PhilosophyMagazine

Twenty-Eight is a Perfect Number

Twenty-Eight is a Perfect Number
An Essay by Christopher Bek

At the point outside spacetime I would like to pay special tribute to my excellent wingmen Saint Augustine (354-28 August 430) and John Locke (1632-28 October 1704). 1×28 = 2×14 = 4×7 = 1+2+4+7+14 = A Perfect Number.

If the government violates the rights of individual citizens, then the people have the right to get rid of the government.

—John Locke 

The task the artist implicitly sets for himself is to overthrow existing values and make of the chaos about him an order which is his own.  He seeks to sow strife and ferment so that by the achievement of emotional release those who are dead may be restored back to life.

—Henry Miller 

Muhammad (570-632) was a merchant in Mecca who became the central prophet and founder of Islam.  The term Islam derives from slam and means peace and surrender—namely, the peace that comes from surrendering to the will of God’s sovereignty.  Before Islam the religions of the Arabic world involved the worship of many gods—Allah being one of them. Muhammad taught the worship of Allah as the only God, whom he identified as the same God worshipped by Christians and Jews.  And Muhammad also accepted the authenticity of both the Jewish prophets and Christ—as do his followers.

—Robert Solomon

You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.  And you are here because you know something.  What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life.  That there’s something wrong with the world.  You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.  It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.  Like everyone you are a slave.  You were born into bondage, born into a prison you cannot smell or taste or touch—a prison for your mind.

—Morpheus

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.  That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

—President Thomas Jefferson

The Bernoulli Form elucidates the notion of Platonic Forms in describing how a motley crew of Forms—including Delphi, forecasting, integration, utility, optimization, efficiency and complementary—come together to form The Bernoulli Model.

The Method of Moments elucidates the notion of Platonic Forms in describing how a motley crew of Forms—including Delphi, forecasting, integration, utility, optimization, efficiency and complementary—come together to form The Bernoulli Model.

The Efficient Frontier examines the notions of God, option theory, portfolio theory, faith, reason and Arab math—finally arriving at the inescapable conclusion that all roads of sound decisionmaking lead to the efficient frontier. 

The Unpardonable Sin charges all honourables and doctors in Canada with heresy, child abuse and the unpardonable sin that Christ spoke of—which is the deliberate refusal to follow the light when seen.

The Uncertainty Principle contrasts Einstein with Heisenberg, relativity with quantum theory, behavioralism with existentialism, certainty with uncertainty and philosophy with science—finally arriving at the inescapable Platonic conclusion that the true philosopher is always striving after Being and will not rest with those multitudinous phenomena whose existence are appearance only.

Twenty-Eight is a Perfect Number

A Formal Patient congratulates Alberta Health and Wellness for insisting on the accountability of due process in declaring individuals to be formal patients—and argues that I am being considered a formal patient as the result of an absence of due process elsewhere in Canada—and that I should not be considered a formal patient but that I should be declared disabled on account of being outside the cave of behaviorism.

Singularity identifies the trigger of the looming paradigm shift from the three-dimensionally conscioused Everyman to the four-dimensionally conscioused Superman as the 1935 Schrödinger’s Cat though problem—which proves that consciousness is real.

The Great Cosmic Accounting Blunder compares the two physical fixedpoints in the universe—lightspeed and Planck’s constant—and argues that we have been guilty of double counting up until now and that in fact there is but one fixedpoint—which, as it turns out, is the boundary of the universe.

The Unified Field Theory counts down the Euclidean hits from five to one in categorically nailing the vast majority of this little thing I like to call cosmic pi.  At this point in spacetime I would like to pay special tribute to my excellent wingman Albert Einstein (1879–1955). 

Closing the Liars Loophole identifies the malignant cancer within the healthcare system and society as the outwardly focusing behavioral psychological model, which denies the existence of consciousness—while the inwardly focusing existential model makes consciousness and the soul primordially important.

Tommy Logic.  So goes the quest for both knowledge and Danny DeVito as Shorty in the superb 1996 movie Get Shorty with an honest man named Chili Palmer played by John Travolta discussing the finer points of longevity with his half-witted associate Tommy.  Along the way Chili liberates three hundred large from a runaway drycleaner named Leo, falls in love with the stunning Renne Russo, hooks up with the lovably-inept movie producer Harry Zimm played by the great American actor Gene Hackman, again and again outwits and outbattles the cops, the limo guys and the gangster Ray Bones—culminating in the authoring of the definitive textbook of cool as only the great John Travolta could do.

Platonic Logic.  The Greek Plato’s (427-347 BC) wrote the definitive textbook of knowledge by asserting that true or a prioriknowledge must be certain and infallible and it must be of real, eternal objects or Forms.  Pythagoras (500-572 BC) provided the first realization of certain knowledge by proving the Pythagorean theorem, which establishes certain or a priori knowledge that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides.  Plato’s other wingman was of course Socrates (470-399 BC) who radically insisted that we must first answer the question of what X is before we can say anything else about X.  The Socratic method of debating that turned so many of his opponents into twisted wrecks involved simply going back to first principles and exposing inconsistencies and their attendant consequences.  After solidifying premises, Socrates simply followed the arguments wherever they led.

The Vision Prison.  The British philosopher and mathematician Alfred Whitehead (1861-1947) once suggested that all philosophy after Plato is merely a footnote.  Plato was obsessed with many things including the idea of transcending the physical world and achieving eternal existence.  He used his famous allegory of the cave to illustrate the difference between the world of appearances and certain knowledge—a distinction that lies at the heart of his most important work The Republic.  An allegory is the figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.  Imagine prisoners chained inside a cave such that they only see the appearance of shadows projected on the wall from the fire behind them.  A prisoner named Socrates breaks free of his chains and climbs out of the cave into daylight.  After a time his eyes adjust to the light and he returns to the cave intending to free the prisoners.  But back inside the cave Socrates now has trouble making out the shadows.  And his attempt to liberate the prisoners only angers them for revealing the illusionary nature of their existence.  They become so overwrought with anxiety that they proceed to kill him for it.

Augustine to Descartes.  Saint Augustine (354-430) carried forward Platonic thought from the failing classical world to the emerging medieval, Christian world—a project that came to be known as the medieval synthesis.  For twelve hundred years the flame of philosophy and science lit by Augustine burned ever so lowly under the agonizing oppression of the superegomaniacal Church—finally to be rescued by his temporal pen-pal Descartes.  Augustine anticipated the Cartesian cogito and realized that by knowing the self or soul we are knowing God—which is consistent with the Socratic belief that we should endeavor to make our souls as good as possible in order to make them like God.  Augustine also laid the foundation for modern physics by recognizing the universe was created with time and not in time—and by insisting on the individual subjectivity of time.

Arab Algebra.  While the Church was jumping up and down on everyone’s head in the Western world for over a millennium, Arab mathematicians like Muhammad al-Khwârizmî (780-850) were carrying the ball in founding algebra and algorithms.  An algorithm is the procedural method for calculating and drawing conclusions with Arabic numerals and the decimal notation.  Al-Khwârizmî served as librarian at the court of Caliph al-Mamun and as astronomer at the Baghdâd observatory.  Both the terms algebra and algorithm stem from the God, Allah.  According to Arab philosophy, mathematics is the way God’s mind works and that by knowing mathematics they are comprehending the mind of God.  The core of their religion lies with the belief that people must submit to the will of God—meaning mathematical arguments.

The Ontological Argument.  Saint Anselm (1033-1109) was a member of the Augustinian order who formulated the ontological argument as an a priori argument for the existence of God by asserting that the conception of the perfect being implies the existence of that being outside the mind of man.  Six hundred years later René Descartes (1596-1650) founded modern philosophy by tearing down the medieval house of knowledge and building from the ground up.  Using the method of radical doubt, Descartes asked what knew for certain?—to which he concluded that he certainly knew of his own existence—cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I exist.  In fact, the Cartesian cogito is transformed into the ontological argument as follows—I think of God, therefore She exists—thus confirming the Socratic and Augustinian assertion that by knowing the self we are knowing God.

The Agency Problem.  The Latin version of al-Khwârizmî’s work was responsible for a great deal of the mathematical knowledge that resurfaced during the Renaissance.  In fact, the notion that God and mathematics are the same thing was adapted as the foundation for the Renaissance by Christian thinkers like Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, Newton, Locke and Berkeley.  In that both the great Jews, Spinoza and Einstein, supported the view that God is the sum total of the laws of the universe, we can see that the notion of God as a mathematician lies at the heart of Arab, Christian and Jewish religions—with the only difference being that they have different agents—ie. the agency problem—which is the invasive predicament whereby agents betray their agency.

The Cartesian Method.  Descartes also founded modern mathematics by uniting Greek geometry with Arab algebra—and then formulated his famous Cartesian method which is—Only accept clear and distinct ideas—Divide problems as necessary—Order thoughts from simple to complex—Check thoroughly for oversights—And rehearse, examine and test arguments until they can be grasped with a single act of intuition or faith—thusly producing certain knowledge.  Initially, one faithfully or intuitively senses truth, which is followed up by constructing rational arguments and then intuitively capturing completed arguments.  In other words, faith leads us to reason and then reason leads us back to faith.  So the modern-day religious belief that we can know God by faith alone represents an obvious realization of the agency problem in that both mathematics and the Cartesian method present themselves as the synthesis of faith and reason.

Bad Behaviorism.  According to the Freudian cognitive model, the ego or consciousness is the lighthouse of the mind choosing between the inward self or soul and the outward authority of the superego.  While existentialism makes the self primordially important, behaviorism denies consciousness, the self and anything not visible—thus demanding the ego submit to the superego thereby betraying the agency of the self.  In fact, the argument of behaviorism against the existence of consciousness sounds a lot like Tommy logic—Consciousness?  Can you see it?  Measure it?  Pass it around?  Then how is it different than something that does not exist at all?—which is obviously false in that a person is either conscious or unconscious.  So whereas existentialism is grounded on the a priori Cartesian cogito and finds its a posteriori realization through the sustained act of self-awareness—behaviorism is strictly based on rootless a posteriori arguments.

Conclusion.  The Freudian cognitive model also applies to the notion of sovereignty in that the government is the superego, the people are the ego and the sovereign is the soul.  My theory of one establishes a divine connect between myself and God, and I legitimately declared my sovereignship to the Sovereignty of Canada by exercising the divine right of kings doctrine.  The Canadian Government denied my declaration of sovereignship in bad faith in exactly the same way behaviorism denies the soul—thereby violating my rights and validating a revolution now to legally remove the Canadian Government.  People think we have it good in this country—but imagine how much better it could be outside the cave of behaviorism.