the price of love

Think of Abraham and Isaac.

Abraham loves his son above all save God. God asks Abraham to trek the mountain Moriah with Isaac and then to murder him for love of God.

At the penultimate moment, Abraham, being a man of honor tells Isaac he will be killed. Abraham does not sell out God, he never tells the son of God's hand in this situation! Abraham couldn't allow God's image to be sullied in Isaac's eyes. Naturally, Isaac freaks out and begins frantically praying to God for mercy, forsaking Abraham.

Abraham and Isaac return home and live out their lives, with ...

Isaac believing profoundly in the father above, and spreading that faith.

Abraham has achieved his true goal of having a thriving, successful son, but with a price. The price being that Isaac will always believe his father to be a murderer, a craven.

I'm reading Soren Kierkegaard's essay on these two literary figures, Fear and Trembling, and the above is a very serious nutshell of his perspective on the story. To catch up on Kierkegaard, he's an existential christian. So, I immediately realize he must love paradox as I do. Soren says of Abraham that his very greatness stems from his dualities, his "...paradox. Strength is powerlessness, wisdom is folly, hope is insanity, love which is self-hate."

Abraham's love of God becomes self-hatred. Abraham knows he is either a murderer or a man of faith, and further knows that there is no heroic movement to be had from this sacrifice. That the real sacrifice was not avoided, Isaac thrived at the price of Abraham's eternal anguish.

Kierkegaard says, "to labor and be heavy laden" is good, that anguish is good, he claims that obligation elevates. That if we are not making passionate, life-long commitments to our personal ethics and arts, then we are just running errands. Soren calls anguish infinite regression. It is the realization that our freedom collapses, that our decisions have consequences, that every want can't be had, that the world is brutal, that the center cannot hold, that sometimes we must give up Isaac for God.

What makes Soren so interesting to me is that he claims an existential should. He says we should push through. He says "infinite resignation is the step before faith". Soren believes that the highest act of faith is Abraham walking down the mountain and returning to life. He also believes that this is absurd and a marvel. From the book, "Abraham's paradox is that murder is turned into a holy act, because faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off."

Well, well, well, really? Finally. A totally honest Christian.

Back to pushing through as a should. What is on one side of the aperture and what is on the other? What does that moment of being both at once look like?

The picture below is worth these words: B is the boundary between two opposites along a continuity (we'll call it a line), on the left the line is named IS, on the right the line is named IS NOT. [[could be positive - negative, white - black, lie - truth, velocity - position, ad infinitum]]

B is the intersection of IS and IS NOT, however briefly, therefore IS = IS NOT at point B. Point B is a paradox. A couple interesting ideas emerge from this ... first that every paradox exposes a duality which exists on a continuous line. And second, that the paradox is precisely where we push through from.

Or what i would call a dimension shift.

Or what Kierkegaard would call faith.

Time less

Free Will vs. Predetermination

Leaving aside the religious angles on predetermination and being grossly simplistic on an overdone topic, it comes down to these:

If we have free will, then actual randomness must exist in the universe.
If we do not have free will, then everything is predetermined.

If everything is predetermined, then time is tenseless. (past, present, future are all fully formed and time's passage is an "illusion")
If everything is not predetermined, then time's passage takes on the form of the present and multiple futures are possible.

If time is tenseless, then there is no such thing as free will.
If time is tenseless, then there is a possibility of a unifying theory of everything.

My telos is a techne to support facts.

Godel claims proof that there are no closed systems.
All basic math and physics depend on equations based on ideal circumstances.  They also use maths solved in 2 and 3 dimensions, which are not factual physical objects, and therefore can only ever be considered models of reality and never theories of reality.
Non-linear dynamics approaches fractional dimensions and is the only math trying to describe actual reality, its prince is the fractal.
If the fractal represents physical reality, evidence is pointing toward free will.

make leaps with me, it's fun.

linocut Gano

People are perturbations.

Some of them are especially perturbing. Robert Gano is this poet. His poems are simple and dramatically cadenced: jackhammer, quicksand, catapult. They deconstruct meaning, turning ideas into objects both as an absurd commentary on an entitled generation and as a Buddhist meditation on assigned values. One senses that the message of his work reveals more about the reader than Gano himself, yet the poems are vulnerable and embarrassingly human.

His work does to context what ee's did to syntax.

Robert is featuring at Blue Monday poetry open mic tonight. You should be there.

[[ 4/13, 8 pm Arts Bar 3611 Broadway 64111 ... no cover]]

In the meantime, Robert is a constant inspiration to my art and companion to my braining. I made this linocut from a self-portrait photograph of/by Robert and combined it with an enjambed word.

dis-
appointment

This was the first enjambment which unlocked some of the deep coding I find in Gano's writing. Think of appointment, only. It implies that there exists a person to do the appointing, as well as the appointed thing. Then the action of dis-appointing a thing can be positive, the thing can cease being a concern. The enjambment also suggests that when you classically disappoint someone, it is a loss of status ... you lose the appointment.

anywhy, here is the thing, I did a run of 14.

the retired linoblock

my deeply cut finger, derp.

photos are fun

#philosophy #art #woodblock #gano #thatsreal #poetry #poem #metaperturbation

responses {{perturbations}}

That there is more to explain is itself a truth-fact.

In response to the light cones post:

Garret: Does that pertain to neutrinos? They hardly interact with matter at all, and when they've been detected, they have proven to be even "smaller" than photons, indicating a smaller frame. As a result, I think there is something else going on with light speed.

The moment of dimension shift between energy being massless and having mass is the smallest 'physical time' unit, which is expressed as photon production.

Think of the pendulum, we mark the middle spot as zero and the ball swings from negative to positive numbers on a number line. It is sensible to put the zero there, where the kinetic energy is highest. Still, the oscillations can be numerated only if some zero is chosen. Now think of the photon as being the zero between mass and massless, which is to say between energy and matter.

The speed of light being constant could be just the highest kinetic energy moment of this process. With faster than/lighter than as feasible as heavier than/faster than.

Here is another space where a dimension shift occurs: think of the exponential growth function, y=e^x, where e is Euler's Constant. The fascinating thing about this constant is that for all the exponential growth possibilities (of which there are infinite!) this is the one where the speed matches the acceleration.

These are all good examples of physical paradoxes we accept because we have experience with them. mass = energy, particle = wave, square root[-1] = i, e = irrational number, etc.

cool links on these topics
what's a neutrino?

faster than light!?

y=e^x and why this is my favorite number and function.

.....from Jared: Garret, you may be equating particle size with unit-of-time size. What Jeannette said does not require the size of the photon or neutrino to be specified (it may end up being a mathematical consequence, but it's not immediately obvious). What you're saying is that the neutrino may end up being the unit-of-space particle whose emergence is correlated with the unit-of-time, instead of the photon, but since neutrinos move at light speed also, Jeanette's idea still holds.

Are mass-generating and space-generating different things?

Randy: But if time is just an illusion caused by photon generation, it can be removed from the equation; thus, making the speed of light indeterminable. I just totally made that up ... but my fine use of commas and semicolons makes it sound believable.

You colon better than other punctuators.

For the conegeeks: I give assertions: Time is not an illusion. Time is real.

Still, some math arguments for sort of ignoring it are valid, we don't call it the independent variable for nothing. These musings are more of a radical redefinition in how we think of time, especially towards unifying the dimension shift between time and space.


Jeff: The unit h is the smallest unit (of mass?) that can sustain a frequency. But how long does it take for an electron to move from a higher to a lower orbit? Some say "No time at all." Light moves at a constant *velocity* for all frames, but the frequency that is observed at the boundary of an event is dependent on the relative velocity of the frame making the observation. Does it take a longer or shorter amount of local time for an electron to move from a lower to a higher orbit? Now compare two frames moving with unequal velocity observing light of the same frequency from a light source. Does one of the electrons appear to move between orbits faster than the other electron? How can both be instantaneous locally and not the same when viewed from outside the two moving frames?

#nothingisbrokenintheuniverse

Lots of maths work just about perfectly in their appropriate frame. Euclid, Hyperbolic, Newton, Einstein .... Gödel, Feynman? I feel the earlier time cones gives a potential structure to those physical paradoxes you describe, we need a mathematician. A model which allows some perturbation to warp space time in such a way that the SERIOUS problems with electrons are resolved.

I love your last two questions. I think they arise from some assumptions I don't agree with, namely that the electron exists at all in lieu of quantifiable perturbation. I think the "electron" is energy until some force acts upon it, in which case the electron appears at the interaction, otherwise it is in it's highest KE state, which is the cloud. In other words, if you bump it, it will be there.

Which makes me wonder, are there "electron cones" like I assert there are "light cones" ... I'm unconvinced at the knee jerk.

on time

Time is man's greatest invention to date.

But it might be more, it might be a real thing, a discovered thing.

Certainly processes begin and end, there are markers of change. When we start to infiltrate time more deeply though, there are questions about when beginnings begin.

Look at this drawing. Imagine event P and Q occur at the same "time." The photons which carry the information begin propagating out into spacetime. The axes aren't labeled, but x is space and y is time, hence the cone shape, light will really propagate in a sphere when unobstructed.

Now event P and event Q are nonexistent to each others' "senses" until their time cones intersect, which is at the shaded area near the top.  This is important because it shows irrevocably that information which exists is also impossible to access.

Funnier things happen if you switch the grid which P and Q live on, and pretend to live on different planes. P can appear to occur before Q and vice versa, though we know I've set it up that they are simultaneous events.

Unfortunately, we don't have access to the original relative frame. There may or may not be one, but without one, it is impossible to know which set of frames we are on, and therefore how events are ordered.

Combine this frame talk with Einstein's observation that photons (light) travels at the same speed in all frames and we come to my potentially original thought:

Light appears to have a constant speed for all relative frames because the process of photon generation is intrinsically equal to the smallest physical unit of time.

This makes me think that perhaps the true relative frame which is at "absolute" rest is the timeless frame in which all photons, past present future, are created. It makes me think that photons are the true timekeepers.

Paradox

Why truth looks like a paradox: we are at a place no one understands yet, we are where discoveries can occur. We are at the boundary.

Truth-Facts

for whyever,

I have faith that truth exists.

When I was young, I sought truth through drugs. Hallucinogens, Leary, Morrison, Huxley, all that. This undid many ravels in the knot of childhood residue, I became dis-invested in vanity. Truth I found: there is some sort of underpinning to all aspects of reality. Like physical time cannot be divided into discrete objects, matter is also intrinsically continuous.

Then came history, current events and obsessive reading. Let's call it a blind and unguided intake of mass amounts of information, the more the more stunning. I used my library card like an addict, read like a hoarder. I developed a fear of forgetting and an anxiety of not knowing. It seemed truth would not be revealed or discovered in the absence of complete knowledge. Truth I found: complete truth is intrinsically impossible to know.

Of course, I didn't believe that, so I turned to Physics. I thought, maybe if i get a phd in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, I will access the truth. I believed physics would distill the universe into calculable equations, show that continuous underpinning. What ended up fascinating me was actually non-linear dynamics and meta-logic; and each of these seriously questions true causality. Truth I found: boundaries are intrinsically paradoxical.

But, how can I be a mathematician or scientist who doesn't actually believe in causality?

What about dimension shifts? How do objects continuously transition from zero to one dimension? Is infinity real? Is time tenseless or no? What value are models? What can we throw away?

What are the axioms of physics?

What are the axioms of ethics?