But I think it's about time to put childish things aside, as my still and favorite Pres. suggested, and get down to the business of doing something. I just finished my most recent cosmology tome, and was bemused to find that a search on its title revealed that a "Surfer Dude" has one-upped the University scholars. But the surfer dude moves in the wrong direction, I'm certain.
So, I won't get anywhere further down the road by compulsively reading for clues. This latest, provocatively titled "New Theories of Everything" was truly incredibly well written, well researched, and displayed a virtuoso mastery not only of physics and the math behind it, but also philosophy and, in some excruciating detail, the very same conclusions, if you can call them that, about abstraction arrived at by David Foster Wallace, in his Infinity book. The thing is, and it really is emperor's new clothes here, the entire resolution left hanging is the one I offer, but can't quite articulate. It's very much a both/and kind of thing, where the world is neither software running on hardware, nor does the anthropic principle need to be strong or weak.
The complexity of consciousness, as neatly detailed in this last book, more or less drops out from the parameters, and if I understand it correctly, achieves its maximal complexity in very neat order. Without a whole lot of fuss in cosmological time. And given that there is a kind of centering rather than distancing required to posit consciousness as integral - that is to say that there need be no priority to the matter of consciousness, nor any issue of simultaneity since concepts are by definition as timeless as the identity-less atomic particles they descend from. There is no telling one from t'other.
So, consciousness-evolved is just as valid as consciousness-prior. Things held in mind are simply and neatly the origin and the end, more as the body contains the soul rather than defines it; opposed very much metaphorically to the software/hardware conjunction. Point being that there is all this continual fuss about understanding the instant information transfer implied in Quantum Mechanics, when the pairing in mind simply obviates the fuss. As 'twere.
And emotion more than thermodynamics is what determines time's arrow. The wanting here and now. So, I guess I will have to take some time out again to detail this more slowly, starting from the obvious case that since we can indeed blow consciousness all to hell, we should ascribe at least as much priority to the matter of our collective caring for one another as we do to the matter of understanding, well, matter.
These pesky issues to the side of our main attention - negotiating treaties, and achieving cross cultural accommodations, and containing all the drunk drivers and match tossers and suicide bombers whose harm is the flip side possibility raised by the very technological progress our astute understandings of the physical world have made possible - those pesky side issues require our main attention. And they all center on emotion, in a way which won't be readily medicated to a dull roar. The fact that you toss a match into a dry forest of tinder does not necessarily make you a mass murderer, does it? I mean, unless that's what you intended to do. But the result is the same, intention or no. Any one can bring down the whole, desire or no, and something like fate ends up defining the difference.
But if mind is universal, and if therefore emotion is universal, as a kind of wave to thinking's particle - a matter of strange attractions and forces mediated by exchange of particulars - then it's time, I think, to turn from a further exploration into the nether reaches of physical explanations, and explore instead the proper limits to that kind of understanding.
So, I'll post in rapid fire fashion, I think, the remainder of my childish writings (so much more readable than these compressed bits of shorthand) and turn my attention to the more labored telling. Labored for me, but hopefully less so for you.
I need and want to explore, again, this matter of fate. The broken symmetries of events not conditioned. Where there might be proof that no algorithm can compress the data to pattern. Where mind requires a kind of kung-fu (I speak precisely here) agility to avoid the occult end. This is surprising stuff. That there may be patterns never intelligible nor certainly perceptible, which may nonetheless guide and determine, the way a narrative, only after the fact, can give shape to what has come to be. That this reverse narrative, reduced poetically to a rhyme in composition against its opposite trajectory, might actually compel us too, if we release our goal orientation in favor of relations, and other female manners.
That hanging on to a plan requires letting go of all that might have been just as much as the other is surely true (the planless is chaotic).That there may be as much value in training emotions as minds. That intuitions are no less mindless - nor surely more mindful - than carefully executed articulations of what is already known.
A turning point is surely reached. Balance is required. The masculine direction toward abstraction now risks more the tearing apart of that which binds us together, far more than it can further accomplish in definition about that upon which we must agree. Physical reality begs the question anymore. As species disappear, complexity diminishes, and my mind becomes unbalanced. Floating free, nauseated by virtigo, left only some parting jab from Dick Cheney disparaging trust and love and other fellow feeling in the face of horrible threat about which we cannot be allowed to know. Anything at all. At all. All. All. all all all
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