Borg & Borges

The name of this blog is Orbis Tertius, which means Third World in Latin. The name was used by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. (It also can refer to the planet Earth, which is the third world of our solar system.) Borges was way ahead of his time, and one could argue that the Internet is in some ways a Tlön. But why I love the story is because of how it portrays the power of ideas and of reality-as-perception.

Ideas matter, according to Marcus Borg, who says, "Ideas matter much more than we commonly think they do - especially our world-views and values, namely our ideas about what is real and how we are to live. We receive such ideas from our culture as we grow up, and unless we examine them, we will not be free persons, but will to a large extent live out the agenda of our socialization."

It is really hard for me to say it better than that. Basically we imagine our own reality. Our existential reality is really a huge conspiracy. Say what? What if a brick falls on your head? Did you just imagine that? No. But all of your attempts to make meaning of it come from you.

Science is one way to assimilate our sense experiences into a coherent reality. Clearly it has been extremely successful, witness the technology necessary to put this blog before our eyes. But it definitely has its limitations. There is a tight circle of tautology in saying that the only truth is a verifiable hypothesis. Who has verified that?

Moreover, the process of scientific discovery is itself unscientific. The creativity necessary to imagine new hypotheses, and the experiments necessary to corroborate them comes from a mental process far removed from the scientific method. It is only after the results of the experiments are analyzed and while the reports are being written that the scientific method is employed. There, the results are sanitized of all the non-scientific part of the process.

It's the same in mathematics. The way you think of a proof is almost never the way you write it down. There are some musicians I've heard of, Mozart I think, that wrote their compositions down all at once without making drafts first. And maybe there are "stream of consciousness" writers who don't make drafts. But most people are not like that. And I suspect that even these "savants" have something like a draft being compiled in their heads.

Hello World

I am going to try Blogger to begin a blog. I really have no purpose for this other than to express myself from time to time.