Blog Adventure 4: Boulder, Colorado and Notes on Contrast

In Part I, I’m going to discuss some differences between Boulder, Colorado, and then, in Part II talk about contrasts and definition in general.  As with the previous posts from our Blog Adventure series, Part II is going to concern limitation, definition, and description. The idea I want to talk about is how definition and limitation are not the only way to describe a subject.

Part I

Boulder, Colorado.  I’m not going to give these impressions in any particular format.

People say, “For sure” out here more than other places like Raleigh North Carolina or Utica, New York.  UC Boulder reminded me of UNC Chapel Hill for its hipsters, but there seemed like there were more hipsters out here.  I really love the different shades of purple and tan rocks they use for bricks on their buildings.  It’s a particular shade of purple-pink, and yellow-tan-brown, with cobalt blue, which is really beautiful.  In front of the Norlin Library there is a fountain, and there are quotes from sages, such as Cicero’s “If you have a garden and a library, you have all you need.”  Everything seems newer out here, and cleaner.  The situation here seems even newer and cleaner than North Carolina, compared to Utica, New York. I went inside a legal marijuana shop in Fort Collins, Colorado, but I was impressed by how legitimate it seemed (was-is).  The Norlin Library seemed very similar to the DH Hill library at NCSU.  Grass seems to be green and over manicured, or very very dry.  The Sunset on the mountains is so beautiful, like a stream of gold over the mountains, a halo.  It rained once, and there has been a nationally recognized fire emergency in the time I have been here.  My lips have been chapped for the past week and a half, letting up today.  My nose has been especially dry.  Living quarters are like ones in Raleigh and Utica.  There are new mcmansions, which all use the same layout, and new apartment complexes, but these could just as easily look like the ones in North Carolina.  There are houses from the 1970’s and 1980’s, which use a familiar rectangular box and red brick pattern (sometimes yellow brick).  Sometimes, as an alternative lawn, people use the prairie grasses.  Often the mountains are visible wherever you look.  Like America the Beautiful, they are purple and majestic.  There is a sort of west-coast mentality here:  more students bike, there is a bike lane, and more students skateboard, compared to other places I have been.  Corporations I went looking for in Upstate New York popped up here:  IBM, Crocks shoes, and Celestial Seasonings have factories I have seen here.  I toured Celestial Seasonings’ factory this past Thanksgiving.  My Dad told me Google has a satellite business here.  There are more panhandlers and beggars in Boulder Colorado than in North Carolina.  Cars are varied, but I have noticed a lot of Subarus, and passed by a Subaru dealer in Longmont.  There are a lot more motorcyclists in Colorado than on the East Coast.  The major highway between Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins is Interstate Highway 25, sort of like Interstate Highway 40 in North Carolina.  Here the speed limit is 75, but everyone goes 80, which I guess is better than posted 65 and everyone goes 80 on 40.  There are more Chipotle’s stores here than elsewhere.  There’s a King Soopers, which is a constituent of Kroger’s supermarket, a Macaroni Grill, which is part of the Chili’s chain.   I thought the Boulder Public Library was big, beautiful, and new, with a modernist architecture.

Part II

How do we make descriptions and contrasts?  What is the nature of description and contrast?

Lately I’ve been thinking about opposites, limitations, and definitions as a mathematical topologist considers graphs.  Instead of Cartesian planes, which are X and Y graphs, topologists consider X, Y, Z, and multi-planar math problems.  They do this using category theory.  The point of comparing the two is how there it is possible to compare more than two things.  X is compared to Y in one, but X, Y, Z, and all of the other letters of the alphabet can dance and swing in the other.

To elaborate, this train of thought is a continuation of hacking the mirror fallacy, like we did a few posts ago.  The mirror fallacy is the idea 1)  thoughts mirror reality, and that 2) thoughts should mirror reality.  The first problem is that they do not mirror reality, and the second is that they really should not.  In the case of a hypothetical example: if an original idea were created, and if it were a good idea (as in beneficial to humanity) we see both the first mirror (epistemological-descriptive) and the second mirror (epistemological-prescriptive, how you should believe) smashed.  No bad luck here though, only good luck for years and years after realizing this.  Our standard-bearer for the mirror fallacy is Spinoza, but we could even better knock out Plato.

The mirror fallacy is steeped in opposites, dualities, and either/or.  Aristotle’s second law of logic, the Law of Excluded Middle, says either proposition-P or NOT-proposition-P.  In this case, we have  already lost the battle for Truth, because Truth is not to be found in propositions.  If propositions are sentences which can or cannot match reality, we have missed the boat.

In an epistemological-descriptive sense, forcing a bad template on experience causes corrupted knowledge.  Spinoza’s idea that every thing is true is goofy, as is Berkeley’s claim everything exists in our heads.  In an epistemological-prescriptive sense, it stops us from trying to think thoughts we seem to be not “allowed” to think.

All of the humbug eventually catches up to morality and everyday experience, like people being held to words or facts when they shouldn’t be.

With this in mind, I have begun to attack recent either-or statements with an aim toward reconciliation and, to phrase it in terms of rigorous logic, applying the law of explosion.  The Law of Explosion says that if a contradiction is allowed, anything is allowed.  I’ve been trying to allow as much as possible.

How is Boulder different from the rest of the United States?  Well the most obvious points are the yes-and-no, obvious contrasts:  there are mountains here, and people speak slightly differently.  The second answer, in a way that does not necessarily exclude the first answer, is that there are not that many differences between Colorado and the rest of the country.  Lastly, and the most tricky,  there are hundreds of readily noticeable and more subtle differentiations between Colorado and the rest of the world.  The point of Part II was to say that these contrasts  and definitions might not even exist between Colorado and the rest of the country, so much as different points of comparisons.  Instead of limiting ourselves to comparing states to states only, we compare the state to the state of being, colors to other colors, business, weather, landscape, people, interests of people, and so much else.  Instead of the X and Y axis only, we consider X, Y, and Z, and other planes we haven’t even thought of yet.  And, dramatically and essentially, on top of these other conclusions, after we do communicate about Colorado, even if we cannot communicate how beautiful Colorado is, because it is beyond language, we maintain that experiences is possible without words, without definition.