David Cornberg
born march 11, 1944 eugene oregon...attended santa monica high school, stanford university, ucla and university of oregon taking a ba in philosophy, an ma in education and a phd in education...have taught at several universities, published five books of poetry, collaborator on five other books in various subjects, painted, showed and sold abstracts and landscapes for many years, lived in taipei, taiwan for fifteen years with my wife, lynn, and daughter, kaiyuh and now live in fairbanks, alaska
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Papers by David Cornberg
By David Ray Cornberg
Abstract
I open this abstract with a BIG THANK YOU to all the people from many different countries who have given their time and attention to my last four papers, Is Randomness In Nature Possible?, Finding The Animal: An Exploration of Entanglement. Causality and Information, Reinvigoration Of The Finding The Animal Discussion, and What Is An Instant?. And now I thank you for giving your attention to the Abstract of this paper. I am what I could call an impulsive/reactive/intuitive/spontaneous writer of academic papers. When I finished each of the papers listed above, I told my wife and daughter that I was done writing for awhile. Then, something came along, took ahold of me, and the words started flowing. This paper is no different: I thought I was done; something came along; and, now, the words have started flowing.
In this paper, I am going to explore the title question, which I am not sure I even understand myself, but clearly follows in many ways from the reflections on time in my last four papers. The title question also reacts to my readings of various kinds of writings—books, articles, summaries, etc., of the long discussions, in physics, philosophy, psychology, linguistics and neurology, on the nature of time and of the experience of time in humans, non-human living organisms, and machines. I also want to share two limitations of this paper. First limitation: the paper is written only in English. The only language in which I can write and read academic papers is current US academic English. The paper considers the terms presence and present only in English and the etymological information is only for the English words. If “presence” and “present” were translated into Polish. Urdu, Hawaiian, Swahili, Dutch, Athabaskan or Korean, for just a few possible alternatives, and included with the etymologies appropriate to each language, my paper’s content might have been non-trivially different than it now is. This is one reason that I do not try to offer a definitive, unquestionable, universally valid and binding definition of either “presence” or “present”. It is also a reason for my being very careful in accepting suggestions to synonymize either term with either identical or similar terms in specialized disciplinary vocabularies or in contexts that have already appropriated either term and fixed meaning(s) and reference(s) for use in those contexts. Of course I am open to whatever suggestions readers want to make in the discussion thread about relations between “presence” and “present” in this paper and in other contexts and I will certainly both appreciate such suggestions and try to give reasonable feedback to them. I am also open to discussion participants sharing translations of “presence” and “present” into other languages given the potential to increase the richness and diversity of the exploration of the title question by such sharing. The second limitation is the fact that I decided before writing this paper that I would not try to find all the uses of “presence” and “present” in English in the various disciplines of the humanities and sciences in order to include all of their variations In their usages in the paper. However, as with other language translations, contributions from specialized disciplinary vocabularies are certainly welcome with relevance to the main exploration.
This abstract also seems the appropriate place to share two observations about the discussions of time which have been both the content of many papers shared on academia over the past several years and the focus of discussions in many intellectual venues in many languages for centuries. The first observation is that most of the writers in the history of time as a subject of investigation have been male. Most of the writers to whom I have had access and whose works have moved me in one way or another have been EuroAmerican males who have received most of their academic and professional training and education in institutions such as Stanford University, the University of Californian at Los Angeles, and the University of Oregon, where, respectively, I received my BA, MA and my PHD. This fact may not seem as important as the difference between taking a medical degree at Johns Hopkins University, in Western allopathic medicine, rather than at a Chinese University in Traditional Chinese Medicine or at an Indian University in Ayurvedic Medicine. However, during the last several years, the orientations of the writers I have read have drawn almost entirely from ordinary language philosophy and the philosophy of science and physics with Western European natural science, especially physics, and mathematics as the primary fields of exemplary and evidential reference.
Both ordinary language philosophy and contemporary physics and mathematics were influenced by positivism in the early 20thc which set as its project the complete elimination of the subject and of subjectivity from both philosophy and science. Of course, if the subject and subjectivity are eliminated from thought and discourse, then their traditional opposites, the object and objectivity lose both epistemological credibility and ontological grounding. Indeed, the pair “epistemology and ontology” become as meaningless as A.J. Ayer was convinced all references to the subject in either science or philosophy could be. The result in the many recent discussions of time, such as those around McTaggart’s A and B series, and the ongoing exchanges among presentists, eternalists, actualists, block growthists, etc. has been the creation and maintenance of an abstract intellectual space in which time can be discussed with reference to nothing more than a “we” that is capable of holding any point of view in any aspect of the discussions of time. I have, more than once, met such a “we” in comments in discussion threads of my papers and every time I have asked the writer who, given that there are 7 to 8 billion humans, more or less, now alive on earth, “we” is, I have received no answer. So, I am not going to invoke that kind of abstract intellectual space in this paper’s exploration, nor am I going to assume that there is a real, living, breathing, referent to “we” just waiting to be called onto the discourse stage to play out my views. I am going to think and write in a different way. I welcome your participation and I will try to give a reasonable response to whatever you choose to put into the discussion thread.
received from participants in the discussion of my paper on the question of
randomness in nature. in this new paper I am stepping back and reflecting on the
question of the nature of nature toward a different kind of event in the same area
where I harvest mint. I have been harvesting mint at the slough for decades,
without knowing whether the mint’s physical existence depends, along with air,
sun, water and earth, on causality, randomness, both, neither or some other as yet
unidentified thing in nature. Nature, in the most inclusive sense of that word,
which includes all known scales, seems indifferent to what humans think it does or
doesn’t do to be what it is. However, there are events in nature that foreground
relationships between humans and animals as well as between humans and plants.
My focus here is on a specific event, witnessed and experienced for generations in
the Koyukon Athabaskan world, which includes the wilderness area where the mint
grows, in which humans and animals connect in a way that may resemble the
correlations of quantum entanglement but with features that seem to require an
additional variable, both hidden and unhidden. This variable may require
representation with a type of spacetime in which the behavior of the variable is
neither determined nor undetermined, and neither chaotic, in a deterministic
sense, nor random in the dual senses of equiprobable and unpredictable. Having
found in my reading no specific name for what may be conceptualized as an
intermediate spacetime, I will hereafter refer to it as spacetime x (stx). The term
intermediate implies that the status of stx in the conceptual structures of
epistemology and ontology, or, epistemic and ontic, is unknown.
Dedication: To the artist Spellman Evans Downer's now long-deceased dog named "Space"
Space is a necessary condition for the existence of any thing. It is a necessary condition because any existing thing is finite. Since it is finite, it must have observable boundaries or limits. Since it has observable boundaries or limits, it must be distinct from other observable existing things. If it is so distinct, then there must be something between it and other existing things that is not an existing thing with observable boundaries or limits. What is in between is space.