Orwell's that ends well

Four legs good; two legs bad; and, one leg seriously unstable.

Infinite density

When we approach the speed of light - as we reach towards infinite mass - time slows down. Now, in theory, if we could exceed the speed of light, time reverses.

E = MC[2]. Where "E" is energy; "M" is mass, and "C" is the constant denoted by the speed of light.

Einstein.

Here's a radical theory ladies and gentlemen: as we get fatter and fatter, we get slower and slower.

And, as we get even fatter and fatter yet, time spreads even thinner and thiner. Yet further still, at some point, we will be close to temporal seizure.

Now, moving beyond the obesity epidemic, my friends, I contend, this is not the time to stop.

Eating.

By continuing eating - food equals energy - we approach infinite mass and, health warnings, surpass: we move into reverse - we get thinner and thiner as we move back in time and our metabolism speeds up.

There! By overeating we can reverse time, as well as weight gain.

Did I mention the eternal youth spin-off benefits?

Don't forget to enjoy the all-you-can-eat buffet after the show.

It really is black and white - isn't it?

Black is the absence of colour and white is the colour created by the confluence of all the colours, at least as far as the additive theory is concerned (though if white is a colour then, by definition, does it include itself? (the "set paradox")); that is, unless we are talking the pigmentation theory, in which case the reverse is true. Having said that, the perceptual theory agrees with the additive theory - up to a point; so I make that: two to one in favour of black not being a colour and one and a half-ish to one and a half-ish in indifference to white being a colour (evens).

I've never met a black person, nor a white person and, nor for that matter, a black and white person.

Cartoons don't count.

As doesn't "Penguin Man".

I don't number by paint, even those that do.

There are no pre-judged "facts" and judgment doesn't belong to you - universally, unless you take "appearances" to be the only "facts".

If you do, conversation is impossible between "us" and the "gray" area between "us" is literary metaphorically, metaphorically literally, "undefined".

Communication is in danger of breaking down at any moment.

Agreement and disagreement implies something shared.

Otherwise communication is impossible.

My breath is wasted if, I don't understand, I don't own understanding alone.

Night and day; day and night.

Needle eyed

Strictly speaking, Alpha-Alpha was clinically dead. A single speck of intense bright white light flicked on in the dark. It expanded exponentially. Engulfing him totally. And then he was travelling down a tunnel. Swirling like a leaf on a liquid rainbow down the funnel. Intermission. Blinking frames of reference. Diffuse boundaries narrowing to blurred outlines. Focus. Figures. His accountant and broker dressed in black.

Where am I?

The other side of the balance sheet.

What?

Death is just the adjacent column to life in the great wheel – business cycle if you will - of double booking keeping.

Again: what?

It turns and from that you must profit or repay your debts. We have assessed the balance sheet and it appears you still have viable business left on earth.

Alpha-Alpha's heart began to pump as he read the quarterly turnover figures. He could reduce his tax exposure by donating to charity.

Even with the stroke of fortune, he hadn't missed a beat.

Whatever

I was watching one of reruns of the BBC's "science" shows the other night, Horizon; I think it was entitled "Parallel Worlds" or something similar. They were discussing String Theory and how this appeared to supersede Super Gravity Theory and how the former postulated ten dimensions (including time) and the latter, eleven; then, they found, they could combine the two theories to form M-Theory and found that, by including the eleventh dimension, this dimension could contain Branes (kind of membranes) - vastly complex topological structures - which, when they collide, in a "Big Bang", could give rise to enclosed universes such as our own. There could be an infinite number of these enclosed worlds, some similar to ours (populated by creatures like ourselves acting out conterfactual scenarios); others with vastly different physical laws. Different physical laws? I thought to myself. But isn't the idea of physics that it's universally applicable? This M-Theory has no empirical verification. The best you can say of it is that it forms a model which we can loosely superimpose on "our" enclosed universe in a complex, multidimensional, game of snap. Another so-called merit of this theory is its internal consistency or "elegance". But again, "universal" is a term that encompasses everything; universal: every-where-thing. (Does the set of everything include itself?) So the idea of an "enclosed universe" is inconsistent, more appropriately, it is only a partially enclosed (in certain "physical" respects) region of the universe . What I am obliquely getting at here is: what kind of "universal", "no exception", physics is it that makes these wild claims which encompasses possible worlds with deviant laws? Wait! Isn't calling these "deviant" laws a little bit like supposing - viewing - our region of the universe as being central? A little bit like supposing everything revolves around the sun? Let's just think about that and the mind-body debate. Dualism is the opposition to the idea that you can reduce mental life (in terms of explaining the phenomenon of conscious thought) to explanations of physical events (alone). But haven't we looked - in M-Theory - at a theory which suggests the realm of physics, as we know it, could vary and may not be universal? And doesn't the dualist stance against physicalism accept - in it's opposition to physicalism - the model of science that is closed, i.e it won't allow that there can be physical explanations of the mind because it has no place for deviation outside of the that law-circumscribed domain? Now if these "fully closed" assumptions are abandoned on both sides, we can have something more like pluralism; a pluralism that both encompasses regionalism, or partially enclosed phenomenon, as part of the universal?

Having said, even if the laws of physics are not constant, those of mathematics are.

Pop-Pop retrieved some more flint from his navel and re-stoked his magic pipe as he passed out on the next puff.

He dreamed of dreaming that he presented his ideas to Alpha-Alpha for incorporation into the Unlikely Solutions Ltd marketing literature and that Alpha-Alpha had hit him over the head.

How prescient that dreamed dream would become viewed from 20-20 hindsight.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Ineffable

Def: too fucked up for words.

What goes around comes around

“Counter context” literary means "against the context". What is the context? The context is the manner in which you arrange or place things - based on the community of ideas you belong to in order to make sense of this - or that - world. Realm. The world of possibilities. Our world. Now some understand context to mean “the established view” (POV) or “the consensus opinion” or “the prevailing idealogical tide”. A less flattering appellation might be: “this season's fashion”. Nevertheless, all these descriptions have something in common: the need to create a framework - a road map if you will - a schemata; a way of looking at the world that is not just about description, but also the manner of intervention: how do I - we - interact with the world in predictable and reliable ways without being complacent? Contribution - participation - is a dynamic relationship that feeds back upon itself. Feed on yourself alone and you starve; learn how to feed each other and we have the building blocks of civilisation. Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, introduced the notion of “scientific revolution” – revolution means to “go back to the origin” - to start again from scratch so that you can rebuild the foundations. Revolutions are started by failure and a natural response to getting it wrong is ... “fuck-fuckerty!” but getting things wrong also provides insight: it's a “you learn learn from your mistakes” thingy. Think back to your childhood, the classroom and one of the things about learning is learning by your mistakes, because mistakes - even those of the ubermensch - makes you stronger. Knowledge is something you earn; it isn't granted. Weakness is complacency; not fallibility, no body is infallible. Knowing what is right is also knowing what is wrong. Knowing what is better is not making “better” an article of faith, but the admission of fallibility is the acknowledgment of strength through trial. Testing. Testosterone. Testees. Talking bollocks.

You are the box

What's in a name? Well nothing because, unlike a box – let's imagine for the purposes of illustration that the box in question is a regular cardboard box – a name has no interior into which we can put things and, therefore, we can take nothing out of the question: what's in a name? But can we? What if it's a magic box? And by magic I mean it displays certain metaphysical properties that cannot be explained merely in terms of the operation of natural laws. That would be a special box indeed. Now suppose that box is not a box but a trans-dimensional gateway, except to the untrained eye, it still looks like a regular box. And further suppose that you could step into that box, sit within its putative confines, and think. In doing so - and now I want to you open the lids of your minds real wide - one could say you were “thinking outside the box” since the box is not a really a box, only a notional representation of boxiness, which you imagine inside your heads. If we could do that, what could we achieve? What couldn't we achieve? I want you to think about that before we meet up for our next motivational seminar entitled “Boxing Clever”.

Morning Wood

Erectile dysfunction; injunction: timbre! timber! Take the blue pill. Cock-sure. Safety off. What's the story? Hoary glory?

The logical space of reason

On that fine spring morning when consciousness was first laid on nature's table there was nothing around but extended matter in space, yet now a non-spatial stuff simmered and bubbled.



That notable occurrence can be regarded as presenting an inverse space problem. For, on received views, it was at the moment of the big bang that space itself came into existence, there being nothing spatial antecedently to that. But how does space come from non-space? What kind of 'explosion' could create space ab initio?