SCIENCE AND SANITY - online book

An Introduction To Non-aristotelian Systems And General Semantics.

	THE NEWER 'MATTER'	699
	way of saying that he established new standards of evaluation in physics, as for instance, that we should never postulate entities which cannot possibly be observed, that the 'laws of nature' should be formulated in terms of generally invariant relations expressed in tensor equations , . The weakness of the system of Einstein, resulting in many futile criticisms, lies in the fact that he eliminated elementalism in one vital region of physics, but he did not formulate the general epistemological principle of non-elementalism, which should be applied everywhere, daily life included. This he could not have accomplished without a still deeper enquiry into the mechanism of time-binding, which produces all science, and which leads to the discovery of the fundamental fallacy in the use of the 'is' of identity. Only after the elimination of this remainder in us of the primitive man, does structure become the only possible link between the objective and verbal worlds, and becomes also the only possible content of 'knowledge'. 'Similarity of structure' then demands the complete and general elimination from science and life of any elementalism. The strength of the newer quantum mechanics lies in the fact that the younger physicists have accepted the new epoch-making einsteinian standards of evaluation or epistemological principles; the weakness lies in the fact that the scientists do not realize that the fallacy of elementalism is entirely general and vitiates all scientific outlooks. No one can produce satisfactory theories, nor evaluate, nor interpret them properly as long as he continues to use the few-valued and elementalistic 'logics' and 'psychologies', which are at present always found at the bottom of any 'evaluation' or 'interpretation'. The latest work of Dirac goes very far in the direction of building physics by establishing his language of transformations, states, observables . , ascribing structure to protons, magnetic poles . , but even Dirac does not seem to realize the general fundamental issues involved. Dirac says: 'The description which quantum mechanics allows us to give is merely a manner of speaking which is of value in helping us to deduce and to remember the results of experiments and which never leads to wrong conclusions. One should not try to give too much meaning to it.'1 (Italics are mine.) The italicized words show that even Dirac does not realize fully the mechanism of identification, as otherwise he would not have used these words in this form. If we entirely abandon identification, then a theory or a book, being verbal, represents nothing else but special language; there is no 'merely' about that either, structure being the only possible link between the non-verbal and verbal worlds. Instead of warning the reader 'that one should not try to give too much meaning to it', we must simply insist that the only 'meaning' should be looked for in structure . , the 'too much meaning' always indicating inappropriate evaluation and ultimately semantic disturbances. Current physical literature shows that the main problems of 'interpretation' depend on the solution of the m.o problems of 'observation', 'reality', 'fact'. , and border on the scientific solution of the problems of pathological 'delusions', 'illusions', and 'hallucinations', all of which involve the fundamental issues of the elimination of identification. But once the issues are structurally formu-