MATHEMATICS OF INTANGIBLES, cont'd
The standpoint of Nature is a reference frame in which everything exists in four dimensions -- three spatial dimensions and time. Nothing in Nature is three-dimensional.
Time can be taken as finite as space. However, just because it may be examined in finite durations does not mean it is any less a dimension than any of the three spatial dimensions. In Nature, space and time both are infinitely extensible. However, they are infinitely divisible only "in the abstract". The points and lines of Euclidean space do not exist in Nature. Nor in Nature can or does does delta-t head towards 0. Only within the framework of these abstractions does motion or displacement of mass in space exist or operate as a function of time varying independently. In Nature there is nothing, be it mass, energy or momentum, that operates as a function of time varying independently.
At any and every point, time t possesses the special and unique property of being consequential. That is: at time t-past there were certain data about particular masses, energies or momenta that no longer existed at time t-current; the same will be the case in time t-future with regard to particular masses, energies or momenta that exist in time t-present. This consequential property of time t is the one that is relaxed when space and time are abstracted to enable their infinite divisibility. It is relaxed so that only what should be expected to happen as a result of motion or displacement of some specific mass, energy or momentum in an abstracted finite space as a function of time varying independently may be predicted or examined.
The mathematics and analysis based on infinite divisibility of space and time and on functions of time taken as an independent variable are in their element when dealing with engineered space and engineered time. The point of engineering space and time by direct intervention, or "shock and awe" if you like, is precisely to suspend the consequential property of time as it actually passes in Nature. Indeed, precisely the degree to which physical natural phenomena associated either with causes or effects of the engineered intervention of interest can be rendered as functions of time varying independently may itself be taken the best measure of the extent to which this consequential property has been banished beyond the margins. The only time that counts for such engineered interventions is the duration of the engineered intervention itself.
20 November 2006
TWO-DIMENSIONAL IMAGING MACHINERIES OF EUROCENTRIC CULTURE
AND THEIR ANTI-NATURE BIAS
The Science of Tangibles - Part 1
There are a number of obstacles inherent in the project to establish a science of intangibles based on Nature. Among these obstacles are those that entail our un-learning much of what we thought we knew before we can begin to learn and appreciate the forms and content of nature-science. Chief among this collection of problems is how we have already become trained by the society, culture and education system to conceive and accept the metaphors and correspondences of engineered space and time represented, essentially, in two dimensions (2-D). It is indeed a considerable accomplishment that, utilising perspective and the projective plane implicit in its geometry, what is actually a third spatial dimension can be represented to us convincingly within a two-dimensional plane. However, the price at which this is achieved is something remarked far less: the fourth dimension, time itself, is made to disappear. In fact, whether the context is the fine arts or engineered space and time, we have learned a certain visual “grammar”, so to speak, with all spatial visualisation and representation. We know no other “language” but that in which either:
1. time is frozen – as in a snapshot – or
2. time is represented not as the fourth dimension but rather as something that varies independently of any phenomenon occurring within it.
The modern history of communications media and information transfer really begins with those famous Canaletto landscapes, of 16th century Italy, incorporating perspective and immediately overthrowing in that same moment the centuries-long authority of the Holy Roman Catholic Church over the message we are to receive from works of art. With the emergence of the new approach in art of the Renaissance, the principles underlying representational art works of the early and high Middle Ages were reversed. Any previously-authorised message already vetted carefully as to the acceptability of its content and the morality of its purpose would hereafter become extraneous and secondary to the information gathered by the visual cortex of the individual observer.
The new approach made the visual arts accessible at all levels of society for the first time. Perspective in Renaissance painting, and the findings of anatomy regarding the movement and distribution of weight in the human frame manifested in Renaissance sculpture, overthrew the centuries-long monopoly of Church authority with the bluntest directness. This was bracingly liberating and bound to provoke ever-deeper questioning of Church authority in other fields. By enabling Humanity to reclaim from Nature something that Authority had denied, these transformations within mass communications media (turning art into a mass medium was itself the key to the transformation) unleashed a social and intellectual revolution. However, even as the new “grammar” of perspective-based representation of three-dimensional space, a space that now appeared to be living rather than representing a purely imaginary phantasm or idea, overwhelmed the previously accepted canons of visual arts, and overthrew with it the long-asserted timelessness of the Church’s approved truths, the new visual canon served up another illusion of reality: the timeless snapshot-like image.
Over the next four centuries, expressed as a struggle to capture the moving image, and later the live image, further development of mass communications media and associated systems and technologies of information transfer wrestled with just about every imaginable and practical aspect of how to engineer the appropriate representation of time and space. Interwoven throughout this development are parts of the history of development of analog and then digital electronic media, of the individual or limited-edition static-image to the mass-marketed photographic static image, and of the illusion of the moving picture – an illusion created by overwhelming the visual cortex with 24 still frames per second and then of this same moving picture with a superimposed sound track (the talking motion picture). Also interwoven are the stories of the unmodulated telegraphic signal whose information is contained in its sequencing to the modulated signal overlaid with an audio carrier (telephone and radio), the modulated signal overlaid with visual and audio carrier signals (television), the encoding of information in digitised sequences (computers), and the digital encoding of information on a transmitted carrier signal (cell phones, the Internet). All these technological aspects have been exhaustively discussed and examined by many people. Less cogently commented, but still mentioned, at least, are the political-economic transitions that also developed within this historical tapestry: from privately-conducted individual, or craft-oriented, production prior to the Industrial Revolution intended for finite, relatively small markets of certain individuals here or there, to privately-owned but socially produced output for mass markets in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the readily-socialised mass production of our own time conducted under increasingly narrowly monopolised ownership. Nevertheless, however, what still remains unmentioned and uncommented anywhere in these historical recapitulations is whatever happened to the tangible-intangible nexus involved at each stage of any of these developments. We cannot hope seriously to make headway towards, much less accomplish, serious nature-science of phenomena, an authentic science of the tangibles-intangibles nexus, without filling in that part of the tapestry as well. That which is natural can be neither defended nor sustained without first delimiting and then restricting the sphere of operation of everything that is anti-Nature.
This absence of discussion of whatever happened to the tangible-intangible nexus involved at each stage of any of these developments is no merely accidental or random fact in the world. It flows directly from a Eurocentric bias that pervades, well beyond Europe and North America, the gathering and summation of scientific knowledge everywhere. Certainly, it is by no means a property inherent – either in technology as such, or in the norms and demands of the scientific method per se, or even within historical development – that time is considered so intangible as to merit being either ignored as a fourth dimension, or conflated with tangible space as something varying independently of any process underway within any or all dimensions of three-dimensional space.
This character of this bias is Eurocentric and cultural-historical, but its consequences are social, political, economic, military and you-name-it, and it takes the form of assuming the human role as one of dictating Nature. If, alternatively, the human role is accepted as one not of dictating Nature, but as the element that can be consciously knowledgeable about the environment and choose, on the basis of conscience, between the pathways that are best for humans and whatever humans already know about Nature, it then becomes possible to glimpse the true gravity of the danger posed by the Aphenomenal Model. If the very way we have become trained to look at things is mired in images and image-making processes that have already become falsified by the manner in which Time itself is mis-treated / misrepresented in the image-capturing process, then whatever we model must become aphenomenal.
AND THEIR ANTI-NATURE BIAS
The Science of Tangibles - Part 1
There are a number of obstacles inherent in the project to establish a science of intangibles based on Nature. Among these obstacles are those that entail our un-learning much of what we thought we knew before we can begin to learn and appreciate the forms and content of nature-science. Chief among this collection of problems is how we have already become trained by the society, culture and education system to conceive and accept the metaphors and correspondences of engineered space and time represented, essentially, in two dimensions (2-D). It is indeed a considerable accomplishment that, utilising perspective and the projective plane implicit in its geometry, what is actually a third spatial dimension can be represented to us convincingly within a two-dimensional plane. However, the price at which this is achieved is something remarked far less: the fourth dimension, time itself, is made to disappear. In fact, whether the context is the fine arts or engineered space and time, we have learned a certain visual “grammar”, so to speak, with all spatial visualisation and representation. We know no other “language” but that in which either:
1. time is frozen – as in a snapshot – or
2. time is represented not as the fourth dimension but rather as something that varies independently of any phenomenon occurring within it.
The modern history of communications media and information transfer really begins with those famous Canaletto landscapes, of 16th century Italy, incorporating perspective and immediately overthrowing in that same moment the centuries-long authority of the Holy Roman Catholic Church over the message we are to receive from works of art. With the emergence of the new approach in art of the Renaissance, the principles underlying representational art works of the early and high Middle Ages were reversed. Any previously-authorised message already vetted carefully as to the acceptability of its content and the morality of its purpose would hereafter become extraneous and secondary to the information gathered by the visual cortex of the individual observer.
The new approach made the visual arts accessible at all levels of society for the first time. Perspective in Renaissance painting, and the findings of anatomy regarding the movement and distribution of weight in the human frame manifested in Renaissance sculpture, overthrew the centuries-long monopoly of Church authority with the bluntest directness. This was bracingly liberating and bound to provoke ever-deeper questioning of Church authority in other fields. By enabling Humanity to reclaim from Nature something that Authority had denied, these transformations within mass communications media (turning art into a mass medium was itself the key to the transformation) unleashed a social and intellectual revolution. However, even as the new “grammar” of perspective-based representation of three-dimensional space, a space that now appeared to be living rather than representing a purely imaginary phantasm or idea, overwhelmed the previously accepted canons of visual arts, and overthrew with it the long-asserted timelessness of the Church’s approved truths, the new visual canon served up another illusion of reality: the timeless snapshot-like image.
Over the next four centuries, expressed as a struggle to capture the moving image, and later the live image, further development of mass communications media and associated systems and technologies of information transfer wrestled with just about every imaginable and practical aspect of how to engineer the appropriate representation of time and space. Interwoven throughout this development are parts of the history of development of analog and then digital electronic media, of the individual or limited-edition static-image to the mass-marketed photographic static image, and of the illusion of the moving picture – an illusion created by overwhelming the visual cortex with 24 still frames per second and then of this same moving picture with a superimposed sound track (the talking motion picture). Also interwoven are the stories of the unmodulated telegraphic signal whose information is contained in its sequencing to the modulated signal overlaid with an audio carrier (telephone and radio), the modulated signal overlaid with visual and audio carrier signals (television), the encoding of information in digitised sequences (computers), and the digital encoding of information on a transmitted carrier signal (cell phones, the Internet). All these technological aspects have been exhaustively discussed and examined by many people. Less cogently commented, but still mentioned, at least, are the political-economic transitions that also developed within this historical tapestry: from privately-conducted individual, or craft-oriented, production prior to the Industrial Revolution intended for finite, relatively small markets of certain individuals here or there, to privately-owned but socially produced output for mass markets in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the readily-socialised mass production of our own time conducted under increasingly narrowly monopolised ownership. Nevertheless, however, what still remains unmentioned and uncommented anywhere in these historical recapitulations is whatever happened to the tangible-intangible nexus involved at each stage of any of these developments. We cannot hope seriously to make headway towards, much less accomplish, serious nature-science of phenomena, an authentic science of the tangibles-intangibles nexus, without filling in that part of the tapestry as well. That which is natural can be neither defended nor sustained without first delimiting and then restricting the sphere of operation of everything that is anti-Nature.
This absence of discussion of whatever happened to the tangible-intangible nexus involved at each stage of any of these developments is no merely accidental or random fact in the world. It flows directly from a Eurocentric bias that pervades, well beyond Europe and North America, the gathering and summation of scientific knowledge everywhere. Certainly, it is by no means a property inherent – either in technology as such, or in the norms and demands of the scientific method per se, or even within historical development – that time is considered so intangible as to merit being either ignored as a fourth dimension, or conflated with tangible space as something varying independently of any process underway within any or all dimensions of three-dimensional space.
This character of this bias is Eurocentric and cultural-historical, but its consequences are social, political, economic, military and you-name-it, and it takes the form of assuming the human role as one of dictating Nature. If, alternatively, the human role is accepted as one not of dictating Nature, but as the element that can be consciously knowledgeable about the environment and choose, on the basis of conscience, between the pathways that are best for humans and whatever humans already know about Nature, it then becomes possible to glimpse the true gravity of the danger posed by the Aphenomenal Model. If the very way we have become trained to look at things is mired in images and image-making processes that have already become falsified by the manner in which Time itself is mis-treated / misrepresented in the image-capturing process, then whatever we model must become aphenomenal.
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