A Live Wire : Machismo of a Distant Surface
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | A Live Wire : Machismo of a Distant Surface |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Marvin Eli Kirsh |
| Keywords | Einstein, relativity, mind, energy, matter, asceticism, centrism, perspective in social and natural sciences, behavior and selection, seduction of the intellect and civilization pathology, surface of ex |
| Published | 2012 |
| Journal | General Science Journal |
| No. of pages | 21 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The scientific study of socio-cultural phenomenon requires a translocation of topics elaborated from the social perspective of the individual to a rationally ordered rendition of processes suitable for comprehension from a scientific perspective. Scholarly curiosity seeded from exposure in the natural setting to economic, political, socio-cultural, evolutionary, processes dictates that study of the self, should be a science with a necessary place in the body of world literatures; yet it has proven difficult to find a perspective to contain discussions of topics in a coherent manner for scientific approach: for example, anthropology, the study of mankind, finds difficulty elaborating definition for the orientation of study; it is a member of the same set that contains it. In this presentation, based on features indigenous to a supposed distant perspective that is exposed employing experiences of history and criteria of common sensory perception, it is conjectured that a civilization lifetime pathology is contemporarily active. Example is taken from philosophical and sociological discourses, modern science theory, medicine in pursuit of international health issues, to capture conceptually a role of motions of external agents occurred within the interval of observation, elaboration of concepts, choice of directions, as a source of paradox and confusion. In supposition that does not escape simple logic, ubiquitously appealing to the experience bound senses for understanding, hidden motions, common to both observer and observed, are hypothesized to render from a sense of familiarity, a continued frustration in attaining an understanding of the self and nature. A psychical seduction is proposed to exist, related to historical behaviors associated with centrism and asceticism, produces eccentric interpretations that are bound modernly to logical circular, centric geometrical reasonings; world conceptualizations are conjectured to acquire an avoidance of a state of ‘motionless’ rather than death within selection processes. Projection by the imagination upon the unknown is conjectured to result in a seduction by an active ‘live-wire” embodied to motions occurred to a distant surface.
Overview
This is a philosophical essay rather than a physics paper. Marvin Eli Kirsh, writing from the Department of Anthropology at California State University Los Angeles, sets out to explain why the human sciences and the physical sciences alike keep generating paradox, and locates the fault not in any particular theory but in the observer's unawareness of his own motion. Anthropology, he notes at the outset, "finds difficulty elaborating definition for the orientation of study; it is a member of the same set that contains it" — and the same reflexive trap, he argues, is at work when physics builds a cosmology out of an unwitnessible beyond.
The central conjecture is that a "civilization lifetime pathology" is currently active: hidden motions common to both observer and observed, originating in what Kirsh calls a "distant surface" or "third surface," are mistaken for features of nature itself, producing a psychical seduction he names the "live wire." Historical centrism and asceticism are treated as two faces of one self-punishing habit that survives its supposed defeat by Copernicus and returns disguised as circular, centric geometrical reasoning. The essay ranges deliberately across Albert Einstein's relativity, the Expanding Universe, quantum entanglement, the smallpox–AIDS sequence, drug addiction, tattooing and capitalism, on the premise that all of these are symptoms of a single unrecognised external influence.
The argument
Protagoras, Socrates and the two trails
Kirsh opens with a Jack Spicer poem and with the ancient dispute over whether "man is the measure of all things" (Protagoras) or men are "but a reflection of nature" (Socrates). He reads the history of ideas as two non-parallel trails descending from that dispute into a modern split between "focus on the physically witnessed and a virtual constructed from the imagination that groups the unwitnessed or unwitnessible to the category 'infinite'." Centric views, he argues, were only nominally buried; concepts, "especially as concepts bearing a sufficient lifetime to have accrued an accountable temporal path," are immutable, so man-centrism survives as an invisible element within a setting arranged to look otherwise.
Concepts, mass, and the objection to space-time
The critique of physics is a critique of the concept of substance. Einstein, on Kirsh's reading, "elaborated a theory of relations attributing a capability of concepts to render either force or material substance," and in doing so divided the living from the lifeless into separate spaces and "excludes the conceptual from nature." His counter-proposal is that a cosmology should contain "only number and the propagation of force to render identity possessing form" rather than mass, energy, time and matter; mass, he suggests, "as a value is better accommodated to refer to number" within an orderly cosmology.
From this he draws several specific objections. The Gravity Probe B result, he argues, may reflect "not a warp of space (space-time) but a change in measured parameters occurring as a consequence of a change in the relationship of uniquely engaged conceptually parallel identities" — earth and the guide star IM Pegasi. The redshift used to establish celestial distances he suspects "refers to motions relative to bodies other than the earth." He rejects the quantification of relative time altogether: "the passage of time to a witness engaged in relations has no means to witnessibility by the other agent and cannot be said to be quantifiable"; delays in signal reception "can be attributed only to transit times of energy" and have no bearing on rates of process at different positions. Simultaneity, correspondingly, "cannot be discussed unless a common physical element exists simultaneously to appropriate witnesses." The Expanding Universe is read symptomatically: a cosmology in which distance is "infinitely abundant, inexhaustible" describes, pointed back at the observer, "a threat to identity, diminishment in the wake of imagined replenished/increasing distances of the self to the external."
Entanglement and the third surface
The longest technical passage quotes Schrödinger's 1935 remark that "the best possible knowledge of a whole does not necessarily include the best possible knowledge of all its parts," together with Bub's account of quantum teleportation between Alice and Bob and the note that John Stewart Bell later defeated Schrödinger's hope that entanglement would decay with separation. Kirsh's move is to make Schrödinger's "representative" into the concept: born of interaction, carried in its bearer, branching in a tree shape, capable of spontaneous change of meaning in later branches. He proposes that in the Alice–Bob case a common cause survives — "a descent of meaning from a common containing element possessing an appropriate single representative of both Alice and Bob." Universal models, he concludes, should be framed with respect to container and contents and familiarity alone: "additional components, such as time, distance, and ether in basic description are not warranted, lead to theory incoherencies." The classical demand that action at a distance requires an aether is dismissed on the same ground. He also warns that entanglement research pursued as "The Joy of Entanglement," and especially experiments directed at black holes, cannot avoid entangling the observer's own natural state with a system possessing "gross distortions in energy/matter processes."
The pathology and its symptoms
The second half applies the scheme. The eradication of smallpox is paired with the worldwide surfacing of AIDS at the same locations, and the reported susceptibility of HIV replication to prior vaccinia immunisation is taken as evidence of an entanglement between the two rather than coincidence. Drug addiction is conjectured to be "habitual behavior that re-creates subliminally experienced pain" caused by externally arrived impulse on the earth's environment, and Kirsh proposes it should therefore show a demographic gradient with distance from its earthly source. The spread of tattooing is read as a symptom of "paradox of number versus name" — identity threatened by mass and number — predicted to be heaviest in crowded high-technology settings and to favour lettering and numerals. Genetic modification, high-energy synthesis of heavy elements, dwarfing of trees, brain–computer toys and the military use of drones and engineered disease are gathered as further instances of a species that has become "more prominently a pathological imitator," imitating a motion of nature that it has not perceived. Against all this he sets a preference for containment over dispersal: birth is "an act of containment," death "an act of dispersement," and the world is better understood "not as having been born but as processes funded by the conversion of energy to matter, the conversion of vast distance to small distance." The conclusion is compressed to a single claim: that "tangible ideations of an elsewhere, contained to rationalized form are falsely considered a viable mode to physically bridge un-spanned or unspannable physical divides."
Assessment
The essay's real interest lies in its reflexivity thesis. The observation that anthropology is a member of the set it studies is a genuine problem, and Kirsh is right that it has no clean analogue in the physical sciences' self-image; extending it to cosmology — asking what an observer who cannot step outside his own motion is entitled to infer about a beyond he can never witness — is a legitimate philosophical move with a respectable ancestry in Mach and in the operationalist critique. His insistence that a theory should not smuggle the conceptual out of nature while granting concepts the power to generate force and substance is a sharp point about the ontology of relativity, and his refusal to let "infinite" serve as a container for whatever cannot be witnessed is a discipline more physics papers could stand. The reading of the Expanding Universe as a picture that mirrors the theorist's own anxieties about diminishment is the kind of thing the sociology of knowledge does routinely, and it is applied here without malice.
The difficulties are equally plain. The prose is the largest of them: clauses run to eight and ten lines, technical terms ("null state," "surface," "parallel," "familiarity," "redemption") are used in senses defined only by their contexts and not consistently across them, and the argument advances by juxtaposition rather than by inference, so that almost no claim is in a form that could be checked. Where claims do sharpen, they conflict with measurement. The suggestion that Gravity Probe B measured a relational change between Earth and IM Pegasi rather than frame-dragging offers no alternative computation of the 6,606 milliarcsecond/yr geodetic and 39 milliarcsecond/yr frame-dragging signals the mission reported. The claim that signal delay bears no relation to rates of process at different positions is contradicted by the Hafele–Keating flying-clock offsets and, more decisively, by the daily relativistic correction of roughly 38 microseconds applied to GPS satellite clocks, which is a rate correction and not a transit time. The reinterpretation of redshift as motion relative to bodies other than Earth is asserted without a mechanism or a fit to the Hubble diagram. The smallpox–AIDS pairing is the weakest empirical link in the paper: the cited work reports reduced CCR5-tropic HIV-1 replication in vitro in previously vaccinated subjects, which is a protective correlation and cannot support the inference that eradication produced the epidemic; the geographic overlap invoked is simply the overlap of dense human populations. The tattooing and drug-addiction conjectures are stated as testable demographic predictions but no data are gathered.
The deepest problem is that the "distant surface" does the work of an unfalsifiable cause. It is invoked to explain relativity's paradoxes, addiction, tattoos, autoimmune disease, capitalism and the direction of research, but it is never given a property that would let one detect its absence. Read as physics the paper does not deliver; read as a philosophical essay on the reflexive predicament of the observer — which is closer to what it announces itself to be — it is suggestive, and its most durable line may be the plainest one: that men "do not represent or experience all of nature."