Spencer Heath Archive

Item 45

Penciled by Heath in an “Empire Wire-Glo” pocket notebook.

April 1961?

 

White envelope has item 45 and 1156.

 

 

     The human individual, during the cycle of his life, is a particular, a discrete and discontinuous unit apart from yet an interacting part of and within the universal environ­ment. This individual has a primary inborn intuitive con­sciousness of self and a secondary derived consciousness of the environment with which he interacts. He has a mental, a conceptual system and a physical, a perceptual and sensory system. By his perceptual, his sensory system he gains knowledge, the concrete data of experience. By his conceptual faculties he identifies the rationale, the immutable processes of his sensory and physical world with the rationale, the immutable rational processes of his mind.

     The physical structure of man, through its physical senses, is the intermediary agent between his objective and physical and his subjective and metaphysical world. This intermediation discovers to the consciousness of man the essential identity of process, the rationality of process in the subjective mind of man and the rationale of the objective world from whence he comes. Thus does his bodily structure mediate between the particular mind, the partial and necessarily always limited mind of man and the objective and universal. (between the immutable processes of the mind of man and the unchanging rationale of his natural and physical world.)

 

     The factual data of physical science present the events which comprise the physical world quantita­tively in three fundamental, discontinuous and interrelated yet wholly unlike aspects — corresponding to the three modes of sensory experience:  (l) that which is perceived as sub­stance or mass and taken quantitatively in numbers based on units such as the gram or some fraction or multiple thereof (2) that which is perceived as motion and taken commonly in numbers based on the centimeter and (3) that which is per­ceived as interval or the discontinuity of succession and is taken commonly in numbers based on the second or some fraction or multiple thereof. When the interval is more than one second it is called time (number of seconds); when it is much less than one second it is inverted and then called frequency (times per second).

     It is by employment of these units that physical science discovers and discloses the inherent rationality of the natural world, for, without units there could be no numbers and without numbers there could be no dimensions nor, in fact, any other ratios wherewith to compare and understand. Only homogeneity, indeterminacy and chaos would remain.

 

     The natural would must be either understandable or not; either a world of order or not, either Cosmos or chaos. If the latter, then all science is futile and vain. And if the world is fundamentally rational and not fundamentally self contradictory and indeterminate, cosmos and not chaos, having the same self consistency and immutability as the mathema­tical processes of the mind, then all its rational processes must be based on fundamental discrete least units of mass, of motion and of interval or time. Thus the principle of discontinuity must prevail throughout for to reject fundamental units is to deny at once both the granular nature of the world and therewith the numerical ratios and relationships which it exhibits on every hand.

     Therefore it is on this premise of discontinuity alone and thereby of units and numbers that the ratios and rela­tionship in which the events (energy or action) which constitute the processes of the phenomenal world can be understood and thereby be made amenable to the heart and hope of man through the rationality of his mind.

     Thinking, understanding, is a process — a going on. It is therefore in terms of its processes (not its “entities”) that the world can be understood. The processes of the world go forward, through mass (force), motion and time. Such goings forward are events. And, being happenings, action or events, they have beginnings, terms and end. They are cycles, in fact, or waves, either in uniform succession (as light) or in multiform varieties of both composition and magnitudes variously transformed.

     Let us begin with the simplest in composition and least in magnitude of possible happenings, processes or events, a quantum of action, in which there are involved but a single fundamental unit of mass, a single unit of motion and a single unit of time. These three taken together constitute, in terms of fundamental units, a complete and single unit of action. If instead of a single quantum of action we should take a single erg-second, using the conventional and much larger units, we would have had a single gram, a single centimeter and a single second, then the proportions, the composition would remain the same but the magnitude of the three would be vastly more. The erg-second unit would be, in fact, as much larger than the quantum unit as the whole unit 1 is larger than the decimal fraction, 6.60 times 10^-27.

     The significant difference between the quantum unit of action and the erg-second is, as regards the over-all magnitude, purely quantitative. If we could know that each one of the conventional units was the same multiple of the corresponding fundamental unit, then we would know that the quantum unit and the erg-second unit were, in quality or composition, precisely the same, the latter being but a vast aggregation of identicals each precisely the same. All the happenings and events in nature would be qualitatively and monotonously the same, differing only in scale. It is therefore logically impossible that the single quantum could be composed of but a single fundamental unit each of mass, motion and time; with always the same proportions among the three would be no room for the indefinite if not infinite variety in which events obviously are composed.

/There follow six notebook pages of pencil calculations./

_________________________________________________________

Commentary by Alvin Lowi, Jr.

III, IV, VII  A.5,  B 1,2,3,4

SUBJECT:  The human individual and the subjective basis of knowledge

Primary, in-born, intuitive self-consciousness. Secondary, derived consciousness of environment (not-self) of which the individual is inherently a part. (Apartness and A-part-of-ness).

Perceptual and conceptual faculties and the functions & results. Physical apparatus (structure) intermediary between physical and metaphysical “worlds.” Subjective and objective rationales related.

Perceptual basis of the fundamental units of physics. Numbers (numerical ratios) as the necessary means to understanding.

Examination of the rational cosmos postulate. — The discontinuity postulate related to it. Processes vs. entities (becoming vs. being) as an agency of understanding.

Argument for quantum composition variation.

REMARKS:  Another good start on epistemological system — Some more clues to Humanness and psychology