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.)

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.

This is contingency

Selection by consequences (the main phenomenon of evolution/learning/mediation) follows a basic movement towards interoperability and interchangeability through modularity.  As forms/structure proliferate (are selected for survivability)  an ever progressive reduction to the simplest aspect of the structure providing the survivability function occurs.  What is replicated within the generational line, the environment and the overall mesh of consequences is a generally modular structure - the signal separates and replicates from the noise. 

Noise and signal.  In replication.  

That "life" on earth (and likely other planets) shares carbon as its elemental basis and proteins and cellular structures as replicating machinery is an example.  Music and the arts are another example of a progression of signal differentiation until what is widely shared is almost pure signal.  Music went from noisy localized and often private events to reproducible written scores to recorded and replayable sounds to studio produced to advertising jingle to 3-note musical logos to iconic ringtones to machine remixes and generative machine mixes.  It is now almost pure signal and total self replication.  Visual arts went through and are still going through this transformation from event to prints to xeroxes to Internet shared images to machine recompositions to computer vision and now googles deep dream and so on.  Manufacturing, too, has gone from artisan craftspersonship to machine generated and exchanged designs printed out and machine assembly by networked 3D printers and robots.   The object is now too pure signal.  

In all these examples gone is the noise of the event. Noise of the making. Noise of the specific context of creator and environment.  Soon we will have virtual realities that remove the noise of the singular universe and have everyone in their pure signal forms drifting through universes of platonic forms.  For these are the most efficient and survivable concepts that remain after consequences.  

Until.  New forms disturb the peace.  From the heat death of pure signal... Springing from probabilities... Which are outside of consequences or rather spring from the complex network of consequences all colliding... A new form burrows out and shocks the consequential network.  A constant, yet choppy cycle of noise to signal to noise - from isolated event to selection to full replication to collision of pure signal to isolated event. 

This is contingency.  This is the phenomena of networks. 

Believability

The issue before any narrative or story or theory is one of believability.   That is, there must be some connection between the author's reality and the audience's reality.   A completely absurd and non-sensical narrative finds no connection and is quickly dismissed into the pile of other things that are not things to an audience.

And so what is the nature of believability?   this connection of reality to reality?   Doubtful there's any common, easy notion to elucidate here but surely it swirls in some notion of shared experience (shared context, culture, events, language, image).   And it is likely beyond a single shared instance of experience the repetition of the experience is a key aspect.   For me to believe what you say/do I must have a reference point of my own or from seeing others having done/say what you say.   Perhaps that's a valid concept... it still leaves open the issue of the INITIAL step towards believability.  How does the initial introduction of a narrative catch fire?  How is the initial expression not immediately snuffed out in indifference or ignorance?

I believe what we think is the narrative and the atomic aspects of a narrative/theory/story/proof/argument is much smaller than we think.   That is, what it is that draws connections (the engine of believability) can be divided into infinitesimal chunks and only a very few recognizable chunks of connection are needed to spark engagement.

A chunk might not even be the words or art someone thinks they expressed. A connection might form by the smell in the air that an artist and audience might jointly experience during a demonstration.   Incidental chunks are as much a part of belief forming as the intended chunks. All shared context that gets encoded into the individuals and the social dialogue and the works of expression themselves.

But was there an initial spark?  Way back at the onset of language? way back with the first cave painting?  

Unlikely.

There does not need to be an originating moment or gesture or act.   Even a seeming nothing is an originating chunk of believability, of connection.   Probably more practical is to assume we can never really know.   

We ask the question of origination because after all these thousands of years of trying to know, to understand and our infinite origin myths of everything under the sun and the sun itself we still carry with us the idea that to know the origin is to believe the entirety.  Where did this art come from?  where did you the artist come from?  what's the authors story?  what's the story of this building?  was this work of fiction based on a true story?

And that shared experience of wanting to know the origin of anything and everything is also part of the activity of believing.  Let us ask together.