Blob Point Moments (partly unedited)

1> In practicing mindfulness of the 8-fold path, begin by rendering conscious the activities of the body. Then extend mindfulness to sense data, thinking and the objects of thinking. Bring the mind under control and into a centered state. This practice produces insight into the transitory and essenceless nature of existence and is the basis for all higher knowledge. 
(This is taught as part of their system in the OrderAdeptaMetamorphosis).

2>mondo - dialogue between 2 practitioners of zen, where one party voices an existential problem and the other, without recourse to logic, invokes the answer from the deepest layers of the questioner's mind.

3>With us, here at the Fringe, there are only individual expressions. Accuracy, success, even persons are folded into this primary. Every expression is on equal standing. We do not privilege hard science over the ambiguity of art. And behind [each and] every expression is a Name. All knowledge, most of it still uncreated, potential and ahead, lies thus before us as tools, vehicles in life's journey. Exper ience of individual expressions - which can only be one's own, the small number of all that are available, endlessly growing but always finite - are personally placed in categories and made into glyphs. This ritual allows the body-centered egoself to participate in the higher subjective, the primary substance. 

This is how the path of the AdeptaMetamorphosis is opened, here at the fringe.

4> PrimarySubstance : where ultimate memory resides.

5>We define "tecnology" in its widest sense, as any technique that constructs experience. It enfolds language, DNA-to-persons, science, the putting together of machines, the softness of art, the quietness of religion, the "Intek" in "intellectual". The universe, which is a single poem, is fragmented only from man's limited point of view.....

6>Here, at the Edge, the New Age SynArtist develops and uses a very diverse skillset to construct a composite self aimed at the future, a concept in the present. (It is always in the present). The {operating}environment is sometimes chaotic, yet systematic, challenging and fun. A wealth of impressions has to be juggled. It is often fast moving, but sometimes glacially slow. It is a work in progress, and what is being worked, on and out, is the artist's life.

7. 1> 5 can be found in 5 quacks, 5 ducks, 5 pebbles, 5 leaves, 5 persons or 5 cars, but is not a quack, duck, pebble, leaf, person or car. Number, though an aspect of the empirical world as quantity or magnitude, can be abstracted from it into a Platonic world of forms.

7. 2> As form, number and its relations, which involve operations that transform one number into another, can be represented, not by empirical objects like quacks and cars, but by symbol -defined as an object (visible or audible) that has no content by itself.

7. 3> Counting can be done by dots  ,.,..,...,....,..... which gets cumbersome for large numbers; by a symbolic system in base 2 such as 0,1,10,11,110,111,...... where each digit position corresponds to a power of 2; by base 10 as 0,1,2,3,4,5,……

7. 4> The number, which is to say the form, is the same however symbolically represented. For example  ..... = 111(base 2) = 5 (base 10).

7.5.1> Reasoning can be described as proceeding from one combination of meanings to another within the category of the rational. The ability to perceive meanings as either rational or nonrational is taken as fundamental – taken as is with no further explanations (though further questions are always possible).

7.5.2> It is a strange fact that once rational meaning ( eg. in logic, geometry, numbers, even physics) is represented symbolically, with elementary symbols and rules for combining them, the reasoning with the meaning/semantics can be dispensed with and replaced with symbolic manipulation according to the rules . Manipulation of symbols by either humans or machine being essentially the same, since the machine merely implements what the human programmed the machine to do.

7.5.2.1>Rational reasoning according to semantics can be made equivalent to symbolic procedure, these are distinct experiences when performed by the human mind. Can one say that something essential has been captured by the symbol system?

7.6> It can be proposed that in principle a human mind (or better) can always be found that can capture, in abstract, anything any machine can do but this does not apply conversely. What follows attempts to understand why this may be, without recourse to Godel.

7.7> It is not surprising that a finite number of formal elements represented symbolically can be combined endlessly if no limit is set to the number(size) of combinations : this amounts to a mapping onto the positive integers, an infinite set. (Atoms can be regarded as a formal system invented as a model to account for physical and chemical events).

7.8>Restated : It is easy to extrapolate endlessness with an open system of formal combination - counting being the simplest.

7.8.1>It is surprising that any and all meanings, localized in symbols such as words, combine endlessly. This is because we do not feel that we have an infinite capacity for meaning, unlike counting that can go on forever/unending/without end/stopping/perceiving that counting can go on without stopping/endlessness in counting [an open-ended formal system].

7. 8.1>When text is read for the first time, word combinations one has never come across, perhaps could not have thought of, appear in one's consciousness, being made up of the stuff of one's own mind, yet perceived as belonging to another, another's voice.

7. 8.2>Many word combinations new to one's experience can be found. So many that one feels that there are more than one can read/experience in a lifetime.

7. 8.3>As words have a formal aspect in a system of syntax, we borrow from it and say that the semantics is infinite. But semantics is endless in a larger, bewildering and mysterious way. This can be seen when formality is included as meaning, as something the mind can do, like poetry or music.

7. 8.4>Similiarly pixels on a finite monitor screen, each in its fixed position, can together display all the pictures in the universe ....

7. 8.5>Different screen technologies reify the same pixel, the specified combination of basic color intensities at its relative location, in order to show the same picture. "Screen technology" is itself an abstract term, implemented (more or less) by each physical copy of the screen.

7. 8.6>Music notes....

8>Expressions can be categorized. Word combinations are seen to capture an outlook, point of view, mentality, purview, modeway of thought.

8.1>Purview: scope of competence, understanding, intention or concern.

8.2> A structure of information is confined.

8.3> A structure of information's meaning and competence is confined to its category.

8.4>This is a form of locality.

8.5>Consciousness, however, is another matter.

9>When word combinations from different categories, times and places are examined on equal standing, they are seen to exhibit mentalities of various kinds. These morph into one another when, imagined or with software, the letters, punctuation and spacing are changed.

9.1>Point of distinction: word combinations are things, which can be found on a page; mentalities are found only in persons.

9.1>Text (any text) can be seen as TheText or the TextField - single, transcendent, representing one's consciousness, if you will - altering its mentality/having its mentality altered with the words.

10>If words capture/express a mentality, and such a great variety can be found, most (of them) from earlier times, and words can combine endlessly, then this is the question : what words can express the next stage/phase of humanity, here at the second decade of the 21st century? (There may be more than one).

10.1>It can only be a story.

10.2> Last Sunday, I happened by an open space that had been converted into a park. It was in an old estate of terrace houses built in the 1970s. A few people were flying kites. These were not the small, diamond shaped kites of my youth, made from translucent paper pasted onto a cross-frame of thin bamboo. These were big, colorful, complex shaped beasts made up of parachute fabric and fiberglass rods sailing the winds of the 21st century. But finding where I was, in the area where I had been a boy, I tried to revisit the scenes of those earlier times. It was not to be - while the street names and most of the houses remained, the sense of 40 years ago, Singapore in the 1970s, had vanished. Still, I could recall those kites of long ago. Fighting kites...

The kite, painted with green and red horizontal stripes, emerged from behind a rooftop 3 rows of houses from the open field, where we were. It caught a strong breeze and climbed, reaching to perhaps the 8th storey height of a new HDB block. Darting back and forth, it was a tantalizing sight. We did not know who it belonged to, but that did not matter. Like a dancing character in an online fight game that would come into vogue 3 decades later for the youth of another generation, it was enough that it was there, an object of provocation.

I grabbed our kite, painted with a single blue stripe, holding it with both hands. With the wind blowing towards me, I backed away from Surin, who held onto the tin can wound with kite string - string that had been treated with powdered glass mixed with glue, then dried in the sun. Glass that used to be soft drink and beer bottles, placed in a burlap bag and pounded fine.

When I was about 7 m from Surin, and the string was taut between us, I threw the kite upwards. Surin tugged on the string with his left hand - he was lefthanded - while holding the tin can with his right, and the kite soared. He alternately tugged and released, tugged and released, letting the string unwind from the can, and kite ascended, surging towards its red and green adversary, which was holding steady. When the kites were about 5 m apart, they seemed to remain still for a moment, one blue striped, the other red and green, then they darted towards one another - and pass. I turned to look at Surin, 3 years older, hoping to pickup a few secrets of kite-fighting, of which he was an expert. He had dropped the tin can and was manipulating the string with both hands- pulling back, letting go - his eyes intent on the two kites.  I caught nothing special and returned my gaze to the sky. The strings of the two kites had become entangled, and sharpened with a coating of tiny glass shards were sawing at each other. I understood the trick of the game to be to control the movement of the kite in such a way that the friction on one's string was distributed over a greater length than that of one's opponent's, while he was trying to do the same, but this may not be right, since I rarely won.

The green and red kite swooped spectacularly towards the ground then up, while the blue kite wheeled in a wide spiral, both of them tied to each other irretrievably - until only one survived. 
Surin started pulling furiously on the string, hand over hand - loops of it were falling and lying on the ground. The two kites sped towards each other and then...and then one kite suddenly lost all fight and started to drift away, tumbling slowly in the wind.

It was the red and green, its string cut.

We had won.

I turned to congratulate Surin but he was frowning.

I looked back.

From behind another rooftop, a yellow and black kite was surging rising into the sky...

11>Inertia causes the world of material bodies to be utterly banal.

11.1>Contemplate reincarnation: I was once an insect being eaten by a bigger predator. Horrible, but natural - it has been going on for 400 million years. Is going on. Will go on, probably, when no human beings are left to walk the earth. Yet "I" am still (t)here...

11.2>Life: a package of water-carbon compounds that can multiply, differentiate and associate into interdependent structures that together form an entity - a self.

11.3>An embodied entity that requires material input to continue; for animals, material input transferred from the disintegrated entity of another life.

12>here we are, the community of true seekers, some of us with great purpose and mission, in an interesting universe, for a lifetime's journey. challenging, given a human body with so many weaknesses and habitats made of strife!

13>All life is embodied. each living body is finite in size and has to exist in an environment. It has characteristics that mark it as belonging to a species and qualities that make it individual. if the characteristics of a population of living bodies allows it/them to acquire sufficient resources from the environment to produce the next generation, the population, hence the species, survives. If one generation fails to reproduce before dying out, the species becomes extinct.

13.1>Inherited behavior that tends to result in the destruction of a living body in a changed environment where it needs to obtain resources for sustenance before reproduction will probably lead to/bring about eventual extinction.

13.2>Since life is embodied, continuation of life is synonymous with survival of the body. This says nothing about the relationships that living bodies can undertake in order to survive, which may range from extreme cooperation, as in the multicellular human brain that has a sense of self and the notion of altruism and the existence of a benevolent God, to extreme individualism, as in single cells that would kill and eat their own clones. It says nothing about the potential of the genetic code to construct living bodies into the distant future which may return to a world of selfish single cells or move towards greater and greater cooperation, perhaps a gigantic hive mind or cooperative composed of the populations of many species, including homo sapiens, everyone feeling lovingkindness towards the other members.....Nor would such a complex hive entity be inferior in protecting itself, on the contrary, as has been imagined in science-fiction, it may actually be a much more powerful entity.....

14>Taoists refer to the golden flower...which opens when the adept has attained enlightenment, consisting in purifying the mind and a return to nothingness. That is, by becoming one with the Tao (Way, Path, Process) thus integrating oneself with the universe and balancing ying and yang.

15>How do neurons, each of which does not, cannot think as we do, each of which can be labelled a relatively simple robot, when together organized as the brain, produce any and all human experience?

While every scientific enquiry has made significant progress since their beginnings in 17th century Europe, the mind-body problem, which was initiated during the same period, is still largely unsolved, now, in the 21st.

This problem has turned out, with the passage of history, to be more difficult than the initial problems of physics, chemistry, engineering and biology. In these fields early, profound questions have been answered to some degree of satisfaction. Framed in ordinary language questions such as "Matter is distinct from space, but what is it? Is it a continuous media as presented to our sense of sight and touch"?

Answer : All material bodies, whatever their shape, color, texture or other properties have mass and are made up of discrete quantum mechanical atoms. Material bodies can bond or undergo transformation (phase or chemical) for this same reason. (The generic atom consists of a  tiny nucleus where positive electric charge and most of its mass is concentrated surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons arranged in shells. The tiny nucleus implies a nuclear force among protons and neutrons that is much stronger than the repulsive electric force among the protons. The balance of positive and negative electric charge among atoms generates a forcefield of probable regions where electrons of neighbouring atoms may be bound to make up/compose molecules...).

"What is life? How does it differ from nonlife?"

Answer : Life is organized material activity that feeds itself, reproduces and sometimes mutate. It  becomes nonlife when the organized, co-ordinated activity ceases. Reproduction, mutation with passive or active adaptation to its environment, and death accounts for the history and diversity of living organisms.

"Can, at least some aspects of thought be mechanized, that is, made material?"

Answer: Calculation can be symbolized and symbol transformation performed according to rules and this performance can be broken into simple steps and these steps arranged into a mechanical procedure."

The triumph of science in describing the world we live in has been a triumph of reducing to material, mechanical and algorithmic components.

Except for the mind-body problem. This too must have a material basis or aspect, but is harder to pin down. Why? Because our subjective experience (smell, taste, feeling affection or anger, concepts like concept) are categorically distinct from our objective experience (my foot, that chair). The contact of my foot and the chair obeys the same laws of physics as the contact of one chair with another. The thought of my foot coming into contact with that chair in the future and then 1 minute later willing my foot into the action does not seem altogether accountable by the laws of physics as we understand it, the physics that has been developed to explain objective material behavior.

How to explain this mysterious phenomenon of my thoughts and will having an effect on my body and through it the material objects in my environment? A phenomenon easily observed and brought about but which is so difficult to account for by a pure reductionism, for eg. into neurons which are simple cellular robots themselves composed of atoms?

I have not the answer but can sketch out an approach in search of one. I start with the fact that all I can know are my experiences. I cannot know of something I have no experience. For eg. I am frequently amazed at the images that can be found on the internet. I did not know that such sights existed - until then. Since all I know are experiences, objective reality - the things that are there, apart from me - are only known as experiences, "through" the experience of perception. Thus objective things and subjective feelings and thoughts can be regarded equally as experiences, are all stuff of my mind. They are meanings. I can treat the full range of human experience (including all perceptions of things, thoughts, hypotheses, beliefs etc - which I have to experience for them to exist for me) as phenomena that can be studied. That they are mindstates I can have or have had is empirical. They can be evaluated for their possibility to make progress on the mind-brain question. It is important to regard the full range of human experience - what I can experience of it - as fact, as real in order to put them into play. Whatever consciousness is, whatever the mindbrain is, it includes the capacity for that full range. Denial of the nonrational as experience would be unscientific, a discarding of part of the evidence.

So now : can numerous simple parts interacting in what humans would call a complex, go beyond a complex of interacting simple parts to generate any thought, any subjective experience? What does the evidence exhibit? It tells us that our experience is strongly correlated to physical happenings in our nervous system which is a complex of simpler interacting parts ( cellular neurons with DNA, proteins etc). Does this mean that any complex of interacting simple parts, let's say a computer executing a complicated algorithm of numerous simple steps (eg. changing (or not) state 1 to 0 or state 0 to 1) go beyond just that - something that humans can experience by a similiar mental perfomance - into other kinds of subjective experience like music or feeling or philosophy or that it is equivalent to every mathematical or logical thought? "No" seems to be the answer. It has been shown that no algorithm, no matter consisting of how many steps or loops of steps, can perceive that it is in a certain type of endless loop precisely because it executes 1 step at a time. (Therefore no computing process can think the previous sentence, perceive irony). Different parts of the computer, of any computer, can execute simultaneously, according to a central signal device, but every part is local, including the central signaller, is "aware" only of the 1 step it is executing at the time; the computer has no entity that is aware of its parts together, that can see or imagine these parts executing simultaneously. Such awareness are found only in persons and probably in other lifeforms. Different parts of a computer register each other's presence only through local interaction (coming into contact or via signals which can be regarded also as parts/parts of it, thus reducing all interactions to contact, to locality). A nonliving thing can be defined as a mere system of local interactions with the absence of awareness of 2 or more parts existing simultaneously, being together as "one". A computer, whatever algorithm it is executing, is a nonliving thing. A person mentally performing the same algorithm is not. A person can be aware of more than 1 part of the algorithm simultaneously. A nonliving complex of simple parts is not aware that it is such a complex. Only living complexes can be so aware. A nonliving complex has no "oversight" entity that is an aspect of it. It does not go beyond a mere system of interacting parts. In contrast, although we have no direct awareness of our brains, there is indirect evidence that convinces us that our experiences are strongly associated with our nervous systems and so conclude that we have thoughts that go beyond the mere system of connected neurons, beyond the material description of the brain. Hence the mind-brain problem.....

Furthermore, since our brains are composed of cells and multicellular organisms evolved from single cells, it is logical and likely that the capacity for awareness and will began with and is to be found in single cells and in their components. That it is logical and likely this defining property of awareness and volition simultaneously at different locations of a living body is a development/product of the nature of the universe. If the currently understood laws of science account for them badly/weakly or not at all then these laws are incomplete.....