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Wednesday 21 January 2009

Space the final frontier debunked

On concepts

Ever since 02 November 2001 16:25 I have been pondering upon the phrase "reallocating roadspace", which may seem like a very long time to contemplate two words, but this should never be seen as too long. In practice it first meant getting angry, then lashing out in a reply, then getting angry again and this second time trying to do something authentically creative with the pain in my brain. I created a fairy-tale to express my problem and to give it an airing to a wider public. I was once truthfully introduced to someones daughter as "an author" which made me feel very proud.

Letting go is the process of turning one idea into another. It is very fulfilling, worth encouraging and is the driving force behind all creative activity. In on sense it cannot be avoided, in another it always involves pain.

On first reading the phrase "if i can imagine it, it can happen" appears to lack sense. This is a common problem from readers who are not overly literal. Firstly the possibility of "if" is endless, "i" the observer, and "can" the enabler is equivalent to "if i can then anyone can", and secondly "it" means "can" is able "to create". Again avoid over literalism because even the pausing comma "," adds weight by waiting. Notice how I could also say adds wait by weighting. Therefore, a change of voice "is" a phase shift.

Any two concepts can be held in conjunction. The resulting tension is also a source of fascination. At this point (in time) I am imagining two infinitely long "curved and straight" lines, at right angles to one another, not intersecting, and curving towards each other due to the attractive force of a relating concept. The standard scientific model is to suggest that to measure something one needs a scale and a "fixed" point. In fact the point is nothing more than you the observer looking directly along one of the lines and observing movements of their subject upon a straight line. Both lines are curved because of the attractive force which happens to be a dead straight line connecting each curved line. Because of the symmetry of the design a "thinking being" can cause the necessary phase shift. If the two curves were to meet an annihilation would occur, because of the precise symmetry of the structure. When an observer fixes there attention onto any particular concept it is as though the direct line of sight is in itself causing a tension directly into the observer's eye. However because of perspective the tension to the observer is unobservable, the closer their attention the closer they are to observing a vanishing point. Other tensions in the structure cause the scale line to be observed as perfectly straight. The observer even believes that the observing line is intersecting the scale line, but this is almost always unlikely to be true.

Three concepts are needed, plus an "observer": one concept is unseen, but acts as the "sights" to line up the observation platform, one provides "tension" to draw the two curved lines together, and one provides the "scale" against which values can be measured.

The concept of time has been widely believed by humans for a very long time. The rotation of the earth, the sun and the "life" of the human provide the apparatus, the concept called "gravity" provides the tension. The concept of "earth" is curved because the tension with the sun drags it towards it. People assume the concept of time is "fixed", and so scientists use this as their line of observation. There is no reason why you could not look along a line of gravity, except the very difficulties of imaging you are at the centre of the sun, looking down on the earth, your observer becomes heat, your scale is angles and your measurement is quite tiring to think about.

To give two comparable examples, when a diver leaps from a high diving board and enters the water at vertical angle, his experience is very like a computer user "entering" a web page by clicking a button. The diver is not particularly aware of the moment of impact and is quickly immersed in a "new world" underwater. A web surfer can take part in the very same experience, but visually.

The key thing to do is to behave authentically. If you believe you have gone back in time by handling an ancient vase, you have. The qualia you experience are identical to those of a similar vase admirer from 2000 years ago. There is nothing "in time" which separates you in this case, the difference will only be one of environment. Reconstructed environments "feel like" the past, because that is exactly what the past "felt like" at the time, subject only to the usual problems of accuracy and measurement. If you literally want to live in the past you only have to take the trouble to construct your environment skillfully enough. This is by understanding that in pushing for something you will almost always make it less likely to happen, the only way to bring about a real change of environment is to have the patience to allow it to come to you.

The modern obsession with time is nothing but an obsession. If you obsess upon some other subject, then time itself dissolves as you increasingly look along it. To measure time you would just have to "set up" a platform from which observe something and be prepared to "dive in" to your subject. Darwin was fascinated by the concept of diversity, and he used the platform of time with which to observe it. Dawkins is fascinated by messaging, and so he watched messages over time, equally obsessed that time must be real. The concept of "now" can be both the now you experience in the mundanety of your everyday life, and the "now" which I hand to you by focusing in upon the topic I am trying to discuss and observing how other concepts behave, given the change of perspective.

The observation of Einstein's that space curves is not particularly special because everything else can curve too. The words and letters that you see in front of you are curved over time to bring into being a concept called language. Look along the line of a language and you dive in to culture. Dive into books and you experience the concept of reason. Dive into the concept of fishing and you experience the concept of waiting. The tension is created by not seeing the fish and not knowing when they will bit. Waiting provides the stillness that convinces the fish that the bait on the end of the line is safe to eat. By diving into the task of writing this down, I observe our cat now takes more notice of me. The stillness provided by the tension between wanting to get the content out, and trying to understand the concepts as they appear (through phase shifting) means that I become a source of fascination for our cat.

The anger produced by the authenticity of the Maze prisoners confinement with their own sense of experiencing injustice allowed them to experience life as a prisoner and not to be overly disturbed by the sensory experience of living with faceas. Contrast this with the very flimsy material nature of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the implication is that there was an ease at which the inmates were led to the gas chambers. The chambers themselves would become objects of fascination, the experience of being gassed a relief from the deprivation of confinement. It is not that holocausts can be avoided, it is that they provide the fascination to attract people into them.

Living well means to accept that all living beings are making the same types of choices that you are, and to try to reconcile the difference between living in the world, authenticity, and living for the world, trying to improve it. Phase shift means that these amount to almost exactly the same things, and free-will gives you the option to choose which you will be at any particular point in time. When you shift the emphasis, you create a moment in time, and others can reference it. Yesterdays inauguration of Barack Obama was not so much his moment in time, the authenticity of the crowds, of experiencing euphoria and joy created, at the same time was counter-pointed by Obamas coolness under pressure and his ignoring the crowd to put on a performance. The fascination of Obama's stillness brought the crowd to him, the phase shift of the tiredness of standing forcing the crowd into the weariness of returning home. Probably only at the last minute was the stillness of home enough to bring them through the door.

The failure of liberalism is the same as the failure of a species to survive or a message to arrive. It is no big deal. Being tolerant is fine, but would you die for tolerance? Tolerance is the ability to phase-shift into another dimension, to make a choice. Intolerance is the ability to resist, to be willing to die for something, a real skill that adds colour to the world. Whatever we do we cannot escape from creating patterns of fascination and pools of intolerance, they are same thing but just authentically witnessed from different perspectives.

The arrow of time works both ways because evolutionary changes mean we create our own environments. Only authentic values such as love, hope, change, honesty, integrity, knowing ones sense of purpose are creating the world we live in, and destroying it again through tension overloading. Dignified indifference has a lot to be said for it, avoiding the annihilation of overbearing fascination.

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