🚀 go-pugleaf

On Aug 24 Pentcho Valev wrote:
> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two
> contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
> of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories
> must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with
> reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself
> that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it
> would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to
> be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
> hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since
> the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while
> retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To
> tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any
> fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
> again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
> to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take
> account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably
> necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
> exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
> tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
> knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead
> of the truth."
>
> Initial destruction of students' rationality:
>
> http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=AJPIAS0000690000S1000S24000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
> "Student understanding of time in special relativity: Simultaneity and
> reference frames"
> American Journal of Physics -- July 2001 -- Volume 69, Issue S1, pp.
> S24-S35
> "This article reports on an investigation of student understanding of
> the concept of time in special relativity. A series of research tasks
> are discussed that illustrate, step-by-step, how student reasoning of
> fundamental concepts of relativity was probed. The results indicate
> that after standard instruction students at all academic levels have
> serious difficulties with the relativity of simultaneity and with the
> role of observers in inertial reference frames. Evidence is presented
> that suggests many students construct a conceptual framework in which
> the ideas of absolute simultaneity and the relativity of simultaneity
> harmoniously co-exist."
>
> Lifelong exercise of doublethink (obligatory even for Einsteiniana's
> highest priests):
>
> http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article.php?story=20050422141509987
> Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity,
> and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like
> an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized
> into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time
> that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what
> happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It
> still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's
> wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is
> wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy
> in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So
> it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and
> juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million
> times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

Sometimes Einsteiniana's highest priests break the rule "the lie
always one leap ahead of the truth" and exercise themselves in
doublethink with the TRUTH one leap ahead of the lie:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a
happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did
bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news
of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such
rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a
comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it
as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one.
We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to
preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured
all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the
stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

Einsteiniana's highest priests can only indulge in this luxury when
the postscientific decay is well advanced and the difference between
truth and lie does not exist anymore.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com