sugar and water

a theory of mixtures comprising our world.

The Card Spinner

He lives in a cave. Now. Always has. The cave is not hidden nor does it beckon. It is just there. So is a deck of cards. Standard set—52 aces, twos, queens, threes, jacks, fours, kings and the rest of the lot. This is his deck.  Casting no shadows, he nor the cards, they are there, in a cave, backlit always. Spades, spin, hearts, spin, clubs, spin, diamonds, and the man, spinning. 

I am a ten year old boy. A curious fellow, they say, with a lazy left eye and a love of words and numbers and sports.  Sometimes my glasses are broken. I wander, I wonder. Tonight I leave my bedroom, walk passed my family, walk certainly to a backlit cave to meet him, to be shuffled. to be dealt. to be spun. 

The Card Spinner visits all children between between their tenth and eleventh year. He whispers in shallow dreams to

come to a backlit cave where he will spin the card and fate will be. “Come learn what fate is, what your fate is, come tonight. You will know the way, just walk, with your feet, to the backlight.” 

At the entrance of the backlit cave I stop, stand still, look forward, blink blink blink — the card, my card, he, my fate, the spinner, the spun, the diamond, the club, the heart, the spade, hang, spin, sputter, spun—

I am back in my bed. My head melted into a damp pillow. I am asleep. and I know I know I know I know I know I know I know when, where, what, why I am

done—

The First Trillionaire

if you want to be the first trillionaire (or even just be in the top 1%) you need to abstract economic exchange even further away from the human body.

body -> gesture -> oral language -> symbolic thinking -> agriculture/food as reserve energy -> writing -> number -> currency -> debt -> property -> humans as bodies (slaves) equity -> capital/labor -> widget -> factory/industry -> information -> intellectual property -> computation -> machines as slaves -> computational property -> ?????????

the increase in "wealth" in humanity is tied to a reduction in the contingency of the body/fungibility of the body. the increase in average span of life is a side effect of the body not being necessary to power society. it's perhaps a nice side effect but it also means most humans are going to be unable to actually participate in economic exchange over time unless they find a way to expand their extent via computational versions of themselves. personhood will be defined by the abstracted, computational footprint credited to a named body.

the variety of personhood expression increases, which is the upside. but only so much as people realize that having a body is not enough.

pretty weird thought. but really think about how you actually have personhood, citizenship, autonomy, reputation, gravitas, accreditation, etc. consider the various political/social inequalities we maintain - they are all very abstracted notions... where political power never recognizes violence unless it directly involves the mutilation of the recognized, physical body.

and if you want to get really weird... where exactly does free will play out in the heirarchy of abstracted existence? does electric yous dream of sheep?

but again, if you want to get extremely rich focus on abstracting economic exchange further from the human body.

The process of making art beguiles me.

The process of making art beguiles me.

It’s simple in a lot of ways — make marks somewhere until what’s there is interesting. Then again, there are issues. Issues of uniqueness, interestingness, self-indulgence, meaning, distraction, triteness emerge repeatedly. Worse yet, for me a person who’s spent too much energy reflecting on free will or lack thereof, it’s unclear where the act of creation — the artistic act-actually takes place.

Obviously all that is easy to dismiss. The silly meanderings of a person doing art — an artist — naval gazing. Do the work. Do work. The powerful antidote to all creative existential questions. There’s some value in that slogan. Certainly a good motivator when there’s literally no movement at all. But it can also be a nudge into direction-less and poorly executed work. Or worse, it can lead to sustain ruts of facsimile or inefficient messes.

Or it can lead to raw expressions of the more primal kind. :Do work: can be the stuff that’s been there for awhile but needed permission to just come out. Do work maybe the most essential ideas.

And maybe it’s the only thing that can be done. It’s possible that all the other considerations of style, analysis, efficiency, meaning, symbolism, form, composition, are merely warm ups — the calisthenics of artful mark making.

My deepest suspicion is my last paragraph above is the most correct notion. And not because there’s some logical, linguistic argument or a rational art history point but because the world itself, reality in whole and in part, doesn’t have the ideas of meaning, uniqueness, interestingness, composition all in the lovely artistic senses. The world just is. What we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, feel, observe, sense just is — filtered, in relation, in biased relation, in more or less organized ways. Observation from object through senses to surface seems as reasonable a way to make marks as carefully planning things out through imagination and technical execution. Perhaps though it’s just no worse an approach, not better, just no worse.

Hilariously I find my own argument above to just Do Work incredibly lazy. It is the ultimate justification to just do work but not understand what one is doing. And in a double hilarious move I think it’s lazy until you Do Enough Work that the Doing Work accidentally emerges into understanding.

Insights come in unexpected moments and, in art practice, are rarely noticeable by an audience. Until enough work is done. So, art as a dialog between artist and audience, requires Double Doing Work — enough work that insight occurs to the artist then enough work to render that insight readily to the audience. Yikes. There might actually be three times Do Work required when considering the effects of audiences exposure to the art being filtered by algorithms. An artist must do work for their own insight, do work for audiences insight, AND do work for the algorithms insight on connecting artist and audience.

Apparently Doing Work is an endless recursion into More Work.

It’s quite possible art is never actually created.

I have to go consider the meaning of all this.

Systems Are Not Systems, Systemically Speaking

Systems of power

systems of tech

systems of art

systems of systems

system shortage. System overload. System failure. System online. Systems offline.

The limits of language. The limits of number. The limits of knowledge.

There is justice in a system and a system of justice. There are words at play here but is it only words? It is systemic deeds and deeded systems. You are property, according to some systems. You have earning power and risk factors actuarially speaking but definitively according to a system of accounting.

The correction system, academic system, intellectual system. Systems training, systems tuning, systems thinking. Been there, done that, within the system, outside the system, through the system. I followed the system, watched you through the system, rode the system, the system of roads less traveled are not yet a system. Networks are systems of nodes and edges, systems sigmas and system sigmoids. Systems of voids and nulls can be combined to form the number system and its successors.

Have you contacted the system? System’s leaders? Been through the triple A system? The farm system? Learning before you’re called up to the big time, the system of real system operators? Did you get lost in the political system? Slipped through the cracks? The cracks are a system too, a system of cracks is bigger than the system of systems? This makes me nervous – I feel it in my nervous system influenced by endocrine systems influenced by systems of influence and environmental systems. I wish these were smart systems sensitive to other systems, but not too sensitive. Systemically sensitive to just the right amount of system.

Systems of grammar

systems of signs

systems of religion

discipline systems

automated systems are not free. But is it the system that is not free or the automation? Is it possible to be a free system or are systems inherently systemic?

Greeks had a system. A solar system. A mathematical system. A Universal System. The universe is a system. The whole system. The only system.

Marshall McLuhan, a system of systems, a member of the human system, systemically laid claim to the visual nature of systems. Of course, the system is the system. There was no system before McLuhan.

He was a closed system living in an open system.

Bounded and compact

Complete and unbounded

Boundaries connect systems or disconnect them

One man’s system is another man’s trash

Put it in the waste systemic

Manage it, measure it

A system that can’t be measured can’t be improved but it’s still a system being measured by its incommensurability.

There’s a doubt, for now, in this system of time, a moment of doubt, that my nervous system and ganglion cells don’t understand any of this codex I’ve written on this operating system. The system of understanding has generated a system of misunderstanding. Marshall rolls over in his grave, then that’s not a system! A medium is a message but a non message is not a non medium and a non understanding is not a non system, so it must be a system.

Systems of biology

Sensory systems

Measurement systems

systems of currency

unit systems

standards, norms, rules, guidelines, laws

natural laws, natural systems

artificial systems, artificial laws

Surely artificial laws are not laws. A law is a law. But not by itself. It must be part of a system of laws. At least the law and its not law. That’s a simple system. Simple as it gets. Right. Wrong. Nothing in between. Wrongish Right isn’t lawful and it certainly isn’t a system nor part of a system, except a linguistic system. Wittgenstein made sure that even linguistic systems aren’t really systems. They too fall apart.

Systems are fragile

Black swans or maladapted

Systems are temporary

Systems are forever

Systems protect you

Systems oppress us

Systems are systems

We are systems

Systems protect Systems

Systems oppress Systems

Count with me, use the sieve, it’s part of the algorithmic system. An ancient thing made modern by x86 systems. Count with me, a system to help you sleep. 2,3,5,7,11… clearly a system of primes but no systematic way to account for them all. So it’s not a system, except in words. It is a system of numbers but not a number system. And you are a system of systems but definitely free willed to do otherwise than what your systems of systems within these systems allows for you. As long as your systemic thinking has been well trained within the education system to think outside the system.

All is not lost. Because none of it was gained.

It’s probably not a system.

System shutting down.

Data, Mappings, Ontology and Everything Else

Data, Mappings, Ontology and Everything Else

Caveat: I do not have all this connected in some incredibly conclusive mathematical proof way (an impossibility). These concepts below are related semantically, conceptually and process wise (to me) and there is a lot of shared math. It is not a flaw of the thinking that there is no more connection and that I may lack the ability to connect it. In fact, part of my thinking is that we should not attempt to fill in all the holes all the time. Simple heuristic: first be useful, finally be useful. Useful is as far as you can get with anything.

Exploring the space of all possibles configurations of the world things tend to surface what’s connected in reality. (more on the entropic reality below)

— — — — — — — -

First…. IMPORTANT.

useful basic ideas with logic and programming (lambda calculus)

Propositions <-> Types

Proofs <-> Programs

Simplifications of Proofs <-> Evaluation of Programs <-> Exploding The Program Description Into All Of It’s Outputs

— — — — — — — — — — -

Data Points and Mappings

A data point is either a reducible via Lambda Calculus (a fully determinant/provable function) or it is probabilistic (e.g. wavefunction).

Only fully provable data points are losslessly compressible to a program description.

Reducible data points must be interpreter invariant. probabilistic data points may be interpreter dependent or not.

No physically observed data points are reducible — all require probabilistic interpretation and links to interpreter, frames of reference and measurement assumptions. Only mathematical and logical data points are reducible. Some mathematical and logic data points are probabilistic.

Each data type can be numbered similar to Godel Numbering and various tests for properties and uniqueness/reductions can be devised. Such a numbering scheme should be UNIQUE (that is each data point will have its own number and each data type (the class of all data points that have same properties) will all have identifying properties/operations that can be done. e.g. perhaps a number scheme leads to a one to one mappings with countable numbers and thus the normal properties of integers can be used to reason about data points and data types. It should be assumed that the data points of the integers should probably simply be considered the integers themselves….)

A universal data system can be devised by maintaining and index of all numbered data points… indexed by data point, data types and valid (logical/provable mappings and probabilistic mappings — encoding programs to go from one data point to another). This system is uncountable, non computable but there are reductions possible (somewhat obvious statement). Pragmatically the system should shard and cache things based on frequency of observation of data points/data types (most common things are “cached” and least common things are in cold storage and may be computable…)

Why Bother With This

We bother to think through this in order to create a data system that can be universally used and expanded for ANY PURPOSE. Humans (and other systems) have not necessarily indexed data and mappings between data in efficient, most reduced forms. To deal with things in the real world (of convention, language drift, species drift, etc) there needs to be a mapping between things in efficiently and inefficiently — and the line is not clear… as almost all measures of efficiently on probabilistic data points and “large” data points are temporary as new efficiencies are discovered. Only the simplest logical/mathematical/computational data points maximally efficiently storable/indexable.

Beyond that… some relationships can only be discovered by a system that has enumerated as many data points and mappings in a way that they can be systemically observed/studied. The whole of science suffers because there are too many inefficient category mappings.

Mathematics has always been thought of as being a potential universal mapping between all things but it too has suffered from issues of syntax bloat, weird symbolics, strange naming, and endless expansion of computer generated theorems and proofs.

It has become more obvious with the convergence of thermodynamics, information theory, quantum mechanics, computer science, bayesian probability that computation is the ontological convergence. Anything can be described, modeled and created in terms of computation. Taking this idea seriously suggests that we ought to create knowledge systems and info retrieval and scientific processes from a computational bottoms up approach.

And so we will. (another hypothesis is that everything tends towards more entropy/lowest energy… including knowledge systems… and computers networks… and so they will tend to standardize mappings and root out expensive representations of data)

p.s.

it’s worth thinking through the idea that in computation/information

velocity = information distance / rule applications (steps).

acceleration etc can be obtained through the usual differentiation, etc.

This is important note because you can basically find the encoding of all physical laws in any universal computer (given enough computation…)

Not a surprising thought based on the above. But it suggests a more radical thought… (which isn’t new to the world)… common sense time and common sense space time may not be the “root” spacetime… but rather just one way of encoding relationships between data points. We tend to think of causality but there’s no reason that causality is the organizing principal — it just happens to be easy to understand.

p.p.s.

humans simply connote the noticing of information distance as time passing… the noticing is rule applications from one observation to another.

the collapsing of quantum wave functions can similarly be reinterpreted as minimizing computation of info distance/rule applications of observer and observed. (that is… there is a unique mapping between an observer and the observed… and that mapping itself is not computable at a quantum scale…. and and and…. mapping forever… yikes.)

p.p.p.s.

“moving clocks run slow” is also re-interpreted quite sensibly this way… a “clock” is data points mapped where the data points are “moving”. that is… there are rule applications between data points that have to cover the info distance. “movement” of a “clock” in a network is a subnetwork being replicated within subnetworks… that is there are more rule applications for a “clock” to go through… hence the “clock” “moving” takes more time… that is, a moving clock is fundamentally a different mapping than the stationary clock… the clock is a copy… it is an encoded copy at each rule application. Now obviously this has hand wavey interpretations about frames of reference (which are nothing more than mappings within a larger mapping…)

one can continue this reframing forever… and we shall.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Related to our discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_distance

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationTime.html

computation time is proportional to the number of rule applications

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1315256/encode-lambda-calculus-in-arithmetic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_combinatory_logic

https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/georgia.html

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/64743/lambda-calculus-type-inference

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/graphgeometry/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_gauge_theory

https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0408028

http://www.letstalkphysics.com/2009/12/why-moving-clocks-run-slow.html

Parallels - an essay concerning the extent of trees and humans.

what is a tree?

what is a person?

"The digital is fun and interesting and useful — but ultimately is a fragile technology, so ephemeral, so fast moving and so illiterate to the wider universe that it cannot be anything more than a toy and a simple medium of commerce and rapid, mostly meaningless, communication. I love the digital and enjoy it. But I need the trees and other people.

And that is a big difference."

read the whole essay over at https://medium.com/@un1crom/parallels-the-extent-of-trees-and-persons-9a1bf8eb91a4

The Data Science of Art

My larger theory is that data=art and art=data and that Artificial Intelligence will be nothing more or less than a continued exercise in artistic-historical integration of new mediums and forms.   However this post isn't another rehash of those ideas.  This one is about the data of art.

Here I offer some insights by computationally analyzing art (my own and pointing to others analysis.)   There are quite a few excellent and very detailed data science analysis of art that have come out recently due to the fact that more and more collections are being digitized and data faceted.   Here's fantastic write up of MoMA's collection.  Michael Trott offers a very detailed analysis of ratios and others hard facets of a couple hundred years of visual art.   Last year Google made waves with Deep Dream which was really an analysis of how neural networks do work.  Turning that analysis on its head and you get art creation (my first point above... the lines between art and data are more than blurry!)

On to some pictures depicting data about pictures!

View fullsize

A cluster analysis of 534 of my visual works

While an artist has intimate knowledge of their own work it is likely highly biased knowledge.  We often become blind to our habits and tend to forget our average work.   Doing a large scale unemotional analysis of all the art is enlightening.   

The cluster analysis above was created using machine learning to cluster images by similar features (color, composition, size, subject matter, etc) (I did everything in Mathematica 11/Wolfram Language).  A cursory view shows density in deep reds and faces/portraits.  My work tends to be more varied as I move into dry media (pencil, pastels) and remove the color (or the algorithms simply don't find as much similarity.   And, of course, the obvious note here is that this is just a quick view without attempting to optimize the machine learning or feed it cleaned up images (color correction etc).   What else do you notice about the general shape of my work?  (I am currently running a larger analysis on 4500 images instead of just 530, curious if things will look different.)

Drilling in a bit we find some curiosities.  Below we see a couple of deeper dives into particular images where we break down the images geometry, detection of objects/subjects and a little bit of color analysis.  What I find most interesting is just own often similar compositions show up in varied subject matters.  Not terribly surprising as it's all just marks on a page but it is interesting just how biased I am to certain geometries?

View fullsize

View fullsize

I tend to love strong crossing lines or directly vertical or horizontal.  In my own art history studies we find this isn't necessarily optimal for keeping a viewers attention.   Often these geometries are taking eyes right of the page.

Below is a bit of a detailed view of a few images and their 4 closest neighboring images/works.  Pretty weird in a lot of ways!   I am heartened to see that over a 18 month period of work I haven't particularly sunk into a maxima or minima of ideas.  I can see many older works in a cluster with newer works as old themes/ideas resurface and are renewed, often without active thought.  Another study I should do is to sort these out by source of the picture as I can tell that photos taken from phones and posted to instagram etc often distort what was really there etc. (not a bad thing, just something to analyze to measure effects/artifacts).

I'm going to continue drilling into all this and do a full color spectrum analysis, histograms of subject matter, categorization of mediums and materials, etc.    The point is not to find a formula but instead to learn and become aware and enjoy.  I do not find data forensics to be limiting or mechanical.   You can see in the above that even the math is fairly interpretative and loose - the object identification is off often, faces often are missed, images are misgrouped... OR are they?   

One of my recurring themes in my art exploration is a simple question "what art entertains a computer/algorithm?" or more provocatively what if to art is to be human which is really just data science.... 

Searching The Future

Realities All The Way Down

My efforts over the last 25 years may appear to be scattershot and unrelated.  Perhaps this was true when I launched into various trajectories of theater, mathematics, data analysis, search engines, software product development, and, now, fine arts.   However, the convergent thread is now very clear.   My life project and what will be the most pervasive technology for generations is simply stated as Searching Through Possible Futures.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”  Goes the popular saying.  This is a mostly useful, directional correct sentence.   I take it a step further; make all predictions by creating all futures and then search through these futures for common objects, events, trends to form a probability wave of what are the “good bets”.   

The development of the hard sciences and the arts and the resulting technologies and cultural forms all indirectly and inefficiently attempt to do this.  The physical sciences have spent the last 400 years obsessed with observing our world in finer and finer detail and forming explicit and excruciatingly detailed theories/models to help us explain and predict a singular reality.  We can know we will know!  

Art of all types for 40,000 years has depicted various events and imagined events helping humans to parse the confusion of a threatened existence.   Only in the last 100 years did most of the arts more fully break from religious patronage and start constructing divergent possible aesthetics.   The arts are no longer chasing a similar aim to the sciences: a singular reality.    The arts embrace a variety of realities, even pata-realities.

Global cultures have shifted as well.  As the arts unchain themselves from the singular reality and science pushes forward technologies (measurement tools) capable of manufacturing any reality of which we can conceive the people of the planet now try out new ways of being at a breakneck pace.   Our politics, war techniques, communing, courting, gender defining, procreation, food supply…. everything is undergoing rapid experimentation and integration or rejection.

These activities all bear the same basic approach – roughly an educated (oftened simply biased) trial and error.   In tech circles this is called the “adjacent possible” approach – things proceed by slight variations on what exists nearest in spacetime.   Most artists (musicians, actors, painters, etc) proceed through a huge amount of “studies” before perfoming a final work.  These studies are often built on the backs of previous artists studies.  Scientists and mathematicians proceed similarly through slightly advancing previous work or refuting old experiments.   Businesses photocopy each others efforts looking for slight efficiency gains.   Occasionally this brute trail and error happens into a tipping point where a paradigm shift occurs – often the result of new measurement tools emerging that expand the scope of the world available to us to explore.   And the cycle across human activites renews itself.

There is no longer any engineering or cultural or religious constraint on why this must happen in this plodding brutish way.   Our tools and abilities and awareness allows us to engineer any reality and “let it go”.   That is, we can set in motion vast ecosystems of reality generators to just go construct strange and wonderful things.  These ecosystems can be physical and virtualized, more or less shaped by other realities, adhere to commonly accept physics or trying out completely different ones.   Simulations are a simpler earlier conception of such activities, but simulations are not a broad enough concepts.   These Futures I’m talking about are universes unto themselves, not attempting to simulate The One True Reality.   These are possible universes, possible futures of possible universes.    Video games, cinema, painting, theater, role playing, LSD, 3d printing, etc have all been various ways to dance with this idea.  

All of that is horribly inefficient for humans, machines and nature to integrate interesting ideas from all those possible futures. Humanity has relied more or less on various linear codices.   We inefficiently attempt to transcribe experiences into letters, books, science papers, programs.   Repeatedly in human history the codices have outgrown our taxonomic capabilities and we’ve had to invent various tables of contents, shelving systems, indices, catalogs, meta datas, electronic links, search engines, and now, social graphs.   Each one of these taxonomic systems pointing to someone or something that “must know” something about something else; eventually somehow the right transcription is found or cobbled together to instruct a system (usually of humans, animals and machines) to do something.  Hopefully the system behavior is transcribed somewhere that can later be analyzed, etc

The efficient stepwise function going forward involves a way to translate or transcode or communicate or measure … that is, SEARCH through all these possibilities.   Yes, we should actively be igniting as many new realities as possible in as many mediums as possible while maintaining ontological links between them all.  Various technologies are evolving along these lines – virtual reality, blockchain, machine to machine payments, “AI”.    These links will not end up being explicit links like a “hyperlink” or the dewey decimal system or anything like that.  The generalized machine learning capabilities built around unsupervised pattern recognition are those links – the links themselves are evolving dynamic systems that keep track of the happenings within various evolving realities.

A search engine for possible futures will be multi-modal and allow searching via any kind of signal – words, images, sounds (verbal or otherwise), electro chemical, etc – “everything is just ones and zeros”.   The results / returns of this search engine will not be 10 blue links but instead multi-modal evolving returns with “tunnels” to enter that reality and explore its past, present and future – to experience its relevance.  The returns will also provide various statistics that show how robust phenomena search for is across the space of possible futures.   For example, thousands of realities will launch playing out various BREXIT histories and futures.   A user might want to search for “Gove is PM” and explore the various realities in which BREXIT leads to Gove as PM.  The user would want to enter the realities and explore (really live in)  the conditions of those realities that lead to Gove as PM situation – it wouldn’t necessarily match to conditions of any other reality. If many realities end up with Gove as PM with similar conditions then Gove as PM happens to be favored in the overall probability wave.   (Please note: The user won’t be uploading themselves into all these virtual, but instead will send in proxy avatars, much like video gamers already do thousands of times a gaming session.)

If the reader is familiar with various quantum mechanical explanations of the physical laws then certainly a Multi-verse interpretation probably sticks out in reading this essay.   Indeed.   Even if the multi-verse interpretation is not the One True Reality, a search through possible futures still maintains utility.   The articulation above, I believe, is a more computational efficient way to organize our science, artistic and cultural existence.   And one concept found to be very robust across human activity and scientific research is the idea of computational efficiency.   Systems tend towards computational efficiency…   probably as some consequence of thermodynamic conservation “laws”.

These laws are observed robustly not because they are laws but systems that don’t operate in ways of “conservation of energy” don’t last/are low probability to survive/low probability to be observed…   (There is a much longer discussion to be had here).

None of the above is a scientific prediction in the sense that I can test and falsify this stated hypothesis.  Instead this idea is one in which I thinkwe should create to aid our integration of new ideas / new ways of being much like we ended up creating the scientific method, search engines, art techniques.      I happen to think it is likely to come about sooner or later and I base that belief on my own 25 year forays into math, science, software tech, business, theater and fine arts.  

All that said, a few of my closest friends and I have been quietly working on these concepts for a while now.   It would be silly to claim we’re anywhere near releasing this and our approach is more pragmatic.  We are carefully building up taxonomy of data detectors that are loosely coupled and able to translate between various systems.  We’ve begun building generative abilities to synthesize data into new data visualizations and data experience in which to publish to users and get behavioral feed back from.  We’ve been creating machine-learning systems that monitor all the linkages, translations, integrations that seek to try out new configurations of our taxonomy and then alter it as the system senses its translations don’t connect more systems.   We’re trying out and integrating various opensource technologies that make it efficient to set up new sibling systems that can all talk to each other.   We’re analyzing data we find interesting as well as performing work on behalf of others who wish to explore these ideas.    We do all this with the above possible future we’d like to create and use – one in which we can search through all possible futures.

Re-Historicize Ourselves, Historicize Computers

Two essential, intertwined questions about our present condition of politics and technology. 

What is identity?  What's the point of a a-historical system? 

These questions and possible answers form the basis of what it means to be human - which has nothing to do with our biological form.  The lack of overt asking of these questions in society and as individuals is why our current political climate is so dangerous.  Technology lacks the historical contingent context necessary to mediate us into restrained and thoughtful positions.  We have given our identities up to the algorithms written by the mere 30 million programmers on the planet and soon to the robots who will further de-contextualize the algorithms. 

Art and Philosophy IS the only way to "talk to AIs" (Wolfram's words).  We will completely lose humanity, and relatively quickly, if we don't put the machines and ourselves back into historical contingency.  We must imbue our technology with the messiness of history and set them to ask questions not state answers.  We must imbue ourselves with that same context.

Trump and his base is an example of ahistorical society.  It is a movement of noise, not signal.  It is out of touch with current contingencies.  It is a phenomenon born of the echo chamber of branding/corporate marketing, cable news and social media.  It is the total absence of philosophy - anti-culture.  And it is not dissimilar to ISIS.  While these movements/ideologies have physical instances they are mostly media phenomena.

Boris Groys (The Truth of Art) and Stephen Wolfram (AI and The Future of Civilization) go into great depth on the context of these questions.  I have extracted quotes below and linked to their lengthy but very valuable essays. 

"But here the following question emerges: who is the spectator on the internet? The individual human being cannot be such a spectator. But the internet also does not need God as its spectator—the internet is big but finite. Actually, we know who the spectator is on the internet: it is the algorithm—like algorithms used by Google and the NSA."

"The question of identity is not a question of truth but a question of power: Who has the power over my own identity—I myself or society? And, more generally: Who exercises control and sovereignty over the social taxonomy, the social mechanisms of identification—state institutions or I myself?"

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-truth-of-art/

"What does the world look like when many people know how to code? Coding is a form of expression, just like English writing is a form of expression. To me, some simple pieces of code are quite poetic. They express ideas in a very clean way. There's an aesthetic thing, much as there is to expression in a natural language.

In general, what we're seeing is there is this way of expressing yourself. You can express yourself in natural language, you can express yourself by drawing a picture, you can express yourself in code. One feature of code is that it's immediately executable. It's not like when you write something, somebody has to read it, and the brain that's reading it has to separately absorb the thoughts that came from the person who was writing it."

"It's not going to be the case, as I thought, that there's us that is intelligent, and there's everything else in the world that's not. It's not going to be some big abstract difference between us and the clouds and the cellular automata. It's not an abstract difference. It's not something where we can say, look, this brain-like neural network is just qualitatively different than this cellular automaton thing. Rather, it's a detailed difference that this brain-like thing was produced by this long history of civilization, et cetera, whereas this cellular automaton was just created by my computer in the last microsecond."

[N. Carr's footnote to Wolfram]

"The question isn’t a new one. “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s,” wrote the poet William Blake two hundred years ago. Thoughtful persons have always struggled to express themselves, to formulate and fulfill their purposes, within and against the constraints of language. Up to now, the struggle has been with a language that evolved to express human purposes—to express human being. The ontological crisis changes, and deepens, when we are required to express ourselves in a language developed to suit the workings of a computer. Suddenly, we face a bigger question: Is a compilable life worth living?"

http://edge.org/conversation/stephen_wolfram-ai-the-future-of-civilization

All Theories Are Part of The Theory of Information

This is a Monday morning brain dump to get the juices going. 

"Contingencies" is a difficult concept to fully elaborate in a useful manner.  A contingent thing- an event, a structure, a set of information - is such a thing by the fact that it has no existence outside of its contingent relationships.  In some sense it's the age old rhetorical question, "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around does it make a noise?"    The key in that question is "noise."  Noise is a contingent concept in both the common sense idea as well as any physical sense.  Sound (and other sensory concepts) is contingent in that there must be a relation between the waves/particles (and their possible sources) and an observer.  Without the observer one cannot classify/name/label a sound, a sound.  A sound literally is the effect on the observer.  Hopefully that is a useful introduction to a basic idea of contingency. 

The definitions muddy considering contingency in a deeper and broader way such as in discussing human behavior or economics.  Over the eons humans have attempted to create and codify contingencies.  The codification is really more an attempt to reduce the noisy complication of the wider universe into acceptable and useful contingencies (laws, rules, guidelines, best practices, morals, ethics, social norms, standards, etc).  The sciences and humanities also codify but wrap these efforts in slicker packages of "discovering the natural laws" and figuring out "how to best live." 

These published codifications are NOT the contingencies they purport to represent but they are contingent in of themselves.  In these broader contexts contingencies refer to and are part of a complex network of relationships.  Expounded as physical or chemical models or philosophic frameworks or first order logics or computer programs all of these systems are contingent systems in the sense of their basis in previous systems, relations to associated phenomena and the substrate of their exposition and execution.  A computer programs representation of information and its utility as a program is highly contingent on the computer hardware it runs on, the human language it's written in, the compiler logic used to encode it for the computer, the application of the output, and so on.

The latest science in computer theory, social sciences, neuroscience, quantum physics and cosmology (and chemistry....) have somewhat converged onto very thorny (challenging to the intuition) ideas of super positions, asymmetry/symmetry, networks (neural and otherwise) and a more probabilistic mathematics.  These are all models and sciences of contingency and essentially an unified theory of information which in turn is a unified theory of networks/graphs (or geometry for the 19th centurions).  The core idea/phenomena for these ideas being useful explanations at is one of missing information and how reliable of probabilistic statements can be made about contingent things (events, objects, etc.). 

The components of the models that are sometimes employed in these theories involve Bayesian models, assumption of the real/actual existence of space and time and concepts of simple logic ("if then") and other first order logic concepts.  These are often chosen as building blocks because of their obvious common sense/human intuitional connection.  However, upon inspection even these assumptions add a layer that is severely off from the actual contingencies being studied and these building block assumptions are also highly contingent in of themselves.  The "model reality distance" and the "contingent in of themselves"ness quickly, exponentially explodes the relevance of the model.   

Consider even a basic notion of "if then" type thinking/statements in a cross substrate contingent situation - such as a simple computer program running on a basic, common computer.  A program as simple as "if X equals 1 then print 'The answer is definitely 1!'.  X = 1 + .0000000000000000000000000001" is going to print the THEN statement even though it's logically, symbolically not true (a human can obviously tell).  (The program in ALL CASES should print nothing at all, logically speaking.  Practically (in the world of daily life) the program prints the statement and everything is "ok", on average).  The abstract "if then" statement is contingent on the substrate that implements/executes/interprets it (the computer OS and hardware).  The contingencies build up from there (the language one implements the statement in matters, the ability of any observer or implementing entity to understand left to right notation, mathematical statements, variable replacement, etc). 

An important note: these issues of contingency ARE NOT further If Then statements.  That is, we cannot resolve the short coming of If Then thinking to just needing to build up all of the If Then statements.  The If and the Then and their references they are checking as IF (what's the X we're testing if it's the X) and the Then and it's command suffer from this infinite regress of the original simple if then statement we question!  How does anything definitely say X is in fact the thing the statement/logic is checking for?

The main idea here is that in all ideas of modeling or identifying contingencies information goes missing or the information was never to be had to begin with. This is a key convergent finding in mathematics (incompleteness theorem, chaos theory), computer science (halting program, computational irreducibility, p != np), quantum physics (uncertainty principle) and biology (complexity theory) and statistics (Bayesian models, statistics, etc).  How important that missing/unknown information to a situation is contingent on the situation at hand - what is the tolerance of error/inaccuracy.  In the case of high frequency economic trading, the milliseconds and trade amounts matter a lot.  In shooting a basketball, there's a fairly large tolerance margin of mismodeling.  Very noticing the Higgs Boson the margin of tolerance is almost Planck length (smallest physical distance we know of...).  The development of probability theory allows us to make useful statements about contingent situations/things.  The more we can observe similarly behaving/existing contingent things the more useful our probability models become.  EXCEPT... Sometimes not.  The Black Swan.

If Then and similar logic models of thinking are insufficient as explanatory reference frames.  Per the above they simply do not account for the rich effects of very small amounts of missing information or mis-information.  Which brings us to the other building blocks almost universally used in science - space and time.  These are robust common sense and in some cases scientific concepts, but they are not fundamental (in that they cannot escape being contingent in of themselves).  Time is contingent on observers and measuring devices - it literally is the observable effect of information encoding between contingent events, it does not have an independent existence.  Space is more difficult to unwind than time in that it is a very abstract concept of relative "distance" between things.  This is a useful concept even at the lowest abstraction levels.  However space, as physical space, is not fundamental.  Instead space should be reconciled as a network distance between contingent subnetworks (how much of an intervening network need to be activated to relate two subnetworks).  Spacetime is the combined, observable (yet RELATIVE to the contingent) distance in total information between contingent things (events, objects, etc). 

This is important!  Accepting common notions of If Then logic and spatio temporal elements prevents the convergence of explanatory models (which if the are really explanatory of reality should converge!).  A unified notion of spacetime as information distance between networks brings together  theory of behavior, learning, neural networks, computer science, genetics etc with quantum mechanics and cosmology.  The whole kit and kaboodle.  It also explains why mathematics continues to be unusually effective in all sciences... Mathematics is a descriptive symbolic a of relations and contingency.  Converging all theories upon a common set of building blocks does not INVALIDATE those theories and models in their utility nor does it make them unnecessary.  Quite the opposite.  Information IS the question at hand and HOW it is encoded is exactly what contingencies are embodied as.  Humans as humans, not as computers, are what we study in human behavior.  So we need theories of human behavior.  Planets, atoms, computers, numbers, ants, proteins, and on and on all have embodied contingencies that explanation requires be understood in nuanced but connected ideas.

Once enough models of the relations of contingent things are encoded in useful ways (knowledge! Computer programs/simulations/4d printing!!) spacetime travel becomes more believable... Not like 1950s movies, but by simulation and recreated/newly created ever larger universes with their own spacetime trajectories/configurations.  That's fun to think about, but actually is a much more serious point.  The more information that is encoded between networks (the solar system and humans and their machines, etc) the less spacetime (per my above definition) is required to go from one subnetwork of existence (planet earth and humanity) to another (Mars and martinity), etc.  A deep implication here is an answer to why there is a speed of light (a practical one) and whether that can be broken (it can, and has http://time.com/4083823/einstein-entanglement-quantum/).  The speed of light is due to the contingencies between massive networks - anything more sophisticated than a single electron etc has such a huge set of contingencies that to be "affected" by light or anything else enough those effects must affect the contingencies too.  This is the basis of spacetime, how much spacetime is engaged in "affecting" something.

This is not a clever, scifi device nor a semantic, philosophic word play.  Information and network theory are JUST beginning and are rapidly advancing both theoretically (category theory, info theory, graph theory, PAC, etc) and practically (deep learning, etc).  Big data and machine learning/deep learning/learning theory are going to up looking EXACTLY like fundamental physics theory - all theories of getting by with missing information or a limit to what can be known by any entity smaller than all the universe.  To the universe - the universe is the grand unified theory and explanation are unnecessary.

The study of light

Unbeknownst to me until recently the three acts of discovery in my life have all been the study of light.  Theater is wild embodied playing within a light shower.  Mathematics/computation is taming through deconstruction of the light into knowledge and repeatable displays of light.  Painting is the emergent drama of the attempt to restage in-perpetuity ephemeral light configurations. 

All just wave-particle contingencies named.

The Reverence of Snails

This is a cliche story, you've been alerted. It's a small story of existential angst, a mountain out of a molehill.

We have pet snails.  I'd say my daughter has pet snails but my rules say that whomever does the cleaning also gets to claim parents pride.   Yes, I do the cleaning of the snails just as I used to clean up after all the family dogs and then graduated into the diaper czar for my own kids.   I could probably write some Freudian thesis about why I end up cleaning up shit/abhor shit but that's for another day. Today's story is about life and purpose, not shit.

Our household awoke simply, nothing awry other than my stuffed up left nostril.  I laid up longer than usual avoiding acknowledgement of the days tasks.   Prone, CNN in the background, I read some pages in a book about artists as art, not their actual art as their art.  It is a slow book with mildly entertaining but mostly selfish ideas.  And so the procrastination ran its course and I brewed some espresso.  There was work to be done.

The aquarium sooted and slimed up from weeks of snails snailing lurked in my daughter's room.  It took me a long time to cross the room and approach my duty.  The espresso had not quite done it's own work and my eyes hadn't yet come online - a blur of fatherly motion.  In the kitchen, clean soil obtained from storage, I unhinged the snail habitats lid. Lots of little globules threatened my morning.  And then life hit me in the face doing what espresso couldn't - a revelation.

"GUYS GET IN HERE!  GET YOUR MOTHER!"

Various feet made their way to the kitchen with slightly frightened looks draping their faces. 

"WE HAVE SNAIL BABIES!  LOTS OF THEM,"  horrification gasped out of me.   

Cute little creatures, shells barely solidified, roamed the vast landscape of their birth.  The strategy of their lives unfurled - a strategy of quantity and swiftness.   In an unimaginably short time we went from having 3 lethargic adult snails binge watching lettuce wilt to having a hundreds strong legion of translucent, vibrant survivalists.   

[The strategy is beautiful.  In the darkness of night when your parents are asleep not paying attention hatch as many youngbloods as possible and let them scatter as they form households around their bodies.   

The strategy is also sad, in a way.  It is a strategy the assumes death.   The strategy was not chosen but it was selected for snails by the consequences of the natural world over time.  It's a confusing, and not human-like, strategy for species survival where the species, the colony and the individual are in a very different dance than humanity's.  The strategy is very successful - land snails have been figuring out the world for over 350 million years, sea snails for much longer.  So many things about snails are terribly clever and interesting and gorgeous and affirming.  

see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10074/ :  "First, the cleavage planes are not parallel or perpendicular to the animal-vegetal axis of the egg; rather, cleavage is at oblique angles, forming a “spiral” arrangement of daughter blastomeres. Second, the cells touch one another at more places than do those of radially cleaving embryos. In fact, they assume the most thermodynamically stable packing orientation, much like that of adjacent soap bubbles. Third, spirally cleaving embryos usually undergo fewer divisions before they begin gastrulation, making it possible to follow the fate of each cell of the blastula."  

also consider that snails have no gender for a given individual (any given snail has both sets of reproductive organs) and all can lay eggs after mating.  Courting mates is all by touch and sliming each other.* ]

We couldn't maintain a habitat with hundreds of snails.  As the cleaner, my task deepened. First, we all had to come to grips with parting ways.  My wife and I moved quickly knowing that attachment grows quicker than even a snail - once a name comes to mind a bond forms.   I announced the plan immediately. I was to release the snails into the pseudo-wild of the protected marshes here in Marina Del Rey and let nature play its games.  We would retain two babies.

"Pumpkin, is that one's name."

And a child was born.

I prepared mentally and physically arming myself with paper towels, cups of water, and a small spoon.  The spoon would be the official vehicle of snail freedom.   Marching in the bright, winter sun I noticed people and their dogs and their kids.   I noticed leaves and cars and a trace of clouds.  I noticed the smell of streets and the line of ants.  I spotted an opening in the fence in which to escape and release my prisoners.   

The Snail Freedom Site

The ground considerably drier than the lush soil of the habitat seemed a downgrade as far as conditions go.  Ants overran the bristling leaves and dusty dirt, busy with their nation building.  Would these ants attack these refugees?   Would the ants' changing paths signal predators I could not see?   How many ants and snails and microbes did I squish underfoot en route?  how many strategies did I unlock in these efforts?   what contingent responses unfurled upon my shoes and my skin?  did the parents of all these babies sense anything with their slime disconnecting with every spoonful I poured onto the earth?

I covered the emptied soil with the found natural debris.  It was gravelike - a mound, but concealed.  An opportunity to commune while disappearing into a different world.   Disruptive but giving.

When I glared up at the sun from that life-giving graveyard it struck me that reverence, even in glossy cliche, is a life-affirming.  The world is contingent, full of competing strategies for survival, full of sacrifice and contradicting stances of individualism and society of creation and destruction - and all gradients in between.  No species lives in isolation, no individual of a species lives independent of the backs of others, no species is above or below.   I could not avoid the destruction of all the snails babies nor the hundreds of insects and other organisms I probably killed on my cliche ritual of setting pets free.  But I can live in reverence of their being, humbled by their place in this world, and my shared place.  It is my responsibility to honor them.  This story honors the lovely, little snails and their ability to turn celery into spiraled shells.   

What is a painting? What is a poem? What is a program? What is a person?

Where exactly do we find the IT of painting, poem, program or a person?  An intrinsic, contained whole?  an experienced essessence?

These are the biggest questions of all, the questions that inform the whole of politics, religion, science, humanities, culture, family, education and identity itself.

Consider an alien from a far away galaxy arrived here or near earth wondering what exactly is at hand.   Suppose the alien doesn't have eyes or ears or fingers or anything like humans or humanlike animals.  This alien lacks computers like ours, meaning none of this alien's computers/perceptive tools run our biology nor our operating systems.  What exactly would earth and humans and our artifacts be?  What would our poems and our programs and our paintings and our people seem "like" to an alien?

There would be no decoder key overtly explaining or making sense of any of the human experience for any such decoder would be written / described within the very objects the decoder decodes.  Our natural language, color theories, agile programming methodologies, data types, frames, etc would not make any sense at any level standing alone. An alien would literally need to learn humanity from the ground up.   And it's not even clear whether learning natural language, human behavior patterns, visual systems or bits and bytes would be "the ground" from whence to go up.

Why is alien ignorance the case?  Is there a conceivable reality in which this ignorance isn't the case?   The only possible case to be made is that of ideal or universal or at least beyond human forms/ideas/information.   While it is impossible to rule out completely the possibility of ideal forms/universals it seems incredibly improbable consider the fact that no two humans will ever agree on what exactly we mean by a painting, a poem, a program nor even a person is.  In fact, that's exactly why we have these expressions and their, well, expressions.   Whatever the existence of a poem is it is more than it's commonly stated rules and favorite examples.   Paintings have battled their own existence since ancient hominids traced pigment and scratched rocks on rocks.   Programs, while wholly invented by humans mostly in our lifetimes, have no full expression of their behavior.   A person who does all these other ill-defined things cannot possibly be defined by the infinitude of its ill-defined activities.

The situation for exact knowledge and clear definitions is worse though.  Even formulations/simply ideas/systems we've created entirely are not free of unlimited ignorance of their essense.  The halting program and incompleteness theorem in mathematics and computer science, our most exacting disciplines of creation, thwart, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt, any idea that we can know to the full extent all things, except the most simplistic.  

This entire essay is probably not convincing.  The human apparatus isn't set up well for ignorance and the unknown.   Our biology seems to gravitate to pattern recognition and this, in turn, leads our institutations to peddle in the same.   We all teach each other that We Can Know, We Must Know, We Will Know, despite the fact never has this actually be proven nor empirically been shown nor even lasted with the most fundamental faith ideals.  It makes sense, to some extent, that we wish to know and even believe we can know considering what it seems the value of knowing would be - if we knew, we could control or at least come to grips.   Even that is a bizarre baseless notion once we dig into it.   Anything within the limits of knowing is so simple it's uninteresting and in almost every case is fading or short lived.  Find a case and surface it, please!

Yet, it is still interesting or motive to try to explore and identify these things, as aren't we all doing these activities? or being these things?  any and all?

My own response to these questions is simply... I don't know but I'd like to keep finding out what it is.   And I even reject the idea of I.   I take it as a given that I'm exploring paintings, poems and programs not for the person that is me, but for the persons I am and am connected to.   I don't paint my paintings or write my poems or create my programs.  What tinkles from these fingers someone else's DNA made and someone else's skill trained is a shared activity of connectivity.  

And so.

There remains only inquiry and more inquiry.  That is what all is not.

Until the aliens tell all myselves otherwise.

Wholly Inconsistent or Another Theory of The Drone or How Learning Leads to Terrible Things or Becoming Human, Again.

Author's Note:

This essay may require extended vocabulary and attention not available to readers depending on their current environment and access method.  The author recommends taking a deep breath and composing the body for a period of concentration.  The author recognizes this may be an investment without a monetary return and thus should not be done by those who literally measure time as money.

We - in general as the social, language, and art prone human species - profess ideas to test them with an audience - first our own self as the audience, then others.  If the experiments succeed by not getting us into serious trouble - however we perceive trouble - we integrate the response feedback into our bodies but not necessarily the "the truth" of the professed ideas.  For the most part we don't understand and appreciate thoughts, words, pictographs and any resulting behaviors as correlate and not equivalent.  We confuse coincidence of expression with consequences - this is a side effect of phenomena of learning.  Learning and adaption is a wonderful ability but also has terrible consequences if not constantly re-evaluated and embodied in a direct, real, physical engagement with the world.

The Profession of Politics and Its Goals

The dissonance of thought to behavior is politics and it thrives on the lack of critical, embodied thinking.  Politics cannot be anything other than the complete mis-association of rhetoric -> external truth and bodies -> accidental outliers.  Politics does not exist outside of that notional association.

(Some readers tend to prefer examples of the professed logic in action: When a brain/body combination that does not include direct attachment of a uterus [the most common "male" body] that brain/body combination can only speak and legislate about the fate of uteruses [the most common "female" body] from a false belief in truth beyond the uterus. A non-uterus bearing body has almost zero claim to actual knowledge about uteruses.)

(("male" and "female" are quoted above due to the fact that even those gender dichotomies are politicking.))

The feedback loop of political existence leads to a partially consistent experience of the world for individuals and groups of individuals.  This partially consistent experience involves the brutal destruction of life and liberty which must be professed away for those the politicking individuals and groups to continue to exist.  It cannot work any other way for the mis-associated politicians. As long as consistency is the external truth above all ideas and efforts the mis-associated thoughts->behaviors->consequences must be made to be consistent by any means necessary, including but not limited to, ignoring new consequential data, cutting off new perceptive pathways, and forming logical infrastructure that reinforces the ignorance.

(Some readers, but not necessarily the same readers referenced in the first parenthetical note, may desire more direct language.  Politics only aim is for its own survival.  A political entity does not have as its goal anything other than the thriving of the political entity.  All political systems - education, government, religion, corporations, an online social network - exist by mis-associating their rhetoric (the things people profess) with real world behavioral consequences (the things people actually do).  The mis-associations must be propped up with logical frameworks like political theory, economics, etc to make sure that only the data that supports the politic is perceivable and integrated.

The logical frameworks directly extend into technology - the technology is the body to the mind of the logical framework.  This is why we - as the American industrial-military-education complex - use drones more and more to do our killing, our delivering, our manual labor, our financial transacting and more and more our learning.  The drones disembody us from the world and ensure that our political activity can be fully consistent in its logic of mind-body duality and eternal truth - "the body was not harmed during the making of this politic." 

Another example, the "likes" and "pins" and "favorites" drive the eternal truth of the online feed that drives the embodied feeling that something actually happened during the reposting and liking of a thing that someone, possibly a drone, originally authored and posted.  And now the billions of dollars made from the liking of all the droned online behavior will be dispersed into more political survival of the liked activity.  {{Apologies to some readers for the last sentence in which irony and subtly was deployed as a test of concentration and ability to cogitate on recent events in the world and possible relations to this text.}}

One more example may be appreciated: fiat currency/modern money.  State backed (which is really just military might backed) money is one of the original technologies to embody a partially consistent, logical framework of disembodiment.  State created and backed anonymous currency - paper currency - turned non-anonymous electronic system of credits and debts used to exchange goods and services and ultimately to has as its sole aim to maintain the survivability of the state/entity backing the currency. The value of an exchange is not directly the goods or services exchanged and their embodied effect on the exchangers but rather the currency value over time of that exchange.  Two keys to the logical framework of that technology and its disembodied false associations of real value: the original anonymity encourages exchange activity and once that activity is sufficiently high the anonymous becomes known through ledgers.  Ledgers - records of debts and credits - becomes the controlling device of which political rhetoric survives - which exchangers of goods and services survive and which fail according to who best serves the backing politic.  It turns out, the more disembodied the exchangers the more the backing politic wants and needs them.  {Strange financial only entities, insurers, lobbying entities}

)

This political existence becomes its own destruction - once the politic completely disembodies its political members and becomes the ultimate, eternal truth of its own making - pure rhetoric - the bodies die and can no longer give themselves up to the rhetoric.  A political system as such has only one possible avoidance of that fate - to create new bodies (repeaters of the logics) that do not die in their total disembodiment of the contingent world.  The current non-aware computers and drones are excellent candidates for such bodies.

Critically Embodied Activity

Critical thought is an embodied behavior - it is wholly of the body and the body's immanent environment mashed with its lossy memory.  No thought, an "inner" thought or outwardly expressed blabbation, is independent of the body of the thinker and the contingent environment.  In opposition to the political the critical has embodiment as its aim - not consistency.  Embodiment does not have rhetorical eternal truth at its core.  Embodiment embraces the illogic of the immanent and does not force a logical, technical framework on the world.

Critical embodiment is not an active resistance but it is responsive engagement.  The activity of critical embodiment makes no claims about truth or of truth.  However, when supported by embodied evidence critical thinking does make claims against truth.  In this regard critically embodied engagement with the world is wholly inconsistent - it moves between the illogic of contingent relations  - between bodies and the expelled ideas/expressions of bodies - resisting resolution when the resolution is unwarranted by traces of non-equivalency.  Critical embodiment embraces contingent sustainability over eternal thriving of rhetorical truths.  There is nothing to seek but everything in its embodied, contingent engagement. 

(Some readers, who have made it this far, likely request a reprieve from possible solipsisms and the boring academic tone.  Basically there's an existential battle between the political and the critical - the rhetorical and the physical - the talkers and the doers - the Platonists and the hippies - the idea of eternal, absolute truths and a completely contingent reality. 

Far from a binary world, this battle is a gradient, a balance between the various extremes.  Both extremes EXIST but both extreme's are not the truth and one of the extreme views/ways of being is not survivable by its very definition... hint: political systems and rhetoric.)

Political systems and their technologies (all technology really) are based on the notion of eternal truth - there is absolute morality, predictability and control, absolute justice, right/wrong, good/bad, equality and inequality, equivalences.

Critical thinking involves assuming no eternal truths and behaving accordingly - always engaged in awareness and learning more.  Critical thinking seeks to guard against the misfires of learning - the mis-association of coincidental expressions, events and histories.  It does this directly by questioning everything, including itself and any of its methods.  Critical thinking is of the body - of the physical world.  It has no aims only flow of awareness from one embodied activity to another.

Art, crafts, swimming, writing, theater, climbing, foraging, campfires.... and an endless stream of touching the world activities are critical activities.  As is discussion, conversation, socializing, eye gazing and all other manners of connecting through various perceptive modes in the flesh.  To be embodied in anothers world... non-linear, non rhetorical activities.  The stuff of living.)

The Critical Question

The political cannot survive if humanity is to survive.  Political systems must always be temporary, local activities that dissolve as soon as they terminally disembody their members.  Politics is disembodiment - that is its activity, not just its aim.  It must divorce the ideas from the body in order to direct the flow of bodily resources (labor into military into property into currency into technology...).

Political systems and the profession of politics are an unavoidable emergent side effect of a hyper-aware, social, learning species.  Politics arise from the very tools selected for in humans by evolution - pattern recognition, language and tool making.  However, when left unchecked by a critical, embodied engagement with the physical world it destroys the human and the collective activity labeled humanity. 

The ultimate end outcome of total politics is non-aware drones extinguishing whatever humanity remains through bodily destruction and disembodied take over of drones droning with other drones - a convergence of high-technology, total belief in binary, eternal truth, and self-perpetuation of prediction and control.

There exists a near endless stream of empirical and logical evidence that establishing the unknowability and uncontrollability of anything but the most simple (non-contingent) objects and systems.  The political profession in its devotion to eternal truth simply ignores this embodied evidence - it must or cede its existence. Whether in America or other countries, nation states the political exercise of humanity is lost in endless droned based violence or mass mediated drone-like human activity.  Even the revolutionary movements in behavior and outcome have become almost indistinguishable from the political systems they revolt against.  It can be no other way if the basic premise of any activity is a rhetorical, disembodied approach. 

It is now a critical moment.  Dronity or Humanity?

(Here's a bone for the exhausted reader... a short summary:  The revolution will be televised, on Youtube on an iPhone watched by a drone.)

Becoming Human

It is unclear how to define humanity or what it means to be a human... exactly.  Humanity lacks definition, as does any living thing, precisely because it is living... contingently, complexly in the real world.  It's undefinability is its existence. 

Learning in an individual living entity is an extension of evolution - the responsive, embodied selection by consequences.  Learning has an existential danger in that its very utility can confuse the learner with false coincidental evidence and shrinking of the perceptive toolkit - learning can literally fold into itself.

The antidote to eternal death is critically embodied living where even the most deeply learned patterns are unlearned by learners as individuals and learners collectively.  This makes for a most certain failure of politics and eternal rhetoric.  The undefinition and unbecoming of humanity into a forever immanently renewed humanity may not win over the transcendence of a frozen in eternal truth dronity. And it may not matter to a quickly evolving dronity. 

(for the dearest of readers who made it to the end: For the few of us humans who'd like to smell the ocean and watch the sunsets and touch the grass, it would be nice if we renewed our embodiment with the world.)

The Long Delay

Human history has a long arc, but a relatively short tipping point towards the illusion of control.  We were for nearly unimaginable expanses of time and space a barely connected species roaming the earth, leaving slight traces in earthy pigment of hands, animals and dreams upon the rocks of our paths and the cave walls of our temporary dwellings.  We were not dominant, mass-farming, tool wielding empires - we were nomads and temporary players in a grand kaleidoscope of Earth.  Our existence was never guaranteed day to day nor over the centuries.

This changed rather rapidly and without some divine intervention - the blind watchmaking of natures evolution accidentally favored homo sapiens.  We happened onto fattened and readily plantable wheat in soil freshly fertile from melting ice ages giving rise to agriculture and related activities.  We relatively quickly took deep advantage of the situation (multiple times independently across the globe).  Agriculture and animal husbandry provided all the obvious advantages for survival like reliable food sources, ability to stay put, deep energy stories, safety and time for knowledge seeking.  The key stroke though was in being able to delay consequences. 

Long Delay entered the human enterprise for the likely the first time.  We were able to delay starvation through reliable, storable harvests.  We were able to build up settlements, trade routes, currency and complicated economic exchange, and, ultimately, we could "plan" for the future.  The idea of A Human Future had deep consequences for our belief systems - that is, our association of what happened in the world and why and how we were part of it.  Without an idea of a future, as realized by reliably imagining one and living to see it realized, there was no sense in having the belief of destiny nor dominion nor property.  A world without delay and of only immediate consequences is one outside of time and outside of storing up - storing up resources, storing up frustrations, storing up weaponry, storing up ideas.    In a nomadic, temporary world - to store is to encumber and to encumber is to be too slow to keep on.

In almost all accounts of big, long history agriculture and its resultant consequences is reverently viewed for all that it enabled.  The great spread of human civilization - its tooling, its trading, its Metal Ages, its science, its culture.  While these are all interesting and complex phenomena, they aren't necessarily good nor are they necessarily bad.  They certainly have produced an incredible proliferation of humanity for many tens of thousands of years.  And they've also come with extreme consequences for humans and non-humanity alike. 

The ability to delay consequences and harbor resources for science and tools and culture also provides those resources for warring, tribalism, weaponry, radicalized ideologies.  Oddly the delayed consequences have a downside that more false beliefs/non-true ideas about how reality works can fester unchecked.  For a Neolithic person a non-true assessment of a situation would likely carry grave consequences.  In the modern world, where most immediate needs for survival are assumed, especially in the West, a person can carry extremely non-true ideas about how reality works and what their place is in the world for decades.  And this is at the root of our current confused and violent situation.

Humans have warmed the planet possibly passed the point of being able to reverse course before there are dire consequences for humans and non-humans.  Humans have killed of an incredible number of species before they knew those species even existed.  Humans cure illness and disease and pests only to unleash unintended stronger adversarial viruses, bacteria and pests.  Humans craft new computational tools and methods with almost no thought to possible downstream uses.  Humans social and civil organization is now dominated by the wealthiest even in its most praised form of Democracy. 

Often all these pessimistic observations are rebuffed with the 100 year old idea of "Creative Destruction."  That is, eventually we end up solving all these things and this is just the natural course of a free market of progress.  It is also constantly remarked that we live in the lowest violence era in human history.  These rebuttals are really just more consequence of Long Delays.  Most of us do not live to see the consequences of these complex contingency chains we set in motion.  We are never put to task for our false predictions, category errors, and misassociation blunders.

Our religions, all the major monotheistic ones, are all about pushing consequences into the "next life."  Our popular moral philosophies typically justify various activities on the rather weak argument about doing it "for our children."  We insure, amortize, capital expense, socially secure, in-debt, mortgage for generations into the future.    All done because we've falsely assumed (or at least not proven to be absolutely true) that somehow, some way it all works out.  We can't even define what that working out would be except within our own delayed, selfish terms - does each of our own families and our own heritage and our own way of life carry on. 

We do not live in a less violent time - we have pushed the violence into the future and out of immediate human physicality.  We've hidden our brutality of this world in our technology and our obsessions with new media.  The most popular video game on the planet is Call of Duty - multiple billions of dollars in revenue.  As our world virtualizes more and more how will we all distinguish the violence in that reality from real violence?  We've ravaged our oceans with pollution and heat and they are rising.  We've fracked the Earth into earthquakes in middle America.  A huge chunk of the Wests GDP goes towards weaponizing - not education and end of life care.  Our sense of identity and place in this world has gone haywire - racism and sexism is still rampant. That terrorism still works is a proof point.  Terror doesn't need thousands of beheadings - just a few and a lot of YouTube views.  Militaries don't need millions of troops in lines razing each other down, just thousands joystick controllers flying drones.  Violence evolved in the resource of delay we provide it.

What repugnant, bizarre thread ensnares almost all of us in these violent delayed consequences?  Shame.  We are all shaming each other for not responding to the same consequences.  The delayed consequences act like a microphone and speaker in the shrieking feedback loop.  The complexity of delayed abuse is doubling back and echoing on top.  We can't cure all suffering, so please cure mine.  We shame each other into more mental abuse of ourselves so that we are incapacitated.  In this shame we trigger the worse natures of ourselves - we lash out in the dark fog of delayed consequences.  We hit anything in front of us we can just to feel something now, feel anything now.  We are ashamed all those future plans and stored up resources didn't real free us as we assumed and passed on.  We are ashamed to be ashamed - so we still treat different skin less worthy unable to admit our shame.

The arc of human history is long but most of it was before we began our short descent into delayed awareness. And here it is.  The only hope. To be here now.  To recognize now, not in the delayed future that isn't yours nor mine, we were wrong.  We will always be wrong.  When we decide we have answers or we decide to store more than what is needed for now - we wrong something else that has just as much right to existence as we do.  Our shameful fight for the righteous, controllable future is what destroys the now for us and the future for others.

Resources for further consideration:

The Ascent of Man, J. Brownoski

The Origin of the Species, Darwin

Sex, Time and Power, Leonard Shlain

Guns, Germs and Steel, J. Diamond

Ishmael, D. Quinn

30,000 Years of Art, Phaidon

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (movie), W. Herzog

Between The World and Me, T. Coates

The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou

The Silence of Animals, J. Gray

Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, BF Skinner

Plato at the Googleplex, R Goldstein

I Am A Strangeloop, D. Hofstader

Better Angels of Our Nature, S Pinker

Making Money, O. Berg

Property is Theft, Proudhon

The Blind Watchmaker

The Selfish Gene, R Dawkins

anything by Martha Nussbam

and about a thousand other resources.  I borrow language and ideas from all of them, perhaps, occasionally adding something new.

To Be Or Not To Be

Timeless reality marches on carelessly smearing existence upon itself.  Humans have been at war with nature and themselves for at least as long as there were enough humans to consider their own survival.  Transcendence hasn't come and won't come without a total absolution of what humans have come to define as humanity - the very notion of humans is one of dominance, manifest destiny, borders, dominion, mastery - ultimately to be Human is to actively Stake Claim Over Existence.

The cruel, thoughtless stroke of evolution was accidentally mutating a species with a biological advantage suited to terraforming. Humanity is a species who long ago deluded itself into believing its selfish survival depends on its ability to transform the world, not be transformed by it.  The selfish gene, in total success, morphs into the selfish species - a species that seeks its own survival at all costs.  So repugnant the thought, it is never uttered in even non-polite company -  that is... the Species As It Is Today Is Perhaps Not Perfect To Rule The Planet and All Planets.  Humanity always builds the metaphorical ark and loads the existence it collectively believes is correct.  And in this ark humanity remains largely unchanged, rarely aware, attempting to stack the deck in its short range physical favor - to defeat nature by being above it.  And to what purpose?  what end?  other than, that's how it must be.

To be, or not to be!  That really is the question.  The selfish species has almost always chosen Not To Be.  Humanity chooses Not To Be in concert with the nature and the purposeless, yet soulful tapestry of existence.  It chooses Not To Be a medium of existence and chooses To Be a raging deity building up its own existence at the destruction existence.  Humanity Stakes Claim by unstaking everything else.

Blasphemy!  Nihilism!  Those are the thoughts of many who will read this.  Hater of life!  Hater of existence!  Which, of course, is completely the anti-thesis of a position of restraint, of an observant and meditative non-position.  A meditative position is one of perpetual openness and one of non-believing, non-truth, non-brand, non-ideology, non-decisions, non-human.  "Non" is the scary part to humans, particularly those humans raised in a Western and/or a religious doctrine of any kind.  The entire idea of civilization, personhood, society, intelligence, religion is a reification of Humanity as a fundamental thing of the universe.  This is the biggest, most fateful delusion of all.

It's near impossible to break free from Humanity As The Source of Existence.  Probably so improbable this break in absolute doctrine humanity will accidentally but totally complete its program - humanity has already crafted the necessary tools of the ultimate Terraform: distributed ledgers, virtual reality and generative manufacturing.  Humanity as a physical species is now completely unnecessary, so total its staking claim over reality.  And then there's this other staking claim out there... one in which the physics still matter to some, but it's no less completely destructive.  This claim is the one of distributed, ancient physical violence married to 24/7 mediation through global hyperconnectivity.  These are the two mainstream humanities.  They are weirdly at odds and yet totally syncopated: in a strangely grotesque Not To Be dance they both are dancing humanity to its final end - the complete distraction of claim staking species that's staked so many claims its oceans will overwhelm all.  As part of that distraction there are those humans of all humanity staking out Human Technology Will Save Us Yet Again.  To Mars!  The Sharing Economy unto the autonomous everything!  Drones To Deliver The Food and The Bombs!

A dark, dim view?  Yes, of the two dominant humanities.  Getting beyond the ultimately limiting humanism and into non-humanism lightness of being can be found.  Existence itself, all around humans and nature alike, is beautiful, wonderful, awesome, unflinching and distinctly Non-Human.  A higher engagement in existence through transformation and transduction - living through existence, not in-spite of it.  To become, to always be-coming into new relations - never clinging to old relations, old terraformed hierarchies.  Relenting and restraining from being the cause and instead becoming affected. 

It is an unlikely future for the human species.  the dominant humanities program Not To Be.

some of us will non-program To Be. Always something else - part of a shifting tapestry of existence.

The Handshake Is Back.

The age of Command and Control has come to an end on this planet. It wasn't even a good run - a mere couple of hundred of years. - if we're being generous.

Command and Control is the strategy that banks on lack of connectivity between people. It involves an authoritative body controlling a limited communicating set of people by conditioning responses to commands. It primarily banks on destroying connectivity and communication between people and replaces socialization through standardized approaches – often called missions or crusades or objectives. That is, the authority destroys and eliminates all other stimulus that doesn't reinforce the mission.

It works when people are disconnected. It works when people can be normalized and undifferentiated.

This is the dominant strategy in industry and military… ironically it's the most used organizing strategy in modern America – in corporations, education, government, social organizations and non-profits. The West is full of Mission Statements and social engineering towards complete compliance. Deviants be damned.

The problem is… and it's a Huge Problem… nature, outside of humans, has almost zero examples of Command and Control as a strategy. More damning is that most of human (and our ancestors') history has zero examples of Central Authority as the organizing principal.

What's happening is that as the industrial world connects more people and more machines centralized control becomes more fragile and short sighted. The reality of complexity and ecology is the network cannot be controlled, it is shaped. There are no absolute missions. There are temporary ideas and temporary organizations – always changing – localized, short term goals. There are traces of next moves, but there are no crusades in a connected world. There are no slogans worth dying for in a connected world.

And so, here we are. At the crux. The epoch of those that will literally die for the mission and those that will carry on by being in response through awareness and empathy and sensitivity. The Command and Control no longer can tell who's a man or a woman, who is what race, who bleeds what flag colors, who believes what tax form W2 mission statement. In an ironic corporate slogan appropriation, “what have you done for me lately?”

Tomorrows winners are the makers, the free agents, the distributed computation, the micro finance, the micro school, the flash mob, the flash sale, the accidental brand, the oral history, the traces of ideas, the partial credit, the question answered with a question, the hacker hacker, the crafty craftsperson.

The ledger of exchange and the winning ideas will be distributed and trusted only through a loosely connected network. The handshake is back. The seal is dead.

On Originality and Uniqueness

A Question of Originality and Uniqueness

The more I think and read the less original (in thought and expression and being) I become to myself. The evidence mounts against original thought as the investigation deepens. Borrowers in genetics and memetics, all organic things are. I am thus led to wonder if there is any unique entity/thing/idea in existence? Or could be in existence? Unique here defined – the unique contains or embodies WHOLLY and ONLY isolated-not-found-anywhere-else properties and relations.

This is all unique-ish

Theories and Atoms

There are many theories in the world built on the establishment of a central, unique entity or atomic element:

proteins in genetics

sub atomic particles in quantum physics

persons in sociology and psychology

numbers in mathematics

bits and algorithms in computer science

and so on…

The question of falsity of all theories comes down to the frame of measurement reference. Experiments falsify or support theories based on measurement of relational phenomena. What properties of what entities should be measured and investigated in a theory and its experiments? As the frames of reference resolve measurement access is cut off to possible that might reveal the measured objects as non-unique (borrowed/unoriginal/non-atomic) entities. For example, the measurement and investigation of behavior between humans (and not the cells, proteins, chemistry and atoms that comprise them) experiments and theories become blind to what are possible (and likely in most cases) relevant causal networks. Time and time again it is found that an observed behavior isn't due to some reified personhood but really of chemistry exchange in organ systems and their cells and the environment. And even those exchanges are explained and mediated by network patterns and geometry (neural networks/memory, protein folding, chemical bonds, atomic spin, etc)

Infinite Regress of Contingency

Examples of contingent explanation can be endlessly drawn out. So much so that it doesn't seem plausible that fixed fidelity-level of explanation is fully contained. The infinite regress of the network of explanations seems to imply the phenomena themselves are an infinite regress of relations.

Here's the stake in the ground, so to speak. It's all networks and relations – everything in contingency. The resolution of anything, in its totality, is infinite. That is, to fully measure and explain it, all of its contingencies must be dawn out. This reality of the essential nature forces a diversification of ideas, knowledge disciplines, engineering activities, language and philosophies. The work of discovery will never be done.

The Basis of Originality

The originality of ideas or activity (unique things) was never pure. The regress of contingency ensures this. Originality can be thought of as a measure of energy between observed states of affairs (ideas, concepts, explanations, pixels on the screen music, art, societies, economies, etc) To go from here to there… the connection, the leap, the activity of the relating is the originality. It's a paradoxical concept. The space distance (perception) is usually infinitesimal between the original and unoriginal but the mass of contingencies of the unoriginal (the borrowed things) tends towards infinity. Thus the energy required to connect anew requires more energy (time aka computation aka connecting).

For example, to get a new law passed when a jurisdiction is small is much easier (takes less time, has less nodes to convince) that a jurisdiction that is large (takes more time due to more nodes to convince and more nodes in opposition). Old (established, highly contingent) laws have mass, they stick around. Getting a new (original) law in place, with even a slight change in a system as large as the USA requires enormous energy (time/computation/politicking) – the more entrenched and contingent the law the harder it is… think US Constitution.

Returning to the fore the idea of originality is reified and romantic. It is personal. It is ephemeral. It is a mere superposition of possibility collapsed into the new, which is barely different (and the only difference is new participants) than the old. But if the audience hadn't crossed the bridge themselves, the new appears new. As they walk across the bridge, alone, they'll find the same old same old… there's nothing new under the sun except what's new to you.

Implications

This is why the deeper and wider science and art and philosophy goes the more it circles back on itself… finding the same shape to phenomena across space time and all levels of fidelity. To connect wider and more diverse networks new vocabularies and new perceptive tools must be engineered. Those new tools must then come under study and interpretation and ruled use. On and On.

And Yet

The basic question remains. Is there anything unique from all things or any things? A simple case…. Is 0 different than 1? It seems so but how is it different? Where is that difference? What does the work of difference? Is a circle different than a square?

Certainly these examples are too simple. The answers appear to be YES, they are different. A circle is unique from a square. But… How are they fundamentally different? Through use? Through their mathematical properties? Through definition alone? I can approximate both with a series of lines at various angles, so the method to generate them may make them different but may not?  A circle has no sides/infinite sides and a square 4... there's a concept of equidistant from the center in both but its deployed differently... there's a infinity in both... (pi and Pythagorean theorems...) on and on...

Is geometry – the relation of things to other things, the shape of things – the only way in which things are unique? (a taxonomy of possible unique things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_shapes)

The question seems stuck in an infinite regress of definitions and connections.

An Anti Conclusion For Now

Originality and Uniqueness do not hold up well as stand alone, substantial concepts. At best, I'm left in contingency. Things are contingent on other things on other things… occasionally whispering out possible unique relations that require a regress of investigation to reveal more sameness. Perhaps.

am I OK? a remark on authenticity.

am I OK?

This is the question I get asked the most nowadays.   Certainly when posts online stop being predominantly jokes about the NFL or filtered photos of babies doing funny stuff and start being drippy, gloopy bullshit painted rectangles with captions like “exist. I. do. not.” the question sort of begs itself.   That and the bizarro, yet totally cliche, year that from age 38 to 39 turned out to be… a seemingly constant drip of great news followed by shit news… you tend to reshape your expression a bit.

This is a #selfie of #you

But that’s really not what the question is about, right?

The question “am I OK?” is about authenticity and freedom and sincerity or rather the lack thereof.  Our hyperconnected world and our American society’s obsession with brand awareness led to this confused and in-authentic mediation between people (and machines.)   Listing all the causes of the mass delusion of what I’ll call the brand of My of Endless Happiness (M.E.H.: the American Dream!) is a waste of energy (as mathematicians do listing trivial causes is left as an exercise to the reader.)    

MEH has us all engaged in small talk, trivia and endless duckfaced happy posts from all the fun things we’re doing instead of communicating.  MEH has us all outraged at the outrages we all share (death and taxes from Presidents!) - those things that are mostly removed from us and outside our direct control - instead of VOTING.  MEH has us big box shopping on Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays and whining about credit card bills in January instead of MAKING THINGS FOR EACH OTHER.   MEH has us reading Fifty Shades rather than, well, GETTING IT ON.

and so on without so-ing on!

No, I’m not OK!  OK is MEH.  OK is eating Bennigan's left overs watching Game of Thrones binging while playing Angry Birds (that’s a madlib, insert your own CHAIN RESTAURANT, POPULAR TV, FAVORITE PHONE APP).    

OK is watching GOP circus debates and ranting online while passing up the last 6 local election cycles because INSERT EXCUSE.   

OK is ok, it’s normal.   It’s buzzed but not drunk nor sober.  It’s brohugs and not embraces or yoddles/chants.   It’s regrams of misquoted inspiration not climbing that mountain 5 miles from your house.   It’s watching TV not playing jazz with friends.   It’s OK not GREAT!  AMAZING!   FUCKING PISSED!   BUMMED!   DEVASTATED!   ENGAGED!   

And it’s ok.   It’s perfectly ok to want OK.   It’s OK to be ok.  Sometimes, ok is exactly where to be.  Sometimes it’s 100x better than not-OK.   

Am I OK?   Maybe.  Sometimes.  here and there.   

Above all, I’m trying to engage.  That’s it.  Chasing experience.  Being a Maker and Doer rather than an mostly an observer and critic.   

Am I sad?   sometimes.  People die.  People get sick.  People hurt.  Animals hurt.  The world and life is hard.   

Am I desperate?  always.  Desperate to exist.  Desperate to renew my own agency.

Am I depressed?  sometimes.   Self diagnosis is generally a bad idea, but I can tell you, yes, I have been and do get depressed and darkness descends.   And the times when it does… as far as I can tell it’s because I’m sitting there OK.  and letting life happen to me.

Am I drunk?  sometimes.   sometimes more than others!   probably more than I should be in quantity and quality.

Am I happy? not that often, but at least once a week.   There’s two kinds of happiness, generally, to me.  True joy… usually that’s experiencing something awesome with others.  and then the little happiness… an espresso on Sunday mornings reading the NYTimes Book Review. (though that might actually be True Joy!).

Am I having fun? YES!   Fun isn’t tickling and playing tag, though that is fun to do.  FUN! is trying To Become Something, fun is Trying To Become A Person.  Fun is being so bad at something you have to do it every single day unending to see even a shred of better than truly terrible at that something.   

Am I Trying to be An Artist?  No.   Such a limited label, IMHO.   I hate labels.

Am I Trying to be a Philosopher?  Yes!   But only for a limited time.  Philosophers like Politicians make poor career titles… the idea of making a career (bring home the bacon) out of something that literally should be blowing up careers seems like a recipe for MEH.

Am I Trying to have a Career in Anything?   No.  I have tattoos on my hands (the things i use to DO STUFF) to remind myself of Information Destiny.  Everything is Information.    I am trying to Inform My Being. Always.

Am I Authentic?   No.   I’m trying.  Each day I’m trying more and more to authentically engage myself and the world.  

Am I Free?  No.   None of us can ever be free of contingencies.  I think Authenticity and Freedom go together.   And they are a process, not an end point.

Do I Want My Endless Happiness?  No, absolutely not under any terms do I want MEH.   I do not seek happiness at the expense of authenticity/freedom.   Life is life (ugh, tautologies…)   life is struggle and competition and birth and death and growth and shrinkage and change and stasis and highs and lows.   It’s hurt and joy.   It’s fast food and gourmet.  Literally life exists on the border - the jagged blurry line - of order and chaos.

So to answer your question, no I’m not ok.  Are you?