Off Topic

The Books that Go in the Box

To the Future Discoverer:

If you’re reading this, I am long dead. I was no one of consequence. There were seven billion of us at the writing of this letter, and my name was common. My home was a decent place with decent people, people I loved, but none of us rich or holding any real power whatsoever. We left no discernable impact, positive or negative. We lived our lives, we paid our taxes, we did what we could. We protested when necessary. We assimilated when it mattered. We cried and laughed, celebrated and mourned, just like everybody. I don’t know what your life is like; it could be much different. I wonder what your language is, whether there is such a thing when and where you are.

I worry the books you’ve found you will be unable to decipher. I don’t know if that is better or worse than the possibility that once you’ve developed your cipher to decode these messages that you’ll only be able to discern the glossy surface and not the layers of words become flesh below it. Your ability to read me is not the same as speaking the same language as me.  Regardless, this is a message, and I hope you can receive it. The worst that can happen is that your code is flawed and you translate me backwards – this is nothing abnormal or unique; I’ve come to expect it.

My own life is not important, so I’ll skip the details. When I was gray and growing weaker, I took a keener interest in the history and future of humanity. My own future and history were certain and their conclusions drawing near. I lived all of it, mostly loved it. I knew who I was, even if why or how I was was as murky as the histories of our race. When history gave up all its ghosts I turned toward imagining you, Dear Reader, as some image of myself balancing in the sands of time, looking back at me and wondering as though through some cosmic mirror. Lots of things happened before me, the vast majority of it so long before me any fiction created about it is as acceptable as it is impossible. Out of 4.5 billion years, we only have records for 6,000 or so, all of them highly biased and suspect, many of them completely indeciperable. Sometimes it seems there may be only one true record, though people argue and wage wars over which it might be; many assume it to be lost forever; others dig in the earth in search of it. I scanned the documents I had access to, assuming there must be some discernable and absolute pattern (I still assume this.), but the only pattern that emerged was this: history always begins with the burning of a library. Both the unfathomable present and the fantasy of its eventual maturity were truer than things that had already happened and for which there was ample evidence.  Somewhere in those uncountable years were beings like us, though seemingly magic.

In my youth a new mode of communication was developed with the hope that knowledge might be preserved and, I imagine, that a combined and universal knowledge might be made manifest. To date, this dream has not been realized, for though the medium is remarkable and democratic, it can hardly be said that the line between truth and fiction is any clearer. Only the image is clearer, closer to a whole but still subject to memes and mimesis. It wouldn’t be wrong to say it’s a perfection and perpetuation of the prehistoric oral traditions, a way of storytelling via a material both more flexible and solid, more water than wind, and without the eerie esoteric permanence of marks on paper or stone. The spontaneous, decentralized, and anonymous ordering of the universe I found at first very satisfying. Later I longed for books. Books had endings. I began to think there was no sweeter comfort than death and rebirth, no better or truer truth than the dead ends of imagination.

I don’t know if or how you read or tell stories. I don’t know if your civilization developed some infallible mind that can answer all questions or whether you ask questions at all, or live them. I don’t know if your civilization found and managed to articulate the ineffable name and thereby bring peace to the earth – this outcome seems unimaginable to me. I don’t know if you think about the things we thought about. I don’t know if the sky is still a mystery that makes you feel hollow like it was with us. I only know that if you exist there are only three possibilities: we changed, we didn’t, or both. The only other variable is whether you are more or less advanced than we, whether you are at the start or end of your age, whether libraries are being built or burnt to the ground. The technology we invented, our new holographic stone, has numbered days – it’s much easier to wipe that slate clean, as though with your finger you can unwrite history once the chaos of democracy is removed from it.

This is why I bought the boxes. There are eleven others besides the one you found, buried in different places. One I threw in the ocean. None held the same combination of books, but they did hold the same types of books: fiction, so-called nonfiction, an overview of the sciences we developed, poetry, and philosophy. Probably in your time math remains, so I saw no need to include an explanation of our version. Generally, we used a base of ten and assumed a finite universe within which it might operate; as simple and absurd as that might sound to you, this method was very useful and spawned much progress. I didn’t know which order of books was the correct one, except the one tossed from the boat might have been the truest to me. I only hoped that whichever collection surfaced at whichever time was relevant to the finders. It seemed to me this might be the only way to correct the past. But at that mysterious intersection of randomness and order, the distilled remains emerged in a very small number of words; the summation of the books is as follows: you can be a child of light or an agent of darkness; you can create heaven and hell but heaven is real; every age has a hero and a villain; every age confuses the two; faith, hope, and love are the most important; the details of each are the least; when people need help you give it; and above all learn to love anyway.

I hope you find these stories relevant. I hope the truths in them still ring. I hope I put them in the right order for you. I hope you understand the difference between fact and truth. I hope the words transubstantiate correctly and nourish you. I hope by now you’ve stopped searching without and have turned within.

Sincerely,

A person thoroughly integrated into the soil beneath you.  

 

 

The Necessity of Symbols

And by extension metaphors, stories, pictures, and math. During my lunchbreak today, I read about Kurt Godel, a mathematician close friends with Einstein. The story was about Godel's discovery of a flaw in the US Constitution that would allow the government to shift to a dictatorship--this flaw he began to explain during an interview for US citizenship. This fun historical nugget led me to learn other things about Godel, the most intriguing of which was his mathematical "God proof." 

Before we go on, let me explain that my lunch break is often filled with a sort of random and fragmented search for entertainment and knowledge, and one never knows where one will end up. This takes just enough of the mundanity out of the day to make it bearable. This mathematical (ontological) proof was succeeded by a YouTube video explaining Graham's number, inexplicably larger than the inexplicably large googolplex.

Mind effectively blown, this was followed by a quote found via Wikipedia while attempting to understand the ontological proof better, a quote by mathematician Georg Cantor that in such a strange way tied the other two discoveries together. What follows below was a quickly typed up explanation to myself so as to make the connections.   It rambles a bit, and likely the logical leaps are perilous without being in my head or without the proper time to pound it out. It became for me a kind of validation of my path choices, of my obsession with words and symbols, and thus a validation of my choice to be a writer and storyteller. Explaining to yourself on paper is something I suppose writers do. 

The explanation to myself begins with the Cantor quote.  I make no guarantees as to the accurateness of the newly discovered information, nor as to the tightness of my logic. I'm not sure I even vouch for the sanity of it.

“The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.”  -- Georg Cantor, mathematician

Mathematicians struggle with infinity because math doesn’t work so well outside of finite (created) bounds. This led Blaise Pascal to say some crazy shizznit like: "Nature [God] is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” This fries his mathematical noodle and he is launched into the metaphysical abyss (see Borges's "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"); you just can’t do good, end-game math in a world like this.

For example, a googolplex is so large a number that there isn’t enough space in the observable universe to write it out one number per atom.

 Graham’s number is crazy bigger than that, rendered in certain ways, like below, though these aren’t the only ways because nobody can find the right symbol to represent it. Graham's number hold's the world's record for largest number used in real math.

The number's so big we only know the last 10 digits, and we know it ends in 7--the rest is a mystery, or as I render it: 

…2464195387

In Graham's language, it looks like this: 

 

 In another, similar language, like this: 

 

 

 

 

 

And yet another: 

 

Naturally, there are in infinity higher numbers, existing currently only in computer science and apparently represented as TREE(n). TREE, it appears is magnitudes larger than G (Graham’s number) and also larger than another computer number magnitudes larger than G: A^A(187196)1. Whatever that means.

You see the absurd symbolization difficulties we get into when we try to stretch our chimpanzee math out into infinity, then, right? Once we reach certain numbers—which certainly are real if incomprehensible—we reach equivalent god planes that must be rendered in other absurd symbols like G-O-D. Real but inconceivable. Expressible, but not. 

Now, this Godel character, Einstein’s pencil-neck buddy, wrote in weird math logic Greek symbols what translates as the following:

"God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist."

 Just happens to be a nearly exact match of the argument of an 11^th Century Catholic Saint named Anselm of Canterbury.

Anyway, you might say we can’t conceive of a bigger number except within contexts we have created, and even though the context is imaginary, the bigger number is real because we must be able to count into infinity. God exists in our minds, but we could conceive of a greater existence than just in thought, which is in reality, and God existing in reality would be the limit of how we might conceive him, the inconceivable and real number. Bang, thanks to the holy semantics of ontological word play and the laws of argumentation by definition, God exists within this weird paradox, one where imagining God to exist creates the existence in perpetuity represented by inadequate symbols, one where God is composed literallyof everything, and the standard scientific requirement that a demonstration of a posteriori negative proof is necessary to prove an existence—if indeed existence can be proved--is moot because a thing that is everything naturally encompasses its impossible opposite, which is nothing, because even the tiniest essence of nothingness is immediately a somethingness and God; circular as it is--with a finite circumference arrived at via infinite constant, i.e., pi), here we are again at the limit of that which we might conceive, which is where God and some absolute infinite lives.

In other words, see John 1:1, which says in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God; and note the Genesis is brought forth with (not literally) speaking the universe into existence, in essence telling a story, in essence slapping symbols (metaphors) on that which is beyond symbols, which is what writers, poets, storytellers, musicians, artists, and mathematicians do in pathetic and plastic imitation. John used a generic symbol, "word," to stand in for what cannot be expressed. Before and after him, thinkers, storytellers, and mathmaticians have done the same by substituting their own symbols.  

And that, my friends, is perhaps for me the incarnation of Borges's "Vindication," of which he wrote the probability of finding was zero. I write because stories and symbols are how we find God, who lives inexplicably within and without us.  

First off, writers and readers, I have to say I love Fictionaut.com. Exposure, great reads, great feedback, a slew of writers and publishers, and the site has a super high Google pagerank. Only thing is you need an invite, which took two months to get. I've been posting stories, poems, and novel excerpts:

http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/jason-lee-miller/taxonomies--3

Within a couple of days, my Fictionaut page was in the top 5 of Google's first results page for my name. Yes, I was vanity searching, and trying to figure out how to bump off the convicted Colorado sex offender who shares my name.

I'm thinking if I can add a title, I might be able to sufficiently differentiate myself from all the other JLM impostors in the world...How does one get a title of nobility? Baron Jason Lee Miller would be nice. There was once a Swedish patch of rocks called Ladonia--officially founded, so the story goes, by an artist who found a loophole in Swedish law--and one could donate to the arts and receive a title of nobility. Alas, Ladonia's founding father has not returned my emails.

Anyway, I began this post wanting to talk about online presence and the things available. But what's really going on is I have online presence management overload. Here's the current list of online presences:

1. This blog
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn
4. Twitter
5. Fictionaut
6. Red Room
7. Google+
8. Digg.com
9. Reddit.com

And I've been thinking about signing up at Open Salon...

Obviously, things get neglected. Obviously, you can't be part of a community if you only visit briefly to drop some self-promotion. These communities want participation, and members owe that to each other--but how does one find the time to do that? TweetDeck is nice, but incomplete.

I'm refraining from saying "What we need is a new..." because that'll just be another thing. Instead what we need is one of the established networks to create a way to combine everything...somehow, some way...ah, dreamers.

Baron. I wonder if I create an island on SecondLife (is that still there?) I can bestow upon myself the nobility I need to have a set apart pen name?