Neil Bruder

10oclockdot:

On Universe-Simulation Computers, 10 points.

1. Nick Bostrom’s “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” discusses the possibility of a planet-sized computer which could run 10^42 operations per second.  This is an astronomical number.  He proposes that such a computer could simulate the entire history of mankind a million times over in the space of one second.
2. When I first read Bostrom’s article, I was already familiar with summaries of his basic argument; consequently, my mind wandered to something else.  How could such a planet-sized computer be powered?  Wouldn’t it require a planet-sized power source?  And wouldn’t that power source have to consume fuel with an incredibly high energy density?  Chemical reactions (such as burning coal or gasoline) would hardly cut it; this planet-sized computer would require nuclear, indeed probably thermonuclear power.  Otherwise, the power source would have to be prohibitively large compared to the array of computers.  Just as chemical rockets (fueled by ammonium perchlorate and a metal or liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) cannot transport cargo intergalactic distances (that is, while keeping the spaceship at a reasonable size), so also chemical reactions cannot provide power to planet-sized computers in any practical way.  And just as intergalactic space travel would only be practical with humongous solar sails, so also planet-sized computers could probably only be run with thermonuclear power.
3. This observation raises another question.  Even if power could be supplied to a planet-sized computer, how could such a massive computer be cooled?  Either the material would have to be fractally porous (possibly resembling a Menger sponge, or perhaps an animal’s circulatory system) to allow a remarkably efficient coolant to circulate, OR - and this seems more likely - the computer would have to be designed from components which could not overheat.  Or, better than that, it would have to designed to function optimally (or even solely) at extremely high temperatures.  Is liquid or gaseous computing possible?  It turns out that the answer is probably yes.
4. Such a computer would be more efficient if it didn’t have to sacrifice any of its power to cool itself.  It would be even more efficient if the power-generating thermonuclear reactions were distributed evenly throughout the computer, so as to reduce the energy loss which crops up whenever power is transmitted over long distances.  Such a computer would approach maximum efficiency if it was it wasn’t powered in the conventional sense at all (with wires and such), but was instead designed to operate in the presence of the extreme heat of the thermonuclear reactions.  At this stage, the computer’s material substrate would no longer be liquid or gaseous, but purely atomic plasma.
5. What would such a planet-sized computer look like from the outside?  Operating at such extreme temperatures, it would emit quite a lot of heat into the surrounding empty space; and a portion of that heat would likely radiate outward as visible light and many of the other wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum.  Imagine it - a vast spherical computer, the size of a planet or even larger, powered by a tumultuous cauldron of thermonuclear reactions, blazing forth against the darkness of space.
6. It would be indistinguishable from a star.  What if the sun is a computer?  What if all the stars in the sky are computers?
7. What if the big bang and the initial conditions of the universe were set up to create sextillions of computers?  What if the designers of our universe designed it only for this purpose?  What if the chaos of the cosmos was designed so that no two stars would form the same way, and thus no two stars would run the same simulation?  What if the Chandrasekhar limit (that is, the mass above which a star will collapse into a black hole), was also designed, so that stars which run sufficiently robust simulations will collapse on themselves when their simulation is completed, either sealing the data obtained by their simulations inside (for later harvesting), or perhaps opening up an output wormhole which sends their data back to the designers of the simulation?
8. But what about the other stars?  Well, they would do exactly as we see in the universe: lighter stars would burn out, unable to transmit their data.  When too-massive stars burn too quickly and go supernova, they would (as they do) emit the fusion products which they once forged in their core as an explosion of dust.  From this explosion, the dust coalesces into nebulae.  Perhaps, over time, other stars will form from this dust and run successful simulations.
9. But also over time, some of that dust may coalesce into planets.  And, in the fullness of time and novelty, life may emerge, as it did.  I don’t know what the beings in the next-universe-up may be trying to simulate, but what if it’s life?  Would it shock them to discover that within the bowels of their microcosmic universe, the refuse and byproducts of failed simulation computers accidentally banded together and actually made life?
10. Bostrom demonstrated that if it is possible for posthuman societies to run ancestor simulations, it is overwhelmingly probable that we are living in such a simulation.  I don’t dispute Bostrom’s math; most life probably is a simulation.  But what if when we look into the night sky, we’re not seeing stars simulated for our eyes?  What if in each stellar twinkling we actually behold a simulation computer at work, and inside it simulated minds and bodies experience first kisses, deathbed farewells, and the rise and fall of civilizations?  Those consciousnesses within the star-computers would accept all their experiences as reality, and they would be right to (as David Chalmers suggests) – but where would that leave us?  What if the beings in the next-universe-up have no idea that we exist, living on worlds and in bodies which self-assembled from their broken computer parts?  What if reality was programmed, “it from bit,” but we were not?  Would this account for our feelings of lostness, purposelessness, and abandonment?  Or might it mean that we are the only truly free beings, for we have escaped the eyes of the gods?

10oclockdot:

On decolonizing the secretly poisonous ideologies of Christianity, 10 points.

1. When I returned for a visit to the emptied-out spiritually-stagnant husk of my old home church over the holidays, I took a moment to wander through the cobwebbed basement and recover a few artifacts.  Above, a youth-oriented paraphrase of the Ten Commandments which reveals much about the Christian miseducation of my upbringing.  Below that, a sheet I found in an adult classroom which shows how that miseducation foments in adulthood; the list not only distorts but also invents a number of sins (including not voting, lack of wholehearted participation in fellowship, “overregulation” of private industry, multiculturalism, and “Leading America into New World Order”).  Here’s also some more evidence from danforth.
2. I was instructed back then that all sins are equal in the eyes of God, which means that in breaking any commandment, one becomes just as sinful as a rapist or murderer.  For instance, the sins of swearing or lying or adultery equal the sin of murder.  As seen in the image above, “Murder is not an option” holds equal footing with “Save sex for marriage.”  I accepted this teaching.
3. Of course, the Bible says “You shall not commit adultery,” not “Save sex for marriage,” which means that my teachers mistook consensual fun for the violation of a sacred promise.  Their explanation: when you have sex before marriage, you’re cheating on your future spouse.  I never thought to ask, “What if I don’t plan to get married?”  I was also taught that both masturbation and lust counted as sins in the eyes of God.  Thus, if adultery and masturbation are equivalent, then, by syllogism, masturbation and murder are equivalent.
4. Plainly, this is madness.  Implicitly I surmised that in order for this teaching to be true, murder must not be a sin against the person who dies, but rather a sin primarily (or solely) against God.  Since no one but God could be the wronged party in masturbation, God must also be the wronged party in murder.  Accordingly, I assumed that rape was only a sin because it violates God.
5. Once a religion computes sinfulness in terms of a person’s relationship with God rather than in terms of a person’s relationship with other people, all other people cease to be fully people and simply become objects.  In my youth, when lust was ignited by the presence of other people, I thought of them, unconsciously, as manifestations of Satan.  They were temptations, not persons.  I sometimes became very cruel to people I cared about.  But I had been taught by masters.
6. So I ask, is belief in God nearly a kind of interpersonal schizophrenia?  When most of humanity’s laws can be explained in terms of a social contract without any necessary reference to the divine, what kind of mental fissures does divinity produce?
7. More importantly, when a person shakes off the shackles of theistic belief, what sort of further mental decolonization is necessary before they can safely re-enter a contractarian society?  As long the Christian maintains the illusion of God as a deterrent, he might mainly go on with his life sinless, which I suppose is a positive result.  However, if the person begins to doubt or disbelieve, God disappears as a deterrent, and with His disappearance, actions formerly counted as sins momentarily appear to harm no one.  During the extended moment in my life wherein I let go of God, I also became a small-time thief, stalking about my college campus at night, turning door handles, and when one yielded, entering.  Sometimes I left only a cryptic mark behind; other times I lifted trinkets from the rooms.  Pens or posterboard, items which a bureaucracy could easily and unsentimentally replace.  Maybe I wanted to take back what “God” had denied me.
8. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I felt justified in these actions only because I still believed that only God would be wronged.  And without a God, no one would be wronged.  Or nearly so.  God still lingered, incompletely exorcised, a palimpsest weakly scratched and not yet over-written.  So guilt also lingered, without apparent justification, and when I made love, my partner’s body still felt like a site of sin.  I could not experience pleasure without some kind of ensuing numbness or nihilism, for I had not yet built for myself a means of morality distinct from Christianity’s mutilated invections.
9. For years as a youth, my mind must have torn viciously at itself trying to comprehend why pleasure was evil, or how consensual premarital sex could be as bad as rape.  In my post-Christian adulthood, more conscious anxiety accompanied the decolonization.  How could I be a materialist without hopelessness?  How could I be sure that others were equal to myself without God decreeing it?  I’m still discovering what ultimately becomes of a post-Christian set adrift.  At times, I wish there were churches of atheism, because I miss the positive aspects of community and shared values.  But by itself, atheism is no ethos.  The world has work to do.
10. Quite a lot of my last decade has been about recognizing my own privilege.  My skin color is privileged, my gender is privileged, my language, my class, my upbringing, and more were all very privileged.  Only in my Christian ideology was I deprived.  So for those of you reading this who value evidence and logic and empiricism over blind belief, I urge you to recognize your mental state as a kind of knowledge-privilege.  Indeed, how privileged was I that I was able to battle my implanted ignorance, since so many of my old Christian acquaintances continue to lack the ability or the desire to break away from the fiction of God!

10oclockdot:

10 New Aphorisms 1. Artworks that ask nothing of the viewer ultimately give nothing back to the viewer. 2. Don’t confuse esoteric with meaningless. 3. Which is more likely?  That the critics are ALL either wrong, biased, stuffy, out-of-touch, or trying to impress each other, OR that you must have missed something and should take a second, closer look? 4. If you want to begin to understand the art of cinema, stop looking at the objects in front of the camera.  Rather, look at their relationships: object and object, object and frame, color and color, light and shadow, shot and shot, sequence and sequence.  As in chemistry, it’s not the atoms; it’s their arrangement that matters most. 5. Art should be about the freedom of the viewer.  To expect a single unified meaning is to expect art to be propaganda. 6. A cover is only good if it’s good for a reason besides the reason the original was good. 7. Saturday Night Live is where unfunny stereotypes go to get hooked up to life support while being beaten to death. 8. Trying to use the internet productively is like trying to read a Faulkner novel if all the odd-numbered pages had been replaced by porn. 9. You’re only a dilettante if you’re trying to reproduce what others have already done. 10. It’s impossible to say anything truly trivial.  Everything connects back to the ultimate questions in some way.  You’re only trivial if you refuse to trace back the connections or care about the questions.

Number 3

10oclockdot:

Applying deconstructionism to the history of mankind’s attempts to interpret and find meaning in the universe.

1. We all live in the same universe.
2. The universe is a text that can derive no meaning from research into an author.
3. This is not because there is necessarily no author, but because the author is not verifiably accessible.
4. Thus, the interpretation of the universe’s objects, what we all take as signs whether we mean to or not, falls entirely upon a machine of interpretation known as the individual.  And each individual has different data, different structures of filtering and organizing meaning, different “preconceived notions,” different “common sense,” different experience and education, different knowledge privilege, and even slightly different parsing hardware (apart from all the aforementioned software and memory) called DNA.
5. Thus, because of these differences in us, and because of occasional runaway eisegetical zealots who distort paradigms or inject false data, the universe is bound to appear a radically different place to different individuals.
6. But we DO ultimately all live in the same universe, and that causes even the most disparate theoretical and interpretive formations - even the most dogmatic or ignorant paradigms - to overlap at curious and surprising points.  We all have to grapple with the absurd, for instance. 7a. To those who see maximal meaning and teleological design in everything, the absurd still barks from the corner where it’s chained up, demanding to be heard, and such thinkers must rationalize the irrational to make it fit their paradigm.  Often something to do with sin and the fallen state of humanity projected onto creation itself. 7b. To those who think existence is essentially meaningless, absurdity becomes another way of expressing the wholeness of things, from chaotic evolutionary biology to Brownian motion.  But to define chaos is to rob it of some of its phenomenal essence.
7. And so nothing is ever totally meaningful or totally absurd.  Each consciousness trying to make sense of the objects of the universe - itself included - runs into this problem, and must read the universe - and itself - through this problem.  And so the universe has as many interpretations as people, though some are not so vigilant or open in their interpretation, and some are not enthusiasts of the text, and some, thinking themselves sacrosanct (for no interpretation is really any more than the sum total of the nature and nurture of the interpretation-machine), deny the pleasure and catalytic potential of the other interpretations.
8. Stepan Pashov, providing the last line in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2008), observed:

“There is a beautiful saying by an American, a philosopher, Alan Watts, and he used to say that through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself, and through our ears, the universe is listening to its cosmic harmonies, and we are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

10. The universe reads itself, and it disagrees.

10oclockdot:

Immanuel Kant identified two flavors of what he called the “sublime,” the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime.  The mathematical sublime is the feeling you get when you survey the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore and realize that you couldn’t possibly count them - that you couldn’t possibly really conceive of a number so large.  The dynamic sublime is the feeling you get when you look out over the ocean or into a thunderstorm and realize that the sum total of the power of the waves, the wind, the lightning exceeds any quantity of power that your brain can meaningfully grasp. ——————————————————- Ladies and gentlemen, I present 10 examples of the sublime in art.

1. (above) Ryoji Ikeda’s The Transfinite, a huge immersive sound and video installation at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC, in 2011.
2. Yayoi Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water, 2002, in which her signature mirrors (plus some water) expand space indefinitely.
3. The loudness and timbre so absolutely overwhelm pitch in the surprising latter half of Sleigh Bells' Infinity Guitars (2010) that the recording seems to feature an incalculable quantity of sound which rushes out of the speakers like an unstoppable wave.  Note: do not watch the video, as it completely misunderstands this most crucial aspect of the music.  Instead, enjoy these children, who clearly get it.
4. Powers of Ten (Ray and Charles Eames, 1977) and any good Mandelbrot zoom.
5. Depictions of mists, storms, oceans, and waves in classic paintings by Friedrich, Turner, Aivazovsky, and Hokusai (to name only a few).
6. The sublime can also be experienced through nearly-absolute absence, wherein the viewer struggles to comprehend the experience of emptiness or nothingness on a seemingly incalculable scale.  Here I’m thinking particularly of James Turrell’s Pleiades dark installation (1983) at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh (which cannot be meaningfully described and simply must be experienced, full stop.).  Work like this naturally reminds me of the “cosmic cinema” (as Gene Youngblood called it) of Jordan Belson), and the sublime effect of the offstage choir’s surprise singing, which suggests a space beyond space in Neptune: the Mystic, the last movement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets (1916).
7. The Oblivion roller coaster at Alton Towers, UK (designed by John Wardley and opened in 1998), which, after a terrifying pause, gives the rider the impression of dropping straighter than straight down into a whole blacker than black, shrouded by mist and incalculably deep.
8. The overwhelming musical forces called for in Berlioz’s Requiem (1837): 4 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 English horns, 4 clarinets, 8 bassoons, 12 horns, 4 cornets, 4 tubas, 50 violins, 20 violas, 20 cellos, 18 basses, 8 pairs of timpani, bass drum, 10 pairs of cymbals, 4 gongs, plus 4 more brass choirs each with 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, and 2 tubas, and a choir of 80 sopranos, 60 tenors, and 70 basses.  He adds in the score, “If space permits, the chorus may be doubled or tripled and the orchestra proportionally increased.”  Though the sonic effect is most striking during the loudest parts of the Dies Irae, Terence Malick knew better than anyone that the thresholds of peace at the end of the Agnus Dei make just about the best entry-into-heaven music ever written (unless we count the endless oceanic chord at the end of The Beatles’ A Day in the Life (1967)). 8b. Gustav Mahler displays similar megalomania to Berlioz’s with regards to performing forces in his Symphony of a Thousand (1906), which in part inspired my film The Mission of Art is to Reverse the Flow of Entropy (Tohline, 2011).  While we’re talking about music, I might as well also mention the very unconventional percussion section necessary to simulate a volcanic eruption in Jon Leif’s Hekla (1964).
9. Though Kant doesn’t mention it, I believe that extreme duration can play a role in the sublime, whether we’re discussing Morton Feldman’s 6-hour String Quartet #2 (1983), The Flaming Lips’ 6-hour Found a Star on the Ground (2011), Andy Warhol’s 485-minute Empire (1964), Martin Arnold’s 12-hour Jean Marie Renée (2002) (and this list), the Nine Beet Stretch (2002) (which transforms Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony into a 24-hour utopia of sound), Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Satie’s proto-minimalist/proto-conceptual extreme-duration piano piece Vexations (1893, unpublished until 1949), or, of course, this performance of John Cage’s ASLSP (1987), which is set to last 639 years…
10. The aberrations and dilations of time in cinema: the extreme slow-motion in Werner Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974), the extreme fast-motion in Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983), and the reverse motion that produces numinous flight at the end of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946). Bonus: this artful treatment of infinity. Did I really not mention Mark Rothko or Edwin Abbott’s Flatland?  Wow, 10 wasn’t enough at all.

10oclockdot:

Someone ought to be archiving good youtube comments.  Here’s one:

Listening to this in the middle of the night with my 4-month-old son (who woke me up ‘cause he was hungry and stuff). Thought it would be a good lullaby. Shedding manly tears. We’re love-filled and alive. But we’re all gonna die. But that’s OK, we’re love-filled and alive! But we’re still gonna die. But! Also love-filled and alive…. Baby doesn’t know or care that I’m writing/thinking this, but this song is putting him to sleep. I’ll sleep soon, too. We all will. But not yet. Johnabelle2 

(via www.youtube.com/watch)

reptilmastaren:

Did you know that Moomin creator Tove Jansson illustrated J.R.R Tolkiens The Hobbit for the 1962 swedish edition? These are just a few of the illustrations in the book.

Shadow of a tree

' .© Mitsuharu Maeda . ;

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                                                                                                                  nevver:

Winter is coming, Mitsuharu Maeda

London Abstract by Neil

Untitled by Neil

Autumn Door by Neil

Scattered leaves by Neil

Autumn Leaves

sosuperawesome:

Animal cameo brooches by murmurfremo on Etsy

thenearsightedmonkey:

thenearsightedmonkey:

Should children do this? Why? Should adults do this? Would you do this if you could?

Dear Students, Why might it be easier to learn something as a group moving in unison? We see it works for drumming.  Will it also work for writing and drawing? Let’s find out. Sincerely, Prof. SETI

thenearsightedmonkey:

Dear Students, Here is an image of the sin of ‘Acedia’ which has come to be known as ‘sloth’ in the modern list of the Seven Deadly Sins, and we tend to think of ‘sloth’ as ‘laziness’ Here’s another interpretation from the Stanford Lyman book my “Grapic Vices, Graphic Virtures” students are reading: “Emotionally and cognitively, the evil of acedia finds expression in a lack of any feeling for the world, for the people in it, for the self”  and “withdrawal from all forms of participation in care for others or oneself”. Lyman presents Chaucer’s view as the “sin of languishing, holding back, refusing to undertake works of goodness because the circumstances surrounding the establishment of good are too grevious and too difficult to suffer.” He also tells us that in medieval literature, Acedia is associated with motionlessness and depicted as ‘the feet of the devil that halt men in his tracks’. This interpretation helps me understand ‘sloth’ as a more complex temptation. It’s not just the temptation to lay in bed all day, it’s also the temptation to do nothing about a bad or difficult situation, whether these situations are small or large, and belong to our personal lives or the world around us. Again, this isn’t just laziness.  It’s also associated with the lack of engagement or the desire for engagement that is part of depression. Sloth understood as Acedia– apathy, depression, despondence is a more complex and useful concept than ‘laziness’ when it comes to understanding human nature, which what those things some call ‘the seven deadly sins’ seem to be about. Sincerely, Prof. SETI