Politics and Society

7 Secret Lives

Gerhard Kleinhans — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:14:00 GMT

It is now more than a week since I've finished Galileo's Dream, and I am still contemplating the wisdom of this passage:

We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo´s Dream, 2009, p. 307

Human Rights, AD 2011

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:37:00 GMT

Barrack Obama, 27 january 2011:

There are certain core values that we believe in as Americans that we believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, people being able to use any social networking or any other mechanisms to communicate with each other and express their concerns.

Do I understand this correctly: access to Facebook is now considered a basic human right?

I was online B4ALL

Gerhard Kleinhans — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 10:15:00 GMT

This makes me so proud I am in danger of combusting ... Click on it and you'll see why.

At the end of the day

Gerhard Kleinhans — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 09:54:00 GMT

The only things you can be sure of ‘at the end of the day’ are that:

the sun will go down
I will cringe

Can we please, please get a substitute cliché? At the end of the day I can no longer take anybody serious who tells me what will happen at the end of the day, and I stop listening as soon as the phrase is uttered. This is also true at any other time during the day.

Reza’s World Cup Conspiracy Theory

Gerhard Kleinhans — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:05:00 GMT

I just googled ‘World Cup 2010 Conspiracy’ and it returned an astonishing 4.330.000+ items. I skimmed the first 3 pages and could not find anything similar to Reza’s theory why Spain won the World Cup:

You see, Spain being the largest of the P.I.G.S. countries, it’s economy could most benefit from the boost in consumer confidence usually following a World Cup victory. Thereby saving the Euro without any further demands on the German bankers …

Best April Fool’s Joke 2010

Gerhard Kleinhans — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 09:33:00 GMT

Having spent a lot of my online time last week chasing fraudulent stories, most of them being rather lame for that matter, I’ve decided to honor the time wasted by instituting the Parvus’ Best April Fool’s Joke Award, to be awarded a few days after April 1st, to the joke that would have blown my mind if it was real. There is no prize.

The winner for 2010 is:

Doctorow and Stross to Write Authorized Sequel to Atlas Shrugged

A brilliant joke! Can I nominate James Morrow to write the novel about Doctorow and Stross having written the sequel to Atlas Shrugged and the resultant confusion it creates in the Libertarian gun-crazy community? Long live Rejectivism!

Oh yes, by the way: if you have not seen John Stewart’s March 18th show yet you’ve missed one of the greatest satirical performances of our times. His impersonation of Glen Beck is superb, and as is often the case with Stewart, his underhand defense of Progressivism is worthy of consideration. But it was his Beckian chalkboard ~~deconstruction~~ misconstruction of Conservative Libertarianism that enshrined him as one of my personal saints. Do yourself a favor, watch it.

It Will Not Just Go Away

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:46:00 GMT

I rarely wholeheartedly agree with Andrew Sullivan, but here he hits the target of being 100% correct. The crimes of the Bush administration will not simply recede into a forgotten past. The legitimacy of our civilization requires prosecution. I know I am getting pretty repetitive about this, but the lack of accountability really offends me.

Respect

Gerhard Kleinhans — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:43:00 GMT

In the Prop 8 trail currently underway in California, a whole day of argumentation was spent on whether we really are persecuted and victimized. As if there could be any doubt.

This clip from de Volkskrant Online that shows that, even if we live in an enlightened country and have prominent and respected gay and lesbian politicians, we are never really safe.

Guys, marriage equality is important, but don’t mistake it for respect.

The Origin of Prescience

Gerhard Kleinhans — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:17:00 GMT

Via DailyKos’ Abbreviated Pundit Round-up today I learned that, according to AP …

Sarah Palin believed that Sen. John McCain chose her to be his running mate in the 2008 presidential race because of "God's plan," according to a top political strategist in the Arizona Republican's campaign.

This almost made me recant my atheism. I mean, ‘God’s plan’ did work out for the better in the end, didn’t it?

Physicists and Philosophy

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:05:00 GMT

A good friend of mine left some feedback to an earlier post with his personal recollections of his first encounter with philosophy. Johan kindly agreed to let me promote his feedback to a full posting.

(A)musings on Badiou 1/6/2010 2:49 PM by Johan Louw

As a young theoretical physicist I was concerned about the validity of my 'science' and started delving into philosophy with the aim of getting a deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge and questions, of decidability, verifiability and truth. This diversion, with the exception of Plato/Socrates and Rene Descartes ( still some confusion) left me more confused than before I started reading.
But then I heard about Kurt Goedel's omega inconsistency theorem. As mathematical logic was not a prescribed course (and the mathematics is rather elementary, or so I thought) I started to work through the main ideas in mathematical logic in order to get to the point where I could understand what the omega inconsistency theorem really meant.
I took me three years of hard disciplined work. It was not the elementary mathematics of formal logic or axiomatic set theory that caused my suffering, instead, what tortured me even in my dreams was the bootstrapping (self referencing or recursive) arguments that constituted the proof as well as the meaning of the symbolism in terms of the knowledge theoretical questions which I was trying to answer. Conceptually understanding this theorem is one of the most difficult things I have conquered in my life and to put this in perspective my field of expertise, gauge theories, is understood to be the most difficult mathematical physics that you can attempt and by the time I reached sixteen I had already worked through and understood many of the different geodesics and solutions in general relativity.
Aside: Bootstrapping although contrary to any logical thinking exists and works, just read about those crazy Kaons ( particle physics) and think about the chicken and egg question in evolutionary terms!
When I finally finished with Frege, Russell, Whitehead and Goedel the orgasmic elation of finally understanding a very difficult theorem was first met with serious disappointment and only later when I realized that my unjustified disappointment was due to the realization that the nature of knowledge is elusive, and that this theorem's brilliance lies in defining the scope and validity of our theories. Translated (rather naively) into English, it says; In some closed axiomatic systems (with some restrictive conditions) there will always be at least one undecided preposition and secondly the axioms of the arithmetic in question cannot be proven within the system. A second more English translation will illuminate the source of my disappointment. It says; If you base a philosophy on a set of ideas (assuming them to be true) and then argue using formal logic, you cannot come up with any new ideas (although expressing the old ideas in different ways may be very useful) in fact you cannot even prove the old ideas(axioms).
An old original joke of mine is 'Newton killed Merlin', but in fact it was Galileo Galilei ( the father of both theoretical and experimental physics) that delivered the death blow. Even after Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler did some of the groundwork, it was the Italian who in one fell swoop destroyed Aristotle's physics and commanded nature to yield her secrets to experiments, when he formulated and tested 'Newton's Laws of motion'. To my mind this obliterates the need to answer any of the Kantian questions relating to epistemology. GG created the link between the human mind and the external space-time in which it lives, allowing us to take the external universe and to encode it into structures which we had created in our own minds over centuries. Suddenly,fear of the natural world had been replaced by a limited command of it as well as the possibility to understand and model it all with numbers and axiomatic systems. Merlin and Yoda ( to be be fair they both told us to look within ourselves) were finally dead and the swamp has become a sharply lit mall.
So Badiou's ideas leaves me with some questions. Can we really use the structures (in this case Mathematical logic, set theories and algebras) created in the human mind to analyze structures created in the human mind. In the language of ML; Does A imply A?, of course it does, but it says nothing! Even more unkind is that ML is in itself an axiomatic system. A second concern that I have is that when we impose ML on philosophy, should we not just admit that we have come full circle and landed in Socrates' lap and unfortunately too close to Aristotle's Nicomachian ethics for comfort (remember his bad physics)!
But enough epistemological jesting, for the point that I am trying to make is that technocratic application of knowledge will get us nowhere. As much as I understand an appreciate the immense power of these axiomatic systems I always preach caution when we try an draw absolute conclusions from areas where the validity of our theories have not been tested. What is important is to see ourselves as a part of this universe and realize the events we experience are just that. Also the ideas we have are just that and even though experience and thought feed on each other and neither could exist independently, they are separate entities that could not be confused. In essence all mathematics ( a philosophy created in the human mind and encoded in a language, not a science) and therefore serious science is based on this kind of abstract thinking, but it is important to remember that we use our thinking to model our environment, even though our environment shaped our thinking in the first place. We are both and at the same time creators and products of our universe.
The only thing left is for us all to become good Buddhists, to realize that the Ying and the Yang are both the same and not the same, and grasping for absolutes in any endeavor will leave us empty handed. It is as if the universe is a large spider web and every move we make, sets off a vibration in the web that influences everything else in the universe including ourselves! Scary is that once, when writing about the way the human brain works, I used exactly the same spider web analogy to illustrate the workings of the human brain! Even our brains mimic the nature of the universe, which is not at all surprising since we are part of it, after all.
But before you follow my foray into ML remember that Goedel died of starvation, he would not eat for fear of being poisoned. How logical is that! For one of the great geniuses of our time? BTW he wasn't the only logician that displayed serious mental instability.
Footnote; I apologize to the reader for ‘Bushi-yfing’ the translation of the IT into English. Also I recommend the reading of any standard ML text by anyone who would like to incur permanent brain damage. More fun and illuminating however would be to read be some English version of Euclid's elements, it is as far as I know the first axiomatic approach to knowledge and still valid after 2500 years (outside of the logical nitpicking) and is way more accessible. Another more accessible work is 'Goedel Escher Bach (an eternal golden braid)' by Douglas Hoffstaeter.

Update: sinnkk asked if Johan has a blog or something similar. Sadly no. Johan seems to pefer an adventurous life-style and is often difficult to get hold of.