Poker face

"Creativity is the ability to introduce order
into the randomness of nature." ~ Eric Hoffer

 

 

 

 

Quantum theory concerns the very smallest particles in the universe; particles so very small that they form the building blocks of subatomic particles like the electron. At the quantum level, matter behaves very strangely - what we think of as particles act more like waves, and what we think of as immutable physical properties become much more mutable. Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle tells us that the more precisely we measure one property at this level, the more imprecise other properties become - for example, we might be able to exactly determine a particle's position at a moment in time, but only at the cost of being entirely unable to divine anything about its velocity. This result is commonly conflated with the 'observer effect,' but is distinct from it - randomness, it turns out, is 'baked in' to the observed world. The validity of scientific laws, that make the world around us a relatively predictable and orderly place, depend upon a substrate which is fundamentally unpredictable and chaotic. This is an iteration of the Paradox of Self-Reference, of course.

 

If we think of the subjective realm as being infinitesimally close to, and yet inevitably distant from, the transcendental, it makes a degree of sense for the subjective, at the limits of measurable perception, to approach closest to the transcendental. If we think of the transcendental as the fundament from which all possible energy-states spring, it makes sense for randomness - probability; potential - to be the recognizable characteristic of transcendence as it immanesces upon the subjective.

 

Happily, we don't have to supercool an atom and bombard it with radiation countless times to identify this kind of randomness in operation. At the macro level we have plenty of analogues to choose from: rolling dice, shuffling decks of cards, throwing yarrow stalks into the air and seeing how they land (incidentally, one of the fundamental constants, pi, emerges from the latter if you look at it right). The first of these is not well-known as a form of divination, although Luke Rhinehart can attest to its power; the latter two, however, certainly are. My knowledge of the I Ching is very limited in this metanow; but I know a thing or two about cartomancy, and my own experiences with the Tarot deck have reinforced my belief in a parasimplistic universe. In essence, all forms of divination have this character: that they combine a certain degree of conscious analysis with a certain degree of deliberate randomness. Successful diviners demonstrate the ability to associate elements freely, without imposing a pattern on what they see - the better to clarify the pattern that exists within them already. FIAT applies: everything is connected, because everything is everything. The Tarot cards can tell us anything we want to know about anything at all, because they embody the characteristic randomness of the transcendental. Insofar as we can avoid rationalizing and pre-empting the judgement of the cards, we can access the transcendental in our own consciousness and let the cards speak through us. It is to the cards of the Major Arcana, and their symbolic significance, that we turn next.

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.

Zenophilia

"Never confuse motion with action."

~ Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

 

Zeno of Elea anticipated many of the points I've touched upon over the preceding few posts in formulating what Bertrand Russell described as "immeasurably subtle and profound" paradoxes. Zeno was a Parmenidean philosopher, who shared Parmenides' belief that "All is One;" his paradoxes challenge the notions of Time and Space and the existence of entitites within them.

 

His 'Paradox of Place,' for example, is both a Platonic Form of the self-reference paradox and, paradoxically enough, a refutation of the Platonic Theory of Forms:

 

"If everything has a place, then place itself has a place, and so on ad infinitum."

 

He similarly challenges Time in the Fletcher's Paradox:

 

"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."

 

In fact, elsewhere in his writings, Zeno demonstrates that not only is it impossible to move, it is impossible to start a journey or to reach a destination. Yet it is even more clearly demonstrable that motion occurs and that physical entities undergo motion travelling from place to place.

 

Intriguingly, advances in quantum physics suggest that apparent motion - and even more importantly, apparent lack of motion - are both not as straightforward as they seem. A famous experimental result, Young's Double-Slit Experiment, proves that light operates as a wave; Einstein's Nobel-Prizewinning verification of the photoelectric effect proves that it operates as a particle. The fundamentally paradoxical notion of wave-particle duality, which follows from these two results and leads to a bizarre conception of matter as a measure of quantum interference patterns and mass as a byproduct of collisions with Higgs bosons - all of this is just another paradigmatic way of representing the Parasimplicity Principle.