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Hmmm. I don’t think Dan Ust is still posting and boasting so I will just use the designation “Dan” to refer to Dan Lewis. Dan, remember “Seven of Nine?” How would you explain the “Borg cloned” humans in "StarTrek Voyager.” Was “Six of Nine” different from “Nine of Nine," though still hot in form fitting clothing?

Dan wrote:

On a specifically human level, our "souls" in context of others might somehow be linked to our level of volitional capacities?

end quote

“You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson.

That is a loaded question if “volitional capacity” is referring to a specific human. It is like asking: “What is your IQ?” or “Are you actually thinking or just reciting knee jerk reactions?” or “Can’t you think outside the box? or “What you just said is ethnocentric!”

As regards the ethnocentric, consider the overwhelming fear of "losing face" in Oriental people and being "macho" in Spanish people. Ethnicity is confining and deterministic.

If we knew of other sentient species they might say, “that is so anthropomorphic” or “that is so like humans.” Would reason be universally the same no matter the species using it?

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Dan Lewis wrote:

So Peter, I guess on your question of a soul within DNA-- I think that "soul" or "spirit" in the abstract sense comes from this creative, self-manifesting force within nature itself.

end quote

Objectivists think their essences are outside, to a certain percent, the deterministic forces of nature. On a scale of one to one-hundred I give myself a sixty five. Did my “soul” evolve after conception? Did “spirit number one” evolve to “spirit number two” to “three” etc.? You refer to soul or spirit as being IN THE ABSTRACT SENSE. Is your “abstract sense” outside of nature itself?

Sorry if I sound like “a bull session.” I really appreciate your thinking though I translate it in a convoluted fashion. Don’t spend more time on it than is polite. (joke – George H. Smith would have yelled, “Just read the damn book!” by now.)

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Once more, and then I will be on my way. Dan, you need not respond to every thing I say, or you may. I will take no offense if you don’t. I am just re-surmising concepts after looking at some other threads, then rereading what you wrote.

How important focusing on an individual’s specific genetic / biological evolution is not scientifically pertinent except as one case study. But if we are examining OUR genetic evolution which I take to mean humanity’s genetic evolution then it is important to know who we are, where we will be after mutations, natural selection, and human caused genetic changes occur.

And altering the language for the better and changing learning structures is an ongoing process. My daughter is an educator so I hear a lot about “Common Core” and other remedies to a less than perfect educational system. I am no fan of artificial human languages like Esperanto but I think English could be greatly improved. Get rid of the silent letters! Stop with the dialects that dumb down the language. Get rid of the accents that deviate phonetically from correct usage.

Augmenting humans with computational and sensory devices is sort of exploding all around us. After seeing Watson, IBM’s computer, beat Jeopardy challengers I am apprehensive of the “terminator affect.”

And lastly, I am sorry many people don’t share my love of StarTrek. It is just that it is one show where great ideas were consistently discussed and illustrated. For me, remembering a concretized example is easier if it were discussed for an hour. A non-fiction book on scientific subjects is harder to digest: fact upon fact upon fact. Dan’s illustrations help.

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Roger wrote:

I really sympathize with the Cardassians. They've been so mistreated by the media. :-)

end quote

What I wonder about is flatulence on The Enterprise or an inter galactic space station. You are walking to ten forward and a Klingon walks by and farts.

“Jeezus H. Christ!” you yell. “What were you eating?”

“What?” he replies. “I didn’t do anything.”

One of the primary social stigmata of Kingons is that they fart in air-locks.

And when the finish doing their business in the johns they say - q'plop,

Ba'al Chatzaf

And poor Data. He has a brief, "functional" encounter with Lt. Yar & he feels nothing.

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Las Vegas wrote:

And poor Data. He has a brief, "functional" encounter with Lt. Yar & he feels nothing.

end quote

I wonder about that. Could Data fantasize? From a posterior view pretty Tasha Yar with her boyish, blond haircut might induce Data into a kinky reverie. Of course to be kinky an android might need to feel jaded, which in turn might mean Data had had coitus with his own species many times, and with several traditionally sexy human women.

Then boyish Tasha Yar would have seemed kinky, or is that just my own programming, Sigmund? After all those hydraulic fluid leaks a satiated Data Soong, (son of Doctor Noonien Soong,) might start saying, “Tasha, why don’t you just call me Dada, instead of Data?” Naw! That is too weird.

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Lol Peter-- I too share a love for Stak Trek, so I know who/what you are referencing when you bring up these scenarios ( I was truly disappointed when they took the lastest Star Trek: Enterprise off the air-- Next Generation was my favorite--I grew up on it).

On the idea of cadavers and genomes, I think that human life and consciousness is more than this, yes. I think the patterns of chemical and electrical stimuli produced through or directed by genomes and in different regions of the body and brain, and within our systems and brains as wholes, probably hold many secrets to the science behind human-specific knowledge and consciousness. But I also think it is important how those patterns compare to chemical and electrical patterns of the stimuli reacting off of external objects—I think there has to be some self-similar physical thread that allows us to define traits of objects and construct percepts inductively. Deductively, I think axiomatic structure may be a key to how synergies between things can be unwound and understood more clearly, and also how we could more easily in creative processes, understand how to put together knowledge to have it actually work or be of significance.

Data and Seven-of-Nine I think were my favorite characters of all the Star Trek characters because they brought to light in me how it could be possible for an inanimate thing to become an entity that could value itself—artificial intelligence seems so possible to me now. Seven-of-Nine was so interesting because she was a biological being that in a mental sense was forced to become an inanimate part in a big Borg machine, and had to relearn becoming an individual, of controlling her own actions, I being of her own volition—that was a fascinating (and yes sexy) character.

You, Peter, ask about soul, and its relation to volition in this way, and make good points about where one would draw the line between a volition that would make one human? I honestly do not know, because we seem to start our lives in volitional states very comparable or even below that of other animals, so I understand why you would want to trace some kind of human “soul” to DNA, as a potential way to trace and differentiate us from other animals. I’m not sure this is possible because as Michael stated and what I hope I explained in the preceding paragraph, life and consciousness, I think, require certain chemical and electrical stimulations to activate genomes and inanimate substances into living ones—I address this somewhat in footnote 24 of the book, explaining how scientists have indeed already created amino acids (the building blocks of proteins and life) from electrically charge elemental gases as early as 1953—in 2010 scientist successfully programmed an otherwise “blank” cell to self-replicate. So I think there is some energetic, self-regulating patterning that converts an otherwise inanimate or “dead” substance to a living one— Binswanger talks about self-regulation in his article “Volition as Cognitive Self-Regulation.” Perhaps somehow this volition, or the ability to go in a different direction within oneself, some internal, multifunctional capacity, may be what evolves things creatively from the inside out, evolutionarily, into “higher” capabilies, “higher” states of being, in some intrinsic way/sense, e.g. actually helping to reprogram our environments and perhaps even our genes/biologies.

I do not think “souls” are outside of nature itself, but are a manifestation of the mechanism of self-creation that I think the universe/existence possesses. I just framed this idea as “abstract” because it is more removed from what we may experience as our souls. So I think “souls” really could be attributed to any individual thing, although the term may be more fitting to address life-forms, conscious or even just self-conscious entities, because the term maybe implies a kind of self-reflection?

I think what sets humans apart from other animals eventually is our high development of creative capacities—our ability to have a lot of options at our fingertips and to go in many different directions—we may fail at a lot of them, but eventually we gain as a collective at a much higher speed I think, because we can find out what works among all those options much quicker. I see “creative” and “evolutionary” as synonymous in some sense, and I think volition in some sense is a creative internal capacity caused by the level of freedom an entity possess. We are getting to the point though “volition,” or at least out conscious capacities of knowledge (more successfully than “random” mutations btw) , that we are able to actually reshape genetic material, control the innate processes that guide our beings—now isn’t that incredible! We don’t have to wait multiple generations, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years to have a part of our very basic, bodily nature change. This is why I think volition comes from some more basic creative force within all self-regulating things. If we access and use that, we seem to have much more power than waiting for “random” changes and/or genetic/environmental deterministic forces to guide our actions.



I appreciate your humor and interesting reflections, Peter. Yeah, poor Data.. all that intellect and he often doesn’t know how to direct it—I suppose he could fantasize is someone directed or told him to--lucky he was is such an awesome environment to sculpt his values—he could have been way more screwed up than just having some trouble wrapping his head around sex!

Thanks Michael for purchasing the book—I’m honored—Steven is actually one of the key people who helped me formulate/clarify some of its most important concepts by asking me some very good questions years ago, so I’m really interested to hear more of his responses as well as yours.

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Las Vegas wrote, “Data looked happy.”

Thank you for the clip! I re - watched the Data, Tasha encounter, up close and on a big screen. It has been years since I saw it. I had forgotten SO much, especially how slap stick it was. I mostly remember Tasha but Data was entirely too adolescently “human.” I must look that episode up. At the end of the clip, it appeared that Doctor Crusher was going to start making out with Captain Picard as soon as the door to his “ready room” closed. Were the ladies on board all becoming aroused at the same time from an external source? I suppose a “captain” might want to have his room near the bridge, but its closeness illustrated its lack of privacy. Remember the Italian Captain of that cruise ship that went aground? He was having a dalliance with a passenger at the time.

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DL wrote:

. . . we seem to start our lives in volitional states very comparable or even below that of other animals, so I understand why you would want to trace some kind of human “soul” to DNA, as a potential way to trace and differentiate us from other animals.

end quote

Was I that obvious? Cyborg, place an emoticon here.

Perhaps the continuation of consciousness, memory, and history within each individual human is what makes it important that our species survive. Seeking survival and immortality in “lesser” living entities is programmed and when higher entities evolve, as in the mammalian classification, we see an emotional desire and not just a programmed response to survive. Someone once described a beautiful natural scene as important only because a sentient being was experiencing the “feeling and appreciation” required for “meaning.”

I skipped ahead in your book to “Ethics.” Your approach truly differs from Rand, Peikoff, etc., (you know what I mean and who I mean.) I truly wish you would put thoughts into essay form as do on OL. Your charts and linkage techniques reminds me of my brief experience with logical proofs. Interesting responses Dan. More later. And as always no response from you is required.

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DL wrote:

. . . e.g. actually helping to reprogram our environments and perhaps even our genes/biologies.

end quote

Get back Vampire. Don’t you see the cross in my hand! My “educator” daughter was just talking about the Seymour Hoffman film, “The Master,” and mentioned the bromide about how “switching on the unused portions of our brains” progresses from a truly *raised conscious awareness* to mind control as with Scientologists, Gurus, e-meter lie detectors, the artificial phony levels of Scientology, and then “you gave me all your money, now go out and coerce other people out of their money.” Her point was that “switching on the unused portions of our brains” is similar to training for the Olympics or Jeopardy, and is a good thing (as with teachers like her) just keep the bullshit “Thetan mentality” out of the process.

I am still waiting for the scientific proof but lectures like, “The Principles of Objective Thinking,” are a step in the right direction, as may be your book. Brain games seem to change the physiology and functioning of consciousness, and not just with Alzheimer’s patients. Though, I am not sure how volitional human consciousness could reprogram its genes, other than in a medical, physical sense, like gene therapy. I seem to remember Objectivists postulating a type of “getting in the zone” mental process which required being aware of everything on the sensory level, then being rational, uncompromised and clear in thinking, which leads to never needing to check your premises, (or ever needing to say you’re sorry.)

Scifi has postulated hypnotic spinning wheels and devices, subliminal TV messages, consciousness raising drugs, etc., to guess what a malevolent future might bring, but I think true brain washing requires human interaction, if only in the sense that one belongs to a group (per Nathaniel Branden.)

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Peter,

Lol-- yeah, I was thinking of volitional reprogramming of genes/biologies mainly in the medical sense, although I do think there is something to be said for states of mediative clarity and good thinking for channeling our biologies in the right direction (thanks for The Principles of Objective Thinking reference). There are some interesting stories of people having "spiritual" awakenings that have helped them overcome diseases/health problems, for instance, but of course all we really have in these cases is testimonials (or maybe someone has done detailed MRI scans trying to document what is going on there, I don't know). I don't doubt that there is some power of positive/spiritual thinking,in reaching out to a "higher" power or something at the base of things that seems more alive or tangibly real in relation to our inner state, in short, some base connection to the wider scope of things-- I don't think people who believe in God in this sense are crazy at all. Maybe there are other directive levels of consciousness too, but a lot of the parapsychology "science" out there is pretty weak right now--that seems more hocus-pocus to me than any simple faith in a larger "purpose" that can at least center us, if not more. There are definitely altered states of consciousness and/or various levels of it, too (e.g. in sleep, drug induced, in early development, etc.), but these are not necessarily synthesizing information with any "higher" level of control, where consciousness itself may be evolving, as perhaps what happens when we become self-conscious in early childhood, or perhaps what may be happening with prefrontal human language development or our logical/analytical abilities (e.g. in piecing together things or objects with their actions, attributes, relations), or perhaps at some "volitional" level where creative thinking occurs instead of pre-programmed and/or mimicry-trained thinking. I think it is curious that all these abilities we often see as more "human" seem to start around the same time-- traditionally as kids move out of infant stages, begin verbally communicating, piecing together concepts, understanding the word "I," and defying parents intentionally (more volitionally) or for no "good" reason (versus the crying of a baby for comfort or food-- a more automatic response to bodily pleasure and pain). I don't feel good either with marking this developmental stage as the beginning point of a true "human" being, but it may be a place where certain rights could be granted a child that it wouldn't have simply at birth (or even within the womb at latter stages). The alternative of not drawing any lines seems to leave us tied-up in ambiguity, leading to our current debates on abortion rights, the death penalty, the right-to-die, and legal ages for adulthood, as well as other rights like sexual consent, drug use, marriage, as well as other legal and economic rights and privileges. If we can start to more accurately define the mental and/or physical qualifications needed to operate on certain volitional levels, it may help resolve many of the social tensions that are caused by leaving it up in the air-- what are your thoughts?

I love to jump around in books-- so I wrote the book figuring people could treat it more like a reference book if they wanted-- and the Humanities section is definitely easier reading than Chapter 3 anyway.

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Las Vegas wrote, “Data looked happy.”

Thank you for the clip! I re - watched the Data, Tasha encounter, up close and on a big screen. It has been years since I saw it. I had forgotten SO much, especially how slap stick it was. I mostly remember Tasha but Data was entirely too adolescently “human.” I must look that episode up. At the end of the clip, it appeared that Doctor Crusher was going to start making out with Captain Picard as soon as the door to his “ready room” closed. Were the ladies on board all becoming aroused at the same time from an external source? I suppose a “captain” might want to have his room near the bridge, but its closeness illustrated its lack of privacy. Remember the Italian Captain of that cruise ship that went aground? He was having a dalliance with a passenger at the time.

I enjoyed the majority of episodes of STNG. 3 characters I could do without were Wesley (hardly believable for bridge duty), Troy (annoying) & her mother (more annoying). BBC, which I don't get, still airs it. ST Enterprise (ah, 7 of 9) & ST DS9 were also usually good.

A side note: I remember reading when STNG was airing in its first few seasons the cost to produce an episode was approx. $1 Million; a sizeable amount during that time.

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Dan wrote:

. . . we may fail at a lot of them, but eventually we gain as a collective at a much higher speed I think, because we can find out what works among all those options much quicker.

end quote

Dan may have used the word “collective” instead of the word “society” before his “Ethics” chapter but that is the first time it poked me in the ribs, because “Collective” is a Marxist term. Of course, Ayn Rand used collective jokingly as the name for her close circle of philosophical friends. I do think he is using collective in a sense similar to Rand’s term society, but with a linkage to our gene pools.

And then for animals we use the terms herd or flock, etc. One example of increased animal longevity in a society: the geese are landing in the fields around my house. When the flock takes off there are sometimes one or two that stick around exposing themselves to increased predation because the open fields gives a fox a clear field of vision and there are no neighbors with watchful eyes to sound the alarm. If there is just one goose it is almost always injured and may not be able to fly or it hurts to fly.

I prefer to use the word, “society” instead of “collective,” to mean a combination of individuals, culture, shared knowledge, government, and gene pool. One castaway may not have the life span of a person within a society if the group is not violent nor the government oppressive, but in writing about ethics I prefer the designations “individual,” and “society.” Of course a permanent castaway cannot continue his genetic lineage, except through far fetched “what ifs”, such as pre-stored genetic material back on the mainland. Now, back to replays of the show, “Lost.” “Lost’s” Doctor Babe with blond hair who is now appearing on “Revolution” would be a fitting companion for a warrior.

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Let’s see if I can paraphrase without quoting. In Dan’s chapter on “Time” he mentions that a photon, or any other particle or mass including a “singularity” cannot exceed the speed of light. However if a mini-singularity (black hole?) and a photon were both emitted towards the same target simultaneously, they would NOT arrive at the same time. Singularities are not affected by gravity. Photons are affected by gravity, as is every other thing in the universe. So each instance that the two entities approach mass, which has gravity, the photon will bend around the pull of gravity but the singularity will not. So the singularity could arrive faster than light, though it never exceeds the speed of light.

With eye number two, I simultaneously watched a science channel last night about SETI. One person speculated that our first radio emissions may not reach a “listener” for another hundred years. Or, if there are malevolent entities in the universe the wise are keeping quiet.

From the note at the end, “The loss of energy also suggests that black holes do not last forever, but rather "evaporate" slowly.”

Peter

Notes, snipped and sniped from Wikipedia:

A gravitational singularity or spacetime singularity is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. These quantities are the scalar invariant curvatures of spacetime, which includes a measure of the density of matter.

For the purposes of proving the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, and a spacetime with a singularity is defined to be one that contains geodesics that cannot be extended in a smooth manner. The end of such a geodesic is considered to be the singularity. This is a different definition, useful for proving theorems.

The two most important types of spacetime singularities are curvature singularities and conical singularities. Singularities can also be divided according to whether they are covered by an event horizon or not (naked singularities).

According to general relativity, the initial state of the universe, at the beginning of the Big Bang, was a singularity. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics break down in describing the Big Bang, but in general, quantum mechanics does not permit particles to inhabit a space smaller than their wavelengths. Another type of singularity predicted by general relativity is inside a black hole: any star collapsing beyond a certain point (the Schwarzschild radius) would form a black hole, inside which a singularity (covered by an event horizon) would be formed, as all the matter would flow into a certain point (or a circular line, if the black hole is rotating). This is again according to general relativity without quantum mechanics, which forbids wavelike particles entering a space smaller than their wavelength. These hypothetical singularities are also known as curvature singularities.

An example is the Schwarzschild solution that describes a non-rotating, uncharged black hole. In coordinate systems convenient for working in regions far away from the black hole, a part of the metric becomes infinite at the event horizon. However, spacetime at the event horizon is regular. The regularity becomes evident when changing to another coordinate system (such as the Kruskal coordinates), where the metric is perfectly smooth . On the other hand, in the center of the black hole, where the metric becomes infinite as well, the solutions suggest singularity exists . . . Such a singularity may also theoretically become a wormhole.

Before Stephen Hawking came up with the concept of Hawking radiation, the question of black holes having entropy was avoided. However, this concept demonstrates that black holes can radiate energy, which conserves entropy and solves the incompatibility problems with the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy, however, implies heat and therefore temperature. The loss of energy also suggests that black holes do not last forever, but rather "evaporate" slowly. Small black holes tend to be hotter whereas larger ones tend to be colder. All known black hole candidates are so large that their temperature is far below that of the cosmic background radiation, so they are all gaining energy. They will not begin to lose energy until a cosmological redshift of more than one million is reached, rather than the thousand or so since the background radiation formed.

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Las Vegas--

Yeah, who wasn't annoyed by the STNG episodes with Troy's mother--lol--though I happened to like Troy, she presented different psychic capabilities that were sometimes interesting, I though, in contrast to all the technological bravado and more "rational" judgement of the other characters-- yeah, her lines were sometimes pretty stupid, and I haven't watched it in a long time, so who knows, it may all seem cheesy to me now:) I was a fan of Voyager too (7-of-9!), some of DSpaceNine (could have done without Odo and Quark though (Whoopi [Guinan] was such a better character for a bartender).

Peter--

Yeah, I suppose "collective" does have a lot of negative connotations in an Objectivist forum--I did mean it to be essentially synonymous with society, not as a mind-dead drone state as may be insinuated with a Borg, "bee-hive"-like "collective." I hope you've realized in reading the book that this is my intention. I used collective instead of society becasue I think it is more entity-neutral-- it doesn't just reference living or human populations.

The Wikipedia article "Collective" states, "A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together to achieve a common objective.[citation needed] Collectives differ from cooperatives in that they are not necessarily focused upon an economic benefit or saving, but can be that as well....

The term "collective" is sometimes used to describe a species as a whole—for example, the human collective."

The Wikipedia arctile "Society" says, "A society, or a human society, is a group of people involved with each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members. In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification and/or dominance patterns in subgroups....

More broadly, a society may be illustrated as an economic, social, or industrial infrastructure, made up of a varied collection of individuals. Members of a society may be from different ethnic groups. A society can be a particular ethnic group, such as the Saxons; a nation state, such as Bhutan; or a broader cultural group, such as a Western society. The word society may also refer to an organized voluntary association of people for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes. A "society" may even, though more by means of metaphor, refer to a social organism such as an ant colony or any cooperative aggregate such as, for example, in some formulations of artificial intelligence."

------------------

Yes-- your paraphrasing of my section on the Principles of Time, "The Speed of Knowledge" is very good/accurate. Essentially, I think some "base substance" or "singularity" at the genesis of the universe or otherwise (as black holes, etc.) likely either moves/moved at the speed of light or faster, because if it moved slower, we'd likely be able to observe it/measure it. And I tried to describe how, through spatial geometry, such a base substance/singularity could still reach points faster tthan light, without having to actually move at an intrinsically faster "speed." The idea of "velocity" as a combination of both direction and speed iwas central to this idea.

Thanks for piecing together all that information on singulariites-- that is really interesting-- although I'd read about postulations of different geometries of singularities, I hadn't read the about the ones you presented specifically. I think the way that light/EM radiation reacts with black holes especially (e.g. Hawking radiation), holds some geometric key to unlocking primal patterns of space-time. I like the idea of a center of a black hole as a worm hole, but I tend to think (as I think most scientists do) that all matter and even light/EM radiation, rips apart and becomes some primal "base substance" after entering a black hole-- though this may lead to an expansion/contraction between the cosmologic boundary of two different universes or between our inner space and a larger infinity of space-time.

You state "quantum mechanics does not permit particles to inhabit a space smaller than their wavelengths." This is a main reason why I think space is externally infinite and internally finite, and why the universe, if starting form an isotropic, homogenous singularity, has to move inward-- and why I think gravity delocalizes/echoes this inward movement after amounts of substance/masses form. For the universe (in the grand sense-- not just to our cosmologic horizon) to create itself, yet still encompass all physicality, it has to have both some infinite capacity and some self-limiting capacity inherent in its nature (if there isn't an external "God" or other force ouside nature). This "outward-inward" construct is the simplest geometric way I could conceive of it-- though "inward" and "outward" may be three-dimensional boundaries that dont exactly function like I/we may visualize them at this most primal level of space-time, or points of singularity.

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Jonathan, Shephen, anyone who may have some insights...

One issue brought soemtimes with my artwork, or sometimes with my love of much of Andrew Wyeth's work (and I think Jonathan--there is some connection here) , is that it sometimes may fall into being "just" design or illustration, and not "art." Is this an arbitrary division? Can something was once illustration/design become "art" and/or vice versa? What could be some main factors that separate one from the other, and is one a "lower" or "higher" expression than the other? I think it is connected to the idea my high-chool art teacher often brought up-- the idea of "showing" vs "telling" --that somehow through the meduim, scale, and/or context of the expression,etc, what people are classifying as "art" more viscerally leads us throughthe experience, whereas in visual design/ illustration all we have is some more brief element, symbol or story to get at a meaning. Almost the difference between pure "aesthetics" vs. its "langauge" -- where more conrtent is infused in the elements and context of the object itself in art vs "design," and I think it might have something to do with how removed we are (bodily and mentally) in the perception process, feeling/relating closer to an object or further removed from it (e.g. when we touch an object it can do more bodily harm than looking at an object) Has anyone thought about clearer distinctions in these divisions?

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Jonathan, Shephen, anyone who may have some insights...

One issue brought soemtimes with my artwork, or sometimes with my love of much of Andrew Wyeth's work (and I think Jonathan--there is some connection here) , is that it sometimes may fall into being "just" design or illustration, and not "art." Is this an arbitrary division?

I think it's an arbitrary or subjective division.

As I wrote in this old post:

"Does the fact that an illustrator contracts for a specific purpose mean that he can't express his independent artistic vision in his work in addition to complying with his client's utilitarian requirements, much as an architect does? If Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and Mary GrandPre were hired to illustrate the same text, each of their distinctly individual styles or visual personalities would show through as strongly as Frank Lloyd Wright's, Frank Gehry's and Santiago Calatrava's would if hired to submit designs for the same building site...I don't think that working under a contract, and for a specific purpose not of the artist's direct choosing, is necessarily a defining aspect of illustration. The online dictionaries/-pedias define "illustration" as visual matter that is generally used to represent, clarify or decorate a text. One needn't be under contract with someone else to do so. In fact, an artist could "illustrate the text" by painting characters and scenes similar to those in his favorite author's novels, or by basing his images on his favorite philosopher's descriptions of what heroes or heroic art should look like, or by fleshing out or mimicking his favorite novelist/philosopher's rewritings of Greek mythology."

Can something was once illustration/design become "art" and/or vice versa? What could be some main factors that separate one from the other, and is one a "lower" or "higher" expression than the other?

There is no rational, objective means of separating them. They're all art. They only become "higher" or "lower" art forms, or "non-art," according to individuals' subjective tastes and opinions.

A typical Objectivist might look at illustrations in a drill's user manual and declare that they're not art, where you might look at them and recognize, where the Objectivist doesn't, that the forms have artistic style and expression that have nothing to do with demonstrating how to use a drill. Like architecture, the images can serve two purposes -- utility and art -- that are not in conflict with each other (the utility of instruction doesn't impede the expressiveness of the artistry, and the artistry doesn't impede the utility of the instructiveness).

J

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Dan wrote:

This is a main reason why I think space is externally infinite and internally finite, and why the universe, if starting from an isotropic, homogenous singularity, has to move inward-- and why I think gravity delocalizes/echoes this inward movement after amounts of substance/masses form. For the universe (in the grand sense-- not just to our cosmologic horizon) to create itself, yet still encompass all physicality, it has to have both some infinite capacity and some self-limiting capacity inherent in its nature . . . .

end quote

Oh ho! So you are a proponent of the sequence: Big Bang, big expansion, big contraction, resulting in another Big Bang? Maybe you aren’t but what if matter is moving and expanding outward from the original big bang but the universe is *finite* and the matter is streaming back towards the big bang’s original location? It requires thinking in at least one more dimension to conceive of the “egg’s” contents (a single substance?) exiting a central “yolk” yet flowing back from beyond the shell horizon.

Bravo for your linkage between the antiquated, discredited concept of “aether” and its similarity to our concept (with more evidence) of dark matter. The universe is 96 percent dark and 4 percent light. Though the theory of dark matter “may be” correct, we still do not know a whole lot about it. Your idea to mine the 96 percent of dark matter turning into light matter is a great theory for a scifi story. As long as the ratio is not essential from the rules of the universe, hi ho, hi ho. Now if you could just find a use for massive singularities . . . though if humans did go on a star trek could we use black holes as navigational “unlight houses” or gravitational whips to speed up and then go past them as has been postulated and used with planets?

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As I wrote in this old post:

Have you corrected the link while I've been putting this post together, or was there a glitch which somehow sent me to the wrong post (this post) on the old thread?

Whichever, delightfully serendipitously from my standpoint, the post which came up when I clicked your link contains a set of parallel images you provided:

2693303411_40dbc3f704_o.jpg

I've been wanting to look again at that set of images, but I didn't remember what thread it was on and I haven't had time to search.

A question I've wondered about before is whether all of the 5 middle images on the left are in fact paintings. To me, they look as if they could be photographs, but maybe that's just because of loss of detail in reproduction.

I re-read the whole thread. I think it's a very interesting discussion and goes directly to the core of issues raised about abstract art, architecture and music. Your posts are concise, and I think that Ted and Robert made intelligent, though mistaken, attempts at defending the idea that music has reference.

Their dismissals on abstract art, however.......

A particular point which strikingly illustrates how differently different people can see the same painting is Ted's remark about the Kandinsky painting Michael Newberry posted:

[....]

kandinsky.jpg

[....]

[....]

How do they make me feel? The colored painting simply evokes pity at incompetance.

It immediately makes me feel way impressed at Kandinsky's skill!

Ellen

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Ellen and Jonathan,

Thoughtful posts... I tend to agree with you Jonathan, that the distinction between "illustrator" and "artist" is probably a pretty arbitrary one, but if "art" differentiates from other forms of creation (e.g. nature's creations (not manipulated by humans-- like a tree in a field), orf technologies (like medicine, electronics, etc), then exactly how? I can see that art could more broadly house all human creations,with technologies being mainly for direct human contact vs. more contemplative, "at a distance" contact which we might prescribe more to our senses of sight and sound.e.g., thus as categories for "fine arts" vs. "applied arts"( although these categories may have an aire of judgement and status unduly placed upon them). Do you agree with this assessment, or do you think the labels are altogether unneccessary?

Post #120-- I love how Jonathan originally paired these representational and abstract images together to show how there doesn't have to be that much formal difference between the two -- or for one to become the other-- Ellen, I think that last painting by Kandinsky is a wonderful example of how something that may appear "simpler" in appearance, may be actually much more creative and intellectually complex than other more "complex" appearing imagery. Funny, I've never really been too attracted to Kandinsky's work (better in person but still not one of my favorite artists), but seeing this painting here, and then comparing it to all the images above it, I have to say I'm most interested in the design elements of the Kandinsky, perhaps because they are strangely unpreditacble-- there is a "skill" or at least a hard at attain sensitivity in work that has both simplicity of form, yet can hold one's interest with an internal dynamism. I get this same sense of playful mastery from Ben Shahn. Children's paintings sometimes have the same attentive uniqueness to them-- and I have been able to see the difference in young students (of no apparent skill level) work where they have been sensitive to the marks and design elements they put of a page-- same as if they were observing an object intently and putting and down what they see, versus the students that more randomly and/or without the same care, scribble something down-- there are happy accidents of course, but those are more rare. I used to think most non-representational art was not very good btw-- it took me a long time to understand some of the actual intricacies of application, materials, and creative uses of design elements. On the Kandinsky above it seems nothing strongly repeats across the whole canvas. I think repetition can kill the motion within visual art if it becomes too monotonous and/or looks too "designed". MC Escher would be a good example of an artist that often uses repetition in what woud normally be considered a "template-like," static "design" motif, except that Escher has such creative dynamism of thought, through his use of positive-negative spaces and figures in braids of illusion, that an incredible variety of interest develops out from his "illustrative" or "design" artwork. Kandinsky approaches his work from a very different angle, reducing the repetition of form and creating more simple heirarches and transitions of shapes and colors that can freely dance upon the surface. I guess another question that arises for me out of this is, how is formal merit (irrespective of moral, social or other kinds of artistic/aesthetic merit), even just technical skill, to be judged, if simple forms can be put together in such a way that they can still elicit a complex response? Are there any solid standards for good artistic judgement , even when reduced to formal/ technical qualities?

I tend to think there are visual forms that break up perception so much that an image can't really be integrated well (e.g. colors to glaringly bright it causes pain to look at them, forms too spatially distant from one anohter to make a relation within our visual views, motions happening too quick or outside of a series of events to detect them,etc.) as well as on the other spectral end, forms that are so simple/common or ingrained in normal experience, they aren't often noticed/separated/absttracted enough to warant contemplation (e.g. a wall of a single neutral color, average/common landscapes/object, etc.) Could these be some formal starting/ending points to qualify "good" art from others?

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Peter--

I had never thought of black holes/singularities to be used like gravitational "whips" to speed up space travel-- that 's an awesome possibility! Not sure I follow the "finite" space (infinite time?) time scenario you are talking about, but I'm sure there are more possible scenarios of how space-time could work than what I have conceived in the book-- though I don't think any of them could get around some substantive infintiy without falling into an infinite regress problem for any "self-caused" universe.

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Post #120-- I love how Jonathan originally paired these representational and abstract images together to show how there doesn't have to be that much formal difference between the two -- or for one to become the other--

That part first. I love the way Jonathan did the pairing, too. He has such an eye. The compositional features of each pair echo each other.

I'll post the images again, to have them on this page. I'll follow with another post from the old thread. The second post shows a progression toward abstractness in one painter's - Mondrian's - tree drawings.

2693303411_40dbc3f704_o.jpg

Time to resurrect an earlier post that seems appropriate here:

An interesting example of increasing abstraction in the work of an artist is a series of paintings of trees by Mondriaan, where you can see the transition from a recognizable tree to an increasingly abstract geometric pattern:

mondriaan1.jpg

The Red Tree - 1908

mondriaan2.jpg

The Grey Tree - 1911

mondriaan3.jpg

Apple Tree - 1912

Ellen

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Next, the Kandinsky. Again, I'll repost the image:

kandinsky.jpg

Ellen, I think that last painting by Kandinsky is a wonderful example of how something that may appear "simpler" in appearance, may be actually much more creative and intellectually complex than other more "complex" appearing imagery.

To me, the painting doesn't appear "simpler." Instead what I see is the complexity of the "line" and the intricate interplay of the colors in relationship to the "line."

Several posters have commented in earlier OL threads where we've talked about Kandinsky to the effect that the paintings look to them just like colors slapped together haphazardly - like Ted's remark on the currently linked thread that he was reminded of a child's finger painting. What I see instead is a color selection and shading and placement which is carefully considered and imaginative in its placement, thus a sort of complexity on the order of permutations and combinations, more similar, say, to a fugue - or, maybe a better comparison, something by Scriabin - than to a song.

It seems to me generally with abstract art that what I'm reacting to is like the abstractness of geometry, crystallography, atomic structure - an underlying level beneath external form.

On the Kandinsky above it seems nothing strongly repeats across the whole canvas. I think repetition can kill the motion within visual art if it becomes too monotonous and/or looks too "designed". MC Escher would be a good example of an artist that often uses repetition in what woud normally be considered a "template-like," static "design" motif, except that Escher has such creative dynamism of thought, through his use of positive-negative spaces and figures in braids of illusion, that an incredible variety of interest develops out from his "illustrative" or "design" artwork. Kandinsky approaches his work from a very different angle, reducing the repetition of form and creating more simple heirarches and transitions of shapes and colors that can freely dance upon the surface.

That comparison interests me a lot, and I think it's accurate. My husband and I are both Escher fans, and we've studied Escher's work in some depth. Larry, my husband, is a physicist. He has a strong interest in symmetry and was for about thirteen years one of the three or four (sometimes three, sometimes four) executive organizers for the International Symmetry Association. (He and the former executive head both retired this last summer, time to pass on the torch.)

This last summer there was a conference of the ISA - in Delft, Holland. The previous conferences have all been in Budapest. Delft was Vermeer's home - and still looks the same as his two landscape paintings. The town is steeped in art, as is Holland generally. You might know that Escher lived in Holland for many years. There's a museum with lots of his original work in Den Haag. We spent a day there. The work is even more fascinating with its broken symmetries when you can see it on a wall where you can step closer to and farther from it. Neither Larry nor I had been aware before, having only seen reproductions in books, that with some of the tilings there's a disconcerting, rather spooky, depth effect as you back away from the etching, especially the ones with fish eyes and/or fins.

Ellen

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Third, the reflections about classification and standards.

Ellen and Jonathan,

Thoughtful posts... I tend to agree with you Jonathan, that the distinction between "illustrator" and "artist" is probably a pretty arbitrary one,

I agree about the arbitrariness. I'll add that some of the world's finest art could classify as "illustration." For instance, the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

but if "art" differentiates from other forms of creation (e.g. nature's creations (not manipulated by humans-- like a tree in a field), orf technologies (like medicine, electronics, etc), then exactly how? I can see that art could more broadly house all human creations,with technologies being mainly for direct human contact vs. more contemplative, "at a distance" contact which we might prescribe more to our senses of sight and sound.e.g., thus as categories for "fine arts" vs. "applied arts"( although these categories may have an aire of judgement and status unduly placed upon them). Do you agree with this assessment, or do you think the labels are altogether unneccessary?

I think the categories have legitimacy, minus undue status placed on them, and I don't think that there's a need to try to find a common characteristic which encompasses all the pursuits for which the word "art" is used in standard parlance. For example, "the art of medicine," or of other practices, where "art" means skillful, knowledge-informed doing, has a family resemblance in the skill and the element of creativity to "art" in the sense of painting, music, dance, literature, etc., but I think the resemblance only goes so far and can be left vague without producing misunderstanding.

I used to think most non-representational art was not very good btw-- it took me a long time to understand some of the actual intricacies of application, materials, and creative uses of design elements.

I think there's a fair amount of non-representational art which isn't very good, and that it's a type of art which provides an easy open sesame to posturing as an artist. However, there's also plenty of representational art which isn't very good, and posturing as an artist is possible with representational art, too, although maybe not so easily.

I guess another question that arises for me out of this is, how is formal merit (irrespective of moral, social or other kinds of artistic/aesthetic merit), even just technical skill, to be judged, if simple forms can be put together in such a way that they can still elicit a complex response? Are there any solid standards for good artistic judgement , even when reduced to formal/ technical qualities?

I tend to think there are visual forms that break up perception so much that an image can't really be integrated well (e.g. colors to glaringly bright it causes pain to look at them, forms too spatially distant from one anohter to make a relation within our visual views, motions happening too quick or outside of a series of events to detect them,etc.) as well as on the other spectral end, forms that are so simple/common or ingrained in normal experience, they aren't often noticed/separated/absttracted enough to warant contemplation (e.g. a wall of a single neutral color, average/common landscapes/object, etc.) Could these be some formal starting/ending points to qualify "good" art from others?

I think that the criteria you mention are the types of criteria which provide "solid standards for good artistic judgement," but that even with such criteria there will remain an ineluctable degree of subjectivity. The judgment of time is the verdict that wins in the end, albeit with vagaries according to fashion. And with differences of opinion even pertaining to artists that many, many people have considered great artists for many years. For example, Vermeer. I was amused last summer when a Delft native with whom Larry and I became friendly, a guy who's super smart, a physicist, well-educated in other areas, a kind of "Renaissance" person, said that he thought Vermeer was badly over-rated and was technically poor - he cited the proportion discrepancies in some of Vermeer's work, for instance, in the view of Delft. "Ah, well," I said, "one really can't please 'em all."

Ellen

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