JD Quotations, aphorisms thoughts & observations

March 2005

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The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
Harlan Ellison

Genius?Our Universe
God & Dice

Gödel
R.Goldstein
 

As individuals, we live in an interregnum: even as we struggle to transcend our background we remain anchored to it.
So long as our biases are not challenged, we cling to them.
Without the courage to act, a social conscience means little.
*Language is the last frontier of identity.
—JD

Being close to life is vastly different from being merely close to a lifestyle.
JD

And a few aphorisms by eminent persons:

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. John Berger
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget. John Berger

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion—T.S. Eliot
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment—T.S. Eliot

To specialise is to lose your soul—W. H. Hudson

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AYN RAND—to observe her 100th birth anniversary this month
She may have been an incurable romantic realist, but she erred on the side of humanity—she did not unequivocally express affection for all living things, regardless of their place in the cosmic scheme of things. Miss Rand would have denounced today's animal activists and their ilk. She honored and worshipped the 'mind' of man, his superior 'brain', which bestowed on him a higher life that deserved to survive above other creatures on earth. It is also the Darwinian way, stripped of ethics and sentiment, moral pretensions, misplaced compassion. She also believed that nothing seems worth doing that is not somehow in the service of man and his life. Man is the centre, the unit of consideration, not his disciplines or theories. If he is not complete, nothing is. When asked why she had written her famous book The Fountainhead, she said: "My purpose is not the philosophical enlightenment of my readers, but the portrayal of Howard Roark as an end in himself."—JD.

...But there are critical appraisals of Ayn Rand's work that deserve our attention—eg. a short essay by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times, Feb 2, 2005...

Genius?
Jortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, once said that one has a genius for what one likes. To him the seeds of genius were sown in individual nature and the instinct  that follows in its wake. Any natural trait can be developed. It is the uniqueness of the individual, and his natural tendencies that could flower and give expression to a latent genius. Perhaps it's not as elusive as most of us think—JD

*Language, whatever its form, gives us our emotional and social  bonds, and thus a sense of intimacy with other people. And an identity that seems to eclipse all others. For that reason alone every language on earth is worth preserving. Globalization seeks to homogenize everything, including language. But an individual lives on a human scale in a community, not on a global scale. Yet globalization is touted as a virtue above all else, as though it were a panacea—JD

Our Universe
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we
created them.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Einstein expressed a fundamental concern, saying "God does not play dice" in connection with the chancy aspect of quantum mechanics, which posits uncertainty with respect to the behavior of matter at the microcosmic level. Why indeed should the universe and all that's in it be a kind of crapshoot? A universe that's not quite tangible—JD

Relativity (Einstein), Incompleteness (Gödel) and Uncertainty (Heisenberg) are often referred to as the 'Holy' Trinity of 20th century science. They heralded a kind of postmodern science, if anything. Relativity challenged Newton's ideas by focusing on accelerated frames of reference, speeds approaching that of light & how gravity determines the nature of space-time. Gödel's program invalidated the aims of Russell-Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (the attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic) and Heisenberg pointed out the probabilistic (or statistical) behavior of very small particles, resulting in uncertainty—JD

...Again, Edward Rothstein (in the New York Times, Feb 14, 2005) offers a lay, but intelligent, review of Rebecca Goldstein's new book Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, in which he summarizes in very simple words the important ideas & discoveries ushered in by this trinity...