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

Note to my unself

Charles Ives' piano music has impossible spreads in it. He knew they were impossible, but felt that the music demanded it, and so, in they went.

Whether anyone ever reads this or not, I will write it.

What I am trying to learn; to discipline myself towards is to be compassionate regardless of how I am treated and to be mindful no matter how hideous things are. To love, regardless of what I get in return, and to make my life a living poem no matter how much the world tries to turn me into a ledger.

It seems to take a peculiar type of stubborn - I'm reading Huckleberry Finn and that's helping. I'm also reading Beyond Good and Evil -



People see the point of survival, but they don't see the point of learning to reduce suffering, to overcome ignorance, to forgive, and give, and love. "If you ask, what is the point of love, you don't know love".

Here's my take on it.....


The Point

To live the life of the flesh, and die eventually then;
the point seems, (like for all animals, all competitors),
what does well
increases

what doesn't
decreases

The point is
winning
surviving
coming out on top;
but not for you...
for the species
or it's predators
or it's parasites
or it's symbiotic
communion.

To live the life of the spirit
to experience god
as forgiver
as free giver
as helper

as brother, sister, mother, father, lover

as double
for trouble

and to experience
creation
as

witness, artist, stoner, connoisseur.

What is the point of experiencing god?

What else is there?

Here is some real poetry -> Heather McHugh

Calculus of my micro-epiphanies

Here's a first glass bead game:

The Rubaiyatt and monotonicity in description logics.

A sprite on my horizon......

Some Good Advice

Read Gide twice.

Read him in need,

read him in tweed.

Read him with Sanburg,

read him with Calvino,

read him to a whimsical

neutrino.

Read Gide,

ravaged by greed.

Read Gide, when

you're ready to seed.

Whatever you do,

naughty or nice...

Read

Gide

twice!