Greetings and godspeed fellow lovers and seekers of wisdom: welcome to b.e. hydomako's philosophy site. Here we will find a selection of Mr. Hydomako's undergraduate work presented complete, unadulterated, and whole1. All images are exact scans of papers that were submitted, evaluated, and then returned to Mr. Hydomako as part of his earning a B.A. in philosophy, which was awarded by the University of Calgary to him in the Spring of 2006. Also included are the complete and whole scans of various handouts that were prepared for a variety of different classes as part of in class presentations which were also evaluated and went, in part, to Mr. Hydomako's grade in whichever class the presentation occurred.
Each of us who has earned an undergrad degree of some kind or other can only speak from his or her experience of that academic endeavour. We can recognize that while most of us earned a degree majoring in some general area of study and complemented this with a minor in some other general area of study, each of our academic paths as an undergrad is intended to be what we might think of as "well rounded." This is to say, part of the idea of engaging in an undergrad academic career is to flesh out our knowledge and expose us to a wider variety of studies and topics. As such, we can suppose that assignments and essays, presentations and talks, are a bit of hodgepodge with regards to their individual topics as focused upon in their individual classes. Most of us likely wrote or presented to the subject at hand and perhaps with little regard to some over arching or "meta" narrative; put differently, it is likely that even if we found ourselves seeing a "bigger picture," say, it is possible that such a picture was not necessarily represented in our submissions and our presentations. Mr. Hydomako seems, perhaps, a bit of an anomaly in this respect.
Mr. Hydomako's work, while not always, but at least some of the time, attempted to weave a strand through each essay and presentation. It would be wonderful if we could think of this strand as what Douglas R. Hofstadter called "an eternal golden braid." Such would be high praise indeed! However, as Mr. Hydomako was writing as a mere undergrad, we might consider that strand to be one more akin to lead. This is to say, using an alchemical metaphor, Mr. Hydomako, as a budding and still undeveloped thinker and explorer--a seeker and lover of wisdom in training, say--was weaving a strand yet to be turned to gold by the process of his academic career. Perhaps one day, if he should earn his doctorate, then maybe that strand might transmute from lead into gold. Such a successful completion to a lengthy academic endeavour, however, does not guarantee that final coagulation which results in the successful transformation of a more base set of materials into something not only purified of the dross, but also sparkling with all that hoped for brilliance of gold.
It seems difficult to summarize exactly what that strand represented for Mr. Hydomako. It appears to slither like a slippery snake at times. One adequate framing for it might be that his work, at times, attempted to get some purchase on what might be seen as a "fundamental paradox" that perhaps is the generator and maintainer of our shared empirical realities.
This paradox, due to its ubiquity and seeming ability to act in chameleon-like ways of camouflage, can take on many different forms. In one form it is the opposing sides to a given whole: in re structuralism as opposed to ante rem structuralism in a structuralist approach to philosophically accounting for mathematics, say; in another instantiation this paradox takes on the dualistic form of Self and Other as equally necessary yet mutually exclusive occurrences of being in the world; in yet another guise it is the very objects of set theory itself--the problematic ones, of course--it manifests there, seemingly, as the empty set in conjunction with V, which would be "the set of all sets" if that was itself not paradoxically problematic; in more religiously or mystically themed manifestations the paradox presents itself as that which is "sacred" in opposition to that which is "mundane" and we struggle with the idea of how the divine, which is merely synonymous with "the sacred," can be both transcendent and immanent, or eternal and yet temporal. Indeed, there is, perhaps, a very large number of dualities that seem necessary for our phenomenological experiences: (right, left), (us, them), (good, evil), (wave, particle), (up, down), (Quantum Mechanics, Relativity)2, (success, failure), (victory, defeat), (true, false)--the list seems to go on and on.
We see there is a reoccurring structure underlying any manifestation of duality, and Mr. Hydomako, for lack of any better way to get a hold of it, denotes this as framed in a metaphor (which is itself both metaphoric, yet literally represents the logical structure of these dualities) taken from symbolic logic, namely, A & ~A. This parsing of the paradox intends to capture how the elements that form these dualities are at once mutually exclusive to one and other, yet, at the same time, are entirely necessary for any empirical, phenomenological, and coherent human experience.
Since A & ~A is anathema to logicians and many thinkers striving for consistency alike, we will, at this point, simply refer the reader to Mr. Hydomako's work--letting it speak for itself via the reader's interpretation--and offer no further analysis or explanation at this time.
Mr. Hydomako would like to thank you, the reader, for taking the time to not only read his work, but to offer your attention and care to it. He feels, perhaps like many of his fellow philosophers both contemporary and historical, that he has something important to say to the others in this world, and he hopes that what he puts forward will not only do no harm, but will also be a benevolent force in the reader's life.
1. As it turns out, not all of Mr. Hydomako's papers could be rediscovered "...complete, unadulterated, and whole," but for the missing "peer reviewed" (i.e., graded by a professional professor) essays we are fortunate enough that digital archives could fill the holes. Papers from the digital vault were printed and then scanned as images to keep the presentation consistent. Since these papers were not graded, a "Grade Received" note has been added under each course heading in order to give the reader an idea of what the copies of the original graded papers might have received re: their assessments.
2. We might not see how QM and Relativity are somehow mutually exclusive dualities. We see that they both talk about a similar set--or at least have a non-empty intersection--of ontological entities: photons, for example, particles, and etc.. And both use similar or intersecting languages to describe these phenomena: "mass," "velocity," "energy," and etc.. So, given all these commonalities, how is it these represent a mutually exclusive binary pairing? The answer to this is their foundations. Each theory is foundationally incompatible with the other in that they offer mutually exclusive views of this foundation. Relativity asserts that spacetime is a continuum; that is, it is made up of a continuous and "smooth" set of curves--there is no smallest interval of spacetime. QM, on the other hand, relies on the exact opposite. It asserts that space is divided into smallest intervals and that there are also smallest intervals of time. In QM's understanding of the universe, it is quantized. So, an analogy would be to say that Relativity asserts an analogue spacetime and QM asserts a digital space and time. This is why there is a push in physics to unite these theories under a single "theory of everything."
