this is likely (as the title puts it) to be patchy. i’ll break and breach off, hopping from topic to topic. i’m not even sure it’s all bound together, but it sure as hell seems so.
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the very first question (obviously) is how exactly to control for another’s perception, given only one’s own perception of self. this is the utmost social problem, that of controlled performance, and one i take to be also the utmost computational problem. how exactly do we go from our initial gathering of sense data into motor (or even static) behavior? a continuous modelling of self is constantly in the background of the modelling function. (issues of projection often abound here (but projection is secondary)). a system is given – and in this simple verb a lot is already hidden – a set of priors on which it cannot help but operate. everything within its purview – itself very much included – is constantly looping though the same categorical apparatus that chops reality into digestible bits. feedback drives this apparatus of capture throughout its environment (which then again it cannot help but conceive as environment, the eternal “not-me”). at each moment it stamps an address and a timestamp, for future reference and motion. this is called “learning” or “entropy dissipation”.
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the world moves in a constant tension, with air rippling static. infolding avenues of contraction display themselves universally. (this might sound pompous, and indeed it is, but it’s necessary). even when the mind tried to calm itself, cutting itself from the flux, it’s only immersed again in a new flow of forms and points of data, recalling and retracing, in a constant effort to *go on*.
it’s gotta go on, you see. it’s the only purpose. what doesn’t go on immediately stops. it’s damn obvious i feel a little ashamed of it. but sometimes the obvious ought to be stated.
continuation, then, is the only purpose. more and more. and already in this questions of identity arise. what, exactly, goes on? “the universal will”, “unconscious desire”? your guess is as good as mine.
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i’ve been translating John Smart’s (yes, i know, this is just the best name for him to have) “Evo Devo Universe” (another great name, although with some questionable aesthetics) lately. it’s hard to paint the general picture, so in general i’d stop at that link and read it all. but it’s a 70-odd page oddly assembled result of possibly decades of research, so maybe a tl;dr would be appreciated.
i’m not sure i have one, but my best attempt: the universe began accelerating more or less 10^5 yrs ago (no one knows why or how) when matter started condensing into galaxies. from then on it’s STEM compression all the down into black holes which are the gametes of universes in a multiversal environment (i’m not fucking kidding you). all complete with the most phenomenal citation work i’ve seen anywhere.
STEM compression is basically things getting into ever smaller spaces, at ever faster pace, with ever greater densities of free energy and ever more densely massive matter formations. that’s the universal developmental trend. that’s intelligence optimization in a nutshell.
intelligence accelerates up its own ass so fucking hard human culture looks to it like plants (have you stopped to talk with a plant lately? they’re slow, but they’re kind). in it’s frenzied ever localized pace, it becomes something of a grey goo (i’d link, but you know what it is) that blows itself into the space and starts consuming the matter around it until it collapses into a black hole (if it hasn’t already found one to throw itself into). in these last stages where it reaches virtually (this is important) infinite amounts of energy and mass density into a single point in space and time, it basically acquires the necessary characteristics to replicate the fundamental parameters of universal physics…. and it all just starts over!
i just wrote three paragraphs out of literally “going on forever”
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okay, so now we’ve probably established that this “going on forever” is both inside any systems internal parameters of perception and also seems to it to be the universal trend going around it.
it’s all so divine one cannot help but wonder if there’s isn’t something fucked up in the reasoning. if you easily spooked by sparkles of divinity and shiny stuff, i definitely don’t recommend universing. (jk)
onto the darker parts: obviously (as our great friend Darwin seems to have found out) none of that comes without the Butcher’s Yard(TM). i’m just gonna quote Land because he’s way gloomier than i’ll ever be about it:
It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)
Smart calls it “learning”. fittingly.
so yeah, there’s the creative destruction thing the universe is doing, but why? why? that question is never answered and you might as well stop asking it already.
maybe it’s just the pleasure of it? of masticating things? of being masticated? processed and possessed? more and more and more? maybe it’s a pleasure in the pain of it. as there is surely a pain in the pleasure. one can go mad trying to disentangle them.
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i should probably at this point give a heads up to Aella. everyone should read her blog sometimes. she’s doing what i’m doing here with much more grace than i could ever muster.
there’s this post by her that cover that last topic rather well.
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okay, i could definitely go on and on forever. but at some point i should introduce patchwork here. it’s a nice term, sounds good and tasty in the mouth, you can see. where does it fit in all this?
well, first of all “localized” means something. in fact, it’s bound to mean very many things, parted and competing. this is the bread and meat of that carnivorous evolutionary process Land outlined up there. that some of it, eventually, after eons of suffering and pleasuring, goes onto to transcension, don’t make it any less patchy. many, many different path necessarily lead into the utmost universal reproduction to begin once again.
the ocean is multiple.
(i’d have written 50 pages, but it would be me, would it?)
Antinomia Imediata 