Philosophy Lesson

This web page is associated with a book called called Reverse Engineering the Universe.

The book can be bought at: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Dr_Jerome_Heath_Reverse_Engineering_the_Universe?id=_OvqBQAAQBAJ

The book gives a more complete explanation of these issues and includes a number of related topic discussions. The combination develops the understanding of these concepts from a number of viewpoints.

When I visited my son who was living in Japan at the time, he took me to his favorite bar. Now the lady who owned the bar liked to do flower arranging. Since I had done some flower arranging as a hobby he asked her to describe how she designed her flowers. She said “Ichi, ni, san” and then showed me how each floor arrangement was ichi ,ni, san. Ichi, ni, san means one, two, three; but to this flower arranging bar owner ichi, ni, san meant more than just one, two, three.

The Bomb

Ground Zero

EIGHT JEROME HEATH EBOOKS

In the developed countries our present age seems to be plagued by many conflicting philosophical groups. I am not talking about religious groups but philosophical ideas that are prevalent.

I have always felt that there must be some important conflict, an out of equilibrium process, to drive philosophical development. In the past that important conflict was often major wars that were quite traumatic like the Civil War or World War I. The driving conflict could also be glaring inconsistencies in the social-cultural assumptions. This driving conflict leads the social-cultural realm to be out of equilibrium enough, and over a long enough period, so it can cause major thought change. For our present age I could not, at first, find such a traumatic cause, at least directly visible, such as in a war. What I have finally concluded is that the conflict of the problem is not any particular war but the fear of a war to end all wars. The New Age has been driven by the out of equilibrium fear of the nuclear apocalypse. Thus the trend toward a new meta-physic.

The new age rejects or ignores Newtonian meta-physics. Here there are two different approaches. The group of New Agers that can be aligned with Zen-Buddhism tends to ignore meta-physics. The meta-physics may be true and OK but it is not the issue. The Zen like groups see that enlightenment through a philosophical approach is not helpful to the whole person. They are hinting that the physical is not the end all of everything. Mindfulness precedes any meaningful living. But they do not question the old meta-physics; they just say that their hope lies in the fact that the physical has no beginning and no end. The beginning and the end is the void. This group is then part post-structuralist but avoids or rejects the dialectic methodology in favor of meditative approaches to truth. They then fit only partly into the new age more generally. The dialectic may be used to guide us to enlightenment, but it is too negative as a logical process after enlightenment.

One large group of this type of thought is the New Age group. Now this is not a consistent philosophical group at all. There are a whole host of New Age philosophies. But they do have some things in common. The most noticeable is that they prefer not to trust the dialectic form of argument. New Age argument is by proposing something new and not bashing other ideas. The New Agers tend to avoid and recoil from the main methodology (dialectics) of the Structuralist (calling it "Yelling and Screaming"). Also the New Age group rejects or ignores Newtonian meta-physics.

UKIYO-E

Boo - Cackle, Cackle

In my view the meta-physics of structuralism is inadequate. My own experience points to a meta-physics that is broader than the simplistic Newtonian formula. Discussing that as part of post-structuralism is the goal of this book.

Reverse Engineering the Universe

EIGHT JEROME HEATH EBOOKS

Dr. Jerome Heath