Time, Number, Geometry, Soul
Metaphysics blog: Time, Number,Geometry and Soul
The Axis of Time
Plato's Model of the Universe
Timaeus
1. WHAT THE EGYPTIANS TOLD SOLON
"Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom Solon heard this veritable tradition.
He replied:-In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; "
2. The Creation: Uroboric Self-sufficiency
34f.
Now the creation took up the whole of each of the four elements; for the Creator compounded the world out of all the fire and all the water and all the air and all the earth, leaving no part of any of them nor any power of them outside. His intention was, in the first place, that the animal should be as far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect parts: secondly, that it should be one, leaving no remnants out of which another such world might be created: and also that it should be free from old age and unaffected by disease. Considering that if heat and cold and other powerful forces which unite bodies surround and attack them from without when they are unprepared, they decompose them, and by bringing diseases and old age upon them, make them waste away-for this cause and on these grounds he made the world one whole, having every part entire, and being therefore perfect and not liable to old age and disease. And he gave to the world the figure which was suitable and also natural. Now to the animal which was to comprehend all animals, that figure was suitable which comprehends within itself all other figures. Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike. This he finished off, making the surface smooth all around for many reasons; in the first place, because the living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet.
Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was to be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a surface in every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it; and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god.
....
3. Soul Details
"Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are speaking of them in this order; for having brought them together he would never have allowed that the elder should be ruled by the younger; but this is a random manner of speaking which we have, because somehow we ourselves too are very much under the dominion of chance. Whereas he made the soul in origin and excellence prior to and older than the body, to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject. And he made her out of the following elements and on this wise: Out of the indivisible and unchangeable, and also out of that which is divisible and has to do with material bodies, he compounded a third and intermediate kind of essence, partaking of the nature of the same and of the other, and this compound he placed accordingly in a mean between the indivisible, and the divisible and material. He took the three elements of the same, the other, and the essence, and mingled them into one form, compressing by force the reluctant and unsociable nature of the other into the same. When he had mingled them with the essence* and out of three made one, he again divided this whole into as many portions as was fitting, each portion being a compound of the same, the other, and the essence* (*alt: "the same, the different and being.")
4. ...Seven unequal circles .
And thus the whole mixture out of which he cut these portions was all exhausted by him. This entire compound he divided lengthways into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point; and, comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same he carried round by the side to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same and like, for that he left single and undivided; but the inner motion he divided in six places and made seven unequal circles having their intervals in ratios of two-and three, three of each, and bade the orbits proceed in a direction opposite to one another; and three [Sun, Mercury, Venus] he made to move with equal swiftness, and the remaining four [Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter] to move with unequal swiftness to the three and to one another, but in due proportion.
*****
HOW IT ALL LINKS THROUGH US
http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=21885
esp. post 181
Formally, Plato's model here can be readily mapped onto A. Gurdjieff's three 'rings of totality' emanating from the Most Holy Sun Absolute, bursting inside one another, as it were, in successive 7-note crystalizations; and B. The Koch Curve and associated fractal visualizations of whatever* can be expressed in words (*tentatively affirmed) about objects and motions in space. These, explained in detail elsewhere, are only gradually becoming linked by analyses of facts, or events, courtesy The Pequod Project. Each one's personal soul constellation is a completing factor of the totality. Now, for the oxygens required to nourish the blood of higher being-bodies ("Handbledzoin"), individual and collective (national), we are given Main Stream Media spewing crystalized consequences of the maleficient organ Kundabuffer, once implanted in humans at the base of their spine, affecting their genetic inherence and completion-of-flow-of-common-interchange-of- substance processes.throughout successive generations, after its removal.
ADD TIME
Suppose what is communicated by the word "Time" is, as Henri Bergson puts it, like this: "objects are not in time, time is in objects", This is the metaphysical center-of-gravity of Neo-Platonism, in my view. Time is the emanating of the emanation: the "-ing" factor in communicating experience.
This squares with Gudjieff's term "The Great Heropass" used for The Uniquely Subjective factor in the totality of Being. Nothing at all, in its own right, either "in" objects or that objects are "in". Nothing. Zero. I take this 'moment' as the psychosemiotic origin of consciousness -- what is communicated first by "consciousness." -- and a reconstruction of "the discovery of the Zero" in antiquity.
TIMES 10 TIMES 10
The proposition ""the number Zero" is 0" is true by token tautology;
Similarly ""the number One" is 1".
The sequence 0 1, given these token-tautologies, can be made to supply a formal logical axiomatic of numbers in general, when the asymmetrical, transitive relation "succeeds", holding for all if for any in a sequence a,b.. m,n, holds for 0 and 1 therefore for all successor. Tokens of these "successors of 0 and 1" can be supplied either by specifying a rule for generating a unique sign for each number, as in Roman numerals; or by individually specifying a few of these -- take the 9 Arabic signs -- put in "0" for "nothing", or "start again", REVERSE TOKEN POSITIONS, and 0 1 converts into 10. This is then used as a "base of nothing" for the unending repetitions of 0 1......9 10 ......19 20 .... 29 30 .....which gives the indefinite repetitions of 0's to approach the notion of "numbered infinity".. Thus our number system using the notion of "powers of 10" is also, at the same time grammatizing a unit of token manifestation under ""Nine" is 9". Time is the completing reality = 0.
The point is to draw out nd distinguish with clarity the mental transitions mediated by tokens, what has been conventionally or naturally coded on a communicating sign as an empirical object, therefore theoretically 'programmable' and computable with the right software. ...and, on the other hand, the mental connections mediated by logical meanings, or text, in the unity of the thought as (in the process of being) thought.
Our vivid new technology, conjoined with inventive ingenuity, can produce insights into token-connections built into the flow of processes of mentation using signs in these two ways to communicate. Just as the 'software' and ingenuous use are a passive- active dyad in the creation of New Being Objects, this distinction between text and token, taken from psychosemiotics, is required as the 'neutralizing third force (criticism)' in order for a being with its own Triazimikamno ("'legs") to arise. , .
The Axis of Time
Plato's Model of the Universe
Timaeus
1. WHAT THE EGYPTIANS TOLD SOLON
"Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom Solon heard this veritable tradition.
He replied:-In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; "
2. The Creation: Uroboric Self-sufficiency
34f.
Now the creation took up the whole of each of the four elements; for the Creator compounded the world out of all the fire and all the water and all the air and all the earth, leaving no part of any of them nor any power of them outside. His intention was, in the first place, that the animal should be as far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect parts: secondly, that it should be one, leaving no remnants out of which another such world might be created: and also that it should be free from old age and unaffected by disease. Considering that if heat and cold and other powerful forces which unite bodies surround and attack them from without when they are unprepared, they decompose them, and by bringing diseases and old age upon them, make them waste away-for this cause and on these grounds he made the world one whole, having every part entire, and being therefore perfect and not liable to old age and disease. And he gave to the world the figure which was suitable and also natural. Now to the animal which was to comprehend all animals, that figure was suitable which comprehends within itself all other figures. Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike. This he finished off, making the surface smooth all around for many reasons; in the first place, because the living being had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen; nor of ears when there was nothing to be heard; and there was no surrounding atmosphere to be breathed; nor would there have been any use of organs by the help of which he might receive his food or get rid of what he had already digested, since there was nothing which went from him or came into him: for there was nothing beside him. Of design he was created thus, his own waste providing his own food, and all that he did or suffered taking place in and by himself. For the Creator conceived that a being which was self-sufficient would be far more excellent than one which lacked anything; and, as he had no need to take anything or defend himself against any one, the Creator did not think it necessary to bestow upon him hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking; but the movement suited to his spherical form was assigned to him, being of all the seven that which is most appropriate to mind and intelligence; and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot, within his own limits revolving in a circle. All the other six motions were taken away from him, and he was made not to partake of their deviations. And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet.
Such was the whole plan of the eternal God about the god that was to be, to whom for this reason he gave a body, smooth and even, having a surface in every direction equidistant from the centre, a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. And in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it; and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence able to converse with itself, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed god.
....
3. Soul Details
"Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are speaking of them in this order; for having brought them together he would never have allowed that the elder should be ruled by the younger; but this is a random manner of speaking which we have, because somehow we ourselves too are very much under the dominion of chance. Whereas he made the soul in origin and excellence prior to and older than the body, to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject. And he made her out of the following elements and on this wise: Out of the indivisible and unchangeable, and also out of that which is divisible and has to do with material bodies, he compounded a third and intermediate kind of essence, partaking of the nature of the same and of the other, and this compound he placed accordingly in a mean between the indivisible, and the divisible and material. He took the three elements of the same, the other, and the essence, and mingled them into one form, compressing by force the reluctant and unsociable nature of the other into the same. When he had mingled them with the essence* and out of three made one, he again divided this whole into as many portions as was fitting, each portion being a compound of the same, the other, and the essence* (*alt: "the same, the different and being.")
4. ...Seven unequal circles .
And thus the whole mixture out of which he cut these portions was all exhausted by him. This entire compound he divided lengthways into two parts, which he joined to one another at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting-point; and, comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same he carried round by the side to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same and like, for that he left single and undivided; but the inner motion he divided in six places and made seven unequal circles having their intervals in ratios of two-and three, three of each, and bade the orbits proceed in a direction opposite to one another; and three [Sun, Mercury, Venus] he made to move with equal swiftness, and the remaining four [Moon, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter] to move with unequal swiftness to the three and to one another, but in due proportion.
*****
HOW IT ALL LINKS THROUGH US
http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=21885
esp. post 181
Formally, Plato's model here can be readily mapped onto A. Gurdjieff's three 'rings of totality' emanating from the Most Holy Sun Absolute, bursting inside one another, as it were, in successive 7-note crystalizations; and B. The Koch Curve and associated fractal visualizations of whatever* can be expressed in words (*tentatively affirmed) about objects and motions in space. These, explained in detail elsewhere, are only gradually becoming linked by analyses of facts, or events, courtesy The Pequod Project. Each one's personal soul constellation is a completing factor of the totality. Now, for the oxygens required to nourish the blood of higher being-bodies ("Handbledzoin"), individual and collective (national), we are given Main Stream Media spewing crystalized consequences of the maleficient organ Kundabuffer, once implanted in humans at the base of their spine, affecting their genetic inherence and completion-of-flow-of-common-interchange-of- substance processes.throughout successive generations, after its removal.
ADD TIME
Suppose what is communicated by the word "Time" is, as Henri Bergson puts it, like this: "objects are not in time, time is in objects", This is the metaphysical center-of-gravity of Neo-Platonism, in my view. Time is the emanating of the emanation: the "-ing" factor in communicating experience.
This squares with Gudjieff's term "The Great Heropass" used for The Uniquely Subjective factor in the totality of Being. Nothing at all, in its own right, either "in" objects or that objects are "in". Nothing. Zero. I take this 'moment' as the psychosemiotic origin of consciousness -- what is communicated first by "consciousness." -- and a reconstruction of "the discovery of the Zero" in antiquity.
TIMES 10 TIMES 10
The proposition ""the number Zero" is 0" is true by token tautology;
Similarly ""the number One" is 1".
The sequence 0 1, given these token-tautologies, can be made to supply a formal logical axiomatic of numbers in general, when the asymmetrical, transitive relation "succeeds", holding for all if for any in a sequence a,b.. m,n, holds for 0 and 1 therefore for all successor. Tokens of these "successors of 0 and 1" can be supplied either by specifying a rule for generating a unique sign for each number, as in Roman numerals; or by individually specifying a few of these -- take the 9 Arabic signs -- put in "0" for "nothing", or "start again", REVERSE TOKEN POSITIONS, and 0 1 converts into 10. This is then used as a "base of nothing" for the unending repetitions of 0 1......9 10 ......19 20 .... 29 30 .....which gives the indefinite repetitions of 0's to approach the notion of "numbered infinity".. Thus our number system using the notion of "powers of 10" is also, at the same time grammatizing a unit of token manifestation under ""Nine" is 9". Time is the completing reality = 0.
The point is to draw out nd distinguish with clarity the mental transitions mediated by tokens, what has been conventionally or naturally coded on a communicating sign as an empirical object, therefore theoretically 'programmable' and computable with the right software. ...and, on the other hand, the mental connections mediated by logical meanings, or text, in the unity of the thought as (in the process of being) thought.
Our vivid new technology, conjoined with inventive ingenuity, can produce insights into token-connections built into the flow of processes of mentation using signs in these two ways to communicate. Just as the 'software' and ingenuous use are a passive- active dyad in the creation of New Being Objects, this distinction between text and token, taken from psychosemiotics, is required as the 'neutralizing third force (criticism)' in order for a being with its own Triazimikamno ("'legs") to arise. , .
posted by Sid Thomas | 9:36 AM
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