Chris - I just turned 50 ! As Gordon said: he'd been around, on: Is There Anyone Home "half a hundred days", well, I've been around half a hundred years ! I do not feel the wiser for it.
But I've heard it said that "he who is wise is one who knows what he know's NOT" - sort of from the homogenized regular guy's verson of Shun Tzu, or Confucious, hmm whadever - someone said it so its got to be true, right ?
Which must make me pretty gol'dern wise(enheimer), because I KNOW I don't know much. So, I
must therefor be pretty wise. Course if I am theoretically, infinitely dumb, (not far from true I am told) and wisdom is the ideological inverse of how well you know how little you know, (&*$!) then my wisom is 1/infinity, or infinity to the power of negative 1.
Therefor, in this paradigm, we have a paradox.
If (hah!) I am infinitely stupid, which explains how I feel sometimes, then I must be very, very wise. But I know I am not very wise. In the original precept:
If P [is high] then Q [then my Q ( wisdom) must be great, where P (knowing full well how dumb I am eg awareness is high of knowing what I know NOT), and Q in turn is then supposed to be high for me e.g. wisdom, but in reality I am not very wise, we have invalidated the precept, or, simply demonstrated the principle of exception, and so we conveniently throw it out as a skew in our convenient statistical spin...., OR, we have in fact ( I like this !) proven as
court de jour empirically that the Heisenburg Principle is true (OK so its ALLREADY A TRUISM pffft), in that by virtue of examining the system too closely we have invariably changed it simply by analyzing and examining it.
And are we not supposed to be self-aware, introspective, self-examining ( I won't go there), and analytical in so far as we may invoke the skill of objectivity ? We then here and now lay claim to DISPROVING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. And all that we thought we knew in our quest toward the unified field theory, and holding true the theory of relativity is now falling through our fingers like sand..... OK says the peanut gallery: all you have done is given legs to Quantum Mechanics and. no doubt, for good white paper presentation's value - fractals, too play a part here. Where I do not know, but they do.
Our "right" triangle is wrong, Euclid was wrong, and the complex plane has been flown ! But, as Nich DeCaro knew all along in Gord's music, string theory is TRUE and GOOD ! And the topologically impossible but real nevertheless Mobius' one-sided Ribbon of Darkness is now a victory of illumination, because by dissection, we have validated the axiom of: Whenever a Mobius strip is cut down the center of its one side, TWO non-Mobius strips result !
On alighternote -that reminds me of a great college prank to play on undergraduate math, engineering, or surveying students- tell them they MUST paint the Mobius strip one side green, the othe side blue, and the blue must be on the OUTSIDE, and that is impossible but not immediately recognizable ! A AH HAHAHAHAHA (evil laugh with good-natured hazing subtext overtones from the necessary adjuncts of the privations of troubled childhood) . Speaking of childhood, that reminds me of age, and the whole point of the thread. But that usually does not deter me.... but OK back to the subject at hand.
Chris - you know you never are suposed to ask a lady her age ! Wait, don't ask her at first.. and then REALLY offend them later with the Teutonic penchant for simply making a bad thing WORSE ! Ask them how old they are, and then say " I never would have guessed you for a day over (the age they specify minus two years) ! - You will think you have recovered from what will clearly reveal itself immediately as a social gaff upon asking their age, then, expecting the recovery with what you thought was a compliment, get wapped on the head for gaff # 2 !
You see Chris, we are supposed to say to women, only when the whole best-voided subject of age is unavoidable, to say to a lady (lets say she has stated coquetteisshly she is 39....... ), you respond with Cary Grant-like debonairre and suave smarmy-ness "why, ma'am, I never would have guessed you to be (what she said eg 39, minus ten - 15 years, unless that makes em under 18, where plausibility is shattered) - "[the mathematical results of your better-be-good math]".
Its a shame about the wisdom versus knowledge thing; since imho it is all a paradigm for humility, not the quest for wisdom, which altruistically is arguably vane, which then if we were to integrate the simultaneous equations of the two algorithms resulting from the paradox, we can therefor approach negative infinity of knowledge, and hence: mucho Wisdomo. But the classic logic algorithm is not valid in reverse.
So unfortunately, if we let our knowledge grow less and less, in an attempt to grow wiser, we learn the intrinsic limitation of not being able to take the inverse of the equation. And in humility is the seed of widom. Back to the drawing board with the universal quest of the neo-illuminati - the attempt to quantify the qualitative. It just don't work.
I know how I'll get dummberer, and in turn wiser: I'll become an extremist Liberal politician, nothing dumb about the Liberal , but the politician....er... best avoided. So, to become infinately wise ( monotheistically impossible) I must move to the left of zero on the integer line of knowledge - to negative infinity again...and..OK ok enough of the hooey. I am sorry to be so full of it... I do actually hope you got a laugh or two, that WAS the goal
I promise my next post will short, concise, and to the point.lol.......
~geo steve