Which if?

We earthlings don't like uncertainty. We usually like imagination. My suggestion: rather than depend on a show of confidence, which ultimately is rather empty or illusory, to get attention and credibility where there's real uncertainty, use imagination.

Rather than say, "We just can't draw a firm conclusion based on these numbers and this proposed mechanism," you can suggest alternative explanations that could hold water for all we know. A vivid alternative can appear positive where a statement of uncertainty would appear negative, even though they are basically the same. As a culture, we ought to embrace uncertainty more as the critical spice it is. Until then, though, use imagination?!

Plicō, plicāre

Is the cat in the box alive or dead? I have the simplest solution to the paradox. The cat makes decisions.

Free will is part of the universe's drive toward entropy. When I was in high school it didn't make sense, as it doesn't, logically, by most any analysis. But now I think it makes a shadow of a sliver of a sense of sense.

Consciousness is not an illusion. If it's an illusion, who is being fooled?

What does it mean to fool an agent without original agency? Why would this entity need to be fooled to prove to it that it isn't what it isn't? By the subjective experience of consciousness and will, which must have evolved as a capacity and must exist in physics as a phenomenon, the universe gives us the means to avoid realizing the truth, which is that this subjective experience is false and we are glorified pinball machines. Why create a subjectivity only to fool it, when there needn't have been a subjectivity at all? And why did consciousness and the experience of active will evolve before any conception of determinism, as would seem extremely likely, given the apparent consciousness of animals?

That doesn't make any sense either, you know.

Let's assume that we are all computer code, and that the code crashes when it looks at itself and realizes that it's deterministic. If it's deterministic, then it doesn't have to do anything; it can just wait for fate to move it. Let's say that logical moment crashes the code, much like dividing by zero. Ok. Ok? The simplest solution here is to evolve ways to keep the code out of that pitfall. You don't need consciousness and an illusive feeling of free will for that. You don't need any feeling of feeling at all. You can just go right on running the code, with the modification that it isn't allowed to divide by zero—or become omphaloskeptic enough to falter.

The illusion of free will is an unnecessary solution.

Across and Opposite of Barrier

The other day I was thinking again about Marshall McLuhan's "The medium is the message" after reading a really good article on the birth of information theory. And I believe I understand the metaphor, but it's easy to misunderstand. At the risk of kneading the obvious, here we go...

Just to pluck up a stray petri dish of an example, the first new Star Wars came out, and (who, me?) I loved it. The Force Awakens! My one big complaint wasn't that it rehashed old plot-liner (very close to a reboot of A New Hope), because I felt that fit. It's a trilogy of trilogies. There will be some recapitulation, otherwise it'll become too amorphous. A poem has stanzas; Star Wars now has a reboot built in.

No, I found the movie thrilling. And this redundancy aspect was a statement, too. New makers, same spirit. If a lot was the same, a lot was different. Anyway, that wasn't my complaint. Nor was the deus ex machina of the Millennium Falcon appearing early on. That said something like, "Ha, gotcha. You didn't realize the Millennium Falcon was part of the Force, did you? It is. Fate will not explain itself to you always." The plot hole improved the experience in meta. No, my biggest complaint was that certain little moments had become de rigueur. When the trilogy of trilogies was first outlined, did Mr. Lucas have any idea how many scenes would involve a Jedi (or Jedi to be) in a fight, arm outstretched, verging on vanquished, light saber pathetically far off, wobbling? It wasn't story parallels or special effects or the unexplainable, but these little tics that were now shopworn. You aren't rehashing old story when things like this happen. You're... a genre.

And that's what resolved the irritation for me. I read another interview with the guy who wrote the script with the director, and he talked very openly about the work of writing genre stories. He'd decided that Star Wars was a genre, and he was thinking about it in exactly those terms. Ah, I thought. Ok. That was intentional.

The next thing he said was what was most interesting. He said that genre doesn't tell you what story to tell. It doesn't tell you what your theme is, your point, your message. You can write a strict genre movie (book, song, etc) about absolutely anything. And that's the beauty of genre. It's like the form of a poem. A sonnet could be about anything you want.

In other words, the medium isn't the message. Right?

It is a metaphor. Your eyes are not two shining suns. Your eyes are biological material with lenses and photoreceptors.

And this unrolls tendrils especially when you think in Claude Shannon terms about what a medium actually is. A medium is something like a sheet of paper. Papyrus is one medium, vellum another, tapestry another, woodcut another, flattened and bound wood pulp another—all closely related. Sure, a sheet of paper could suggest all kinds of ideas to you, and there are ways you cannot repurpose a sheet of paper. But there is so much you can represent on or with a sheet of paper that you are almost unconstrained. The sheet is genre. You can make it about anything you want.

It's worth agreeing that medium, genre, series, form, and format are different ideas. But this actually feeds into the larger claim. If genre allows just about any message, then medium certainly does. McLuhan is right, of course: choice of medium (and genre, series, form, format, etc) is part of the message and imbues it. And the appearance of a new medium changes society, revealing natural hierarchies and possibilities previously unknown. But we also need to agree that all these nouns work as information channels in the brass tacks mathematical sense outlined by Claude Shannon. Genre—say "historical fiction" or "dubstep" or "televised golf"—is like a wire. It's a narrower wire than medium—say "podcast" or "magazine" or "plasticine."** But they're both wire-like, media, tubes of aether. And both work just like wires to carry what wouldn't be there otherwise, which brings options to sender and receiver.

**If you want to call these more expansive names like "recorded sound" and "print" and "sculpture," then so much the better. That strengthens the argument.

Expression

For all that new tech gets old, computing is universal. It doesn't turn into a raisin and then topsoil. It's here to stay past the morning. It always was here, but in the last century, humanity has discovered the informational equivalent of electricity. And that isn't "big." That's got more unseen matter than a galaxy cluster.

It's the same thing I like about early, silent movies and improvisational music. There's this aura of elemental invention. The silent movie makers are more limited, more hobbled than anyone who came after them, technically. Yet they know anything is possible. They'll do weird things like try an entire feature-length film with characters but no words, and more amazingly, it'll succeed even by today's narrative standards. They'll slap a color on the projector in the cinema to show you, ponderously, that it's daytime, evening, or nighttime, despite black & white footage. They'll have a person walk into the theater, sit down at a piano, and make up music while watching the film with you.

This is crazy shit. None of it's realistic. Even the acting is wildly unrealistic. Most people find it unbearably hammy. But given these films had no sound, the visual acting had to carry what was missing. This was a functional adaptation. They could have thrown out their hitchhiking towel and said, well, guys and girls, we just can't put on a performance like the one next door they're doing with Agatha Christie's play, so what's the point? They could have gone home. But they believed anything was possible, and so you have silent films with the whole range of acting from subtle to ridiculous, and even at the most unbelievable end, the ridiculousness is often helping to convey the message, and it becomes part of the aesthetic, like the unrealism of claymation.

I don't know how to convey that sense to others. Maybe it's something I gravitate to, and I can't convey it.

Sit down, or stand up, with any musical instrument or soup can, and make music. You don't need to be a musician. Make music. Explore the possibilities of sound.

We think a person needs to earn the right to speak freely. Before you're allowed to paint what you want, you'd better paint what your teacher asks.

And I think that's antithetical (as an attitude) to discovering the possibilities of paint. Oh right, yes of course, you can paint what your teacher wants. That's fine. And you'll learn something. I'm an educator and believe in education. But what I'm saying above is what possibility and creation are about.

Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, or this is just garden-variety ego (who am I to talk about this anyway?), or I'm expressing a feeling and pretending it's logical when it's a feeling.

Computers allow us to explore choice in a way that has never been possible before.

Computing isn't just an aid to this or that. Computing is a medium—perhaps the greatest medium aside from the physical universe and the stuff of our minds—of choice.

Information is defined in several key ways: an alphabet soup of symbols, probability, choice, surprise.

It's often said that quantum mechanics is an ad hoc set of equations cobbled together from experimental evidence. It's said so often it's become an old chestnut. But since 2001, several theorists have shown that you can "rediscover" quantum mechanics from a few axioms (rules), usually just two or three, having to do with information and its properties. The key notion I took away from that article is that quantum mechanics, while it seems forbidding and weird, is actually just a generalization of probability theory. It's a mathematical structure that happens to mirror what's going on all around us laceratingly more closely than we would have any right to expect.

Quantum mechanics is also about choice. And it's also computational.

Isn't this exciting? To me, it's exciting... it's maybe the most exciting thing going, and I wish I knew a better way to express that.