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.