Creatio ex Nihilo god and god particle: Part II: Atomos and Anu; Causality and Adristam

In the ingrained philosophy of the Indian subcontinent, god or divinity is in all things animate or in-. As a first or instinctive conclusion, this view is particularly consistent with the impression of what we have of, what is known as, Higgs’ field. This field is postulated to permeate everywhere in space, meaning that its value is non-zero so that it acts on any particle. Since, in Newtonian kinematical terms, a force is measured by the acceleration it produces on a mass, one may, at least intuitively, assume that an all-pervasive Higgs’ field gives a mass to all particles. A particle may then exist because it has mass. If the Higgs’ field is associated with the existence of a particle, then the Higgs’ particle may be treated – in quasi-theological or multi-media-religion terms - as a god-like particle or “god-particle.” If god is something which gives mass to a particle (“soul”) then there may be many gods acting by different fields in different sub-worlds. The Higgs’s particle is the god that gives mass even in the absence of other fields or other worlds.

However, the obvious question that arises in the mind of an inquisitive, partially informed, layman is “shouldn’t it be the same as a gravity field that permeates everywhere there is mass? If god is something which gives mass (“soul”?) to a particle, then there may be many gods acting by different fields in different sub-worlds.

An informed analysis (not mine) states that the force acting due to a field (say gravity) depends on the existence of a gradient of that field. If the force exerted by another field (say Higgs’ field) is uniform everywhere there will be no effect on the gravity field by the Higgs’ field, provided the two fields do not influence each other. (they are orthogonal which my computer says it means they are mutually independent, non-redundant, non-overlapping or irrelevant; in computer terminology, something ... is orthogonal if it can be used without consideration as to how its use will affect something else.) So there is no loss of quantification of the influence of gravity if the Higgs’ field is arbitrarily chosen to be zero. This could be equivalent to making the vacuum energy density to be zero. This is convenient. it seems, because the vacuum energy density cannot be calculated as yet with accuracy. There are other such problems --- such as a cosmological constant or dark energy --- for the theoretical physicists in their search for a mathematical absolute truth.

From an Ockham’s razor (see previous blog) point of view, perhaps, we may say that there is a self- consistency emerging from the empiricism (remember Godel? of “Godel, Escher, Bach”?) of mathematical formalism which explains the behaviour of some class of particles.

The question to ask is (always perhaps) which came first ... the Higgs’ field or the Higgs’s particle. Which is the “god” that gives mass and therefore existence to particles even in the absence of other fields or other worlds?

In philosophical terms, is it the atomos-anu particle or causality-adristam concepts of Greco-Indian philosophies?

Since I have no licence to speculate on either particle physicist or philosophy, I guess (using Ockham's razor), I may have a better chance of putting forward from the perspective of an ordinary what the main issues could be. We need to be logically consistent even if we need not be mathematically correct to understand what ancient philosophers had to say about the very beginning.

Atomos of Leucippus-Democritus-Epicurus

Philosophical issues such as the indivisibility of matter or the first matter or atomos has been attributed to Democritus-Leucippus in the western world. The concept of there being an “uncuttable” (atomos) state of matter is attributed to Leucippus or earlier while Democritus probably has to be credited with the establishment of the concept of atomos by building upon it quantitatively in mechanical terms and by proposing mathematical laws. The senses are a reaction to changes in time of the different configurations of atoms.

While Democritus did not deny the existence of sense and sensibility (awareness) the interpretation of an observed (therefore true) phenomenon due to such senses may be subject to misinterpretation and is therefore subjective. The more objective truth behind the phenomenon that is registered by our senses is derived from the influence of the motion and rearrangement of atoms in void. This is the real truth whereas all other phenomenon are (in a well quoted phrase) “... sweet by convention, hot by convention, cold by convention, color by convention ... .”

There is this contradiction between Democritus and Epicurus which formed the basis for Karl Marx’s thesis. Epicurus stated that reality can only be defined by the senses. What we learn from our senses is the only legitimate knowledge. Epicurus followed the same postulates of Democritus regarding the atomos. Yet they came to opposite conclusions. The difference between Democritus and Epicurus is, I presume (after reading Pierre-Marie Morel’s Epicurean Atomism) basically in the way infinity has been used. Democritus conjectured that the atoms have infinite shapes which may be extended to saying that atoms could have infinite sizes. When this is done, it contradicts the notion that atoms are invisible and indivisible. At the same time if there are infinite shapes of atoms and infinite number of rearrangements that accounts for the seemingly infinite number of sensations. There would then be no way to distinguish between subtle changes of sensations and shapes because it would be impossible to discern their boundaries and thereby feel distinct sensations. This is the contradiction studied by Marx. Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but — how inconsistent! — they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth,

One of the concerns of Epicureans is the role of pain of body and trouble in the mind and the way it has to be removed to feel pleasure which is the only good. The role of religion is to provide this good. All desires which create no pain when unfulfilled are not necessary (see http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/PD.html). The concern with death is tackled by reducing it into nothing. The second of his four-fold cure for anxiety says

Death is nothing to us because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.

In der Zwischenzeit, between the beginning from atoms and dispersal into atoms is life.

Epicurus would have the living extract pleasure from sensations as the only reality. This is Marx’s dilemma. How do Democritus and Epicurus starting from the same atomos concept come to diametrically opposite conclusions? Longfellow had perhaps examined this aspect by this line “dust thou art to dust returnest” from his poem “A psalm of life” but he did not intend it in the Epicurean sense (perhaps). His poem has the lines
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,/Is our destined end or way;/But to act, that each to-morrow/Find us farther than to-day.

And still they gazed and still the wonder grew how one small head could carry all it knew.
This section has been put in as a diversion. One looks at inanimate images (sculpted or sketched) of faces and one tries to figure out from the face if there is an additional hint about their life.

It would have been nice to have lived in the times of Leucippus-Democritus-Epicurus --- the time after Buddha got his enlightenment --- and decide, if necessary, for ourselves what they meant. For the present we can only look at their images as created by the artist that made their images while they posed, say. The final image of their face could be a reflection of their reaction to their artist. But if one has posed for some time, this reaction would have been washed off and one could perhaps get a true equilibrium state of their minds as a composite of their left- and right-brain activities.

The images of Leucippus and Democritus as well as Epicurus --- as taken from Wikipedia --- are given in the centre below. Each of these images have been have been split into half. The left and right halves (facing the page) are then copied, pasted, flipped horizontally, and then joined back to give the composite left and right faces. The left-and right sides of the images are actually the right and left side of the face towards the artist. The expressions on the right side of the face is controlled by the left half of the brain which is the analytic half (logic, math, science, creativity, details, making strategies) while the right half of the brain works on the more synthetic aspects (shapes, pictures, melody, beauty, possibilities). The expressions on the left side of the face (right-side of the picture) is thus controlled by the artist side of one’s personality. That on the right side of the face (left of the picture) is controlled by the analytic aspects of one’s mind.

The point that I am trying to make (besides finding an excuse for putting in a picture as otherwise Alice may not read it) is that Leucippus, who thought of atomos first had a balance between the analytic and synthetic sides of his mind. Democritus’s mind had his left side seemingly active with conflicts about his analyses, while his right side had no such conflicts. Democritus therefore went into details of the atomos concept, visiting the world, learning and debating and preaching

The left brain activity of Epicurus seems to suggest a “I told you so” look of a man who is not too concerned about the beginning and the end but just the simple joys of living-hood.

The right-brain activity as expressed in the images seems to show increasing doubt on going from Leucippus through Democritus to Epicurus.

The concept of anu.

In my search of the internet for the philosophy behind anu, the Indian philosophical equivalent (so we have been told) of atomos, I understood from Wikepedia that the philosophy of anu is in the Vaisesika sutra. I could find (besides Wikipedia) two documents that gives the Vaisesika sutra of Kanada as translated by Sinha and an article by one Roopa Narayan on “Space, Time and Anu in Vaisheshika” which is really a more readable (and probably more inaccurate) version.

It seems from Sinha’s translation (page 2) that vaisesika means ‘characteristic’ or ‘distinguishing’ and that from Panini’s grammar rules for Sanskrit vaisesika is derived from visesa so that vaisesika sutra is a treatise on visesa. The word visesa itself is differently interpreted, so that to ordinary mortals like us we cannot, even if we knew Panini rules, know what visesa means. Sinha’s translation gives “species, distinction, difference, excellence, superiority” (did he mean hierarchy?) for visesa.

It turns out, after I formed an oopinion, that part of the confusion may lie in the possibility that the root of visesa may not be in Sanskrit at all, but in older languages such as Tamil or Bengali (!). After all, we Tamilians begin our day asking “enna visesam?” and we Bengalis begin with “ki bishoi?”. These are probably the English equivalent of “what’s new?”. In this sense we may say that vaisesika sutra deals with the origin of matter (material or spiritual).

This interpretation also opens up the possibility that the thoughts on visesa might have come before the time vaisesika sutra was written in Sanskrit (assuming as I do that Tamil, Bengali were developed before Sanskrit, if only because these languages, like English, do not have genders for their nouns). But more on this later.

There is this tendency among mis-informed Indian-western thought that the corresponding Indian (I don’t know what I mean by “Indian”) term for atomos is anu. The English translation of Sinha suffers from the fact that it was written in deeply colonial times when the best Indian scholar had to follow or be validated by the best western traditions of scholarship, such as John Stuart Mill’s 1845 book on “A System of Logic”. It is therefore not clear to what extent western philosophy subconsciously dictated the translation. Thus Nanda's translation uses the word atom for anu without seemingly trying to differentiate between the two.

The translation of Sanskrit texts is something which is subjective. The Sanskrit texts have considerable parsimony in their use of words and the translation would depend on the interpretation by the readers which in turn will depend not only on the knowledge of the grammar but also on the life-experience of the reader (e.g., the word visesa itself or the word anu as discussed above). Thus a sutra (learned treatise) would have a connected string of aphorisms (statements that says something wise and true, my computer informs me) that keep adding up to a bigger self-consistent truth. Since hwat I don't know about Sanskrit would fill all books written on it,

I am attaching the Sanskrit texts from Nanda’s translation without adding his commentaries in most cases. This text breaks up the sanskrit words into its components and gives an interpretation of what the aphorism could meam in English. This is not a good thing to do because the modern idiomatic interpretation of English may be very different from the ancient idiomatic interpretation of the texts as read by the Greeks or by Sanskrits.

The reader has the chance to make his own interpretations depending on his life experiences. I also have used a sequence of aphorisms in vaisesika sutra in order to suit my own string of thoughts. I actually start from near the end.

In Nanda’s translation of the Vaiseshika sutra, the word anu for a small object cannot be defined by contrasting it with the word mahat for a massive object. The first meaningful attempt in trying to define anu comes (7-1-6; the sequence here means book 7-chapter 1-aphrism 6)) in a negative sense by saying what largeness may mean

In the next aphorism (7-1-10) anu is used in a general sense as meaning small (and not atomic, as Nanda may have misinterpreted, I think). The anu is said to be what largeness is not.

Then comes a more difficult passage for an ordinary mortal (not a Sanskrit scholar) The definition of smallness or largeness are obtained simultaneously. It comes after one has first defined the eternal as something that has always existed and not created because of any cause.

Such a duality of opposites anu and mahat is probably necessary. It seems to me that the concept of very small first requires the concept of the infinity in space or its equivalent, the eternal in time. Thus the aphorism 4-1-1

From this the Vaivesiska sutra continues (aphorism 5-1-2) with the definition of what Nanda calls the ultimate atom. The effect that we see because of a cause is because of the lingam of the anu (mark of the ultimate atom).

Other effects on our senses arises by what Democritus would call convention in a cause and effect manner.

Because there is a sequence discerned in causality, the sequence of events give the notion of time. There is no time without events.

Once the featurelessness of the featureless eternal is perturbed by a sequence of causes and effects (movement of the jewel and the approach of the needle) marked, say, by the heaven-created time-beats of the the dance of Shiva, appearing as Shiva the creator

This is where the concept of adristam (perhaps the physicists equivalence of a field) is invoked. It is through adristam that there is earthquake, or circulation of water in the trees, or thunder and lightning.

The Vaisesika Sutra of Kanada is really an analysis of cause and effect or of adristam. Very early (aphorism 1-2-1) causality is introduced,

One cannot expect the analyses of cause and effect will allow one to predict or foresee all events in space and time from the beginning till the end. Even in our finite time-scale we will not be able to predict accurately such small things as weather conditions if we are not sure of the boundary conditions --- the conditions in the beginning and end of the time interval concerned. This is often put (in quasi romantical terms) as the “butterfly effect” by which a butterfly flapping its wings in one place alters weather conditions far away,

The butterfly effect is perhaps one way of way of saying what adristam is. The commentary in Nandalal’s translation in vaisesika sutra is equally poetic. I reproduce the English commentary simply to suggest that the butterfly effect can be put in more complex language, such as that below:-

Whereas it is seen that in spite of earth, wheel, water, potter, thread, etc., being brought together, there is non-existence of the pot, if there is non-existence of the; potter s staff, and that in spite of earth, water. etc.. being brought together, there is non-existence of the shoot if there is non-existence of the seed : it (i . e., non-existence) cannot be explained without the relation of effect and cause between the potter s staff and the pot or between the seed and the shoot. Otherwise there will be non-existence of the pot even on the non-existence of the loom, etc., and there will be non-existence of the shoot even on the non- existence of pieces of stone, etc. Moreover it is seen that the pot, a piece of cloth, etc, exist for a time only. That even cannot be explained without the relation of cause and effect. For they being non-existent at one time, their temporariness in the form of existence at another time is not possible but by the dependence of existences upon causes.

This concept of adristam and maaya are two philosophies that are accepted in our Indian (the true meaning of Hindu) lives in a quite secular manner. The adristam is something one has no control of although we know that it is a result of the past (and therefore necessarily future) cause and effects as long as time is not still. Activity in the ultimate anu comes because of adristam in the time that between the beginning and end of the (cosmic) cycle. Because of this we may understand the entry in Wikipedia which states that anu “... come into being and vanish in an instant” in one form of the cosmic cycle. The truth between these instants are phenomena which may be described as maaya which is not the absolute truth (not Brahman; maaya transliterates into “not that”). This interpretation is perhaps close to being Democritean.

Adristam is also something that is ingrained (modern science would perhaps say it is expressed in one’s gene or DNA without really clarifying it further) and is to be distinguished from instinctive action that comes from a past experience. Nanda cites as example, the lust for women in young men even though they have no previous experience of them or the fear of snake bites.

Adristam is well ingrained in Indian vocabulary. One philosophically accepts events in one’s life as something like “that is my adristam”. Yet what is real is more material as visesa. The malayalees of Kerala --- a place in the south where philosophies of northwestern invaders would have arrived late --- call their new year day as vishu. Vishu Punniya Kalam is said to be a time before vishu when nothing exists. Recommencement as existence of material space begins after vishu. This recommencement is symbolized as kai visesam, --- the giving of a gift from the hands of an elder.

Chronology

The philosophy of anu and adristam has in it components of the Leuccipu-Democritus-Epicurus thoughts on atomos. It is therefore not clear whether the vaisesika sutra was influenced by their thoughts. Sanskrit scriptures as documented are usually dated to 300 BC which is certainly after the times of Leuccipus-Democritus and contemporaneous with Epicurus.

This is certainly not acceptable to Hindus (Indians) like me. However, I will put up with it reluctantly, after making a few qualifying remarks.

Earlier references to anu comes from Babylonian king of angels in Chaldean. In http://translation.babylon.com/english/Anu2/ we find
“,,, There seems little doubt that the Chaldean Anu and the Sanskrit Anu (atom) are identical in origin. Anu is a title of the formative Brahma who philosophically is often envisaged as the cosmic atom or infinite universe. The mystical significance is the ever-invisible, unreachable divine center -- whether of a being or universe -- which is the divine-spiritual focus of essential consciousness, from which flow forth all the streams of consciousness in its multiform varieties." ... WOW!!!

There are various names that begin with anu and which are associated with beginnings. Thus Anukriti (creation), Anubhav (experience), anubhuti (feeling), anubodh (awareness), anudeep (bright light), anugraha (divine blessing) and so on.

An interesting aspect is that while the Sanskrit word krithika means creative, anukrithika in tamil means “no”. The implication, as Tamilians always maintain, is that Tamil came before Sanskrit. A proof (even if not entirely convincing to most) of this could be read into anukrithika (implying vacuum in Tamil) coming before creation (krithika in Sanskrit)???

As another “proof” we have the English word "annunciation", from the Latin Annutiatio nativatis. It conveys conception to virgin (vacuum?) Mary. This even is also associated with the time (nine months before Christmas) of the vernal equinox which is a time for the New Year.

Kanada, who compiled the Vaisesika sutra, is said to belong to the lineage (gotra) of one of the seven great sages (sapta rishi) Kashyap who (according to Wikipedia) is the father of all humanity and who is also from Orissa which is as close to as one can get to Bengal (suggesting to my satisfaction that Bengal is the origin of every thing). I am not suggesting any connection but the name for tortoise or turtle is kochop, in Hindi kachua, and in Marathi of Maharashtra it is kasa.

Anu-imaging

Since images of anu can only be captured by the influenceof adristam, when time exist, when can only reprsent the action of adristam. In the aphorism 5-2-13 of Vaisesika sutra we have

One can, I suppose, make an imagery of the forces of adristam acting on anu. One has done so in the internet and we come up with somethings in the image below One image (Fig 5 left) of anu seems to roughly incorporate the descriptions of adristam above (from http://sevensuns.org/Sevensuns/plane0.html). In the blog on a mathematician’s view of the god of Abraham, there is a representation of a 4-dimensional Hypersphere which has the same volume of a solid Torus in 3-dimensions (see http://www.meru.org/GodofAbe/onegdpix.html) which is vaguely similar (Fig 5, top right).

The tortoise plays an important role in Hindu Vaishnavite (Vishnu) mythologies. For some reaon (not necessary for this blog) the forces of good (Devas or god’s people) ahd to churn the seas along with their foes (asuras, which I interpret as Assyrians) had to churn an ocean of milk with a serpent as the churning rope and a mountain as the churning rod. During the churning as the mountain sank into the ocean Vishnu took (see http://geeksutra.blogspot.in/2005/08/kurma-tortoise-second-avatar.html)the form of a turtle to bear the weight of the mountain. The whole purpose of the churning was to restore immortality to the Devas. Since anu is immortal the shape of the tortoise may be taken as the shape giving time or mortality to anu or its adristam.

There is little more that I can do to show any connection with images of anu and Hindu images, except to point out a rough resemblance (Fig 5 right bottom)to the tortoise or kochop in Bengali. The tortoise is present outside the main idol in many temples in Mahrashtra.

The various parts of the turtle represents the heavens (shell), earth (body) underworld (undershell) and is thought to have rought about the creation of the universe or at least to have restored (by the churning of the seas) the parts of the universe when it was destroyed after the great flood.

So, in a roundabout way I have found the link between the tortoise and anu and adristam. This is not the purpose of this blog. It is just its adristam.

Creatio ex Nihilo god and god particle: Part I: Twixt Abraham, Aquinas, and Ockham

What we all know or have experienced is the omnipresence of a god whom we accept (or, equivalently, not accept) in various ways without necessarily having a rationale for accepting it --- or rejecting it. In a thesis-antithesis space our love for god should have an accompanying dislike for god.

When we were being taught Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” in school, two lines stuck in my memory

The man had killed the thing he loved
And so he had to die.

I was struck by the unreasonableness of the phrase “and so he had to die” because of the lines that followed:-

Yet each man kills the thing he loves/ By each let this be heard,/ Some do it with a bitter look,/ Some with a flattering word,/ The coward does it with a kiss,/ The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,/ And some when they are old;/Some strangle with the hands of Lust,/ Some with the hands of Gold:/The kindest use a knife, because/ The dead so soon grow cold.

If the thing you love is the worship of god then do you kill this god by cold physics?

It is not necessary that we have a logical basis for registering/understanding this god experience. Our acceptance of a god will be unkind if it is primarily based on our fear of the unknown and the possibility that there is a god who manages our portfolios.

We may, instead, just succumb to the instinctive fear of the unknown/uncertain nothingness (nihilo) especially when it comes in the form of dark moving shadows or white floating smoke or claps of thunder.

This we probably did in the way we understood shamanism as Shyama or Shiva as dark gods residing in the smoke of the funeral pyres. All of us have seen (or ought to have seen) animals exhibiting this fear spontaneously.

I have not seen animals in spontaneous worship of the unknown. The closest I have come to images of animals worshipping god on the internet is shown in Fig 1.

It is obvious that we accept images of animals worshiping god when it corresponds to our image of worship. Whether the animals would agree with this image of worship is not clear. As Bertrand Russell famously said:-

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known. “

Man (at least some of them) would like to think that they are more intelligent than animals, that they have an analytic mind. These men must always have a logical basis for their actions including their thought, since, they would say, for example, without much more enlightenment, that it is in their DNA (or ought to be). They are thus compelled to use this mind to understand the metaphysical god or its particle-physical counterpart --- now claimed to be in popular scientific parlance as the “god particle” or what more spiritual physicists would understand as the Higgs' Boson.

One of these most active minds must have been M. C. Escher whose mind must have been always occupied with the geometry of things and their symmetry. I don’t know how god or god-particle was represented (even if unconsciously) in Escher’s drawings. But he must have been very close to god-like (in some eyes) in his search for perfection. It is difficult to choose any of Escher’s drawings over others.

The drawing in Fig 2 left probably shows a morphing http://www.freakingnews.com/Escher-Hand-Holding-Chameleons-Pictures-82485.asp
of Escher's 1935 drawing of “Hand with reflecting sphere (self-portrait in spherical mirror)” and his 1948 drawing of “Stars” in which there are “All kinds of single, double and triple polyhedrons floating like tars through the air. In the center is a system of three regular octahedrons ... . In this cage live two chameleons whose ... legs and tails are particularly well adapted to grasp the framework of their cage as it whirls through space.” The original drawing of “Hands with reflecting sphere” shows a reflection of himself in the spherical mirror held in his hand“... your own hand or more exactly the point between your eyes is in the absolute center. No matter how you turn or twist yourself, you can’t get out of the central point. You are immovably, the focus, the unshakeable core of your world.”

In the morphed picture of Fig 2 (left) the centre of the octahedron would form the corresponding point. One could then interpret the drawing as the centre of you perception of the world wherein the chameleons who “... add an element of life gives the aspects of changing time in what could be perceived as life” in whatever form.

Escher add that the sphere is “ ... resting on a left hand. But as a print is the reverse of the original drawing on stone, it was my right hand that you see depicted (Being left handed, I needed my left hand to make the drawing). Perspectives change with changes in symmetry.

The figure on the right top are the steps from Escher’s “Ascending and Descending”. If the vertical axis of time then the figure would represent the endless-ness of time, no matter in which direction one travels. That is eternity. Between vacuum and eternity there are experiences appearing in myriad patterns. Escher (Fig 2 bottom right) expresses this many a time by spirals which can be viewed either way --- as spiralling outwards from zero to infinity or inwards from infinity to zero.

So where does the god of our creation come in?

Some long time back (early 1990s) I took a survey of people from the scientific community (at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste) on what was their impression of god. Scientists from a Christian background usually thought of God as a happy old man with a white beard. Scientists from the east (including Muslim background) thought of God as a blue light or some sort of energy. I have no expertise (this should not stop me) to go into the ethnological reasons for this difference, except the obvious --- westerners are more spontaneous.

On hindsight, these, two ways of looking at god, represents two different aspects of looking at our origin, somewhat irrelevantly distinguished as religious or scientific, and perhaps more tautologically as real and reciprocal, i.e., images in real space or images of tracks of energy-events. As Oscar Wilde said somewhere (I don’t know where)

People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards

What I would like to pass-time on in this blog, on which I spent too much god-from-nothing time, is to discuss (in my present vision of the world) how the concept of, or logic behind, the revelation of god and/or god particle seemed to be necessary/justified in understanding te mass mentaity due to the mass religion of the powerful people.

My views on god is as uncertain as my views on how my brain will continue to function in the zwischenzeit after I am pronounced clinically dead and before I am dispersed to ashes. The first visual impression on the scientific evidence (Fig 3) for a god particle is equally inconclusive (mercifully) except that it looks like a blip.near the atomic number at the limit of stability of a hydrogen-atom-like species(fine structure constant ~ 137)

Abraham’s God and thereafter

The central thesis in all philosophies (as distinct from) religions is creatio ex nihilo (see Creation and the god of Abraham edited By Burrell, Cogliatti, Soskice and Steeger, Chapter 2) which means creation from nothing. This creation should also include vacuum (giving substance thereby, perhaps, to Julie Andrews’ song “nothing comes from nothing” in the Sound of Music) although not specifically stated in religious doctrines (seemingly). Probably influenced by it, the physicist would give a time (plus or minus a few million years) to when the world was created going by what they know --- at least, from their empirical observations at the present time.

Religions, interested in propagation of their philosophies, would resort to the language of faith in their religion, and would require an original god or prophet. There is no logic (or profit) for these religions to have god to be an uninterested eternal. A god has to be present with his people for all time, the pat, the present, and the future --- the father, the son and the holy ghost. As Judaism would say “The will of God is to dwell, as it were, among mankind, within this world. It is our duty to form ourselves into worthy vessels for the Divine Presence, the Shechinah, to dwell within.”

In Hebrew scriptures, the sequence of events for the creation of the world as revealed in the genesis of god, the emission of light (or bosons when light is described as photons) started the world, with the subsequent formation of water and land and sun and moon and day and night, and then satisfied with his work, god created man in his own image. The importance of god started with the calling of Abraham, for guiding his people after the flood as Noah was thought to be too naive to deal with evil things e.g., Sodom and Gomorrah.

Abraham’s God is thought to be a product of the reasoning from the mind of man that has been given to him by god. Abraham’s observation on pagan rituals has been described in Kaplan’s “Handbook of Jewish thought” as
"It was into this pagan atmosphere that a most unique individual was born. From his earliest childhood,32 Abraham transcended his pagan environment ... and recognized that the world was governed by one Supreme Being. As one of the greatest geniuses of his time, Abraham was able to use his keen mind to see through the sham (Shyama, shiva, shaman?) and falsehood (postulates?) of the values of his generation,and understand the true purpose of creation.”(questions in parentheses are mine).
The logic of Abraham was simple,
... Avraham our father wondered, “Is it conceivable that the world be without a caretaker?” ...
For his times this must have been a most original thought because “,,, therefore, the Holy One, Blessed be He, appeared to him and said, “I am the Master of the universe and its Caretaker.”

It is not a matter of surprise that Abraham’s god should be the forebearer of religions from the people of Abraham (ephrahim, Ibrahim, Avraham, Avram). What is not surprising is that they gave rise to religions that claims to be the most pure (whatever purity may mean). What is of concern is that these religions continue to generate the most war-like talk in the world.

Logic of some Christians

Faith in God and the Christian church is something peculiar to Americans. What is the philosophy of the god that is important to the most powerful/influential/ country in the world --- US of A (at least at the present juncture of time).

The philosophy of the god of the Christian faith is perhaps in Abraham’s God.

Other countries take their Christianity for granted and it is a non issue for protecting their life or their style. The colonizing Americans were Christians who could not understand the hostile native population, unfortunately termed as Indians, and their worship. It is the Christian church, in their various forms, that provided an unifying God “… of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles." The advantage of being a Christian is that one is then not a Buddhist, or a muslim. In the Christian Church there are simple commandments by which one can be judged, without requiring an interpretation. Nevertheless, every advocate of Christianity would be happy with a logic or philosophy since it is, according to most religious philosophers, the human mind that is able to appreciate the Christian God. The conflict between doctrine and dialectics, reason and faith, has been one which has always troubled the preacher when he is asked the Aristotelean “why”.

Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham were two philosophers born in the 13th century without beards and with a distinct humourless curl of their lips (Fig 4) when sketched by an artist.

Thomas Aquinas (from Aquino in Italy) was canonized by the Catholic Church because he perfected the great *synthesis” of two seeming irreconciliables --- faith and reason.

I am not aware (as yet) of the details of this synthesis.

Aquinas provided answers to some “Disputed questions of created spirits” which requires (to sound authentic) a Latin translation as Questo disputata de spirityalibus creaturis. For example, a question asked would be
Is a spiritual substance able to be united to a body?
For which a Thomist (follower of Thomas Aquinas) would argue
“… that the distinctive action of spiritual substance is to think – an action that can’t be a body’s action since thinking does not call for a bodily organ …”
(see http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/digitaltheses/public/adt-acuvp18.16082005/02whole.pdf).

I suppose to a standard rationalist the statement “faith can move mountains” cannot be based on reason. A Thomist could, at best, have faith in reasoning out a way to move a mountain.

It would be important to gain insights into a person like Alfred Freddoso, John and Jean Oesterle Professor of Thomistic Studies Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame. Fredesso is part of the very solid conservative strain that is said to be the back-bone of honest-to god American politics, who are not expected to not vote for Obama. Alfred Freddoso may not be a prime example of Camelot’s ordinary folk, but he certainly could have enjoyed many happy months of May. Alfred Freddoso has five children which is sufficient in modern times to make him a saint, provided he is not (for different reasons) Osama Bin Laden (> 20 children) or Lalu Prasad Yadav (twelve).

Freddoso’s distinction is that he translated Thomas Aquinas’s works from Italian to English. He writes “Christian life consists not just in God’s forgiving our sins, but also in his effecting within us an interior transformation that needs to be spelled out in straightforward metaphysical terms.” Freddoso would ask questions such as
“And how does one imbued with that vision (Christian way of life) and that ideal, along with the wisdom they promise, look upon the main alternatives proposed by philosophers who have sought wisdom outside the framework of faith in Jesus Christ?”

This conservative logic is not different from the way a Marxist would like Marxists to behave or Islam would like muslims to behave. It is difficult for us Indians, who have grown up in the very liberal traditions of our soil, to find any salvation in being close to a God of an indefinite but singular kind when we have so much plurality in them and their teachings.

The efforts of Thomas Aquinas who used Aristotle’s philosophical methods to base his philosophy in defence of the doctrines of Christianity resulted in the belief of Christian philosophers about the complementary nature of reason and faith, and that they cannot be treated as opposites.

I personally do not think so. While Aristotle has a spirit of free inquiry, the method of Aquinas assumes that there is a correct answer to every question and his service to the church was to help in the search of the correct answer by his methods. Thus, while Aristotle had in ascending order of knowledge perception, memory experience, art, science and wisdom, Aquinas had in descending order, god, angels, humans and other animate or inanimate creatures. Aquinas’s philosophy led naturally to his favouring a hierarchical society which required men in society to be governed preferably by one ruler. (see Karl Marx And The Future Of The Human by Cyril Smith).

Alfred Freddoso has also studied William Ockham of the Ockham’s razor fame. Ockham is considered to be a staunch critic of Thomas Aquinas. According to Alfred Freddoso “... Ockham is ... less hopeful than Aquinas ... in his assessment of just how much philosophical truth natural reason is capable of acquiring without the aid of divine revelation ...”

Everyone knows about Ockham’s (Occam’s?) razor which is difficult to understand for some when stated as
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate
In English it is
pluarilty should not be posited without necessity when explaining something...
In his History of Western Philosophy (1945, see Taylor) Bertrand Russell writes
... Although he did not say this, he said something which has much the same effect, namely: "It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer." That is to say, if everything in some science can be interpreted without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it.”

Ockham’s principle of parsimony (being frugal) was probably stated by Aristotle as perfection makes easier function and by Isaac Newton as “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances." The key word here means that it should be sufficient. For example, when the apple falls, the colour of the apple or the eyes of the beholder, or the mercy of god and the hunger of the people are not important ingredients to understand why the apple falls.

Occam's razor in ontology (philosophy of existence) is probably aimed at leaving questions of theology --- natural or revealed --- aside and accept the basic doctrine or faith when no matter what one posits one does not add more significance. By this logic one does not have to explain mass of matter or action at a distance by positing Higgs’ boson.

Probably in this sense I have to agree with “Menvall's Blog: Phylogenetics – change on different levels” (February 2012) where he concludes
*... Logic has no possibility to reach unambiguity ... I reckon this is the same message as William of Ockham, Cantor, Russell, TS Eliot, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gödel, Douglas Hofstadter (with Gödel, Escher and Bach), among many others, have tried to convey. It is the message of the impossibility of a single truth, ...”
.
The corollary to this is that if Ockham's razor supports the idea that we accept that God created everything since it is much simpler than the complex ideas of evolution, we mmy acept Bertrand Russell's (1912; see Raylor’s Ockham’s Razor in Russell’s Philosophy) perfectly acceptable point:
“… every principle of simplicity urges us to adopt the natural view, that there
really are objects other than ourselves and our sense-data which have an existence
not dependent upon our perceiving them. . . . Since this belief does not lead to any
difficulties but on the contrary tends to simplify and systematize our account of
our experiences, there seems no good reason for rejecting it. “.

This should be the view of both Aquinas and Ockham.

In the great debate of whether God exists or not we would simply have to say that there is no good reason for rejecting it. Just like the Bellman we simply have to treat the search for god as another Hunting of the Snark, and one only has to assert three times that that God exists and that will be true.

As a corollary, we may also argue that since the creation and destruction of the world --- the snark and the boojum? --- is in the hands of god (or of Shiva if you insist) one does not have to debate about how the world ends. It is at God’s (or goddess Gaya’s) mercy, no matter how much you may huff and puff about global warming, Monsanto seeds, environmental population or IVF babies.

Or even wondering about our origin the way only man does (supposedly) compared to other animals (at least those that we have not communicated with). This is expressed in the cartoon (from http://omgobama.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/objectivist-ethics-on-trial/)

The way the society is being run by the multimedia we may love to limit our thinking to that of the animals.

King Arthur as President of Simple folks of America? Marx, Engels, Snark and Boojum.

There is always the wish in the mind of the ordinary simple folks that they could be ruled by a benevolent figure like King Arthur or his equivalent, It would be better still for the world if the most powerful country in the world, say America, had such a leader.

It is easy to pose the question in the title of this blog. One looks at the presidential candidates or presidents or important public figures of USA, The answer would be very easily a simple “no” … not even if you were allowed to consider Che Guevara!

The rub comes if we can think of “yes” as an answer. Then we have to pose some more questions. Therefore this blog?

It will be somewhat out of character if this blog is not as long as it is. Unfortunately, it could have become longer simply because there are so many things I have to learn through blogging... and there may be little time left?

The last time I started on a blog was more than four months ago. I thought I would write on Labour day, trace its origins, come to Chicago, find an Obama-connection and then argue about why Obama’s strong Chicasgo influence makes him use an altruist’s concern for the poor for his own selfish ends of remaining in power and bank-rolling his life style at the expense of the American people. We in India know about the qualities of our recent day politicians too well and need not be disappointed with the behavior of any politician, least of all any recent American president. All this I will leave to a later blog.

Obama is no King Arthur nor was meant to be. Obama, as an individual or as a president has seemingly (at least to somebody like me) has made little positive contribution of any kind to an original, typically American, philosophy that could improve the quality of the life of the ordinary American, regardless of colour or wealth or religion or education.

As world citizens, however, we were really hoping that a man such as Obama with an “ordinary” upbringing could come out of his middle-class-ness and rid the world of its petite bourgeoisie mentality of undeserved and unreasonable self-enhancement. We had also hoped that a benevolent American President, would take up global concerns that affect the life of the simple folk.

The danger is that the hunt for a King Arthur may be like the hunting of a Snark when all we have is the Boojum

Who are the simple folks?

They celebrate the May festival.

I will spend some time with the origins of May Day because this day has its roots in the earliest spontaneous folk festival which did not require a sanction from authority. To be a benevolent leader one could ask, like White’s “Once And Future King” Arthur asks of his queen Guinevere in the film version of Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot (just in case you have not seen the movie several times),

What do the simple folk do?
To help them escape when they're blue?
The shepard who is ailing, the milkmaid who is glum
The cobbler who is wailing from nailing his thumb
When they're beset and besieged
The folk not noblessly obliged

To which Guinevere guesses

“… They must have a system or two
They obviously outshine us at turning tears to mirth
Have tricks a royal highness is minus from birth …”

Guinevere, so lustily enacted by the very charming Vanessa Redgrave, would look forward to the month of May

… That lovely month when ev'ryone goes
Blissfully astray.
Tra la! It's here!
That shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts
Merrily appear!

It is this general acceptance in Europe of May being a lovely month that led to the celebration of May Day. This festival, it seems, is really from a pre-christian Celtic paganistic festival pronounced something like Beltane. This festival has some similarities to our own Holi festival especially in the way they light bonfires to mark the festival. Beltane also refers to the god of fire/light. This ancient pagan (relating to an ancient religion that had many gods and praised nature.. my computer tells me) festival is also associated with the Maypole festivities of Whitsun which is thought to be related to lingam worship (see “The Sacred Fire: The Story of Sex in Religion” By Ben Zion Goldberg) and a licence for free sex, as it is (or was, perhaps, before internet and virtuality came in) supposed to be in our Holi festival.

My father was born in the first of May. As children, we five siblings within twelve years of each other, have celebrated May 1 as my father’s birthday. As a six-year old or so, I concluded --- as usual wrongly --- that the public holiday on May 1 was part of celebration of my father’s birthday by the workers of the small factory where my father was chief engineer. As my innocent world expanded with age I was impressed by the number of other factory workers celebrating our father’s birthday.

We looked forward to that May-day holiday when we would picnic in My Ladye’s Garden (did not understand at that time why “lady” became “ladye”) before or after we went to the (now shifted) Madras zoo. Labour day was indeed a day of family celebration. Even if summer was not the best time the sea breeze was most cooling in the summer evenings when the typical madrasi male would roll up his lungi to ventilate his inners.

In the context of the May festival , it has to be mentioned that My Ladye’s garden was initiated by Charles Trevelyan in 1859 when he became a Governor of Madras (now Chennai) for a brief period. Trevelyan did it as a People’s Park which ended in a place that is now called Park town. So our family’s may day was somewhat in touch with the “pagan” spirit of May Day in a “holi”-day sense.

A more people-unfriendly view of Trevelyan is that of one who was put in charge for relief during the Irish famine in the mid 1900s when nearly a million people died. Trevelyan failed to bring the famine under control, He is supposed to have written (according to Wikipedia) "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated... The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people." Maybe Trevelyan made the people’s park for the Indian people as a penance for his Irish crime, ... or was it for for his ladye who “... remained in London for the sake of the children.” (Florence Nightingale’s letter in 1859).

Simple folks and the Proletariat Caste: A Loss of Innocence.

Our communist labour-union-leading relatives traced its origin for us to the workers’ revolution in which Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky figured. The workers, they said, revolted against the richness of the rich who profited from the wealth of the workers’ labours. This was how the class-distinction between workers and rich factory owners crept into our minds at our young impressionable age.

Marx and Engels had just entered manhood when they voiced their philosophies. Engels wrote Engels would write his book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” in 1845 when he was twenty four years old! That is the age when one is not afraid As a preface to the 1891 English Edition of his book, Engels would write

The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was first issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young, twenty-four years of age, and his production bears thestamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed.

Youth is never a problem for original thought and action. Einstein was 26 in the year when he published his works on Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy, S N Bose’s work that led to the concept of bosons --- as in the so-called god particle Higgs boson --- was also that age when he finished his work. Enrico Fermi was twenty two when he realized the possibility of enormous nuclear potential energy in Einstein’s E = mc2 equation. Alexander was twenty two when he invaded Persia minor.

The immaturity of youth is a problem, however, when it comes to social issues since age does temper the impetuosity of youth, with the arrival of children and grandchildren and with the simple joys of running a family.

The loss of innocence of Camelot’s “simple folks” all over the developed/developing world is one of the more important consequences of the influence of the philosophies of Marx-Engels. The simple folks became the proletariat caste (Roman term, as we ought to know, for those whose children are their wealth because they perform manual services for the Roman empire that the aristocrats cannot). Engels would write “…The first proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it, and accordingly, those employed in manufacture, in the working up of raw materials …”

Since that time, the middle of the nineteenth century, the aim to be come a so-called class-less society, has seen instead a new hierarchy of caste systems within the salaried class. As Engels noted, “… the degree of intelligence of the various workers is in direct proportion to their relation to manufacture; and that the factory-hands are most enlightened as to their own interests, the miners somewhat less so, the agricultural labourers scarcely at all … .”

In the context of this article, it was the misery of the Irish workers in Manchester that led to Engels’ Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England in 1845 that eventually led to the workers’ revolution and to the amelioration of the conditions of the factory workers. The credibility of this revolution led eventually to the monopoly-like power of labour leaders. This revolution was destroyed by the Communist party of the Soviet union and re-phrased by the (now capitalist) Communist party of China. Both of these developments left the communist parties all over the world rudderless. With it, the theme of “upliftment of the proletariat” --- so common in the mid twentieth century --- vanished from political usage.

The salvation of the so-called poor, sadly it seems, can never come from the poor simply because the poor think themselves to be poor because of conspicuous images that drive them to want to be conspicuously rich also.

Their actual salvation seems to come from people who have been healthily and wealthy for several generations. These saviours are able to be generous without being conscious (say by tax concessions) about it.

The saviour has to be something like King Arthur in his Camelot.

Marx and Engels and King Arthur --- men with beards

A king such as King Arthur had to rule based on a philosophy on which he must have been advised on. Let us say that his advisor was Merlin the magician. Merlin may have been a magician to King Arthur, because Merlin’s advice worked like magic since he would not have understood the philosophy in its full context.

Let us also say that Marx-Engels to a modern ruler would be somthing like a Merlin.

Both Marx and Engels belonged to an affluent class which pu them, like a Buddha, to be in position to feel the sufferings of the poor from their truly privileged position. Because of their privileged position they could also be heard by people of consequence. Engels would write in the preface of his book on the conditions of the working class in England,

“... I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life -- many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of everyone but an English money-monger...”

The images of Marx and Engels above, presumably working on the conditions of the working class, show them in quite comfortable conditions. These conditions naturally made them appreciate the misery of the working class. Marx would seem to be the more convinced. Engels was probably more steet smart. He would publish his “authorised version” of an English Translation in America, hoping as usual to make some money.

When Engels made his classification of workers based on the degree of intelligence, he was, of course, like all non-proletariat intellectuals, unaware of the amount of intelligence used by an organic farmer because of his experience. In any sensible society of simple folks, this organic farmer, who cannot be thought of as part of a petite-bourgeois salaried class, should head any labour hierarchy simply because of the essential food he provides. Instead, in the modern world, the hierarchy of labour is headed by programmes generated by computers.These programmed machines of manufacture are in the hands of environmentally de-sensitized, conspicuously consuming, clerk-people. The conditions of these workers are naturally unstable since they become redundant when more efficient labour unfriendly programmes increase worker redundancy.

Engels and Marx become relevant in modern times because of the philosophy of their ideas, even if they rephrased old philosophies in terms of what was contenporart for their times, Their analyses do not depend (I think) on the actual working condition of a salaried class, Their importance came from their unorthodox views which they could sustain because of their affluence.
The images of Marx and Engels that we are familiar with are those with long beards. Fig 1 is taken from the internet, pens and relative positions of the two have changed. Engels in a woollen coat may have been visiting Marxr. A portrait on the wall behind (;eft of Fig 1) suggests an affluence associated with Marx in his earlier days. It is their beard which gave American politicians their phobia of people with long beards (Castro, Osama, holy muslims, Sikhs).

The growing of a beard could suggest a non-necessity to spend time shaving one’s self purely for the purpose of conforming. The series of photographs in the top row of Fig 2 shows Engels growing up from a cocky young lad of the upper classes, through an uncertain angry young man who has made his first protest, then basking in the comforts of his recognition till finally becoming a wise old man, a little uncertain and perhaps forgiving himself for some of his early inaccuracies.

Not all men with beard are associated with blood-spilling bolshevikism (say, Jesus Christ or Gabby Hayes --- he was the sidekick that provided the negative space that made heroes out of cowboy legends such as Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry)., Cricketing revolutionaty W G Grace (played cricket from age 17 to 61) was famous for his bird nest beard. Tendulkar by this example could break another record by playing till 2035, sharing as he does Grace’s financial acumen. I don’t think Tendulkar is hairy enough to grow a Grace-ly beard.

Marx’s Philosophical Problem

Karl Marx did not start his non-conforming life with a beard. He had the air of a confident young man, because of which perhaps he engaged in a difficult doctoral thesis on the difference between Democritean (from Democritus’ theory of atomos or indivisible) and Epicurian philosophy in Nature. Karl Marx’s dilemma was the following:-

Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but — how inconsistent! — they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general. I say that they stand diametrically opposed, and I shall now try to prove it.

Some of Marx’s statements (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch03.htm) are quite simple

“... while Democritus turns the sensuous world into subjective semblance, Epicurus turns it into objective appearance... ;
... Democritus, dissatisfied with philosophy, throws himself into the arms of empirical knowledge, Epicurus has nothing but contempt for the positive sciences, since in his opinion they contribute nothing to true perfection. ..."

Such contests between the philosophical and the empirical comes up in all aspects of life ... The philosophical aspects are most often imbibed by the deprived while the empirical or practical aspects are best suitable for the ordinary (non-monsanto?) farmer who has the more difficult task of understanding nature and drawing from her resources without upsetting her rhythm.

When Marx and Engels started their collaboration, they were perhaps guided by the Democritean approach. They required an analytical basis, not unlike aspiring scholars of that time. Just like the laws of motion in physics, they came up with “ … dialectics, or the laws of motion of nature, human society and human thought …” (most of the comments on dielectics in what follows immediately will be based on Robert Sewell’s “What is dialectical materialism? - A study guide with questions, extracts and suggested reading” http://www.marxist.com/what-is-dialectical-materialism.htm).

Dielectics (a method of argument for resolving contradictions or disagreement) is primarily meant by Marx and Engels (I think) to provide the required philosophy for the working class (producers of wealth) to understand the conflict in their relationship with the capitalist class (hoarders of wealth). Once this is understood it can be used as their most effective weapon in their fight against their exploitation by the capitalist class,

One important aspect of such a dielectic, that is to Hegel in western philosophy, is that for every thesis one seeks an antithesis and one makes progress by a synthesis that removes the contradiction till another antithesis is found.. and so on. This is a dynamic theory which changes with change. Change it must as the environment of the universe changes with time independent of the direction it goes.

Within the limited lifetime of interest in philosophy that is available to a human mind such changes become slow to grasp after a certain time. The synthesis becomes static and reaches a steady state in which contradictions are not perceived to exist. One then writes a textbook or a treatise that is used as a guide. This may be thought to be a crystallization of ideas but is actually a petrification. Outside such a fossilization of a living mind, however, change continues relentlessly, A given synthesis or treatise becomes erroneous and therefore obsolete with time. The dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis continues but any synthesis during a finite period of time remains incomplete.

The requirement for the fulfilment of this dialectical process is infinite time which is impossible for the ordinary human. In this case one requires an authoritative statement from one who has experienced infinite time (in any direction). This becomes the dogma of a doctrine or a revelation in religion.

One may conclude, as a corollary, that since one does not have infinite time in one life, such doctrine must come from another world where time has reached infinity (godliness) and no change in time is possible. This could provide the basis for a “god-given” treatise such as the Vedas. The following of the Vedas will then necessarily have to be ritualistic since we cannot know truth in our finite life time. On the other hand, those who live in a dynamic sense and perceive change, the time-dependent dynamic dialectical method of perception and inference are the only source of knowledge, with little interest in its end. It provides the philosophy for action in life. In the context of awareness of the Vedas, this is the interpretation of the Mimamsa philosophy.

The essential feature, at this point of my understanding, is that at every point of one’s life the essence of any experience (forward in time) at any instant of time is registered only because of its negative or contradictory memories (backward in time). We learn how to walk on two legs because of our memory that we fall if we move forward without walking properly. This we do instinctively, even if we do not realize that we fall because our centre of gravity falls outside our base of support and we can prevent ourselves from falling if we move our base of support of our centre of gravity before the time it would have taken to fall. The quicker we do it, the steadier our gait is. This is so in all aspects of our walk through life. This is an irreversible process. We cannot unlearn it simply we cannot un-experience it. Just as a fallen stone will not climb up.

Dielectical materialists are those who believe that matter always existed but the consciousness of the existence of matter came only from the mind of evolved species such as that in mankind. But if life is a reaction to change, then all changes must be considered as a life process. The requirement for change is a requirement to remove differences in potential that appears due to such a change. This does not require a cognitive mind. The notion that there is change even when there is no mind to perceive the changes suggests that time is independent of its perception by the mind and that there would be no existence in the absence of time or change.

Dialectical Materialism as applied to mankind (Historical Materialism) refers to the events in History that was created by man’s consciousness and has been applied to the role of man in his economic order and the contradictions that arise within. The class of mankind that controls production of wealth is in contradiction with the other classes. Historical materialism predicts the synthesis of such contradictions.

Because of its very contradictions, Marx”s conclusions derived in the early 19th century cannot be expected to be valid in the early twenty-first century.

The dialectical method --- not necessarily that of Marx --- will still be relevant.

The Snark of a Story teller

The storyteller has many times perhaps little use for the empirical or the philosophical sciences. His successes depend on the acceptability/gullibility of his readers and their own private biases of their life-experiences.

One of the more attractive storytellers must be Lewis Carroll, which is the pen-name of Charles Dodgson (the same name as his father, his grandfather, his great grandfather). Lewis Carroll did not grow a beard, probably because he stammered. One of his poems on “The Hunting of a Snark” had a bearded Bellman captaining his ship who lands his crew on a beach hunting for a Snark. The Bellman (second from tight in the bottom row of Fig 2)who was trusted so well as the Captain “... had only one notion for crossing the ocean, And that was to tingle his bell ... .”. Henry Holiday’s sketch of the bellman has quite a resemblance to Charles Darwin.

The poem begins thus
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care; 
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair. 
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew. 
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”