Pikabu the cat knows how to count 0,1,2. Dr. Marek Wolf, the author of "Plato was right", in a response to my previous post "The magic of numbers 0,1,2" (featuring Pikabu ze cat), kindly informed me in a private communication, that there exists empirical evidence that hens (and other birds) can count to three. And indeed, on Researchgate we can easily locate the appropriate paper on this subject. The paper "Any bird and chicken can count to three " by Alexander Yurkin provides us with the following observation:
"It is known that any bird and chicken can count to three (if the chicken incubates 4 eggs or more, and someone takes an egg, then she sits quietly, if the chicken incubates 3 eggs and someone takes one egg, then she begins to scream, about the fact that her eggs are stolen)."
The paper by Yurkin was inspired, in turn, by another paper, by Pradeep Mutalik (or Hradeep Mitalik?) in Quanta Magazine, "How Randomness Can Arise From Determinism". Quanta Magazine goes into the Quantum Future of Quantum Waves. We are not there .... yet. So, let us, for a while, remain at the level of cats and birds, and integer numbers.
Reality is all entangled. Everything connects to everything in an acausal synchronistic web of connecting arrows. Every day, while in the hyperbaric chamber, at the pressure of 2.0 atmospheres and oxygen level 90%, I am either meditating or listening to an audio book. Recently I am listening to Dan Brown's novel "Origin".
And so yesterday I listened, in particular, to a fragment containing this piece:
"The Ancient of Days, Langdon thought, squinting through the darkness at Blake’s famous 1794 watercolor etching.(...) The piece was so futuristic in style that, centuries later, the renowned physicist and atheist Stephen Hawking had selected it as the jacket art for his book God Created the Integers."
2006 edition cover. 2007 edition cover is, for some reason, totally unimpressive.
It starts with 1,11,then 121. There are no zeros shown in this triangle. In my previous post, "The magic of numbers 0,1,2", there were lot of zeros. Let us have a look at these 0,1,2 again:
Our attention concentrates on triangular patterns. It is so easy to miss the main point:
In each row a squared plus b squared gives c squared.
The numbers are big, so you would need a 24 digit calculator (or Wolfram Alpha) to check this statement. For instance
21x21 + 220x220 = 221x221
etc.
Each row is a Pythagorean triple.
How many are there of such triples? How to generate them?
Everybody knows the famous 3,4,5 and 9+16=25. This is the "Mother Triple".
But then what would be the "genealogical tree" of these big 0,1,2 triples in the image above? And what does it all have to do with "The Origin" and "Quantum Future"?
Pikabu knows the numbers. Not many-many numbers. But she certainly knows 1 and 2. She counts: one, two. When she sees both of us, she knows the world is "in order". When she counts and there is only one - she is unhappy. When she can't count even "one", when the result of her counting is just 0 - it is a disaster, end of the world. Cats are strange.
ze Cat in HD
Pikabu, while in a "state of happiness", created this table of numbers that she knows about:
Meow!
It's her creation. Letter a,b,c over the columns has been added by me. I am the "organizer". I know the magic of creating a full dish out of the empty cat food dish. So Pikabu does not mind me adding letters to her creation.
But now, we, human beings, have the ability to give meaning to symbols. That is the main function of our minds. The more knowledge we have, the more "context" we are able to give to the raw "data".
What meaning can we associate with the numbers above? We know how to multiply numbers and how to add them.
What "magic" is in the above table created by Pikabu ze cat that knows only 0,1,2?
To be continued
P.S.1. Perhaps I should mention that long before Pikabu there were those Babylonians and Hindus
When in 1997 I visited Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge I bought a book "Men of Mathematics" written by E.T. Bell, edition from 1937 [1]. In the five story bookshop there were a few shelves with classics: "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" by Isaac Newton, "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" by Paul A.M. Dirac from 1958 and the above-mentioned book by E.T. Bell.
Chapter nine of Bell's book is devoted to Leonhard Euler (1707--1783). On page 147, citing de Morgan, Bell tells an anecdote, about Euler who was a deeply religious Calvinist. At the same time there lived Denis Diderot, who, as a progressive philosopher, was atheist. The two men met one day and Diderot asked Euler if he has a proof that God exists. Euler wrote some formula and said: "Hence God exists. Sir, please reply". Diderot embarrassed quickly walked away.
We do not know what the formula was, but here, I will present two formulas in the same spirit, which I often expose students to during the first calculus lecture. The first is following:
Add two first odd numbers: 1+3 = 4, we added two numbers and the result is 4=22. Next we add five: 1+3+5=9, the summations of three first odd numbers gives 9=32. Next we add 7 and obtain 16=42, again the square of a number of added terms. It continues to be true up to to infinity. In formula we can write it as
The simplest proof is by induction.
The second example is following:
We add cubes of consecutive natural numbers. Thus we have
1 + 23 = 1 + 8 = 9= 32 = (1+2)2 ,
1 + 23 + 33 = 36 = 62 = (1 + 2 + 3)2 ,
1 + 23 + 33 + 43= 100 = 102 = (1+2+3+4)2: the sum of cubes of the consecutive integer numbers is a square of the sum of these numbers.
And again so on to infinity.
Isn't it miraculous and mysterious? It seems to hide some deep secret. As an equation we write
This identity is sometimes called Nicomachus’s theorem, after Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 60 – c. 120 CE). About four centuries ago, Johannes Faulhaber (1580--1635) developed formulas for the power sums. He published many papers on this topic, initially he found particular sums up to exponent 7 in 1614. Subsequently Faulhaber gave a formula expressing the sum of the k-th powers of the first n positive integers. In no other case is a sum of powers of consecutive natural numbers equal to square of another sum. In [2] Sheila M. Edmonds proved that no higher power of n sums would be expressed as the square of the sum of powers of 1, 2, ...,, n. More precisely she proved that if
then p=3 and q=1.
These formulas (1) and (2) are the absolute and eternal truth. It means that they were true even before mankind appeared on the Earth. They were true also before the Big Bang (if you believe in it). It means that there is a world containing such mathematical truths independent of our real Universe. This idea was first put forward by the Greek philosopher Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC). This system of beliefs in philosophy is called "Platonism".
What is the reality of mathematical theorems? Has the theorem existed anywhere until the moment it is formulated by a mathematician, or is it only the appearance of it in the head of a human that creates the reality it concerns?
Many mathematicians consider themselves Platonists.
Today Euler could argue using the axiom of choice. It is a kind of mathematical joke: choice axiom is equivalent to the existence of God. The choice axiom is a statement from set theory and was formulated in 1904 by Ernst Zermelo. The axiom of choice says that given any collection of non--empty sets (even if the collection is uncountable), it is possible to take one element from each set and construct a new set from these elements. Assuming the axiom of choice, Zermelo proved that each set can be well-ordered. It means that in each set there exists the first element with respect to some ordering relation. In particular a set of all causes can be well ordered. Hence there exists the first cause.
According to Saint Thomas Aquinas the first cause of everything was God. In the opposite direction it is simpler: God is an omnipotent being and thus can choose from each set by one element and the axiom of choice follows. In 1963 Paul Cohen (1934 -- 2007) proved that the axiom of choice is independent of other axioms of the set theory. It means it is possible to have consistent mathematics with or without the choice axiom. Therefore it "means" it is possible to have a world with God and a world without God.
German mathematician Don Zagier in his habilitation lecture in 1977 said "... upon looking at prime numbers one has the feeling of being in the presence of one of the inexplicable secrets of creation." [3]
[1] E.T. Bell, "Men of Mathematics. The lives and achievements of great mathematician from Zeno to Poincare ", A touchstone book, 1937, New York, London, Sydney
The Cosmic Context of Greek Philosophy: Part Eleven
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Plato 427 – 347 BC
Plato was related through his mother to
Critias, one of the Thirty who ruled Athens following the end of the
Peloponnesian war, and who was subsequently killed in the retaking of the city
by the wealthy elite. Diogenes tells us that Plato was, essentially, the
product of the rape of his mother by his father and his followers were fond of
pointing out that he was born on the birthday of Apollo. His birth name was
actually Aristocles, but was called Plato because of his ‘robust’ build. One
gets the impression that he was built like a Sumo wrestler. (He was, in fact, a
wrestler.)
Plato was built like a Sumo wrestler...
He was also noted for having a weak, high voice. Based on just this
description, which compares to that of many ancient descriptions of a eunuch,
one cannot help but wonder whether or not he suffered some early genital injury
or a congenital hormonal imbalance.
Aelian, Varia Historia 10.21 “Know that Perictione used to carry Plato around in her arms. When Ariston, his father, was sacrificing to the Muses or the Nymphs on Hymêttos, the rest of the family was present for the worship and Perictione placed Plato in the nearby myrtles because they were thick and lush. While he slept, a swarm of bees placed some Hymêttian honey on his lips and buzzed their song around him, thus foretelling Plato’s eventual power of speech.”
Supposedly he studied under Heraclitus, but
that is unlikely since Heraclitus probably never went to Athens. We are also
told that Heraclitus “hated the Athenians and his fellow Ephesians…” and went
off to wander in the mountains. Additionally, Heraclitus died in 475 BC while
Plato was born almost 50 years later.
Plato became the student of Socrates at the
age of 20 and Socrates died when he was 28. So actually, very little of his
intellectual life was even involved with Socrates, though he has become the
chief purveyor of what Socrates may have thought or intended or said. It’s
surprising that more people don’t have a problem with that. He did some
traveling about, including visiting the Pythagoreans in Italy, in particular
Philolaus and Eurytus. Following this, he went to Egypt in the company of
Euripides, probably picking his brain all the way.
Socrates (rubbing chin) discussing philosophy with his most famous pupil, Plato (under tree).
As mentioned in the discussion of
Pythagoras, Diogenes Laërtius reports that Satyrus[1] and others said that Plato wrote to Dion in Sicily, instructing him
to purchase three Pythagorean books from Philolaus for 100 minae.[2] In the same paragraph (the obvious connection being things
Sicilian), he tells us that Alcimus reports that Plato “derived great
assistance from Epicharmus the Comic poet, for he transcribed a great deal from him…” This Alcimus is either the
Greek rhetorician from around 300 BC or a Sicilian historian about whom almost
nothing is known.[3] I would suggest the latter since the subject is a Sicilian comic poet
who wrote in a Sicilian dialect, and only another Sicilian might be qualified
to recognize the plagiarism and only his dates would fit the claim. This
statement is followed by an example from Alcimus where he, apparently in humor,
wrote about “objects of sense and objects of thought” and pointed out the
plagiarism. Diogenes then – via Alcimus – presents a comic dialogue, evidently
by Epicharmus. Further example is given comparing things Plato said to the
words of Epicharmus who, we must remember, was writing comedy! Diogenes patches
over this at the end of the discussion by saying: “That Epicharmus himself was
fully conscious of his wisdom can also be seen from the lines in which he
foretells that he will have an imitator”:
And as I think – for when I think anything I know it full
well – that my words will some day be remembered; someone will take them and
free them from the metre in which they are now set, nay, will give them instead
a purple robe, embroidering it with fine phrases; and, being invincible, he
will make every one else an easy prey.[4]
Plato made three trips to Sicily and on his
first trip, apparently, was ‘forced’ to become the lover of the king Dionysius.
Plato allegedly called him a tyrant and said other nasty things, at which point
Dionysius had him arrested. So the story goes. He was brought to trial and
barely escaped death, though he was condemned to be sold as a slave. Someone
paid the price and sent him home to his friends, probably telling them to keep
him out of trouble. I think, based on how he later wrote about tyrants being
against pederasty, and how he himself was an avowed ‘lover of young boys’, that
the charges were more likely to have been along that line. One can hardly
imagine the king being attracted to a guy built like a barn and squeaking like
a soprano.
Dion Presents Plato to Dionysius, Anonymous, 1876
Then Diogenes says something rather
curious. One variation of the story that he gives is that the ruler, Dionysius,
asked Pollis, a visiting Spartan
admiral and ambassador, to take Plato off his hands. Pollis took Plato to the
slave market on the island of Aegina, and put him up for sale. Plato was
miraculously redeemed and then we learn:
Pollis, however, is stated to have been defeated by Chabrias[5]
and afterwards to have been drowned at Helice, his treatment of the philosopher
having provoked the wrath of heaven… Dionysius, indeed, could not rest. On
learning the facts he wrote and enjoined upon Plato not to speak evil of him.
And Plato replied that he had not the leisure to keep Dionysius in his mind.[6]
Actually, Pollis did
not drown at Helice, he was killed in the mentioned naval battle against
Chabrias, probably in 376 BC.
Nevertheless, regarding this alleged
drowning of Pollis, we find that something very interesting was going on. It
seems that there was a terrible earthquake and tsunami in 372/373 BC and the
entire city of Helike (Helice) disappeared, submerged in the sea!
The much
later 2nd century historian, Aelian, records only that a tsunami
swallowed up ten Spartan triremes (galley ships). The entire story looks very
suspicious and from our Chronicle of Comets we read:
373-372 BC, Winter, Greece. A comet was seen in the west at
the time of the great earthquake and tidal wave at Achaea, Greece. From the
Greek descriptions of the comet’s motion, Pingre infers that its perihelion was
located in Virgo or Libra and that its perihelion distance was quite small.
Pingre considers this comet to be the one the Greek Ephorus reported to have
split into two pieces. The accounts given by Aristotle and Seneca suggest the
comet was seen in the winter of 373-372 BC while the account of Diodorus
Siculus, an historian of the second half of the first century BC, suggests the
comet was seen in the following year. (Barrett, 5)[7]
Aristotle mentions four comets in his book Meteorologica, written around the year
330 BC. Apparently, only one of them stood out enough to be called the ‘Great
Comet’.
The great comet, which appeared about the time of the
earthquake in Achaea and the tidal wave, rose in the west … The great comet …
appeared during winter in clear frosty weather in the west, in the archonship
of Asteius: on the first night it was not visible as it set before the sun did,
but it was visible on the second, being the least distance behind the sun that
would allow it to be seen, and setting immediately. Its light stretched across
a third of the sky in a great band, as it were, and so was called a path. It
rose as high as Orion’s belt, and there disappeared.[8]
Since the discussion is mainly about the
risings of the comet, how on the first night it was too close to the Sun, and on
the second was the least distance from the sun to be seen, it’s obvious that he
is recording the progress of its risings until, finally, “it rose as high as
Orion’s belt and then disappeared.” What this can mean is uncertain.
Diodorus’ description tells us that:
… there was seen in the heavens during the course of many
nights a great blazing torch which was named from its shape a flaming beam.
Some of the students of nature ascribed the origin of the torch to natural
causes, voicing the opinion that such apparitions occur of necessity at
appointed times, and that in these matters the Chaldeans in Babylon and the
other astrologers succeed in making accurate prophecies … this torch had such
brilliancy… and its light such strength that it cast shadows on the earth
similar to those cast by the moon.[9]
It is noteworthy that a few scholars think
that this event is what inspired Plato to write the ‘myth of Atlantis’.[10][11][12][13] I have a different view, however. I think that Plato got his
background for the myth of Atlantis from the lost books of Pythagoras and
possibly from discussions with Socrates regarding the work of Heraclitus that
required a “Delian diver” to plumb.
Plato and Atlantis
Plato was 23 years old at the end of the
Peloponnesian war. He had seen many things during his most impressionable
years, including the violent overthrow and death of his uncle, and soon would
witness the execution of his teacher. If Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and
Socrates, as well as Critias and other members of the Thirty, were “Delian
divers” who made certain ‘cosmic connections’, and Plato realized that those
who talked about these things came to a bad end, usually death, no doubt he
would have had the idea to handle these ideas, very carefully.
And so, 15 years after his trip to Sicily,
after having gone to the trouble to obtain the three books of Pythagoras, after
studying Heraclitus, he may have had certain ideas about the earthquake and
destruction of Helice.
In my book, Secret History, I discussed Plato’s account of the destruction of
Atlantis from a different perspective. With all the additional information that
has become available since that time, my view has been somewhat expanded. As we
now know from the scientific work partially presented in this volume, the
global cometary disasters that destroyed Plato’s Atlantis did actually occur
pretty close to the date he gave for them. So, in light of all that, and other
things we have uncovered, I think we can safely say that Plato had something to
base his story on, but it probably was not an ‘Egyptian priest’. Timaeus and Critias, written by Plato some time around 360 BC (39 years after
the death of Socrates and 12 years after the great comet of 373/2) are the only
existing written records which specifically refer to Atlantis. Up to that point in time, the great epic destruction
stories were the Iliad and Odyssey, and the city was Troy.
Let’s look at the main characters of the
dialogues. First, there is Plato’s teacher who died under a repressive regime.
Then there is Hermocrates, who was a Syracusan general during the Athenians’
Sicilian expedition that ended so disastrously. Hermocrates is referenced in
Thucydides where he gave a speech before the beginning of the war, demanding
that the Sicilian Greeks stop their quarreling. In 415 BC, it was he who formed
the coalition that included even non-Sicilian cities, in alliance against the
aggressor, Athens. Francis Cornford writes:
It is curious to reflect that, while Critias is to recount how the prehistoric Athens of nine thousand
years ago had repelled the invasion from Atlantis and saved the Mediterranean
peoples from slavery, Hermocrates would be remembered by the Athenians as the
man who had repulsed their own greatest effort at imperialist expansion.[14]
Timaeus, the character who gives his name
to the title of the dialogue, was a Pythagorean
philosopher living c. 420-380. He is credited with a lost work entitled On the Soul of the Universe.
Considering what Heraclitus wrote about the ‘Cosmic Mind’, that is certainly
suggestive. Keep in mind also that Diogenes Laertius (VIII 85), Hermippus of
Smyrna (3rd century BC), and Timon of Phlius (320-235 BC, claim that
Timaeus was influenced by a book about Pythagoras written by Philolaus.Those individuals would have been in a
position to know since the texts probably still existed, but modern scholars
reject such an idea.
The final main character is Plato’s great
uncle, Critias[15], who was killed in the overthrow of the Thirty. According to
Polybius, he asserted that “religion was a deliberate imposture devised by some
cunning man for political ends.”[16] This reminds us of two things: 1) Thucydides’ description of how
the Athenians, during the plague at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war,
felt abandoned by the gods and fell away from their religious practice, which
was one of the things the wealthy elite used to control their behavior. The
Athenians clearly understood the plague as evidence that they were in the wrong,
despite the fact that their elite rulers were demanding the prosecution of the
war for reasons of greed and power; 2) After the overthrow of the Thirty, who
had been his friends and associates, Socrates constantly criticised the
democratic government. It has been suggested that Socrates’ criticism was a
threat to the newly re-established democracy and it certainly may have been in
a very particular context if he agreed with his friend Critias that “religion
was a deliberate imposture devised by some cunning man for political ends.”
Speaking the truth about the Natural History of the Earth as revealed by
Heraclitus and Pythagoras may very well have contributed to the condemnation of
Socrates.And, we are reminded that he
was charged with “refusing to
recognize the gods recognized by the state, and of introducing other new
divinities.”.
I would suggest that, by the very selection
of the main players in the dialogues, Plato may be trying to convey a message:
the very message that was contained in the works of Pythagoras and Heraclitus.
In response to a prior talk by Socrates
about ideal societies in the Republic,
Timaeus and Critias agree to entertain Socrates with a tale that is “not a
fiction but a true story.” The story is about the conflict between the ancient
Athenians and the Atlanteans 9,000 years before Plato’s time. Knowledge of the
ancient times was apparently forgotten by the Athenians of Plato’s day, and the
form the story of Atlantis took in Plato’s account was that Egyptian priests
conveyed it to Solon. Solon passed the tale to Dropides, the great-grandfather
of Critias. Critias learned of it from his grandfather, also named Critias, son
of Dropides, and was now going to tell it. Basically, the story tells how, in a
long-ago war made by greedy, power-mad
Atlanteans, the Athenians were the good guys. The story abruptly ends with
Zeus – the god of gods – seeing the corruption of the Atlanteans, determined to
chastise them. Zeus begins to speak; but what he says, and everything that
follows in the Critias[17], has been lost. Well, why are we not surprised?
Temple of Zeus (of Athens)
One thing that I find fascinating is that
Herodotus, during the second half of the 5th century BC, almost a
hundred years before Plato wrote about Atlantis, reported in the second book of
his history that certain Egyptian priests
asserted that within historical ages and since Egypt became a kingdom, “four
times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to his wont; twice
he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where he now rises.”
So, I think we may assume that Plato took
the cue from Herodotus to put the story in the mouth of the Egyptians and made
up the name and the details of the civilization, and the moral of the story was
that a wonderful civilization that began so well could go so wrong and bring
cosmic destruction upon its head.
A few of the details that Plato included
are:
There have been, and will be again, many destructions of
mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the
agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.
There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaeton,
the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father’s chariot, because he
was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was
upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has
the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving
in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the
earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon
the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than
those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore …
When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a
deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who
dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by
the rivers into the sea. …
The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or
of summer does not prevent, mankind exists, sometimes in greater, sometimes in
lesser numbers. …
Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be
provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the
usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down,
and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so
you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what
happened in ancient times. ...
In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but
there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there
formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever
lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or
remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for
many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written
word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the
city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of
all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the
fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of
heaven….
Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in
our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour.
For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition
against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This
power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean… This vast power, gathered into one,
endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the
region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the
excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent
in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the
rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone
the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and
preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously
liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars….
But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods;
and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank
into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the
depths of the sea. …
I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias
heard from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about
your city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came
into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious
coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of
Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had
elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run
over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak.[18]
[Emphasis, mine]
Here we find another interesting clue.
Critias has just told us that Socrates was discussing the very things that are
included in this story – that everything Socrates had been saying the previous
day “agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon.”
And so I readily assented to your request yesterday,
considering that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale
suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well
provided. And therefore, as Hermocrates has told you, on my way home yesterday
I at once communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered it; and after
I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly the whole it.
Truly, as is often said, the lessons of our childhood make wonderful
impression on our memories; for I am not sure that I could remember all the
discourse of yesterday, but I should be much surprised if I forgot any of these
things which I have heard very long ago. I listened at the time with childlike
interest to the old man’s narrative; he was very ready to teach me, and I asked
him again and again to repeat his words, so that like an indelible picture they
were branded into my mind.
As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed them as he spoke them
to my companions, that they, as well as myself, might have something to say.
And now, Socrates, to make an end my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole
tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the particulars, as they
were told to me.
The city and citizens, which you yesterday described to us in
fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. It shall be the ancient
city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined, were
our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke; they will perfectly
harmonise, and there will be no inconsistency in saying that the citizens of
your republic are these ancient Athenians. Let us divide the subject among us,
and all endeavour according to our ability gracefully to execute the task which
you have imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited
to the purpose, or whether we should seek for some other instead.[19]
And we come to the final understanding that
conveys to us the secret of the story of Atlantis: that it did not actually
come from an Egyptian priest, but that this was a story that was created to
“execute the task which you [Socrates] have imposed upon us,” which was to veil
in fiction something that was Truth. Does this mean that they were ‘making it
up’? No, indeed. It means that Plato was attempting to find a vehicle for the
history that would ensure its preservation. I may be giving Plato too much
credit, he may have merely wanted to capitalize on Heraclitus and the
Pythagoreans for his own aggrandizement, but the facts of the dialogues suggest
otherwise. It was political commentary, history, and ethics in relation to the cosmos, all rolled
into one.
Another clue is Herodotus. Herodotus wrote
around 450/60 BC. He had calculated that the Egyptians were claiming that their
nation had existed 11,000 years before his time. That is amazingly close to
12,900 years ago, i.e. 10900 BC, at which point we are fairly certain the cometary
event occurred which was discussed in detail by Firestone, West and
Warwick-Smith and others since. But we know from the work of other scientists,
including Baillie, Bailey, Clube and Napier, that there were other,
periodically repeating events – some greater, some localized – like Tunguska or
a number of Tunguska-like events. We also know that there are myths and legends
about these events that survived amazingly intact into the early 20th
century, and may survive still. So surely, there
must have been a general awareness of these things in the times of the ancient
Greeks by at least a certain set of people, if not amongst the wider public
with their penchant for myths and legends. This is the sort of thing that
Herodotus was collecting in his ‘history’. Since Herodotus often speaks of
Pythagoras, it may very well be that he was quite aware of what may have
brought about the downfall of the Pythagoreans, and thus brought the topic up
in a way that would protect him from their fate, i.e. putting it in the mouth
of an Egyptian priest as a fantastic claim. I would even suggest that Plato, by
doing the same thing, utilizing an Egyptian priest as the source, was explicitly referencing what Herodotus had
written, that is, “four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose
contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where
he now rises.” Obviously, we are not talking about a pole flip here, but a
blazing, sun-like, destructive comet approaching the Earth from the West, a
comet as bright as the Sun, or even brighter, sending out thunderbolts,
shedding flaming rocks and dust, and roaring with the sound of a thousand
crashing seas; Zeus as the representation of the ‘Cosmic Mind’ “setting things
in order” because humanity had lost their moral compass.
So Herodotus may have been telling us that this
sort of civilization-destroying event had occurred four times within a certain
historical period. Counting the Noachian Flood as a fifth event – actually the
main onslaught of the Giant Comet, probably the most destructive – we have a recurrence
of the ‘Big One’ about every 2,500 years. Yet, as we noted already, the dates that the various
researchers have given to large events that can be discerned in the scientific
records (tree rings and ice cores) are 12800 (or 10900), 8200, 7000, 5200,
4200, 3000, 2354, 1628, 1150, 500, 208 BC and 550, 850 and 1300 AD.[20] (These can be adjusted as more
precise dating methods are developed or applied.) That’s a lot more than “four
times”. But certainly, each of those events would not have been accompanied by
the “sun rising in the west,” i.e. a comet approaching very close from that
direction, so obviously Plato and the gang didn’t have the whole scientific
banana. (Neither do we!) What Plato had, which seems to shine through the
philosophical threads we have followed, was the idea that humanity could bring this sort of destruction on themselves,
as suggested by Heraclitus, though it was simply a natural reaction of forces,
not necessarily anything that was conscious and deliberate on the part of some
god. Also, as I have pointed out, simple math demonstrates that the time
distance between those numbers is as follows: 4,600, 1,200, 1,800, 1,000, 1,200,
646, 726, 478, 650, 292, 758, 300 and 450 years. Is the decreasing time period
indicative of the increasing corruption of humanity? And can we define ‘corruption
of humanity’ as a failure to deeply study nature, learn its natural laws, and
live in accordance with them?
So, what did Plato get for his efforts? So
far, we’ve found him being accused of plagiarizing all over the place, making
fun of people by using the dialogues of a comic to formulate ‘philosophy’,
probably nearly getting put to death for pederasty, and covering up a
significant historical event.These accusations may or may not be true.
Fernando Santoro
"Epicharmus and the plagiarism of Plato p. 307"
We certainly
realize from his dialogues, Phaedrus
and the Symposium, that what Plato
wrote and thought and felt bears very little resemblance to what we may think
of as ‘Platonic Love’, which is supposedly beyond the reach of most humans. Any
person who reads what Plato actually said about love would never, in a skinny
minute, allow him to babysit or preside in a classroom of young children. If
you doubt that, just read Phaedrus
and the Symposium carefully and
forget that this guy is supposed to be the arbiter of philosophical values, the
author of great poetry and whatnot. The words he put into the mouth of Socrates
just boggle the mind. Like Socrates, the guy who gave his life for Truth with a
capital T, would ever have been interested in this garbage? Or ‘ravished’ by
it? What is utterly soul-chilling is that Plato did this to his teacher, cast
him in the role of lending authority to filth. Not only are women physically
excluded in Plato’s world, but the goddess who supposedly inspires his
rapturous pedophilia (for it can’t be called anything else) has no woman as an
ancestor and is therefore, what? Apparently, barbarians are unable to see the
superiority of pederasty which is equated with philosophy and gymnastics and
together all three somehow stand against tyranny? Men who don’t go after
pubescent boys are “poor in spirit”?! We are next told that “so great is the
encouragement which all the world gives a boy-lover or lover-boy-child” that
his raptures excuse literally any anti-social act or absurd and immature
behavior. It sounds as though he is defending the psychopathy of Alcibiades.
And, even though the lover of boys, or the boy choosing a lover, can go through
all kinds of concatenations in the process of swearing and proving eternal
devotion, we learn that this doesn’t have to be sincere! But darn those parents
who object to their children being sex objects for perverts:
But when parents forbid their sons to talk with their lovers,
and place them under a tutor’s care, who is appointed to see to these things,
and their companions and equals cast in their teeth anything of the sort which
they may observe, and their elders refuse to silence the reprovers and do not
rebuke them – any one who reflects on all this will, on the contrary, think
that we hold these practices to be most disgraceful.[21]
In other words, Athenian society wasn’t
exactly as welcoming to Plato’s ‘philosophy’ as he wanted it to be. Shame on
those bad people who want to protect their children from predators! In case you
think I’m quoting out of context, read it yourself. And sure, you will read
that “the soul of the young boy should be loved more than the body”, but it is
entirely unclear how that is accomplished since the mode is purely sexual. He talks out of both sides of his mouth
at once.
As for fidelity, it is clear from the literature that this was not
what actually happened in these pedophilic relationships. They discarded their
beloved children the instant they began to look like men!So much for true, lasting, “Platonic love.”
It seems that, toward the end of his life,
Plato concluded that the noblest love denies any bodily contact. I suppose that was an easy enough conclusion to
come to once his libido had run out. Then, he finds any sexual exchange to be
unworthy of a philosopher. In short, after a lifetime of pederasty, abusing hundreds,
if not thousands of young boys, Plato finally denied the flesh. And for over
two thousand years our civilization has been speaking in awed and hushed tones
about this guy? And what is astonishing is the fact that when Plato talks about
love, he is talking about pederasty
exclusively and women are not even a part of the picture! The question is,
of course, what effect has this message had on our society as a whole? It seems
to me that the influence has been profound, particularly since Christianity was
shaped by the influences of Plato in its formative stages. And the result is
that the problem in our world is not homosexuality, a private matter between adults, but anti-sexuality, that is, the obviation of women in toto, and we have Plato to thank for
this. Thanks to Plato, by way of Christianity, the chief effort has been to
inculcate disgust toward sex in general, and women in particular.
Inspired by Plato, St. Augustine found the
sexual organs to be shameful and denounced those parts as the loathsome
instruments of original sin.
Sexual desire was evil and horrible. He scorned
humanity because we are born “inter
faeces et urinam”. What is more, he agonized over this stuff almost
endlessly! Then, over the centuries, the tendency to define as ‘the flesh’ all
that is trivial, evil or vile, continued to grow and develop, particularly in
relation to women. Those rascally guys who wrote Malleus Maleficarum, the Witches’
Hammer[22], made believers out of everyone when their inquisition road-show
came to town: woman, in contrast to man, is by nature a vicious liar, the
embodiment of fraud and iniquity:
What else is woman but a foe to friendship, and unescapable
punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a
domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature painted with false
colors!
Sounds rather like the other side of
Plato’s coin, eh? What he didn’t write in his dialogues, but wished he could
have! Nowadays, things are even worse, even with the changing of attitudes,
because now the sex pendulum has swung to the extreme opposite and sex is
completely divorced from love or any sense of spiritual, emotional, or
psychological nobility.
Additionally, when one combs through
Plato’s formulations of the physical world – his ‘natural philosophy’ – it
sounds like little more than the book of Genesis in fancier words. In fact, I’m
sure that Plato influenced the writers of the Pentateuch considerably.[23] He probably did plagiarize. He probably did utilize comedy to
convey a few truths, and he probably wasn’t such a great genius at anything.
But he managed to stay alive and tell a story about cosmic destruction that has
survived over two thousand years; and that’s something. Even if he added so
much nonsense to it that generations of believers have been searching for a
truly mythical Atlantis that never existed in the terms that Plato described it
at all.
Certainly, there were ancient peoples with
significant knowledge and abilities: the megaliths that blanket the Earth give
mute testimony to that. But just as the Mesopotamian empires, and the later
Roman Empire, could be vast political bodies of extraordinary complexity,
though not based on high material technology as we understand it, so were the
more ancient empires. It was based on a
completely different interpretation of the Laws of Nature and that explains how
there can be, at one and the same time, examples of extraordinary construction
abilities, craftsmanship and artistic expression, side-by-side with what we
consider to be primitive stone tools and weapons.
What was the ultimate meaning of it? As we
read above in the discussion of Archelaus, he was called “The Physicist” to
mark the fact that with him, natural philosophy came to an end as soon as
Socrates introduced ethics. I think we can come to a somewhat different view of
things now. First of all, I suspect that Socrates was executed because of his
teachings about natural philosophy based on his own understanding, as a “Delian
diver”, of the works of Heraclitus and Pythagoras.
Secondly, what we notice overall is that
most of the original so-called philosophers didn’t seem to be very bright about
‘natural philosophy’ but were rather good at being put in charge of growing
colonies, which suggests that their philosophy had a different objective than
explaining the order of the universe. Their ideas are just barely cogent enough
to be sold to masses of ignorant people and that is probably what they were
designed to be used for. The sky was quieting down, and perhaps there was
awareness of terrible things that had been done in the past to kings and ruling
classes as a result of the popular perception that the gods were angry. And so,
things needed to be put on a different footing. Thus ‘wise men’ were put in
charge of colonies, made laws, justified those laws based on ‘cosmic principles’
that they were busy making up, which definitely separated men from the gods,
thus putting the cosmos into an order where nothing ‘up there’ could ever have
anything to do with things ‘down here’.
Thirdly, with the rise of the idea of
natural philosophy, that things needed explaining, some really bright people
turned their minds to the study of the world and ancient knowledge, coming to
some rather different conclusions; people like Pherecydes and Pythagoras and
especially Heraclitus. Anaxagoras got into trouble pushing this idea of ‘finding
out the truth’ and so did his student, Socrates, and both lost their lives for
it. I don’t, for a minute, think that natural philosophy died with Socrates;
rather it was Plato who buried it so that he could stay alive during times that
were not exactly as “golden” as we have been told. He enjoyed his popularity
and built a satisfying life for himself by twisting and re-interpreting the
work of giant intellects. And then, when he began to get older, when the fires
of his flesh began to cool, when the tenor of the times changed somewhat
and his own reputation demanded of him something more, he wrote the dialogues
detailing the story of Atlantis. He was honest enough to put the discussion in
the mouths of those who probably did discuss periodic cataclysms and
cleansings, though he felt the necessity of putting the Athenians in the
position of the good guys, and casting the bad guys ‘out there’ beyond the
Pillars of Hercules. There may even have been information accessible to him
that there was a vast continent across that ocean that suffered the most
terrible destruction imaginable, the same event to which the Carolina Bays bear
witness. But beyond that, I doubt that there was much more, and so the name
Atlantis, and the description of it and its people and lifestyle, were purely
figments of his imagination or based on legends and stories of the
Hyperboreans. The line of philosophers who followed Plato were thus lost
without the keys.
[1] A peripatetic philosopher and historian, whose biographies of
famous people are frequently referred to by Diogenes Laërtius and Athenaeus.
The Peripatetic school was a school of philosophy in Ancient Greece. Its
teachings derived from its founder, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and
Peripatetic is a name given to his followers.
[2] Four minae was the average annual wage of an agricultural worker.
[3] Schmitz (1867) ‘Alcimus’, in William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1, p. 102.
[4] Alcimus, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, III. 17-19.
[5] An Athenian general active in the first half of the 4th century BC.
Demosthenes described him as one of the most successful commanders Athens ever
had.The Boeotian War was fought between
378 and 371 BC between Thebes and Sparta with Athens joining the Thebans.
[12] Forsythe (1980) Atlantis: the
Making of a Myth.
[13] Taylor (1928) A Commentary on
Plato’s Timaeus.
[14] Cornford (1937) Before and
after Socrates, p. 2.
[15] Some scholars believe that it is not the Critias of the Thirty
Tyrants who appears in this dialogue, but his grandfather, who is also named
Critias.
