16 August, 2018

Special Issue 60: A New Basis





The End of Copenhagen & A Wholly New Basis

The current major crisis in Sub Atomic Physics is actually the clearest evidence of a much larger, and, therefore, more general set of definitely terminal dead-ends, in literally all intellectual disciplines, and primarily resident in both the philosophic and scientific underpinnings of them all.

Indeed, an apt metaphor, for the current state of Understanding, has to be that it is like a finally totally stunted-and-dying Bush, with every single, finally- produced twig permanently terminated by a seemingly totally, non-transcend-able impasse.

Apt because it is now an entity with absolutely nowhere to go, with literally everyone switching from twig to twig looking for a way out, but always finding none!

So, both the depth of the crises involved, and the fact that the producing-situation has been in place for some 2,500 years, without any significant improvement across the vast majority of the human population, also attests to the difficulties involved in making any sort of necessary and transforming change, which could even begin to address the almost endless impasses now terminating ALL attempts at real understanding.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that there are none. Just none on this bush (in this situation): the problems were set- in-place much too long ago, on a long-passed initial twig, which has now become the supporting trunk of the resulting thicket of dead-ends!

Yet, such a devastating opening to this paper was, I’m afraid, absolutely essential, for what is required is no mere Change-of-Course, but a truly Revolutionary Transfer to an entirely different tree, currently depended-upon by no-one, but nevertheless in sight, and available, if the leap across can be effected.

Don’t get me wrong! There will be some branches, upon the dying bush, that could be effectively transferred by grafting it onto the new Stock, but all their terminations will have to be savagely pruned, and the saveable graft properly cleaved-in and wedded to the new vigorous stock.

So, let us systematically reveal the diseases involved in arriving at this dire state, which were, surprisingly, initially significant advantages, but which gradually became liabilities, as the overall entity grew significantly in size and scope.

Indeed, all of them will be shown to have the same sort of disadvantages, actually never having the more-general- applicability, with which we mistakenly endowed them, and hence becoming increasingly debilitating features.

It has been a difficult trajectory, and really nothing like our usual assumption of a simple aggregation of ever more “understanding”, ultimately destined to explain absolutely everything.

For, definitely no-such-mechanism even existed prior to the first appearance of Mankind. Thinking, as such, was a human social invention, initially pragmatically assembled, via various arrived-at-means that “seemed to work”, but were always, at best, only pragmatic solutions, in particular contexts, and never ever general truths. Indeed, they couldn’t possibly be anything else!

In the several million years of the hominid line, and, of that, the only 200,000 years of Homo sapiens (humans), Philosophical thinking only really started around 2,500 years ago. And, for almost all of that prior history the Pragmatist tenet - “If it works, it is right!” was all we had.

So, the following series of papers has had to attempt to describe that trajectory of development in a very different way - NOT as some systematic erection, but instead as a series of always insufficient attempts, all of which, at crucial points, had to drastically rebuild its foundations in order to proceed further. As V, Gordon Childe always insisted - Man makes himself!

The “available alternative bush” mentioned earlier has to deal with dynamic reality, based upon Hegel’s Dialectics, but radically altered from a system which was limited to Human Thinking, to one transferred wholesale to a materialist basis, and hence applicable to all of concrete Reality too.

The project will reveal its efficacy (and its inadequacies) in its application to Sub Atomic Physics.

No comments:

Post a Comment