Some observations

I see mathematics relying upon:

1/x

x²

√x

This observation also falls prey to my interpretation of numerous glazed-over math presentations. 

I am finding that much of what mathematics does is to calculate or analyze plots in a three dimensional volume.

Finally, as we've been beholden to 2 dimensional graphical means for representing thought/calculation/analysis so long, the big discoveries in the past century have been attempts to transcend those 2 dimensions while working within them representationally.

Computers allow us to serially compute vast points in three dimensional volumes in order to test hypotheses about the probabilities represented by those points in space as a matter of a behavior imputed to those points. 

Quantum computing represents the next step in modeling points in a three dimensional volume such that it need not go through step-by-step modeling, via math, of points in three dimensional space but can do multiple points simultaneously, thus adding 'volume' as a baked in feature of its compute cycle. 

Classical computing is flattening of calculation to logic gates on atoms-thick wafers to maximize serial calculations within two-dimensional space. Quantum computing pushes through that miniscule control arena of two dimensions into quantum space, thus opening up multi-matrix calculation by having qubits masquerade as the control conditions for information. 

This is a mess, and I will return to it. 

Sartre on the human investment absorbed by material objects

"In this way, society in its most concrete movement is shot through with passivity, and unceasingly totalises its inert multiplicities and inscribes its totalisation in inertia, while the material object, whose unity is thereby recreated, re-discovered and imposed, becomes a strange and living being with its own customs and its own movement" (p. 169).

Later Sartre writes, "This is not a metaphor. To preserve its reality as a dwelling a house must be inhabited, that is to say, looked after, heated, swept, repainted, etc.; otherwise it deteriorates. This vampire object constantly absorbs human action, lives on blood taken from man and finally lives in symbiosis with him. It derives all its physical properties, including temperature, from human action. For its inhabitants there is no difference between the passive activity which might be called 'residence' and the pure re-constituting praxis which protects the house against the Universe, that is, which mediates between the exterior and the interior." (p. 169)

from Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1"

Man and machine in the process of totalization

"Determination of the present by the future, oscillation between the inert and the organic, negation, transcended contradictions, negation of the negation--in short, developing totalisation; these are the moments of any form of labour, until--at a dialectical level that we have yet to consider--society develops the division of labour to the point of the specialisation of machines. The process is then inverted: the semi-automatic machine defines its environment and constructs its man, so that the inorganic comes to be characterised by a false but effective interiority, and the organic by exteriority. Man becomes the machine's machine; and to himself he is his own exteriority. But in all other cases, the dialectic appears as the logic of labour." (p. 91)

From Jean Paul Sartre's "The Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume 1"

Technopolyps

 Technopolyps/technopalypse

When one considers the religious/existential implications of interfacing with a device that has processing power enough to addict oneself, keep oneself coming back, and to enforce an identification regime, we've reached the status of technopolyps/technopalypse. 

What this means. 

The term describes the time/space/attention commitments that people have to interactive devices, content delivery devices, attention consuming devices that, to the extent that they have sway, erode people's commitments to a society and make them into users, not citizens. Imagine one day when the streets are empty (a foregone conclusion resting upon its predecessor) and the only people engaging with the world are those indigent, homeless, and drug abused, shuffling like a zombie horde about the homes, nee cages, of the 'residents' all of whom are quietly alone before a screen. Here I stand, before a screen myself, scrawling upon the walls of my 'gilded-information-age cage' a cry for revolution resounding to all, alone, as a singular cry for help. 

To become a technopolyp is the preceding condition to becoming the soft-pot upon the chassis of ascendant technology. In becoming a technopolyp, one establishes boundaries around one's identity that exclude others and include only those engaged with a specific game, streaming show, news outlet. And only to the extent that others engage together they form a community, and in doing so exclusively of others they form an army against outsiders. Without guns, without enmity, this army fights a quiet war to secede, like a Texas, from a larger community entirely and only on the basis of its time and attention investments in a given interactive medium. 

But having a community apart from others solely upon one's interactive media choices still establishes a power-based conflict. To reduce that to it's basic unit, to cellularize it, is to use computing power to tailor media specific to each and every user. Thus rendered from others, and over time to a shared language and world, the mind becomes severed without surgery from its physical environment and its body in such a way that face-to-face interaction becomes a disease whose symptom is pathological isolation. 

Yet here I stand, before my screen as if before the altar to a domestic god 2000+ years ago, hearing the admonitory voices from afar or apast, heeding their call to some place outside of one's immediate space and time. Completely untethered from the day-to-day needs of a community, severed from self, awash in a sea of 1s and 0s and soon to become qubits engaged in a keyboard, gestural, voice activated ceremony to a self-reflective God standing amidst an army of none. 

Life, self-knowledge, entropy, space-time

Life is an ordered system maintained through the intake of energy against entropy and the stochastic imprint of time upon its development and evolution. Regardless of how the universe achieves self-meaning it will find it in the persistent organization of space-time at some location. Given the exploded nature of all the matter in the universe, the question begged is how much of the universe is required to be organized for it to achieve self-knowledge?

Brain-Universe Interface

Let's propose a starkly material version of consciousness as the product of the brain activity devoted to it. This not only describes the nature of consciousness as housed within a brain's neurological function but also sets the upper limit of consciousness and what brains can conceive. To end this discussion abruptly, the universe can only be conceived up to the limit of the brain. In so far as a brain's synaptic connections can be quantified and measured in terms of astronomical units, that is, 'stars in the Milky Way,' this rough analogy for understanding the size and complexity of the brain also displays the total possible complexity of what it can understand. And so we have to ask if there's an entry level into consciousness of the universe that the universe itself produces for the sake of its own existence. If it is a forest it has to produce a tree and finally an onlooker in order for a logical chain of events to substantiate its existence and its dynamics. 

Social order in a culture predominated by schizotypy

"For schizophrenia, whether one illness or many, is in its florid stage practically defined by certain characteristics which we have stated earlier were the salient characteristics of the bicameral mind. The presence of auditory hallucinations, their often religious and always authoritative quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog 'I', and of the mind-space in which it once could narratize out what to do and where it was in time and action, these are the large resemblances.

"But there are great differences as well. If there is any truth to this hypothesis, the relapse is only partial. The learnings that make up a subjective consciousness are powerful and never totally suppressed. And thus the terror and the fury, the agony and despair. The anxiety attendant upon so cataclysmic a change, the dissonance with the habitual structure of interpersonal relations, and the lack of cultural support and definition for the voices, making them inadequate guides for everyday living, the need to defend against a broken dam of environmental sensory stimulation that is flooding all before it--produce a social withdrawal that is a far different thing from the behavior of the absolutely social individual of bicameral societies. The conscious man is constantly using his introspection to find 'himself' and to know where he is, relevant to his purposes and situation. And without this source of security, deprived of narratization, living with hallucinations that are unacceptable and denied as unreal by those around him, the florid schizophrenic is in an opposite world to that of the god-owned laborers of Marduk or of the idols of Ur.

"The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a culture. But he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle of mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is a mind bared to his environment, waiting on gods in a godless world" (pp. 431-432).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"