Introduction to Anti-Jump Muscles

Welcome to Anti-Jump Muscles Relaxed. This section of kindahardpuzzles has just about nothing to do with puzzles. It’s a collection of perpetually almost-finished philosophical essays I've worked on over several years. One group of them represent a book I started in 1995. Many others read like first pages of longer works. You'll find a lot of very creative and fresh ideas here that might spark your own imagination given half a chance. Most of these pieces try to draw attention to alternative ways of understanding the world, as suggested in the delightful old B. Kliban cartoon on the Anti-Jump page.

My excuse for not having been more daring and creative throughout my life is that my anti-jump muscles have often been too darn tense... and I suddenly realize that this also explains why the essays are unfinished! It's not that my creativity muscles are weak, it's that my anti-creativity muscles are strong and quickly bring me back to earth. The anti-jump metaphor says that creative acts, among other mental and physical events, don't require construction or manufacture; under the right conditions, they just pop out of the awesome fecundity of reality — even when conventional wisdom says they won't. Intelligent thought, creative thought, is like this. It involves redirecting the preexisting underground stream of potentialities like a judo master uses an opponent's energy to her own advantage.

Let me mix the metaphor a little more. You've probably seen those Magic Eye images that were very popular in the 1980s. They look like a bunch of random dots until the extraordinary moment when a vivid 3D image coalesces out of nothing. Try this one:

Magic Eye image

In my experience, success at getting this transition to take place doesn't require effort. In fact, effort here leads only to frustration and failure. You have to allow the appropriate frame of mind/vision to take over, Grasshopper; relax those muscles that are holding you fast to the ground. This is pretty close to a cliché, I realize; surrender to the void, just let go, trust the Force. But that doesn't really capture what I'm trying to get at. The hope is that my essays will give meat and bones to such airy pronouncements.

In the end, my bigger point is not about any particular alternative viewpoint or the idea that such an alternative version of how jumping happens is somehow righter than the usual description; it's that there are limitations and paradoxes built into any point of view, but we can take advantage of all insightful versions of a situation to describe things better and get a fuller understanding of them. By alternating between the vase and the faces, between the duck and the rabbit, between jump muscles and anti-jump muscles, we get a hint of the actual thing that's somehow/somewhere in the middle — and nowhere nearby!

It's all about the premises. Mutually contradictory assumptions are hard to hold simultaneously and impossible to reason with, but that doesn't imply there's no benefit in their strategic deployment.

A too-simple example: People are evidently both good and evil, right? Are they essentially good — born with pure spirits that slowly get corrupted by life's negative experiences — or do we enter the world as brutes swimming in original sin and get pulled up by society and culture and/or redeemed by faith? Both and neither of these seem to me to be the case. Both-and-neitherness is a recurring theme. It's rather inconceivable to me that one or the other of these might offer the last word on the subject, but there may be a benefit in pretending one or the other is true for the sake of argument and seeing where it leads.

When approached from different premises, a single set of observations of our world (e.g., people are both good and evil) leads to different conclusions and actions. By taking the assumption that people are essentially good but corruptible, we may come to appreciate our inner child and learn to guard against pernicious and pointless psychological influences like peer pressure. By taking brutishness as the fundamental condition of humanity, on the other hand, we might look for ways to better ourselves or try to make peace with our personal demons. I don't know; it's just an illustration, okay? Note here that it's helpful to take one or the other of these positions rather than just sticking with "people are both good and evil," which is sort of a wishy-washy fact and doesn't lead to the sorts of insights mentioned above. That's a remarkable fact: It can be useful to take sides even when no side is right.

It's sort of obvious that such a two-headed approach can apply in the small world of one's own psyche, less obvious that it might apply equally well to political thinking or physics. But I think it does apply. There can be a quasi-mathematical equivalence between opposing approaches — even non-mathematical approaches — where the relevant nouns and verbs swap their positions. The new pair of perspectives seem contradictory but have an inner coherence; cosmic complementarity.

Now, this is pretty much a cliché too: The Absolute is the embodiment of oppositions. Guilty! And, reading over what I've written so far in this introduction, I see I'm giving off a distinctly mystical vibe, but that's not really my thing at all — well, hardly. I'm a thorough-going rationalist by temperament and training. I've had two real jobs in my life; one as a math teacher, and the other as a puzzle editor and programmer — you can't get much more rationalist than that. I am, however, kind of obsessed with the relationship between what we think about (the world as it really is, whatever that means) and what we think with (language, impressions, explanations, consciousness, mentality). The map is not the territory — another cliché! — but, at the same time, the map sometimes does such an extraordinary job of tracking the territory that we are beguiled and forget the distinction. Since our normal idea of jump muscles pretty much wrap up the phenomenon of jumping with one tidy bow, we might miss the existence of anti-jump muscles. I try hard to come to grips with both halves of that idea — the distinction and the forgetting. Mulling over this all-important map-territory relationship has led me down some peculiar pathways ending in a sort of relativism that at various points borders on nihilism, existentialism, and I-don't-know-what — a cockeyed open-mindedness! If that has something in common with mysticism, so be it.

You'll also notice a lot of redundancy in these essays. Sorry. I guess I'm only really interested in about ten things, so they keep cropping up. The essays also constantly refer to each other but there's no best order to read them in! Finally, most of the essays just sort of tail off at the end. Sorry again.

Note that some of these essays move pretty far afield of "alternative explanations." For instance there are some about math and some about morality. In any event, there is nothing here that makes any special claim to truth or knowledge. With any luck, you'll run across a few interesting images and conjectures and find your own inspiration or insight. I hope the essays succeed at least in cultivating a sense of playfulness and wonder.

Joel’s Hot Takes

The following catalog is intended as a sort of overview of many of the ideas in the essays at this site, albeit presented in a slightly provocative and wild-eyed manner. Naturally, the arguments and justifications are almost entirely left out:

The map is not the territory, except when it is. Even the best simulation isn't the real thing.

The territory is essentially unknowable, but is mysteriously tracked by simple explanations. Meaning is everywhere; meaning is impossible.

All Knowledge is Ptolemaic. The key to achieving a satisfying explanation is continual doubling down on arbitrary epicycles of description.

In thought, we necessarily take some aspect of the arbitrary, irreducible, idiopathic, brute world as it is and reduce it to a few simple explanatory principles, and then bludgeon reality into submission with those principles.

Deductive and inductive reasoning have an almost magical capacity to extend a thought beyond its starting place, but, because of the multiplication rule applied to imperfect assumptions, the further one extends one's reasoning, the greater the map-territory mismatch -- so stick closely to simple insights rather than extended reasoning.

The world is like a metaphor

I oppose philosophizing on philosophical grounds

The best argument may be the one that argues against its own validity.

Superposition of theories developed from mutually contradictory assumptions can ameliorate or circumscribe the limitations of the Ptolemaic trap.

There's no such thing as nothingness. Duh! This fact points to the ultimate imperfection or contradiction of mapping. We cannot "understand" when we have nothing under us to stand on, when there is no background to bring the foreground into relief. To understand somethingness requires standing on nothingness, which is definitely not a thing!

All thoughts/ideas/explanations have foregrounds and backgrounds (aka assumptions), but the territory is indifferent to the distinction. What we call the foreground and the background ultimately have equal status.

The words explain, describe, express, and justify all refer to the idea of undoing the effect that the world has had on us and our state of consciousness.

The self is both bubble and beacon that says to the world, "Don't try to change me; in fact, why don't you act a little more like me."

We further the interests of the self by preserving the self by canceling out the outside world.

We further the interests of the self by creating disturbances to the bubbles of others.

Thinking is not about getting real; it's about getting even and about getting ahead.

In defending our interior space, we make the world over in our own image. In influencing others, we solidify, codify, concretize our own selfhood.

Explanation and rationalization are the same process. The self-serving aspect is never absent; it's fundamental.

The sensors used by selves always incorporate signal cancellation, which isn't an ideal method of decoding a signal. Duh. That is, if the process of perception is even partly about masking and undoing the effects of the outside world ("how can I understand this event so that it has no effect on me?"), then of course perception makes a poor medium through which to understand what's truly out there. Human understanding is in this sense self-limiting, even self-defeating.

Everything is trying to happen at once, and mostly failing because of the cancellation of contrary influences. Singularly unopposed or incompletely opposed things happen.

You ask "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Ha! Why is there so little rather than everything.

Things can happen by subtraction rather than addition of influences

The flow of X in one direction is the flow of anti-X in the opposite direction. Darkness and light have equal ontological status despite the assumptions of physics (which tends to say that darkness is a mere absence of light. Try thinking that light is the mere absence of darkness).

Energy is to force as information is to influence. Scalar and vector. Information/influence on the inside reflects energy/force on the outside.

What we call mental energy isn't energetic per se at all. It's about marshaling information to apply influence. Marshaling involves control and restraint rather than movement/energy. Thought happens spontaneously when mental chaos is held at bay.

Memory isn't in the brain. Remembering is... Thoughts ain't not in the brain neither no how.

The past is more influential than the future only because of special cancellation.

Consciousness can't be an illusion, because only conscious beings can have an illusion. [There's a weird self-reference in that sentence.]

Does the world consist of agents and behavior (the view from the inside) or objects and laws (the view from the outside)? Both and neither. There is the world as seen from the outside in and the world as seen from the inside out. These views are utterly incompatible... and equally valid and useful in their contexts. I would change the epitome of yin from passive to "from the inside" and yang from active to "from the outside." The world doesn't have a yin and yang nature, but our maps necessarily do.

Identification is the basis of the empathy which leads to moral choices.

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1. METATHEORY: The efficacy of human explanation is both much greater than we can logically justify [the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics] and much less than we intuitively judge it to be [map-territory confusion]. There has to be a kind of arbitrariness about explanations (as illustrated by my reinterpreted Fourier Theorem), but we can't easily see it. That is, our explanatory narratives are made-up stories, but we can't help but believe them. Ultimately, facts or statistical truths must trump our descriptions and explanations and narratives, but the human mind seems to be built for narrative explanation rather than Bayesian inference. For one thing, we are far more likely to believe a set of facts when we have a satisfying narrative built around them. If narratives are sufficiently satisfying and deep-seated, they will blind us to contradictory facts. All of the above applies to all of the above.

My epistemology is a sort of extreme skepticism. So extreme that it can't be logically valid. If it were valid, logic would not be valid. A contradiction! That is, I'd have to express my skepticism in the form of an explanation or justification, and the ultimate validity of explanation and justification I deny. I even deny the idea of denial. My denial would be in the realm of mapmaking and thus invalid. It is what it is what it is. Which it isn't.

Questions of knowledge, expectation, intention, consciousness are the ultimate expressions of the sorts of self-reference that lead to the classical and modern paradoxes of logic -- from Epimenides to Russell to Godel to x=-1/x. Thus, they will never be answerable in their own context, the logical landscape, but instead require the "imaginary" plane. This is what the both-and-neither fractal is intended to account for; a sort of meta-logical landscape. At minimum, we must acknowledge the necessarily incommensurable status of the view from the inside and the view from the outside.

2. THEORY (taking the above metatheory into account): Explanatory schemes with any legitimacy can be conceived as points in a conceptual space (the both-and-neither fractal) connected by continua that represent assumption switches. Each point represents a completed point of view -- a mass of logical deductions and inductions based on a given self-consistent set of assumptions {A1} constructed to account for some specific set of facts {F1}. These assumptions necessarily have "side effects": newly deduced facts {S1} that go beyond the mere boundaries of {F1}. That is, {A1} implies {F1} union {S1}).

{S1} is of great interest if all or some of its elements are consistent with the actual world. That would be our ultimate validation for taking on {A1}. By altering or even contradicting one assumption or another (i.e. moving around in the conceptual-assumption space and resulting in {A2}), and then trying to account for the same set of facts {F1}, a new tree of deductions develops that will intentionally include {F1} and other side effect facts {S2} which will almost certainly differ greatly from {S1}. See the Both and Neither diagram. If my hunch is correct, both set {S1} and set {S2} will include much that seems intuitively or factually correct even if individual elements of S1 and S2 are mutually exclusive. See "the flow of x in one direction is a flow of anti-x in the opposite direction." No one point in the space is a be-all and end-all. The fullest picture is achieved by moving fluidly through the space of points. There is no correct set of assumptions. Example. Things change and things stay the same. This is a simple observed fact. We might take the assumption "things change spontaneously unless they are prevented from doing so" or we could take the opposite tack "things stay the same unless something forces them to change."

3. MODEL (taking the above theory into account): The Bubble and Beacon model posits multilayered selves as the primary objects of reality, influence as the primary substance, and consciousness as the primary condition. An important assumption switch involved here has to do with the prime directive of the selves: either "The self must preserve itself" or "The self must reproduce/extend itself." From the Bubble perspective, the prime motivation is to preserve and reinforce the self and maintain its steady state by trying to undo the effects of the outside world (non-self), just as a bubble's internal pressure undoes disruptions to its naturally spherical state. In the Beacon case, the self is more interested in disturbing the bubbles of others, to expand or reproduce the self, to have an influence. Put your own spin on the incoming influence and "reflect" it as an atom absorbs a photon and releases one of its own.

These two perspectives, by the way, encompass the two most typical kinds of pathological "selfishness": creepy self-protection and dickish domination. I also believe they can be naturally extended to subsume ostensible selflessness by defining selves more inclusively -- the protection and clout of my family, my nation, my species, my galaxy. That is, even apparent selflessness is selfish in this way. My claim is that these two prime directives (Bubble & Beacon) are remarkably consistent and can each account for many of the same facts we see in the world ranging from the laws of physics to human relationships. See The Allegory of the Cafe. That is, they are complementary and quasi-equivalent perspectives -- self-protection and self-extension are, surprisingly, two sides of the same coin. In defending our space, we make the world over in our own image. At the same time, in influencing others, we solidify, codify, concretize our own selfhood. The Beacon's message of "Be like me" has the same effect as the Bubble's note-to-self "Stop becoming like them."

I put a lot of weight on a series of ideas where the connections will probably seem tenuous to philosophically minded readers (see below). Maybe I can strengthen those connections

1) selves are like bubbles ->

2) their shapes are distorted by unspecified bombardment of influence from other selves, from subselves, from superselves, from nonselves->

3) consciousness is consciousness of those distortions. In an act of self-preservation, selves push back on the distortions->

4) in the case of actual bubbles, the pushing back is a simple matter of internal air pressure that seeks equilibrium. In the case of selves, the pushing back is by my lights an odd combination of things which I may metaphorically group together under the banner of description, explanation, expression, justification:

a) if the distortions are physical (being knocked off balance by the wind, being injured in a fall, being pushed aside by a person in a hurry) there is one suite of responses (planting one's feet to maintain balance, healing, getting back on your own path)

b) if the distortions are mental (hearing a friend's opinion, feeling intimidated, seeing an ad for the next fashionable thing) a different set of behaviors kick in -- explanation (returning to flatness), description (unwriting), expression (rejecting what presses), justification (evening up).

Both and Neither (The H-Fractal)

I refer to the both-and-nether diagram fairly often. For me, it’s an idealized vision of the landscape of theories that can be developed through assumption switching.

Below is a 13th level diagram. The infiniteth level is a space-filling, self-similar fractal of my own invention, I think. [Oops, some research shows this is a well-known curve, the H-Fractal. I'm still quite sure I discovered it independently. It first appears in my notebooks around 1980 -- a little before I'd ever heard of fractals. Apparently, the shape has some significance in the design of microchips and micro-antennae. My application is quite different as explained below.]

I stopped at level 13 so that you can see the structure. I picture this thing as the space of all maps. Suppose that a line segment (of length x) represents a continuum between descriptors A and ~A. For example, look at the thick horizontal line in the middle of this image. As we slide from one end to the other a representation of yin becomes a representation of yang, good becomes evil, love becomes hate, levity becomes gravity. That is, each line segment represents a quality that has poles of difference. Now add a new dimension by imagining that each endpoint of that continuum is replaced by a new continuum at right angles to the first (with a length of x divided by the square root of two in order to keep the curve from running into itself). An interpretation will follow shortly. Continue in this way. That is, replace each successive endpoint with a shorter, perpendicular line segment. Here I've made longer lines thicker as well so one can better see the bones. This variable thickness messes up the space-filling aspect a bit. You can see the thickest lines are already making contact with the shortest ones. In the ideal representation, no line segment has any direct contact with any other segments except its immediate "parent" and two "offspring." The 2 to the n endpoints create a grid of dots that fills the rectangle more thoroughly for each new value of n. Two things to notice: 1) the paths from every endpoint to the center of the diagram all have exactly the same length (approaching (2 + sqrt(2))*x); 2) The graph is self-similar.

Both-and-neither diagram

In my specialized interpretation, each endpoint represents a different perspective from which the world can legitimately be described. Each line segment is a continuum or spectrum ranging from utterly x to utterly not-x. The world is both that understood from one such point or another but obviously not entirely from either. Both both-and-neither and neither both-nor-neither.

This diagram gives an illuminating way to pack many dimensions into just two. Because of the unique scaling, each nonintersecting perpendicular of a particular length can stand for a different variable or idea. One gains a tremendous amount of simplicity and comprehensibility -- just try to picture 13 dimensions in some other way -- but of course much is lost as well. For example, the represented 13D plane doesn't have what mathematicians call a metric. We'd like nearness to indicate similarity; we'd like distance to have an interpretation. But here two very near points can be parts of two very distant branchings. Perhaps there is an interpretation that preserves a sort of mysterious metric, but it isn't clear to me how one would go about it. Maybe there's a discovery to be had there. I take it back. Nearness along the curve does have meaning; it's only when you venture from one point on the curve to another through white space that the metric is completely lost. Since ultimately there is no white space maybe this isn't a problem.

This may at first seem to be a stretch to my reader, but for me, this diagram is a nice representation of the map-territory relationship. Each endpoint/segment can stand for a particular map, a particular and definite way of describing the world (the LRRLLLRLRRLL perspective), and the collection of them for all the switched and/or hedged versions (see elsewhere) of the map. The territory is described by all of the maps but by none of them very well. Each is simultaneously an overstatement and an understatement. Each connected pair sets up a both-and-neither situation. Both yin and yang and neither yin nor yang. A pair of connected pairs gives a "both both-and-neither and neither both-nor-neither". Ad nauseam. In toto, the collection of maps gives a super map that represents the territory better -- if only we could understand it with our feeble seven-plus-or-minus-two minds. Martians may be better at seeing the point.

The image resonates for me, but interpreting the diagram in this way can be tricky to instantiate. I'll settle here for a slightly different and more mundane interpretation.

Let me describe a super map of, for example, political perspectives using this imagery. I'll only go to a 3rd level diagram with eight endpoints (see below) to keep things relatively manageable. I'll use right and left in their political senses. (More commonly I have yin on the left and yang on the right.) The right end might be small-and-decentralized government and the left big-and-centralized government. So this first dimension is about someone's preferred degree of government involvement or control. A second dimension might involve something about the emphasis on individual good (right) versus collective good (left).

The small government preference/perspective could thus split off into small government with a collective sense of the good (tribalism/communalism) above and small-individual (libertarian/free-market-capitalism) below. Likewise, big government splits toward socialism above and liberal democracy below.

Another dimension might involve secularism (left) versus sacredness (right). With a little imagination, one can picture libertarians splitting into those who, on the one hand, find that regulation is inefficient and stifles the production of wealth and, on the other hand, those who object to governmental intrusions in their private lives and beliefs. That's one of four splits at this level. How might communalism split? Efficiency and profit through cooperation and teamwork rather than competition (the old Japanese business model) versus the communalism of the Amish, serving God and the good through group effort. Two down. There are secular and spiritual versions of socialism -- Sweden versus the Quakers maybe? The so-called East Coast media liberal elites are a sort of secular big government individualism. Who will exemplify the eighth and final node of my diagram sacred-big-individual? Maybe militaristic interventionist nationalists. If we were to go on, a fourth dimension might be freedom (right) vs. rights (left) and the eight nodes would have to become 16.

Let me summarize the examples above:

1) Small-government collectivist secularism [(RLL) Japanese business model]

2) Small-government collectivist spiritualism[(RLR) Amish, tribe]

3) Small-government individualist secularism [(RRL) free marketeers]

4) Small-government individualist spiritualism [(RRR) the Freemen]

5) Large-government collectivist secularism [(LLL) Sweden]

6) Large-government collectivist spiritualism [(LLR) Quakers]

7) Large-government individualist secularism [(LRL) upper middle class liberal Democrats]

8) Latge-government individualist spiritualism [(LRR) Americanism spreaders like Dick Cheney]

This effort is a little lame, but I hope the point of the exercise is clear enough. The diagram embodies multiple perspectives in a rational way that reminds us of the relativity of each perspective while also reminding us of the monolithic territory (white space) on which is all rests. For any one place, there's only one way to organize a government.

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All Possible Maps

Over the last 50 years, I've spent an awful lot of time daydreaming about it, so I want finally to try to develop a picture of the space of all possible maps -- ones that show insight, accuracy, connection, etc. to the territory.

This effort is bound to be connected to the Allegory of the Cafe, the implicate order, Joelesque taoism, and especially the both-and-neither diagram. My ultimate inspiration might be my teenage whimsy I called the Melonquescence -- the set of all things that have yet to be imagined -- which itself must have been inspired by brief exposure to Russell's paradoxical set of all sets that aren't members of themselves.

First, a few premises.

•The map is not the territory. Duh.

•A nascent map of certain aspects of the territory can be developed from assumptions in a somewhat Euclidean manner. That is, they grow out of the assumptions 1) by deductions from those first principles, but also 2) by inductions based on evidence (which is itself interpreted through the lens of the assumptions). Change the assumptions and change the maps that develop, obviously. Furthermore,

•There are no correct assumptions. Only a God could have made any set of assumptions correct. There is no way to hold up a particular assumption to evidence and decide if it's a good one. Occam's Razor is ultimately irrelevant to truth -- it just helps we poor human thinkers deal with the immensity of the task. Thus, statements that seem patently false can be legitimate assumptions. In that case, the complement of other assumptions might be built around why the first assumption isn't really false.

•Thus, we can come up with a reasonable sort of set of assumptions and create a galaxy of maps to cover the gamut of observations (via deduction, invention, reverse engineering). Maybe the totality of Euclidean geometry would make a good example of a galaxy in this sense. There is a huge and perpetually growing collection of theorems derived from Euclid's axioms and the "laws of logic." These theorems stretch tentacles into all sorts of geometrical realities.

Such a map galaxy exists within a universe of many, many such galaxies such as various non-Euclidean geometries. The universe of map galaxies is a rational set of points (metaphorically at least) that approach the irrational (or real) points of the territory (which can't itself be legitimately thought of as a space since IT lacks essential mapness)

I am particularly interested in

•a good process for generating sets of assumptions that lead to map galaxies. What I call Assumption Switching is one such process. Various yin-for-yang switches from say standard scientific assumptions lead to galaxies intimately tied (orthogonal maybe) to those standard galaxies

•the structure of the relationship between galaxies. The relationships are a big part of the ultimate meta-map; a claim which I'll have to justify at some point.

Example of a standard assumption, informally expressed: Things change only when caused to do so. The world is implicitly reluctant and inert and must be coaxed or coerced to act, so we are interested mainly in explaining the circumstances that lead to change. In the simplest and oldest interpretation, change manifests only through force (i.e. coercion).

Switch from that assumption: There are many, many to choose from. The most extremely antithetical to the former assumption, and thus the one I have the most fun with is "Everything is trying to happen at once." Rather than being inert, the world is intensely alive, fecund, and creative. Talk about the set of all sets! Now we will be interested in explaining how some things sometimes remain unchanged, how anti-jump muscles flex. There's no use asking this theory to explain what mechanism makes everything try to happen at once -- it's an assumption.

I hope that the ridiculousness of this new assumption inspires you to see the equal ridiculousness of the former. Neither would seem to represent how things actually behave. The observable world is predominantly neither about change nor stasis. I like to say that the territory is egalitarian. As in any interesting case, both A and the opposite of A are embodied in the world. Our tendency -- maybe even our psychological or linguistic need -- is to pick one side of the debate as natural or original and thus not to be explained, and the other side as unnatural or derivative and in need of explanation. Logic moves in a line from A to B but the world the logic illuminates does not. A and B were always there from the start. Logical deductions perform miracles, but they ultimately produce phony naratives.

Let me briefly address "Everything is trying to happen at once" so that it might sound a little less absurd. If there's an inherent impulse to move object X to the left, there's also another impulse to move object X to the right. One can imagine that the impulses cancel each other out. Imagine a circle of electric fans pointing toward the center of a circle occupied by a beach ball. The ball is stuck there, maybe jiggling a bit in the turbulent airflow -- like quantum indeterminacy or Brownian motion. Now turn off one fan. The imbalance leads to movement toward the turned off fan -- voila, change! Likewise, the seething undercurrents of contradictory sociopolitical wills in a nation (fans standing for fanatics) tend to cancel each other out peacefully on the beach ball of state until one or more of the factions stops blowing or another one starts blowing harder when radical changes begin to happen. Maybe vacuum cleaners are more apt than fans. By this view, time/history is the slow leaking of events allowed by asymmetric canceling impulses. Almost everything gets canceled out by the saturation of fans blowing in different directions. There are lots of situations that do seem to depend on imperfect cancellation of myriad tendencies -- through, for example, the sum of probability amplitudes in quantum mechanics. Stasis and change are statistical -- probabilities tending toward certitude through large numbers.

Well, as in most of my writing, so far there's been nothing but tangents all the way up! I promised to develop a picture of the space of all maps. Have I even begun to do that? [Don't beat yourself up, Joel. You're good enough and strong enough, and, gosh darn it, you have important things to say. If nothing else, you're exhibiting everything-trying-to-happen-at-once in your head! Narrative linearity is overrated. This is philosophical poetry, popping out little jabs of insight that cannot be sustained. Does that diminish the value of the insight. Well, yeah, but not entirely.] I guess I'll take whatever moments of lucidity I can muster. Okay, I can proceed now...

Okay, we have these assumption-driven galaxies. There are a countable infinity of such galaxies, even if deterministic science wants us to believe that only one of them is correct. Does this even begin to cover all of the points in the space of all maps. Doubtful. I just compared the infinite list to the rational numbers that come plenty close to touching all the points but only account for a set of measure zero. That might be about right. Again I am thinking of my both-and-neither diagram which is an H-fractal in a 1 x 1.414 rectangle. That rectangular area is the set of all maps. and the H-fractal extends its tentacles deeper and deeper, but only the unrealized limit extends to all the "irrational" points. Each path from the center moving outward taking a series of increasingly frequent right and left turns represents a galaxy. each turn is a binary choice of yin or yang orientation on a single (axiomatic) question (like "Does the preferred governmental policy-making structure involve few or many people?" or "Does one's ability distinguish the weights of two handheld objects primarily involve absolute or relative differences?". That is, questions about things that have endlessly debatable consequences.)

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A few other observations:

1) As here, analysis leads to splitting, which leads to subtlety and novel juxtapositions, which with luck leads to insight. We like things in black and white, but the more you analyze, the grayer it gets, the more strange the bedfellows.

2) I want also to point at the relationship between reality and our descriptors for reality (like left and right). Ultimately, this relationship which we assume to be sound and stable is kind of arbitrary and bound to collapse.

My politics are both right and left, and neither right nor left. Both both-and-neither and neither both-nor-neither.

It's very hard for me to go on to a fourth dimension with 16 examples. That's the law of 7 plus or minus 2 again (see elsewhere). People just aren't designed to think that minutely.

I've done other "octets" like this. My dichotomy is more likely to be yin-and-yang or love-and-will than right-and-left, but it doesn't really matter. Here's one I'll be making up on the fly.

dimension 1 LR: The "naturalness" of change versus stasis. Isolated coercive forces vs. cancellation of persistent universal tendencies

dimension 2 RL: determinism vs. indeterminacy. The pre-existence of the future vs. the unfolding of novelty

dimension 3 LR: consciousness is fundamental vs. consciousness is epiphenomenal

RRR Stasis-determinism-epi : "hard" Newtonian mechanistic science of universal mathematical laws and thus strong AI

RRL Stasis-det-consc: Cartesian dualism?

RLR Stasis-indet-epi: Quantum reality?

RLL Stasis-indet-consc: Western mysticism?

too hard after this.

Cogito

Because of my person predilections, I always feel compelled to start studies from scratch, trying to build the whole of my philosophical system from a single starting point — unrealistic and misguided though this may be. I am in the habit of thinking that the best insights come near the beginning (see The Multiplication Rule). However, this method tends to impede progress, to say the least. Well, here I go again.

My ultimate starting point may be the one Descartes made famous: I think therefore I am. It seems to me that people — those straw persons of my imagination — thoroughly misinterpret this statement. They think of it as supporting rationality over emotionalism or something — "thought/rationality is what makes me me." But "cogito ergo sum" merely affirms that there can be no better evidence of existence than the fact that one experiences stuff. I can doubt many things, but I seem unable to doubt that there is an I having an experience. I can have all sorts of doubts about what it is exactly that I'm experiencing or what the nature is of everything that is-and-isn't me and what the relationship is between me and the stuff that I experience. I can also wonder about the existence of other people experiencing things as I do, although I don't find that a particularly fruitful doubt to ponder. But even if the world is just a dream, there is still a dreamer dreaming it. Even if I'm a brain in a vat whose world is shaped by Martian scientists (speaking of unfruitful hypotheses), I still experience something and thus exist. Consciousness can't be an illusion, because only conscious beings can have an illusion.

That is as close to a sure thing as I can imagine. If the task is to build up a list of sure things from first principles, then this effort is well begun. As we try to reconstruct knowledge on a sound footing, where do we go from here? It's actually really difficult to move much beyond this super-sure statement. All the rest is presumption and conjecture.

But this start does strongly suggest some metaphors that I have found fruitful to ponder. As I said, I am less sure about the contents of my awareness, but I am pretty sure they represent something real and out there. The most abstract way to describe the "cogito" world view is as a separation, a cleaving of the world into me and not me — the experiencer and that being experienced. Mystics will claim that I've already made an error in lending reality to this separation, and I actually sympathize: not one to accept absolutes am I. That is, this separation is just a point of view, but that point of view is all I'm really sure of (see above). One way to regard the separation assumes there are maps (mental and physical representations) and territories (things being represented). I can't seem to do without this assumption. I believe, although without anything approaching certainty, that all maps — and yes I've reduced all of mental life to map-making — are based on assumptions or perhaps metaphors, just as mathematical proofs are based on postulates. If cogito is my first postulate, the map-territory distinction is my second.

This cleaving of the world further implies a boundary, a frontier, a perimeter to the I that separates it from whatever otherness might exist — the air, the desk, the continent, my wife, my species, etc. The maps develop from what source? Occurrences at this boundary, duh. The image that I'm most comfortable with is that the boundary is a sort of bubble that is subject to slings and arrows from the outside and potentially from the inside as well. All the maps are inside the bubble and the territories are everywhere (and nowhere since whereness is in maps and not in territories). Further, rather than identifying the self with the interior of the bubble, I tend to think of the self as this boundary itself; experience happens on the bubble, not in it, and experience is all I have to go on. The interior is as remote and inaccessible as the exterior and things are as weightless in there as they are in the hollow earth (Hollow Earth). The inside could be the home of unconscious stirrings and a million internet influencers (sub-bubbles?), but none of that quite deserves the label of self.

Okay, I'm an experiencing bubble. Geez! A bubble in the pudding, perhaps, rather than a pebble in the void.

What am I experiencing? I surprise myself by concluding that the best way to answer this question is not to say that I experience the outside world but that I experience only my own state or, more specifically, disruptions of my own state. Kind of solipsistic, but how could it be otherwise working from my bubble assumption? Any other way of saying it sounds like spooky action at a distance. At the very least I would have to violate my newly established boundary between me and the other to actually have direct access to the other. Perhaps it is fair and wise to say, within this metaphor, I experience the shape of my bubble. And I experience traces of the world outside or inside only to the extent that this other stuff deforms my bubble. You might think that I'm just talking about sense data here but no: Sense data sounds all digital and electronic with little detectors at discrete locations signaling the CPU rather than like the analog and messy thing that I picture. Also, reverberations from this morning's confrontation with your boss or alarming reports in this afternoon's news are disturbances to the bubble and have precious little to do with sense data. I haven't gotten to the level of machinery and senses yet and have deliberately left things abstract and metaphorical. I have a secret agenda here in describing it this way. I want to leave room for a sort of deeper level of reality that extends far beyond (or at least is distant from) the senses — like Bohm's implicate order or Leibniz's Monadology or Plato's world of ideal forms outside the allegorical cave. The bubble exists in an abstract place which isn't the space of physics (what Bohm would call the explicate order). The bubble space must relate to or give rise to physical space at some point but the two needn't be identical to each other. In any event, you don't have to take this imagery as seriously as I do. Just treat it as a toy model, a tool of imagination.

By the way, there's a reason I chose the image of a bubble rather than say a dome or a lump of clay or a shell or a wiffleball to stand for the self. A bubble implies not just a surface but also internal pressure that pushes back on deformations. More on that shortly. Perhaps it shouldn't be an airy, elastic, and delicate bubble but a heavy and fuzzy tennis ball. Or something in between.

The world deforms the bubble. What now? Where does experience come in? Well, at this point my assumptions and complications really start to multiply. And as assumptions multiply, uncertainties and divergences, sources of disagreement grow geometrically (not exponentially!).... We started a moment ago with a kind of certainty and already things are obscure and endlessly debatable. This follows from what I call the multiplication rule: Even if each layer of assumption has a strong 90% validity, the logical deductions based on three such layers would have only .9 to the third power (or 73%) validity. In no time one is down to near zero, but we may go on theorizing!

I could choose to identify the bubble with consciousness and say the awareness of my state is direct and simple, but intuition tells me otherwise. My deeper inaccessible being (beneath the surface ego) seems more related to the internal pressure than to the surface itself. If there is a sort of elan vital in my picture of reality, it is this bubble's internal pressure. In any event, my stand on the relationship between the surface of the bubble and consciousness is about to get a little more complicated.

I've already alluded a few times to the idea that maps are based on assumptions, and this is as good a time as any to say that I believe we have a certain amount of freedom in choosing those assumptions. And I don't mean freedom as in free will exactly. The freedom is more about lack of definiteness. The territory isn't especially particular and doesn't demand the use of specific or correct maps. All explanations are Ptolemaic (Ptolemaic). Most readers will be familiar with the idea of yin and yang. I will find it convenient to make two (or four or eight) versions of pretty much every idea that is to follow by occasionally swapping yin and yang orientations (Both and Neither). To oversimplify things, I will assume at some point that the world is at base quiet and unchanging, and I'll need to explain noise and change. Later, the assumptions and explicands will swap places, and it will be changelessness that must be explained. You'll get the idea once we run through a few of these.

Now I want to introduce a specialized use of three words — explain, describe, and express — that I will sometimes write as ex-plain, de-scribe, and ex-press to distinguish the usual versions from these nonstandard ones. The metaphor that these new words embody works off my bubble imagery and stakes a claim to a sort of etymology for the usual uses of those words. If awareness or consciousness or experience — these nebulous words that are so hard to define and to distinguish from each other — is tied up with changes to the shape of my bubble, so too are they tied up with ex-plaining, de-scribing, and ex-pressing. The metaphoric use of these words refers to smoothing things out. Ex-plain = flatten; de-scribe = unwrite; ex-press = remove what presses. The world ruffles my feathers, and, rejecting that disturbance, I try to smooth them out again. If you were not to smooth out the influences, the consequences could be dire; the bubble might burst or wobble out of control like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The way I experience the world is by ex-plaining, de-scribing, and ex-pressing the effects the world has had on the shape of my bubble. So my consciousness is part of a homeostatic process that undoes what has been done to me, and my representation of the world is a doubly inverse version of the actual world: An outside event makes a sort of death mask impression or a seat-butt impression on my bubble; that's the first inversion. I push out the impression and get my image of that external cause from deconstructing it; that's the second. I imagine what could have made such an impression in the first place (a face or a butt, e.g.). There's detective work involved here and guessing and feedback and lots of biology. I.e., precious little certainty or absoluteness. The Prime Directive for the experiencer from this point of view is to preserve the self by preserving its steady state. That is, all of what I've described above is done in the service of keeping my bubble as it is. I am a bubble that gets distorted by bombardment from the world, and my conscious life is all about bringing things back to normal, like the pressure within an actual bubble does.

This version of things, carried out on a larger scale, makes up what I call the Allegory of the Cafe or the World of Describers. The world is an Internet cafe, with people sitting at their tables absorbed by their screens and wearing noise-canceling headphones to enjoy their music. The clatter of plates, the street noises, the conversations of passersby, social concerns, etc. threaten to distract the patrons from their solipsistic enjoyment of self-selected influences — music, podcasts, cat videos, Twitter. The headphones counteract or smooth out the incoming noise by creating subtle noise of their own that cancel out the other sounds, at least in the vicinity of the patrons' own ears. That's how noise-canceling headphones work, if I need to mansplain it to you. Outside of those small regions near the ears, i.e., between the tables and among the wait staff, the noise is actually subtly increased by the anti-noise put out by the headphones, which is itself a slightly out of phase time-delayed de-scription of what was there already, like a weird game of telephone. And this second order noise created by the headphones necessitates increased noise cancellation among one's neighbors. Side-effect echoes of noise is a major part of the stuff of this world. The noise-antinoise interplay feeds back on itself endlessly. The inner worlds of the patrons are relatively quiet (the hollow earth again), but the outer world is a potential cacophony or plenum of influences. That's right, the territory is full of everything ever described! In this image, a big part of the stuff of the world is just a side effect, collateral damage inflicted by a process designed to quiet things down locally. To project back from this metaphorical world to the real world, substitute influence for noise and ex-planation/de-scription for anti-noise. By the way, the selves in this scenario aren't the people in the cafe; they are the headphones or the headphone/person system!

In the last few paragraphs, I have followed the yin assumption that the primary role of consciousness is to further the interests of the self by preserving the self by smoothing out or minimizing changes, but that's only half (?) the story. If that were the way the world truly were, it would be a timid, closed-off, mechanical place. But the yang aspect of the self also wants to further its interests, albeit in a complementary manner. It desires to be recognized, expand it's influence, reproduce itself, aggrandize itself, take over the world, become corrupted by power. Here the self is more beacon than bubble. We aren't patrons of a cafe; we're wolves on hilltops howling at the Moon, or teenagers perpetually taking selfies. "Here I am! Check me out. Be like me! Succumb to my will! Don't mess with me! Make way. Like my Instagram photo. I'm working on my brand. Like me!" This version furthers the interests of the self by creating disturbances to the bubbles of others. As one pushes one's agenda, there are new sorts of disturbances to the bubble (self-caused, internally caused) that need to be dealt with. That ambient cacophony at the cafe which I called a side effect of noise cancellation is now the whole reason we're at the cafe — to see and be seen — and the side effect is the relative stability or quiet of the self. Our explanations aren't about fending off the outside world here; instead they become justifications and rationalizations of the changes that we wreak. In the previously sketched World of Describers model, outside influence was a side-effect left over from cancellation. Here the side-effect is the self's influence on the self. That is, the result of my broadcasting "Be like me" is that I become more like me in bootstrap fashion; it reinforces the self and builds up the boundary between self and other. The constant thing spanning these two models is the internal pressure of the bubble. Constant pushing out both flattens the surface and influences the outside world by utilizing the energy of the incoming energy judo-style.

I want to emphasize that these two models — Bubble and Beacon — are both trying to depict the same territory using the same data points, but the orientations of the descriptions are inverse or complementary. That is, I'm not talking about two distinct pieces of the territory but two equivalent descriptions of a single piece. This will probably require a lot more explaining. All in due time.

In looking over what I've written here, a third major postulate/ingredient of the Joel Nanni universe —after cogito and Map-Territory — is influence; the primary currency of exchange between the various selves is influence. Me influencing the world and rejecting and/or accommodating influence from the larger world. I think of influence as the vector form of scalar information. Information is to influence as energy is to force. I'll describe this in more detail eventually.

So the self is both bubble and beacon. "Don't try to change me; in fact, why don't you act a little more like me." I claim that both these versions of the self are equally valid, representing only an exchange of foreground and background. That is, they may each be the basis for further deductions. But... they are mutually contradictory re the world of maps, so we must be careful to leave them in their separate realms, lest the contradictions manifest themselves in the deductions. Later, when the deducing is over, we may be able to superimpose or combine insights so gained and start to circumscribe the possibilities of reality or maybe selfhood, but only just start. That's my assumption switching concept in a nutshell.

I have just described a binary view of the self — bubble and beacon — but, unfortunately, one has ultimately to add another entire dimension. These two images of beacon and bubble put together still paint a picture of a lonely, isolated world which trades only in brute competing influences. What of sharing and communication, community, and empathy? In these latter cases, influence is still a primary commodity, but the stakes have changed. The influence is being accommodated, shared, and mutually developed rather than inflicted or applied or canceled out. To get to that fuller picture of reality, we have to understand selfhood in a broader, fuzzier way with nestings and collectives of selves. Ultimately there are more than just selves or at least more than just individual (human) selves. In what's been described so far in terms of monolithic bubble/beacons, we are complementarily pushing out influence and fending it off. In this next layer, we may be sucking in influence or sharing it or mutually producing it, subordinating the smoothness of one's bubble to the smoothness of a super-bubble. The unit of analysis will cease to be an individual self, and we individual selves cease to be fundamentally selfish. We begin perhaps to be part of a loving dyad where influence is exchanged and accepted. Or we begin to surrender to a larger self — one idea, one family, one tribe, one city, one nation, one species, all of existence (often at odds with other families, tribes, etc.). That is, I originally described conscious bubbles as if they were people. Well, that was because individual people are the things we think of as conscious beings. If a family, for example, qualified as a conscious bubble too, what sort of consciousness could it have? Lacking an integrated brain, how subtle could its actions and reactions be? Not very subtle, I guess. This fits my experience though. Dynamics within my own family are systematic and undeniable but weird, mechanical, and often foolish. That is, my family acts as if it had a mind of its own but only a rather stupid mind. The way I act is utterly different in my various roles as a child, sibling, spouse, parent, employee, teammate, citizen. Often, I find it difficult to behave as an intelligent, individuated self when I'm with various parts of my family. That is, the extent to which I surrender my sovereignty to a larger self is the extent to which my behavior becomes that of a roughly brainless drone. Or a hooligan at a soccer match. Certainly the metaphor of bubbles becomes less apt when incorporating families (.9 to the tenth power), and perhaps it breaks down utterly — bubbles aren't parts of other bubbles — but these bubbles never did exist in normal 3-dimensional space anyway. It's a metaphor! In a sufficiently abstract space, one can certainly say that a family is like a bubble, just as one can say that a person is like a bubble or a hydrogen atom is like a bubble, and that the people in a family are like bubbles within a larger bubble. That is, collective bubbles don't need to be made of individual bubbles but only to contain them. My subselves are bubbles in my bubble and I am in the bubble of my superselves' bubbles. Nesting Russian dolls of selfhood.

The issue of brains is a good one. A self worth its salt may need to have one, but it appears that all levels of selfhood lack one except the level of individual organism. Douglas Hofstadter and others have tried to paint a picture of an ant colony as a having or being a sort of brain where the individual ants themselves are sort of slow-acting neurons. Maybe. An atom of hydrogen may have a consciousness of a sort — I posit that it does. It may be a bubble and a beacon, but its repertoire of behaviors, de-scriptions, and ex-planations would necessarily be rather limited since is has no brains let alone language, memory, or hands. [Some collective consciousnesses do have metaphorical hands!]

And let's also focus for a moment on our relationship with our sub-selves rather than super-selves — organs, cells, perhaps even multiple personalities (or Minsky's society of mind or the bus-load of selves model). They sometimes cooperate with me and sometimes rebel against me (a la cancer), they accept my influence and reject it. They may apply their own influence on me — witness the heart transplant patient who undergoes a personality change or the person who stops eating pizza because the digestive system says no. Those who believe that genes are destiny may feel that those selfish little bastards are influencing me rather strongly. My sub-selves are bubbles within my bubble, and my super-selves are bubbles my bubble finds itself within.

How exactly one can surrender one's bubble to a greater bubble, I don't know. If I suggest it's through a kind of resonance, will you laugh?

MT Theorizing

It seems to be impossible for me to settle on any final disposition to take toward the relationship between my experience and the world at large, between things internal and things external, between what we think with and what we think about. Here's an octet of competing grand MT (Map-Territory) theories.

1. The Apeman MT: Come on! We're just a bunch of less-hairy monkeys running around flinging poop at passers-by and writing books about our itchy crotches. How can we have managed to come across and understood anything true or absolute about the world? The very idea of understanding is itself a ridiculous joke. The Martians are laughing at us! And God is laughing at them! And the godless universe in which we reside is laughing at Her! The world is queerer than we can imagine! How does a species even go about evolving a capacity for final or meaningful knowledge? What we call knowledge is just the glintings of neurons in one tiny corner of the universe. One grunt means hand, another means east, a third means horny. How do we get from there to expressing our feelings about our favorite TV show or writing down an equation that allows us to predict when the comet will return? Can't say. Despite my susceptibility to nearsighted speciesism and the seeming truth of my own thoughts, you can't ever really convince me that anything we think we know has any sort of universality. Hubris! We have cobbled together an impressive array of mental behaviors (for a monkey) that produce our peculiar world, but none of that qualifies as understanding — only self-deception and illusion added to intentionality. Our most sophisticated maps are as a three-year-old's crayon scribblings compared to... compared to something, I'm sure! The very notion of a meaningful conception of maps and territories (qua maps and territories) is undoubtedly impossible (for Martians and Bodhisattvas too) and/or beyond us.

Belief in any degree of meaningful theoretical knowledge involves swallowing a sort of miracle: maps can somehow give true insight into the territory, a good simulation of event x is equal to event x. I'm not quite ready, in this frame of mind, to give myself over to this miracle. Thus, my answer to the question "What is the relationship between our mental representations and the world we seem to be aware of? "Whuh?"

2. Platonic Idealism MT. There is a deeper reality beyond our minds, but it isn't atoms and the void, not the world of matter. It's a world of permanent forms whose shadows or projections or intersections-with-the-physical-plane we see dancing on the walls of the cave. This MT theory is related to my Allegory of the Cafe and Leibniz's Monadology and Bohm's Implicate Order. They all imply that our participation in the very dynamics that the territory puts out preclude any possibility of unmediated exposure to the deepest stuff. We are, in a sense self-blinding. (In the case of the Allegory of the Cafe, the very purpose of our noise-canceling headphones is to the keep out influence from everywhere else, so its no surprise to discover that they make poor instruments for hearing the things that are actually out there). We are only aware of phenomena (the product of the monads, etc.) on the surface of our bubbles, while the underlying sources of the phenomena (the noumena and/or the interiors of the monads themselves) are forever inaccessible (windowless). We can understand the phenomena in a manner of speaking but absolutely no progress can be made toward the Absolute. And it's not necessarily as simple as if there is some noumenon X that we experience as phenomenon x. The plural totality of {X} may give rise to a singular x at some point in spacetime. This unbrigeable separation isn't something to be fretted over, however; it's just the way it is. So, in the end, this MT is indeed em-tee. We can no more know about the relationship between maps and territories than we can about the territories themselves. (A mystic might say that we can turn off the cancellation function of our headphones and some of the world can sneak in unscathed. Which leads to...)

3. The Transcendental/Jedi MT: Maps are perpetually illusory, something to be overcome or bypassed or transcended to achieve direct contact with Being. There is no try, no rational approach to understanding the nature of the deeper reality, but through meditation on it or contemplation of it or total immersion in it, wisdom can be achieved. What is the intellectual manifestation of this enlightenment? That is, are there enlightened thoughts? Can the Buddha come back from a transcendent state and talk to us about it? I would think not, except to grant Her the ability to say with certainty, "No, that idea betrays such and such an illusion." The most we can ask for is that we come to regard our explanations and descriptions with the just the right of blend of skepticism and belief -- and that would be pretty good!

Perhaps the living world is undergirded or sustained by a sea of Force consisting in the conscious energies of all beings. Deep connection between the individual and the Force which bypasses maps leads to great power for Good ... or Evil.

4. The NT MT: In the beginning was the word (logos, i.e. maps). The world is made of or through the speech of God (as in "Let there be light"). Humans (unlike other animals) are also endowed with this godlike capacity of speech, this intimate connection with the Divine Territory. Words are prayers and incantations, and the Universe is a text written by God to be read by us. The world was created in order to be understood by the righteous. This MT theory is an ingenious and satisfying settlement of the big MT question. That is, there is no Territory but that which arose mutually with its appropriate set of maps at the dawn of creation. God said, "Let there be light," so that the nature of light itself is forever bound up with the word "light." This isn't very far from Einstein's God who doesn't play dice with the universe. That is, the MT connection is mysterious (since it must be taken on faith that God is creating and sustaining that connection), but the world is comprehensible nonetheless (since God has made it thus for us). This MT seems in many ways mystical and unscientific, but it leaves lots of room for science to discover the actual laws of Nature rather than the sort of laws we find in the next MT, which explains how science flourished in the Christian Era. Physics can be lawlike, and correct maps correspond to territories perfectly. (See the Correspondence Theory of Truth).

5. The Falsifiability (or Approximation) MT: Maps are provisional approximations of territories. We can compare various versions of these models to the territory and semi-rationally choose the ones that do the best job for the purposes at hand with the predetermined measurement criteria. No model can ever be known to be final or perfect. Thus, we leave aside the question of truth and knowledge as fruitless and unnecessary. We must satisfy ourselves for now with a particular degree of uncertainty, but as science progresses that uncertainty will shrink. Our maps might not be perfectable but they are always improvable. Since statistics trump explanation, we gather the data and generate Fourier-like theories (see 6 below) that account for them. These theories only apply over limited domains.

The Copenhagen interpretation, devised in response to the multiple and unresolvable explanations of quantum mechanics, really extends to everything; measure and then report on your measurements, but be careful saying what it all means. This MT theory is the point of view scientists should emphasize, in my opinion. That is, it's THE science MT. Unfortunately these damn scientists often lend their science credibility to truthy pronouncements that are way out of bounds — We now understand that a spider's behavior is hard-wired in its tiny brain. Really?

6. The Fourier Sledgehammer MT: The relationship between our maps and the territory is arbitrary or unknowable — and possibly meaningless. The only bits of evidence we have about the supposed territory are its effects on our consciousness bubbles. Those effects trace out deformations to the surface of those bubbles we can picture as highly squiggly graphs (This is a metaphor, people!). Our only way of perceiving the deforming events involves pushing back on them (smoothing them out). Get that? We don't know them until we engage with them and analyze them. Thus, our descriptions and explanations are (based on) this cancellation process. Fourier showed that judicious subtraction of sine waves can cancel any deformation as perfectly as we please, like a body shop banging out dents in a fender. Likewise, little wavelets (Gaussian curves) and other stock objects can in practice do the job as well as Fourier's waves. That is, whatever deformation takes place, we can ex-plain it using any of a variety of off-the-shelf candidates (perhaps atoms and forces, God's will, natural selection, sex drives, the dialectic, class struggle, the conspiracy of the illuminati, grace, good vs. evil, spiritual evolution, etc.). The explanation can work (undo the deformation) to any degree of accuracy and yet bear no meaningful relationship to the actual external events that produced the deformation in the first place (if it even makes sense to suppose there is such a thing as an external event). Any such sledgehammer explanation is by its nature parsimonious in that a single off-the-shelf item does all the work. No multiplicity of causes here. All theories that ex-plain things are correct explanations. Do explanations that include mathematically accurate predictions trump the others, truth-wise? Can't say. The accuracy seems to come from greater attention to detail rather than any superiority of technique. From the Fourier metaphor's perspective, most arbitrary explanations should have some applicability beyond the designated area of cancellation — but less and less so the further out we go from the finite interval over which it was calculated. Thus, they can make relatively decent predictions near the domain of cancellation. That is, it shouldn't be too surprising to get decent predictions from arbitrary explanations in some cases, and that might inspire faith in our explanation, but only explanations that somehow reflect the actual nature of the territory being described should produce really good predictions far from their original domain of applicability. Given a bit of determination and resourcefulness, we can invent enough epicycles to make any basic approach work for us. Given the diversity of opinion in the world and the extraordinary degree of satisfaction people derive from sticking to their various crazy positions, it certainly seems to be borne out that almost any dogma will do just fine (if the ultimate criterion for judging a map is the satisfaction of the map's owner -- and I reckon that's as good a criterion as any). The key to understanding might be "doubling down" on our favored point of view until the world gives up. All explanations are Ptolemaic.

7. The Idealism MT. There is no territory and no maps, only mind. Thoughts aren't representations but instead have their own existence. Bypass the middleman for big savings! The apparent truths or scientific laws may be valid, but only for the minds perceiving them. (Frankly, it's hard for me to know what to make of a pure or simple-minded idealism, and I haven't the education or imagination to devise one that isn't simple-minded)

8. The Feeling MT: Reasoning about the nature of the MT relationship is a fool's errand. It is what it is! A holistic, intuitionist approach to thinking is all we have and all we need. Believe or don't believe, act or don't act, but please don't subject me to your tortured philosophical musings. I mean really. How far has all of this gotten you? Empty (MT) theorizing indeed!

My own point of view is a sort of combo drawn from some shifting middle ground between Plato, Fourier, and the Apeman. The typical intelligent person spends most of her time in the Feeling camp but will profess to be in the Falsifiabilty camp.

The Switches

Assumption switching is my prescription for increasing insight. Here are several:

If a statement is true, its opposite must be false.

vs.

Since the world is too rich to be subsumed by any single formal theory, the fullest description of the world involves complementary theories with contradictory assumptions (including the superposition of the two theories generated from these contradictory assumptions).

The world is independent of the maps we have made to describe it.

vs.

The world is part of the process of description and thus consists in maps of a sort.

Things stay the same unless something causes them to change.

vs.

Things change unless they are prevented from doing so.

Events in the present are determined by events in the past.

vs.

The state of a system is attracted toward certain preexisting preferred states (states of least energy, etc.)

Things set processes in motion

vs.

Things are stable processes.

The deepest background of physical space is a passive void in which things and processes play out their interactions

vs.

Space is a plenum which is inseparable from the phenomena of the world

Nothingness is a well-defined concept.

vs.

There is no completely consistent way to represent absence.

Every event A is caused by some set of events A'.

vs.

Coincident events, A and A', arise mutually.

Perception is the passive reception of a separate outside world.

vs.

Conscious perceptions are exchanges.

Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of materialistic processes.

vs.

Matter is all information and influence, and thus consciousness of a type is a fundamental aspect of all events.

To understand a process or an object look to its components.

vs.

To understand a process look to the wholes of which it is part. That is, look at its place in its context.

Forms perpetuate themselves through competition.

vs.

Forms perpetuate themselves by becoming indispensable parts of ecosystems

All but the most fundamental things are made of more primitive components.

vs.

Things participate in their own development.

Fecundity

Most of this essay was written under the conceit of it being a TED Talk

The Axiom of Fecundity:

Every possible event is spontaneously trying to happen right now... and failing mostly.

"Really? That's your Ted Talk thesis?"

Yes, more or less. How's that for a seriously hot take on a seriously cold issue!

My unexpected thesis is, I claim, every bit as true and valid as its more conventional opposite: Nothing happens unless it is caused to do so...except sometimes. What makes the latter believable and the former unbelievable, I think, is merely a matter of our biology, training, and habit rather than a matter of fact. It would hardly be an overstatement to say that our entire Western knowledge system is built around the “nothing” version, so the “everything” version is literally almost unthinkable. My job today is to make it thinkable. You were undoubtedly unaware of having made the choice between the two. But yeah, you have. And if you sit with it for a while, wouldn't you really rather approach the world in a way that emphasizes infinite possibility over dead matter? It's more like the world I see around me for sure. Certainly more like the world of mind where creative possibilities, though sometimes hard to access, are limitless.

Again, my claim is that it is just as valid to say that the universe is absolutely fecund -- an actual plenum of creativity and change -- as to say that it is relatively meek and inert and unfolds only through coercion (i.e. "force"). It is just as valid to say that we must explain why things mostly stay the same as to explain how things sometimes change. Yup, that's my thesis in a nutshell. The facts are these: Things sometimes remain the same and sometimes change. The only question is which of these two conditions is the default circumstance, and which needs to be justified.

Okay, you've got 17 and a half minutes left. Convince them!

Let's bear in mind a few things I'm not saying. I'm not saying that fecundity is true and inertness is false. My belief is merely that the landscape of valid explanatory schemes is broad enough to encompass both approaches. Each can be an axiom -- I like the sound of the Axiom of Fecundity-- in a completely logical descriptive system that will create consistent and comprehensive explanations of a given body of facts. Just don't try to put these contradictory postulates in the same logical system or -- kablooey! -- contradictions everywhere. When I try to picture the explanatory landscapes of the two axioms, I get a Venn diagram with major overlap and major distinctions. With luck, the overlap includes or accounts for all established measurements.

Before we get into it, we probably have to go a bit deeper in the underpinnings first. My deeper claim: The simulated is not the actual. That doesn't sound related to my thesis, but bear with me. We all perpetually confound the map and the territory. The illusion's nearly impossible to overcome and, by the way, it's becoming more and more problematic over recent history as people's experience increasingly comes to involve simulated worlds. That is, if we increasingly spend our mental lives peering at screens, living in simulations that are two steps removed from the territory rather than just the old-fashioned single step away, the territory itself becomes less and less relevant to human thinking and, by extension, scientific thinking. And that's bad! By my way of thinking about it, our thoughts (or mind maps) are just that -- simulations of the real world -- both more and less sophisticated and entrancing than the simulations in the latest computer game. And if those computer simulations get so good that they can't be distinguished from reality, is there still a distinction to be made?

I say "Hell yes!" Turing's famous test kind of says no, but I've never thought that it made much sense. No simulation of say, the law of gravity actually has gravity, and significantly no simulation of a conscious mind actually is a conscious mind. And reality is no video game! It's become a common sci-fi theme to ask if our world is part of a simulation created by some computer programmer of higher consciousness. I don't know if that's feasible, but it seems pretty silly to me, involving a weird sort of humble brag -- God is a geek like me, only with a much better computer. Not to mention the glaring infinite regress which plagues all Godly scenarios. It's a simple map-territory blunder.

But I'm getting way off track here. Reality is radically other than a map, no matter how detailed and excellent the map is. If you can let that thought marinate for a while, it's much easier to contemplate my real takeaway you need here. No single map or set of maps is the right one or the right set. No map is perfect or even best, just more or less useful or enlightening or insightful under the circumstances.

There's more than one way to skin a kumquat

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose

Let's get down to science for a minute, an area, by the way, in which I have no credentials (duh!). Isn't a law of physics supposed to be some sort of absolute and perfect map? I think that's the original idea -- at least before Kuhn. Well, the best exemplar of a law of physics I can think of -- Newton's law of gravitation -- seems about as perfect and unexceptionable as can be. Two masses are attracted to one another depending precisely and simply on their magnitudes and the distance separating them. The simple equation that most first year algebra students can just about understand offers skilled practitioners the ability to, for example, predict eclipses with extraordinary precision many years in advance. For 200+ years there was little reason to question its absolute correctness; its truth and the validity of the scientific ideal were one and the same. That is, science became science based on the paradigm of this single, simple law. If something as fundamental as gravitation could be perfectly epitomized by an equation, this clockwork view could probably be applied to just about everything. And it has been. And it's all more or less worked too...if you don't mind the myriad messy side effects we call the modern world.

But let's not forget that Einstein came along eventually, and now gravity ain't what it used to be. Sure Newton's nice equation does a good enough job most the time, but it just plain isn't right. It's main appeal -- simplicity -- is the problematic part. Apparently things are a little more complicated and not at all the same. For one thing, there's no real attraction (something btw Newton himself didn't accept) -- instead masses mysteriously warp space itself so that planets merely travel in "straight" lines. I don't understand the particulars particularly well, but that's okay. That isn't what this talk is about either! A scientist might frame this Newton-Einstein story as one theory being superseded by a better one -- science at its best! But I want to frame it as right answers only being right for particular contexts and inevitably losing their rightness as we try to extend them. The underlying reality is indifferent to theoretical claims.

Right. Enough background. I've chosen one particular seemingly right thing that I want to offer an alternative to.

Nothing happens unless it is caused to do so.

Hmm, again that sounds about right, non? It's practically the definition of causation -- what causation causes is change. A rock is mostly just going to continue on; it won't spontaneously pop out of existence or explode or morph into the Eiffel Tower. Don't bother explaining that. It's natural! The rock only changes when you hit it with a hammer or melt it or slowly erode it away with wind and water, etc.. Likewise my political beliefs or the position of my ear relative to my nose stay pretty much the same unless events cause them to drift a bit to the right or left. There's a kind of natural inertia. Reality seems to need its butt kicked to get moving. This perspective reflects a master-servant relationship between laws and existence. It isn't surprising that it was formulated before egalite was much of a thing, and when social power structures were more top-down.

Sometimes the necessity of causation is a little more subtle than in the case of a rock, however. That is, sometimes it's less obvious that nothing happens unless it is caused to do so. My body will very much change for the worse unless I eat, breathe, etc. Won't it? Causation is required to keep my body or a hurricane as it currently is. That is, I will die and decay without food and elimination, and a hurricane will dissipate into nothingness without something pumping energy into it. And on the flip side, something similar is kind of true even for a rock. Is an extreme temperature that melts rocks less natural than a moderate temperature that leaves them existing? Or more or less natural than a temperature of absolute zero, when matters begins to behave very peculiarly indeed. The persistence of the rock can be said to be caused by moderate conditions which themselves must be caused by something. Still, there's a deep faith that we just need to lower the level of description -- to chemistry maybe -- to see where the degradation of my body without food is caused by something, in the absence of which my body would persist, preserved in amber. Would my political beliefs also be so preserved? Hmmm.

How about the decay of an atom of uranium 238. Current understanding, I am told, suggests this just happens spontaneously and probabilistically -- NOT because something triggers it. Maybe the "nothing happens without cause" approach is worth questioning.

Here's a restatement of the above rule:

In the absence of causes, things stay the same.

This is pretty deep, man. I call the above statement the General Law of Inertia or GLOI, based on its resemblance to Newton's famous law of inertia or LOI (aka the first law of motion):

In the absence of forces, motion stays the same.

You might be more familiar with it in this form:

A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force. (The Wikipedia phrasing.)

A hockey puck or a planet or a speck of dust won't just start moving by itself, and if it is in fact already moving and nothing acts to stop it, it's going to keep going just as it is under its own inertia. Only acceleration (defined as change of motion) is in need of explanation.

This sounds pretty tame and obvious to the ears of modern educated westerners, but back in the day it was utterly revolutionary [and easily contradicted]. Aristotle thought that a thrown stone needed constant impetus to keep moving -- and of course that's kinda right too. A thrown stone, in my experience, will fall to earth, hit the dirt and skid to a stop. No constant motion here.

So that suggests a good first alternative to GLOI: In the absence of causes, change slows down to a stop.

Here are few more alternatives:

2) In the absence of causes, the world ceases to exist. This point of view has been taken up at times -- in Kabbalah e.g. God and human contemplation of God must be ever vigilant lest we puff out into non-existence. "Let there continue to be light." It's worth looking into the religious/philosophical question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" But that's not the topic today either.

3) Heraclitus's formulation: You never go to the same river twice. You and the world are in a constant state of fluctuation and revolution. This is close to my Axiom of Fecundity, but not quite.

And finally:

4) There is never an absence of causes; potential causes are ever-present and plentiful, so everything is trying to happen at once but mostly failing. All changes are the result of successes of that inherent procreation. The generalized law of fecundity or GLOF.

Briefly, the key to making sense of my Axiom of Fecundity is the idea that cancellation of contrary influences keeps things from happening willy-nilly. Yup, that is the topic today -- cancellation. Why didn't I just say so before? I'll trot out some examples shortly. This self-canceling plenum seems more complicated than GLOI, with an infinity of things to keep track of rather than one or a few causes -- but that's really no reason to disbelieve it. Ugh! It's the tyranny of old Occam's Razor, the principle of parsimony. "If two systems equally well explain something, choose the simpler one, stupid!"

Wrong, stupid! Choose an interesting system that leads to further insights. More metaphors bring more insights, at least potentially -- and vastly differing metaphors bring vastly different insights. Don't choose one over the other except as a matter of convenience. In fact, choose both/all in turn for a fuller understanding. Insights brought by analytical thought always involve a trade off between complexity and comprehensibility and thus between accuracy and understanding.... Rather than the simplest theory that accounts for facts, we should instead opt for the most complicated one that we can understand or that can provide the most insight. The assumption-switching process involves a difficult mind trick: sidestepping the law of excluded middle: A and not A can't both be true. I'll address that issue shortly.

Even given the validity of some form of parsimony, one could still argue that GLOF is just as simple as GLOI. It's a clear statement and requires about the same number of words, e.g. It's only the ramifications that quickly overwhelm our poor human minds. It a priori multiplies possibilities rather than narrowing them down. How many things are preventing you from getting a headache right now and how many are trying to give you one? (Is this talk one of them?) Maybe my alternative premise is ill-suited to human brains or to practical engineering. That's a reason for an engineer not to focus on it, but no reason for a seeker of insight to ignore it. It isn't ill-suited to epistemological understanding.

Someone out there is certainly angrily thinking my weird world view contradicts the conservation of energy or other cherished notions. It probably doesn't really if we're clever enough about choosing our other axioms. We can't just flip GLOI for GLOF and leave the rest of the rules the same. The measurable facts will start to get in the way. Remember that we want to account for, or at least be consistent with, the accumulated facts and measurements of science. That will take some major changes to standard procedure. Many will believe that to be an impossible task; I don't think it is. I believe in the power of the patch!

So, the reason that most things are failing to happen right now is that opposite tendencies cancel out. It's important to keep in mind in this regard that cancellation isn't annihilation; waves canceled by your noise-canceling headphones, for example, keep on propagating... Again more later.

As a simple and imperfect illustration of this cancellation model (finally!), imagine a beach ball floating in a circular pool. Around the edge of the pool placed every ten degrees of arc are 36 portable electric fans, each pointed toward the center of the pool. Turn them on. You get the idea, I'm sure. Each fan represents a tendency to move things in a particular direction. Many things are trying to happen. But, in this case, what does happen? Not much, right? You can guess that the beach ball heads toward the center of the pool and more or less stays there, buffeted maybe by turbulent up and down drafts of the crashing streams of air. So... my metaphor suggests that the things that are trying to happen are failing mostly because of cancellation by the myriad efforts of lots of other somewhat contradictory things that are also trying to happen. The beach ball stays the same and doesn't move. Now turn off one of the fans. Something happens. It happens because of an asymmetry. It happens because less is trying to happen. Nanni's First Law: Singularly unopposed or incompletely opposed things happen.

Blocking x facilitates the opposite of x. It's like the judoka who, in fending off an attack, redirects the attackers' energy back at them. My version of an equal and opposite reaction.

Here's a more detailed cancellation image to think about: Suppose you found yourself in the exact center of a mostly hollowed out spherical planet. Take a second. How does it feel? What sort of gravitational tugs are you subject to from the mass of that planet? Every point on that sphere is yelling "come here." By the symmetry of all the mass surrounding you, however, all of those calls in all of the directions would be equal and thus effectively cancel out. It's the electric fan situation again -- or maybe more like a circle of vacuum cleaners; you would be weightless. Weird. Already we have an infinity of actions trying to happen, but they all cancel. Now imagine drifting say northward toward the north pole in this enormous interior. The northerly parts of the globe are now nearer to you so pull harder (according to the inverse square rule), but the parts that are more southerly, though more distant, are growing more numerous. Newton's famous shell theorem proved that the total of gravitational tugs still cancels perfectly. That is, you remain weightless everywhere in the interior of the hollowed out planet. Wow. Why isn't this mentioned in every elementary school! It sets my imagination to buzzing! It might be enough to make you think that cancellation is a common and important aspect of how things work! In particular, notice that when you place an object at a particular spot it just sits -- not by inertia but by perfectly balanced cancellation.

Once you cross the threshold to the exterior of the shell, of course, things go back to normal-- that's the more famous part of the shell theorem. Since nonhollow planets like our own can be thought of as made of layers of shells (like a jawbreaker or an onion) that each produces this cancellation, the rule applies to actual Earth situations. If one were able to make and survive the trip halfway to the center of the Earth, for example, and ignoring the changing density as we approach the center, one would actually weigh only half as much, since the effect of all the outer shells wouldn't have any effect. (For those checking the math, 1/8 of the mass is attracting you but you're twice as close so that means half as much force is produced). Wow again. The part of the Earth further from the center than you are have no net influence because they're pulling equally in every directions, but the part closer to the center than you are all pulling in the same direction, so you feel it. One last image in this thought experiment. If there were a sizeable hole in the north pole and nowhere else, you would slowly accelerate to the south pole. Singularly unopposed things happen, and blocking x facilitates the opposite of x.

Aside from supporting GLOF, the point of these cancellation examples is to spur creative insights, so here's one. Maybe it's just me, but this hollow planet reminds me of how time and memory work. Think of time and space as a nesting of 3-D surfaces (spheres) in 4-D reality, where one such surface is the moment in time in which you find yourself. The interior of that spherical surface is the past and the exterior is the future. We feel and remember the influence of the past but not the future because the influence of one is unopposed and the influence of the other is opposed, except maybe sometimes.

In the hollow planet example, the cancellation is perfect and geometrical. In real world cases, however, the cancellation is a statistical and happenstance, so little bits of everything trying to happen leaks out less than fully cancelled. That is, some special stuff manages to happen.

Okay, if that silly notion hasn't already gotten me banned from TED, here's something that definitely will: Experiments consistently show that ESP is real! And materialists equally consistently deny it and say that every single one of the hundreds of studies showing, for example, clairvoyance are poorly designed or fraudulent. Ugh. Sounds like a bunch of poor sports. Unfortunately for the true-believers in ESP or the Men Who Stare at Goats, the effects are really small and thus neither particularly useful, glaring, or convincing. That is, it's a statistical fact that people have very small but nonzero ability to predict the future among other things. Well, of course, if the influence of the future isn't perfectly canceled, little bits of it leak into the present for us to (somehow perhaps) perceive. I'm not saying how one might perceive them... Remembering the future, maybe?

The idea that massive cancellation is part of the story of reality is nothing new. The basic computations of quantum mechanics involve enormous cancellations. In Richard Feynman's delightful book "QED," he gives a quantum description of light reflecting off a mirror. The familiar notion that angle of incidence equals angle of reflection holds in the end but not in the simple way that we imagine for billiard balls bouncing off cushions. According to quantum electrodynamics, any given photon from source S could reflect from any point on the mirror in almost any direction and be detected by observer O. That is, the observer would see the dot of light at different places in the mirror or all over the place rather than one place. Each of the infinitely many possible paths from S to the mirror and off to O is associated with a different probability vector of a certain amplitude. The remarkable thing is that those vectors are different lengths and point in different directions and so tend to cancel each other out; the sum of those vectors that reflect off an "incorrect" point to O is always virtually zero. So the likelihood of detecting a photon from S that reflected off a point other than the preferred point A is near zero. Only the vectors from S to O passing through "correct" point A reinforce each other rather than pointing in contrary directions. Singularly unopposed things happen. If you think this might be some false hocus pocus, Feynman describes how the idea can be tested. If many well-placed scratches are made in the silvering of the mirror, the perfect cancellation of the wrong paths can be disrupted. Glare and hilarity ensues. The mirror no longer acts as a mirror. That's queerer than I can imagine! I obviously haven't done this example justice in these few moments. I urge you check out Feynman's detailed but non-technical description.

Outside simple examples from physics, how might one demonstrate things happening or failing to happen by cancellation? How about this. In reductionist determinist thinking, there's never such a thing as a new creation or idea -- just fortuitous recombinations of old things or ideas that haven't come up before. What could cause true novelty? This sort of thing rubs most laypeople the wrong way. GLOF may or may not be consistent with true novelty, but it at least gives us a more favorable approach to the issue. Creativity is baked into the axiom.

Well, you probably aren't convinced that everything's trying to happen at once, but maybe you're at least a tad intrigued. The thing is, this isn't in itself something to argue for; it's something to be assumed. I've developed a whole system I call Assumption Switching, the point of which is to call old assumptions into question with the hopes of leading to new insights into our world while promoting a kind of open-mindedness.

You might well ask what sort of universe we live in if the coercion assumption has the same status as the fecundity assumption. Answer: a world that cares not for assumptions. Human thinking seems to be bound by foregrounds and backgrounds, insides and outsides, subjectivity and objectivity, yin and yang, my way or the highway, but in the deepest reality no such distinctions hold. If maps always contain these dichotomies like foregrounds and backgrounds then the world isn't fundamentally mappable no matter how subtle the map. What is is mysteriously, tantalizingly situated in the space between the between of the between of our maps (see the both and neither diagram).

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My little "between the between of the between" phraseology isn't quite as poetical or whimsical or random as it might at first seem. The idea comes from another one of my favorite math metaphors that also includes a kind of cancellation. You must know that people love the number pi -- the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter. Since going around a circle is about 3 times as far as going across a circle, pi is about 3. Mathematicians have known for a long time that there are equations that can approximate pi as accurately as you please if you are willing to calculate for a long time. They also know that there is no way to calculate an exact decimal value of pi in a finite number of steps. The algorithm may be brief but the steps go on forever. The first of the great pi equations is:

pi = 4 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 ...

That's thrilling to contemplate. What do the odd reciprocals of the integers have to do with circles? Hell if I know.

The good news is that we know the equation is true -- after alternate steps we get a quantity too big then one too small, constantly over-correcting (the cancellation part) and the approximation gets better and better forever. The bad news is that it zeroes in on pi agonizingly slowly.

And here's good news again! There's a very simple way to speed it up that I call finding "the between of the between of the between."

Let's see if we can get there in just a few explanatory steps. First, I want to replace this series of individual terms with a sequence of running totals:

4 (4 - 4/3 = 8/3) (8/3 + 4/5 = 52/15) (52/15 - 4/7 = 304/105) ...

For comprehensibility, let's use decimal representations for this never-ending sequence (truncated at an arbitrary point):

4 2.666666666 3.466666666 2.895238095 3.339682539 2.976046176 3.283738483 3.017071817 3.252365934 3.041839618 ...

Heading to 3.14159265 maybe, but too slow, right?

The neat fact is that this sequence goes up and down in such an interesting and particular way that a new sequence made from averaging consecutive terms above will also approach pi, but a bit faster. We'll call this row of averages the second row.

3.333333333 3.066666666 3.180952380 3.117460317 3.157864357 3.129892329 3.150405150 3.134718875 3.147102776 3.137077714 ...

Well, that's the first "between" and the results are a bit more like it: the averages are "better" than the original list of running totals (partial sums, as they're called)

You may have already guessed that we can just keep doing this. Take the previously created sequence and replace it with averages of consecutive terms again, and so on. In each new sequence of averages, the result heads toward pi even faster. Here's the tenth row:

3.141686658 3.141581088 3.141594858 3.141592104 3.141592818 3.141592596 3.141592675 3.141592644 3.141592657 3.141592651 ...

and the 20th row:

3.141592688358 3.141592651252 3.141592653841 3.141592653553 3.141592653596 3.141592653588 3.141592653590 3.141592653589 3.141592653589 3.141592653589 ...

So, in my funny way of putting it, pi is between the between of the between of the original terms of the simple sequence. A simple scheme plus a bit of complexification leads to dramatic accuracy

Anyway, by metaphorical extension of this betweenness business, I want to say that actual territory is always between the between of the between of formal (or informal) maps inherent in various sets of assumptions.

The Fourier Sledgehammer

Overview:

1. The world that we experience and try to understand, from our point of view as bubbles-and-beacons, is like a gigantic, complicated curve.

2. Our explanations of the the world are thus really just reactions to the curve, and they rely on our ability to undo that curve, to smooth it out.

3. That ability probably arises from simple strategies, not unlike that offered by Fourier's Theorem. Those strategies may involve layered application (epicycles, harmonics) but not diversity.

4. Fourier/Ptolemaic units don't tell us anything about that which created the curve to begin with, so neither do our explanations.

5. This situation creates a Map-Territory crisis.

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Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye. (Pierre Simon Laplace)

I love this famous quote. I don't agree with it, but I love it. It's the quintessential expression of determinism, and it circumscribes an idea worth thinking about. It suggests that the world has a grand formulation as a set of mathematically precise physical laws; a pile of equations that merely need to be first discovered and then solved or applied. If the sentiment here is insightful and the world does reduce to a bunch of equations, then we can visualize it as reducing to a bunch of graphs, even one grand graph. In fact, it could just be the graph of the formula mentioned by Laplace above. I want to develop and think about that metaphor: Reality is (or is tracked by) a really huge, complicated mathematical "curve." Here and there, I may switch over to thinking of this grand graph as the surface of a bubble -- ala Bubbles & Beacons.

I guess I'm asking you to imagine that the variety of all possible events, phenomena, molecules, afternoons on Mars, arguments, emotions, impulses, personal relationships, geometries, etc. in the universe are represented as pieces of this curve or perhaps represented by relationships between aspects of the curve. You can either imagine that the curve is changing in time or that all of history is somehow reflected in a static curve. I've chosen this image because it's the most abstract image I could come up with that could believably stand in for the something as multifarious as reality. More importantly, this curve is all we have to work with to figure out what's going on out there.

Well, contrary to Laplace, my own prejudices say that this curve is arbitrary (in a mathematical sense) — the world simply is, and, assuming there's no God, there's also no compelling reason to think there is any ultimate rhyme or reason to it, at least no perfectly correct explanation or equation that accounts for all the aspects of this curve. Which is not to say that there aren't regularities and meaning and such; it just means that there is no essential rule or group of rules that determine it or epitomize it in any ultimate way. What regularities we find there are a bit more like habits than laws of nature. As we will see, however, there is a set of elements, rules, equations -- in fact many different sets of rules -- that can be used to describe the curve as well as we please and that make the distinction between my position and Laplace's almost immaterial, which is kind of miraculous and deserving of consideration.

Let's take a look at this world curve. There are portions of it that are regular and smooth like lines and parabolas that might appear law-like, and other parts that are extremely jagged, choppy, and discontinuous. As messy or tidy as reality itself.

Despite the fact that we aren't very close to the all-knowing deity that Laplace hypothesizes, I would say that we observer-participants in this messy curve-world can get little glimpses of pieces of it — the real thing, the curve-world itself — as it impinges on our states through the senses etc., and our individual survival may depend on our ability to interpret and respond to the information contained in that glimpse. We must take those tiny bits of the graph and use our minds to project extensions of the pieces that we can't see directly. If, for example, we extrapolate our insight into the current weather conditions, we may predict a tornado in the near future and take cover in the storm cellar. Or perhaps our insight into the way a hungry lion thinks might make us imagine an impending attack. Glimpses lead to analyses lead to extrapolations which suggest actions -- this is one's mind artificially extending tiny sections of the graph to a complete picture. In order to get that complete picture, we'll need first to describe the pieces and make generalizations from there. We'll need a means of representing this piece of curve in front of us so that we can generate or project predictions. We need to describe and explain this arbitrary curve with the idea of reliably extending it to parts we can't see. The way I'm laying this out probably seems like an iffy and unnecessarily complicated affair, but it's only because I'm having trouble expressing it. I'm trying to say that humans are forecasting or prediction machines, and I'm merely suggesting, vainly perhaps, that this is all connected to my reality curve metaphor. More simply, we receive data, try to interpret it in it's context, then figure out what will or might come next. I want to look at the figure out part.

Mathematics provides extraordinary descriptive powers when it comes to decoding pieces of the reality curve and extending these tiny fragments into sizable, usable chunks of meaning. There are a variety of techniques in the arsenal — Taylor polynomials, wavelets, splines, and (of course) Fourier series — that allow us to deconstruct the curve in all its messy, arbitrary glory into simple comprehensible parts, and we can do that to any degree of accuracy we choose — no matter the actual underlying meaning of the curve (supposing for now that it has one). If invisible 5-dimensional gremlins actually cause the weather, it doesn't matter -- these tools allow us to describe the current state in terms of, say, waves -- the lingua franca of Fourier Analysis. Each of the techniques mentioned a moment ago allow us to describe arbitrary curves of fantastic complexity as the limit of a sum of simple curves — sine waves being the simple curves of Fourier analysis. And I'm finally getting to the point here.

So let me immediately go off on another tangent! I'm going to backtrack a bit to make the enterprise easier to understand. It was a dark, clear night in ancient Greece... Astronomers there observed that the heavens seemed to be in motion. Mars is in one place on Tuesday at midnight and a slightly different place on Wednesday at midnight. Simple Euclidean prejudices told them that the motions must involve circles with the earth at the center of the circles, because humans are obviously at the center and circles are the simplest and most perfect things! We now know that of course neither assumption is very parsimonious; the earth isn't in the center of much of anything, and circles aren't quite the golden ticket either. The idea of circular motions did a decent job overall; if the heavens make a roughly daily trip around the earth, what other sort of motion makes sense? However, Ptolemy's observations and measurements soon showed that your basic geocentric circle wasn't going to work — too many errors. For example, if Mars were on a circular Earth-centered path, its roughly daily trek across the sky should either stay the same or alter from day to day in a smooth, simple way. That is, if you log its position every night at midnight (supposing it's out then) -- such and such degrees from the horizon and so on -- that position should change from night to night either not at all or by a constant amount. It doesn't. Sometimes the plot of midnight positions does change pretty smoothly, but at other times, it changes more quickly or stalls at one location or even starts to backtrack in the opposite direction -- so-called retrograde motion. Ptolemy (or the astronomical tradition of which he was a part) came up with a solution. Without abandoning his most cherished premises of geocentricity and the perfection of circles, he was able to devise what today we might call a patch — his patch was the epicycle.

Think of the wheel on Wheel of Fortune. When it's spun, a spike on its outer rim traces out your basic circle. Now imagine a replica of the wheel maybe 1/4 the size of the big wheel mounted out toward the edge the big wheel. Finally, mount a little light bulb at the outer rim of the smaller wheel. With the room lights down, spin the little wheel and the light will move in a little circle. Now give the big wheel a spin, and the bulb will now trace out a more complicated path. By varying the relative speeds of the wheels and perhaps adding yet smaller wheels on the wheels of the contraption, we get a wide variety of roughly cyclical paths -- and account for the retrograde motion of Mars. Think of Spirograph creations.

The diagram for epicycle on Wikipedia isn't currently animated, but I bet it will be. You might be able to guess that the motion can get more complicated than a circle. As I understand it, Greek astronomers carefully picked specific epicycles for heavenly motion that coincided with observation. If they couldn't quite get things to work out by twiddling the radii and rotation speeds, they could just add another epicycle to the first one — another wheel on the wheel. The sledgehammer metaphor of circles was preserved! And they found that any heavenly path could be accounted for. No one today thinks that this description of heavenly motion — accurate though it is — gives any insight into that motion. Copernicus' heliocentrism, Kepler's ellipses, and especially Newton's gravitation formula give a system completely at odds with the Greek system and one much more comprehensible, but back then I'm sure that Greek astronomers were filled with a feeling that they were uncovering important truths about the mind of God. Geocentric circles are a simple and blessedly versatile sledgehammer unit of description. If the model doesn't work, just double down on your descriptive strategy and keep going. And such doubling down will eventually work!

Now let me return to Fourier's Theorem. It says that absolutely all curves, no matter how messy or arbitrary, can be expressed as the limit of a sum of sine waves with proscribed frequencies and data-determined coefficients -- that's a simplified version. To get an idea of what happens, picture your crazy curve. Now compare that curve to thousands of possible sine waves, and choose the one where the space between the curve and the wave is the smallest. Now replace your original curve with the new one that's the result of subtracting the heights of the sine wave points from the corresponding points of the original graph. We chose the best sine curve, so we can at least hope that the total space between the new curve and a flat line is smaller than before. Repeat the process., and subtract sine wave number two. And so on. The curve is slowly transformed into a flat line (y=0), which means -- as I hope you can now see -- that the sum of all those sine waves are getting closer and closer to the original curve. Before we started, there was no guarantee that this strategy would work. Well, that's where the theorem comes in. It says that the process will work, and furthermore you don't have to guess what sine wave to try. The successive choices are proscribed by certain integrals that are calculated from points we read off the original curve. Even if the data points are sparse, Fourier allows us to build a function that elegantly and smoothly passes through those data points with great precision. Now, we calculated those sine waves over a certain range. What if we have to guess about what's beyond that range or in sparse gaps in the middle of the range. If we just use our simplified sum of sines, the theorem gives no guarantee that the graph will continue to match an extension of the actual curve, but it will give us plausible knowledge or educated guesses about points between or beyond our original range. This wave object is a one-size-fits-all unit for deconstructing -- i.e. canceling -- any curve no matter what caused it to be there in the first place.

For years I've been using the example of Ptolemy to make Fourier more comprehensible, but I found out today (5/25/2019) just how related the two examples are. It turns out that Ptolemy's epicycles are precisely Fourier's sine waves. Just shift the sine waves from Cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates, and we get Ptolemy's circles. And from the correct geometric perspective, each additional wave added to a Fourier series is precisely an epicycle. But, again, Fourier's Theorem gives a bonus that Ptolemy would have loved to know about. It takes away all the hard work of guessing and twiddling. I've just become aware of a lovely animation that turns one such series of wheels within wheels into a perfect line drawing of Homer Simpson. Sounds impossible, but it's just a matter of plotting points and doing calculations to get the coefficients of each successive epicycle. Just google "fourier homer simpson." I'm trying to imagine carrying out the project of reproducing the whole world graph rather than just the graph of old Homer.

The simple waves or geocentric circles in my Fourier/Ptolemy picture stand as metaphors for the units of description deployed by we humans in commonplace situations to ex-plain and de-scribe the actual world -- whatever those units might be: Darwinian struggle, Biblical absolutism, Marxian economics, Schroedinger's wave equation, etc. Suddenly, with our simple-unit goggles on, the world seems to us to be nothing but a complicated combination of our simple pieces. Even exalted "laws of nature" are just cycles and epicycles. We have a sledgehammer metaphor that can't fail; we'll never be surprised by some non-wave phenomena because Fourier guarantees we can turn it into a wave -- a tornado wave, a lion wave. Yet our wavy description of things need not bear any intrinsic or necessary relationship to the world at all. If our brains perform Fourier analysis on the world, all we'll see are superpositions of sine waves. And since this will probably do a better than random job of projecting good extensions of the curve (even when poorly or minimally executed), it serves our purposes and increases our faith in the rightness of our approach. Who's to say that the world really isn't a bunch of ... random blobs rather than sine waves at all? Maybe we should posit that there is no real reason for the curve -- there is nothing but the brute fact of the curve, THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY. It's only we humans who make up stories about the curve. Maybe, don't know.

Let me fumblingly repeat my idea again in these terms. We can add as many epicycles as we please to our Ptolemaic calculations or higher frequency waves to the Fourier fundamental and "explain" the curve as well as we please. That is, we can double-down on our simplistic sledgehammer descriptor of reality again and again until the world succumbs to it! Here's the hand-waving part. But this doesn't mean we have any knowledge of the chunk of curve in itself or what may have caused it — just as Greek astronomers had no "correct" explanatory knowledge. That is, there's no apparent way to connect the epicycles to Newton's or Einstein's gravitation laws. Our state of knowledge about everything, I'm saying, is almost necessarily knowledge of the Ptolemaic variety -- stories constructed from prejudices, accurate though they may seem to be, obtained through repeated and dogged application of assumptions. The difference is that there may be no ultimate, absolute Newtonian or Einsteinian version lurking underneath. And those two theories, after all, are probably also Ptolemaic in the sense I'm trying to develop here. Human knowledge is Ptolemaic. (I use Ptolemaic because it sounds better than Fourierian or Fourieresque or Fourieristic.)

The really real world curve is potentially (even probably) independent of our description, but if you use principles (primary units) that are as flexible as waves are in Fourier Analysis or as circles are in Ptolemaic astronomy, it doesn't matter that they have no essential relationship to anything real. Our explanation for the curve will tend to be all about waves or circles, but the real territory may be about something else entirely -- the inverse square law or curved space or nothing at all at bottom -- just turtle waves all the way down. LaPlace's confidence that there are definite mathematical laws (which was inspired by Newton's apparent success at finding a few of them) may be a sort of illusion deriving merely from the strange mathematical fact that anything will look simple and lawlike if you apply Fourier-like tools. The fact of Fourier's Theorem means the world cooperates fully in our desire to describe it accurately.

For me, this metaphor shows, on the one hand, the futility of using maps to arrive at truths rather than as guides and, on the other hand, the power of the mind or of logic or of metaphor to make simple, comprehensible maps of intrinsically unknowable territories. This is a terrific nutshell version of my epistemology: The territory is essentially unknowable, but is mysteriously tracked by simple explanations via the Fourier sledgehammer.

I'm beginning to think that's about as good as I'm going to do in illuminating the relationship between territories and maps. The mysteriousness alluded to above is mitigated somewhat by my generalization of the implications of Fourier's Theorem. To wit, simple explanations work because logic and mathematics, the nature of reality so to speak, say that they must. That mystery, however, is also amplified because math and logic seem to reside entirely in maps, so the relativistic limitations on their applicability fall under the umbrella of Fourier-like explanations. There's a kind of recursiveness at play. Map world, whose relevance we a priori question, is given powerful relevance only as a pure and remarkable product of that map world -- the Fourier Sledgehammer. The evidence is only in the maps and not the territory. Is this all just a fancy version of the cliched conundrum about whether mathematics is discovered or invented? Guess in a way it is. Never appreciated how deep that question goes. We can only definitely answer the question (on the side of discovery) if the territory is made of math and logic like Plato's fixed and permanent forms. I picture my Allegory of the Cafe where the map world's contribution consists in the churning out of noise by the noise-canceling headphones and the real landscape is what exists in the cacophony of the abstract space between the patrons. How is this mathematics or ruled by mathematics? I don't know what I'm talking about! Math is unreasonably effective! And the world is queerer than we can imagine!

If this is as far as I can go with my epistemological musings, I ultimately have two more or less equally reasonable versions of things to conclude. Let's call the first one Strong Fourierism -- the territory has no fundamental nature or description; there are only various Fourier sledgehammers that we are free to choose among. The second version is that there is some sort of deeper way to think of or approach the territory. (The ultimate and true Einstein beneath the delusional Ptolemy.) I'm thinking now of my both-and-neither imagery. By superimposing more and more descriptive orientations organized rationally along say yin-yang switches, it's possible to at least approach a map-territory equivalence as a limit through circumscription. Systematic assumption-switching is the loophole through which we can escape. The singularity is reached when the superposition reaches the limit. Humans can't handle four levels and 16 superpositions, but computers (and possibly Martians) are apt to ultimately do waaay better. There is a third possible conclusion: with apologies to Wittgenstein, "of that about which we cannot speak we must remain silent." If the map cannot be the territory, then shut up about it.

Belief in strong Fourierism may lead humans to sense that existence is ultimately meaningless -- just a play of abstractions -- whereas faith in the weak Fourierism can offer at least a shred of comfort. Anyway, it seems to me we are forced to ask about what the relationship is between a good explanation and the thing it explains if they have no ontological relationship... So I'm asking.

If I'm not being clear, let me try to say it more plainly. When we humans describe or explain or tell stories about aspects of the world, we can't help but use a kind of one-size-fits-all strategy: Fourier analysis in my metaphor but who-knows-what in your version of reality — maybe the synthetic theory of evolution, Freudian analysis, Marxism, manifest destiny, the invisible hand of self interest, the conspiracy of assholes, or the sunshine of God's love. That strategy might not really connect with the world at all — as sine waves probably fail to epitomize the underlying curve. This is what I mean when I say that the world simply is. We take the arbitrary, irreducible, idiopathic, brute world as it is — some little chunk of it at least — and reduce it to a few simple explanatory principles. The relationship of maps to territories is like this; provisional, relative, and perhaps arbitrary. Maybe I'm expecting too much of maps. If true map-territory connection is impossible, and all we have are our descriptions and explanations, then who's to say what our attitude should be toward these maps. We should be thankful they work at all. I guess I just want to introduce doubt about the possibility of true maps or even approximate maps — they're just more or less useful, more or less meaningful, better or worse for the purposes to which they're applied. Maps are instrumental; the territory is indifferent to usefulness and getting things done. [Maybe nouns and verbs are the equivalents of waves in the metaphor.]

Also, in my grand scheme, I want to leave room for alternative explanations and metaphors that are utterly different from ones that seem to work well and may themselves work in a wholly unexpected way that gives new insight. Insight is king! If the Fourier metaphor works, then that desired room is left open. This I can say about the ultimate relationship between maps and territories: The territory seems to be set up to be amenable to such maps. That is, Fourier analysis works for some reason — Fourier's Theorem.

There's a sense, I guess, in which Fourier analysis approximates the curve — quantitatively, at least — but not ontologically, causally, etc. The sine waves probably don't tell you why the curve is there or how it got there, although it might suggest a story for both that involves ... duh, sine waves. "But," you could say, "there's nothing to a curve but its quantitative existence." My sense is that that's truer of curves than of reality; that's precisely where the metaphor breaks down. If I could do a much better job of getting my thoughts out here, it would go a long way... a very long way, Chuck.

Fourier can be used, for example, on digital recordings or any other large amount of data, which can then be compressed to just a small collection of number triplets — amplitudes, frequencies, and displacements along the x-axis. So, many thousands of initial measurements can reduce to just tens of such triplets, and data storage requirements are reduced 100 fold. I've seen demonstrations of very complicated sounds made by a small set of tuning forks. It's very easy to believe that music is a bunch of waves, but the amazing thing is that the technique works equally well for all sorts of data — a digital image, for example, or a line drawing of Homer Simpson.

Someone trying to explain what the curve is will tend to see it in terms of waves (or other simple units), and we will tend to frame all explanations of reality in terms of — I don't know what. It's the fish in the water phenomenon again. For a reductionist, materialist scientist it will be.. what?... a machine. For a shaman, spirits. For a subtle and clever thinker like myself, something very interesting but as yet undiscovered.

I should tie all of the foregoing to my bubble and beacon image of selfhood. Also to my emerging thoughts on explanation vs. statistics. If explanation is intrinsically Ptolemaic (and thus, in a strong sense, a failure) is there a way to side step it altogether? (Bayesian) probability seems to offer a way. Maybe.

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In my fourier metaphor, what is a law of nature? Maybe three or four terms of any of infinitely many infinite sums -- so a rough estimate of an arbitrary procedure. So why do those laws convince physicists that they are something special? Because mathematics is full of enticing regularities that make meaningless connections seem meaningful.

I want to believe that there is nothing special about fourier's theorm. That is, there are many other ways to achieve graph cancellation. That is, there are other sledgehammer units besides sine waves. Wavelets certainly, but perhaps any number of arbitrary "shapes" (read prejudices). Maybe even Homer-Simpson-shaped lumps of various sizes

A further obfuscation has just now occurred to me. Suppose the world curve is first distorted by adding umpteen Homer-shaped bulges to it before the Fourier analysis begins. We can still cancel out the curve! Think about it! Flat-Earthers can add their delusions into the world curve, apply their weird perspective to unraveling the curve, and end up with a satisfying ex-planation. Let all semblance of parsimonious truth be damned. This is a big deal!

[Expand the arbitrary curve metaphor. Will my fourier-induced hallucination of reality cohere in every way that the world coheres? Why wouldn't it? Fourier is the ultimate sledgehammer metaphor]

Problem with trying to analogize the map-territory relationship (which is already a metaphor) — metaphors are always map-to-map. My arbitrary curve is a map standing for the territory. The path of Mars is real, but I can only compare a WRONG metaphor to a RIGHT one

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8/4/2022 Just saw a video where Chomsky says the difference between Ptolemaic explanations and good scientific explanations is that Ptolemaic explanations are too good (sledgehammers, in my phraseology). They explain what is but are equally good at explaining what isn't. A good theory should describe only what is and disallow what isn't. Falsifiability in disguise maybe?

Since I respect Chomsky's great intellect, I initially found his statement deflating. Now I'm not so sure the old guy is right. First, the P description of the motion of Mars only describes the motion of Mars and nothing that isn't that motion. That is, the P explanation for any particular celestial phenomenon is a specific equation. Newton's description is exactly the same thing -- a general procedure that leads to specific predictions in specific cases. The fact that P can be applied to unrealistic motions isn't to be seen as a problem, I don't think. And the fact that Newton is so much more satisfying and simple? What weight does that carry? Well, that's a good reason to use it -- its practical superiority -- but no proof of its ontological superiority.

Second, if you accept his premise about requirements of a good theory, then Darwin's theory is also no good. It's generally used to give a plausible account of something that is already the case -- the characteristics of a species or the path from a fossil species to a current one. If a fake species were conjured up with a set of unreal characteristics -- like say wheels in the place of legs -- an evolutionary biologist could try to explain said characteristics using natural selection. And it's general enough to succeed in pretty much any case. It can explain how speed might develop at the expense of strength or how strength might develop at the expense of speed, explain both selfishness and altruism in humans. How often is Darwin predictive and how often are those predictions correct? If random or other unknowable factors are involved (as is the case in biological evolution) then the applicability of more limited and deterministic. Causal explanations are hard to gauge.

Explanation of Explanation

What is the role of thought? Why do we do it?

Of course, that's an impossibly general and loaded question, and one that can be answered in innumerable ways from differing points of view. The fact of that multiplicity in itself is worthy of contemplation.

Let me enumerate some reasons we think. We think in order to:

1) Solve problems, figure stuff out, get things done, gain an advantage. Do engineering.

2) Communicate. Share information.

3) Lay out options and choose between them.

4) Apply memories, instincts, intuitions, and explanations as templates in planning, predicting, anticipating — to project ourselves into possible futures and rehearse them.

5) Project aspects of reality into abstracted virtual landscapes where simulations can be run, logical and quasilogical rules can be applied, so we can project the results back onto the world.

6) Produce models

7) Churn out a randomized stream of consciousness to create serendipity. That is, to imagine, to create, to test new metaphors.

...

It's fun to try to add more reasons to the list, and to look at ways in which the different versions overlap with each other or account for each other's deficiencies. On the other hand, it is valuable as always to keep in mind that we don't really think for a reason or a set of reasons; we just think. The world is such that thinking happens. To go too far into some sort of deterministic causation here would be tantamount to confusing the map for the territory. Anyway, I have my own two pet roles for thought that are very general and can be applied broadly and complementarily.

We think in order to:

A) Explain, describe, express, understand, justify, sort out — to process experience.

B) Maintain ourselves and expand our influence over others (and ourselves).

The words explain, describe, and express have a special significance in the Joel Nanni universe. It's not unusual for amateur scholars/crackpots such as myself to look to the distant past, to the originators of language, for insights into the deep meaning of their words — meanings whose metaphorical power no longer have any punch — dead metaphors. In that spirit, I have tried to conjure up what those earlier English or Latin or proto Indo-European speakers had in mind when inventing or borrowing the three words above.

And, to me, they all suggest a single metaphor or insight at work in our attempts to process our experience. An important and largely ignored metaphor, I think. They all refer to the idea of undoing the effect that the world has had on us and our state of consciousness.

Picture a self as a bubble or balloon dividing the world into an interior and an exterior. The surface of our experience bubble — our homeostatic steady-state — is made bumpy by events that pelt it from the outside, and there is some sort of imperative to smooth it out, settle it down.

[Is this imperative derived from the laws of physics or from the nature of consciousness? I don't know, both? Perhaps physics is consciousness from the outside looking in. I definitely want to encourge people to think that consciousness and the supposed laws of physics are intimately tied. Behavior is the key word here.]

Ex-plain means to make flat

De-scribe means to unwrite

Ex-press means to take away that which presses upon us or has been impressed upon us.

I sometimes refer to this constellation of amateur etymologies (which, it seems, sharply disagree with the standard etymologies) as the Smoothing Out metaphor. For any self, the process of explaining, describing, and expressing happens automatically. To be conscious of something is to be engaged in this process; that's what the stream of consciousness is. [We can't help engaging in these processes, unless perhaps we are experienced meditators who can bring them to a halt.] According to the bubble model of being I'm referring to here, we have no awareness of an event until it disturbs the bubble (how could we have?) and no conscious experience of it until we begin ex-plaining it -- undoing, negating, or canceling it. That is, it isn't the intrusive event itself that we know about but our reaction to or explanation of its effect on us. Thus, what we know is a sort of reaction or undoing or opposite of what's actually out there — if anything is out there beyond the bubble. This is the epitome of the map-territory distinction — if there is a territory. We are locked in a mental space twice removed from the thing we are contemplating -- the undoing of the effect of the territory. The territory makes a mark on the self as a butt makes an impression on a seat cushion, we automatically endeavor to undo that impression, and then finally see not the butt itself but the image afforded by the explanation of that undoing.

[BTW, its of fundamental importance where consciousness appears in the sequence. I've just hypothesized that the order is 1) disturbance, 2) brute awareness of it or sensitivity to it, 3) Explanation/description/expression of it, 4) consciousness of it. This marks explanation as automatic rather than conscious. Instead, one could easily identify consciousness with sensitivity, and make our explanations more under our conscious control. I'm on the fence. Which doesn't bother me because the sequencing is post hoc -- it all arises mutually/simultaneously]

In addition to these three smoothing-out words, several other important descriptors have a similar orientation or evoke a similar feeling of smoothing out: Justify can mean make even or true (as in justifying a line of text), and true can mean aligned, as in truing a wheel. Justice, fairness, truth all connote evenness and bringing things into balance — Justice, after all, holds a set of scales in her hand. A true statement or a just decision is the one that successfully unruffles the feathers and quiets the inner storm. That is, all of the above words have a kinesthetic quality of smoothing or flattening, of calm, ground state, inertia, equilibrium.

Thus, the language is suggesting (and I am seconding the notion) that Thinking has a homeostatic function and works by canceling out the effect of the outside world. This seems kind of obvious to me, but I can't seem to get anyone else very excited about it. Thinking helps bring us back into balance after a disturbance. It's self-soothing behavior. Explaining is a kind of healing — or healing is a kind of explanation.

Questions and mysteries and annoyances and challenges-to-beliefs and challenges-to-well-being and unsatisfactory exchanges of the day and injuries and events of all kinds unbalance us; they set up vibrations in our bubble like poking a balloon with a stick would. Disturbances are... disturbing and must be dealt with. Answers and explanations and descriptions and expressions and justifications and getting-even and settling scores restore balance, unless they fail to. The perfect explanation for an event, from this particular and passive perspective, would be one which returns us to our previous equilibrium (or, to be more accurate, steady-state) with no side effects for the bubble and no effects on the outside world. Ex-plained and no more. No collateral damage or metal fatigue. But the more realistic scenario, since our explanations are imperfect, is that the new equilibrium accommodates something of the disruptive influence [This is as good a way as any to define memory. Traces of history, of disturbances to the bubble.], and has the side effect of pushing our explanations out into the world where they can wreak havoc of their own on other people's bubbles — as well as our own ultimately. By this latter part, I mean that the action we take to smooth out the bubble, being imperfect, leaves over a little vibration of its own, and that goes out into the universe. More concretely, I might explain to myself the unhappy event of losing my job (the disturbance) by blaming the immigrants (the ex-planation), and hate groups are spawned (the side-effect).

An eye for an eye... is a primitive but excellent way to undo a civil wrong, an equal and opposite reaction.

If the people who created the words explain, describe, express, justify, etc. saw mentation in this way, why have we now lost the sense of our mental activity as smoothing out our experience? Is it because we have been seduced by the success of our ex-planations so that we have begun to take them for something real rather than something metaphorical and instrumental only? Have they become the reality — so it's silly to think of them as un-anything? Are we confusing the map with the territory? Yup, yes, and mm-hmm. We're clinging to the illusion that our perceptions of reality are reality. In particular, the successes of mechanistic scientific thinking have convinced us that our perfect and/or perfectible maps are equivalent to the territory, so the undoing aspect of our thoughts is irrelevant. The earlier view has been superceded by a better one... or not. As our worlds become increasingly "virtual," another layer is being created between us and the territory so that in the course of time this illusion, by my lights, will become harder and harder to see through.

So, taking the smoothing out metaphor seriously changes completely the status of theories and thoughts and explanations. It's not about getting real; it's about getting even. This new view promotes a sort of Kuhnian perspective. What works is all there is to the real truth. Different ideas may work best under different conditions, and the possibility exists that different, even mutually exclusive truths might work equally well. Also what smoothes out well for one person may work more poorly for another. Duh! And what works today may work less well tomorrow. This is relativism is spades! We are free to pick the general disposition and moral stance that inform our version of truth, that undoes what disturbs us. Well, this may be going a bit too far. I don't entirely pick how I feel about things: I don't decide what disturbs me.

Here's a brief mathematical detour that tries to tie all of the above to Fourier analysis. There are more detailed versions of this elsewhere in my essays. For the sake of my story, think of a graph — an undulating magnitude sketched out as a curve on a piece of paper— as the trace left by events, the scribing that our minds must de-scribe, the disturbance on the surface of our bubble. The graph might be thought of as the cross-section of the disturbed bubble. Our task as de-scribers is to bring the graph back down to a disturbance-free horizontal line — y=0. We want to undo as much of the graph as we can by pushing back. If this trace has been created by a regular and lawlike world, there are bound to be patterns to the scribble, patterns that correspond to those laws or somehow encode them. Possessors of knowledge about said laws will have the key to de-scribe or cancel it out it best. This is how it ought to work anyway. There ought to be a one-to-one relationship between the lawlike squiggles and a correct idea of what caused them. Our specialized hammers for whacking out the dents will be precise and do a perfect job, with no side effects, no residual dents, no metal fatigue. That's a good reason to try to figure out those laws of nature.

Here, however, is the surprising mathematical truth. You don't need to know the actual causes of the disturbance to cancel them out beautifully! In general terms (that mathematicians will hate), Fourier's Theorem says that we can approach that perfection of de-scription — y = 0 — without any knowledge of the real laws. We have been given an all-purpose sledgehammer to knock out all dents! Any scribble at all is a simple and easy-to-determine sum of simple sine waves. As long as we understand waves, make excellent measurements, and apply that knowledge with diligence, we can de-scribe anything to any desired degree of perfection (at least within a finite area of applicability).

Step 1: find a sine wave — the so-called fundamental — whose subtraction will leave the graph closest to y=0. Subtract it. We now have a new graph closer to the flat y=0. Step 2: look for a new sine wave of higher frequency but smaller amplitude that does the best job of matching whatever's left. We are guaranteed that this process — carried out in a way proscribed by the theorem — will achieve y=0 in the limit. This is no pie-in-the-sky mathematics, by the way. This one-curve-fits-all is the basis for digital recording, data compression, noise-canceling headphones, all sorts of engineering advances. Since Fourier's time, we've developed other handy curves/hammers — little bell curve blips used to decompose graphs in wavelet theory, etc. It's somewhat important to my later conclusions that there are many, many such all-purpose techniques to undo that graph.

If one buys my de-scription model of consciousness, then the epistemological implications of Fourier's Theorem are HUGE! Perfectly good explanations don't need to reflect anything absolute about that which they are trying to explain.

To review,

1) Events in the greater world or even inside me impinge on my homeostatic bubble, leaving it disturbed, de-formed, and changed.

2) The change signals me to find and implement a wave or series of waves (qua ex-planations) that cancel the change out. Our newly formed image of the outside world is this combination of waves. We are freer to choose between different explanations than one might at first imagine.

3) The implemented wave is my outgoing message to the world which sooner or later impinges on your bubble, and the beat goes on.

In practice, humans can't or don't tend to apply many layers of "overtones" (secondary, tertiary waves) to the fundamental wave, so there's plenty of leftover ripples. In other words, we don't often manage to bring much subtlety to our explanations. I for one am easily confused, so I keep it simple. What I try to do instead of actually dealing with the subtle debris left by my incomplete explanations is remind myself that the debris is still there. That debris also leads to that annoyingly unending stream of consciousness that tries to deal with it — the unresolved issues of the unconscious mind. It's unconscious because it's unexplained, not the other way around. This awareness of the incompleteness of my de-scriptions leads to a degree of self-doubt and skepticism, which of course has both positive and negative aspects. Concerns for another essay.

We all know people who wield a sledgehammer (the wave in my Fourier metaphor)in de-scribing and ex-plaining the things they experience around them -- in terms of, for example, rich people, or poor people, or human nature, or foreigners, or sex drives, Oedipal complexes, genes, Marxian dialectic, clinging, science, universal love, football, God's will, computers, the invisible hand of self-interest, big government, big corporations, the conspiracy of assholes. We all have our own explanatory predilections. The only thing that gives us the right to complain about someone else's Fourier sledgehammers is if 1) scribing remains after they apply theirs and/or 2) there's evidence of side-effects, collateral damage, metal fatigue, a wake, a mess for everyone else to clean up. Well, that's actually plenty to complain about, isn't it.

So what does this Fourier metaphor say about the territory, the real stuff that scribes our graphs in the first place? Are these territories really all about sine waves or Gaussian curves? Are they really about anything (or everything)? There's literally no way of knowing, since knowing, I suspect, is based on nothing but our ability to assess the success of our explanation in smoothing things out and waves or blips will be successful.

These cancellation techniques utilize stock objects like sine waves or Gaussian curves rather than anything directly related to the processes causing the bumps, so does that mean anything about our explanations, aside from their two layers of distance from the impinging outside world? Yes. It points to the ultimate disconnect between maps and territories. Our explanations are fundamentally "made of" stock objects, metaphors, etc. that bear no necessary relationship to that which actually is impinging on our experience bubbles. What's an enlightened philosopher to do? In this particular light, there are a couple of options. 1) Tailor one's explanations to help sledgehammer the world into a more commodious form — that matches one's pre-existing (and relative) idea of the good. 2) Tailor one's explanations to minimize the side effects — use smaller hammers. This latter is the only objective(?) way to judge between various explanations — at least from the yin point of view.

But of course it's okay to have an influence on the world, right? Do I dare to eat a peach, to have an impact on the rest of existence? If I do dare, then I must be willing to face the consequence of acting in the world through my explanations, descriptions, and expressions.

The Other Half of the Story

This version of the MT relationship (which I refer to as the Smoothing Out Metaphor or, sometimes, the Allegory of the Café) puts homeostasis or maintenance in the foreground and indicates that explanations are strictly reactive. My perceived world is one big canceled wave. We further the interests of the self by preserving the self by canceling out the outside world. The effect of these explanations on the outside world is all side effect. All of the foregoing is describing a very yin world. However, there is a corresponding yang version that reverses the orientation, puts those outside effects in the foreground and homeostasis in the background — i.e., as the influence of the self on the self. This complementary version is closer to the modern and scientific view of how things work. Apparently I like making up silly names for these things. I call this yang version Be Like Me. The self desires to be recognized, expand it's influence, reproduce itself, aggrandize itself, take over the world, become corrupted by power. Here the self is more beacon than bubble. We aren't passive reactors; we're wolves on hilltops howling at the Moon, or teenagers perpetually taking selfies. "Here I am! Check me out. Be like me! Succumb to my will! Don't mess with me! I'm establishing my brand. Make way. Like my post. Like me!" This version furthers the interests of the self by creating disturbances to the bubbles of others. As one pushes one's agenda, there are new sorts of disturbances to the bubble (self-caused, internally caused) that need to be dealt with.

A) Be Like Me: Influencing you to be like me has the side-effect of maintaining the self and fighting off changes or challenges to the self. The expression of will also engenders self-preservation.

B) Smoothing Out: Canceling influence coming from the outside has the side-effect of influencing the outside world (through sledgehammer imperfection). The expression of self-preservation, self-maintenance also engenders influence on the world.

My Claim: A and B are alternative descriptions (yang and yin) of the same thing. This will be a new and confusing idea to many people. How can two seemingly opposite descriptions with opposite assumptions and orientations describe the same phenomena and somehow achieve a kind of mathematical equivalence? This is a big old ball of wax for me, but I will touch on it only briefly here. If, as suggested above, there are no correct maps for the territory, only somewhat arbitrary sledgehammer maps based on our various predispositions, then, from an epistemological point of view, possibilities really open up. We are limited to imperfection and ignorance, but at least we are free to choose. We can choose among many interpretations of truth even if we are all working from an agreed upon collection of measurements or facts. Because of my own predispositions, I have wanted to preserve some sort of ultimate version of truth, and here's what I've managed: the set of all possible maps consistent with a set of facts circumscribe (rather than epitomize) the territory. Further, I think I have a way to organize and present this infinite set in an instructive and possibly even useful way (see the Both and Neither diagram or H-Fractal). What I call Assumption Switching is the key to passing between equivalent maps (see The Switches).

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Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly

Man got to ask himself why, why why

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land

Man got to tell himself he understand

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Postscripts

In the world of mathematics and science there are two kinds of quantities —scalars and vectors. When we measure force, we get a number (like 20 pounds) and a direction (like down) — it's a directed quantity. The number is meaningless (or at least ambiguous) without the direction. The directional quality especially comes into play when trying to combine various forces and arrive at a net result. 2 + 2 might equal 1 (4 being the upper limit). A measurement of energy, on the other hand, is just a number (like 3 kilowatt-hours) — it's just a lump. You can combine various types and amounts of energy without regard to form or direction (2 + 2 is always 4). Force is akin to energy — where there's the smoke of force, there's the fire of energy. Force is like directed energy, energy with a purpose, energy put to use.

I claim that information is like energy in this way — a scalar. What is the equivalent of force here? What, if anything, is like directed information. Metaphorically at least, what we're talking about is influence or persuasive information. Information that pushes us in a particular direction or toward a particular decision, that expresses the intentionality of the sender, that can cancel influence of an opposite kind (2 + 2 can equal zero). Energy is to force as information is to influence. Suppose you pick up a book on investing. You might think of it as filled with information, but if something you read in it influences you to buy a particular stock which makes money...or inspires you to blow up the World Trade Center.... Information becomes influence in minds and probably in other places as well.

I would suggest that influence is as fundamental as information, as force and energy are equally fundamental, but it is much harder to bring the information-influence pair into science since intentions-- the directional aspect of influence -- probably aren't directly measurable. A bit of influence is itself made of information but it doesn't equal its information. It has a direction. Information acting on agents. Okay, the world consists of beings and influence, in no particular order. Beings produce influence (in order to affect other beings) and influence makes beings (how?)

I have often marveled at the way zero-energy information can set in motion energetic events. You read a book on engineering (not much energy involved in the transaction, vanishingly little) which inspires you to build rockets that go to the moon, etc. Information can become influence at any time, inside a mind or even not — think of the market threshold that automatically triggers computer programs to sell stocks when it is surpassed, causing a cascade of events culminating in global depression. In any event, there's amazing interplay between information and energy, between influence and force, a kind of complementarity.

Mental energy isn't energetic per se at all. It's about marshaling information to apply influence. See my notes on physical exercise versus mental exercise, physical injury and healing and psychical injury and healing. Information/influence on the inside reflects energy/force on the outside. Consciousness is what the world is like from the inside. Correlates abound

You make a prototype to make a mold to make multiple copies. Interiority is the "dual" of exteriority. An idea or perception about an exterior object is in a way the opposite of the object, it's orthogonal to it, it's everything but it, it's the negative inverse — x=-1/x, solve for x. The map is to the territory as the mold is to the prototype. And with the same purpose, more or less — to make copies. In-formation, in-deed!

imagine a dog in middle of a suburban backyard. It barks. It's saying:

I am here

I don't fear you

Fear me!

This is mine

If you're within the sound of my voice, know that I claim this land for England!

Is anyone there?

Be like me

Imagine a teenager in the middle of a suburban mall. He takes a selfie and posts it to Instagram: He's saying:

I am here

I'm working on my brand

I'm the best me there is

Fear me, follow me

If you're anywhere on Earth, know that I claim this planet for me!

Is anyone there?

Like my image, like me, be like me

Anti-Jump Redux

What exactly is my anti-jump-muscles imagery meant to suggest? Well, I've often preferred to let it stand by itself so that it could embrace almost any sort of alternative interpretation, but there is a particular idea that it originally grew from: assumption switching.

I've always been fascinated by Euclid's geometry. In particular, I loved the sort of mathematical dream that stands behind it: If we can identify a set of truly fundamental facts that absolutely compel acceptance, then we can apply rigorous logic to them and build up an edifice of theorems of increasing complexity that could, in theory, eventually encompass all true statements. What a wonderful world that would be.

Now, there are many ways in which this dream can collapse. 1) It might not be possible to develop a good enough set of axioms to actually get anywhere; 2) No matter how excellent our axioms, there might still be some important truths that would evade proof (incompleteness); etc.

But these possible pitfalls are no reason to abandon the task of axiomization and proof. Euclid did it! We might not be able to achieve for morality or politics or even auto-mechanics what Euclid was able to do for geometry, but surely the hard sciences — physics, chemistry, et al. — would benefit from such a program. It's kind of sad to me that nothing like this has ever really gotten off the ground (as far as I know -- and I don't know anything). In fact, (as far as I know) the only example of full axiomization outside of geometry is that carried out for set theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a reaction to certain crises in the foundations of mathematics.

My belief is that Newton had a program of Euclid-like axiomization in mind when he set down his laws of motion. Fundamental laws of physics, in this view, aren't the equivalent of theorems as one might suspect — they are undeniable truths or axioms with which one tries to "prove" the observable facts of the world. That is, we show that, given such-and-such set of laws, the observed facts could not have been otherwise. It can work either way. We can use the laws to churn out predictions which can be tested by experiment, or we can take an observation outside our current knowledge and see if logic can bridge the gap between the laws and the observation. Failure doesn't necessarily show that the laws are wrong — the problem might be with either the observation or the logic. Nor does success prove that the axioms are the right ones.

In mathematics, the axioms are ostensibly the easy part. The crowning achievement for the mathematician is the proof, the theorem. Oddly, it's the other way around for scientific theorists. Their crowning achievements are the axioms, the laws or explanatory principles. To them the observations are the grunt work, and the actual explanations of the observations from the laws, although challenging and creative, are mostly just a matter of grinding it out.

Okay, before I try to hook this back up to anti-jump muscles, I need to develop the idea of assumption switching. The dream of Euclidean certainty in mathematics survived through Newton's era, but in the early 19th century that certainty began to show serious cracks. I'll give a brief exposition (which has been done much better elsewhere). One of Euclid's postulates was that, given a line and a point not on that line, there is exactly one other line in the same plane through the point that will not intersect the line — a line parallel to the original line. Get it? There's exactly one line through a given point parallel to a given line. This postulate seemed to many geometers through the ages to be less self-evident than the other postulates, and extraordinary efforts were made to try to do without it. That is, these geometers tried to derive the parallel postulate from the others. We now know — it's been proved — that such a proof is impossible. The truth of the parallel postulate is independent of the others. But that doesn't mean that the parallel postulate is justified. Some adventurous mathematicians tried to see what geometry would look like if the parallel postulate were actually false — if there were 1) no parallel lines or 2) more than one. In both cases, perfectly valid theorems were produced. In the first case, it produced the geometry of the surface of a sphere, and in the second the geometry of a hyperbolic surface. BTW, there is still some question which of these three geometries is the true geometry of the natural world — whatever that means — and therefore the most fundamental version of geometry.

Anyway, the point is that there turned out to be nothing ultimate about Euclid's postulates. This fact sets up the assumption-switching paradigm. Take a basic "truth," and see what happens when you defiantly and deliberately negate it in some way. Assumption switching like this has been my inspiration, and I keep trying to apply it any- and everywhere.

The most familiar of all the axioms of classical physics may well be Newton's first law of motion: an object in motion (or at rest) will remain in that same constant rate of motion unless it's acted on by an outside force. It says that simple continuance of motion is the default state. In our post-Newtonian world, we have internalized this idea and find it almost obvious, but, in Newton's time, this was not at all clear. Everywhere observers saw projectiles arcing through the air but then coming back to earth. They saw balls rolling to a stop, clocks winding down, people growing old and dying. Even when objects like the Moon do stay in motion, their motion isn't constant and linear but curving and accelerating. So Newton was saying that none of the observed world fit in with the natural condition! He conceived and formalized the idea of force (what an amazing job of abstraction that is!) as something capable of accelerating or changing things from their natural condition of changelessness. Frictional force acted on objects to slow them down, and gravitational force acted on objects to alter their paths from the linear and constant to the curving and accelerating. His idea, in other words, was that the default state of motion (or motionlessness) is other than that which he ever actually found in nature. Bold! Might it be valid to develop an alternative to Newtonian physics based on some negation of Newton's first law? I have every confidence that this heretical position is tenable, but I'm not the person for the job. I take my lack of scientific credentials seriously! Some folks might wish I did the same for my lack of philosophical credentials.

I have, however, taken the liberty of generalizing the law of inertia (as it's called). Here is the Generalized Law of Inertia: Nothing changes unless it is caused to do so. Physical cause is taken here as akin to force in Newton's version. Living in a post-Newtonian world, it's hard not to believe this. It's kind of like the definition of causation, for Pete's sake. But it isn't what we actually observe either. Everywhere things are happening kind of inevitably and on their own — aging, evolution, growth, decay (both biological and subatomic), catastrophic extinction, not to mention friction, entropy, and gravity. And many things only stay the same through forces -- hurricanes, people, etc.

It is this generalized law of inertia which I've most often tried to flip — with varying degrees of success. There are many such flipped versions. Heraclitus was an early adopter of one such interpretation: All is change. That is, spontaneous change is the natural condition or default state.

My favorite switched version is close to that of Heraclitus: Everything is trying to happen at once but failing mostly. This of course is not what we see in the world around us (any more or any less than we see objects in constant motion.) Things do sometimes happen (!), but when they do, they seem to happen in a tempered and sequential fashion (explosions aside, I guess). Chairs don't spontaneous morph or disappear. Events tend to wait their turn. By choosing something rare or counterintuitive as the default state, it sets up something else as the primary "agent" — in the case of the Heraclitean axiom, something that controls, reins in, or undoes change.

If this switched assumption has any merit, something must be taking the place of force as the reason everything isn't happening at once. Yes, and if this idea has any merit, that reason is... cancellation! If a ball wants to accelerate to the speed of light, but wants to do so equally in every possible direction, all of these impulses cancel each other out. If this same ball has an impetus to spontaneously disintegrate or morph into a model of the Eiffel Tower, these impetuses must also be mostly countered by some or many impetuses in the opposite direction. (What's the opposite of the Eiffel Tower?) The world is mostly held in an exquisite balance of multitudinous and contradictory tendencies all trying to express themselves. The things that do happen are those that have what I call special status. Something in the symmetry of opposing "forces" has been broken, and the event leaks out of the boundless but frustrated fecundity of nature. The anti-jump muscles somehow relax and we take flight. Picture a circle of 100 fans blowing inward on a beachball in the center of a circular pool. There will be little movement beyond random fluctuations due to turbulance, since all forces on the ball are balanced. But turn off one of the fans (with special status) and ball moves slowly toward it. Either the turned-off fan is having an influence or the fan directly opposite is. Which would you say?

There's something further I want to mention about some forms of cancellation that helps create the world as we know it. Cancellation doesn't mean annihilation. Two waves, for example, can cancel locally and augment each other elsewhere.

And there it is! That's why I find the flippedness of the antijump muscle image appealing.

My essay called Future Influence includes a longish discussion of cancellation-with-special-asymmetries as a major "force" of nature. I put quotes around force because it ain't your grandfather's kind of force.

Let me relate this back to another of the cornerstones of my philosophical system (he says pretentiously) — the World of Describers vs. Be Like Me. From the yin POV, the fundamental activity of conscious agents is to cancel out incoming influence to maintain stability and identity, but beyond the region of cancellation, these efforts actually add to the chatter of the world. These "forces of cancellation" are the counterparts of the "forces of change" that emerge from the yang perspective.

Cause vs. Statistics

Here are two fundamental and incommensurable ways to approach understanding, forecasting, judgment, decision-making, and expectation:

1. Explanations, natural laws, stories, narratives, descriptions, anecdotes

vs.

2. Statistical probability

This is just starting to coalesce in my mind. It's still hard to say how these two relate to each other. I can say that although the second can be way more accurate if the pitfalls are avoided, humans are very bad at recognizing, understanding, using, interpreting its implications, for Darwinian reasons I imagine. The upper layers of the human mind (the stream of consciousness) invest heavily in 1 and can access 2 only with great effort and only in a heavily mediated way. My interest in the dichotomy is intensified in light of my new commitment to a Fourier-like view of the map-territory relationship -- all explanations are Ptolemaic. Accepting a statistical understanding of reality that trumps a narrative understanding represents a way forward. The way I've laid out this dichotomy also obviously reflects Kahneman's system I and system II -- which I've been reading about lately. But I'm not pitting intuitive bias vs. logical reasoning. Both of Kahnemann's categories lie firmly in my 1 above. 2 is weird alien territory that people hardly knew about until the 18th century. (Law of Large Numbers/Central Limit Theorem, Bayesian inference)

The above dichotomy also reflects the direction of the history of physics from the classical view to the quantum view. A heavy reliance on 2 over 1, is very close to the Copenhagen Interpretation. To some extent, this is deductive reasoning (1) vs. inductive reasoning (2), but that doesn't completely characterize it. Inductive science, it seems to me has been a means of choosing between various narratives rather than a way to transcend narrative completely.

I heard a perfect illustration of that on an old Radio Lab episode I heard today (3/13/2022). Apparently some AI program can do amazing things with finding regularities in masses of data. It "discovered" Newton's F=ma without possessing any rules of physics; it just had access to massive data about the behavior of a chaotic pendulum contraption. This program, the story continued, was also able to describe in a few equations how a particular complex biological system would behave in terms of changes in chemical processes. I'll have to listen again to get the deets. The part that struck me was that the biological researchers were able to verify that the equations produced by the program were correct, but they didn't think they could publish their findings because they didn't understand them. They had nothing resembling an explanation for why the equations made such accurate descriptions. Well, by gosh, that sums up perfectly my ideas on the limitations of "knowledge" as we know it. No narrative means no knowledge? Not at all! The correct equations are an end in themselves -- a statistical truth. Is it at all possible there exists no explanation for why these equations work? I think yes. Pretty much everyone else in the knowledge industry says no. They would say that we aren't yet smart enough to explain it. But, again, I think this is a misunderstanding of the basic limitations of beings whose access to the world is mediated by a rubbery bubble that does its best to cover its own tracks and convince us it isn't there at all. Explanation is a human activity and probably an activity of any other sentient creatures in the universe (deriving from a Bubble and Beacon view), but it isn't a fundamental aspect of the territory itself. Explanation is Ptolemaic. Is there something unclear about what I'm trying to get across! Yes! Ugh! Explanations and narratives are always arbitrary fairy stories -- even my strained pleadings now. All that we know for sure that has a real existence is the underlying regularities.

"About what percentage of cases like this are resolved in favor of the plaintiff?" "Don't be silly; every case is unique." Both the statistical perspective and the individual-cases perspective are legit, but they are thoroughly at odds. The probabilistic approach is clearly right in the long run, but maybe not for individual cases. Still, you have to think that the current case is part of that long run. Isn't that our best evidence? There ought to be a quick way to signal which of the two ways -- individual cases or longterm regularity -- one is talking about. They can't be mixed -- like theories derived from my switched assumption thing. Precisely that. This is a prime assumption switch that we are already using in scientific discourse.

"About what percentage of coins turn up heads?" "Don't be silly. It all depends on what happens on the particular coin flip." Individual cases can often depend too much on complexity, randomness, and the vagaries of narrative bias to be of much use.

The key to making perspective 2 worthwhile in the above two cases is that there is a degree of uncertainty. But isn't there always? At some threshold of randomness, perspective 2 becomes vastly superior.

This should turn into a whole big thing for me. I wonder if I can sort it out. Examples!

Thinking about this dichotomy proves to me how fundamental explanation (qua ex-plaining) really is to the human mind. The bubble-beacon perspective is built around smoothing disturbances. #1 accomplishes that goal, but #2 doesn't. Thus, statistics, while superior, are less satisfying. That's really important. Stats don't ex-plain. They forecast without explaining. Maybe they meta-explain. Thus, a statistical approach to knowledge is simply not for the world of humans. Science, at its best (IMHO), avoids explanation and refers only to demonstrated regularities and correlations, statistical analyses of experimental results. Policy- and decision-makers may have to take action based on those results, but that is outside the purview of science. Humans need and respond to stories (because they allow us to fend off, understand, assimilate, spread influence). This is a deep divide that I'm not quite able to express, but humans and other natural systems in the bubble-beacon framework are intrinsically, ontologically committed to 1 over 2.

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A digression:

Tensegrity is a name coined by the redoubtable Buckminster Fuller to describe self-supporting structures that possess precious little physical structure. A simple tensegrity column may include just three relatively massive rigid struts of equal length and nine relatively wispy wires. The struts aren't in direct contact with each other. Instead each of the six strut ends is attached by wires under appropriate tension to three of the other ends. Anti-intuitively, the thing stands up spring-like and can even bear quite a bit of weight, depending on the tensile strength of the wire and compression/torsion strength (?) of the strut. That is, a tensegrity column can replace a traditional massive column whose whole job is to bear masses aloft. A quick search will yield the images you need to understand this. The only weakness with a tensegrity column as a construction concept is that if you snip one wire, the whole thing collapses. Its hierarchical, interdependent nature makes it too untrustworthy; it's easy to sabotage.

I brought tensegrity up because of an unusual recursive property it exemplifies. Since the completed structure is essentially a column, it can itself fill the role of a rigid strut, so it's possible in principle to replace each of the three struts with a smaller version of the original tensegrity column. (I don't recall where I came across this idea.) You can probably see where I'm going with this. There's no reason you can't keep replacing more massive struts with less massive tensegrity columns until there's almost no rigid structure left at all; merely wires under tension miraculously carrying a load, and vanishingly little of a recognizable kind of mass or structure.

For some reason, this has become my go-to image for replacing the cumbersome mechanism of explanation with the wispy elegance and recursiveness of probability. The explanation gets the job done but with a lot of expensive mass that a probabilistic approach doesn't need. Standard column structure goes with linear reasoning and tensegrity goes with unanalyzably complex interdependence -- like the world. Non-narrative recursion sometimes allows us to get rid of the massive machinery.

Continuing to digress:

Here's a sort of example that will take some time to set up. A computer program that plays a winning strategy of tic-tac-toe could just be a long series of if-then statements or perhaps a couple of clever procedures. In either case, in order to write the program the programmer would have to understand a winning strategy and be able to explain it. That is, the program is all about explanation -- i.e. the programmer's explanation to the computer of what to do to win. On the other hand, you could write a very simple program (equipped with a decent pseudo-random number generator) that experimentally determines a winning strategy with only a knowledge of the rules and no idea about strategy. The often unrealistic condition that holds for tic-tac-toe is that the number of games states is small. Assign a random number to all possible game positions that will eventually represent the desirability of that position, and start to play. In one round of game play, starting from the current position, the program determines all of the (nine or fewer) positions you could get to with its next move, and chooses the one with the highest number (strength) assigned to it. If the program wins its game, the number in each used position is increased by say 1% (multiplied by 1.01). If it loses, the number of each used position is divided by 1.01. Tie games have no effect. This is a loose sort Bayesian inference model. Due to mathematical attraction, after a couple of million plays (i.e. in a few minutes), the program will zero in on an expert ability to play tic-tac-toe which will mostly consist of a set of numbers assigned to a set of positions. Something rather like this technique was demonstrated in the 1950s using matchboxes filled with variable numbers of beads for each position (rather than a computer at all). I have come to call this method of reinforced probabilities the Matchbox Method. The result surely is wispy and nonlinear from the point of view of the programmer. The technique can be applied to almost any game or real world situation where you have large piles of data (like millions of played games or maybe text of billions of Wikipedia articles) and some degree of feedback (like winning and losing or some other success-failure criterion). And the point is that the solution is entirely explanation-free. There is nothing in the program that understands tic-tac-toe in the sense that a human does (or seems to) and no way to see an explanation of why it works from an inspection of the boxes. The numbers might well suggest an explanation, but no such thing will be inherent in those numbers. Cut out the middleman for huge savings!

For years, I have been threatening to write a related game-playing program for backgammon, but it quickly starts to sound like a lot of work with billions or trillions of simulated games played in order to achieve good strategies. The difference from tic-tac-toe and the big challenge is that there are too many possible game positions in backgammon for each one to have its own "matchbox." The matchboxes would fill the universe. In chess, the situation would be even more untenable. The simplifying idea that makes the matchbox method applicable is that one can create a "covering" of several thousand or several million matchbox positions that can represent all of the possible positions presumably to a measurable degree. Come up with a crude way to measure the degree of fit between any of the myriad actual positions and those few in the covering. Suppose from your current position, you roll a (4,2) and that this roll opens up 23 different new positions for the player to choose from. Take the position resulting from one of the 23 choices and comb through the covering for say six elements of the covering that are most "similar" to the original -- yield the highest matching score. Use a combination of the "goodness" values for these 6 elements (which are at first arbitrary) to calculate a supposed goodness value for the actual position. (The combining technique can start out almost arbitrary too, but I'm confident an increasingly accurate method will evolve.) Now do the same for the other 22 choices, and simply choose the position predicting the highest chance of victory. If a game results in victory, all of the choices made and recorded in the winner's game log -- even inadvertently bad ones -- are reinforced by increasing the values assigned to the elements in the covering. Values for losing covering elements are decreased. In many cases, a single game will increase and decrease the value of a particular covering element several times. The values will wander, but ultimately settle down (like the value of pi calculated by Buffon's Needle). The key is billions and billions of simulated games and a faith that a solution state is "attractive." The program can be played against a more traditional program or against itself. The elements in the covering can evolve over time, as can the criteria used to measure fitness to the elements and the way these values are combined. That's at least 4 evolving systems. Like with the recursive tensegrity column, elements of logical structure (weight-bearing struts) could successively be replaced with wispier bits of probabilistic structure (tensile wire). In this scenario, the wires are no more vulnerable to sabotage than the struts, I think.

By my very limited historical understanding, researchers in artificial intelligence and/or expert systems spent decades mostly focused on two different lines of inquiry rather than the simple thing outlined above for games: 1) Neural nets that tried to mimic human abilities by mimicking the structure of the brain at a level below conscious explanation, and 2) Programs that mimicked human thought based on analyses of higher-level thinking functions (like the tic-tac-toe program that's a long list of if-then statements or clever procedures). The first of these was in essence probability-reinforcement-based but couldn't exploit the power of a digital computer, so, for example, there was no way to find where the acquired knowledge resided so that it could be manipulated and experimented with and no direct way for the knowledge to be communicated or transferred to other machines. Neural nets are too wispy and interdependent!?

Of course, neural nets are still useful because they can be quite good at pattern recognition in a way that the matchbox method can't match.

The second approach suffered from an overestimate of our ability to correctly analyze thought, an underestimate of how complicated such explanations can become, and the limited range of applicability of any one explanation. It was only with the data explosions in the age of the internet that the third way, the matchbox method, could be fully exploited. If I understand it correctly, IBM's Watson and many of the new autonomous driving systems are of an explanation-free, probability-based sort. Matchbox computation seems to be the way forward.

It is entirely debatable whether such systems do in fact mimic human minds at some deep level, but it's clear that at the highest behavioral levels, human decision-making and understanding are about narratives, stories, unquestioned facts, protagonists, sympathies, rules of thumb, descriptions, explanations, expressions, and visceral preferences and prejudices. And not about holistic and rational assessments of probability. Probabilities are only exploited by people weakly through (neural nettish) intuition or even more weakly through slow and difficult analysis.

It's a fascinating mental challenge to try to reject the narrative/explanation nature of reality in an intellectual way. Impossible I think. Tied to language as we are, is there so much as a sentence we can form that doesn't rest on an assumption of narrative legitimacy? I can't think of one at the moment. If it is impossible to reject narrative, the question becomes "How are we to regard our explanations as secondary to factual\statistical reasoning -- the alternative view of reality, induction versus deduction -- and have the whole thing hold together?''

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somewhat related musings on autonomous vehicles

I know no details of how self-driving systems work beyond what I can gather from articles in the popular press, etc. So my thoughts here are pretty much 100% conjecture and thus totally wrong. I will proceed anyway. (further study indeed indicates a lack of match between real self-driving systems and what I lay out below)

Self-driving car systems have a huge number of inputs, but essentially only two output recommendations: a speed change (usually zero) and a direction change (usually close to zero).

I picture the programming for these systems as closely analogous to the description given above for backgammon. A "covering" (or representative sample) of input states would have to number in the millions, but there's probably a way to subdivide the millions into 1000s of clusters of 1000s of representatives for faster evaluation. You read an input state. It includes map data, visual data, sonar, lidar, the works. It includes how fast each nearby vehicle is going, how much each is able to maneuver in case of an emergency. Perhaps 50 million bits of information. Score that set of data against the 1000+ cluster reps. Find the, say, three most pertinent, highest scoring clusters. Now scour each of the 1000 elements of each of the these clusters for the three most pertinent representations there and the final computations are some kind of linear combo of the decisions for the (3 x 3 =) nine reps, with coefficients determined by the various matching-scores. The nine representatives and 4000 scorings are of course phony numbers. The actual numbers will be the largest that can be processed in the allowed time -- maybe .05 seconds. These numbers themselves could be subject to evolution. Somehow, the most cautious (or extreme) recommendations (hard deceleration, hard turn to the right) must have greater weight. A hard right and a hard left shouldn't cancel out but must be chosen among. One would hope that in 99% of cases the nine recommendations would agree and a lot of that time the unanimous choice would be zero turn and zero acceleration.

I envision having 20 independently evolved matchbox programs running on 20 independent processors (tons of cheap special purpose chips), and each will offer a recommendation and a confidence level to a central organizing system that will determine a final decision based on those recommendations. I say twenty independent matchbox procedures because each matchbox system will tend to evolve independently and learn different lessons from their experience and have differing sweet spots in their skill sets -- like the European model and American model in weather forecasting. Again recommendations for extreme maneuvers have to be listened to with heavier emphasis to make sure those deadly corner cases aren't missed -- the stop sign that's hard to identify because it has a sticker on it or the person in a very creative Halloween costume so she doesn't look like anything in the database and who is missed by 18 matchboxes and weakly sensed by 2.

If information security issues can be solved, it would be great if the central system also had access to the recommendations of nearby cars -- the wisdom of the crowd would be very beneficial. When the central system is receiving too wide a spread of recommendations from the 20 matchbox programs or the recommendations all have low confidence levels, the coordinating system should carefully slow the car down until the recommendations from .05 seconds later will give a more unambiguous message.

I have little doubt that dangerous errors in these autonomous vehicles will ultimately become infrequent and death rates will be cut drastically, especially as fewer human drivers throw their wrenches into the works. But some deadly errors will look absurd to human judgment (like the famous pedestrian-with-bicycle death of 2018 (?)). This relates to the premise of this piece: statistical choices are explanation-free and inarguably capable of vast superiority by any given set of criteria while human choices are statistics-free, explanation-rich, and subject to 1001 unconscious and erroneous biases. Thus, people will overrepresent the random, unexplainable deaths of a few compared to the equally random but perfectly explainable deaths of many -- the driver was drunk or sleepy or distracted by texts. Somehow, a death caused by an inadequate program that missed something no human would miss is more tragic and unacceptable (or at least generates more terror) than one caused by a flawed human driver who missed something no program would have missed. Understandable, I guess.

Anyway, this state of affairs will no doubt slow the adoption of the technology. What will win out in the end are all of these more modest systems like auto-braking, lane assist, blind-spot warnings, distracted driver warnings convincing people that the systems are superior to the humans.

Exercise & the Mind-Body Metaphor

The mind and body are not only opposites of one another; they are also very alike. There are many metaphorical connections we make between the two, and these connections often seem so natural to us that we hardly recognize that the connections are indeed metaphorical. I'm relying on this metaphor in my anti-jump muscles imagery, for example.

All of the nouns listed below (separated into two categories) apply to both mind and body

I Strength, power, endurance, exhaustion, exercise/exertion, ease/difficulty

II trauma, pain, injury, scarring, healing, stress/relaxation

Each one applies more fundamentally to the body and only to the mind by analogy — the first set pertain to intelligence or knowledge or determination, the second to emotions or well-being. Am I right in thinking you never pondered the connection between physical healing and emotional healing? Between physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion? Is one's recovery from a broken arm even slightly related to one's recovery from a broken heart?

It would be interesting to try to apply mind descriptors to the body rather than the other way around. People do speak of body intelligence or muscle memory, but I assume those apply to aspects of unconscious mind rather than to the body per se, as a physical phenomenon. Is it just because humans developed a language for the body before they did so for the mind? Is that the only reason we use the same words for the mind...because there were already handy, useful words around to cover the bases?

It occurs to me that learning is primarily mental and might apply to the physical side of things metaphorically. Might one be said to have learned to dead-lift 200 pounds? You could certainly learn to do it properly, but might one have gotten strong enough to do it by a process of learning? Eh. Meh. The metaphor seems weak, but it might hold some water.

This little essay mostly concerns the idea of exercise in the two realms of mind and body. Readers be warned that conclusions are not reached. This writing is more in the nature of fumbling around, although I have some sort of agenda in mind.

In order to learn to play the piano, learn algebra, memorize a poem, or increase our mental acuity, we do mental exercises. When we want to get stronger, increase our endurance, or improve our cardio-vascular health, we do physical exercises. Is this just a metaphorical relationship or is something more direct and immediate involved in the relationship between the two? Let's at least entertain the notion of a deeper connection — what I call an ontological connection (by which I mean a connection at the level of being), if only because people tend to associate the two sides so completely. For what it's worth, I think there probably is such a deeper connection, but it's hard to pin down the subtleties. Perhaps we still don't have a language that applies very well to the mind.

What connects the two interpretations of exercise? In the most general terms, it is the idea that repetition facilitates improved performance, that usage facilitates itself. Performing an activity in the present (even ineptly) makes one better able to perform a similar activity in the future — whether it's running a mile or writing a clear declarative sentence.

We might be able to go even deeper and say that exercise is the application of intentionality to goals. That is, we try to gain knowledge and strength, and, by trying, slowly achieve them. This latter accentuates persistence over repetition, but the best way to express persistence is through repetition, I suppose.

This fortuitous ability we humans have to accumulate powers for ourselves involves a ratcheting up that preserves progress. That is, once you run a sub-five-minute mile or solve a quadratic equation, you're apt to be able to do it again. In what does this ratcheting consist? I guess that's the hard question under consideration here. On the face of it, the mind and body have very distinct ways of doing this ratcheting, and I'm searching for a meaningful connection or natural overlap.

By the way, it didn't have to be this way, did it? Nature might not have made such ratcheting possible. Or this kind of ratcheting could have been possible in only one mind/body realm and not in the other — these realms that seem separate and quasi-independent. (That is, our explanations or pathways for each realm sound unrelated as we'll consider shortly.) I could even imagine a world not too different from our own in which usage doesn't facilitate itself at all, where practice doesn't make perfect and powers don't accumulate. Insects, for example, don't get stronger through exercise, do they? Or learn through doing. They only learn through generations as their genes happen upon arrangements that promote successful abilities and behaviors — genetic ratcheting. In this genetic version of ratcheting, it isn't repetition or intentional effort that leads there but ecological fit and biochemistry — the meta-repetition of many different lives in similar circumstances perhaps. Anyway, it seems to me that a universe as complex and realistic as one with insects but no people could exist without physical or intellectual exercise. Maybe there are inhabited planets that have no exercise.

We probably couldn't have human culture without mental exercise or something to take its place, but I can imagine humanity much like it is without the benefits of physical exercise. That is, there's a plausible science fiction universe where we are automatically maximally physically fit. You'll see why I think this is plausible later. If it were the case that exercise wasn't necessary for strength and endurance, it would change social and power relationships a lot, but much of our world would be the same.

Animals invented the physical exercise component long ago, I would guess. Is it only mammals that benefit from physical exercise? Can birds and reptiles develop their muscles? I wonder if there is direct scientific evidence one way or the other? At what point in evolutionary history did the mental exercise component kick in? Do dogs practice their barking? Play-fighting among puppies seems like a kind of mental practice or rehearsal, which amounts to the same thing. Presumably though, frogs can not improve their frog skills by practicing them. Maybe a little as they adjust to say weather conditions.

Exercise is about changing one's abilities during a lifetime rather than between lifetimes. It's clear that those who have a means of improving capabilities during a lifetime -- metagenetic capacities -- can respond more flexibly to their environments and gain a survival advantage, so a Darwinian explanation definitely comes into play. But that doesn't explain how such a thing would actually work. Did the benefits of mental and physical exercise evolve separately or together? Did the genome at some point acquire a propensity for ratcheting in general that began to work in both spheres at once? Could it be that exercise ratcheting is deeper than Darwinian evolution? Sorry for so many questions, but I really have no clue.

Perhaps usage facilitating itself is deep in the nature of reality — ontological natural selection. By ontological natural selection, I mean something like this: The universe, in its infinite fecudity and creativity, throws up all kinds of phenomena. One presumes that most of these event-types are entirely evanescent and have no opportunity to evolve; they're gone before they can reach the first ratchet. Some of these processes, however, have the capacity to facilitate their own continuance — they persist in time or they copy themselves or they have some level of stability. By virtue of that quality, they are capable of playing the evolution game (or the ratcheting game) at some rudimentary level. (Ratcheting may be implicit in the idea of a steady state, in mathematical attraction.) These stable systems may lack genetic inheritance or genetic mutation, but through repetition they can be shaped and preserved. That's certainly what Rupert Sheldrake would say. (Given mainstream scientific opinion of his ideas, I may not be helping my case by invoking his name, but his notion of the presence of the past and morphogenetic fields would go a long way toward explaining why mental and physical exercise both do what they do.)

[I'm to some extent stealing these ideas, I now realize, from Lancelot Law Whyte. "All structures facilitate the processes which develop them." That sounds a lot like ontological natural selection. There's some Lyall Watson in here too.]

It's of some significance, I suppose, that both the physical and mental senses of exercise often apply simultaneously. When we repeat a forehand tennis stroke over and over again, our minds are getting feedback on what works and what doesn't which we somehow take in unconsciously (or so the explanation might go), while at the same time our legs, shoulders, back, lungs, and arms get stressed in ways that lead either to injury or to greater strength/endurance the next time around. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger...or weaker.

Let's take a step back here and ask the question, "How does physical exercise lead to strength and endurance?" The usual physiological explanation is something like this, I think:

Muscular exertion depletes oxygen and other chemicals from muscle tissue, stressing and/or killing cells. As part of healing the tissue, the body reacts by bathing the muscle tissue in chemicals which promote new cell growth. The body knows (via the lessons of natural selection) that increased use in the present predicts continued use in the future, so it allocates more resources to the site which builds more and/or more-efficient muscle fibers. Heavy loads trigger the generation of strength (more), while continuous lower loads trigger endurance (more efficient).

Other physiological effects of exercise are subtler — calluses form, ligaments stretch, etc. The effects I'm mentioning here are all working toward facilitating better performance at the same activities the next time around.

I hope I got that right in very general terms. It seems reasonable. This description de-emphasizes repetition and emphasizes stress as the key to physical exercise.

The conventional scientific view of the path from physical exercise to physical strength thus has a couple of intermediate steps which involve selected-for biochemical processes. For my purposes, that's the important thing: Exercise, by this explanation, doesn't seem to build strength directly or inevitably or "ontologically" as people may often think. It isn't some kind of law of physics. Or cosmic justice, paying for gain with pain.

Could one bypass the exercise component by, say, injecting chemicals into the tissue that mimic the chemical state induced by exercise? Possibly. This isn't quite what steroid injections do, is it? ( I have asked elsewhere if increasing your heart rate by holding your breath might be equivalent to a cardio workout). What if some surgical (physical) intervention could put muscle tissue in the same state as exercise? Would the same ends be met? Doesn't this idea offend your sense of justice? Gain without pain?

Let's point out here that the steps to increased physical strength made no reference to the mind, and the forthcoming explication of mental strength doesn't seem like it will have much to do with muscles. Despite the cliche to the contrary, the brain is decidedly not a muscle.

Okay, I was about to try a half-baked description of what happens in the brain during and after mental exercise that facilitates improvements in future activities, but then I realized that I don't really have a clue, not even a phony scenario as above. I wonder what the state of knowledge on this subject is — what is the received wisdom of neuroscience? (Research time.) In trying to grasp a concept, you might mimic the activity of the teacher. You fake it until you make it, until the aha moment. Suddenly the skill is easy. What does this look like in the brain? My best descriptive account off the top of my head is more schematic, more about the mind than the brain, making no reference to the underlying physical substrate. Perhaps that's appropriate. It involves canalization (reinforced neural pathways, perhaps) and memory storage and retrieval. But then where is that aha moment? In any event, my point is that there's not much obvious connection between how physical and mental practice achieve their ends. That is, whatever a reasonable description for mind exercise might turn out to be, it won't be about damage and repair or marshalling of resources — I dare to say!

How is mental exercise like physical exercise? What intermediate biochemical steps — or correlates of biochemical steps — account for the benefits of mental exercise? In the step-by-step explanations of how neither physical and mental exercise work do we get an account that satisfies our intuitive sense of what's happening — nothing about how it feels to learn or to transform our bodies, nothing about the nature of reality.

My guess is that this outline is rather incomplete. I think there is an ontological aspect to the benefit of exercise that I'm struggling to express (or even find an entry point for the discussion) that goes deeper than biochemistry. That is, there's some as-yet undiscovered explanation that better ties physical and mental exercise together. My only guess is that the following statement almost has the status of a natural law:

Repetition facilitates further repetition. Use doth breed a habit, and habit eases use. If that is the case, then, at the very least, the "selected-for" part of the process takes on a different meaning — selected for not only through genetics or biochemistry but through a sort of preference of reality. My Sheldrake is showing again.

An odd but important distinction: Both realms of exercise involve energy expenditure but in very different senses of the phrase. Physical energy is — duh — the energy of physics, a conserved quantity that can be stored in batteries, in suspended masses, in fuels, then unleashed or transformed in order to accelerate masses, etc., and ultimately devolving into heat through friction. Mental energy does rely on a substrate of physical energy, but isn't essentially energetic in the physical sense, and I wouldn't think it is remotely measurable nor conserved. Rather than unleashing, it's about leashing (according to my bold theory!), about focusing attention, managing information, controling randomness, relaxing anti-think muscles rather than flexing think muscles. Thought is what happens when mental chaos is held at bay. That is, it's something we allow rather than make.

Despite my inability to find a way to motivate or justify this conclusion, I'm going to go ahead and say that mental and physical exercise are not separate developments ; somehow they are the same thing and arose mutually. In fact, my impulse is to say that the aforementioned natural selection itself is a kind of exercise or something more general, in the sense that it too is usage facilitating itself, ratcheting up through genes rather than muscles or minds — not that I have any inkling what the connection could be. I'm just saying...

And this essay comes to a crashing thud of an ending.

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A side question: under what conditions would it behoove the body, would it be an appropriate allocation of resources, to be in less than perfect cardiovascular condition — given a certain level of available resources, nutrients, etc. Thus, since exercise is apparently unnecessary for conditioning, why are we not automatically fit. Is there or could there be such a thing as a fat and unfit cockroach? Is not their conditioning automatically optimal?

(Oh my God. What a great title for a diet and exercise book — From Fat and Unfit to Fit and Unfat)

related topic: physical computation. Someone gives you a stone weighing 3 pounds that you've never seen before and asks you to toss it into a circle of two-foot diameter that's on the ground 20 feet away. No problem. You manipulate the stone for a few seconds, sensing its mass and aerodynamic properties, and then you let it fly. Bet you get within five feet of the mark, and most people would do a lot better than that. Maybe a skilled basketball player launching three-pointers is a better example. How is this computation done? Can this computational mechanism, this analog computer, be harnessed to do numerical computation? Is Steph Curry really a sort of genius? Is this a related topic? Perhaps only in the sense that the physical and mental are tied together in a weird way -- muscular release closely tuned by mental simulation.

I'm thinking about how mental exercise is related to memory. How much is learning equal to memorization? A lot but not completely, I guess. How many kinds of things are called memory? Remembering how to ride a bike (is this memory in anything but name)? Remembering your 5th birthday party. Remembering what I said at the beginning of this sentence so that I could finish my... Remembering that Riga is the capital of Latvia. Remembering the date of my anniversary. The lyrics to a song I haven't heard in 50 years. The buttons to press to turn off the house alarm. Is there a memory scheme that encompasses them all? Does one remember where to position the racket to perform a topspin lob or does one just do it. What's the difference (between doing, knowing, and remembering)? Maybe all memory is just doing it. Memory may be a misleading name, a mere reification, for an aspect of reality that just is, inappropriately singled out from a flowing reality. The act of remembering is a real process but the memory itself doesn't have an existence of its own. Memories are the actual past.

What's the difference between knowing and remembering. Do you know anything that you don't remember (such as a fact or how to hit top spin)? Sitcom amnesia victims know a lot but remember nothing. They know what a refrigerator is for, but don't know where they grew up. They know who the Chicago Bears are, but don't remember if they root for them. If actual amnesia is anything like this, it suggests very compartmentalized types of memory. Do the modern concepts of short-, medium-, and long-term memory cover the gamut? What is the supposed physical difference between those three types. Current favorite catchphrase: memories aren't in the brain; remembering is.

this really approaches the crux of the mind-body problem. Mind-body = mental influence (psychology, persuasion)-physical influence (physics, gravity). How about: persuasion is to gravity as learning is to physical conditioning . Persuasive influence is to information as force (coercive influence) is to energy -- vector to scalar.

look at the law of entropy for clues. Information=negative entropy (re Shannon). If influence is an information "vector", is directed information, teleologic information, information with a mind of its own, then what is the energy equivalent of influence? Physical causation? The exercise continuum fits in here

physical influence-> psychological influence

physical healing-> emotional healing

physical exercise->mental exercise, learning

physical exertion->mental exertion

physical control->mental control

Canalization? Repetition is fundamental to exercise per se but not to science's understanding of exercise's benefits. Science says the same results are possible chemically. Strength can be imposed on the muscles. Learning can be imposed on the brain. But we actually achieve both through repetition.

What is the physical correlate of intellectual insight?

There's actually at least two different kinds of mental exercise. Learning a tennis stroke, through repetition, experimentation, feedback is very different from learning a fact through contextual understanding or memorizing your lines — or providing opportunities for reflection. Maybe the latter type doesn't count as exercise.

what doesn't kill you makes you stronger

a healthy mind and a healthy body

practice makes perfect

Powers accumulate

use it or lose it

no pain, no gain

Fake it till you make it.

[doing stuff now makes you better at doing stuff next time]

If intentions seek out pathways, as I was once fond of saying, then an underlying tendency of usage to facilitate itself will find its various physical and seemingly unrelated expressions in different contexts

the mind-body distinction and the map-territory distinction are joined at the hip. I find m-t more fundamental. On the other hand, fundamentalness is artificially hierarchical

If the connection between mental and physical exercise is more than metaphorical, it would seem on the surface to imply at least one of two things:

1) Physical strength and endurance are learned or at least involve a kind of concentration.

2) The brain is a kind of muscle, knowledge is literally power.

The first of these is more appealing to me at a visceral level, but I don't see either of those options going anywhere rewarding. The only other option I can think of is to look for a third thing underlying both — like natural selection.

let me try something out here.

In the exercise realm, repetition leads to a ratcheting upward. In the evolution realm, it's kind of reversed in a weird way — genetic ratcheting leads to repetition (sex drive, reproduction and species survival).

Golden

Golden Rule: Treat others as you would want to be treated.

Platinum Rule: Treat others as they wish to be treated.

I've been fascinated by the distinction between these two succinct moral statements for a long time. It seems nicer and logically simpler to follow the platinum rule, but apparently the Judeo-Christian God morally obligates you only to the more modest and ambiguous level of the former. Both statements urge kindness but are utterly distinct in tone.

And I think I have some issues with the platinum rule myself. Is it that it expects too much of its adherents to have to surmise what another person wants? That it almost insists that one be willing to behave in a way that may go beyond one's own beliefs and comfort zones? If a Muslim wished to be greeted with "Praise Allah" and would be deeply hurt otherwise, does the platinum rule oblige a devout Hindu to do so? Maybe so.

Or is it that the platinum rule is actually morally inferior to the golden rule? How can we presume to know what others really want, and why should we give it to them in face of our own contradicting desires? Is that kindness or indulgence? Empathy or paternalism? This is a major distinction that becomes evident to me all the time. Yet I have no ready way to decide a course of action.

The golden rule perhaps makes it easier to stick with your own beliefs, in contrast to the beliefs of others. This can easily go too far, however. If, for example, I think that all Martians are nerdy, and I want to treat them as if they are my social inferiors, it is possible for me to justify my preferred behavior by claiming, in spite of the Martians' insistence that they want to treated as equals, that if I were a Martian I would want to be treated as the inferior nerd that I would actually be according the natural social order. This manages (barely) to fit the golden rule. It allows one to maintain a yang kind of disposition (on the will side of the love and will continuum). Actually, while the platinum rule emphasizes love over will (which I like), the golden rule allows one to choose a place of balance between the two that I generally find preferable. It facilitates politeness rather than obsequious bleeding-heartitude. Maybe the golden rule really is better.

Sudden idea: If you'd like others to treat you according to the platinum rule -- and who wouldn't? -- then following the golden rule implies following the platinum rule. Get it? Tricky logically in that self-referential way, but take a moment to work through it. It's interesting, yes? Very meta. The RECURSIVE VERSION OF THE GOLDEN RULE: Treat others as you would want to be treated (that is, according to the platinum rule). That self-referential aspect may account for the unsolvability of the choice between them. The solution may be to say that you don't want to be treated according to the platinum rule because that would selfishly put the treater in a bad spot. "I don't take kindly to charity."

There are many levels of interpretation for the golden rule. For example:

EMPATHY (YIN) VERSION: treat others as you would want to be treated while imagining yourself in their place, with their desires and needs rather than your own. This comes close to the platinum rule.

POLITENESS (YANG) VERSION: treat others as you would want to be treated while completely being yourself with your own prejudices, desires, needs, agendas.

These are just endpoints of a whole spectrum of interpretations.

Is it going too far to say that the golden rule (yang version) goes with political conservatism or libertarianism and that the platinum rule (or the Yin version) goes with political progressivism, inclusiveness, multi-culturalism, appreciation of diversity? GB Shaw, who is sometimes cited as the first expresser of the platinum rule, certainly saw it as a justification for socialism. In contradiction to that, my own politics are on the left, but I seem to lean toward gold rather than platinum. I think that kind of gets at my frequent discomfort with true-believer liberals. I ought to reflect more on this.

If empathy is the basis of moral behavior, perhaps the real golden rule is "Walk a mile in her shoes."

Another Golden Rule: You may be able to justify "punching up," but you can't justify "punching down."

NEW REVISED GOLDEN RULE: Treat people with as much empathy and kindness as you can muster or afford under the circumstances (without undermining your own most treasured needs). If you can muster none, at least be polite.

I have a large but incomplete theory of morality based on differing manifestations of selfhood, empathy, and identification that is closely related to these thoughts about the golden rule. I've thought about it a lot but haven't really gotten around to putting it down on paper. It would be appropriate to start that essay here, I guess. Elsewhere I've laid out my bubble-and-beacon (music of the spheroids) version of selfhood and tried to expand it so that it applies not only to individual human selves but to all sorts of sub- and super-systematic selves. The id or my inner child or a cell in my spleen might each be a sort of subself of mine and my family or my self-pet dyad or my local football team's fan base may be a superself. Each of these will be a bubble and a beacon on it's own, though one of dubious characteristics -- such as intelligence, internal integrity, stability, permanence, influence, empathy-worthiness.

To me, differences in legitimate moral stances necessarily derive from one's own identification with various superselves of which one is a part. That is, I might believe (at an intellectual level at least) that the suffering of a Sri Lankan is as important as that of my neighbor or my son or myself because I identify (at an intellectual level at least) more strongly with the superself called humanity than with the superself called neighborhood, family, or Joel. Those who identify more strongly with the "American" superself (on the right) or with the superself of all living creatures (on the left) might legitimately disagree with my plan of action -- in the former case, to allow anyone at all to enter the country or, in the latter case, to eat meat. By this analysis, identification is the basis of the empathy which leads to moral choices. I think that simple formulation could be really useful.

My feeling is that there is no god-decreed or correct way to choose the superselves with whom to identify. As a beacon, of course, I want to promote the sort of identification that aligns with my own, but I seem to have a scruple against telling others that they are wrong about their own way. [I have no such scruple it seems about calling Trump voters ignorant assholes. Go figure.] I suppose I might ask them to try to think about their "identity," in this sense, or even suggest that they might reconsider whether some group deserves their empathy, but ultimately, I doubt that this will make any difference.

Part of the point here is that the primary distinction isn't between selflessness and selfishness; we're all selfish by this bubble-and-beacon analysis, but differ in where we draw fundamental lines of selfhood. In this context, conventional selflessness might be interpreted as identification with our more inclusive superselves. The classic "Are people naturally selfish or naturally altruistic?" debate has it wrong. If you think you are a somewhat selfless sort, ask yourself if you wouldn't do something to advantage your own child at the unavoidable expense of disadvantaging someone else's child. By my lights, that's a form of selfishness. It may be hard for me, for example, to morally justify feelings of blind patriotism or loyalty to friends who transgress my own moral code, but I experience feelings like that nonetheless. These feelings are also selfish in the sense I've expressed here. We can't help identifying at a visceral level with odd superselves we'd prefer not to identify with. We may be able to transcend those feelings by focusing on our "preferred preferences." That pithy phrase deserves its own essay.

Virtuous behavior doesn't require total selflessness -- at some point we all "dare to eat the peach" -- but a certain level of selflessness is required to avoid breaking one's own unwritten law. Hmm, where exactly is that level?

Okay. Let's hook this up with the golden rule vs. the platinum rule. The platinum rule goes with the "illusion" of true selflessness, and the spectrum of interpretations of the golden rule are more consistent with varying levels of identification and empathy. It generally encourages us to err on the side of empathy and kindness while allowing us to draw our own lines. That is, it seems to say to me "Broaden your identification" which is a lot like "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Pretty good advice in any event.

Is there a moral obligation to try to rid oneself of self-serving rationalizations (as opposed to a desire to serve the self)? For me, yes. It's clear I cannot say what the moral obligations of others are. But I can and will use my beacon to further that point of view.

If legitimate moral reasoning boils down to empathy and identification...

I want to consider the concept of governance in the context of these moral musings. In a lawless society lacking any governance, where would all the power reside? Reasoning simply (and simplistically), I'd have to say that power would probably tend to accrue to the strong -- where strength includes physical and mental strength, but maybe also charm, charisma, or persuasive strength. That's virtually a tautology, to the extent that strength and power are almost synonymous. Among the group of strong and powerful people, to whom would the most power accrue? To the those that want power the most. To the greediest among them. And among this group of greedy, strong people, to whom would the most power accrue? To the most ruthless -- those who would go to any lengths. Thus, in a vacuum of governance, power would reside predominently among the strong, greedy, and ruthless. Gee. In fact, this group would likely take on the role of de facto governance, mafia style. I am supposing that this state of affairs wouldn't suit most people at all.

I would propose that one of the two or three primary reasons to inject governance into this (fake and pre-existent) state of anarchy would be to counteract this power group. That is, a just government (democratic or otherwise) has the role of taking some power away from this group and redistributing it to weak and/or communitarian and/or kind people. In practice, it might be difficult to identify these people, so poverty and low social status might be used as proxies for those other characteristics, and money for the most part is what would get redistributed. Also set-asides and hiring quotas. Echoing Rawls, the most just social policy gives the most advantage to the least advantaged. Conservatives like to deny that in a free society like our own that anyone can be disadvantaged -- we are all at liberty to make of ourselves what our talents allow. They begin to label any affirmation of the above idea as "class warfare" or "identity politics." Ugh! Is it worth stating the obvious fact that people in the power group are more apt to hold and express this opinion? Shouldn't that fact alone help persuade one of its self-serving nature and of its illegitimacy? Works for me.

How do the ramifications of my declaration here shed light on the golden-platinum dichotomy? I think they do. There may be legitimate differences between individual moral behavior and the moral behavior of a government or a society. The just society isn't necessarily totally egalitarian (as might be ultimately implied by the platinum rule), but is only always leaning in that direction -- like the golden rule on a large scale.

In June 2022 I saw a quote from Elon Musk saying that he used to support Democrats because they were the "kindness party." Elon and I don't see eye to eye on much, but my support of progressives continues for this same reason alone -- relative kindness. But mean people suck, and the meaner they get the harder it is for any party to be kind to all -- including the enemy.

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I've been thinking about writing an essay called There Ought to Be a Law about the polities in which we draw the line between moral resposibilities on the one hand and legal responsibilities on the other. Just because we think some behavior is wrong doesn't mean we should advocate for making it against the law though there is a tendency for public sentiment to run that way. That is, you don't have to advocate abortions or even advocate abortions rights to accept the idea that legal abortions are available. You can say that you will never get an abortion, and you can try to convince everyone you know to likewise refrain, and yet still accept that many, many people believe otherwise equally strongly. By the same token, you may feel strongly that everyone should get their covid vaccinations and yet stop short of demanding that they be required by law. Why do I almost never see a sign in a store window saying "Masks not required but strongly preferred?" It seems to me that much of the intractable disagreement between the right and the left here in the US stems from disagreements about where those lines (morality vs law) should be drawn -- both sides often demand laws to prevent behaviors they are against and in so doing deny the legitimacy of the opposing point of view. It seems to me as well that the public discourse I'm aware of avoids this particular perspective -- or at least fails to put it in a central location. Guns, the death penalty, so many issues are like this. Particularly the ones that never go away. Further, it seems that Golden vs. Platinum can shed a fair amount of light here. I have imagined various subheadings for this essay, like:

Freedom To (do whatever I want) vs. Freedom From (the predations of assholes who do whatever they want)

Statistical Reasoning in the Realm of Moral Decisions

I want to look at the issue of Covid masking regulation vs. guidance in 2022 as an illustrative example. I hope I can do it justice. Hah!

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Robert Nozick's "The Examined Life" brings up a fascinating bit that I think fits well with a discussion of the Golden Rule. If God is perfect and thus perfectly good then why is there suffering in the world? One answer is that some good things conflict with each other. For example, the meting out of justice is good, and being merciful is good, but, in an interesting way, these to things can work against each other. Justice is the condition where everyone has gotten exactly what they deserve, and mercy is the condition where some people might be punished less then their due out of kindness. Equality under the law and simple human kindness don't always go together.

I'm not much into the idea of God or even the idea of getting what you deserve, but I do see that total kindness to others (platinum) conflicts with the kindness to all including oneself (golden). The dimension that argues for kindness is the inequality of circumstances in the Rawlsian sense. The most disadvantaged (especially to the extent that this disadvantage is not of their own doing) don't just deserve fairness but maybe a little extra kindness. The most advantaged (especially to the extent to which they haven't "earned" their advantages) may deserve evenhanded treatment but certainly no extra considerations.

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I was just watching a Malcolm Gladwell talk in which he points out four problems with our idea of meritocracy and gatekeepers. My summaries aren't his and are mixed with Kahnemannisms.

1) Experts at NIH are very poor at deciding what study should be funded (based on prescores vs. eventual citations). This makes a certain amount of sense, since expertise is intution in the realm of received knowledge, while research success involves intuition about knowledge that doesn't yet exist. Statistically unrelated are they. How do we decide who or what is in the most promising group so that they can be fostered? Do we not foster everyone instead only because it would be too expensive? I guess. But is it too expensive? Maybe minimally fund every pilot study and then start the application process over again.

2) The surgeons with the highest success rates aren't so successful out of their familiar surroundings (team members etc.) Teamwork is an important feature of excellence but isn't part of the meritocratic process. How is teamness to be incorporated into a meritocracy?

3) Timed LSATs don't do a good job of sorting the most promising future lawyers into prestigious programs. Skill at jumping to reasonable conclusions in an instant isn't ultimately a very important skill in the meritocracy. It may be important for a smoke jumper or a soldier in a fire fight to make good snap decisions but not for a neurosurgeon or a physicist or a state senator. By placing too high a priority on confidence and quickness, we handicap our expert class. We end up with the world we have.

4) Junior league hockey is filled with kids who were born in January and February. Wow and duh. Likewise, Harvard is filled with students who were always older within their grade level. Those reaching puberty early often have a leg up in sports as well. It's hard to remove arbitrary injustices from creeping into large scale sorting procedures -- even when it's clear they exist. Even harder to remove non-arbitrary injustices like racism, I suppose.

The above facts make one question the very existence of a meritocracy -- the self-justifying merit part. And even if there is such a thing, is it desirable, and do we need to foster it? Some kind of sorting may indeed be necessary, but in a just society (even one committed to maximal intellectual progress) we may be better off with something close to random assignment. At the least, sorting should happen later in life after passions and abilities and creativity begin to emerge and rapid physical and mental development have settled down.

This all goes nicely with the insights of Moneyball. Use actual success rather than perceived potential as the best indicator. After removing impediments to opportunity, let's see who starts to succeed before we worry about fostering.

Of course, removing impediments to opportunity (such as poverty, ignorance, prejudice) is the hardest and most important part. If we succeeded there, the need for further fostering is probably unnecessary. Relax society's anti-jump muscles rathering than providing free jumping classes to promising jumper elites.

Meta-Analysis

These notes will look at the good and bad aspects of analysis, keeping in mind that, as examples of analysis themselves, what is written here will suffer and benefit from the same negative and positive characteristics herein described.

What do I mean by analysis? I don't mean to limit the thing to the formal analysis of experts and mathematicians. There are aspects of analysis in our every thought. I'll give examples after a little explanation. There are several steps to the process I'm thinking of. These don't describe actual phases of the process because the process doesn't necessarily have phases; the aspects usually come together in a helter-skelter, simultaneous way. (This granting of form after the fact — in particular, this fallacy of sequence — is a typical side-effect of analytic thinking. )

0) Framing of the situation being investigated — i.e. asking a question, developing a thesis.

1) Separation. Pulling out significant-seeming details from the situation or system being analyzed — the pertinent agents, interactions, aspects of the milieu — whether or not they have actual independent existence.

2) Conferring upon these separated elements simple descriptive characteristics. For example, when analyzing an American election, we might treat individuals as if they were primarily democrats and republicans (or elements of some other larger set of categories — middle-class Hispanics or soccer moms, e.g.) rather than idiosyncratic individuals or gay farmers or Presbyterian adulterers. We will, of necessity, eventually stop looking at variation and indefiniteness within the category. That is, this separation entails simplification, reduction, artificiality, and abstraction.

3) Injection/projection of our abstracted tokens into an artificial, rule-oriented environment.

4) Logical or intuitive manipulation of the tokens based on rules and a set of

5) Premises to make deductions and inductions. The premises are rarely explicit. I would claim that they can never be entirely so.

6) Re-inflation or re-animation of the conclusions drawn in the artificial world back onto the real situation.

Step 7 involves holding up those conclusions to reality. This isn't necessarily part of all analyses. This is where analysis becomes science.

There is a fundamental trade-off here. Analysis throws away completeness in exchange for comprehensibility. Well there it is in a nutshell! We can embrace the whole of reality while confusedly dithering and dickering over every last detail and the glory of diversity and a thousand interpretations thereof or we can KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and get on with it. The good and bad points of analysis are completely subsumed by the implications of KISSing. Comprehensibility isn't in and of itself a good thing if what we comprehend is shallow and unimportant or perhaps even detrimental to a deeper understanding. That is, it's no good if it strays too far from reality. Comprehensibility doesn't imply significance or meaning or a moral justification for action. Much bad science and bad journalism is perpetrated through meaningless analytical diddling.

Analysis is necessary to the extent that we can't logically manipulate actual things but only tokens for things. The trade off is 1) the bad throwing away of uniqueness for 2) the good of submitting the world to logical manipulation. The question becomes "How do we know when-and-how to apply analysis, and when and how to avoid it?'' When is the trade-off worth it? Details to follow.

The fundamental thing to note is that analysis is necessarily artificial, make-believe, and subjective while frequently lending to the investigator a sense of naturalness and objectivity. My current analysis seems very objective to me right now, for example... even in spite of my pointing it out.

Negative consequences can enter this system at several key points — particularly at steps 1, 2, and 5.

1) We can draw lines in inappropriate places. Or too few or too many places.

2) We can choose inappropriate characteristics to focus on. Predetermined or prejudicial ones, for example.

5) We can make assumptions that are ill-founded or incomplete.

Star Trek's Vulcans glossed over the subjectivity of 1, 2, and 5 — as if only the axioms of mathematics were in play — so that Spock was always surprised when Kirk's seat-of-the-pants decisions were more successful than the logical ones he was able to conjure. The rational (which subsumes the analytic) differs from the logical. Logic is powerless without good separation, good reduction, and good premises, and it can offer none of those by itself.

The positive side of analysis is that, if we've done an adequate job with 1, 2, and 5 — i.e. considering various alternatives, taking input from parties of differing perspective, avoiding unnecessary simplification, holding initial implications up to reality, etc. — the success of steps 3, 4, and 6 are limited only by A) how smart the investigators are, B) the state of mathematics, C) the state of computation, and D) the quality of data-gathering, which are all trivially easy to deal with in comparison, and are themselves easier to analyze. What I'm claiming, I suppose, is that faulty logic is less a problem than faulty assumptions, faulty abstractions, etc. [This of course depends on the circumstances.]

I should point out an important caveat about step 4. I'm suddenly remembering how fraught it is. We should try to spend as little time in abstractionland as possible. With each round of logical manipulation, the faultiness of our metaphors and/or insights and/or premises is amplified, and results tends to diverge further and further from reality. That is, if our assumptions are each 80% right or valid (to artificially put a number on it), as they are iteratively applied, the conclusions go to (.8 x .8 =) 64%, (.8 x .8 x .8 =) 51%, etc. For me, then, one of the keys to a good theoretical representation is brevity. We should try to get from premises to conclusions in a minimal number of steps. That's what I mean by spending as little time as possible in abstractionland. (The layering of abstraction on abstraction is my primary dissatisfaction with so much of philosophy. Get in, get out, get on with it. Most of the good stuff is in the initial insight or metaphor or the magnum opus's introduction.)

I should spend the rest of my life trying to validate this theory of diminishing analytical benefit! A life well-spent. Indeed.

What is an unnecessary simplification? The Law of Seven (plus or minus two) comes to mind here — limitations of human mental capacities. It's the whole reason to keep it simple, stupid. I've unconsciously utilized this law earlier in this essay with my 7 parts of analysis (0 to 6, for some reason). Appropriate simplification is cutting things down only until we can manage them well enough — and no further. Why say "There are two kinds of people in the world" (or two parts of analysis) when we can handle three, four, or seven. On the other hand, what possible use is it for a person to say there are 153 kinds of people in the world (or 153 steps to analysis) . A mind can't hold onto all of them at once (or sequentially) in a way that increases analytical benefit. Comprehensibity is lost, and that was the whole point. It makes for a very weak thesis and can lead to no further insight in the listener -- unless, I suppose, we are dealing with technical categories; things that don't need to be kept in mind all at once. There might be 153 different varieties of some gene with specific implications for each — like subtleties of eye color etc. My point, and I do have one, is that every such categorization scheme is artificial, so it stands to reason that we should use one (or several) in which we maintain FULL comprehensibility while losing as little detail as possible. Once we pass a certain level (2, 3, 4, 5 etc categories) then the tradeoff begins to take effect — inclusiveness again being at odds with comprehensibility. "There were six principal causes of the Russian Revolution" — is going to go over way better in a history lecture than 2 or 22 principal causes. The history student will learn more, gain more insight with the six. I'm not saying that there will in fact be a small number of causes of the Russian Revolution; only that, if the point is to engender insight and understanding and not overwhelm our little minds, a smallish number will do a better job.

Now, holding as many categories as possible doesn't mean that if we've come up with four so far, we keep those four and try to add a fifth. The essential nature of a five-part categorization may differ from the four-part in very deep ways, and may have to be developed by an entirely separate process. Here comes a ridiculous, crude, and long tangent to illustrate this point!

When I was a young man, my eldest brother told me about a friend of his who had found a way to put everyone into one of two categories. Succinctly put, everyone is either a creep or an asshole. In case that doesn't give you an immediate aha moment, let me elaborate. My interpretation is that all people are screwed up, selfish, and pathological: They differ only in how they go about getting what they want. Assholes, my explanation goes, are aggressive to the point of obnoxiousness about what they want, blundering ahead by intimidation and cluelessness. They are egotistical, insensitive, etc. Donald Trump is an amazingly good example. Creeps, on the other hand, are more internal, passive-aggressive, quiet, self-righteous, even skulking. They get their way through obstruction, underhandedness, inconspicuousness, obsequiousness, shaming, repulsiveness — by creeping around the edges. Donald Trump is an amazingly good example. They are more scavengers or parasites than predators. Politicians and used car salesmen and bullies are assholes and serial killers and bureaucrats and nerds are creeps. It aint exactly yin and yang, but kinda like that. Back when my brother offered me this tool for understanding the world of human interaction, I had a name for the scenario — the Cynic's Delight. A nice aspect of it is that it's completely egalitarian — no one is exempted, not even oneself. The question becomes, "Which one am I?" After due consideration, I've concluded that one person can take on the role of creep or asshole under different conditions, pecking orders etc. The bad news is that by trying to become less of an asshole, you probably become more of a creep, and vice versa. It's only by becoming less selfish or less self-serving that one can escape the cycle. Good luck with that!

If you were to ask my co-workers and others who only know me in limited contexts which category I fall into, I think the vast majority would say I'm decidedly in the creep camp. But the better you get to know me and the more comfortable I feel in your presence, the more my asshole nature emerges. It's a matter of trust vs. fear. While playing sports and some other competitive activities, I am definitely in the asshole camp. Anyway, for many years the cynic's delight served as a useful metaphor to comfort me at crucial moments. ("I can't really hold a grudge against the guy; he can't help that he's an asshole ")...then something changed.

Many years after finding the cynic's delight, my other older brother (every bit the cynic that the first brother is) recommended that I see the movie "Team America" by the South Park guys. Despite its excessive vulgarity and adolescent hatred for and dismissal of just about everyone (or perhaps because of it), this movie is a must-see. There's a scene in it where one of the protagonists is sitting dejectedly in a bar after having made a mess of his life. He proclaims to everyone and no one in particular that he's a dick and has fucked everyone over. A peculiar-looking hobo/drunk/shaman tries to comfort our hero with the following speech (that I transcribed from YouTube).

"Well, being a dick's not so bad. You see, there's three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you've got your assholes, Chuck. All the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because... pussies get fucked by dicks, but dicks also fuck assholes, Chuck. And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!"

Wow, this is a way better description of humankind than the cynic's delight (once you fill in several thousand blanks). And even more cynical. Of course, I'm not sure how appealing it would be without the crude imagery.

The category of creepiness from the earlier dichotomy miraculously gets distributed over pussies and assholes in the new tripartite system, while the former asshole category is distributed all around but mostly on dicks and assholes 2.0. (Yes, the word asshole used slightly differently in both systems is a bit confusing.) The real revelation here for me is the category of person who just wants to make everyone as miserable as they are. Kind of like a creep, but with some asshole 1.0 as well. A yang creep. The asshole has something awful in her. She'll feel better if she lets it out, but everyone else must now deal with her shit.

There is just a hint of subtlety here. There's yin, yang, and other. Even hippies and idealists (ostensibly unselfish people) are implicated. Don't you self-righteous people know about dicks and assholes? You're just enabling them! Your petulant refusal to take these harsh realities seriously — or think you can change the dicks and assholes — just misses the point and makes things worse.

In addition to the egalitarianism of the Cynic's Delight, this interpretation includes another positive twist. Don't wish to rid the world of dicks, pussies, and assholes. Without dicks and pussies, after all, there'd be no procreation, no sexual release, no life. And without assholes, we'd all be constipated and miserable and eventually succumb to our self-produced poisons. We each serve the purpose of keeping the other two types in check like the three branches of the federal government. [When things are running well, the president is a dick, the congress are pussies, and the judiciary are assholes. Or something.]

All in all, I'd have to say that this second tripartite system maintains comprehensibility and gives a richer description of reality along with more interesting insights than the first bipartite one. And it's remarkable how different the worldviews are. And that's the reason I brought this up in the first place. Long digression complete. When you draw the lines in different places (especially more places), you get new insights. It would be pretty difficult to get to the Pussy-Dick-Asshole analysis by merely adding a new category to the Creep-Asshole analysis. The tripartite system can't be derived from the bipartite system. This says something about the plasticity of analysis.

If you tried to say there are 13 kinds of people (Chuck), the incisiveness and comprehensibility as well as the humor would be lost. If I tried to articulate the causes of the Russian Revolution first as a pair and second as a trinity might the interpretations be equally different? I think maybe they would. Project for another time.

Back to analysis. Actually, this digression kind of derailed anything else I might have had to say.

Future Influence

Shadows of What May Be or Remembering What Comes Next

Things that happened in the past have an influence on what will happen in the future. Duh. Some might call it a deterministic influence. At the very least, the things that were happening a second ago seem to have a huge impact on what's happening now — and, in theory, we can trace that back second by second as far as we want.

We can imagine the events of the past as propelling us into the future, like the exhaust propelling a rocket. Reality is pooping out the past on its trip to the future. Past-push causation. Past-blow.

What about looking at things from the other end? Can the future also have an influence over the present (future-pull causation, future-suck)? I think yes, but it's limited and tricky.

Let's leave aside for now our visceral conviction that the future can't have an influence because it doesn't exist (yet), and act for now as if it does already exist in a way. In fact, try to think of the future as it's represented in A Christmas Carol — the "shadows of what may be." The future has a vague kind of preexisting reality that at least opens up the possibility that it influences the present.

One point in favor of the idea of the future pulling on the present is that the known laws of physics are almost entirely time symmetric. That is, the equations behave the same running forward and backward — so that, for example, systems of low friction like planetary orbits look about the same in reverse motion. But the fact is that most backward-running movies -- like one of ceramic shards gathering together to form a coffee cup that then flies off the floor -- just look silly, i.e. unrealistic and highly improbable. Disorder can come from order for free but turning disorder into order comes at a cost. Still, the laws themselves are reversible on a micro level.

To the extent that these time-symmetric laws embody causation, they must be embodying it in reverse as well. Thus, without further evidence to the contrary, we would expect causation to work both ways.

The scenario I'm about to lay out draws only minimally from the laws of physics, but I hope it might begin to explain how the future might influence the present. In fact, we will get both an explanation for why causation is mostly from past to future and a glimpse of how the future can nudge or guide events to some degree as well. There could be a kind of weak direction to history — a gentle pulling in addition to the overwhelming pushing, like that rocket being dragged by a tow rope.

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up is that I've just been listening to Bob Wright's interview of Francis Fukuyama. They are talking about teleology, the seeming path of history toward the Good. And I say that perhaps you can still get the observed quasi-benevolent march of time by replacing the designer of human history or Bob's win-win economics with this idea of the future drawing us toward it in a particular asymmetric way.

Before I get into my future-influence scenario, I want to take a long, pre-emptive tangent that might make the whole enterprise a little more palatable. It involves an image I call the Hollow Earth. What follows is drawn from my essay called The Hollow Earth. If the central core of the Earth, say a ball of diameter 7000 miles, were miraculously removed (leaving a 500 mile thick crust) while maintaining the total mass of the planet, a remarkable situation would arise. Surface inhabitants would experience no gravitational difference from regular Earth dwellers, but inhabitants of the open interior would experience a weird world. Imagine first that you are at the exact center of this hollowed out earth. By symmetry, of course, you will be weightless — not pulled in any direction. You will be subject to an infinite number of equal tugs in every direction so that the net effect is no effect. This leads to a very big question for me, "Is there a difference between nothingness and canceled somethingness?" I dunno, but my guess is this is the only kind of nothingness there is(n't). Let's leave that aside for now.

Anyway, it's true-but-not-obvious that at all other points in this hollow interior, Newton's inverse square law of gravitation manages the same awesome feat — perfect cancellation. Somehow, despite that lack of symmetry, the sum total of the tugs from the many points on the surface still cancel out. All interior inhabitants would be weightless with respect to the planet. The Earth has a radius of about 4000 miles. If it were hollow and you somehow found yourself 1000 miles below New York City, you'd also be about 7000 miles from the opposite point — China or whatever. Imagine yourself in that spot. The fewer, closer portions of the sphere (everything within about 2700 surface miles of New York — including Los Angeles, Bogota, Yellowknife, and Reykjavik) pulling you toward them and away from the center of the sphere somehow precisely balance out the more numerous and more distant sections (including London, Moscow, Hawaii, both poles) pulling in the opposite direction toward the center (and ultimately China). I shan't belabor the point. Newton proved it — it's known as the Shell Theorem. It's the less well known flip side of his important concept that massive objects can be treated as if their masses were concentrated at the center of mass. I present my Calc I proof in another of these essays. The math is pretty cool. By the way, since real non-hollow planets can be thought of as composed of shell upon shell, the implications can be extended. If you found yourself halfway down to the center of the actual earth, none of the earth "above" you (i.e., nearer to the surface, including China) would have a gravitational effect — only the deeper part would. To be clear, the surface parts would act all right, in a way consonant with the pull from the other parts, but their actions would cancel each other out perfectly. In fact, if you somehow managed to survive the very hot, very arduous trip halfway to the center of the Earth, you would weigh, as it turns out, half as much.

One might wish to say that the shell theorem is merely a fortuitous result of the mathematical relationship between the geometry of spheres and the algebra of inverse square laws, but it gives me a spooky feeling of inevitability and significance.

The interior inhabitants of the Hollow Earth would experience no attraction in any direction, except toward the sun, other exterior planets, stars, etc. Now imagine that the hollow Earth and perhaps several other planets all existed within another bigger hollow planet that might be within an even larger one. Nested Russian dolls of spherical shells. Each shell is of course subject to gravitation from each other shell but is only affected by gravitation from those it contains and its neighboring fellows and not from those shells that contain it. The inside is influential, the outside not so much.

How wonderfully cool an image this is! It may indeed just be a wacky sort of mathematical coincidence, but it also suggests that there might be something of deeper interest going on here. Inverse-square phenomena like gravitation abound. Spheres abound. Perhaps this sort of perfect cancellation is commonplace. Here's a reason to think so. If influences are randomly and thus roughly evenly distributed around us in 3-space, then collectively, statistically perhaps, they can be represented by spherical shells. [I may be conceiving of this 3-space as metaphorically extending beyond actual space into abstract idea space. I'm all about the metaphors!]

In particular, doesn't the Hollow Earth image work nicely as a metaphor for the past and the future? Yes, it does! Think of three concentric nested shells (perhaps 4 dimensional!). The inner one is a moment in the past, the middle one is the present, and the outer one is a moment in the future -- the jawbreaker model of time. The past is interior to the present, and the future is exterior. The influence of the past has gravity and pulls the inhabitants of the present toward it but the future's influence cancels itself out (on average). Past influence (through memory and materialistic causation — past-blow causation) is unfettered, but the future's sucking influence is in an outer shell so it cannot be felt — its influence is self-canceling. Thus, the influence is there, the future is there, but without effect. Potential influences from the future swirl around us, but are neatly canceled. I find it a particularly compelling way to think about memory. It's why we can't remember the future, if you'll indulge my whimsical what-have-you.

Now imagine a small hole drilled in the surface of the future shell and hold that thought...

Okay, I'm ready to end this long digression and launch into my positive-flow-of-history scenario which involves a related kind of cancellation.

The whole thing requires that we take seriously another potentially bogus image from physics — the Many Worlds Model, which I will describe as briefly as possible. Keep the hollow Earth image in mind as the metaphors are related. As you certainly have encountered at some point, the quantum world is said to be rife with indeterminacy, uncertainty, and nominal paradoxes. Simple billiard-ball causation gives way to spooky probabilities which take on an almost physical status. In this indeterminate world, umpteen gazillion events every second are decided in a probabilistic way. Does some particle decay now or wait 10 nanoseconds? Does a photon hit a photographic plate here or there? And by a complicated (and dubious?) extension of the same idea, do you choose the vanilla or mint chip cone when you like each equally well? Some physicists have posited that the simplest way to square the counter-intuitive implications of quantum mechanics with common sense is to say that all possible outcomes at the decision point are realized in one of many offshoots of the present, and simple probability determines the actual path followed. There isn't just one but many paths through history. That is, while any given moment in our observed universe has exactly one past (?!), it has infinitely many futures — shadows of what may yet be. This is the essential point to take for the sake of my argument. The world splits into different timelines. We are only directly aware of the one timeline that we are actually traveling on but others are constantly sprouting, and it's only a matter of chance which sprout one's current self will take. Physicist David Deutsch has further suggested that adjacent, currently-splitting worlds can interpenetrate. This helps him explain the weird results of the double-slit experiment (which I won't do justice to here), and other weird stuff. Even if you shoot one photon at a time through the slits, there's still an interference pattern as if all the photons were emitted at once and interacted with each other. What's interfering? Perhaps it's events that are being manifest in nearby, parallel worlds (the one photon interacting with many different copies of itself in slightly different futures), as if the present moment isn't of absolutely zero duration (perhaps an actual infinitesimal duration as I've suggested elsewhere), but is long enough that some timeline splitting is happening within it and differing "decisions" coexist there.

This Many Worlds concept offers a simple explanation for why the past would influence the present more than the future would: there is one monolithic past, and gazillions of diffuse futures with no coherent message for the present as we try to let the arrow of time flow in both directions. We can also see, however, how Many Worlds leaves the door open for small future-to-past effects.

Let's beg the question here and suppose each of those futures exerts some tiny attraction toward it as seemingly implied by the time-symmetry of the laws of physics. Each moment is an exploding firecracker (or — to unmix the metaphor — a rocket pushed by exhaust and pulled by a googol little tow ropes in a googol forward directions. Imagine James and the Giant Peach held up by all those birds.)

All things being equal, for every tug in direction A into the future — say toward the southwest of Wednesday — there's another one in direction ~A also into the future but toward the northeast of never. If you like vanilla and mint chip equally well, the futures in which you have chosen each cancel each other out in the present. If each of the gazillion tugs has equal oomph, you'd expect their combined effects — vanishingly small to begin with — to actually cancel each other out so that we'd travel down a course more or less determined by the influence of the monolithic past. This virtually complete cancellation would be the reason that we can't see any obvious effect of the future on the present. [In a similar but contrasting vein, see Feynman-Wheeler Absorber theory which suggests that a potentially influential backward moving wave stimulates a forward-moving reaction that cancels it out. Real science types will want to check this out. I can't say I quite get it.] This is where we hook up with the hollow earth metaphor. It's all about cancellation, and holes in the future.

Now, there exists no higher power or deeper law making sure that each future influence is counterposed by its opposite; it's merely a statistical certainty that, given a diverse-enough array of influences — and the enormity of the number of futures being spawned every millisecond assures diversity — there is a strong tendency toward cancellation. It is therefore possible that certain asymmetries could develop that would leave some sorts of tugs reinforced rather than canceled. Perhaps that's exactly what the passage of time is — that which leaks out of near perfect cancellation. In the book of my philosophy (which exists where exactly?), this all goes under the heading — EVERYTHING'S TRYING TO HAPPEN AT ONCE — BUT IS FAILING MISERABLY. That is, the world is teeming with staggeringly diverse influences buzzing by us — a literal plenum of all that is possible — tugging on us, but the influences are mostly imperceptible because they mostly cancel each other out. The asymmetries that I refer to above are like drilling a hole in the shell of the hollow earth. Everything is thrown slightly out of balance.

Before we consider one or two possible asymmetries, let's pause for a second to consider an important question the answer to which could mess up the whole scenario I'm in the midst of laying out. Since we're assuming that all possible paths into the future are realized in some universe, does it make sense to refer to the future sucking the course of history in one particular direction? It gets sucked in every direction! There's not one but gazillions of courses of history! ISN'T THERE A KIND OF FUTURE EGALITARIANISM? Since this stuff all differs so sharply with our usual premises and logic, things can get rather muddled here, but I think I can save this. In keeping with quantum mechanics, not all futures are equally probable. Maybe other timelines exist but are followed with smaller probabilities so that some futures peter out into virtual impossibility. Their tow ropes get punier and punier. We inhabitants of these many universes are almost all on timelines where very nearly all branchings have been highly probable ones, so it still makes sense to be pulled in one direction or another.

Now we're going to indulge in even more hand waving, dubious suppositions, and question-begging on the way to my big finish. We're leaving behind any appeal to the laws of physics, if I ever succeeding in making a legitimate appeal -- any expertise I have in physics is strictly of the self-proclaimed sort. Suppose, for example, that the outcome of a decision I'm about to make is subject to influence from similar decisions made by people (especially my future self) in these myriad futures. These would be persuasive influences (like preferences) rather than coercive influences (like gravity). Further suppose that, all things being equal, the degree of influence is tied by little tow ropes to each such decision made and the thickness of a tow rope varies with the degree of similarity of the people to myself and the degree of similarity of the decisions which they will someday make to the decision I'm about to make. (Sounding rather Sheldrakian again). There are people in those futures — my future self in particular —pulling my decision in one direction, another direction and even the opposite direction.

(Sudden thought: What past events are my current self influencing right now? Blows the mind! Is it possible to suggest that the future is pulling on the present and at the same time to deny that the present is pulling on the past? Talk about your revisionist history! Something tells me this has some legitimacy though.)

Now what if, in some of these futures, the decisions made by those future people lead directly or indirectly to the end of human existence further down the road. (There's a sci-fi plotline if ever there was one. In fact, Timescape by Gregory Benford is something like this, come to think of it. That's also where I first read about Feynmann-Wheeler.) Thus, since there would be a smaller human presence in these futures than in futures where humanity thrives, fewer, thinner ropes would reach back from that general direction in future space.

The result would be that this ill-fated future would pull less well on my decision-making process. The futures that are malevolent enough to eradicate humanity (or otherwise diminish human presence or be grossly unlike our present) would have less influence over this eternal now. That is, the roughly positive futures and less malevolent futures and unchanged futures are slightly more influential than they would otherwise be — especially, I guess, futures teetering on the brink of overpopulation, since such futures are more filled with people like me. Keep in mind that there is no increase in "positive" examples/influences; merely an absence of "negative" ones. Causation by absence; jumping by the absence of anti-jumping. What might happen in this scenario is a kind of historical brinksmanship. Every time we get close to an utter catastrophe, more positive future influences remain uncanceled, and the possibility of catastrophe is mitigated somewhat. That's my modified positive arch of history.

Even if you accept the possibly benevolent march of time, it's worth noting that, at some point, if things get so good that the survival of culture into the future is assured, that the general tilt toward improving outcomes will disappear. Thus, the direction of history will become more and more diffuse. That is, the final "perfection" — Teilhard's Omega Point — of culture will be elusive. Ain't it the truth, Brother?

This line of thinking also indicates that the population explosion will be hard to halt since futures with larger populations will have more pulling power on behavior. That is, these futures will be more influential until they lead to Malthusian catastrophes. Only when more people tips over into too many people followed by too few does the strength of influence begin to decrease. We may dance on the edge of these catastrophes forever. What's the catch-phrase of Per Bak — self-organizing criticality — that may be at play here.

Ironically, it would be at the times of greatest risk of human annihilation (with many human-occupied futures ending abruptly) that the positive effect of the future would be greatest. Maybe ironic isn't the right word. Maybe this is exactly what history teaches. We rush to the brink and then pause. How did we avoid ending the world with atomic weapons during the cold war? Seems almost miraculous; the powers-that-were only had to mess up once to bring the whole world crashing down, and they had messed up so many times in other circumstances. So maybe the greatest progress toward a better world has occurred in the recent past, because that's when the risk has been greatest — that is, when the asymmetries have been most pronounced. Has the Atomic Age been a Golden Age? Before you say "of course not," check out statistics on world poverty, hunger, literacy, justice, etc. I'm a believer that the world is better is many ways now than at any other point in history-- which is why all of this is interesting to me.

Of course in my scenario, there are no guarantees that this positive influence will be enough. Perhaps the exhaust of the past makes us a juggernaut of destruction that can't be diverted from its course by however many tow ropes from the future there are pulling us toward safety. The Black Death that killed 1/3 of the population of Europe in the 14th century may have been such a juggernaut. That is, suppose there were human behaviors that were conducive to the rise of the plague (a feeling that flea-infested rats are cute, perhaps) and others that would have tended to prevent it (a feeling of revulsion toward flea-bitten rats). My future-suck scenario says that the latter behaviors would have been selected for (or been pulled toward). That plausibly may have been the case — I for one (whose ancestors' genes survived, BTW) want to stay away from places rats live.

Yet the plague came. Perhaps it could have been worse! Maybe rats used to be more appealing, but the people with the rats-are-cute gene died off.

Speaking of juggernauts, I don't think my scenario helps at all to prevent disasters over which human behavior has no control — like asteroid impacts.

Does any similar sort of reasoning help explain a hypothetic benevolent march of time -- improving quality of life for medieval European peasants (or whatever)? Yes, supposing that increasing populations correlate with improving conditions. It aint exactly Guns, Germs, and Steel, but perhaps this odd logic could play a part. [Wow, there's a classic map-territory confusion.]

You may have noticed a similarity in form of this sort of influence of the future with natural selection, but an extra-genetic factor has been added. In both cases, forms and behaviors that produce abundant futures are favored. My strange generalized concept of natural selection will undoubtedly piss off the hardheaded Darwinians among us for introducing an unscientific and unmeasurable element that encourages the survival of species in tough times outside the domain of genes. On the other hand, it's well to remember that Darwin himself had no concept of genes. They came later. Perhaps my scenario would be appealing to him, but it would certainly be more appealing to Lamarck.

Will humans, with our expanded repertoire of behaviors to select from, be better at avoiding species-wide catastrophes than lower species with more limited repertoires and less say over their environments. Tautologically likely.

Okay, with a crashing thud, I've completed my exposition. The idea is that we are influenced by the future but in ways that mostly cancel out. Special conditions — holes drilled in the future — can lead to particular asymmetries that let the influence through. These special conditions might involve potential catastrophes that lead to the removal of some influences (bad decisions or bad directions taken) and allow other influences (good decisions) to predominate. Thus, for most timeline inhabitants, we move in roughly positive directions or at least catastrophe-sparse directions.

The aspect of the above that recurs most often in this essay and in my thinking in general is this idea of the importance of cancellation in producing the world as we know it. The-things-that-happen do so because obstacles are removed, not because they are directly caused. Anti-jump muscles sometimes relax. Imagine a beachball on a floor symmetrically surrounded by a circle of 30 little electric fans pointing straight at the ball. Turn on all the fans at once, and what happens to the ball? Turbulence and such probably means there will be some buffeting of the ball, but there would be a kind of automatic self-correction: the ball would stay where it is. Change is checked by cancellation. It's the hollow earth all over again. Now, turn off one of the fans, and the ball moves toward it (I imagine). The system's antijump muscles relax, and change happens.

Here's a very different sort of example: in each of our cells there are little protein factories producing chemicals whose job it is to promote cell division and other factories producing division-inhibiting chemicals. Most of the time, these chemicals cancel each other out in an appropriately balanced way, leading to moderate reproduction of cells. But sometimes something goes wrong with the inhibitor process (the anti-jump muscles fail to flex), and the promoter process goes unchecked. It doesn't go wild; it's merely unopposed. Cells divide too frequently. This condition is called cancer. A sustainable, balanced, cancer-free existence requires cancellation.

Returning to hollow earth cancellation for a moment. Tiny, even infinitesimal, asymmetries — like a little hole drilled into the crust of the hollow planet or a missing piece of the future — leave a crack for weird stuff to get in — future-suck causation as outlined above but also perhaps clairvoyance, premonitions, etc . Maybe this is why psi tests tend to show highly significant correlations but only weak ones. That is, they indicate strongly (with high confidence) that people have ESP, but it's very weak ESP. Weird stuff are well-canceled phenomena — that's what makes them weird — but they're not perfectly and completely canceled. Note that the drilled hole causes attraction in the opposite direction, toward the opposite wall of the sphere. Away from the extincting bad decision toward the opposite decision.

The other appealing cancellation example I often think of is the explanation of reflected light that Richard Feynman (he of the completely unrelated Feynman-Wheeler absorber theory) lays out in his classic work of popularization QED. Think about reflection in a mirror. Suppose I'm standing in the bathroom looking at the reflection in the mirror of the showerhead behind me. I was taught in high school physics that what I'm seeing are photons that reflect off the showerhead then bounce off the mirror like billiard balls off a cushion and travel into my eye (where various photons are focused onto the retina to make a coherent image). Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection. Well, quantum electrodynamics (QED) tells us that much of this story is wrong: there is no bouncing and no billiard-ball caroms. In reality photons hit the mirror and are absorbed. The photon-absorbing atoms are excited by the energy of the impact so that they quickly give up a photon of their own. Potentially, the exiting photo can be going off in pretty much any direction. Somehow, however, quantum probabilities for all directions except the special one where incidence equals reflection almost always cancel out and almost all such photons follow that preferred path. Thus, I can locate and focus the showerhead photons at a clear and definite spot in the mirror rather than all over the place. Here again is the slippage of special non-canceled stuff (like holes in the future). That particular angle has a special status (from a mathematical perspective) — it slips through as uncanceled. This seems like a peculiar and unbelievable explanation of reflection in a mirror, but a simple experiment can confirm it. As before, it's absence that does the trick. Here, if thin strips of tape are placed regularly over the mirror or scratched off the mirror's silver backing strategically, it's possible to mess up that cancellation of probabilities so that other angles of reflection become more likely — glare and hilarity ensues. The mirror ceases to act as a mirror.

Apparent nothings become somethings through events that are not essentially energetic — through holes or scratches, through relaxing anti-jump muscles rather than flexing jump muscles, withholding rather than applying. Yugoslavia descends into chaos when the forces that were always there are no longer held in check by Tito's regime. Cells divide like mad. Epigrammatically, Things can happen by subtraction rather than addition of influences.

Mathematical Attraction

It's probably a good idea in this context to mention mathematical attraction. It provides a way for the future to have a sort of influence without any of the hocus pocus of my Many Tow Ropes scenario. A simple demonstration involves a scientific calculator in radian mode. Use the one built into your desktop or available through a search engine. Enter any number in the display. Now press the cosine button several times. You'll see that the displayed result quickly tends toward a single fixed number .739.... This number is unchanged by the cosine function. That is, cos(.739) = .739. This fact of equality explains why the loop stayed there once it got there but not why it went there to begin with. The mathematical explanation of this process is beyond what I want to delve into here, but it is a well understood consequence of the local slopes (derivatives) of, in this case, the cosine curve. Actually, it's kind of like reflection in a mirror (reflection in the line y=x)! In any event, it makes as much sense to say that the existence of the fixed, predetermined endpoint of .739 pulled us toward it as it does to say that we were pushed there. Feedback is the key to this phenomenon. Feedback (or repeated iteration) can lead to one of four regimes. It can lead to explosive divergence as in the case of the screeching PA system — the sort of feedback you may be most familiar with. It can also lead to convergence, as in the cosine example, as well as to periodicity like a planetary orbit. And finally, it can lead to chaos — random-looking bouncing around. The idea of cosine-like convergence is often exploited as a way to solve equations (see Newton's Method and other procedures). Apropos of nothing, let me mention that convergent feedback is an extraordinary fact of mathematics that ought to be part of every child's education.

Now let's look at a simple example of convergent feedback in the physical world. A guitar string is attracted toward an unvibrating state, so when you pluck it, it's future low-energy state begins to call. You can think of feeding the current amplitude into the system and getting the next one as an output — a slightly smaller amplitude owing to the energy lost to friction (i.e. the sound of the string). Wherever there's feedback there's the potential for attraction — which I'm claiming is like a future state pulling on the present. Here's an example where the physics isn't so clear. Whether or not I choose to have spinach in my omelet in the morning, I am apt to be the same person in the evening. Variable input leads (ultimately) to unchanging output. That stable future state of my being is always drawing me in. General systems theory calls this equifinality. The stable endpoint is sometimes inherent in the system. Much of what happens in the world is just the future-to-past pulling of pre-existing equilibria or steady states. Balls roll down hills and stay in valleys because it takes energy to kick them out again; the bottom of the valley is an attractor. So some futures are more attractive than others — the ones with deeper valleys. The far future is the Big Valley of maximal entropy.

A closing thought that just occurred to me and that might be worthy of a whole revision: In this essay, I have thought of cause and influence as synonymous with physical cause (coercive cause), but sentient beings also experience a different kind of influence — persuasive causes (ideas, etc.) that don't quite follow the same rules. The fact that I liked the apples I got at this store last week influenced me to buy more of them this week. Or perhaps my anticipation of enjoying the apples later on influenced me to buy them in the first place. Because I was burned as a child by matches, I shy away from them. In this case of thought-causation through memory (which is descriptively very different from physical causation, though some would try to unify them), the future can have an influence. If you are about to step on a banana peel, it may — at least metaphorically — be said that a possible negative future result caused you to take a sidestep at the last moment. Thank God you remembered the future just in time! As the White Queen says to Alice, "It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." There's that Dickensian version of the future again, the shadows of what might be. [Two allusions to 19th century Brit Lit in one paragraph. Wow!] Any preventive or pre-emptive action one takes is caused by such a future — in a way at least — perhaps in a more literal sense than one wants to believe in our modern rational world. This doesn't have to be the avoidance of a future negative state. For example, my future as a movie star, might draw me to an audition. Does the mind create/construct artificial forecasts of the future in order to make decisions or does it have some sort of direct or indirect access to the real thing? It fairly strains credulity to consider the latter possibility, but let's keep an open mind. Until you show me a printout of the mind software for forecasting future events, I won't be entirely convinced that it exists and exists to the exclusion of the other possibility.

By disposition, I have never been a big fan of the idea of destiny in life — the idea that my predetermined (by God?) role in the universe is simply unfolding (as it should). People as diverse as Hitler and George Lucas make much of destiny as a sort of justification. The one who was foretold, etc. But if we imagine ourselves the chosen ones, we are no longer moral agents but merely instruments of God's will. I very much hope that in bringing the future to our considerations of causation I have sufficiently distinguished it from this pernicious concept of predestiny. The shadows of what might be are distinct from the futures that the gods guarantee.