From: bob logan <<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: July 5, 2007 11:56:29 AM EDT (CA)
To: "Joseph Brenner" <<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Bob Logan's introduction to the FIS list: A Problem in Physics
Dear Joseph - thanks so much for your email which has been most
stimulating. I read the two papers you attached but found them hard
sledding, ie. difficult to read because of my lack of a background in logic
which I always found too formal. I must admit in some ways I am
undisciplined and have trouble with details. I googled you and found two
items of yours actually more helpful. They were PARACONSISTENCY AND
TRANSCONSISTENCY IN THE LOGIC OF STEPHANE
LUPASCO and Stephane Lupasco and Florentin Smarandache: Conflicting Logics
of Contradiction and an Included Middleâ¨byâ¨Joseph E. Brenner (I think I
only found the abstract of the 2nd paper- perhaps you could send the whole
article.
Perhaps you could help me by stating the 3 laws of classical or Aristotlean
logic which in agreement with you I find too confining. McLuhan observed
that all technologies provide both service and disservice. I see logic as a
technology to sort out our thinking. It's service is obvious but its
disservice is that it excludes rich possibilities and tends to crowd out
empirical thinkng as was the case with the Classical Greeks. Aristotle was
a great logician, drama critic and not a bad biologist but his physics was
atrocious. He argued that a ball dropped from the mast of a moving ship
would fall to the deck behind the mast in the opposite direction of motion.
Very logical but wrong. If he actually dropped a ball from the mast of a
moving ship he would have discovered that his logic was wrong. or as
McLuhan liked to joke his fallacy was wrong. Parminides argued A could not
change to B because non-A could not be as it was a contradiction in terms.
He succeeded in convincing every Greek philosopher that they had to have
something in their pilosophical system that did not change (atoms, 4
elements of earth, air, fire and water, Plato's ideal forms, Aristotle's
aetherial heavens. Another consequence that I argue in the attached chapter
from my book the Alphabet Effect is the Greeks missed the concept of zero
because non-being, i.e. zero could not be.
Also could you explain the included middle - my guess is that it means both
A and not-A can be true or have some truth to them and some falsity as well.
I also find it hard to absorb the idea of another form of reality ala
Nicolescu. For me the reality is that things are simultaneously true, false
and evolving into something new in their Adjacent Possible (see Propagating
Organization An Enquiry in Section 7 of
<http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan>www.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan for a
better understanding of the Adjacent Possible.) The triality I see is that
I am Bob, non-Bob and the transition to the new-Bob simultaneously because
as Heraclitus described it I am in total flux and you cannot encounter the
same Bob twice because I am everchanging and in fact you cannot encounter
me even once because I am a verb and not a noun.
I lookk forward to your responses to my musings - Bob
ps - this was fun
On 4-Jul-07, at 6:19 AM, Joseph Brenner wrote:
Dear Bob,
I am very grateful to Pedro for having placed me on the FIS list also and
thus enabled me to see your note. My initial training was as an Organic
Chemist (Ph.D. U. of Wisconsin, 1958 (ugh)) but my career was in corporate
development with the Du Pont Company. Since my retirement in 1994, I have
become an amateur philosopher and logician, concentrating my effort on the
non-propositional "logic of reality" of the Franco-Romanian thinker
Stéphane Lupasco (Bucharest, 1900 - Paris, 1988). This logical system is
grounded in the quantum mechanics of Planck, Pauli and Heisenberg and
assumes a principle of duality, a dynamic opposition (e.g., of intensive
and extensive character) at the heart of energy and hence of all
phenomena. I thus look forward very much to reading the papers available
on your site, and attach, for what it is worth, a recent talk I presented
at a logic conference that outlines my system (LIR).
This leads me to my question: since I am totally outside academia, I have
no ready access to working physicists. And yet my system depends on the
correctness of the attached paragraph, LIR and the Four Constants of
Physics, from a manuscript I am working on. Might I ask you to comment on
the latter, or, if you do not have the time, to suggest an accessible
reference in which the properties of the "Four Constants" are discussed?
I hope that my further activities with Pedro and the Trancoso Group may
lead to the occasion of our meeting, in Spain or Portugal, or Switzerland.
If you are passing through Geneva, it is only 1-1/2 hours by car from
where I live.
Best regards,
Joseph (Joe) E. Brenner
P.O. Box 235, CH-1865 Les Diablerets, Switzerland
Phone and FAX: +41244922118
E-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S. I write the occasional poem (some of them "Songs of Science"). I have
corresponded recently with Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize in Physical
Chemistry in 1981, who is also a scientist-poet but like you teaches
poetry as well, at Cornell. Do you know his work? Also his monograph The
Same and Not the Same. I am sure you would like it.
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
