Mythopoetics

Given a set S, a cardinal number M is the invariance of S after changes in the properties and relations of its objects. Two sets have the same cardinality if we can construct a one-to-one correspondence between its elements. These definitions are highly psychological. It implies a deeper identity of a set than the identity given by the extension of a property. Such identity would have to be a property since it can be predicated of more than one set. But how are we to know such substance in relation to which there occurs an invariance after changing properties and relations of objects? From a constructive point of view it would only make sense that such unmovable and unchangeable “Terminus” was to be introduced by definition (recursive). Then cardinal number would mean simply that we can construct a countable algorithm (in ℤ +) for a given set, and two sets have the same cardinality if for a given machine their countable algorithms stop at the same time.

Ideas become sensory experiences through the arts, practical or aesthetical . The linguistic  immateriality takes shapes in matter whether in the etheric consistency of a sound wave or the persistent reality  of a stone. As physics  proposes, it is matter what determines space -time , thus, our ideas give shape to space-time through the artistic action: we think and space-time becomes this or that, only perceptible and ready for experience in the particular object. Contemporary sculpture  has transformed the tradition of experimentation  with form in a direct experimentation of space , i.e. of the curving of light . The experience of space as the curving of light has produced a kind of living experience of space as a basic intuition  for the awareness  of our own life: movement through space becomes intuitive thinking, a rather deeply grounded intuition in our animal nature. We move and the universe  begins, like in the Walkabout  of the a...

Cuando Galileo vio por vez primera los anillos de Saturno a través de su telescopio, pensó que eran orejas, e hizo tres dibujos conforme a su percepción. Desde luego, con un mal telescopio pueden parecerlo, incluso con uno mejor si no sabemos con antelación lo que estamos mirando, y nada nos empuja a priori a pensar que alrededor de un planeta pueda haber anillos. De hecho, no se trata de anillos como los que nos ponemos en los dedos, sino de pedazos de materia, que van desde el centímetro a los 10 metros de longitud, que orbitan el plano ecuatorial del planeta, y que desde cierta distancia pueden ser descritos, de una manera vaga, como anillos. Cada vez que percibimos un objeto completamos su forma con la información que tenemos de otras formas semejantes en nuestra memoria y nuestra experiencia, una experiencia que se adapta mal a intervalos temporales demasiado cortos o largos, o a espacios demasiado grandes o pequeños. Lo nuestro son las dimensiones medianas y las aproximaciones...

    Eduardo Chilllida asked himself if “place” is not some sort of unmoving energy. Then, he went on and asked a further question: “to occupy a place and have no measure: would not be that space?”    Our intuition of space is based on the movements that we make within a cloud of gas that we call air on the surface of a quasi-sphere, our home planet. Upon that we have built a conceptual web for composing those intuitions into a set of consistent statements, geometry. But geometry uses ideal objects which are not part of our intuitions: points, entities without physical dimension and that unlike numbers have no-individuation. We cannot expect geometry to shed any light on our intuition of space, for space for us is the result of our vital action, the energy that we project around creating an image of the world. We can easily understand what a place is: a scenario for a particular action. But space is not the set of all places, for there is not a set of all ac...

An ethical code is like the tip of an iceberg which represents the conscious acknowledgment of the valuations made by a human group. The underwater part has its roots in those emotional valuations that were successful in the process of survival during a specific period of the life of the group. These hidden valuations are basically encoded at a deeper level in the social actions, and thus, in the group’s communications, i.e. in its mythico-ritual axis. A common characteristic to all ethical codes is their pretension of universal validity, for they express the way things are. Contemporary Western codes base their valuations in a mythico-ritual axis which is a mixture of myths of universal law and myths of the human law, but could we formulate ethical principles which follow exclusively principles of human law, putting aside gods and the supernatural, or even materialist reifications (and transcendentalizations ) of the own human being? This is a small collection of ethical axioms...

There is nothing new in the mathematical approach to music composition which characterized many of the main stream pieces after the 60’s of last century. Recall Leibniz’s words: music is the hidden exercise of arithmetic performed by the soul though unaware of its process of counting. To a Platonic and Pythagorean oriented mind that would give an explanation for the universal power of music, its qualification as a mathematical discipline and thus as a subjacent structure of reality. Music would represent a kind of algebra for the intuition of time just as geometry deals with our intuition of space. Obviously, from a Kantian point of view, where space and time are pure forms of intuition or the conditions for our intuition of the world, such idea is meaningless: space and time are not objects, nor relations among objects, but simply the way that occurs our perception of the world. Other minds (non-human) would perceive it differently. In any case, mathematics prestige and strength, h...

  Dizziness in front of an empty canvas. Death is an empty canvas that we could never fill, fathomless non-existence free of will and mistake. Biology displays a representation of life as a sequence of chance, trial and error, but what kind of knowledge do we gain from it? What is the meaning of chance, or of error? Maybe they are just ways of understanding the all too simple straight ways of our will, life’s will, that produce a thin shadow of fleeting security, a brick house resembling shelter in the middle of the ongoing storm… We are precariously sheltered.   How to begin a painting? Robert Motherwell said that he began with a series of mistakes that were later corrected by feeling. Old metaphysics to face the unheimlich. I recall Robert Mussil: it does not matter what you do, but what you do next. And then, when to stop? Are we to stop simply by dopamine exhaustion, or by any random feeling of fulfillment, when we arbitrarily think that nothing is left to tell and t...