Plato's Point of View

One of the greatest barriers to the understanding of Plato is that he is writing from a perspective quite different from our own. I say ‘our own’, because this perspective can be clearly defined as something which we, in our cultural continuum, implicitly accept (even if a number of individuals in that culture don’t). That is, we assume that what is real is what is physical. So when Plato was writing about what is metaphysical rather than the physical, he was writing about something extra, something beyond that physical reality. Sometimes this other level of reality is spoken of as a supersensible realm, in that it is beyond the world of sensory experience, and also beyond a comprehension which requires sense data.

This is not the way that Plato would have looked at transcendent reality. It is not something extra, superposed on physical reality and the world of sensory experience. It was there first, and had its existence before matter and sensory experience came to have existence.

This is the plenum, which I have discussed elsewhere. It is unlimited, and undefined. It is what must be there before anything is defined. It is neither presence nor absence. It can be thought of as the nothingness before the creation of anything, but to characterise it as nothingness is to misunderstand both what it is, and how it needs to be understood.

If the physical world did not exist, and so there was no such thing as movement, all that might be possible, in terms of a physical existence, and consequently movement, would necessarily exist in potential in that transcendent and undefined plenum. The evidence of our senses, and the categories of our understanding, tell us that the world of movement and change, illusion or not, has a certain level of reality, which has a certain mathematical regularity, which is one way to define something which has intelligible reality. All of that is necessarily present in the plenum, which is ever-present and unchanging, and devoid of actual movement. Of any sort at all.

From Plato’s point of view, the transcendent reality is the only thing which is truly real, and which is necessarily what it is, and not something other than it is. It is not a copy of anything. It is eternal in its nature, and is not subject to change of any sort.

The major difficulty in understanding Plato arises from the fact that almost all discussion in Plato’s canon of works is based on an abstract understanding of the transcendent reality. He is not trying to penetrate what is transcendently real from the point of view of physical or sensory reality, existing in time and space. Instead, he has an understanding of the nature of what is real, largely built on logical  and dialectical argument.

By this I mean the nature of reality itself can be approached and understood by questioning what it is, and what it is not, what properties it may or may not have, and how it stands in relation to the physical world. Questions such as ‘is reality itself one or many? If it is one, how is it the case that the physical and sensory world is full of things, and why is it represented to us in such a way?’ And the opposite question also makes sense: ‘if reality consists of the many, and not one thing, in what way can we understand reality as reality itself? Why should there be many things at the root of reality?’

Which is how the ancient consensus about the nature of reality came to be. This consensus was in place as early as the mid-second millennium BCE. But possibly much earlier than that.

So much of Plato’s argumentation is based on a point of view which we generally do not share in the modern world, and which is hard for us to fathom. Where Plato's work is taught, which is almost every major academic institution in the world, it is not taught or understood in terms of a range of arguments which apply to the transcendent reality, and questions of existence and the creation of a physical world which is full of both things and images. Instead, it is taught in terms of exercises in human thought, covering a vast range of subjects, including discussions of metaphysics, the ideas of beauty and justice, ethics and morality, of friendship and love, mathematics, geometry; even philology and etymology (in the Cratylus). It is taught in this way, since much of subsequent philosophical thought has its roots in Plato’s dialogues, even if we do not fully understand the point of view expressed in them.

So Platonic thought is taught in a fragmentary way, which Plato would not have understood, and the intellectual and logical roots of the dialogues are often treated as neither here nor there.

The tradition of studying Plato lay largely fallow after the collapse of the ancient world, and particularly after the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 C.E. This closure is an extremely significant event in history, though the destruction of the glories of the ancient world had been under way already for a considerable period (as far back as the argument with Caligula about putting images of Caesar in the temple in Jerusalem, recorded by Philo Judaeus, who was the man who drew the short straw). The closure of the schools tells us that the basis upon which the ancient world once argued about the nature of reality and physical existence was opposed by imperial power and its requirements, and that humanity was entering a period in which knowledge and thought were thoroughly deprecated.

Ideas of the importance of knowledge and what it is, and also what is meant by the divine, and the role of the divine for the human race, were now based on the requirements of the secular powers, and their political and ideological concerns.

Formerly, political power, and royal and imperial knowledge of the will of the divine and the gods, drew strength from the idea that there was a rational connection between the nature of reality and the divine, and the world of the here and now, the secular world of time, and of physical power (expressed eloquently by Homer, with the golden chain of Zeus stretching into the world, according to his will). Now the nature of reality was of no interest, and gave nothing to the secular powers. Whatever was left of the notion of a rational connection between physical reality and the divine ran the other way. Physical power and its preoccupations would now determine the kinds of discussions there would be about divine things.

We have been on this downward slide since the time of imperial Rome and its campaigns of conquest. It is one of the most powerful of Roman legacies.

   

The story of the occasional and partial reversals of this long intellectual and cultural slide has yet to be told coherently, and I am not going to undertake the task here. I will mention the reversal in the Italian renaissance, where Plato was understood rather differently than he is now. For example, it is useful to approach Plato through Marsilio Ficino’s understanding of his work, and also through the writings of Giordano Bruno.

So it is not that we have no alternative ways to approach Platonic thought; but we choose not to look at another approach, since we know what is real, and what isn’t. We think this is a rational view, and our own way of thinking, but it has been gifted to us as the result of political and ideological struggles long ago, which did not fear to destroy rational connection with a transcendent Reality, once understood as the reason why the physical world existed at all. 

Physics and the Origins of the Universe (II)

Current popular understanding of how the universe came into physical existence depends on some improbable ideas, such as the existence of physics where physics cannot be present, and that there was a physical explosion of something into a place which did not yet exist. This doesn't seem to trouble the popular understanding. More importantly, it does not seem to trouble most physicists. 

I've written elsewhere about how we got into this difficulty. In short, the west ditched certain ideas about reality between the time of Newton and the Enlightenment, and consequently also ditched the intellectual tools necessary to understand how and why we have physics and a physical existence.

What follows is a description of creation as it might have been framed, if the west had not offloaded the concepts and tools which enable an understanding of the origins of the universe not requiring us to believe several impossible things before breakfast.  

Essentially this argument proposes that physical existence is the consequence of an underlying plenum, whose nature transcends our understanding of what is real. The nature of this plenum is what gives rise to physics and the physical world, through the necessity of retaining its own nature. As a result, the physical world has a logical origin, rather than an origin requiring a strange pre-existence of physical laws.  

The second part of this discussion (Physics and the Origins of the Universe III) concerns the Kaluza-Klein hypothesis, whose implications suggest that the idea of a plenum, in the form of a fifth dimension, is critically important in connecting Einstein's field equations, and Maxwell's equations for electrodynamics. 

The Plenum and its Properties (I)

The Plenum is, as it is, undefined in any way. We can say that it is what it is, and that its properties are those which can be said to characterise the plenum: it has no shape or form, or size. It does not move (there is as yet no space), and it has no age (there is as yet no time, which is a vector of change).

What are the properties of the plenum? It is one undivided thing, which has no physical existence, no location, and is something which remains unaltered and unalterable. It is literally eternal. It is utterly transcendent of the categories of our understanding, and is not subject to the laws of physics. Though it is one undivided thing, it is beyond characterisation as one undivided thing. It is just that which is, before dimensions and time, and categories of understanding.

It is neither one thing nor another.  It can be understood as a fullness, since it is not an absence. But in itself, it is not a presence either. It has potential. This does not mean that its nature will change, but that there is potential within its nature for the appearance and perception of change, size, form and shape.

So we are building up a picture of the plenum, or the initial state of the cosmos. It is one not two, (there is no ‘two’). It is beyond definition. It is unmoving and is not subject to change. It contains the potential for all of these things, including time and space, since it is undefined. It can contain these things as entities which appear, in the context of other things which can perceive entities which appear. At the earliest stages, perception can mean as little as detection of, and response to, things which appear. Not consciousness of any sort that we would understand.

All physical reality that may ever have existence is, in a sense, already present within the plenum. That is, physical reality is already present in potential.

All possibility is present in the plenum. Nothing is fixed or determined, at least initially (we are looking back at the initial conditions, so ‘initially’ references our own point of view, not that of the plenum. It is not in development. It does not change).

So the plenum is, conceived from the outside, is a formless, churning and foaming potency.

What other things can we say of the Plenum? It is infinite, in that it not finite, since it is undefined. It is also infinitesimal, for the same reason.

The parameters in which the apparent realities of the physical world can have their existence include binary opposites.  We can oppose the ideas of the infinite and the infinitesimal, but we can also oppose the ideas of the infinite and the finite. These are different oppositions involving the same concept. We can do the same with other oppositions, such as the unlimited and the limited, and the limitless and the limited. These may appear to be the same, but the unlimited is something which has not been subject to limit. The limitless is simply that which is without limit.  Likewise with the ideas of great and small. But the great can be contrasted with the not-great, which is not limited to the idea of small.

These may appear to be footling distinctions between abstractions, but the abstractions are the earliest things which can be present in the plenum, before the plenum can give rise to the appearance of a physical reality (abstractions are by definition beyond particular physical instances). So the churn in the plenum is in a sense a logical one, rather than anything resembling a physical reality. It is a chaos of logical possibilities, and also of logical contradictions. The Plenum does not have a consciousness, at this level of the creation.

The plenum has been defined as one, and itself. What may the one be contrasted with? The many? Or the absence of the oneness of anything? The idea of the many can be contained within the plenum as an abstract idea, without compromising the oneness of the plenum. Likewise, the absence of oneness. Each of these opposing abstractions within the plenum represents a potential subdivision of its nature, by which a physical creation increasingly becomes a possibility. All of this is present in the plenum from the beginning. This chaos of conflicting abstractions is eternal.  For a physical and ordered world to exist the conflicting abstractions need to marshalled.

The formless abstractions are ideas, which are subject to the power of other ideas. This stage can be understood as a second creation, in which logical decisions are made. At this point we could speak of the presence of a consciousness, though all that is meant is that an ordering process begins to take place, replacing a senseless churn of abstractions and oppositions.

The oppositions represent the sameness of the plenum with its difference. In the case of the infinite and the finite, the infinite is the sameness, and the finite is the difference. In both cases, the same and the different are the same plenum, understood differently, and looked at with different categories of understanding.  In a sense the plenum begins to understand itself after the second creation. The idea of finitude is crucial to the creation of physical reality, and is created as a qualifier of the idea of infinity.

Another property of the plenum is the completeness of what it is. But completeness can imply boundedness, rather than the boundless. Is the plenum bounded and therefore limited and finite because it is complete? Again, it is a matter of the categories of understanding which are brought to bear.

With finitude, and the idea of the many, physical reality becomes possible. The abstractions can be understood in terms of number, while still being abstract.  With the presence of number, all kinds of processes and constructs become possible.  But we are still (from our point of view) before space and time in any sense we would understand. 

The unmoving abstract concept of the plenum gives rise to the idea of a possible opposite, which is a cosmos of movement. So space and time become abstractions by which numbers and their interactions may be represented. Once you have space and time, the representation of numbers can move beyond points to geometrical shapes, and eventually three dimensional form.

Space and time are generated by the same process of opposing the same and the different. Ultimately they are both representations of understandings of the plenum.

So what populates the cosmos? The earliest occupant of the newly generated physical cosmos will be hydrogen, since it is the simplest element, made up of two different electrical charges. These charges will have been created as a consequence of the same principle of opposing the same and the different. A myriad of representations of one or more of the original polarities contained (as a possibility) in the plenum. 

It is possible to see opposing electrical charges as a representation of the same and the different in the context of finitude.  Whereas the raw state of the plenum is foaming and churning (from our point of view), hydrogen represents a stable opposition of electrical charges in a dynamical relation. The foaming and churning has, in this representation, been reduced to a resonance. Order has emerged from chaos.

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There was a well-known toy for drawing complex patterns when I was a child (Spirograph). It had its limitations as a toy, but it taught me that a simple ratio could imply something very complex, depending on how that ratio was expressed. Similarly so with the development of patterns in animal fur, which Alan Turing investigated at the end of his life – the underlying mathematics were often simple, but the process could produce startlingly complex patterns.  The complexity we see in physical reality can have its roots in something very simple, such as the generation of numbers (real or imaginary).

I learned to use log tables and a slide rule while at school. That taught me that a process such as multiplication could be represented as addition, depending on the adopted point of view.  In the case of logarithms, through the use of reciprocal numbers.  Again, the same, represented in both form and process, by the different.  And patterns emerge from the encounters of the same with the different. So interaction between the plenum itself with its difference, and the representations of its relationship with its difference, can be understood in terms of ratio. The old sense of what is rational descends from this idea – what accords, what is consonant, etc. 

Two logical modalities underpin the descent of aspects of the plenum into physical reality. One can be understood in terms of entities possessing identity with itself, of not being something else while it is itself, and not partaking of itself and something else while it is itself. The other logical modality is startlingly different, but it is a completely rational modality. Since the encounter of the same with the different is happening within the underlying plenum, and is in a sense powered by the properties of the plenum, it is the case that all things can pass into one another. That is, what is the same as itself, can pass into what is different from itself.

It is not possible however for the same to always pass directly into something which is different from it. It must pass from itself to what is different through a rational process. It is possible for the same to do this, since it necessarily shares aspects of its nature with the plenum within which it has its reality. This is how this logical modality is rational, and not chaotic.

When I learned music, I found that the possible scales were patterns within the octave which reflected mathematical ratios based on the octave itself. That is, each of the notes possessed a relationship with the root note of the octave which expressed a ratio which existed outside the octave. Music works because we are hearing the intervals, and the progressions of the intervals, all of which are in a sense beyond the actual notes played. So we are appreciating the rationality of the relationship of one to the other.  The expression of those relationships can be understood as a rational and logical interplay between what is the same, and what is its difference; multiplied, and in different sequences, both horizontally and vertically.

One particular ratio, is defined by ‘the smaller is to the larger, as the larger is to the whole’. This is of course the golden ratio, where each of the parts bears a relationship to the whole, and, is not dependent at all on any scalar values. So it has a reality which exists apart from any particular instance in which this ratio may be expressed. It refers to itself, without necessary reference to anything which has physical reality. It is an abstraction which refers only to sameness, and to difference. It is therefore a conception of great importance, and we should expect to find it often represented in the continuum of reality. And we do.  It is the plenum, the thing which is itself, reminding us of how the world of physical reality came into existence.

***

The two logical modalities both draw their natures from the properties and characteristics of the plenum. They appear to be contradictory, but then the nature of the plenum contains a number of apparent contradictions. Nevertheless, it must be itself, whatever itself is. But it must also share its identity with every aspect of itself, since, in reality, there is nothing other than the plenum. Accordingly, the world of appearances is just that – the world of abstractions and concrete instances, of ideas, number and physical form, is just an array of different perspectives on the plenum. The plenum is the one true thing, and all that there is.

***

The plenum is complete, and whole. Every other thing which has reality has it because it participates in the plenum through its completeness. Anything which is whole participates in wholeness, and wholeness is an abstraction which provides connection with the ultimate abstraction of wholeness, which is the plenum. All parts of things also participate in the plenum through the wholeness they share as the parts of things which are whole. If they are whole or completed parts, they again participate in the wholeness of the plenum. So in sense, the part and the whole are not entirely separable concepts. They can be understood as the same and the different. They may also pass into and out of one another.

Because nothing can have reality or existence, or come to be and pass away, change, or move, without the underlying ground of reality, it can be argued that the plenum must be real for the illusion of these finite things to function.

***

This is an account of a creation from abstractions, which have no firm location in time or space, even where there is time and space present. So it is possible to conceive of them having reality before time and space came to be.  The need to explain the presence of the physical world in terms of a physical creation is removed, which is plainly a species of category mistake: the presence of the physical world does not need to be explained in terms of a physical creation, which approach has saddled our understanding with the need to find a prime mover.

There is also no need for the idea of a creation ex nihilo. The presence of a plenum (which is neither presence nor absence) allows for a rational creation from the interplay of abstractions. The plenum contains all things which may be thought, and which may come into existence. Hence we can understand reality by studying its properties, as well as come to understand why the physical world is the way it is. This approach is not the opposite of a scientific understanding of reality, it is the root of a scientific understanding of reality, and of its subset, the physical world.

Thomas Yaeger, 21-2 February 2016.

Pleroma, Cosmos, and Physical Existence

As suggested elsewhere, there isn’t much we can say about the initial state of physical reality at a notional time of its emergence, if the various parameters of what can be said of it don’t have any existence. That’s the problem physics has when it is looking for causes and mechanisms.

However it is possible to talk about the initial state of reality in terms of logical argument, which is how it was done in antiquity. They were familiar with talking about reality in terms of extreme states: does it exist? What is it? Is it one or two? If it is two is reality other than itself? Is reality complete in itself? Is physical existence a copy based on the pattern of reality itself? If it is a copy, has the nature of reality itself been compromised?

Whatever the initial conditions might have been, we can say that those conditions are at the edge of physical existence. Which is not to suggest that they actually occupy some kind of space at the edge of physical existence. Just that, since the initial conditions don’t participate in the conditions of our physical existence (extension, vectors, time, etc), then these conditions will, to us, appear to be something which we can find at the extremes of physical existence.

This is the root of the idea of the telos. It is about beginnings and endings – how things start and finish. When what is ultimately real is considered in this way, it is susceptible to logical analysis, and an idea of a prime mover beyond the properties of the telos itself is not required.

A discussion of this conception of the telos should be untarnished by the general deprecation of teleological argument in any kind of scientific analysis. We aren’t looking for purpose. But we are looking for the beginning, and how things might have unfolded from that beginning. The concept of the telos as a plenum, a pleroma undefined by the kind of parameters we find in our physical existence, as opposed to the idea that physical existence just appeared ex nihilo, can be discussed. Nothing as absence is very hard to discuss, except in the context of its opposite. In fact it cannot reasonably be conceived without that context.

The discussion of Aristotle (elsewhere) places his laws of thought into a wider context. The laws represent tools in the Greek dialectical armoury. So do the techniques used by Plato. But they are quite different and produce different kinds of argument and result in different conclusions. They belong to the same armoury (a discussion for another time). It is possible to understand some things with Plato’s approach which would not be possible with a rigorous application of Aristotle’s laws of thought. It isn’t the case that one logical approach is correct, and the other not. But they are appropriate to different contexts.

A plenum can be understood as identical with itself, and so, in that sense, can be thought of as consistent with the first of the laws of thought. But its properties, as understood from the point of view of physical reality, cannot be self-consistent, since it is beyond definition in physical terms. So the plenum must have a paradoxical aspect (literally meaning it is beyond human understanding), and therefore must breach the other two laws of thought (it can be one thing or its opposite; and it may also be neither one thing or its opposite).

There are several ways an argument about an initial and ever-present plenum can be taken forward. One is to take the view that physical reality represents a partial view of the plenum. Or can be understood as an assemblage of partial views of the plenum. It contains consistencies and regularities, but at a granular level (particularly), it behaves with apparent inconsistency, being best understood in terms of probability. That is how the plenum is, or at least the best way it can be understood by us. It isn’t one thing or the other. But occasionally its granularity looks like one thing or the other. And sometimes both at the same time. We can describe what is going on in terms of probabilities, which is how physics handles it, but it is not understood except in terms of mathematical description. The idea of the plenum, as established through a purely logical analysis, gives us insight into how the universe is actually operating.

It could be argued that physical reality behaves as it does at the quantum level because, for all practical purposes, the plenum has no size. So, at the quantum level, we are looking more closely at the nature of the plenum as it is, or rather as it must, on account of its nature, look to us.

Quantum entanglement might have a similar basis, on the ground that what is happening is actually happening in the plenum, rather than in physical space. Despite it having no size, it must necessarily be (in a sense) distributed throughout space and time.

In future I will be discussing Bell’s Theorem; Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen; and Klein-Kaluza. Also about the fact that Maxwell’s equations can be derived from Klein-Kaluza, and why the maths of Klein-Kaluza has two states.