Mind and Cosmos by Nagel

Commentary, Part Two, involving meditation, mathematics, and the Moon

PART TWO

Meditation and Mathematics

Just you take care, carefully, to take out the meaning. You must know beforehand that you have passed on the effort, given up, resigned to the "better life" and certainly it would be always so except for greed, pain, cruelty, egoism, and so on. Then the better life can be chanting to yourself, thinking nothing, "in tune" or tuned out. In short, meditate yourself away. Away with it all. Except for the ever present involuntary, that is the noise, the static still picked up by you, your receivers, you still get transmissions, like it or not.

Time "t" is of the voluntary. It is conceptual while our time is based on the involuntary, and the involuntary is of process. The time "t" can be unsatisfactory, if it is of structure as "space" and "time" or "spacetime", also conceptual and structural. Einstein certainly made space and time into a structure. It is sad that we begin, at birth, not knowing what the hell is going on and die in the same way, that is, not knowing what the hell is going on.

Instinct is incessant. So, too, is the involuntary, but we impose (superimpose) pause, and reflection. Thought without sufficient process but having structure, is instinct and like the world of the idiot savant, in which is neither emotion, nor creativity. Neither emotion nor creativity is of structure. They are change of a special kind.

Mathematics, once the Queen of the Sciences, is the basis of science but mathematics is flawed with not enough fluidity and not enough interaction with process. Gödel showed its lack of fluidity, its rigidity. He showed time "t" is acceptable from a scientific standpoint. How else could it be so but not for our time, a "humanistic time"? Science, physics, puts structure after structure, placing structure B after structure A in time "t" and so motion (abstracted) and causality comes about so they say but Hume knew better, he showed they put B after A so truly that is not causality, not process, but conceptualization. At root, it is a space as concept and a time as concept, which is not causality. No fluidity, no process, they moved the structure in their minds. They conceptualized it to be so. Not "reality". They have left out emotion and creativity. Odd, they say how creative they are with their scientific theories. As opposed to undiluted science is intelligent design. Intelligent design is about structure, instinct, no fluidity, no creation. Yet behind it is "creation" as God's handiwork. If proof of God there be, it is not via the existence of structure but through process.

The Moon, not really a digression

No one has claimed the Moon as an example of intelligent design. We see, perceive, and know the Moon. It is a scientific Moon, the one pre-visit and after. The scientific Moon changes if there are new data. As you view it with a telescope, it is different at different magnifications. The unscientific Moon is one of lore, myth, and religion. It has been less than a century since we lost our connection to it. We knew moonlight did not reveal the Sun, it transformed it. It was an alchemical light, a gateway, an opportunity not like now when it is off-limits, kitsch, debased, and sentimental. Milton met Galileo and said Galileo was able "to descry new lands" and once Galileo saw them, all could see them. There is unadorned perception and perception thought of and Galileo was engaged in the latter, as were those to follow.

To find the newer Moon, you can quest for it by rocketry or you could have found the older Moon in Japan in the autumn when the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar occurred. For more than a thousand years, they celebrated viewing the Moon with the Tuskimi festival. Moon viewing platforms were built in ornamental gardens. The Japanese might have concurred with Anaxagoras and Democritus that the Moon was another Earth. Anaxagoras knew of the fall of a meteor in 467 BC at Aegospotami. Later, Diogenes of Apollonia read Anaxagoras and visited Aegospotami and saw it was like pumice. Pumice or not, others persisted in crediting the Moon with being not only a different Earth but a better Earth.

Now we can see the Moon to displace the virtual world we have now. The Moon can place us in a longer cycle than the false faster one we have imposed on ourselves. For Lucian, the Moon and its truer cycle had a purifying distance from us. It was in a moral dimension, a dimension out there never glimpsed by Einstein or Darwin. The Moon and much else, to be seen and known properly, required ethics to be a part of the process of understanding. A special understanding, the truth, would forever be absent unless the ethical pursuit be accomplished. Nagel's teleology lacks ethics. It lacks morals that would enable one to know it in a special way.

One of our Moons that had been known became much more distant, beyond its perigee and apogee, when Jan van Eyck made a true representation of the lunar surface for his Crucifixion in the early 1400s. Conversely, bringing the scientific Moon closer before Galileo was William Gilbert's naming, in Earthly fashion, features of the Moon. Harriot, after Galileo, drew and also put in commentary about what he had seen. Sir William Lower used Harriot's telescope or "perspective cylinder" to find it "confusedie al over". What they were seeing, knowing about the Moon, was not what we see and know. Galileo himself distorted and amplified what he had seen to make it more referential, that is, more like the Earth. Everyone was making discoveries about the Earth projected onto the Moon.

The excitement of the new and the news about the Moon were lessened as it was used to illustrate Newton's laws and became a clock for vessels at sea. Still, it was so that some persisted in volcanos on the Moon as did Herschel. Schroeter found much more and wrote about it in fantastically unreadable style even if it was honest observing to obtain extravagantly wrong conclusions, as Joseph Ashbrook put it. Gruithuisen, with the keen eyesight that was indispensable in that era, absorbed the Schroeter approach and kept alive Schroeter's belief in Selenites. He was direct about it - "We are still in love with the beautiful moon, and dry reports of observations are better able to hold our attention if we can somehow keep alive the possibility of Selenities." To concur, he would find the Wallwerk, which contained a temple for star worship.

Humboldt in his Kosmos wanted all of science placed in a magnificent perspective. In general, Mädler in his visual depiction of the Moon, aspired to Humboldt's completeness in the thousands of facts about the Moon he would draw. Mädler's Der Mond showed the Moon not as a copy of the Earth. Even so, the human visual orientation to the known details of the Moon's surface was slipping into an envelope of machine-like detail of such quantity that even Schmidt, the most obsessive observer who ever lived, realized that a telescope as modest as the six inch Athens refractor would show no end of features during all of a lifetime. The acquired data, Baconian in flavor, was in danger of going amok. A helpless, hopeless conglomeration of facts with no overall assembly of the effort had been underway. They persisted. Fauth found constant fresh oddities that made all lunar maps unexceptional. But this was not the allure of the old Moon.

For those disposed to science, the organization of the data was in progress in a geological context. The study of geology had become the most popular science in Britain. It was almost as popular as astronomy, though beetles absorbed the interest of many. Mostly, for geology, they were fascinated by the vast tracts of time in which they could speculate. The common Biblical influence put only thousands of years at the disposal of the geologists, but theory demanded millions of years. Later it became millions and millions of years.

With such a range and a conviction that present day changes of Earth could be induced to provide for modest but persistent geological change, there was forged the conviction that the very vastness of time itself could be put to any biological need for sufficiency in regard of changes in species. Biological speculation about change, using induction, could harness geological change to service the need for the room to carry out the structural necessities of the speculation.

This unalloyed vastness of geological time in service to speculation about or belief in aspects of E-NS was put into place despite "punctuations" (to borrow from Gould) in the text of E-NS that did not allow for commas for pause, periods for end, or exclamation points for emphasis. But de Beaumont and Cuvier and the later comets, asteroids, Kimura, and epigenetics did become a locus for examination of this unqualified acceptance of a broad unfocused and primitive uniformitarianism.

The Moon was asserted to be dead to change. Such an assertion was vital for the cause of upholding E-NS. Any dramatic changes that could be observed on the Moon could, at the very least, indirectly call into question the abject acceptance of the transference of geological time to biological time. The authorities in astronomy in regard to what was happening on the Moon were amateurs. The professionals of astronomy had other fish to fry. There was the old hope that the Moon could be more Earth-like coupled with the need to be taken seriously in one's amateurish activities.

Volcanos offered an agent for change on the Moon. The craters of the Moon could be the result of volcanic action or so it was thought by some amateurs. The maria and sinuous twists readily seen could be the result of lava flow. Even without them, Messier A and B plus Linne, all phantoms for change, provided, for a time the needed detection of change. In addition, Nasmyth and Carpenter saw volcanism abundantly evident on the Moon. Their models in plaster gave to devotees of a Moon a ragged, jagged, and slender spired concoction of a vision befitting science fiction fandom.

Sober scientists like G. K. Gilbert studied Coon Butte, better known as the Meteor Crater of Arizona, and was left with no choice but a meteoritic theory. There were many, many craters on the Moon, where was the like on Earth? The Moon and Earth would have been bombarded with equal intensity so then the Earth's portion of the onslaught must have been erased by water and wind, neither of which prevailed on the Moon. Added to Gilbert's conclusions were those of Baldwin who saw what many others could not - that the Moon's craters gave evidence for alignment and grooves or ridges going out across much lunar territory. Ferocious blasts of asteroids of long, long ago would fit the bill. The craters were fossil remains. They were fossils like bits of bone in long, long ago geological deposits on Earth.

The believers in E-NS could make good use of the sources of the craters in lunar orbit about us. The Moon's tides dramatically affected life on Earth. The Moon's influence on Earth's climate was also vital. Such an influence could not be matched by feeble Deimos and Phobos in their revolutions around the only other Earth-approximate world - Mars. Both Mars and Moon, once, broadly put, were in a romance that we put together. As for Mars, Ray Bradbury,in his Mars and the Mind of Man has it that- "I think it's part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality". Could our religious ties circa Darwin have been "romantic" but severed by E-NS in order to build toward reality?