The Discovery of Chance

I'm currently reading this book about the Russian Alexander Herzen, and it's holding my attention:

amazon.com

Here's a review:

The Living Truth

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03 - 10 - 2017

Okay. I finished reading this book. I think it is a well-written and interesting thing. My only real complaint is that Herzen doesn't come to vivid presence. So much is about ideas, to the point that the subject himself seems diffuse, hard to grasp as a solid being.

desperate measures

I'm labeling, indexing this post as: "dreams, life, science."

"Science" -- Ha. 


I have a hypothesis about dreams. 

The phenomena that occur in dreams are less striking to me than the tenor of dreams. I can only speak from my sleeping experience about a general dream atmosphere; maybe others would have different experiences of "climate" (variable instead of consistent?) and have alternate opinions about the nature of dreams. 

Does the more-or-less uniform background aura of dreams that I encounter -- pensive, tragic, hyper-existential -- also contain a tentative, experimental feel to the ambiance? And signify anything that can be talked about coherently, conceptually?

Darwin basically gave us this: creatures trying not to die and in the process becoming different things. Sort of a Great Escape. Living and dying are quite serious concerns for an organism. But humans have gotten so abstracted into realms of social mediation and cultural metabolism that the instinctive "mind" gets shoved aside or turned down to a barely audible volume. The biological-subconscious frenzy of being doesn't get fretted over very much by us while awake. It's left to operate on autopilot, so to speak. But when we get very sick or when someone dies, we are then briefly shocked into confrontation with Darwin's creature mantra -- "Live, live!" 

If Darwin and the neo-evolutionists -- including evolutionary psychologists -- are right, then all forms of behavior are adaptive techniques. So what kind of adaptation is involved with dreaming? Merely a sideshow for the mind while the brain reboots itself at night? Or something stranger and cooler?

I prefer the strange and the cool.

The consistent aura of my dreams suggests to me that the soul (that impossible nexus of biology and spirit) is taking desperate measures. It's making nightly attempts to save memory per se -- a whole life -- not just memories in particular. And is trying to circumvent time and space by projecting the self's being into other, possible worlds. A futile nightly act of bio-meta-mythic survival. 

The phenomena of dreams -- events, interactions, predicaments -- are the residue of memory per se refined into new substance. And from this dark material is extruded quasi-experience as a something palpable enough to be projected toward a tentative, potential-eternal situation.

Survival. 

Deep interior self is alerted to, reminded of eventual death as it succumbs each night to the metaphorical little death of sleep, as consciousness involuntarily goes away. That triggers the mania to construct an after-world. But the spherical architecture of the dream won't permanently cohere. The bubble eventually bursts into a lingering mist only of frustration or sadness.

And nightmares? The specter of extinction, despite great substance and process to the contrary, is eating its way through the tissue of our survival-sphere. We wake, and a perspiration of horror is residual on our spirit. 

Our biological-subconscious soul has made a desperate and exotic effort on our behalf, for a continuance after the day of our bell's tolling. That gesture is doomed to failure. But I think it's extraordinary to consider the vast resources of instinctive art and experimental elan -- those actualized holographies, those populated narratives -- our consciousness musters, brings to bear against mortality while we're sleeping.

Beneath the waking mind is another mind that broods and plots the coordinates of symbolic escape toward further and farther experience.

I Saw Three Cities
Kay Sage (1944)

time is crazy-weird

This -- from Gurdjieff's book Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson -- is very strange, almost impossible to interpret, therefore it makes much more sense than physicists' opinions about the nature or essence of time:

Only Time alone has no sense of objectivity because it is not the result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic phenomena. And it does not issue from anything, but blends always with everything and becomes self-sufficiently independent; therefore, in the whole of the Universe, it alone can be called and extolled as the ’Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon.’ 

Thus, my boy, uniquely Time alone, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘Heropass,’ has no source from which its arising should depend, but like ‘Divine-Love’ flows always, as I have already told you, independently by itself, and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in the given place and in the given arisings of our Great Universe.

if I ever gave a physics lecture

The opposite of the curvature of space is what happens when Einstein accelerates while running sideways.

Sir Francis Bacon said this:

Nevertheless if any skillful Servant of Nature shall bring force to bear on matter, and shall vex it and drive it to extremities as if with the purpose of reducing it to nothing, then will matter (since annihilation or true destruction is not possible except by the omnipotence of God) finding itself in these straits, turn and transform itself into strange shapes, passing from one change to another till it has gone through the whole circle and finished the period.

~ from Proteus 

1561 - 1626

The future...

...is what hasn't happened yet. I repeat -- hasn't happened yet. 

So if any Mr. Future Guys insist on appearing anyway, they deserve cream pies in their faces.

on spiritual myopia

Apparently, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are not death-haunted and those who are. Art has a chance of taking place among the latter group. The former are too oddly situated within a sober existence to be genuine makers or deep appreciators of art.

Art is a form of attempted transcendence. Any attempt at art -- music, painting, dance, sculpture, poem, novel -- that doesn't have death somewhere in the foreground or background will yield pedestrian results. That's an assertion. So be it. And here's another one: the genuine work of art is one in which consciousness knows that transcendence is only a fleeting possibility -- a something available only during moments of creation. Knowing that permanent transcendence is unavailable will texture or imbue the creative work with a sense of the tragic.


What got me to thinking about this stuff is an article I read this morning:

"Evolution and Existentialism"

I come across this attitude often, and it remains a baffling thing to behold. In this case, the fellow is trying to amalgamate evolutionary biology and rational existentialism. Oddly, he is not the least bit concerned with the macabre fact of death or with expression toward transcendence. This fellow is way too well adjusted. Art didn't even appear in his article about life.

But maybe his way is just one of the ways of being in the world. One in which art doesn't much register as a possibility of living and coping. Each to his or her own, right? The problem is that this fellow is preaching a preferred way of being. For all of us sentient human creatures. He says that the blending of scientific and philosophical rationalism will put us on a better path of life. And to that I say "Balderdash."

There's an unsettling blitheness to the article writer's construal of being and time: life overall is meaningless so our job is to lose ourselves inside little meanings. That won't cut it. A greater response to overall meaninglessness is called for. Art is the deeper form of life. The tragic sense is the called-for tonality.

Reality is not explainable, nor is consciousness. Another grand assertion, which is fun for me to make. So we are ensconced in a permanent mind-bending mystery. The fact that biological entities evolve or that old French guys in cafes prescribe free choice does nothing to quell the big problem: human consciousness and mortal existence are incompatible. We are located in a compelling paradox. That's where and why the artistically tragic takes center stage.

Mahler's symphonies make the article writer's attitude seem myopic and rather air-headed.

That's all I have to say right now. I need some more tragically existential coffee.

When in a certain frame of mind...

...I can be reconciled to the existence of space and substance. But light is a problem. It makes no sense. It seems superfluous, gratuitous, anomalous -- like too much red lipstick on an ostrich.

I'm on the verge...

...of completing construction of an experimental-conceptual quasi-quantum holistic computer for calculating the quantity of neurosis and cold sweat in mathematicians obsessed with triangulating the convergence of non-Euclidean gravity, clandestine energy, and laughing space.

happy campers make me nervous

When I read books about philosophy or science, I'm struck by an undercurrent of tone that is complacent and too comfortable in those worlds. As if the attitude of the writers grew slowly into their brains like a large and happy fungus. 

When I read books that are a bit more speculative in nature, I'm then struck by a tonality of credulousness that makes me wince.

Maybe the kind of perspective or attitude that would please me -- involving a mixed tone of stubborn equivocation and metaphysical paranoia -- doesn't exist in the authorial or academic world. 

Maybe my desire for a different tone and approach is actually a symptom of my head beginning to dissolve or becoming unstable in space-time.

brain power

Alexa, a reader, sent me this cool graphic on brains and intelligence.

It shows that Nobel Prize winners have a 158+ IQ. I knew it! When I was reading a book of essays by Joseph Brodsky a few months ago, I kept murmuring to myself: "This guy's a genius."

It also shows what can be done to increase IQ. Oh my. Diet, sleep, physical exercise, brain exercise -- no wonder I'm getting gradually stupider. I do all the wrong things.


Click on the chart to go to original page with complete image:


Created by: www.OnlineMastersDegree.com

Richard Feynman

I intend to watch some or all of these:


Richard Feynman lectures -- from io9



Here's the first one:

quantum rant

I used to get freaked out in a fun way over all that spooky-weird quantum mechanics stuff. Of course, one really needs to understand blackboard gibberish, needs to have been born with a mind hyper-flexing with math to properly fathom quantum mechanics. But not knowing stuff has never stopped me before from spouting off about stuff.

I think things have gone too far with quantum mechanics. It's a door that should not have even been opened. “That contradicts human curiosity and the compulsion to go wherever we go!” says probably everyone. I never pay much attention to “everyone,” anyway. So, I'm gonna rattle off my thoughts about this junk.

Some groovy practical things have come from exploring quantum theory (I can't think of any right now, but I'm sure there must be some nifty things). But at what cost? – parallel universes, string theories, the multiverse, zombie cats in boxes, vortexing brain tubules, freakin' wave-functions collapsing, photons giggling at us during their long-distance tangos...all kinds of wild shit. Guys and dolls in fancy universities are straining hard to make Einstein's General Theory of Relativity play nice with quarks and sub-quarks. That giant underground collider contraption in Europe sends pieces of reality zooming around and smashing (something tells me those physicists get off on the ultra-violence).

Some doors should remain closed. Because opening them turns us into quivering idiots.

It should be apparent to sentient beings that Quantum World is not Human World. Our brains ain't built for that. And what's on the other side of black holes has no bearing on our lives. Alice taught us that the Looking-Glass world is too damn freakish. The quantum world is where we stop and...whatever...is its own concern. We keep trying to punch holes into reality. To flush a god out into the open. We're so silly! The Big Bang? Who cares? Much better to leave some darkness intact. Darkness is where the mysteries live that allow us to make art. A good poem is worth more to the human spirit than a sack full of ancient cosmic radiation.

What's the motivation for funding research into all this exotic stuff? So technologies will be developed and turned into products for corporations. "4D television sets coming soon. Place your advance order!" So CEOs can build Taj Mahals on all five of their vacation homes.

Just because we don't know something doesn't mean we should. Hell...no one has a clue what consciousness is in the first place. And we're gonna use consciousness to figure out a theory of everything? Talk about the cart before the horse! “But maybe we'll finally understand what consciousness is when we break through the last quantum door or pull hard enough on 11th-dimensional strings.” And maybe pigs will build submarines and have fun zooming around under the ocean.

All I'm saying is this: we've seen enough to know that reality at the depth of quantum particles behaves in a way too bizarre for explanation...for understanding. We are pieces of reality. But reality itself will not allow pieces to see the overall image of the puzzle. That's my assertion, and it is fun to make it.

those quirky quarks

Tonight, I'm wondering why the statistical matrix of subatomic particles-in-motion corresponds to the distribution of prime numbers.