01. 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.

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.

So people need to seek out new sources of knowledge. The standard sources seem to only know the old physical world (at least the learned sources appeared to only want to know the old physical world) which is definitely passing away in a horrible nuclear way. The physical apocalypse that the new agers saw was far worse than anything in the Apocalypse of John. Remember, although we all knew about this problem we were not able to talk about it generally. It was too horrible. So it remains the subconscious assumption behind our thoughts and our own philosophical development. It is obvious that this driving force would engender more interest in another reality, a reality that could not be affected by the final nuclear event. The social-cultural realm was far from equilibrium, in a hidden way, and thus we were driven to seek new approaches to resolving our inner conflict. The new age had to happen and it had to question the meta-physics..

We start with the Structuralists or Modernists. There seems to be a large and diverse group of those who came from and stayed with Structuralism from a philosophical viewpoint. This is a large group of scholars that have some kind of Structuralist basic assumptions. These see the language and logic as being definitive and as either able to resolve all issues or as being capable of resolving all issues by carefully defining how the language and logic are used. And, in particular, the meta-physics of this group is that something is real only when it can be established by empirical analysis. This group also tends toward the Newtonian view of the universe (each action has an equal and opposite reaction or determinism).

One interesting group wants to develop science as a philosophy. The scientists who like to philosophize seem to gravitate to narrow structural and deterministic views. Their view of things begins and ends with the Newtonian view (which is very Structuralist; even though Newton was an alchemist not a Structuralist). Most scholars have always read Newton as structuralist and determinist.

That's the old school. Now we discuss the new schools. One large group 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 (called "Yelling and Screaming"). Also the New Age group rejects or ignores Newtonian meta-physics.

But there is another major group of philosophers known as Post-structuralist or Post-modernist. This group has seen the light related to the problems of Structuralism and Modernism, and want to resolve the conflict and contradiction by thinking beyond Structuralism. The basic framework is that Post-structuralism wants to resolve the issues of structural problems without changing the meta-physics. That seems to be the prime rule. The meta-physics of Post-structuralism also regards reality as only those things that can be established by empirical analysis. Post-structuralims is also seen in practical methodologies like the Toyota Management System and Agile Systems Development. Note that in my approach to Post-structuralism the pure Newtonian meta-physic is inadequate. Things are obviously happening that are not Newtonian in form.

Reverse Engineering the Universe

Seven Covers

Jerome Heath Books

Jerome Heath