< unknown pleasures >

“The <Unknown Pleasures> was written by Chuang Tse. The essence of it is telling you that you are free to do anything you like.” 

THE INDEFINITE IS FUNDAMENTAL

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The biosphere that can be described is not the biosphere that will become.”

"What’s the largest unsolved problem in complexity science? Getting beyond its utter dependence upon mathematics."

'Life is a nonequilibrium, self-reproducing chemical reaction system that achieves: i. Collective autocatalysis, ii. Constraint Closure, iii. Spatial Closure. 

"In Critique of Judgment, 1793, Kant wrote: 'an organised being has the property that the parts exist for and by means of the whole.' He was trying to find a notion of natural purpose. Every living organism is a Kantian whole. You have a heart and a liver and a kidney and a spleen. They exist because they’re part of you, and you exist because of them. Once you’ve got the notion of a Kantian whole—of parts and whole—you can talk about the function of a part, non-reductively and non-circularly

 Inside the environment of the cell, viruses are Kantian Wholes that reproduce. The Parts of the virus, in the context of the cell, create multiple copies of the Parts of the virus that self-assemble into the mature virus Whole. It is of interest that a definition of life including that of a Kantian Whole classifies viruses as alive. Kantian Wholes are a special class of dynamical physical systems. A crystal is not a Kantian whole. The atoms of the crystal can exist without being parts of the crystal. A brick is not a Kantian Whole. A cell is a Kantian Whole."

'It is of the deepest importance that all living cells achieve constraint closure. Cells construct the very boundary conditions on the release of energy that constructs the very same boundary conditions. Cells construct themselves. Computers and locomotives do not construct themselves. Reproducing cells are fundamentally not von Neumann’s self-reproducing automata, (20). These are based on a “Universal Constructor.” To construct anything specific, the Universal Constructor requires specific “Instructions.” These are encoded in a physical system placed inside the Universal Constructor. The physically embodied instructions play dual roles: They are used to construct a copy of the Universal Constructor into which a physical copy of the physical Instructions is constructed and then inserted. The dual roles of the physical Instructions constitute precisely the distinction between software and hardware. In sharpest contrast, a living cell, via catalytic and constraint closure, constructs specifically itself. A cell is not a universal constructor requiring separate Instructions.'

"The function of your heart is that subset of its causal properties that sustains you. Your heart pumps blood. But your heart also makes heart sounds, and it jiggles water in your cardiac sac. Your heart makes indefinitely many different sets of causal properties. Unlike mathematics, the actual behaviour is physical, not symbolic. Mathematics misses the physicality."

Darwinian Exaptations or Evolutionary Co-Options as defined by Gould and Vrba: "(1) A character, previously shaped by natural selection for a particular function (an adaptation), is coopted for a new use—cooptation. (2) A character whose origin cannot be ascribed to the direct action of natural selection (a nonaptation), is coopted for a current use—cooptation." 

"Here’s a Kantian whole. It’s got a bunch of parts. Each part has a very large number—I will say indefinitely many—subsets of causal features. Any one of them could become of use. But from the use of a heart to pump blood, you cannot deduce that jiggling water in the pericardial sac might be of survival value. There’s no deductive relationship between the different uses of parts. And the word “use” is not in physics, but it is in biology. The implication is open biological evolution is real, and it’s real because parts come to have and have used different functions. So that underlying open evolution is not deducible.

So uses of things have the following three properties: they can’t be put into one-to-one correspondence with the integers; use of things is just a nominal scale; there’s no ordering relationship; you cannot deduce one use from another. Therefore, the indefinite is fundamental." 

"The indefinite is things with the property that they cannot be listed, cannot be ordered relative to one another, and cannot be deduced from one another. The definition is instantiated by the Darwinian pre-adaptations. This opposes Plato’s forms, the eternal realm, and the fundamental notion—which is central to Newton—that all the possibilities already exist. And that’s Newton’s pre-stated fixed-state space. At the pre-stated fixed-state space of quantum mechanics, biological evolution creates new possibilities. They come into existence. Tigers came into existence. A tearing head. And that’s why biological evolution is open-ended. But it also means the evolution of the biosphere is an undeducible propagated construction, not a tale of deduction. There is no theory of everything."

"We in the West have looked for 2,500 or 2,400 years on the basis of Plato’s Logos: the world is understandable, which is his internal realm, where all the possibilities already exist. The possibilities already exist—again, as Newton’s pre-stated state space. It’s the state space bit of quantum mechanics. It’s the pre-statement of probability theory. All the possibilities already exist; therefore you can calculate a probability. It’s the same thing thinking of statistical mechanics: all possibilities already exist. Essentially all of physics, all of complexity theory, is in the formal world. And essentially it’s in Plato’s world. 

But the evolving biosphere isn’t."

"-There are new possibilities. When the tiger and the gazelle evolved, tigers could eat gazelles, and the possibility that a tiger will catch a gazelle and get dinner is real. Three billion years ago, there wasn’t the possibility that the tiger exists. The possibility itself came into being. And it does so because Darwinian pre-adaptations really are new possibilities. Once a swim bladder exists, for example—it evolved because it was good at being a swim bladder, namely neutral buoyancy in the water column—but watch: once it’s true that there is a swim bladder, is it now possible that a worm could evolve to live only in swim bladders?

-Sure.

-Before there was a swim bladder, was that possible?

-No.

-New possibilities come to exist all the time in the evolving biosphere, and that’s outside of the purview of physics. So life depends on physics, but can’t be reduced to it. 

And if that’s right, then, beloved, there is no theory of everything—if you want the theory of everything to include an evolving biosphere."

"Technological evolution is the same thing. You cannot get a crossbow until you’ve got a bow. If you’ve got a bow, it is not hard to think about a crossbow. So technological evolution is doing the same thing. It is innovating based on what’s around, typically for a new use. And if it’s new, we see if it’s patentable. It’s not invented.

Did you ever see this wonderful series of James Burke called Connections? It’s about the evolution of technology. It’s wonderful. One of them is about the evolution of the carburetor. I think it’s the carburetor from a Persian biologist’s coarse perfume. Or the cannon evolved from a church bell. Think of the shape of the bell, squeeze it in, and it becomes a cannon. That’s “cannon” for “invented.” Most inventions are pre-adaptations—Darwinian exaptations—of things that already exist. There’s not a pre-existing space of all the possibilities."

"If we cannot say what will next become, we cannot pre-state it like the now. We don’t know the sample size of the process, so we can’t define probability, so we can’t define “random,” so we can’t assess risk for you true capitalists. You kind of know that.

And now I get something fundamentally cultural to it. It means Plato and Newton gave us a machine. The world is a machine. It’s a clockwork. But a machine has a property that we can master it, and we have dominion, which is what Roger Bacon told us.

In fact, we cannot reason about what is going to become. The response has to be participation, not dominion. So it got into some kind of cultural transformation, there is something about humanity and participation and wisdom—not dominion power.

It’s this stuff glimmering in me, and I don’t know."

THEOREM

 Beware of angels, always. 

Obsessed by the idea that there is at least a touch of evil in the interaction between angels and humans. When angels violate human space, they know this. Angels are not inherently holier than humans. Angels occupy different spaces and possess higher-order capabilities, and of course, have greater access. But angels are susceptible. On the surface, an angel's intervention on earth seems miraculous, but they are messing around where they should not be. 

Angels and humans can agree on their envy for each other's state. 

"Look at the state she's in, eating nettles" 

"I no longer even recognise myself. What made me like the others has been destroyed. I was like everyone else, with many faults, perhaps, mine and those of the world around me. You made me different by taking me out of the natural order of things. While you were near, I didn't realise it. Now I understand, you're leaving and knowing I'm losing you makes me aware of my difference. What will become of me from now on? The future will be like living with someone, nothing to do with myself. Maybe I must probe the depths of this difference you have revealed which is the innermost anguish of my being. But whether I desire it or not, won't this set me against everyone?" 

Yes, it will. And it will be a lonely life. Revelations, cessations, and shifts that increasingly divorce someone from ignorance, force them to look. Because once ignorance is split, what you thought was bliss, does get exposed, and then it breaks down. If the individual wants to exist in a state of true bliss, they are forced to try to stand upright. Trying to get up is lonely. You'll roam around the 'Deserts of Love'

"Your destruction has been complete. You've simply destroyed the image of myself I've always had"

I wish I did not feel this way today, but I do. How can people skim the real and not want to go there? How can you get messed up by a painting or a track but stay committed to your sleepwalk? I love everyone, but that doesn't mean I want us to stay where we're at. I am grossed out by my own sleepwalking, maybe the bare minimum is to wish for a change in that state. It's better not to talk to anyone at all than to talk to another sleepwalker that is perfectly contented with the dumbest, basest distractions possible. I want to refuse talk with them forever, at least until I get myself up. Christ. 

"His life was his and his alone... It would take longer to duplicate his goodness than to create a star. The godhead which had come without my hoping for it has not returned, and will never return again" 

He modifies the line from "hers" to "his"

"Through the love you gave me I've become aware of my illness" 

Erotic encounters are precipitated by wiping cigarette ash off someone's pant leg, looking through a book of Francis Bacon paintings together, hunting gunshots and barks in the background, lifting a sick man's ankles up to shoulders, sitting between the devil's knees to show him photographs she took. 

"We must try to come up with new, unrecognisable techniques resembling nothing that's come before to avoid the childish and the absurd. One must build one's own world that allows no comparisons where previous standards don't apply. The standards too must be new, like the techniques themselves." 

--Taking a very Cixous-like stance here. But remember, his madness came from being touched by the "miraculous" 

"Nobody must realise that the artist is worthless, that he's an abnormal, inferior being, squirming and slithering like a worm to survive. No one must ever witness his lapses into clumsy artlessness. Everything must appear perfect, based on unknown and hence unquestionable rules. Like a madman."

"Pane after pane, because I can't correct anything and nobody must notice. A sign painted on a pane corrects, without soiling it. A sign painted earlier on another pane. But everyone must believe that it isn't the trick of an untalented, impotent artist. Not at all. It must look like a sure decision, fearless, lofty and almost arrogant. Nobody must know that a sign succeeds by chance... is fragile. That's as soon as a sign appears well-made, by a miracle it must be protected, looked after, as in a shrine. But nobody must realise that is the artist is a poor, trembling idiot, second-rate, living by chance and risk, in disgrace like a child, his life reduced to absurd melancholy, degraded by feeling of something lost forever."

The powder blue kitchen matched the same colours in London in the late afternoon and early evening today. Pasolini's was a tenebrist, doors open light on them. Underwear and messed up clothing on the floor is such a thing in this movie: signalling abandonment everywhere. Wiazemsky's goddamned perfect spinning face. 

"Don't be afraid, I didn't come to die, but to weep. Not tears of sorrow. No they will be a source of suffering. Go away now." 

"You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced. You have violated me and you have prevailed. I have become an object of daily derision, everyone mocks me. For I heard the defaming of of many, terror on every side: 'Denounce him, and we will denounce him' All my friends awaited my downfall saying:  'Perhaps he will himself be seduced and we shall take our revenge on him'