COMMENSAL ISSUE 92

I enclose a couple of comments and thank you for your continued commitment to the SIG.

CUCKOOS (Theo, C91/21): To be honest I don't really want to get bogged down in the philosophy of mathematics. As far as I know there is no precise mathematical relationship between a straight line and a curved one. Also, the fact that mathematics can never be a complete system means that it can never fully describe reality; though for Godel's sake don't ask me to prove it! At best I see it as an interesting fiction which occasionally happens to accidentally match some minor part of reality.

I assume you are agreeing that whatever space is, it isn't nothingness. Whether or not there is nothingness as well may be a meaningless question. As our positron and electron annihilate each other they return towards the state from whence they came via the radiation which formed the early stage of everything. I have some doubts over whether holes filled by electrons become nothing, but that's Physics for you. Also, I cannot agree that the positive and negative signs for the positron and electron are mere convention (assuming you mean like 'up' and 'atom'). The error is to model zero as nothingness rather than the ground state of everything; a ground state which must be undetectable simply because it is a ground state. A ground state which, as you know, I believe to be consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS (Roger Farnworth, C91/37-39): What if the brain itself was simply an input device, one part filtering the senses; another filtering the memory. The problem is that you could never prove that memory was in the brain in the first place. How could one tell the difference between a memory centre and a memory access? It may seem that memory is put into the brain because of the lack of alternative sites but the current state of physical knowledge leaves no excuse for that. Everything is part of everything else. Why should we be left out?

KILLING (Sheila Blanchard, C91/36): I must apologise for the careless use of language in my term 'legalise murder' concerning abortion. I believe that the state commits murder by concealing what is actually happening behind distorted definitions of life and dependency without which it may well be illegal, and that the distortions may be maliciously intended to deceive; but even these cannot save this unfortunate marriage of words from being a contradiction.

Sheila was right that I wasn't making a serious moral judgement, as I intended mainly to be provocative. However, I believe that people must be held responsible for their actions or society will disintegrate. An often quoted though rarely applicable justification for abortion is rape but it still involves killing a human being, a proto human if you prefer. If the state is determined to kill something wouldn't it be better to kill the rapist and let the child go for adoption? Of course, I cannot fully understand the effect of rape on a woman but it is unlikely that this would be much mitigated by killing the child. It could even be made worse! In all other cases the mother must take responsibility, as must the father. If the woman is so promiscuous as to not know who the father is then it seems entirely fair that she accepts the burden alone. I strongly suspect that part of the reason for the cute definitions which enable the state to get away with murder, and, incidentally, to divert the resources of the NHS, is to lessen the increase in population. This may well be a necessary measure, but why not kill criminals (C88/28) ? Why not bring in licences for having children; the penalty for having a child without a licence being sterilisation. The licence could be granted at any time up to the birth, given that the parents satisfied whatever were the criteria: being married being a fairly obvious one. Those failing to get a licence would then be freed to be as promiscuous as they liked.

None of this will happen, of course. The well-meaning but wholly misguided will co-operate with the promiscuous and the criminal until the latter are in the majority at which point no democratic government could do anything about it and anarchy would ensue. I am not being censorious in this matter, in fact I abhor all forms of censorship, which are little more than advertising. If we behave like animals, nature will judge us as animals: and nature's judgements are harsh.

Anthony Owens

Anthony : I agree with you that we shouldn’t get bogged down in the philosophy of mathematics, as it’s highly technical and requires a good knowledge of mathematics even to get started. As far as I’m aware, though, mathematics has no difficulty distinguishing straight lines from curves. A straight line (a geodesic) is the shortest distance between two points, using the appropriate metric. A curve, in the non-limiting case, is a line that isn’t straight. A straight line on the non-Euclidean two-dimensional surface of a sphere looks curved - and is curved - when viewed in 3 dimensions, but then the metric, or the geometry of space, has changed. There’s no confusion, however - the context always has to be taken into account.

I think your thoughts on mathematics, complete systems and Godel are muddled. What Godel is saying is that mathematics is bigger than any axiomatisation of itself - that there are always true mathematical statements that cannot be proved within any axiomatisation of mathematics. This has nothing to do with whether or not mathematics can fully describe reality. This seems doubtful to me for other reasons, in that mathematics deals with quantity and structure, not with qualities. However, mathematics does describe some areas of reality very well - and whether this is accidental or not is a very deep question.

Maybe we could continue the discussions about space in PhySIG ? You are right to draw a distinction between nothingness and empty space - the latter is a stage on which events can happen, whereas the former is presumably not. The same’s true about the distinction between ground-states and a true zero. The former deals with differences - we’re interested in the difference between the excited state and the ground state - the latter with something more absolute. I don’t think mathematics has problems with this. As I said last time, it depends on which model you set up.

We’ll have to return to your ideas on consciousness another time, lest this edition of Commensal not appear until well into June ! As you also know, I believe consciousness is something to be explained in terms of other things better understood, not a "given" from which other things should be explained. That’s because part of the meaning of "explanation" is that it should help us move from the simple to the complex, the known to the unknown. OK, our own consciousness is known to us with an immediacy unlike anything else, but others’ consciousness is forever inaccessible as we’re talking about a subjective experience. Even our own consciousness is paradoxical, given that we often act unconsciously & only subsequently realise and rationalise what it is we’ve done.

I agree with much of what you say in your response to Sheila. I think, though, that some cures are worse than their respective diseases. You can set up a society where a license is needed to reproduce and where draconian measures are brought to bear on those who fail to obey - but such societies have to be oppressive in order to be able to enforce such dictats. Alternatively, you can redefine those aspects of immorality we particularly dislike as "mental illness" and lock people away in mental institutions (as was the case with "wayward girls" earlier this century). Do we really need these measures, though ? If our population was galloping away (as in China hitherto) there might be a justification - desperate situations require desperate remedies - but there’s no population explosion n the UK that I’m aware of. We need to avoid idealistic and fanatical "solutions" to problems for fear of creating worse ones !

Theo