, think about their experiences, and try to make some sort of sense of them.

But, let us be clear, to even be able to do such things is a wondrous ability. For, we, ourselves, are a product of Reality, and definitely not an outside observer. We are the most self aware and intelligent things in the Universe (as far as we know).

We are Reality’s most developed product, and we attempt to understand how this came about, by thinking both about the contents of our world and ourselves. So, though many would believe that thinking about such things is not for them, I have to disagree: for you, me and every other human being, are the only ones who can! We must not only consider things outside of ourselves, but also how we can do that, and how we can constantly improve our ideas about such things.

For, when we don’t, we are purposely misled by those who do profess to know, and have the wherewithall to propagate their preferred version. Indeed, in all forms of available information, and even entertainment, there is given out a steady stream of what they want us to think, and it is rarely the truth! Indeed, it is invariably a concoction that is biased to their own advantage, and almost never to yours!

So, we have to try to get around the propaganda, and think for ourselves.

But that isn’t automatic! We have been fed upon what others require us to believe all our lives, and mostly we manage to survive, without building our own view. But, when crises occur, then you cannot avoid it.

Just listen to those around you: everyone will have an opinion.

Everybody is concerned, for it is always YOU, who is made to pay!

They will simultaneously step up the constant stream of necessary diversions, whether Sport, or Royalty, War or Nationalism and Prejudice to feed an easy and diverting set of conceptions, and avoid a critical, and potentially damaging, response to their role in the crisis.

And, let’s face it; mostly they get away with it!

But, if you can continue to be satisfied with what you are given by a regular diet of experts in one impenetratable area or another, may I suggest you look at what is happening to the Greeks, the Spaniards, the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Pakistanis and many others.

For, they are being made to pay for any privileges that the West needs to survive, and if the crises get any worse, they will not hesitate to transfer such iniquities to YOU!

Physics is not the Basic Science

 It is, at best, the earliest.

Criticisms of the usual way that Reality is investigated by Science in general, and Physics in particular, are invariably rubbished, not only by the rank and file of these disciplines, which together constitute an admittedly very fruitful approach, but perhaps even more vociferously, by the denizens of this set of disciplines.

But, I’m afraid that they are wrong, and for very good philosophical and scientific reasons.

For, the usual methods and their consequently associated theoretical conclusions simply do not address what I call Reality-as-is! Indeed, what is always dealt with is a limited and certainly modified selection from Reality.

Neither can the methods they use deal with anything other than completely stable situations – either as they occur naturally, or, in the overwhelming majority of individual situations, in totally man-devised and constructed Domains – expressly designed to make Analysis as simple and easy as possible. “You know you have it right, when the targeted relation sticks out like a sore thumb”

Priority One in preparing to do an experiment of this sort, is to first isolate a well-defined situation for study, and, thereafter, to implement a great deal of tailoring, involving both the elimination of the more confusing other, non-targeted, factors, and also by purposely holding tightly constant many others, in order to actually farm that Domain appropriately to display clearly a single targeted relation, in order to investigate that as straightforwardly as possible.

Clearly, if this could then be done separately for each and every significant relation (each with its own tailor-made domain), then the overall situation will be, supposedly, cracked, understood, and be able to be used to particularly useful purposes. One relation and its associated domain at a time.

To complete the process this farming of the chosen plot is intended to make it ideal for displaying, and then extracting by measurement, the targeted relation, and then its idealisation by fitting-it-up to a purely formal pattern or Equation, so facilitating its purposive use.

NOTE: such a process was totally inconceivable prior to the Neolithic Revolution, which changed Mankind’s mode of existence from a roving hunter/gatherer existence, to one dependant upon staying in one place, appropriately transforming a plot, and then growing what you needed.

This set of procedures is, by now, a well-honed, and highly successful methodology, turning an ever-increasing Knowledge Base into the ideal tool for subsequent Predictions and productive Use.

But, nevertheless, it only indirectly increases our understanding of Reality.

For, at no point is Reality-as-is addressed directly. Instead, and in Mankind’s usually effective and pragmatic way, it bypasses the imperative for Understanding, by instead employing the immediate and survival imperative for practical use. And, such a purpose cannot be denounced. It has led to what we call Technology, and an ever more far-reaching control of our immediate and necessary environments.

Photographs by Edward Burtynsky

It has produced our current World!

BUT, no one can say that such methods deal with Reality-as-is!

On the contrary, what is investigated is a highly unnatural, farmed set of situations, designed primarily to reveal a given, at first only glimpsed, and then targeted, relation.

The supposition is that the relation and its equation so affectively extracted, is still the very same one as exists in completely unfettered Reality. And, the philosophical justification, finally included to justify this methodology, is the famed Principle of Plurality, which insists that all simultaneously acting factors in the Real World are due to Eternal Laws, and are hence independent of their concrete contexts. Each is wholly separable, and in no way distorted by where it occurs.

Any evident variations that unfettered Reality seems to deliver are simply put down to additions of many different relations, none of which is in fact in any way modified by its co-existing partners in a situation, and which delivers what it does as merely the sum of the many independent contributions, varying only in their relative magnitudes, but unchanging in their essential natures.

Clearly, if this Principle were true, then all the tailoring of situations would be entirely valid, for they are then just an effective means of revealing the eternal, and hence unchangeable, natures of the relations involved.

But, this is merely a belief!

The major plank, for accepting it, is the occurrence, in complex situations, of dominances, where, in spite of the multiplicity of simultaneously acting relations, the sum can tend towards an integrated result, which, via dominance, implies an underlying, main eternal law.

But no evidence apart from the classical pluralist method of simplifying the experimental context is available.

The two things seem to support one another, but they are actually mutually dependent upon one another: no independent evidence has ever been gathered to prove it.

The very methodology actually prohibits any means of dealing with Reality-as-is, for the usual methods deal with Reality by significantly changing it to produce an overall, if somewhat simplified, stable situation, which is then turned into what appears to be that of an unaffected particular part, and this, thereafter, is always considered as a revealed Eternal Law. But it isn’t!

And, in addition, such a Principle can never explain when and why the relation will ultimately, and certainly, fail, so that a very different one takes over.

But, even these criticisms are much too weak to reveal the most damning inadequacy of this Principle, for the most important episodes in all of Reality, which have to be explained, are those when an existing stability begins to break down, until it finally dissociates completely. And not only that, for it then is always replaced by a wholly new situation, sometimes even at a higher level of organisation, and then involving its own top-down causalities to distort the remaining bottom-up factors still in evidence. For, such always involves new entities and properties, which just did not exist within the now replaced stability.

Such Emergences are always creative and not just reorganizations of the same set of Eternal Laws.

These crucial developmental interludes of real qualitative change and creation are in everyday language described by the word Revolutions, but academically now generally termed Emergences. And these are totally outside the capabilities of a pluralist determined scientific method.

For that criticised approach in Science cannot ever deal with the creation of the New, so real Developments, occurring in all the major achievements such as Life and Consciousness, are unaddressable by that methodology, which can only be applied within Stability, and nowhere else!

Now, though the physicists are adamant that their science is the Basis of all the other sciences, it is actually, not only a myth, but, in fact, a disabling detour that will never be able to address development at any level at all.

How can a science, which is incapable of dealing with development, be the Basis of all said-to-be derivations from itself? For the very qualities that make developing Reality what it is are totally unavailable from such a pluralist standpoint.

And that is a standpoint that only works within Stability – the complete prohibition of qualitative change, And, it can only be made to deliver anything at all in natural or engineered stable situations, if all developmental elements are excluded on principle, and by the methodology used.

Indeed, at present, only those sciences addressing higher levels of Reality, such as Biology for example, implicitly ask how they came-to-be: they just cannot avoid the question! And, they are also confronted constantly with qualitative change in every single living thing that is studied.

Indeed, it was, and still is, from these higher sciences that the wherewithall to address Emergences came, AND, perhaps surprisingly, came up with wholly new methods to deal with them.

Photograph by Ansel Adams

The Origin of Species was a triumph of Biology in understanding Reality-as-is - and was totally unaddressable by Physics.

Indeed, it is these creative interludes that constitute the most significant periods of qualitative changes.

In fact, they also occur even within Physics, but are totally ignored (or even emasculated) by the dominant approach within that science: so they are never properly investigated.

In all the various levels of Reality, where these interludes of creative, transformational and qualitative change do occur, it was also how all these higher levels were originally created from simpler levels. But, nevertheless, the physicists not only claim primacy for their science, but also refuse to investigate how the higher realms of Reality came to be.

Instead, they continue to insist that all higher levels can be completely explained by Physics, using only physical Eternal Laws. It is, of course, nowhere near the truth!

And to compound the felony, it also prevents physicists from explaining qualitative changes even within their own areas of study. The Wave/Particle Dichotomy proves it!

Indeed, it is perhaps the most damning evidence from Biology of the inadequacy of Physics (as it is currently considered) that it is these so-called derived sciences that managed to deliver The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and the crucial research into the Origin of Life in experiments carried out by Stanley Miller. And, perhaps pointing the way, the crucial phenomenon that focuses attention upon the nature and reasons for Qualitative Change is embodied in the explanations of the existence and origins of Metamorphosis in living things.

Metamorphoses Post

The problem boils down to the inadequacy of the Principle of Plurality in dealing with Reality. The opposite alternative of Holism is clearly much closer to the Truth, and this does not see Reality as the simple summation of existing Eternal Laws, but, on the contrary, that it is a developing Reality that actually generates these “laws”, which will always depend upon context for their actual forms.

They are simply not eternal!

Dark Matter?

No, I’m afraid you've missed it.

It’s behind you!

 

Pardon me, as I am forced to point out that you cannot see Dark Matter for two very good reasons.

First, it is invisible and well nigh totally undetectable. And second, it is also absolutely everywhere, and you can’t see the trees for the wood!

As you study in your underground laboratories, and your ever higher powered Accelerators, seeking the undetectable Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), you are completely missing the NIPs that are all around you, in such abundant profusion that they are, inconsequence, even more difficult to detect.

NOTE: with these Non Interacting Particles (NIPs), I miss out the “M for massive”, because the particles suggested have equal and balancing amounts of matter and antimatter.

Yet, the indirect evidence for these entities is also absolutely everywhere, though we invariably choose to ignore it. These particles exist as a “Paving” throughout the Universe, which actually propagates all Electromagnetic Radiation, AND they do it in quanta! NOT, I must immediately emphasize, by actually moving about themselves as carriers, but by a bucket-brigade kind of passing on of individual quanta from unit-to-unit!

[By the way, the Speed of Light, though indeed a constant, isn’t a Universal Constant: but merely the speed of transfer between these equally spaced out elements of this Paving].

They are not usually translational objects, though we humans can make them so in our many infernal devices.

Welcome to the neutritron! (Which is sometimes it is erroneously identified with the high-energy, short-lifetime version – the positronium as its normal state, which it isn’t!).

This is a mutually orbiting pair, consisting of one electron and one positron.

Perhaps surprisingly, you are already familiar with it in its modes of Pair Annihilation and Pair Production, when it either dissociates from a neutritron into its component parts, or is involved in the union of these two into a mutually orbiting, and stable pair, if the appropriate form of encounter of its soon-to-be components occurs.

It can also carry extra electromagnetic energy, above that necessary to maintain its base orbit, in exactly the same way that the atom does, via the promotion of its mutual orbits (somewhat different, of course, to the atom, because of the absence of a determining nucleus).

Oh, and by the way, I’m afraid it is also causing major confusion at the edge of the Universe, where the Paving ends.

For there, it causes Total Internal Reflection (or something very similar) of all electromagnetic radiation. And it causes trouble by giving not only by this means many extra virtual stars and galaxies, but by, also and confusingly, delivering multiple images of the same single source, yet apparently from quite different directions, as well as from different times in its past history.

If some great Being designed this particle, he (or she) must be giggling uncontrollably as the evident confusion caused by the particle, is shown to affect our most eminent scientists!

And, to compound the felony, this particle and its Paving has enabled the solving of the anomalies of the Double Slit Experiments, and is rapidly burying the ubiquitous Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory.

Sleep well tonight, my beauties!

“But, how are these particles also the source of Dark Matter?”, you may well ask.

Well, all this talk about mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter makes me think what is actually happening is that it that it is them becoming an undetectable combination of matter and antimatter, as in the neutritron. Could that Universe-wide collection of hidden matter + antimatter BE Dark Matter?

The Worship of Form

Having read the article about Max Tegmark’s new book Our Mathematical Universe, my dire predictions for the unavoidable future of the current dominant tendency in Science have been sadly confirmed.

For, he discounts the whole of explanatory Physics as “mere baggage”, and endows what Forms are currently dealt with by the vast majority of current sub atomic physicists as the only True Essences of Reality.

What is more, it is these admittedly abstract Forms that are the drivers of Everything (he “subtly” puts it that they also constitute Everything, but that doesn’t help either). He has finally gone the whole hog to Idealism!

Materialism, as the usual basis for Science, is just another type of “baggage”: that is it is consequence rather than a cause. And the Universe acts solely in accordance with purely formal relations – as extracted and investigated by mathematical physicists.

Such an amazing standpoint has somehow to be established, so he stresses the various alternative explanatory physical theories as non-essential baggage, merely mistakenly added to the revealed, formal essentials. He doesn’t say it as such, but what he infers is that all such “baggage” consists of man-made inventions, while what mathematical relations deliver are aspects of Absolute Truth.

I have to admit that I want to take every word that this man utters, and force it back down his throat with some real Reality-based Philosophy, but to go to such lengths gives altogether too much credence to what he has to say. But, he has finally admitted what the majority of present-day Sub Atomic physicists believe, which will, inevitably, deliver its demise.

Interestingly, he puts it very differently. He says that anything less than a complete subscription to Form alone, will certainly cause the end of Physics.

But, of course, he is confusing what he, and his mathematical colleagues do, with the Science of Physics – the scientific effort to understand Reality. What the consensus (including Tegmark) do is Mathematics – the detailed study, NOT of Reality, but of its universal shapes and patterns that can be both extracted and then idealised from Reality, and into a World of Pure Forms alone, which we term Ideality.

Now, of course, this Sub World of Form alone is not an invention. It does exist, but nowhere as such in Reality.

For each and every relation is idealised into a Pure Form as it would exist, if and only if, it could stand entirely alone – without any other relations or even any concrete Reality: it is the World of Purely Formal Abstractions!

Now, of course, such a sub World of Form, and nothing else, is not some totally arbitrary invention.

It does, indeed, exist, but as a very limited reflection of Reality, like the shapes of the shadows it casts. Mathematicians study these in preference to Reality itself, because it is much easier, and seems to directly deliver Absolute Truth - which is impossible when studying an actively changing, indeed an evolving, concrete Reality.

The simplest analogy that I can give is that it is like a study of the shadows cast by real objects: for they are determined by the real objects, but do not in any way contain the substance and active relations of that Reality, but only derived and content-less Forms of it. Hence, they will reveal relations, but only as disembodied and idealised Forms!

Clearly, as such, they cannot be either arbitrary or invented, but they have stripped out completely what actually casts that shadow leaving only a very limited set of formal features of the severely limited views and their rules.

Now, though by no means exact, this analogy can also address the surfaces on which the shadows fall, from purely flat planes to all sorts of other topologies – delivering very distorted, yet expressible, shapes that occur upon them. So, in that sense, Mathematics is incomparably less than Reality, while also extendable beyond its concrete source in all its possible distortions.

To the man in the street, unaware of modern Sub Atomic Physics, what Tegmark expresses is either totally unintelligible, or alternatively “beyond his ken” - magical truths revealed by the only true experts in studying Reality at that level.

Yet, the first conception was the right one. Such people as Max Tegmark are what are termed mathematical-theorists of Physics. They deal wholly and only in mathematical forms, believing they are true essences of Reality. And, in that they are totally wrong!

The question is, “How do they get away with it?” And, “Why are they not trounced by other physicists occupying themselves with concrete Reality itself?”

Well, the reason is that the opposing group (what is now left of them) were, and still are, also incredibly compromised in their own basic standpoint and approach.

For centuries they have all based their studies and experiments on the fundamental Principle of Plurality, and this has led them into a complete dead end in attempting to continue ever deeper into revealing the true Nature of Reality. For, Plurality enables their banker technique, which they call Analysis. It is assumed that numbers of eternal Natural Laws act together upon each and every situation in Reality, but only sum in various ways, with different dominances that deliver very different resultant scenarios.

Their only approach is to tease out what they assume to be these “entirely separable” laws, in order to explain what they have observed.

Experiments are purposely constructed with the objective of clearly revealing a particular “law”, so that it can then be extracted. Multiple reapplications of such methods can be arranged to reveal each and every acting law in a given situation, and once they are all known (or, at least, the most important ones in the given context), they can be summed with different weightings to explain the overall unfettered Reality that has been directly observed.

BUT, Plurality is the Principle that insists that these laws are wholly separable, and that such methods are therefore entirely valid. But, it just isn’t true!

The World is certainly NOT pluralistic, but, on the contrary, it is Holistic! The laws extracted by these methods are NOT eternal, but actually caused in each situation by many different factors, which mutually modify each other and deliver what we actually see. The assumption of entirely separable laws is a man-made construct!

ONLY, in appropriately constrained conditions can such ideas and methods be made to work, but absolutely NEVER in totally unfettered Reality!

Plurality is a man-devised strategy to make of Reality what enables investigations to deliver such “laws”, and thereafter to use them to both predict and produce as long as the conducive, restrictive and filtering conditions are maintained throughout! Such “laws” are limited to the conditions in which they were extracted. Outside of that context, they are different, and will fail!

Now, this development, historically, was entirely unavoidable! For, in spite of Holism being much closer to the real nature of Reality, it could NOT suggest any means of investigating what was going on.

NOTE: Buddhists might disagree, but their whole philosophy is mankind-based, and is about the “perfection of the individual” in their personally realising Reality in all its simultaneity.

The pragmatic purposes in manipulating parts of Reality to both analysis and useful tasks, was much better served by control and maintenance of Parts of Reality assumed by Plurality, and implemented by extensive “farming” of contexts. Indeed the whole of Science is generally pluralistic!

In addition to this important flaw in conceptions and consequent methods, this meant that all Theories were also unavoidably flawed too. The pluralistic methods did indeed reveal very clearly entirely extractable and also useable formal relations, BUT ONLY in the simplified set-ups that had always to be both constructed for extraction, and also maintained for effective use.

And unsurprisingly such intended idealisations meant that the very same Pure Forms were found in many different situations.

Such idealised Forms were indeed universal, in such carefully perfected and producing contexts.

Yet, this was damagingly turned into a belief that the Forms were the motive forces of Reality: they all over the place, made phenomena act as they did. The preoccupation with Ideal Forms, automatically endowed them with causality, and hence turned believers into Idealists rather than Materialists.

As Hegel had clearly demonstrated, incorrect assumptions would always lead to the establishment of a Dichotomous Pair of mutually contradictory conceptions, which had to be switched between as and when each delivered what was needed.

Science had long been afflicted with such an impasse, but pragmatically soldiered on; unphased by their contradictory based Sciences, and even Physics became an amalgam of separate specialisms with different philosophies – Experimenters, Theorists and Technologists!

Now, Mankind, being what it is, these approaches were speculatively extended with a view to explaining the World. And together they gave both an explicable view, as well as a pragmatic useable Form. But, while one, the explanatory View, could never deliver the “Absolute Truth” of Reality, the other, the mathematical one, could indeed deliver the Absolute Truths of Pure Form!

You can see the unavoidable problem!

Now, re-reading the whole of the article on Tegmark again, you cannot but be struck by how static is the World he describes. And such a stationary World is also not true!

You would think he is saying that he is attempting to reveal the eternal laws, which supposedly add together to make Reality what it as (as strictly pluralistic as that of his opponents), so, nowhere do you get any kind of inkling of the actual Development of Reality, and, most importantly, its undoubted creations of the wholly new.

He might disagree, but frankly such things are so important that to not even mention them means indisputably that he doesn’t consider them as significant. I can only assume that he is a supporter of the “ever more complex mixes” attitude, wherein all the acting laws are totally constant, but come together occasionally in new quantitative mixes, and thus deliver what seems to be wholly new, but is actually just a re-arrangement. This would make Life – merely a re-arrangement, and Consciousness – yet another! NO!

Emphatically, Tegmark is not only a mathematician, but also a pluralist, and a rejecter of what are usually termed Emergences - or short episodes involving creations of the really wholly New! To miss out this absolutely crucial aspect of a Developing Reality, also condemns his standpoint completely, and makes his philosophy a study of Stability only!

Nowhere does he include interludes of crisis, collapse and emergence. To him, presumably, his elementary particles have just come together in a particular way, in, say, the human brain, and when he and his fellow physicists have all the fundamental laws within their hands, they will have no real difficulty, not only in explaining Consciousness, but also in being able to construct it on the very latest computers.

May I say it?

It is a very stupid philosophical or scientific standpoint!

ENDS

This paper has been published as part of Issue 34 of the Shape Journal entitled Myths of Tegmark

A Peak in Darien?

This long series of papers, in both Science and Philosophy, may seem like an intellectual self-indulgence, but that certainly is not the case! For, such flights of brilliance can only be indulged in by the very clever, who can always make silk purses out of sow’s ears with relative ease, and have the requisite vested interests to pass off such frauds as the real thing.

No! These particular efforts are the culmination of a very difficult 55 years of effort in the attempted resolution of difficulties within my chosen specialism of Physics.

And these studies were both made harder, and yet were also remarkably revealed, by a much wider set of experiences (to a serious level) in many other equally demanding disciplines from Politics to Teaching, to Geology and Evolution, and even to Sculpture to Ballet.

But, unlike the Hegelian Emergences (in Thinking alone), this realisation has had a truly enormous gestation period, along with other major threats to health and even life, which made the effort to find a solution both increasingly conceivable and also extremely urgent too.

The real problem has been the major crises, which beset Mankind in its attempts to understand Reality. For, each and every major gain has also, and inevitably, always then been an ever more debilitating restraint on taking things further, and the Emergences necessary to transcend each consequent impasse have become all the more difficult to arrive at.

Conceptions of “Truth” are always over-rated, and get in the way of taking things further, in the form of ideas of “progress” and “correct method”. For, such realisations, when they occur, are indeed miracles of an amazing order. For, here is a remarkable product of the evolution of Reality – namely Life, which, in its further development in Mankind, has produced the first product of this evolutionary process to be in a position to attempt to understand it! Yet, in no way was Man endowed with the readymade tools for the job.

For, as with the early hominin Homo Habilis, he had to learn to actually make the tools necessary for effectively tackling such questions. And also, in the same way as Homo Habilis’s flint tools, they would not only open up entirely new vistas, but even brand-new ways of thinking too, while, at the same time, be strongly-limiting fetters, incapable of going beyond a certain level.

In modern Sub Atomic Physics, the gathered masters of that area of study finally insisted that Mankind could never understand this crucial area, as it was totally outside our experience, and hence our ability to make sense of what was occurring there. You simply had to give up trying to actually understand, and instead use pragmatic rules and laws to get the required results.

But, of course, they were entirely wrong!

The whole history of Mankind has been one of self-construction! Man may not have been genetically equipped with all the necessary tools, BUT he was genetically developed enough to actually find wholly new methods. There is NO congenital limit to Homo Sapiens - ourselves. Its adaptions for success have been primarily in the development of its brain and thinking. It doesn’t come with anything but the most basic congenital skills: most of what Mankind needs and uses has had to be both found and learned, and in that no other known organism in the Universe gets anywhere near Man’s abilities in this area.

Yet, periods of transcending the old and established, and constructing the new, don’t just fall into our laps. Many Dark Ages can last for millennia, and some of the restraints upon Mankind’s current thinking have been unchallenged for several hundreds of years.

The Solvay Conference, at which the physicists gave up the imperative to understand Reality, was in 1927 – 87 years ago, and until now (2014) no one has been able to demolish that disastrous Copenhagan Retreat, and construct an alternative. Until now, that is!

As a famous revolutionary once said, “The situation for a revolution isn’t just ready for occurring, it is now well over-ripe”. And so, it is vested intellectual and financial interests that are now so well entrenched that wars are more likely than revolutions. And, to overturn the current establishment is now a great deal bigger than a national revolution: it has become a global task!

But, that is what, in Physics, is beginning to happen.

At first, slowly and spasmodically, individual scientists attempt to transcend the limitations imposed by past gains, and consequent vested interests. Ever since Charles Darwin, and (much later) Stanley Miller, individuals (like Yves Couder) have continued to make new kinds of attempts to tackle the seemingly impossible problems inevitable from the working through of past banker positions.

In the last decade Yves Couder has developed a wholly new method of experimentation, which involved the deliberate construction of a tailor-made analogue set up, to help to solve the seeming impasses in Sub Atomic Physics, by moving the action wholesale into the much easier macro areas.

All such trail-blazers were, and still are, Holistic in their approach to Science, rather than pluralistic, and in their work and methods are the key pointers to a new and essential approach, which, for the first time, can tackle Reality-as-is, rather than the usual artificially set up and maintained experimental Domains.

Before us lies a new Ocean, of colossal extent and a new richness, and to glimpse its possibilities must be like the very first view of the Pacific, from a Peak in Darien many centuries ago.

Issue 34 of Shape: Myths of Tegmark

This issue of the SHAPE Journal is basically a response to Max Tegmark’s work as revealed in New Scientist (2952), but to deliver a meaningful critique, we must first clear up a few important questions.

Now, as is becoming clear, there are already many different responses to Max Tegmark’s various recent articles and publications (including his recent book Our Mathematical Universe), but though he represents an extreme position in modern science, his basic conceptions are not only adhered to by the majority of his colleagues in his, and related, areas of study, but also that such a standpoint is fundamental to their own positions too.

So their entirely-within-house criticisms are way short of what is required here. For, as they either partially, or even wholly, subscribe to his fundamental bases, they simply cannot demolish his ground, as they too are standing squarely upon it! Two sets of papers are therefore proffered by this more thoroughgoing critic.

The first set addresses Tegmark’s contributions, while the second set is a direct critique of the basic assumptions that he makes, and these are made from a position, which is both materialist and holistic, whereas the tendency containing both Tegmark and the vast majority of his colleagues in Sub Atomic Physics are both idealist and pluralistic.

P.S. Subsequent to the writing of these papers, Tegmark has produced yet another rocket, in which he insists that Consciousness is merely yet another Phase of Matter, along with Solid, Liquid and Gas.

So clearly, more will follow to debunk such nonsense in the near future. JS

Read the Issue