What's the difference?

Why say things this way
or that?
What is the difference
in what they enact?

What's the difference
in the keys?
What difference
is the harmony?

Why this fact?
Why this inference?
What are the words
that make a difference?

What is the same?

Bored? Try something impossible.

Miles is playing 'Round Midnight, I am looking at the words I wrote next to Rothko, "One thing leads to another". Rothko said: "Silence is so accurate".

Something happens to you when you listen to a lot of Miles and Coltrane. You hear what couldn't be beaten out of these men. You hear the truth that holds up against the ugly they had to deal with.
When the house is silent and I move like a ghost from room to room, snowed in, cut off, I forget the warmth that can come from music.

Each of us writes our own story in our minds. We say the words, we make it so. In the end, will we be liars or wiser?
Honesty is humiliating, but dying a liar is dying in vain.
-------------------------------------

So much of what we admire comes from oppression. The great existential journal hidden under the planks, not to be read, but written to be read. Who is it that sits on the other side complacently expecting flawless prose, a proper address, canto.
Can we move our memos to the top of the pile by being clever, profound, omniscient, eternal?
What god is it really, that has the rules? That expects sacrifice? What god is it really, that is vengeful, that collects foreskins and alms? Whose law hangs the murderer? Whose judgement makes it so? What voice can not be stopped when there are: sPelling erRors - uh-oh, comma, uh-oh, comma,.....
Whose voice interrupts yours and makes you doubt your own instincts?
Whose voice is so loud that nothing else gets in?
But this god has swallowed sand, already sick with Miles, Thelonius, Burroughs and Ginsberg, Dolphy, and Freda, and Socrates, and Pierce, and Nietszche, and Dostoevsky, this god can not stop the derelict sacheing about in his girlfriends pink running outfit, can not masse' the MFA onto what it is like for a kid to take a shit in the woods.
This god, no matter how brazen it is, can not choke the experience out of life with grammar and style.
For all of the fine attractions: the neutrino exhibit, the Louvre, the three body problem and two-phase commit and tensors and commuting diagrams and buzz of PDEs and latest Vegas act with one man synchronizing a re-enactment of the entire Civil War using life sized puppets; this is not a miracle. These are the possibilities, these are the props. Only one god can make the miracle of perception reach for the right brush.
To move these gods to action, away from the current, away from the easy fiction that is always believed - away from platitudes and cliches -
This god is predictable, it is the mind of the rancher, breeding stock.
Winter makes for judgement, for ranking, for reassuring lies.

Must every wrong have a villain, must the mobs judgment be so low?
What is at the heart of revenge, of anger, of malice?

Imagine motive and you'll find blame.
Knowing motive tells you nature.
Knowing nature, makes the crime
fit the punishment.
----------------------------------------
In 500 years, we would tire of it all, the scripts, the unavoidable betrayals, the pretense of it. In 500 years, we would see the physical world as a broom.
But like all con artists, it does not stay long enough for you to catch it in a lie.
It can only hide the words: "If we don't have em read it now, they never will. But they won't understand it, they're too young. Make them understand it. "

"There now children, you have read Moby Dick."

In 500 years we would see it as moronic.
-------------------------------

There is only one miracle, and that is in the imagination.
It is only the imagination that makes the choice between so many truths.
Out of all of the things the world could be, it will be this one.
Out of all the reasons not to choose, I am choosing this.
Knowing it is a choice is the heart of freedom.
Knowing what to choose, takes art.

------------------------------------------------------

If you want to know what is possible, try something impossible - "petition the Lord with prayer".
"To know you are not alone...." - that is the echo, that is the refrain.
---------------------------------------
When will we tire of the flawless performance?
We sit like Kings and Queens in the concert halls watching one they found for us with talent.

When will we all be artists?

In here, all that is useless is burned up. Each day I am confronted
with my own hypocrisy, my own deceptions. Each day ruined by
my own ignorance, my own prejudices. I cower, I make excuses.
I forget my complicity.

You would not have seen it.
You would have to
have read my mind.

Why must there be the other?
Why do I simply wait?
Forty years in the underground have made me a hodge-podge.

It is unbearable, but it is fair.
If you love fairness, it is fair.
If you love desire, it is fair.

I must know this pain.

I am like a dog. Once pet, I want more petting. Once loved,
I will wait in the cold as my dog heart goes on beating. See that
dog, tied to the fence at the train station? See how he looks at you, see how my dog heart scrounges?
See how far I have fallen; one of the cats, knowing where the good stuff was; to this.

I am the cargo cult. I am the beggars hand.

Can a dog, really know abandon? Fortunately, no.

I do tricks, I pant. "Did anybody see that? That was pretty good." I look around the station. Maybe she realized she can not live without me, and has come back. She is stepping off the train now and will run up to me and put her arms 'round my dog neck. But yes, it would be later, when the house is silent and she is alone with her memories, that is when she will be overcome, and run out of the house, and straight for a ticket. No, she'd wait, it will be tomorrow, not enough time has passed. "Wait, did that person stop for a second?"
Love and sorrow have turned me into a dog.

If only I were a great man instead of a dog, then my story would mean something.
If only it was a war that did this. Something with stature. Instead, I am a dog, with the rain outside and the trees turning yellow, something I had looked forward to seeing as a man.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Inquisitor: You would agree that seven out of ten things matching is much more significant than seven out of a thousand, wouldn't you? But when you see fifteen or sixteen things match up, you take it as a sign, you assume it is not fifteen out of a thousand or a million. You want it to be a miracle. That would be your miracle, not God's.
Your losses are like everyone's, they are every day - go to the hospitals, or the flop houses, or the bus depots. This is no Helen of Troy, you are not Paris.

This is here.

The bindings slip, the brittle pages
fall out in my hands.
Everything is putty
or stone.

This is that place where the compass spins;
where memory and experience are one.

All that I have had, is a mystery, to all but me.
Fate by way of history has made it so.
Economics, has made it so.
But I remember - hedging bets, being greedy, giving up, from cowardice.
I remember, deals with the devil.
Then history started again.

I did not change a thing. I have only moved through here
on my way to a cowards end.
Knowing I am a coward, I look for strength.

If I can not be brave, I will be stubborn.
I will be or I will sit.

/I can still be brave, behind the lines.
/Who took these things from me?
/Who am I at war with?
----------------------------------------------------------
Habitus

Habitus: the state as parasite; hidden by its gargantuan implausibility;
hidden by
the dirty dealings
only we
know of.

Habitus: the great excuse; the absolution of personal responsibility.
Habitus: to wash away the homeless; to not know about Africa; to shoot a man for stealing.

Habitus: our conspiracy of silence.
Habitus: the cynic's choice, the efficient ontology.
Habitus: the ghosts of our primitive ancestors.
Habitus: the double cross.

I will be ridiculous, I will hope for the moon, I will be derivative and mediocre, I will
let myself be measured with those ridiculous instruments.
If a book can be written, so can a life.
I know what I have decided. Now, I wait for compassion.


-------------------------------------------------------

In my final moments,
I want to see yellow leaves
in the rain
and listen to Scriabin.

I want to smell Cherry tobacco
and eat gooseberries,
and live in a tent in my pajamas.

When I go, I want it to be like leaving a dear friends
house. No visit last forever.

And on the way home, I want to remember every fine
detail of the evening, I want to know that I was there,
forever.

Honestly -
We tell our lower classes, sorry, people in the food services, or accomodations or ... they are important and then abandon them, give them second rate educations, feed them fairy tales they live vicariously or practice mindlessly, we tell them they are important when we don't know ourselves.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Ladder of Disgust

If the Checker can not be on its own square, where can it go?

The peasant has a cat's soul. It does not go to school, it does not need help,
it has no particular talent. It gets by on its style and its cunning.

The peasant has the heart of a dog. It is simple and loyal and long suffering. It will wait, in the cold, for you, and come to you on three legs if need be.

Is the cat, a cat, because it can not be anything better? Who ever thought such a thought?

Inside the Castle, they are spoiled, it is natural. They have not wasted the grander things
on you. They have ranked all things and dispensed accordingly.

And so, at your funerals, in your bars, in your rest homes;
the lottery ticket, the bingo card, the visitor's badge; the fairy tale you'd tell a horse
before you shot it.

Prince Myshkin; Joseph Necht;
Pierre;
your gods had a weakness
for irony.
You were their apostles.
Tell us now, what really happened.

----------------------------------------------------

where left and right are naught

and there is only inside -

There can be no separation, too much is shared:
poems on the walls,
paintings in the
windows.

When the air is
thick with Turpentine and Mercury vapor,
it is only pain
that must be known
(in absolute time),
And when it's known
then that's another time.

The staircases see this. They hear him cry out in the dark. They see him in his palsey, shaken 'til his teeth rattle.
But they have not heard him say those words, those tragic words;
the ones that silence the whirlwind.
For this, they have decided they will not make him stumble and fall, no matter how lop sided his use of them is. They look at him and say, "He is too pathetic to hurt."

After this, he didn't take them out of obigation any more, he wanted to make them happy, for them to feel his feet on their steps. When he was at the top or bottom of one of them, he was swept away by their beauty as they lay themselves before him. Warm gratitude and love, that's what he started feeling for them.
They made a pact; he would see their beauty and love them for it, and they would not kill him, no matter what, (at least for now).
-------------------------------------------------------------------

I dreamt

I dreamt my hair fell out.

I dreamt my teeth fell out.

I dreamt my hands shook.

I dreamt I was layed open

and left to die.
I dreamt "me" too, seeing it,

and being afraid.

Condensation

Stone Walls;

read my words!

Read what I have written on you.

Stone Walls;

you must take pity

or laugh.

Stone Walls;

I speak to you!

Know my story, Stone Walls.

I will wait,
but read my words!

Monkey Politic

I am bored of the appearance:
the turned down cards,
the noblesse oblige.
Look, I come in my pajamas,
I have toilet paper stuck to my shoe, my fly is open, there is something between my teeth, my pants have come down.
I am tired of grammar, and spelling, and punctuation,
as clues.

I will grunt my grunts, unedited but in the soul,
and be done with grace.

I will not rehearse to be.

I will take down the imposing door.
I will write in my human hand,
for the record.

I am tired of avoiding the shame
of being human.

On what physic rests your
conception of
self?

What law to be kind, or honest?
What momentum is it that hurls us
into memory?

Yet, I, in the molecules ...somewhow,
am.

Only one of the selves must be meaningless,
dying with it's name.
Understanding time, as the hunter knows it;
Knowing from the start, where it goes.

The certain void?
Irony is no more inevitable
than getting the wrong answer.

Inclined, as it were, to excess,
excess must account.
The inequality can not know this place.
Meaning has lysed,
and symbols tumble out.

Escher's Place

Up and down the stairs
the phantoms move
their awkward load.
Clumsy with the weight,
they go to work and
to their habits,
and in between,
like anamorphic smudges,
rear their shadow selves.

Descent into the "schlock" of despair

"Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man needs meaning in a meaningless world".
----------------------------------------------------

"The immediate facts are what we must relate to. Darkness and light, beginning and end".

- Peter Wessel Zapffe

Okay, here's where the experiment starts to get interesting. What if you see how far into madness you can descend in a controlled way. You can reason your way out of madness, Nash proved that. Imagine something like a madness "reactor", instead of a madness bomb. Let symbols be like the fuel rods you inject to get a controlled reaction. When it gets too "hot", you pull some symbols back to their groundstate.
Of course, the only thing that makes this madness interesting is how gauche and protracted it is, especially with all of the hack poetry and everything else. This may be it's major appeal: the number of things that are done poorly at the same time. You've heard of polymath, call this polyhack - shameless drivel, therapeutically designed to fight off the insignificance of being a polyhack. One advantage: the polyhack is much easier to understand than the real thing. The mirror neurons have to be kept from trigerring the action, but if they are released, what amusement in the flailing. If a fool, then a grande, or at least loud, fool.
The longest and most shameless dance, at the end of a rope, is the one that makes the crowd feel grateful.

The inner (left) house -

Plain as Sandburg,

a bed, a dresser, a kitchen chair,

a wooden floor, bare walls

An elephant stands against its massive door.
This house is out on a limb. It is a chamber. It is a tomb. It is a sarcophagus.

In the sitting room, a night-lite changes colors, neon red, neon green, neon blue, red, green, blue, yellow, violet, white, endlessly repeating the same rosary.

In the darkness of that room, now neon red, now neon green, a

deer with a womans head;
its body

a quiver

of arrows

floating up and down like wings in take-off

red, green, blue, yellow, white.

It is all madness, except in the moment.

"Huck hung himself when he heard about Jim."
"Apparently, Jim finally went back to Miss Watson and allowed his self to be sold off, said freedom was too unbearable lonely."

Countless ways of measuring are on the walls and on the shelves. They can all add to zero or to 1. It depends on the weights, and the permissions, and the logic, and the facts. It depends on the s,p,d,f of it all, and maybe it all comes down to one electron in my brain.

The frog can not help but jump for blue by jumping away from green.

There are the "charming" coincidences, predicted by Ramsey's theory.

If there is (complete) transcendance from the physical, then meaning reigns.
If there is no transcendance, if life is purely physical, then existentialism reigns.
Any philosophy that tries to establish either case is a botch.

If we were immortal
what would we know
after a million years?
We might know that
we forget most of what has happened,
and are but a suggestion to the future.
We might realize that all we ever have
is the moment.

Why must we be immortal in order for there to be meaning?

When the beautiful construction is shown to be a hoax; a corny trick, the workers, that day go home in shame.

Zappfe's four mechanisms:

One hides from the truth.
The lies we tell ourselves.
The distractions from the paradox.
The sublime.

This can be a lie we tell ourselves
climbing mountains.
We climb to climb. And if we should fall,
we will surely die. So we shall climb and think of
nothing else.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I have no need of infinity,
no room for it. I can take this interval
and make it real.
Here is where left and right are naught,
and blind with eyesight, faint of heart,
we pester ourselves with dreams.
Gaze headlong at the possibilities,
and weep.

In here, the raw abandon of incantation
knows the fire that
runs with it ;
the flames that
leap at night.
It is always there, waiting,

----------------------------------------------------------

My house is conjoined. There are two separate houses, each with a staircase running from the kitchen to the upstairs, and they are conjoined through a central staircase that faces their shared front door.
I imagine these three staircase are very lonely and must be used about the same amount or they get will get jealous. Of course, the most dangerous one, (the steepest), is the one you use the least, especially in the dark. But then, it gets very jealous, and who know what it could do to you if it were so inclined.

-----------------------------------------------------------

My house is pretty crooked. Doors open and shut by themselves. The door to my bedroom, (the lower left kitchen), is kept open with a candle in the shape of a little mahogany colored elephant . It tirelessly presses its elephant brow, against the door, like a real elephant in some ancient palace. When I look at it, I am a giant, going in to sleep in my giant bed, large enough to sleep,.....the sleep of Ozymandias.


-----------------------------------------------------------

My two houses have their own histories with their own secrets. Topologically, there is a Klein Bottle conjoinment between the inside and the outside - left and right have been made naught.
One house, knows the endgame leads to inevitabilities; the other, wants life.
In the limit, information is nothing; simply another random bit pattern. Attention must be ex-nihilo, an act of desperation by the imagination. It must be from within, compulsory, it must be what justifies your net effect.
Outside (right), this is fear; inside (left), this is perfection; indistinguishable in the twisted flute of this space. Newton be damned! Euclid be damned! They describe the machine, not its occupant.
One secret is of shame; for cowardice, deceit, impotence - a child in an old man's body.
One secret is of hope; silly, unbounded hope, for all good things, all fine discoveries, all noble truths.
Cowardice from too good of an imagination. Cowardice from too much harm too early. Cowardice ex-nihilo.

Understand, this is not one house. It is two houses, conjoined, with two occupants. The twist in this space, of course is that they appear as one.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The outer (right) house -

I like the three staircases, they keep me company. I have decorated it to suit my tastes; photo of Coltrane, math and technical equations, photo of Paris, Rothko, Freda Kalo, ....that type of thing.
I play my piano, listen to music, work on software architecture, read, study, write, and so on. I am completely alone: irreconcilably separated, my son won't speak to me, my "soul-mate" left me, I am running out of time, and desire has me in its grip. I have no one to talk to. Anyone who could actually understand me would probably think I was full of shit and everyone else doesn't know what I'm talking about. I separate the spaces.
I have come to this place by luck, destiny, and nature. If I had played the game differently, I might have gotten different results - but maybe not.
I can look at my life a lot of different ways. If my life has been a waste, what did I waste it on? Yeah, there's the usual stuff: my self: vanity, gluttony, avoiding pain, seeking rewards, etc. But, what did I tell myself I was looking for?
1. Total merging with someone romantically - super conscious love - transcendent love - divine love.
2. The QUESTION: How does this work? - reality that is. I've been obsessed with this for as long as I can remember. It's like my consciousness recognizes something other than itself and says, hello, who are you, how do you work? But reality is not just physics, it's the inside worlds. If I am sad, it's just as real as the grass outside. The only real difference is that internal reality changes differently, it's more responsive. What about my perceptions, my explanations of people's behavior, of my own behavior? This is the reality I mean: Whatever is on the other side of consciousness and whatever is in consciousness.
I want access to reality, I want to be able to communicate with it, to know I'll be alright, to understand at least. If I understand, (I hope),I'll be alright.
I must trust the universe. I must believe in the good and see what comes of it. I must not lose heart. My only redemption is to improve myself. I must put desire behind me, it is the source of all suffering; only then will I be at peace.
These are the kinds of things I have to tell my self. An instant later, I am wrenched by the pain of it all, then the wheel turns again, and I can see how I deserve this, an instant later, I am filled with desire - to be mis-perceived in a way that turns me into my better self.
It is a network of meaning, and interpretation is it's vehicle. Nothing important is unambiguous.
RGB is measured more intelligently than we measure a life. Godel, Saussure, Solomonov; irrelevant, in personal life.

I write to justify my pitiful existence. I can see my words, dignified by the font. I can pretend they will be discovered, and me with them.

In the end though, there is but one metric - has anyone ever taken you in?

the wheel turns again.....

------------------------------------------------------------------

The Compulsive Communicators

David Attenborough's reverent look at "Life on Earth", refers to humans as the "Compulsive Communicators".
What happens to the most compulsive of these when they are isolated from anyone to talk to?
MADNESS

The question is, what kind?
Here's one. It's like a poor man's Second Life. There are two main differences: 1. You have to use your imagination for everything; and 2. (and this is the really rough part) there's no one else, since your imagination, is well, your imagination, if no one else imagines the same things, there you are...
This will surely drive you mad, if you don't have to be mad to begin with to even do it.

I've Gone Mad Checklist
Type: Scientific Madness

1. Learn just enough science to sound like you know what you're talking about, even to yourself
2. Discover "invisible world"
3. Decorate it with technical mumbo jumbo
4. Get some type of job that gives you some credibility
5. Idealize your self in that world
6. Become mysterious and misunderstood (because you're so smart, evidenced by you zero nobel prizes, Ph.D's, etc.)
7. Write a manifesto
8. Let appearance go so you can look like a mad scientist
9. Post it all to your zero-comment blog
10. Let the beasts have their way or fight to live another day

MANIFESTO - DRAFT

pointer - don't just rant, try to dignify your obsessions with grand themes like truth, beauty, love, and God (prefferable Buddhist)
The allegories and metaphors are not entertainment. They are real.
Everything sings the same song.
Friction teaches us that resistance is everywhere, but that once you get things going, it's easier to overcome it.
The prism teaches us that things are not what they seem, not even light.
"Must there be light to see? What is at the center of the darkeness?"
The sostenuto teaches us that some things need to be left free to vibrate;
and the rodent that bigger teeth always need grinding.

Reality is an intelligence that teaches us about love.
Cynicism is the same as death.
So materialism is the religion for the young, what about the old?.....
"I've got it, make them feel bad about not being young. Sell them age products!"
When we legitamize anyone thinking of us as a consumer, rather than a brother or sister, neighbor, then we become less than human, taking the chains our selves, because they look so good, and putting them on, oursleves.
pointer - it's OK to go overboard on things as long as they relate to your overall delusion.

Things that are computationally equivalent can be transformed into each other.
pointer - make an scientific outlandish prediction, if you're accidentally right, you'll be a profit in the future!
I predict that NP-Complete problems are computationally similar to black holes and will be found to radiate polynomial solutions.

Personal philosophy, religion, ethics, spirituality, aesthetics, and the other elements of individual, personal, CULTURE, have been appropriated by some business or institution. They invalidate our desire to develop these and replace them with "store bought" versions that are easier to market and distribute.
pointer - use puctuation to keep your Manifesto from beoming monotonous, you want your Manifesto to stand out.

Fear -> Lying -> Hatred -> Harm -> Fear
Revenge -> Harm
-> Fear
-> Revenge

Power Corrupts

There is but one moment
There is but one choice

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

YOUR NUTTY SCORE: Congratulations! You're well on your way!
http://www.yournutty.com/ for all of your nut supplies

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes from the inner-underground

What is the variety?

What is the variety of your

thought?

Are there flower gardens of thought?

Are there thoughts like brooks,

or meadows of thought?

Does your thought

have clouds

and wind

and rain?

Are there daring thoughts

and daring deeds of thought?

Are there forrests of thought,

and in those forrests,

are there living thoughts?

Are there mountains

of thought, and lakes, and valleys, and plains

of thought?

Is the extravaganza of it

in there,
with you?








---------------------------------------------------------





Forty years in the underground -


We live in a world of thoughts. We pretend that this isn't so, but we are always thinking. We decide to go to the bathroom at a certain point, we decide to take a bite of potato now, or brush our teeth for this long. We make thousands of decisions each day, possibly each hour. "Who we are" is a set of decisions about beliefs including values, perceptions, and so on. What we want is based on rational expectations, we don't decide to become an olmpic gold medalists at 80 or nobel prize winner at 7. We are constantly trying to figure out theories of who we are and why we feel like we do.

So, let's just accept it; no pretense of "I like to just turn off my mind and listen to music." No mind....no music. Or, I don't want to overthink my life, as if overthinking is even possible.

Let's also stop saying, "it's only words", no matter what the words are. Yes, someone conning you or themselves can say things that don't mean anything. Lots of people can. But lots of people haven't. Is, "I have a dream.", just words? Or Principia, or Zarathustra or the Brothers K? But they are different, you will say. In the hands of a master, we would never say that.

And to the lowliest poet writing for his lowliest wife, the simple, trite words that she can understand; is she forgiven for saying "it's only words".

Beyond that, in the wilderness, where no poetry exists, only instructions, they are still not "only words". "I am somebody" - "I am somebody" - "I must win" - "I am a winner" - "The trick to this task is...." - "No one likes me" - "I am a loser" - "Life has no meaning" ......

It depends on the words and sometimes on who is saying it.

Words and thoughts entangled - Entangling is a nice metaphor for this. There, see, I am pleased with the thought and the word itself......entanglement.

One of the fundamental laws of Cybernetics is the "Law of Requisite Variety". Like all fundamental laws, it doesn't seem to say much until you start applying it to keep from losing your way in the intricacies of what you are studying. One way of stating it is that the solution to a problem has to be at least as sophisticated as the problem. You can substitute complex for sophisticated or go back to original and talk about variability. This is actually the most illustrative way of "thinking" about it. Here are the words:

Variability is the number of different ways a thing can behave. To control something, the controller must have as much variability as the thing to be controlled. The variability of a car is a perfect example. Out of control, it can go left, right, slow down (going up hill), speed up (going down hill), run into things, etc. So, the controls have to have as much variability, aka, steering wheel, brake pedal, gas pedal, gear.

One of the things that is ironic and poignant about our current collective predicament is that the variability that is being "dealt with" all of the time is economic, social, physical, etc. This is not where the maximum variability is for a human being. We can think all sorts of thoughts; imagine complex tapestries of absurdities, impossibilities, possibilities, and beyond, to new ways of imagining. Thought-world is where the real action is. What controls thought world is something inside of thought-world.

Does your "working theory of the world" have the variability of "thought"?

If I show you a pattern like so: 1,3,5; you might see the rule: "add two".

But if I tell you I have left out some of the numbers from:1,1,2,3,5,8,13, 21, ...

Now you say, it's Fibonacci, each the sum of the previous 2, except the first two.

When we make hypotheses, we are in essence controlling a hypothesis process, unless it is a trivial hypothesis, that is, minimal or no uncertaintly, few or no stochastic variables, etc. The hypothesis should have as much variability as the phenomena. If your hypothesis doesn't have the right number of variables, then it is probably wrong. I'm not talking about the conclusion, it may be boolean, but how did you get the conclusion, that's what counts.

Tolstoy depicts this in the "Kreutzer Sonata".

If the right level of variability doesn't exist, you get cynicism: the simplest and most negative explanation. In general, complex phenomena have complex explanations.

You could say, wait, Wolfram has these cellular automata exhibiting very complex behavior from simple rules. Yes, that's true, but that doesn't explain it, it just says where it comes from. Complex systems have lots of variability and the requisite variety is in thoughts.

What is the variety of your thought?

I Am Ridiculous

I Am Ridiculous

I forgot I was ridiculous

for the moment, thinking:

"The flowers I picked from the wallpaper are real,

(as I always do), but I am not ridiculous for this."

I forgot I was ridiculous

taking things to heart

like a fool

(as I always do)

thinking:

"But I am not a fool for this."

Now I remember

and

I am embarassed,

lest I

forget again,

that

I am, ridiculous.

Involuntarily Kierkegaardian

This is the experiment I will try from the lowest point (so far...)

The way out, is through forgiveness. It is the only sign of real love.

The way to forgiveness is through compassion. It is the only sign that you can really see.

The way to compassion is through suffering. It is the only way to truly be.

The Pointless Peak

Live every day as though it were the first day of your life.

John had decided not to go back to art school. It had been his dream through all of those tortuously dull years of looking forward; looking forward. But now, here he was, and it just seemed silly. Besides, his hands hurt most of the time from Arthritis and holding a brush would be difficult.

What he had gotten was comfort. No worries about money, where to live, health, nothing. After all that having to be somewhere all the time and struggling and rushing and hard days and nights, it was great to just relax.

The grand kids were coming on Tuesday and he liked that. They were fun to watch: "all that energy".

He liked to sit and watch the news or shop for those things he'd always wanted.
The books he hadn't had time to read back then, or that video, "what was that video?".

He'd bought a guitar with some video lessons from some guy who sounded "pretty good!", but eventually gave it to one of the kids.

"Art School" was the last lay-away item to be abandoned. He'd always thought of himself as an artist. All those dull years, he had thought: "I'm really an artist." Now, he knew better, or was too tired to care.

All he wanted now was to be comfortable and rest after his long journey here.

Collage

excerpt from Heather McHugh's "What He Thought"

The statue represents

Giordano Bruno, brought

to be burned in the public square

because of his offence against authority, which was to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government

but rather is poured in waves, through

all things: all things

move. "If God is not the soul itself,

he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man

was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask

in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.

That is how he died, without a word,

in front of everyone. And poetry--

(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

(full poem here http://www.spondee.com/poems.html)

In 1963, he was arrested and in 1964 charged with parasitism ("тунеядство") by the Soviet authorities. A famous excerpt from the transcript of his trial made by journalist Frida Vigdorova was smuggled to the West:
Judge: And what is your profession, in general?
Brodsky: I am a poet and a literary translator.
Judge: Who recognizes you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of humankind?
Judge: Did you study this?
Brodsky: This?
Judge: How to become a poet. You did not even try to finish high school where they prepare, where they teach?
Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school.
Judge: How then?
Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.[1]
For his "parasitism" Brodsky was sentenced to five years of internal exile with obligatory engagement in physical work and served 18 months in Archangelsk region. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet and foreign literary figures, such as Evgeny Evtushenko and Jean Paul Sartre, protested.

anuther one what come to meeting in their overalls

OK - here's a new term: Information Fission

I say it is inevitable due to Wolfram Computational Equivalence, Digital Physics, etc.

plus Solomonoff's agenda -

Solomonov's equation:

and the associated error equations.

Splitting the bit -

Knowledge as work done by information

If instead of hypotheses based on data values (information) it was fed knowledge (extra symbols, relations, functions, etc.) or simply metadata -

When information is turned into decisions about a "state of affairs" that improves them with respect to some frame of reference (cost matrix, value tree, goal seeking system, etc.) then we could say that the work to move it from state i to state j is a measure of the increase in order of the overall system - which should be measurable in correlates of pressure, volume and temperature.

Truth value is the invariant. Perturbing a suitably prepared knowledge base might produce a chain reaction of inferences that lead to an imrovement in the knowledge base, preparation process, and inferencing mechanisms. Maybe this is rule e for stochastic cellular automatons.

Maybe clock speed is like the speed of light - or we just use it as the clock speed -

Wouldn't it be weird if it was something like the K = nC^2, where K is a measure of knowledge in suitable units, n is the amount of information in bits and C is the familiar speed of light.

SoulJack - np-completeness and "the good"

If you know about NP-Completeness and other completenesses and incompletnesses regarding global solutions and you apply it to optimizing the human condition as it's own system and/or cooperating in a larger system, then practical ethics must account for the non-realizability of certain constructs.

Is there a basis for believing ethical dilemmas are somehow NP-Complete?

At some point, each ethic has to deal with the day-to-day problems of boolean satisfiability, traveling-salesman, clique, etc. - especially if the way these problems are solved determines the physical constraints imposed on the members of society.

Yet, people can know this, and not use it in their personal religion/spirituality/metphysics/ethic/morality/etc.

I believe that a side effect of our culture is the devaluation of the real aspects of our real lives. We watch movies about heros sacrificing for a cause or living the big life, but we don't apply it to our own lives, we play it safe. We say we believe in this or that, but we don't practice it in daily life, as though our daily life doesn't count.

Whatever the reason this seems to happen, it is a tragedy for our entire culture. I hear people talk a lot of science and then claim to be this or that sect of christian along with some set of rules that separate good from bad - that is, the human condition is NP-Complete but god's judgement is the oracle that always guesses the "right answer" - how great can a mind be if it is governed by a lesser mind?

What if most of these "moral habits" were reconsidered by the better minds of our nation. What if every truly educated thinker had as much ambition about their personal philosophy as they did their career?

What if managing the continuous duplicity of saying we believe in certain things (justice, freedom, love, etc.) and behaving according to ritual and atavistic mores dulls the mind and the soul.

Is there anyone left not on Prozac or some other SoulJack?

Hush - what's that quiet?

Hush - what's that quiet?

We listened to the lawman

til thet got old

then we listened ti the banker

til all's bought and sold

Thun we listened ta the preacher

til all the truths was told

and we listened to the doctor

til all the pills'd been doled

We listeln tu tha fiddle man

till all the feeling's been bowed

Un we listn'd ta tha science man

'bout how we hed evol'd

And then we knowed it all

we warn't no fools.

........

and came a hush

so lonesome and cold

We was losing our grip

by nothin'

to

hold