Stuffing

I share these ideas with whoever can use them. These are debris from my "spiritual" journey. For the most part, they are stolen, borrowed, assimilated, cherished, passed along....

First, the self-fetish. It's all about me. My greatness. My superiority. Your failure is my success! We impose self-flattering distinctions between the self and the other. But!

To go right after the ego and make the ego a "sin" is too often one more version of the self-fetish. I'm more ego-less than thou. There are so many convoluted ways to play this game. I've probably tried them all. (I'm more self-depreciating than thou!)

The anxiety of influence. The desire to make one's name. But what is one's name? The beauty of some of this math made me forget I ever fancied myself a writer. When I did write, it was joy exhaust. I just wanted to share the ideas out of some simple love for them. I felt no lust to play the math whiz, as the mountains of math seemed topless. It was sculpture made of pure form, absolute form. It's harder than stone. Perfectly beautiful. And you can carry it in your head...

I'm no angel. Who isn't proud at times of the road they've traveled, of the books they not only read but more importantly digested, truly assimilated. Granted. But it's not always a parade. Because we are taught an idolatry of famous thinkers and of the famous in general, the reference to one of these names is experienced by some as a sort of incantation --which is sometimes threatening. They perceive that a distinction is possibly being drawn between them and the other who is drawing it. The ins and the outs. The oldest game in town.

But to deny that it takes some time is also not feasible. We are dependent on books in many ways. I vote that we praise the book as great and love the man as the vessel through which these ideas flowed and gracefully expressed.

1. I'm thinking of trying to move toward private messaging as far as this forum goes.
2. I expect there is less posturing involved as the privacy ups the seriousness of the words exchanged.
3. Maybe we are less tempted to role play for the public at large.
4. I start some thread about the fundamentals of mathematics --a Kantian sort of thing --and some little turd can't shut up about his homework.
5. That little turd is me in another life. That's what makes it worse.
6. I praise someone's intelligence and someone uninvolved, presumably envious of such praise, interrupts to attack self-education. Claiming a great education himself.
7. It was wasted on him, or...
8. He's yet another insane person on planet Earth, who believes his lies.

7. I know this is wrong. It's my "official" position that we are all connected to one another's vices and virtues. In theory, I believe in forgiveness.
8. But this person reminds me of what Jung would call the devouring mother...which symbolizes everything earthbound, reductive, cramped. I hate humidity and I hate


1. Once again I'm going to try to forget the haters, including myself.
2. It's about the ideas!
3. Don't hate on my numbers.
4. Unity is only trivial if you are counting with rather than thinking about numbers.
5. We use our hands everyday without appreciating their beauty.
6. It's the same with unity, with "not, if, and, or," etc.
7. How sharp is the point at the top of a cone, an imagined cone? Is it infinitely sharp?
8. George Cantor's work is GREAT ART made of pure thought. And, sure, a few sweet glyphs.
9. I'm done with starting threads for now. I'm going to blog about whatever lifts me out the hatred and misery too common on planet Earth.
10. If anyone is amused by or attracted to any of these ideas, they can private message me for a conversation on any particular point.
11. I don't claim them. They claim me.
12. The good stuff cannot be claimed or caged. It belongs to no one and everyone.
13. It's tempting to try to cage up "god" or "wisdom" or "truth" and to put a crown on one's head.
14. Screw that.
15. And screw the lack of enthusiasm/joy that pretends to wisdom.
16. Just to make this clear, it's not my intention to pose as some math whiz, or to mystify with the few poetic equations I have learned.
17. In fact, it's just the opposite. I hate that math is seen as sterile, dry, difficult, hard work.
18. Some math is indeed hard work. Some of it is dreary.
19. I'll leave the drudgery to computers, or to those who just like it.
20. I want the lovely essence of it. I want the depth of it.
21. The essence of calculus is simple and ridiculously poetic.
22. In 8th grade we learned about the infinite series in Zeno's paradox. I loved it then. I love it now.
23. I think that most 13 year olds with a passion for it could learn the basics of calculus without much trouble.
24. Passion is what drives comprehension. We think on what delights us. We follow our bliss.
25. Granted, some skills must be learned by rote, fun or not. Like the multiplication table.
26. But even this is fascinating if one feels the beauty of simple numbers.
27. G. H. Hardy tempted me toward a Platonic view on numbers, as they call it. But it didn't stick.
28. And yet there is something strange here.
29. The primes get quite a bit of attention. And it's not just their use in codes.
30. G H Hardy used a particular prime number, 317, as an argument that numbers are Out There.
29. We iterate unity and get strange properties from some of the bundles we create.
31. And yet they all divide by one.
30. If an integer didn't divide by one, that would be strange.
32. But isn't this unthinkable?
33. Is my interest in the intuition of unity really so absurd?
34. I remember how struck I was when it occurred to me that beings are always singular.
35. And we only deal with pluralities as sets, also singular.
36. If this only applied to number, it would not be as interesting.
37. But it also applies to words.
38. We put spaces between our words and our words are circles drawn around patches or bits of our experience.
39. "Dog" is a way to see all the properties of a dog as related, integrated.
40. Our more common words are infinite sums.
41. Can anyone offer an exhaustive description of justice? of love? of meaning?
42. Any description of reality that pretends to completeness must also incorporate this very description.
43. This is where natural science fails the standards of serious philosophy.
44. It represents patterns in experience without representing the pattern of these same representations.
45. Philosophy is the science of science.
46. F = ma. This is brilliant. But where is the formula that explains the existence of formulas?
47. I use the word "explain" generously.
48. Science doesn't ultimately explain anything.
49. It just integrates experience in an imagined causal web mathematically.
50. Do we really think the word "gravity" is an explanation?
51. Of course not. Newton's formula is golden. But it's not an explanation.
52. It's an abstracted form, useless without the intuition of unity.
53. Useless also without the nonmathematical conceptual understanding that allows us to see how it can be applied.
54. What is this "Force"?
55. Oh, well that mass times acceleration.
56. What is this "mass"? What is this "acceleration"?
57. I'm not denying that we do make sense of these terms. I'm just pointing out how abstract they are.
58. Physics time is a brilliant invention.
59. But it disturbs me to see this invention taken as "real" time.
60. Where is change in the absence of memory?
61. Where is the man who doesn't live largely in the future?
62. Where does this future live?
63. It's the same with the past.
64. Are meaningful human relationships made possible by physics time?
65. Or is it by memory?
66. Natural science has generally imagined the world as if the observer didn't matter.
67. I realize this has changed significantly.
68. But an obsolete view of science still has taking impossible abstractions for ideal truth.
69. What man have we known of who existed apart from other humans? Who did not think and speak in an inherited language? Who did not live among the creations of other humans?
70. What man have we known that wasn't exchanging air, water, food, etc. on a regular basis with his environment?
72. In a physical, emotional, and intellectual way man is immersed in his environment. To consider him apart from this environment that sustains him is an abstraction.
73. Abstractions aren't bad. But sometimes they become obsolete.
74. What world exist for man that does not include him? Only the abstraction he has dreamed up.
75. The mind-matter distinction is useful but in some ways absurd.
76. William James saw this. Hegel saw this. And long before either others saw this.
77. Kant was on the edge of this. Berkeley was on to it in some way it seems, but clung to he idealist terminology, it seems.
78. I speak of "concepts" which sound biased toward idealism, but this is what I am forced to work with in our dualism heavy language.
79. There was a reason that Hegel came after Kant.
80. I feel that the idealist emphasis is a necessary step toward the non-dual or absolute position.
81. I don't think we can live there. We are going to fall back on our useful dualisms.
82. And yet the non-dual view is a logical presentation of something metaphorically equivalent to this: we live in God and God lives in us.
83. In my opinion, most religion tends to cage God, and present God as some sort of cookie one gets for obedience.
84. Even worse is the misunderstanding of symbolic narratives like walking on water as the literal claim of such.
85. If we teach humans that God exist in miracles, we are obscuring that all life is a miracle, even if its sometimes a terrible miracle.
86. All the predictive formulas in the world still don't tell us WHY.
87. Mental models of electromagnetic radiation (an impressive abstraction, admittedly) can't obscure that the "subjective" experience of a roses redness is what it is. Just like you know who.
88. Electromagnetic radiation is just as "subjective" in its own way as redness. This "radiation" is made of concept. This "redness" is made of [insert synonym for "qualia" here).
89. That's the beauty of Wittgenstein's best line. They smack us awake to our self-satisfied complacency.
90. Why didn't we notice before that prediction is not explanation? That prediction in mathematical terms and a minimum body of supporting hyper-abstractions was hardly an exhaustive revelation of being, to say the least.
91. How is it that we forget how much of our living human experience is made of language?
92. Why is it so shocking to be reminded that the intelligible structure of the world intimately involves us? (is us?)
93. Science is not our enemy here. Our intellectual complacency is our enemy here.
94. We thought that science could just go ahead and take care of philosophy for us at the same time.
95. Until the "explained" world becomes a bore.
96. Is metaphysics the bad guy? Is religion from top to bottom the bad guy?
97. Or is bad metaphysics the bad guy? Is inferior religion the bad guy?
98. In the broad sense of the term, man has always been and will always be religious, a creature insisting on purpose.
99. We can rename it to avoid unpleasant associations, but it's same anew.
100. Societies exist around common values.