Miscellaneous Chatter > Philosophy & Science

Black Hole Sun: On the Materialist Sublime

<< < (2/3) > >>

TaoHorror:

--- Quote from: BeardFisher-King on April 11, 2019, 02:52:30 am ---1. From what perspective can the photograph of the black hole be described as "beautiful" or "sublime"?
--- End quote ---

From wonder - it's one thing to mathematically discover and quite another to see it with our own eyes. I think it was Einstein who said ( badly paraphrasing ) experiments amaze more than math can. Anything that can generate wonder falls in the category as exciting, sublime ( the Goad? ).


--- Quote from: BeardFisher-King on April 11, 2019, 02:52:30 am ---2. If a black hole is a work of art, who is the artist? ("Work" implies a worker)
--- End quote ---

Unsettled human business - some say "God", others "god", others "nothing", others "don't know" ... that said, the author could've been lazing with this language and simply leveraging artistic verbiage with sublime. I think all the author was saying is the human experience of art need not be limited to human productions, plenty of art in nature.


--- Quote from: BeardFisher-King on April 11, 2019, 02:52:30 am ---3. What can it mean for quantum matter to "perform"? Does an oscillating pendulum "perform"?
--- End quote ---

I took this as experiencing experiments is akin to experiencing art. If this is the point, it explains the usage of artistic verbiage. But I could be wrong, maybe the author is saying quantum is "performing".


--- Quote from: BeardFisher-King on April 11, 2019, 02:52:30 am ---4. From what perspective can a aesthetic judgment that quantum activity is "performatively sublime" be made?
--- End quote ---

Well, all art is in the eye - plenty of "great art" out there many think would be better used for toilet paper. I think all the author is saying is it's valid to stare at this picture with wonder, awe and humility and allow yourself to emotively learn from the experience as we do when viewing art. I'm not agreeing/disagreeing with the author, just what I think the point of the article is.

H:

--- Quote from: TaoHorror on April 11, 2019, 01:07:49 pm ---I took this as experiencing experiments is akin to experiencing art. If this is the point, it explains the usage of artistic verbiage. But I could be wrong, maybe the author is saying quantum is "performing".
--- End quote ---

Well, there is someone of a "scientific sentiment" that exists, that it's possible that quantum things only "do" certain things (or "exist at all") when we look at them (measure them).  I don't know enough of the mathematical structures of such a thing, but I think that is the idea, that in this sort of way, observance is productive of phenomena.  Kant would like that, I think.

sciborg2:
Sadly I have no answers, I just found it a bit interesting.

I also don't know what the New Materialism is, will see if I can get more info.

sciborg2:

--- Quote from: sciborg2 on April 11, 2019, 04:31:34 pm ---Sadly I have no answers, I just found it a bit interesting.

I also don't know what the New Materialism is, will see if I can get more info.

--- End quote ---

Ah here we go:

Returning to Lucretius

Thomas Nail


--- Quote ---I recently returned to Lucretius in 2014, when I taught Book II of De Rerum Natura for a class on what I called “the philosophy of movement.” I added Lucretius to the syllabus because he was an overlooked figure in the history of philosophy who wrote about motion. I was excited about the text, but I was also skeptical that anyone who believed in “eternal unchanging atoms” could have motion as their philosophical starting point. What I encountered, however, absolutely shocked me.

There were no atoms. I scoured the whole Latin text. Lucretius never used the word “atom” or a Latinized version of this word—not even once. Translators added the word “atom.” Just as shockingly, I could not find the great isolated swerve in the rain of atoms, for which he is so well-known. In Book II, Lucretius says instead that matter is always “in the habit of swerving” [declinare solerent] (2.221) and if it were not (nisi), “all would fall like raindrops [caderent]” (2.222). The solitary swerve and the rain of matter are therefore counterfactual claims. Lucretius never said there was a rain and then one atom swerved. He says that matter is in the “habit” [solerent] of swerving, meaning that it happens more than once. This, he says, is the only way to avoid the problem of assuming that something comes from nothing—the swerve of matter in the rain. 

This small but significant discrepancy made me wonder what else had been left out of translations and interpretations. Could it be possible that there was a whole hidden Lucretius buried beneath the paving stones of Greek atomism? If there are no atoms and no solitary swerve in Lucretius, can we still make sense of the rest of the book or had a missed something? In 2016 I decided to find out.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---Mechanistic materialism has been throughly criticized across the humanities and sciences, but I think we have been too quick to throw out materialism with the mechanistic bathwater. Lucretius is such a wonderful figure to return to today because he embodies the diffractive relations we need to rediscover between the arts, sciences, and humanities for a new posthumanities and a new materialism. Lucretius was a scientist and philosophical poet. Knowledge today, however, has been so compartmentalized that thinkers like Lucretius are extremely rare. This is a profound loss for most universities.

However, if we are going to address contemporary ethical practice at the global level seriously, we can no longer be merely scientists, philosophers, or poets. It is no longer enough to be merely the scholars of such and such figure or topic; the humanities and sciences need to come back together again. The study of nature unites all theoretical practice. Globalization and climate change demand that we see the big picture—that human activity is completely continuous with natural processes. Humans are geological actors, and the Earth is not a passive stage for our performances. The disconnect between the humanities and natural sciences is part of the same disconnect between humans and nature. We have divided up our knowledges as we have divided up our world, and the consequences have been disastrous. We can no longer study nature as if our acts of inquiry were not already ethical and transformative practices of nature itself.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---Corpora have always moved according to the same motions [motu principiorum corpora] (2.297–8). There never was a cataract. There never was a point in time or space when they started swerving, because it is only their swerving motion that produces time and space in the first place.

This is the hardest idea to think. The swerve is neither determined nor random. It is an indeterminate relational process capable of producing emergent forms. This is what he means when he says there is no oblique causal motion. For Lucretius, there is an immanent self-causality or continuous transformation of the whole of nature at each moment. Each motion comes from another, not in a completely determined or random way. Randomness is merely another version of ex nihilo creation. Lucretius is therefore neither a mechanist or a vitalist.

Wherefore again and again it is necessary that corpora swerve a little, but no more than a minimum, lest we seem to be inventing oblique motions, and the true facts refute it.
--- End quote ---

TaoHorror:
This is an amazing read, Sci :)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page