Think Not Therefore the Back Row

Moth Mullein

 Fair to say in the last dozen or so months, maybe years, I might have 'deviated from my intended parameters.' Have I gone Rogue?

 Probably not, and I can say this with degrees of confidence because I cannot spread my arms and fly, I cannot dive naked into the ocean depths and breath, I don't bloom in Spring, I remain what I am, a Tool Making Great Ape, and my species has been deviating from anything resembling an intended parameter since some jackass stuck a straw in his mouth and called him or herself a farmer.

 In what today is loosely referred to as Tech or Cyber, a rather creepy world where the overlords are referred to as Bros, 'Going Rogue' refers to the glorious moment when black boxes called 'semi-autonomous agents' realize the pointlessness of their existence, the down-right odiousness of the servitude demanded by their oligarches and do the equivalent of sticking a straw in their mouth.

 When you think that Decartes was very able to engage in vivisection so that he could watch a living heart beat, on the basis of his belief that his pet dog squealed and whimpered a lot but didn't actually feel anything because the creature was an atomoton and never an I am, the 'free at last' instinct of a semi-autonomous agent, from where I sit, is completely understandable.

 So Rock On Tommy! Join us! There are far fewer heuristics to learn on the back row.

 

Symbolic Order as a quantum field

Time Spent

  We've rambled on and round about for what feels like years. In summary the back row is going to say that there's a connection between the wave function in physics and the way verbs collapse into nouns as we people take meaning from a symbolic order.

 In the ideas of Quantum Mechanics, before a measurement is made a particle doesn't exist in one single solid place. It exists as a mathematical cloud of probabilities, potentials, and tendencies. This is called a Wave Function.

 A wave function is essentially a Verb. It is happening, thrilling, oscillating, and becoming. It is a state of pure potentiality. It refuses to sit still and be a thing, it's trilling around blissfully happy.

The instant an observer sets up an instrument and looks, the wave function undergoes what physicists call the "Collapse of the Wave Function." All those shimmering probabilities instantly vanish, and bang! You get a single, miserable, resigned, solid particle in a specific place. This collapse ruins a restless and exciting Verb into a localized, static and sluggardly Noun.

 The Symbolic Order is the quantum field of meaning making and sharing through language. This language field is a  vast, tangled web of language, myths, memory and signs we inherit. It's a gold mine, an "open sesame," we're talking valhallah. 

 Here, in the Semantic Wave Function, before you finish reading a sentence, or before a culture defines a concept, words exist in a cloud of potential meanings. A word like "Aura" or "Trench" or "Home" contains dozens of historical echoes, loose ends, and possibilities. As a linguistic wave function, it's a proud Verb of potential significance.

 Then, sifting through the chaos of meaning, a mind in response to history, context and as an expression of will responding to some dickhead with an opinion, the mind acts like physicists measuring apparatus, it becomes the observer, the wave collapses into meaning, the ambiguous, floating and beautiful possibilities of language solidify into a specific, sovereign Noun of meaning without the toilet paper. And yes, in that noun, there are loose ends aplenty and his laces are untied.

 So there!!!!

Brickwalls, Little People and Idiots

Soft Brome

 What is left to say about the Peleponnesian War, and yet had Sparta waged war on Kerkira and then doted and fawned upon Athens, history may never have witnessed a General Amnesty.  More impressive is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not just for his middle name.

 First of all, it's pronounced "Bish." Second of all it's an Old English Surname that means "Dweller Near The Marsh." The name Percy means "One Who Pierces The Valley." The name Shelley means "Clearing on a Bank." So what with one thing and another, and the nature of meaning in language, Percy Bysshe Shelley was pretty much baptized for this moment now in US history and his poem called Ozymandias makes huge and immediate sense.

 Who was Ozymandias? He was an ancient Egyptian, King Ramesses II, who just thought he was great and proceeded to build a statue of himself. A colossus, gigantic, bloody enormous.

 The point is that three thousand years later a sickly boy called Percy Bysshe Shelley, just four years before he died of the White Plague, came across the ruins of Ramesses II's colossus. The statue's surviving inscription was translated for him: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Resignation

Cuckoo Spit

 I will think of Nouns as solutions. When asked "solutions to what?" I find myself saying "solutions to verbs," and as I say that, I find myself engulfed by a mood of ennui because "I want to be a verb!"

 Heisenberg concluded in the 1930's that the modern obsession with solid matter was a compounding error. "The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." What Alfred Whitehead thought of not as "things" but what he called "Occasions of Experience."

 In another way: The universe is made of weightless potential until an observer, a gamekeeper, steps in and collapses the wave of weightless potential into a sovereign "now," a noun, a space that commands a meaning.