80
8.7 Anthropical Sub-texts
In that context, the multitude of well-recognized paradoxes are each of an anthropical nature. From Euclid’s Elements (ca. 300 BCE) to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(1781) human logic has dictated that from premises flow logical consequences. But
that pure, transcendental deduction presupposes such premises, and consequences—
also of a stark logic—irrespective of whatever empirical knowledge might alter our
premonitions or hindsight. This purity (allegedly) rests upon our intuitive grasp of
time and causality, and the supposed truth of such insights. It occurs in a specific
space. All of the logical predicates that follow are subject to mentation and/or perception. It is a transcendent logic that is, in essence, the opposite of what, in Vedic,
Brahmanical, and Buddhist traditions are known as Pratītyasamutpāda (Sanskrit), or
dependent origination, a causal chain in Nature and in Mind whereby all phenomena (dharma) are variously linked.
But regardless of the debates and their outcomes, the logic is human logic. Even
in the case of ghost lineages, whether an avian phylogeny is confirmed by fossil
evidence, the impression of ancestry versus contemporaneity is a human impression. But what of a different order of impressions: In 2017, an estimated 821 million
of the 7.8 billion Homo sapiens were under-nourished.
34
How do we accommodate
our species’ own vital signs within a philosophical template that is wide enough to
encompass both our own blinders and some set of observations free of those same
blinders?
Given the varieties of human perspicuity and an equally decisive battlement of
narcissism, a crucial test of the durability of standard weights and measures fails
when it concerns human demographics. Demographers themselves continue to
modify projections unself-critically with respect to decade after decade of
miscalculations.
Census data, however accurate, is mired in a homocentric vision that quickly
smooths over a mere two-hundred-year timeframe in which the human population
soared from 1 billion to 7 billion, with a continuing escalation.
35
Most classical
paradoxes, among numerous such classes, are able to intellectually and logically
tease their way out of ultimate discord and discrepancy. These often-surprising
challenges to the eventual escape from mathematical traps, and countless other
strangely disparate premises and conclusions are found throughout physics, economics, medicine, statistics and probability, mechanics and cosmology, relativity,
chemistry, linguistics, and philosophy, among other zones of human conceptualiza34 “Climate Change, Population Growth, and Hunger in the 21st Century – A MAHB Dialogue with
Gernot Laganda,” by Geoffrey Holland, https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/climate-change-population-growth-hunger-21st-century-mahb-dialogue-gernot-laganda/Accessed January 25, 2019.
35 See https://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/unit/text.php?unit=5&secNum=4; See also
Population Reference Bureau’s http://www.worldpopdata.org/Accessed January 27, 2019.
8 Paradoxical Frontiers
8.7 Anthropical Sub-texts
In that context, the multitude of well-recognized paradoxes are each of an anthropical nature. From Euclid’s Elements (ca. 300 BCE) to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(1781) human logic has dictated that from premises flow logical consequences. But
that pure, transcendental deduction presupposes such premises, and consequences—
also of a stark logic—irrespective of whatever empirical knowledge might alter our
premonitions or hindsight. This purity (allegedly) rests upon our intuitive grasp of
time and causality, and the supposed truth of such insights. It occurs in a specific
space. All of the logical predicates that follow are subject to mentation and/or perception. It is a transcendent logic that is, in essence, the opposite of what, in Vedic,
Brahmanical, and Buddhist traditions are known as Pratītyasamutpāda (Sanskrit), or
dependent origination, a causal chain in Nature and in Mind whereby all phenomena (dharma) are variously linked.
But regardless of the debates and their outcomes, the logic is human logic. Even
in the case of ghost lineages, whether an avian phylogeny is confirmed by fossil
evidence, the impression of ancestry versus contemporaneity is a human impression. But what of a different order of impressions: In 2017, an estimated 821 million
of the 7.8 billion Homo sapiens were under-nourished.
34
How do we accommodate
our species’ own vital signs within a philosophical template that is wide enough to
encompass both our own blinders and some set of observations free of those same
blinders?
Given the varieties of human perspicuity and an equally decisive battlement of
narcissism, a crucial test of the durability of standard weights and measures fails
when it concerns human demographics. Demographers themselves continue to
modify projections unself-critically with respect to decade after decade of
miscalculations.
Census data, however accurate, is mired in a homocentric vision that quickly
smooths over a mere two-hundred-year timeframe in which the human population
soared from 1 billion to 7 billion, with a continuing escalation.
35
Most classical
paradoxes, among numerous such classes, are able to intellectually and logically
tease their way out of ultimate discord and discrepancy. These often-surprising
challenges to the eventual escape from mathematical traps, and countless other
strangely disparate premises and conclusions are found throughout physics, economics, medicine, statistics and probability, mechanics and cosmology, relativity,
chemistry, linguistics, and philosophy, among other zones of human conceptualiza34 “Climate Change, Population Growth, and Hunger in the 21st Century – A MAHB Dialogue with
Gernot Laganda,” by Geoffrey Holland, https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/climate-change-population-growth-hunger-21st-century-mahb-dialogue-gernot-laganda/Accessed January 25, 2019.
35 See https://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/unit/text.php?unit=5&secNum=4; See also
Population Reference Bureau’s http://www.worldpopdata.org/Accessed January 27, 2019.
8 Paradoxical Frontiers