In 1900, when Planck introduced the quantum of action, a strange loop in the intellectual history of the West again re-played itself, a repeating strange loop which a president of the American Mathematical Society, Eric Temple Bell, brilliantly essayed upon in 1934 with his book The Search for Truth (N.Y.: Reynal & Hitchcock): the periodic emergence and re-emergence of discrete from continuous, continuous from discrete in Western thought going back to the ancient Greeks. Just as controversy over the Axiom of Choice was reaching hysterical proportions in which the mathematical establishment rejected the discreteness of denumerable transfinite sets (as opposed to infinite sequences that cannot reach their limit in a finite span of time), thus casting its lot with the continuum of a non-modular spacetime and William James’ “stream of consciousness”, Planck introduced the discrete quantum of action, thus casting his lot implicitly with spacetime modularity (limited spacetime domains, multi-sheet models,
3-geometries, laminated spacetime) and the discrete, frozen-frame-sequence, stop-action notion of consciousness which Buddhism has always embraced. In demonstrating that a denumerably infinite set has the same cardinality as any of its proper subsets, Cantor, in violation of plain logic, went part of the distance toward removing the distinction between distinctionless continuum and distinction-filled countable discrete ensemble: in terms of cardinality, the two are one: indistinguishable. Superceding the illogicality even of his own Cantor dust with his Continuum Hypothesis, Cantor proclaimed more and more indistinguisablenesses that collectively undermined even the fundamental basis by which one self-identical number can be distinguished from another: non-self-identical numbers! Two is not only two, but also one? Not according to the logicality of plain logic. But what about according to the logicality of multivalued logics?

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