Isomorphism is simultaneously one of the most simple and most difficult concepts in mathematics. We can say that two things are isomorphic (or, equivalently, if there exists an isomorphism between them) if there is a way to represent one as the other, without loss of information.

It’s a simple concept because it’s just so intuitively obvious - 1 = {{}} = the multiplicative identity = f (x) -> x (function identity), etc. It’s the essence of two things being the “same.” It’s “sameness” in its purest form. What could be easier to understand? That dog is that dog. That dog is its cells and organs. That lump of cells and organs is that lump of molecules.

It’s a difficult concept because it’s really unclear how to use it. The answer to this question is more of an ontological/meta-mathematical nature than a purely mathematical one. E.g. what do you do when you find out that two things which you did not think were isomorphic, are indeed isomorphic? E.g. Howard-Curry Isomorphism which proves that proofs in intuitionist logic are isomorphic to a type of computation. Proofs are computation? Holy shit, now what?

But I mean, but I mean, there are no isomorphisms in nature. Information is always lost. Perhaps quantum entanglement or some shit, but I don’t know shit about that.

Anyway, consider a song with a 4/4 beat. “Downbeat” is a construct, in other words it’s a map from the song to some conceptual ideal. But “upbeat” is there, too. And “tone” and “color” and “mood” and take all that shit that you could say about the song. The set of all things we can say about the song uniquely identifies it. And if we can represent these somehow visually, through dance, through animation, etc. then we have some sort of spastic isomorphic form which a space alien human-reverser could transform back into the aural version.

Shit! You know what I mean. Did you watch the videos? Those motherfuckers dancing is isomorphic to the songs!

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK I love Tucker Barkley. I watch his videos frequently. When I go dancing, I strive to move like his soft pasty white man-ass moves. He’s so ridiculous and fun and spastic and spontaneously creative and AHHHHH. It’s more more more more more than anything else EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER.

I think that my aesthetic has been dominated, historically, by a desire for spontaneity. I don’t create many complete forms. I freestyle rap, I dance, I write short poems, I write steam-of-consciousness blog posts. My style is dynamic and spastic and aims to be transcendental. But it is also burdened by a deep guilt – a lack of intentionality – a flailing, neurotic character. When things go on too long they begin to feel burdensome and dark and terrible. Like on a long run, when you’re running out of blood sugar. Like at the end of a trip, when you’re still far from home. Strung-out and irascible, horny and haunting.

I believe that this spastic dynamic spontaneous shit is tied somehow to my desire to motivate to radical/extreme positions. I wish that I could push the people I know to be radical – give you kids drugs, murder, steal, have sex with basically everything that moves. I wish that I could move myself to be radical. And it feels like the only way to push to radicality is through an impulse – that a full, well-constructed form will move people, change people, drag the social fabric around, but will not radicalize.

I also believe that the reason that I am capable of being spontaneous is that I have become, in many ways, a mirror, a channel, a vessel. I am able to observe a form in one domain and transform it, isomorphically, preserving its flavors, into another domain. This is what poets do, right? They can taste the trees and touch, and it’s all vague, but so honest and true, and they are mirror, mirror, mirror. I mean, to think that all of this structure that I spit out in my blog and in the world somehow lies uniquely and solely in me is just downright arrogant, right? Obviously I’m just taking shit from somewhere else, repackaging it, and sending it out?

This type of packaging can only be accomplished spontaneously. Everything that we do is a transformation, basically, but a slow one is a more complicated one. Not isomorphic, not even linear – a complex convolution of information input with past experience and randomness rolled up and pressurized until it boils out as a new form: lush, green, vibrant, and fertile. It’s great, it’s beautiful, it’s everything, but it’s not me. It’s creating worlds instead of echoing them infinitely. Repetition is the essence of life and I want life want life life LIFE.

I think that spontaneous action which is equivalent to isomorphism – a lossless transformation of form to form – exposes the underlying similarities in reality which free us from independent, burdensome reprentations. So BASICALLY fun = isomorphism, is what I’m really fucking saying – or alternatively: forget about experience reality, BE reality.

A confession: writing in my blog often makes me feel arrogant. I think that sometimes I go a little overboard and the teleological-speculative aspects of my writing take over. Sorry about that. I’m not even sure why I write. I do know that I feel great pain, that the pain accumulates over time, and that when I write I feel less pain for a little while. Good enough reason for me.

Please read my last post. Also, please ask me questions – not just on this last post, but in general. I’d love to know what you all would like me to talk about. I will answer all questions that you write as comments to this post.

- Chris

When a geographic region becomes closed – becomes a nation, a city, a state, a family, a horde, a clique, etc. – its population gains a potential for self-knowledge and self-reflection which allows the formulation of descriptions of sub-forms which are representations of its highest values.

Tersely/abstractly, my thesis is this:

In this way, these men, along with the powers they commanded and the structures they subsumed – which is to say the “structures of these men” – were the principle epiphenomena arisen in their anthropo-social-manifolds as resulted from motions of the fundamental principles of these structures.

When humans collect into groups their first task is to form a communication net which allows them to cooperate, to become a big old family, as it were.

The second task is to manifest a King.

The third task is to create a burial vessel for that King.

—–

I am, of course, speaking somewhat cryptically, but I have two hopes, and I hope that you’ll tolerate my horrible writing style long enough to embrace them:

1. That you can see the echoes of this metaphor/structure throughout the ages – a moment of stasis, a collection of truth, a human manifestation, and then the death of that manifestation and a revolutionizing of reality w/r/t the principle which that manifestation represented.

2. That you will join me in the belief that we are in stage 1 of our narrative. That final globalization has begun – that we are:

i. Forming an information network which spans the globe (the internet) so that we can increasingly see each other as family (once we realize that foreigners, drug users, homosexuals/transexuals/pedophiles/queers, psychotics, the disabled, etc. are all, really, brothers and sisters)

ii. Working together to permanently dismantle the structures which enable the few to live at the expense of the many

iii. Allowing to arise a new morality which everyone can more or less buy into because it’ll just be that fucking obvious (and btw when you fail to live up to it, that’s OK)

iv. Electing the human who most perfectly, obviously, and humbly reflects this morality to act as a sort of living standard of harmonious and beautiful human action

v. Coming to terms with the death of this human, and thereby achieving a deeper understanding of our relationship to the universe, mortality, etc.

—–

In vulgar terms, we are in a dark age. We are doing the hard work of building the network to inter-communicate. We are learning to share. We are learning to think about our distant neighbors as our brothers and sisters. It will be long, it will be hard, but we have to do it. There is no other option, and there is not much time.

I believe that if we do not experience the death of this “King” figure (who, btw, obviously doesn’t have to be male) then we will not, as humanity, internalize death. We will live in ignorance of death. Therefore, we will die.

This is (almost) obvious from the point of view of the Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis dialectic or (in another tradition) the middle way. You must know both extremes (Life and Death, in this case) completely before you can transcend either concept.

—–

Some concrete things we can do to get there:

1. Stop hating anyone, period. Even the 1%. Even the small mass of vulgar, greedy politicians who despise us and wish to suck our blood. Even the wall-street sociopath who sees you as a number. Even mass-murderers. Even George W. Bush. Even Stalin and Mussolini and Mao and Kim Jong Il. They are your brothers and sisters, even if they’ve lost the way. If you attain love for them then you will have conquered them.

This is not to say that you should not experience hate, or neglect or ignore your emotions. It is to say that you should not participate in creating social forms which encapsulate and reify this hate. It is to say that you should express your hate directly: “I hate X.” Perhaps the way to conquer your hate will be through hating 10x more than you’re now giving yourself license to hate. Maybe you need to get it out of your system.

God only knows I have trouble with this one. I could fill volumes with the names of people and things that I hate. But I’ve gotta let it go, man.

2. Be pro-drug. This means all drugs are on the table. This means no more war-on-drugs. This means the most important political question is 100% drug legalization. There is no political topic as important as drug legalization. We need LSD and mushrooms and research chemicals and god knows we need ibogain and ecstasy and we need them now. We need to free our minds, first. We’ve figured out the whole “how-not-to-die” thing, for the most part. Put it aside. Stop worrying about it. Free your fucking mind.

3. Live radically healthy. However healthy you think you are, you must be more healthy than that. Love and support anyone around you who is committed to radical health. Help other people be radically healthy. We all know how to eat right and exercise right and love each other, so let’s start doing it for fuck’s sake. We’ve got enough time and energy. Do nice things for people. Do 10x more nice things for people than you think you should.

4. Come to terms with death. No suggestions on how to do this, as only maybe 5 people who I have ever known have died, which is crazy given that I’m 26. Maybe shielding me from the pain of death is the true gift that reality has given to me.

—–

We can do it!

My goal is to communicate this moment, but also this eternity… can I say “this eternity?” This particular one, which you and I are moving through. Because, if space-time is a 4-dimensional object, then isn’t it in a sense static, an “eternity?” And if not, then how can I say “this moment?” Because isn’t a moment just a 3-dimensional slice of eternity? And if not, what is it? And even this metaphor of “moving through” the 4-dimensional object is actually itself unclear. Do we move like balls move? What movement is our movement like?

But let’s just restrict ourselves to my 80+/- year life. I can break it down in any way: 1 second now, 1 second later, or 20 years now, 20 years later. The now and the later. A trim ontology of planning, reading and waiting for me to insert the proper time/place constraints and then it just GOES. Like, fix it at 40 years. The next 40 years are then “now” and the 20 or so after that are “later.” When are you going to have kids? “Later” not a realistic answer, here. Not like if the next 20 years were now. And how it changes!

Oh how the ontology sings! Like a violin, as I sweep the bow of my caprice across it. What mellow tones it emits as I draw my now from the hour to the day to the week to the month to the year and beyond. What colors and shapes and elements of basic reality and how they shift, from the fuck to the outing to the work-a-week cycle to the specific fitness goal to the General Fitness Goal and beyond! And beyond! And when I work my way out way beyond, to think of “now” as 10 years and then 20 and then 1000 and then a billion, how it changes what I think! And the way I think! It changes the writing of this. This!

Oh how to think out a billion years. That’s almost eternity! And I’ve known almost no time. But isn’t it weird how we think we know infinity? Even schoolboys can tell you the basics: 1/Infinity = 0. Infinity + Infinity = Infinity. This, the backbone of the modern ego must be deconstructed for the soul to flower. How can a child know infinity? Doing these basic arithmetic tricks makes it feel like it knows. Like it can almost taste it.

But what is knowing? Perhaps this is what I wanted to talk about. There is a deeper knowing than that which we know. And here we have the ontology of knowing. Do you know that man’s name? Do you know the most populous country? Do you know the square root of 4? How about the square root of 5? And is there something that you know, but that you don’t know that you know? Like, the deep knowledge which compels me to cry at sappy movies, or sometimes when I think about my mother, or when I think about God and Christ. Like, my desire to fuck. Is not that desire a kind of knowing?

There is this feeling that I know everything, this feeling that I could know everything, that I should – this feeling that everything is attainable, that the universe is not infinite, that all the information in it could be grasped. It’s like the throes of a suffocation in a great information-desert. This feeling that everything is knowable is equivalent to the desire to know everything, is equivalent to the desire to know more, to always know more, to know more and more and more and more. And isn’t that death? And loneliness? The not knowing. The not feeling. The non-friction of soul against reality.

Information is hills and valleys and teeth and eyes and magma and unicorns and fetish and every metaphor possible. Information is ______. Information is ALL.

Did you know that you win at evolution by having the most information information? You win at life by it. You win. You are the one who grew the primordial wing. You know, minimally, that flying exists. So as the flood sweeps through the plains you hop/fly to a tree and live. And your children now know it and theirs and theirs. And this knowing is their victory over all those creatures who didn’t know? But how did they not know? How did you, you half-winged creature? So, anyway, information is winning.

And humans know. And they know and they know and they know more and more and more. They make little circles and look at each other. They look at things. They look at each other looking at things. They look at each other looking at each other looking at things. Each little nugget of information is stored and it’s known that it’s stored, and so on. And these circles intersect and intermingle, and the information moves around, and they use it to grow, to conquer, to win. TO WIN!

And if they die, the dynamic will still be there. Do you hear that!?! The dynamic of information = winning will still be there. There will always be unhad information which can be capitalized upon to win.

—

You know deep things. You know your mother and father, even if you’ve never met them. And how to walk. And how to make the sound “fffffffffffff.” You know how it feels to slide your penis in a woman (even if you’re a woman!) and how it feels to take a penis in your vagina (even if you’re a man!) You know love. You may not know that you know it, but you know it. You know what that means. You KNOW what love means. You KNOW IT. I am adamant about this. Your history is not disjoint from love. It has left its mark on you.

“Keep away from love, it’ll fuck you up, fuck fuck you up” – The Blow

You know how to throw and you know what it feels like to kill. You know wind and trees and fields and the savanna and the steppe. You know information and spirals and fractals and all that shit. You know what it feels like to smoke weed and you know what it feels like to eat psychedelic substances. You know what it’s like to cry as a baby. You know what it’s like to cry as an old woman/man. You know me and I know you.

You don’t know eternity, though. And you never will. And you’ll never know what it’s like to be a plastic bottle. And you don’t know what it feels like to stand on Mars and you don’t know what it’s like to be a god.

Fuck, do you know eternity? Do you know infinity?

How can man think about infinity, if he doesn’t know it?

I remember an argument in first grade, about whether there was a number bigger than Infinity. The first boy said that of course there was – there was a number bigger than anything the other boy could name. But the second boy said that there wasn’t – that this thing uniquely had no number bigger than it. For instance, 6 is not bigger than infinity.

What were they talking about? What was their intuition? Did they know infinity, or were they just saying things?

If infinity is madness, then we are all mad. When did man become mad?

—

This is a poor essay. It contains many questions and almost no answers. I’m not sure that I have too many. I try. I try and try, you have to believe me.

I want to understand how I can know so much, why I love women, why I get scared of psychedelic drugs, why I am challenged by certain types of thinking and unchallenged by others. I am thirsty for these informations because I have to win GODDAMMIT. I have to win! God, what am I doing if I’m not winning? Am I mad with my desire to win? Am I already mad or already dead?

Where do I go from here? Where the fuck do I go from here?

—

Back to the beginning. Cuz I got caught up thinking on a billion-year level, about man, and evolution, and life, and all these things I know, and how I’m transforming that knowledge into symbols, how I’m relating those symbols to each other, how those relationships are growing in strength and robustness, how I’m transforming myself into a knowledge-crystal, with signals being sent around like a singing wine glass, but no movement except a dim, sad, hum. And then I fit in with other crystals into mega-crystal, etc. etc.

But now I’m on a second level, and now a half-second, and now a millionth of a second, and now drilling down into the nowhere space the nowhere time the nothing behind my eyelids and my fingers have attained a mind of their own and it’s just this music this sound this circuitry and it’s scary and dark and my eyes are closed and I’m thinking and it’s hard to resist the urge to come back to time and it’s hard to not think about that and this is and I’ve stopped and I’ve stopped and I want to stop this moment, though my head hurts, but that’s not a millionth-of-a-second thought, it’s a 5-minute thought. Can this typing really go on externally to what I’m thinking? And in that “can” isn’t there an eternity, hidden? What words do not hide eternity? I can now feel it everywhere. I can now feel it rising up around me like a thick blackness, like a dirty wheel, spinning uncontrollably, like an inky demon crying and whirling and drawing me in and in. It’s all of these things. These things are all mad.

But perhaps to escape from it I must become yet madder. Madder than eternity. How anguished I feel when I catch myself thinking 20-year thoughts: kids, house, wife, love, plan, career. How sorry I feel that I would pass this deception on to these structures. That they would spiral out to live 20-year lives of their own, and eventually fall. And I become so sad when I think 60-year thoughts. To live to be healthy when I’m older – don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t smile excessively, don’t climb mountains, don’t drive. And as my horizon spins out wildly again it is merely constraints that I see: do not pollute, do not kill, do not steal, do not cause anguish, do not lie, do not do not do not. Because there can be no DO in the hell that is eternity.

In this moment there is enough DO to go around: do scratch balls, do type, do rub temples, do process information, do strive, do love.

And so I am crushed between the DO NOT and the DO. If you are honest and you look in all places, there is really only the DO NOT and only the DO. There is nothing else. There is no maybe, no try, no thought. A thought is a doing or a not-doing. A transformation of information, or a destruction of it. A birth of sentiment, or a nullification, a suppression.

How can a person think about reality seriously and not contemplate suicide? We are mad! How can suicide not be an option. A way out, finally. And what happens if you do it? Does your information get squished with your soul? Or does it slowly seep out of your pores? What happens to your mother’s memory, when you die?

(I am nervous about discussing suicide as it exists in a particularly bizarre state of taboo wherein the discusser suffers the worry of those who perceive his discussion as a cry for help. I have contemplated suicide, but not in the sense of someone who is depressed or psychotic, but as it is, face to face. The reason that these worriers worry is that they are unwilling to do the work and face it, themselves.)

For one thing, a great many great men and women have committed suicide. And what has happened to them? What did they know, that they could not bear to know it anymore? Or perhaps they were they mistaken. Maybe they saw reality through a distorted lens. What did David Foster Wallace know? Sylvia Plath? Hunter S. Thompson. Such beautiful names and souls.

To live life as a sentence requires a period.

I often think that great minds spring from a deep tension. Can you tell the difference between a great mind and a mediocre one? How could you not? A mind exists on the level of its strain. If you experience only superficial discomfort you will experience only superficial thoughts.

And perhaps these great minds were digging furiously into themselves, to find this pain. Or maybe they thrived on it, in a way. Perhaps it was their drive. Perhaps their souls told them to dig furiously, but they ignored them, stealing the fire. Perhaps they weren’t digging at all, these suiciders. Perhaps they were cheating – using their deep tension – their deep knowledge, to other ends.

What the hell is deep tension, anyway? It’s when you know that something is a certain way (deeply) but are forced to live as if you believe it is another way. The superficial hooks of your attachment to life and pain and love and women and sex and money have long lines which sink into the ether and are wrapped around that deep, heavy, truth, preventing it from falling into the abyss of your soul. Maybe you know that people suffer. Maybe you know that animals feel. Maybe you know that a cock feels great in your ass or your mouth. Maybe you know the scent of women. Maybe you know that your mother or father or sister or brother is sexy. Maybe you know that we all eventually die.

It’s impossible to live forever with this tension. Because life is accumulation of attachment. Suffering is the tension between apparent and actual truth. Cut your lines!

1. Internet “community” is rapidly evolving into a more coherent, moral unity. E.g. reactions to SOPA/Protect IP. E.g. Go Daddy Boycott.

- I would like to have a way to be more moral, in general, in my business dealings. Who/what should I boycott? How can we spread information about businesses engaged in immoral acts?

- Is there a way to subsidize others to act more morally? E.g. we could pay people to NOT shop at walmart? Create a don’t-shop-at-walmart fund? Or a fund for people who want to eat well? Charity for the lowest class is good, but what about charity for middle classes?

- Is there a better way to organize people online? There still isn’t a fully unified structure, but rather distributed structures (reddit communities, hacker news, digg, etc. etc.).

2. What is the fucking deal with all these attractive women in movies? Pisses me off.

- Watched Captain America - without an attractive woman for the main character it would have been an impossible movie, narratively, because there would have been no mechanism for correlating CA’s patriotism with his heroism.

- Watched What A Wonderful Life - without an attractive wife for George Bailey, the townspeople would have never gathered, he wouldn’t have been anchored to town.

3. Bitches need to be doing some drugs.

- How can we get more people to do drugs?

- How can we get them to do drugs better?

- Why the fuck is anyone still anti-drug?

- Why is there this myth that there are “bad drugs?”

4. Philistines!

- Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading/thinking more, lately, but I’ve been seeing philistines everywhere. It’s a hard question – how much of society to “reject.” Everyone has their own personal answer. The sum of all these answers constitutes the fabric through which society expresses its power relationships.

5. Value of Ideas

- What is the value of an idea? Part of the reason that the US maintains global superiority is that it produced a lot of good technologies (ideas). A technology is an idea, you know? And it created systems to protect US ownership of those ideas, internationally. I now view the patent system as an international phenomenon – protecting US intellectual interests abroad. But now we’ve specialized in ideas, and perhaps the ideas are running out. What happens then? What happens in the mind, when it runs out of ideas? Is there an “America of the Mind?”

6. Destroying Capitalism?

- How to destroy capitalism (if that’s what you want to do)? Can it be deconstructed? Can we go back to multiple standards, then barter, then nothing? Just sharing? An interconnected web? True communism? World unity? Can this be done intelligently? Or does it require going through capitalism, to the other side?

- Is there a word for this sort of phenomenon – the rising and falling of a dominant system which leaves its mark? A return to naivety, tempered by lots of examples of the failures of the complex system? How can experience from the use of a complex system change one’s perception of their use of a simple system? Simple bad example:

Interaction with physical system (balls flying) -> intuitive approach -> increasingly sophisticated systematic approach -> calculus -> decreasingly sophisticated approach -> intuitive approach

Perhaps it’s just the old thesis, antithesis, synthesis phenomenon. Is there a way to write a program that encodes this?

7. Rapid ideation

- I feel like I’ve been having so many minor epiphanies, recently, and it’s hard to write them down. It’s hard to communicate them fast enough. And I just hear everyone around talking about the same old stuff in the same old ways and I want to be like “NO NO NO IT’S ALL DIFFERENT, NONE OF IT IS THE SAME!” And I’m bored and melancholy and it’s hard to focus, goddammit.

Gone, gone, gone beyond (diamond body, liquid heart) ~~~

There was a man and he lived his life in the same way and then at time X he began to live his life differently

He decided that it was all systems and systems:

[Suppose X is a system and X changed: dX -> dX is a component of another system, then (e.g. Tensors are operators on tensors, being both data and transformation). And it's systems and systems and systems. I'm talking multi-linear, here. I'm talking non-linear. I'm talking quasi-linear. Systems & systems and structures & structures and technology & technology.]

The man was endolinear, he: King World!

Endoquasitranssexual do a hand-stand yeah!
Genderbender king queer lick my tits and fist yeah!

[]

Each shape perfectly unfolding through its negative space-
A rose made of shit, a hill of valleys-
Friction of gun against lower lip, lick it yeah!
Kick your face, back-flip out to infinity yeah! Now I’m standing on a star and there are hearts here
How we move~

I AM KING WORLD

Do you not understand? This is no temporary delusion of grandeur. There is no simple explanation!

It’s a salty taste, and sweet-tarts, the taste of tears, the taste of pomegranates, nitrous expanding within your lungs, dirt, cloud, moon, cock. How I move~

LISTEN TO ME

Please please please please please please please please please please

LISTEN TO ME

It’s just need + time, pressure + time, self-analysis, slow evolution of self, slow self-analysis of slow evolution of self, …, pleasure + time, pain + time, time times time, is there anything else?

And now, what are you thinking? Are you out of it, yet? Are you still ensorcelled by politics and lunar cycles and other contingent truths? Or have you blasted off, finally, to the land beyond words where:

1. The fact that none of this particularly makes sense is of no importance whatsoever

2. You can begin to perceive the underlying fabric of emotion/thought/experience which has brought this particular meat popsicle here to flail inarticulately at this keyboard and produce this very thing that you are reading right NOW

And NOW forget about NOW, expand to this week past, this week future, out to your birth, your death, the beginning and end of your experience, the beginning and end of all experiences, the universe, the loops, hmmming…

But that’s a false conception of time as linear, the encapsulation of a non-thing into a model, caustic reification: devious conceptualization crystalizes fantastic emerging truth of minute and maximal detail oscillation.

And NOW forget about YOU and THIS and would you take my cock in your mouth or fuck your mother or torture a child? You’re feeling fear at these thoughts and now you’re revolting against my analysis and now you don’t know what to think.

Forget about all of that, forget it! It isn’t important.

—

There is nothing new in the whole world, isn’t it boring?

Something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong…

A lot of the time it feels like it’s the background to everything. You’re watching the news and you can feel it in each pronouncement: new genocide here, new protest there, new corruption scandal over there. You watch a Disney movie, and it’s there, behind every smile. Something bad will happen to those characters. They may look happy now, but they will get old, and diseased, and die. Everything, everywhere. All culture, all religion, all time.

But then, every once in a while, something good happens. This something unerringly takes the form of a technology. Like the dishwasher, or the car, or taming horses, or taming fire. Something that makes us collectively exhale our tension – something that makes us forget that everything is wrong, something that makes us feel as if we’re finally – finally! on an upward trajectory.

I feel like there is some very deep truth, here, that I can’t quite uncover. I can’t say it. I feel it. I know it. But, I can’t put it into words. Instead I’ll just say a few (seemingly unrelated) things and hope that you can see the connection:

- Cancer cells are the same as regular cells, they’re just cells that “do not die when they should.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_cell]

- The idea for the pyramids could not have possibly come from anywhere. It is completely, 100% irrational. It is not the solution the a problem. Thus, humans are capable of monumental collective undertakings without there being an underlying, “real,” reason.

– The connection being that the pyramids might have been the consequence of over-population, of human cancer, which had to take some form before technology allowed it to attain self-control.

- Humans have undergone a process of self-knowledge, but this process is still ongoing. Does it have a possible completion? Can humans ever “know themselves?”

- Perhaps what feels “wrong” is this – the fact that there is precisely one zone which is fundamentally hidden, in all of the universe, and it is us.

- There is a law governing conservation of energy, one for conservation of momentum, one for conservation of information, etc. But, if anything, life on this planet is exploding in complexity. Things are getting weirder. Why are complexity and weirdness seemingly increasing, without bound? Why don’t we see them increasing on other planets?

- As organic systems evolve, they seem to attain a sort of equilibrium. But, we generally think of this equilibrium as somehow slippery – as if we could all just get up and act differently if we wanted to. Perhaps it’s instead like a crystal, and as time goes by we are locked into our positions. Perhaps there are only a few dimensions in which we are locked, but in the others we are free. Perhaps we do “work” by locking down extra dimensions. The work of capitalism is to turn society into a crystalline form.

- Let’s go one step further with the crystal metaphor, however. The peculiar thing about human systems is that whenever a human system attains a form with a finite description it seems that there must be, a priori, a way of acting externally to that form – of stepping outside of the form and gleaning nourishment, creating new professions, new definitions, new math, etc.

- So, if we ever truly, fundamentally, deeply, purely, completely know ourselves – if we can create a human system which takes its elements completely into account – then there will be no stepping-outside-of. We will have pinned ourselves to the wall.

- The paradox being that it seems like there should always be a way of stepping-outside-of. Thinking of the something-else. A freedom unchecked. It seems like there’s something that can’t be pinned down.

- What is the force that pins it down? How do we do work by transforming freedom -> rigidity?

- Is this not precisely the definition of technology? (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=technology) The formalization of art? Self-knowledge? Reification? Turning our abstract selves into concrete selves, selves that can be locked together, formed into a structure?

- Has there ever been a movement towards more freedom? Away from technology? Is such a thing even possible?

- Sometimes I think that, if we were to kill 99.9% of everyone, the remnants of humanity might have enough perspective not to over-populate the planet, not to create new technology. We could, perhaps, know ourselves by remaining finite, rather than by conquering all possible selves.

- This is the “something that is wrong” – there is only finite novelty, and at some point the gig will be up.

Example:

Let your friend know that it can stay at my place when it is in town.

Somehow this is dehumanizing?

But doesn’t the fact that this somehow feels dehumanizing mean that we see sex/gender as intrinsic to humanity? So that a non-man, non-woman is non-human? This is very strange to me. There seem to be multiple conflicting systems at play, here.

1. Progressives are the main source of contention w/r/t use of “he” as the gender-neutral/gender-ambiguous English pronoun.

2. Progressives maintain (though perhaps not explicitly) that sex/gender is unrelated to humanity. You can be whatever you want – gay, straight, cis, trans, androgynous, inter-sex, a-sexual, etc. But you’re still human. You can still be human, even if you’re uninterested in sex/unrelated to sex.

3. But somehow leaving out the gender (“it”) is dehumanizing?

It doesn’t have to do with animacy. We can refer to animate (asexual) creatures as “it” – bacteria, plants, protozoa, viruses, archaea, etc. We also refer to ambiguously-sexed animals as “it” – e.g. “Look at that horse over there – it’s beautiful!”

So we have a conflicting set of intuitions/emotions here. Feel what it’s like when I refer to your mother as “it” – “Would it like to eat now?” It feels like I’m calling your mother an animal! But somehow assigning her a gender (“she”) makes her human?

So we have two transitions:

Reference: Neutral -> Gendered = humanizing

Actuality: Gendered -> Neutral = no effect

The reason that referring to a human as “it” feels dehumanizing has to do with the history of seeing non-gendered creatures as somehow less. Like – oh, your mother isn’t a horse! she isn’t an “it!” she is a SHE, she has a gender! she is more than a mere creature!

Then shouldn’t referring to people as “it” be the first step in undoing the history which put gender above non-gender?

Just another example of fools not willing to be radical enough to find the pure solution.

1. Why is this obvious?

2. If it’s obvious, why is this concept of “skin-deep” beauty so popular?

—

It’s obvious because I can come up with lots of alternative explanations off the top of my head:

Characteristics like simplicity and symmetry are generally found attractive – perhaps this is because it’s easier to store information related to a person if their characteristics are simple/symmetric (which is a type of symmetry). A person whose face is simpler will not burden our weak little minds as much as the face of a beast.

Lots of deformities are actually related to some type of pain. E.g. burn victims, people with genetic disorders, victims of abuse, people with scars, etc. Seeing a deformity can then remind one of such a type of abuse.

Physical attractiveness is “known” to be important/desirable. This leads to lots of social effects. E.g. wanting hot girlfriend/boyfriend so that others will be jealous -> do more for you.

Certain types of body-attractiveness are associated with freedom. E.g. part of the reason that contortionists are so hot is that they can move freely through space. This is poetic and romantic and therefore desirable.

Certain types of body/face-attractiveness are associated with sexual pleasure. E.g. pouty lips -> better blow job. E.g. flexibility -> more interesting positions. Etc.

And those are just the reasons that come up off the top of my head. NOW. You could be thinking (assuming you’re one of those fetid everything-is-genetics/evolution types) that this all really relates back to genetic pressures. But in thinking so/saying so/doing so what you’re really doing is conflating genetic pressure with genetic relation.

Everything is trivially related back to genetics. We are genetic creatures. The earliest forms of life were little more than a lump of genetic material, lying around somewhere, and they are what you come from -> what you essentially are.

But not everything is genetic. Some things are. E.g. when I am hungry and see meat and my stomach growls and I get this strong urge to eat MUST EAT, that is genetic. When I smell pussy and get turned on, that is genetic. Perhaps even when I see boobs and I’m like “mmm boobs, must suck,” that is genetic.

But appreciation of freedom of movement? Wanting someone because I know my friends will be jealous? Appreciating the fine and gentle curves of someone’s face?

—

The reason that we want to believe that beauty = genetics is that then we can dismiss it and doesn’t that make us all so much more comfortable?

We can dismiss it at this point because genetic makeup is somehow not related to intention. As far as the moral fabric of the society I’m a part of is concerned, the #1 most important thing is intention. If you hit someone because you wanted them to hurt, that is bad. If you hit someone because you are crazy, that is not bad or, at least, you are not bad.

Somehow we think that mental makeup is related to intention. Like, when I was born, I sat down and just intended the rest of my mental development. I thought “oh, I’m going to care about Math and Science and Art and Language.” And when I was given the chance to stray from my path – I didn’t take it! I didn’t intend to and I didn’t. My mind is my own creation, yada yada.

The real crux is that physical appearance is visible. If you have not yet engaged with the manifold question of “why is visibility important?” then here’s a quick run-down. If no one finds out that you killed someone, then it’s actually 99.9% OK. If you don’t see someone suffering, then you don’t care. If you see them suffering once, but never again, then you will forget. If you saw someone for the last time 3 months ago, you might die right now, and you’ll never see them again. If a politician has plausible deniability w/r/t a morally unsanctioned act then the political may commit it.

Visibility is awkward. It punishes negative behavior much more than it rewards good. It connects us in uncomfortable, awkward ways. It has this pernicious ability to ruin our freedom. It instills neurosis. It prevents us from throwing stones, etc.

It disconnects us from the physical world.

It’s strange to think that this is the case, but surely it is true. The path of our material has been inward and away. Away from reality. Away from phenomena. Build a cell wall. Make a million of you! Create a culture which encodes information about what not to do. Live in a house. Live under a blanket. Predict the weather. Don’t let anything be a surprise, ever. Create your cage, and then sit in it.

And why? Because you can see that there is weather and violence and horror. The fact is that 99.9% of everything is shit. In order to come up with a good idea, you have to have 999 bad ones. In order to make a beautiful painting you must create sketch after sketch, hone your skills, ride the waves of technique passed down through generations of people making mistake after mistake and the only way they could make those mistakes is by being shielded from the fact that: HA HA you just spent your life making mistakes and now you are dead!

As visibility increases – as we see the type of beauty which the physical human form is capable of, we simultaneously see the monsters that we have become. We see what types of twisted forms we have allowed to carry through our genetic histories. We see the disease that has spread and become commonplace because not just someone, but many people, had to get their sex on.

And this is the sick twist! What is really “genetic” is our response to physical ugliness. Now that our psyches are clean and our eyes wide open we can see, and react, fully. We can want, really.

The reason that someone has sex with an ugly person is some other reason. In a society that systematically obliterates all other reasons, only beauty can remain important.