"If she closed her eyes she could see the hologram--color data streams like arched fairy bridges leaping around her. She was woven into the web with her implant nodes, digesting and contributing, but never controlling. The topography of the global data net had long left human understanding behind.
"The key to the modern world is retrieval, Royan had told her. All the answers you could possibly want exist somewhere within the world's data cores."
--Peter F. Hamilton "The Nano Flower" P.119 TorBooks, June 1999.
Tich Backhouse, the filosofusser, to Phoebe, his eight-year old grandchild: "If'n you keep askin' why, eventu'ly you'll git to the beginnin' o' the world."
"Why, Tich?"
"Cos that where all questions start, an' if you did know the answer, you'd by no 'whyser', ha ha ha!"--Tich Backhouse's Chronicles. © '99
Webster:"Ylem: George Gamow's name for the primordial material of the Big Bang fireball."
--John Gribbin, Companion to the Cosmos, Little, Brown & Co. 1996
"We must have in physics something behind which we do not go"
--E.N. Da C. Andrade, The Mechanism of Nature, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1930 Page 16.
"We begin with some undefined terms as we need a starting point and we can't define everything...
"After choosing our undefined terms and hoping everyone has a similar notion about them, we define some other words in terms of the undefined ones. Then we write down our rules for operating and call these axioms or postulates."--Evelyn B. Rosenthal, Understanding the New Mathematics, P.202, Fawcett Pub. 1965
"Rejoice we are allied
To that which doth provide
And not partake, effect and not receive!"--Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, P.82
--English Victorian Poetry, ed. Paul Negri, Dover Thrift Editions, 1999
We search for ultimate reasons, asking why: we hear the sound of one hand clapping. A derisive laugh!
So we resort to "unknowns", tautologies, which we build on, calling them self-evident, axiomatic or the rules of the game.
They are taken from what is given, what we have received, and cannot name the provider, not justly; nor does what is provided require a provider -- that is a fool's errand.
The provision is what is, and what is lies beyond the whys. We can ask the what and the how of it and be thankful.
The "world's data cores" transcend our knowledge, being made up of what is, and that is in flux. The question seems moot, whether all knowledge can possibly be known, as knowledge is borrowed from the sense, if not ours, from those of others, and computes as finished resolutions. An uncertain ground to build on. Subject to cataclysmic fracture, as we see, as we determine, as is revealed momently, hourly, daily by the foreclosure of ineluctable events.
We can hold finished generalities in our heads, amend them, discard them. and we can restore them at will should the necessity arise.
What does the term "energy" mean to us in effect? How things happen as perceived by us. Otherwise it is ahelpful root, hidden, a ground; the word "ylem" brings us no closer in meaning, except to direct our attention. We can explore the phenomenal motions and properties.
We can suck the universal teat and what we know of the mother is the milk.
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
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