Infinite Transforms and Western Philosophy
January 7th 2007 21:15
Hi,
In this post i'll be talking about the ideas of 5 philosophers:
- Plato, and the universals of his realism
- Descartes, and his Cartesian way of defining the world
- Kant, and his noumena-phenomena description of the interpretation of the "real"
- Wittgenstein, his definitions of facts and logical use of the language
- Husserl, and the relation of all these ideas to his phenomenology
If you don't know a thing on these 5, please take your time to read about it before reading this, otherwise you won't understand much..
This time i wanted to add comments around the first conclusions i made in linear transforms and the description of the world. I compared it to the Nietzsche way of seeing the world, i think now i should show that this way of thinking do not exclude the way other philosophers like Kant, Descartes, etc. defined the world too. In the end, i give some examples of the application of the theory in the interpretation of some facts.
In historical order, let's start with Plato. One of his contributions to philosophy was his definition of reality. For him, the characteristics we can apply to describe "facts" are called "universals". It means: universals are like "beautyness", "redness", "softness", etc. Then we have "particulars", which are these characteristics applied to the things in "real". It means, a strawberry has something of beauty, something of red, something of softness, etc. These are the "particulars" the strawberry got from the "universals".
This, interpreted in the Infinite Transforms, would be like this: "beautiness", "redness", etc. are like Dirac's Deltas in different components of the "base" of "real". These components do not exist in real, only in though (and maths..). Then, since "facts" in "real" are vectors, they have in their components, something of "redness", something of "softness", etc.
Now we pass to Descartes. He defined the world as being able of having a definition in Cartesian bases (in "Discourse on method"), where we would be able to explain everything around us, and define the laws that rule them. He did not get it all wrong, even though Nietzsche's though may seem completely different if we look at it quickly. But taking the infinite dimension linear transforms as the way the world is, we have in intersection between Descartes and Nietzsche, because we put the world in an orthogonal base, and still, we don't allow men to know exactly what is happening. So we have both together, even though we have to throw away parts of their ideas.
Concerning Kant, let me make the analogy of the Infinite transforms and his noumena-phenomena theory (he develops this in "Critique of Pure Reason"). In his works, Kant states that the world divides between the reality (noumena) and what we can get from it (phenomena). We can see this in the same way as exposed in the last post, where the "real" is Kant's "noumena", and what we have access to is the transformation of the vectors in phenomena, a transformation to our internal "base", which could be described as our mind. This is obviously not the same for everyone, so we can conclude that it is not exactly the "real" to anyone.
Let's see then the Wittgenstein contribution to modern philosophy and how do this relate to the Infinite Transforms. The definition of "facts" he uses (he calls them atomic events) is the same as the vectors in the "real" base (the noumena base). When Wittgenstein talks about language, he refers to it as a way to picture the facts, which means that what our senses give to us is a phenomena that we can explain using language (in "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus").
The problems in his theory come when he considers that, when using logical forms in language, we can get to conclusions about the "facts" we interpret. All the analytic tradition in Western philosophy follows this though. But since we do not have access to noumena (and noumena is infinite dimensional) we can't get to conclusions to what it exactly is. Which does not mean that it's useless to try to get conclusions, when we try as better as we can to reduce the loose of information in the noumena-phenomena passage. But to get as close to the truth as possible, we can't use only language, which is obviously restrictive. Anyway, we can't get to the truth..
Last and most important, time to take a look in Husserl's contributions and see that his way of thinking is already quite close to the one i'm presenting.
He is the father of 20th century phenomenology, which guided philosophers like Sartre and Heidegger in his thoughts. For Husserl, like for Kant, philosophy should focus it's studies in phenoumena, and with it take all conclusions about the "real". His importance in philosophy is that, even tough he liked to use maths in the explanation of the world, he broke away from the positivist though, that stated that we could define the "real" with positivist sciences. Subjectivity got more importance in the analisys of the "real", and so the "base" that interprets the "facts" got new vectors, not defined in a positivist way of defining "real". He also has the root of the Infinite Transforms in his ideas, altough these kind of maths were not widespread by the time he lived.
Unlike Heidegger tough, Husserl saw philosophy as a science which had no correlation to the importance of the studies of the historical importance in the analysis of "beings" and "real", which is clearly a fault if we consider that most "real" systems do depend on their values in older instants to define their result in each instant. Thus time and history have an influence in "real". But we'll get to the problems between Heidegger and Husserl later, when we talk more about beings.
Well, enough with comparisons with other philosophers. Let's just give some examples of the idea of the "real" and our interpretation of the real.
A first good example comes from our "daltonic" friends. As we know, they have a problem in distinguish between colors, so you can see that they interpret the noumena in a different way than most of the people. So, as they don't see the colors as other people do, plenty of other things are interpreted differently too.
Another example comes from a professor in the Engineering School. To make an analogy between the description of signals in a time base or in the Fourier's frequency base, he talked about cooking. When you go to a restaurant to get something to eat, the way you see your grilled beef with rice is not the same as the cook's view. For you it's tasty, warm, and fills you up when you're hungry. For the cook it's a receipt, with an order to follow, and for something he has seen a lot of times, and will not want to eat it as much as you...
In these 2 examples you can see that for every single "being" that can interpret the world we'll have a different explanation, a different passage from noumena to phenomena in each one's minds.
Next post i'll be talking more about physics, talking about the phenomena-phenomena relation (the interpretation of an already interpreted fact) and about causality. Cheers.
Uula
In this post i'll be talking about the ideas of 5 philosophers:
- Plato, and the universals of his realism
- Descartes, and his Cartesian way of defining the world
- Kant, and his noumena-phenomena description of the interpretation of the "real"
- Wittgenstein, his definitions of facts and logical use of the language
- Husserl, and the relation of all these ideas to his phenomenology
If you don't know a thing on these 5, please take your time to read about it before reading this, otherwise you won't understand much..
This time i wanted to add comments around the first conclusions i made in linear transforms and the description of the world. I compared it to the Nietzsche way of seeing the world, i think now i should show that this way of thinking do not exclude the way other philosophers like Kant, Descartes, etc. defined the world too. In the end, i give some examples of the application of the theory in the interpretation of some facts.
In historical order, let's start with Plato. One of his contributions to philosophy was his definition of reality. For him, the characteristics we can apply to describe "facts" are called "universals". It means: universals are like "beautyness", "redness", "softness", etc. Then we have "particulars", which are these characteristics applied to the things in "real". It means, a strawberry has something of beauty, something of red, something of softness, etc. These are the "particulars" the strawberry got from the "universals".
This, interpreted in the Infinite Transforms, would be like this: "beautiness", "redness", etc. are like Dirac's Deltas in different components of the "base" of "real". These components do not exist in real, only in though (and maths..). Then, since "facts" in "real" are vectors, they have in their components, something of "redness", something of "softness", etc.
Now we pass to Descartes. He defined the world as being able of having a definition in Cartesian bases (in "Discourse on method"), where we would be able to explain everything around us, and define the laws that rule them. He did not get it all wrong, even though Nietzsche's though may seem completely different if we look at it quickly. But taking the infinite dimension linear transforms as the way the world is, we have in intersection between Descartes and Nietzsche, because we put the world in an orthogonal base, and still, we don't allow men to know exactly what is happening. So we have both together, even though we have to throw away parts of their ideas.
Concerning Kant, let me make the analogy of the Infinite transforms and his noumena-phenomena theory (he develops this in "Critique of Pure Reason"). In his works, Kant states that the world divides between the reality (noumena) and what we can get from it (phenomena). We can see this in the same way as exposed in the last post, where the "real" is Kant's "noumena", and what we have access to is the transformation of the vectors in phenomena, a transformation to our internal "base", which could be described as our mind. This is obviously not the same for everyone, so we can conclude that it is not exactly the "real" to anyone.
Let's see then the Wittgenstein contribution to modern philosophy and how do this relate to the Infinite Transforms. The definition of "facts" he uses (he calls them atomic events) is the same as the vectors in the "real" base (the noumena base). When Wittgenstein talks about language, he refers to it as a way to picture the facts, which means that what our senses give to us is a phenomena that we can explain using language (in "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus").
The problems in his theory come when he considers that, when using logical forms in language, we can get to conclusions about the "facts" we interpret. All the analytic tradition in Western philosophy follows this though. But since we do not have access to noumena (and noumena is infinite dimensional) we can't get to conclusions to what it exactly is. Which does not mean that it's useless to try to get conclusions, when we try as better as we can to reduce the loose of information in the noumena-phenomena passage. But to get as close to the truth as possible, we can't use only language, which is obviously restrictive. Anyway, we can't get to the truth..
Last and most important, time to take a look in Husserl's contributions and see that his way of thinking is already quite close to the one i'm presenting.
He is the father of 20th century phenomenology, which guided philosophers like Sartre and Heidegger in his thoughts. For Husserl, like for Kant, philosophy should focus it's studies in phenoumena, and with it take all conclusions about the "real". His importance in philosophy is that, even tough he liked to use maths in the explanation of the world, he broke away from the positivist though, that stated that we could define the "real" with positivist sciences. Subjectivity got more importance in the analisys of the "real", and so the "base" that interprets the "facts" got new vectors, not defined in a positivist way of defining "real". He also has the root of the Infinite Transforms in his ideas, altough these kind of maths were not widespread by the time he lived.
Unlike Heidegger tough, Husserl saw philosophy as a science which had no correlation to the importance of the studies of the historical importance in the analysis of "beings" and "real", which is clearly a fault if we consider that most "real" systems do depend on their values in older instants to define their result in each instant. Thus time and history have an influence in "real". But we'll get to the problems between Heidegger and Husserl later, when we talk more about beings.
Well, enough with comparisons with other philosophers. Let's just give some examples of the idea of the "real" and our interpretation of the real.
A first good example comes from our "daltonic" friends. As we know, they have a problem in distinguish between colors, so you can see that they interpret the noumena in a different way than most of the people. So, as they don't see the colors as other people do, plenty of other things are interpreted differently too.
Another example comes from a professor in the Engineering School. To make an analogy between the description of signals in a time base or in the Fourier's frequency base, he talked about cooking. When you go to a restaurant to get something to eat, the way you see your grilled beef with rice is not the same as the cook's view. For you it's tasty, warm, and fills you up when you're hungry. For the cook it's a receipt, with an order to follow, and for something he has seen a lot of times, and will not want to eat it as much as you...
In these 2 examples you can see that for every single "being" that can interpret the world we'll have a different explanation, a different passage from noumena to phenomena in each one's minds.
Next post i'll be talking more about physics, talking about the phenomena-phenomena relation (the interpretation of an already interpreted fact) and about causality. Cheers.
Uula
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