nocuo.us

☀ Aggregate.

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:07:14 -0600

Imagine a very large, well-lit room. No shadows obscure any corner. Every surface is smooth and within easy reach. You’ve been usered in alone with nothing but a small can of paint and a brush. You can do anything you like while you’re in here, but in a short time you’ll be removed, never to see it again. Within a moment you realize you’re not the first person to have been in this position. While there is plenty of blank space left, everywhere there are clusters and clusters of brushstokes, smudges, drips and streaks and prints of paint, all by different hands. The variety is staggering.

Many have chosen to use their time creatively, loading the walls with images of every sort — some simple and elegant, some rough and ribald, others of intricate detail and still others of great broad strokes. Scribbles have grown into huge murals by small additions, and somehow the same theme runs through the hands of fifty disparate artists. There is not shortage of words among this gallery, either. Empty spaces are packed with friendly greetings, advice, personal histories, and even bursts of poetry and prose have found their place. There are philosophic arguments, competeing accounts of events, explanations of mathematic proofs, and throughout all are wit and humor in every written tounge.

A few of the previous occupants of the room have not settled for the standard experience of creative expression and contented themselves with destruction. Beautiful brushstrokes are marred with crude additions, slashed away quickly by incurious hands. Long poetry cycles built slowly by dozens of authors are obscured by huge, hateful words, slogans reducing fear into rough, easily-remembered thoughts. And even though the supply of paint to each visitor is small, plenty have put it to use covering whole swaths of work — creations buried utterly under angry splatters of paint, gone forever.

What next becomes obvious is that the overwhelming majority of those who have stood where you now do are not represented. Through the walls are a crowd of painters hands, a look at the floor shows wearing from legions and legions of feet. For some that came to the room it was enough to be known by name. Initials and signitures abound, some with dates and names of places, hometowns and far regions. But not even all of them combined could account for the shape of the floor. For every work of art, every hateful word, every story or explantion, vandalism, attribution or confession, there must have been a hundred people who thought that they had nothing whatsoever to contribute.

You return to yourself. How much time has past since the door closed behind you? How much time remains? It could take days to look at everything that was made or unmade in here, yet the paint and the brush are still in your hands. Do you try to make sense of everything you see and add a summary for others to keep them from wasting their time getting lost on these walls? Do you focus your energy into creating the very best thing that you know how to, or do you leave a message for other visitors, an instruction or memory or simple record of your existence? How many people will you be able to talk to through this room, how many of them could understand who you are? Or do you simply look, taking it all in and feeling the intense privilege of being here in this moment?

If I was asked to describe what I thought was the dominant theme in human experience, it would probably go something like what I just wrote. I like this explanation, that everything we do in our short lives is effected by those who occupied this space before us, because I think it has a quality that mathematicians like to call “elegance”, that is, it is both simple and it applies to a great many disparate questions. But I think I like it more because it points at a bigger idea, one that is useful in understanding more than human culture and history.

☀

The shape of a riverbed transcribes the movements of a very complex system of energy. It is not simply the byproduct of a liquid making the minimal required amount of effort to be in compliance with the laws of gravitation – it is a complete record of trillions and trillions of atomic interactions over tens millennia. The causality of a river’s ever-changing path through a landscape does not arise from a single body of water interacting with a single body of rock. There is no single description of the behavior of a river, only the description of a single molecule of water or a single atom of sand. Complex systems and complex events arise from the aggregate effects of simple systems and simple events. There is no native complexity, only iteration. The repeating dance of going back to the same fork in the road and making an independent choice each time puts down the probablistic layers of a system’s texture. It is the same paint applied with a thousand varying brushstrokes — no single one is responsible for the overall feel.

On any scale in which you might examine the physical universe, the explanations which will best fit what you observe are the ones which describe the behaviors of the smallest components, because these will dictate what the macro scale will look like. Small, repeating causes with tiny variations will, over time, have large and complex effects. What we call complexity does not require will or thought, it is the picture of a million different paths of the same simplicity. The large grows from the small, but never the reverse.

The visual language of complexity isn’t straight lines and solid colors, it’s sketchy curves and stipple shading. There’s no hard boundaries, just clouds. Non-uniform density, a topographic map of probability where even the highest peaks still don’t touch concrete certainty. It’s no coincidence that the descriptions of both electrons and storm systems are in terms of likelihood — they’re both products of countless simple forces colliding. The fuzzy shape of a system is just the outer boundary that the inner turmoil describes; a reductive view for illustration, like a projection of a five-dimensional shape in a two-dimensional space. The universe doesn’t exist in terms of always and never, just likely and unlikely.

☀

Being able to see human history as qualitative instead of quantitative is just the beginning. Once you have absorbed these ideas you start seeing things that were once difficult to understand. Thinking in terms of iteration and aggregate action makes the unfathomable accessible. You worry less about agency because conscious intent is no longer a necessary precursor to complex behavior. You focus on the elemental to better understand the whole. You stop looking for reasons why and see the shape of everything around you. There is no predetermination, only probability.

Reading.

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:37:51 -0600

Reading isn’t a distraction or diversion, at least not the sort of reading that leads to reading long lists of minutea about what has been read, collections of details without any context. Good reading leads the reader to explore the inner parts of his mind, to become familiar with them in more than just an instinctual way, rather like how when moving to a new city, you might come to find your way by memorizing turns, a left here and then two rights, and recognizing landmarks and generally feeling around for familiar things like a blind person until you arrive at your destination, but then after time you start to learn the names of the streets, how they flow together and the personalities of each, until one day you are suddenly able to make spontaneous connections and routes, and your trust in the city is cemented, because it’s no longer a place that you fills spaces between your departures and arrivals but a complete thing in itself.

☀ The Sea.

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:44:14 -0600

There’s a world or a space that belongs to ideas, where they touch and push and combine with each other, and that world mostly intersects with ours inside of human skulls, but there other physical places where they are more visible or at least concentrated heavily enough to be felt, if not seen. Some of these places just the secondary effects of the ideas that enter into our world though the skulls, residue of the skull’s subsequent actions upon intersecting with an idea and some of them are places where ideas are so strong that they are embedded into the brick and plaster and steel - huge temples with great halls to serve the will of the ideas, closed rooms, darkened lest the ideas stir from their dreaming.

The human world is often described as described in terms of its component ideas and usually in the same breath the human owners of the ideas are named. Often these owners are not the ones whose skulls collided with the idea in the first place, they just saw something they could attach themselves to and did, allowing the tremendous force and power of the grand idea to pull them through the world, and these people imagine themselves as commanding a team of strong horses, guiding them with their own will, instead of the truth, which is of course that the idea turns when it wishes to turn and runs when it wishes to run and when it collides with another idea that is because of its own internal forces and not those of any human skull.

Laying claim to a collection of ideas is like saying that every fish in a certain part of the sea is yours because you have decreed it so. The sea is larger than any human or group of humans can control, and like the realm of ideas, unexpected things emerge from it every day. No one power controls it, there are simply those who can cut their way through it faster than others, and even these do not know all of the depths below them.

Ideas mix and breed and grow and push and sleep and die, and they cannot be made to do anything. Some of those who have gained from the chance presence of a particular idea in the human world learn this, and some of them do not. Those who do are apt to ride the huge crests of energy in the wakes of ideas moving through the world. Those who do not are apt to react with fear and hatred to ideas which threaten their own chance gains, because a new idea might allow another person to profit by chance, too. Then there are those who can neither ride nor run, those who can’t be bothered by the trouble of something unpredictable, but find other people to handle the idea for them, to guide it or fight it, to smooth out the rough surfaces of an idea’s path. To be a handler is to have very little control of anything at all — not the idea nor the will of those who wish you to harness it.

Nobody is running the show. We all reach into the sea and see what we can fetch out of it, but no one owns the sea, no matter how powerful they might seem. It belongs only to itself. We are merely borrowing unused energy from it.

☀ The Divide.

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 22:25:00 -0600

Factual knowledge and abstract concepts are of the same kind of stuff. That is, they are patterns in our brains with two qualities:

1) We have direct access to them, as contrasted with things like reflexes, muscle memories, and other forms of conditioned or pre-existing reponses, which we normally cannot activate consciously.

2) They can exist in any brain, provided that the brain has the foundational patterns to support them (for example it does not matter if you dervive the Pythagorean theorem yourself or if you learn it from a textbook, you won’t be able to make use of it unless you already possess concepts of arithmetic). These distinctions are important because they qualify imformation which is transmissible; they are what separates shared experiences from qualia, the subjective ones. Experiences tied to the visceral cannot be fully communicated to another person because are so dependent on the senses and psychology of the person experiencing them. Some part of the feeling will be diminished because not every brain pattern which existed in the one who experienced it exists in the one who is being communicated to.

Humans natually learn things through direct experience. Empirical knowledge is internalized in a different way than knowledge acquired through language — it is woven more tightly into the fabric of the mind, becoming close to us and difficult to remove. The distilation of facts and concepts from written or spoken language is an acquired skill. Making ideas out of words takes a great deal of practice and effort, and many years to develop subtlety. When you’re doing this, you’re essentially internalizing another brain’s encoded experiences, so many of the intermediate steps get dropped becuase they’re not required for the final brain-state. However, when a person has matured this faculty, they tend to lean on it heavily, since it allows one who posesses it to absorb ideas quickly and with greater frequency than simple experience (which includes the development of ideas through direct rumination and thought).

A side effect of this new behavior is a change in how one treats language, and more importantly conversation. When words become a medium for information, there is a tendcy to optimize the internalization process by taking every word at its common meaning. When you’re in the habit of ingesting as much information as you can, things like irony and emotional subtext are not often in the forefront of your mind, and because of this they stop being expected. People who read a great deal begin to take all language literally.

This also creates a social and personal gap when literal people want to communicate things which may only be communicated through direct experience: things which might be subjective, or the affects of emotion. Literal people want to use words to compress the information extracted from experience into something portable, and what they end up with is something lacking the essence and the potency of the original experience. Or they will wish to convey the affects of their emotion in words, when it would be more effective to take actions which will allow the listener to directly experience what they (the speaker) is feeling.

Speaking as a literal sort of person, I often find myself thinking not that I desire the ability to communicate in terms of direct experience, to think first in the subjective, but rather a frustration at not being able to communicate in the way that makes me feel most comfortable: efficient, unambiguous exchange of information. This I think is a sort of second-order behavior of what I think is most important here: the prioritization of knowledge above all else, including common human experiences.

This kind of thinking is a very convenient way to make philosophic descions: it gives a wonderful feeling of always knowing what is truly important (this, of course, is seen through the lens of a limited set of knowledge — more on this point later). It is also a very convenient way to buffer your own emotions from the people around you. If all your mind ever has to concern itself with is things that are purely objective and factual, you can easily dismiss what another person feels as tained with emotion, invalid and without merit. This is particularly handy if you don’t agree with the other person, or if you don’t like how the other person’s opinion makes you feel.

The instinct to have both feet planted in the realm of facts diminishes existence by removing community with our fellow humans — it acquits us of the need to acknowledge that what another person directly experiences, their feelings and opintions, are as real to them as ours are to us. No one is fully aware of their own biases or the limitations of ones knowledge. No one can see the back of their own skull, but when the aquisition of ideas becomes a common task it is easy to forget this because after a while you simply feel that you know everything.

I bet you thought this was going to be a treatise on the nature of knowledge.

Objectivity is worthless without empathy. Ideas are impotent if they cannot be shared. Visceral, emperical experience will always weigh more than abstraction. Abstraction is important, because it removes friction from ideas, allowing them to move quickly from mind to mind as all useful ideas must be able to do, but it is not the singular tool at our disposal. The human sensorary aparatus is a hugely powerful thing. Most importantly: direct experiences which can be reproduced directly in other people are the most potent way to transmit ideas.