Index 
Epistemology Idea of "Other" Language Morality Souls
What “It” Is: Truth is probabilistic, so say the physicists; so, of course, are “good” and “evil”. Perhaps good and evil are distributed along a normal Gaussian curves, maybe more like a dome around the peak value or a doughnut around the poles. There must be a name for the dome shape but I can't find it (image right). Poles are arbitrary such as between “truth” and, what shall I say? perhaps “ignorance”?, perhaps “deceit”?, “prevarication”? (whew, what a lot of letters to say “lie”). Or how about the distribution of morality between truth and loyalty? truth and authority? authority and morality? or authority and loyalaty? and infinite others? To leap ahead (to use an aggressive, confrontational metaphor) or fall back (to use a submissive one), it is little wonder that we are enclosed in a very personal thing called by many names such as “spirit”, “soul”, “Atman”, "self", “consciousness” and others from the other world beyond the senses. We still don’t know what “it” is or where it came (comes) from, but we ALL know ALL humans have it. The analysts, reductionists, or generalists (all kin) probe ever deeper into, to use another metaphor, (well, DUH, all communication is metaphorical), what seems a fractal universe of unknowns, its boundary ever slipping into ever more indecipherable complexity. As we zoom in, as into a cycling Mandelbrot set, the objective recedes at the same rate as the “progress” but pattern of unknowns becomes ever more complex, and, shall we say, intertwined. I spent a few years exploring the Mandelbrot boundary and really made it flow on a 386 MS-DOS machine, programming in Quick Basic. My favorite was making movies of Julia sets dancing along successive points on a moving line across the Mandelbrot boundaries, on both sides of the lacuna; swirling and twirling in ever increasing complexity until exploding into oblivion at the boundary, then like a phoenix, rising again on the other side of the lacuna, the “Grand Cardioid of Oblivion”. Even in the zone of oblivion (the lacuna) are patterns of flashing stars swirling together then apart. That was a LOT of fun. I lost all the programs, but copyrighted them anyway. (only the first and last pages sent to copyright office, added August 14, 2016) |
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