Space Messages and Double Entendres (vers.2)
Introduction by "The Quotes":
"All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else." - Buddha
"We're born alone. We live alone. We die alone. Only through love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone." - Orson Welles.
"None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Note: I suppose I should be angry, but I'm not. I had written a great deal of this entry when Blogger interrupted me and said "uh-oh!", and I was unable to save the words I had spent the previous hour or so typing. I had this image of countless millions of people around the globe giving this giant, simultaneous "oh shit!" mutter, and somehow that made me feel okay about it all. I'm not as alone as I think I am, after all!]
Some years back, when space exploration still maintained the public interest, the States launched a satellite into the apparent unending part of space [Note: a blog entry coming up soon will ponder the curvature of space, and how it relates to Chaos Theory and 'is'...stay tuned to this station!], in the hopes that it would be intercepted by some other form of intelligent life, who would then get in touch and return the call. There was interesting talk at the time pondering, in addition to radio signals and such that it would emit as attention-getting devices, what messages or symbols should be engraved on metal plates so an alternate life form would be able to correctly crack the code and realize where the signal came from. In other words, assuming these creatures had developed the same sensory mechanisms as we have {sight, hearing, touch, ...} and assuming their thought processes were similar to ours {logic, rational, deductive, ...}, assuming indeed that they even had thought processes, what images might best identify our location?
I often find myself pondering the same when I write my blog entries about 'is' theory. It's as if I'm casting a rod out into the world in the hopes of snagging something.....anything. I ponder if I'm inscribing the right words, knowing that I'm not, because the words I use often don't satisfy even me [Note: when I did a "recover post", this is how far it recovered, so I'll carry on from here, with a different bent than the original].
I checked my Stats Tracker results this morning and found another query had brought someone to my site...and it was by far a new record for me. With the search words "find my imagination", I popped up as 6th out of....sit down for this one, folks....42.5 million possible hits. My first thought was, "Wow! maybe I've got a bite here". Then I realized that the odds of my having anything worth saying are about 1 in 42.5 million. And then I realized the searcher had not put quotes around the three words, and I subsequently dropped to 'something' out of only 484. I couldn't find myself, and those millions had all matched to the bait of the word "my". Heavy sigh! Oh 'my'!
When I write entries about 'is', I struggle to find words to express the thoughts I'm having. And yet, I have an image of the concept so clearly in my mind, it's that whisper that Emerson speaks of in the quote above. It's as if English is the engraving on the side of my satellite, and the fuzziness surrounding my inscription of the message, combined with the noise of your reception, drowns out the message itself. This is, in fact, an example of 'is' theory [and, for that matter, Chaos Theory too], where the three component pieces {my message space; the threshold of message noise that needs to be traversed; your message reception space} are all present, but the width of the noise in the threshold is so wide that each mirrored half of the message barely recognizes that the other exists.
Yesterday I spoke of simultaneous [a word I have used often, and one that is critical to 'is'] thoughtlines, as well as letter space, which is the concept that each letter in a language communication carries with it more than the value assigned to the letter if it were merely considered to be a stand-alone symbol selected from a set of 26 letters. This extra message that gets added to the letter space [and hence the reference to 'double entendre' for space message in the blog's title] is a measure of the letter's entropy within 'is', another concept I explored yesterday.
[As a total aside, when you have version 2 of a double entendre, do you now have four possible meanings?!!]
If you are a regular reader of my blogs [there are a few!] you will no doubt have noticed that occasionally [and often in the middle of a sentence or phrase, thus interrupting its normal flow] I will insert some comment in square brackets or make a hyperlink reference to one of my other postings. Both of these are techniques, primitive as they are, to interweave simultaneous [that's another technique of written thought: bolding and/or italicizing for simultaneous extra emphasis on a thought...as is repetition..., attempting to give it additional prominence above the surrounding noise] thoughtlines in a sequential flow of letters.
How do those interruptions distort the space message contained in the surrounding letters? Consider the last sentence of the previous paragraph as an example, and read it without the portion in square brackets. Do they create signal interference, since they are merely blips of thoughtlines, and not continuous streams? Do they add clarity by their simultaneous appearance? Do they compete with alternative thoughtlines that you, the reader, may be internally building as you read the blog, creating an overload of competing thoughtlines, and adding to the already crowded {noise space, disturbance, turbulence, crossover, threshold....}? Do multiple, alternative set lists [such as that one] create the same kind of additional noise, or serve to {eliminate, cancel out, balance...} other noise sources by providing alternative mental menu choices, leaving the main message clearer, even though I have no idea which menu choice you selected, so I know that you're building a different message than another randomly selected reader would build.
Should a message be {succinct, clear, precise, restricted, unencumbered....} so that only a single, linear message is transmitted at one time (thus eliminating surrounding and competing messages) or, like using a broadband transmission, is the message clearer when it is wrapped with surrounding options and/or 'help manual' message snippets?
'is' would answer "both", but how can you simplify a message and complicate it simultaneously? 'is' would answer that one with "you MUST", because one defines the other. A linear message cannot be selected out of letter space, if it's not there to begin with, and a NOT-LINEAR (simultaneous) message bundle similarly cannot be selected if the bundle of interwoven linear messages are not interwoven. A single linear letter stream delivers a different message than the same letter stream that is part of a bundled letter stream. In other words, the value of the letter space, measured in quantities of 'message delivered' is different in each case, and is determined by those letters surrounding it. I discussed this concept yesterday also. That message that is encrypted onto each letter is a measure of the letter's entropy.
Well, there's the paradox, isn't it? If I send the bundled stream of letters, how do I know that you will {extract, unwind, interpret....} the individual message threads that I have included without changing their meaning? It's as if I had spun a multi-strand skein of multi-coloured wool with all its intricate fibres, and then expected you to reverse engineer it so that it is restored to its original format....exactly. It's as if I mixed a cup of ink with a cup of water and half a cup of oil, and then asked you to separate them out into their original constituent parts. Exactly. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that's impossible to do. It's a one-way street. So is it impossible to have a clear communication signal? Apparently so.
IF...
...the English language is your choice of cabling, your transmission media. That's why I'm proposing that 'is' will have its own English-like, but NOT-ENGLISH, language. The message of the letter space, while often confusing and assumed in English, will be clarified and minimized in 'is'. The context of an 'is'-WORD will be embedded within the word, rather than the word's definition.
Definitions, by definition [another example of the 'is' principle which states that an entity is self-generating] must use other words to describe themselves, and so some of the meaning is automatically lost, since no two words are identically the same. There is obviously no need, and as you will hopefully recall, that uniqueness has been one of the foundational concepts of 'is'. The meaning which is lost by using definitions is the WORD-SPACE that will be used to hold the WORD-CONTEXT. It's just moving everything up one level. It's riding the elevator to the next higher floor. It still consists of floor space and walls, it's just got a better (i.e. clearer) view of its surrounding territory. Again, as discussed yesterday, if letter space is large enough to hold far more than it is capable of holding, WORD-SPACE will be exponentially greater, since words are more complex than letters, and so context, which is far more complex than definition, will be able to piggy-back along on the 'is'-WORD itself. The final point I'll make here before leaving it for a future blog is to remind you once again that LETTER-SHAPE will be part of the encoding of the WORD-CONTEXT.
In the past, I have used words like serendipitous to describe effect-cause relationships that I notice occuring, and more recently I have replaced it with words like prescience, premonition, coincidence and determinism. It continues to happen on a more and more frequent basis, and it continued last night with my reading as I continue to see the overlapping relationships between Chaos Theory and 'is' theory. It continues to amaze and astound me, and I continue to feel compelled on a daily basis to continue to record the events here. Continuously. Last night, I interrupted my on-going amazement and glee, and instead had the thought "Okay, it happens. Get over it. Ask yourself why it is happening. How it is happening." And it became instantly obvious.
I can recall instances of seemingly remarkable coincidence occur while I was growing up, but they seemed infrequent and random. Now they are occuring regularly, frequently, and at all levels from trivial to mind-bending. Is it just selective perception? Have I mind-shifted to a different mind state? Has bipolarity created a sense of NOT-NORMALCY within my brain's perception abilities? Am I 'crazy'? [Remember that 'is' doesn't make judgements, merely observations on differences, so crazy 'is' not a derogatory term]. Have I evolved into something that I was not?
All of the above.
It is part of that image of the concept that I have in my mind. I see Chaos Theory as being the complement of 'is' Theory, and vice versa, obviously. They both have the seemingly mysterious pattern of three's embedded in them at some level [in 'is', it would be the triad of {ANYTHING, NOT-ANYTHING, THRESHOLD} and in chaos it would be the triad of {steady state, bifurcation point, chaotic state}}.
This is a graph, taken from a chemistry and thermo-dynamic example, of a bifurcation point as it applies to Chaos Theory, first recognized by Robert May, and explored by James Yorke in his paper "Period Three Implies Chaos", in which he made the proof that beyond a point of accumulation, periodicity becomes a state of chaos, and then in the middle of this period of chaos, suddenly order again returns. In the graph, the point of accumulation is where the solid line coming from the left of the graph breaks into two, forming a sideways 'Y' shape.
As a system is observed and plotted over time (left to right), the plot points form a Euclidean graph (line) of some plotting, but at the point of bifurcation, the plot line splits in two, and plotting points bounce back and forth between the two lines in a non-linear sequence. If further observed, each of these lines will eventually reach a bifurcation point and they too will split as shown in the second graph (hence the repeating patterns found at different scales of fractal diagrams as you zoom in).
Let's, for a moment, use this as analogy for my life, and the two theories (chaos and 'is'), and reverse engineer it, so we''re going to 'read' it from right to left, starting with CURRENT-MOMENT or 'is'-MOMENT. The two alternating lines are simultaneously co-existing, bouncing back and forth between the two, depending on each other for it's next point-plot in time/space. Not only do these two lines represent the two theories, individually and separately plotted and independently visible (just as the intermingling of English-inscribed thoughtlines were separated from each other by square brackets earlier in this blog), but AT THE SAME TIME one cannot exist without the other, since the lines are being drawn simultaneously.
At some point, specifically the bifurcation point (and 'is' says that will be EVERY point on the line, since every point contains the self-generating, binary potential of making a decision to override the default decision), the two become indistinguishable one from the other, and merge into what appears to be a single line under the same magnification level. That is another aspect of 'is', that both ends must be worked toward the middle. You can't have a part of an entity without also it describing the absence of itself. So, to the left of the bifurcation point, the two theories are indistinguishable one from the other (providing at the same time a completely synchronized meshing of the two, and so much noise and interference at the threshold point that the point can't even be seen). To the right of the bifurcation point the two theories are completely separate from each other, but dependent totally upon each other for determining the placement of the next plot point as they bounce back and forth between the two lines.
This pattern is happening at all buried levels and all higher levels simultaneously and continually, just as the words behind every hyperlink continue to exist somewhere in hyperspace whether or not you click on the link, and whether or not they are firing up little photons on the screen in front of you at this particular time. Where are those words? Every 'is' seed is a hologram of itself, completely self-contained, as is every seed within it, each capable of self-generation. They are contained within the word space of the hyperlink, its potential value, its entropy.
Returning to the idea of the graph being a plotting of my life. As the 'is' concept continues to grow inexorably and continually as a concept within my mind (just as knowledge continues to grow through the entropy characteristic of the protoplasm of billions of years ago [see yesterday's discussion]), and again, reading it from right to left (in effect, reverse engineering my thoughtline development, regressing towards original and first thought, also previously discussed) the two lines are quite clear and distinct. That is why I am able to perceive the {serendipities, coincidences, eurekas, premonitions, effect-cause relationships....} now, whereas I couldn't do so earlier in my life. Generalizing, it's how we learn anything. We separate it out from NOT-ANYTHING. It's the "hindsight is 20-20" principle. But at some point, {THRESHOLD, crossover, chaotic state transference, bifurcation point...} the distinction becomes so murky as to be indistinguishable. In learning, the bifurcation point would represent the 'mastery learning' point; the point where you are able to distinguish what you are learning from what you are not. In a perfect world, that is the sum and substance that should be appearing on any test or examination given in school, for a job interview, etc.
If asked, every person will be able to list a handful of 'watershed' moments in their lives....decision points that affected their life journey. These are merely the bifurcation points that are grossly obvious. The others are all there, just as the words and thoughts behind a hyperlink remain. They're just so relatively insignificant that they are not included in the field of perception. Obviously one of mine was my first physical attack of mania, although it is quickly receding into the past as I learn to cope with the biofeedback mechanisms inherent in the physical components of my being. Another was when a computer matched me up, fairly arbitrarily, with a job in Montreal in 1967 (where I subsequently lived and worked for the next 9 years of my life) when I was a student in the Co-op program at the University of Waterloo. Another was the loss of my father, and so on. I cannot attribute the beginning of the evolution of 'is' to any one event or moment...it is the sum and total of the evolution of the thought connections and synaptic jumps that I have uniquely made within my brain. And because they are unique, and I am unique, you will never 'get it', not the same way I do...but you will get it [in fact, you already have]. Statistically about half will have gotten it more profoundly than I, and about half less so, but perhaps more distinctly, and so on. The descriptor that is used is useless [consider the English of that phrase 'used is useless', in the context of 'is'], which is why 'is'-LANGUAGE will be so much shorter and so much more precise than English could ever hope to be....for describing 'is'.
I started this entry by bemoaning the fact that I can't find the English words rich enough to grasp the concept of a theory (in this case 'is'). I conclude by saying I also can't find the English words poor enough to be stripped of distracting meaning to convey the same thing. English is a second language to the language of ANYTHING. ANYTHING, as part of its own context, contains its own LANGUAGE. By defining a new language for 'is', I am merely choosing another incomplete tool to transfer thoughtline from my brain to yours. It isn't until we learn how to control and use something like mind-thought transfer [as is believed by some to exist, for instance, between twins, best friends, close sisters, etc.] more directly that we can eliminate the current barrier that will inexorably exist between individuals. The barrier of misunderstood communication, the barrier of THRESHOLD, the barrier of chaos, the barrier of flag, country, politic, religion and symbol. However, when we learn how to eliminate those barriers, we will simply have moved to a more refined level of communication, a less noisy one. A less chaotic one. Until we adjust the zoom lens again.
Until, then (and even after then) all we can hope to do is minimize it in order to retain our self-sustainability as a race. Our ability to re-generate. Our ability to 'is'. To be or not to be. The answer lies in the moment.
PEACE.
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