03.15.10
Posted in Insightful..., Rant at 10:46 pm by tempo502
Falling asleep — the purposeful cessation of consciousness. It is a temporary rejection of lucidity, an aim to relinquish mental control in favor of the wild chaos of the dream world. Is it any wonder that I avoid going to sleep? I demand mental control. I sometimes flee this biological state with more wild-eyed fervor than when delaying necessary pain. Only the morning consequences of insomnia push me to sleep at all.
And why should I want to surrender consciousness? Every time I lay down my head, it is a tiny act of existential suicide. It is a pillow and eight hours in lieu of gun and eternity. It is a deliberate effort to shut off my mind. It strikes me as a form of violence against that which makes me human.
I dream of nonsense and nightmares. It would be better if I did not dream at all. Then upon waking, I am a terrible beast, an ill-tempered idiot. I cannot differentiate between dream and reality. I do not control my judgments, and rage at the morning. I wish this persona could be banished forever.
How can I seek to disconnect my reason? How can I be comfortable allowing my biological foibles to disable my rationality? I hate this frailness of human form.
I understand the necessity for sleep, but I do not feel it. I wish it were not so.
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03.29.09
Posted in Everything/Nothing, Insightful... at 10:32 pm by tempo502
I wonder how many things my mind’s dissected, taken apart, been inside. I’ve got this maddening drive to see every angle of every concept. Sometimes that means getting into the very core of it, and sometimes that means finding a remote vantage point from which to see the whole. I pride myself in acquiring pieces of knowledge to tie together to form some monstrous web of ideas and relations. It’s part of me. That web is a piece of who I am, and I love how it catches most every morsel of the world flitting by.
Sometimes though, it’s utterly draining. I see interconnected layers and unifying principles every I go. I can never give a complex question a simple answer. I can always give a simple question a complicated answer. Nothing is straightforward — there are useful simplifications, but always a deeper truth that no one has time to hear.
I wish there were easier ways to turn off this relentless searching, combining, analyzing, memorizing. Restless speculation has kept me awake at night for as long as I can remember. As a simple survival strategy, I’ve had to structure my life and my time around exhausting myself before it’s time to sleep. I don’t always succeed, but alcohol helps a lot. I suspect there’s some existential masochism in there as well. What is a vodka tonic, ultimately, but an attempt to put away the most lucid part of yourself? What is a white russian, really, but a blanket with which to smother one’s own humanity?
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09.13.08
Posted in Everything/Nothing, Insightful... at 7:40 pm by tempo502
These waters of purpose drive to find their goal, but meet wall after canyon wall. A mind channeled — given direction but given constraints. The struggle, then, is whether to follow course or assault those walls. Should rain and wind be let loose to breach the levees? Burst these limits for the sake of unfettered expansion? Or drive onward, carving mighty furrows into that one worthy purpose?
Shallow lakes dry faster than deep rivers. Better a lasting journey than a short-lived sunburst.
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07.26.08
Posted in Insightful... at 8:43 pm by tempo502
Perhaps it’s because I’m an engineer, but I find flying over a city at night to be a stunningly beautiful affair. Just as a downtown skyline stabs through the nighttime horizon, suburban sprawl forms an expansive portrait that fills the plane’s window-framed view. The serpentine expanses of asphalt, the stocky huddling of office buildings, and the slow trundle of automobiles all mesh together to form an intricate amalgam of man and machinery. The resulting spread of half-orderly lines and pinpricks of light is at once mesmerizing and inspiring.
At night, nature fades to obscurity. My aerial vista is solely the works of man. Every sodium-arc streetlight is a spark of humanity’s triumph over the tyrannical whims of nature – these commonplace truths of city living are our most tireless warriors in the fight to push back the darkness. I can’t help but consider the structures that enable the struggle to be fought at all – our immense infrastructure of power and transportation. Light requires power, generated from steam, fueled by coal, which is seized from darkness made bearable only by yet more electric light. Every step of the process is the result of lifetimes of planning and labor. Our modern world is the product of centuries of engineering.
Why do we so praise the beauty of nature, when it represents only divine whim? Of all the powers of an infinite god, the design of both flower and mountain seem insignificant in the grand scope of creation. We do not praise trivial accomplishments by men. Why exalt the smallest acts of omnipotence? Better to admire those creations which were wrought from glass and steel, those acts of men struggling to create. A city skyline represents the purest vision of our culture’s accomplishments. An expanse of streetlight-lined asphalt is an artery in the unfathomably complex body of civilization. These things are the fruit of the mind, the children of driven men and brilliant inventors. Do they not deserve our praise?
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05.05.08
Posted in Insightful..., Rant at 3:30 am by tempo502
I believe the goal of mankind ought to be to make a world in which the only material deprivation is self-imposed. I cannot, in good conscience, permit the forces of incompetence, tyranny, or chance to impose their damage upon a thinking being. Powerful forces cannot be fought except by collective action. To this end, I hold that the highest goal of government — indeed, its only justification for existence — should be to support and improve the lives of its citizens. Likewise, I cannot limit the free-thinking decision of a human being to make choices towards a self-destructive end. Freedom only exists when a person’s fate is self-imposed, for good or ill. The value of individual freedom ought be held above any pragmatic end except where doing so limits the freedom of others.
I believe the goal of mankind ought to be to make a world in which our collective struggles are waged solely against history’s attempts to wipe the slate clean. What existence do our daily victories earn if they are allowed to vanish into dust without record or lasting consequence? A thought is gone in a moment, an act survives a lifetime, and a monument lives as long as stone can fight the wind and earth — but the memories and knowledge of the human race are the only portion of its accomplishments which might last forever. The pursuits of the mind which can be realized in action are the greatest measure of human progress. Lost wisdom and forgotten knowledge are the killers of immortality. When conflicts drive humanity en masse backwards on its winding path to the future, they do not merely end the existence of living beings: they rob those who lived before of the significance garnered by their advances.
I think the goal of mankind ought to be to make a world in which the existential act of being can take its rightful place above the pragmatic act of survival. The only thing which is truly unique to each individual is his subjective experience of being. Indeed, the sensation of being a thinking entity is at the very core of humanity. People on the edge of survival cannot look inward — the mind must be focused on accomplishing each task because failure may mean death. Subjecting a person to constant fear or deprivation keeps the mind from seeing itself. To bar a person from any introspective examination of being is to rob him of the only experience which every human can share. It is likely impossible to make every human happy or close to it, but we could at the least permit everyone the opportunity to be fully human. Sufficient physical security to stop, pause, and reflect on what one is experiencing now is the one luxury I wish everyone could enjoy.
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04.29.08
Posted in Insightful... at 3:19 am by tempo502
The mountain icepacks drip, drip in the spring warmth. Last winter’s ice releases tiny pieces of itself into motion. The trickles strengthen and converge into streams, streams winding their way to significance. Each droplet alone is the barest shred of a concept but thousands together form the bubbling roots of ideas — many floating influences coming together at every confluence. Every joining masks the droplets’ roots yet forges something more powerful, more coherent. These heights offer a vista perspective to those who brave the rocky climb.
The craggy edges of the mind’s ill-explored peaks soon give way to the rolling foothills of thoughts well-traveled. These gentle slopes of the everyday-encounter cannot sustain torrents of creativity. Streams slow in their channels and rivers begin — these are not spurts of insight nor gushes of enthusiasm, but steady forces of habit.
Has some insight survived its crashing descent from the heights, to laze gently down calmer currents? These are the ideas that we seek, to solve problems and spur advance. We need it, this flotsam, to survive its voyage from the mind’s inhospitable edge. All thoughts must derive their force from the unexplored shadows of the mind, but few hold their shape when reaching introspection’s spotlight. The sunny land of reason does not favor pockets of frozen emotion. A strong current can carry tons and tons of eroded sediment, but not the shape of the rocks which guided its course.
The mind’s river can meander as years pass, or its banks can widen or constrict as it passes from belief to belief, but little changes day by day. Only floods may rapidly alter its well-worn route. Stormy outpourings of emotion must sometimes burst free the levees and wreak havoc ’til the weather has passed. Most souls respond by rebuilding their levees stronger. Older rivers carve deeper channels. Both efforts forestall new watershed moments — easing suffering but instilling permanence.
Fixed in its route, the mighty river slows. Thoughts blur together and habit guides more than perhaps it should. Life along the riverbanks seldom intrudes. The last silty remnants of mountain rock settle down to form a vast delta of emotional detritus. The river fragments apart — partitioning itself among each banal act of everyday life. The river of consciousness ends not with a waterfall’s plunge, but by passive release… the river of consciousness has no end but to join the vast sea of thoughts forgotten.
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04.02.08
Posted in Insightful... at 2:27 am by tempo502
Words flit and flutter through my mind, spinning fragments of incoherence into almost-insight. I hold these unfinished phrases one or two at a time, each recognizably a piece of some greater pretentious thought, yet signifying nothing. For a writer, these snippets of English must be standard equipment, filed away in the professional toolbox. For me they are toys to be bandied about and mashed together ’til sleep comes or something worthwhile results.
Can I fit two thoughts’ edges and cement the gaps with improvised enlightenment? Will something useful come to mind, revealing the next entry in this electric journal? Or will it only serve as fodder for the tattered back pages kept in my back pocket? Were it not for the clear warning inherent in that book’s title, “Pretentious,” I would be embarrassed to show its pages light.
I can’t stand to let the slightest cleverness fade into the oblivion of thoughts left unexpressed. I try to record any coherent assembly that springs forth. Most of it amounts to little. The exceptions lay before you.
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03.11.08
Posted in Everything/Nothing, Insightful... at 7:27 pm by tempo502
When I look at a machine, I want to know what makes it run. Any time something breaks, I take it apart to learn how it works and see if it can be fixed. The plastic-stamped phrase “Contains no user-serviceable parts” is like a siren song. On a pragmatic level, it’s nice to be able to repair things, but that’s not really why I do it. Mostly, I just want to get inside the mind of the person or team that designed it. I think about how I’d solve the problem while I remove screws and coverplates, and then see how it’s actually done.
When I look at a wire, I want to know where it goes. Power lines are my biggest distraction while I drive on the interstate. I try to figure out which wires carry telephone, which wires carry three-phase AC, and which transformers connect high-voltage lines to low-voltage lines. It’s pretty straightforward when you know what to look for. Same for the connecting wires inside electronics — you’ve got the ground plane on the circuit board, capacitors for voltage regulation, silver-printed power lines going to each chip, and hair-thin electrical traces sending digital signals from one chip to another.
When most people look at a machine or piece of electronics, they see a facade of input buttons and they see the obvious function of the device. Most people don’t know or care how anything really works, but understanding the innards of everyday devices opens all sorts of possibilities. Did you know a hard drive can be easily converted into a makeshift audio speaker? Or that a sheet of aluminum foil stuck to a TV screen can be used as a source of power for small devices? Or that digital cameras can see the infrared light used by remotes? There’s an entire world of accidental engineering that can be harnessed for gain or entertainment. When I’m bored during class, I have to fight the urge to take the clock off the wall and reverse the direction it runs. It takes about 5 minutes, a pair of pliers, and some superglue. It makes an incredible prank. (Yeah, I bring that sort of stuff to class — a scout is always prepared.)
I’ve found that there’s a certain threshold of knowledge (about math, physics, electricity, mechanics) that lets you understand entire systems from top to bottom. Things like computers and refineries have so many distinct layers of complexity that few people can really claim to “get” them on every level. Everyone’s a specialist these days, and that works alright, but there’s also a real need for people who can see the big picture. I wish I could say that’s why I do what I do, but in the end, I guess I really just want to know how everything works. I’ll keep taking things apart until I do.
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02.01.08
Posted in Insightful... at 3:38 am by tempo502
Symmetry – a geometrical or other regularity that is possessed by a mathematical object and is characterized by the operations that leave the object invariant: A circle has rotational symmetry and reflection symmetry.
A face is symmetrical. A vertical line down the center divides equivalent sides. The operation rendering it invariant is a reflection. A windmill is also symmetrical — one arm rotated will produce the full turbine. The crucial element, the defining essence of symmetry, is that an ordered self-similarity occur. Some part of the figure must equal another part through simple geometric transformations.
In each of these symmetries there is some critical dimension — a plane of reflection or an axis of rotation. The necessity for such a geometric entity is not immediately clear; drawing a line down a face can show that it is symmetrical, but does the identification of this imaginary plane serve an actual use? What is the use of identifying symmetry at all?
The only obvious use is fostering simplicity. In a practical sense, half a face is easier to draw, process, or store than a full face. On a very abstract level, a symmetric figure represents less information than an irregular figure. A windmill’s turbine can be considered one blade presented three times and instantly its complexity is reduced by a factor of three. A face is only half as much information as it appears to be, barring the odd beauty mark. Incredibly complex systems can be described with a very limited amount of information: a kaleidoscope is really little more than a central element and three mirrors.
So then, the use, the purpose of symmetry can be considered to be compression of abstract information. Things may be represented by less information than they appear to require, so long as those critical dimensions (plane of reflection, etc) can be identified. Some part of a symmetrical thing can be used to define the whole.
Is a fractal symmetrical? Fractals appear to be infinitely complex. Their defining characteristic, however, is that their parts resemble their whole, that a section under magnification has the same appearance as its parent. A tree limb has a very similar structure to the trunk from which it sprouts. A branch has a very similar structure to the limb on which it grows. Trees (and many other shapes in nature) are fractals, albeit imprecise ones. A mathematical fractal is self-similar under any level of magnification.
So a fractal is a complicated structure, but its shape can be described rather simply. Knowing one part is sufficient to (mathematically) define the whole. In that sense, the information has been compressed. That precisely fits the function of symmetry. A geometric operation (magnification) has replaced information.
What, then, is the critical dimension? There is no identifiable plane of reflection, line of rotation, or point of revolution. There is no euclidean entity capable of describing the type of symmetry exhibited by fractals. Their self-similarity is that of scale, not of space. A similar question might be, “when a thing expands or contracts, on what dimension is it being translated?” If anything, the nearest conceptual analogue is the distance of the observer from the figure. A figure can be made “larger” by taking a step forward, causing it to fill more of the field of view. This is the key.
A note, first, about these critical elements required for classical symmetry. A flat image might have a plane of reflection that cuts through the page, or a circle might have an axis of rotation stabbing through the page, or a sphere might have a point of revolution that is entirely excluded from the surface. In any case, this element must be “perpendicular” to the thing it reflects: a line of symmetry can only travel in a direction that the symmetry it describes isn’t. A vertical symmetry is described with a horizontal line, a rotational symmetry is defined by a straight line through the axis.
A fractal appears the same at any level of magnification. Magnification may be considered stretching a small image into a larger one, or it may be considered to be moving the observer closer to the image. Physical magnifying glasses operate by shifting focal points so that the object appears closer to the eye than it is, so this explanation of distance seems more apt than an appeal to stretching. A fractal is then self-similar on the line of the observer, in the same way a face is self-similar on the horizontal. A face has a vertical line of symmetry, perpendicular to the horizontal symmetry.
What is the critical element of symmetry for a fractal? What is perpendicular to the observer? More precisely, what is incapable of intersecting with the line of the observer, excluded from the observer’s line by definition? Unreality? The fourth dimension, time? Unobservedness? God?
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09.12.07
Posted in Insightful... at 7:57 pm by tempo502
I was cleaning my apartment and found my notebook from Philosophy 3500: Existentialism. This is something I wrote by hand during one class period about a year ago. The bit about Sartre misrepresents his argument but I haven’t made any changes except some copy-editing.
Most philosophical lemmas stem from a fundamental misunderstanding or misuse of language. It is the simplest of fallacies to construct a phrase or question with the semblance of intelligibility, but which contains no valid communicative content. This particularly manifests itself in the discussion of intangible concepts — language has, by necessity, placed them on equal semantic footing with the concrete — and philosophical thought has vastly suffered for it.
“Reality lies beyond our vision” is a classic example of the abuse of language. “Reality,” as a word, refers to those things that exist. Existence entails different things to different people, but to exist, tautologically, a thing must have a mode of existence. What form does it possess? What manifestation do we know it by? Physical things can only be perceived rather than directly known, but at least we can assert that some external force or information is being filtered through the senses. Through commonality of experience we may determine that external information persists despite individual vagaries. From that conclusion — the things we perceive (even if inaccurately) are external to us — it follows that the things external to us have characteristics and attributes that are independent of us as well. Thus we derive empirical existence.
Empirical things are perceived directly or intuited through indirect observation. Matter and energy are (as science tells us, anyway) the sole means of objective existence. No thing “exists” except through energy and matter. To say a thing such as “Freedom exists” may represent two valid claims — that physical things exist which have conditions or properties that we label “free,” or that within the electrochemical storage of human brains lies a data pattern of conditions that we then sum up with the term. It does not make a claim to the same mode of existence that rocks or trees or photons exhibit. To claim otherwise is a gross extension of our generalizations upon the universe. Our generalizations are formed out of those things that are real. We use concepts to understand real things. Archetypes are not intrinsically real.
Rather, archetypes of things are conceptual. Individual instances of things are empirical. Neither alone is sufficient to mentally function — it is through generalizations that we are capable of encapsulating and processing individual stimuli. Without the multitude of sensations and experiences, we would have no drive to generalize, no fuel for idealization.
Intangibles — Freedom, Virtue, Sin, every “-ism” we can create — do not then have independent existence. Without a mind to think them, they disappear. These, lacking original expression in matter or energy, cannot be said to objectively exist (except perhaps in the way all thoughts exist via neurochemistry). We — sentient minds — create all intangible things. They are tools we use to better deal with reality. Unfortunately, sometimes these tools lead us down fallacious paths of logic. Consider Sartre’s claim that existence of an individual precedes its essence. Existence and essence cannot be separated. If a thing has no qualities, it does not exist. If a thing has qualities, it must exist to do so. “Existence” is not an isolated assertion of being, but a necessary corollary to possessing properties.
What other claims to linguistic accidents support? The most acknowledged proof of selfhood: “I think, therefore I am.” Yes, Descartes’ “Cogito” entails existence in the sense that semantics demand a verb have a predicate. When we divorce the teachings of language, though, we see in truth that the “I” and the “think” need not be connected. “I” is an assumption. “Think” is self-referential: “thought about thought exists.” The self cannot be proven by merit of the fact that an assertion of self-action exists. It relies on the unproven assumption that assertions must come from an asserter.
Do we then conclude that the self does not exist? No. We can reasonably conclude selfhood based on expedience and the mirroring claims of those who resemble us. What we need to conclude is that no a priori truth exists. Every claim ever produced lies upon assumptions of language — this is tautological, as claims must be made via communicative media.
If every claim needs the background of language, it is wise then to be clear and cognizant of what our words mean. It is too easy to slip into poorly-structured thoughts or to ask questions that do not query intelligible things. Language can construct phrases that do not carry content. A sufficient examination of philosophical disputes will show that problems of semantics and meaning — problems of language, not thought — are truly to blame.
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