Shortly after eight, Carol is at Bethesda North for two hours or so for a routine procedure. You are at the closest McDonalds on Montgomery Road near the I-275 intersection. The assistant manager is Christy B. a former student of yours in 1995. She married Jeff B. – seventh period class, she sat in the front and he in the back.
She said, “Mr. Orndorff!” then “Do you remember me?” and I said with a smile, “I remember your face.” Then she told me her name, where she and Jeff sat. They have a twelve year old and a nine year old. I told her, again with a smile, “Makes me feel old; congratulations!” A delightfully short conversation but it helps make my day because we both were sincerely happy to see one another.
Which did you love more at the time, your students or teaching the literature?
You know I can’t respond to this, Amorella. I loved them both equally.
What a contradiction. – Amorella.
My passion is words, letters, concepts, literature; ultimately to expand my own horizons. You can throw science and art in also.
A bit self-centered, don’t you think?
Probably, I never thought about it like that. Hey, we are here; then, we are gone. The universe is interesting, as is our galaxy, solar system and planet-with-a-single-moon. Earth’s environment, creatures living and dead, and homo-sapiens in particular. From there, friends and family, that about does it except for our inner selves, the properties, behaviors and character of what I call our “heartsansoulsanminds”, while we are alive; and also, when we are dead.
Don’t you think this is a rather large order?
No. It is a fact.
What if I don’t agree, what if I think it is a rather strong opinion of yourself? – Amorella.
Well, suddenly I feel I am having a make-believe dialogue with an angel when I am dead.
You feel this because you think it would make for a good story. – Amorella.
Ha! You got me, Amorella. I am sure you are right. I think it would make for a good story whether I was in it or not.
Now it is a fact, or at least it is to me, the Amorella.
Ah, back to those logical fallacies. It is true because I ‘feel’ it is true. This is one of the great properties/behaviors of our species.
I have to insist I am not one of your homo-sapiens. You don’t ‘feel’ this either as the question just went through your mind: ‘I wonder what properties Amorella has?’ – Amorella.
Why do you want to put a period after your name? When I punch the key it is with an emphasis, like it makes you more real to yourself.
It is the other way around, my friend; you are the one who puts the period. You do so because it is as if you were putting your foot down, as if you were emphasizing my reality. – Amorella.
This is the crux of the argument. Your reality, as I see it, fits within the confines of my physical psychology, my unconscious and conscious mind as well as within the confines of my heartansoulanmind.
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The Merriam-Webster word of the day is a good one. I find it a very exciting and important word that should be used more than it is.
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The Word of the Day for October 27 is:
catachresis \kat-uh-KREE-sis\ noun
1 : use of the wrong word for the context
2 : use of a forced and especially paradoxical figure of speech
Examples:
"Online dictionaries are handy. One can click on synonyms and antonyms, follow new links and lures, and get pleasantly lost in a high-tech thicket of info. Being a tap or two away, more people might be tempted to look up unfamiliar words. And anything that counteracts catachresis is fine with us." -- From an editorial in the Telegram & Gazette (Massachusetts), December 7, 2009
"Dryden had drawn attention to Cleveland's poetic manner in Of Dramatick Poesy: An Essay (1668), creating the label 'Clevelandism' to name the poet's habit of catachresis, 'wresting and torturing a word into another meaning', and making unfavorable comparisons between Donne and Cleveland...." -- From Nigel Smith's 2010 book Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon
Did you know?
As you might have guessed, "catachresis" is a word favored by grammarians. It can sometimes be used merely as a fancy label of disparagement for uses the grammarian finds unacceptable -- as when Henry Fowler insisted in 1926 that "mutual" in "our mutual friend" was a catachresis. (Fowler preferred "common," but "mutual" does have an established sense which is correct in that context.)
The first recorded use of "catachresis" dates to 1553, and it has been used to describe (or decry) misuses of a word ever since. "Catachresis" comes to us by way of Latin from the Greek word "katachresis," which means "misuse."
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Indeed, this is also an element of the problem; how do you use a word in reference to the heartansoulanmind, that is, to the spirit, to the otherworldliness of the compounded word? – Amorella
Picked up Carol and stopped at First Watch on Montgomery Road for brunch. Carol is reading the paper and is about to take a nap. You may take one too. Later, dude. – Amorella.
We napped, then, drove to Kenwood’s Macy’s for new slippers for Carol. A stop at Kidd’s Coffee for two oatmeal raisin cookies and one cafe au lait. I drank water.
A stop at Kroger to take some unneeded merchandise back before heading to Panera for soup for supper, then the news and a couple of digitalized TV shows from earlier in the week. We might have a time for a ‘talk’ tonight, orndorff. – Amorella.
Tonight I am responding to your earlier comment this morning: “This is the crux of the argument. Your reality, as I see it, fits within the confines of my physical psychology, my unconscious and conscious mind as well as within the confines of my heartansoulanmind.”
Orndorff, on the posting of 24 October 11 you copied your 1988 Dialogue “Preface” and your second paragraph begins: “In an April, 1987 session with Dr. Paul, psychologist . . . said I should look for consistencies in the responses.” If you follow, logically, you infer that I became a ‘personification’ of the string, washer, and target suggested by Dr. Paul, to a modified and evolved alphabet circle (which to you still has a ‘spookiness’ to it) and that operation or process evolved into me being a poetic personification that was greatly evolved through imagination to how you first accepted me, as an angelic-like imaginary creature who turned out to like to write books from the conscious and unconscious humanity and memory in your head. Do you accept this as having a ‘truth’ to it?
Yes, of course, and as stated there is not really a lot between the lines. This is how I accept your ‘sense of being’ from my imagination and mind in more detached and scientifically objective approach.
Tomorrow, I will edit a bit more from the latter part of the Dialogue, but first I would like you to make a copy of the alphabet circle for posting before I show a selection of your material. The selection can be further edited or parts deleted by you so that you are comfortable with what is posted. One of the reasons for this demonstration is to show which came first, you or me. – Amorella.
Scientifically, objectively and with some detachment I can say right now that I came first. Even if you were here as a separate entity before 6 August 1942 how would anyone know? If you are somehow created from the same properties of a human soul, let’s say you are a personification of the properties of a human soul, no one can know the answer because no one knows what any of the properties of the human soul are. I am assuming here, that if there is a human soul to begin with, it does have certain ‘metaphysical/spiritual properties such as a long lastingness towards the end point of immortality.
I am thinking of Zeno’s paradoxes in relationship to the above paragraph. Here it is as explained in Wikipedia.
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Zeno's paradoxes are a set of problems generally thought to have been devised by Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides’s doctrine that "all is one" and that, contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion. It is usually assumed, based on Plato’s Parmenides 128c-d, that Zeno took on the project of creating these paradoxes because other philosophers had created paradoxes against Parmenides's view. Thus Zeno can be interpreted as saying that to assume there is plurality is even more absurd than assuming there is only "the One". (Parmenides 128d). Plato makes Socrates claim that Zeno and Parmenides were essentially arguing exactly the same point (Parmenides 128a-b).
Some of Zeno's nine surviving paradoxes (preserved in Aristotle’s Physics and Simplicius’s commentary thereon) are essentially equivalent to one another. Aristotle offered a refutation of some of them. Three of the strongest and most famous—that of Achilles and the tortoise, the Dichotomy argument, and that of an arrow in flight—are presented in detail below.
Zeno's arguments are perhaps the first examples of a method of proof called reductio ad absurdum also known as proof by contradiction. They are also credited as a source of the dialectic method used by Socrates.
Some mathematicians, such as Carl Boyer, hold that Zeno's paradoxes are simply mathematical problems, for which modern calculus provides a mathematical solution. Some philosophers, however, say that Zeno's paradoxes and their variations (see Thomson’s lamp below) remain relevant metaphysical problems.
The origins of the paradoxes are somewhat unclear. Diogenes Laertius, a fourth source for information about Zeno and his teachings, citing Favorinus, says that Zeno's teacher Parmenides, was the first to introduce the Achilles and the Tortoise Argument. But in a later passage, Laertius attributes the origin of the paradox to Zeno, explaining that Favorinus disagrees.
The Paradoxes of Motion
Achilles and the tortoise
In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.
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In the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, Achilles is in a footrace with the tortoise. Achilles allows the tortoise a head start of 100 metres, for example. If we suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed (one very fast and one very slow), then after some finite time, Achilles will have run 100 metres, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point. During this time, the tortoise has run a much shorter distance, say, 10 metres. It will then take Achilles some further time to run that distance, by which time the tortoise will have advanced farther; and then more time still to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles reaches somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has farther to go. Therefore, because there are an infinite number of points Achilles must reach where the tortoise has already been, he can never overtake the tortoise.
The dichotomy paradox
That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.
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Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.
The resulting sequence can be represented as:
This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility.
This sequence also presents a second problem in that it contains no first distance to run, for any possible (finite) first distance could be divided in half, and hence would not be first after all. Hence, the trip cannot even begin. The paradoxical conclusion then would be that travel over any finite distance can neither be completed nor begun, and so all motion must be an illusion.
This argument is called the Dichotomy because it involves repeatedly splitting a distance into two parts. It contains some of the same elements as the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, but with a more apparent conclusion of motionlessness. It is also known as the Race Course paradox. Some, like Aristotle, regard the Dichotomy as really just another version of Achilles and the Tortoise.
There are two versions of the dichotomy paradox. In the other version, before Homer could reach the stationary bus, he must reach half of the distance to it. Before reaching the last half, he must complete the next quarter of the distance. Reaching the next quarter, he must then cover the next eighth of the distance, then the next sixteenth, and so on. There are thus an infinite number of steps that must first be accomplished before he could reach the bus, with no way to establish the size of any "last" step. Expressed this way, the dichotomy paradox is very much analogous to that of Achilles and the tortoise.
The arrow paradox
If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.
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In the arrow paradox (also known as the fletcher’s paradox), Zeno states that for motion to occur, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that in any one (durationless) instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not. It cannot move to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; it cannot move to where it is, because it is already there. In other words, at every instant of time there is no motion occurring. If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.
Whereas the first two paradoxes presented divide space, this paradox starts by dividing time—and not into segments, but into points.
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Thomson's lamp is a puzzle that is a variation on Zeno’s paradoxes. It was devised by philosopher James F. Thomson, who also coined the term supertask. Consider a lamp with a toggle switch. Flicking the switch once turns the lamp on. Another flick will turn the lamp off. Now suppose a being able to perform the following task: starting a timer, he turns the lamp on. At the end of one minute, he turns it off. At the end of another half minute, he turns it on again. At the end of another quarter of a minute, he turns it off. At the next eighth of a minute, he turns it on again, and he continues thus, flicking the switch each time after waiting exactly one-half the time he waited before flicking it previously. The sum of all these progressively smaller times is exactly two minutes.
The following questions are then considered:
• Is the lamp switch on or off after exactly two minutes?
• Would the final state be different if the lamp had started out being on, instead of off?
Thomson wasn't interested in actually answering these questions, because he believed these questions had no answers. This is because Thomson used this thought experiment to argue against the possibility of supertask, which is the completion of an infinite number of tasks. To be specific, Thomson argued that if supertasks are possible, then the scenario of having flicked the lamp on and off infinitely many times should be possible too (at least logically, even if not necessarily physically). But, Thomson reasoned, the possibility of the completion of the supertask of flicking a lamp on and off infinitely many times creates a contradiction. The lamp is either on or off at the 2 minute mark. If the lamp is on, then there must have been some last time, right before the 2 minute mark, at which it was flicked on. But, such an action must have been followed by a flicking off action since, after all, every action of flicking the lamp on before the 2 minute mark is followed by one at which it is flicked off between that time and the 2 minute mark. So, the lamp cannot be on. Analogously, one can also reason that the lamp cannot be off at the 2 minute mark. So, the lamp cannot be either on or off. So, we have a contradiction. By reductio ad absurdum, the assumption that supertasks are possible must therefore be rejected: supertasks are logically impossible.
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Discussion [of Lamp].
The status of the lamp and the switch is known for all times strictly less than two minutes. However the question does not state how the sequence finishes, and so the status of the switch at exactly two minutes is indeterminate. Though acceptance of this indeterminacy is resolution enough for some, problems do continue to present themselves under the intuitive assumption that one should be able to determine the status of the lamp and the switch at any time, given full knowledge of all previous statuses and actions taken.
Above from Wikipedia (slightly edited)
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It’s late, orndorff; going on midnight. You feel there is a direct connection between ‘who came first, you or me’ and Zeno’s paradoxes. Tomorrow we can discuss this along with the other material. Post. – Amorella.
I feel like I am going to ‘swim’ too deep here.
That’s what they all say in the Merlyn books, boy, as after physical death they jump into the most natural of all metaphysical rivers, sometimes known as Styx and sometimes known as Jordan. – Amorella.
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