Parasimplicity

"Nothing is itself alone."
~ Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

 

And so we come, by a commodius Vicus, to parasimplicity.

 

The first formulation of parasimplicity that visited me was this:

 

"Everything that exists, exists in order to exist more."

 

This is what I now call the teleological principle of Parasimplicity, which later evolved into the ontological "everything is itself and something else" and the epistemological "transcendental truth is the whole greater than the sum of subjective truths." All of these say the same thing in different paradigms, but the teleological principle is going to be my focus today.

 

The closest thing orthodox science has to a teleological principle is probably the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This essentially states that, in any system, heat energy is transferred from a hotter to a cooler system; in the limit, the thermodynamic system of the whole universe tends towards maximal entropy - what is sometimes referred to as 'heat death.' Entropy is the property of thermodynamic equilibrium; maximal entropy occurs when that equilibrium is at zero. Since temperature is an indirect measure of mean particle velocity, maximal entropy correlates to the system in which all its particles are entirely without energy. Among other important consequences, the Second Law of Thermodynamics disproves the possibility of the perpetuum mobile - but we'll come back to that later.

 

An entropic system is arguably the simplest possible arrangement of elements in a system. In a system of maximal entropy, nothing changes. It simply is what it is, and cannot be anything else. There is no way in which any element of this system can have any knowledge of any other element, or of itself - there can be no information transfer within such a system as information transfer is impossible without energy transfer, and energy does not transfer in a maximal-entropy system. Max-entropy is not only the death of heat: it is the death of Consciousness; and it is the death of Time (there's room here for an interesting speculation as to whether Consciousness and Time are somehow functions of one another, or whether this is mere coincidence; another time, we might turn our consciousness to that question).

 

In any system short of max-entropy, energy causes particles to interact with one another. Energy transfers between particles; information passes between them too. A thermodynamic system short of max-entropy exists in several states - we can view these states as occupying successive instants of Time, or we can view them as superimposed probabilities, or we can view them as notional sectors of a putative Block Time - but what matters is that its existence (its transcendent existence) is not the unitary existence of max-entropy (of Nothingness) but the plural existence of thermodynamic systems. This is what we mean by the ontological assertion of parasimplicity - because each state, while representing a real systemic entity, also represents only a part of the whole system of possible thermodynamic states (and each state is a necessary part of that system, requiring itself and every other possible state - a very important consequence of quantum theory). Only the ground state of max-entropy exists on its own, separate from all other states. One can present the analogy of a system permutating through every possible energy state on the course towards max-entropy; equivalently, one can speak of a system summing all its possible energy states to achieve max-entropy, which is merely to consider every successive instant as itself a necessary element in a whole. It also, of course, provides another paradigm of the All-in-None (which is the transcendent: the formless void, the fundament from which all matter and energy springs).

 

Equating this to the teleological principle is somewhat counterintuitive; it helps if we take our existing view of a thermodynamic system evolving through all its possible energy states towards the simplest, most elegant, max-entropic Nirvana "one step beyond." Let us postulate that the max-entropic state is not, after all, entirely devoid of energy: let us postulate that, as a perfect summation of all possible energy-state dispositions of the thermodynamic system, it incorporates a perfect balance of opposed energies acting on every particle (this isn't so far-fetched as it might seem; the apparent stability of macroscopic matter is revealed at the quantum level to be the result of a perfect summation of quantum probabilities in which 'quantum interference' mitigates against the seeming instability of a system in which every particle has a positive probability of existing in every place). We can now consider each of those summed energy states in isolation, and say that in the max-entropic system that state has no discernible existence but nevertheless exists. It exists both to sustain max-entropy and to negate it; in its existence, it necessarily gives rise to the existence of counterbalancing energy states. Everything that exists, exists in order to exist more.

 

We'll be coming back to this, because in this exploration we are not bound by the monodirectional river of Time - and because this discursion is itself a parasimplex, but that should by now be apparent.

Time travel

"Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal."

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

 

 

We'd talked yesterday about identity, and how fractured a thing that is. We considered primarily the intersubjective entity - the word, the symbol, the representation of the objective in discourse. Today we're going to look more at the objective entity itself, the Dasein, as we move from a consideration of self-referentiality to infinite recursion.

 

What do we mean by Dasein? The term comes to us from Martin Heidegger, and it literally means "being there." As opposed to simply "being," it denotes being in a particular place - which, for a dynamic entity in a dynamic universe, entails being also at a particular time. A "being," particularly the abstract "being" that we draw upon in discourse, does not have a necessary relation to any other being; the Dasein exists in the context of other entities in time and space. It has coordinates. In an important sense, the Dasein gives meaning to Time and Space - we understand both indirectly by the changes entities undergo through dimensions of time and space. Our consciousness of space is perhaps more direct: our proprioceptive sense tells us how our physical body is oriented in space, and gives us some idea of its relative propinquity to other physical bodies. Our sense of time passing is not as direct, and in fact the naive view of Time as a river flowing from past through present into future can limit our worldview in important ways despite being the most straightforward way to interpret our impressions of the empirical world.

 

Borges, in Funes el memorioso, describes a remarkable character blessed (or cursed) with absolutely perfect recall. This individual's unique worldview creates for him a difficulty with identity - his recall is so perfect that he can recall every single instant of his subjective existence with crystal clarity. He does not need to reference an abstract intersubjective as a placeholder for the vague recollection that must suffice for most of us. He remembers every single instant of perception as its own unique set of entities - the bed or the book or the tree that he saw this morning is, for him, isolated from every other perception of what we would see as "the same" bed or book or tree. Number has no meaning for him; defying arithmetic, he invents his own number system in which each number has its own idiosyncratic name (the number five hundred in his system is known as nine, for example). It may seem that Borges invents Funes merely as a device to investigate the assumptions that underlie our perception of the world; in fact, the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria describes a real-life case with striking similarities, and there are perhaps a dozen such cases in the literature of brain science.

 

There are obviously good reasons to assume that Time does indeed flow in a linear fashion from Past to Future; that our naive impressions are accurate depictions of an empirically real world in which physical entities interact in predictable and measurable ways. Centuries of scientific experiment support this view; but it's worth remembering that the assumptions underpinning science, the axioms of science, predispose us to accept certain sorts of evidence. Inductive reasoning - the scientific habit of extrapolating from known patterns exhibited in the past to predicted patterns expected in the future - suffers from this problem, as David Hume noted: there is no good reason to believe that some relation which has been demonstrated between entities in the past will continue to be demonstrated in the future. One pithy formulation of this is the observation that we can't know that the Sun will rise tomorrow, just because it did today and yesterday and every day before. We can produce all sorts of scientific arguments why it should, but all of those arguments rest on inductive reasoning as well. We must accept axioms on faith, in science as in any system of thought. In fact, an axiom is necessarily not provable within the logic it supports (this isn't Godelian Incompleteness, however; this is a fundamental question of knowability, and one we'll look at later in the company of Fitch and Gettier, among others).

 

If Time is somehow other than linear; if it is, for example, a continuous dimension in which all events we perceive as consecutive are actually simultaneous - if, going one step further, it is a fractal dimension in which all possible events, perceived and unperceived, are simultaneous - then our assumptions about its passing and our motion through it are flawed. The limits of our experience of Time are revealed as precisely that: limits of our experience, and not of Time itself. Paradoxes of infinite recursion encourage us to visualize alternative models of Time that resolve or obviate the paradox - but that we are discussing in another metanow...

Connecting the dots

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our
aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
~ Alfred North Whitehead

 

What we perceive in the objective entity is only its properties. I say this as an adjunct to another important unproved result from another very lengthy examination, in this case an examination of Time - the result is intuitive and obvious, but involves some very complex analysis if we want to go about proving it, and it states simply that we can only directly perceive one objective entity at once. When we understand that a relation is necessarily the product of some comparison of more than one entity in the context of this result, we obtain the happy insight that relations necessarily concern subjective entities, while properties necessarily concern objective entities. Our understanding of discrete entities, either subjectively or objectively, requires us to understand both properties and relations: of course, the experience of observing some property creates the endogenous impression of that property, and it is strictly this rather than the property itself that informs our identification of any entity.

A subjective entity, which we have said is a created thing, a manifestation of the willed agency of the mind-artist, is therefore a deliberate arrangement of property-impressions and relation-ideas. The distinction between impression and idea can be more clearly understood in this framework if we appreciate that we can choose to arrange a given set of property-impressions and relation-ideas any way we like - we are not constrained to those arrangements which correspond to identifiable objective entities in our experience. We can invent entirely novel arrangements of property and relation that have no objective existence. We can, in fact, posit continua of relationship, along which entities of successively greater bigness or redness, say, can be intuited. The ability to intuit such relational chains, which is what cognitive scientists call pattern recognition, is an immensely powerful mechanism of rational thought. In the limit, we can consider relations as continua without specifying any entities lying anywhere along a particular continuum. This is what Plato meant by an ideal; in Platonic idealism, every thing that physically exists partakes of the ideals of its necessary properties.

Pulling this back to your understanding of my writing - you, as a self-aware conscious individual, have a reaction to this (to any subjective entity, in theory) which is essentially emotional, or sentimental to use a Humean expression. This reaction represents your critical evaluation of its conformity with your own subjective ideals, which develop organically out of an extrapolation of your historic perceptions. In hopefully plainer English, you develop your ideal of 'bigness' through having had to compare different entities along a continuum of increasing size in the process of identifying them as uniquely individual objective entities. For a fundamental physical property like 'bigness,' there might be quite significant agreement between several observers on the ideal of bigness, but it should be obvious that more abstract 'properties' can be perceived which give rise to far more heterogenous ideals.