Noncontextual hidden variables theories, assigning simultaneous values to all quantum mechanical observables, are inconsistent by theorems of Gleason and others. These theorems do not exclude contextual hidden variables theories, in which a complete state assigns values to physical quantities only relative to contexts. However, any contextual theory obeying a certain factorisability conditions implies one of Bell's Inequalities, thereby precluding complete agreement with quantum mechanical predictions. The present paper distinguishes two kinds of contextual theories, ‘algebraic’ and ‘environmental’, and (...) investigates when factorisability is reasonable. Some statements by Fine about the philosophical significance of Bell's Inequalities are then assessed. (shrink)

To relax the apparent tension between nonlocal hidden variables and relativity, we propose that the observable proper time is not the same quantity as the usual proper-time parameter appearing in local relativistic equations. Instead, the two proper times are related by a nonlocal rescaling parameter proportional to |ψ|2, so that they coincide in the classical limit. In this way particle trajectories may obey local relativistic equations of motion in a manner consistent with the appearance of nonlocal quantum correlations. To (...) illustrate the main idea, we first present two simple toy models of local particle trajectories with nonlocal time, which reproduce some nonlocal quantum phenomena. After that, we present a realistic theory with a capacity to reproduce all predictions of quantum theory. (shrink)

According to Kant, the division of the categories “is not the result of a search after pure concepts undertaken at haphazard,” but is derived from the “complete” classification of judgments developed by traditional logic. However, the sorts of judgments that he enumerates in his table of judgments are not all ones that traditional logic has dealt with; consequently, we must say that he chose the sorts of judgments in question with a certain intention. Besides, we know that his choice of (...) judgments and categories is strongly influenced by certain views of natural science that he fully accepts. For this reason, his argumentations are sometimes seriously inconsistent. As to Kant’s argumentations of categories, many problems have already been pointed out, but in this paper, I take up the categories of quantity and quality once more, and make clear his argumentations’ hidden logic and its distortion from the point of view of the history of logic and natural science. First, I confirm that there are non-negligible problems in his explanation to the effect that his derivation of the categories of quantity and quality is based on the quantity and quality of judgments. Next, I reconsider the meaning of his treating the categories of quantity and quality as pure concepts of the understanding. Finally, I conclude that by having recourse to the categories of quantity and quality Kant tried unjustly to apriorize the distinction between the “extensive magnitude” and “intensive magnitude” that has a long formational history since Aristotle. (shrink)

This paper examines Wesley Salmon's "process" theory of causality, arguing in particular that there are four areas of inadequacy. These are that the theory is circular, that it is too vague at a crucial point, that statistical forks do not serve their intended purpose, and that Salmon has not adequately demonstrated that the theory avoids Hume's strictures about "hidden powers". A new theory is suggested, based on "conserved quantities", which fulfills Salmon's broad objectives, and which avoids the problems (...) discussed. (shrink)

This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Sleep is shown to be important for our understanding of Sloterdijk’s project as an index of his subject’s larger, hidden complex of inertias, habits, and corporeal requirements and processes that dominate subjective life and that exist outside the mastery of ego and consciousness. The essay explores this thesis by considering a series of figures that appear in Sloterdijk’s writings and interviews: the philosopher Heraclitus with his dismissive (...) remarks on sleep, the insomniac Emil Cioran, the sleepwalker in Romantic thought. As the essay develops, it shows how, given such a subject formation, anthropotechnics is properly conceived as a management of the subject’s automatic processes to trick or repurpose or redirect them to work in concert or coincidence with the anthropotechnical project, rather than against it. (shrink)

The debate over the question whether quantum mechanics should be considered as a complete account of microphenomena has a long and deeply involved history, a turning point in which has been certainly the Einstein-Bohr debate, with the ensuing charge of incompleteness raised by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument. In quantum mechanics, physical systems can be prepared in pure states that nevertheless have in general positive dispersion for most physical quantities; hence in the EPR argument, the attention is focused on the question (...) whether the account of the microphysical phenomena provided by quantum mechanics is to be regarded as an exhaustive description of the physical reality to which those phenomena are supposed to refer, a question to which Einstein himself answered in the negative. However, there is a mathematical side of the completeness issue in quantum mechanics, namely the question whether the kind of states with positive dispersion can be represented as a different, dispersion-free kind of states in a way consistent with the mathematical constraints of the quantum mechanical formalism. From this point of view, the other source of the completeness issue in quantum mechanics is the no hidden variables theorem formulated by John von Neumann in his celebrated book on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, the preface of which already anticipates the program and the conclusion concerning the possibility of ‘neutralizing’ the statistical character of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Beginning with a review the logically first stages in the project of Random Dynamics, hoping for all laws nature being emergent, we also review what can be considered a consequence of Random Dynamics, a model—by myself and Masao Ninomiya—, which in principle predicts the initial conditions in such a way as to minimize a certain functional of the history of the Universe through both past and future. This functional is indeed the imaginary part of the action, which exists (only) in (...) our model of complex action. The main point of the present is to suggest this complex action model to be also helpfull in solving some problems for quantum mechanics. Especially as our model almost makes it possible in principle to calculate the full history of the universe, it even makes it in principle calculable, which one among several measurement results in a quantum experiment will actually be realized!Our “complex action model” thus is a special case of superdeterminism—in Bells way—and does not have true causality, but rather even in some cases true backward causation. In fact we claim in our model that the SSC(Superconducting Supercollider) were stopped by the US Congress due to the backward causation from the big amounts of Higgs particles, which it would have produced, if it had been allowed to run. The noumenon (“das Ding an sich”) in our model is the Feyman path integrand or better some fundamental quantities determined from second order effects of the latter integrand. The quantum mechanics interpretation here is strongly similar to the much criticized “transactional interpretation” by John Cramer (Rev. Mod. Phys. 58:647–688, 1986), but we might respond to some of the criticism. (shrink)

Whittaker studied Dirac's equation, using prequantum mathematics, and found oscillating vectors corresponding to Schrödinger'sZitterbewegung. An extension of his study, without added assumptions or speculation, reveals the speedc associated at any instant with a direction that can be defined by specification of the Dirac spinor. This direction is hidden from quantum theory because that theory violates the physical principle that coherent amplitudes of the same kind must be added before quadratic quantities are formed from them. Two-component equations are formed (...) from Dirac's four-component equation and are found to contain information not explicit in Dirac's equation. (shrink)

Contents: Evandro AGAZZI: Introduction. Part One: PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS. Paul HORWICH: Realism and Truth. Evandro AGAZZI: On the Criteria for Establishing the Ontological Status of Different Entities. Aristides BALTAS; Con-straints and Resistance: Stating a Case for Negative Realism. Michel PATY: Predicate of Existence and Predictability for a Theoretical Object in Physics. Part Two: OBSERVABILITY AND HIDDEN ENTITIES. François BONSACK: Atoms: Lessons of a History. Alberto CORDERO: Arguing for Hidden Realities. Bernard d'ESPAGNAT: On the Difficulties that Attributing Existence to « (...) class='Hi'>Hidden» Quantities May Rise. Massimo PAURI: The Quantum, Space-Time and Observation. Part Three: APPLICATIONS TO QUANTUM PHYSICS. David ALBERT: On the Phenomenology of Quantum-Mechanical Superpositions. Gian Carlo GHIRARDI: Realism and Quantum Mechanics. Michel CROZON: Experimental Evidence of Quark Structure Inside Hadrons. (shrink)

We consider a stochastic process which is described by a continuous-time Markov chain on only short time-scales and constrained to conserve a number of hidden quantities on long time-scales. We assume that the transition matrix of the Markov chain is given and the conserved quantities are known to exist, but not explicitly given. To study the stochastic dynamics we propose to use the principle of stationary entropy production. Then the problem can be transformed into a variational problem (...) for a suitably defined “action” and with time-dependent Lagrange multipliers. We show that the stochastic dynamics can be described by a Schrödinger equation, with Lagrange multipliers playing the role of phases, whenever the transition matrix is symmetric or the detailed balance condition is satisfied, the system is not too far from the equilibrium and the number of the conserved quantities is large. (shrink)

This brief poem (Hor. Carm. 1.30) is by turns enigmatic (what is the purpose of Horace's prayer to Venus?) and slightly incoherent (why should both Horace and Glycera be praying to Venus? Are they praying for the same thing or for different things? Either has its problems). A further problem is that, if Horace intended uocantis in line 2 for a genitive, the text as it stands misleads the first-time reader, contrary to Horace's normal practice of authorial kindness toward such (...) readers. The way to deal with this is to take uocantis as accusative (‘those calling on you with much incense’) and to insert an ‘and’ in the text to connect sperne and transfer: sperne dilectam Cypron et uocantīs | ture te multo Glycerae decoram | transfer in aedem (‘reject your beloved Cyprus and your incense-offering devotees and move to Glycera's beautiful shrine’). If this is right, it addresses the incoherencies under which the usual interpretation labours. (shrink)

Non-commuting quantities and hidden parameters – Wave-corpuscular dualism and hidden parameters – Local or nonlocal hidden parameters – Phase space in quantum mechanics – Weyl, Wigner, and Moyal – Von Neumann’s theorem about the absence of hidden parameters in quantum mechanics and Hermann – Bell’s objection – Quantum-mechanical and mathematical incommeasurability – Kochen – Specker’s idea about their equivalence – The notion of partial algebra – Embeddability of a qubit into a bit – Quantum computer (...) is not Turing machine – Is continuality universal? – Diffeomorphism and velocity – Einstein’s general principle of relativity – „Mach’s principle“ – The Skolemian relativity of the discrete and the continuous – The counterexample in § 6 of their paper – About the classical tautology which is untrue being replaced by the statements about commeasurable quantum-mechanical quantities – Logical hidden parameters – The undecidability of the hypothesis about hidden parameters – Wigner’s work and и Weyl’s previous one – Lie groups, representations, and psi-function – From a qualitative to a quantitative expression of relativity − psi-function, or the discrete by the random – Bartlett’s approach − psi-function as the characteristic function of random quantity – Discrete and/ or continual description – Quantity and its “digitalized projection“ – The idea of „velocity−probability“ – The notion of probability and the light speed postulate – Generalized probability and its physical interpretation – A quantum description of macro-world – The period of the as-sociated de Broglie wave and the length of now – Causality equivalently replaced by chance – The philosophy of quantum information and religion – Einstein’s thesis about “the consubstantiality of inertia ant weight“ – Again about the interpretation of complex velocity – The speed of time – Newton’s law of inertia and Lagrange’s formulation of mechanics – Force and effect – The theory of tachyons and general relativity – Riesz’s representation theorem – The notion of covariant world line – Encoding a world line by psi-function – Spacetime and qubit − psi-function by qubits – About the physical interpretation of both the complex axes of a qubit – The interpretation of the self-adjoint operators components – The world line of an arbitrary quantity – The invariance of the physical laws towards quantum object and apparatus – Hilbert space and that of Minkowski – The relationship between the coefficients of -function and the qubits – World line = psi-function + self-adjoint operator – Reality and description – Does a „curved“ Hilbert space exist? – The axiom of choice, or when is possible a flattening of Hilbert space? – But why not to flatten also pseudo-Riemannian space? – The commutator of conjugate quantities – Relative mass – The strokes of self-movement and its philosophical interpretation – The self-perfection of the universe – The generalization of quantity in quantum physics – An analogy of the Feynman formalism – Feynman and many-world interpretation – The psi-function of various objects – Countable and uncountable basis – Generalized continuum and arithmetization – Field and entanglement – Function as coding – The idea of „curved“ Descartes product – The environment of a function – Another view to the notion of velocity-probability – Reality and description – Hilbert space as a model both of object and description – The notion of holistic logic – Physical quantity as the information about it – Cross-temporal correlations – The forecasting of future – Description in separable and inseparable Hilbert space – „Forces“ or „miracles“ – Velocity or time – The notion of non-finite set – Dasein or Dazeit – The trajectory of the whole – Ontological and onto-theological difference – An analogy of the Feynman and many-world interpretation − psi-function as physical quantity – Things in the world and instances in time – The generation of the physi-cal by mathematical – The generalized notion of observer – Subjective or objective probability – Energy as the change of probability per the unite of time – The generalized principle of least action from a new view-point – The exception of two dimensions and Fermat’s last theorem. (shrink)

A great quantity of American plants traveled with the precious metals that arrived in Europe from New Spain after ‘1492. Some were brought over intentionally, perhaps in the hands of some Spanish Indian (Spaniards who had travelled to the New World to make their fortunes and had returned were called “Indians”) who had become accustomed to new tastes in America. Others arrived by neither will nor invitation, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the ships or mixed in with (...) the ballast that the galleons carried on their return trip to the Old World. (shrink)

Electricity is hidden within wires and networks only revealing its quantity and flow when metered. The making of its properties into data is therefore particularly important to the relations that are formed around electricity as a produced and managed phenomenon. We propose approaching all metering as a situated activity, a form of quantification work in which data is made and becomes mobile in particular spatial and temporal terms, enabling its entry into data infrastructures and schemes of evaluation and value (...) production. We interrogate the transition from the pre-digital into the making of bigger, more spatiotemporally granular electricity data, through focusing on those actors selling and materialising new metering technologies, data infrastructures and services for larger businesses and public sector organisations in the UK. We examine the claims of truth and visibility that accompany these shifts and their enrolment into management techniques that serve to more precisely apportion responsibility for, and evaluate the status of, particular patterns and instances of electricity use. We argue that whilst through becoming Big Data electricity flow is now able to be known and given identity in significantly new terms, enabling new relations to be formed with the many heterogeneous entities implicated in making and managing energy demand, it is necessary to sustain some ambivalence as to the performative consequences that follow for energy governance. We consider the wider application of our conceptualisation of metering, reflecting on comparisons with the introduction of new metering systems in domestic settings and as part of other infrastructural networks. (shrink)

The debate about the meaning of color terms in the philosophy of language has been dominated by two main issues. Firstly, there is the discussion about the context-dependency of color terms, specifically, quantity, the degree to which the object is of the color, and one of the dimensions of color quality, hue. Secondly, there is the question of how indexical contextualism can account for these elements of context-dependence. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, to examine brightness, one of (...) the dimensions of color quality that has been neglected in the literature. For this purpose, we will examine how the equivalent of “white” in Arabic and Spanish interacts with brightness modifiers. The analysis will allow us to distinguish three different usage patterns, light source, light reflection, and contrast between white and black, pointing to three new ways of contextual incompleteness of color terms. Second, to assess indexical theories of color terms considering these new empirical findings. We will argue that the results of our study offer support for indexical contextualist theories by distinguishing new dimensions of contextual incompleteness of color terms. However, the consequences of applying the standard indexical contextualist explanation–hidden-variable analysis– are too strong. (shrink)

I compare deterministic and stochastic hidden variable models of the Bell experiment, exphasising philosophical distinctions between the various ways of combining conditionals and probabilities. I make four main claims. (1) Under natural assumptions, locality as it occurs in these models is equivalent to causal independence, as analysed (in the spirit of Lewis) in terms of probabilities and conditionals. (2) Stochastic models are indeed more general than deterministic ones. (3) For factorizable stochastic models, relativity's lack of superluminal causation does not (...) favour locality over completeness. (4) If we prohibit all superluminal causation, then the violation of the Bell inequality teaches us a lesson, besides quantum mechanics' familiar ones that quantities can lack precise values and that pairs of quantities can lack joint probabilities: namely, some pairs of events are not screened off by their common past. (shrink)

Gentzen’s approach by transfinite induction and that of intuitionist Heyting arithmetic to completeness and the self-foundation of mathematics are compared and opposed to the Gödel incompleteness results as to Peano arithmetic. Quantum mechanics involves infinity by Hilbert space, but it is finitist as any experimental science. The absence of hidden variables in it interpretable as its completeness should resurrect Hilbert’s finitism at the cost of relevant modification of the latter already hinted by intuitionism and Gentzen’s approaches for completeness. This (...) paper investigates both conditions and philosophical background necessary for that modification. The main conclusion is that the concept of infinity as underlying contemporary mathematics cannot be reduced to a single Peano arithmetic, but to at least two ones independent of each other. Intuitionism, quantum mechanics, and Gentzen’s approaches to completeness an even Hilbert’s finitism can be unified from that viewpoint. Mathematics may found itself by a way of finitism complemented by choice. The concept of information as the quantity of choices underlies that viewpoint. Quantum mechanics interpretable in terms of information and quantum information is inseparable from mathematics and its foundation. (shrink)

The experiences of 90 individuals who self-identify as “excessive” or “maladaptive” fantasizers are summarized in this report. Our sample consisted of 75 female and 15 male participants, ranging in age from 18 to 63 who responded to online announcements. Participants completed a 14-question emailed survey requesting descriptions of their fantasy habits and causes of potential distress regarding fantasy. Results demonstrated that participants shared a number of remarkably specific behaviors and concerns regarding their engagement in extensive periods of highly-structured, immersive imaginative (...) experiences, including the use of kinesthetic activity which accompanies the fantasies of 79% of participants. Participants reported distress stemming from three factors: difficulty in controlling the need or desire to engage in fantasizing; concern that the quantity of fantasizing interfered with actual relationships and endeavors; and intense shame and exhaustive efforts to keep this behavior hidden from others. It is hoped that this report will encourage interest in this elusive syndrome. (shrink)

This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any (...) one of the premises. I argue instead that Harsanyi was right: his theorem and its weighted-utilitarian conclusion do not require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. The key to making sense of this possibility is to treat Harsanyi's weights as dimensional constants rather than dimensionless numbers. (shrink)

According to what has become a standard history of quantum mechanics, von Neumann in 1932 succeeded in convincing the physics community that he had proved that hidden variables were impossible as a matter of principle. Subsequently, leading proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation emphatically confirmed that von Neumann's proof showed the completeness of quantum mechanics. Then, the story continues, Bell in 1966 finally exposed the proof as seriously and obviously wrong; this rehabilitated hidden variables and made serious foundational research (...) possible. It is often added in recent accounts that von Neumann's error had been spotted almost immediately by Grete Hermann, but that her discovery was of no effect due to the dominant Copenhagen Zeitgeist. We shall attempt to tell a more balanced story. Most importantly, von Neumann did not claim to have shown the impossibility of hidden variables tout court, but argued that hidden-variable theories must possess a structure that deviates fundamentally from that of quantum mechanics. Both Hermann and Bell appear to have missed this point; moreover, both raised unjustified technical objections to the proof. Von Neumann's conclusion was basically that hidden-variables schemes must violate the "quantum principle" that all physical quantities are to be represented by operators in a Hilbert space. According to this conclusion, hidden-variables schemes are possible in principle but necessarily exhibit a certain kind of contextuality. As we shall illustrate, early reactions to Bohm's theory are in agreement with this account. Leading physicists pointed out that Bohm's theory has the strange feature that particle properties do not generally reveal themselves in measurements, in accordance with von Neumann's result. They did not conclude that the "impossible was done" and that von Neumann had been shown wrong. (shrink)

If the concept of “free will” is reduced to that of “choice” all physical world shares the latter quality. Anyway the “free will” can be distinguished from the “choice”: The “free will” involves implicitly a certain goal, and the choice is only the mean, by which the aim can be achieved or not by the one who determines the target. Thus, for example, an electron has always a choice but not free will unlike a human possessing both. Consequently, and paradoxically, (...) the determinism of classical physics is more subjective and more anthropomorphic than the indeterminism of quantum mechanics for the former presupposes certain deterministic goal implicitly following the model of human freewill behavior. Quantum mechanics introduces the choice in the fundament of physical world involving a generalized case of choice, which can be called “subjectless”: There is certain choice, which originates from the transition of the future into the past. Thus that kind of choice is shared of all existing and does not need any subject: It can be considered as a low of nature. There are a few theorems in quantum mechanics directly relevant to the topic: two of them are called “free will theorems” by their authors (Conway and Kochen 2006; 2009). Any quantum system either a human or an electron or whatever else has always a choice: Its behavior is not predetermined by its past. This is a physical law. It implies that a form of information, the quantum information underlies all existing for the unit of the quantity of information is an elementary choice: either a bit or a quantum bit (qubit). (shrink)

Laplacean determinism remains a popular theory among philosophers and scientists alike, in spite of the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, with which it is inconsistent, has been around for more than fifty years. There are a number of reasons for its continuing popularity. One, recently articulated by Honderich, is that there are too many possible interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the subject is too controversial even among physicists to be an adequate basis for overturning determinism. Nevertheless, quantum (...) mechanics is an enormously successful theory, considering the quantity and variety of its predictions which have been verified under conditions never dreamt of by its originators; and the Copenhagen Interpretation is the only widely accepted interpretation of it. Although a hidden variable theory consistent with the results of quantum mechanics is not impossible, one of its major advocates admits that it is highly speculative, and far from adequately developed. Yet such a theory would be needed to reconcile Laplacean determinism with quantum mechanics; most of the controversies alluded to by Honderich are irrelevant. (shrink)

The subject of this study is the special theory of relativity (SRT) by A. Einstein, the debate about which has been going on for more than a hundred years. The aim of the study is to evaluate SRT from the side of whether everything that is discussed in this theory and thus in the new, relativistic physics is possible in nature itself. At the same time, the author pays special attention to three issues: the principle of relativity, the necessary condition (...) for the objectivity of the content of scientific theories and the Einstein style of scientific thinking, which predetermined the ideological component of SRT and all relativistic physics. But such issues as relativistic reductions of lengths and durations, the relativity of simultaneity and a single space-time do not remain without attention. The study revealed the fallacy of a long-standing and widespread opinion about the relativity of properties. The necessary condition for the objectivity of scientific theories is revealed. The natural form of expression of quantities is revealed and the non-relative nature of all natural quantities is shown. The hidden form of relativity inherent in the SRT postulate about the constancy of the speed of light in all inertial reference frames and extended in SRT to the magnitude of all lengths and durations considered in it is revealed. It is shown that such relativity is based on the dependence of the quantities on the choice of their reflection systems. It is shown that such dependence is impossible in nature itself. It is concluded that the SRT is erroneous. At the same time, the factors that served as favorable ground for the emergence and spread of this erroneous theory are listed. (shrink)

Continuity as appears to us immediately by intuition differs from its current formalization, the arithmetical continuum or equivalently the set of real numbers used in modern mathematical analysis. Motivated by the known mathematical and physical problems arising from this formalization of the continuum, our aim in this paper is twofold. Firstly, by interpreting Chaitin’s variant of Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem as an inherent uncertainty or fuzziness of the arithmetical continuum, a formal set-theoretic entropy is assigned to the arithmetical continuum. Secondly, (...) by analyzing Noether’s theorem on symmetries and conserved quantities, we argue that whenever the four dimensional space-time continuum containing a single, stationary, asymptotically flat black hole is modeled by the arithmetical continuum in the mathematical formulation of general relativity, the hidden set-theoretic entropy of this latter structure reveals itself as the entropy of the black hole, indicating that this apparently physical quantity might have a pure set-theoretic origin, too. (shrink)

Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker's well-known argument against hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics is also an argument against the possibility of quantum systems having, simultaneously, precise values for all of the dynamical quantities associated with such systems. Devices for defeating the argument were in the literature even before its publication, but recently Arthur Fine has raised a new difficulty. Fine points out that Kochen and Specker's argument requires the following principles:Sum Rule: At all times, in all states, (...) the value of the quantity with operator A + B is the sum of the values of the quantity with operator A and the quantity with operator B, provided A, B commute.Product Rule: At all times, in all states, the value of the quantity with operator AB is the product of the values of the quantities with operators A and B, provided A, B commute. (shrink)

Lewis Carroll, both logician and writer, suggested a logical paradox containing furthermore two connotations (connotations or metaphors are inherent in literature rather than in mathematics or logics). The paradox itself refers to implication demonstrating that an intermediate implication can be always inserted in an implication therefore postponing its ultimate conclusion for the next step and those insertions can be iteratively and indefinitely added ad lib, as if ad infinitum. Both connotations clear up links due to the shared formal structure with (...) other well-known mathematical observations: (1) the paradox of Achilles and the Turtle; (2) the transitivity of the relation of equality. Analogically to (1), one can juxtapose the paradox of the Liar (for Lewis Carroll’s paradox) and that of the arrow (for “Achilles and the Turtle”), i.e. a logical paradox, on the one hand, and an aporia of motion, on the other hand, suggesting a shared formal structure of both, which can be called “ontological”, on which basis “motion” studied by physics and “conclusion” studied by logic can be unified being able to bridge logic and physics philosophically in a Hegelian manner: even more, the bridge can be continued to mathematics in virtue of (2), which forces the equality (for its property of transitivity) of any two quantities to be postponed analogically ad lib and ad infinitum. The paper shows that Hilbert arithmetic underlies naturally Lewis Carroll’s paradox admitting at least three interpretations linked to each other by it: mathematical, physical and logical. Thus, it can be considered as both generalization and solution of his paradox therefore naturally unifying the completeness of quantum mechanics (i.e. the absence of hidden variables) and eventual completeness of mathematics as the same and isomorphic to the completeness of propositional logic in relation to set theory as a first-order logic (in the sense of Gödel (1930)’s completeness theorems). (shrink)

Motivated by the known mathematical and physical problems arising from the current mathematical formalization of the physical spatio-temporal continuum, as a substantial technical clarification of our earlier attempt (Etesi in Found Sci 25:327–340, 2020), the aim in this paper is twofold. Firstly, by interpreting Chaitin’s variant of Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem as an inherent uncertainty or fuzziness present in the set of real numbers, a set-theoretic entropy is assigned to it using the Kullback–Leibler relative entropy of a pair of Riemannian (...) manifolds. Then exploiting the non-negativity of this relative entropy an abstract Hawking-like area theorem is derived. Secondly, by analyzing Noether’s theorem on symmetries and conserved quantities, we argue that whenever the four dimensional space-time continuum containing a single, stationary, asymptotically flat black hole is modeled by the set of real numbers in the mathematical formulation of general relativity, the hidden set-theoretic entropy of this latter structure reveals itself as the entropy of the black hole (proportional to the area of its “instantaneous” event horizon), indicating that this apparently physical quantity might have a pure set-theoretic origin, too. (shrink)

A physical mechanical sequence is proposed representing measurement interactions ‘hidden' within QM's proverbial ‘black box'. Our ‘beam splitter' pairs share a polar angle, but head in opposite directions, so ‘led' by opposite hemisphere rotations. For orbital ‘ellipticity', we use the inverse value momentum ‘pairs' of Maxwell's ‘linear' and ‘curl' momenta, seen as vectors on the Poincare spherical surface. Values change inversely from 0 to 1 over 90 degrees, then ± inverts.. Detector polarising screens consist of electrons with the same (...) vector distributions, but polar angles set independently by A & B. The absorption/re-emission interaction process is modelled as surface vector additions at the angle of polar latitude of each interaction. This ‘collapse' of characteristic ‘wave values' is really then simply ‘re-polarisation', with new ellipticity. We then obtain the relation Cosθ at polarisers. We may simplify this to new ellipses with major/minor axis values. Considering as spherical orbital angular momentum rotation we invoke the unique quality of spheres to rotate concurrently on three axes! Rotating on y or z axes concurrent with x axis spin can return surface points to starting positions with non-integer x axis rotations, from half to infinity!. Second interactions at photomultiplier/ analysers are identical but at two orthogonal ‘channels'. Vector addition interactions at BOTH channel orientations normally produce a vector value of adequate amplitude to give a *click* from the MAJOR axis direction. At the ‘crossover' points at near circular polarity the orthogonal ‘certainty' is ~ 50:50, so both or neither channels may produce a ‘click'. The apparently unphysical but proved ‘Malus' law' relation; Cos2θ emerges physically from the 2nd set of interactions. The main departure from QM's assumptions are; That the original pair members each actually possessed two inverse momenta sets; ‘curl' and ‘linear'. Also that complex ‘vector additions' of those pairs occurs. Vector quantities allow A & B to reverse their OWN finding by reversing dial setting, reproducing experimental outputs without problematic ‘non-locality'. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Several theoretical publications on the Dirac equation published during the last decades have shown that, an interpretation is possible, which ascribes the origin of electron spin and magnetic moment to an autonomous circular motion of the point-like charged particle around a fixed centre. In more recent publications an extension of the original so called “Zitterbewegung Interpretation” of quantum mechanics was suggested, in which the spin results from an average of instantaneous spin vectors over a Zitterbewegung period. We argue that, the (...) corresponding autonomous motion of the electron should, if it is real, determine non-relativistic spin measurements. Such a direct connection with the established formal quantum mechanical description of spin measurements, into which spin is introduced as a “non-classical” quantity has, to our knowledge, not been reported. In the present work we show that, under certain “model assumptions” concerning the proposed autonomous motion, results of spin measurements, including measurements of angular correlations in singlet systems, can indeed be correctly described using classical probabilities. The success of the model is evidence for the “reality” of the assumed autonomous motion. The resulting model violates the Bell—inequalities to the same extent as quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Work of elderly is a controversial problem. The introduction of protection of old age in form of pensions and retirement caused shaping in modern societies qualitatively new social category of persons in post-working age. Growth of human life-span with simultaneous lack of the principle changes of pensionable age inflicts grow in quantity of persons’ using welfare benefits. Growing costs of seniors livelihood lead to transformations in socio-economical structures as well as forcing them to engage in activities that will help increase (...) their social participation, including the lengthening of their professional activity. It seems that the nowadays processes of dematerialization of work combined with the shaping of knowledge-based economy and the movement of third-age universities largely enable the achievement of these objectives. Article aims to approximate the results of qualitative analysis of elderly economic activity in Bialystok conducted in the context of social capital research. Study describes main factors that restrict work opportunities for older people, as well as their hidden resources and potential workplaces. ** Wykonywanie pracy zarobkowej przez osoby starsze jest zagadnieniem kontrowersyjnym. Wprowadzenie zabezpieczenia starości w formie rent i emerytur sprawiło, że w społeczeństwach nowoczesnych ukształtowała siȩ jakościowo nowa kategoria społeczna składaj¸a}ca siȩ z osób w wieku poprodukcyjnym. Wzrost długości życia ludzkiego przy jednoczesnym braku zasadniczych zmian progów wieku emerytalnego sprawia, że ilość osób korzystaj¸a}cych ze świadczeń rośnie. Zwiȩkszaj¸a}ce siȩ koszty utrzymania seniorów prowadz¸a} do szeregu przemian w strukturach społeczno-ekonomicznych oraz wymuszaj¸a} podejmowanie działań, które pozwol¸a} na wzrost ich uczestnictwa społecznego, w tym na wydłużanie ich aktywności zawodowej. Wydaje siȩ, że zachodz¸a}ce współcześnie procesy dematerializacji pracy ł¸a}czone z kształtowaniem siȩ gospodarki opartej na wiedzy oraz ruch uniwersytetów trzeciego wieku w znacznej mierze umożliwiaj¸a realizacjȩ tych celów. Artykuł ma na celu przybliżenie wybranych wyników jakościowych analiz aktywności ekonomicznej ludzi starych w Białymstoku prowadzonych w kontekście badań nad kapitałem społecznym. Określone zostały podstawowe czynniki ograniczaj¸ace możliwości wykonywania pracy przez ludzi starych, jak również ich ukryte zasoby i potencjalne miejsca pracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Drieu, Céline: French Fascism, Scapegoating, and the Price of Revelation Richard J. Golsan Texas A &M University Although the Girardian concept of the scapegoat and its attendant phenomena have a number of obvious implications for the study of fascism, to date the connection has been addressed only in broadly theoretical terms. In Des Choses cachées and in subsequent works, René Girard has alluded to modern political scapegoating such as (...) the Nazi persecution of the Jews as examples of mass victimizations where the enormous number of victims represents an effort to compensate for the failure of the scapegoating process itself in the wake of Christian revelation.1 While the victims are initially vilified, they are not sacralized after their sacrifice, and order is maintained only so long as a steady stream of victims is forthcoming. As Andrew McKenna explains in Violence and Difference, "with the passing of the sacred order, of the sacred tout court, sacrifice becomes less and less capable of uniting the community and therefore demands more and more victims... the decline of symbolic violence brings an increase of real victims; their quantity mounts in inverse proportion to the ritual efficacy of sacrifice, and victimage appears more and more gratuitous" (159-60). Moreover, McKenna continues, victimage of this sort becomes increasingly untraceable, rootless, and it is this aspect of official Nazi anti-Semitism, for example, which allowed many Nazis in their postwar trials to proclaim their innocence for their roles in the Final Solution by insisting that they were "only following orders" (162-3). 1 See Things Hidden 128-9. For a more general discussion of the persecution of ethnic minorities as a source of social cohesiveness, see the essays "Violence and Representation" and "Generative Scapegoating." Drieu, Céline: French Fascism173 These observations certainly help to illuminate the role of scapegoating in Nazi racial politics and in the Holocaust in particular. They are less helpful, however, in understanding other paradigms of fascism in which antiSemitism did not play as central a role or in cases in which fascist ideology was not synonymous with government policy or political hegemony. The role of scapegoating in Italian Fascism, for example, is more difficult to ascertain than it is in Nazism because anti-Semitism was less crucial as a means of establishing social cohesiveness, at least until Nazi influence became predominant during World War II (Soucy xviii). In France, the presence of a number of fascist movements from the twenties through the end of the Occupation, and the absence of an autonomous fascist state during the same period, make the task of assessing the role of scapegoating even more difficult. This is especially true in light of the fact that a number of French fascist movements were not anti-Semitic, at least until it became expedient to be so to curry favor with the Nazis. In French Fascism: The First Wave, Robert Soucy notes that during the interwar years, fascist groups including "the Jeunesse Patriotes, the Croix de Feu and the Faisceau... welcomed Jews into their ranks" (xviii). The lack of a consistent attitude towards the Jews is, in fact, just one of several points of divergence among French fascists and fascist groups prior to World War Two. As a result, historians and political theorists who have studied French fascism have strongly disagreed as to its origins as well as its basic ideology. In Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, Zeev Sternhell argues that "the history of fascism can be described as a continuous attempt to revise marxism and create a national form of socialism" (20). Soucy, on the other hand, insists that on many of the most important social and political issues, including "taxation, government spending, nationalization, property rights, class conflict, religion, education, and foreign policy, French Fascism was overwhelmingly conservative" (xi). Other historians, especially among the French themselves, have gone so far as to insist that there is no such thing as French fascism, that such a creature, if it existed at all, was merely an import, a watered-down version of Nazism or Italian Fascism.2 If no consensus as to the nature or even the existence of French fascism can be reached by analyzing the programs... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recovering the Vestiges of Primeval Europe: Archaeology and the Significance of Stone Implements, 1750–1800Matthew R. GoodrumFor the antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who studied the few broken monuments and obscure artifacts that survived from the earliest periods of human history there was a dawning realization that these remote epochs were not as inaccessible as had previously been believed. This attitude was mirrored in geological research where natural (...) historians were using fossils and geological formations to reconstruct the history of the earth, which was turning out to be considerably longer and more dynamic than had previously been thought.1 Antiquarianism and natural history shared many features and problems in common during this period and their fates would become more intertwined than either discipline realized at the time.2Despite the growing hope that archaeological monuments could illuminate the past, a great deal of early human history remained hidden, enveloped in a fog that the antiquary could only occasionally peer through.3 Yet [End Page 51] the nascent science of archaeology made great strides during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Antiquaries throughout Europe were investigating field monuments, collecting artifacts, and excavating barrows in an attempt to throw some light on the original inhabitants of the continent. 4 Antiquarianism, a scholarly discipline dedicated to the study of antiquities and other historical documents, had close links with natural history during this period and many antiquaries employed methods and a mode of reasoning drawn from the sciences.5 By By the late eighteenth century, antiquarianism itself was changing and a new science of archaeology was emerging and defining its own professional identity.6Among the objects investigated by these antiquaries was a particularly curious class of artifacts that had long been collected and examined in Europe. Natural historians throughout the early modern period had collected a type of stone called ceraunia, or thunderstones. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that antiquaries and natural historians suggested that these stones were not produced in clouds by natural processes but instead were stone arrowheads, axe-heads, and other implements fabricated by early Europeans. Once these objects were accepted as ancient human artifacts, entirely new sets of questions arose: for example, why would early Europeans make tools out of stone instead of metal, what were these objects used for, and what could they tell us about the culture of ancient peoples.7 The latter question was all the more disturbing since it [End Page 52] was apparent that the stone artifacts found in Europe were very similar to the stone implements and weapons used by the so-called “savages” of the New World and the South Pacific. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was an increasing amount of evidence and a growing consensus that the inhabitants of many parts of northern Europe prior to the Roman era possessed only stone implements and culturally were rude and barbarous peoples. This idea that early Europeans had been barbarians was not new; Roman historians had asserted as much, but what was new was the quantity of archaeological evidence for this idea and the way it was understood within the context of European contact with the indigenous peoples of the New World and the South Pacific who still used stone tools.Antiquaries and natural historians during the first half of the eighteenth century were still accumulating evidence to support the idea that so-called thunderstones were in fact archaeological artifacts. They were also attempting to understand what they meant as historical and cultural artifacts, and importantly they were trying to integrate this new understanding within the traditional biblical view of human history.8 A great deal has been written about the study of prehistoric stone artifacts in the early nineteenth century, especially since it was during this period that Scandinavian archaeologists formulated the Three Age System that organized prehistory into a succession of periods from the Stone Age through the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.9 In addition, the important theoretical breakthroughs of the early nineteenth century, combined with the expansion and professionalization of archaeology as a discipline during this period, have tended to focus the attention of historians of archaeology... (shrink)

Emilio Santos has argued (Santos, Studies in History and Philosophy of Physics http: //arxiv-org/abs/quant-ph/0410193) that to date, no experiment has provided a loophole-free refutation of Bell’s inequalities. He believes that this provides strong evidence for the principle of local realism, and argues that we should reject this principle only if we have extremely strong evidence. However, recent work by Malley and Fine (Non-commuting observables and local realism, http: //arxiv-org/abs/quant-ph/0505016) appears to suggest that experiments refuting Bell’s inequalities could at most confirm (...) that quantum mechanical quantities do not commute. They also suggest that experiments performed on a single system could refute local realism. In this paper, we develop a connection between the work of Malley and Fine and an argument by Bub from some years ago [Bub, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Chapter VI(Reidel, Dodrecht,1974)]. We also argue that the appearance of conflict between Santos on the one hand and Malley and Fine on the other is a result of differences in the way they understand local realism. (shrink)

A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime's quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In (...) The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain's obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience. (shrink)

For many people the existence of God is by no means a sufficiently clear feature of reality. This problem, the fact of divine hiddenness, has been a source of existential concern and has sometimes been taken as a rationale for support of atheism or agnosticism. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist and agnostic. There is (...) coverage of the historical treatment of divine hiddenness as found in the work of Maimonides, St. John of the Cross, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, and various Biblical writers. A substantial introduction clarifies the main problems of and leading solutions to divine hiddenness. Primarily directed at philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars of religious studies, this collection could also serve as a textbook for upper-level courses in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In the present article, he explains why divine silence poses a serious intellectual obstacle to belief in God, and then goes on to consider ways of overcoming that obstacle. After considering several ways in which divine silence might actually be beneficial to human beings, he argues that perhaps silence is nothing more or less than God’s preferred mode of interaction with creatures like us. Perhaps God simply desires communion rather than overt communication with human beings, and perhaps God has provided (...) ways for us to experience God’s presence richly even amidst the silence. (shrink)

In this article, we present a new conception of internal relations between quantity tropes falling under determinates and determinables. We begin by providing a novel characterization of the necessary relations between these tropes as basic internal relations. The core ideas here are that the existence of the relata is sufficient for their being internally related, and that their being related does not require the existence of any specific entities distinct from the relata. We argue that quantity tropes are, as determinate (...) particular natures, internally related by certain relations of proportion and order. By being determined by the nature of tropes, the relations of proportion and order remain invariant in conventional choice of unit for any quantity and give rise to natural divisions among tropes. As a consequence, tropes fall under distinct determinables and determinates. Our conception provides an accurate account of quantitative distances between tropes but avoids commitment to determinable universals. In this important respect, it compares favorably with the standard conception taking exact similarity and quantitative distances as primitive internal relations. Moreover, we argue for the superiority of our approach in comparison with two additional recent accounts of the similarity of quantity tropes. (shrink)

Many people do not know or believe there is a God, and many experience a sense of divine absence. Are these (and other) “divine hiddenness” facts evidence against the existence of God? Using Bayesian tools, we investigate *evidential arguments from divine hiddenness*, and respond to two objections to such arguments. The first objection says that the problem of hiddenness is just a special case of the problem of evil, and so if one has responded to the problem of evil then (...) hiddenness has no additional bite. The second objection says that, while hiddenness may be evidence against generic theism, it is not evidence against more specific conceptions of God, and thus hiddenness poses no epistemic challenge to a theist who holds one of these more specific conceptions. Our investigation leaves open just how strong the evidence from hiddenness really is, but we aim to clear away some important reasons for thinking hiddenness is of no evidential significance at all. (shrink)

Gricean pragmatics. Saying vs. implicating ; Discourse and cooperation ; Conversational implicatures ; Generalised vs. particularised ; Cancellability ; Gricean reasoning and the pragmatics of what is said -- The standard recipe for Q-implicatures. The standard recipe ; Inference to the best explanation ; Weak implicatures and competence ; Relevance ; Conclusion -- Scalar implicatures. Horn scales and the generative view ; Implicatures and downward entailing environments ; Disjunction : exclusivity and ignorance ; Conclusion -- Psychological plausibility. Charges of psychological (...) inadequacy ; Logical complexity ; Abduction ; Incremental processing ; The intentional stance ; Alternatives ; Conclusion -- Nonce inference or defaults?. True defaults ; Strong defaultism ; Weak defaultism ; Contextualism ; Conclusion -- Intentions, alternatives, and free choice. Free choice ; Problems with the standard recipe ; Intentions first ; Free choice explained ; Comparing alternatives ; Two flavours of Q-implicature ; Conclusion -- Embedded implicatures : the problems. The problems ; Varieties of conventionalism ; Against conventionalism ; Conclusion -- Embedded implicatures : a Gricean approach. Disjunction ; Belief reports ; Factives and other presupposition inducers ; Indefinites ; Contrastive construals and lexical pragmatics ; Conclusion. (shrink)

In this chapter, Mark Budolfson and Dean Spears analyse the marginal effect of philanthropic donations. The core of their analysis is the observation that marginal good done per dollar donated is a product (in the mathematical sense) of several factors: change in good done per change in activity level of the charity in question, change in activity per change in the charity’s budget size, and change in budget size per change in the individual’s donation to the charity in question. They (...) then discuss the “hidden zero problem” that some of the terms in the equation (in particular, the last term) might be “hidden zeros” that prevent donations from doing any good—or worse, imply that they do harm—even if the charity is at the top of effective altruism rankings based on the other factors. (shrink)

This paper challenges a common assumption in the literature concerning the problem of divine hiddenness, namely, that the following are inconsistent: God's making available adequate evidence for belief that he exists and the existence of non-culpable nonbelievers. It draws on the notions of defeated evidence and glimpses to depict the complexity of our evidential situation with respect to God's existence.