Some quotey quotes

"It is well known that scientists and mathematicians have evolved a cryptic language, a language so elusive, so fugitive, and yet so essentially cosmic that it forms an almost qabalistic mode of communication, often misinterpreted by its own in­itiates!" - K. Grant, Outside the Circles of Time

"the primary study of the man who wishes to be a poet is his own knowledge, entirely. He seeks for his soul, inspects, tempts it, instructs it. As soon as he knows it, his duty is its cultivation ... The soul must be made monstrous ... I say that he must be a Doyant, make himself into one. The poet makes himself into a seer by a long, tremendous and reasoned derangement of his senses. All the forms of love, suffering and folly, he seeks himself; he consumes in himself all poisons, in order to retain only the quintessences ... Thus he attains the unknown; and when, at the point of madness, he finishes by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has beheld them!" - Arthur Rimbaud

What is science beyond cause and effect?

It doesn't matter WHO is making the choice, what matters is a choice is being made(sure.) and there is a result that occurs.
It doesn't matter what we call this or that, just that something is happening and can be described.
Instead of looking at the equals sign as an assigner, better to look at it as the point on a perfectly balanced fulcrum.
Reminded me of the cat analogy in "The Book" by Alan Watts:

A similar solution applies to the ancient problem of cause and effect. We believe that everything and every event must have a cause, that is, some other thing(s) or event(s), and that it will in its turn be the cause of other effects. So how does a cause lead to an effect? To make it much worse, if all that I think or do is a set of effects, there must be causes for all of them going back into an indefinite past. If so, I can't help what I do. I am simply a puppet pulled by strings that go back into times far beyond my vision.
Again, this is a problem which comes from asking the wrong question. Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes his failure to see that head and tail go together: they are all one cat.
The cat wasn't born as a head which, some time later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once.
The narrow slit in the fence is much like the way in which we look at life by conscious attention, for when we attend to something we ignore everything else. Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together--as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam. Perception thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but it has to focus on one area of thc wold after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television, and Norbert Wiener and his colleagues found some evidence that there is a similar process in the brain.

A history of western philosophy

Here's a quote:
"...any hypothesis, however absurd, may be useful in science, if it enables a discoverer to conceive things in a new way; but that, when it has served this purpose by luck, it is likely to become an obstacle to further advance."

Seeing God

I ran across this article today after putting "Godel's Incompleteness Joke" into google, I used the term to describe myself on facebook, and found this great article, good message all around. Here's an excerpt:

What is God's best joke? It's called Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. It is so powerful that, when I first met it as a graduate student over 40 years ago, it almost caused me to have a mental breakdown. I had built my life on a foundation of logic, and logic was now showing itself, at best, to be incomplete.

Roughly speaking, Gödel proved that there are truths that we can never know – that human beings cannot know all that is true. What does it mean for there to be a truth that we cannot know. Who knows it? Only God.

So Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem basically proves that God knows things that we cannot. If one grants that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is part of God's Creation, not only did God set things up so that we cannot know everything, but God set it up so that we can prove that! Quite a joke, though perhaps at our expense.

And here's the link to the full article: Seeing God

The part where he talks about repressing anger, is dangerous, imho.

Accelerando

Just started reading it today, free download, good.

"I work for the betterment of
everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked
into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem
anymore - it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as
much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found signs of smart matter -
MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared - suspiciously high
entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy
was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we're seeing now set out. The
intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us
and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?"
Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, carnivorous stare. "I don't care: It's too
far away to have any influence on us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether I believe in that singularity you keep
chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years away. It's a chimera, like Y2K, and while you're running after it,
you aren't helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that's what I care about. And before you say I
only care about it because that's the way I'm programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am.
Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it."

Gödel's Theorem: The Very End of the Proof

Explanation of the theorem

What Now?
If you followed all that, you can now say with reasonable confidence that you "understand Gödel's theorem." That is, you understand why no formal mathematical system can ever hope to represent all statements about natural numbers.

As I see it, there are three directions you can go from here. The first direction is down, to a more mathematical level. The explanation I have given is very "high-level," and would not satisfy a real mathematician for an instant. By learning more about the math involved, you can work the proof to ever finer levels of detail, and make it ever more rigorous and bullet-proof.

The other way to go is up, to a more philosophical level. There are many people who believe that the human mind, based on neurons and physical principles, is just a very sophisticated formal system. Does Gödel's theorem imply the existence of facts that must be true, but that our minds can never prove? Or even stronger, that our minds can never believe—or strongest yet, ever conceive?

The third direction you can go is sideways, to lunch. Who wants to spend his whole life worrying about abstract mathematical theorems?

Great Heinlein quote

Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. And another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible results.

Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

Source: Jubal Harshaw in To Sail Beyond the Sunset

On the Bondage of the Will

From the wiki article: "On the Bondage of the Will"

His conclusions are that unredeemed human beings are dominated by Satan: Satan as the prince of this world never lets go of what he considers his own unless he is overpowered by a stronger power, i.e. God. When God redeems a person, he redeems the entire person, including the will, which then is liberated to serve God.

and I thought this was a good joke, the wiki author thought he was "proud" of his essay On the Bound Will...

Regarding [the plan] to collect my writings in volumes, I am quite cool and not at all eager about it because, roused by a Saturnian hunger, I would rather see them all devoured. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the one On the Bound Will and the Catechism.

Great quote from amazon review

"In Jesus Christ we go to GOD TOP-DOWN !!!
With alchemy we go to GOD BOTTOM-UP !!!" - Fernando Romero

The middle pillar, thrusting back and forth kether to malkuth, malkuth to kether, between severity and mercy, the path is one and many.

Want God bottom up? or top down? I've been enjoying bottom up lately~
Aurora Consurgens (amazon link)

Gabriel Syme, the protagonist (Thursday)

Copied straight from Wikipedia, just for my own collection of words placed in patterns that please some neurons that I associated with.

* "[...] no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid."
* "The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it."
* "Chaos is dull [...]"
* "[...] what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. [...] Revolt in the abstract is — revolting. It's mere vomiting. [...] It is things going right [...] that is poetical!"
* "[...] just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."
* "[...] always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?"
* "The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anyone else."
* "Don't you see we've checkmated each other? [...] I can't tell the police you are an anarchist. You can't tell the anarchists I'm a policeman."

I'm going to go pick up the book this character is from tomorrow, "The Man who was Thursday"... seems really cool from what I've peeked.