genes

Genes are the clockwork of dynamic flow. 

form is the world's voice

Form is the world's voice. Time and process shape this form into a ledger of all the countless interactions— the stochastic bell-shaped data model of all the most-probable coincidences that created this form. 

Currency as an elite enrollment mechanism for governments

"The invention of money undoubtedly proved beneficial to the subjects of the governments that issued it—in spite of the socially subversive fluctuations of inflation and deflation, and temptations to lend and borrow at usurious rates, which the invention brought in its train. But a greater benefit assuredly accrued to the issuing governments themselves; for the issue of money is an acte de présence which brings a government into direct and constant contact with at least an active, intelligent, and influential minority of its subjects; and this monetary epiphany not only automatically fosters a government's prestige, but also gives it a magnificent opportunity for self-advertisement." (p. 76)

from Volume 2 of "A Study of History (abridged) by Arnold Toynbee

Morphogenesis

"Morphogenesis does not take place in a vacuum. It can only begin from an already organized system which serves as a morphogenetic germ. During morphogenesis a new higher-level morphic unit comes into being around this germ, under the influence of a specific morphogenetic field. So how does this field become associated with the morphogenetic germ to start with?

"The answer may be that just as the association of material systems with gravitational fields depends on their mass, and with electromagnetic fields on their electric charge, so the association of systems with morphogenetic fields depends on their form. Hence a morphogenetic germ becomes surrounded by a particular morphogenetic field because of its characteristic form." (p. 76).

from "A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance" by Rupert Sheldrake

kids in mills

The only reason child sexual abuse is prominent in Hollywood is because textile manufacturing was run by Jews, historically, and as that industry exploited children by utilizing their ability to to run the machines it was a breeding ground for that nascent behavior. An asymmetry in power, an informal relation between two age-distal, space-distal, and ethnic-distal  groups leads to the 'child  rape' accusations that simmer out of Hollywood. 

That being said, I feel like a product of my time. It's anyone, regardless of their ethnicity, that had access to this asymmetry, which produced boners. So it ain't Jews. 

My God. What have I become?

Proteus disease is a multidimensional visitor

I am imagining a re-imagining of the Elephant Man's 'John Merrick' as, in fact, a hyperdimensional object visiting the three-dimensional beings here upon earth in some Victorian England. And the tragedy of his treatment leads to some trippy scene back in this hyperplane from where these visitors came showing their 'soft-pot' breathing and beating erratically, substantiating the sadness and sobbing of a hyperdimensional being who has failed to make meaningful contact with these Victorian working class people. 

deep sea vents and sort algorithms

I have this suspicion after nibbling at the buffet of popular science literature for the last few decades about the origins of living things on this planet. Some of our modeling software and our algorithms may be the best models of what a biomolecular soup bathed in solar radiation or living on some temperature, pressure, and chemosynthetic gradient deep in the ocean may have produced. The short and skinny of it is that in the case of deep-sea vents, a continuous warm jet of chemicals was being belched from within the earth's mantle. Under the pressure of earth and the ocean, this hot jet churned the relatively cold water of the ocean, causing the kinds of heat and chemical dynamic mixtures that various mixing experiments on the street or at the lab bench could produce. Adding in the constant pull of a magnetic field the molecules forming in this churn have a chronic spooky action interface, which would tend to sort the kinds of molecules that form with a self-similar chronic feature of this interface: polarity. This 'chiral precondition' establishes a lingua franca for all consequent molecular bonding under the varying conditions inherent around these vents. 

Now here's a complete pull-it-out-of-your-ass kind of assumption that as the various available chemicals churning from these vents over millions of years accumulated, so did the various chemical bonds made available. More specifically, the temperature gradient extending from the mouth of this undersea geyser to some theoretical outer space establishes the zones that favor certain kinds of molecules to form, reform, and proliferate, all using the concentration of specific molecules and temperatures as the catalyzing foreground for a semi-stable equilibrium. This creates a kind of layered onion, or in chemistry terms, a loosely colloidal sphere extending out from this deep-sea vent. At the limens of these discrete molecular regions interactions occur, causing novel pairings to 'precipitate out of solution.' What that suggests in this colloidal sphere model proposes that a kind of super-saturation of self-similar molecules were existing at different regions and that under the right bumping into the optimal companion molecules could create something novel and discreet against its environs, something which had a energy state that made it even more stable than that of its environs as well. 

I'm drawn to a description of an experiment run by Michael Levin's lab with sort algorithms. In it his lab showed that when each number cell was assigned a specific sorting algorithm (n = 2), moments of clustering occurred among similar algorithms, all while still achieving the same result in the end: sortedness. What is the teleology of life? That life has a form, maintains order, and transcends to populations or communities of its kind points to some of this. But all of that rests upon some of the conditions set up in this theoretical chemistry experiment happening along the temperature gradient retreating from the deep-sea vent. My hasty conclusion will be that the energy costs of the sortedness of life are its delimiting feature, and that which essentially defines it. As we also know from grade school science the principle of the conservation of energy—nothing is lost; it simply changes form, dissipates out into the environment, or becomes a semi-stable, unreactive oxidated component clinging to the system. If energy is saved, why does it want to coalesce into the kinds of things that live, if only briefly among its kind, and pass back out into a local universe of possibilities? 

These are hokey thought exercises. The writing is coarse and high-school level at best. But sometimes a feller just has to give things a think, and cobble together his prototype as kludgy as possible. 

Reality, allegory

Reality wears a petticoat of ignorance.

consciousness, yet again

I think in the opening bit where he talks about Hofstadter claiming that "some integers are conscious" he's placing a bar upon consciousness, and thus, perhaps, dismissing the discriminatory affordances (being systematic) of math symbols as having a way of dividing the things they touch or approach them and thus conduct some element of computation as a result. Now, that 'touch or approach them' quip leans heavy on analogues of movement, space, and refraction (in my mind), but if we take how we use our symbolic vocabulary seriously, that's perhaps what gives them use value to begin with—being analogues to sensory experience and the systematic nature we see in that. What this unravels isn't much other than the consistency of the interface, and Godel's argument shows that computation is bounded, and more seriously it cannot prove itself with consistency. That's where Penrose leaves space for consciousness, which is above and beyond mere integral or mathematical systems, but we are finding that much of the world around us, including the cells that make us do simple discriminatory computation and future-oriented planning all the time, something that can happen in the merest of molecules and the chemical interactions they afford And here's the rub for me, electromagnetics is the domain and coding space of consciousness. Regardless of if that emergent/transcendent entity, which emerges from so many coordinated, goal-oriented cells, is merely a space for something even bigger to find purchase is for the pantheistic argument, nevertheless, the complexity of cellular architecture, its attendant systematic set of chemistry, and the achievement of orchestrated, conformal electromagnetics is the stuff of what makes the conscious entities, which emerge in this world.

The big question racing toward the big answer is AI

The history of communication is wrangling with an interface with god. That we're racing toward a natural language wishing well super AI encompasses the value and the consequence of how we both construct that and what we do with it. The big question and the big answer are being developed simultaneously in the theoretical AI as infrastructure and interface.

Is vision a metaphor?

I was listening to NPR while making dinner tonight and heard about plant-insect signaling, which focused on a specific rainforest species of plant that has existed for countless millennia and is now being threated with extinction. Apparently, this plant heats up its fruiting body to signal to a specific beetle that uses its antenna to 'see' this heat spike against its background as the thing it is looking for: the pollen of this plant. 

I draw this conclusion because of a book I read by Donald Hoffman, who deconstructed space-time as an evolutionary adaptation, which is, itself, a fiction. From that we can draw how we reconstruct our perception of photons by our eyes as doing just this—reconstructing within the three-dimensional environment the point-source for this photon. The same can be said for this beetle's 'seeing' of the plant's heat in the infrared range. And the same thing can be said for dolphins echo-mapping their environment both at its surface and its depth, determining whether a reflected object is coral, food, or foe—a metaphor for seeing. 

Something to chew on. 

Beings of light

We are beings of light marooned upon the rocky shores of a rocky planet. Slowly we pick up the implements of our reconnection to that primordial world. At the heart of this is the spark. 

Our evolution is both an exemplar and explanation of the process. It is both the process of path optimization as it is, at the bleeding edge, of optimizing its own path. Evolution is evolving but along a specific trajectory to more and more momentum along this path. As we ramp up our speed we harness more and more energy until we have reconnected with our primordial past, as beings of light. 

Quan Titties

I had this realization doing my usual OCD meander through BBC archival stuff.

Phrenology represented the skull as a specific map the topography of which told a story about the attributes of the person.

https://imgur.com/nH6IvIz

Today's 3d capture technology is a coordinate map that tells a story to a computer about your body's attributes rendered as a 'digital asset,' which will be required in order for you to float around as a formality of being a jobless entity with citizenship in some tech-hole's dead-mall VR sim.

https://imgur.com/AVlzWem

I'm a cursed visionary. I need my I-phones plucked out by birds, which aren't real.

Shaman Lesko



Part of a series of unsent e-mails to two former colleagues in higher ed.

#001

asexual assault

Any injury inflicted upon one party by another party without a sexual component. 

A website and an idea so cutting edge it's probably a grift

 https://www.abliss.space/biocryptography

Fascinating idea if anything. 

Law and God in civilization (according to Toynbee)

"This pair of concepts—a ubiquitous and irresistible law and a unique and omnipotent deity—will be found at the heart of almost every representation of the Universe that has ever taken shape in human minds in the social environment of a universal state; but a survey of these cosmologies will show that they tend to approximate to one or other of two distinct types. There is one type in which Law is exalted at the expense of God and another in which God is exalted at the expense of Law; and we shall find that the emphasis on Law is characteristic of the philosophies of the dominant minority, while the religions of the internal proletariat incline to subordinate the majesty of the Law to the omnipotence of God. However, the distinction is only a matter of emphasis; in all these cosmologies both concepts are to be found, co-existing and interwoven, whatever their respective proportions may be" (pp. 565-566).

In Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One (Abridged Version)

yet another analogy of consciousness

Consciousness is a ray of light and truth beyond space and time refracted through the circuitous configurations of atoms at the dimension of the picometer and projected into the meso scale of meter-length sizes from a rather ticklish medium, the photon, and creating in its wake the stabilizing form of a timeframe-redraw transcendent subject, persistent through time, and using that very medium--time---to fold in on itself modes of self-reflection, the capacity for thought, and ultimately knowledge of self-and universe. 

"More bullshit after these messages."

The transcendent moment

What if the next stage of evolution was the slow rise of an understandable human voice among all life on the planet, speaking directly to you sometimes out of the blue. 

Aesthetic genetics

Beauty tends to beauty and thus it accumulates. 

Now I'm the dupe

Two points: we have no community. In the past many ran with groups of familiars in their generational cohort and through them met with similar groups and that was the medium through which strangers were made familiar enough to connect. It was much more organic. As a result, we've become atomized and in seeking to reconstruct that world, we've fit it into our screens. This results in reducing everything in our life to an interactive square within our glowing rectangle, our food lever within our Skinner box. Now, we're all a captured audience not unlike those dupes at the video poker in the gas stations in the muddy Midwest of my youth. Sad really, I've found myself more than once become that sun-leathered dupe, cigarette smoldering between lips, staring blankly at card choices, smacking away at the select/discard buttons like a monkey in an experiment.