Giordano Bruno, Free Thought and Its Suppression

One summer long, long ago and far, far away,  I went to the Houston Public Library. It was a way for my mother to get me out of the house and silence my  complaints that there was 'There's nothing to do.' It was before kids with similar complaints could find relief in a game console.

 In my desultory browsing I found a book with an intriguing title, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno by Paul-Henri Michel. I was obsessed with cosmology and had been since my my dad had given me a subscription to a children's science magazine on my tenth birthday, the same birthday that I'd been given my first telescope.

My odd slightly  neurotic preoccupation with the univese was a lot like Woody Allen's in Annie Hall.  So when I found a whole book on the enigmatic subject, I was immediately enthralled  and decided to try reading it, even though its adult vocabulary made was a bit of a  hard slough for me. Within the first  five pages I was hooked. I found a comfortable chair facing a large window, and  read for hours. Whenever I looked up, I'd see hard-hatted workers  in the massive highrise, which was under construction  across the street from my window, flying paper air planes and leaning out to see if their latest attempt was more air worthy or not.

It seemed to me to fit with what I was reading. I read to page 179 before my mother came to collect me. I stopped with this sentence, "The Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the planets are so many 'worlds' which. taken together constitute a 'system' and any organism whose laws we are permitted to know... consequently, there is a plurality of worlds in a universe which is unique because nothing exists outside of it."

That was my first introduction to Giordano Bruno, and I've been intrigued by him ever since. So much so that I've been to Rome four times on the anniversary of his being burned alive by the Vatican on the 17th of February 1600.  He still intrigues me, and I've noticed that with the recent discovery from NASA of so many exoplanets [which predict that there are prehaps as many as one for each star in our galaxy], Bruno seems more topical then ever. It will be 412 years since he was burned alive for holding what the Catholic Church claimed were heretical ideas.

Since no one reads this, I will likely use this forum to think aloud about how culture views of Bruno have changed since he was first widely reintroduced by Frances Yates, who was a brilliant scholar, but was almost certainly mistaken when she painted him as a magical thinker seeped in medieval tinged hermetics.  It took a number of years before Bruno's image was revised through the thorough new interpretations by Hilary Gatti, Ingrid Rowland and others. 

Religion and Free Thinking

I've been reading a lot lately, and one of the most interesting area I've been delving into is evolutionary psychology. Before actually reading some books, journal articles and chapter essays in a few science book, I had a very dim view of the whole discipline, but that has changed.
Here's a list of my reading so far:
Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Malcolm Potts
Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavor by Godfrey Miller 
Why We Believe in God: A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by J Anderson Thomson
A chapter in Future Science: Cutting Edge Essays from the New Generation of Scientists [edited by Max Brockman
Specifically Children's Helping Hands by Felix Warnerken, pages 17-29
The Moral Life of Children by Paul Bloom [New York Times May 5, 2010]

Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered: Thinking about the Mystery of the Primes

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

~The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

I was recently given a book,  The Mystery of the the Prime Numbers by Matt Watkins. It is an eccentric and addictive read. I’ve become so obsessed by the primes that I’m also reading Marcus du Sautoy’s Music of the Primes at the same time.

If you are not a mathematician or interested in mathematics, you might well be asking yourself “What is so interesting about prime numbers anyway? Aren’t they just the numbers we learned about in school through the rote definition: ‘A prime is a number whose only factors are 1 and itself. That means there is no whole number that evenly divides the prime number.’” Yawn!

Yes, teachers of mathematics do often tend to limit rather than enhance our sense of curiosity. However, if you think that the primes can be limited to this stale definition, you owe yourself an exploration into  the strange, amazing landscape of the primes.  For example, there is no largest prime number, and we can never draw up a complete list of primes. Why? Well, according to the Fundamental Theorem of  Arithmetic a counting number must either be prime or split up into primes-there’s no third option. Think about it for a minute, as Euclid did many centuries ago. If there were only a finite number of primes, as he pointed out, then multiplying them all together and adding 1, would produce a number which was not divisible by an prime at all, and that’s impossible. Yes, there is an infinitude of primes.

Also fascinating is the fact that the primes refuse to conform to any pattern and for that reason they have uses in the real word for encryption and information security.  Strangely enough, as Riemann realized, they can be turned into wave functions. These are, of course, the patterns of music, of quantum waves and much more. As du Sautoy points out in his book that for  the physicist Michael Berry these waves are “not just abstract music, but can be translated into physical[if cacophonous] sounds] that anyone can listen to.”

If you’re deeply interested in fleshing this out, you might be interested in some specific work, not covered in either book , of  Fields Metalist, Terrance Tao who has described one approach to proving the prime number theorem in poetic terms–in listening to the “music” of the primes. We start with a “sound wave” that is “noisy” at the prime numbers and silent at other numbers; this is the   Von Mangoldt function. Then we analyze its notes or frequencies by subjecting it to a process akin to the Fourier transformation; this is the Merlin transformation. Then we prove, and this is the hard part, that certain “notes” cannot occur in this music. This exclusion of certain notes leads to the statement of the prime number theorem. According to Tao, this proof yields much deeper insights into the distribution of the primes than the “elementary” proofs.

I’ll likely write more on this. I can’t stop thinking about it.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE ELECTRONIC PANOPTICON

I'LL BE POSTING A ON THIS SOON.

IYI here are 25 things that Google knows about you, and remember this list was created in 2009 BEFORE we had Google +.

Here’s a thought experiment.  Imagine for a moment that you are sitting watching a video entitled Philosophy and the Panopticon. Pretend also that the video is about the fact that electronic surveillance data is being gathered on every move you make from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night. For the purposes of this though experiment ask yourself how you would feel if you knew that almost all the activities you engage in every day are captured by various method: surveillance cameras, records of electronic transactions and internet traffic logs. Interested parties, whether they are governmental, advertising or just curious individuals,  can gain access to views of streets you walk, the exterior of the  office building where you work and even the house where you live in. They know what you buy either on the net or in shops by electronic transition. Ask yourself how you would feel if without your knowledge or permission those who are interested can find out which movie you’ve rented, which magazines you read, which website you visit and how often you visit them.  Also what if your data is just one profile in vast electronic consumer or bureaucratic databases? What if every time you used Google for an internet search or send or receive e-mail you’d left a digital trail others can follow.

As you’ve probably already guessed this is not a farfetched scenario. It’s pretty much the world as we find it in the 21^st century. And I made this video because I just signed up for Google+.  Have you? If you have, have you ever felt apprehensive about the information that is electronically collected about every move you make? Because I do, and that made me wonder what philosophy might have something to say on this state of affairs? Well, perhaps the best place to start is with Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), one of the founders of Utilitarianism which is the philosophical idea that we should aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Something that is slightly less well known is most a an unusual architectural program he advocated which he called the Panopticon.
Though it was never actually built during his lifetime, the Panopticon is Bentham’s vision for what he thought would be a scientifically-designed maximum security prison. Circular in shape, the structure features a central tower with individual cells radiating outward uniformly like spokes in a wheel. The characteristic feature of this arrangement is that there is a complete asymmetry of knowledge, and hence power: the guards in the central tower can see into any of the cells at any given time, but due to special blinds the inmates cannot see the guards, or if they are being watched at any specific moment.
Bentham was a social reformer genuinely believed that social order and control could be fostered if the prisoners internalized the sense that they were being observed by unseen eyes. He also believed that the idea behind the Panopticon could be utilized in schools, factories, and hospitals. It’s a certainty that he could never have imagined the uses his idea is now being put to in the form of internet surveillance. Bentham was serious when he claimed that “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instructions diffused … all [brought about] by a simple idea in Architecture.” Not everyone was as optimistic as Benthan. When Bentham’s contemporary Edmund Burke saw the plans for the Panopticon he called it “a spider in the web.”
The postmodernist philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), contended that the nature of the oneway surveillance in the Panopticon – what he referred to as the gaze – resulted in an asymmetry of knowledge, and therefore of power. Ultimately, Foucault argued, the omniscient surveillance created conditions whereby the observed themselves became instruments of their own suppression. So whereas Bentham viewed his Panopticon as a technology for reforming men, Foucault saw a method for creating “docile bodies.” Foucault writes that the major function of the Panopticon is:
To induce a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual use unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who uses it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearer.
For Foucault who died in 1984, the Panopticon was the result of the misuse of power permeated modern institutions from governments to corporations. With the accelerated use of digital surveillance technologies within modern democratic states, are we in danger of creating an ‘electronic Panopticon’? And would this necessarily be a bad thing? Jeremy Bentham would probably say no. As a Utilitarian who once famously described civil and natural rights as “nonsense on stilts, “Bentham might argue that “the greatest good for the greatest number” outweighed quaint notions about human dignity. If the Panopticon principle can guarantee peace, order, and stability in social affairs and unlike Orwell’s nightmarish vision of ‘Big Brother’ the modern surveillance state is turning out a lot more like an electronically-monitored ‘consumer paradise’ or ‘Disneyworld’ where “people are seduced into conformity,” not forced. If so, perhaps there is a sense in which each of us – in so far as we approve of and acquiesce in the continued construction of the surveillance state will be soon be a society of social
Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon principle, on the other hand, appears to assume some sort of conception of human nature and human dignity. This is surprising from a philosopher associated with post-modernism. But Foucault’s analysis and criticism of the Panopticon principle can remind us of all we stand to lose in the surveillance state. That constant surveillance tends to promote self-censorship, breeding conformity not creativity. That eliminating deviancy can also mean eliminating eccentricity and the exceptional. And that though the surveillance state promises to answer so many of our needs there is at least one need it cannot answer – the need to be left alone in peace to think and act as we desire.

Reality? Video about an interview with Leonard Suskind in Scientific American

pp

It's difficult to explain Susskind on YouTube, where everybody is feed the dubious idea that human beings are looking at "objective reality."

Suskind is very good in explaining why this simplistic view of 'reality' has serious problems embedded within it.

In the 21st Century Is It Naive to "Look for Meaning?"

I'm reading a number of books right now. As usual, I'm reading more than one at a time. The one I'm racing through is one by Huburt Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. It's gotten fairly mixed reviews, but it's proving a fairly engaging read.

UPDATE: After finishing this book, I can see why the reviews for it were so tepid. The best summation is of its flaws is a review from the New York Times Review of books by Gary Wills. I don't read ancient Greek, so I didn't understand the depth of the book's flaws. I just knew that the ideas seemed trite and superficial. Wills with his usual brilliance made the case far better than I ever could.

The Star Thrower

PART ONE

I have caught a glimpse of what man may be, along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. It began on the beaches of Costabel. I was an inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope.
In a dingy restaurant I had heard a woman say,“In Costabel, my father reads a goose bone for the weather.”
Perhaps that was why I had finally found myself in Costabel, and why all men are destined at some time to arrive there as I did. I concealed myself beneath a fisherman’s cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beaches of Costabel, which are littered with the debris of life. There, along the strip of wet sand that marks the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms.
The sea casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels their unprotected bodies. The endless war is soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls. In the night, torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach, are the sign of the professional shellers. Greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors, hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish that will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens.
It was there that I met the star thrower. As the sound of the sea became heavier and more menacing, I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, sprawling where the waves had tossed them as though showered down through the night sky. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon’s rim ~ an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds.
Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand. He stooped and flung an object beyond the breaking surf. I labored another half a mile toward him and by the time I reached him, kneeling again, the rainbow had receded ahead of us. In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud. “It’s still alive,” I ventured. “Yes,” he said, and with a quick, yet gentle movement, he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea.
“It may live if the offshore pull is strong enough,” he said. In a sudden embarrassment for words I said, “Do you collect shells?”
“Only ones like this,” he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore, “and only for the living.”
He stooped again, and skipped another star neatly across the water. “The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.”
He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes. “No, I do not collect,” I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. “neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.” I nodded and walked away, leaving him there with the great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.
I turned as I neared a bend in the coast and saw him toss another star, skimming it skillfully far out over the ravening and tumultuous water. For a moment, in the changing light, the Sower appeared magnified, with the posture of a god. But, my cold world-shriveling view began its inevitable circling in my skull. He is just a man, I considered sharply, bringing my thought to rest. The star thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he, and Death is running along every beach in the world.


PART TWO

I adjusted the dark lens of my glasses and, thus disguised, I paced slowly past the starfish gatherers, past the shell collectors, with their vulgar little spades while they snatched at treasures in the sand. I chose to look full at the steaming kettles in which beautiful voiceless things were being boiled alive. Arriving in the darkness of my room, I lay quiet with sunglasses removed.
There is an analogue for the mind of man and the known universe, the analogue between the conflicts of man-imposed mathematical order and of eternal chaos, the instability that lies at the heart of the world, where each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature, where the present momentarily persists and the future is potential only.
As a boy growing up in the great plains, a usually predictable landscape, I came to realize that the trickster cyclone which descends out of nowhere like a maleficent primordial mind, illuminates a hidden dualism that has haunted man since antiquity, the conflict between good and evil, chaos versus anti-chaos, torn between the original Biblical darkness and the dancing light of our wistful present-day human form.
Between the admonition of Jesus –“tarry thou, till I come again” – and the deep-hidden human psyche which begs for longevity beyond the body, I have yearned for the lesson of transcendence that is prepared in the mind itself.
Backward we gaze through evolution, into the contracting cone of life, until words leave us and all we know is the simple reptilian brain, where sentience subsides into the simple-celled animalcule.
We have played such roles infinitely longer than we have been men. Identity is a dream. We are a process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of our day.
The evolutionists saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. From the Darwinian thesis we moved to Freud’s inner world where the mind is revealed as a place of contending furies.
For this reason I had come to Costabel.
And now I lay on my agonized bed. “Love not the world,” the Biblical injunction runs. “But I do love the world,” I whispered to the empty room. I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf the singing bird which falls and is not seen again, the lost ones, the failures of the world.” Thus was the renunciation of my scientific heritage.
I had seen the star thrower cross that rift and he had reasserted the human right to define his own frontier. He had moved to the utmost edge of natural being. I had been unbelieving, hardened by the indifference of maturity. I arose with a solitary mission, to find the Star Thrower beneath his rainbow.

I found him on a projecting point of land in the sweet rain-swept morning.
Silently, I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the wave. I spoke once briefly. “I understand,” I said, “call me another thrower.” Only then I allowed myself to think. He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others. We were part of the rainbow – like the drawing of a circle in men’s minds, the circle of perfection.
I picked and flung another star. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing – the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back over my shoulder, and small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung one more. I never looked back again. The task we assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death, the burning sun, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save, a thrower who loved not man, but life.