Somewhat embarrassingly, I still find myself tussling with Bratton. He seems constantly to be building straw dogs to knock down. (Don't we all!) Boomers are responsible over the inflexion year of 1968 for distrust in authority, and in our Foucauldian slide away from rational governance. Populism is a symptom of our retreat from rationality. Of course, my mind is not sufficiently academic to properly document it all.
Bratton seems to disparage every earnest wish for any return to normal, since normal is the thing we have to get away from. And we can't do it by a change of attitude, mainly because there just isn't time for that magic sauce to do its trick.
But "normal" is to be in History, and not beyond it. But maybe that's wrong. Maybe this could be the first time we've ever had the chance to be normal, in the sense that any living thing can be normal. For an instant.
Who knows if it was like the snow in winter in Buffalo when you're only as tall as a newly conscious five-year old, but I was always taught history as though we were somehow beyond it. The caste system in India, the superstitions of non-Christians, the beautiful primitive of native Americans, and most of all the pristine beauty of nature without us. That from which we have arisen.
But really, what was being preached was a kind of apotheosis of each and every individual, mainly because that's how our late capitalist economy works. We have raised the individual up to heaven like a flag up a pole, and no wonder we still have to identify with superstars of all stripes. Jesus Fucking Christ!
Jeans were once a way to blend in, like the freak flag of unkempt hair. Now we streak our hair with green, say, which is sometimes to lodge a protest about those with the money to sculpt their bodies and fill out designer jeans in just the right way, and sometimes as a kind of offset to how absolutely gorgeous we actually are.
Let's say some NFL designer body has taken steroids and other medications A(gainst) M(edical) A(dvice), and is (therefore?) now worth something north of a quarter billion dollars on contract and won't take any vaccine against the 'rona. Now isn't that like mass-murder?
Well, no, not exactly. It's just stupid, like Trump is stupid, like my friend who won't talk to me anymore is stupid calling RBG a mass-murderer. And I told him so. So I'll be damned.
What if our history now is coming to proper terms that guilt and innocence are never so easy to assign. The liar paradox is only a paradox if you can't distinguish between good and bad lies. If you can't find the continuum between. Like Zeno's paradox dissolves once you realize that all boundaries are fractal and dynamic. Probability waves collapse.
Say, when people actually believe that race is part of some great chain of being, and when fighting and killing and bloodletting was pretty-much universal and something women hardly ever did, but often aided and abetted. We are beyond the easy answers of motivated history. We're deep in it now and again forevermore.
Even though and as and while she exposes deep duplicity in the profit models of "surveillance capitalism," I get why Bratton thinks Shoshana Zuboff is stuck in the wrong paradigm, defending individual privacy which is now the problem and not something to be worshipped anymore.
But Bratton too is stuck within an obsolete paradigm, where agency relates to crafting our future according to rational principles. Agency never did do that. Agency is the emotively powered reaction to things which remind us of other things that have already happened for which ratiocination is never quick enough.
Collectively also, we will never be quick enough to react to the ever so comfortably rising temperature of our froggie bath. We will respond to the wrong stimulus after it's already too late. That's what it means to be conscious and evolving. Conscious evolution has never happened and never will.
Of course we must mystify the brain. There is a straight line from Plato through Christianity whereby humans embody an idealized self in the nature of an eternal soul which distinguishes us from all other creatures . . . a straight line to our mystification of the human brain.
We think that history is progressive. China thought that history was authoritative, and they edited it to make it so. And then history went in cycles, no God required.
Scientists look for quantum explanations and structural specificity to the brain on the order of computational reality (which means logical reality, where there is also no completeness) in just the way that Bratton looks for solutions in the form of governance structures. As though humanity is that distinct. Perhaps because we've built this brave new computational overlay to the earth.
As predicted by Hopi prophecy, 'a web will cover the earth' and stupid humans will take credit for it. Like those paper wasps so proud of their hive that Kinsey deconstructed. There are no ideal types. There can be no pride in what just happens, because it's part of what you are.
I know that I wear my secrets on my face, and with Bratton, I know that masks have the dual function to reveal and to conceal (if there really is such a thing as choice). But if you know me well enough then you share enough of my world to know what I'm thinking and I can see it in your shaded reaction too.
It's not attitudes which must and will change. It's the science, stupid! Our minds are hardly more individual than our faces are. They exist at all only because of the shared outerances of words, just as the face depends on commonality of eyes ears nose mouth and never mind how identical all private parts are. I know you at a glance, and your thoughts are not so far behind.
Sure you must be able to recognize me as distinct - as individual - but that's what naming means. It's naming where emotion and perception, conception and force, come together as something new for the cosmos. Naming is that powerful. That emotive. It is always a mistake to put a Name to any godhead. That's emotion as a nuclear power. Something never to be deployed, once properly understood.
So, you know, what if millenarianism (technological or religious, makes no difference) and scientism and mysticisms of all sorts and even Q-Anonymity are all no less wrong than the others. What if there really just plain isn't a right way forward, and what if your certainty is not helping, whoever you are, and whatever you are certain of.
The necessary shifts will come (or not) when the veils fall from our collective minds because the science has shifted. In just the way that the magical thinking of exceptionalist USA did, in fact, get us the vaccine and distributed it nearly in time, and now even the deniers are coming around to the real, maybe.
Or in other words, our brand of economic radical individualism is what's killing us and always has been. Money acts precisely as a virus against our moral operations. We can't help but buy that car against our future. I have no idea if it's adjusted pennies or absolute pennies, but I have it on high authority that stagecoaches cost more per mile than my first car did. That's what economy means.
So long as the oil keeps pumping.
So what's science got to do with it? It is scientifically already obvious that we can't exist as the absolutist individuals which objectivity requires. We are embedded and responsible for that. We are embedded not just in history, but in the science which would explain the world as if without us, which is the most important remaining fiction of our straight-line history. Starting with God as Creator.
From the insides of emergency rooms, you'd have to be nuts to drive a motorcycle. From the insides of the insurance industry, you'd have to be nuts to promote the insurance industry, knowing how you are instructed to deny claims at random whim. From the inside of having something wrong with you, you'd be nuts not to think that the paradigms within which our healthcare system works are at their turning point.
Once upon a time a pill had some predictable effect. On the model of antibiotics, it would cure you, even while it might have caused some bad taste along the way. Now, the explanations of the ways these pills work are so couched in obscure in-group language that you have no way to gauge the grip on reality of the person doing the prescribing. You might be able to do the math, to check the statistical calculations, but you would have to endure an entire degree program to learn the shorthand code for the conventions of the math in this particular field.
In the end, what you do know or can know or even must know is that the pills you take now are meant merely to change the odds. And they change those odds very subtly, even while you're somehow meant to imagine that they change the odds on the same pattern as those good old antibiotics used to. Doctors look for what they expect to see in response to bad events. And mostly they find it, the wages of overindulging, and can confidently prescribe the odds-changing treatments of statin drugs or blood thinners or a baby aspirin a day, and if you're smart or if you're susceptible you feel comforted somehow, like being tucked in by Daddy.
But reading through the layers of the esoteric onion, trying to understand at some expert level, you're still pretty sure that the net effect of the pills you're taking is to push the odds off in the right direction, but not really to the extent that improvements in your living habits or in the environment might. But theses are so hard to collate to correlate to find any sense in.
You know that population studies can quantify how many lives potentially lost have been potentially saved, although the statistics for non-compliance - not finishing the course of various meds - are pretty sobering in themselves. Whatever the proximate cause for that, you can be pretty sure it's a proxy for financial distress. Why else would people be too disorganized to take their meds?
The surgery is pretty effective when the inexorable does happen, but even then it's hard to know, isn't it? You can't fend of death forever.
But we're living on a planet now which shows the drastic impact of our lovely selves, gouging out the easy pickings, lighting them up, and looking for all the world like some dread disease process upon the very living planet. We are that, at the very least. A human strain of killer pathogen.
The same math which keeps you from understanding what your doctors (but not your nurses) presumably do understand, prevents you from understanding why we can be so certain that the Earth is warming, and that it's because of our lust for a good life here and now. Which isn't quite, but is almost, the same thing as wanting some reasonable comfort while we do our important work.
The economic arrangements render up our lusts much better and more efficiently than they render up our needs. What was that important work again? Not the paper pushing that you and I do surely, but the important stuff the scientific community accomplishes, maybe.
This ancient and somewhat tired now equation between the guts and the lowly and the brain and the ethereal - where the angels tread - fits perfectly here. It's hard and it's frustrating to be told you're maybe an idiot, but it sure does seem, intuitively, as though the Earth is far too big to be all that impacted by the way we choose to live. So some artist of emotion, some Glenn Beck or Rush or even Oprah, sends down to our guts good feelings which aren't in need of any mental math mediation to know their truth.
And Glenn Beck or Rush, but not Oprah, encourage you to rationalize your rage and frustration that you just can't understand what they're talking about, and you're pretty sure they're just trying to get theirs, since it's pretty demonstrable that all those Ivy egg-heads are only after theirs or else why would they insist on driving the ego cars and living in the ego mansions and squiring the ego-trophy-wives. That just makes sense to your guts, your lusts, and so your anger is justified, and you do so desperately want to go back to the way it was when you were safe and snug and warm and didn't really have to worry about your impact-by-proxy rendered up to disease proportions for the whole globe.
That same esoteric barrier against understanding prevents you from getting why it is that evolution is established fact and not some fanciful theory. You don't really buy that it has to be survival of the fittest, since if that were the case, then all these efforts to find the cure for this or that should be halted right now so that the fittest might survive, which just sounds an awful lot like what Glenn and Rush and those creationist cretins want us to believe. That God will guide that proper survival, and we should just stay out of it and let the unfortunate among us die out. Which just sounds a lot like traditional high-handed cruelty from the inside of some castle, but there you go!
Still on some level, you get that the great diaspora across the earth of man out of Africa is now coming to some conclusion. That even while we madly cater to the fears of each of us that we might just die unfairly, the so-called races are mixing it up again, which likely would be good for the longevity of the whole. Ideas are mixing, cultures are rubbing off on one another, and whole new categories of beauty to lust after are getting created.
And at the lowest level, which might really just be at the highest level, since who can know what these encodings might really mean, the DNA is mixing it up. The genes are mixing it up and the memes are mixing it up and the semes are mixing it up, and up and up and up until you might even get the wrong idea that the best among us are the ones meant to survive and define the brave new racist humanity.
Which isn't, I'm pretty sure, the way that evolution works. It might be the quirky ones which mesh best with the changed environment, but now the environment is almost all ours and no longer what might by reach be still called natural? Nutty people study ways to improve the human race, as though we might live forever or make our better selves still better, based, presumably on some normative exam of what it means to be best. Hire in ETS, which just sounds a lot like Hitler.
So one thing we do know is that we can't all survive the pressures from the environment which have been created by the pressures from us, which have been rendered up in proxy from our lusts and not our needs. You can count this pretty neatly just by counting heads, or mouths the way the Chinese like to do.
That's a guaranteed outcome of lusts, on the level of population studies, provided that you have something on the right side of a cruel civilization to catch the babies, which might be a toss-up most of the time. The ones who survive will be the lucky ones or the unlucky ones depending on the circumstances, as we can reflect by watching any one among umpteen movies or reading the end-time books.
Or if you read the Good Book, then it will be the ones who are saved and like to Jesus. But no question that those scientific methods have allowed and maybe even encouraged the survival of that many more of us, no matter their physical fitness for survival. No matter yours and mine.
Odds are we've blown it, and you might as well believe in fairy tales, since what else have we got?
Well, it was pretty odd in the first place for us to be here. Those, mathematically speaking, odds are precisely one. Which is a funny mathematical sort of artifact when you think about it, which you won't want to do too much since it will make your head hurt. There's not really anything awfully pretty about that artifact, since it's just by very definition. Which it's really really hard to escape from, definition.
Still, for so long as there is life and lust and breath, it seems that the Earth might stand a chance. It would seem a crying shame if it were only the earth and no so-called consciousness, however. I mean, it's taken umpteen million years just to get here. You'd think we could start to take it easy after all. But after all, we can't and there remains so much important work to do.
I'm drawing my line in the sand right here. I heard just now about how in Iran when the people come out to protest, the police are shooting them with paintguns - marking them to be dealt with later. How diabolically clever is that?
This is even better than smartbombs. Better than teargas by far. Better than surveillance cameras, against which people can wear disguises. No one is hurt, and it might almost be confused with fun if it were done in this country. Hell in 1984, the fictional version, they didn't even have to bother with real wars, when the pretend ones could have the same effect.
We all already knew that anonymity is impossible anymore, no matter what we used to think about how a dog can be a dog on the Internet. But if our government condones this as a crowd control method, then we're fucked, and I use that term advisedly. Or unadvisedly, so take your choice.
We already know that they can make us standout by searching our phone calls and emails for particular words or patterns of speech. But we also know that speech doesn't prove anything.
We know that they might selectively arrest people according to their background checks, putting away activists for twittering crowd avoidance methods, say, but we hope they won't shut off twitter the way they did in Iran.
Put all these things together, though, and now you've got real problems with civil liberties. And it could be the teaparty activists as readily as the antiwar activists (if there were any anymore, or is that just a media preference? Or a venue preference - try imagining anti-war protesters at Opryland.). But one hopes that if the police in this country were to be ordered to shoot with paintguns, there would be a suit and they would lose. But who can tell with this supreme court?
And you do have to wonder what's the difference between picking, based on speech, who to follow at the protests, and picking them out in your paintball sights. The intimidation factor is about identical.
So, why, exactly, aren't the teabaggers concerned? And why is everyone else staying home?
I guess the teabaggers are the ones feeling screwed while the rest of us, frogs in a slowly heating pot, are rationalizing away all the little things. Or maybe it's a media spotlight thing. Or maybe they've already made it clear how outraged they would be, and so shooting them with paintballs would just prove their point. That they're the victims and everyone in the government is out to get them. I guess they might want to be shot with paintballs. Do you?
Maybe they're just more used to guns. Oh hell, I don't know, maybe they're just too stupid to think about civil liberties, but I do know that if we assume that and act like we think they're stupid, then they've won because, well, that's what they were complaining about in the first place.
After so many years of haphazard looking, I finally find a guy who understands and can explain Bayesian Statistics, and he won't even give me the time of day! Well, I'm used to that, so no hurt feelings. I thought I gave a pretty cogent explanation about how the basic principles work, but I think my writeup is in the realm of dangerous for the masses, who might make all sorts of wrong conclusions from it.
The same guy also wrote up a great explanation about why quantum physical understandings of the world say utterly nothing about how the person doing various kinds of experiments is implicated in their results. I've been looking for that one since just about forever too, and thank goodness I've finally found it. I've been getting a little bit tired myself with all sorts of pretty smart people getting all excited about how our state of knowing is implicated in what it is we know.
Well, maybe it is, but only at the very fringes of reality, as in you might be the guy who set up the experiment, and maybe there had to be a reason for you to want to do that, but the results of the experiment don't implicate you. That's what science means.
Except that now here I am writing all these posts, pretty much the way John Cage used to compose music, just letting in random things which are happening all around me. Now since I'm a fan of Julian Jaynes' psychology, you'll have to expect that for me this kind of random is akin to hearing the voice of God. And, well, it is, kind of sort of, for so long as you don't think I mean that literally, the way Jaynes kind of sort of did.
Julian Jaynes, you may recall, is among a small cadre of smart people who actually understand that consciousness, as in the sense of "I", could not have pre-existed language and culture, no matter how ready the brain might have been, and specifically that the sides of the brain didn't get "broken down" until the written word took hold. He actually provides a read of historical evidence which is not too disimilar to what I'm trying to do with scientific evidence from physics, which allows lots of otherwise sketchy detail to fall right into place.
He pins the great event right at about time of Christ, which makes a nice pun if you consider the meaning of the cross and crossroads and even the Chinese number for ten, which is just a cross and has absolutely no meaning here except for random digits. We don't have to be too precise, since you could sweep up all those great seminal philosophies and philosophers from about the same rough period. Within a probability cloud around two thousand years ago, say.
Jaynes supposes, again with some evidence, that people would actually hear a voice inside their heads, rendering for them the collective imperatives which would keep them in line with one another. A kind of pre-conscious conscience, which Jaynes supposed might have been construed as the voice of the gods, or eventually the voice of God. It explains a lot of the cruel practices marked down in the Old Testament. Things we'd never do, like shun people or sleep with relatives, or murder our children. Really nasty stuff that we have laws for, and more humane reactions.
And I know Neal Stephenson riffs on this a lot, although his books start to read for me like too much time on computer adventure games, but his earlier stuff practically drips with Jaynesian thinking. So I can't be the only one out there who groks this idea, although the mainstream scientific community doesn't seem to find it very useful. Jaynes gets a kind of drive-by mention in Richard Dawkin's book, though.
So my buddy and I are trying to spin up pikk.com, against all sorts of improbability, since we don't have the multiple millions it takes for most Internet startups to even fail. But just like writing this, it seems worth the risk. OK, I'm not risking very much, and neither is pikk, but the upside is pretty huge. So, like they say over there at the oh-so-evil New York Lottery, "hey, you never know".
Except you do with the lottery, and only stupid people would play it. In fact, it's pretty much a stupid tax, which is the only justification I can think of for the government stooping that low. But then that makes our friendly gov. pretty much like my beloved credit card companies, which find my unemployment good reason to raise my rates.
Yeah, sure I know all the reasons, since I'm that much more a risk now. Except, in a Bayesian sense, I'm really not, and they're just gaming my damned system, and, well, there really oughta be a law!
Oh, I guess there is a law, and they're just getting their diggs in (sic) before it clicks into place. My timing always sucks. I'm selling my house just when the buyer can get all my value, part from the government stimulus, and part from the fact that the stimulus isn't going to anyone who doesn't already have a down-payment, so there are no first-time buyers, which is like a Catch-22 against me all over again. So the price is way below what it should be, and I get hit once as taxpayer and again as seller. And we never even had a bubble around here, from which the price might have fallen! No damned fair!
Don't get me wrong, I like the guy who's buying my house, and don't begrudge him a nickel, but I'm just saying.
The reason the credit card company is acting badly is because they already know all about me. I have a long long history, and I've never defaulted on any debts. But they're treating me as though I'm just another person without a down-payment who can be preyed on. It seems we've had a run on that kind of predatory behavior lately!
In essence, that's what Bayesian statistics is all about. It's even behind the medical community finally waking up that massive testing for breast cancer has almost no impact on survivability rates below a certain age. We'll be getting a lot more wake-up calls like that one, as we continue to try to disentangle greed from want and need. Come to think of it, my friendly non-reader also helped me to understand that right before the medical establishment figured it out. Some coincidence if you ask me!
I'm not about to make any hay out of that, although I got my title today "Breaking Water" from my early morning fear that my water heater was about to burst and flood my basement which in my house would be a real pain, since the "basement" is where I sit right now. It's a split level.
And a friend of mine (see sweetie, I'm backing off here) who's much more responsible than I am is getting hers replaced prophylactically, which makes me realize what a slouch I am. And I'm really hoping that it doesn't break before the house sells, since you know, the credit card companies are already on my case and all. Maybe they know me better than I do. Hmmm.
But for me breaking water reminds me of giving birth which reminds me of breaking out of cocoons. So I had to use it; the title I mean.
But what else are we to draw our writing from? You can claim to be all organized, but in the end, if you're doing quantum physical experiments, like that huge crowd of brainiacs over there at CERN, each one of you still has a whole personal narrative of strange, random and unaccountable happenings which made you what you are.
So what, you might say, there's no meaning to all that stuff? It's just random! Or maybe not. I guess it's what you make of it that counts.
Here's where the going gets rough again, for which I apologize in advance. But at least there won't be any math, so you can thank me for that. Although it loses me my very best readers. The trouble is this dog's just plain too old to learn new tricks. I left math behind when I turned down MIT and CalTech (I know, it's disgusting, but I have to name drop or I won't get anywhere at all) in favor of a shot at the ruling class at Yale, and well, as you can see the ruling class turned me down pretty flat and for damned good reason, so there you go again and again and again. But I keep taking my shots!
So yesterday, I took a stab at explaining "possibility waves," an analog of the probability waves which define all you can know about subatomic particles' momentum or position before they get detected.
Possibility waves are something I just invented out of thin air, so to speak, but you'll see that there is actually an ironical reason to do so. Since I did make the claim yesterday that things in motion relative to one another are actually quite impossible if you think about it. It's a paradoxical consequence of various Einsteinian discoveries, which is damned inconvenient. It's the paradox part which makes it so inconvenient.
And obviously nobody can get their head around things in motion relative to one another being impossible, since we all move around, and we're hardly impossible to one another, right? But we're only talking fringe science here, and not something you really have to worry about in real life.
In fringe science - you know the avant garde, the cutting edge - they talk about "many worlds" of all things, and even give that theory high marks compared to other theories. Many worlds even solves the problem for you and me, since for sure I don't have any idea what you're thinking right now.
But I'm not saying things are literally impossible, only that there might be something which pops them right out from physical nothingness, and that that something is also perfectly analogous to detection in the realm of what collapses probability waves into actual particles.
Now some people mistakenly think that there has to be some mind-controlled instrumental detection to make probability waves collapse into actual particles, but, yep you guessed it, my good non-friend puts the lie to that one too. It's the particles themselves, kind of rubbing off on one another which keep them each from filling up the entire cosmos with their conceptual wave-forms. Sort of like those cellular automata I was talking about the other day, and which also get passing reference in the above referenced article.
This makes it incredibly unlikely to the point of vanishing infinity that you'll find a particle emitted over here way way over there where you don't expect it. Of course the point of vanishing infinity is pretty hard to distinguish from the point of impossibility.
But, as you know these particles can't be distinguished from one another anyhow. They have no actual identity, unless you're an AI guy in in which case you might think maybe someday they might have. But that seems pretty unlikely to me, its having already been proven to my satisfaction that these subatomics are all anonymous. You have no way to know if the one you detected over here started its life, so to speak, way way over there. Except for the limiting effect of the speed of light, which would make it, well, impossible.
So you pretty much take it on faith, according to the known laws of the universe that there are limits to where a particle can be found, and that these limits are expressed by the probability waves which can be calculated to a pretty tight limit of precision. Tighter than just about anything else in physics, actually, such that if you could actually hurl something without interference you could almost hit an atom in Silicon Valley from here using that kind of aiming precision.
That's better than even GPS can do, but that would be another meaningless digression into smart bombs and things like the Chinese written form of the number ten. Sorry. It's probably just that two hands together equals ten, and crossing fingers, one from each hand like they do in China to show "ten", makes a pretty neat shorthand. No coincidence at all, see, except in the evolutionary sense of how come we don't have a different number, which is a pretty meaningless question if you understand digital math. (I still count on my fingers, in my head)
Anyhow, just as with perceived or detected particles, there has to be some ongoing exchange of force-carrying or force-defining (take your pikk) particles for these other particles to remain in proximity to one another - that's what force means after all; the glue to hold it all together - so there must be something in the conceptual realm before detection to keep the impossible and the possible from jumping apart altogether.
It's the thing which holds things which aren't physically connected actually together in one conceptual space. In our world, you can think of this like gravity, which keeps your feet on the ground and your head out of the clouds if you use it right. And it's actually pretty darned hard to use wrong, if you've ever tried flying, for instance. Which I for one would never do without an airplane.
Of course, of course, there's no such thing as physical connection. That's just a fiction we live with in the macro world when we tie things down, or nail them together or otherwise tangle them up in one another. Down at the level of the subatomic real world, it's all just probability clouds and forces.
And the same thing happens with things in motion relative to one another. They stay in touch with an exchange of particles too. The same forces, the same way, making it necessary to expend all the force - read energy expenditure - in the entire cosmos to move something up to the actual limiting speed of light. At which point you're back to a single something filling up the entire cosmos, pretty much like back at the Big Bang.
At which, this speed of light limit, well you become pretty much impossible to me, and the exchange just stops. Which is pretty much how these force carrying particles feel about one another. They're not even possible. Or to put it another way, this being yet another distinction without any difference, any one is the same as any other, and how would they know who's who or what's what?
I'm a brrroken hearted doicher (spelling is for pronunciation purposes)
vot's filled mit greef and shame
I tell you vot der trrruuble is
I doesn't know mine name.
Mine mudder, she had two leetle boys
Dey vas me and mine brudder
Ve looked so very much alike
No one knew vich from t'udder
Vell, one of us got dead
Ya, mein herr, dat is so
But vedder Hans or Yocub (Jacob)
Mine mudder, she don't know
And so I am in trrrubbles;
I can't get dru mine head
Vedder I'm Hans vot's living
Or Yocub vot is dead.
Silly silly. I don't mean that the particles do any knowing. Just that you can't have any two of them in relative motion greater than the speed of light, but since again by definition they do actually move at the speed of light because what else could light speed be if not the speed of a photon. The trick being that the photon is massless in motion, and so no laws get broken. I'm just tossing terms around here, so give me a break if you want to get all technical about what has mass and what doesn't. The principle still holds.
So here comes my punch line, and you're really not going to like it, but what do you suppose the thing is which pulls these subatomics out from impossibility to possibility. It's perfectly analogous remember, to "detection" in the realm of the physical. But here we're in the realm of the pre-detected conceptual. Here we're in the realm of the probability waves which can't be detected without collapsing them, just like Shroedinger's cat is neither alive nor dead until you take a look.
Guess what, hey, it's emotion. You can call it something else if you want, but emotion works just fine. There has to be a wanting for this impossibility to become quite possible. Notice the passive voice. I'm not saying who or what does the wanting. I'm just saying that it makes as nice a way to define connections among conceptual things as force does for connections among perceptual things.
There doesn't have to be any kind of knower, or thinker or feeler, any more than there has to be a detector for probability waves to get defined. I think some people once tried to define these conceptual particles as a species of quasi-particle or phonon, but they were from Italy and so no-one paid them any attention. You know those Italians, never taking no for an answer and so they just go on and do their own thing whether or not anyone's paying any attention.
Anyhow, you're allowed to carry information faster than the speed of light, which is what happens with quantum implication where you can know something over there just by detecting something over here, so long as they belong together by some kind of law, these two things. Well, calling them two in the first place is a kind of splitting hairs, but you get the idea.
So, that's about it, folks. You get pulled out of nothingness if you're wanted and otherwise you're just impossible. In physical terms, you won't be wanted unless and until some other particle goes missing, which falls right out from some principle about conservation of mass and energy. But in fact things are being created and destroyed all the livelong day, although you'd never know it, since at that scale these "things" are really neither here nor there.
So now go to pikk.com and play around. We have no idea if anybody willl like it; if it's wanted in the cloud. But hey, you never know, it might be. And if it is then all sorts of people will get confused by what I'm writing. And maybe, just maybe, one of them will actually get what I'm talking about and tell me where to get off.
Of course, I'm not getting off, since you can't go around crying wolf all the time and expect people to believe you the next time. No, I'll keep trying until someone sees the obvious: That no more can the Church fairly rely on Science (I hate using Caps like that, but I'm a conventional guy, and it seems to fit) to pin down the point of life's conception than can Science get away with calling religionists a bunch of fools who take things on faith when they don't need to. Since as everybody knows, the scientists all take what they know on faith too, until their probability waves collapse and things get reconfigured just like good ol' doubting Thomas Kuhn said they always would.
Knowing just keeps on going and going, and just won't stop. Well, I'll stop there then. 'til next time.
