Oedipa's Incidental Ego

[wood jim]

OK! So many messages here and so little time, sorry.  

Locke, and not a few others, had distinguished the
primary qualities of bodies, which are inseparable 
from the bodies, and which include, extension and 
figure, and also, solidity, motion or rest, and number
(this, by the way, has everything to do with God, the
central figure in all of these theories from
Aristotle's 
Gravitational Field  to Maxwell's Demon. And, as far
as Einstein is concerned, it might be a good idea to
read Einstein's own words and discuss how he read
Spinoza), from the secondary qualities of bodies     

Berkeley was able to eliminate matter from the world. 
In his NEW THEORY OF VISION, Berkeley treats the
perceptions of distance 
by sight and by touch as real in their perceptual
particularity, not as perceptions by two different 
senses of a common reality, distance. Visual
perceptions are simply signs of what we can expect our
tactile perceptions to be. Thus by treating extension
and figure as immediate perceptual realities, 
Berkeley made them no more objective than the
secondary qualities. 

However (this is the point), Berkeley's denial of the
reality of matter, is a denial only that matter is
real and not a denial of the reality of any perceptual
effects that those that think that matter is real
suppose matter to produce. There is thus, as Dave
Monroe hinted, no experimental method for deciding
between Locke and Berkeley on the reality of matter. 

And God? And the Ego? 

http://www.utm.edu/research/hume/hume.html



Oediapa is in the tower (Yeats! Knower from the
Known). Her Ego, incidental, the magic malignant, a
force from the outside, and she has no way to measure
it. 

So, the novel turns to the 19th century, where the
contrasting views in the science of
electricity/magnetism is a re-working of argument
between Aristotle's Field gravity and the particle
physics of Democritus.    

"Ho, Maxwell, cannot you get out? If any man can find
his way through a crowd it should be you."

		--Faraday


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