Andréa Morris - "Testing a Time-Jumping, Multiverse-Killing, Conscious-Spawning Theory of Reality"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2023/10/23/testing-a-time-jumping-multiverse-killing-consciousness-spawning-theory-of-reality/?sh=554dfa85209b

In 1931, mathematician Kurt Gödel revealed his incompleteness theorems—theorems of mathematical logic that show there are statements in mathematics that must be true even though they can’t be proven. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, and Goodstein's theorem sometime later, made an indelible imprint on Penrose. He took from these theorems that there’s a unique property of the physical universe giving rise to conscious understanding. This is our human ability to understand truths that cannot be derived from the rules that gave us those truths. In other words, the rules allow us to ascertain truths beyond the rules. The ability to understand Gödel and Goodstein’s theorems means there’s something about our conscious understanding that is not confined to computational boundaries. Since all theories of physics are computational, Penrose believes something must be happening in the reduction of the quantum state that gives rise to non-computational understanding. “All I have are all the theories we know in physics. Computational, computational, computational. I mean, you've got to find room for this thing,” says Penrose. He confirms that this thing that physics has to make room for is understanding.

Benjamin Libet is best known for his seminal research that seems to show that our choices to act are too slow to be made consciously. The brain "registers" the decision to make movements before we consciously decide to move.

Sam Dresser - "Heidegger v Carnap: how logic took issue with metaphysics"

https://aeon.co/essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics

Interesting article about metaphysics and Heidegger and Carnap. Heidegger being a nazi-sympathisant was messed up.

Logic will not stand in his way; logic, says Heidegger, is not 'the highest court of appeals'. His point is that humans can understand things in ways that aren't strictly intellectual. In our day-to-day lives, we talk about 'nothing' all the time. ('What did you do in school today?' 'Nothing'.) We can use the concept in this way because we have a pre-theoretical idea of what 'nothing'... is, Heidegger says Getting to this 'pre-theoretical' place is the very heart of the philosophy as a whole. It means going 'beyond' logic, or perhaps 'behind' it, to appeal to the what-it-is-like-ness of being a person. Heidegger wants to show - but not really to argue for - the idea that logic doesn't exhaust what we can meaningfully say about existence.

It is through moods such as boredom, joy or anger that the world 'discloses' itself to us, Heidegger says.

Now for the twist: the reason we can toss 'Nothing' about so easily - the reason why we have an inkling of 'Nothing' even if we can't directly speak about it - is that there's a particular mood that 'discloses' Nothing. That mood is anxiety. While fear tends to have a singular object, like a vengeful spider or a murderous clown, anxiety lacks a target. It shears away meaning, revealing the pointlessness of it all, the utter, hollowed-out barrenness of existence.

Perhaps it takes a mind as subtle as Ludwig Wittgenstein's to really, truly understand Heidegger. After reading Heidegger's lecture, Wittgenstein remarked:

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being [Sein] and anxiety [Angst]. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language.

Much of the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap boils down to the notion of 'limits': the limits of words, the limits of knowledge, the limits of expression. And limits naturally prompt questions about beginnings: where to start when we do philosophy, and how does that starting point influence wherever we might be headed? In logic, Carnap found firm ground from which to launch his own philosophy, and to articulate the kind of thinking that should be classed as truly 'philosophical'. For Heidegger, logic is useful but not sufficient. There is so much more to say, so much more to question, so much more bound up with the business of being alive.

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney - "Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: the Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History"

I have selected as an example the symbolism of cherry blossoms, which became the master trope of Japan's imperial nationalism at the beginning of the Meiji period - "You shall die like beautiful falling cherry petals for the emperor." Many tokkōtai pilots flew to their deaths with blooming cherry branches adorning their uniforms.

[...]

The pilots were the intellectual crème de la crème. They were students from top universities whom the government graduated early in order to draft.

[Navi vice-admiral] Onishi Takijirō and his right-hand men thought the Japanese soul, which had been built up to possess a unique strength to face death without hesitation, was the only means available for the Japanese to bring about a miracle when the homeland was surrounded by American aircraft carriers whose sophisticated radar systems prevented any other method to destroy them. When the operation was instituted, not a single officer from the military academy volunteered to sortie as a pilot; they knew too well that it was a meaningless death.

Even non-Christian pilots eagerly read about Christianity. Not only were the most influential-intellectual leaders in Japan's modern times Christians, but the young men's quest for the meaning of sacrifice often led them to Christianity. They turned to Christianity also because none of the Japanese religions offered them even the slightest vision of what was to happen to them after death - to their soul and the body - a central theme in Christianity.

The word for "meal" also means "rice" in Japanese and Chinese, so does the word "flower" mean cherry blossom, the queen/king of flowers in Japanese.

At the collective level, although each social group in the mosaic of Japanese society has its own tradition of cherry blossom viewing, the flower also became a dominant symbol of the Japanese as a whole by the end of the Edo period. It rose to the consciousness of the Japanese during the ninth century as a result of their discourse with the Chinese, against whom they sought to establish a distinctive identity. They chose cherry blossoms in opposition to the Chinese plum blossoms, which had been espoused by the Japanese elite.

Originally a shaman who guaranteed a good crop of rice because of his or her power to communicate with the more powerful deities, the Japanese emperor had been one of the millions of deities. The Meiji constitution elevated him to the status of an Almighty God, a concept that was and is alien to the utterly "secular" religiosity of many Japanese, who sought earthly benefits from their deities. He was made even more powerful than the European kings, who were conduits of divinity rather than divinity itself. In order to buttress the newly assigned nature of the emperor, the oligarchs adopted the advice of Lorenz von Stein, the chief German consultant, and developed the native religion of folk Shinto into a centrally orchestrated state Shinto while attempting to stamp out all "foreign" religions, including Buddhism and Christianity. While "God the Father" was an utterly alien concept to the Japanese, the Meiji state adopted the pastoral model of governmentality and promoted the notion that the emperor was the father of all the Japanese people.

Aestheticization facilitated méconnaissance, a common phenomenon in symbolic communication in which actors fail to recognize that they are reading different meanings of the same symbol. The pilots endorsed the aesthetics of Japanese nature, and of cherry blossoms as a dominant symbol of nature, without realizing how these symbols were locked into the pro rege et patria mori ideology. Neither side - pilots or the state - was fully aware of the phenomenon. The young men found aesthetics in the purity of devotion to their country without realizing that such devotion was exactly what the state wanted so that they would die for the emperor qua Japan - not their Japan, but imperial Japan.

Yet neither the pilots themselves nor the Japanese public considered their acts to be acts of suicide. They were killed in action, just as foot soldiers were killed on the battlefield.

These "chronicles" were commissioned by the Tenmu emperor (r. 672-86) in order to establish a Japanese identity distinct from the Chinese, whose "Great Civilization" was engulfing Japan at the time. He did so by adopting folk oral traditions in which rice, introduced from the Asian continent, was appropriated as indigenous to Japan. That is, rice was grown in heaven by Japanese deities, whose names all bear reference to the ear of rice. Thus, a foreign element, rice, was turned into the marker of Japanese identity. This cosmogony, drawing on folk agrarian cosmologies at the time, established the official agrarian cosmology, which became the symbolic foundation of the political economy for centuries, and in fact, even today.

Some scholars further suggest that sa in sakura (cherry blossoms) is the same root as sa in such terms as "to prosper" (sakaeru), "to be prosperous" (sakan), "good fortune" (sachi), and "rice wine" (sake), all signifying a positive power.

In cherry blossom viewing, hanami, the symbolic association between the flower and love is most conspicuously expressed.

Kabuki, whose golden age was the Edo period, is a performing art characterized by costumes in brilliant colors and by highly stylized dramatic movements on the part of the actors.

Kabuki also uses the flower in a complex way; for example, a broken branch of cherry with its blooms is a standard sign of approaching death. Willows stand for the capitol, geisha, and madness - all of which are also represented by the cherry, whereas the pine is a contrasting metaphor, signifying eternity and stability.

According to Yanagita, a fairly common folk belief was that a dead person goes to the mountains to rest and becomes "truly dead" after thirty-three years, during which time the impurity incurred by death is thoroughly removed. After thirty-three years, the individual identity of the dead merges with the collective identity of the "ancestors", represented by the aforementioned Deity of the Mountain, who comes down to the village in the spring as the Deity of Rice Paddies.

In The Tale of Genji, of the aesthetics of pathos over evanescence, symbolized by falling cherry blossoms, was responsible for the beautification of the death of young men and of not clinging to life, and hence for acceptance of the military motto.

[...] 

It was The Tale of Genji that placed at the center of the Japanese ethose the aesthetics of pathos (monono aware), the acute sense of the fleeting and ephemeral beauty of all living things.

[...]

There are some instances in the Genji in which the ephemeral nature of cherry blossoms is pointed out, but this is seldom done only to aestheticize their short life. In other words, they truly lament the brevity of blooming rather than celebrate it through aestheticization. The sentiment is sorrow rather than aestheticized pathos.

Aestheticization is the mechanism that firmly anchors the alternative imagination in the minds of the people, who nevertheless may not be fully conscious of those subversive forces. In other words, cherry blossoms, the very symbol of the normative order, are also a potent symbol that, by offering provocative alternatives for imagination, destabilizes the universe by calling the normative order into question.

The loss of self through madness is another phenomenon associated with cherry blossoms (Watanabe Tamotsu 1989: 181) as expressed in a well-known phrase, "the flower [cherry blossom] turns people's blood crazy."

During medieval times, the term kuru'u meant both "to go insane" and "to dance" and dancing in turn was an act to communicate with the deities.

During the medieval period, wealthy and powerful temples kept a number of young men, called chigo, for an average of four to five years each, until they were about fifteen to seventeen years old. During these years they applied cosmetics like women and learned flower arrangement and other forms of art for women as well as how to manage and control their bodies and behavior. The ultimate goal of the daily training was to nurture them to become like idealized court ladies. Some were made partners of older homosexual monks, who were referred to as "the fire in the abyss" (mumyū no hi) whereas the boys in this situation were referred toi as "the flower of trurth (hottushō), in other words, cherry blossoms.

We recall cherry blossoms began to be associated with the pathos of evanescence during the medieval period. In the case of the geisha, however, their world is even more intensely ephemeral. The relationship may last only until the dawn; perhaps it is for this reason that dawn at Nakanochō is a favorite theme in these woodblock prints. Moreover, the world of geisha is predicated upon its own nonreproduction, individually and collectively, that is, biologically or socially.

[...]

The night cherry blossoms of the geisha represent the height of "life," or "desire" in a more fashionable parlance today, underscored by its ephemerality both in the temporal sense and in the sense that it is divorced from "real" life.

The Japanese style of painting called Yamato-e, which developed during the latter half of the ninth century, was a conscious effort on the part of Japanese artists to develop their own style of art in order to break free of the tradition dominated by the Chinese style of painting, kanga, in which cherry blossoms did not have a place. Cherry blossoms became an important and frequently used motif in Yamato-e. Again we see that cherry blossoms were chosen as a symbol of the Japanese and their art as opposed to Chinese art. The Yamato-e tradition focused on the depiction of the four seasons and the months of the year, each of which is represented by flowers and other features of nature.

polysemic symbols: different meanings of symbols and use depending on context and social agents.

The dynamics of a polyseme, then, does not lie in the static fact of having many meanings but in the fact of interpenetration among many meanings, including the palimpsest, as it were, of the normative world with an underlay of its subversion. This dynamics is the very site of the power of a social agent to mobilize symbols. It is precisely because cherry blossoms stand for life, predicated by death and rebirth, that the Japanese military could tip the scale in the symbolic representations by cherry blossoms and foreground death, instead of life, without people realizing that this important shift had taken place.

[end of 16th century] Some who discretely enjoyed meat did so by giving the names of flowers to animal meat, such as cherry blossoms for horse and peony for wild boar - a custom retained even today.

The Yasukuni Shrine occupies an important place in the historical processes that led to the aestheticization of the notion of pro rege et patria mori.

The shrine was built at a time when the remaining forces of the shugunate were still fighting against the new government, whose officials were often the targets of assassination attempts. There was a need to mark heroes and enemeis within. The government instituted rituals called the "rRitual for Soldier-Deities" (Gunshin-sai) at the imperial palace for the purpose of the apotheosis of these soldiers at the shrine.

in order to overthrow the shogunate, the oligarchs used the rhetoric of the "restoration of the ancient imperial system" (kodai ōchō). However, in reality they instituted an entirely new imperial system best suited for a strong central government to ward off the foreign barbarians.

Yanyu Chen - "Moving Bricks: Money-Laundering Practices in the Online Scam Industry"

https://globalchinapulse.net/moving-bricks-money-laundering-practices-in-the-online-scam-industry/

amazing read on how the scamming industry has created its own banks and values/bonds of trust.

Taking investment scams as an example, what happens after someone takes the bait and invests in the fake financial product? First, scam operators will coach them to invest money at certain times, claiming they have privileged information that enables them to predict trends, but also warning that the investment will be profitable only if it is made within minutes. Once the target agrees to proceed, the scam operator will send a message to the Telegram group run by the gateway explaining the currency and amount of money about to be remitted by the scam target. Brokers at the gateway will then send the details to the motorcade group to match bank accounts. After the motorcade group provides the information, the gateway will send the appropriate details and trading rules back to the scam operator.

The CEO of Company P shared with me his view on cyber-scams. For him, the distinction between legal and illegal is an issue of power rather than law and behind it lies the question of 'who has the power to define what is illegal?'. Power, in turn, depends on access to social resources. In international money-laundering transactions, the actors involved are often at war with the financial systems of different countries and know how to play with their rules. In Cambodia, they can get the payment service provider and banking licences they need to enter the Cambodian financial system and build apparently legitimate fronts, but it would be a mistake to blame this exclusively on the shortcomings of the Cambodian political and financial systems: some companies have also obtained cryptocurrency exchange licenses in a compliant manner in European countries.

Josh Dzieza - "What do you love when you fall for AI?"

https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt-assistant-romance

People often respond to the perceived weaknesses of AI by pointing to similar shortcomings in humans, but these comparisons can be a sort of reverse anthropomorphism that equates what are, in reality, two different phenomena. For example, AI errors are often dismissed by pointing out that people also get things wrong, which is superficially true but elides the different relationship humans and language models have to assertions of fact. Similarly, human relationships can be illusory - someone can misread another person's feelings - but that is different from how a relationship with a language model is illusory. There, the illusion is that anything stands behind the words at all - feelings, a self - other than the statistical distribution of words in a model's training data.

Matthew Hung - "Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance"

https://mascontext.com/issues/trace/kowloon-walled-city-heterotopia-in-a-space-of-disappearance

Heterotopia was a term first coined by Michel Foucault in 1967 to an audience of architects where he used it to explain the spaces of otherness. These spaces are sites that are places outside all places but at the same time related to all the other sites from which it is located against. Foucault used the mirror as a metaphor for a Heterotopia due to its ability to reflect and disrupt. When considered in such a way the Kowloon Walled City can be seen as such a mirror to Hong Kong where some aspects of it confirm through its similarity with the rest of the colony but also unsettle through its rejection of the norms outside the informal settlement.

Foucault outlined principles or characteristics that are present in all Heterotopias and these can be seen in the Walled City. One such principle is that Heterotopias exist in diverse forms but can be broadly categorized as either Heterotopias of Deviance or Heterotopias of Crisis. Heterotopias of Deviance are places where those "whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed" such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Meanwhile, Crisis Heterotopias are places where those who, in relation to the society they live in, are in a state of crisis such as adolescents and the elderly but could equally apply to the refuge. During the Walled City's time in Hong Kong, it provided a place where those people that were in a state of crisis could reside. In particular, it allowed those refugees who had been alienated by China, but also inconsistent with the new orders of the colonial government, a place to live in a state of crisis.

Erik Naggum - "A Long, Painful History of Time"

https://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

French has a number which means "arbitrarily many": 36, used just like English "umpteen", but it is fascinating that a number has meaning like that. Other numbers with particular meaning include 69, 666, 4711. The number 606 has been used to refer to arsphenamine, because it was the 606th compound tested by Paul Ehrlich to treat syphilis.

A reportedly Swiss saying goes: "A man with one clock knows the time. A man with two clocks does not."

Elizabeth Kolbert - "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term "myside bias." Humans, they point out, aren't randomly credulous. Presented with someone else's argument, we're quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we're blind about are our own.

[...]

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren't the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Joe Zadeh - "The Shrouded, Sinister History of the Bulldozer"

https://www.noemamag.com/the-shrouded-sinister-history-of-the-bulldozer

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word "bulldozer" was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of "bullwhip," the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with "dose," as in quantity, with a "z" thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.

If, like gods, we aspire to create machines in our own image, then it's fitting that the original bulldozers were humans. Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. The thugs were the bulldozers, and the acts they carried out were bulldozing.

It's not commonplace to associate bulldozers with war, and yet they were as important to the Allied victory as the aircraft engine, the radar or the atomic bomb. "Of all the weapons of war," wrote Colonel K.S. Andersson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1944, "the bulldozer stands first. Airplanes and tanks may be more romantic, appeal more to the public imagination, but the Army's advance depends on the unromantic, unsung hero who drives the `cat.'" The war was largely defined by control of the air, and airplanes needed airfields within operating range of their targets. If dispatched from seafaring aircraft carriers, then those ships needed docks and dry docks. And those airfields, docks and dry docks needed bases and road systems. In essence, for airplanes to stay mobile as the front shifted across the planet, an entire network of ordinarily immobile infrastructure had to become mobile to. Bulldozers move wars.

The bulldozer in this view was a creator, not a destroyer. Yet the legacy of that period still scars Guam, where the rainforest has fallen silent. The ships that brought the machines during and after World War II may have also accidentally carried with them an invasive species: the brown tree snake. With no natural predators, its population exploded, turning Guam into one of the most snake-infested places on Earth, wiping out 10 of its 12 native forest bird species by the 1980s and nearly erasing the sound of wild birdsong. Those birds used to eat the spiders and now there are too many of them, too.

But "illegality" in the built environment is extremely common in India. In Delhi alone, estimates suggest that anywhere between 30% and 80% or more of properties could be considered illegal.

"For many marginalized groups around the world, heavy earthmoving equipment has often been the visible part of the faceless bureaucratic megamachine that runs roughshod through communities in the name of urban renewal, beautification or 'slum' clearance."

"It was clear that it was only Muslim houses being targeted," [Fahad] Zuberi told me. In the wake of the demolitions, BJP politicians publicly celebrated them as a form of "vigilante justice," and the phenomenon became known as "bulldozer raj" (rule by bulldozer). The anti-Muslim overtones were clear: in a now-deleted Twitter post from 2022, a BJP spokesperson equated the letters JCB with "jihadi control board."

 Around the country that year, widespread glorification of the machine engulfed certain sections of society. Processions of JCB vehicles started appearing at BJP political rallies, adorned in flowers and carrying people in their buckets, while crowds of onlookers waved toy bulldozers in the air. Pop songs about the machines racked up millions of hits on YouTube. Grooms rode to weddings atop earthmovers, and shops sold "JCB Gorilla" condoms - further emphasis on the machine's enduring associations with a particular notion of hypermasculine heroism. At a mass wedding in March, newlywed couples were given toy bulldozers as gifts to "symbolize the victory of good over evil and also order in life," according to a guest at the event.

JCB, or J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited, is a U.K. company founded in 1945 by Joseph Cyril Bamford, who began by making agricultural machines from war surplus materials in a rented garage. Today, the company is among the world’s largest manufacturers of construction machinery [...] The company is now run by Bamford’s son, Lord Anthony Bamford. 2024 was a good year for Bamford and his family, one of the wealthiest in the U.K. [...] Renowned as both a flamboyant socialite and political kingmaker, he’s among the top donors to the U.K. Conservative Party and is close friends with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose wedding he hosted in 2022. Bamford is also currently being investigated for hundreds of millions of pounds in tax avoidance. He and his wife, Lady Carole Bamford, live in the Cotswolds, a quaint pastoral utopia for the U.K.’s rich and famous, in a Georgian mansion once owned by a former British governor-general of India [...] The day after the destruction in Jahangirpuri, Lord Bamford happened to be in India with Johnson, who was still the U.K. prime minister. They were inaugurating a new JCB factory in Gujarat, the home state of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. At one point, Johnson climbed into the cab of a machine and leaned out to wave at photographers. Neither he nor Bamford made any comments to the press about the violence in Delhi.

A bomb is a clear and blatant act of violence, but a bulldozer can appear banal and bureaucratic. The violence the machine enacts is slow, rumbling, grinding, drawn out. Not an instantaneous vaporization.

In the spring of 2022, Russian soldiers looted 27 machines worth nearly $5 million from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, and shipped them 700 miles back to Russia. But when they tried to turn the machines on, they had been remotely "kill-switched" by the dealership. What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as "VIN-locking," which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products, instead requiring a licensed or official company technician to do so. It is a controversial practice that has been at the heart of the "right-to-repair" debate in the U.S. and has resulted in widespread "tractor hacking" by farmers who wish to mend their own equipment. As the sci-fi author and tech journalist Cory Doctorow wrote in his analysis of the Melitopol story, "The technology was not invented to thwart Russian looters... [I]t was invented to thwart American farmers."

Ralph Waldo Emerson [in a book of essays "The Conduct of Life"], in one chapter titled "Fate," Emerson sought to address "the question of the times" - "How shall I live?" he wrote: "You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."