🚀 go-pugleaf

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."

This text is particularly relevant: "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":

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/Reciprocity/index.html
John Norton: "Is Special Relativity Paradoxical?....Now this is a
serious problem. Either the car can or cannot be trapped fully within
the garage, but not both. (Or so it would seem.)
The garage attendant says:
There are two events:
"Left door shut": I closed the left door before the car struck it.
"Right door shut": I closed the right door after the car passed.
And these events happened at the same time.
Therefore the car was fully enclosed.
The car driver says:
"There are two events.
"Left door shut": You closed the left door before the car struck it.
"Right door shut": You closed the right door after the car passed.
But these events did not happened at the same time.
You closed the left door first.
Then--later--you closed the right door AFTER THE FRONT OF THE CAR HAD
ALREADY BURST THROUGH THE CLOSED LEFT DOOR.
Therefore the car was never fully enclosed......
Therefore there is no observer independent fact as to whether the car
was ever fully enclosed in the garage."

Note that John Norton introduces BURSTING THROUGH THE CLOSED LEFT DOOR
(what if the door is strong enough?) which is only valid for the car
driver, not for the garage attendant. Note also that Philosopher John
Norton is the cleverest Einsteinian:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners
of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is
a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the
best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest
from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the
understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the
less sane."

In the absence of doublethink John Norton would have concluded:

"Einstein's 1905 light postulate entails trapping a long car inside a
short garage. This is REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM par excellence. Therefore
Einstein's 1905 light postulate is FALSE."

In fact, guided by doublethink, Einsteinians convert REDUCTIO AD
ABSURDUM into a demonstration of the glorious ability of Divine
Albert's Divine Theory to produce breathtaking miracles. So the long
train is short (if trapped inside a short tunnel), the 80m long pole
is 40m long (if trapped inside a 40m long barn and Einsteinians have
forgotten to reopen the doors of the barn "pretty quickly"), the bug
is both dead and alive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSRIyDfo_mY&mode=related&search=

http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html
"These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors
at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a
switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in
the barn....So, as the pole passes through the barn, there is an
instant when it is completely within the barn. At that instant, you
close both doors simultaneously, with your switch. Of course, you open
them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the
contracted pole shut up in your barn."

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html

On the other hand, doublethink forces the clever Einsteinian to
constantly return to the reality with which "he is playing tricks".
"The process has to be conscious":

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is
right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his
instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and
time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that
it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a
malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of
stars, planets and matter."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton, 1 Mar 2009: "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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com