Taking stock

"Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory
but that it is institutional." ~ Terry Eagleton


On its face, "parasimplicity" looks a lot like an excuse to make things that are really simple a lot more complex. But, as I hope you've picked up by now, what parasimplicity - or anything else - looks like isn't close to being what it really is. For instance - and this is just a 'for instance' - it also serves as a handy tool for making things that are really complex a lot more simple. The Law of Fives is extremely simple, and as good a shorthand for the very complex things it actually references (which this collection of blogs to date has similarly referenced but at more length, including the obligatory self-similar discussions of the Law of Fives itself). The reduction of all paradoxes to the twin paradigms of All-in-One and One-in-All is another parasimplistic operation (actually the final operation in a chain that begins with the appreciation of all statements as interactions of paradoxes, but we'll get to that).

So, how do we apply parasimplicity? How do mountains become not-mountains, and then not-rivers become rivers? If you've been paying attention, you may already know. What you know may even be what I was trying to say; equally, what you know may be more than what I know. We can't know what we don't know, but we'll get to that, too.

Let's tie in the koan to our five-layer reality cake.

Mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers - this we can consider to be referring to the objective mountains and rivers. Bear in mind that these are not mountains and rivers we can ever directly know: we form subjective impressions of the relations of properties we intuit as belonging to the objective realm, and that is as close as we can get to knowing them.

Mountains are not-mountains and rivers are not-rivers - these not-mountains and not-rivers are not, as you might be forgiven for thinking, equivalent in our model to the subjective mountain- and river-impressions. The not-mountain is the intersubjective mountain: the mountain that emerges from discourse, from interrogation of our subjective mountain-impressions. IF the objective mountain is real, and IF our impressions of it are accurate, and IF we share our impressions truthfully, and IF we don't later edit or filter our consensus to fit some concept of 'truth' - and those are all very big 'ifs' indeed, which we'll review when we turn to Baconian Idols in the near future - then the not-mountain may be apparently identical with the mountain (this is one of the cruder approaches to paradox resolution, in fact - the rejection of the paradox as presented on the grounds that the presentation is corrupted by one or more of these factors). But not-mountains are, well, not mountains..

Mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers - these 'again' mountains and rivers are the transcendental mountains and rivers, which we have said are immanent upon the subjective (we might, with a sly wink at Dali, say they are immanent upon the objective as well; in fact Dali's paranoiac-critical method is another rewarding subject for study). We have already said that we can't directly know the objectively real mountain - so how can we possibly hope to know the transcendental mountain beyond? We cannot cross the same river twice (so claims Heraclitus), so how can we know the transcendental river that is beyond all those once-crossed iterations?

The answer is that we need to work against our brilliant knowledge-building engines, our glorious rational Big Brains. We are hardwired to recognize patterns, and we are hardwired to filter and sort the data our brains receive to make it a coherent conscious experience (a trivial example with which you're probably familiar: optics being what it is, the visual data we receive on our retinae is inverted; our brains flip the image over during processing to restore it to its putative objective orientation). However, if we seek the transcendental, that which is equally remote from all things, that in which mountains are again mountains is equivalent to mountains are not mountains or even mountains are rivers - we won't find it after our brains are through processing the data.

Recall that objective entities are entirely separate from subjective ones. Yet our brains, in processing the data from the objective, produce impressions that are subjective and are qualitatively the same as Humean ideas that have no relation to empirical data whatsoever. What this tells us is that the process of rational cognition is capable of bridging the divide that separates objective and subjective - and what that is really telling us is that, somewhere in there, we are working in the transcendental. Each and every one of us, it turns out, is also a Gateless Gate.

The transcendental Universe is self-similar, not only with the objective, but with the myriad subjective Universe-impressions. We could, perhaps, approach some rational understanding of the transcendental if we could somehow simultaneously apperceive all of those possible subjective information-states; but the self-similarity of the Universe, embodied in the Gateless Gate of each self-aware consciousness, makes this unnecessary.

How do you pass through a Gateless Gate? Begin with a gate, and take the gate away so it becomes gateless. Then pass through. 'Get OUT,' as Crowley had it.

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.