Mondaugen’s Miscellany
The past is what we make out of it
The future is unwritten
Avoid over-serious people and seek the genuine smile
What have you thought about today?
(A collection of personal essays on travel, life events, and thought experiments, aiming to engage, amuse, befuddle, and inspire)
September 7, 2025
I’m listening to a fragment of an interview on Star Talk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s podcast. I’m getting annoyed.
Now, I’m not annoyed with Tyson or his guest. Both are thoughtful people discussing interesting things.
They’re asking “are we intelligent enough to understand the universe?” It’s a lovely and important question. What are the limits of our understanding, if there are any? Will we constantly refine our understanding of life and the universe, ever getting closer to full comprehension? Or will some things forever elude us? And why?
I have thoughts on this. Will I ever be invited to speak on Tyson’s podcast? Ha, no. Why not? The same reason none of you will be invited, unless you’re a famous physicist or other credentialed expert. I accept this entirely. Relying on experts for their accumulated knowledge and insights is a good system to keep loudmouthed, blinking idiots from projecting authority and misleading everyone who doesn’t know the topic (not that the US has a problem with this). Experts can be relied on to have thought deeply on their area of expertise, and so should be able to offer in-depth answers.
But I remain annoyed.
Because we will forever get in our own way.
Because they’re making assumptions that undermine the foundation of all human insight. Their very expertise blinkers them to the need for a paradigm shift. They’re asking the wrong people. To get out-of-the-box answers you have to ask out-of-the-box people.
I am no expert on anything, but I read. Over 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn’s woke us up to a fundamental way in which science works. Normal science works within a paradigm, a general system of understanding of how things work. Normal science involves discovery within the limits of its paradigm, however, in the process, discovers anomalies that don’t fit the paradigm. When enough anomalies accumulate, only revolutionary science can resolve them, producing a new paradigm that accounts for all the old data and the anomalies. Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, each offered us a new way to understand the universe, new paradigms that have been progressively more accurate in their ability to predict phenomena.
We live in an era of normal science in which so many anomalies and paradoxes have accumulated, that it is all we can talk about. In the quantum realm, observations affect outcomes, entangled particles communicate with each other faster than the speed of light, and the future affects the past. We need revolutionary science, a new paradigm to make all of this “understandable” to us. it may all fit the Standard Model, but the Standard Model is incomprehensible.
No one discusses where the next paradigm shift has to come from. It seems so blinkingly obvious to me, a mere woodworker, that I can only assume the experts’ siloed expertise prevents them from asking it. And it’s just a question, a relatively simple one.
If conscious understanding and communication depend on representational, symbolic systems (language and mathematics), what are the limits of these systems to understand and communicate the natural world? Or are these systems infinite their capacity to refine and perfect themselves, and eventually equal to all that is in the universe? Can we make a map, as Borges explored, that is equal to the country it describes?
The 17th and 18th-centuries in the West saw a huge interest in perfecting language, especially discovering the original or Adamic language, in which every word was a perfect representation of reality, offering no possible misunderstanding. From John Wilkins to Jonathan Swift, the hope and despair was fully explored, and ridiculed.
It wasn’t long ago that Bill Clinton’s lawyers asked what “the definition of ‘is’ is” Please pause and let this sink in—just how fluid, changing, and open to interpretation even the most basic elements of language are. When we say “a photon is a particle and a wave” what the dipstick do we mean?
Math is supposedly a pure language, and yet 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1, while 1/3 = 0.33… and 0.33…+0.33…+0.33…=0.99… therefore 1 = 0.99…
Is this an artifact of an imperfect representational system in mathematics, or something else? Our mind thinks of 0.99… as almost but not quite 1. But we are wrong to think that if our mathematical representation is accurate. What else in math is not quite what our mind thinks it is, and is this a failure of math and out thinking or an inadequate explanation of reality that match will eventually explain?
I’m not sure we can base an “understanding” of anything, especially the laws of the universe, in the quicksand of ever-shifting language. My tiny grasp of these matters is nothing, so I would be happy to learn from an expert in these matters, if there is one, who isn’t a quack.
The paradigm shift we need that will enable us to intuitively understand quantum weirdness will be found in questioning and refining our reliance on language as the structure of our conscious understanding. When we can redefine how we feel and understand the words “now”, “the past”, the “future”, “here” and other vaguely defined concepts, quantum weirdness will begin to make sense. But can we “improve” language and thereby conscious verbal understanding to such a degree?
We should not look in supercolliders for answers to quantum paradoxes, but explore how we can “understand” beyond, or without, words or other systems of representation. Is this possible?
How ridiculous and impossible does that sound? No more than the Copernican, Newtonian, and Einsteinian physics did to the practitioners of normal science at the time.
It may be a dead end. We may never be able to escape the limits of our system of linguistic representational conscious thought and communication. It’s not for me to say. But it is the fundamental question that has to have a definitive answer before we can build any greater understanding, that isn’t built on a foundation of sand. And I know there are different ways of knowing things. Could one of them be equal to the task of truly understanding quantum weirdness, for starters, if “understanding” is an adequate concept to express what higher levels of knowing could be? Perhaps prediction and manipulation are more meaningful tests of our intelligence?
How about it Mr. Tyson? Maybe ask the hard questions about “what is understanding” in science? But who would you ask who has looked into this as an expert?
Just askin’, as a complete non-expert.
September 6, 2025
A political piece:
Today I read a Democratic legislator bemoan the seeming indifference of the American people towards Trump’s short march into autocracy. She wondered where the outrage was. I was saddened to see one more sign of our first two lines of defense from dictatorship (the judiciary and the legislature) shrug, and shuffle responsibility onto the average citizen—a third of whom are in love with the idea of a Trump autocracy (with little understanding of what it will really be), a third who express public outrage whether through a protest or otherwise, and a third who are simply afraid and don’t know what to do, silence apparently the safest option.
I’ll remind our befuddled non-MAGA legislators, judges, employees of the executive branch, and military officers, that they have the power to oppose and even correct Trump’s non-constitutional actions and preserve democracy, through powers given to them by the Constitution. All the average citizen has is the moral power of non-cooperation and civil disobedience when told to perform or applaud atrocity.
Meanwhile, I will reread Dark Side of the Moon after I finish The Gulag Archipelago. History reminds us what we are capable of doing to one another in the name of glorious-sounding ideals, such as making America great again.
A well-meaning friend once tried to refine the difference between an idealist and an ideologue, of course beginning with the idea that one does good and the other does harm. He admitted that both have a strict adherence to a set of principles. He wondered if the absence of a moral code to inform those principles made the foundational difference. His argument collapsed in the end, however, beyond the gambit of one-man’s-freedom-fighter-is-another-man’s-terrorist, when he realized that mankind lives through practical considerations only. The realm of ideals, principles, and even morals can only be clear guides when they disregard humanity’s imperfect complexity. Beliefs and faith are of the mind, not the hand. Perfect ideals can never be achieved with imperfect people, so heads must roll to make the people fit… We might label a man such as Gandhi as an idealist, but a closer look finds a deeply wise, and therefore practical man, famous for what he did and how he did it, not so much for the ideals he could articulate. I could say the same about a poet whose work I adore, G.M.Hopkins. As a Catholic priest, and therefore an idealist, he died young serving the poor. What he believed is secondary to the fact of his good works. This is apparent in his poetry, so beautifully crafted from his loving understanding of human frailty. Glory be to god for dappled things.
We have a choice. Of what we do. We always have a choice.
Who or what would you hurt in the name of an ideal?