Heidegger

PART SEVEN – CONCLUSION.
After reading thus far through the above account and the claims it makes - that our traditional intuitive perceptions of causation are no more than helpful fictions, one could be excused for responding: ‘So what?’ Our present understanding is quite sufficient to allow us to make reasonable predictions about the world in which we find ourselves. We know the likely outcome if one throws a brick at a window – the glass shatters. Our scientists tell us, that just as the kinetic energy of one billiard ball is transferred to another when they collide, the kinetic energy of the moving brick is transferred to the fragile surface of the window and the glass breaks when the missile hits it?’ David Hume considered our perception of causation as that of necessary connection as being naive. He thought the association not in the objects but envisioned by the mind. A number of subsequent philosophers have addressed the Humean problematic by seeking a connection in the objects via so-called physical processes such as the mysterious ‘energy-flows’ of which nothing is known. Not a single person on the face of the earth can give a convincing definition of the abstraction that is ‘energy.’ The reason is of course quite simple – it does not exist to be defined. What exists are energised objects or energetic holonic systems.
A wild claim? Not in the least. Here is what some leading scientists have written:
Authors of text books for US High School students Abbott, & Van Ness (1988) comment thus: “Energy is a mathematical abstraction that has no existence apart from its functional relationship to other variables or coordinates that do have a physical interpretation and which can be measured. For example, the kinetic energy of a given mass of material is a function of its velocity, and it has no other reality.”
Surely what this means is that ‘energy’ is simply ‘mass’ – the manner in which all objects exist. What is ‘mass?’ Something tells me we are to be told that it is a so-called ‘property’ of something – like ‘beauty’ is the ‘ property’ of a beautiful woman or ‘love’ the property’ of a lover? And sure enough – here it comes…‘Mass,’ so any dictionary tells us is: ‘The property of a body that causes it to have weight in a gravitational field.’ The answer of course is what was obvious all along – the only thing in the cosmos which has ‘mass’ ‘(whatever the word ‘has’ is supposed to mean in this context) – is matter. Thus the so-called ‘energy’ that ‘does all the work’ that the scientists keep telling us about – like ‘causing’ other objects such as billiard balls to move etc – is nothing more than just the way that the billiard balls as part of the materioarchy exist. Now as the materiocracy and its parts are the same thing, what the human observer sees when he witnesses the collision of the billiard balls is just the tiny bit of the cosmos that he is homing in upon at that moment. In his mind he associates the two ‘events’ as one happening and attributes the cause of what he sees to the two specks of matter before him and ‘brackets out’ (in true Husserlian manner) the rest of the immensity of the historical and contemporary universe, which is (in human terms) the true concatenational reason for anything that has happened, is happening or will ever happen anywhere at any time. This paradigm can be used with any abstraction one chooses to name.
And this is what Richard Feinman – one of the most respected twentieth century scientists in the world had to say on the matter: “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount.” Feynman (1987) Surely *energy* like all abstraction is merely a reification of the activity of an object into a ‘thing? Similar to the way that ’love’ is reified into a quasi object, when plainly it is only the human objects we characterise as lovers who exist? And yes, someone else believes that to be true… “Energy is an abstract concept invented by physical scientists in the nineteenth century to describe quantitatively a wide variety of natural phenomena.” Faires and Simmang ( 2002) For the eliminative determinist there is no need for this definitional confusion and difficulty – ‘Energy IS Matter!’ All talk concerning the existence and transfer of ‘energy’ is mystical nonsense. For Abbott, H.C. Van Ness (1988) continue… Here’s the second paragraph in book:
‘Thus [energy] it represents a primitive statement about a primitive concept. The way I see it, the idea of attributing some ‘mysterious’ process which is not understood as being the work of some secondary even more ‘mysterious’ force that is not understood, is hardly different from that of our primitive ancestors, who, ignorant of the nature of thunder and lightening, attributed the flashing and banging phenomenon to an unknown, invisible spirit who lived in a tree. If one ceases to believe in spirits or Gods that once satisfied our forefathers as being responsible for a so-called ‘creation’ of the universe – then what else is there other than material TO be held responsible? By eliminating one of only two alternatives, a person is but left with one remaining available explanation – an explanation which I am forced to cast into metaphorical language as that of:
MATTER BEING BOTH THE RULER AND THE RULED.

Posted on Saturday, March 31st, 2007 at 5:25 pm
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