Mathematicians Map E_8
Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E_8. This achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge and because of the many connections between E_8 and other areas, including string theory and geometry. The magnitude of the calculation is staggering: the answer, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. Mathematicians are known for their solitary work style, but the assault on E_8 is part of a large project bringing together 18 mathematicians from the U.S. and Europe for an intensive four-year collaboration.
The article compared the size of the calculation to the representation of the human genome which, it notes, is less than one gigabyte in size. I feel entirely comfortable in saying that any of those 18 mathematicians would only understand a small part of what they worked on and produced and that no human being, even if they made this project their sole and exclusive field of study would ever "know" more than a small part of it.
And this mathematical object is not known to exist as a real entity in reality, not to mention as a material thing. In so far as human beings can be concerned, there is no way of knowing if it might not be a product of human imagination having no other existence, anywhere. It could be a human invention, the expression of which in absolute terms exceeds even the human minds which may be the only place where it resides.
What that makes their accomplishment, I don't know but I'm pretty sure neither do those who understand anything about it. One thing I'm confident in asserting is that its implications for even the simplest objects and entities within human perception may well lead a reasonable person to think that there is not a single one of those things which, addressed in similar terms as this E_8 object, would be comprehensible to even the most brilliant minds among us. Another thing I am confident in asserting is that we, all of us, in every way, must live out our lives and make up our minds on a basis other than absolute knowledge and proof because such absolute knowledge and proof is not accessible by human minds and, in human terms, is merely a satisfying fantasy and an arrogantly and stupidly waved weapon of arrogant polemical assertion.
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Resurrection imaginable? People too easily forget that both "resurrection" and "raising" are metaphorical, visual terms. The picture is taken from "awakening" and "rising" from sleep. But, as an image, symbol, metaphor, for what is supposed to happen to the dead person, this can be both easily understood and easily misunderstood. It is the very opposite of returning as from sleep to the previous state of things, to the former, earthly, mortal life. It is a radical transformation into a wholly different state into another, new unparalleled, definitive, immortal life; totalier aliter, utterly different.
To the question that people are constantly inclined to ask - how are we to imagine this wholly different life? - the answer is simple, not at all! Here there is nothing to be depicted, imagined, objectified. It would not be a wholly different life if we could illustrate it with concepts and ideas from our present life. Neither sight nor imagination can help us here, they can only mislead us. The reality of the resurrection itself therefore is completely intangible and unimaginable, Resurrection and raising are pictorial-graphic expressions; they are images, metaphors, symbols which correspond to the thought forms of that time and which could of course be augmented, for something which is itself intangible and unimaginable and of which - as of God himself- we have no sort of distinct knowledge
Certainly we can attempt to convey this intangible and unimaginable life, not only graphically but also intellectually (as for instance physics attempts to convey by formulas the nature of light, which in the atomic field is both wave and corpuscule and as such intangible and unimaginable). Here too we come up against the limitations of language. But then there is nothing left for it but to speak in paradoxes: to link together for this wholly different life concepts which in the present life are mutually exclusive. That is what happens in a way in the Gospel accounts of the appearances, at the extreme limit of the imaginable; not a phantom and yet not palpable, perceptible-imperceptible, visible-invisible, comprehensible-incomprehensible, material-immaterial, within and beyond space and time.
"Like the angels in heaven" Jesus himself observed, using the language of the Jewish tradition. Paul speaks of this new life in paradoxical terms, which themselves point to the limits of what can be said: an imperishable "spirit-body," a "body of glory," which has emerged through a radical "transformation" from the perishable body of flesh. By this Paul simply does not mean a spirit-soul in the Greek sense (released from the prison of the body), which modern anthropology can no longer conceive in isolation. he means in the Jewish sense a whole corporal human being (transformed and permeated by God's life-creating Spirit), which corresponds much more closely to the modern integral conception of man and to the fundamental importance of his corporeality. Man therefore is not - Platonically - released from his corporeality. He is released with and in his now glorified, spritualized corporeality; a new creation, a new man.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel saying, "Death, then, is not simply man’s coming to an end. It is also entering a beginning." The Christian religion is the younger brother of the Jewish tradition.
The second thing, being a political blogger, was what such a conception of human beings would have to lead to if you accept that you have a moral responsibility to other people or other beings (I am not going to exclude our fellow living beings) who share in that same status as opposed to the materialist-atheist-scietistic view of human beings as objects or the vulgar, Trumpian, gangster view that other people have the same status that people generally hold of animals that they are objects to which people owe no moral obligations, a status consistent with modernism after the Cartesian fashion and all too consistent with how human beings from peasants to the most powerful and rich treat them. I will forego the temptation to go on at length at how pandemic viruses are only one result of that cruel utilitarian view of life while pointing out that slave labor and wage-slavery is another obvious result of it which Marxist materialism did absolutely nothing to mitigate or lessen.
I recently asked the political question of Christianity, what you get from choosing to really believe it as opposed to what you get from choosing to disbelieve it. I think that the difference you would get from someone having this view of human beings, of human potential and our mutual moral obligations to be good to each other and seeing people as objects to be used as you can get away with doing, of Darwinian objects of greater or lesser value, of greater or lesser "fitness" which really means whether or not their death will serve the purpose of those who can bring it about or prevent it, has the most profound moral and, so, political results.
I started my investigations into the reason the American left failed so consistently and I have come to see that the ubiqutious materialism, Marxist or merely practical and unestablished in an ideological framing, is one of the most serious reasons that the American left fails.* The moral framing required for egalitarian democracy, the very reason for any "left," so claimed to exist does not inhibit the opposite which, even when it calls itself "Christian" is fully consistent with and can prosper within the degraded view of humanity that real Christianity is in the most profound opposition. Jesus is taken by Christianity as the first human to attain the status as indirectly represented by the paradoxes and reservations given by Kung. The fact is that not everyone who claims to be Christian hold with the most basic definitions of Christianity, a large number may have been called, but they have not, so far, answered.
* In 2020, with the history that Marxism has had in reality instead of imaginary wet-dreams by academics and other fantasists, with the various attempts of non-Marxists to work with and defend Marxists (what we should have learned was not only impossible but a gurantee of getting stabbed in the back from Orwell in the 1940s) it is way, way past time to not only dump them but to drive them out and discredit them. Getting past the romantic Hollywood presentation of them and their eternally regurgitated victim hood, the sum total that I would guess most college-credentialed Americans, those most prone to being suckered by them piously believe they know about it, is probably the biggest hurdle to get over. Hollywood, too, is one of the worst disabilities of the American left, it makes leftists stupid in a different way than it does those prone to want right-wing gangster government.
Certainly we can attempt to convey this intangible and unimaginable life, not only graphically but also intellectually (as for instance physics attempts to convey by formulas the nature of light, which in the atomic field is both wave and corpuscule and as such intangible and unimaginable). Here too we come up against the limitations of language. But then there is nothing left for it but to speak in paradoxes: to link together for this wholly different life concepts which in the present life are mutually exclusive. That is what happens in a way in the Gospel accounts of the appearances, at the extreme limit of the imaginable; not a phantom and yet not palpable, perceptible-imperceptible, visible-invisible, comprehensible-incomprehensible, material-immaterial, within and beyond space and time.
"Like the angels in heaven" Jesus himself observed, using the language of the Jewish tradition. Paul speaks of this new life in paradoxical terms, which themselves point to the limits of what can be said: an imperishable "spirit-body," a "body of glory," which has emerged through a radical "transformation" from the perishable body of flesh. By this Paul simply does not mean a spirit-soul in the Greek sense (released from the prison of the body), which modern anthropology can no longer conceive in isolation. he means in the Jewish sense a whole corporal human being (transformed and permeated by God's life-creating Spirit), which corresponds much more closely to the modern integral conception of man and to the fundamental importance of his corporeality. Man therefore is not - Platonically - released from his corporeality. He is released with and in his now glorified, spritualized corporeality; a new creation, a new man.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel saying, "Death, then, is not simply man’s coming to an end. It is also entering a beginning." The Christian religion is the younger brother of the Jewish tradition.
The second thing, being a political blogger, was what such a conception of human beings would have to lead to if you accept that you have a moral responsibility to other people or other beings (I am not going to exclude our fellow living beings) who share in that same status as opposed to the materialist-atheist-scietistic view of human beings as objects or the vulgar, Trumpian, gangster view that other people have the same status that people generally hold of animals that they are objects to which people owe no moral obligations, a status consistent with modernism after the Cartesian fashion and all too consistent with how human beings from peasants to the most powerful and rich treat them. I will forego the temptation to go on at length at how pandemic viruses are only one result of that cruel utilitarian view of life while pointing out that slave labor and wage-slavery is another obvious result of it which Marxist materialism did absolutely nothing to mitigate or lessen.
I recently asked the political question of Christianity, what you get from choosing to really believe it as opposed to what you get from choosing to disbelieve it. I think that the difference you would get from someone having this view of human beings, of human potential and our mutual moral obligations to be good to each other and seeing people as objects to be used as you can get away with doing, of Darwinian objects of greater or lesser value, of greater or lesser "fitness" which really means whether or not their death will serve the purpose of those who can bring it about or prevent it, has the most profound moral and, so, political results.
I started my investigations into the reason the American left failed so consistently and I have come to see that the ubiqutious materialism, Marxist or merely practical and unestablished in an ideological framing, is one of the most serious reasons that the American left fails.* The moral framing required for egalitarian democracy, the very reason for any "left," so claimed to exist does not inhibit the opposite which, even when it calls itself "Christian" is fully consistent with and can prosper within the degraded view of humanity that real Christianity is in the most profound opposition. Jesus is taken by Christianity as the first human to attain the status as indirectly represented by the paradoxes and reservations given by Kung. The fact is that not everyone who claims to be Christian hold with the most basic definitions of Christianity, a large number may have been called, but they have not, so far, answered.
* In 2020, with the history that Marxism has had in reality instead of imaginary wet-dreams by academics and other fantasists, with the various attempts of non-Marxists to work with and defend Marxists (what we should have learned was not only impossible but a gurantee of getting stabbed in the back from Orwell in the 1940s) it is way, way past time to not only dump them but to drive them out and discredit them. Getting past the romantic Hollywood presentation of them and their eternally regurgitated victim hood, the sum total that I would guess most college-credentialed Americans, those most prone to being suckered by them piously believe they know about it, is probably the biggest hurdle to get over. Hollywood, too, is one of the worst disabilities of the American left, it makes leftists stupid in a different way than it does those prone to want right-wing gangster government.
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