bobbijoy4 (imported) wrote: Fri Jul 27, 2012 7:20 pm i don't know if "janekane" is a professional logician or on acid. in any case, it made sense...and i had a logic course in college and tripped on acid twice. both were learning experiences. when "advice" i gave before to see a therapist was the good, old tradition stuff from which i won't apologize. so, let's say you have or will do this. i an going to slaughter this but didn't the French have a saying which went "viva le differerence" or long live individuality? because i have always used this saying as it meant a lot to me. and aren't we all supposed to be sexually unique? each of us has a fingerprint which nobody else has? and every relationship we have with another is unique? so let there be "wannabesmooth" and his uniqueness...great.
Am I on acid? Depends upon which acid or acids. There is deoxyribonucleic acid; I seem to be "on" some of that. There is ribonucleic acid; I seem to be "on" some of that. Basically, I am willing to allow that, perhaps, it would be base of me to believe that I am "on" a variety of acids, particularly acids which are essential to my being alive. Without being "on" DNA and "on" messenger RNA, I find I would be unable to be.
Silly attempts at ridiculous humor aside, I am a licensed professional; licensed as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, and I somehow successfully glommed onto a B.S. and a Ph.D. in bioengineering. Prior to studying engineering at college, I was a liberal arts college physics major (for three years) where I did take philosophy classes, including in formal logic.
My being licensed in Wisconsin comes with the requirement that the work I do in engineering be done in accord with the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers. For me, a terse summary of the essence of that Code is, "In my work as a professional engineer, I am to hold paramount the public safety, work only in areas of my professional competence, and do both of those without deception."
What is my work as a professional engineer doing bioengineering? Doing the analysis and synthesis that will, if successful, eradicate and eviscerate human destructiveness from human society. Were I foolish enough to speculate, I might wonder whether that problem, as an engineering problem, might be among the most difficult of engineering problems. The only way I have found enough hopefulness to bother with this problem is through observing that it is apparently a core problem for billions of other people, all of whom also work on it much as I do; at the limit of their practicable ability.
Huh, what?
My life goal decidedly is other than being assigned by human society the role of scapegoat-pariah.
Engineering is, to me, the solving of practical problems, efficiently, economically, and effectively, using scientific principles.
Bioengineering is, to me, engineering applied to the phenomenon of life.
The phenomenon of life is, to me, comprised of all that is alive and all of the substrate of all that is alive.
Therefore, to me, the entire universe (or the universal universe of all parallel, perpendicular, and all other, universes) is exactly contiguous with the phenomenon of life.
And so, to me, existence is life and life is existence, and the phenomenon of life is the whole of existence
Oh, sorry. That thar liberal arts stuff did include studying, as formal philosophy, existentialism and existentialists.
Some years ago, I attended a formal lecture given by a "bright" person who had gathered multiple graduate school degrees. Near the beginning of the lecture, the lecturer said, in effect, "As Einstein proved, everything is relative." Not to derail the lecturer or the lecture, I waited until the lecture was finished and questions had subsided. Then I went to the front of the lecture hall and the following ensued...
Me, "Did you say that Einstein proved that everything is relative?"
Lecturer, "Yes."
Me, "Have you done the math?"
Lecturer, "No."
Me, "Well, I have; and I find that Einstein's theories of relativity are an interesting collection of absolutes."
Lecturer, (silence and turning away)...
Einstein's "The Meaning of Relativity, Fourth Edition, Fourth Edition," Princeton University Press, 1953, joined my personal/professional library in 1959.
From pages 161-2 of said book for which I here do not use the BB quote and end-quote codes because using them would tend to obscure the original text formatting:
{begin quote}
If one does not regard as final the transition to a theory which is in principle statistical, as present-day quantum mechanics is, then the goal of a physical theory presents itself as follows: An objective (in principle complete) description of physical systems, together with a setting up of a structure of laws which connect the concepts entering into this objective description. By "objective description" is meant a description which claims potential validity of meaning without reference to any acts of observation.
Physical theories differ from mathematical structures only in the following aspect. The physical theory should provide an essentially complete and reproducible correspondence between the conceptually described real situations and the direct sense perceptions. The question of how to set up this correspondence can only be handled intuitively, and is not expressible within the framework of the logically formulated theory.
What distinguishes one theory from another is, in the first place, the choice of foundation stones, that is, its irreducible basic concepts out of which the structure is built.
{end quote}
I find that any structure of human society which has among its "foundation stones" any belief to the effect that avoidable mistakes are ever actually happen has a psychotic delusion as one of its "irreducible basic concepts,' and human destructiveness is the inescapable consequence of acting out that psychotic delusion.
What do I find to be a plausible candidate for one of Albert Einstein's psychotic delusion foundation stones? Simply this: {begin quote}By "objective description" is meant a description which claims potential validity of meaning without reference to any acts of observation.{end quote} That view of "objective description" as being without reference to any acts of observation, is, to me, a decent approximation of the epitome of biological utter nonsense.
In my view, Einstein never adequately escaped the imprisonment of reductionism sufficiently to truly fathom absolute relativism and relative absolutism. People born long after Einstein was born and who have explored theoretical biology, such as Walter Elsasser, Robert Rosen, Francisco Varela, or A. H. Louie, have all (as best I can tell), as I have, abandoned reductionism as a useful way to fathom biology, and have turned to relationalism because reductionist methods have been demonstrated to be incapable of at all accurately modeling life or living systems.
In, as it was called when I was a physics major, "modern physics," there is to be found "The Pauli Exclusion Principle," which, to oversimplify it, has it that, in a given "thing," no two parts of the "thing" can have actually identical quantum states. What I did as a physics major with an interest in the relationship of physics and biology, was to do a thought experiment in which the "thing" to which the Pauli Exclusion Principle was applicable was the entire universe. Whence, I arrived at a simple thought; if two things are actually the same, there is only one of them.
And that thought dragged me into linguistics. For one "thing" may be given innumerable names. The names of a thing are never the thing so named.
Alas, if a person has successfully internalized the delusion that avoidable mistakes actually happen, then direct observation of objective reality becomes impossible, because it is impossible to directly observe the making of an avoidable mistake. Why so? Because, if a mistake was actually avoidable, this is established as fact only by the fact that the mistake was actually avoided. However, the fact that the avoidable mistake was actually avoided is the fact that the mistake did not happen and it is impossible to know what the avoidable mistake is, or was, because it never was.
Am I now hearing, however faintly, the ever louder tolling of the death knell of the adversarial system of law and jurisprudence?
Put me on a jury, and I will listen to the evidence, weigh the evidence, and inescapably find the evidence proclaiming the absolute innocence of the defendant. I will do so truthfully, for I will find all the evidence to be situational and the deed for which the-accused-is-the-defendant to be of entirely situational nature, and totally outside the locus of control of the falsely-accused defendant. This is because my grasp of biology informs me that all defendants are falsely accused, and are falsely accused through dastardly-deceptive attribution errors.
Except through one or another form of delusion, the inborn, intrinsic, innate, and inextricable absolute and perfect validity of every human person is perfectly inviolable.
And, no, I am not using supposedly illegal mind-altering substances to be able to think as I do.
I was born this way. I was born with the ability to learn of what I did not yet know, to learn to become familiar with what I was not yet familiar, and to learn to understand what I did not yet understand.
...Just like everyone else, in the unique way of the way of my life, as in the unique way of the life of every one of us.
The desire to be normal is the least strange desire I can imagine, perhaps because being normal is all that is actually achievable.
