Anton's Ideas

<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/brainwave/”>Brainwave</a&gt;

a real brainwave

                                  NOW THERE’S A THOUGHT

Is it possible to have a complex thought or a really interesting brainwave if you cannot share it with someone else? Wittgenstein, in his theory of solipsism as the basis of every individual’s personal perception of the world, certainly suggests otherwise. Usually an exchange of ideas is only possible if you know somebody who is as well versed in the subject with which your brainwave is concerned as you are. Otherwise you first have to define what you mean by your clever thought or brainwave before discussing the concept further.

Dictionary definitions seldom help very much with this type of problem as is illustrated by the OED which defines brainwave as a ‘sudden clever idea’, or an electrical impulse in the brain. The key adjective here is obviously ‘sudden’ but that does not allow for the range or scope of the thought that is implied by the other adjective ‘clever’. Newton, when an apple fell on his head, cleverly worked out his laws of gravity. But they were hardly sudden. Thus the thoughts emanating from his near pommicidal experience were not brainwaves. But they were clever thoughts. So it can be argued that clever thoughts do not have to be brainwaves. But let us consider another famous scientific moment.

Archimedes watched his bath water level rising as his body’s mass displaced it and he saw a whole, complete and exquisite explanation of a mathematical problem. How to measure volumes of hydro-displacement. That was sudden and was a brainwave. But it was so quick it did not really involve much thought at all. All it involved was seeing something and realising its possible significance. So was Archimedes cleverer than Newton or was he just quicker off the mark? And anyway which one of them knew enough people to whom they could explain what they believed they had discovered without first having to give them a lesson in what they were talking about?

I mean, would you consider a raving lunatic rushing naked down the street shouting “I’ve got it” necessarily more clever than a chap, bent double, hobbling out of an orchard complaining that he had a headache because he had been hit on the head by an apple? Most people would probably have sought medical help for both men in each case. And imagine how much longer the world would have had to wait for enlightenment in science if those two things had happened. 

Now there’s a thought!

AWE

Super Sensitive

which sense would you give up and which have accentuated?

COMMON SENSES

I am in no doubt that I would give up common  sense and that I would greatly increase my emotional sensitivity. There are two reasons in each case which stand out for me.

With regard to giving up common sense I suppose it is becaue it is the most contentious sense we have. Everyone has their own idea of what common sense is. For me basically it is what appears as the blatantly obvious to each individual  and this for so many different reasons. Firstly  I assume that some things in life are perceived logically by my senses and I cannot understand why others do not feel the same way. For instance I take it as obvious that I do not want to die any sooner than I absolutely have to, but  given that many people commit suicide I suppose for many this piece of logical common sense does not hold good. But even so I accept that this is a very common piece of sense indeed. Where one sees the meaning of common sense being heavily disputed is in politics and religion, in other words where and  how we order our lives and the purpose of that ordering are greatly disputed and so one man’s common sense in such an issue would certainly not be another’s. Therefore this sense would definitely be the one to go.

But on the subject of increasing a sense my emotional perception would certainly be the sense that I would want to increase a hundred fold. I consider the need for this to be obvious  as I am referring to the acuteness of my ability to understand how I feel about other people and why I want to. If I love my wife it would be wonderful to be able to love her twice as much. The joy I get from loving her and knowing she loves me is enormous and any way in which I could increase this sensation of perceived and reciprocal enjoyment of being with me, or I being with another person, must be something I would seek to increase as much as possible.Also The emotional side of spiritual love and affection  is part of that same sensation of feeling loved and wanted but in a different, though equally strong, manner.  Thus you have my answer to this prompt.

But hang on. I have a feeling the prompt setter may have been talking about my five physical senses. I do hope not because I would not want to change my physical make up in any way at all. Imagine wanting to lose a sense. If you really did want to be so handicapped you would probbly need psychiatric help, unless that is what led you to feel the need for your loss in the first place!!

Anton Wills-Eve

The years 1715 to 1792 are known in many countries as either “The age of enlightenment” or “The age of reason”. This is for the very simple reason that in the previous 100 years the Western civilised world had undergone a series of momentous scientific and geographical discoveries leaving the average intellectual no longer obliged to turn to the Church to say whether or not their ideas or theories were in line with Christian teaching because the myriad of Christian denominations which had sprung up since the reformation, approximately between 1511 and 1567, meant that the authority once automatically vested in the church in all matters of scientific and sociological morals, ethics and facts was considered no more likely to be right than the theories of political philosophers, mathematicians or discoverers.

So a whole century of changes in every walk of life culminated towards its closing years in the French revolution and abolition of hereditary privilege in France, financial and trading freedom in Italy, Spain and England and writers of all types in every country no longer felt obliged to seek ecclesiastical permission to be published. Also, the establishment of independence in North America and the founding of penal colonies in Australasia were the foundation stones of the English speaking world as we know it today.

This short proof concerns one example of how freedom of intellectual enquiry gave rise to perhaps the most intriguing puzzle, problem and obvious but unprovable hypothesis in the history of maths. Christian Goldbach, a keen amateur mathematician – yes in those heady days of original thought even mathematicians had original ideas, not allowed in schools nowadays – wrote to a friend of his in Switzerland, Leonhardt Euler, one of the most distinguished mathematicians in the history of the discipline. Christian suggested to his friend that all even numbers were the sum of two prime numbers. He allowed for only one odd number to be the sum of two primes, ie 3, as it was 1 + 2 . But He could find no even number that was not the sum of two primes.

The only problem was that,while it seemed obviously true, and nobody could, or at least has as yet, disproved it, he could not formulate an acceptable proof of his conjecture within the accepted rules of traditional mathematics. A large prize was deposited in a Swiss bank which was to be awarded to the first person to come up with such a proof. Now this was some 270 years ago, but still nobody has managed to formulate an acceptable proof. The prize money is still earning compound interest at 5 % and by now would make the winner one of the richest academics in the world. The most powerful computers in today’s world cannot disprove Goldbach so why can the conjecture not be proven?

Well, personally, I have always believed it is simply because it is too obvious. Can one actually prove, for instance, that 1 plus 1 equals 2. Not by any other method than saying that 1 is what we call a single unit of something, 2 is 2 such units and so on. But this is no more than giving a definition of, or naming the noun which corresponds to, a mathematical symbol or tool. Well, surely, that is all that Goldbach’s conjecture does. He simply SAID IT THE WRONG WAY ROUND. What he should have said is “an even number is any number that is the sum of two primes.”( 2 ,of course is sum of 1 +1). That is a perfectly valid and true definition of an even number. There are others, such as “an even number is any number which can be divided exactly by any other number higher than one.” But the important thing about my definition of an even number is that by its linguistic composition it obviates the necessity to take Goldbach’s conjecture any further, in order to prove it, than to state what an even number is. Doing this proves both the conjecture and satisfies the mathematical logic inherent in proving all theorems; ie using nothing more than the numerical value and meaning of a number’s name to make a mathematical point.

QED.
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