ONT lates & xtras contents i. re Gödel's ontological argument ii. deep in pi's numeric noise iii. from Nothing, something iv. endless in the wrong direction, tragic v. they give you all Eternity to answer vi. what of God's mercy? vii. informed consent and prayer viii. i won't live on, perhaps. a deed i've done may ix. my selective memory x. Janus means: in close-up of foam, two faces xi. a liveable world is a readable world xii. what Supervenes from this? xiii. at each extreme our naming is anachronism xiv. Cat is a collapsing of the wave-function xv. diminishing returns in the history of Experiment xvi. all those undershared Nobels xvii. ice preserves the Cold from heat xviii. a desert spreads xix. Pinker's wit, on jokes xx. Rome surrounds St. Paul / Paul is now the center xxi. each is a gathering Ministry xxii. white boy shot execution-style xxiii. the McDonald's Statement of Claim xxiv. first & last: Don Quixote / Ulysses xxv. The Summer of Rave xxvi. this electro is intrinsically anonymous xxvii. all thru Asia, Drake-Rihanna xxviii. WHO IS BETTER: PLATON OR KANT? re Gödel's ontological arg re Gödel's Ontological arg re Gödel / God El / the God re Geach's "Truth and God" re Geach's J1, his Judgment 1, that Jupiter is round ; that god the father, the Deus pater, the early El - is a Circle. deep in pi's numeric noise somewhere down the decimal line, there's bound to be a binary string: whose length is the product of two primes; and whose plotting shows a circle. deep in pi's numeric noise: a circle is described.1 1 in Carl Sagan's Contact. odds are high it's deep in pi, waaay down the line - is thus an impressive discovery. the Circle is a Medal for a mathematic culture, a token of its competence. the Circle is an order that arises in the noise. it's rare, yet statistically necessary. likewise: if Chaos is endless, Cosmos is bound to arise in it. the Cosmos is huge, so Life shall arise & be lonely in it. Life shall seek its Like, and travel far: this is the message to Elie from her Father, and this is Sagan's thesis: that Contact is rare, yet bound to happen; and the Circle is a perpetual re-discovery, shared among the beings who meet. deep in pi's numeric noise, there's order: a recursion. for the noise itself is implied by the circle's formal properties, i.e. the infinite digital string is the base-10 expression of the circumference/diameter ratio. the Vegans share their discovery with Elie, Sagan's thesis: signal & noise are co-involved, so cosmos & chaos mutually generate. from Nothing, something Melt the vacuum? I couldn't get that phrase out of my head. It was so awesomely bizarre-you can melt nothing? Okay, I knew that the vacuum wasn't really "nothing." Nothing, presumably, would be a state of zero energy, and zero was way too precise a number for quantum mechanics. Quantum nothing seethes with activity, thanks to the uncertainty relation between energy and time-the shorter the time period, the larger the energy that can spontaneously spring from the depths of the vacuum only to disappear again in far less than the blink of an eye. This energy can take the form of fleeting pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles that boil up from the vacuum, then meet and annihilate.2 2 Amanda Gefter, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn, 2014, p 90 and i thought: Could it be? an Answer, at last? i found myself rationalizing: Nothing, by necessity, seethes with potential. so Something might spring from it would have to, statistically, eventually. . . for a few hopeful seconds: a quantum Vacuum's pseudo-nothing got me to affirm a false Cosmogeny. i shook myself out of it, found my prior sanity: Nothing is nothing we mustn't smuggle Time & subtle energy in! i'd been seduced, for a flash, from my proper austerity. then i chuckled, wondering: was the primal Nothing itself so seduced into existing? Guth tells Gefter: the cosmos is a complicated Nothing: as far as we can tell the total angular momentum of the universe is zero. If you add up the spins of all the galaxies spinning in different directions, as far as the astronomers can tell it really is zero.3 the universe, as far as we can tell, is electrically neutral.4 gravity's contribution to the total energy of the universe cancels out the positive energy of all the mass.5 the universe does not have any non-zero conserved quantities.6 3 Alan Guth, quoted in Gefter, p 75 4 Guth in Gefter, p 75 5 Guth in Gefter, p 74 6 Guth in Gefter, p 74 the cosmos is a Nothing with structural specificity, like this conjunction: 76.777 + -76.777 since a number and its negative are an equal distance from 0, they're equal, in a way. 76.777 denotes e.g. a quantity of physical force equal to -76.777 ; so the cosmos is an equipoise of forces whose differential value is 0, yet whose meaning is 1 = 1 - which is something, it would seem! the cosmic value is Zero: yet it asserts something. Gefter notes: the Empty Set can output all the integers. from Nothing, an infinite series of values: which is Something. [ Dale Glover objects: if cosmogenesis is an eidetic process - this implies a God, a selfexisting Grothendieck to think it. ] endless in the wrong direction, tragic perhaps we are unborn yet bound to perish. i.e. the reverse of immortal: we're endless in the wrong direction, tragic. our Story opens: Once upon a time. so do we evade our ineffable origins. we evoke our infinite past, then pass over it. i mean ▪ our Story opens vague because we have no origin ▪ our Story's end is vague because the end is yet to happen, and we're ignorant of it they give you all Eternity to answer perhaps it's simple: they ask you a question, then give you all Eternity to answer, if needed. You probably noticed the world was on fire. Tell us: what were you in that Fire? Feeding it? or Fighting it? they let you think it thru, to fully justify. is Fire good? encourage you to vividly simulate Variants. vividly means: they let you re-incarnate unceasing till you learn your Test Environment intimately; so you arrive at your answer thru a trial of pain & repetition. they judge you, yes then give you all eternity to acknowledge the justness of their judgement. the air is clear, in higher Court! Heaven is there, where lying is impossible! where all belief is justified! what of God's mercy? perhaps it is this: God is a moral skeptic, and correct. the austere fact is that no one deserves anything. yet God rewards us, anyway. his justice is his mercy. informed consent and prayer the angels are moral, so respectful of our agency. we give them, in effective prayer, informed consent for their aid. the consent part is easy; the informed part is subtler. our first, tentative, prayer might go: prayer A: IF you exist, you know more than I. thus IF you exist, i hereby permit you to guide me, arrange my world, whatever it is you do. IF we observe a positive net effect an uptick unlikely by the Null Hypothesis, & corrected for Selective Perception, for the Placebo Effect, et cet our next supplication could then be better informed, so rightly more hopeful, so more effective: prayer B: [prayer A] + i have some evidence you exist. many prayers later, informed consent could be robust: prayer X: dear Michael: many times i've asked, and many times you've answered. i know, now, the style of your benevolence and know your plan suits me. even when i first object, distressed by your effects, it turns out for the best. my will is thine, truly! act as thou willst, i Commend thee. i won't live on, perhaps. a deed i've done may a deed i've done may resound in halls of Valhalla, forever run in the war-tales demi-gods regal themselves with. their stories are like action films: a narration of Acts by which my inwardness, my I, is obliterated. perhaps, at best, faintly inferred by the out-of-it listener slumping in the depths of their drunkenness. i'm not personally immortal, in Valhalla. they tell my story in a strict Third Person. they rarely even quote me. it's all "He did this, he did that." the Novelistic technique the Joycean stream of inner life has not yet reached Viking eternity. my selective memory i have selective memory, and/or poorer than average longterm recall. my childhood is eons away, remembered in a small set of bits. but each, in time, shows a lesson. is it: every moment of life has a teachable? so i extract a lesson, eventually, from each moment i happen to remember? or: do i remember only those moments that promise wisdom? and my Memory - wiser than i know - retains those bits it hopes i'll solve? i.e. have i gathered into memory pieces of a puzzle to solve, the puzzle of the Self? i.e. is it the knowing Self itself who selects? Janus means: in close-up of foam, two faces Janus at the Temple doorway: prior to the idols. invoked in every offering & preamble. Janus means: in soap foam i see a pair of faces, on in-zoom: on either side of some kind of portal. Janus means: it may be you, Selecting. it may be you, a Demi-urge, at minimum: eliciting from noise & foam, a Story. Janus, prior to the gods themselves; Janus, a Selector. a livable world is a readable world in conceiving The Magic Mountain, there were two ways for Mann to populate his Alpen spa with interactable Types: [i] start with the Types [the Humanist, the Nihilist], then write the Dialogue, set them walking with words in their mouths, assign them plausible genealogies & fitting maladies. improvise them fireside stories, infer their favorite cigars. [Mancinis, a trunk-full.] [i] labor for a total Psychological Realism and, as in life, the rest shall be added unto it: a symbol scheme shall naturally emerge, for a livable world is a 'readable' world, has an order of symbols the author need not intend or ever discern. what Supervenes from this? [a party game] e.g. what supervenes from twenty-nine camcorded scenes from the 1980s with diverse form & subject, yet whose time-stamps align them in a single Systemmemory? what Supervenes from this? ▪ the fathers of Turing/Ramanujan spoke Tamil ▪ Turing/Ramanujan were conceived in South India ▪ it was Chatrapur, 1911, where Turing's "first cells divided, broke their symmetry, and separated head from heart"7 ▪ Turing/Ramanujan came to Cambridge, for Maths 7 Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma 1983 & Leibniz was CHINESE. did he like that, being CHINESE? at each extreme our naming is anachronism at each extreme macro & nano our naming shows anachronism: ▪ atom is a legacy term, from when we thought we'd found the smallest bit ▪ Universe, too, we deployed prematurely, tied to our own homely locus. Cat is a collapsing of the wave-function in her solo repose, in her serene self-regard, Cat is a collapsing of the wave-function. [ simplify & veganize Cat to a DoReMon Doll whose blessed chamber of Eternity a quantum trigger may release a [non-toxic] crimson dye into. Schrodinger's query refines to: on opening Box, is DoReMon red, or blue? the Box isn't special. it's whatever now you're looking at. it's what's outside your window. it's the weather as you swipe-refresh your app. the aerosol's Trigger is Quantum Law, itself; and the Function collapses whenever we measure, thus even when we introspect. diminishing returns in the history of Experiment there's light beyond the Visible: what Herschel found out with a prism & a thermometer. Cavendish Lab, where the nucleus was proven, spent £9,628 in 1925 - "including all salaries and equipment".8 8 as cited in Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom [Basic Books, 2009] p 62. Sick Kids spent 400 million in 2013 on the Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning and kept on spending & raising cash, are well into the 5-plus Billion of their VS campaign. [VS Cancer, VS Unbelief and Who is With Us?] all for private preemie rooms, you'd think from the posters on the TTC. diminishing returns in the history of experiment: Any next generation accelerator able to explore even modestly higher energies than the LHC will be far off in the future and very expensive.9 it's why the news called it the God particle. to baffle & wow us, to justify the billions & the labor of thousands. diminishing returns, & diminishing chances. no experiment has ever produced evidence for a selectron. There appear to be, so far, no squarks, no sleptons, and no sneutrinos. The world contains huge numbers of photons (more than a billion for every proton) but no one has ever seen a single photino.10 9 Peter Woit, interview with Scientific American. April 27 2017 10 Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics [Houghton Miffln, 2006], p 75 the LHC is an Earth-embedded ring-trap, a giant hoop to lure in rarer, ever more marginal phenomena. all those undershared Nobels Partly as a result of his own preparation for the conference and partly as a consequence of the other studies presented there, Mann advocated running a high-energy neutrino experiment at NAL. But he was hardly the only physicist with his eye on the first neutrino experiment that would run at the new accelerator. It was clear from the start that whoever conducted the first neutrino experiment would be in an excellent position to reap the effects of a beam with an energy high above that of all previous accelerators.11 the medal is embossed with a man's name & head: relic of a personal Science, when Maxwell & wife with a home-built apparatus could confirm the atom, an apparatus simpler than any one of the ninety-two tasks in a flow-chart for the building of Gargamelle/CERN, from 1964.12 So it was that no single argument drove the experiment to completion any more than a single move brought the muon into the physicists' repertoire of entities. In both cases, it was a community that ultimately assembled the full argument.13 11 Peter Galison, How Experiments End [U Chicago: 1987] p 198 12 reproduced in Galison 13 Galison, p 194 ice preserves the Cold from heat ice preserves the Cold itself from heat. in ice, Cold builds a bulwark to delay its diminishment. a desert spreads a desert spreads. the grove & vinyard faded as an Adriatic islet on the over-counter menu at a Bloorcourt diner: a 70's promo poster, its backlight long ago cracked. waves lash up at the ruins piled-high on the lonely rock! Pinker's wit, on jokes i laugh e.g. at what makes babies cute i laugh because he forces an anomaly, compells me to another interpretive frame within which someone's dignity is impugned. it's Pinker's own theory of humor i deploy, the one from the end of his treatise. ▪ the anomaly is his plausible response to a Psychologic mystery ▪ the mystery is the baby's cuteness ▪ my initial interpretive frame is my usual low hope an inducement from years of lame theory, of truisms & not-even-false obfuscatings that when someone says human nature, they'll then say something i won't yawn at ▪ getting Pinker's theory, i'm jolted to a new frame: one wherein he's making sense of life. the dignity impugned is mine & the baby's. we're not that mysterious, suddenly. once you've taken Darwin in, the baby is a strategizing monkey and i, swooning in anomie, pleading to the cosmos WHo AM i ?? am quickly comprehended, naked. it's slapstick, getting Darwin: we're jolted from the self's eternal mystery into concrete answers. Life itself is some kind of slapstick, says Darwin. we slip into life from the abstract field of mutational possibilities - it's a physical accident. Shakespeare's jokes the puns they insisted on in highschool English are lame. yet his wit is unlimited. there's a running joke, a joke unstated, humming down the column thru the oeuvre. reading him well, we're getting something constantly. in Shakespeare, as in plausible Evo-Psych, the comical anomaly is life comprehended. explicit in Pinker, often quantified. shown not told, in Shakespeare.14 as Bloom puts it somewhere, Freud shall state as Theory, centuries after, the wisdom implicit in Shakespeare. 14 though his most compelling characters are wise, so they say what is true. he shows us a plausible wisdom performing. Rome surrounds St. Paul / Paul is now the Center the freedman Tiro, Cicero's amanuensis, invented the ampersand - and w/ it the shorthand. ▪ ampersand, the word: portmanteau of and per se and ▪ ampersand, the word: expansion of the & ▪ ampersand, the word: the opposite of shorthand the freedman Tiro invented the ampersand and when freedmen sum their Masters - i listen. Matthew listened well when Housa, Herod's house manager, told of Herod's words to his servants on hearing of the feats of Jesus: What! the King said him I thought we'd killed already! he meant John the Baptist. the Prophet lives on, Herod meant, so was witty, and a believer.15 15 Tim McGrew infers that Housa is the source of this Herod Quote, by reading the Gospels stereoscopically. [e.g. on Unbelievable with Justin Brierly. July 17, 2015] does Rome surround St. Paul? or Paul is now the Center. in drawing our worship to a unitary God, did Abraham prime us for a worldly Emperor? each is a gathering ministry 1. at the high black gate, a gathering Ministry: here to re-affirm our faith in the dignity of the human spirit; of all men, everywhere, every place! 2. in the Federal Plaza, a yawping mob: BOMB HA-NOI ! BOMB HA-NOI ! floor-traders off from the Exchange. their office collars open for some street-level antics. they're smug & beaming, the slow pan taking in these boors by the dozens, & each is smug or just on the edge of. yet one guy, the black guy, isn't chanting. he's unimpressed, not quite present. has a Time Traveller's remove from the yawping mob, & from the Documentarian he seems to stare down. he seems aware i'm here on the other side of lens; that i, years later, observe him. he meets the lens, chewing gum largely at me. he stares me down thru his still-cool sunglasses, his style unsurpassed by a half-century of fussy shifts of Fashion.16 16 The Grin without a Cat, [Chris Marker, 1977] white boy shot execution-style . . . for riding his bike on the wrong lawn; yet it's Okay to be a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan at the Oakland Colosseum, 1977 ! - i can't write that in the Comments section w/out wondering: will it cost me my job? the McDonald's Statement of Claim look at this, in the McDonald's Statement of Claim17: The First plaintiff is the proprietor of the well-known McDonald's Restaurant chain in the United States of America and throughout the rest of the world 17 https://www.mcspotlight.org/case/pretrial/state'o'claim.html The First Plaintiff is a blood-lip fiend who moves among your kids with delight! he refers to himself in the Third Person: Lord of Misrule, Lord of Flesh, Lord of the Flies, et cet. it's Mr. McDonald what they call him in the Philippines. the judge seeks clarity re whether the First Plaintiff owns all restaurants world-wide trading under the name "McDonald'S". the judge demands they identify the relationship between the First plaintiff and every such restaurant. explain what is meant by the term "is the proprietor of the well-known McDonald's restaurant chain". this judicial move, i admire. he seems to be saying: tell us who you are, really. tell us: whose typo is the capital S? or is it correct, on S's own insistence? first & last: Don Quixote / Ulysses Don Quixote not the First but so great & early, it plays the part well in a simple History of the Novel. Ulysses not the last yet unsurpassed, it's often said. a standard "ultimate" novel. both are mock-epics: with modern heroes, mockheroes. ▪ Don Quixote persists in his chivalry, makes grand gestures in an undersize Europe, his world shrunk from the Romantic, turning bureaucratic. ▪ Leopold Bloom's progress is nominally Ulysses' own, scaled to the Dublin quotidian. the Epic shows a hero in adversity. these two modern epics, these meta-epics, show Heroism itself, the classic Story, under threat or waning. DQ is of noble comportment, thus out of place & time. the Misfit is comic yet any derision in our laughter ought target the Setting: a Europe where heroism has become laughable is exactly what the new hero struggles against, and we should consider siding with him, taking his fight into our lives, and being laughed at ourselves. DQ shows the hero as anachronistic, obsolescent; while Bloom is utterly of his age, immersed in the day's minutiae. Bloom's triumph is attending to this shrunken world, datum by datum. his heroism is demotic, for we share in it by reading him, attending to his consciousness. Bloom's heroism is a condition of life. Joyce assures us this small redemption, as certain as the cogito: that all who live are survivors of experience. we inherit a baseline resolve & durity, a tolerance for the humiliations & outrages of life. the Novel as the modernized Hero Story. a definition not inconsistent with Le Guinn's contention that "The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story" for by 'hero story' she means, rather reductively, "the killer story", the one about 'bashing, thrusting, raping, killing'.18 then again, Don Quixote, we learn on page three, is very fond of hunting & of meat. a man with a solid carnist resumé. Bloom's first quest is to find some kidneys to fry for his breakfast. Bloom hunts within our modern division of labour where the City's ugly business is handled by a small group of specialists; so for Bloom the hunt reduces to a morning errand. a parody, an epigonal echo of the hunter stalking his beast. a tiny task to draw him from home, to get him to the butchery. 18 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction', 1986 the classic hero is "on his horse", displaying his animal mastery. his resumé assures us he's fit for the role - yet Don Quixote's masteries tend toward the "leisurely": hunting, roasting meat. he's the Killer in his dotage. the "leisurely" hunter is mid-point in the declension of violence from Oog the Slayer of the megafauna to Bloom on his errand for pig's kidneys. The Summer of Rave in 1989, England had its hottest, dryest summer in three centuries. over there, everything is older even weather stats! the glowing sun brings alive the pagan gods & ancient rhythms of trance. any Lady whose name hangs over a nation's decade is that nation's Queen. the Thatcher Era means: Thatcher was the Queen. the late 80s Thatcher rallies have the stagey look of all the big 20th century Fascisms. so does the closing Star Wars ceremony, which Lucas defends: a large military gathering, Lucas says, tends to look like that. yet to Lucas, i'm tempted to reply: "a large military gathering" is a good def for "fascism". the Thatcher epoch, of diva Pop. the Thatcher epoch, of narcissist queens of consumption. her factories make a doll called Kevin Donovan - for her public & private pleasure. he's her modular, malleable groom-at-arms for a party put on for whatever it is that Condé Nast, Murdoch News and MTV keep celebrating. we don't call the U.S. 1980s the Madonna years. we might say the decade of MTV. either way, we'd disparage the Era unless we speak with a love naïve, or the Scholar's abstraction. if Sony won't sign you till you cut your hair and they put it in the contract that you keep it cut - you've maybe sold out. you've sold at least your hair ! some docs call Hillsborough a massacre. some say it was due to political unrest. this 'worst disaster in British sporting history' may not have happened had 'police not assumed they were dealing with crowd trouble'. [ this, i note, is open to a Query tab re what we mean by 'sporting'. e.g. was hunting a sporting disaster for England's free-running animals? how many wars of Europe were a dog-fighting tournament for lords with gold & honor in the game? a burning for Prestige and the approving eye of wicked Ladies. re Hillsboro: should crowd dynamics, or the crowd itself, be blamed? there was no first Pusher, perhaps. a surging crowd is an Emergent: which may mean it was the People's fault. guilt shall disperse over stadium masses and thru Thatcher & the cops for encouraging hierarchies, thus making more likely crowding in the floor pens - we're all damned or all saved together, perhaps. i'm over-sympathetic to mobs, to Thatcher & the cops, right now. to 90's U.K. pop, right now. i believe, by the BBC, the electro was lovely & insurrectionary. i'm not on E but did come into twenty Biphentins lately. though will not take one, remembering my veganism. it's Saturday nite and i'm only on weed, and look what time i'm watching free docs & writing till! till 5 AM, i will not call it Sunday! till waking up, i will not say 'today'. i borrow from our day of rest, for Satur-nite's Party. i fall asleep, on Satur-nite, in debt to coming Sunday. this electro is intrinsically anonymous Don DeLillo is an old man ! born in the 1930s ! he names 60s music by track, album, band. he deftly paints Mick and impersonates Lenny's wise-ass rap in Underworld. yet the club electro isn't ID'd even by genre in Cosmopolis. he'd rather describe what he hears musicologically, give us an essaylet on "the loop", describe the timbre of the drum & its ritual meaning. his description is apt: this electro is intrinsically anonymous. has no frontman Mick. no ego as its center. or rhythm is a Dancer the music is for you, the consumer! electro is diegetic sound for the movie of your life. the egalitarian politics of narcissistic Disco-land: a neat trick! DeLillo's an old man. then again, he knows his Sufi hip-hop well invents a plausible subgenre and its sui generis ghetto star. all thru Asia, Drake-Rihanna up thru Egypt, down thru Ghana. in each locale they are honored & lofted. named among the city's elder numens. in Egypt she is Nefertiti; Drake arrives in Tel Aviv a Sephardic king, with excellent skin. aglow in Earthly blessings. they own Oman, are pan-Islamic. Number One in summer downloads, Number One by nation, number: and i wouldn't care but he's rapping on a stage outside my office, and brought his paid entourage: bubbas in shades who guard the tenfoot security fence. the RSU paid a million dollars for it. girls skip off my Friday class to wait in line for it, to press / be pressed into the steelframe risers & delight in him saying Bitches. everywhere it's Drake-Rihanna, and i'd bike away, i'd leave this Campus but he's always floating over, gloating from a run of billboards down Gerrard. i'd cross the Don River but it's Drake/Rihanna, getting down from limos at The Real Jerk. they're always just arriving, are always already in the back room grinding and are just about to leave for a better party, always. still i love them ! still i wish them well ! [ i'm vetting this, a few weeks on. am working thru the Singles charts, and - still - it's Drake-Rihanna. [ these findings are buried, were no fast google. i tried, e.g., best-selling songs by country - which gave me the U.S. hegemony: a tenpage scroll thru the slick new Dixie. [ i took out country, put in nation still it gave me Country Hot 100. WHO IS BETTER: PLATON OR KANT WHO IS BETTER: PLATON OR KANT! a grumpy Slavic oldtimer wants to know! he's squirming, muttering, all thru Korsgaard's Colloquium. then up from his seat with the start of our applause, waving his arm, already spitting his question.