Dear Thomas Friedman

I have long admired your intelligence, and your ability to find new takes on hackneyed reality. I'm not so sure about your take on AI.

Language is the stuff of intelligence, and the artificial sort of intelligence works off that. But human intelligence - as is, incidentally, encoded in the Chinese language - also includes emotion at our center. Heart and mind are combined in a single word in Chinese. 

I was privileged recently to observe a lively discussion, led by educational policy leaders, about AI in education. After a fairly brief formal presentation, when questions were invited, I was gratified to hear each of the Chinese international students point out that emotion is what's lacking in AI. They seemed determined to make that point. It was well taken, and taken well.

Your phases of history are still progressions along a continuum which has already broken. As did most of us, you missed the happening. Humans have become so impressed with ourselves that we never did pause to examine our cosmologies after the Bomb, capital A. The Manhattan Project was perched on a World War; one in which we were desperate to keep at bay what by now has almost fully engulfed us. Totalitarianism is a failure of feeling, and it can't be eradicated by physical means. 

AI represents the totalization of language, just as physical infrastructure now represents the totalization of our planet. It can be very difficult to know anything beyond those facts. Totalitarians are humans who have made themselves inhuman. They have no understanding. Their expression comes from a very immature place. The tragedy of Hitler's rage returns as Trump's farcical buffoonery. A Marxian quip on history. But we have banished all teleology now, and good riddance. We shall never understand the All. And History has no more discernible direction than life as a whole does.

By commission and omission we have been killing more actual people before their time than ever before. Those at the top seem to celebrate this still, as well they might. When no meaning is made from history, only power remains. Power, as we all know, is addictive.

What we failed to notice even after we proved that we could in fact and in deed enact the reality of the mass/energy equation, was that our emotions had been dulled by those phases you recite in your piece in the New York Times: With your second phase, the Age of Information as triggered by the printing press, we had already introduced Artificial Intelligence. We could be emotively moved by a thing, though mostly because we imagined a person behind it, or sometimes God. It was the printed Bible which blew it for the makers of God's artificial meaning. 

Turing, Shannon, and all who work in AI, never understood that there is no information without its comprehension. It's otherwise only noise. We have equated information with its methods for decoding, and not with its meaning, and then we get sucked up into our own tuba. That is idiocy no different from a monkey playing piano.

Books hold no more emotion than does a brick. AI holds an equivalent amount. As with a furry robot, we project our feelings upon a void. 

We express our emotions facially and physically, though there is no one physical medium to make or convey the expression directly. It has to be understood, but in a way quite different from our understanding of the mass/energy equation. While a machine may learn to call out a smile, a machine will never feel it. Among living creatures, there is always reciprocal feeling. To smile at a machine is to give away far too much of yourself, as many of us have learned the hard way.

Our investigations into quantum physics take no emotion into account, despite the paradox of mind/body resolution. We thought we'd resolved the cartesian divide, when all we really did was to eliminate any possibility that mind is apart from matter. Maybe Penrose is taking a look, though he seems still to be looking for mechanism. A quantum aspect of the brain? How about mind as an aspect of reality from the beginning and to the end? Quantum reality has always been an aspect of mind.

Well, Penrose is beyond me, though I doubt it's all that complicated. If one simply supposes, as I do, that emotions are always simultaneous, which means that physical force is absent in if not from the emotion, then there is no medium through which they propagate, apart from all media. We've done away with ether in the physical world, but what we have yet to do, because it can't be done, is to do away with conceptual reality altogether. Conceptual reality allows for void, which perceptual reality abhors. Perceptual reality is understood conceptually.

Part of conceptual reality is the quite bizarre existence of DNA molecules. Our imagination fails to find meaning in their random appearance; and then again we fail to find meaning in evolution over time according to random mutation. Or rather, we posit that meaning itself is made from random connections, which is certainly true. There is vanishingly little about my life that I can attribute to my own choices. In that I might differ ever so slightly from those still jacked by the Manhattan Project. 

We flunked that test - the atomic test - when we let the hard-heads take charge. They dropped two bombs and then some, based on scant understanding. We've been frozen in time ever since. Now the digital adepts believe absolutely that they can make reality; and banish random from reality.

How ironic that early exponent of Geek Rapture Eliezer Yudkowski is now calling the technology evil and deadly. Along with Kurtzweil, he was celebrating the possibility of a cosmos where "intelligence" crowds out all else, imaging that he could perpetuate his disembodied person. Personality? Emotions are always bereft without a body.

Books disempower as much as they empower. Most of us cannot be either authors or authorities, and so we adapt the thoughts of others. Tools (your first phase, Mr. Friedman) had already channeled our actions according to some masters' wishes. Books carry on the same tradition. 

Recognition always precedes understanding. Cognition is always involved, while recognition engages emotion. Emotion triggers physical motion in living beings. Neurological studies demonstrate that decisions are not cognitive; they get made before we're conscious of them. They must be emotive, since cognition is too slow. Trust or fear, fight or flight. These are emotive decisions. Understanding is settled cognition, awaiting only upset. 

Time can only be defined metaphysically, as recognition followed by comprehension. There is no physical definition for time. Physical time surfaces in the same way that trust might arise from a smile. 'This' prior to 'that' has no meaning without emotion. Meaning is comprehension with consequence. One emotively knows what to do.

Now in the face of digital AI, which can feel no recognition though it might easily name you, we require the emotional maturity which we lacked upon the triggering of atomic explosions. As yet, we are not responsible adults. God knows how to organize ourselves globally anymore. 

We don't need leaders and followers so much as we need community. Community is always only local. Digital, as we deploy it now, disempowers community and creates actual physical gods. These, each and all, must be dethroned. Here's a paradox for you: One is Only Authentic when One Plays a Role (Yudkowsky joke)

God has no role. God is Love.

I mean this quite literally, of course. 

The interesting thing about AI is that it has one incredibly singular use. That would be to detect other AI. When declarations are found to be derivative and not initiated by the person who made them, which is trivial to discover by AI, then the person who made them is deploying AI. Thus a C-level spokesman for a corporation says only what he's been self-programmed to say. Emotion has been expunged; an activity long honored in the feminine fearing My Fair Lady West. Which hardly lets China off the hook.

A person with fellow feeling, which is to say a person who is a member of the same community he addresses, cannot be an AI, but can easily be exposed by AI as human. We'll waste a lot of energy and therefore money getting around to universalizing moral behavior, but it still happens willy-nilly. Remember the tobacco executive breaking down in tears?  He had been sorely tested. 

Germs that cause illness have always been a part of life. Who among us wants to relinquish our intelligent fencing off of germs? Recently, the global body politic has been infested by a kind of virus. I use the term advisedly, since viruses are generally found to be not-quite alive. But so deep has our mistrust of government and public institutions generally become that we have now elected a majority in government which has no fellow feeling at all. They work only for themselves.

Will it really take AI to call them out? Or is it that each of us has already been infected so that we think only of ourselves as well. One can't legislate morality. That's why we have elections. But we've all been trained now to look out only for number one. Digitally, that makes each of us a zero. When it's a contest and not a community initiative, getting ahead is immoral. Never mind the economic dogma. 

Anyhow, the really fun thing about quantum physics is that you can't remove mind from the equations. We already almost knew that when the first A-bomb was exploded. We knew that relativity, in addition to establishing the speed of light as a constant, also erased the possibility for any actual simultaneity. Emotion is always simultaneous. Bell theorem. And so we discover and name endless so-called particles without even pausing to wonder that they each may be a reflection of the strange community of strong agreement that is science. 

Alas, even that community has lost its trust. All research is motivated research when we stop stopping to smell the roses. At its most basic science was meant to delineate that knowledge upon which we must all agree. Their sin has also been a totalization of knowledge. 

There are just two books which I sorta kinda liked which I could never finish. I know it's a literary sin to say so, but one is Joyce's Ulysses and the other is The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Now my mind has become too weak, but frankly Joyce the man and his oddity slipped through his lyrics, and, well, Gaddis just cuts too close for my comfort. 

Yes indeed it is our craving recognition which is killing us. Along with our hiding of our basic loving nature. The rest is all outcome.

Review of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century's only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup

Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kastrup is brilliant, and this book provides an excellent exposition of the metaphysics behind his cosmology. His theorizing usefully dispatches several of the nuttier directions that dogmatic physicalism has taken. Along the way, he provides an excellent elucidation of what information theory is and what it isn't. I've been craving that since forever. Not to mention putting A.I. in its place.

The trouble is that although he claims Occam’s Razor as his guide, he introduces still more needless complexity with his flip-flop from physical to mental; thinking that he’s reduced complexity by claiming that all of reality might reduce to a single principle, which is mind.

I have more than a little sympathy for this maneuver, but in fact Kastrup glides past a more basic distinction between perceptual and conceptual reality. By replacing the substance of physics with mind-only, Analytic Idealism actually re-enters woo-woo mysticism rather than to escape from it.
In the end, Kastrup has conducted a sleight-of-mind 'against' himself; he fools himself in almost the way that he accuses physicalist scientists of doing.

Kastrup is right about many things, and his insights have enabled him to challenge accurately many of the stranger cosmologies of his physicalist colleagues. But that doesn't quite stop him from his own weird conclusions.

In brief, Kastrup substitutes an inside/outside duality for the now antique mind/body duality for which Descartes generally receives credit or blame, depending on one's disposition. Mind/body maps to concept/percept while inside/outside creates an entirely unnecessary complication about that aspect of mind which cannot consistently be claimed to be inside, and that which is demonstrably outside.

Kastrup’s usage of his newer term "alter" to describe our individuated interiority is useful, though not meaningfully different from Descartes' usage for mind once inside and outside are introduced.
In Kastrup’s “analytic idealism,” alters exist in a field of “subjectivity,” built on the analog of a possible grand unification theory for quantum electrodynamics, where there would be a single quantum field upon which all that we perceive as physical has no separate ‘substance’ from the field. A wave is an action on water and is nothing without the water. It has no substance, and is the very meaning of abstraction once we call it into being. Abstraction is a conceptual maneuver whereby concepts are taken from physical reality.

No actual circle exists in nature, any more than numbers can be imposed there without some degree of abstraction. But the concept of the circle and the power of numbers to help with prediction and therefore with understanding are both undeniable. Sure, a circle is the stuff of mind, while we may perceive only approximations. It’s the matching of percept with concept which composes understanding.

While there may not be any actual and perfect circles in what I would still call the physical world – the world of substance – there are plenty of structures whose description is equivalent to their actuality. Molecules, for instance, whose structure is identical from one to the next such that each is individually indistinguishable. But they do have a describable form.

‘Field of subjectivity’ is only meaninglessly different from ‘field of objectivity.’ The meaningful distinction is between conceptual and perceptual reality.

As do many who descend from the world of information technology, and in his case also the kind of Quantum Electro Dynamics which energizes CERN, where he once worked, Kastrup uses the inaccessibility of personal thoughts to others/outsiders – the secrecy of our thoughts and feelings – to prove his inside/outside distinction.

He then goes further, and for me beyond the pale, to replace the sensible apprehension of the boundary of skin with a fairly, to me, specious metaphor of a “dashboard.” In many ways - and this is surprising to me - Kastrup is himself stuck in the Western set of imperatives as much as are those physicalists that he ridicules.

"Alter" is his metaphor for how individuals - chips off the cosmic mind of analytic idealism - are individuated. We are likened to the seemingly separate selves of those who suffer dissociative identity disorder, or what used to be called multiple personality disorder.

One of the weirdest of Kastrup's moves is that he posits a reality apart from perceptual reality (as conventionally considered) that is more real than what we perceive. I suppose the metaphor is that the physically real is composed of unperceivable parts; subatomic particles, in a vast emptiness, say, pervaded only by a quantum field.

According to him, those “particles” are actually eddies in the subjective field without substance of their own. Quantum fields may be more both/and than he thinks though, which might even scotch the dream of completion for a Grand Universal Theorem. Not every literate human culture is quite so obsessed as the West is with history as unitary progress toward completion.

He attributes our misperception - our inability to perceive actual reality - to the perceiver inside our perceptual apparatus having only a dashboard by means of which to perceive. We can’t see reality in itself. Well, of course we can’t. Reality as we perceive it is also composed with concepts, which are mind extended into matter.

But Kastrup then goes so far as to say that the things of our lived experience from behind our dashboard wouldn't exist without someone there to perceive them. They exist in mind and not in matter, remember. He thus reintroduces the gracefully moribund mind inside the mind corroborating sensory inputs. The mind behind the inner screen is a free floating "alter." A mind inside a mind in infinite regress.

Abstraction is real. The physical is real. One is conceptual while the other is perceptual. Putting both on the same side in a universal field of subjectivity is where Kastrup stops following the principle of Occam’s razor. Analytic idealism is far more complex than a metaphysics allowing for both conceptual and perceptual reality; both mind and physical stuff.

In my usage, the only meaning for interiority is that there must be a physical divider for perception to occur. That's not the same as to say that there must be a perceiver "inside" or behind some screen. There is no real locus for the self inside of mind. Kastrup’s replacement of skin with screen, and mind with alter recreates a superfluous and unnecessary confusion.

Perception happens to a body as divided from the rest of reality by a skin and its organic involutions which form our perceptual organs. The mind of the perceiver has never been confined there, inside our skin nor certainly inside our skull. Kastrup and I seem to agree on this.

As do most scientific thinkers, Kastrup - who talks about emotion more than most scientists do, and certainly more than most devoted materialists ever would - still relegates emotion to being epiphenomenal to consciousness. He often conflates thoughts and feelings as things without extension. He claims to deproblematize the puzzle of consciousness by positing that mind is the whole shebang. So, no problem with consciousness being transformed or transmuted out of physical stuff!

But really, consciousness is just the apprehension of both conceptual and perceptual reality. A lizard knows a hawk when it sees one. Evolution adds the quickening of emotion to the apprehension of a hawk to short-cut conscious thought.

At some level higher than a lizard, something like re-cognition occurs, bringing choice along with reaction.

I confess that I don’t see the need for the usage of “qualia” that many philosophers see. Just because colors and flavors don’t exist in the thing itself, the fact that such so-called qualia are almost universally shared should be sufficient to put them on the perceptual side of things. Niggling about the marginal cases seems not much different from mistaking distortions for wholesale misperception, as Kastrup tends to do.

Those perceptions assigned to the category of qualia are rather more complex than simpler perceptions. I would say that the proof for their objective existence is simply that we can talk about them. And animals respond to qualia much further “down” the line.

I would say that concepts exist outside the individual mind, and that, therefore, emotion is fundamental and even primordial. Indeed, mind cannot be described without emotion. Any mind is as much about emotion as it is about cognition. I’ll even grant that Kastrup might agree with this.

But emotion requires at least as much definition as physical forces do. Here’s my radical maneuver: emotion is both real and as outside of mind as perception is.

In my usage, emotion is rather more like the false definition of gravity as a simultaneous force acting at a distance. That sort of physical simultaneity is better defined by a shared 'curvature' of space-time, as Kastrup urges us to understand. Emotion is defined by actual simultaneity without any physical force involved. Emotion is engendered by conceptual/mental and not perceptual/material movement. Emotion involves no physical force but is engendered by the matching of concept with percept, the apprehension of new concepts or the transformation of old ones. It is not a process which can exist within an asocial individual. For humans, emotion takes as much learning as does cognition. But unlike perception, emotion is felt directly by the mind. If mind is outside the skin, then so is emotion.

And furthermore, morality is no more a part of Kastrup's purportedly comprehensive analytical idealism than it is a part of physicalism. Kastrup’s ethics might be something like “we have to keep contributing to the cosmic mind.” In the same way, a physicalist might use the imperative to understand as the highest purpose for humanity.

But in fact, conscience is more a matter of fellow feeling. For humans, the recognition which engages conscience is enhanced by the highly individualized nature of faces and voices and stature and skin coloring.

Being me is still about outside and inside, and a bat or a human only knows what it's like to be me from the outside. And yes, I mean that I don't know what it's like to be me from the inside. I can't know myself without you who help me to know myself. Cogito ergo sum is nonsense, as we all know. My good friends know my thoughts much better than I do. That sometimes hurts. Don’t we hide from ourselves as much as we have secrets? And having secrets doesn’t indicate a thing about the privacy or insidishness of our mind. Sure, we put some of our thoughts behind a blind, and sometimes we blind even ourselves.

To repeat myself again and again, I make my claim for his fooling himself in part because of his strange - to me - reliance on the hackneyed usage of an instrument panel to describe our distance from understanding or even describing the world as it fully is. Like a computer screen and its icons as related to the workings of the actual computer, another of the metaphors he uses, we only know what is presented. Trying to interact directly with the inners of a computer could only get in the way of its usefulness. This "interface" between inside and outside is identical, I would say, to the dualistic distinction between mind and body, and equally useless as an explainer of anything. 

His screen metaphor confuses our perpetual shortfall from full understanding with a perceptual shortfall from full seeing. Indeed, I don't believe any adequate description for 'understanding' exists in his arguments.

Sure, there is more complexity to the world than what we can know, but almost none of this regards what most of us will continue to call the physical world. The contours of the physical world are as real as the conceptual relations beneath or behind or within those contours. Those interior contours of reality are, yes, mental, but as with the surfaces, they are the same to every understander. Instruments on a panel may refine our perception, but they almost never change its outlines.

The complexity we miss from behind our screens is really mostly social and intellectual. The sort of complexity that it's always hard to understand without actual engagement. It is indeed our physicalist researches which have, by way of measurement and calculation, enabled us to refine our understanding according to the materialist scientific method, to the extreme that we have.

Of course, there is complexity to the physical world which we cannot see directly. But we can certainly understand it by way of instruments connected to a dashboard.

Sure, we are limited in our perceptions by the fact that we don't see all frequencies of light, nor hear all frequencies of sound, nor taste all that might be tasted. But when we do extend our perceptions by use of those instruments which compose his metaphor, we have no reason to expect that the invisible - meaning not fully perceived - world would be drastically altered [sic] from that part of it which we do perceive.

And to perceive is not to understand. Instrumentation and numbers enable a deepening of our understanding of the physical world. There is no reason to suspect that the physical world is substantially different or other from what we perceive directly. And you will never know me by my guts. Do we see through or with a telescope? Our instruments allow us to make better predictions. The best part is that quantum physics puts a stop to our dreams of complete understanding. We cannot and do not stand outside the real world.

Understanding is a match between conceptual and perceptual reality. As regards the material world, that would involve the ability to predict behaviors based on an understanding of properties. Emotional reality depends, differently, on mutuality and simultaneity of a sort which can't exist in the physical world.

For a conscious agent having free will, emotion impels both physical motion away or against or toward at the same time that it instigates a mental quest for understanding. It is telling that Kastrup is involved in developing hardware for Artificial Intelligence. But, mirabile dictu, he is not so mystified by it as are those whose most precious dream is to get fabulously rich and powerful off it. Kastrup’s explanation about what AI is and isn’t is just as good and clear as is his explication of information theory.

If mind is all, then there can be no fundamental difference in mind depending on its substrate. Kastrup avoids the trap that the brain is the house of the mind. It's not just that AI has a difficult time with emotion. It's that the on/off nature of silicon logic gates divides such quasi-thinking from the extension that living mind has to the universe all around. Kastrup gives us this and then takes it away with his dashboard.

As the mind researcher Riccardo Manzotti urges us to understand, our memories are not contained in our brains, which instead loops our actual perceptions of actual things. Our memories are all around us. Visit a former habitation if you can find one that hasn't changed too drastically, and feel the memories rush in. Our brain generalizes from multiple perceptions to form concepts. Those concepts are also out in the world. We prove this easily by the languages which create our social being. We share conceptual reality.

It is specifically this conceptual reality which mind "imposes" on what we perceive. We organize the world into lions and tigers and bears, never mind that these are not always so distinct as our mind would like them. Those objects still exist if conceived differently by others. Sure, there is some raw stuff not yet conceptualized. But the reality that we've already conceived is as real as real can be, despite Kastrup's protestation that evolution requires distortion of our perception. Distortion does not make the world that we perceive unreal. Distortion is correctable.

Emotion is as real and external to us as is measurable and detectable physical reality. Indeed, the reality of emotion falls out naturally from Kastrup’s definition of reality as cognition. Mind before matter, as it were. And emotion before cognition.

I do think his discarding of matter complicates rather than simplifies his cosmology. Of course, matter is something, but it is not everything. Neither is mind. Contrasting with his usage for the parsimony of Occam's razor, I would say that to maintain the yin/yang of both mind and matter is the parsimonious course. Get rid of static outside/inside. Reality moves.

As illustration, consider that evolution has a direction which is, in rough terms, opposite to the direction of physical entropy. Indeed I would say that the physical enactment of time's arrow is defined by that interplay, and I would call the direction of life's evolution something akin to love or eros (for the materialists).

On-line, Kastrup has described his own uncanny experiences, which are nothing other than meaningful coincidence, which probably can't be proven or disproven, since it's only meaningful to those who find it so. But Kastrup has described his openness to such happenings after being convinced by his own analytic idealism. Likewise, evolution depends on random mutations - on happenstance - which is no longer so meaningless when taken in the aggregate.

Apart from the metering of entropy, material science has no explanation for time's arrow. And yet for all his analytical idealism, Kastrup still treats time in the way that historians do, and supposes a before and after for everything. Having experienced death a few times, I have the revelation that before and after collapse into a lifetime fully present. Kind of the way the Big Bang might or should be conceptualized, instead of trying to measure its distance from now across time. I would love to disabuse Kastrup of his fear of death.

Love is indeed the hardest guide for humans to follow, though most of us know it easily enough in opposition to, say, hate. From there, everything about morality can be built, no man-made dictates from a man-made God required. However, why not call the non-alterial [!!] all of analytic idealism - the cosmic mentation, if you will - why not call that God? What else to call cosmic mind? It does remain other to us, and always shall be. And God won’t be conscious until or unless there’s another cosmos. Ha! Bernardo and I agree!

Is it any wonder now that the world is in the thrall of conscienceless individuals? These are people without fellow-feeling, sometimes believing that they are following God’s dictates, and sometimes obeying the false consciousness of transactional materialism.


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It's About Time

I said I'd stop this. I'm old and I'm tired much of the time. I'm always in pain. Not debilitating pain, but the kind that makes you not want to kneel, lift, climb and so forth in anticipation of how it will feel. I exhibit many of the signs which most people refer to as lazy. I'm certainly lazy in my writing. 

Way back when I hit on what I thought then, and still think now, was an important reconfiguration of how we conceive of understanding, I was certain that the upshot was so obvious that all I had to do was prime the pump and then some more qualified individual would take it over. 

Indeed that pattern has been my conviction about how things work. If Einstein hadn't come upon his theories of relativity, someone surely would have. After all, these are matters of truth - or what I prefer to call truing - where, over time, all of us must agree. I don't tend to credit genius as much as an exuberant first to the finish line. Perhaps you might say that so-called "genius" is a grant from the Fates, which it surely is. But a winner does require skill and training to luck into a win. 

A lazy ass like me can almost never be a winner. Well, I'd say, based on work I've done and jobs I've held that I am not a lazy soul. But I sure am shy of winning. 

Lately, I've been making the unsupported claim that time is a conspiracy of life. Then last night I watched a fairly pedestrian biographical look at Einstein, on Netflix, and realized that I'd better do a bit more work here. 

Among the quips tossed off by the actor playing Einstein - all credited as the actual words of Einstein in writing or in speech - was one about time. Something like "no future to look forward to and no past to regret". I find this online: "The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Close enough. 

But Einstein's theories only showed that time would slow according to relative velocity of motion, I don't think he ever demonstrated, in his thought experiments, that time could reverse. Subsequent physical models have required time reversal - a kind of reverse causality - as a feature of our cosmos at its extremes.

So it remains unchallenged and therefore unexamined that on the macro scale, causality defines the material cosmos. That's the basis for how the scientific method sets out to understand the way things are structured, and the way that they work. Prediction is the thing, and it should, ideally, be based on a schematic model; a theory. I understand something, scientifically, when my predictions are true, to within some acceptable margin for error.

In a way, I would like to broaden the meaning of "understanding" to accommodate what most of us mean when we say "understood." We live in a time of radical mistrust of authority, which must relate at least a bit to the complexity of elite theorizing. I think that the cosmos may be rather simpler than the experts let on. I continue to believe that this reconceptualization will be good for us all. And by "good" I don't refer to the good life, but rather to life that is good for everyone. A community of man.

But most of us who read at all know that there is this pesky matter of quantum theory, also triggered by Einstein, which prevents, in principle, knowledge about causality beyond certain limits for perception. Indeed, most accepted versions of the theory have it that the investigating subject cannot be removed from the observations; that any attempt to measure - to pin down - what is happening has an impact on the results. Objectivity is dashed beyond a certain scale. 

Now way back when in my youth I was troubled by the twin paradox in classical relativistic physics. In my thought experiment I had to reduce the cosmos to just two elements, each of which would leave the cosmos of the other were they moving relative to each other.

I understand that the paradox has been rubbed out by math, but however those formulations are made, they don't resolve the thought experiment for me. It's trivial to realize that objects in relative motion eventually fall out of touch. But for me, the trouble was that 'out of touch' meant impossible of relation in the direction of what I consider to be 'multiple cosmos solutions' to knotty physics problems. Talk about a violation of the principle of Occam's Razor!

In a material world, there are only forces and objects, and all relative motion must be accountable to those. I surmised that there must be a conceptual relation apart from forces and objects, without which there couldn't be a singular cosmos at all. 

Without forces, these relations are static; they form concepts or ideas. When they change they do so according to the quasi force of emotion. But emotion is an apprehension rather than an imposition. Still, it is real. The shape of a crystal is real and realized over time. It seems to tend in the direction of some idealized geometric form. 

We humans are used to distinguishing natural forms from artifice on the basis of shapes which tend toward ideals, discounting the spirals of the nautilus for their very complexity; their no two the same quality. 

Now here's where my laziness kicks in. I simply don't know what the consensus is about apprehensions of intelligence. I know that the creationists are crazy, but I don't know that the evolutionists care enough about how unlikely evolved "natural" forms are. I differ with their usage for random.

Over enough time, the random processes of evolution begin to look similar to crystallization; as though revealing a kind of hidden structure - the manifestation of an atomic structure "underneath." Might we ourselves not be conceptualized as the manifestation of some latent structure of the cosmos? Something only manifest over time. 

I would maintain that time is directional in either the materialist or the evolutionary sense only as a conspiracy of the whole. Furthermore, there is no purely physical resolution to the conundrum of time's arrow. 

Here I make my lazy leap, that, therefore, time's arrow is a function of the evolution of life. And the attention given for the measurement of quanta, whose existence in a particular locus in space-time as required by an act of measurement, is demonstrably absent prior to the measurement being taken. The "thing" measured demonstrably exists in a measurable, or at least estimable, cloud of probability. There are waveforms which pervade the cosmos, until they are collapsed by impingement.

My own impetus for this kind of thinking was to resolve - or to "understand" - the many "meaningful coincidences" that I, and I suppose all of us, experience in life. It seemed too lazy even for lazy me to attribute these to God. There had to be something missing in our treatment of random. In all things, I took some clues from China.

Probability relates to chance which relates to random. It is my contention that emotion is what turns the attention of the measurer to the object being measured; passionless though those operators of the perceptual apparatuses may seem. I am redefining usage for emotion to where it is never absent and is never just some quality of the higher forms of life. Emotion is apart from, but essential to, the materialistic outlook.

If there is consternation about the weirdness of quantum mechanics, it seems to focus on the absurdity that conscious measurement determines the disposition of reality. Or call it conscious attention. I understand there may be argumentation about whether, and if so how, consciousness might be an aspect of everything. A kind of panconsciousness. Some call it panspiritualism, panpsychism or maybe "analytical idealism" the way that Bernardo Kastrup does.

I'm trying to make this all much simpler. In my understanding (haha!) it is emotion which is pervasive. And emotion is not something that is possessed, any more than forces are. Emotion is a relation, as is force, and it constitutes the apprehension of forceless motion; meaning, really, that there is a correspondence between the motion happening "over there" and something "familiar" toward or away from which it is moving. 

I don't wish to imply that there has to be an apprehender. I'm only trying to distinguish from perception, which is material implication. Emotional implication is what entangles the twins of the twin paradox. A sense of potential oneness. This is also the superposition familiar to researchers in quantum computing. The connection of distant particles, by definition as I'm suggesting, is an emotional connection. 

At the mega scale at which we operate, all that means is that the particles are connected by a "knower." There is no other way to define both the separation and the oneness. Knowledge then consists in a correspondence between models in the mind and models in reality beyond the mind. The match is an emotional match. Reality can't be defined without it. I guess that I must confess that I also don't think "mind" implies a knower. Mind is a distributed quality of matter when that matter takes a form. Mind conceives, while force is required for perception. And exchange of percepts or what we sometimes call gauge bosons (I think).

Or in other other words, the search for strange forces or time un-bound exchange of information is fruitless, and shall forever be. Information theory is strangely agnostic about means of transmission, which makes information seem disembodied, which, of course, it can never be in reality. There has to be something to count; whether "packets" of zeros and ones as transmitted by wifi or ethernet or light pulses or whatever. The information is sent and it is received. In the case of superposition, there is no transmission at all. There is a definition for identity which is far more extensible than the resolution of the twin paradox ever need be.

Well, I guess and suppose that this is all about as clear as mud to you, though it is as limpid as ether to me. I remain convinced that this shift to understanding can and will make a difference, and that it is as inevitable as Einstein's part I. Part II is where we neutralize the power of the bomb because we realize that it is only love which is holding it all together. No matter what the Right Wingers tell themselves, truth does matter. A lot. 

Let's start telling it.

Bernardo Kastrup Explains Everything

Well, I feel mildy excited, and greatly relieved today, I don't quite understand how my son-in-law decided that Kastrup's thinking reminded him of mine, since I don't have too many actual memories of exposing my thinking to him or to anyone else. I only ever get so far. But then I'm on the slope down now toward the singularity of collapse into the enternal present of death. Memory, in other words, ain't what it used to be. Anyhow, thanks to him that I watched (listened to) the YouTube hereinbelow.

So I watched it, and was utterly amazed at Kastrup's lucidity, and at the completeness of his philosophy (be forewarned, it's two hours long):

His view of consciousness seems to conform to mine, as well as his placement of narration on the "inside" of our own strangely individuated whorls in the continuum of universal "mentation." He uses the term "alter", derived from dissociative identity disorder in the field of psychology, to describe the (pathological?) sequestration of a self from cosmic mentation. 

I am left with two or three basic questions that I have yet to find an answer to:

• I haven't found his opinion yet on whether artificial consciousness is possible. Since he lists that field as one of those in which he holds degrees, I think the answer might be consequential. And does he really find the film Inception to be anything but trash?
• While he acknowledges the importance of emotion to mentation, at least implicitly, I wonder if he's done any theoretical work on emotion.
• While the non-dualism of his idealism manages to retain the validity of the empirical scientific method, I haven't seen where he actually defines mentation in any way to cosmically differentiate it from whatever are the processes of materialism. He erases an unnecessary boundary, sure, but doesn't quite, to my satisfaction, answer the "OK then, so what?" question. He seems still to imply a before and after and is therefore stuck with chicken/egg.
• Somewhere in this YouTube, he says something that I also have said; that the mutations on which evolutionary theory depends are not random (not accidents), and I want more on that. He indicates somewhere in this YouTube that the closely watched mutations across the past couple of years somehow demonstrate this. How? Fate and subconscious; same thing. Duh.

I think that I want to suggest that he doesn't really follow his own rules of maximum parsimony, derived from Occam's Razor. Yes, physical descriptions of reality will always be incomplete, but not only because of leaving out any adequate function for consciousness. His version of idealism suffers the same limitation without his supplying some more fulsome definition for what mentation actually is.

Sadly for me, there is no way even to attempt to contact the fellow. I'd have to stalk him to conferences, or get him somehow to read my own writing. It feels like the identical problem of getting to the bottom of almost anything these days as you slog past the money and the motivations of the publishing organs to sort out if you're seeing what you want or need to see or simply living out what the powers-that-be want for you to see. That is especially true when a guy like Kastrup relegates me to the need to abide by his "social media policy." Social media?? Are you freaking kidding me?

Look, I am nowhere near as intelligent as Bernardo, nor certainly as educated. I have near zero ability to cite philosophers or to name theories from physics. I am a good troubleshooter and problem-solver in all fields, which include physics and philosophy, but is mostly limited to machines and constructs, including computer hardware and software and especially networks. And I know how to read classical Chinese poetry, which is not exactly nothing, though it may come close. 

If I am right about Bernardo Kastrup, then he may be one among bejillions who might have the capacity intelligently to comment on the following propositions. I hold their truth to be self-evident, and once deployed to offer a far more parsimonious approach to understanding than Kastrup's unitary Idealism.

• There is no meaning to the question of which comes first, mind or matter.
• That is partly because of the impossibility to define time in purely physical terms, but more fundamentally because our linguistic usages prevent us from a coherent understanding of narration, which is the basis for time and causality in the context of universal mentation.
• Concepts are the primitives for the ideas of Kastrup's idealism. He calls genes something like 'physical information' in implicit accord with his insistence that there is nothing to be gained by distinguishing mentation from physical processes.
• Just as do the so-called "particles" of the standard model of physics, the component parts of static concepts move apart or together, but without the necessity for force to do so. Force in the physical sense is a function of the exchange of "smaller" particles. Movement without force is emotion. This cannot occur in a unitary material world, nor in a unitary ideal world. It's always both/and.
• Emotional connections, which are not mediated by forces, define simultaneity. (Physical simultaneity is meaningless by analogy to the precise position or mass of a "particle". Waveform collapse defines the boundary.)
• Particles are realized by implication with other particles and ultimately with consciousness as that which collapses them from conceptual waveforms.
• At least two "alters" are required for emotional impingement and for simultaneity. This is the only cosmic meaning of "contact." Ditto physics, where contact is not possible. Entanglement is not yet contact. (Kastrup's description of Quantum Entanglement - Dick and Jane simultaneously - is as incoherent as most descriptions of the Twin Paradox. He doesn't provide any definitions for such basics as what simultaneity means, or distance, or how consciousness at either end is connected)

In brief, there is no irony about Bernardo Kastrup's cosmology/philosophy. Irony is the fundament of everything, or as I responded to my son-in-law in my skepticism before starting my witness of the YouTube:

I read thousands-page books, while two hour YouTubes may be a challenge, though I’m intrigued. At the outset I will impudently say that the fellow seems too utter in his idealistic philosophy. My own view tends more toward irony - both/and. Once time is idealized, before and after, like chickens and eggs, collapse into the same eternal present which we mistakenly sometimes think is compatible with physical reality. Time is an emotional concept, felt directly by universal mind, while perceptual reality is always distant and felt at the remove of physical distance prior to being narrativized by mind, which means in time and space, and which is the only meaning of causality which is not a physical reality. Now is only emotively real, and physically impossible. All cognition is, therefore, precognition (ironically!). Cognition conditions understanding which provides the basis to act. All who act are conscious. Maybe not plants. 

Gobbledegook for sure!!

CODA updated 5/11/22

Materialism is tested by what it enables humans to do by virtue of understanding. Science has moved far beyond mechanism to descriptions of things and processes which we can only describe and never understand nor often embody, the way that we can with mechanism. Perhaps we can realize some implementation of all of the fundamental forces of nature by way of our technologies, in just the way that we might realize some new techniques for encryption based on our understanding of quantum physics. Anyhow, it all comes down to agency for most humans, no matter how well-read.

My own contribution, if it is a contribution, would be to describe what Kastrup calls mentation by way of some redefinitions for things and processes that we only think we understand. We are far too busy learning to exploit our understanding of the material world to turn our attention to the more fulsome world of emotive consciousness. Emotion may goad action, but it also redefines agency. There is no starting point for emotion; no place to lever from. It takes at minimum two. Emotion defines simultaneity. 

This is even while those at the extremes of our society exhibit ever more serious psychoses. Emotional disturbance. We have homelessness and QAnon on one end, and insanely manic consumption and self-promotion on the other, without any way to challenge these realities, though they spell our collective doom; what most of us would consider to be the end of agency.

So, to reiterate, here are my redefinitions:

Time is not divided between forward and backward, but rather between the entropic time of material physics, and the lived time of life's evolution, which direction is defined as love. There is no physical force which drives it, which might be what we mean by random. History is neither teleological nor progressive, but is, rather, a description of socio-emotional alignments as these tend toward or away from life as a cosmic and primordial process. The tendency of current history is neither destruction nor apotheosis. It is our choice, collectively, and so why not make it apotheotic? 

Deliberate love is not love. Falling is not the same as choosing.

Just as Freud might have alluded, there are no accidents and there is no random except as defined by materialist physics and gambling, whose usages are solid as far as they go. 

Viewed from the widest possible distance, the processes of evolution move in the direction of love.

It is not scientific to leave moral guidance for behavior beyond the reach of science. Religion as a basis for moral behavior is right out there with QAnon, and not incidentally for that. Scientifically moral behavior, guided by universal understanding, would never allow the likes of Samuel Alito to dictate civic law, nor Amy Coney Barrett to sit as judge for any legal proceedings. I won't elaborate. 

Concepts are mental arrays of conceptual primitives, which may be composed of physical approximations of those primitives, like the pointers of words, for instance. Emotion is defined as the motion toward or away of conceptual primitives which do not entail physical forces; those forces are described by an exchange of still more primitive primitives. Emotions are felt directly by mind, unlike perceptions which are felt at the remove of an extended body. The mind narrates perceptions which have no order without mind. This is trivial to demonstrate given the slow speed of neural transmission. Now is fuzzy until it's felt.

Mine is a literary rather than scientific approach to understanding. Bernardo is utterly correct as to the singularity of NOW - the present - as the ALL that there is. But his ALL is as metaphorically one-dimensional as materialism is. Mind/body sounds like dualism until you take it ironically when it becomes the transmutational dynamic of yin/yang. Mind and body, or perhaps mind and its embodiment are the reductive minimum for any reality at all. Can't have one without the other.

As creatures in the cosmos, humans are consequential. Morally consequential. God has moved from being a guide to being a COPOUT. God is love, and as such is not constituted to tell us what to do or how to behave. We have that in us. We must and will narrate our own future, just as we narrate our pasts, thus engendering time. The cosmos is not mind or mentation, it is God and divinity. 

Blahbeddy blah gobbledegook. I haven't the words to true. But like Robert Wright, I can true bicycle wheels.

Notes While Reading The Dawn of Everything, by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow

Lately, I've been amazed at how often my local library has the books I want to read. Sadly, even though I could use the out-of-house time to make the nice and interesting walk to the central library, I mostly get them digitally. Now I have a backlog.

Whatever else I might eventually wish to say about this book, it surely does give the reader enough remove from Western Ways to see that we here in these United States revert to the aristocratic European form we'd meant to leave, far more than we diverge from it. Anymore.

The book dives into the question about why we seem stuck in our Western Ways which have revealed themselves to be at such a remove from Freedom, and even survivability. Their main objective seems to be to question the popularly received truths that ours is inevitably the social setup that all history would inevitably tend toward.

Whether in terms of political or financial power, the structure is aristocratic, no matter who the controllers are by any other name. If anything, our new aristocrats are more stupid, more foolish, more juvenile and more selfish than even the court of Louis XIV. I shall see if this book answers the question why.

Of course, to me, from the remove of China, I already have an answer. But China has also become more like than different anymore, and so I'll still want to know what better answers might be hinted in my read. 

The book's grand omission, so far as I can see so far, is the impact of the written language on history. I need to know, and I'm not sure these authors have anything on offer, if (and then how) it might be that the written word has created our most recent and now global prisonhouse. It's hard for me to disconnect the written language from our scientific and technological advances.

Of course history requires writing to be history, which means imposition of narrative onto the raw stuff.   

For sure there is a connection to law, as the sublimated and humanized version of subjugation to God's Word. And then, for equally certain there is the tabulation and recording of money hoards, and their transmutation into property and title (as the root of all evil).

But I think these authors are leaving the obvious alone. They deconstruct our projected histories according to a meticulously scientific method. They unsettle the seemingly obvious progressive timeline, where the "discovery" of agriculture is conceived as a unitary event, which sets us on the way toward our constrained bureaucratized state of complexity, which we can't seem to imagine ourselves getting beyond.

But these few observations threaten to paint these authors as just a newer sort of essentializer about what it means to be human. Or in other words, they stretch humanity to be coterminous with our genetic biological advent, where most of us would place humans in history, which means written history (along with our fantasies about what went on before history, which it is this book's main burden to reveal).

The answer I read for is about whether there might be a way to escape the prisonhouse of the written word without leaving history altogether. A way through instead of a way out. I think that's what they aim for as well.

It seems harder for me to trash our technologies entirely than it does for these authors. I want to keep my feeling that there might yet be something worthwhile about what we may indeed foolishly construe as our human ascendance. (The foolishness would be in our destruction of our earthly body, which makes us cancer, the single most powerful metaphor on offer in my other recent library reads, which would be the works of Ibram X. Kendi.)

Perhaps it is just that our preoccupations focus more on physical pleasures, offered or withheld, than could the primitives which precede us. Perhaps that's what entraps us. But if we are obsessed with pleasures, that might make us collectively one with all of life, which evolves toward fitting in some niche, which is made by all of other life? 

As a whole, must we be cancer? Or might we be fitting in to something even greater than our earthly body? Might we be a channel for the grander schemes of evolution. A scheme which would even entail the destruction of individuality among us. A reversion, in false historical terms, to the most primitive state of all. We become the rhizome, the media for some message that there is no one to read.

And then what will that sort of life look and feel like? Well, no inside, no outside, it will feel like nothing. Which could be a kind of nirvanha, right? Right?

Read on, read on, and see if you are liberated or if you are trapped. Really, this book is only about whether our own internal subversives - those whose books I seem able to find in the public library - have ever been real and in the flesh, or if they have only ever been jesters to the courts of power. Rhetorical devices designed to challenge and seeming to want to subvert the powers that be, but only ever actually bolstering those powers by their own inevitable and highly regularized failures.

How shall we succeed, is the question I want answered.

In partial answer, I would like to offer a smashup of the early reference in this book to Gregory Bateson's "schismogenesis" with Johan Huizinga's calling out of agonistic contest as the "play" which unites us with all animal life. Play is the realm of freedom, that thing which these authors now attribute, in debate, to introductions from American native peoples.

Or, in other words, our recent history is marked by a taking too seriously of our truths. We offer academic degrees in seriousness, and so the sides take up, in deadly earnest, their disagreements with the other side. As Bateson points out, each side moves to some sort of opposite extreme from the other, as now our Red and Blue teams do. The result is, of course, polarization and anger, as, perhaps, between the sexes which is one of Bateson's examples from the “savage” world.

And so the possibility for success might be prefigured in the comedic processes of queerness and transgender, but also in the raw comedy calling out each team for its exaggerations. It only seems that there is no common ground, which is not the reason for our deadly anger at one another. Rather it is our deadly anger which erases all the common ground, which does, in fact exist.

Pull the clothes off our representative leaders, and you will find harlequin fool facing off against harlequin fool; the people having willingly given over our every freedom. 

It would seem that non-Western "primitives," among other things, have a better sense of humor than we do. They might not take themselves so seriously, just as Huizinga once thought about us more recent Americans in contrast to the seriousness of European and Chinese politics. Now we follow the inevitable grim pathways of all imperialists, and we charge along as seriously as did those damnable Jesuits before us.

Would that we could mock our scientific and technological advances! Well, I sure do! There has never been a more Arlequin Sauvage than our kidlets riding their Unicorns worth billions. There is nothing more silly than a sexy car as apex object of desire. Inequality and even lack of freedom may be the inevitable result of divisions of labor according to economic valence, but our arrangements are grotesque by any measure. And most of us do laugh. 

So here's a definition of time, in human terms. Future is a place where things have yet to happen. It can be a source of dread or hope or even ecstasy or despair. But the future is never thought to be the cause for what happens in the now. Primarily, that's because it's not a fact yet.

A fact is something whose causal relation to the now can be proven, in a way, theoretically. An idea can only be related to a fact by way of some sort of documentation. Otherwise, an idea can only be a goad toward some future or other.

Now if I am right (and of course I am) that mind has always been an aspect of reality, since at least the Big Bang, then the distinction between past and future becomes much more interesting. And our problem in the present is transformed. 

Just now, those of us on the literate side of the great red/blue divide feel almost nothing but dread about our collective future. In part, that must feel like a tremendous sense of loss. We've had a near lifetime of experience with our cherished democracy persisting despite the idiots - charlatans, cheats, snake-oil peddlers - who have always been in charge. We developed a sort of faith in the system.

Mostly, we've experienced our fellows as idiots who don't understand the pleasures of comfort over extravagance, good wine over a good drunk, travel to wild places instead of to Disneyland. We've been content to see them deluded by cartoonish religious beliefs, mostly because it keeps them passive. And we've pretty much assumed, qua Steven Pinker, that history moves in an anti-racist ameliorative direction.

But now none of us can imagine how to get out of the mess we've made. Global Warming has become our catch-all, which manages even to lump into its bin all the reddening folk who seem to want to destroy any and all dreams of democracy in the name of a fantasy that things were oh so wonderful in the recent past. About the only thing that reds share with blues - our common ground - is a dread about the future.

Each group probably thinks the other has taken the red pill (blue pill? I honestly can't keep them straight) where fantasy replaces reality wholesale.

Anyhow, our overall trick is to replace dread with something toward excitement. Sure plenty of blueish people do that by way of the cool whiz-bang of our inventive recent history. But those darned redsters keep wanting to tear it all up with their coaling monster trucks.

So which of us is falling into the Somerset Maugham Razor's Edge trap of thinking that if we can think it, it can be real? Which of us is destroying our collective future by our dread of it?

Now along comes this contrarian, anarchistic, view of humanity which I want to believe in just simply because I like the authors so much, but they posit a pre-written language sort of consciousness that I just simply can't see. The writing on the wall tells me something different.

The Writing on the Wall shall be the title of my upcoming science fiction book, which will be about this hinge in time where present and past swap, in a way, and the writing no longer predicts or foretells or guides us into our futures, but as though light started to go backwards, is coming to us from a future which is as far from us as the stars. 

Not everything important is physical Larry Darrell. That's the name I was given as an outlier space cadet at Yale, when we had all just read that book. The only thing I had in common with the prepsters. I did, of course, deserve it. Already a classic, and old. But we had not yet escaped its thrall. 

I was, of course, a mistaken admit who made it in the back door of the engineering school.Worth David  - now there's a name right out of fiction - told me so by a look. He corrected course quickly, to allow the institution more certainty that its recruits would uphold the fiction of merit and talent and be out mostly for themselves, and eventually their alma mater. Most certainly yes.

And so which team, red or blue, betrays the promise of anti-aristocracy? That's the bigger question than the rest, no matter how caught up we all are in that trivia.

To put the matter into other words, has the written word become our prison house, or might it yet be our redemption. Read on, Sailor Moon, read on. Notes from the future take no time at all to reach us. They have been there all the time. It's the parsing takes time.

And nope, no Julian Jaynes, no Johan Huizinga in these authors' bibliography. Tant pis. We all have our blind spots and shortcomings and can't keep up with everything. Hardly. But the term "homo ludens" does appear. Shall I doubt their documentation, then? Of course to cite Julian Jaynes is to court ridicule.

But here is the reason why the globe is now overrun by the imperialistic and very racist police state: it's because we're in a mad dash to our future. We're on the move, and like societies everywhere, we don't dare to allow ourselves to be pushed off course. Our forebears also clamped down while on the hunt.  

The Trumpers are right to detect a kind of illicit coercion in all the sound scientific advice they're meant to ingest. They're right that it's a false future that's being held in trust. That we have construed a (virtual?) state of perpetual warfare, and that's why we're "stuck" (to use these authors' word).

This is a major insight from this massive book. Many societies which predeceased ours had cyclical periods of control and anarchism. The control was never gentle, but the anarchism mostly was. The control was focused on the capture of a kind of annual  plenty. The Buffalo Police of the American plains would viciously corral everyone to corral the Buffalo. Once the plenty is gotten, they revert to gentle anarchy.

And so here we are, so very excited by the plenty dangled in front of us or on our screens. And we want to squash everyone in our way. Some - the Trumpers - are saying enough already, leave us be. We don't want no stinkin' yacht to take care of. The rest - the literate - are just plain excited by the ever-elaboration of high culture, and want to know where it might end. 

Slowing down would be the thing, wouldn't it? But alas, all of us are addicted to speed.

In the back of my mind, and perhaps in the back of everyone's mind, while reading this book, is writing. While focusing on the likely equivalency between the political savvy of primitives and moderns, these authors do conflate pre-literate and post-literate humanity. They make a good case, in other words, for the fictional myth-making nature of our grand political histories, which move Biblically from primitive to modern, while apparently ignoring the forward march of science. 

Who is the sinner and who is sinned against here? It is hardly arguable that the explosion of technology in our contemporary world is disconnected from the warmaking and prodigious bloodletting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Now, we have made the emergencies permanent, but in a tiredly positive sense. We are feeling on the brink of breakthrough, and have for quite a while. Therefore the full regime of control as deployed by the written word is being deployed 24/7/365 as led by these United States. 

The trouble is that you can't follow science if you can't read, and so it was inevitable that the hoi polloi would, as these authors do, conflate political with scientific (anti-religious) thinking. Oppressed politically, the non-literate naturally assume that the oppressive forces extend to science. All authority is bad, unless it be a permanent jester-king, Buffalo Bob's Howdy Doody - Ronald Reagan in all his forms - who has always been meant to amuse us to death. 

Along with the technology inevitably comes social media. But social media with its algorithms of hate-concentration (this is just a law of nature, since anger promulgates far faster and wider than love) misses the main point. Which is that in our red counties, people still check in with one another. That is how they form their political opinions and actions. There is an hermetic distance now between urban and rural, and it is the distance of art from colloquy. 

Scientific discourse is political discourse in only the metaphorical sense. And vice versa. It is our figures that are mixed up. Private property is no requirement of the sciences, and in many cases has become its enemy, where money leads any discourse now.

And, back to the main point. If we are to become hopeful again about our collective future, we will then have to let go of the imminence of completion. We will have to recover seasonal ways of being rather silly. We will have to, periodically, issue get out jail free cards to all those who sinned against our ritual kings when we were stuck in the permanence of the hunt.

* * *

Anyhow, as I continue to read along in this lovely book, I am becoming rather convinced of its main thesis (at least as that appears to me so far, about halfway through). As humans apparently always will, we have imposed our narratives backwards across the vast expanse of time, and seen there all the signs of a narrative progress toward where we are today.

These authors are therefore solidly in line with scientific thinking, which takes evidence first before creating their narrative. They have a theory, sure, which is approximately that subjugation of man by man is not the necessary end of history, along with, of course, exposure of the equally false corollary; that further "progress" will get us beyond this local aberration. Here I find more true believers in human agency, so long as that agency makes allowances for something beyond rational economic ecological adjustments. So long as there is room for quirk.

It must be in the back of every reader's mind that they will have to explain away notions of scientific progress as well, along with the general certainty that this follows, more or less inevitably, upon the advent of writing. Certainly, they will at least localize our particular scientific fluorescence, perhaps following upon the WEIRD thesis.

As I might say myself, science is as stuck as everything else about our now globalized ways, and I hope and actually by now believe that the arguments in this book shall help us to get unstuck. I am puzzled for a moment when they declare that there have been no real scientific breakthroughs since Einstein. Perhaps to them, as to me, it's the physics which really matters?

I awaken this morning after the dire warnings yesterday of a wind storm. Funnel storms have churned a path from Arkansas through Tennessee, centering on Kentucky, as long as any recorded in history. The crows (are they ravens?) have returned to what I lately discover is their highest Buffalo concentration, just beyond my windows. What does their noise portend?

At the very least, I am convinced of the unity between private property and the narrative construction of an individual and highly specific self, housed within the boundaries of our skin. We have reduced agency to these terms as well. And we shall - we must - soon discover the fiction of this arrangement for our thinking right along with exposing the fictions of our grand stories for geologic time.

As these authors describe cars, whose insides are legally inviolate while their disposition and usage are incredibly circumscribed by not only law but by infrastructure and even, dare we say it?, civic norms. (Of course those norms have been massively disrupted in cities now, where loud and law-breaking two and four wheel Mad Max vehicles scream through the nights) . . . as they describe cars, they will certainly describe humans. Ownership of our fetishized self is as much a fiction as are the national boundaries.

Liberty is not available to those who fetishize narrative eternal life. (I also just completed Amor Towles' Lincoln Highway) There is no necessary progression through the agricultural "revolution" to enclosure to the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons also describes the tragedy of dividing of be-souled humans from the rest of life.

We shall see. The crows have dispersed with the sunrise. I remember that the Mad Max marauders are far milder and more funny than that term allows. There are also electric skateboards and unicycles and proliferating bikes. Perhaps my thinking has calmed.

So back to cars for a moment - that focal point for all that is wrong with the way we live now. Our mediated lives tend to lead us to think that the solution to cars is less polluting cars, when the only real solution is not to want the particular life which allows us to live, even in cities, without really having to interact with anyone outside our small circle of friends. 

The same lens needs to be applied to the meaning of all this communications technology and artificial reality. Does it solve a problem or exacerbate one (which might, as ever, be a goad to evolution)? What change in our consciousness - our sense of self - could change this? What are the powers which are desperate to keep us wanting what we want, and how do they infect our lives? Is it even possible that the Trump reaction is actually salutary, in a cosmic sense?

Horror of horrors, right? But where is the desperate rhetoric about what is going wrong lodged, and whom does it serve? Why are we meant to feel the precarity of the anthropocene and the inevitability of cataclysm if not utter ecological and economic collapse? Should these sorts of exhortations lead us to double down to preserve what we have or to dismantle it? We really can't seem to decide. 

Urban elites seem divided between thoaty exotic sports cars (I suppose one would have to include Beemers and Benzes and newly cheap Maseratis and the Japanese luxury models here as well), and the quicker and more acceptable to the authorial elite Teslas and their potential descendants. Meanwhile, the ride of choice in the redder counties is the pickup truck, around whose bed men commune and communicate. 

Could it be that the social networks are not powering social polarization and anti-literate chaos? Could it be that those outside the city still do actually know and go to church with and talk to each other? And form their takes on the world that way?

As tempting as it is - and it is really tempting - to see everything about the Trumpers in terms of racism and even white supremacy, the urban centers remain largely defined by exclusive neighborhoods if not by exclusive politics. Who among us participates in that politics to the level and extent of rural churchgoing?

If one doesn't read all the urban rags but listens instead to the likes of Rush Limbaugh (R.I.P.), or Hannity or that Fucker Tucker, or all the other fabulously wealthy exploiters of ignorance, why, really, wouldn't one be fairly certain that there is a conspiracy afoot which considers its opposition to be a Conspiracy of Dunces. 

I'm about to read this other book, which I consider to be a tract of the opposition. I am certain that its arguments will proceed conspiracy style. It's called Life 3.0, and it will reduce life the universe and everything to that old hardware/software saw. You won't even know what's been denied existence by omission. And I, for one, will be horrified that there are people who actually buy and believe this shit. 

Can't we please just get beyond conspiracy theorizing?

This book Life 3.0 will take to absurdity the procrustean logic which is deconstructed in the book I'm reading now, The Dawn of Everything, which is co-written by an anarchist who wanted to help guide us out from our current nightmares. 

The corrective lens The Dawn of Everything applies to our grand histories of the past can be and must be applied equally to our suppositions about our collective future. Already - halfway through - I find myself deconstructing apocalypse as yet another Platonic Christian imposition. And here I'd thought it was scientifically considered opinion, just like the grand histories Hariri and Diamond wrote.

Nope. Just more mythmaking. It's not that global warming isn't anthropogenic, it's just that the earth has turned more wildly many times before. One gets the feeling that we actually do still evolve and are still evolving and that far from being the end of history, we are closer to its beginning. Pushing back the timeline of the Anthropocene - which the book also implicitly does - also highlights our recent accellerationism.

Yes indeed now is far "worse" than when the dinosaurs were killed or when the earth was crusted in ice and human habits and habitats were squeezed. But as we are, we are hardly poised to prevail in our current disposition. What comes next becomes far more interesting and not necessarily deadly.

Whatever we explode into, supernova-like, it won't be Life 3.0. That sort of cognition riding on fully describable hardware is so very YESTERDAY. The belief system of (mostly male) children who don't even know what love, literature and good living are. Who fervently believe that they have driven the godhead from existence permanently and for all time by good common sense. Now that right there is just nuts.

Right there at the beginning, the author declares:

"But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not in the laws of physics, so before our Universe awoke, there was no beauty. This makes our cosmic awakening all the more wonderful and worthy of celebrating: it transformed our Universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty and hope—and the pursuit of goals, meaning and purpose. Had our Universe never awoken, then, as far as I’m concerned, it would have been completely pointless—merely a gigantic waste of space. Should our Universe permanently go back to sleep due to some cosmic calamity or self-inflicted mishap, it will, alas, become meaningless.

He then goes on to describe Larry Page as some kind of change-the-world genius. Really?!? These dudes are the reason I should have hope?

I mean the arrogance to suppose that without us the cosmos is meaningless! Our physics tell us that we can't know. What we can see is always from our past, and if one were to suppose that life develops according to the same universal timeline that life on earth has, then we shall never know, even before our inevitable flameout. And so we should fill the cosmos with us? I'd say that right along with Larry Page, these AI folks extend (to infinity, if they have their ways) our private property enslavement culture of totalitarian empire.

Apparently, I am the only non-Godist who understands that there is no time required for emotive contact. God Himself is, of course, just another anthropomorphic imposition on cosmos, in precisely the way that AI is. We reduce life, the universe and everything to our parochial terms and then we declare it ours. I'd say that's what's beyond boring.

We have always been in contact with other life, and it's not cognitive in the way that math could describe it. We just simply aren't paying attention.

Well back to more reading about what is and isn't "common sense."

* * *

And now, finally, by the summary chapter, I see it! As the discoverer of an earth-shaking scientific principle that I've strived to share for most of my life, I've also tortured myself each time - and it's only moments here and there - that I wish for fame and fortune. I see myself being interviewed on TV, say, where I will know what to say, when I can't while writing. 

But I don't need no stinkin' audience. I need only a single interlocutor, and I can't find them.

And so I realize that there is terrorism - and slavery - implied by individualism. If only my name were a title, shared by those in my geographically dispersed clan, I would be able to remain calm about my imminent death, for whatever reason it will come. Though I may never experience a spirit dream of sufficient power to marshal all my clan's power, I may know when one comes along. I would recognize it by obvious ways without possibility for trickery or secrecy, because it would be written on the landscape, in the weather, on the evening news. 

That is what money is for. Selfiness. GDP. GPP. MIT. And all I am allowed - no longer allowed - is the brief ecstasy of copulation. Now even that has been cleansed of smell and shaved and rendered into a commodity with almost all fetish power leached away, though I may still make claim to how amazing it really is to be slingshot into space. Changed forever. So profound. Orgasm and away, with Big Boobs, eh Bezos you big rocket prick?

My nightmare would be to awaken as Zuckerberg. Abandon hope, for your script is written. What does it profit you to gain the entire world? Oh one name men of the world all Ga Ga for the very same thing. So singular. So detached from all that keeps the rest of us alive. 

Sour grapes? You say. Well, I can't know. I don't know. I know that the plot of my own life interests me, and that it remains almost entirely unpredictable. And I'm nobody's slave.

Cycling down toward the end of the book, I find myself feeling hope and despair both. The hope, of course, is the loss of the feeling of inevitability toward the end of history. We've been here before. Perhaps not to this scale, but the pattern is the same. And so the Trumpers fit into the longer sweep of history, and are no more (certainly not less) deluded than the rest of us who have been both mystified and taken in by the arrangements of our modern world. 

As have peoples eternally, we don't even recognize what we've lost, even in the face of extremes of lost liberty (properly so defined) and lost truths and an apology for democracy that could not be more forced, and grotesque for that. And so the despair is that it must always be this way, cycling toward and away from more communal and congenial forms of life, perhaps because the strains of any sort of living can always lead to dreams of something better.

And so I am left wondering what can be preserved? Could we who have inherited the roles of priests and nobles in our brave new world extrapolated from all mystery come down from on high to understand the misery of the masses of people who feel so pushed around? Could that even be what 'woke' could come to be? If we could ever even take the esoteric out of that term.

At least I have a model for our future. We will have titles and not proper names, and we will share these and be therefore less alone. The ego will dissolve as will the state, and we shall be once again a part of nature. Could there be anything more certain than that?

Well, spoiler alert, by the end of this book the authors make a pretty good case that it really is all about private property and its genetic connection to slavery. It's about money, and if agriculture is important, it's because cereal grains can be counted and stored and are fungible forms of edible energy. 

We are not so smart. Our cities are no more complex than the many which came before we could write history. In most ways, our cities are far simpler. We are constrained in our behaviors in ways that were never even imagined before. We actually believe it's all hardware/software and that we are somehow different from all of life because we are conscious. And our definition for consciousness - like any good conspiracy theory anywhere - is perfectly circular. A perfectly empty concept. And round we go, above the earth and under our waters and never even touching life. Just gawking at how boring it would be without us.

Oh Please!

And Thank You Graeber and Wengrow for this wonderful book. It has given me actual, tangible, scientific hope. I'd thought hope was gone, and I am very glad to be proven wrong!

Filling the Blanks in Cosmology, Getting the Terms Right

I once introduced myself as a cosmologist. Only once. I meant it in earnest, but still felt silly about it. I quickly demurred that "I make my money in other ways." As though I make money at all. 

I was celebrating my 60th birthday with friends, and their friend, who is friends with (Buffalo) Mark Ruffalo, happened to be there. She runs a non-profit in earnest, which promises to find a sustainable energy infrastructure in our approximate lifetimes, which is all the time we have left. Ruffalo helps. It was she who provoked my verbal incontinence. Welcome to grandiosity.

And yet I am a cosmologist. Not sanctioned as such, but I am in line with a turn of thought which still goes back to the Bible's setting up man against nature in what must be considered now to be a battle with God for dominion. 

My cosmos is composed much as is the cosmos of the sanctioned philosophers and scientists except that they all still seem stuck with a, to me, rather silly conflation of the brain with the mind. 

That has allowed us to imagine computers, which operate in the realm of purest abstraction, as a model for the mind, and especially for intelligence. Mainly it has allowed us to conceive of a cosmos that is without us, separate from us, and which doesn't need us.

Nobody supposes that a computer is not detached from the world around it. A computer even has to reach out to the natural world for real random numbers, since it can't create them on its own. But everyone supposes that the cosmos doesn't need mind. I beg to differ.

Cosmos certainly doesn't need computers, but we might, here on earth.

I once ran into Bruno LaTour, who sat randomly behind me after his talk at the "Feverish Planet" symposium in Burlington Vermont, where I was no longer making money "doing other things." The college didn't need me anymore.

I mentioned to him that his talk gave me hope. He raised his eyebrows in surprise, commenting that most people find his expositions on planetary distress depressing. I told him that he had gotten some terms right, and that gave me hope for our future. He had rectified the words.

I sure do wish I could remember how his terms were "gotten right," but then I've entered the dead zone, Meaning the zone whereinafter my death won't be considered a tragedy so much as it will be considered part of the more natural course of events. Meaning that there's lots of important stuff that doesn't stick with me so well.

Part of it was that he'd inverted a map - a schematic - of the world, to show inside as outside perhaps, and that had empowered me. I haven't been able to afford the time or money to catch myself back up. He was concerned about the thin surface where life abounds, and to be sure that we could see it.

We certainly do live on an uncanny planet. This New York Review of Books review is right on my money. 

Meanwhile, I'd better try to clean up some of my own terms:

Percept

Perception

Concept

Conception

Emotion

Motion

Naming

Abstraction

Information

Mind

These are the terms which I manipulate on my way toward a description of cosmos that makes an improvement on the one concocted by physicists. I believe that it, "my" cosmology, moves decisively away from regarding man as a subjective observer of a world that runs without us. It makes a completion of the war against God, with resolution is in the direction of peace.

I would even say that this cosmology offers a kind of extravagant hope even in the midst of collective despair among those of us who are reasonably well-educated and still not so much on the winning side of the capitalist Hunger Games to where life is so good that we don't give a fuck about what happens in our collective future. 

I do disparage digital, and not only because of its hijacking of so much of our time and free-will by its futures economy of ownership of the noospheric commons, and not even so much by its hijacking of our actual organic living by luring us into a kind of metaverse life, although those things are really awful. The trouble isn't even with the conflation of mind with brain. The trouble is that these digital denizens live in a cosmos where they get the terminology all wrong. Which means, of course, that they know not what they do.

I do retain the faith that we can fix things if we get the terminology right. It is certain that we can't if we don't. It is also certain that there are some corporate persons in the digital economy which are just as sociopathic as DuPont has been revealed to be.

Digital is, by definition, only capable of abstraction. It only exists in the abstract. It can imitate life to any arbitrary degree of accuracy, but it can't be life, any more than a perfect circle can exist in perceptual reality.

By the same token, perceptual reality can't exist without conceptual reality.

Here's why (again, by way of definition):

Percepts are those things that we, living creatures, interact with physically. They touch us, and thus we feel them. We perceive them. I remember being astonished that our eyeballs can detect even a single photon, and then it was proven and I saw one. A single photon.

Concepts are those things that we can't perceive, but which are no less real for that. We seem to be able to hold them "in" (by!) our minds, but that doesn't mean that they reside only there. Beyond the photon scale toward small, we still consider things to be physically real, which means perceptually real, even though they are more properly concepts. Concepts also come into being on their own, and we may discover them but not invent them in the way that we ordinarily mean by "conception." We speak of concepts by way of metaphor, most of the time. From the physically real to the conceptually real. Often starting with our bodies. (Chinese handles this differently, without God, without Plato, by way of correspondence in form of function in a literary couplet.)

Emotion describes the relation among percepts or concepts when that relation doesn't involve perceptual motion. Perceptual motion involves forces and energy. Forces and energy involve "particles," many of which are particles only in the metaphorical sense. Emotion is instantaneous and defines "synchronous," which can't quite physically exist, in actuality. All of physical reality is in constant motion, living or dead, and this creates imponderable paradox, post relativity theory and quantum theory, in definitions for simultaneity. While those paradoxes may not be resolved conceptually, they are resolved when concepts are properly "placed" outside, in the world. A conceptual relation is, in effect, timeless.

Naming is what the human mind does in order to share, even with oneself, something important that the mind does for the sake of physical survival. To name is to abstract something conceptual from what had been repeated iterations of a threat or an object of desire. Private language is not a possible move linguistically, and so a name is necessarily also outside the mind.. Names are by definition shared, and happenstance is what's left over when the desired matching of name with object doesn't bear fruit.

Abstraction, though happens well before the human mind and before naming. Any conscious creature abstracts before emotion - sometimes referred to in these cases as intuition - can direct action in the "right" direction. Even in the human and word-addled mind, emotion directs the mind's action, even while thinking the very most abstracted thoughts, which are but rehearsals of language, preverbally, after we learn to be silent and not even engage the vocal apparatus. We call this activity thinking. We take conscious ownership of our intuitive decisions once we can communicate them, even to ourselves. Our brains may play halfsies for a reason.

Information is what might be important to communicate. It is a conceptual relation of concepts or percepts, most often, these days, reduced to numerical abstraction for ease and fidelity of communication. Its usefulness in communication relates only to the desirability of the work that it allows to be accomplished. The entropy of information depends entirely on whether it gets communicated or not. Order is reversed, in this case meaning order as orderliness where, in communication, the less order the less entropy, the more surprise. Absent communication, the more order the less information and the less entropy. This allows for the difference between life and death, the communication does. Genes are devoid of information; they are instructions, worthless without something real from which to make [life].

Mind, therefore, has always been present in cosmos, and is not attributable to human existence. I say "therefore" because a cosmos without concepts is inconceivable! 

So there's my cleanup. I still maintain that if we get the terms right we can "fix" the damage that we've done. Not by going backwards, but by going forward, as Mark O'Connell urges. Or is it Nathaniel Rich. I shall be reading them both now, grace the public library.

We can only change the way we live on our planet home if we let go of those misconceptions which allow us to feel innocent about what we're getting and doing wrong. 

We still won't change until we recognize our responsibility to change. That means letting go of misconceptions, religious, scientific, and otherwise. It means accepting that we can't know anything about how cosmos runs without us.

The good news is that abstraction is extremely powerful. It gives us the ability to make forever chemicals that might destroy civilization, at the same time that it gives us the ability to know they're there, just like we know to some degree of precision how much radioactive fallout we've added to our planetary load.

If I'm right that emotion can be defined as concepts morphing; including arrays of perceptual matter which change configuration not because of forceful interactions, but perhaps because we've changed the way we "see" them. 

And if I'm also right that cosmos doesn't require human mind for this to happen; that it's happening all the time all over the place. Then the very encoding of information about what's round about us might be an intensely emotive act in and of itself.

We find ourselves at a time when we still refuse to recognize a direction to the evolutionary process, and yet we could. That makes us the moral equivalent of global warming deniers. But I exaggerate. What I don't exaggerate is what Bratton's so-called "stack" does to provide us with levers, which could never have been so powerful, mainly because they're so collective. But alas, he lives in a purely physical world. The moral equivalent of living in a purely digital world.

As is always the case, our tools may harm us. Digital reality allows me to borrow a book from the local library in the time of the plague, and read it instantly. Digital reality also allows me to entertain myself with empty matters without ever leaving my seat. It allows for a new phase of vectorialist capitalism, which might make way for sociopathic corporate persons even worse than the DuPont which gave us PFOA, to give us Teflon, so that we wouldn't have to scrub our pans. Warfare fallout.

We shouldn't make the same old Platonic mistake of trying to live in a world of pure ideas. We have to live down to earth. We aren't alive without it.

Entropy of Emotion; Entropy of Money

These are notes while tearing through James Gleick's The Information, a characteristically comprehensive and fascinating book. I'm cranky, he's not. I'm pretty sure that most any reader would struggle to get their head around this survey, but I seem to want to push back on some of it. Like, especially, the conflation of "brain" with "mind" and the elision of any truly unitary definition for "Information." To be silly about it, our usage of that term seems plainly chaotic. (I know I own and have read that book, but where oh where did it go? Entropy is a bitch!)

I order my living space because it pleases me. The actual work of ordering pleases me, though it might be considered a chore. I also enjoyed the Sisyphean task of owning a wooden boat that was older than I was, because the work against entropy was tangible and, for me, intrinsically enjoyable. I enjoyed the blooming beauty, but of course most of all, I enjoyed the sailing. 

Ultimately, and naturally, the entropic "forces" embodied in my boat overwhelmed me, and I was forced to give it away. No actually, it was the entropic forces that I faced in my life. Scrambling for money, having to move, facing decreasing time for anything but driving, and no daylight for myself. 

The boat was fine. My work was true. But nobody really shared my enthusiasms anymore, or perhaps, rather, if they did they would prefer to build from scratch. That would be inevitably less frustrating and probably more satisfying than to keep up with an old boat.

But I could never afford to build a new one, either in time or money, which were and are related, of course. And giving away a perfectly good boat was far more satisfying than to have to quantify the use-value I gained from sailing it. There is entropy to emotion only when always wanting something new. A law of nature, that.

Like all other "forces," emotion orders reality only in concert with all the other facts of life. By itself, emotion can lead as easily to destruction as to positive building up.

Now ordering my living space should decrease its entropy, and yet I am building no potential for either usable energy - the way that entropy differentials should allow in physics - nor for the living space to come alive, in the way that information preservation might, say, in the form of genes. But I am enacting, at least, the proper direction for entropy while living. My living space and I endure together, or neither at all. It feels very important that I enjoy my space, so that I may live out my days.

I am constructing part of what I require to stay alive myself. All of it is somehow fungible with money. I seem to crave tiny spaces to live in. First my boat and then my more recently abandoned tiny home. I love the combination of freedom with the manageability of my living space. "Free to loving home," would be interestingly recursive, right, if I were to give this one away? But this time my tiny home is worth something. During the pandemic, lots of people want to carry their space with them. Astronauts on Earth.

In my life, I have quit rather quickly those money-making jobs which felt like a kind of wage slavery. My quitting inevitably involved a director wanting to direct me, rather than to trust me to direct myself. And I have enjoyed rather lengthy tenures whenever I found a job, no matter how arduous - and some were absurdly so - where I could be fairly autonomous. 

This is, of course, a measure of my privilege, as is my nice living space. I am at liberty to quit, even while I may convince myself that I am willing to die if necessary, rather than to allow myself to do meaningless chores. Even though I would never risk my life for country. Even though I love my country. I don't trust her. She lies.

According to Information Theory . . . 

Information theory is deuced hard to get a handle on, since in its numerical form, the more information, the more entropy. In shorthand, the entropy of information is something like its capacity to surprise. According to Information Theory, there is a trade-off of sorts, between information and physical entropy. If you want to take advantage of entropy differentials to get work done, you have to have some information. The information is valuable, in terms of useful energy, the more entropy it has. But energy flows from more entropy to less. 

It would seem (this is but a passing footnote in the book) that one might have to expend some information in order to get work done. There is a  trade-off. The only way that I can think of to interpret this is that information must be transmitted, in some sense, before it is useful. I find a muddle between information theory and communication theory.

I'm pretty sure, but far from certain, that the muddle is that information is thought to reside in the occult spaces of the mind, and that the mind is thought to be coincident with the brain, and so the supposition is that information has to be communicated before it means anything. That's where backward comes in.

It would seem that I'm hardly the first person to be confused. Big Big Names have gotten information entropy backwards, apparently for the same reasons I have. It just doesn't seem right that order should be taxed as entropy. The definition depends on something like interpretation, which depends in turn on what random means.

To Maxwell and others "It seemed impossible to talk about order and disorder without involving an agent or an observer - without talking about the mind" [Gleick's words]. I get that there must be an entropy differential, analogous to the one that work comes from physically. And that ordered information, in the logarithmic extreme, is stillness and death; sameness operator and receiver. All zeros or all ones carry no information, and yet they are ordered.

Time itself depends on chance, or "the accidents of life," as Richard Feynman liked to say: "Well, you see that all there is to it is that the irreversibility is caused by the general accidents of life."

It turns out that finding random is almost as tricky as finding pattern, which also has a complicated meaning in the mathematical abstract. Everything is translated to number space and then random is defined by that condition that a number be calculable; meaning that it can be represented by a formula which would have fewer information bits than the number itself.

It's still hardly clear to me that the definitions for work IRL (in real life) have anything to do with these technical, formal usages for both entropy and work. There must be some math behind it. 

Yes, OK, I can see why transmitted information might be needed in trade for energy, to keep various conservation laws intact. In a closed quantum system (is that an oxymoron?) information can neither be created or destroyed, just like energy in a closed thermodynamic system.  It got a little dicey for a moment there with information disappearing into black holes, according to Stephen Hawking, who later corrected himself before he died.

Now things are turning, just a little bit, on a theory of information transfer, communication. Definitions for information start to scintillate, just like waves and particles do. Nothing can be pinned down.

In some form, energy is always required for life. Living things transform some of that energy into something both mechanical and durable in a direction away from physical entropy. Just now, we seem to be still in the throes of trying to determine if digital information processing can be turned into a realistic imitation of life. We remain obsessed with intelligence as the form of life we prefer. God knows why! Look where it has gotten us!

But life is, naturally, composed in a matrix. Genetic code, or any code, has no meaning without the complex ground for its realization. Words require literate readers. Computer codes require computers. Abstraction requires a mind. And of course, genetics are a blueprint for nothing without the proper ground of other life.

Intelligent life, awash in meaningful symbols - in code - must incorporate the highest information content of any structure in the known cosmos, which would mean that it is the most disordered, terms of information. It has the highest entropy. It is the most surprising thing. I'm still having a hard time getting my head around this. How can the most surprising thing - intelligent life - also be the most disordered? Where is the transaction between informational entropy and physical entropy? When does the communication happen?

Well, paradox is always part of any equation. That's been proven. Godel.

There is some fungibility between information and energy, which depends on [intelligent?] life for its realization. The closest we may ever come to perpetual motion might be our sun, and it too has a limited and predictable life-span; except it's not alive.

Intelligence only comes into play after there has been a near eternity of coding. Intelligence comes after words, which come after life, which takes the crystalline eternal structure of cosmos at its highest entropy and turns it's normal path toward decay in the opposite direction. Living eddies in the physical flow.

Time is an invention, according to a John Wheeler quote, like probability, "concept[s] invented by humans." Well, I say, concepts can't be invented, they can only be discovered. How recalcitrant of me!

By the time that we are awash in words, we require a different way to make energy fungible with information. We call this money. I put my money down that theory of any sort cannot come even close to describing humanity!

In an ideal world, money would be denominated in energy. Money already is mostly denominated in energy, mitigated by enthusiasm, but in our ideal world it would be factored according to sustainability, which means according to what a mess monetizing (queer word, that little neologism) might make of our earthly home. Our earthly home is, quite naturally, alive and requires certain ordered conditions for its overall survival, however limited that life-span might be. There shall be other earths, anon. Just not real soon.

In the near term we should try obvious things, like realizing a humane mass-transit system, where you smartphone would call something to your door (autonomous or driven hardly matters in the short term. Neither does single-rider or group), line up your transfers while dissolving waiting and optimizing transit time to be faster than private cars. Trivial, if we did but have the collective will.

Of course there must be a tax on wealth, and it must be calibrated to how much of the commons is allowed to private use of the taxpayer. That would include the commons of predicting our collective behaviors, of course, and not just air and water and wild space. That tax shall be used for governance, and of course Bratton is correct that when the very air we breathe becomes dangerous, then the government can and must mandate our participation in protecting our immunological commons.

But government must also build infrastructure, and provide guidance about the forms the infrastructure takes. This becomes our collective home. 

Good governance must prevent the squandering of human resources by educating all equitably and richly. In a world where money is defined properly, a private automobile would be abomination, as would a private yacht. Airplanes would be simply unnecessary. A balance would be struck between voluntary and guided. All of this could be available to us on the morrow, if we were to get our definitions straight.

For now, we must proceed according to approximations, and make the not unreasonable assumption that our actual facts are moving in the direction of this ideal. Our math shall be crude. Our identities only approximate. But there can be no question that profligate use of energy is in approximate identity with the sudden shift from entropy of information to entropic chaos embodied by the disembodying bomb. Twas purest intelligence built it. Dragging the sun's power down to earth in a far too literal fashion! I mean, we must do it far more literally and a lot more slowly. We must curb our enthusiasms for a while.

In any case, it's not so hard to imagine that money might represent a kind of enthusiasm for the schematic of information. If my home is truly beautiful, regardless of how much money it may have cost me, it may be quite valuable in some sense, at least to me. But alas, as with my sailboat, the value is always limited by fungibility. Things must come to resemble money as interchangeable parts of the economy. A house is not a portable work of art, and in any case each household wants to make its own. But houses have rapidly become only fungible space. 

Perhaps someday the tiny fungible houses will appreciate in price faster than the gaudy expressions of personality which all look the same. Ticky tacky. But when, anyhow, did even space become fungible? Families once lived in the same space across generations. 

A hoard of money must symbolize increasingly low states of entropy. The sameness one coin to the next is by definition. A string of zeros. A string of ones. Money's value is in its differential, as is always the case with entropy, But as with information, money is worth nothing unless and until it is deployed by [intelligent?] life. 

Somehow, there is no question in my mind that upon launch, a mega-yacht loses value faster, even in proportion to its cost, than even an automobile does upon being driven from the showroom. It is such a particular and peculiar embodied want. And the wealth required is so utterly singular. Anyone singularly wealthy would, well, rather commission their own.

Now with space shots, there may be some better fungibility, given that the craft is almost and merely symbolic - a code, in a way - for the complex matrix of advanced technology that it depends on for its usability. And unlike the yacht, its thrill is brief, if intense. No wonder Bezos' is a phallus.

Our collective objective now must be the preservation of the earth. In combination with economics as we mean it, and comfort as we have come to expect it, and derision of labor as we mean by slavery [wage slavery, sex slavery, literal slavery] we don't seem to be approaching our objective at all. 

Indeed it begins to look as though there will ultimately be a global conflagration, in minuscule imitation of the sun, that will reduce life to its beginnings in the greatest trade-off between energy and information since the beginning of time. 

I believe that's how any exponential curve works. Stored energy builds until it blows. In our case, we are organizing our living space according to a dangerous differential of money, built on the manipulation of enthusiasms into baubles of mechanical production. That's what unsustainability means.

We fear, don't we? that if we were to spread the wealth, then our industry - that thing which distinguishes us as intelligent life - would be destroyed as well. As though we would not want anything at all, because we would not want, and the economy would collapse.

These are all plays on words. And yet emotion is real, and money is real, and both are spent in relation to the intensity of desire. The question becomes, what might suffice, for each of us, to return the earth to homeostasis? How many will you ignore in pursuing your individual desires? Each of us is but an atom, while the whole is boiling hot. There is a formula for how the probability functions build on exponents to explosion.

How much is sufficient? Sometimes it seems as though nobody noticed when we jumped the great divide into abstraction. Once upon a time, numbers were used to enumerate things. To count. Quantities of actual things easily turned into some primitive form of money. Counters. Counters turned back into things like coin and gold. 

I have stored this many bushels, and have expended the dung of this many sheep, some of whom have become food themselves, some who provide clothing and blankets, and some to replace those that die. I am more than sufficed. And you? What might you want?

When people speak of evolution, they hardly ever talk of the matrix which holds the other part of the genetic code. There is no meaning to the code without the entire history of life which came before. Readers of genetic code arrive at it from mathematics, which is a purely disembodied sort of logic. There is no metaphor there, as there must be in physics if it wishes to deal with the real. 

My very self is composed of many more gene pools than those that my kind lays claim to.

And now money too, like a perfect circle, is thought to be somehow eternal and disembodied and without connection to life or to emotion, which is absurd on its face. Name your price! Everything is fungible. I'll throw in a perfect circle for free, with each transaction. It's out of this world! Express your code in my matrix! I have what you need! Fast turnover.

Any complete Theory of Information would have to distinguish between the thing and its bits; the embodiment and its template. And there is no complete template for anything in our cosmos. There are only things and their variations upon accident.

What is a matrix, you ask? Well, the existence of a matrix in which a code is embedded is what distinguishes natural encodings like language, genes, and perhaps even mechanical schematics from abstracted encodings such as math/numbers, encoded logic and computer code. The distinction is both crass and subtle at once.

It was the age in which genes were first named and then discovered and finally sequenced which allowed the disappearance of the matrix from our minds. It was a masculine age, when, for instance, Watson and Crick overwrote Rosalind Franklin.

Indeed, information theory is entirely mixed up. Information must be defined as the static configuration of conceptual reality. Perceptual reality is in constant motion. If it weren't, it would be conceptual. In just the way that energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed in a closed thermodynamic system, neither can information be created or destroyed in quantum reality. 

Shannon entropy applies only to the transmission or communication of information. Communication of information may be analogous to the work which can be accomplished by the transfer of energy. Information similarly flows according to a differential. Instead of work, in this case something like meaning is accomplished. Code is nothing without matrix and meaning both. (The 'medium is the message' one better?)

Of course, before information can flow, it must be encoded. Entropy thus applies to the code, rather than to the information. The code is abstracted from whatever matrix the information was a part of; the matrix in this case being the constellation of concepts which rendered the information meaningful, in just the way that words without a language are meaningless.

 

No wonder anti-entropy and entropy have been confused and confusing when applied to information. It would seem, in other words, that ordering my living space would be to decrease its entropy. It would further seem that there is no easy way to speak of transmitting or otherwise sending that order by any process of encoding, other than, perhaps, by way of video. But video abstracts. You can't live in it. 

Only abstracted information may be in motion, and to abstract is to encode. Emotion is engaged by concepts in relative motion. That's what abstraction implies. Math operates now only on code, and as we all know, math is entirely removed from emotion, except, perhaps, in the lonely person of the mathematician, whose mind has already adapted to Turing machine reality. Math is exciting only at the peak, which is, by very definition of that sort of excitement, a very lonely place.

We think that information is transmitted in just the way that energy is conveyed. It is not. Information is a function of the mind, which is not coterminous with the brain. While we may talk about perceptual information being transmitted - perceived - by the brain, there is no reproduction in the brain of that object. What is reproduced - in the mind - is an abstracted version of the perception which always remains the percept - outside of the brain - and not the conceptual generalization which is the mind's province.

The "encoding" of perceptual transmission is a function of the receiver and not of the object. In a similar way, work is accomplished by differentials in entropy by a transfer of heat, which is related to no concept of sender and receiver. Perception is an act of conceptualization, if it is to become a useful part of memory. Memory is useful only for comparisons with present perceptual reality. Concepts are not abstracted until they are encoded. They are otherwise very real and very emotionally present.

That's what mind means. Concepts are no more in the mind than percepts. The mind matches them. Brain relates to mind, perhaps, as word relates to meaning. Words are external. Shared. Brains are all largely alike as well. They mostly do the same thing.

Watts cannot be a definition for work, any more than a page of gibberish can be called information. It may have an information entropy of a jillion, because it is a monkey typing, but it contains no meaning. In the same way, energy transformed may not equate to work. An explosion is simply the rendering of order into gibberish.

Work must be defined in relation to meaning, as must information. No work is accomplished in the demolition of a bridge, unless that was the object of the harvesting of  the energy. The simple moving of an object may be work, if entropy is decreased, or it may be the natural increase of entropy, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics.

Money, especially money, must not be abstracted from the matrix of actual life. Plays with money must always be suspected as salvos against the planet, and taxed to the players' limit of survival. Money also is a form of life, but abstracted money is a cancer. A viral vector for disease.

A single gene is not a code for anything. Only when, as James Gleick notes in this masterful Information, only when all copies of a particular gene are considered as one, which is to say a gene that endures for eons, only then may one consider that gene a code. It has been abstracted not just from the matrix of all life, but from any and all particular organisms. The abstracted gene was never alive. It was always code. It became code when it became legion, across time.

And so is copying a form of transmission? Why yes, of course, it must be. It moves. And it defines time. Like gravity, there is a direction to evolution, and it is love. Gleick is subtly wrong when he says that the music is the information. He's forgotten the receiver. The "information" must be realized and transmitted before it can be music, in a direction opposite to encoding. It is the making real of code which might cause the rapture to ensue.

And, of course, the rapture is upon us, since the alternative - the destruction of our matrix - is quite literally unthinkable. There is no figure without its ground.

The most dangerous concept with which the West has infected the rest of the planet is the "idea." Ideas are thought to be disembodied, while also housed in the brain. But the brain is not the mind, and the mind extends through all perceptions and conceptions that are without the brain.

Memes then cannot be distinguished from their embodiment, any more than thoughts can be disassociated from words. Gleick makes the point that a hula hoop is not a meme. It is, rather, the idea of a hula hoop, of which the thing is one specific embodiment. I think he is quite wrong. It's not the ideal wheel which is the actual meme of a wheel. It is the one that works.

And, of course, Bratton is wrong when he insists that digital reality cannot be excluded from the processes of life. But of course it can. By definition, digital is already abstracted. Its begins with code. It is the actual embodiment, when made real in the form of video, music, or words (among infinite other things) of that impossible abstraction; the idea. 

That is, of course, what makes digital dangerous. QAnon is a cult of memes, trivially produced by some idiot savant trickster, who styles himself "Q." Bitcoin embodies purest evil, not only because of the diabolical nature of bitcoin mining and its squandering of energy, but for its utter abstraction from anything that might be represented by money. We allow it only because we have no idea what money really is. A medium of exchange. 

Our entire economy seems to have become a trade in individualistic memes. Sex sells. And so do quirky and sometimes perfect gestures. And then we consider them to be international threats to our national security, because they will do the same corruption that Google or Facebook already do to our body politic, but they will do it for some other culture's reasons. As though we had reasons of our own.

But it's the secrets, the hacking, the entree to our banking spaces. As if there were enough of the proper kind of trustworthy human actors to assure the security of your transactions by way of the Internet. The brain as mind is a thought stopping cliché. A semantic stopsign, in the usage of that geek rapturist, Eliezer Yudkowsky. It is also a cliché to say that computers think (and that brains compute). 

Life requires a matrix, and that matrix is built with other life. There is no calculating - no expression of genes or memes - except in the cliche-ridden (and according to Robert J. Lifton, brainwashed) minds of idealist abstract thinkers and in their fevered machines. We otherwise must count.

I guess it's just too trite and obvious that words are the memes of language, and that what we are so fascinated by are the metaphorical viruses. The chain letters and phrases like "jump the shark." Chain letters never make it into "the language" while 'jump the shark' actually does. But the viral memes are dangerous, and only innocents can continue to use Facebook to connect with other free-thinkers, subversives, radicals and liberals. 

Again, Bratton is right. It's not our precious privacy that's being invaded. It's thought and language itself, and all because we thought that digital technology was just another morally neutral tool. No one disputes the amorality of COVID-19, but it's still bad. At least as bad as radioactive fallout. Digital tools can be useful, but not when they are allowed to run free in our economy.

I straighten up my living space constantly. It bothers me when things aren't square, except that I absolutely adore the feng shui of my off kilter apartment. I don't clean  quite as constantly, perhaps relying overmuch on my deficient human nose. But I can be certain that when I wipe a surface - the toilet tank top, for instance - dirt that was utterly invisible will appear. And it will be hard to rinse away from the cloth that did reveal it. 

The real now is the invisible. Not just the virus, whose revenge Bratton riffs on. But also genes, and electricity and ethernet and Internet streams. The invisible is what composes and controls our lives. The invisible is a conceptual realm, and so it must feel natural that concepts should be invisible inside our heads. And that concepts are ontologically equivalent to viruses or electricity, and that, expressed, they might have some use. 

But even conceptual reality must be perceived and felt if it is to be believed. We can deny the reality of the virus, or call it a hoax for purposes of power, but it will still kill us. Ideas will still move us, but not when they remain locked up into fictions of individuality.

There is a different possibility, of course. We may come together in sanity, having trued our words even across vast cultural gaps, and we may learn to preserve our precious commons. Pure abstraction, which is also real, might help us with that. But we cannot live in our abstractions. We cannot construct our matrix. We must co-evolve together. That is the real. No revenge. It just simply is.