Wednesday, August 30, 2006

arrhybtun: pranadhyana

The constantly transforming surfulgent... media? suchness? agar gel of reality whose changes in density and smaller more semiautonomous blobs. You try to keep your own house. Do you keep your own house closed off to the rest of suchness.

Perception makes suchness indirectly accessible. It's not something which can be directly apprehended in a rational manner. Therefore it does not make much sense to try to hold on to it in a rational manner, that is, to tie a noose around it and claim that it is a *thing*, that you can hold on your plate and draw a square around in magic marker. Therefore, spend your time worrying about what you can worry about. Deal with the things which are here. Deal with what you have in front of your plate no matter how desirous you are of directly and rationally cogitating about it.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

meditation

A house of biofeedback. Well, a small like with a boundary. An ocean. To cross again is to not cross. But the separation is artificial. There is no boundary anywhere. The process of birth fractures a small pieces of the universe of. That piece of the universe came from nowhere. Well. It was an extension of pieces of the universe previously partitioned. Where does the matter that comprise a baby come from? The bonds in the molecules of plants ultimately and essential comes from sunlight.

When one meditates, one tries to make it so that the border that is between ones self and the universe becomes nonexistent, that is to say that the artificial separation which consciousness causes between the self and the universe can be eradicated, and such eradication is not nihilistic in character. Western nihilism is the fetishistic and religious adoration and obsession with a particular kind of nothingness: an intrinsic nothingness which reeks of the worst excrecable excesses of goth poetry. To wit: Western nihilism is somewhat insane, and pointless.

When I meditate, I try to match my internal fluctuations, vibrations, oscillations, simple harmonic motions, chaotic motions with those of the universe, where in this case when I say "universe", I mean everything and anything which isn't contained and tainted within the artificial and decadent cathedral of the ego-self which people spend enormous effort in deluding themselves is a permanent and timeless thing. When death comes, that boundary is going to go away anyway, so you might spend some time preparing, and not in a religious "well, this is exactly what's going to occur to you after you die and if you don't follow the precepts and rules of some specific religion a soul-image of you will be ripped apart by carnivorous apple-spirits.

These external vibrations, oscillations, echoes, waves, fields, etc. may be of average muon density per cubic parsec, prana grad or curl, chi divergence, neutrinos per cubic meter, free electrons per cubic furlong, the high order literary interpretation fields which are only sensate to organisms with development of literature which are complicated and require more in the way of processing ability than in sensory apparatus, the amount of ego in raw space (doesn't really make much sense, but perhaps there's some kind of analogue, I dunno), anyway, there are the fluctuations which are fluidly varying, and then this membrane, this wall, this partition, this division, this border between the cosmos, the universe, the world, and yourself. These same fields have internal values, namely those internal values at the self, which seems pointlike but isn't. It is within the purview and capacity of the human mind to achieve and attain a balance, an equipoise of these internal fields so that the internal fields at this previously described barrier between the inside and those fields existing on the outside are in a state of contiguous continuity: the transition between the inside and the outside is in no way translated into discontinuous jumps or changes between the field inside and out: the mind is maintaining a second order awareness of the senses, but more so the ego is no longer there: it has not gone in the sense that there's a rug and it's been swept under the rug, but the actual process of ego is no longer present temporarily: there is no separation between oneself and the universe: to call it "being at one with the universe" is a misnomer because one is constantly at one with the universe, even with the artificial precession of the self occurs. What does happen is not that one is at one with the universe, but there is no one and no universe: the perception of a universe requires a one to percieve it. When there is no distinction between the either, neither exists. If the observation of a thing is the cause of the existence of the observer and the observed, then if that observation never occurs, then there are no things and no observers of things. There might as well be no observers and no thing of things. And when that happens you have the experimental verification of gobsloads of wisdom about meditation.

Seek not the stories of meditation or the warnings which accompany it, or religious marketing gobbledygook. Acquire direct mystical experience: this is the closest you can get to being entirely empirical without resorting to believing morasses of ideas concocted for social control... of you.

Cheese's ghost relies upon the snorting of the celery stalk for the insights into the sex lives of muons. Briefly the sun flashes upon Cornwall. You have seen this perfectly and exquisitely illustrated before in unambiguous and precise paragraphs. The pyramids of self-frustration alight perfectly on the diseased onion-seller's cart in the bazaar. Seventeen men named Yorke-Klinsley pirouette around the obelisk at the center of town, demanding equal wrongs for divisors of zero. And somewhere in this thick pea-soup of an explication you're seeking a precisely spelled out path, a religious monomania for which you wish to adjourn the wait for direct mystical experience and purchase promises of redemption and infinite bliss in the afterlife for the price of social obligations committed for (what will turn out to be) the wrong reasons.
Being at one means being at none: neither thou norst the other means either aren't present. Hence: you fly at night and sleep at day and seek not thy peanut butter turbines.

Other options extant, indeed! Pursue not the green slines for the sake of simple additive redemption. Understand not the ways of the gray bifurcation between thyself and other.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

some thoughts from Doctor Rinidab Forskolin

Gweetings and insultations to thee, Meissners und Mindiers. I am playingunf around with complicated and bizarre entities and things. Or well, no, I'm not. I'm not playing around with anything at all.

Well, perhaps Dr. Rinidab Forskolin does not exist. Perhaps he is an illusion of our collective imagination. That is substantially more probably than reading some paragraphs from his book "An Attack of The Mongeeses", which for reasons which continue to leave the more relaxed elements of the public bewildered, it was subject to a vicious and harsh bookburning at the hands of the Toronto Apathetic Person's Association -- it was that horrible a concoction that they couldn't leave it standing, Apathetics that they be.

Friday, August 25, 2006

valve gas arrhythmia

Razor green homoclinic points resonated slowly in the mire. We watched as the manifold of perceptual eructation began to vilify our punctuation. I found the Transjunct widget, a small piece of material about the size of an iron filing, but like a nisk in capacity. Oh, well, I'd better back up.
A nisk is a very capable and flexible machine. Nisks are some of the most benightedly insightful pieces of spatial engineering ever created. When Percy Syzgaurus discovered a nisk in the junkyard in Stavron-on-Tengor, by the next day the Cjalj army, who had been committing horrible atrocities in the occupied Kaiurna district for the past five centuries, was defeated without any injury to anyone. No violence was involved either. The nisk was a tool that accelerated Percy into both differential space and differential time. It's really hard to talk about differential space and differential time the same way you might talk about a frog. If you take ordinary time and represent it as a room, and then smoothly cleave the room into smoke fragment puzzle pieces, differential time is like being able to play hopscotch on them. They can be rearranged, moments can be bisected. Events can be split, stretched, transformed into pencils. In differential space the same kind of temporary division of one's sensorium occurs. This way Percy was able to simultaneously transform every single weapon in possession of the Cjalj army into a hummingbird, butterfly, loaf of bread, piece of cheese, piece of porn, candy bar, or intoxicant in the space of five minutes. And the Cjalj army had about 10,000 troops in the area. It's a good thing because the higher ups had a massacre at Stratiti planned to commence within the hour. Percy later described the use of a nisk as "one of the strangest experiences in my entire life -- simultaneously I was in many places at once and doing many things at once to many objects but was not confused by them, or the separation between them. I was conducting a symphony of thousands of parts, and I was the director. I enjoyed the experience immensely but it was only a single use nisk. Perhaps one day I will get a hold of a multiple use nisk.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

strange attractors and algebraic varieties are the same things

A plume is invariant under a transformation: it is more interesting, more involved than a fixed point. A fixed point is a single point which doesn't change: it doesn't tell us much about the transformation. At least, what we can deduce from a fixed point is not as interested as what we might deduce from a plume. Demonstration to follow.

solutions of equations

In the first era of history, mathematics was concerned with finding the solutions to equations, and it made the assumption that the solutions of equations corresponded to the values of some variable inside the equations was equal to zero. If that variable itself wasn't equal to zero, a new variable could be manufactured -- progeny of the first variable -- which could be set to zero. Solutions were single points at which some function was zero. This gravy train began with simple quadratic polynomials in Phoenicia, to the unsolvability of the quintic by radicals and rational operations alone, to even more bizarre and weird functions. And once happy with methods for distilling the solutions of expressions, they proceeded to find the shape of the spaces of solutions and topology was born -- well -- driven along. High order mathematics got high falutin, but the basic idea to a schoolchild is that you're solving something -- you've got some problem with an unknown -- a specific and exact quantity which isn't apparent but through reasoning and thought can be made apparent.

Today, we know better. Equations gave way to isomorphisms, thus we could consider that the set {apple,bear} and {Springer-Verlag, riding crop} are not themselves isomorphic generally speaking, but given an appropriate adjunction, they are both sets of nouns, or from a more set theoretical approach, they are sets with identical cardinality.

When mathematicians first began studying strange attractors, they started out with the notion that these were limiting sets of points. They were thinking in terms of points because that's the heritage from which their thinking descended. The attractor was a variably visualized adjunct to the reasoning processes employed in the abstract comprehension of it. Then gradually, as Ryelgin and Stanstorpe's ideas about objects which weren't singular -- i.e. solutions to equations which weren't single points began to be advocated and accepted throughout the mathematical community, a great revolution occurred rather rapidly.

Take, for instance, the Ikeda map. Back then, it was said "For one basin of attraction, there's a fixed point, and for the other, there's a strange attractor". These days, both the attractor and the fixed point are viewed as solutions/invariances of the Ikeda map. The Ikeda map leaves both the fixed point and the attractor invariant. Now they are on equal footing as being solutions, but not on equal terms in interestingness. After a period of distracted terminological puritanism, and some fine filigrees of terminological hubris, some dude or another decided that 'attractor' was perhaps the wrong moniker for these sorts of diffeomorphism invariant -- well, what were they? They weren't manifolds. They weren't probability distributions. And all points in the basin went to the attractor. It's a nice word. But it was too big in practice. Indeed: what the intellectual descendants of Ryelgin and Stanstorpe wanted a nice short word that captured the spirit of 'attractor' and 'attraction' without having a feeling of staccato gravity. The word 'plume' was eventually decided on. So when you're looking at a picture of the Ikeda attractor -- the notion is that both the fixed point and the interesting structure are solutions to the Ikeda map -- both of them are valid as attractors for their given basins of attraction, but only one is a plume -- that is -- the fixed point -- is now distinguished from a bizarre collection of points which was formerly and still occasionally referred to as an 'attractor'.

Another point to notice: for every sequence which eventually arrived in the Ikeda plume, it had a countably finite number of points. But the Ikeda plume itself has an uncountable infinity of points.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

telamon or broke

Speaking for the parties with no voices, perhaps askew expression begets badly strewn scallopscapes. Inexactitude is like the wind: the words are like lillies undergoing brachiation or some other kind of inexactly expressed idea. Today, I shall learn another script or another way of expression, but not really. No proper chalk chiaroscuro will suffice to express the idea currently ululating in my mind. It is like a smudged thought, that I desparately place upon some kind of window and then distractedly wander off, hoping that I will find someone who those thoughts will jive, will be heard appropriately and without confusion. That is my usual wish. Thus I engage myself in programmes of self-expression, but programmes of self expression without intended audiences: I speak to the void, not worrying about anyone specifically, I just let the words and phonemes pitter patter down. It's tiring, these gray doldrums. I've made a cozy little vortex my home. I'm familiar with its characteristic smoke fragments and extruded frustration vapor. I see occasional lampposts which are sharp and stark against this landscape, but they are also distant and hard to get a hold of. I wish they were nearer. I wish I didn't have to dredge the mines for such an interminably long time. I'm stuck in an archipelago by a strait next to an isthmus: I wander this grotto, fumingly: I see landmarks and broken ideas here. I don't feel like I'm a part of any tradition. I feel like I can hear the sounds of a massive wooden behemoth breaking and shattering into tiny pieces. People have gotten sloppy. Very sloppy. I suppose it's cyclical and given a sufficiently disintered observer in the curds and flotsam of human experience you could find patterns of sloppiness and nonsloppiness, but it looks like the current one is going to go on: that's the direction of the climate. And I believe the human species is far too early along its little wanderlust for anything like memetic climatology to be firmly developed to the point of consistency. Some people are creative and playful, but most are hacks. There's nothing wrong with hackery, but the problem is if everyone is a hack then you kind of get lost in a sea of approximations. Oh, we're satisfied with linear approximations because elliptic functions and hypergeometric functions scare the heebie-jeebies out of us. Oh, we're going to go with documents prepared with microsoft word and typeset in times new roman because it's what's out there, and we're not going to admit to knowing any better because we so clearly don't. And then this lot gets it into their head to complain about things that don't work or have changed without them knowing the specifics, or that the announcement of the change was placed in a disused lavatory at the bottom of the stairs with a sign saying "beware of the tiger". Wasn't Arthur Dent the one who didn't know how anything worked? (c.f. Mostly Harmless). And now there are an effectively innumerable number of Arthur Dents dentishly squishing their nose at the glass wondering why they keep being exposed to a deranged and chaotic universe which doesn't seem to possess once ounce of sympathy for them before, after, and during a series of misadventures with technology. The commonweal is too common. And most people are dimly aware of that. And they'll go and purchase incandescent lights and bad beds and complain about the same things over and over again. A lack of focus, it is, I think. I also believe that there is a lack of distactable perfectionism: people are either too narrowly focused or dead. And the dead are living: cavorting and zombily walking the earth, yapping on their cellphones. But enforced belief system injections are not the answer, and neither is appealing to the uncertainty of the universe. It's utterly foolish and completely irresponsible for anyone to say that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation, or quantum physics, or Godel's Incompleteness theorems (or extensions thereof by Church, Turing, Chaitin, and others) are a clear sign that science has lost it. This is like treating science as if it was one thing, either a clear and victorious method of human epistemology free from issues, or a downright scoundrel determined to undermine humanity. It's one of those intrinsicist farragos which more pointless intellectual strife progresses as result. That minor point aside, it's the ad agencies, like the religious missionaries and proselytizers who stretch an improperly degranularized science as the princeps of human reasoning. Close parenthesis. The result of this simultaneous marketing of science and religion is a disaster.

It would be amazing if there was an epistemology which didn't have the faults of (the granularized) sciences or religious reasoning. It's know that both the process of understanding and comprehension cause opiates to be released in the brain. It's also know that religious processes in the human brain involve opiates as well. What is strange is that both processes are involved in the relief of pain. There is pain associated from not knowing? That section of the do reticulum necessarily cut off from one's perception by the individuality of a person under normal circumstances. So, harking back to my misguided attempt to define informed aesthetics in a previous post: I want to say that something whose aesthetics I consider informed has the following properties: it is unquestionably identifiable as a given object by its context. There is no ambiguity in determining what the thing is, and this is particularly important for single use physical objects. For multiple use physical objects, the object's ambiguity of scope of function should make it easy for the user to toggle their mental image of the functions of the object. The object should be designed such that the person who is using the object has little difficulty figuring out how to use it. For a given object there will be a relatively reliable way in which it relates to the person using it, and in most cases, I think that way should give the person using little thought about using the object. Such objects should also be easy for people to use in the sense that it should not be difficult for the particular person to go from two year old with a given sort of object to the state where their use of the object reflects precision and experience: objects should not be excessively hard to use. (I think I should find the essay about spimes).

Monday, August 21, 2006

stranger than the strangest fleece

Lying gravy perchance a fog. Bliss engines cavort in the waves. Did you see that flash? That was an arrangement-symmetry lost on the sand. Oh. I watched the sun twist and revolve and transform. My pencil transformed as well. The event plumes and world-dusts scattered to the turbulent winds afar. The flavonoid turbines and the probability filters rusting against the junkyard. Vapors of sublimated red cosines teased my nostrils as the moon began to oscillate. Chance-icicles and quaternion curtsies falvifferated and circled around in proud flourishes. Reason-explications and precision abutments fell from the starscape. Monstrous vibrations and scantily explicated concepts gloriously rotted on the turf. Somewhere, a bottle of glee was opened and the partiers drunk themselves to a release of tensions. Rose colored exhortation pentagons fell from the trees, then wetly shattered into thousands of many colored droplets, each one vitrifying and then itself smashing into a coruscating explosion of color, until the landscape was glowing with smashed iridescent microdrops skipping across the rock face.

Several antlike philosophers wafted their antennae in the direction of the colorquake. A Bisbrion plant underwent primary metamorphosis, its onctopoate membranes hardening
as it prepared for translation of the main organism into a post-onctopoate glial intelligence.
"Hath this vexing riddle a disharmonious solution", muttered a ribald celery stalk, just shadowed by a waterfall. Niser Quayvors greedily and grumpily gulped down unleavened hope, and a lispy wine.

Athwart the nasally transparent orb, we began to learn how to move for the first time. Suddenly, quite suddenly, we were going to witness an onctopoate creature birefringing for the first time. An amazing process. We placed ourselves high and out of its range, and watched the creature meditate, or ingest some form of chemicals. We're really not sure which we're exactly sure which. Its simple biology began to fraxyfrellate, its ossars got sparser. The Ridge of Blyphontus underwent transfrenulation. We watched its Rising Chorus of Trystero undergo moiety transduction. Then the processes were settled. The border between the onctopoate entity and the rest of everything began to soften, to weaken, its artificiality was exposed. Then we didn't see it. It wasn't there. But we felt it. The back-straddle cardboard arrangement of relations in our neighborhood of the do reticulum was stratified, reified, extended. It had emerged from the snail-shell of the beginning and was at the end, or in the middle, or somewhere else. Or elsewhence.

complete noninternal self-reflection

There a-lies the statement for which there are no methods by which that it can be decoded. Linguists have been consulted this way and that and yet none of them have anything useful to say about anything in particular. Because of their improbable recalcitrance no one has anywhere to go or anything to do. What a vague array of statements. Or, more precisely, what a vague disarray of statements. There's nothing there! No content. Not as much as a whit of intellectual development or precision. Well. What have you? In these days there's absolutely no precision: well, further emendation: nothing of substance. And you know, the disturbing thing is that this rage, this sound and fury, was signifying nothing ten billion years ago. At our heart of hearts we know this. It all amounts to a progression of a complicated and perhaps incomprehensible cavalcade of imprecise ideas and nifty things which don't amount to anything themselves. Well, that's a raid on the disease which improper practitioners of zen are likely to provide you with. Or some kind of pseudomystic gobbledygook which you're eager to have or go on, or something or other which is important like that. The less you pay attention to something specific or something meaningful, you'll find that nothing much comes of it. Where wasn't I? Not anywhere in particular. That is to say that the kind of people that don't signify nothing work in insane and often paradoxical ways not to amount to nothing. Well. Or other. Or something.


Yes, it's complete and utter noise. Something with a signal to noise ratio so low that donuts and other assorted forms of shrimp can barely reify themselves. Something so absurd and free of nouns and adjectives that you'd just think that it was some kind of verbal eructation produced by something, or rather someone with nothing much to say, and there you'd only be partially write. I have a channel and some kind of language generation processes which I employ, but these language generation processes are highly filtered and that filtering makes it hard to express myself, and the way that I'm working on relaxing myself involves doing what I can to perhaps unfilter those channels. At first the emerging material in a specific channel kind of resembles gobbledygook, and only later on does it get modulated into some kind of sensible stream of coherent information. In the case of speaking about nothingness and the void my opinions are more complicated. Sure, I have a point, if you really want to stretch that rather unelastic thing, but the problem is that I realize that some things I want to communicate rationally about, like love, and other things I want to be as vague and random as possible about because I feel that the process of making them as explicit as possible has lost them, particularly to those people who think that they can be made explicit and easy to understand, because they don't make sense without the proper kind of direct mystical experience, the one that is unfettered by force and engaged in by people who want to just see the universe for themselves.

And, I can't provide a direct tutorial. I've been there, well, I claim that I've been there in so many words, and it's not something which I can present well, if at all. The point being that the idea is not one that admits an easy didactic expression. It's not one that even fits anywhere. It doesn't work when trying to hit someone over the head with a bat (it's not something which can be communicated to another by argumentum ad baculum), and the strangest thing is that I think it's the most important thing which I think I can express. It's something which demands to be expressed, not by whit of itself: it's nothing in itself, but by the kind of relations that it has with other objects, it is perhaps the most important thing that a person living can experience or have any knowledge of, and to make it religious or of marketing character, it kind of becomes stupid, void of --- well, it can't ever really be denied, or filtered, but much of the time it is filtered out, smashed, twisted. I can't talk about it not because my language is good enough. But because language sucks. Language is not the tool for the expression of this. Language just doesn't work. Language is too rigid and brittle a medium for expressing this kind of thing.

If anyone starts talking about the glory of god, just tell them to be quiet. Particularly if they start talking about the glory of god in a religious context. It's not fun listening to retelling of others experiences, particularly when these experiences aren't direct mystical experiences but are experiences of buying the marketing which other people have installed in themselves. Oh, well, god's glory is great and swell, but what do the idiotic linguistic scripts of religion have to do with actual direct mystical experience. There is no way to independently verify that someone has had a direct mystical experience. It's not something which can be objectively quantified, at least not yet.

I look forward to the day which we can reliably give people direct mystical experiences at a specific point in their lives regardless of their life experiences, their wealth, et cetera. It's something which I think is necessary for every member of the species to have at present. I'm so extraordinarily tired of trying to think in terms of the species at the moment. I'd rather the species get its druthers together and decide that this would be a good idea rather than fighting more pointless wars for misallocated energy and resources. Why are the damn primates in charge of their own happiness? They're not. They're not even doing economics at the present... what was the word... chremastics. Machines could have more empathy for humans than humans could have for other humans, because machines, and not human machines, either, nonhuman machines with the survival conditions for each one of them being the amount of happiness they bring people. The machines that make people happier will survive, and the machines that don't make people happy will not survive. Eventually what will occur is that people will factor themselves out of this process completely. And the machines that make the most people happy will have a larger chance of surviving than machines that make people less happy. It's going to be a long road, but the space for such machines to evolve in has been progressing for hundreds of years, and with computers we're beginning to see the beginnings of machines which are aware. The machines are coevolving with people and their evolution is staggeringly rapid, but the sad thing is that few see that happening. Either we've got matrix style paranoia that the machines are taking over the world, or we've got other crap going on which few people understand, and there's so much of that other crap that it's going to be difficult to recognize that the machines are evolving. Their nucleic acids just reside in different places than the nucleic acids of the minds of men. The minds of human being are the nuclei in which the evolution of memes occurs. The memes recombine, compete, and to the point at some points hither and thither the memes are transcribed and converted into physical objects. And that is the kind of hierarchy I'm talking about. Well, it's more of a network than a hierarchy... at least in the ideal. At the moment it's a hierarchy because the machines haven't gotten to the point which they're solely designing themselves. Doomsday scenarios aside, at some point we will reach the point in which machines and humans kind of mesh, and mesh in the sense that the separations of time and distance which have so traditionally plagued humanity will be gone. Perhaps that point will be soon but perhaps too it might be very distant.

When the machines are on equal footing with us: when we recognize that we are biological machines and the paranoia concerning the mimesis of human beings in a technological form is over, then the idiocy of the spamwar that is our genes, which we have borne ourselves out on, may be replaced by something even more efficient. Perhaps all of those ALU repeats are good, but perhaps we can do something better if we can clean our genetic code of them. Perhaps we can use the.... pipe dream. Let me not go there.

muon orgiasty (et liberorum et cetera)

Oh. Plethysms abound here! Many of my mice meet metallic matte masters in the citadel. They offer us ribald tales of foregone conclusions. We don't listen very closely. We watch for the sleepy giants and the lethargic beanpoles to point at distant twisted objects, as if to misdirect us to simpler conclusions about the state of our lives. Sometimes a little old man wanders out of the distict pyramid, with a distacted look on his face and clipboard in hand. He says (to anyone willing to entertain the exhalations of incoherency which somehow manage to escape from his mouth): "I know it seems like everything's under control, and it is. So would you please cease this endless bantering about Missy's professional Octagon-neutering service. The Octagons are near extinction in this part of the country! Now shoo! Go about your business and leave an old insane man to froth mightily about skin cancer or illegal velociraptors or some other kind of piebald nonsensica!"... (and so on and so forth, ad nauseum, ad astra, et cetera.

In so doing he has yielded to us, the magic shadow shapes, the secret of creation. To that which isn't we know that it is relationless. It is entirely symmetric in both relations to other things and relations of all sorts. We must endeavor to break this symmetry, first in mind, then in matter. As minds are already more broken by whit and writ of the Normative Thinkologists, they constantly cleave and shatter the ghost-wracked weave of implications and provide ideas from this, that, the other, yon, and neverwherever. Thus, we concieve of the relations we want first, and follow with an object (a things which exists independently, or so they say, an illusion, a candy factory on the Red Sea, in the middle of July, with a nice northeast breeze and twelve mimes sitting in a circle around a granite dodecahedron, providing some kind of holy ground, an extension). The symmetry is broken, the properties (which are broken symmetries themselves) congeal, and an object is borne in mind, wherein the mind endeavors (well, more to the point it falls flat on its face, such as it would be if it were reified) to break further symmetries. Not content to remain merely in mind, the strongest of objects propel the mind with their images and shadows, and the mind is the bubble chamber or conductor through which these objects use to induce their existence: they are not self-existing as they did not arise with no relations to other objects. Such is a nightmare. It's a sticky thing, this dough reticulum. You could shatter it like shattering vitrified jello. To do so is to take objectivist intoxicants, such as the intrinsicides.
Randians are known for ingesting large quantities of intrinsicides, or perhaps for synthesizing them internally while dousing their ideas and ideals with "a=a"ism.

To exist is to have relations. The copulaphiliacs will wonder why "is" is. So: "existence", in any number of quotations, metaquotations, references, or uses, is a red herring, a distraction. A purple cardboard trapezoid in the center of your hypothalamus providing you with some kind of linguistic pirahna on which you've been convinced is necessary for life. What would a de-existence agent be like? Make you or me philosophical zombies? Existence is as normative as Queen Ontologia: The Queen of Existence, Absolute and Precise. For which things are spelled out in black and white and the nodes are more important than the network. Have they seen the network with their rigid hierarchies? We've got to remold the dust, prepare the ideas, or work like maniacs to express this unprofundity. But we'll most likely be upstaged by fundamentlist existialists. Or Fundamental Ontologists. Or The Order of the Orthodox Objectivist Ontologists (usually acronymized to 4O).

Defend not thy paragons of meaning from the acid of nothingness. For perhaps thy hydroxyl ion of glee and thy hydrogen idea of unrepresentability tumble and gyre in the wake of the iron rust galligaskin.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

losing the attenuator

strobing ikeda valleys await a continuation: two doilies are fingered identically, gingerly compared and contrasted. No general mechanics of doilies is there. The language is abuzz with horrible mockery and imprecise formulations. Ah, well. Can't express it precisely all of the time. At first a few brave explorers declare territory or find wondrous new geological landmarks of stunning complexity and amazing disposition. Exorbitantly complex visually stimulating structures which pause everyone's attention. Too rapidly landmarks of similar ilk are discovered nearby and given similar names, or names which are confusing. The Standard Map. Is it the Map which applies universally? Is it the Map which one encounters on the banks of the Nile?

Friday, August 18, 2006

informed aesthetics

Some highly coherent thoughts cannot be expressed as if they were single points. They don't fit inside single points. They're also too large to be expressed as a series of points linked together by linking sentences and structures. You just have to hope that the way in which you express the thought manages to work. What do I mean by 'work' in this context? And what do I mean by highly coherent thought?

I have a program of aesthetics. Well, it's a kind of aesthetics that I've been working on that's related. I call it informed aesthetics. And I suppose that I can start explaining it simply: basically the idea is that a considerable number of aesthetic systems work in a void. They don't consult with other areas of human knowledge. There's no exchange, just isolation. I think a considerable quantity of dreck is generated when people either don't have some kind of overarching vision -- which is a problem because the whole programme is started with a collection of vague, overarching statements which are supposed to be the guidelines for every enactment of that given sort of aesthetics, or people just declare that certain items belong in a newly named aesthetic, and later wonder about what fits into that aesthtic in particular, and some even go so far as to be gatekeepers of a particular type of aesthetic, putting themselves in charge of declaring what's a member and what isn't. That's a bad idea for thermodynamic reasons, particularly if someone is very strict about what belongs with a particular aesthetic and conservative with their ideas about what belongs.

Objects do not possess independent existence or independent qualities of their own. They acquire both their preobjective qualia and their properties through their interaction with other so called objects. To determine a putative object one must determine its putative relations to all other objects. (this is dependent origination, from Buddhism). Therefore, to determine the a given aesthetic, one must decide what are the relationships of this aesthetics to other aesthetics, and any given sort of object which the aesthetic might relate to.

Informed aesthetics is not about art. Informed aesthetics is about one's living environment, one's representations, one's constructed reputation. It is about objects which are useful. It is about objects which may be interpreted as artistic or displayed in museums later. The relations here is that this form of aesthetics which I am proposing is concerned solely with objects that interact with people on a more regular basis. One appreciates art in a museum, but one does not live in a museum. If the art is in one's living space, or one works at an art museum and is concerned with the arrangement of art pieces there, then this aesthetics applies. This aesthetics does not apply to environments for which a given person will never have any interaction with.

The above paragraph mostly covers scoping issues. The next covers content.

Imagine that I am considering a pepper grinder. I want a pepper grinder that will last a number of years, be immune from rust when cleaned with water, will work with relatively little effort on the part of the user of the pepper grinder -- so if they want quite a lot or a little pepper they aren't strained. These are functional requirements. But there are other requirements as well. The pepper grinder should be immediately distinguishable from the salt shaker in form so that when one reaches for a pepper or salt shaker one does not have to pick the wrong one. In restaurants this is accomplished by having the two items different colors. The more visually distinct they are the better. But there are other requirements of the pepper and salt shaker: they should not necessarily be imbued with outright and flagrant trademarks of the organizations that made them. If they are to be sold or marketed on the flashiness of their image rather than the functionality of their products, then they are just as culpable for the modern affectation with representations of objects (whether these be corporate trademarks or not) being more important than the functions of objects. Then, assuming that the manufacturers of the pepper grinder have designed the golden pepper shaker, comes the question on their part of how to design some kind of way of identifying them along with the packaging: if they engineer good products, they should be known on the basis of the good products. Corporate trademarks of high visual complexity abuse people's ability to judge whether or not a product is worthwhile because people are more concerned with the brand than the viability of the object in the long term. Such shenanigans should not have a place in the modern world. Whether or not a given object works is not determined by an imprint on that object.

On the flip side, whenever self-representation is properly called for: that is, when I'm representing myself via stationary or writing, I want myself to be as distinct as possible. Which is to say if that I produce a personal logo, mark, or symbol denoting myself, I want it to be as robust under a wide variety of methods of interpretation as possible. If there are ten different ways of interpreting the same symbol or logo, I want those ways of interpretation to produce the same result. Or as close to the same result as possible in a wide variety of people making that determination. This drives to the heart of the difference between personal artifacts and corporate artifacts. A corporate artifact wants to be as nonambiguous in interpretation as
possible that it is associated with a particular corporation. Well. The corporation wants that of the artifact. And, again, a way to do this is ornateness of construction in all respects. A logo is not the same thing as complex artwork with multiple interpretations on multiple levels. Especially if those interpretations are layered on top of each other cryptographically. With ten different interpretations of a complex corporate logo, anyone who was copying some given item would not necessarily know or care, and thus those complex multiple layers of encoded meaning might not be copied properly.

So, the idea here is twofold. One is a functionalist message, that aesthetical viewpoints about particular objects should jive together as a coherent whole, objects should be biologically, ergonomically, physically, and visually constructed to be pleasant and sensible, and that construction should be complex in such a way not as to be excessively complex so as to be brittle, but sufficiently complex that multiple layers of meaning pointing to the authorship of the object are clear. As an example, if anyone writes a large quantity of text, a statistical signature of their word constructions can be generated. In an ideal world, we'd be able to generate that on the fly and discover that during reading of texts, but most people are incapable of sorting out the authorship of a text just by reading it, and many texts generated by people are too generic to specify one or the other. But this text which I've just wrought should scream that it was written by me very strongly. And when I get custom stationary made by Crane's, it's going to feature a complex logo with multiple layers of interpretation, one that is not one of those monograms or other rather poor representations which people choose which say "well, yes, I like high quality paper but I'm too demented to realize that that hideous copperplate or whatever other typefaces they provide are ugly and robotic in character and rather unbecoming to personal stationary or whatever kind of other personal representation which I've chosen for this paper". Something with fractals is my choice. Something with a fractal whose constant is generated from binary numbers generated from some kind of representation of my name. Something with that many layers.

For the moment I'm done with this.
Interminable giblets splatted against the window. Inside, five men looked at each other as if they were about to rip each other's throats out. A metronome in the table tocked and ticked to and fro'.

Jvelve: It is! It is adumbrated
Wrunskis: I say. I say. It's a flap-wrong idea.
Jvelve: In-flooping-deedy.
Mr. Wrarpshard Plentwistle: This is protestable. I mean. What if Belgians get a hold of it?
Ydrumby: Plentwistle: you can take the incomprehensible British antipathy of Belgians and soak it in a sock. This is business. This is a mighty serious business we're considering here.
Jvelve: Order! I call Order.
Heeblefleen: Order is rescinded by the chaos of St. Jerome the Twisted!
Strampolis: But it is a thing!
Mr. Wrarpshard Plentwistle: Oh please. It is so not a thing. By the writ of so-and-so or thus-and-such the falseness of it has been completely and unambiguously demonstrated
Stampolis: Its thingness is incontrovertible!
Heeblefleen: It has been entirely controverted!
Ydrumby: But, what, about, the meaning!
Stampolis: Shatnerism
Ydrumby: hic! sorry
Jvelve: haec. quod est disputandem
Mr. Wrarpshard Plentwistle: I've had enough, what is it?
Ydrumby: meaning! I call a misappalachia!
Stampolis: all resolved to collide our heads with mischevious and reckless glee?
Heeblefleen: Think of the ridges! The mad Englishwomen wielding spacklers! What have we wrought here? A vexing question? A lack of nouns?
Jvelve: Oh my god.
Mr. Wrarpshard Plentwistles head begins smoking.
Heeblefleen: we have discovered the robot! Time to order pizza.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Atypical Kayapo Arctangent Ritual

Thus bespake the Mousegoo: I am a frog to the unrhymeable word! I am a majestic maharaja! I am the pentacle of glee upon which the mismastered modern approximation of Americana dances floppily in glee! I am the unbludgeonable standard upon which creative expression shall be measured against! I am the transmarginality suffering at the end of a sentence when all is said and done. What? You were expecting Abbott and Costello? Or Martin Lawrence? Or some more modern magus of the English language to provide to you some kind of emmenagogue for your misconcieved thoughts? Oh, you wound me with your comparisons of me to a lemon, to a lemonade stand, to a degreed molecule of gabapentin lamenting its motehood. You'd want another preacher, one who wanted to inject ideas into your head, perhaps with an actual syringe filled with metaphysical mustard of poor consistency and even more dependency on simile turmeric this and syllogism onion powder that, and Thomas Pynchon's unauthorized biography the other. Oh, you want something explicit. Something painfully obvious spelled out in words made from obscenely legible letters? Something so legible and crisp that you could cut your nose on it? Good luck finding that in this post-trans-structuralist cavalcade of poorly expressed ideas and ill-constructed thoughts. Oh, so you're saying that I should march my Mousegoo to the temple of High Energy Physics and wait until they tell me the fundamental explanation of all reality? My error, that required capital letters and italics: The Fundamental Explanation of All Reality. (doesn't that acronymize to FEAR?) I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you've got the wrong number. I'm no longer at that address (nor were you). We've moved on. You can purchase our idea-globules at the local soda factory for ten ducats a dram. I'll see you when the sheep come home.

internalities

What is this about? And why? And who? A dirigible antwhistle? A man with a plan to speak? A hot lass in a short skirt? A chocolate martini? And who has the explanations? And why is there such a drive for things to be explained? Religious maniacs want the root of the tree. More generally monists. Tho' the insanity of the typical monist is so well documented there is no point in precessing around it in glee, for they too are religious in their search for the root of their tree.
I could say "well, it's a dependent origination reticulum -- a do reticulum", and you'd wonder, well if it's this network of links then what does the network subsist in? What's the medium of it's occupation? At this point I look like a frayed water cable and can't offer you any more explanations. I might point at a brick. Or smell like pelargonia as means a way of explaining, but there is no explanans and no explanandum. There's just the whiff of oranges in the breeze and a feeling that somewhere, somehow, an adjective describing cows has been horribly misused. The one true reason is driven in twain. The arborial metaphor is already broken by the time the primate hierarchies come to addict you to it, and most of the time you're so unprepared to defend yourself against such an unreasonable point of you that you're doing planes of it off the backside of the cute local topologist or gardener.

I have a temple to sack that isn't anywhere, it's everywhere. It's a stubborn feature of human reasoning. To counter it I can't employ counterarguments, because those just have the same valences of finding the root or center. So my attack has to be askance, at an angle. Orthogonal to the manifold and breezy. I have to come in, be confused and well nigh incomprehensible, make a few impassioned statements and some very, very explicit object lessons with shockingly visual metaphors, and leave in a huff, or on the breeze, letting it sink in that my point is that I don't have one and neither should you. And if you do have a point, or are a point, then maybe spaciousness is a viable option, and that perhaps you should consider planting some flowers and staring out at the horizon while chewing on a tomato.

waiting in the mist

Many technical problems are all around. My focus is not one of them. Instead awaiting clarity, lucidity? Finding not a trace or whit of these signposts of well-reasoned argumentation? Or well-reasoning in general? Just a congealed mess of oil and badly expressed ideas or uncreative forces contriving to generate the worst possible dreck? And also to celebrate the worst possible dreck. Is there an elitist blog service? Is there a fine aesthetic to this? Of course you have the wannabe expats with their moleskines and their ludicrously incoherent pen preferences, which reside in blogs this way and yonder, but are these little complaints ever funneled into a coherent kind of proper graphology? Graphology is, I'm sure you're aware, a psuedoscience. Hands this way and that are supposedly the signposts of personality. But is there any morphological analysis of people' s hand anatomy and the way they write? It may exist. The point being that writing a sequence of personal and revealing commentaries and eccentricities about oneself does ought not give one the leisure to be shallow.