Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
THE PARTURIENT BLESSED MORALITY OF PHYSIOLOGICAL
DIMENSIONALITY : ALEPH – NULL NUMBER
2004
India ink , photocollage, vinyl letters on acid free board
17 x 24 in.

(1) Physiological Dimensionality: The Manifestation Of Fate :[The Parturient Blessed Morality Of Physiological Dimensionality: Aleph- Null Number]

17”V. x 24”H.
India Ink, vinyl letters, and photo-collage on board
2004

Rationalized dimensionality above and below the dimensional realm- the dimension that has been defined as “consensus reality” – is the work of the geometer and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), who conceived on a higher-dimensional analytic geometry, and the mathematician-physicist Georg Friedrich Bernard Riemann (1826-1866), who as a student was influenced by Gauss. From 300 B.C.E. to 1854 the third dimension of the ancient Greek geometer Euclid held sway over the spatial imaginations of most of the population of the Western world. Even a mind as brilliant as that possessed by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was not immune. The sense of the misplaced absolutism concerning space and time was never challenged with the exception of G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then a number of mathematicians began to voice a new direction such as Nikolay Ivanovich Labachevsky (1792-1856) and Jonos Bolyai. But it was ultimately Riemann who advanced the concept of dimensionality into an N-dimensional manifold with a metric so as to establish a quantitative rule for assigning lengths to paths. This now meant that one could consider force or energy to be a consequence to geometry, making the laws of nature seem simpler when viewed from the context of a more comprehensive dimensional space. The apotheosis of his thinking resulted in the revolution in physics initiated in the early twentieth century by Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and continues to influence contemporary physics although modified into quantum geometry.

From the mid-nineteenth century until now, dimensionality has gradually replaced the traditional concept of fate, first anthropomorphized by the ancient Greeks as three female sovereigns who determine the course of human life. The fates from the latin “fata” (singular- “fatum”) derives from the ancient Greek word “moirai” (singular- “moira”). Both words mean “prophetic declarations” or “oracular utterances.” When an event is said to be fated it is the same as that particular event being decreed to come to pass.

But for humanity the future always remains unknowable except for an occasional divine inspiration which is seldom heeded. The interlocutor for the Romans was Jupiter, while the decisions of the fates for the Greeks were spoken by Zeus. Cassandra, a daughter of Priam (King of Troy), was endowed with the gift prophecy but fated never to be believed. This is the condition the human species finds itself in relation to the future, never to know the absolute future, but always believing it can. In the Greek and Roman cultures the three fates:

1. Cloto- the spinner- she who spins the thread of life;
2. Lachesis- the disposer of lots- she who determines the length of life;
3. Atropos- the inflexible- she who cuts off the thread of life.

These were all called goddesses. They were, however, of such primordial nature that even early Greek commentators such as the poet Hesiod (FL. CA. 800 B.C.E.) and the historian Herodotus (CA. 484-420 B.C.E.), considered them Titans (the parents of the gods). Eventually even that description would not suffice.

Ultimately the function of the fates in the universe became associated with the term “anagke” or necessity. This is a concept that includes the notions of both the abstract and the concrete, and idea for which we have no word because it is assumed that they are opposites.

Even the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (CA. 428-348 B.C.E.) was unable to find a principle that would act as a sufficient contrary to necessity. He proposed the concept “nous” or reason. In the Timaeus, one of his last writings, he had to accept that reason- the highest and most perfect knowledge humans could strive for- could only persuade the dictates of necessity, that is sometimes.
The fact that necessity has no particular concern for the human condition either individually or collectively casts a shadow on the efficacy of reason to persuade anything. This doubt led in classical Greek drama to a tragic sense of life in which humanity lives in a tension of faith in the future and hope for personal control in the present by reason. And since life seems like an abrupt vacillation between joy and agony, passion and apathy, success and struggle, it was assumed that all human concerns are subject to the whim of the gods. And sometimes even the gods are dominated by necessity.

The discovery of chance or caprice to be paradoxically at the heart of the fates led the ancient Greeks to wonder to what extent the human soul might be in some similar fashion free and not just a marionette on the gods.
From then on the history of Western thought became a philosophical investigation based on the theme of fate and human freedom.
On the one hand, fate was viewed as the phenomena of existence that we all have to endure regardless of who we are, while on the other hand, the soul and/or consciousness became the repository of an endless investigation over the centuries of precisely how free we actually are and under what circumstances.

The concern for the phenomena of existence became Naturphilosophie or The Philosophy of Nature. Its subject matter was, at the end of the nineteenth century, nearly all of the objective sciences which eventually fell under the rubric, of quantitative science. For years the study of physics was known as the most favored among the absolute or formal studies. As we enter the twenty-first century it seems that biology has pulled ahead and now physics is becoming one of the applied sciences.
Lebensphilosophie or The Philosophy of Llife was at mid-nineteenth century, defined as an overall vision of/or attitude toward life in general and the purpose of human life in particular.

Deriving from The Zeitgeist- a concept invented by Johann Wolf Gang von Goethe (1749-1832) in 1790- Lebensphilosophie was gradually fleshed out as the intellectual, moral, historical, religious, and cultural climate of an era. In order to discover the degrees of freedom possessed by the human soul, it became necessary to throw out the widest net possible to encompass those subjects which eventually were called the humanities. These are the branches of learning such as philosophy, languages or the arts that investigate human constructs and concerns as opposed to natural processes as in physics or chemistry. The humanities, of course, began by being concerned with quality- one of the basic categories of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Quality is defined as that by virtue of which a thing is such and such. It may be a habit, disposition, capacity, or the form and figure of a thing. Qualities were considered primary and secondary. The primaries of things are solidity, extension, figure, motion, rest, and number. Secondary qualities are colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century George Berkeley (1685-1753) Irish philosopher and bishop challenged Aristotle’s distinction with his identification of being with perception. “Esse est percipi” (to be it to be perceived) was his philosophical slogan. Berkeley called his philosophy of life immaterialism, that is nothing material exists. Agreeing with the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) that all ideas originate in sense experience. We have, therefore, no immediate perception of our three-dimensional world. Instead, claimed Berkeley, we experience our sensations by means of co-operation amongst the senses, while learning to refer these impressions to their appropriate spatial distances, and thereby correctly interpret their magnitudes.

For most of the nineteenth century and for seventy years into the twentieth century The Philosophy Of Nature held sway as objective quantitative science, while the sense of quality associated with The Philosophy of Life was looked upon with suspicion, if tolerated at all. This reign of quantity, (that is useless to assess the nature of consciousness, let alone such concepts as soul and spirit), became the intellectual means by which pseudoscientific statements of the time could be tolerated and eventually fostered. One statement that was particularly vicious and so typical of the mid-nineteenth fifties could be heard on the campus of any college teaching the school of psychology known as behaviorism.
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Bernard Riemann [ 1826-1866 ] student of Carl Friedrich Gauss [ 1777-1855 ] developed what we currently call dimensionality. Since dimensionality in the generic sense means the range over which, or to the degree to which any entification manifests itself, it often became further defined as a series contextual propositions. In other words it is a language which Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951] considered a weltanschuung or worldview, an idea that was eventually fleshed out by Benjamin Lee Whorf. But these ideas have kept dimensionality well within the scope of practical science in which one paradigm becomes either parasitic to or subsumptive of all other paradigms.

The person who moved dimensionality away from the iron grip of traditional mathematics and back to the Ancient Greek concept of Fate, was Georg Cantor [1845-1918], who posing as a mathematician [ a scientist who abhors the concept of infinity in its abstract and concrete manifestations], sought the realm of actual Absolute Infinity – the Aleph-Null Number. This was his search for the living presence of the number of elements in the set of all integers which is the smallest transfinite cardinal number, which goes beyond or surpasses any finite number, group or magnitude.
What Cantor was doing was following the learning process of The Kabbalah, which is a search for God from a base of total materialistic skepticism.

One of Cantor’s followers, Kurt Gödel [1909-1963] actually attempted to devise a mathematical proof of the existence of God.
This all leads to the idea that consciousness is embedded within the nature of dimensionality, and that consciousness can not be defined totally as we experience it in our fourth dimensional realm of Time-Solvoid by projecting our definition of consciousness, learned from experience, onto other more comprehensive and less comprehensive realms.

Consciousness presents itself, therefore, as a family of forms – an octave of intelligence many aspects of which can not be accessed by our human intelligence. But the fact that analogy-cum-metaphor is the operation of the imagination means, even if the transfer of the mind is never complete, that aliveness and deadness are terms relative to a dimensional realm.
Beyond the human realm of Time-Solvoid, the existence and nature of consciousness is often designated as God , gods, demigods, Demons divas, Angels ,souls, heroes , etc. While accepted as part of nature, these entities are rarely understood. Below or less comprehensive than the human realm, consciousness in the form of ghosts, apparitions , shadows or hallucinations are just as distant from human consciousness as members of the so-called divine realm. But the real difference is that most humans feel obviously and naturally superior to these entities. This feeling is often translated into propositions which state that these beings are without any kind of consciousness, and that the attribution of consciousness to them , is what gave rise to the existence of superstition prior to the rise of experimental science. A science that tried, on the one hand, to discover their true nature, and on the other hand, to dismiss their existence as flim-flam.

The pre-scientific Ancient Egyptian Civilization accepted shadows as having consciousness. Of the nine parts of the Egyptian personality, two were about the shadow. The Khaibit (the shadow of the physical body) which never leaves the carcass, and The Ka (the doppelganger) the shadow of the soul that moves freely about the Earth and the stars are interpreted as phenomena such as lucid dreaming or the out-of-the-body-experience in terms of human perception.
While both forms of the shadow are ultimately the same, the dynamic and static forms demonstrate the form of Life-Death of the Shadow.

In today’s world-view, very few people believe that shadows possess a form of consciousness, let alone believe that a human can communicate with one. To most people the shadow is simply the result of solid objects in space blocking the rays of a light source and that is it.
The association of light with consciousness has a history lost in time. But closer to our time James Clerk Maxwell [1831-1879] discovered in 1856 the relation between light and electricity which led eventually to the theory of the electromagnetic spectrum which developed in the early 1930’s. From about 1875 on, the Occult vision of dimensionality, akin to the Pythagorean musical scale of infinite extent, was introduced and supported by Maxwell’s discovery.
Degrees of consciousness, from almost blinding light to almost total darkness, provide the metaphor for Good to Evil, The Divine to The Demonic, Life to Death, all as degrees of embodiment. These are the aspects of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which include what we call visible light –a very small portion of the spectrum. Most of the spectrum is undetectable by our unaided senses, but nevertheless, it contains octaves of energy which separate themselves into individual dimensions.
Today so-called “physical light” is a metaphor the position of human consciousness within the total dimensional system for two reasons:

(1) “Physical light” always has its origin in the Past, whether or not that origin is a star or a candle;
(2) The “brilliance” that we associate with light exists in Nature only in the minds of intelligent conscious life-forms, and is not inherent in the non-conscious aspects of Nature. The photons which deliver energy to waiting retinae do not “carry” light. If it was the case that they do, the entire Universe would be “lit up” all of the time in an isotropic and homogeneous manner, and there would be no “darkness” in the Sky.

The symbol for the velocity light has been in our contemporary world the letter “C” meaning 299,796 + or – 4 km./ sec. in a vacuum near the Earth , or in the open air. But now astrophysicists are discovering there is a type of space which can not be monitored by any aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the space where an old star goes when it explodes and dies. This space is distinct from the space of a Black Hole, only in the sense that the Black Hole space is an infinitesimal point of that , space infinite in extent, which acts as the background energy plenum of the Universe.

On Earth these same astrophysicists have discovered a way of slowing down the speed of light to 17 mph by changes of media. They expect very soon to have light to travel at 4 mph. Then everyone will be able to interact directly with light, even the blind , because the energy of the electromagnetic spectrum travels in the human brain at 700 mph.

According to Philip Gibbs in an article entitled: “The Symbol For The Speed Of Light ? “, he states : “…, it is possible that its use persisted because “C” could stand for “celeritas” and had therefore become a conventional symbol for speed. We can not tell for sure how Drude, Lorentz, Planck or Einstein thought about their notation, so there can be no definitive answer for what it stood for then. The only logical answer is that when you use the symbol “C”, it stands for whatever possibility you prefer “.

While there are many physicists who propose an identification between light and consciousness by means of formulae that rival the simplicity and power of Einstein’s famous E = Mc2. I prefer, therefore, to use “C’ to stand for consciousness.