Peter Sloterdijk - On The Living Space and Sphereology

Turn On Your Radios - Dark Galaxy on Andromeda's Horizon

Forbidden Symmetries and Alchemical Mysteries

from Google AIi:

Penrose tilings exhibit "forbidden" symmetries, particularly 5-fold and 10-fold symmetry, which are not possible in traditional repeating crystal structures. This was a revolutionary discovery that opened new avenues in crystallography and quasicrystal research, ultimately leading to Dan Shechtman's 2011 Nobel Prize. Penrose tilings, with their non-repeating patterns, also demonstrate the potential for aperiodic structures to exhibit mathematical properties related to quantum error correction

Parmenides, Meet Heraclitus!

46 and 2

The "Strange Magic" of Social Control

Alchemy for Non-Alchemists

You're sailing softly through the sun

In a broken Stone Age dawn

You fly so high

I get a strange magic

Oh, what a strange magic

Oh, it's a strange magic

Got a strange magic

Got a strange magic

You're walking meadows through my mind

Making waves across my time

Oh no, oh no

I get a strange magic

Oh, what a strange magic

Oh, it's a strange magic

Got a strange magic

Got a strange magic

You know I got a strange magic

Oh yeah, I got a strange magic

Got a strange magic

Got a strange magic

Oh, I'm never gonna be the same again

Now I've seen the way it's got to end

Sweet dream, sweet dream

Strange magic

Oh, what a strange magic

Oh, it's a strange magic

Got a strange magic

Got a strange magic

It's magic

It's magic

It's magic

Strange magic

Oh, what a strange magic

Oh, it's a strange magic

On Cliodynamics and Constructing a New Seldon Plan for the US/ China

Peter Turchin's Future of Psychohistory

The Role of Extinction in the Physical Process of Evolution in Replicators and in Non-Physical (Abstract) Ideas Like Constructor Theory

What is Knowledge?

Knowledge: A replicator that tends to remain instantiated in phyrical systems, and can cause transformations to occur, retaing the property of causing them again and again.

In Sum: That which allows for Resiliency through Replication

The fundamental Principle of Constructor Theory:

Whatever transformation is not forbidden by the laws of physics, can be performed  to arbitrarily high accuracy provided that the requisite knowledge is created.

Excerpt from video above:

The only way knowledge can be created under these laws of physics is by a non-directed process of trial and error correction steps.  And this is true of Natural Selection and of the knowledge creating process that occurs in people's minds.  But here we come to a fundamental distinction between the two, because in Natural Selection, the only way a non-adequate theory or idea, a non-adequate recipe for a bacterium can undergo Extinction is by actual death of the organism that it happens to be travelling in.  This is a feature of Natural Selection.  But it need not be so in general, for extinction.  In fact, in human minds, what happens is that whenever a theory is found to be parochial, that is to say that there are problems it cannot solve, the way it is eliminated, the way it undergoes extinction is by criticism.  And criticism is tentatively directed to progress, and it's a fundamentally non-violent process which doesn't involve death, if not of abstractions.  So as Karl Popper put it, we can let our ideas die in our place.  

Once thinking abilities have emerged, a new kind of extinction has become possible, that does not involve death... 

"one that is based on criticism and on actually criticizing abstractions.  So it is this kind of Extinction which is not only crucial for the creation of new knowledge, but with a Constructor theoretic insight, it is part of the very process where our endeavors to create, to perform transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics, take place.  An so this is how Constructor Theory lets us see how"

...Extinction can be a Constructor for future possibilities!

Roger Penrose's Most Significant Idea...

...conceived in the days following the JFK Assassination in '63

Twistor Theory

Why Life's So Complex...

Welcome to My (Evolutionary Assembly Index Step x) Snowball-Earth Life Complexity and Diversification Factory.

The Pros and Cons of Lindy Having Some Skin in the Game

(Living in the Belly of the Whale)

If an aviation expert like a pilot makes a mistake, he dies.  If a journalistic 'expert' has an "agenda" and makes a mistake, if discovered, he'll print a retraction (maybe) or more likely, just double down  His only skin in the game being his 'agenda', not his life..

Pulling Rank on One's Level and Type of Expertise

..and wee-weeing out over possible 'Disinformation',  not the "Evidence" presented from the Argument.  After all, that's why there are two-sides presented in a dialectic.  Thesis:Antithesis::Synthesis (not ad hominem "you're not an expert, so there!")

PMC Experts, the New Surplus-Salaried Elite

(so much for the New Enlightenment)

MAGA America's Pareto Principle's 80/20 Rule in Practice

Linguistic Debates... UG... Merge... Recursion... Arboreal vs. Rhizomic serial thought translations

Speculations on Consciousness:  The "attention" space carved from short-term RAM where analog parallel subconscious goes digital-serial (& layered) within the neocortex.  That "serialized" voice in your head.  Ape's short-term RAM can hold many more simultaneous parallel thought objects in RAM than humans.  If shown a collection of objects, they're much better at recalling them and their relations to one another.  We "focus" on serializing and layering the multiplicity stream and so can usually recall only a limited number of the objects. Autistic humans may be less limited in this regard than neurotypical thinkers.  This "distraction" by language is acquired in humans from childhood and forms the foundation for neurotypical mental/ neural development structures.  Why Russian orphans neglected in early childhood seem "retarded" without all the linguistic distractions of attentive parents.

 

More "Chunking" thoughts...

The New Face of Robotics...?

Creating New Forms from Mascaritas de Crystal

Byung-Chul Han, "Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies of Power"

Jenny Holzer

Accents and Orthophonetics in Finnegans Wake

Thiel & Peterson

Are All Democrats Creatures of 2nd Order Observation?

Excerpt from Hans-Georg Moeller video above:

Nicholas Luhmann

...at the level of first-order observation,...we...describe facts and objects as existing in such terms as... "there is" socialization, "there is" consciousness, "there is" life, and so forth.... The world is presented as if it was just there in the... way in which it was described.

...In biology, society, etc., everything acquires... a modality of being in relation to a reference, an observer, an observing system. ...the shift to Second Order Observation is a shift of consciousness of reality to a description of descriptions.

Kant observed REASON as an observing system. He called it "transcendental Philosophy". Hegel developed Kant's approach. For Hegel, reality is neither simply "in itself", that is "objective", nor simply "for itself", that is "subjective"; but is "in and for itself" that is, both objective and subjective. We must consider both these moments in relation to one another. So for Kant, the observing system was Reason, or Vernunft. Vernunft is static and a priori. For Hegel the observing system was Spirit or Geist and Geist is dynami,c and constantly develops itself through its' own observations.

For Luhmann there is a multiplicity of observing systems; social systems, mental systems, biological systems, and potentially others. They're all autopoietic and they develop and reproduce themselves while observing and influencing one another.

I'm not sure if Kant and Hegel's philosophical shift to second order observation had any effect on Analytic Philosophy, but it did have a big impact not just on Luhmann, but on Continental Philosophy. Nietsche, for instance, thought in the mode of second order observation when criticizing Plato, Christianity, or Kant, for that matter. He doesn't simply argue that they are wrong about some facts. He doesn't simply disagree with them in the mode of first order observation. Instead, he observes them as observers, criticizing not just what they say but how and why they say what they say, and what they don't say.

The second order observation approach characterizes many 20th century thinkers including Freud, Derrida, and Foucault. They didn't just theorize about what dreams, texts, or history said. They weren't just focused on the message. Instead they looked at dreams, texts, or history in relation to an observing system; a psychological system, textual system, a power system which produces these messages.

This approach makes an ontological difference, a difference of Being. There are no longer simply dreams, texts, or history as facts or objects. There are observations by and for observers. Psychoanalysis, deconstruction, genealogy, and social systems theory are all second order observation theories.

Now second, to sociology. In modern society, according to Luhmann, and I think he's right, we did not only switch to theories of second order observation, virtually all of society also switched to practices of second order observation. Luhmann writes "The perception of what others say, or do not say, has become the advanced mode of perceiving the world in modern society; in science no less than in the economy, in art as much as in politics." And I think Luhmann is right. In today's society, as he writes, it is no longer necessary to know how the world is as long as we know how it is observed, and as long as we know how it is observed and find orientation in second order observation.

Arguably, second order observation evolved most forcefully in the economy by the rapid development of financial markets. Back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes illustrated the key role of second order observation in the economy with the example of a new kind of beauty contest. Keynes' beauty contest is not about seeing who is the prettiest, but about seeing who is seen as the prettiest. Keynes writes, "It's not the case of choosing those faces that to the best of one's judgment are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be." And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth fifth and higher degrees.

The financial markets create economic value through second order observation processes. Just like Keynes beauty contest creates beauty value. I discussed more examples of second order observations in other videos. Here I just want to say yes second order observation has a long history, but its institutionalization in the form of rating, ranking, and reviewing "systems" is a new thing. For a career as an academic, for instance, you need to be successful in the Peer review System, and that's new. And believe it or not, when I was a student that system didn't exist. The whole digital revolution, the spread of algorithms that influenced most of social life today, is a practice of second order observation.

AI is misnamed. It's actually not intelligent in the sense of thinking. How do ChatGPT or Deep Seek work? They calculate probabilities by observing observers. They do not understand any message or any meaning. But they are very good at statistically observing your observations. By observing what and how people observe, not what they think or feel, AI can, for instance in the form of text generation, reproduce such observations artificially. What is more, it can and does condition your observations. The fact that you are watching this video right now is conditioned by organized, commodified, and digitalized second order observation.

Third, second order observation has an existential dimension. It's built into the identity technology of profolicity. In authenticity we're concerned with Dasein, as Heidegger said, with "being there". But in profilicity, we're concerned with "Dastehen", with standing there in the eyes of an observer. We see ourselves as being seen. When shaping our sense of self we orient ourselves to others, to our general peer, or our "scrollmates" as viewer Charlie Abbott suggested we call them.

In an existentialism of the 21st century, we need to move beyond Heidegger and understand that there is no simple "being there". In order to "be there" you need to stand there in the first place. Dasein is Dastehen.

Your online profile is just "standing there" (Dastehen), after all.

"... I've built my PROFILE, so you must respect my iDEN-ti-TAH!

Democrats - Masters of Dastehen (Standing There, in the Eyes of an Observer/ General Peer)  Look (Observe) at ME and at how BEAUTIFUL I am!  I LOOK Good!

Republicans - Masters of Dasein (Being There, in the Eyes of an Observer/ Friend)  Look (Observe) at the WONDERFUL Things I've Created!  If  THEY LOOK Good, I AM Good!

Giambattista Vico: "The New Science" (1725)

Occupante Concede: History Demands a Coherent Narrative

A History of Epistemes and Paradigms

"Custom is like a King, and the Law, like a Tyrant"

- Dio Chrysostom (Natural Law being adopted by social custom, not novel Legislation)

Natural law contrasts with legal positivism, which views laws as solely based on societal rules or the will of the legislature.

Excerpts from video above:

This natural law was born of human customs, which sprang from the common nature of nations, which is the universal subject of my science. And this natural law preserves human society, for there is nothing more natural, because more pleasing, than observing natural customs. Consequently human nature, which is the source of human customs, is sociable.

So we can see that this idea of natural law is a function of human customs. We create what we see as essential in human development and action. And nevertheless, Vico is going to try to say, and I'm really not sure of the validity of this, that behind human custom is a fundamental human nature, a commonality to all humans which among other things is our sociality, which acts as the basis by which we can enter a common historical development. That we can see ideas develop in various paradigms that connect to each other in a temporal sequence.

---

Vico attempts to develop a sort of common grammar or logic by which society develops. He says, that we observe that the barbarous and civilized nations of the world, despite their great separation in space and time and their separate foundations, all share these three human customs: which is all have some religion (and he sees this as the proof of the historical revelation and presence of divine providence), second all contract solemn marriages (which he sees as the proof of the family as the fundamental social unit), and third all bury their dead (which he sees as the proof of the eternal nature of the human Spirit).

And thus the notion of humanity is constantly recursively developing itself through history in every nation, no matter how savage and crude, no rights are celebrated with more elaborate ceremonies or more sacred solemnities than those of religion, marriage, and burial. So he's trying to find some sort of common conceptual vocabulary that we use to frame our actions.

Thus the philosophers, he says, have made a fundamental error by avoiding the historical development of these concepts. He says that the philosophers should have discussed Providence, as revealed in the economy of civil institutions. This is clear from the proper meaning of the word Divinity, which was applied to Providence. This noun derives from the Latin verb "divinari", to divine. In other words, to understand either what is hidden from men, meaning the future, or what is hidden within them, meaning their conscience.

All right, so this idea of the future, of the unfolding of ideas, of a sense of becoming that Hegel is going to develop, and this idea of conscience, of a developing historical consciousness, which is going to become for Hegel self-consciousness, and thus the resplendant truth of the development of a dialectical unfolding of Geist, of Spirit for Hegel.

My new science, he says, is therefore a demonstration, as it were, of Providence as a historical fact. That is, it must provide a history of the orders and institutions which provide bestowed on the great polity of humankind without the knowledge or advice of humankind and often contrary to human planning. For although by its creation our world is temporal and particular the orders which Providence establishes in it are universal and eternal. So essentially, governing and managing the immense variety of experiences, ideas, and peoples is a series of definite orders, which are these you know, Ages of the Divine, the Heroic, and Mankind; which are going to frame the historical development of our species and thus of civility itself.

Now there's a lot more that I could say about this. He's going to talk about the development of language from monosyllabic grunts and song, as well and its' relationship to mythology. There's some interesting stuff in here, and a lot of it, we know now, is incorrect. A lot of his etymologies are wrong. They are in fact, made up. But I think that there's a slight magic in this, which is, that we're seeing a break in the way we conceive of history from a simple tabulation of facts, to a conception of narrative and coherence that blends us through a development of ideas that are recursively and self-reflexively understanding their relationship to the past, and the future. so I think that this is a very incisive moment in the history of philosophy and in the philosophy of history

Out of Beer!

Machiavelli, On Why Most "Leaders" Suck

Byung-Chul Han. "Vita Contemplativa'

"Depression arises not from lack, but from excess. It is a result of too much possibility, too much pressure, too much self."

- Byung-Chul Han

Don't be a Grub Street Scribbler!

On the Ethics of Bad Art (Kitsch)

Robert C. Solomon, "On Kitsch and Sentimentality"

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession:

The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! 

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankiind, by children running on the grass! 

It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch!

As the notion of "truth" requires "falsity," the very notion of "taste" in art necessitates the existence of "bad taste" and, consequently, bad art... These days, it is far wiser for an aspiring young artist to offend or disgust the viewer rather than evoke such gentle sentiments as sympathy and delight.... So this is just what is particularly interesting from a philosophical point of view, about the peculiar variety of "bad art" called "Kitsch", and, in particular, the variety of kitsch sometimes called "sweet kitsch".. that appeals to the sweeter sentiments.

Is the "Sentiment" of Kitsch a 2nd Order Observation? 

 Rick Anthony Furtak, "A Review of Robert C. Solomon's 'In Defense of Sentimentality'"

This volume is the second in a series collectively entitled The Passionate Life, which promises to bring together a definitive edition of Robert Solomon's essays in the philosophy of emotions. While its chapters (most of which have previously been published in one form or another) deal with a range of topics in aesthetics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of religion, the common thread from beginning to end is a focus on the affective dimension of life. If this qualifies as a philosophical category in its own right, it is largely due to the work of Solomon himself, who over the past thirty years has arguably done more than anyone else to establish the philosophy of emotions as a major area of inquiry.

One of the chief aims of the book is to defend the importance of being emotional: against those who harbor distrust toward particular emotions or toward emotion in general, Solomon mounts a counterattack meant to demonstrate that emotional sensitivity is an ethical virtue, valuable in itself and essential to any meaningful human existence. This goal is especially prominent in the first and last essays of the collection, which (according to the author's preface) serve to lay out the concerns of the volume as a whole. "In Defense of Sentimentality" and "On Kitsch and Sentimentality," the two chapters in question, are united in their denial that the term "sentimentality" ought to have negative or pejorative connotations. This goes against the practice of using the word to describe emotions that are inauthentic, facile, excessive, self-deceived, or distorted. According to Solomon, this critical use of the word "sentimentality" is nothing but a convenient way of expressing a more comprehensive bias against emotion as such, and especially against a class of emotions variably described as the "sweet" or "tender" sentiments. He puts forward the remarkably strong claim that, in spite of prevailing opinion to the contrary, "there is nothing wrong with sentimentality" (4).

In taking this unapologetic stand against those who have argued that sentimentality involves a wistful turning away from reality, or an objectionable misrepresentation of the world, Solomon puts himself in the position of having to defend any and every instance and type of emotion that has typically been stigmatized as sentimental. A reader who is sympathetic to his project in many respects may reasonably feel that such a position cannot be rendered plausible and coherent, or at least that Solomon does not succeed in proving his extreme thesis that all opposition to sentimentality is unjustified. After all, he makes reference throughout the book to the Aristotelian ideal of appropriate emotional response. If it makes sense to speak of being angry at the right person, for the right length of time, and to the right degree, then it must be possible for our emotions to "go wrong" (244) -- that is, by virtue of being inappropriate in a given situation. It would be strange to suffer more grief over the death of a goldfish than over the death of a close friend (81), and there is something wrong with a person who "romanticizes" the raw experience of grief in abstraction from its object (87). Likewise, our feelings toward the natural world ought to include an awareness of its violent side (151), not only of such properties as the cuteness and innocence of prairie dogs. These are just a few of Solomon's own examples of what another philosopher might describe as sentimentality. His examples of flawed emotion are proof that Solomon is not as indiscriminate as his thesis would lead us to believe. Why, then, should he maintain that the very attempt to distinguish more and less defective instances of emotion is motivated by a generic prejudice? On the contrary, anyone who acknowledges the intentional content of emotions (as Solomon does) has a reason to care about the difference between cases in which our emotions go wrong and cases in which they are right on target.

A philosophical defense of the emotions does not have to be such an all-or-nothing affair, and Solomon himself clearly appreciates the need for Nietzsche's distinction between those emotions that are worth having and the ones that weigh us down with their stupidity. It is a frustrating strategy, then, when he continually punts to making vague allegations about the pervasive bias against emotion -- a conversation stopper if ever there was one, since it only changes the subject and does nothing to explain why a particular kind of criticism should not be made. One may be convinced by Solomon's essay defending the desire for vengeance as an emotion that arises from a tacit sense of justice, but this is no reason to abandon the belief that there is such a thing as patriotic kitsch, in which non-tender emotions (such as hatred for "the enemy") are sentimentally evoked. When Solomon reports his own "suspicion" that a specific criticism of sentimental emotion is based on an anti-passionate bias in the critic, this should not change the mind of anyone who suspects that the criticism is valid (242). There is a difference between interpreting things in the best possible light and seeing only what one wishes to see, and Solomon should not be so quick to concede that all emotions involve a distortion of the world, or that "what love sees and thinks is mostly nonsense" (173). We are guilty of a kind of deception when we project onto the world whatever qualities would justify the emotions that we most enjoy having. This is subtly but crucially different from viewing the world in light of our concerns: in the former case, we invent a pretext for feeling what we have already decided to feel. In the latter, emotional attunement provides the framework through which we experience situations that are not themselves subject to our will.

Although emotions, like other intentional states, must in some sense be answerable to mind-independent reality -- as Solomon points out, I cannot be angry at you for stealing my car if I know that my car has not been stolen -- it is also true that our experience of the external world is affected by the emotional state of mind with which we approach it. In other words, our emotional comportment toward the world has a decisive influence on the nature of our experience: even though it would be naïve to imagine that we have the power to "create" our own reality, the lens through which we are looking goes some way toward determining what it is that we see. This dialectic between the subjective and the objective aspects of emotional perception is among the more intractable facts that must be explained by any philosophical account of the passions. On this topic, Solomon has some insightful remarks to offer, although these are not very well represented by the title of his book. At one point he distinguishes between idealization and illusion, the former being a kind of glorification of the object, the latter a falsification of it (227). This is a welcome alternative to the idea that all emotions are equally distorting, and it captures the sense in which love provides us with a kind of knowledge that is not available to the dispassionate observer. When I love someone, it is likely that I am especially able to appreciate her good qualities, because these are glorified in the light of my radiant gaze; and this is not equivalent to admiring a falsified image of her while failing to see who she really is. Love does not "make anything true," but it does transform our whole perspective, enabling us to see things that were previously hidden from us. To be passionately engaged, then, is to adopt "a positive attitude in which all sorts of possibilities open up that may not have been so evident before" (160). For this reason, gratitude for existence is a good emotion to cultivate, regardless of whether or not it can be "objectively" justified.

The Wave's not Real...

...and other modelling and mathematical theoretical "artifacts".

Palantir, from the Outside

The New Society of Control

>

Now Get Back to work Producing Content, Cloud Serfs!

Why the Universe Matters!

from Wikipedia:

The Ambassadors is a 1533 painting by Hans Holbein the Younger. Also known as *Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve,[1] after the two people it portrays, it was created in the Tudor period, in the same year Elizabeth I was born. Franny Moyle speculates that Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, then Queen of England, might have commissioned it as a gift for Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador, portrayed on the left.[2] De Selve was a Catholic Bishop.

As well as being a double portrait, the painting contains a still life of meticulously rendered objects, the meaning of which is the cause of much debate. An array of expensive scientific objects, related to knowing the time and the cosmos are prominently displayed. Several refer to Rome, the seat of the Pope. A second shelf of objects shows a lute with a broken string, a symbol of discord, next to a hymnal composed by Martin Luther.

It incorporates one of the best-known examples of anamorphosis in painting. While most scholars have taken the view that the painting should be viewed side on to see the skull, others believe a glass tube was used to see the skull head on. Either way, death is both prominent and obscured until discovered. Less easily spotted is a carving of Jesus on a crucifix, half hidden behind a curtain at the top left.

The Ambassadors has been part of London's National Gallery collection since its purchase in 1890. It was extensively restored in 1997, leading to criticism, in particular that the skull's dimensions had been changed.

*Dinteville's motto was Memento mori, meaning "Remember thou shalt die."

...and if Time ran backwards in the anti-matter Universe?

from the Jowett summary of Plato's "Statesman"

No, not that; but another part of the story, which tells how the sun and stars once arose in the west and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, as a witness to the right of Atreus. 'There is such a story.' And no doubt you have heard of the empire of Cronos, and of the earthborn men? The origin of these and the like stories is to be found in the tale which I am about to narrate.

There was a time when God directed the revolutions of the world, but at the completion of a certain cycle he let go; and the world, by a necessity of its nature, turned back, and went round the other way. For divine things alone are unchangeable; but the earth and heavens, although endowed with many glories, have a body, and are therefore liable to perturbation. In the case of the world, the perturbation is very slight, and amounts only to a reversal of motion. For the lord of moving things is alone self-moved; neither can piety allow that he goes at one time in one direction and at another time in another; or that God has given the universe opposite motions; or that there are two gods, one turning it in one direction, another in another. But the truth is, that there are two cycles of the world, and in one of them it is governed by an immediate Providence, and receives life and immortality, and in the other is let go again, and has a reverse action during infinite ages. This new action is spontaneous, and is due to exquisite perfection of balance, to the vast size of the universe, and to the smallness of the pivot upon which it turns. All changes in the heaven affect the animal world, and this being the greatest of them, is most destructive to men and animals. At the beginning of the cycle before our own very few of them had survived; and on these a mighty change passed. For their life was reversed like the motion of the world, and first of all coming to a stand then quickly returned to youth and beauty. The white locks of the aged became black; the cheeks of the bearded man were restored to their youth and fineness; the young men grew softer and smaller, and, being reduced to the condition of children in mind as well as body, began to vanish away; and the bodies of those who had died by violence, in a few moments underwent a parallel change and disappeared. In that cycle of existence there was no such thing as the procreation of animals from one another, but they were born of the earth, and of this our ancestors, who came into being immediately after the end of the last cycle and at the beginning of this, have preserved the recollection. Such traditions are often now unduly discredited, and yet they may be proved by internal evidence. For observe how consistent the narrative is; as the old returned to youth, so the dead returned to life; the wheel of their existence having been reversed, they rose again from the earth: a few only were reserved by God for another destiny. Such was the origin of the earthborn men.

'And is this cycle, of which you are speaking, the reign of Cronos, or our present state of existence?' No, Socrates, that blessed and spontaneous life belongs not to this, but to the previous state, in which God was the governor of the whole world, and other gods subject to him ruled over parts of the world, as is still the case in certain places. They were shepherds of men and animals, each of them sufficing for those of whom he had the care. And there was no violence among them, or war, or devouring of one another. Their life was spontaneous, because in those days God ruled over man; and he was to man what man is now to the animals. Under his government there were no estates, or private possessions, or families; but the earth produced a sufficiency of all things, and men were born out of the earth, having no traditions of the past; and as the temperature of the seasons was mild, they took no thought for raiment, and had no beds, but lived and dwelt in the open air.

Such was the age of Cronos, and the age of Zeus is our own. Tell me, which is the happier of the two? Or rather, shall I tell you that the happiness of these children of Cronos must have depended on how they used their time? If having boundless leisure, and the power of discoursing not only with one another but with the animals, they had employed these advantages with a view to philosophy, gathering from every nature some addition to their store of knowledge;—or again, if they had merely eaten and drunk, and told stories to one another, and to the beasts;—in either case, I say, there would be no difficulty in answering the question. But as nobody knows which they did, the question must remain unanswered. And here is the point of my tale. In the fulness of time, when the earthborn men had all passed away, the ruler of the universe let go the helm, and became a spectator; and destiny and natural impulse swayed the world. At the same instant all the inferior deities gave up their hold; the whole universe rebounded, and there was a great earthquake, and utter ruin of all manner of animals. After a while the tumult ceased, and the universal creature settled down in his accustomed course, having authority over all other creatures, and following the instructions of his God and Father, at first more precisely, afterwards with less exactness. The reason of the falling off was the disengagement of a former chaos; 'a muddy vesture of decay' was a part of his original nature, out of which he was brought by his Creator, under whose immediate guidance, while he remained in that former cycle, the evil was minimized and the good increased to the utmost. And in the beginning of the new cycle all was well enough, but as time went on, discord entered in; at length the good was minimized and the evil everywhere diffused, and there was a danger of universal ruin. Then the Creator, seeing the world in great straits, and fearing that chaos and infinity would come again, in his tender care again placed himself at the helm and restored order, and made the world immortal and imperishable. Once more the cycle of life and generation was reversed; the infants grew into young men, and the young men became greyheaded; no longer did the animals spring out of the earth; as the whole world was now lord of its own progress, so the parts were to be self-created and self-nourished. At first the case of men was very helpless and pitiable; for they were alone among the wild beasts, and had to carry on the struggle for existence without arts or knowledge, and had no food, and did not know how to get any. That was the time when Prometheus brought them fire, Hephaestus and Athene taught them arts, and other gods gave them seeds and plants. Out of these human life was framed; for mankind were left to themselves, and ordered their own ways, living, like the universe, in one cycle after one manner, and in another cycle after another manner.

Enough of the myth, which may show us two errors of which we were guilty in our account of the king. The first and grand error was in choosing for our king a god, who belongs to the other cycle, instead of a man from our own; there was a lesser error also in our failure to define the nature of the royal functions. The myth gave us only the image of a divine shepherd, whereas the statesmen and kings of our own day very much resemble their subjects in education and breeding. On retracing our steps we find that we gave too narrow a designation to the art which was concerned with command-for-self over living creatures, when we called it the 'feeding' of animals in flocks. This would apply to all shepherds, with the exception of the Statesman; but if we say 'managing' or 'tending' animals, the term would include him as well. Having remodelled the name, we may subdivide as before, first separating the human from the divine shepherd or manager. Then we may subdivide the human art of governing into the government of willing and unwilling subjects—royalty and tyranny—which are the extreme opposites of one another, although we in our simplicity have hitherto confounded them.

Noether's Theorum

Noether's theorem states that every continuous symmetry of the action of a physical system with conservative forces has a corresponding conservation law. This is the first of two theorems (see Noether's second theorem) published by the mathematician Emmy Noether in 1918.[1] The action of a physical system is the integral over time of a Lagrangian function, from which the system's behavior can be determined by the principle of least action. This theorem applies to continuous and smooth symmetries of physical space. Noether's formulation is quite general and has been applied across classical mechanics, high energy physics, and recently statistical mechanics.[2]

Salvatore Garau, "Aphrodite Crying"

An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. It’s Made Literally of Nothing

“It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination,” Salvatore Garau said of his sculpture.

The Italian sculptor Salvatore Garau has “installed” one of his “sculptures” in front of Federal Hall, right at GW’s feet, and I have never found a better use for snarky air quotes than in this context. (Thanks to Jolene Howard for the heads up.) “Aphrodite Crying” is in a circle marked on the cobblestones at the corner of Wall and Broad.

I’m all for high concept but this one has got me. Still, the video is a lovely tribute to Fidi (despite the time lapse that has all the passersby jogging) and the buildings that surround the sculpture. And the more you think about it, the more you realize that he may be on to something: I am not sure I will ever pass this spot again and not think of Aphrodite. (This also happens to be the site where the city wants to relocate Charging Bull, the work of another Italian sculptor with a radical bent.)

There’s one flash of an image of a sculpture in the video, which I caught here as a still.

The press this week revolved around his sale of another sculpture of, well, nothing for $18,000. “It is a work that asks you to activate the power of the imagination,” Garau told the Spanish news outlet AS. “After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?”

The video has subtitles that have the occasional English translation:

“You don’t see me but I exist, right above this white round shape.

“I am Aphrodite, an intangible sculpture made of air and spirit.

“Still don’t see me? And yet I am here, in front of you.

And I cry because I am beauty and love which is disappearing.”

HE Neutrino from an Evaporating Black Hole?

Catherine Liu

On Deleuze & Guattari's Rhizomatic Unconscious

NAZI Kitsch: Making Germany GREAT Again!

James Lindsey: On the Dangers of the Woke/ Nationalist Right

...More on German Kitsch and the banality of Evil

\

Woke Kitsch: Making Diversity GREAT Again!

Lviv Animosities in WWII

Mario Vargas Llosa, RIP

Padre Homero

No sabemos si era uno o muchos.

Ni siquiera sabemos si existió

o lo inventamos

para dar un dueño y una leyenda

a los poemas que fundaron

el mundo en que vivimos.

Las cuencas vacías de sus ojos

iluminan como dos soles

las aguas, las islas y las playas

del Mediterráneo.

Tampoco sabemos si las historias

que cantó tuvieron raíces

en la historia real

o fueron fantaseadas

por su imaginación incandescente.

---

Diálogo de damas: La Realista

Sólo existe lo

que piso, miro

siento y toco:

la lluvia que

nos moja

los perros que

nos huelen

y los apresurados

transeúntes.

Detesto las

mentiras de

la irrealidad.

Acato sin

protestar la tiranía

de todo lo

existente.

Sólo amo lo posible

y me sublevo

contra el hechizo

de las ilusiones.

Pobres amigas,

ustedes tienen miedo

a la vida y por

eso se esconden entre

las musarañas de

la fantasía.

Yo sé vivir

Constructor Theory: From Universal Computers to Universal Constructors

More...

Zizek's Quantum Geopolitics

Sara Imari Walker on Assembly Theory

Electro-Magnetic Planet Factories?

Samuel Beckett: Quadrat I & II

 A Play in 2 Parts with an Intermission of 100,000 years.

Quadrat - German for "Square"

Object Assemblies in Time are Contingent

"Life is merely the amount of selection going on per unit volume"

Natural Selection = Shortest Assembly Theory Path

Welcome to My Star Factory

...and Start-of-Life Factory?

Zizek: "Trump is a Liberal fetish"

Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication

...direct from the Schizoid M.I.T. 'department' of "none of the above".

FabLabs portend the birth of the Tofflerian Prosumer!

Excerpt from video above:

...So there's so much potential for good, so much capacity for good that FabLabs and the ability and the tools of creation really unlock that potential.

- I don't say that as sort of dewy-eyed naive. I say that empirically from just years of seeing how this plays out in communities.

- I wonder if it's the early days of personal computers though, before we get spam.

- In the end, most fundamentally, literally the mother of all problems is who designed us? So assume success in that we're gonna transition to the machines making machines and all of these new sort of social systems we're describing will help manage them and curate them and democratize them. If we close the gap I just led off with of 10 to the 10 to 10 to the 18 between chip fab and you, we're ultimately, in marrying communication, computation, and fabrication, gonna be able to create unimaginable complexity. And how do you design that? And so I'd say the deepest of all questions that I've been working on goes back to the oldest part of our genome.

So in our genome what are called HOX gene, and these are morphogenes, and nowhere in your genome is the number five. It doesn't store the fact that you have five fingers. What it stores is what's called a developmental program. It's a series of steps. And the steps have the character of like grow up a gradient or break symmetry. And at the end of that developmental program, you have five fingers. So you are stored not as a body plan, but as a growth plan. And there's two reasons for that. One reason is just compression. Billions of genes can place trillions of cells. But the much deeper one is evolution doesn't randomly perturb. Almost anything you did randomly in the genome would be fatal or inconsequential, but not interesting. But when you modify things in these developmental programs, you go from like webs for swimming to fingers or you go from walking to wings for flying. It's a space in which search is interesting.

So this is the heart of the success of AI. In part, it was the scaling we talked about a while ago. And in part, it was the representations for which search is effective. AI has found good representations. It hasn't found new ways to search, but it's found good representations of search.

- And you're saying that's what biology, that's what evolution has done, is created representations, structures, biological structures through which search is effective.

- And so the developmental programs in the genome beautifully encapsulate the lessons of AI. And it's embodied, it's molecular intelligence. It's AI embodied in our genome. It's every bit as profound as the cognition in our brain. But now this is sort of thinking in molecular thinking in how you design. And so I'd say the most fundamental problem we're working on is it's kind of tautological that when you design a phone, you design the phone, you represent the design of the phone. But that actually fails when you get to the sort of complexity that we're talking about. And so there's this profound transition to come. Once I can have self-reducing assemblers placing 10 to the 18 parts, you need to, not sort of metaphorically, but create life in that you need to learn how to evolve.

But evolutionary design has a really misleading, trivial meaning. It's not as simple as you randomly mutate things. It's as much more deep embodiment of AI and morphogenesis.

- Is there a way for us to continue the kind of evolutionary design that led us to this place from the early days of bacteria, single cell organism to ribosomes and the 20 amino acids?

- You mean for human augmentation? - For life- what would you call assemblers that are self-replicating and placing parts? What is the dynamic complex things built with digital fabrication? What is that? That's life.

- So ultimately, absolutely, if you add everything I'm talking about, it's building up to creating life in non-living materials. I don't view this as copying life. I view it as driving life. I didn't start from how does biology work and then I'm gonna copy it. I start from how to solve problems and then it leads me to, in a sense, rediscover biology. So if you go back to Valentina in Ghana making her circuit board, she still needs a chip fab very far away to make the processor in her circuit board. For her to make the processor locally, for all the reasons we described, you actually need the deep things we were just talking about. And so it really does lead you.

There's a wonderful series of books by Gingery. Book one is how to make a charcoal furnace. And at the end of book seven, you have a machine shop. It's sort of how you do your own personal industrial revolution. ISRU is what NASA calls in situ resource utilization. And that's how do you go to a planet and create a civilization. ISRU has essentially assumed Gingery. You go through the industrial revolution and you create the inventory of 100,00 resistors.

What we're finding is the minimum building blocks for a civilization is roughly 20 parts. So what's interesting about the amino acids is they're not interesting. They're hydrophobic or hydrophilic, basic or acidic. They have typical but not extremal properties. But they're good enough you can combine them to make you.

So what this is leading towards is technology doesn't need enormous global supply chains. It just needs about 20 properties you can compose to create all technology as the minimum building blocks for a technological civilization. - So there's going to be 20 basic building blocks based on which the self-replicating assemblers can work?

- Right. And I say that not philosophically, just empirically, that's where it's heading. And I like thinking about how you bootstrap a civilization on Mars, that problem. There's a fun video on bonus material for the movie where with a neat group of people we talk about it because it has really profound implications back here on Earth about how we live sustainably.

- What does that civilization on Mars look like that's using ISRU, that's using these 20 building blocks and does self-assembly.

- Go through primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary. You extract properties like conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric, flexural. These are the kind of roughly 20 properties. With those, those are enough for us to assemble logic and they're enough for us to assemble actuation. With logic and actuation, we can make microrobots. The microrobots can build bigger robots. The bigger robots can then take the building block materials and make the structural elements that you then do to make construction. And then you boot up through the stages of a technological civilization.

- By the way, where in the span of logic and actuation did the sensing come in?

- Oh, I skipped over that. But my favorite sensor is a step response. So if you just make a step and measure the response to the electric field, that ranges from user interfaces to positioning to material properties. And if you do it at higher frequencies, you get chemistry. And you can get all of that just from a step in an electric field. So for example, once you have time resolution in logic, something as simple as two electrodes let you do amazingly capable sensing. So we've been talking about all the work I do, there's a story about how it happens, where do ideas come from?

- That's an interesting story. Where do ideas come from?

- So I had mentioned Vannevar Bush and he wrote a really influential thing called the Endless Frontier. So science won World War II. The more known story is nuclear bombs. The less well known story is the RAD lab. So at MIT, an amazing group of people invented radar, which is really credited as winning the war. So after the war, grand old man from MIT was charged with science won the war, how do we maintain that edge? And the report he wrote led to the National Science Foundation and the modern notion we take for granted but didn't really exist before then of public funding of research, of research agencies. In it, he made what I consider an important mistake, which is he described basic research leads to applied research leads to applications leads to commercialization leads to impact. And so we need to invest in that pipeline.

The reason I consider it a mistake is almost all of the examples we've been talking about in my lab went backwards. That the basic research came from applications. And further, almost all of the examples we've been talking about came fundamentally from mistakes. Essentially everything I've ever worked on has failed, but in failing, something better happened. So the way I like to describe it is ready, aim, fire is you do your homework, you aim carefully at something, a target you wanna accomplish, and if everything goes right, you then hit the target and succeed. What I do you can think of is ready, fire, aim. So you do a lot of work to get ready, then you close your eyes and you don't really think about where you're aiming, but you look very carefully at where you did aim, you aim after you fire. And the reason that's so important is if you do ready, aim, fire, the best you can hope is hit what you aim at.

More about MIT's FabLabs 

Quilting with Deleuze and Guattari

On the Movement between Modern and Meta-Modern Societies

Which Prophet's Prophecy Foretells the Future?

...the moment you wake up inside someone else's dream, you discover "The Nightmare"!

Henri Fuseli, "The Nightmare" (1781)

You are trapped in an inescapable time bubble with No Exit.  Everything is already determined.  You have no free will anymore!  The infinite possibilities of the future foreclosed and reduced to a single nightmare by the collapse of Time's wave function of the present moment... the singular experimental result revealed to the horrified Observer.  Art-ificial Limits to my Own Desire (which will Brook NO Limits)

...but if only it were your dream.

I wonder why George Soros' "Open Society" hides behind so many closed National and Globalist Society Secrets?

Meet Me on the Dark Side...

...for the Eclipse!

Damien Hirst: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable

Lee Cronin On Why AI Doesn't Stand a Chance..

Excerpt:

What Burgson said...actually I like it a lot because Instinct going into cognition gives you intuition. Intuition is the thing that you can't yet put into language very well, you haven't got there, but you've got this thing right?