Wednesday, May 9, 2007

"Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen" versus "ignoramus et ignorabimus"


Whatever i am about to write was known to Zeno of Elea,and therefore to everyone. First thing i came to know,which is culture inculcated, that believing that earth is flat is wrong and that earth is spherical or elliptic is right.Zeno also knew that ,but since he and everyone thought in terms of Euclid (and even today we somehow think a la Euclid),a paradox was celebrated .Paradoxes are simply manifestations of extremes out of continuum of a causal chain.So the problem emanates from the conceptions of extremes and continuum itself.The conception of continuum seems, prima facie, intuitively clear to human brain and ergo the secret of the ambiguity appears to lie somewhere in the perception of extremes or the infinity.Though deeper inspection reveals that the conception of continuum is nothing else but a meta-construct on the conception of infinity.
Digression: When we were young ,we never passed things in silence and were not aware of anagrams which were not a priori anagrams.Self-reference is the truth was known to the Charvaka,others couldn't understand it because it was so simple, so mundane, pertaining to the quotidian(what we don't understand is the simple and complex is what we understand,should I support it with academic reference of Murray Gell Mann ?) .Put it otherwise, the Charvaka proposed that epistemology is in vein and that's why one should just live and do whatsoever to sustain livelihood.For obvious reasons they were supposed to be a group of bums and social parasites. Human brain is regimented in a way that we mostly understand and again re-understand and we believe that we have come out with something new........ will-o'-the-wisp.These became slowly 'things of the past'.Something happened of significance in the western hemisphere in the early 20th century(What follows is serious name-dropping and my apologies for that.).Mostly it has to do with the Hilbert's programme,not negating the influence of Frege,Whitehead,Russell(Principia..) and Peano on its development.They firmly believed that regimentation of language is solution to 'the problem'.Things started well and Principia was the symbol .But a permanent halt came when this not so regular member of 'der Wiener Kreis' called Kurt Godel suggested starkly clear through his two 'Incompleteness Theorems' that the Hilbert's programme cannot be carried out .And viola! what a similarity between Godel's and Charvaka's propositions.This historical and hence cyclical movement itself records ,though vaguely,the idea of the incompleteness theorems,that "we understand and again re-understand and we believe that we have come out with something new......will-o'-the-wisp"(contd.)