On Quiddity and the Dipole of Truth

In scholastic philosophy, quiddity ( /ˈkwɪdɪti/;Latin quidditas) was another term for the essence of an object, literally its "whatness," or "what it is." The term derives from the Latin word "quidditas," which was used by the medieval Scholastics as a literal translation of the equivalent term in Aristotle's Greek.

It describes properties that a particular substance (e.g. a person) shares with others of its kind. The question "what (quid) is it?" asks for a general description by way of commonality. This is quiddity or "whatness" (i.e., its "what it is"). Quiddity was often contrasted by the scholastic philosophers with the haecceity or "thisness" of an item, which was supposed to be a positive characteristic of an individual that caused them to be this individual, and no other.

In law, the term is used to refer to a quibble or academic point. An example can be seen in Hamlet's graveside speech found in Hamlet by William Shakespeare. "Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures" says Hamlet referring to a lawyer's quiddities.

One of the reasons this notion of quiddity comes up persistently is because it is inescapable; the popularity of the expression "it is what it is" is an indicator. No matter how many abstract maps and categorical sortings you impose on the universe, there remains the notion that behind them all is the territory in its very whatness, unimpressed by labels or measurings, one pole of the dipole "truth". The quiddity of x is certainly closer to the truth about x than any proposition concerning it can be, including this one. The other pole of the "truth" dipole is sheer vacuum, the zeroeth power of apparent reality where the consciousness abandons all postulating of form and resides as awareness of awareness of awareness without any dimensional artifacts.

...

(Dipoles in material science are funny things, and the word is probably not wholly appropriate for a discussion of kinds of truth. But it seemed like a good idea at the time).

...

I think the dynamic tension between these two forms of truth -- pure consciousness and pure quiddity--may be the key to understanding the universe as a whole, both the conscious and the mechanical aspects of it. There is not a lot of science around that integrates these extremes (if they are extremes). Most science slices, dices, chops and fries without taking the conscious end of things much into account, and often chases maps and categories in endless loops of signification far removed from any sense of quiddity.

...

Of course, such a "subject" would have to come up with a way to talk about things that avoided the trap of maps and categories. Without such a vocabulary we're kind of limited to making crude signals toeach other about it, like pre-language ape-men trying to organize a group hunt.

On the Origin of Forms

The ultimate common denominator of anything which exists in a time-space continuum is form.The gross material objects you trip over or manage during the day are the most ready example. Nuclear particles have their own way of being a form, just as definite and automatic. When you start discussing mental energy and objects, there is another array, ranging from heavily massive mental objects to high-frequency creations which oscillate around beauty itself as a frequency. The spectrum _seems_ to have a discontinuity between high-level frequencies north of EMF radiation, and the class of energy and solids which are experientially mental things, not physical ones. But they do overlap, as anyone who has seen a good old-fashioned glare-fight between highly endowed spirits can attest.

But all this is an array of forms. Where does form end and background against which forms are viewed begin?

A being growing up in a body, forced to endlessly communicate to forces and energies of a fairly low scale (such as nerves, light, sexual vibes and the like) grows more and more into the conviction that he is among those things -- a form or compound himself. This is not true -- it's a special effect that comes with long-term habituation to the physical universe. But is a popular addiction, probably the most popular religious belief in our species: the physical universe is the Real Universe; Thou Shalt Have No Other Universe Before It; and It Contains You. This is a great pile of dung and smelleth strongly. But it is the belief system among which we travel.

If you shed or strip away or release all attachment to forms, desires or resistance about them, and let go of all pictures, and efforts, you find yourself creeping back into contact with the ultimatee zero-wavelength phenomenon called Pure Consciousness, the awareness without object that is the end point of all exploration. This is the engine of the mind, the creative seat that makes the decisions which get so convoluted, and who you are (the I before you started generating a self to be). It is an infinity, and a zero, because it is something beyond the pale of numbers and dimension, and has none of the wavelngths of the material universe; although it certainly has qualities of the kind called ability: to intend, to perceive, to postulate what shall be.

It is not that a lot of attention has to be put on this background existence which precedes all form and defines it. It is simply a good thing to be reminded every once in a while what comes from which, so as not to be fooled too seriously.

Information Systems, the World and Everything:

Information as A Spiritual Product

This is a long essay, extracted from a book called Notebook 15, which seeks to lay out some clarity on the nature of our information systems where they reach their final destination — you and me. I apologiz e for the length of it but I did not have time to make it shorter, as a famous writer once said. If you do take the trouble to read it all, I applaud you and hope that you find some part of it valuable.

The first section discusses what we use to relay information — the signals, symbols and semaphoes from which we miraculously get understanding.

The second section provides some deconstruction of what occurs when we send each other postcards or e-mail.

The third offers a bridge to the real driving force behind information and communication — again, you and me. Let us move out, and see how we might get ìthereî from ìhereî.

Signals, Semaphores, and Systems of Symbols

Information and information technology rule the tide of our late twentieth and early twenty-first. centuries No other discipline attracts as much new attention, or comes anywhere near as close to replacing sex and food as the topics of the hour, hour after hour, in the cafeterias of western mankind.

Given this amazing and still-swelling transfiguration, it may be worthwhile to notice what all the blather concerning the Information Age and informational economies are about.

First, the machinery. Ever since a transistor began making the rounds at Bell Labs, we have been accelerating on an autobahn defined by switching machinery. Our halls are littered with boxes — 286es, 386es, Suns and Amigas, Macs and Pentiums and beyond. The boxes contain switching machinery carried to the absurd limit, it seems. Where we were raised thinking of switches as finger-sized, we now carry pockets full of them, numbering in the millions and now trillions. The terabit, a number of switches once exceeding all the switches on Earth, now fits into a large human hand.

And, make no mistake, all we are working from in this tidal wave is switches. Someone noticed that a switch has two choices built into it; that if you have two switches you have four choices; with four, sixteen choices, with eight, two-hundred and fifty-six choices. Compounding the numbers of switches, each only representing two states, allows the entire universe to be condensed into a simulation, given enough switches and the power to set and reset them quickly.

There are grosses of fat tomes available on the rationale of this approach to information representation. A switch represents whether or not person ìAî is in the room, whether a plane is in motion or not, whether a motor is running or cold. Eight switches can count up the number of times a fly breathes, or the gallons of fuel used in one minute of operation by a flattop. This power to represent extends from the instant to the dynamically changing: communications become possible as soon as an energy pulse can be agreed to represent a switch in an on state or an off state.

So far has this wave extended across our cultural horizons that these notions, once the bleeding edge of cybernetic theory, are now grade-school stuff. The machinery to combine and design more and more of these switches has become the hottest industry of the century in less than twenty years.

This is a migration past a third-order abstraction of awareness. This is not a difficult thing to notice.

First, notice the simple and highly energetic condition of being aware of something. Make it a cat, if one is nearby, or your own shoe if you are wearing one, or any object; notice the action of being aware of it.

Second, conceive a memory of that experience in the form of a mental representation of the cat or object. This is a first order abstraction, taking the raw experience out of its place in time and carrying it forward with the owner's attention. You are a viewer; you see a picture of the cat or whatever you just chose to look at. It's not an experience of the direct sort — you're experiencing looking at an image in a different space or way than you were looking at the object. The experience is abstracted into a different kind of experience.

For a second level of abstraction, conceive that language exists, and that you use some of it to describe the experience of facing a cat..Think of the words you would select to parallel the picture which in turn reminds you of a past fact. Don't do anything with them, just choose the words. In so doing you have constructed another half-step away from the experience, abstracting from a picture to words. Now, decide to make some noises to express the words chosen to relay the experience of this cat (or whatever) across a distance or across a span of time (Yesterday, a cat watched me; today, I watched a cat).

Notice the experience of making the noises is a bit more abstract than the experience of seeing the picture (recalling an event). If someone else is making the noises (leaving it to you to understand and reconstruct what pictures they might be looking at, and from there what they might have experienced), you have an additional step of remove from the raw experience of seeing.

For a third level of abstraction, take the noises of language, with which you have draped your intention to communicate the fact of facing this cat, and make up some symbols — odd shapes or pieces of felt or copper or some such — that will do to represent the noises that you would make if you were using noises to express the words which represent the concepts which represent the the image your mind contains which represents the experience of facing this cat.

This symbolizing process actually requires several layers of abstraction.

1. Experience a cat
2. Make a mental picture of experiencing a cat
3. Make concepts representing the memory image
4. Make language representing the concepts, including morphemes into which you may embed abstracted bits of meaning and phonemes containing agreed-upon sounds
5. Make an alphabet of shapes to represent phonemes of sounds (omit if using Chinese)
6. Make spellings, using the alphabet, to establish forms for the word-sounds used to represent the abstracted memory
7. Carve, paint, or build from sticks symbols representing the alphabet forms agreed on for the words needed to represent the thought representing the experience. Or draw them on paper. An A drawn on paper represents all A functions which represents sounds Aww, Ahhh, and Ay, one or more such letters representing the phonemic component of a sound series agreed upon to represent a concept of an experience.
8. Make a numbering system based on your fingers or toes, or both. If you are a sloth, multiply by six and call it hex. Now, take all those forms representing sounds representing words representing A , O, etc., and choose a number to represent each one of them. This is a Good Thing because numbers are better than letters anyway.
9. Now build a switching system to make digital (binary) representations of the numbers which you have mapped to characters in the alphabet, and a complicated electronic display system to translate those digital representations back into shapes (analog) that your eye can translate. As you have already learned, probably, you can do all 27 of our letters plus numbers and symbols using 8 bits.
10. Using a modem, send pulses representing the bits of the binary representation of the characters combined into words representing sounds representing concepts representing the memory of the experience of looking at a cat.

Not all these steps are actual abstraction, but note that we have abstracted experience into memory ,and memory into words, The other steps have to do with symbolizing, which is similar but different.

The use of switches has added another and subtler layer of abstraction or at least derivation. Electronic mail, for example, represents the act of one person communicating to another, but it provides a far more abstract experience because there is no contact between the effort at source and the experience at receipt. It is more of a semaphore than a hello.

Even in an old-fashioned hand-written letter you could see the personality of the individual revealed through visual cues in the formation of the characters, the sweep of the connectors or the spikes of the risers, etc. The new medium not only removes the visual cues, it also abstracts the experience of reconstructing the senderís view one more level by removing even the fingerprints and sweat one once knew were present in a hand-written letter. Given that e-mail does this, why does it seem so rapid and intimate and yet easy to understand when it does? Ah — there ís the mystery.

How does understanding leak through all these layers so that we see clearly what Joanna is saying and meaning even though we only have a trace on a screen to look at? Most ordinary thing in the world, happens millions of times a minute in the world. But how? How does such a diluted trace enable us to not only understand what Joanna is saying, but even better to intuit what she really meant? (I hasten to add that for the sake of clarity and simplicity we haven't even gone into the subtlety of deciding to say words other than those that reflect your meaning, so that they will be altered on receipt and somehow get your meaning across without your having to articulate it––which is neither abstraction nor symbolizing but often just aberrant communicating).

This digitizing and undigitizing of messages places sender and receiver one step further removed, and in doing so brings about dependencies. These are one generation more complex than the dependencies which informed Marshall McLuhan when he discovered the medium was the massage. Most such massages were not digital when McLuhan wrote, but the advent of email is certainly a coherent extension of the trend he was brilliant enough to identify. It abstracts from a direct experience of communication to one which is a step removed through a digital laundering — the communication without the substance of the communicator or his direct efforts.

The current raging growth of the technology through which these abstractions are created and used is what is being called the Information Age, not because the mechanisms are binary but because a new order of magnitude has been achieved in speed of relay of signals, including pages of words and numbers, and because networking technology has raised the inter-accessibility of information to new orders. Whether or not this is a Good Thing, it is certainly an interesting one and it remains to be seen how the human race will adjust to this new power of exchange of information. So far, it has made definite differences. The networking of the species, as far as it has gone, has been a power for the better on balance.

Deconstruction

The process of information abstraction and interchange is a wide study and it cannot be done full justice here. Suffice it to say that modern information technology has fundamentally modified the quantity of explicit information, by orders of magnitude, which can reach the ordinary individual. It has also subtly modified the quality of that information. Thus, it has become popular to refer to the period as an Information age, running Information economies. Before too big of an issue gets made of this, it might be useful to look a little closer at what information is.

The largest and most obvious component of any information is the system of relays via which it arrives. The information itself is less palpable, although it may be more far-reaching and far more important.

Consider the receipt of an ordinary postcard, on which your cousin in Indiana writes to tell you he has seen a cat. The obvious, real and immediate components of the experience are the card, the writing on it, the mail box from which you recovered it, the postal person who brought it, the truck which brought it from the airport, the plane it came from Indiana on, the intermediary steps it went through after it left his hand, and so on. It may evoke, when you read it, images of the table at which he sat while looking at his cat, or the weather in Indiana on the day he saw it. But on a physical level it is the vias, the physical relays of the communication which are tangible and obvious.

Systems of information exchange deal primarily with these "via" or "relay" issues and have little attention to spare for the event that occurs after delivery or before transmission. The technology is not truly about information, for the most part, or even remotely about communication in a living sense. It is about the design of relay systems and the architecture of vias, mechanisms for flooding the channels of networks with signals.

But no matter how complex the network, how wide the WAN or how fast the throughput, there is an alpha and an omega in information. We touched on the alpha when we examined the abstracting process in part 1. It involves the creation of representations of experience. At the beginning of any system, system of systems, layer or concatenation of layers, is the simplicity of this initial process: the representation of experience. The beginning of all information is the apprehension by an awareness of experience. From this all else derives. You could say the alpha point occurs when a source of understanding generates an intention to bring about understanding.

Similarly, the end point of all information and its measure of value is not anywhere in the formatting process or the transmission or the correlation. These things serve to support the value that occurs, but the value does not occur until a source of understanding appreciates the information.

It needs to be said that the alpha and omega points described here are different than any other part of the information process. It is not that the information enters the brain where the circuits are so subtly complex that they bring about understanding. The most complex correlation of neurons in the universe contains no information until the omega point of appreciation by a source of understanding occurs. This is so simple it is possibly mind-bending, but it is as close to absolute as a proposition ca get in this universe: the understanding that precedes the creation of information and which appreciates information at its receipt is qualitatively different from any process involved in relaying that information.

IF you can imagine the series of transformations which make up information processes as a straight line, it might help. Like a straight line, the process is made up at least theoretically of a series of points which can be made to seem discrete, although perhaps they are not. Within any such point you can scale down your inspection and examine finer and finer subroutines: the mechanism of modulation and demodulation, the physics of bandwidth in twisted-pair configuration or optical fiber, the intricate storing of voltage pulses as binary data in registers, and so on. Each of these in turn has its own subset of intricate processes. Nowhere in any of this, however, has information occurred until the qualitative difference is entered in of an understanding appreciating the meaning of the information.

Please also notice that a source of understanding, as a phenomenon which shows up in the physical universe, is different than any other class or kind of phenomenon in that universe because it adds the non-material ingredient of understanding. Understanding is not exercised by material systems. Computers do not understand; dogs understand more than the most complex mainframe. This is not to say that just registering an analog display of information in front of an eyeball produces understanding. Misunderstood displays or comatose internal states can prevent understanding, as when you see your first Arabic car advertisement or when a teenage street punk is invited to the opera.

Neither you nor the street punk is short of potential understanding, but the necessary via of symbols and the dependency on them have combined to prevent it from occurring. It is easy and lethally wrong to conclude from this that the registration of symbols linked in enough ways will produce understanding. This is a fallacy of confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions. If you believe understanding must only occur when symbol-linking occurs, there is no way to account for instances where it has occurred spontaneously, as in imagined or dreamed circumstances or when inventing new algorithms or designs.

We are, after all, talking about a source of understanding, meaning an emanation point, not just understanding as an unaware reflex following the right inputs. The whole point is that the latter is nonexistent. Awareness is not just another reflex. It is qualitatively different — a different ìwhatî — not just a different number of switches at work. There is a leap to a different — entirely — class of event. The more you compare the nature of switches and relays with the natures of insight and understanding the more obvious the qualitative difference between them becomes.

Catalogues of Knowing

Any viewpoint can be considered as a collection of known realities or a catalogue of ìknowingnessesî. Your first boy- or girl-friend had such a collection, which you found out about gradually, remember? And you certainly brought such a collection into the day when you finished waking up this morning. One reason we never seem to run out of things to laugh about is the endless tensions and collisions that can behad between these different methods and packages of knowing.

The sum total of experience being had at any point in time by one viewpoint is the sum total of "forces of knowing" composited in the individual catalog. If you want an example of forces of knowing, imagine or remember what it feels like to know you are inadequate to deal with a very important situation which is demanding your attention right now. Another example: recall what it feels like to realize you are completely on top of things.Recall the feeling of encouragement that comes from knowing you have done well, or the force of self-devaluation that can come from being harshly criticized by a relative.

Think back to a time you took a stressful exam, or passed a tough test, and what you were knowing at the different extremes of the experience.

Within any catalogue of knowing there may be contradictions - sets of knowledge that do not harmonize well, such as knowing you are extremely important but not knowing how, or knowing you are nothing but must be something, knowing you feel fear but must be brave, and so on. These fields of ìknowingî address all vectors and all dynamics of the spectrum of life. Example: knowing there is no ground fault in a circuit, but knowing it looks like there is one and knowing that you donít know where it is, at the same time that you know God is on your side in this matter, and knowing He should hurry up and clarify things for you. Compounds of knowing, some parts of which blend well, others of which conflict. Another easy example: knowing that high school history is about as dull as a living person can stand without weeping and also knowing you need to placate the professor for the sake of your diploma and domestic tranquility but knwoing that the only thing interesting within fifteen miles is Sally Wethersfield in the row ahead of you.

Everything

Armed with these complex compounds of Know, people use business to earn money; they use money to buy futures and positive experiences of the present. They buy futures in order to contemplate varieties of experience. There is no objective standard that requires what sort of future experience should drive any given individual or market sector. But it is clear that there is a spectrum of possible experiences which constitute the driving energy behind the accomplishment of future experience.

This spectrum includes individual experience, including individual material well-being`. It includes future familial experience, starting with the affinity of romantic and/or sexual bonds. The energy of this kind of knowing leads some to believe that the driving consideration in life is love, getting laid, making babies or "family values" built around the generation of new humans.

In addition, efforts to achieve the future of groups experiencing as groups - be it Rotarians, citizens of Smallville, Urbane Cosmic University Graduates Associated, Denizens of Earth, Employees in Revolt, or Butterfly Lovers International . Each individual builds a set of these groups which function somewhat like a template, in his mind, of things he belongs to, and about which he knows. Great philosophies have been built up on the notion that this kind of knowing is really the dominant one — Marxism and capitalism are two that come to mind.

The species itself, sensed as a whole, is another zone of future experience, as are the planet as an environment, and the space-time continuum. Another is spiritual experience, individual or organized. Sometimes the groups category is substituted for the spiritual as a token to hold the place of spiritual experience by at least participating in a group. Church service is an example — it may or may not be a spiritual experience but is usually an experience of group and group agreement in any case. Not the same thing, though, and certainly the two involve very different kinds of knowing..

There may also be some sort of Infinite vector of experience, which mystics have historically tried to describe, but since it approaches All, both in experience and time, it is not evidently nameable as something we can map here.

For any given viewpoint, then, there are compounds of knowing on all these vectors, and probably a few more as well, and at any given moment some of them are in play in his or her makeup while others are dormant. The set of knowing that is operating at a given moment is highly variable, is relative to other sets of information and the individual himself and a host of emotional variables; and the entire complex becomes more or less transparent depending on how free the individual is to stay up with the moment,

un-subdued by having his attention sucked up by complexities of unreconciled knowing. It could be said from this perspective that all problems are problems in knowing, including knowing not.

Something to be known about the use of certain systems of knowing is that they can be self-solidifying and can have triggers built in to them such that when they are threatened with understanding, they automatically refresh their own solidification by being harder to understand. Some people generate these paradoxical minefields of knowing as a method of defending themselves against simple attention and understanding, but only after they have drifted pretty far down the spectrum.

This self-preservation and self-solidification feature appears as though it operates without any participation by the viewer. This apparent condition is untrue and the alteration enables persistence by making it hard to understand what one is really looking at.

Self-reinforcing, self-solidifying beliefs LOOK like they are the reality structure - because they get more solid when you look at them. Therefore they must be "what is real", because it appears not to change.

The actual reason it appears not to change is a time-loop built into the mocked-up, generated knowingness. The loop acts as though it is saying "I am what I was before, only more solid".

You can buy into (agree to know) the assertion, and your perception will be of something persisting and growing more solid. Then you will know how solid things are, how hopeless hope is, and how useless trying.

As an alternative, you can see through this assertion, peel it away, and your perception will be of an apparent but untrue assertion, a marketing day-mare, a neon fallacy twinkling in the sea of consciousness, a belief like many others. Like other beliefs, a structure erected by, for, of, with, in and from consciousness.

This trick can turn the catalog of knowingnesses into an instant of raw knowing, a window of direct light rather than a complex maze of allowed reflected perceptions.. That is the moment where the Knower transcends his own Knowing and gets back home.

If information systems have any ultimate Good to steer by, that very moment may well be it.

# # #

Maps of Unknown Territory

It is interesting to look at old maps of the world, when the parts of the Earth's surface were not well known. The rough shapes of landmasses are in place, but their details are left to the imagination. The areas that were not yet explored (to this mapmaker's knowledge, anyway) were often embroidered with fanciful scrolls or lettered warnings or fanciful images: mermaids, sea-monsters or warnings that "Heere theyr bee dragonnes". The edges of the known world, in other words, were populated with fantasies and imaginary creatures.

To a certain extent this occurs in any map, whether it is of geographical territory or some other aspect of reality. The humours believed to be injected into the tides of the blood in Galen's time were such, as were the angels said to be peeking through every star in the galaxy. So to was caloric imagined to explain heat transfer.Thus, also, are our political dialogues often populated with imaginary demons when the substance of a situation is not well-viewed. God in his heavens turning the sun around the Earth, against which Galileo tried to make his early scientific proofs, is another one. Yet, nevertheless, it moves. When the territory is better explored by actual experience -- by sailors following the course to the world's edge and finding only more world -- the edges of the known are expanded, and the fantastic creatures that populate the unknown are moved back.

There is a lot to be said about this mechanism, which is widely popular. The contents of the imaginary, and the boundaries of the known, vary dramatically of course, depending on the viewer and the area of knowing under consideration. But there may be a commonality in this observed mechanism that is worth keeping an eye on, especially when one is deciding whether or not to face the demons that dance at the edges of the known and possibly run the terrible risk of dispelling them.

The Eight Faces of Living Dangerously

The intricate web of causes, false causes, effects, false effects, and the infinite array of names and opinions we place upon them demands understanding if it is ever to be navigated, let alone escaped.

The truism of "maps not being territories" is well-used; the truth is that sometimes, maps are not even maps. And even when they are, they cannot help if they are maps from some other land, in some other tongue. Finally, the deepest well of mystery cannot have a map, because it is the Source of maps, the Thou, map-maker, before any map is visible or designed.

In the rivers of cause and effects, there are two false flows which will betray the soul. One is Desire. The other is Resistance. And on the inverse face of each one is its complement: Enforcement, and Inhibition (or suppression).

For any territory, any place within any territory, these are the land-mines, the uninspected betrayals.

Consider that with desire, without enforcement, with resistance and without inhibition, every flow of attention, perception, and understanding would be unburdened, and therefore would pass through its own experience into the liberation of the awareness it engaged. The moviegoer would pass through the screen and return to the complete authorship of screen, projection, plot, film, and deployed light which comprised the illusion of the movie.

When the imagery of the moment is seized as an answer to Desire, or is enforced as a demand on the attention like a Fox News broadcast; or is hidden in its sources, cloaked in mysteries or barriers of suppressed information (consented to or not); then, the film goes on, and all is at it is meant to seem to be. When the movie ends, the moviegoers move out, return to their lives, let the images fade, and engage the next moment of their time.

Here are some things to notice, or consider, or to heal from:

1. The self desired, inhibited, enforced, or resisted.

2. Desired connections, to share creation, love, or family; likewise, the same connections inhibited, suppressed, or enforced, or resisted.

3. The desire for membership or grouphood or neighbor-ness, the belonging of the tribe or the clan or the community, and what happens to that experience when it is enforced, or inhibited, or suppressed or resisted.

4. The desire to exist as human, and the ways in which that existence can be enforced, or inhibited, resisted or suppressed.

5. The desire to exist among life's forms at all--to be among trees, animals, mammal-kind or bird-kind or fish--kind, and the suppression that can inhibit it; the result of enforcing that desire or resisting that existence.

6. The desire -- sometimes a blind hunger -- for existence among material forms and masses, bounded by the lines of time and the breadth of spaces. What explosions occur when desire and suppression collide, or when that face of existence is resisted? Suppressed? Demanded?

7. Consider the love of being one's own spiritual nature. Consider, too, when that love is suborned into desire, and when it is in turn suppressed, or enforced, by ritual or authority or arbitrary infringement, or inhibited likewise.

8. Consider the inklings of the Infinite that are on every hand, and how they too are solidified by enforcedment, denied, inhibited, suppressed.

In all these arenas, the four distortions of desire, resistance, enforcement and inhibition are at play. Imagine if they were to vanish completely, and the Middle Path were made whole.

There would be a travel to write home about. Except that one would be there already.

San Diego

June, 2009

Implications of Quantum Entanglement

Quantum Entanglement, aside from being intuitively boggling to some, is a challenge to one or more of three certainties. First, our model of particles, learned since childhood from dodgeball and pool halls, is one which has been ruled out by the general sense that we are talking about fields and eigenstates of energy bundles.

The second is our model of energy. The violation of instant information transfer across a distance that occurs when quanta link their states means that the information joining them "transfers" at FTL speeds. This implies extra-spatial dimensions, or something even further afield.

The third, little considered, is that our understanding of space itself is awry. Newton's infinite box of space worked well for his equations and their scale, but not for Feynman's. But even Feynman's, as far as I know about them, did not tackle the issue of whether space is --just for one example--a function of light or a function of perception.

Our legacy is to tend toward considering the two interchangeable. Perhaps that is something we should outgrow. That space might be a function of viewpoint is hard on the materialist legacy of "physics envy", but it is aligned with a large number of instincts from many philosophical traditions.

As a practical matter, one could see what happens if he sets out to intentionally change space, make more space, or (horror of horrors) throw some space away. Trying these steps for an hour or so instead of watching a television show might be instructive.

What Makes Humans Tick
The most pressing question concerning the planet and any state or organization of life on it is of course the question of humans, who have dominated the environment for centuries and expanded their empire of dominion relentlessly on an accelerating curve.
And the most pressing issue about humans themselves is what makes them tick and why they take the actions they do.
I would submit for consideration that any human can be found on a broad spectrum of mental states that hinge on his (or her) ability to be rational in the present.  Above that hinge-point, the individual becomes more and more fully aware of things as they are now, and contemplates the present and the future.  
Below that hinge-point, the individual leaves more and more of the present on automatic and has his actual attention more and more embedded in past events, with the result that his calculations and estimations are less and less connected with actual vectors of change in the moment, and less and less accurate as a result. Complexity, disruption, layers of alteration and excuses increase as one goes south.
Most of us are in a region of clarity near that hinge-point or center region , able to be more or less in the present but, on the other hand, constantly being invited to let our attention drift into areas of the past where uncertainty, absence of closure of some kind, regret, loss, unresolved fury, or deep apathy serve to make us less competent and capable than we are.  Sometimes we're a little further "north" of the hinge-point, able to see the future more clearly, act more dynamically and more rationally, and other times we are a little further south than that, dragged down by unidentified past emotional and mental thrusts from times that no longer exist (except to the degree we keep on reconstructing them).
Getting out of the gray zone in the middle, the north bound side of this equation is to a greater and greater degree concerned with future well being.  Getting out of the gray zone, the south bound side is more and more concerned with bringing about destruction in one or another form.  
But this is not the way it seems to the driver.  Both sides of this spectrum tend to be perfectly justified and rationalized. The husband who leads his marriage into destruction by starting a series of affairs, or by hitting the bottle, will tell you at every moment along the way that what he is doing is "right" for various reasons, and the explanations will be as ready and as facile as the stories about checks in the mail from a tenant down on his luck.
It is very interesting that both sides of this spectrum believe (at least superficially) that they are going forward.  Like the engine of a vehicle that continues to run in the same direction whether the gears are in forward or reverse, the difference between forward and backward seems almost undetectable to the operators, sometimes.
The core equation in both regions is still being fulfilled, just as the engine on the car is still going around clockwise.  And that core equation is what makes people tick.
The core equation is to bring about future for whatever one sees as oneself, one's proxies, one's allies and symbiotes, and one's symbols.  Building a future for a company at which one works is bringing about a future for one's own symbiotes and allies.  That future may be toward growth (n the north end of the spectrum) or toward contraction, dispersal, and collapse on the south end.  To the operator, unless his or her attention is strongly directed to look, the fact that these are opposite directions will not seem evident, because of the screens of justification and the terrible deep urge to be right even when steering toward failure.
The impulse to bring about future may be applied to families, to companies, towns, tribes, nations, or races.  It may be applied to beasts and birds and flowers and vegetables, estimated as symbiotes to one's own groups.  It may be applied to the whole species, or other species on which ours depends, or material frames or manufacturing tools or space exploration; but behind it all is his singular drive: let there be future for me, my symbiotes, my proxies, my allies, and my symbols. This drive for living into the future directly or indirectly is the core engine of all human transaction.
The art of doing this well, of course, depends on recognizing the difference between north and south.
And thereby hangs a tale.

On Stupefied Computer Users, the Nature of Consciousness
and the Energy Crisis

There are thousands of clever people across the country today earning
social admiration and sometimes good money providing consultation to
computer users baffled by the nature of their systems. These gurus all
anchor their profits, social or financial, on a key point of
understanding, the secret of the Inner Circle, which they have mastered
to greater or lesser degree. They understand the difference between an
interface and a generator.

Alfred Count Korzybski famously once wrote, in his discussion of general
semantics, that the map is not the territory. It is similarly true that
the interface is not the system. Whether in information representation
or in matters of core substance and the generation of physical
realities, it is a key point of stupidity to be bemused by the hijinks
of the monitor to the point where you confuse it with the substance of
the system. Computer consultant know that the world is not made up of
folders and icons, and that error messages are often completely wrong,
generated not by the error they cite but by some other condition
altogether. They know that the significance of a file name means
nothing to the machine behind it, but that the trivial comma you want
to include in it can be a deal breaker--not because it is a comma, but
because it has been defined at a low-level architecture as a forbidden
combination of bits. The user sees AOL buttons where the Priest sees
switches, parameters, NOR gates, and algorithms. The user is bemused by
his interface and its encoded representations, while the Priest knows
somewhat more of the actual machinery generating the symbolic blips on
the screen, and is not fooled that they have any of the meaning in
themselves that they are supposed to induce in the mind of the user.
And thereby hangs a tale.

This difference is so fundamental that it colors our politics (think
Terry Schavo, or the State of Texas suing the people who brought out an
energy drink called "Cocaine" because it had an offensive filename). It
may also play a key role in the ineptitude of our learning systems (why
Johnny doesn't understand Darwin) and our obsessions with Newton and the
King James translation of the Bible.

One of the critical arguments arising in the current crop of discussions
about the human mind and the consciousness is the premise that
consciousness derives, and must obviously derive, from wet-ware -- the
softly wired intricacy of the human nervous system. The logic runs
along the line that "All human thought that we know of has come from
human beings who are alive. Therefore human beings who are alive
(meaning operating a running body) are the source of consciousness. All
human bodies which are alive use nervous systems as their signal system.
Therefore thought must come from nervous systems, specifically from the
brain."

This is interestingly similar to the computer user who says the machine
doesn't want to allow them to open a folder, probably because it was
named with a dirty word or had a misspelled title. This sort of
rationalization is badly entangled with a confusion about the semantics
of the interface and the actual ground-truth architecture of the
generator on the other side of the interface.

The possibility that the brain is not a generator but an interface seems
too mind-boggling and different, as a paradigm, to even allow
constructive thought to occur from it. But it is a shift in perspective
as simple as learning not to believe the words in a folder title or an
error message as intended, but to see them as artifacts of a different
sort of process altogether. The difference between the computer guru
and the bemused user hinges on this distinction, and so does the
difference between a genuine understanding of thought and the sort of
logic used by the ex-machina rational of the neuro-anatomist. The
counter argument of course is that if you remove part of the brain, the
organism appears unable to think certain thoughts; it loses memory, or
vocabulary, or focus. If you stimulate parts of the brain, suddenly
certain memories or capacities seem to be enhanced. In a computer, if
you pull the VRAM, the monitor will be unable to tell you a lot of
things, too. If you kill certain pixels, only certain thoughts, based
on their locational mapping, will be visible to the user. Change the
scan rate and the world will look blurry and incomprehensible, resulting
in "stupidity" or "coma" on the part of the user as far as that role and
that machine are concerned.

The body, as a whole, is also a sturdy interface to what we think of as
the material universe. We have, as a species, acquired painstakingly
detailed lessons about how to interact with gravity, solidity, cold
things and hot, poisons and foods and masses and liquids through long
experience, going back millions of years. Giving this pre-dispositive
legacy, it is little wonder that the framework of mass, velocity, time,
duration, light and three-dimensional spaces seems surely and
irreversibly proven in our minds to be a territory, not a map, and the
core system in which we operate. But the body itself is, perhaps, an
interface as beguiling and bemusing as a point-and-click information
interface is to a computer user. Focused on a small section of the
measurable EMF spectrum, unable to handle sound frequencies above
birdsong or temperature levels below freezing, it is a very narrow-band
device indeed. And just as a monitor cannot tell you why your system is
painting the screen blue or flashing "General Error" messages, the body
cannot tell you much about how the space in which it measures itself as
existing is being generated. And therein lies another tale.

If in fact the body is an enthralling interface to the territory of
space time, we are faced with the same basic problem as the socially
dysfunctional ubergeek. Does he break out of his Jolt and Google habit,
and go downtown to see what real folks are up to? Learn to talk human?
Discover "real" relationships independent of Facebook or "Ars Technica"?
Or does he retreat into the reclusion of his cybernetic operating
center?

Your call, dude.

But think on this. If i is possible to un-confabulate the measuring systems of the body, and the architecture of space itself, it is possible the zero-point energy matrix that seems to (theoretically, at least) populate the thin skein of spatiality as it wavers in and out of existence can itself be ordered around, or engineered, or otherwise put to service. Although this may seem arrogant or inordinately hypothetical at first blush, so did Harvey's circulatory system and Galileo's earth orbit around the sun.

The subject of spationics is waiting to be born; with it, we could find the ultimate renewal of the human adventure.