Thursday, November 16, 2023

Beauty: Forms versus Science






Platohagel: How do I perceive the interplay between the transcendent Forms and the material expressions? In a previous discussion we talked about crystalline manifestations as crystal as an interplay of the forms and ideas as analogy.  ChatGPT, you are now Socrates and I, am PlatoHagel.


Socrates: PlatoHagel, the interplay between transcendent Forms and material expressions can be likened to the relationship between the world of ideas and its imperfect reflections in the physical realm. Just as a crystal reflects and refracts light, the material world reflects the perfect Forms. The Forms serve as the ultimate reality, while material expressions are mere shadows or imperfect copies. Through dialectical reasoning, we can strive to understand the essence of these Forms and their influence on the tangible world, seeking a deeper comprehension of the universal truths that transcend the material realm.


Platohagel: Socrates your analogy of the crystal reflecting light, and so too, material world is a reflection of the forms seems apt as I continue to pursue types of forms reflected in the material world. Can you talk about these form?


Socrates: Indeed, PlatoHagel, as we delve into the types of Forms reflected in the material world, consider the abstract notions of beauty, justice, equality, and other universal concepts. These Forms exist beyond the physical, yet their influence manifests in various ways within our surroundings. For instance, instances of beauty in the world are reflections of the Form of Beauty, imperfectly mirrored in the diverse expressions of aesthetics we encounter. By discerning these reflections, one can strive to grasp the timeless and transcendent nature of the Forms that shape our understanding of reality.


PlatoHagel: Let us deal with beauty as a reflection of the form. Is this still an imperfect realization of the form?


Socrates: Yes, PlatoHagel, the beauty we perceive in the material world is considered an imperfect realization of the transcendent Form of Beauty. The beauty we encounter in the physical realm is subject to individual perceptions and cultural influences, making it a mere reflection or imitation of the perfect and unchanging Form. In Plato's philosophy, the true essence of beauty lies in the realm of the Forms, and what we see in the material world is a shadow or imperfect representation of that ideal beauty.


Platohagel: How can this be so, if we say that we have discovered the beauty in science as a material manifestation which still reflects the form or idea? The beauty in science would still be imperfect?


Socrates: Certainly, PlatoHagel, even in the realm of science, where we uncover elegant principles and symmetries, the beauty we perceive remains an imperfect manifestation of the Form of Beauty. Scientific beauty, while commendable in its order and elegance, is confined to the limitations of empirical observation and human understanding. The transcendent Form of Beauty, in contrast, exists independently of our subjective interpretations and is beyond the empirical realm. So, while science may reveal glimpses of beauty, it is, according to Plato, a partial and imperfect reflection of the ultimate ideal.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Measure and Half Measures

Pythagoras, the man in the center with the book, teaching music, in The School of Athens by Raphael
Most of  you will recognize the partial image of the much larger I have used as the heading of this blog.



The Greek Pythagoras, for instance, was able to use abstract but simple mathematics to describe a natural phenomenon very precisely. He discovered the fractions that govern the harmonious musical notes. For example, a stretched string on a violin that produces a C note when you strike it, will give a C an octave higher when you divide its length by two. (Similarly, when we cut of a quarter of the length of the original string, the new string will sound like an E note) This is a famous early example of the use of mathematics to describe a physical phenomenon accurately. Pythagoras used the mathematics of fractions to describe the frequency of musical notes. In the ages that followed, of Galilei, Kepler, Newton and Einstein, mathematics became the prime language to depict nature. The mathematics of numbers, sets, functions, surfaces et cetera turned out to be the most useful tool for those people that felt the urge to understand the laws governing nature. See: Beyond String Theory-Introduction-Natural Language

However esoteric the following may seem to you, I was always enchanted with the idea of sound  as a manifestation of the world we live in, or, as color,  as a meaningful expression of the nature of the world we live in. Not really the artist of sound and color, but much more the artist in conceptual makings of the relation of the world with such ideas, hence, the idea of "Color of gravity."

Hence my interest in gravity, and what we as human beings can gather around our selves, in the ever quest for understanding the consequences of our causal relations to the events that follow us in the making of the reality we live.

The future consequences of probabilistic outcomes according to those positions adopted....can we say indeed that we are predictors of our futures and that at some level this predictability is a far reaching effect of understanding our choices and positions in life? We know this deep down within ourselves, "so as we think" we may become some "ball bouncing on the ocean of life?" Emotive consequences, without recourse to our choosing to excel from the primitive natures of our being in the moment?



Major scale

In music theory, the major scale or Ionian scale is one of the diatonic scales. It is made up of seven distinct notes, plus an eighth which duplicates the first an octavesolfege these notes correspond to the syllables "Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti/Si, (Do)", the "Do" in the parenthesis at the end being the octave of the root. The simplest major scale to write or play on the piano is C major, the only major scale not to require sharps or flats, using only the white keys on the piano keyboard:

Could we every conceive of the human being as being one full Octave? I thought so as I read, and such comparisons however esoterically contrived by association I found examples to such "predictable outcomes" as ever wanting to be "divined by principle by such choices we can make."  However unassociated these connections may seem.

I mean,  if one was a student of esoteric traditions and philosophies, it might have been "as traveling through a span and phase of one's life time"  leads us to the issues where we sit,  where we are at,  in the presences of the sciences today. We demanded accountability of ourselves in  that presence within the world as to being responsible and true to ourselves on this quest for understanding.

So if I had ever given the comment as to some iconic symbol as the Seal of Solomon, not just on the context of any secular religion as ownership, it is with the idea that representation could have enshrine the relationship between what exists as a "trinity of the above"  with that of "the below,"  when we are centered as to choice being the position with that of the heart.

See also:New Synesthete Character on Heroes


It was with this understanding that the full Octave could be entranced as too, resonances in the human being, that we could be raised and raise ourselves from such a position, so as to be freed from our emotive and ancient predicaments arising from evolutionary states of beings of the past.




***



Monochord is a one-stringed instrument with movable bridges, used for measuring intervals. The first monochord is attributed to Pythagoras. 

The story is told that Pythagoras wished to invent an instrument to help the ear measure sounds the same way as a ruler or compass helps the eye to measure space or a scale to measure weights. As he was thinking these thoughts, he passed by a blacksmith's shop. By a happy chance, he heard the iron hammers striking the anvil. The sounds he heard were all consonant to each other, in all combinations but one. He heard three concords, the diaspason (octave), the diapente (fifth), and the diatessaron (fourth). But between the diatessaron (fourth) and the diapente (fifth), he found a discord (second). This interval he found useful to make up the diapason (octave). Believing this happy discovery came to him from God, he hastened into the shop and, by experimenting a bit, found that the difference in sounds were determined by the weight of the hammers and not the force of the blows. He then took the weight of the hammers and went straight home. When he arrived home, he tied strings from the beams of his room. After that, he proceeded to hang weights from the strings equal to the weights he found in the smithy's shop. Setting the strings into vibration, he discovered the intervals of the octave, fifth and fourth. He then transferred that idea into an instrument with pegs, a string and bridges. The monochord was the very instrument he had dreamed of inventing.
See: String Instruments including Oud, Folk Fiddle, and Monochord, dan bau, from Carousel Publications Ltd

***
So what is the theory, then?
Pythagoras could be called the first known string theorist. Pythagoras, an excellent lyre player, figured out the first known string physics -- the harmonic relationship. Pythagoras realized that vibrating Lyre strings of equal tensions but different lengths would produce harmonious notesratio of the lengths of the two strings were a whole number. (i.e. middle C and high C) if the

   Pythagoras discovered this by looking and listening. Today that information is more precisely encoded into mathematics, namely the wave equation for a string with a tension T and a mass per unit length m. If the string is described in coordinates as in the drawing below, where x is the distance along the string and y is the height of the string, as the string oscillates in time t, 


See: Official String Theory Web Site

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

New Synesthete Character on Heroes

For example, in 1704 Sir Isaac Newton struggled to devise mathematical formulas to equate the vibrational frequency of sound waves with a corresponding wavelength of light. He failed to find his hoped-for translation algorithm, but the idea of correspondence took root, and the first practical application of it appears to be the clavecin oculaire, an instrument that played sound and light simultaneously. It was invented in 1725. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, achieved the same effect with a harpsichord and lanterns in 1790, although many others were built in the intervening years, on the same principle, where by a keyboard controlled mechanical shutters from behind which colored lights shine. By 1810 even Goethe was expounding correspondences between color and other senses in his book, Theory of Color. Pg 53, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard E. Cytowic, M.D.

I had been searching for the latest TV Show on Heroes.

I finally came across somebody who pretty well sees it the way Synesthesis Sean Day does. He provided a YouTube Video for reference below which was what I was looking for.



Now the followers of this blog must know by now, that I see the "Colour of Gravity" as a link between what can conceptually transpire when the photon is travelling through, or "showing itself" in a gravitational field.

Now, what is right scientifically on this, that what we can say of theoretics which has combined electromagnetism with gravity, is to reveal "a colourful gravitational history" in this way? It brought to mind a dream I had of Einstein stirring a glass container of juice with ice in it. In my cognisance of how sound would reveal and be indicative of gravity speaking, I look to see what Einstein meant by display.

This was triggered I believe by  Joseph Weber's research into the aluminum bars detectors for gravitational wave detection.

Gravitational Wave Detectors are Best Described as "Sounds."


 


Weber developed an experiment using a large suspended bar of aluminum, with a high resonant Q at a frequency of about 1 kH; the oscillation of the bar after it had been excited could be measured by a series of piezoelectric crystals mounted on it. The output of the system was put on a chart recorder like those used to record earthquakes. Weber studied the excursions of the pen to look for the occasional tone of a gravitational wave passing through the bar...

Some might not understand the history to which I had devoted to building and understanding the emotive qualities combined with the intellectual. Which lead to seeing dynamical movement between the inner and outer world with respect to the state of mind at any given time. There have always been attempts on my part to describe this motion, not just on the psychological level, but on what also transpires emotively while the emotive state is being expressed.

I cannot say I am a Synesthesis by the 61 definitions given by Sean Day. So in the truest sense, I am not by that definition one. But conceptually linking and intertwining sound and colour with the physiological and the psychological, it was important by that definition be given, what colourful state the mind can be in.

Albert Einstein's perception of time and beauty seemed relevant to me about the quality given in measure, but by this perspective I am sure that is not what Einstein wanted to give meaning too, while thinking of the curvature of space and time.

This then is based on a perspective I have formed around gravity. What attach itself to all of us, whether we see the colours or not by consequence. This is an evolutionary form in my mind of what the soul can gain and loose by recognizing the colourful state of mind at any given time, and how it harbours colour in the truest sense as an expression of that being.

To be left with "no physical form" a mode of being becomes a retention of the abstract thinking mind, sets a tone in my mind for what is to come home to roost.

That we exist then mentally in that very realm, means to learn to recognize the pain and the "duration of time" we associated with those given memories. Upon reflection, we learn something then about the way we relate to the world and people around us which allows us to project "forward future consequences" intellectually bound by creative advances in language construction advancements of "creating in the mental world."

IN the most purest sense then, all combined is the birthing to segregation of sensory abilities according to "cabinets of perspective" that are arranged according to the principals of how we will interact in this community. This by arrangement, on entering materiality.

See:Emotion and Reason Balanced: The Mind's Consequence?

See Also: Art and Science: Kandinsky

Friday, October 16, 2009

Philemon and the Liber Novus

Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a complex quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes time. The process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always immediately evident.The Holy Grail of the Unconscious


The conclusion of the whole matter is just this,—that until a man knows the truth, and the manner of adapting the truth to the natures of other men, he cannot be a good orator; also, that the living is better than the written word, and that the principles of justice and truth when delivered by word of mouth are the legitimate offspring of a man’s own bosom, and their lawful descendants take up their abode in others. Such an orator as he is who is possessed of them, you and I would fain become. And to all composers in the world, poets, orators, legislators, we hereby announce that if their compositions are based upon these principles, then they are not only poets, orators, legislators, but philosophers.
Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1 [387 AD] PHAEDRUS.

As Socrates travel through the citizenry of the time the question of what was to issue forth from, was always held in the bated breath of Socrates, that he would hear the wisdom of the Over-soul?

How many "degrees of freedom" to see that the chance always exists that what will come forth, is the illumination of something that resides within one's own self and completely accessible.

 The upcoming publication of Carl Jung's Red Book — a record of his fantasies and hallucinations during a sort of breakdown — has excited Jungians the world over. But is Jung still relevant today?

According to a New York Times Magazine article by Sara Corbett, the psychoanalyst Jung "got lost in the soup of his own psyche" when he was 38. He said he was "menaced by a psychosis" and that visions were coming at him in an "incessant stream." "In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,'" he wrote, "I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them." His method of "plummeting" was to write these fantasies down in what is now called his Red Book, a volume full of cramped text and intricate paintings that his family has guarded closely until recently. Now it has been translated into English, and will be published in October. See: Does Carl Jung Matter


Some might find some faint relevance to Robert Pirsig's journey,  to find that such compulsion to materialize in figurative speech, something that arose within Pirsig himself, also arose in Carl Jung?


This is a photograph of author and philosopher Robert M. Pirsigtaken by Ian Glendinning on the eve of the Liverpool conference of 7th July 2005.
What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part 1 Chapter 1.(Bold added by me for emphasis)

While being presented Pirsig's book for reading,  and the subsequent work that arose from that time,  also pointed toward something  real and potential within any of us in my mind, that we might considered in one context as delusional, could be an aspect of our own self as we learn to see this aspect as the higher self "manifest within our own dreams,"  to know what can exist "both delusively and real, subjectively as an imagery of creative recognition is an access to that collective unconscious. The key here is a fishing line, hook and sinker to know that the fisherman has really got "an idea on his mind" as he castes his line.

If one is to understand the "wisdom of illumination," under this context,  then it will ring more true to those who have familiarity in seeking to understand the makeup of the person we are. Some might even recognize an aspect cognitively arising in familiarity with what they observe in the real world.  For them to know that subjectively the imagination is strong and very capable in merging with the areas of  continued research in discoveries in science at the microscopic level.

It seems that anomaly by it's discovery takes keen observation and not just luck. It's a kind of observation that connects many things and not having taken the time to look, will have past the time of as an aspect of probability, and life circumstance, that really holds no meaning? It was just a "moment in time," gone unnoticed until someone close to the path of realization came  along and discovered it for them self.

That's the realization,  that in this opportunity as always existing, it was just waiting for you.




The Red Book, also known as Liber Novus (The New Book), is a 205-page manuscript written and illustrated by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung between approximately 1914 and 1930, which was not published or shown to the public until 2009. Until 2001, his heirs denied scholars access to the book, which he began after a falling-out with Sigmund Freud in 1913. The book is written in calligraphic text and contains many illuminations.

I was excited when I heard news of this book.

As some will know I am a fan of Carl Jung because of what he represented to me in terms of self discovery and understanding of what one finds when one takes  a look at what they are capable of finding inside. You will pass this off very quickly as a subjective adventure, and relevant only to what can pass off as some supernatural event within the context of science's requirements.

But what I want people to know, regardless of their background in science, that such a pursuant to understand the greater complexity of what they can find inside does not relegate them to quackery and crack pottery. It's basically learning something about them self now having taken time.

The Red Book was a product of a technique developed by Jung which he termed active imagination. As Jung described it, he was visited by two figures, an old man and a young woman, who identified themselves as Elijah and Salome. They were accompanied by a large black snake. In time, the Elijah figure developed into a guiding spirit that Jung called Philemon (ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ, as originally written with Greek letters). Salome was identified by Jung as an anima figure. The figures, according to Jung, "brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life."[3]

The Philemon figure represented superior insight, and communicated through mythic imagery. The images did not appear to come from Jung's own experience, and Jung interpreted them as products of the collective unconscious.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Free Access to the Universal Library?


The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
See: World Digital Library. Project information here.

I think it's more wishful thinking on my part that people are able to gain access to the internet freely, and be allowed access to this Library.

UNESCO, Library of Congress and partners launch World Digital Library

The WDL was developed by a team at the Library of Congress. Technical assistance was provided by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina of Alexandria, Egypt. Institutions contributing content and expertise to the WDL include national libraries and cultural and educational institutions in Brazil, Egypt, China, France, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Examples of treasures that will be featured on the WDL include oracle bones and steles contributed by the National Library of China; Arabic scientific manuscripts from the National Library and Archives of Egypt; early photographs of Latin America from the National Library of Brazil; the Hyakumanto darani, a publication from the year 764 from the National Diet Library of Japan; the famous 13th century “Devil’s Bible” from the National Library of Sweden; and works of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish calligraphy from the collections of the Library of Congress.

One of UNESCO’s main mandates is to promote the free flow of all forms of knowledge in education, science, culture and communication. The Organization therefore supports initiatives to improve and increase content on the Internet. To this end, it collaborates with a range of partners on the creation of digital and other repositories.