Form Karl (complete message) ----------------------------------------------------
Further to Leonardo and why the outsider - he who proposes a wholly unusual idea - does better to remain in the dark. The reality concept is different between the avant-garde and the main body. They live in different realities and think the other's mental creations to be an absurd or impossible phantasy. There is no common ground about what is reasonable. The group's discussions have reached a stage where there is a commonly agreed on reality and an alternative reality which the outsider proposes. If the outsider's proposal is judged to be too outlandish or even ungrammatical, he looses the belonging-to attribute within the group and is subject to aggression. In such a situation, it is helpful to take recourse to numbers. In old times, it was the Bible, or Aristotle's writings or any other sacred web of interrelated concepts. Today, thanks to Descartes, we have a very simple and useful set of interconnected concepts, inasmuch as they are mirrored in the numbers. Our belief in the numbers is as unifying today as was the common religion and Latin with its implicit rules of thinking (Wittgenstein again: the grammar of a language restricts that what is possible to be communicated in an intellectual fashion). The group situation is eternally the same: the fight with the content of a complex system of problems ends regularly in that situation that the group can realise that the underlying web of problems is subject to rational dissection and evaluation. That is a reality check for the labours so far. We may wish for this and that, but if the numbers don't allow, it won't be done. This is the test between reality and phantasies. Now would you, if you had the impression, that your friends have a much higher proportion of phantasy-production in their brains than you, tell them this? No, you would not. You would keep conducting experiments in the dark, which are not even experiments in the strict sense of the word. Using the words in an unusual fashion creates social tensions. It is better, one murmurs them in the dark and hopes that those will notice who share a feeling of "this system is old, outdated, does not serve our needs any more". But it is very dangerous to say such words aloud. If attacked, one can always say: "Well, for Ultimate Unified General Ordering Principle's sake it is not ungrammatical to say that b-a=u is as good a description of (a,b) as is a+b=c.One can solve an equation with two unknowns with the help of 9 functions, and each (any) two of the functions is sufficient to establish a position and/or an amount. I use the functions (a,b,a+b,b-2a,b-a,2b-3a,a-2b,17-a+b,2a-3b)." Being the outsider means to think in a different fashion. The basic concept is not static but based on movement coming from a fluid discussion about what contradicts what and what is congruent with what. Letting loose the neurologically satisfying concept of ONE Euclid space and living in TWO Euclid spaces which are of course intimately interdependent of each other allows a nice inner feeling of reality (having two hemispheres in the cranium). The experiments are with the holy words of our time, with the numbers. Watching their movements in convoys during a reordering remembers one on Leonardo's search into the nervous transmission in the body, and may be as close to the fundamentals of Physics as was Leonardos's obduction of dead to modern forensic pathology or neurosurgery. Starting to talk about numbers is an important point in the progress of Science. Then, one has hope that the concept can be caught, caged, reproduced, domesticated, familiarised. We tame regions of the brain as we extend a kind of discipline that the numbers impose on us. The inner education of the feeling and the thinking brain to cooperate is facilitated by allowing a more flexible way of dealing with the basic patterns of the thinking brain. Let "twice the one minus thrice the other" be as routine as "both together". Thanks for the nice, timeless picture of why is the outsider in a delicate position during the progress of Science. Karl ---------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
