Kingspiercing and Snowmen
“The not-art of criticism needs to change. Everything has to change, or everything should be dynamic like the universe: time is motion in one sense or dynamism these are ideas not merely words tiswhatis important here: if one can tell the brain to treat things it reads or learns as ideas and concepts outside of language, then one can explore and create new knowledge with language as a guiding tool. Continue reading
I was fortunate to take an intermediate-level survey course in thermodynamics with one of the most influential scientists of the post-WWII generation, I mean this guy was at the center of research for combustion and fueling, kind of combining modern thermo and fluid dynamics, at NASA through the rise of the space age and jet propulsion. Early in the quarter he gave this lecture, just in a small class of 20 or so young engineers, that began with an explanation that while he can’t possibly fit a lifetime of knowledge into a single class over a relatively small time period, we should trust that we will learn plenty of the material deemed necessary to get good grades in the class itself by default if we just go to class and do the work.
What he meant was he would touch on topics that we weren’t prepared to fully grasp, teaching us far more than we would need to pass his tests. His philosophy is that the mind is the most complex closed object in the universe, and if we listened to him with an open mind, the brain has an incredible capability to keep knowledge stored away until it could be used properly even if it’s a decade down the road, and by implication the brain also has an innate ability to know when knowledge that I would never have imagined I am able to retain can help me understand life better in the future.
He called this inspiration, and I indeed think about that lecture now. Then he shared with us a tool to understand the universe, a concept generally termed scale invariance over a metric space in mathematical language, and he told us we might not fully appreciate this concept for a very long time, but if we remember to think about it and look for its representations, we will have an essential skill for understanding why things are the way they are. Scale invariance, or self-similarity, and ideas about connectedness or more deeply gauge symmetry or mirror symmetry and S-duality: these are essential properties that allow matter and energy to have structure at sub-atomic levels, and explains why this structure scales up to describe molecules and life and consciousness and planets and stars and galaxies.
In its most intuitive form, it’s the metric we define as distance or size in a given dimension, measurements we can make to determine how far away something is on earth but also how far things are in space; and then how can we define a radius of an atom or how solid ice takes up more volume than liquid water despite having the same molecules. It can go even deeper to relate to particle theory and gravity and spacetime, human memory and computer memory, dimensionality and rank of things called number fields crucial to encryption security; economic theory, human behavior, evolution; why there is no such thing as ‘zero or nothingness in the most general sense’ but rather different scales of infinity.
Now I’ve diverged from the actual point here, and that is: don’t worry about understanding all of this (I don’t) or concluding: cannot now and will not ever understand it because a lot of intelligence is convincing ourselves of our own immense brainpower, then using it positively towards oneself and others. True knowledge while we are here on Earth reduces quite nicely to human interaction, shared experience, happiness, kindness, altruism, empathy, compassion and all that good stuff. Society can make progress, but time scales as well and it took billions of years to achieve consciousness in real time yet we have the power to destroy the Earth many times over in an instant. It takes a lot more than money and people yelling at each other on TV or the Internet. It takes genuine cooperation and a mind open to dynamic adaptation and learning and filtering out noise and synthesizing experience.
It takes fundamental change in the way we think about ourselves and the world around us.
It takes unity and diversity.
-BB
Effect (cause) to You,
In a perfect little display of human non-logic: someone working on real, groundbreaking theory, but everlacking in the imaginative art of ‘dumbingus downus’, even more but and lacking the essential ability to know one’s limits in regards to the art of philosophical expliation, reductio’d ad absurdumbdum’d and invoked an image of a butterfly (or at least let’s say a rabbling bunch of butterflies) flapping wings in Asia or at a point in the somewherewhere wind patterns patter or wind patters patterns before Coming to America and contributing through flippityflapping to a tornado later manifesting in oklomaha.
This is slightly less absurd than taking the same hypothetimage of our non-denoMonarch butterfly pseudo-randomly path-integrating along a worldcurl in Asia-somewhere and stating: at some arbitrary not-in-Asia-somewhere point in Earthspace, simulTIMEously, flies some butter describing the inverse path; and concluding: together the butterfly and the flyingbutter, due to the unity of all things coming from the same thing(s) (unity has its limits like any real representation of anything), are, quantumly, entangled. Einstein and Zeus would take a break from their heaven-is-craps game to throw lightning-dice from above for thinking like this.
There have been reports of butter flying in the American South…
If ears are fine-tuned, we might hear Bells, hidden distantly (re: nonlocally), alarmringing like vibrating strings permeating a folded brain.
-BB
History Ain’t Pretty, People :
Perturb the system:
The end of WWII proved the fallacy of static determinism in a post-war world so Cold.
Humanity spent much of History pre-20th-century determined to
deny and defy everything this world presented it as Real,
as Natural,
as Existing and Universal;
subscribing instead to a cyclical series:
ignorant, reductive, irrational, human-constructed systems built on fragile foundations of nothing in the name of:
predatory pretend prophets proselytizing propaganda promising progress pathetic pointing the blade plunging precise the pistol pealing the people pleading their screams piercing like pure silence…
-BB
Ancient Human Thought
The profound sense of self-significance leading to the formulation of the universe as some abstract not-earth, but certainly something because in this space of habitually-blue-but-not-water-blue somethingness exist the two great balls, the one of fire who must be best friends with eyeballs, raised to an exalted position because despite eyeballs’s inability to provide reciprocate offerings (while glaring at the fireball all day is harmful (inducing any major-general assumptions about something based solely on sensory perception generoftenally (moreoftenthannotuhlee) makes an ass out of umptions or sumpthins) enough anecdotal evidence exists to support the following conclusion: staring at the Great Ball of Fire assiduously ironally also makes a butt out of one’s eye duo thusly we derive the proverbial epithet ‘butthead’ to those blindly worshipping that which cannot be known) the great fireball still shows up and gives to eyeballs everything it can. And even though it must abdicate for that introverted, oft-veiled (finger nailed?) ball of shadows, the two balls having some sort of agreement or compromise on the great question asking is one ball better than the other, or, perhaps, equivaliantly to these icons of egotism: is one ball more deserving of attention than its dual.
This is probably how early human minds thought about these things right? No? History (and human thought) tends to imagine transitions like the one to full (ish) consciousness and sense of time and self and environment and others etc. as very sudden, or don’t think about it at all. Biologically, we share certain invariants with all life, but consciousness split human evolution because a brain with some self-awareness, self-reflection, being-in-worldness with other beings and objects, and access to long-term memory representations and associated functions to compare and to synthesize (thus self-generating new constructive representations leading to creativity and imagination and multi-tasking) and to retain for most of a lifetime has profound implications for human life, for all life, and even for the universe. Instead of relying on successive generations for evolution to perform its future-blind, random ‘learning’ by natural selection on entire populations using DNA as the memory record-keeper (mutations are random within the individual and thus random individuals have mutations, but they won’t be self-aware of the mutation), the human brain can create limitless closed representations to both map in reduced form onto DNA for later generations but, locally, to store in the infinitely complex (built on unity) fine structure underlying our hyperfunctioning deep memory. Over an entire (very short relative to biological evolutionary timescales even though we live long) lifetime, each individual human being experiences, learns, and synthesizes more knowledge than natural selection can do on its own over epochs.
The BIG QUESTION OF QUESTIONS at the beginning of the evolution of human beings is then, informally, the following: Why consciousness evolved at all?
Access and reassess and
-BB
If given a string,
Then:
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-BB
I’d like to givuh SHOUTout to spiders because they geddahbad rep buddhat silk has tensile strength greater than steel of the same weight…maybe next time seeing one of them 8-legged motherfuckers crawl out from under the couch or descending from above or spindling that magnificent silk in some forgotten orthogonal meeting of three planes, before the ritual of overreaction which leads to: frenetic movement, shrill noises, some form of paper whether it be: towel, toilet, tissue, and the fast-twitch nab “gotcha sucka”; PAUSE for a moment before heroically annihilating and ask that miniature anarch-arachnid, just say to it, “Hey, spider, I know you’re supposed to be more afraid of us than we are of you, but you’re a spider so the word afraid probably doesn’t register, nor does any word, nor sound…but hey, for the sake of this hypothetical let me just ask you how do you make that silk so fucking STRONG?” Cut to spider hanging by his thread: “Well, GIANT DEATH THING (that’s you), if words are a more optimal means to secure a future existence than the usual: 1. Run away and hide; If not possible then: 2. Don’t move (ceiling); if not possible then: 3. ATTACK!!!, then I will tell you the spider virtues that all spiders follow: 1. Patience; 2. Complexity from simpliciterations; 3. Efficient optimization of space and resources; 4. SYMMETRY…
During which you interrupt that damn spider, “What the fuck, spiderman, I want to know how to make the fucking silk itself, the biochemistry, and you’re just giving me a lesson in spider philosophy. I don’t care about why, I only need my ho-hum-handy-how. I already know everything for Man I Am. Silly spider…don’t you know?…No?…You think we are the unknowing?…
Spider: First, let’s clear something up: Spiderman is an ignorant, delusional, superegomaniacal nonhero and disgrace to spiders everywhere. He merely gets in the way, causes destruction and confusion, and consciously exposes himself to losing his life to gravity. Speaking of ego: ummcuzlike, though you can perceive-FEAR the transcendentALLing ascenDANCE to consciousness…andandand, and the unityversatile convalergence of divergence; allallall the infinitely iterative generation of representations? andcuzlikeumm, after one spacetime-you-nity and diffselfsimilar spacetime-you-nity unify in a singusensational cumming2gether of 2nity-as-1ity to procreeyoonifornicate their very own newnity, you ahhhhhwaken immersed in universal consciousness, timeflow, and the representational memory of all past evolution; equipped with the ability to sense the gridfield spacetime; the capacity to store, process, compare, learn, and imagine all the possibilities…
You (interrupting): Wait, wait, wait…1) whywhatwherewhenhow did you become all-knowing?; 2) you’re proving my point geethankspiderguy…
Spider: Let me finish you impatient monster: THOUGH you have the freedom to create and interact/change yourself and your environment as a conscious representation of universal, infinite complexity in structure and form within a closed, compact, connected being ideally sizescaled to perceive the limits of the arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large (the physical realizations of the theoretical zero and infinity)…you are all of this unity of nature and life and the universe and knowledge and memory, yet you turn yourselves into defective, destructive robots. You learn nothing from the self-sustaining antifragility of natural systems; you create false logic and use it to manipulate yourselves and others; you despair at the insignifutility and onlylonlyness of life when you become pathetically needy for attention, and if you find somebodies to tolerate your solipsism, you use them until they leave you alonely repeating cycles spiraling into the void…
“ENOUGH! THESE ARE YOUR LAST WORDS,” you screamshatter. “Humans have conquered Earth, and we have tools and computers and our own Web to do our bidding, but you wouldnt know about those. I ask one more time for the code for the protein.” And the spider, sensing this isn’t going well, desperate to survive this sudden confrontation with Death, but unwilling to surrender his pride pleads, “Come on, Man, Im tellin ya all I know. You think I have the answer to the question of why does silk come out of my ass? I’m a spider, not much goin on but this here silk and my instincts, so I don’t ask questions. Humans can’t even figure out how a spider in nature makes silk? If you can perceive and study Nature in all of its self-sustaining, system-efficiency-optimizing formfunctionality, and your response is to subjugate, waste, deny, and kill at will Earth-be-damned (why conquer at the potential complete loss of conquered). Then dominant species my [silk] ass.”
And indeed, those were its last, soundless words.
-BB
The paradoxcycle dilemmena: the langauge theories (gauges more typtopically ordered to put the Four Forcemen of the Antipocolypse (BANG!) into their group theorhetorical cages to prove onceandforall, onallstages fourallayges, the symmetrickly (it’s super!) allelegance and the scaley invariance undoudubitably sphericentral to our infinidismal variexistence) novel is all about rhymerhythm and flow (from swerve of shore to bend of bay), which requires the reader ‘listen’ carefully, meaning quite literally sounding out everything on the page in or out the head. Honestly, it’s a distinct advantage to have engaged in conversation with or to have listened to one or the more the merrier for a significant length of time enough to pick up some idiomatic or colloquial language, to experience the cadence and inf(l)ections and the compoundplexity: the constant fissioning and fusioning of so many of the words we’ve come to know and love forward momentum in the writing: read it on the page hear it in the head
-BB
unitytheory.co 
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