Different kind of polarities

[Pietro]

While we are happily bashing each other at the feninization of the western male, an important topic came out.

Something I wanted to speak about from a long time.

 

Here and there people are realising that men and women are not opposite. But I feel the big picture is missing. And this is somethign I realised some years ago. I was following a thread that started from "the science of discworld" but it actually want deeper, into Aristotele.

 

It is the concept of privative.

 

What is a privative?

A privative is something that does not exist...

(easy hehe )

... but that we treat as if it existed.

 

You want an example?

 

Cold. Cold is a privative. Cold does not exist. As correctly stated you might say, lets open the window to let the cold in. But it is not the cold that gets in, but the warmth that gets out. There is no thing which is cold, as also things that are cold are warmer than others...

there is no thing that is cold... but there is something called a temperature. So in a sense everything is warm, and the situation is not truly symmetric (I know some of you will not grab the tao te ching, and want to burn me, we'll speak about it later). Everything is warm, and the only thing that is truly cold is something that is at 0 degrees... kelvin.

 

But nothing is at 0 degrees kelvin. It is not even possible to have matter at 0 degrees kelvin. So cold is a privative. It doesn't exist but we treat it as if it existed.

 

Another is black.

Every color has a bandwidth... but for black. Black has no bandwidth, as it is the absence of any color. You cannot associate any vibration to that.

 

So privatives represent one side of the biggest polarity we deal with: the polarity between what exists, and what does not exist.

 

 

And here comes the real cool thing about it. This polarity is not symmetric: one side (what exists) further differentiate, while the others does not. And the one to first make this observation was Aristotele in the Categories.

 

Darkness and light is a first polarity, but then light differentiates in all its color.

 

So we now have the polarity between darkness and light, and the polarity between blue and red. Can you spot that they are not of the same kind? In one case you have one thing that exists and one that does not. In the other you have two things that exist. We shall call them polarity of type A (between a privative and a non-privative), and polarity of type B (between two non privatives).

 

Can you now guess male-female what kind of polarity is it?

Hint, it is not of type A.

And TaoMeow is absolutely correct in stating that if you take away masculization to a man you don't automatically get a woman. Also if you look at trans, and hermaphrodite, those are people who are both male and female. Like the color violet is both red and blue. They have both male and female hormones. And then you have people who have very little of both hormones. But of course since the absence of hormones is a privative you can't really reach that side completely.

 

 

And in life, what other polarities are between a privative and a non-privative?

After careful consideration I reached the understanding that freedom/non freedom is a polarity of type A. And the privative side is freedom. You are never totally free, you are always tied. At least to your physical needs, and similar. And I used the term non-freedom to because there are so many different ways to be non free that I just can 't come up with a term on the spot for one that embraces them all.

 

And now let's go back to the TTC. I once told all I have told you to a friend, an instructor from Bruce. He told me: "you are wrong, for you think you are smarter than lao tzu, so you MUST be wrong". He left quite upset.

I, a couple of years later, told about all this to Bruce himself; his comment was: "of course, it is obvious".

 

Was Lao Tzu wrong in saying that all polarities are symmetric? Was that what he was saying? Even if it was it would not be the end of the world. The fact that thousands of years of civilization can progress the history of understanding of polarities is actually quite a good thing. But the truth is that I am not sure what was Lao Tzu saying. And I will doubt of anyone who here will claim that they understand the real meaning of what Lao Tzu ment. Lineage masters aside.

 

Now a last question: is enlightenment a privative?

Edited June 2, 2007 by Pietro

[Todd]

This one is easy.

 

There is something rather than nothing. This is what your explanation of privatives points to. Nothingness is just a concept that does not have existence within reality. Even the experience of nothingness has the experience of nothingness.

 

However, everything that we think about this something is made up of self-destroying (in other words, symetrical) polarities. Another way of saying this is that all thought is based upon false duality. This includes the thought of privatives, which is based upon the polarity of existing versus non-existing.

 

Is enlightenment a privative? It depends on what you think enlightenment is. If enlightenment is equated with nothingness, or with something outside of what actually currently is, then yes, it is a privative. It is based upon a thought that something, enlightenment, which actually doesn't exist, exists.

 

Enlightenment as question is much more interesting. It is based upon the destruction of investment in polarities, and not much can be said about that, unless one really wants to.

[gendao]

This is very simple.

 

Yang = +, male

Yin = -, female

Wuji = 0, androgynous

[Taomeow]

If we consider Laozi's "know the white but keep the black" as an instruction as to how to differentiate between privatives and non-privatives, the non-privative appears to be black. "Know the male but keep the female" is another way he puts it. All that exists is a privative; while all nonexistence, the limitless potential from which all existence comes, is real. "Being comes from non-being." Enlightenment is a privative; reality is endarkenment. Wuji is not hermaphroditic, it is essentially yin, the "true yin" of the classics. That it gives birth to yang is part of the way true yin works. This crucial step is often overlooked by the seekers of the true yang. Tao-in-stillness, aka wuji, unlike "father in heaven" of all Indo-European religions, appears to be a girl. "Mother of all things," according to Laozi, not "father of all things" and not "hermaphrodite of all things."

 

And, yes, I do believe that whoever thinks he's smarter than Laozi is a privative.

[Spectrum]

this space we place our pace

 

in case encased case in point

 

vortex imagined or enjoyed

 

multidimensionally

 

ergonomically

 

evolutionary

 

you taobum revolutionary

 

Spectrum

[gendao]

Wuji is not hermaphroditic, it is essentially yin, the "true yin" of the classics. That it gives birth to yang is part of the way true yin works. This crucial step is often overlooked by the seekers of the true yang. Tao-in-stillness, aka wuji, unlike "father in heaven" of all Indo-European religions, appears to be a girl. "Mother of all things," according to Laozi, not "father of all things" and not "hermaphrodite of all things."

Wuji is not Yin, it precedes the Yin and Yang duality.

 

0 is not positive or negative. Wuji has no "gender," either.

 

Feminists just try to substitute "mother" for "father" everywhere like a revisionist Mad Lib. It's not transcending the whole paradigm and is pretty annoying.

[Taomeow]

Wuji is not Yin, it precedes the Yin and Yang duality.

 

0 is not positive or negative. Wuji has no "gender," either.

 

Feminists just try to substitute "mother" for "father" everywhere like a revisionist Mad Lib. It's not transcending the whole paradigm and is pretty annoying.

Never before have I heard of Laozi being called a feminist, but if you so choose... who am I to blow against the wind?

 

He didn't "substitute" "mother" for "father" though, he just happened to notice how reality works and describe it accurately.

 

"Yin," my friend, is not a "gender," it's an "attribute of reality." That it happens to intersect with what taoism sees as "the female principle" ain't no coincidence and ain't no artificial notion concocted by a human mind, whether feminist or male chauvinist. E.g., a "vortex" naturally and spontaneously has the properties of yin, as opposed to a "peak" that naturally and spontaneously has the properties of yang. Your name is a yin name, and you gave it to yourself, no big bad feminist did it to you. You just chose the yin principle to express yourself, for reasons best known to yourself. This doesn't make you a woman, right? or a feminist? Yin is yin.

 

Wuji, while it "precedes" duality (a precarious statement in and of itself, since "time" is not an attribute of wuji and nothing precedes or antecedes anything in it), possesses certain attributes that the classics describe as "tao-in-stillness" or "Earlier Heaven" or "the world of the unmanifest." If you consider the attributes of yang -- motion, Later Heaven, the manifest phenomena, you will have no trouble understanding why Laozi sees the "mother" and not the "father" of all things in the progenitor tao. (Tip: the egg just sits there in the dark stillness doing nothing, accomplishing everything; the sperm run the race to get somewhere so as to manifest something. Remember? It happened to you in this-here life, surely you should remember what wuji is, after all that's where you come from, like every other good little boy?! )

[Cameron]

I think there are some texts and teachers who would basically agree with what Taomeow is saying. I know David Twicken talks about the early heaven realm as being 'The mysterious mother' that gives birth to the 10,000 things. But in another place he calls it the godly realm that creates.

 

I was recently listening to an Adyashanti talk where he talks about Genesis. First there was silence..or first there is Tao..which moves and creates everything..yin/yang..the 10,000 things.

 

My guess is the primordial void that either "birthed' or "created" everything is beyond male or female..but I guess you would really need to return to the origin to know.

 

Ime too busy having fun in the manifestation for now to worry about it

[Taomeow]

Ime too busy having fun in the manifestation for now to worry about it

Way to go!

 

There IS an inherent paradox in this, definitely, that of yin-yang duality being born of yin-type nonduality rather than of anything devoid of both yin and yang attributes. I've seen a far out dissertation by a taoist researcher (not "researcher of taoism" but a "researching practitioner") that basically proves, with extensive references to dozens of authentic ancient taoist scriptures, that Laozi in his immortal deity capacity (and he IS attributed this capacity in all major taoist sects, not just that of a mere-mortal author of a book) is proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have been his own mother. I kid you not. If I find the bookmark, I'll post the reference.

 

Did you study David Twicken's feng shui? He's not the source of what I was talking about but I know him for a useful and to-the-point author, one of those I would definitely tell a beginner to study so as to get the overall picture. In particular, the genesis-related stuff he presents is very clear -- tao's very own family tree in plain view, right from the very beginning of time and non-beginning of non-time.

[Cameron]

Yes, I did a weekend workshop with David last year on Flying Star .To be honest I havent really gotten into it but I have this big book from the workshop I'll probably study one of these days. You can get his take on Feng Shui, Astrology and Alchemy in the book 'Treasures of Tao'. I think he also does a week long retreat at Michael Winn's Heavenly Mountain retreats.

 

 

Cam

[Spectrum]

The Classics are nice because they solidly express Unity Concepts.

 

Arguing over black and white dualities comes with that territory. Duality is just one level or frequency of dialog. From the 3 comes the many. Asking a question leaves an answer shaped shadow, by proposing opposites attachment are avoided while every duality strikes a chord whos 3rd note is harmonically mean.

 

What does this mean? From perceived opposites a 3rd choice is created, a three strand cord is not easily broken. E Pluribus Unum. From politics to healing it's not difficult to see Ancient Concepts in action today.

 

Thinking does not have to be caught up in the stories of human measurement of self w/ the gods. Mundane tasks maintain their mythic proportions if your backs not hurting when you get up from Your Chair.

 

On a practical level chi gung taiji and gungfu are the simplist ways to mindfully engage in a multitude of polarity exchanges in a very short amount of time. Cultivation of many other arts only act to sooth the mind in my opinion, although no less masterful, the hangtime manifested in quality taijiquan or other meditative movement traditions is far more valuable to those engaged in the psychonautical navigations of the most current curvatures of space. Wu Ji has womanly shapes, yet mainly manly in means.

 

Spectrum

Edited June 4, 2007 by Spectrum

[Spectrum]

"There IS an inherent paradox in this, definitely, that of yin-yang duality being born of yin-type nonduality"

 

I wonder where her consort is.

 

Spectrum

[Pero]

While we are happily bashing each other at the feninization of the western male, an important topic came out.

Something I wanted to speak about from a long time.

 

Here and there people are realising that men and women are not opposite. But I feel the big picture is missing. And this is somethign I realised some years ago. I was following a thread that started from "the science of discworld" but it actually want deeper, into Aristotele.

 

It is the concept of privative.

 

What is a privative?

A privative is something that does not exist...

(easy hehe )

... but that we treat as if it existed.

 

You want an example?

 

Cold. Cold is a privative. Cold does not exist. As correctly stated you might say, lets open the window to let the cold in. But it is not the cold that gets in, but the warmth that gets out. There is no thing which is cold, as also things that are cold are warmer than others...

there is no thing that is cold... but there is something called a temperature. So in a sense everything is warm, and the situation is not truly symmetric (I know some of you will not grab the tao te ching, and want to burn me, we'll speak about it later). Everything is warm, and the only thing that is truly cold is something that is at 0 degrees... kelvin.

 

But nothing is at 0 degrees kelvin. It is not even possible to have matter at 0 degrees kelvin. So cold is a privative. It doesn't exist but we treat it as if it existed.

 

But what if I stand on the other side of the window, and I say, oh, I`m not letting warmth in, I`m letting cold out. And I could say, nothing is warm, there are just things that aren`t so cold.

[Pietro]

But what if I stand on the other side of the window, and I say, oh, I`m not letting warmth in, I`m letting cold out. And I could say, nothing is warm, there are just things that aren`t so cold.

 

They are not symmetric.

For example there is a limit on how cold something can be, but not on how hot it can be.

 

I have no time to write more right now, let me know if it is still not clear.

[Pero]

I get what you`re saying now, although I`m not sure if there`s no limit on how hot something can be.

Anyway, for what purpose are these distinctions made (by Aristotle, or in your opinion)?

[fatherpaul]

pietro says:

Now a last question: is enlightenment a privative?

 

 

what is your answer pietro?

 

oh and by the way define "enlightenment"

[Pietro]

pietro says:

Now a last question: is enlightenment a privative?

what is your answer pietro?

 

oh and by the way define "enlightenment"

 

Since it is a buddhist concept I shall stick with the canonical definition which I gather (not being a buddhist myself) is (complete?) cessation of sensations and perceptions.

 

And being an absence of something how could it be not a privative?

 

I get what you`re saying now, although I`m not sure if there`s no limit on how hot something can be.

Anyway, for what purpose are these distinctions made (by Aristotle, or in your opinion)?

my first answer:

to describe reality.

 

But I would suspend the answer until I have studied more (if I ever will). The question "for what purpose are these distinctions made" to be adressed fully have to be adressed in its historical context, and I am just to ignorant of Aristotele to be able to answer it.

[Ian]

They are not symmetric.

For example there is a limit on how cold something can be, but not on how hot it can be.

 

 

Not convinced. Ultimate cold is just no movement. There could be infinite movement, something already everywhere. Just harder for us to conceive of.

[fatherpaul]

Since it is a buddhist concept I shall stick with the canonical definition which I gather (not being a buddhist myself) is (complete?) cessation of sensations and perceptions.

 

And being an absence of something how could it be not a privative?

 

 

 

i disagree that it is a bhuddist concept

it is a universal human concept that, by your definition of privative,

is privative. the concept is privative, for that matter all of our concepts are "privative"

for they are not realities.

why do we need new words to discuss the same old thing?

 

 

as to hot and cold, they are mutually realised

as is long and short, etc.

it is your mind that is "ultimate cold or ultimate heat"

this too must be privative...why bother with this?

[Pietro]

...

for that matter all of our concepts are "privative"

for they are not realities.

why do we need new words to discuss the same old thing?

as to hot and cold, they are mutually realised

as is long and short, etc.

it is your mind that is "ultimate cold or ultimate heat"

this too must be privative...why bother with this?

 

Not all our concepts are privatives. Temperature is not a privative, and yet it is one of our concepts.

Privative is NOT a new word, although its use has been lost from some time.

We need to use it to distinguish better among the 10.000 things.

By distinguishing better we can separate polarities among a privative and a non privative (pnp) versus polarities among non privatives (npnp).

 

By being able to clarify the distinction among the two types of polarities we can avoid to require one type of polarity to act like the other.

 

For example the difference among the two genders are differences between two categories, neither of which is a privative. When we say: if you are not a man, you are a woman AND if you are not a woman you are a man we are EFFECTIVELY applying the privative/nonprivative classification to something that is instead a non-privative/non-privative situation. This is why, for example, toilets are generally male/woman. This is why some human beings who do not fit are suffering a lot in our society. This is why on your passport your sex is indicated in a discreete way (M/F) and not, for example, with two numbers (97 M, 25 F).

[Pietro]

Not convinced. Ultimate cold is just no movement. There could be infinite movement, something already everywhere. Just harder for us to conceive of.

 

Interesting reply.

 

Let me be more precise. What exists is temperature. Now, you can measure temperature starting from 0 degrees kelvin. Molecular movement exists. And when I say hot exist is because I refer to heat as molecular movement.

 

How would you suggest to measure movement starting from infinity?

[Spectrum]

Thanks for your simplicity fatherpaul.

 

 

why do we need new words to discuss the same old thing?

 

as to hot and cold, they are mutually realised

 

it is your mind that is "ultimate cold or ultimate heat"

 

 

 

How many privatives do we embody at the same instant? Stillness and Motion are the basic powers that you have within you to work with. No-one can take these from you. You can only polish or tarnish your own jewells. What if every intellectual realization inhibited manifesting that privative that was previously an instinctively concealed jewel, the next moment laid open w/ the scapel of mind, no longer to function in body.

 

Suddenly to think about moving forward means to only move backwards. Thinking of moving fore and aft one only bobs left and right. Swinging around reduces you to only a vertical axil... until finally... you are still in your absoluteness of being. With every directional possibility before you. How many directions can you go at once to get to the same place? How many paths through your house? How many paths through the park, forest or neighborhood? How many ways around? Around the ways of how many?

 

Polishing the unspoken windows of the mediums in which seekers travel only benifit those wishing to peer into the drivers seat. What you think are cryptic mudras is the driver desperately trying to wave you off his hood!!!

 

I believe Master Usheiba taught there are 8 forces that make up creation.

 

Movement - Calm

Release - Solification

Retraction - Extension

Unification - Division

 

Spectrum

Edited June 6, 2007 by Spectrum

[fatherpaul]

Not all our concepts are privatives. Temperature is not a privative, and yet it is one of our concepts.

Privative is NOT a new word, although its use has been lost from some time.

We need to use it to distinguish better among the 10.000 things.

By distinguishing better we can separate polarities among a privative and a non privative (pnp) versus polarities among non privatives (npnp).

 

By being able to clarify the distinction among the two types of polarities we can avoid to require one type of polarity to act like the other.

 

For example the difference among the two genders are differences between two categories, neither of which is a privative. When we say: if you are not a man, you are a woman AND if you are not a woman you are a man we are EFFECTIVELY applying the privative/nonprivative classification to something that is instead a non-privative/non-privative situation. This is why, for example, toilets are generally male/woman. This is why some human beings who do not fit are suffering a lot in our society. This is why on your passport your sex is indicated in a discreete way (M/F) and not, for example, with two numbers (97 M, 25 F).

 

 

all i can gather from this reply is

that sex is a privative

 

 

as for the need to distinguish between the 10,000 things

show me where one ends and the other begins and i will distinguish them

 

 

Thanks for your simplicity fatherpaul.

How many privatives do we embody at the same instant? Stillness and Motion are the basic powers that you have within you to work with. No-one can take these from you. (here is where duality enters)You can only polish or tarnish your own jewells. What if every intellectual realization inhibited manifesting that privative that was previously an instinctively concealed jewel, the next moment laid open w/ the scapel of mind, no longer to function in body.

 

Suddenly to think about moving forward means to only move backwards. Thinking of moving fore and aft one only bobs left and right. Swinging around reduces you to only a vertical axil... until finally... you are still in your absoluteness of being. With every directional possibility before you. How many directions can you go at once to get to the same place? How many paths through your house? How many paths through the park, forest or neighborhood? How many ways around? Around the ways of how many?

 

Polishing the unspoken windows of the mediums in which seekers travel only benifit those wishing to peer into the drivers seat. What you think are cryptic mudras is the driver desperately trying to wave you off his hood!!!

 

I believe Master Usheiba taught there are 8 forces that make up creation.

 

Movement - Calm

Release - Solification

Retraction - Extension

Unification - Division

 

Spectrum

[rain]

Maybe all human beings are, like the universe, shaped as "an egg with energy that turns inwards in it self", in a neverending cyclic movement. What if, this point of stillness in meditation is the very middle of this "egg", and our experience of stillness can be resembled to what you`d find in the middle of a tornado? Balance...

When we are not in this blissed middle stillpoint, our impression will be influenced by the angle to whatever we focus on at the moment. CON means "with", "CEPT" means ;"take,get, go, receive", is a process outside what I earlier described as "the quiet place"

And furthermore, the angle matters, the meridians govern emotions too...

So I gather it is not enough to sit on the ass in bliss...there are so many concepts rooted in the body system that need to be adressed/blockages that needs release/muscular balance improved etcetc. Medical qigong is said to be a tool for this. I sure hope so.

I am still a little confused about the "who am I" questioning in deep meditation. Seems not necessary to ask, when you actually finally know. Better to practise dilligently until you carry the ultimate sense of self into the daily life. Or Use it as a point of reference, when your mind fights with polarities and paradoxes to decide who you are in relation to other aspects of life.

As to who was first, yin, yang or "it".....

Who said it was "a first" In contast to "last"? You people believe a "BANG" was the beginning?. Like in math "the point", "the line", "the square" and "volume" (or what you call it in english?) Recall the egg. No beginning, no end.

 

I liked the one about black being a privative to white (when it comes to light).

But what about black holes and dark matter? Don`t scientists detect any form of waves coming from them?

Are they just "taking" contra "giving"? In that case their blackness cannot be a privative??

[Pietro]

I finally found the original quote from Terry Pratchett Science of Discworld on what a privative is. SO I decided to add it to this thread:

 

LIGHT HAS A SPEED, SO WHY NOT DARK?

It's a reasonable question. Let's see where it leads. In the 1960s a biological supply company advertised a device for scientists who used microscopes. In order to see things under a microscope, it's often a good idea to make a very thin slice of whatever it is you're going to look at. Then you put the slice on a glass slide, stick it under the microscope lens, and peer in at the other end to see what it looks like. How do you make the slice? Not like slicing bread. The thing you want to cut, let's assume it's a piece of liver for the sake of argument, is too floppy to be sliced on its own.

Come to think of it, so is a lot of bread.

You have to hold the liver firmly while you're cutting it, so you embed it in a block of wax. Then you use a gadget called a microtome, something like a miniature bacon-slicer, to cut off a series of very thin slices. You drop them on the surface of warm water, stick some on to a microscope slide, dissolve away the wax, and prepare the slide for viewing. Simple . . .

But the device that the company was selling wasn't a microtome: it was something to keep the wax block cool while the microtome was slicing it, so that the heat generated by the friction would not make the wax difficult to slice and damage delicate details of the specimen.

Their solution to this problem was a large concave (dish-shaped) mirror. You were supposed to build a little pile of ice cubes and 'focus the cold' on to your specimen.

Perhaps you don't see anything remarkable here. In that case you probably speak of the 'spread of ignorance', and draw the curtains in the evening to 'keep the cold out', and the darkness.

In Discworld, such things make sense. Lots of things are real in Discworld while being mere abstractions in ours. Death, for example. And Dark. On Discworld you can worry about the speed of Dark, and how it can get out of the way of the light that is ploughing into it at 600 mph. In our world such a concept is called a 'privative', an absence of something. And in our world, privatives don't have their own existence. Knowledge does exist, but ignorance doesn't; heat and light exist, but cold and darkness don't. Not as things.

We can see the Archchancellor looking puzzled, and we realize that here is something that runs quite deep in the human psyche. Yes, you can freeze to death, and 'cold' is a good word for describing the absence of heat. Without privatives, we would end up talking like the pod people from the Planet Zog. But we run into trouble, though, if we forget that we're using them as an easy shorthand.

In our world there are plenty of borderline cases. Is 'drunk' or 'sober' the privative? In Discworld you can get 'knurd', which is as far on the other side of sober as drunk is on the inebriated side, but on planet Earth there's no such thing. By and large, we think we know which member of such a pairing has an existence, and which is merely an absence. (We vote for 'sober' as the privative. It is the absence of drink, and, usually, the normal state of a person. In fact that normal state is only called sobriety when the subject of drink is at hand. There's nothing strange about this. 'Cold' is the normal state of the universe, after all, even though as a thing it does not exist. Er ... we're not going to get past you on this one, are we, Archchancellor?)

Thinking is required if our language isn't to fool us. However, as 'focusing the cold' shows, we sometimes don't stop to think.

We've done it before. At the start of the book, we mentioned phlogiston, considered by early chemists to be the substance that made things burn. It must do: you could see the phlogiston coming out as flames, for goodness' sake. Gradually, however, clues that supported the opposite view accumulated. Things weigh more after they've burned than they did before, for instance, so phlogiston seemed to have negative weight. You may think this is wrong, incidentally; surely the ash left by a burnt log weighs a lot less than the log, otherwise nobody would bother having bonfires? But a lot of that log goes up in smoke, and the smoke weighs quite a bit; it rises not because it's lighter than air but because it's hot. And even if it were lighter than air, air has weight, too. And as well as the smoke, there's steam, and all sorts of other junk. If you burn a lump of wood, and collect all the liquids, gases, and solids that result, the final total weighs more than the wood.

Where does the extra weight come from? Well, if you take the trouble to weigh the air that surrounds the burning wood, you'll find that it ends up lighter than it was. (It's not so easy to do both of these weighings while keeping track of what came from where -think about it. But the chemists found ways to achieve this.) So it looks as if something gets taken out of the air, and once you're realized that's what's going on, it's not hard to find out what it is. Of course, it's oxygen. Burnt wood gains oxygen, it doesn't lose phlogiston.

This all makes far more sense, and it also explains why phlogiston wasn't such a silly idea. Negative oxygen, oxygen that ought to be present but isn't, behaves just as nicely as positive oxygen in all the balancing equations that chemists used to check the validity of their theories. So much phlogiston moving from A to B has exactly the same effect on observations as the same amount of oxygen moving from B to A. So phlogiston behaved just like a real thing, with that embarrassing exception that when your measurements became accurate enough to detect the tiny amounts involved, phlogiston weighed less than nothing. Phlogiston was a privative.

A difficult but stubborn feature of human thinking is involved in all this: it's known as 'reifying': making real. Imagining that because we have a word for something, then there must exist a 'thing' that corresponds to the word. What about 'bravery' and 'cowardice'? Or 'tunnel'? Indeed, what about 'hole'?

Many scientific concepts refer to things that are not real in the everyday sense that they correspond to objects. For instance, 'gravity' sounds like an explanation of planetary motion, and you vaguely wonder what it would look like if you found some, but actually it is only a word for an inverse square law attractive relationship. Or more recently, thanks to Einstein, for a tendency of objects not to move in straight lines, which we can reify as 'curved space'.

For that matter, what about 'space'? Is that a thing, or an absence?

'Debt' and 'overdraft' are very familiar privatives, and the thinking problems they cause are quite difficult. After all, your overdraft pays your bank manager's salary, doesn't it? So how can it fail to be real? Today's derivatives market buys and sells debts and promises as if they were real, and it reifies them as words and numbers on pieces of paper, or digits in a computer's memory. The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes: most of it doesn't actually exist at all.

Some years ago, at a science-fiction convention held in The Hague, four writers who made lots of money from their books sat in front of an audience of mostly impecunious fans to explain how they'd made huge income from their books (as if any of them really knew). Each of them said that 'money isn't important', and the fans became quite rude at this perfectly accurate statement. It was necessary to point out that money is like air or love, unimportant if you've got enough of it, but desperately important if you haven't, Dickens recognized this: in David Copperfield Mr Micawber remarks 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.'

There's no symmetry between having money and not having it, but the discussion had gone off the rails because everyone had assumed that there was, so that 'having money' was the opposite of 'having no money'. If you must find an opposite, then 'having money' is opposite to 'being in debt'. In that case, 'rich' is like 'knurd'. In any event, making the comparison between money, love, and air lowered the debating temperature considerably. Air isn't important if you've got it, only if you haven't; the same goes for money.

Vacuum is an interesting privative. Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could sell vacuum-on-a-stick. Vacuum in the right place is valuable.

Many people on Earth sell cold-on-a-stick.

Discworld does a marvellous job of revealing the woolly thinking behind our assumptions about absence, because in Discworld privatives really do exist. The dark/light joke in Discworld is silly enough that everyone gets the point, we hope. Other Discworld uses of privatives, however, are more subtle. The most dramatic, of course, is Death, many people's favourite Discworld character, who SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Death is a seven-foot-tall skeleton, with tiny points of light in his eye sockets. He carries a scythe with a blade so thin that it's transparent, and he has a flying horse called Binky. When Death appears to Olerve, king of Sto Lat, in Mort, it takes the king a few moments to catch up on current events:

 

'Who the hell are you?' said the king. 'What are you doing here? Eh? Guards! I deman...'

The insistent message from his eyes finally battered through to his brain. Mort was impressed. King Olerve had held on to his throne for many years and, even when dead, knew how to behave.

'Oh,' he said. 'I see. I didn't expect to see you so soon.'

YOUR MAJESTY, said Death, bowing, FEW DO.

The king looked around. It was quiet and dim in this shadow world, but outside there seemed to be a lot of excitement.

'That's me down there, is it?'

I'M AFRAID SO, SIRE.

'Clean job. Crossbow, was it?'

 

Our earthly fears about death have led to some of our strangest reifi-cations. Inventing the concept 'death' is giving a name to a process, dying, as if it's a 'thing'. Then, of course, we endow the thing with a whole suite of properties, whose care is known only to the priests. That thing turns up in many guises. It may appear as the 'soul', a thing that must leave the body when it turns it from a live body into a dead one. It is curious that the strongest believers in the soul tend to be people who denigrate material things; yet they then turn their own philosophy on its head by insisting that when an evident process, life, comes to an end, there has to be a thing that continues. No. When a process stops, it's no longer 'there'. When you stop beating an egg, there isn't some pseudo-material essence-of-eggbeater that passes on to something else. You just aren't turning the handle any more.

Another 'thing' that arises from the assumption that death exists is whatever must be instituted in the egg/embryo/foetus in order to turn it into a proper human being, who can die when required. Note that in human myth and Discworld reality it is the soulless ones, vampires and their ilk, who cannot die. Long before ancient Egypt and the death-god Anubis, priests have made capital out of this verbal confusion. On Discworld, it's entirely proper to have 'unreal' things, like Dark, or like the Tooth Fairy in Hogfather, which play their part in the plot. But it's a very strange idea indeed on planet Earth.

Yet it may be part of some process that makes us human beings. As Death points out in Hogfather, humans seem to need to project a kind of interior decoration on to the universe, so that they spend much of the time in a world of their own making. We seem, at least, at the moment, to need these things. Concepts like gods, truth and soul appear to exist only in so far as humans consider them to do so (although elephants are known to get uneasy and puzzled upon finding elephant bones in the wild, whether this is because of some dim concept of the Big Savannah In The Sky or merely because it's manifestly not a good idea to stay in a place where elephants get killed is unknown). But they work some magic for us. They add narrativium to our culture. They bring pain, hope, despair, and comfort. They wind up our elastic. Good or bad, they've made us into people.

We wonder if the users thought that that cold-focusing mirror worked some magic for them. We can think of several ways in which it might appear to. And some very clever friends of ours are persuaded that souls might exist, too. Nearly everything is a process on some level. To a physicist, matter is a process carried out by a quantum wave function. And quantum wave functions exist only when the person you're arguing with asserts that they don't, so maybe souls exist in the same way.

In this area, we have to admit the science doesn't know everything. Science is based on not knowing everything. But it does know some things.