Submitted by Catchabula on Sun, 05/10/2008 - 14:03.
Catchabula
Posts: 25
An Instructive Discordia
from the Kyronian Letters.
From Catchabula of Europaea to Kyros Polynomos in the Colonies, greetings!
Catchabula,
It is a wonderful dance of words you have written here. Much of it though seems to be just that!
I'm happy that words can dance, instead of marching like soldiers in a row! I'm so happy that words have a life of their own, instead of being just unambiguous signs. Have this one: words are like the labrador dogs on a polar expedition or the horses of knights and conquistadors. They serve you well but they may be stubborn, they need to be dominated but they can become your friends. Words are seductive like women and treacherous like females too, they are allowing you to use them as long as you allow them to use you. We speak with words, meaning we not only talk with them but also TO them, as if they had a consciousness of their own, and they are indeed fragments of consciousness. You have told me about ambiguity and about the creation of non-ambiguous languages, and about the advantages these are supposed to have for science and the progress of knowledge. In my opinion we may not fight ambiguity but we must protect and defend it, because it is connected with the most valuable aspects of our humanity. Try to take away ambiguity and you take away poetry, try to take away poetry and you take away the human soul. The project of Newspeak in Orwell's "1984" prooves how real that connection is: trying to introduce an impoverished language is often part of introducing tyranny. You know that the notion of objectivity is often abused, as a decent name for the specific opinions of certain individuals or factions, or as a justification for that lowest of human passions, the lust for power. I would prefer tolerance over objectivity, not rejecting subjectivity but appreciating and stimulating it, allowing each mind to blossom like a flower in the fields. There are no weeds in the garden of the mind, though some flowers may be good for health while others may be poisonous. But I know this is dancing again...
You have said that time has a beginning and an end, is there something you base this on besides the whispering of your ghost? People often say that the big bang was 'the beginning', but thats not necessarily true, its just that the big bang is the earliest moment of time we can speculate about seriously because of the current limitations of black hole/singularity physics. It is quite likely that the big bang was proceeded by a 'big crunch' where the previous incarnation of the universe collapsed under the influence of its own gravity into a massive black hole. My doubting questions about my axioms were not because I thought that time would suddenly stop somewhere, but that the ability to do anything would decrease to nothing as the universe tears itself apart and expands at an exponentially increasing rate.
All that is science, but though it is correct in its own way it's just another way of thinking. It reminds me of the words of Blake: "See the Universe in a grain of sand, and Eternity in an hour". Blake took at least the subjective element into account, but of course he was a poet. Poets and scientists have the same goal though, and that is the increase of human knowledge (mind the word "human"). And beyond knowledge there is wisdom, where the subjective part is even more substantial and is taking its most dignified form. No scientist can ever be wise unless he becomes a poet at some point in his development; he may never become wise though, and keep making neutron-bombs or do experiments on people. And about that ghost: everybody has one (remember that Manga-movie); I try to live with it and feed it, and sometimes it likes a good drink too! Sometimes I ignore it and the results are always poor and flat, as were some parts of my previous letter. I don't wish to be a scientist though, I want to be a man among men and share the human condition as my main source for knowledge. Cyrus, come over to Belgium and I'll teach you how to live! I'll pay you a beer in a 13th century cellar, we'll talk and maybe sing, and there will be girls around to admire and to love! As a librarian I'm very correct in my daily service, but the female students feel the admiration in my correctness; they feel so much and they understand the importance of sensing and feeling. I am convinced that girls are guardians of some universal secret; just take a good look at them, they are Atlantis and the Holy Grail together (what an old perv I am ). Cyrus, let's get drunk and confuse and confound it all! Why are you afraid of Satori and not of guns? Be wise and live, because time is passing and life is short. This may not be very scientific but it's genuine philosophy. Why didn't you notice that in my previous letter??
(Again I'm a bit afraid of you: a scientist with a gun! We ought to explore the dangers of that; one day you might think you are right . I prefer to be a drunk poet who is never right and in fact always, instead of being a scientist who is always right and in fact never. But of course this sentence is ambiguous, unclear, meaningless, untrue, and its creator ought to be shot. You can not imagine how fast some people go down that row!).
The mere fact that we cannot draw an infinite timeline is a moot point (Also a moot point since I never said it was infinite, just that it 'approached infinity' which means as it becomes larger and larger your answer approaches a number, the phrase 'limit' means that we are talking about that number it is approaching) since we cannot even draw fundamental things like atoms and even photons without creating images that are many times removed from what the actual structure is (Can you draw something that is in one place and yet every place at once?). By the way, what would a drawing of time even look like?
Time can be studied in many ways, so why always stick to the physical side of it? Why always try to understand time in an objective way? I want to state that eliminating subjectivity in the study of time is not favorable for its understanding and may even give you a completely false idea of it. Time is part of both our outer and our inner world and cannot be understood without taking into account its interpretation and significance. The question is not so much what time is as well what time does to us humans, as we ARE time in many ways, time embodied and obtaining consciousness. I could refer to several great books on this subject, and I suggest you adopt Heidegger in your reading program (go straight to his main work "Sein und Zeit" or "On Being and Time"; it's hugely difficult as it creates a lot of new and peculiar concepts). One of my favourite quotes is from Heidegger and I cited it before: "Irrationality looks with myopic eyes to things that rationality is blind for" (I doubt that my translation is exact but the general sense is clear). Now it took me a lot of effort to discover this, but I think time is... a rabbit! I'll stick to that from now on, as this image makes the notion of time very clear to me: alive, organic, full of movement, passing by, shy and discreet, a bit elusive though with a familiar outer look, and a dozen other qualifications. You can even kill time as you can kill a rabbit. Yes, this is meant as provocative but I really think you should learn how to dance. Try to experience as well as to imagine and you will understand. This goes for so many things...
(By the way, I often mix not understanding your letters with not wishing to do so, and I know that is wrong. But as you see I'm a sportsman... ).
Your second paragraph makes a very good point: two complex entities, like trees, are never the same. But is that necessarily true? My hypothesis is that the probability of two objects being the same is inversely proportional to some derivative of their complexity. An analogy might be flipping coins, the probability of flipping a certain sequence on your first try is something like this:
Probability = 1 / ( 2 ^ Sequence length)
The probability of selecting two trees that are exactly the same is something like trying to get a billion coin sequence on your first try. I can't even calculate 2 ^ 1,000,000,000, and I doubt I could write out the number in any email of reasonable length. But if you look at enough trees, eventually it will happen. And those two exactly-the-same trees are not necessarily growing in the same soil, in the same climate, or under the same type of sun.
(A critical note on chaos theory will follow)
In the opening paragraph of your second letter you said that a making a duplicate is not immortality, and I agree, but I also didn't propose that. =) I proposed that the information that defines a human a particular instance of a human, i.e. a particular person at a particular moment, will reconverge given an arbitrarily long period of time. This is the information that is what enters and leaves you every day, when you watch television or talk on the phone. This information would be mostly dispersed when you die and completely dispersed as your body decays. This information defines the numerous atoms in your body, their charges, their velocities, their masses and various other states.
I don't understand how information can remain intact when its carrier does not. And didn't you call your theory your "Improbable Immortality Theorem"? I think there is life and death on one side and information theory on the other, and both are as related as... well... damn, everything is related! And I also tried to express that I wanted to think about life and death in a non-scientific way, in a way that is both more clear and meaningful to me. Take this for instance:
Life hides in a whipcord's clap
On London Bridge at nine,
It fills an ancient sailors' inn
And smells as stunning wine.
There is no life where preachers tell
To seek from joy release,
It is where fools and fancies dwell,
In towns and hills and seas.
So when my dusk is getting near
I'll scorn the pangs of it.
Let laugh undo the slightest fear
With Life so infinite!
These being the words of a would-be poet. Well, even these early trials had their infuences, I read a lot of Masefield in those days. What I wanted to say is this: we all are blind and deaf somehow and the first condition for hearing and seeing is listening and looking. We must listen to many tales and even to different versions of each tale, but adults are often listening too much to tales and not enough to the world. Tales are always deceptions but some may be more deceptive than others, while the world may be vast and complex but at least never lies to us, as tales inevitably do. Science is just one of these tales, and the deepest motive for science may be our need to find some sense in an incomprehensible and seemingly senseless world, by just putting it there. And so does poetry and art in general, and the tales of Milton and Shakespeare are definitely equal to those of Newton and Einstein. But tales are only tales and made of words, while the world is talking to us without words, forcing us to live in the presence of an eternal riddle. What do the birds say to us and the flowers? Ask any child and she will tell you, and how beautiful that tale is! Some claim that the riddle of the universe is its own solution. I think I'll keep that one for my deathbed...
We are an amount of incomprehensible information. And this incomprehensible information forges and uses illusions to feel and understand this universe. Does that really make what we love and desire of any lesser value? Are shadows less fulfilling merely because they are shadows? The scientist is right, the television is really only composed of it's circuits and components, the images on the screen however are all in our minds (Or as my philosophy professor says 'part of our cultural lenses'). I am not trying to escape love and life by these speculations, I merely enjoy speculating, that is part of my enjoyment of life. =)
Bravo!!! Now we are getting somewhere! I couldn't have said it better (I'm just bad in science but you know that ). Cyrus, you are very clever and I envy you a lot: all these years you (probably) have before you, still being able to taste them with the intensity of youth. Discovering all the endless facets of the outer and inner world, exploring and connecting them, and returning on your footsteps, and yet growing and evolving. Still so many books to read, so many movies to see, so much love to make and so much beer to drink, so many laughs to laugh and tears to shed... As for me, you can only envy me my belly and my darkening mind! Feel, learn, grow, live, love and be careful with thinking; always add a dash of feeling to it or it may devour you alive (or at least leave you with a bad taste in your mouth). And remember that memories may be the only reality we have, and that dreams are memories of events that have never happened. And keep in mind that not all passages in a bad letter are bad, and that words need words to deny themselves. That there are beautiful words such as "friend", and that you must dance to see the beauty of a word. And.. and... No thanks Bart, I think I had enough!
Hope to talk soon,
Sincerely,
Catchabula
P.S. My dad was saying that a bale of hay was an amount of hay that could hold a rectangular shape when tied together. My response was: 'By how much deviation?'
I suggest you lie down in it, with some good company .
Catchabula
Posts: 25
An Instructive Discordia
from the Kyronian Letters.
From Catchabula of Europaea to Kyros Polynomos in the Colonies, greetings!
Catchabula,
It is a wonderful dance of words you have written here. Much of it though seems to be just that!
I'm happy that words can dance, instead of marching like soldiers in a row! I'm so happy that words have a life of their own, instead of being just unambiguous signs. Have this one: words are like the labrador dogs on a polar expedition or the horses of knights and conquistadors. They serve you well but they may be stubborn, they need to be dominated but they can become your friends. Words are seductive like women and treacherous like females too, they are allowing you to use them as long as you allow them to use you. We speak with words, meaning we not only talk with them but also TO them, as if they had a consciousness of their own, and they are indeed fragments of consciousness. You have told me about ambiguity and about the creation of non-ambiguous languages, and about the advantages these are supposed to have for science and the progress of knowledge. In my opinion we may not fight ambiguity but we must protect and defend it, because it is connected with the most valuable aspects of our humanity. Try to take away ambiguity and you take away poetry, try to take away poetry and you take away the human soul. The project of Newspeak in Orwell's "1984" prooves how real that connection is: trying to introduce an impoverished language is often part of introducing tyranny. You know that the notion of objectivity is often abused, as a decent name for the specific opinions of certain individuals or factions, or as a justification for that lowest of human passions, the lust for power. I would prefer tolerance over objectivity, not rejecting subjectivity but appreciating and stimulating it, allowing each mind to blossom like a flower in the fields. There are no weeds in the garden of the mind, though some flowers may be good for health while others may be poisonous. But I know this is dancing again...
You have said that time has a beginning and an end, is there something you base this on besides the whispering of your ghost? People often say that the big bang was 'the beginning', but thats not necessarily true, its just that the big bang is the earliest moment of time we can speculate about seriously because of the current limitations of black hole/singularity physics. It is quite likely that the big bang was proceeded by a 'big crunch' where the previous incarnation of the universe collapsed under the influence of its own gravity into a massive black hole. My doubting questions about my axioms were not because I thought that time would suddenly stop somewhere, but that the ability to do anything would decrease to nothing as the universe tears itself apart and expands at an exponentially increasing rate.
All that is science, but though it is correct in its own way it's just another way of thinking. It reminds me of the words of Blake: "See the Universe in a grain of sand, and Eternity in an hour". Blake took at least the subjective element into account, but of course he was a poet. Poets and scientists have the same goal though, and that is the increase of human knowledge (mind the word "human"). And beyond knowledge there is wisdom, where the subjective part is even more substantial and is taking its most dignified form. No scientist can ever be wise unless he becomes a poet at some point in his development; he may never become wise though, and keep making neutron-bombs or do experiments on people. And about that ghost: everybody has one (remember that Manga-movie); I try to live with it and feed it, and sometimes it likes a good drink too! Sometimes I ignore it and the results are always poor and flat, as were some parts of my previous letter. I don't wish to be a scientist though, I want to be a man among men and share the human condition as my main source for knowledge. Cyrus, come over to Belgium and I'll teach you how to live! I'll pay you a beer in a 13th century cellar, we'll talk and maybe sing, and there will be girls around to admire and to love! As a librarian I'm very correct in my daily service, but the female students feel the admiration in my correctness; they feel so much and they understand the importance of sensing and feeling. I am convinced that girls are guardians of some universal secret; just take a good look at them, they are Atlantis and the Holy Grail together (what an old perv I am
). Cyrus, let's get drunk and confuse and confound it all! Why are you afraid of Satori and not of guns? Be wise and live, because time is passing and life is short. This may not be very scientific but it's genuine philosophy. Why didn't you notice that in my previous letter??
(Again I'm a bit afraid of you: a scientist with a gun! We ought to explore the dangers of that; one day you might think you are right
. I prefer to be a drunk poet who is never right and in fact always, instead of being a scientist who is always right and in fact never. But of course this sentence is ambiguous, unclear, meaningless, untrue, and its creator ought to be shot. You can not imagine how fast some people go down that row!).
The mere fact that we cannot draw an infinite timeline is a moot point (Also a moot point since I never said it was infinite, just that it 'approached infinity' which means as it becomes larger and larger your answer approaches a number, the phrase 'limit' means that we are talking about that number it is approaching) since we cannot even draw fundamental things like atoms and even photons without creating images that are many times removed from what the actual structure is (Can you draw something that is in one place and yet every place at once?). By the way, what would a drawing of time even look like?
Time can be studied in many ways, so why always stick to the physical side of it? Why always try to understand time in an objective way? I want to state that eliminating subjectivity in the study of time is not favorable for its understanding and may even give you a completely false idea of it. Time is part of both our outer and our inner world and cannot be understood without taking into account its interpretation and significance. The question is not so much what time is as well what time does to us humans, as we ARE time in many ways, time embodied and obtaining consciousness. I could refer to several great books on this subject, and I suggest you adopt Heidegger in your reading program (go straight to his main work "Sein und Zeit" or "On Being and Time"; it's hugely difficult as it creates a lot of new and peculiar concepts). One of my favourite quotes is from Heidegger and I cited it before: "Irrationality looks with myopic eyes to things that rationality is blind for" (I doubt that my translation is exact but the general sense is clear). Now it took me a lot of effort to discover this, but I think time is... a rabbit! I'll stick to that from now on, as this image makes the notion of time very clear to me: alive, organic, full of movement, passing by, shy and discreet, a bit elusive though with a familiar outer look, and a dozen other qualifications. You can even kill time as you can kill a rabbit. Yes, this is meant as provocative but I really think you should learn how to dance. Try to experience as well as to imagine and you will understand. This goes for so many things...
(By the way, I often mix not understanding your letters with not wishing to do so, and I know that is wrong. But as you see I'm a sportsman...
).
Your second paragraph makes a very good point: two complex entities, like trees, are never the same. But is that necessarily true? My hypothesis is that the probability of two objects being the same is inversely proportional to some derivative of their complexity. An analogy might be flipping coins, the probability of flipping a certain sequence on your first try is something like this:
Probability = 1 / ( 2 ^ Sequence length)
The probability of selecting two trees that are exactly the same is something like trying to get a billion coin sequence on your first try. I can't even calculate 2 ^ 1,000,000,000, and I doubt I could write out the number in any email of reasonable length. But if you look at enough trees, eventually it will happen. And those two exactly-the-same trees are not necessarily growing in the same soil, in the same climate, or under the same type of sun.
(A critical note on chaos theory will follow)
In the opening paragraph of your second letter you said that a making a duplicate is not immortality, and I agree, but I also didn't propose that. =) I proposed that the information that defines a human a particular instance of a human, i.e. a particular person at a particular moment, will reconverge given an arbitrarily long period of time. This is the information that is what enters and leaves you every day, when you watch television or talk on the phone. This information would be mostly dispersed when you die and completely dispersed as your body decays. This information defines the numerous atoms in your body, their charges, their velocities, their masses and various other states.
I don't understand how information can remain intact when its carrier does not. And didn't you call your theory your "Improbable Immortality Theorem"? I think there is life and death on one side and information theory on the other, and both are as related as... well... damn, everything is related! And I also tried to express that I wanted to think about life and death in a non-scientific way, in a way that is both more clear and meaningful to me. Take this for instance:
Life hides in a whipcord's clap
On London Bridge at nine,
It fills an ancient sailors' inn
And smells as stunning wine.
There is no life where preachers tell
To seek from joy release,
It is where fools and fancies dwell,
In towns and hills and seas.
So when my dusk is getting near
I'll scorn the pangs of it.
Let laugh undo the slightest fear
With Life so infinite!
These being the words of a would-be poet. Well, even these early trials had their infuences, I read a lot of Masefield in those days. What I wanted to say is this: we all are blind and deaf somehow and the first condition for hearing and seeing is listening and looking. We must listen to many tales and even to different versions of each tale, but adults are often listening too much to tales and not enough to the world. Tales are always deceptions but some may be more deceptive than others, while the world may be vast and complex but at least never lies to us, as tales inevitably do. Science is just one of these tales, and the deepest motive for science may be our need to find some sense in an incomprehensible and seemingly senseless world, by just putting it there. And so does poetry and art in general, and the tales of Milton and Shakespeare are definitely equal to those of Newton and Einstein. But tales are only tales and made of words, while the world is talking to us without words, forcing us to live in the presence of an eternal riddle. What do the birds say to us and the flowers? Ask any child and she will tell you, and how beautiful that tale is! Some claim that the riddle of the universe is its own solution. I think I'll keep that one for my deathbed...
We are an amount of incomprehensible information. And this incomprehensible information forges and uses illusions to feel and understand this universe. Does that really make what we love and desire of any lesser value? Are shadows less fulfilling merely because they are shadows? The scientist is right, the television is really only composed of it's circuits and components, the images on the screen however are all in our minds (Or as my philosophy professor says 'part of our cultural lenses'). I am not trying to escape love and life by these speculations, I merely enjoy speculating, that is part of my enjoyment of life. =)
Bravo!!! Now we are getting somewhere! I couldn't have said it better (I'm just bad in science but you know that
). Cyrus, you are very clever and I envy you a lot: all these years you (probably) have before you, still being able to taste them with the intensity of youth. Discovering all the endless facets of the outer and inner world, exploring and connecting them, and returning on your footsteps, and yet growing and evolving. Still so many books to read, so many movies to see, so much love to make and so much beer to drink, so many laughs to laugh and tears to shed... As for me, you can only envy me my belly and my darkening mind! Feel, learn, grow, live, love and be careful with thinking; always add a dash of feeling to it or it may devour you alive (or at least leave you with a bad taste in your mouth). And remember that memories may be the only reality we have, and that dreams are memories of events that have never happened. And keep in mind that not all passages in a bad letter are bad, and that words need words to deny themselves. That there are beautiful words such as "friend", and that you must dance to see the beauty of a word. And.. and... No thanks Bart, I think I had enough! 
Hope to talk soon,
Sincerely,
Catchabula
P.S.
My dad was saying that a bale of hay was an amount of hay that could hold a rectangular shape when tied together. My response was: 'By how much deviation?'
I suggest you lie down in it, with some good company
.