What if life is just a screen saver?

We look at an idle computer, and our screen saver kicked in. We can pick a screen saver we like, from a finite number of options. There is no need for screen savers with modern computers and still we have them. Isn't that like life---or is it ---life? For most people is a screen saver. For all, except---scientists and engineers, those who rearrange the external world. The latter may get something besides a screen saver---they may see wall paper when they focus on what is going on. Is that all?

One merely makes a conjecture, but what about those whom history remembers as saints, and I include here Jan Cox and Gurdjieff, regardless of their current esteem by historians?  Their knowing may resemble strings of binary code, or even trinary code. Something that can be translated, but not for most the components of conscious thought. Just a guess, but---in the words of Jan Cox, "it would explain a lot." Though not electricity.

Occult Objectivity

Jan Cox said once, that he only ever talked about one thing. And each night he spoke there were fresh maps, because it could be fatal to think to yourself, I heard that before, I know what he's talking about. Because an ordinary person could not. Because Jan was pointing beyond words. His aim was for us to be able to do this ourselves. The "how" of the method is not the current topic.  My newest phrase for the method, is, occult objectivity. Occult because the student should never appear strange to the world--the audience should not have their eyes drawn to something that in fact was motivated by the energy behind attention seeking. Objectivity because the method enables seeing the interstices of science, the gaps in theory, the horizon of ignorance. Occult because one must be hidden to oneself. Objectivity because in the reality of the shared edge of inward and outward lies what is. 

Tumbling tombs

Consider the importance of tombs to archeology. The progress of this science is largely dependent on tombs to evaluate and discover preliterate cultures. The discovery of a tomb with treasures is always an opportunity to learn, and any tomb furnishings open the door to knowledge, and many times graves are not just a main source of knowledge, they are the only source.

In literate societies you might assume the task of reconstructing the past to be different. Such is not substantially the case however. When you realize that words themselves, the record of which defines the beginning of human history, are a form of tomb, the possibility for a knowledge ignored by scientists is extant. Reality that is captured in words is AT BEST, only the past, never the present. So in a sense you are still not able to access an eye-witness account. Not keeping this aspect of linguistic reality in mind, hinders any apprehension of a real present, much less, what might have been a past reality.

The recognition of the reality of tombs allows a kind of knowledge, if that recognition is persistently pursued. The fresh, unbreathed before, air is in realizing the difference in horizons, in distinctions, like that between, 'there is no life after death', a binary phrase, and, the words of Jan Cox, only superficially similar, "there is no evidence of life after death." 

A Smelling Bee

A Smelling Bee is the level on which the real W.O.R.K. operates. (W.O.R.K., being the acronym used by Jan Cox for Way of Real Knowledge)

Jeopardy quiz show was lots of fun

The Jeopardy quiz show was lots of fun. I refer especially to the shows featuring IBM's natural language computer. It was fun to watch, not for the answers, but for the players, and by that I mean the host, and the IBM programmers interviewed. The conclusion to the game seems to be that the computer beat the people playing the game. But that is not what happened, and thereby lies entertainment on another level.

The answers Watson the computer, gave, were easy because all the answers in its databanks were "correct." The computer could only chose to answer the question based on picking an answer supplied in some gigaencyclopedic dump. Nothing required an intelligence that observed, that experimented, that could come up with something new. Neither can a human, of course, using their own binary verbal intelligence. But while humans can come up with answers regardless of their own pervasive ignorance of their intellectual wiring, a computer can only, ever, rearrange the pieces on the board, the chalk lines on the grass, and never really deal with the new, that breath of the future that prevents the whole house of cards from collapsing on itself. Jan Cox found the whole idea of artificial intelligence amusing, and I suspect my points above may have been part of the reason.

Is 'Watson" the heart of human intelligence?

Is "Watson" the heart of human intelligence? This is the description given by an IBM engineer involved in developing this computer. The answer would depend on one's ability to appreciate the nature of human rationality---the human brain has a verbal level which depends on binary thought. A common assumption among academics is that this verbal level is the depth and dimensions of human intelligence.  Actually those academics are incorrect, but let's pretend there is some legitimacy to this stance. Watson's success in answering natural language questions is a sham. All the answers have already been stored in the computer. There is no environmental interplay and learning which involves dealing with a chaotic interface to an external world. All the answers Watson discovers are right, because the computer only has RIGHT answers stored in it. A human binary brain, may seem limited compared to have have a million encyclopedias scanned into one's cranial cap, but even at the most limited view of the human brain, the view which actually ignores human experience and history, even this binary rattletrap, learns by interacting with a multivalent flow of energies which is only artificially divided into external and internal. Take the answer given on the Jeopardy show----Toronto. A mistake you say, but Toronto is the right answer to some question, just not the one that was asked. The human players on this revered game show, had to pick the right answer, not from a finite list of correct answers, but a infinite list of almost correct answers, mixed into the imbroglio. Reality at even the binary level is only superficially composed of alphabetical blocks. At any juncture there is an infinity of answers, which the players pick from, a job made easier by mechanical intelligence, but only superficially does this ease get confused with the crisp matrix of yes and no which the Watson engineers only can guess is the nature of reality.

But wait, the patient reader may protest, weren't you going to keep your response within the artificial and unreal limits of binary thought. Are you not pointing beyond the rational mind when you point out the chaotic edges of reality.

No. And I say no, we are still talking about binary thought, because the thinker can only ever stay with the limits of binary thought by imaginatively ignoring the reality that his cranial canvas is something unique to him. Since the binary thought extends from a broader organism called humanity, even the fiction that binary thought is the way a man thinks can only be maintained by allowing his individuality to remain unexamined. The human binary mind, can be compared to the natural language computer, ---both mechanical, both blissfully unaware of their limitations, but the human binary mind, still must, thrive, in a chaotic situation, or else the most mechanical mind, could not breathe.  Like slats in a fence perhaps, all measured out and fixed side by side, and nailed against a cross beam at intervals,  is that human mind at its most mechanical, but even then, and this is the point, it has to have slits between the slats, a view of a real chaos of the unexpected, to perform its mechanical function. Like a bee, adorablly mechanical, must still search for new flower patches.

And of course, we let up on Watson, just so we could make the argument seem fair. The human mind is not just a binary machine, though such is the main part of the verbal structure. And who will be able to see this point?

Is there a word that describes "it all?"

Is there a word that describes "it all?" A word like cosmos, but a
word which hints at the mechanics of reality, not just the beauty. You
might suggest verbalizable, but this does not suggest that which is
not verbalizable. The word that occurred to me is "knock-off." Jan Cox
expressed a comparable idea when he pointed out that without real gold,
there would be no market for counterfeits. The thought that the world we talk about is a knock-off suggests a reflective quality of words. At the same time knock-off suggests there is a world which is unmediated by thought.