Elementary Units and Emergence Patterns

Philosophy is a diverse intellectual ecosystem. People are inspired to think about just about every aspect of reality and imagination.

My focus in the sophi is nearly always what I call "axioms." These are elemental units, building blocks, basics; what I sometimes like to call "legos." A good way to think of this is to image the ACGT of DNA: from these legos are built every known instance of life. The types of life which emerge from these basics are part of what I call "emergence patterns."

=> => => => => 

It is a mistake to think that one can treat a frog in the same way as a DNA helix. It is also a mistake to try and apply the problems, systems and causalities of emergent patterns to the nature of philosophical axioms. One might also think of these two types as general (axiomatic) and specific (emergent).

These two types of thinking are often confused, and I think it's a good practice to consider the reach of any one idea. Is it a basic of something? of everything? Is it a repercussion of something?everything?

For example:
axiom: energy exists
emergent pattern: atomic bombs exist

Suppose one says, "atomic bombs are bad" and gives thoughtful reasoning as to why this should be. It would be a mistake to respond: "that's like saying energy is bad!" There exist too many interactions between e=mc² and Hiroshima to apply the same conclusions to both instances.

Axioms tend to be observations, whereas emergent patterns easily run the gamut from observations (I see that butterfly), to physical interactions (that butterfly is pollinating a flower), to ethical decrees (you should not kill that butterfly).

I'm interested in axioms because the puzzle of finding the true commonalities between things is fascinating. <poet> I'm not making idle chatter, I'm chasing the truth. </poet>

micro-videos

The little videos.

I don't know why I started making these. I try to think as little as possible.

Still, they fit.

So, I continue, but I want to say a bit about my intentions.

These are flippant, short, funny, stupid, esoteric, and meant to be laughed at. They expose the confident know-it-all we are constantly bombarded with, they have no common sense, they show nothing bad happens when you do it wrong. We are full of ideologies, dogmas, traumas, phobias, "certainties" and mostly .... habits.

The videos are anti-habit. They are trigger happy. They aren't shell-shocked. They are full of wonder and childish play.

Anyway, they have a home now. Jeanette Powers You Tube Channel

#thatsreal

Definitions of terms

well, this is going to take forever.

well, that depends on what you mean by forever.

my ouroboros shark tattoo by Betsy Barratt

My goal is axiomitizations. Basic principles or truths or relationships. The fundamental building blocks of well, things. That'll require some basic defining of terms. I know other philosophers talk about these things with different terms, and appreciate Heidegger's comments on the relevance of connotations (however). I hope to offer what may be happily called "a layman's guide" to big ideas.

He who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never fully kiss you.

Therefore: terms.

A THING is anything. Idea, axiom, item, element, process, person, connection, paradox, that which can be named, described, sensed, imagined. ALL OF IT, it's all something.

INFINITY is the set of all THINGS. The set of all things is infinity. There is nothing outside of this. It is neverending.

Subsets of infinity include:

ITEMS: the totality of things which exist outside of human consciousness. That items exist outside of human perception is an axiom. I take Husserl's answer to Descartes for the curious, but admit this is a inherently unprovable.

IDEAS: the totality of things generated by human consciousness. This is most things, and importantly, all names. Many philosophers spend a lot of time making the connection between naming (an idea thing) and the real item thing. Wittgenstein and I are working that out now, but I angling for there is no distinction between the item and the idea. We just need any-old-aribtrary-agreed-upon name.

AXIOMS: Something true which cannot be proven true. For instance (what will be the first axiom), infinity exists. I say that there exists no mechanism which can itemize infinity, it cannot be proven true. Yet, it is. The justification for this comes later and uses Godel's Incompleteness Theorem heavily to conjecture.

ELEMENTS: a set of things from which all other sets of things can be built. For instance, what atoms are to molecules. Atoms are the elements of molecules. Also, importantly think of Euclid's plane geometry ... what he calls postulates I call elements. This is so the idea of elements can leave the realm of mathematics and its rigor.

MODELS: systems described by elements as axioms. Take a set of elements as axiomatic, then correlations, causations and conjectures can be shown with logic or mathematics. Most of modern physics and math does this exclusively, that is: solving problems in idealized situations. No friction, no turbulence, no resonant frequency, no variable tension due to temperature change etc etc etc. It is important to keep in  mind that models are not actual pictures of reality, though (luckily) often so close as to make no difference.

INTERACTIONS: all sets of coordinations between things. What are seen as connections, processes, causes, attractions, systems.

that's all for today. tomorrow we build!

***************

note to you: I left off DIMENSION SHIFT definition because I don't have it wrapped yet. BUT, think on this:

THERE ARE NOT FOUR DIMENSIONS.

There is no zero dimension, because every thing exists.
Every thing exists in one dimension, at one and only one place. The place is precisely the thing.
When things have interactions, a DIMENSION SHIFT occurs, and systems emerge.
2 and 3 dimensions are only useful for convenience and shortening maths. VERY USEFUL! But not descriptive of fundamental items or interactions.
Once interactions occur, which is technically always, we exist in 4 dimensions simultaneously.

So, only what we traditionally call dimensions 1 and 4 exist in reality.

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.