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Any authentic philosophical project ultimately represents a rebellion against all forms of tyranny, including tyranny of the majority.

The following text has been adapted from portions of the recent Arktos publication of Dr. Jason Reza Jorjani’s Lovers of Sophia.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.
…Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
…The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love… Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

The United States of America is often mistakenly considered a democracy. Even some of our recent Presidents have spoken as if it were a democracy, and one of them called for spreading the fire of democracy around the world. Well, we have seen just what kind of fire that policy has spread in the Middle East. In fact, the United States is not a true democracy, and most of the Founding Fathers of America considered “democracy” a dirty word. They were students of classical Greek and Roman thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Cicero who reasoned that democracy was pretty near to the worst form of government that there is. Only tyranny is more vicious than democracy from a classical perspective, and the Founding Fathers viewed democracy as a “tyranny of the majority.” Those with a poor education in history think that democracy was some shining accomplishment of the Greeks, when in fact almost all leading Greek intellectuals were harsh critics of democracy.

A philosopher is someone whose thought engages with fundamental questions concerning Truth, Beauty, and Justice, in a way that leads to the discovery of concepts with a potential to catalyze scientific and political revolutions.

Analysis of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the various writings (including the private letters) of the Founding Fathers make it clear that, rather than being a democracy, the United States is grounded on the concept of Natural Right – sometimes also known as the Rights of Man. The founders of the American constitutional Republic – and science by the way also some of their French revolutionary colleagues – saw Natural Right as a universal ethical standard. In his book The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, who set off the American Revolution with his more widely read pamphlet Common Sense, explicitly and publicly states what others of the founders privately believed: Natural Right is so universal that it applies even to all of the other intelligent beings throughout the Universe, so that the bell of liberty rung by the American Revolution is not even limited to all of the oppressed individuals on the planet Earth – it reverberates throughout the Cosmos.

For Deists and Freemasons such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other key founders, the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence was not the God of the Bible but the macrocosmic order reflected in the microcosm of reason that allows us to perfect ourselves. This relationship between an intelligence inherent in Nature at large and the conscientious self-consciousness characteristic of human nature is at the core of the idea that we have certain rights that are “inalienable” – in other words, not given by any government and therefore not justly ignored, withdrawn, or violated by any government.

Even if a 99% majority of people in this country were to vote through their elected representatives to strip individuals of their natural rights, their votes would be null and void. Military officers who have sworn to uphold the Constitution could legitimately disempower a congress or President that acknowledged such a majority vote. So, again, the United States is very far from being a democracy. It is a constitutional government dedicated to the protection of the Natural Rights of Man, where “man” means not just men and women but each and every intelligent being in the Universe.

The American founders thought that democracies will always be instruments of master manipulators, whether through the coercive power of the collective unconscious of the ignorant mob or through the dealings of oligarchs who hide behind the façade of democracy in order to outlast other more forthright forms of tyranny. Any authentic philosophical project ultimately represents a rebellion against all forms of tyranny, including tyranny of the majority. Its goal is the highest human self-consciousness and the most creative self-determination. If a society believes that there is an eternal, unchanging Wisdom that can be definitively attained by a person living within the present time, and that another intelligent person need only to study under such a sage to have this knowledge imparted to him, then that society will never see the kind of scientific and political revolutions that are catalyzed by genuine philosophers.

A philosopher is someone whose thought engages with fundamental questions concerning Truth, Beauty, and Justice, in a way that leads to the discovery of concepts with a potential to catalyze scientific and political revolutions. The philosopher’s ethics and politics must be grounded on his metaphysics and epistemology, and this integral thought has to be guided by an aesthetic intuition comparable to that of the most extraordinary geniuses in literature and the arts.

Metaphysics asks about the ultimate nature of reality. Ethics is concerned with the question of “the good life.” Epistemology is concerned with the theory of knowledge or how it is that we can know what we claim to have knowledge of. Politics is concerned with the art of statecraft and the applied understanding of the concept of Justice. Aesthetics is a study of the nature of the beautiful, for example, as contrasted with the merely pleasant in judgments of taste.

Until about 250 years ago all of what we now study and practice as the various empirical sciences were considered types of natural Philosophy, falling within the domain of Metaphysics or Epistemology. Science or Scientia simply means “knowledge,” which is part of what philosophers sought in their “love of wisdom” (philosophia). Beginning with Physics in the mid 1700s, then Chemistry and Biology in the 1800s, and finally Psychology in the early 1900s, the various sciences attempted to distinguish themselves from Philosophy. Yet, in fact, what had happened was that a certain type of metaphysics had become dominant in Physics, and ever since most other scientists have tacitly deferred to it.

For the last couple of centuries there has been an almost universal marginalization of work in the sciences that does not suit the metaphysical doctrine that there is only matter.

For the last couple of centuries there have been an almost universal marginalization and exclusion of work in the sciences that does not suit the metaphysical doctrine that there is only matter and that the smallest or most elementary constituents of matter interact with each other in a mechanical way. Yet this dominant metaphysics of the scientific establishment makes nonsense out of Ethics. This remains true even if many have tried to worm their way out of recognizing it. Some establishment scientists try to speak as if, from out of the gray matter of the brain and the various mechanical processes that make it function, there is an “emergence” of mind, including its ability to make choices that are sufficiently free that the individual making them can be held responsible for the actions that embody those choices. Yet mind as an “emergent property” is completely empty and superfluous rhetoric unless the mind that emerges can do things not reducible to the elementary particles or waves – or, these days, superstrings – that have none of the agency that is attributed to persons.

It is not true that Ethics does not make claims about the way that the world is. A world in which ethical or unethical action makes sense cannot be a world of nothing other than mechanistic causality acting on the microscopic material structures that make up everything in nature without remainder. Nor can it be a world wherein everything that we might do – or rather that we might misperceive ourselves as initiating – is already an event mapped out in a completed logical space accessible to the eternal mind of God, whose mind is capable of now surveying every possible future. Either of these possible futures collapse into a single predefined future, in which case we have no free will, or there are an infinity of parallel universes in which doppelgangers of ourselves live lives in many cases nearly identical to our own and in other cases somewhat more different, in which case none of these parallel selves are any more unique or uniquely responsible for the minutely different iterations of their actions than we are for ours in this one of many possible worlds.

I can well imagine traveling through a worm-hole into an alternate universe where I meet a counterpart of myself who has lived a very similar life, but has or has had somewhat different relationships with counterparts of people with whom I have or have had certain relationships. My presence in his life would change it and, once I traveled back through the worm-hole to my world, my encounter with him would make me reflect on and change the circumstances of my own life as well. Even if these lives were for all intents and purposes identical, the possibility of meeting my counterpart would allow each of us to act freely in reaction to the other – which, at that point, would cause the direction of our two lives, and of our two worlds, to significantly deviate from one another. Only in this case would each of us be metaphysically independent agents.

It is a question of novelty. I must be able, by my actions, to transform the world around me in such a way as it could never be transformed were it not for my decision to take those actions. Of course, this transformation need not always be according to my intention, and indeed if it always were exactly what I wanted, that might pose as great a psychological obstacle to a life worth living. It may be an extremely subtle and hardly noticeable transformation that I effect in the empirical world, and in the large and long view it probably always is. However, it must be possible to do something no one has done in just the way that I am contemplating doing it – not anyone in this world of mine, or anyone however like me in any other world that there might ever possibly be, or that there ever has been. Otherwise, I do nothing at all, and for that matter “I” have insufficient personal identity to really be anyone either. To be someone who makes his or her life what it alone uniquely is, and not the life of another, demands a non-reductionist view of consciousness, one wherein our minds are not ontologically derivative of some more elementary constituents.

In his last years, William James – who was the brother of a great story-teller – came close to seriously advocating such a view in connection to the problem of free will. In two sections on “Novelty and Causation” in Some Problems of Philosophy, James points out that the notion of “causation” primarily derives from our own experience of bringing things into being that we intuitively know could not otherwise have been. Our own acts of origination, our acts of creation, are the basis upon which we then only secondarily attribute causes to other beings in nature. To intellectually abstract “causation” from its primary meaning as an immediate experience of the agency of conscious willing beings such as ourselves, and to turn it into an impersonal universal principle, leads to an infinite regress wherein causes collapse into effects of other causes, without a first cause being found anywhere within the limits of possible experience. Without a first cause with a metaphysically irreducible explanatory power, all causality loses its necessary aspect.

It is worthy of note that the Greek root of the word “mathematical” is mathesis – which means “that which can be learned,” in other words that which is formulaically anticipatable. On the other hand, logos, the Greek root of the word “logic,” originally means “discourse” or even “story,” and its first philosophical use in reference to the constitution of the cosmos still retained this sense. That first use of the notion of “logic” – to refer to dynamically adaptable tactical rules on a cosmic scale – was by Heraclitus, who also called the cosmos “a child at play, moving pieces in a game.” It may be that any free will worth having requires the world to indeed be something like a story-teller’s tale – where fundamental ontology allows for the same logically “impossible” phantasmagoria characteristic of the vagueness of aesthetic imagination.

In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism that André Breton put out in 1929, he called for a “derangement of all the senses” directed toward this end, and for a revolt against centuries of “domestication” and “insane resignation” to an all-too-unimaginative conception of “reality.” Breton identifies a Kabbalistic concern with the power of language in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, but then criticizes Rimbaud for not going far enough – for not recognizing that the world is constituted by poetic logos, in other words that poetry literally has the power to transform the world. The alchemical Philosopher’s Stone becomes, for him, that which allows the “imagination to take a stunning revenge on all things,” to re-imagine the human reality.

Aesthetic judgment is no less arbitrary than the other domains of philosophical thought, and it is as integral to the task of being a philosopher as metaphysical, ethical, and political thought.

Jackson Pollock’s early paintings are an evolution directly out of Surrealism, and they continue the surrealist concern with alchemical or occult themes and motifs. If this were not obvious from the content of the paintings themselves, the titles he chose for them make this explicitly clear. Here are some of my personal favorites from this period: Male and Female (1942–1943); Guardians of the Secret (1943); Troubled Queen (1945); Alchemy (1947). There is also a related totemic quality and shamanic trend in this early work, for example: Bird (1941); Birth (1941); The She-Wolf (1943); Totem Lesson 2 (1945). Yet once he makes the transition to his fully abstract expressionist style, somehow the magical dimension remains and in a few pieces appears to be working its effect on the viewer at an ever deeper level; again, the titles that Pollock chose reflect his awareness of this: Lucifer (1947); Full Fathom Five (1947); One (1948). Pollock made a similar transition as Max Ernst did when he went from painting overtly alchemical pieces to creating paintings alchemically – even if they do not feature any explicitly discernible esoteric symbols. The nature of the magic at work in Pollock’s paintings has now been discovered, and it is far from any trickery – unless real conjuring of the kind practiced by a sorcerer is to be considered trickery.

Richard P. Taylor, a physicist at the University of New South Wales, who is also an abstract painter, discovered that there are fractals in Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings at many different levels of magnification. He reports his findings in a piece titled “Order in Pollock’s Chaos,” which appeared in Scientific American (December, 2002). Taylor happened upon this discovery during a break from his work at the university to go on a retreat organized by the Manchester School of Art. However, a storm struck the Yorkshire moors in northern England and instead of simply being holed up indoors, Taylor recruited some fellow artists to build a contraption made of fallen branches with paint buckets attached to them that would harness the wind pattern and direct the paint onto an appropriately positioned canvas. What they found after the windstorm was astonishing: a Jackson Pollock painting. Taylor had an insight and went back to test it at the University, working with a group of experts in respective fields from mathematics and computer science to perceptual psychology.

It turns out that if quintessential Jackson Pollock paintings are scanned in to a computer and then overlaid with a grid that can be loosened or tightened in its level of magnification, a mathematical analysis of the drips on the canvas reveals that they conform precisely to the kind of fractals that are found in nature: in sea shells, in sunflowers, in tree branches, in weather patterns, and so forth. The difference between these fractals and those mechanically produced by a computer are that they display only a probabilistic statistical self-similarity that has an organic feel to it, rather than an exact self-similarity where the pattern breaks and repeats the same way at regular intervals. Moreover, these natural fractal patterns are discovered in Pollock’s paintings at many different levels of magnification, in other words – there are fractals within fractals within fractals. The smallest fractals found are 1,000 times smaller than the largest.

There is no way that Pollock could have planned this kind of painting, at that in the 1950s – decades before the scientific study of the fractals discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot. It is absolutely impossible for the rational mind and lies completely beyond the conscious or analytical perceptual capacity of human beings. Yet, Pollock once chose to epitomize his artwork with this statement: “My concern is with the rhythms of nature.” There is documentary evidence that he would dance around his canvas with movements that very closely resemble the ritual dances of Native American Shamanism, except more fluid and dynamic. He would also paint in bursts, over a long period of time – sometimes months. This would account for the many different layers of fractals. He would lay down only so many as he could while an unconscious force was still moving his body, then he would stop.

The best evidence that such an extraordinary process was at work is that only Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings have these fractals in them. When other drip paintings in “the Pollock style,” including clever forgeries that might even fool some art critics, are scanned into the same computer program, they fail to yield the fractals in a genuine Pollock. Taylor theorized that the unique aesthetic experience of Pollock paintings, the reason why they are more widely appreciated than other works of abstract expressionism by people with a well-developed aesthetic intuition, is that the human mind is naturally keyed to respond to the beauty of fractals in nature.

This is as much as to say that aesthetic judgment is no less arbitrary than the other domains of philosophical thought, and it is as integral to the task of being a philosopher as metaphysical, ethical, and political thought. In fact, understanding the nature of genuine creativity is inextricable from fathoming the kind of metaphysical structure at work in nature that makes ethical and political concepts such as “Justice” and “Right” meaningful in the first place. The art of being an authentic philosopher demands creative and integral thought in all of these domains, free from the constraints of ossified traditions and the tyrannical dictates of unconscious masses in any and every society. Such independent individuals are the true lovers of Sophia – brothers across the ages, and into the distant future, into the lighthouses of a galactic Alexandria. From Zarathustra onwards, all are flames of the same undying cosmic fire and the glowing forges of futures past. The philosopher’s task is that daring, but providentially favored endeavor (annuit coeptis) of working to bring forth a new order of the ages (novus ordo seclorum).

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Dr. Jason Reza Jorjani

Jason Reza Jorjani, PhD, received his BA and MA at New York University, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Dr. Jorjani has taught courses on Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and the history of Iran as a full-time faculty member at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Earlier he taught Comparative Religion, Ethics, Political Theory, and the History of Philosophy at the State University of New York. He is a professional member of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). He is the author of Novel Folklore, Lovers of Sophia, World State of Emergency, Iranian Leviathan, and Prometheus and Atlas, which won the 2016 Book Award from the Parapsychological Association, and Iranian Leviathan. His website is jasonrezajorjani.com.

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Dale
Dale
4 years ago

Three people I recommend for learning about Philosophy and Metaphysics are; Julius Evola, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Algis Uzdavinys.

Our original Nordic-Aryan teachings (most knowledge and wisdom comes from white Aryans, even the Buddha was a white Aryan, the pyramids and knowledge/wisdom in China, etc all came from white Aryans) teach Emanationism, not Judeo-Creationism, Atheism and Neo-Paganism. For basic info on Emanationism read these three articles:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sSCq8TmvBE8u975GqPgyQkRv9H_oCX27/view

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lZZwozWViHtwolDHzM8GB1qgWfKbLkOh/view

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ORSdqJ-1LmVMgAHwYiRt0SwqeHIiRM6F/view

I would also like to mention that modern science is full of bs atomism. https://imgur.com/gallery/NaRWeTZ

I’m just getting started on this, but a decent book so far on how real science should be (in this case as pertains to the investigation of what magnetism is) is:

https://ia802502.us.archive.org/31/items/magnetism1small/magnetism1small.pdf

a kullervo
a kullervo
4 years ago

Thoughtful and thought-provoking article. And yet, first thing coming to mind was: “For many are called, but few are chosen.(Matthew 22: 14)>/a>.

As I’ve commented once, somewhere in the web:
“Mankind encompasses two main groups: a) people needing to be guided; and b) people wanting to guide the former, but who are ineffective at doing so. Dealing with the issues arising from this arrangement isn’t easy; therefore, if you have reached a state where you clearly see yourself as an outsider from both bands, here’s my humble suggestion: steer clear of guiding others, even if they ask you to. Join people of your own rank, and let the ones who fall under both monikers a) or b) to deal with their own lack of awareness.”

That said, I feel uncertain whether I’m here to learn or only to seek solace from the like-minded (the latter seems more an more like the only possibility left in this time between orders.)

Thank you to all at Arktos for the outstanding work, and to you, kind reader.

David Schmitt
4 years ago

Dr. Jorjani, you have given us a tantalizing piece of philosophical work. You have my summary agreement with your comments regarding democracy. I am going to devote additional reflection to your introductory welcome to hate via the epigraphical quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Many Christians have an apprehension of love, viz., ‘Caritas’ (to use a term somewhat more firewalled from trivialization-), which is not quite on the mark. Nonetheless, I propose that a well-seasoned Christian view addresses a proper understanding of the world as it is, how the Christian is to countenance this reality and how the Christian can begin, travel and return to a superlatively-held primacy of Caritas despite his necessary sorties into the unprotected forests of life. God is Love and, indeed, is quite incompatible with the Architect of Masonry, Cabalistic notions and the whole assortment of dualistic philosophies having parities of love and hate.
“Perfecting self” is a misapprehended notion if it is used as anything more than hyperbole. This does not mean that in the collusion between God and Man, as two runners on an urgent mission necessarily running together through the wilderness, does not inherently involve an individual man’s choice interacting with that of God. A deftly-executed dance would be another apt analogy. There is the added power, in this Christian view, of the limits of Man’s powers of self-fabrication or remodeling that comes with an adequate, but not obsequious, humility. We live in society. To provide a counterpoise to this, there is an exhilaration that comes from a sort of Christian existentialism. That is to say, to accept God’s invitation to drive as hard as possible through the chaos and to see self fashioning in its coordinated sense with God’s fashioning. When limitless possibilities exist, something subtracted from infinity is still infinity. God’s actions are not constricting of Man, but to be sure, are empowering.
I have criticized the science of “little hard balls” in my 2013 talk, “Medieval Philosophy to the Rescue: A Thomistic neuroscience and the mind-brain opportunity,” at the International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Thought, Sam Houston University, Huntsville, as well as at the 2013 meeting of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry, with the presentation, “Neurophysiological perspectives on Plato’s craft behavior (‘techne’) in contrast to theoretical knowledge (‘epistēmē’): implications for practical and theoretical learning in education, business and economics.” Any person in a science field should have been exposed to a physics class, and if exposed to modern physics should have some familiarity with quantum physics. is not a physics of little hard balls.”

David Schmitt
4 years ago

[corrected & cont., sorry, I accidently submitted the previous fragment.] Any person in a science field should have been exposed to a physics class, and if exposed to modern physics should have some familiarity with quantum physics. and quantum physics is not a physics of “little hard balls.”
Others before had hit upon the explanatory imagery that I like: “It is information all the way down’—and I might add, “it is information all the way up, as well.”
Emergence, whether from an informatic or from a materialistic system (which is an informatic system, remember) does not necessarily imply determinism. I suppose that one could write a fiction novel where a purely informatic universe is deterministic, but I ask—“Why would you?” Regardless, emergence is not the magician’s trick that we need. The informatic universe is that trick.
The relationship of brain and mind becomes much easier to reconcile in an informatic universe. On one side, we have something that –for now–we can say resembles a biological state brought forth by the senses. This state is all of the known and unknown neurophysiological activation of brain structures considered at all of their physical levels, the perceptual processing, the emotional contextualization, the memory, the rational & formulaic declarations and the unconscious processing. On the other side, that side which we want to hold separate from the material stuff of ourselves and hold instead as a creative and freely judging element, an immaterial and more fully-actualized aspect of the informational self: the mind. Together, the both ends of the spectrum of the Aristo-Thomistic transition state from material to formal cause, potential to actual, is what I find handy to refer to as the neurophantasm. This perhaps a-little clumsy neologism conveys the notion of the biological end, the wet and gooey end, with the mind as St. Thomas would refer to it. I could have called it, ‘mind’, and that is of course is a perfectly good term, but I have found that in a contemporary setting too many listeners have accepted the term with lots of mutilation. Plus, I want to free mind from its hard category—as I do for brain as well. Mind is immaterial in its extremity, but it transitioned from that which had those conventional doodads that we call, for the convenience of our senses, “matter.” The significance of this thing is that I submit to you under the name of the “neurophantasm” is that it is a form-form bridge from one manifestation of the informatic unity that our senses conventionally interpret as “matter,” and the other more in keeping with our folk theory of “form” or in religious lingo, “spirit.” Spirit is an apt folkish analogy because like its root, breath, it is invisible; and like breath it enters comes in leaves; and like breath, though invisible, it can exert pressure as when blowing; and like breath it appears to be vital for experienced life. Nothing about the concept of the form-form bridge involves a “hard problem” (philosophy department jargon) of relating the material to the immaterial, and it suggests the means of connection that makes possible causal interaction. Even more, the form-form bridge quality of the neurophantasm is what opens the side streets of the intersection to non-deterministically-caused, willed, creative action. The quantal nature of reality permits indeterminism to enter. The volitional selection of future possibilities is the essence of creativity where–as is always the case in the temporal universe–there is incomplete and imperfect knowledge.
I am pleased that you introduced ‘Logos’. I am also glad that you brought her to the ball dressed in poetry as well as reason. This was beautiful. There are indeed realities that are part of the qualia of experience that cannot be made equivalent to the sign we use to point to these realities. And moreover, in the Christian metaphysics, that reality of the Logos is a Person. And to make a quick and Trinitarian jump, as is permissible with the readers’ indulgence for a “short comment,” that Person of the Son along with the Person of the Father make a community that is increased further still in number by the procession of the Love between the First and Second Persons as a yet another Person, the Holy Spirit. Note the metaphysical primacy of Love in the proceeding of the Spirit from the Love of the Father and Son and the asymmetry regarding Love and hatred. I cannot treat it here, but notice that I have thus far avoided conflating hatred and evil. And I will continue to do so. Again, a deeper explanation for another day.
I enjoyed your description of Jackson Pollock’s method of artistic production. If true, then that is–I agree–very significant. You have helped me see something that I have found to be a road block. Namely, I appreciate your educating me on the possibility of a distinction between an organic versus a mechanical subtilty within the realm of fractal patterns. I need to explore this more. Thanks!
As a Christian, I thrive on a conception of the ‘Logos’ that integrates the sciences of regularity with the poetic (even as there is creativity in hypothesis generation and regularity in poetry) I was long ago moved by this relationship. In graduate school at the University of Notre Dame in the mid-eighties, I tried to promulgate this idea, or I should say, this Word. E. Michael Jones in one interview hints that he was set a bit off-track by the employment of the word, ‘Word’, for The Logos. I do not want to seem that I am beating up on Dr. Jones, but in my understanding of the informatic nature of the universe, ‘Word’ seems precisely like the term needed to convey the intended mysteriousness and depth of what is meant by Logos. For instance, I designed a cover for one of the ND Graduate School publications that graphically depicted symbols of the various disciplines surrounding a centrally placed quotation of the beginning of the Gospel of John, spelled out in Greek characters. Without this Fourth, non-synoptic Gospel, I di not know if I could find Christianity as quite as lovely and intriguing. That different, independent, dissident eye, so radically divergent form the other three, creates a home for me in this Cosmos. The Apostle John’s vision is a vision that makes limitless the visions possible spreading out into an eternal landscape. Some of that is vision that we would call religious, some metaphysical, some otherwise philosophical and some in the form of the naturally scientific. Some is poetic and romantic. Some is just a nice tune.
The dissertation work that occupied my time in South Bend was on the ability of honeybees to meaningfully orient their bodies using the earth’s magnetic field. Demonstrating this was quite a significant achievement, if you think about it, and if I may say so myself. (St. Paul: “Think no more highly of yourself than you ought.”). I was also able to experimentally detect the ability of bees to follow gradients (changes ) in magnetic field strength and to orient their bodies in regular geometric directions with respect to the magnetic field vectors. Specifically, bees could be shown to prefer preferences for hexagonally-oriented positions with respect to the direction of the magnetic field. There could be a number of possibilities how and why this is so. One intriguing possibility is the incorporation of crystalline magnetite (known to exist in bees) in sensory, transducing cells connected to the central nervous system. Magnetite crystals possess an internal lattice structure that–every 60-degrees–resists the turning of the crystal in a magnetic field. This can be measured electromechanically. In fact, engineers studying the use of magnetite in the design of motors did just that. The action that the bee might experience could possibly be like that of turning a channel tuner on an old television set. Imagine that that tuner had six dentitions representing the selection of any of six channels within a complete rotation of the knob. Perhaps this little torsion is what the bee might “feel” as it turns its body in the magnetic field.
At the annual Gordon Conference, where various experimental results were presented, I had a memorable discussion with a senior scientist. No, he did not invite me to a mysterious meeting of alchemists. But we did discuss fundamental patterns that reappear across many levels of organization in the universe and the advantage and delight that exists for a scientist to learn how to work with those recurring patterns as a pathway to discovery. Perhaps an equation shared between population biology in the discipline of ecology does not surprise one as having originated in economics. I do not think my view that economics is really a sub-branch of human ecology and ecology as a whole, and so the significance of this shared mathematical principle may not overwhelm the reader with awe.
But Claude Shannon’s insight in using the Boltzmann equation for a measure of information (did I say, “information”) was an example of a man whose mind, like that of Boltzmann’s–and like all truly creative scientists,–could arrange and rearrange parts and wholes to create new entities. Many people cannot do this, even people who are extremely capable using equations of solving problems. There is a poetry to this kind of creativity and hypothesis formation, yes, you have that very right Dr. Jorjani. The Poetry of even natural science, and subtle patterns with a spark of life, all of this allows one to build. Applied to our world, that makes ‘us’ the architects, or at least the co-architects. We are not mere, compliant laborers. We are not only the stone masons, though we are indeed called to labor physically and (ahem) materially at times. We do not so much need approval from “The Architect.” The patterns that He provides are simply the tools and the supplies. By the arrangement of the parts, He allows us to create the blueprint.

clyde ward
clyde ward
4 years ago

This article brings to mind:

“A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.” Ernst Junger

“Really, doesn´t everything make sense? There are, of course, things from which we more or less recover, although some of them are too harsh even for saints. But that is no reason to accuse God. Even if there are reasons to doubt him, the fact that he did not arrange the world like a well-ordered parlor is not one of them. It speaks rather in his favor. This used to be much better understood.” Ernst Junger

“There are two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.”
“Imagination rules the world.”
Napoleon

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