Word Jazz and SETI

In another life, as they say, before the invisible cities, before the invisible wars, my girlfriend and I got hooked on Ken Nordine's Word Jazz, which was on NPR. It was so profound and metaphysical, but with a jazz attitude. Very cool. After a while, it seemed like his shows had some sort of clue about our lives. We couldn't wait to get home from work on the nights his show was on and see what he had in store for us. It seemed like the them of our lives for that week was the them of the show! Sometimes they were very specific things, like something happening on a bus on his show that was weird but almost identical to something that happened to us. Yeah, I know, tropical fish look like they're dancing to the music, Ramsey theory says you always find patterns, etc. But, I've never known anyone who actually thought the fish were dancing, it just looks like they're dancing. Yes, we always find patterns, but some are more meaningful. For some reason we think it's more than a coincidence that when we read a book, we generally learn, or that in conversations, what the other person says, usually fits with what you were saying, (more searching for entailment).

The difference between superstition and science is, the amount of scrutiny the conclusions get. So, yes, I could think Ken was communicating clues to my girlfriend and I because of natural co-occurrence, Ramsey theory, Dada, mind as meaning maker, whatever. But once we ask ourselves, "Is it possible?" - things change.

Let's look at some of the ways this could occur.

1. The message is deliberate, strictly personal and is equivalent to one given by an omniscient agent that knows the significant facts of who you are. This happens with no one else.
2. Just like 1, except everyone gets a personal important message. In essence, KN is Santa Clause, knows every kid and what they need to do get the best Christmas ever. Everyone that listens will hear their personal important message.
3. Just like 2, except ...

We see the pattern.
Basically we have {always personal and specific} {deliberate, not deliberate}, {only for you, for others{grouped, ungrouped}, for all others{grouped, ungrouped}}
Specific means, you might listening to the show and he would be talking about how greed brings grief with it, and you just realized that you had been greedy and hurt other people by putting yourself first.
So we want to see if there is a feasible interpretation over these possibilities.

Here's what I think: We live in a fractal reality, so everything is essentially the same thing. But there are "ways" of being the same thing, and some of them are death and some are life, some are ugly and some are beautiful. Everything true is personal and specific because the specifics are just the local distortion of the truth fractal. Actually, to be specific by attribution is so much less personal than by "speaking truth" if we are indeed truth incarnate. I'm pretty comfortable with that metaphysics.

So, what's this got to do with SETI. They have the same problem. Is this signal varying because it knows something we recognize, or is it merely the transcription of some deep truth. Is it intelligent? Does it care?

Ken Nordine speaks the cool truth, like Miles Davis did. I eventually moved away and never found it on radio again.
After all these years, I've never forgotten him or the excitement and mystery of listening to his shows and seeing how they seemed to fit with our daily lives. I ordered a couple of his Cd's and that was about it other than periodically surfing for him on the web. Well, he has a web site (of course) - and I just went there for the first time - there's no place like home, ah Oz....let's go see what he has to say tonight, shall we?

word jazz