Mentation which strangles insight

An interesting science article includes this summary paragraph:

"The typical way that plants communicate is through chemicals that they release through their leaves and roots," says James Westwood, a plant physiologist at Virginia Tech and a co-author of the study. "So to find out that there is an exchange of RNA" — the intermediary form of genetic information that fills the gap between DNA and proteins — "is a new concept that hasn’t been explored at all."

The headlines of this article demonstrate a reliance on binary thought:

Scientists think they've discovered an entirely new mode of plant communication
And parasitic species might be using it for espionage

Rather than conceiving these plants are already mixed up, we start with the idea that the plant species are separate. This gives rise to metaphors of hacking and espionage. If the plants are actually both part of something else at the start, the options for understanding change. But the narrowly understood rational mentation, which assumes everything is isolated, then can only imagine one of two options. I can only guess at an alternate vista, which I do merely to make my complaint clear--  What if these two plants are actually collaborating on something new which will become apparent in a different climate. Whatever.

My point is the thinking process of the scientists, not the, also quite fascinating, plants in question.

Larger structure mysteries

From arstechnica we quote

Large galaxies such as the Milky Way appear to have been built by repeated mergers of smaller ones, but not every small galaxy has ended up being swallowed completely by a large one. The Milky Way is orbited by dozens of dwarf galaxies, some of which have been disrupted and stripped of stars, while others may have slipped into orbit largely intact. Similar dwarf galaxies orbit our nearby neighbors, including Andromeda.

Based on what we know about these mergers and computer modeling of galaxy formation and growth, the collection of dwarfs should be an unruly lot, having approached the galaxy they orbit from directions that are essentially random. Yet the dwarfs orbiting the Milky Way largely inhabit a single plane, orbiting in a manner analogous to moons around a giant planet.

....

and also the concluding paragraph--

Overall, the disks of dwarf galaxies probably play a significant role in the physics of the local environment. The authors estimate that their collective angular momentum is roughly the same as all the stars in the main galaxy. As for how they got there, that's less clear. The fact that the orientation of these disks is correlated with the nearby galaxies suggests that it may be dictated by the larger-scale structural organization of the Universe. But how large-scale structure can influence the dwarfs isn't obvious, and it will be difficult to determine until we can start getting our models to reproduce it.

Has mathematics fallen into the same hole as philosophy

The article at this link is titled

Dividing the indivisible.

http://plus.maths.org/content/dividing-indivisible

A g;lance at the contents reveals it to be about dividing goods between two parties, like divorcing people.
I got excited to see the headline, it harks back to the beginning of religion, philosophy, and mathematics when the point of inquiry was simply to figure out what the heck is going on.

In fact the phrase

Dividing the indivisible

refers to an experiential investigation of the edge of the visible and invisible. You keep dividing something into smaller parts, and you find, unexpectedly, that logic reaches an edge. A worthy path to follow but it is not easier with inane applications.

Some cosmological mysteries

Excerpting the article at this link:

http://listverse.com/2014/05/30/10-unsolved-stellar-mysteries-in-our-galaxy/


The Nebula Of Uncertain Parentage
Planetary nebulae were discovered in the 1780s. The astronomer William Herschel believed that they were newly forming planetary systems. He was wrong, but the name stuck. They’re actually glowing clouds of gas around a dying star, and they’re often quite beautiful....
Many planetary nebulae are bipolar, meaning that they have symmetrical clouds coming from opposite sides of their star—they’re often compared to an hourglass or a butterfly. Sharpless 2-71 is made of multiple bipolar lobes in different orientations....

The Neutron Stars That Look Too Old
....The neutron star [left from a supernova explosion] in the center is spinning with a period of 6.7 hours per rotation. Since a star’s rotation speed slows down over time, this would normally put this particular neutron star’s age at several million years. However, the parent star went supernova around 2,000 years ago. The variation in the neutron star’s X-rays are also unusually large, so something is going on....

Multiple Messier Mysteries
...The stars of the Messier 15 globular cluster are unusually bunched in its center....

Crab [Nebula] Flares

"...Until 2011, it was thought to be one of the most steady sources of light, radio, and gamma radiationin the sky....
But between 2007 and 2010, astronomers from different observatories detected three powerful gamma ray flares with no change in other wavelengths. This was described by one astronomer as a “big puzzle,” while another called it a “real mystery.” The unexpected flares were the first seen from a nebula and were five times more intense than any other yet observed....."

Aligned Bipolar Nebulae

"...It’s not just the jumbled bipolar nebulae in Sharpless 2-71 that pose a mystery to astronomers. Scientists used the Hubble to examine 130 such objects in the central bulge of the Milky Way and found something weird. The nebulae were in different places, formed at different times, and have never interacted. Yet despite that, most of them appear to be aligned along the same axis...."

The Great Eruption
"....In 1838, the glow of Eta Carinae increased until it became the second brightest star in Earth’s sky. It stayed that way for 10 years...."

Mysterious Magnetars
"...Magnetars are a type of neutron star with a magnetic field quadrillions of times stronger than Earth’s. They’re the most powerful magnets in the universe. They were only theorized in the 1990s and they’re filled with properties that we still haven’t figured out...."

The Sun’s Mysterious Cousins
'...Around a third of Sun-like stars have year-long periods of varied brightness as they approach the ends of their lives. ... The conclusion [of a recent study] was clear, and told us exactly what we already knew: “All the possible explanations for their unusual behavior just fail....”'

Epsilon Aurigae’s Disc

Polaris Is Awkward
as described in an essay entitled "The North Star Mysteries: The Remarkable Brightness Increase of Polaris from Historical and Modern Observations."

Crows and kids

Our link is to an article on experiments with wild crows. My point here is beyond the conclusions the scientists and bloggers may have made.

The setup is that crows who have not been in a laboratory setting before could not figure out how to extract food from the plastic box with levers, setup in the laboratory. 

Here is how Ed Yong put the point----
quote
These two abilities—understanding causality, and using that understanding—seem so simple and mundane to us that it feels weird to lay them out, and weirder still to separate them. But they are separate. That much becomes clear when you study an animal that can do one of these things and not the other.end quote

What the study purports to conclude is that without the experience of successfully using their problem solving abilities, they cannot repeat and extend their problem solving. Read the article.

In fact, this study is much more interesting.  Not surprisingly little attention is paid to the moment crows or humans DO get the connection between cause and effect. That is because the study, as is typical of much natural science, begs the question of origins.Ignoring this question leads to the idea that crows in the wilderness never have a moment of insight about causality, and that babies come out of the womb with an abstract idea of this connection. Rather silly if you draw out these conclusions. 

And origins is exactly where this study took me. The question of whether essence precedes existence (what the study calls "understanding causality, and using that understanding") is the tawdry story of 20th century philosophy. But that is really an aside. 

What Yong calls the ability to 'understand causality' I am calling, rather vulgarly and more broadly, a moment of mystical insight, that is.essence --that which can directly perceive something, say the fact of causality. 

What the blogger calls applying the principle of causality, I am calling existence in the way that term was used in 20th century philosophy, that is a life of words. 

And the exciting possibility to which this study points is not only that the moment of insight comes before the typical cascade of words that unravel and develop that insight -- but that you can see this on a scale beyond that of the human.

And if you want to extend the crow story the implications of this study concern the wordless and the wordfull. One would not have thought this mystical goal extended to the creatures without verbal capacity. But maybe it does!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Electric arguments

Brian Koberlein, the physicist with a most amazing humility and clarity in his expositions, at this link to his website  examines the claims of an alternate model which apparently is popular among some quite intelligent folk.

I post this because it made me think about the kind of minds that would originate a theory like the Electric Universe. A hallmark to me, in this EU alternative to the picture painted by modern physics, is that it seems to be based on a view of the mind which says I can understand everything and complexity is obfuscation. On the one hand this is an admirable approch, and explains the progress of modern science: the human mind is capable of comprehending the world of which it is a part. The implication that the measure of the world is the measure of my own mind, however, means we may see a collapses into egoism. Of course it is comforting to think that the ordinary binary mind is the best measurer of our world. Scientists, kooks, and EU proponents all crave this plank. But the ability to teeter on the plank of rational thought, to reach higher, see farther, to risk even, falling off the plank, adds bravery to the mix of what it takes to apprehend an edge between knowledge and mystery, along with a determination to press on, regardless of consequences, The fine minds have this to some degree.  Koberlein, in listening to an alternate theory, is a good example.

My notes here, towards what may be called an anthropology of the human mind, point toward a love of complexity as a distinguishing factor for true pioneers. I suspect, and wonder, if mathematicians might not fall into this category. I know it is a broader category than even scientists imagine. 

A Charming Example

Chad Orzel . a science blogger, wrote recently these sensible words:

“Science Is Never Over,” ... there are a nearly infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder, with surprisingly rich dynamics in the simplest of things. I mean, look at the thousands of words I’ve gotten out of talking about sticky tape."

This approach could take you far, I almost put this note in the american mysticism blog. What interested me is the evidence here of a certain stance: there is always the manageable spigot. Notice the word "nearly." What the heck does that mean. If you were getting near counting finits, you could characterize that point somehow, and yet he cannot, and one has to wonder if that 'nearly infinite' is not some deflection of a rigorous pursuit of the logic, or the evidence. He gets his infinites, notoriously hard to corral, and yet can twist the faucet whenever he gets panicky.  He gets to look out the plane window -- to change the metaphor mid altitude-- and know he won't have to use the parachute.

"A nearly infinite number' puts the reality of change in a squarely nouny [static] context. That spigot is binary thought, two options. To make sure, the mind, does not get overwhelmed by --- reality.

How true his words though---...[There is] an infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder,