20050125   

Michael considered fate at 03:53   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

I'm afraid I wasn't very clear in that last post on politics and the world at large. I tend to do that sometimes when I think too hard: fail at clarity. The silt at the bottom gets all stirred up and muddies the waters. Then it always takes awhile to settle back down.

All I was trying to say, really, is that I think it would behoove us as a people, as a nation, as a species, to realize the common goal, common good, etc, etc, but more importantly - much more importantly - realize the limits to that goal, realize the inevitable failure at pure fantasy.

It just isn't going to happen. Our home-built version of fantasy is some sick world of eat-too-much mentality with piles of money and enough fish to go around. It's grapes lowered by servants (robots by now) into our awaiting mouths. It's tvs, flat screens, flat panels, lcds, plasma, microfibre, nanotech all so we can get closer, deeper, into our world of more before the world around us of not-enough sinks into our conscious any further. Fantasy, in the human mind, is the ultimate work of art. Inside our heads, the greatest possible rendering of reality exists - all the variables, inputs, outside phenomenon, and even the physical brain matter, it all comes together to form this person, this personality, to form this mind which, in turn, dreams.

The trick is to remember where the art is - on the inside - and not try to look to hard for it on the outside cause what you are bound to see is death, dismemberment, countries going to war, famine, and really bad mcdonald's food.

There is a little corner of computer science called formal verification which is an attempt to develop mathematical theories to be used to prove the correctness of programs. That, essentially, is like einstein trying to come up with a function to be used to prove the correctness of the universe. That is if the universe were one big program. These things, however, or not so simple. There is ultimately a point in time where you will have found the correct order, the correct threshold, the correct inputs, but there will always be something tiny missing. There will always be a constant or a slight multiplier.. something that we can't detect or measure, something that isn't quite right. Something that will always elude us.

Don't believe me? Solve it. Consider the dividing problem, whereby you learn knowledge in 50% increments. At first, you know 50% of everything there is to know. At the next step, you've learned 50% of what is left over, and have reached 75% of all knowledge. However, at the next step, you learn only an additionaly 12.5% of the original amount, since 100*.5*.5*.5=.125. And thus, out to infinity, you can never truly learn everything there is to know. When scientists first decided to try and solve the age old question of how old the earth is they tended to come up with wildly varying numbers. 12,000. 1 million. 300,000. They were pretty much all over the place and yet none of them, at first, was even close to the nearly 4.5 billion it very well may be.

And yet these numbers were read, believed, and accepted (to varying degrees) despite their gigantic (and that might not even be the word) error. They were, in fact, as much as 750,000% off (in the case of the bible's estimation at 6000 years).

The bottom line is that we are wrong, very often extremely wrong, and we will never be anything but wrong in our entire existence. The best we can do is keep trying not to be wrong. It's like the neverending race, or the song that never ends, or like that weekend your aunt visited and just wouldn't go home. Anyway you look at it we're in for a long time. No two ways about it. The best we can do is try.

And if trying means believing the world is flat for a few hundred years, so be it. If trying means believing in communism then so be it. If trying means having a system of morality and valuing human lifes then fucking try, already.

I have a friend who is argueable a pretty damn smart guy. He's all over the place from Europe to South America and he sees the world in some funky colors sometimes in a way that neither you nor I do. He's a bit, well, special. What is so special I couldn't put my finger on it but one might describe it as a "gentle autism for the game" and by the game I mean any game. His mind, once introduced to a game of mastermind or a round of Go, once presented with Hanaoi's towers or even tic-tac-toe, becomes a different machine, whirring, processing, changing. There is definitely, clearly, something odd going on inside his head. He'll spend days with the most simple brain teaser. He'll memorize the rubic's cube and maybe someday, the puzzle he'll put together is that of renewable energy.

Some might argue that I'm speaking crazy talk here, that he is completely normal, that he is exactly like you or I. But he isn't, and neither are you. We are all, in some cosmic boiling-pot sense, mutations and broken, fragile, models of our original blueprint. We are, in a word, misrepresented. This randomness is what makes us special and unique and what makes even mechanically-human systems of ours such as the stock market appear random as well: it really is. It is the result of a gaggiagazillion-trillion-million chemical bonds being built, broken, torn, repaired, and rebuilt.. a second, all over the universe, and we expect to be able to understand it?

We, as humans, are either blessed or cursed with a sense of perspective on this all. We're stuck with a big screen tv looking into the inner workings of ourselves only we know it's prime-time tv and what we're seeing is not necessarily real. It's just what we see. The trick, the truth, is to just keep on widdling away at that knowledge. 50% of the time.

Take home message: we're the only ones that can grab that knowledge for us. And for every normal girl or boy there is an autistic game-playing boy or girl on the other side of the street that may just see the world in enough of a different light and who knows, the one may be important, or the other. Who can know? Who can tell. We are our own greatest natural resource. Not iron, or water, or soil, or sun would do much for us anyway if we didn't have ourselves. It's on the inside, where the art comes from, the creative center, the imaginative possibility.

Clearly we could stare outward at the world and, with our newfound sadness, cry at the cruelty of nature's hand or we could wisely turn inward. It's where the heart is, the dreams, the pure no-holds-barred fantasies, It's where the natural resource of the people come from. It's where einstein found the theory of relativity, where newton found his apple, and where the world is truly defined.