Perfection & Infinity

RICHARD SANSOM:

Perfection

What does the concept of *perfection* mean? How did it arise? If it is agreed that there is no such thing as perfection, how and why is it used, or is useful?

JUD EVANS:
I think it simply arose from the fact that from a human point of view some things are aesthetically or functionally well formed, and others are less so.

    To depart from the natural language use of the term *perfection*  into an ontological mode of viewing the concept, If (in some possible world) I was to believe in the abstraction called ‘perfection,’  (which I do not) the notion would only make sense to me as being relative or applicable to *matergy*(combining matter and energy in one word to describe a materio-energetic object) including the objects known as neurologically equipped human beings. Einstein stated that energy and matter can be equated  (E=MC2) and in a relativistic sense are the same, so many physicists are now beginning to refer to what was often conceived as two separate entities (*matter* and  *energy*) by one noun:  *matergy.*

For me the abstract noun ‘perfection’ or the adjective ‘perfect’ are only meaningful when construed as referring to the state of some matergenic object that is fully realized as a current entiatic actuality, as opposed to a reified potentiality or counterfactual possibility. As far as nature is concerned entities cannot BE imperfect. They either survive or they do not. They either function or they do not. They either [if organic] pass on their seed or they do not. They either find an environmental niche or they do not and their *type* dies out [is unreplicated] or it reproduces and flourishes.

If I were ever to use such a term in ontology and MEAN that something was perfect (which I would not) then it would have to be in conjunction with conatus, the striving or ‘natural tendency inherent in a body to develop itself,’ leading to an eventual, if only temporary: ‘perfected material presence.’ Further defining my attitude requires a more pragmatic interpretation of the human existential process we call 'our life.' For me ALL objects (including all humans) are physically ‘perfect.’ Every entity concretely and momentarily represents the current, most suitable catenulate outcome appropriate to their individual, deterministically arrived at conative telos possible.

Onto-deterministically, if they could have evolved otherwise – they would have done. All objects are an ontological fait accompli. The physical determinates of the material existential imperative (the 'physical imperia' or ‘laws of nature’) countenance and authenticate the entiatic viability of all that can be found in the universe. That is not to say that *laws* or some *authenticating authority* exists, but simply that objects could not exist in any other way to the manner in which they actually exist.

    Man anthropocentrically proposes (and categorially attributes in order to differentiate) but the material imperium disposes (and cosmically allocates.) The material imperium is simply a term to indicate the inevitability of individuate material conformity to the restrictions and allowances of the material mass that surrounds it. One can think of the cosmos in terms of individual elements by observing one grain of sand or one star in the heavens, or pull back and adopt the optical resolution of a macroscopic point of view [as Parmenides did) and view the whole pile of sand or The Milky Way as a holon. Therefore the very notion of 'perfection' is a redundancy - a useful fiction for everyday life, but as far as the material imperium is concerned all objects are 'perfect' and cannot be otherwise in ‘the “eyes” of nature’ or in the *eyes* of the omnimodus universus or universal whole.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Remember that Pythagoras, who came up with his famous theorem regarding the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle, was stumped when he confronted irrational numbers – i. e. numbers that could not be perfectly represented by the ratio of two integers. Pi is another example of such an irrational number. The expansion of pi using a modern computer can be carried out indefinitely, to billions of decimal places, with no end in sight. Without a perfect representation of pi, there is no perfect determination of the area, circumference or volume of a circular disc, circle or sphere. Many will claim that we can conceive of the perfect circle, since we can define it in our minds as a line that is everywhere equidistant from a single point outside the line. However, a good reductionist will ask: What is a line? If the answer is: a continuum of points of infinitely small size, the reductionist might ask: What is a continuum? What is a point? What is *infinity?* Yet we probably all agree that there is something to the idea of conceptualizing a perfect circle, and all those abstractions that go along with a complete definition. We might get out a compass and draw a reasonable facsimile on a piece of paper, claiming that but for the inherent imperfection of the pencil and the compass, the circle would be perfect. What is a perfectly straight line? A common statement regarding straight lines is that it is the shortest distance between two points. Not so in Einsteinian spacetime – there aint no such thing since the shortest distance, often called the geodesic, between two points is a curve. At the macro-level the common rule is a good approximation, but not at astronomical distances.

JUD EVANS:
I have always believed that number and geometry, in fact all human thoughts and languages, are strictly our human-centred ways of understanding the world that surrounds us, and are only meaningful or relevant to our species. The the uncaring existential imperative [meaning the only way that material can exist] does not care a fig for humans, or our [cosmically speaking] pathetic schemes of measurement, based as they were originally, on the length of our hands, the feet, our thumbs, or other appendages, or the numerical convenience of having ten digits on the end of our arms which led therefore to our adopting a scheme of maths which later threw up the problem of pi. The cosmos doesn't give a shit about how many peppercorns placed end to end measure a certain length of gold thread.

   Length, size, weight etc are abstractions which only have meaning to humans. The circumference of circles and the *mysteries of pi* are obviously of no consequence to the material imperative, otherwise there would not be any round objects in the world. If the matergy of which an entity consists finds it more convenient in relation to the surrounding environmental material - it will adopt a circular shape.

To paraphrase Descartes - *Round *matergy* is viable and therefore exists,* or as a more general extrapolation: *Objects are - therefore they exist.* There is something naturally tautologous about that which exists and the way it exists. The claims by some that quantum physics shows that reality at a sub atomic level either does not exist until observed, or that all realities exist until a specific one is observed is poppycock. *Reality* does not exist - only the real *matergy* ( materio-energetic objects) that exist - exist, and they do not stop existing if no godlike human being happens not to be looking at them. Objects do not pop in and out of existence and play hide and seek with humans.

Materio-energetic objects are  *condemned* by the nature of the material imperative to exist for ever as ever-changing *infinitons.* In other words the *stuff* that is presently known as *Richard* has always existed,and will exist for ever and ever. [in differing forms]

RICHARD SANSOM:
It is said that all electrons [one of the leptons] are perfectly identical in all their attributes; if you have seen one electron, you have literally seen them all. Thus, electron A and electron B are perfectly identical.

JUD EVANS:
Physicists challenge this. I read somewhere only recently (DAMNED if I can remember just now) that it is ontically impossible for any object in the cosmos to exist EXACTLY like any other - or it WOULD BE that other. Even if they all came into existence at exactly the same time - their spins would differ and they would change. If an object does not change it cannot exist. So if electrons form in stages (rather than all at one time) they would ALL have to be different from any that already existed in electronic form. Who or what is going to single out one particular electron out of the countless multitude and confer upon it the mantle of Platonic perfection of form, and by creating them all as all perfectly the same would automatically make them dissapear like a horde of conjurer's rabbits?

RICHARD SANSOM:
The charge on all electrons is minus-one – exactly minus one, because that is the definition!

JUD EVANS:
That is because electrons cannot exist in any other way (as electrons)

RICHARD SANSOM:
The charge on the charm quark is exactly +2/3. [i. e. 2/3 of the charge on the electron, but positive] Are these arbitrary values *perfect?*

JUD EVANS:
They simply conform to the fact that charm quarks could not possibly exist in any other way.

RICHARD SANSOM:
In other words, could some errant electron have a charge of minus 1.00011? As I understand things, the answer is definitely NO. It seems that quantum physics relies in some manner on the idea of perfection.

JUD EVANS:
My own preference is not to call it *perfection* for all objects are perfect. I prefer the term:*conformity.* That is NOT to say that *conformity* [the matergenic imperative] exists, but rather that conforming or conformant *matergy* can only exist in a certain way - and that way (tautologously) - is the way that it exists. A person with Down's syndrome is a most perfect example of that individuate type of unique human entity.

RICHARD SANSOM:
This is to say that quantum physics would not function as it does if the above kinds of attributes were not perfect in their similarities. [Then there is the aspect of an electron being a probabilistic wave bundle; how then might it be perfectly the same as any other such bundle?]

JUD EVANS
Quantum physics functions as it does because any other way would be unfunctionable and is therefore a counterfactuality. There is nothing * probabilistic* about any single
*matergy* in the cosmos - the problem is that our intellect is as Laplace pointed out] insufficient and that the interactional determinations are so complex that it is beyond the human brain ever to compute the paths and quantum events. Laplace explained it when he wrote:

[this is from wikipedia]

Laplace strongly believed in causal determinism, which is expressed in the following quote from the introduction to the Essai:

RICHARD SANSOM:
Of what value is the concept of perfection, and what was its origin? I believe it goes back to the concept of equity, or balance. The ancients used a simple scale to measure out quantities; when the scale was balanced, there was equity between the standard weight [of some kind] and the ingredients being weighed. With sufficient patience, the scale could be made to show such equity; i. e. a perfect agreement between the standard of weight and the ingredients being weighed; perfection was exact equality between two things. As for imagined perfection – say of a circle –the equality is between a real and a conceptualized circle, but the *scale* will always be just a tiny bit off

JUD EVANS:
The above is a very good description of how the human notion and attribution of perfection originated.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Infinity [to aperion]  We can imagine or conceive of perfection, but what of infinity – both the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large? Are these related in any way to perfection? In addition, how are the two forms of infinitude related to one another? One way to see a connection is to consider the equation:

X = 1/Y

As Y tends to zero, X tends to infinity; as Y tends to infinity, X tends to zero.

JUD EVANS:
For me zero = *nothing* and it is impossible for *nothing* to exist. Therefore it is no more than a useful fiction which fictionalises the whole project.

RICHARD SANSOM:
While this may be easy to state mathematically, it is not very easy to imagine. The infinitesimally small is …. nothing, and the infinitely large is….. everything?

JUD EVANS:
For me - infinitesimally small is not nothing and is not particularly small IN NATURE but only *infinitesimally small* from the point of view of a human whose powers of visual discernment go not much further *down* than the full stop at the end of this sentence. Big and small - down and up are only conceptually meaningful to humans and some other animals. The abstractions of math no more exist that the abstractions of natural language - what exists are communicating linguists and communicating mathematicians - i. e., human beings. Their abstraction do not and neither does finitude or infinity.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Neither of these results are imaginatively easy to comprehend. Leibniz said of infinity that it can be captured in the mind intellectually, but not imaginatively ; the perfect circle can be captured by both of these faculties, but like infinity, we have the feeling it does not really possess ontic reality – it is purely and only an invention of the mind – unless of course one is a Platonist.

JUD EVANS:
These Leibnizian and Platonic problems of understanding are homo-specific problems. The unconcerned cosmos does not concern itself with the worries of some ephemeral, insignificant temporary life form in some obscure corner of the some boondock universe.

RICHARD SANSOM:
The Pythagoreans believed that peras, [finiteness], was good and that to aperion, [infinity] was something abhorrent and bad. A. W. Moore says, speaking about the Pythagorean view:

JUD EVANS:
For some people what they cannot understand is frightening - it is understandable for infinity is like some black void that goes on for ever and ever in all directions. In that sense it belittles us to an enormous degree.

RICHARD SANSOM:
It was senseless, chaotic, indeterminate, and without structure, simply waiting to have peras [order, finiteness] imposed on it. A. W. Moore, The Infinite

JUD EVANS:
The human desire for peras [order, finiteness] is part of the survival agenda beautifully appraised and described in your TWTWI (The Way The World Is) when you addressed the proto-animals ordering of position, size, rearness, frontness, fight or flight etc.

RICHARD SANSOM:
We might assume that the Pythagoreans found infinity abhorrent because it is inconceivable, or because it is conceivable! They also found irrational numbers nasty things. They observed the square root of 2 to be not representable by the ratio of two integers and did not like this fact, and yet they could write it down symbolically. We can also write down the lazy-8 to symbolically represent infinity, but that does not mean it exists – Cantors transcendental numbers notwithstanding. IMO any mathematical representation of infinity is nothing more than symbol manipulation following certain axioms within that discipline – nothing more.

JUD EVANS:
I find it most fortunate that we have a friend like you - a professional mathematician who appreciates that math - whilst so important to mankind, is, in the last analysis, a tool of numerical manipulation that we use to measure and make predictions about our environment

RICHARD SANSOM:
The above equation, relating the very large to the very small is a *cognitively perfect* representation of an impossible reality when Y is either zero or infinity.

Just food for thought………

JUD EVANS:
A great meal - served with your usual aplomb and panache!

Hi Jud, Here is some additional food for thought regarding your response to my piece on perfection and infinity:

Hi Richard, I always look forward to the next meal and your brain food does wonders for my neurons.

RICHARD SANSOM:
You maintain that all objects could not exist in any way other than the way they are, and that all objects, including humans are *perfect* because of this ontological imperative. This naturally renders the concept of perfection meaningless – which is your point. If everything can be labeled as perfect, then indeed the term has no meaning. Later in your post you state that the cosmos does not concern itself with the goings on of us insignificant organisms here on earth. I will discuss each of these.

JUD EVANS:
Yes, that is a good summing up of my position. For me to be *perfect* or *perfection* is ontologically meaningless - whilst being useful terms l in natural language. Purely for clarification, rather than describe the existential mode of all matergy (that does not exist in any way other than the way it does) as: *perfect* - I prefer to describe all material as *self-referentially conformative.*

RICHARD SANSOM:

1] Claiming that all objects could not exist in any way other than the way they are says that the child born with a cleft pallet could not have been born any other way. Or, in other words, paraphrasing Eliot, imagining this child with some genetically engineered intervention that would have prevented the condition is only an abstract speculation. But, IMO, it is much more than that – it is a real and significant possibility, and without such speculations and the devotion of science to the problem no prevention will ever be established. I have an opposite opinion to yours: There is nothing in the universe that could not have been otherwise than what it is.

JUD EVANS:
I would defend my position in this way. My evidence that the child born with a cleft pallet could not have been born any other way is very simple. It WAS born that way. To claim that circumstances could or might have been different is to enter a world of metaphysical counter-factuality. The poet Eliot calls it a world of speculation. What I am referring to is the *actual* rather than the *what might have been.* It was INEVITABLE that you got together with Lilly and me with Clare because IT HAPPENED. To wonder what might have been if we or our partners had gone elsewhere on the particular day we met is to enter a world of unscientific dreams.

Now I admit that unscientific worlds of dreams are sometimes enjoyable, intellectually restorative, engendering fictional creativity, but that side of my *spiritual* life I keep separate from the (admittedly inductive) investigative ontological activity which I love so much. I say *inductive* because from a Popperian point of view my claims are not backed up or supported by any deductive laboratory experiments. There is no way that I can falsify or verify my ontologically deterministic claims because my claims are based upon a denial of the claims of others. As those others do not provide one shred of evidence for their dualistic claims that there exists a *mind* or *being* or *forms* or *free will* etc. I cannot deconstruct their claims for there is not evidential criteria to get my teeth into. If a man claims that a spirit lives on the planet Mercury that controls the patterns in the clouds of sulphur - one can only answer *OK, prove it!* If he chooses not to provide evidence either because he lacks any or there isn't any then what can one do? If a person says:

*When I was eighteen I was offered a job in a small company that was newly established and they were offering all new employees shares. I turned down the job, but have since heard that everyone who joined the company at that time are now all millionaires and their shares are worth millions. If I had accepted the job offer, I too would probably be a millionaire by now.*

The answer is NO - you would not - because you DID NOT accept the job offer, and to imagine a possible world in which you HAD accepted the offer is of the same order of fictional counterfactuality as if you HAD accepted the offer, had become rich, and were imagining a counter-factual world in which you HAD turned down the offer and were not a millionaire.

Forensically you then need to look at the reasons why you turned down the job offer. This is done in murder trials where the events that led to the crime are examined. WHY do they do that at trials? Because they are aware that all events are the result of a concatenation of previous events. They do not deal in speculative counter-factuals. The judge and jury are unconcerned with what might have happened if the man who walked into the bank at the wrong time and was shot by the bank-robbers had instead gone to the tobacconists to buy a pack of cigarettes and thus avoided getting shot. They are only concerned with what ACTUALLY HAPPENED and not whether the events [the shooting] could have been AVOIDED, either deliberately or inadvertently. They are not concerned with what did NOT HAPPEN they are only concerned with a correct account of what DID HAPPEN.

Now it is true that we can learn lessons from what DID happen and make changes to the way that events happen in the future. But any changes we make to bank security or with scanning techniques and proceedures  to spot cleft palettes in unborn fetuses are THEMSELVES the deterministic results of prior events. We may convince ourselves that such changes were made because we had the *free will* to change them, or even more naively that we exercised a decision to recognise certain imperfections in certain systems and  *decided* to make changes. The real cause of any changes we made to our systems was the bullet that entered the body of the victim, and the cause of that was the man that pulled the trigger, and the people who made the gun, and the people who mined the metal from which the gun was made, and the shop that sold the gun, and the architect who designed the bank, and the men who made the bricks, and the men that fathered the men who made the bricks.

     You could choose any of these antecedal bifurcatory paths to trace back the causal links but you could never trace back the linkages of the child who was born with the cleft-palette because that version of the child WITHOUT a cleft palette does NOT EXIST and neither were there any catenulate linkages which can be traced back. In other words if a judge and jury were examining why the child in the dock did NOT have a cleft palette - they would not be able to come up with any evidence. It seems to me that to imagine a world where things might or could have been different is to imagine a fantasy world.

RICHARD SANSOM:
2] As for the cosmos not concerning itself with our insignificant actions and beliefs; what is *concerning itself?*

JUD EVANS:
I deliberately chose the words *concerning itself* to highlight the fact that the cosmos is insensate. For me the materiality ITSELF is naturally self-conforming - not because there exists some dualistic metaphysical supra - legislator, or even something called *nature.* I believe the word *nature* [phusis] to be a convenient reification which avoids us having to examine more closely the natural conformity of material. Even the word *conformity* does not hit the ontological nail on the head. To *conform* infers that it is possible, or there is an obligation to adapt or conform to existent or different conditions. The words *conform* (and I am addressing the so-called *Laws of Nature* here) hints that there may be some other form of behaviour possible, as when a youth may be unwilling to *conform* to the social mores or laws of his or her community.

As I see it as far as the material imperative is concerned - there IS NO ALTERNATVE, but it is not because there exist any meta-existential *laws* which a mysterious
*nature* imposes or impinges upon matter - but because that is the way that matter exists and to think differently - to think that matter might exist in some other way (if there were no *laws* to control it) or if *things had happened differently* is to think counter-factually and to live in a world of the imagination rather than a world of material determinability. Cosmically things could not have been different and proof of that is all around us just by observing what is - rather than what is not.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Do we *concern* ourselves with things? Of course. And we are part of the cosmos – made of star dust, to echo Carl Sagan.

JUD EVANS:
I agree with you and Sagan that we *concern* ourselves with things. My argument is that what we concern ourselves with is ALWAYS concatenationally determined by past events and not by some putative *free will.* We do not call the shots. We are as complaisantly self -accommodating as any other materia in the cosmos.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Further, IMO, the fact that we can intentionally manipulate our small portion of the universe through even a meager understanding of its properties, means that there is at least a degree of isomorphism between our few billion synapses and the shape and functionality of the universe.

JUD EVANS:
Again I agree with you that we have intentionality. My argument is that our intentionality is ALWAYS concatenationally determined by past events and not by some putative considered or impetuous *free will.* The isomorphism can be explained by the fact that materially we as matergy also *conform* to the material imperative of which we too are a part.

RICHARD SANSOM:A virus, a quasi-living organism appears to have no such intentionality and goes about its business as best it can without *concern.*

JUD EVANS:
I believe that all living creatures are *engined* by the same conatus or series of unconscious actions advancing a tendency toward a particular end which is change and proliferation. In order to avoid you thinking that I have suddenly gone teleologically *all meta-physical* on you - I want to make it plain that I am not speaking about an Aristotelian style cosmic intentionality or purpose when I speak of *a tendency toward a particular end,* but of the simple fact that every tiny bit of materia, or the whole cosmic integrality and entirety - whichever ontological magnification you choose to view it in - Parmenideanly macro or Platonically micro or otherwise - exists in the manner of a self-regulatory conformity, not because of any form of outside intervention by an *all governing nature* but because THAT IS THE ONLY WAY IT CAN EXIST - or as Wittgenstein might have said:  *That is the fact of the matter.*

RICHARD SANSOM:
But we humans go about our business with a purpose – albeit relatively simple and provincial [relative to the cosmos] but still, since we are a part of the cosmos, might we not assume that it is, in a very small way, a cosmic *concern* that we possess? I do not separate us from any other aspect of the universe, except to say that we can think and speak about it.

JUD EVANS:
I suggest to you that what we call *purpose* is no more than our human version of the viruses' conatus. We too exist in the manner of a self-regulatory conformity, not because of any form of outside intervention by an *all governing nature* but because THAT IS THE ONLY WAY WE CAN EXIST. You want proof? We may *purpose* [the verb] to be law-abiding citizens , or we may *purpose* to rob banks. Whichever of the two determinations holds sway is evidenced by our actions. The good citizen could never have turned out any other way and neither could the crook. What is real, genuine, actual, attested, authentic, manifested, demonstrated and vouched is WHAT HAPPENED. The are no  *MIGHTS.*

RICHARD SANSOM:
I have heard us humans likened to the virus – a cosmic one – that may some day infect the galaxy and beyond with our intentional ambitions. We may be better equipped than the ordinary virus by our ability to form understandings of what we are about and where we might be going. Of course this is speculation, but it is not idle speculation. The cancer researcher speculates on what she might do next in her quest for a cure. I believe speculation is the engine of change and progress – no matter how one defines progress.

JUD EVANS:
I too wonder with you about such things. Taking up you title *Food for Thought* as a metaphor to lead me to the next subject... we have a grammar which suggests that we are in charge - but we are the victims of our own conceits. Metric tonne for metric tonne I have read that bacteria/viruses are a far more successful species than mankind as far as numerical replication are concerned. If you go here you can watch a video by a professer who believes that corn is taking over the world and when we mow the lawn we are being conned to keep the trees away for the benefit of the conatus of the grass.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/214

Sounds crazy? Listen to the guy - he is a biologist a Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and very convincing in the way he approaches the conatus of the other species with which we share the world. ;-) He says that looking at the world from the point of view of other species is a salutary cure for our own species obsessional self-importance with the supremacy of mankind. Michael Pollan is his name and he is worth watching.

In his Botany of Desire, Pollan explores the concept of co-evolution, specifically of mankind's evolutionary relationship with four plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes, from the dual perspectives of both humans and the plants themselves. He uses case examples that fit the archetype of four basic human desires, demonstrating how each of these botanical species are selectively grown, bred, and genetically engineered. The apple reflects the desire for sweetness, the tulip beauty, marijuana intoxication, and the potato control. Pollan then unravels the narrative of his own experience with each of the plants, which he then intertwines with a well-researched exploration into their social history. Each section presents a unique element of human domestication, or the "human bumblebee" as Pollan calls us. The stories in each part are varied, often fascinating, even hilarious. These range from the true story of Johnny Appleseed to Pollan's first-hand research with sophisticated marijuana hybrids in Amsterdam, to the alarming and paradigm-shifting possibilities of genetically engineered potatoes.

Such stuff fits perfectly with my notions of the *Material Imperative* or *Conatic Peremption* [I love dreaming up various metaphysical mastheads for my theories) ;-)