On recycling

(Or on the risk-mixinfinitum problem of metaphors and entropy with damping)

Life is or is not or it may be a can of let’s be healthy and say sparkling water and already this is unraveling: open the top and there’s carbonated liquid inside and gas escaping and the can remains a solid boundary for the liquid but the gaseous liquid is subject to complex dynamics and the bubbles are pretty fascinating describing their movement and flow and thinking of Perelman’s description of deformations of objects at singularities like beads of water or universes meeting making grown adults cry probably in the mind-enhancing revelations kind of way to prove a conjecture over a hundred years in the making but kind of the homology the pockets of gas in a fluid some of which adheres to the solid boundary the fluid I mean and the evident fact that water can bead or bounce, roll and pinch on a solid surface on various solid surfaces and liquids more generally on solid surfaces like rain and jet fuel and additive manufacturing and ideally not fracking because not all applications are good for the world learning and trying to choose the good ones and defining good is as useful or more than knowing of them and gas can bubble in water quite randomly and life can form in or on deep ocean vents the randomness of which is a question wars can’t answer but the probability of which is small enough to require the spacetime of a dynamic universe…but just drink it already this life-sustaining liquid who cares obviously not really that dismissively but overwhelmed (and thirsty) and it’s gone the fluid the can is still there unsurprisingly hopefully and it’s a pretty interesting shape (aren’t they all): how to replicate it or even just the shape with a different material or why it exists at all then just twist and crush it that’s humanly natural proving sort of time’s irreversible orientation in the evolution-of-a-volume-element-in-motion-through-fine-grain-phase-space entropic way (hardly) and human ego and more like proving the ability to manipulate real objects human-made or otherwise requiring an application of the aforementioned evolution concept in reality and the scale-invariance of the theory and the responsibility that implies and don’t cut a finger by the way and recycle and move on but the can though crushed and more like a nondescript thin aluminumostly object that quite recently served as the container of a liquid volume and don’t forget some carbonation and can be viewed as a covering surface of a semi-cylindrical-like space or mesh and the canny-like peel can it be called a can if it was once a can and no longer appears to be this is not our problem but it is and that’s fine

Etc

Balls 1

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

Conversations with…

Spider

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