Trapped in our own perceptions

5/17/2017

Are we truly seeing the elemental nature of the world, such as Table of Elements, as it is? If not, where is the evidence?

I think I've landed upon one bit of evidence.
Philosophers more than chemists tend to ponder this one, but I think the clue to our fish-in-water nature is literally at our fingertips every day.

Are we trapped in such a narrow range of living conditions so attuned to earth that it would be impossible to start a life anywhere else within 100 light years?

To believe one is a fish in water, one must admit to the possibility that it can be just as complex and real outside of water, in conditions deadly to oneself but just fine to the creatures who live there. While that world will not be inhabitable by you with adaptation, not in your lifetime or in 50 generations, it is inhabitable. The methods and means can never be imagined or devised by humans. Even if there was a way that humans could be told, it will still not make sense.

A good example is electronics. The science of electricity. At first blush it seems impossible our human limitations have any effect on this science. It’s nature has been discovered down to the electrons and neutrons. Our range of understanding that extends from naturally-occurring lightening to billion-dollar particle accelerators bespeaks of our grasp of the whole idea. . . right?

Yet . . . why are all our electrical devices ‘happy’ at exactly the same temperature range as ourselves? They overheat when it’s above 150° F. and they don’t work right when it’s below -10° F. In fact, they work best when it’s between 50° and 80° F.

Yet electricity in nature works from -80° to thousands of degrees. The only electricity that seems to care about such a tiny range is the stuff we generate and tame.

Don’t reply that it's the limitations of materials; even when our finest minds want to design for 300° F. or -90° F., these finest minds devote years to simply duplicating something that works just fine at 75° F. Even the cooling of supercomputers is for the purpose of bringing the swiftly-heating working parts down to room temperature.
In fact, almost everything we build, whether out of elemental materials like aluminum or concrete or of earthly materials like cloth and plastics tends to function the longest at the very heat and humidity that is most comfortable for humans. Once moving out of that range, to say -30°F or 150°F, it degrades, develops cracks, changes shape.

It stands to reason this may be the reality for several materials or elements–but not ALL of them! We can look at outer space and the neighboring planets to see that all the elements are perfect-functioning for millions of years outside of our comfort range.

Almost everything we've designed is human. It works best at temperatures, humidity, air pressure and acidity that a naked human could stand for two hours.

1 Comment

Daniel Pech link

1/14/2019 01:22:02 pm

Presumably, what nearly all human cultures recognize as the sonic essence of music are sets of sounds that consist in the some degree of interplay of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Even mere percussive musics typically involve different tones of percussion, and these different tones coordinated with each other in non-random ways, or melodies. Thus melody is a sequence of tones, usually of various pitches.

Harmony is the match of wavelengths of functionally distinct instances of pitches, whether simply by the same pitch or by various pitches the wavelengths of which typically fit into each other on neat fractional bases.

But rhythm, or percussion, may be where it all is conceived. Normally, musical rhythm itself is conceived as the perceptibly temporal spacing of discrete sounds. But this merely is a convenient conception in terms of the temporal ‘progress’ of a melody. The simple fact is that a single pitch constitutes a rhythm comprised of its own sonic wave: a regular back-and-forth structure of motion, or ‘vibration’ of some physical medium. And that same rhythm can be conceived to constitute also a harmony, and even a melody. In other words, I propose that the sonic root form for even the most paradigmatically human of human musics is none other than sound itself.

But it is understandable why we would ignore the sense that sound itself is what, on the most basic level, inspires humans to make their music. To conceive of a single tone as the root form of music may seem such a trivial definition of music as not to constitute music at all.

A mere tone, and its own complex coherence, is trivial in face of the massive quantity of tones, and their inter-coherence, that comprises paradigmatically human music. But this is merely a comparative issue, not a strictly objective one. And the central feature of that comparison is not human paradigmatic music at all, but human musical sensibility as an integral dimension of the human animal:
What humans normally recognize as ‘music’ is something more ‘out into the world’ than simply a single moment of a particular sonic wave. In fact, this recognition seems to be a key to our definitional conception of music qua human normal functions: The individual human animal persists far longer than does a momentary sonic wave, and is far more complex than a single sonic wavelength of any duration. Moreover, unlike all other animals, humans readily are capable of perceiving, and perceptually tracking, vastly complex structures of all sorts, including those of sounds.

Therefore what humans normally mean by ‘music’ is that sonic typology that paradigmatically is a reflection of humans: a harmonic melody repeated, variated, expanded, tapped out, and wrapped around itself like a cozy kingly robe. One might, therefore, conceive of such paradigmatically human music as the direct sonic instantiation of the specifically human self-identifying lingu-oid proposition:

‘I am a human being, and I am the particular unique chemical, macro-physical, and personal being that I am.’

This sonic propositionality is implicit in Margulis’s (2014 On Repeat) observation that one of a very few things that marks the most paradigmatically human musical kind of sound is some coherence in terms of repetition. For humans, that repetition most normally takes the form of repeated whole or partial melody, and otherwise by a regular rhythm.

Natural cycles constituting an animal organism comprise the most direct instantiation of propositional meaning. It is at once a regularizing rhythm and a repetition of organic self-identity.

This self-identity obtains physically within, and in direct-and-constant relation to, a generally cyclical external environment, and thus in distinction to which the natural organism must repeat.

This necessity of organic repetition is due to the fact that natural organism is not as distinct from its environment as the human brain is justifiably wont, for neuro-efficiency, to conceive. Concepts are not the realities from which the concepts are abstracted.

The organism is profoundly fueled by, and otherwise-empirically related to, its environment.

The forms which organic repetition takes widely varies, but most cases it is so merely biological or intellectual that they go unrecognized by us as essentially forms of repetition-as-self-identity.
A most familiar instance of this obscured repetition-as-self-identity is that seen the conflict between the West’s ‘old fashioned’ Grammar School teacher and many a child’s supposed double negative:

‘I don’t got no school books, ma’am!’

As Menary (2006: 4) puts it, ‘reflective thought often intrudes into enactive performance: when performing a bodily skill, it [often] is better to let the body get on with it than to consciously direct the activity.’

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