You are falling. Falling through darkness. Then a glimmer of white light emerges in the distance and suddenly it is all you see, filling your vision with an unbearable brightness. But in the midst of the blinding white is a speck of black which grows rapidly until you are once again immersed in a pool of cool darkness. Then the light comes once more, washing over you like a wave. Flashes of white and black flicker past as you try to get your bearings, but there is nothing. Only you, the void, and the lights. Black, white, white, black, on and off, endlessly, forever.
You hear the voice of a young girl speaking to you through the vortex.
“At first there was darkness,” she says. “And with it came light.”
The lights are incessant. You reach out your hands to shield your eyes and discover you have none. You are a being without a body. The voice continues:
“And from the thread between the two followed everything else.”
You watch as the light hurtling towards you splits in two and a black dot forms at each centre, creating a set of eyes that continue to grow. Then the pupils split, mimicking mitosis, creating two black figure eights. Another set of eyes grows in the pupils of the previous and what was once black becomes white again as the fractal repeats in a dizzying display. You are swept through its passages at random, unable to control your trajectory, aware only of the other paths which flicker past your peripheries.
The light begins to slow as the white pearl of the throne room comes back into focus, the silhouette of a girl sitting as a black dot in its very centre. As she grows larger reality comes rushing back and you remember where you were, in Wonderland, the Town of UM, the palace, the Princess… The girl gazes at you expectantly and you realize you have regained your feet, the vision having ceased only moments ago feels like a distant memory.
“What was that?” You ask, feeling rather ill.
“Don't you remember?” Inquires the Princess. “You wanted me to show you what good reason looks like.”
“How… How did you do that?” You ask.
“Like this.”
The Princess proceeds to withdraw a small brass lamp from her robes with the letters “MU” engraved on the side. She gives it a rub and a wisp of silver smoke creeps out, pooling on the floor of the throne room and slowly collecting into the head of a man. He is old but ageless, wrinkled features pronouncing a feeling of gaiety that is relaxed and effervescent. He has a pointed face and long, thin, silver goatee that floats down to the ground and mixes with the surrounding smoke. He is bald except for two wisps of white hair which stick up by each ear. His eyes twinkle with an eerie air of mystery, and his smile suggests the subtle hint of a secret.
“What would you like now, Princess?”
“O Great Mudjinnshin,” cries the young girl. “You must have made some sort of mistake! For our guest now no longer remembers the conversation we had here mere moments ago. Refresh their memory, will you?”
“With pleasure,” says the Djinn, dissolving into a great cloud of gray smoke that swoops towards you, engulfing you whole. Your minds eye is filled with a vision of the throne room but you are no longer inside your body. Instead, you watch it from above, looking down upon the scene below:
“I’m quite curious to know how a girl as young as you rules over a place as prosperous as this,” you hear yourself say.
“Good reason,” the Princess tells you plainly.
“That’s it?” You ask, rather taken aback.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s it.”
“Show me,” you implore her.
“Alright,” agrees the girl. She reaches into her robes and withdraws a small brass lamp with the letters “MU” engraved on the side and gives it a rub. A trail of silver smoke pours out of the stem and fills the room, engulfing you and the Princess in brilliant silver light before coalescing into the face of a man mere inches from yours. You watch yourself startle and step back a few paces.
“Who have we here, my dear?” Asks the Djinn with a grin.
“O Great Mudjinnshin, O Wise Wazir, this visitor here would like to know what good reason looks like. Would you show them?”
“With pleasure,” says he, dissipating once again into a cloud of smoke and engulfing you entirely, immersing you in a void of murky black with no end. Suddenly, you are falling….
Chapter One: Zero One
Welcome back to Wonderland.
We are starting our second season at the very beginning, going all the way down to bedrock; the essence of reality that sits at the underbelly of all that we know to be true. Today we will be talking about relation, computation, chaos, order, and the integral energy that pervades through it all.
The Taoist symbol of Taiji, more commonly referred to as the Yin-Yang, represents the idea that all things exist in relation. It is depicted as a black and white fish conjoined in a circle, with the eye of each as the colour of the other. Yang is the white, the masculine. He represents order, positivity, warmth, and action. Yin is the black, the feminine. She represents chaos, negativity, coldness and passivity. The two are intertwined in an eternal dance, contrary but complementary and codependent. They are corollaries; the formation of one necessitates the derivation of the other. Sunbeams are Yang while their shadows are Yin. A pitch is Yang and the catch is Yin; one starts an action and the other completes it. And as their eyes suggest, each contains the seed of its opposite. Every revolution brings about a new order just as every system eventually devolves into chaos. The philosopher Robert Pirsig describes these two mutually dependent yet opposing forces as dynamic and static quality. Yin is dynamic, chaotic, ever-changing and unpredictable. Yang is static, solid, structured and therefore breakable. The tension between the two is what allows for our survival: static quality preserves the status-quo while dynamic quality is constantly challenging and reinventing it. Each force is necessary to sustain the other and therefore neither can be considered superior.
The very notion of existence demands this concept of relation. 0 is a corollary of 1, they come into being concurrently as one cannot exist without the other. “Something” implies the potential for nothing, but true nothingness can have no name as there would be no being to name it. The concept of darkness is contingent upon the existence of light which illuminates their difference. This is why the Bible begins with “let there be light,” thus giving form to the formless and bringing substance to the Earth. The interplay of opposing forces is what gives things their form. As Escher demonstrates through his figure and ground lithographs, meaning must be derived through relation as all things are defined by the differences between them. We cannot say that something is “long” without having the concept of “short” as a referent. In order for an object to have a discernible quality we must be able to identify another one which does not. Without difference all becomes one which is nearly the same as being nothing at all.
To say, “black and white” demands the and: a frame. The acknowledgement of relation brings about a third dimension, that which emerges through their unification. It is found in neither part alone but only through their conversation, which creates something new. Once you have the “and”, you can iterate this process recursively, continually stepping outside-of and looking beyond the bounds you have created. The one demands two which brings about three and gives way to the many. In other words, you can never capture something entirely because once you create a boundary you’ve developed a new frontier. Imagine drawing a black dot on a sheet of paper: that’s something. Now circle the dot to demonstrate how it gains shape through relation to the white. Circle that circle to contain both black and white. Circle that circle and now you have frame slipping; you can never capture the entire image without failing to account for the net you threw around it. This is the same conundrum that causes children to ask what sits outside of the universe and which led to the derivation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. You can never have a self-containing system because no framework can be all encompassing; it’s turtles all the way down.
This notion of infinite regression speaks to the fractal nature of reality. Not only can you always go up another level of analysis, but the nature of the contents contained therein are similarly slippery. This phenomenon is demonstrated by things like the coastline paradox: any attempt at objectively measuring the coastline of an island varies depending upon the unit of measurement. The jagged coast is filled with nooks and crannies which can either be overlooked or accounted for depending upon the size of the ruler. The closer you look the longer it gets as more details are added to the total. This subversion of expectation is like an inversion of Zeno’s paradox, wherein increasing by half-length increments never gets a mover to their destination. In both instances, there is always territory left unexplored.
Binary notation uses this notion of relation and frame slipping to encode increasingly complex information. A single bit, or binary digit, has two possible states, zero or one. If you wished to count one in binary then these two digits would suffice on their own, but in order to account for the number two you must “step outside” of the system by layering in another dimension of information: a second bit. This second bit is added to the left of the first and provides an additional two units of information, allowing us to represent the numbers two (10) and three (11). This process can be repeated ad infinitum, with each added bit increasing the total representative capacity of the system by a power of two. Thus, an eight bit system can represent numbers as high as 255 using only eight units of information and two digits. This same process of encoding can be used to represent letters and symbols, but because these concepts are abstract rather than mathematical there is no direct isomorphism between the relationships within the data structure and the meaning they are intended to convey. A translator must step in to interpret the code.
Chapter Two: The Rhizome
You find yourself back in the throne room with the Djinn and Princess gazing at you expectantly.
“I still don't understand!” you say. “How does what you showed me have anything to do with good reason?”
“It has to do with the law of life itself, and from there good reason must follow. For the Town of UM is founded upon one common understanding: we know what law is natural law and what law is our own.” She says this with an air of finality which leaves you feeling more confused than ever.
The girl notes your expression and muses, “maybe you would understand better by seeing things from a different perspective. After all, a map always leaves something lost in translation. It’s only in three dimensions where you get a real sense of substance.” She looks to her left where the smokey head of the Djinn is perched on the arm of her throne, his long beard trailing down to the ground in a thin wisp.
“O Great Mudjinnshin, would you please show us another one of your marvellous visions? Take this as inspiration,” she says, unclasping the green amulet from around her neck.
The Djinn eagerly opens his mouth wide in anticipation and the girl drops the emerald necklace inside. Immediately he begins to laugh, green clouds erupting from his mouth along with brilliant beams of lime light which bounce across the walls. A web of energy forms in the air as the room is engulfed in a hazy splendour. Soon you can see nothing but the Princess standing before you, immersed in green smoke. She reaches out and plucks one of the bands of light like a violin. The effect reverberates throughout the space, rippling across a network of invisible strings and sending beams of yellow-green shooting towards you.
“Now you’re in the thick of it,” she says with a smile. “Follow the light and you will find what you seek.”
You gaze around the once-room, the hazy green causing the lattice of light to seem without end. A low glow creeps throughout the structure, moving along spandrels and coalescing in various locations, collecting in thick bundles which seem to pulsate with an energy of their own. You pass your hand through a nearby beam and it disintegrates in your fingertips before slowly regaining its form.
“I’ve seen this before,” you realize. “In the forest, the cracked mud, the ant hill…”
“Yes,” breathes the Princess. “These trails have a way of always leading back to one another. The trees may look different but their roots are all the same.”
You venture towards where the locus of light seems to grow thickest. But as you approach it dissipates down new threads in different directions, like a pool of minnows evading capture. You track the changes and try to keep up with the current but to no avail. The energy is elusive, always a few feet further than your reach.
“I can’t keep up!” You lament. “It’s faster than I am.”
“So then what have you learned?” The girl asks. You look back at her, bewildered.
The notion of frame slipping has an important implication, which is that what seems to be true varies depending upon your level of analysis. From afar a depiction of Yin may appear to be all black, while when standing too close you would only be able to see her white center. Any truth statement you may wish to make also has edge cases of untruth. We fall into language and logic games which create fuzzy borders around what we can claim to know. You may insist that one and one is always two but start applying this abstract principle to concrete reality and suddenly the conclusions are not so clear. Two raindrops will slide down a window pane to create one larger one, two rabbits can bring about a family of three or even thirteen. To place mathematical ideals above the workings of the world forgets that we use math as a tool to explore reality and not vice-versa. The truth is hardly ever a matter of either/or but almost always better understood as “yes, and…”. There is no reason to artificially limit the routes through which we can derive meaningful knowledge.
Truth is therefore relational, context dependent, and ever-changing. Something that is said to be heavy in one circumstance may be light in another. This is not to say that the object does not have an objective quality, but the paths through which we define objectivity are slippery and constructed out of other sets of relations. As Pirsig says, “to define something subordinates it to a tangle of intellectual relationships.” The concepts of good and evil, for instance, are the products of a specific selection of reality rather than an impermeable absolute. Any particular rule you may wish to define as to what constitutes “the good” can be easily subverted by example: it is good to give a parched man water but not good if the water is poisoned, it is good for a parent to protect their child but not good if they are overbearing. What constitutes moderation will always vary depending upon the specific circumstance. Optical and auditory illusions demonstrate that even things like our perception of colour and sound will vary given the surrounding context. The nature of the relationships may be objective and real but this does not mean that timeless truisms can be easily extracted.
I believe this is why so many religions refuse to define, or speak the name of God. By it’s very nature, God must be that which transcends all language and limitation. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides is known for saying that, “we cannot know what God is, only what God is not.” For to say that God is equivalent to X suggests that the essence of the divine can be captured and broken down into parts. This is why the First Commandment warns against idolatry, and the Tao Te Ching claims that, “the Dao which can be named is not the Dao”. Likewise, a central tenet of Zen Buddhism is that it is impossible to characterize what Zen is; it will always spill over and step outside of conceptual capture.
This is what Robert Pirsig refers to as dynamic, or undefined quality. It cannot be contained in any system or framework as it is the force that subverts and questions the status quo. In a complex system, dynamic quality is the lone ant pursuing a new path down an uncharted trail, or the genetic mutation which causes a species to evolve in a new direction. It is what creates antifragility in systems by employing random error to their benefit and growing stronger by continually adapting in relation to the environment. Any fixed pattern of value will eventually become outdated and start to erode the force of life it was established to protect. Concepts are static while reality is dynamic and ever-changing, thus there is always a discrepancy between the two.
While all truth is context-dependent, some truths are deeper than others. Like a flow of ocean currents, the bottom of the sea floor moves slowly and gradually while the top layers are constantly shifting and changing trajectory. Everything moves eventually, but some patterns are more stable and longer-lasting. This suggests that many different interpretive frameworks may all have meaningful things to say about the world while appearing contradictory on a surface level. Some religious systems encourage substance use while others discourage it, and both do so with good reason. The spiritual insights one may access ingesting Ayahuasca are not equivalent to the recklessness of daily drunkenness. These competing systems of thought can be conceptualized as paintings in an art gallery. No one painting will show you “the full picture”, but each provides its own unique point of view. Different people will be drawn to different perspectives for different reasons, no one particular representation holds objective merit over the others. This metatheory is therefore like a map of the gallery placed on the wall, encouraging visitors to examine the various pieces.
The rhizome is a concept coined by french philosophers Deleuze and Guattari to describe a network of relations that resemble the structure of roots. All points are interconnected and interdependent, unfolding in a nonlinear manner with no consistent source of authority. A social media network is a perfect example of a rhizome. Each user represents a node of relations which can both influence and be influenced by other users. Whatever is trending that week demonstrates where the most activity is concentrated but the collective ethos is always shifting. The patterns of energy which pulsate through the digital system may congregate in some central areas, but these flows will change with the passage of time.
Wikipedia reveals the rhizomatic structure of information better than a traditional encyclopedia by utilizing links between the articles. This feature demonstrates that the content is not to be understood linearly, but as an entangled whole, providing a richer understanding by allowing you to traverse the relationships between the ideas. In doing so, the website operates in three dimensions rather than two, creating a more accurate representation of reality. Part of the why it’s difficult to communicate an idea in linear form is because all of the content is interconnected, yet some of these bonds must be broken apart so that it can be flattened to a page. Much like a map, this causes distortions to occur as it allows some relationships to be highlighted while sacrificing the accuracy of others.
Alternatively, a rhizome has multiple points of entry and is composed of dimensions in motion. It has no clear hierarchy, no beginning or end, everything is suspended in an endless milieu. This isn’t to say that no hierarchies can manifest, but they are always contingent and relational. Someone who dominates in one field may be a smaller player in another. A frog is predator to the fly and prey to the cat. What was once modern art becomes classic as dynamic quality calcifies into static. There are no true contradictions, but many frame dependent ones will arise when you look at the same phenomena through different lenses.
When you start to think of reality in this way you quickly realize that there is no solid ground at all. Things come into existence through their relations with others and what is figure for one is turned to ground for the rest. A plant forms a rhizome with its environment, taking information from the wind, sun, water, animals, and soil to determine where to grow. But the animals also form a rhizome with the plant and will react to its behaviour accordingly. Each informs the other in an iterative fashion, generating epiphenomena which have a causal power of their own. Flowers and hummingbirds have coevolved in a manner that now makes them mutually dependent, with the birds relying upon the flowers for their nutritious nectar and the flowers upon the birds for pollination.
These nexuses of casual power are referred to by Deleuze as plateaus, which he describes as continuous, self-vibrating regions of intensities. Any set of ideas with enough weight to merit a Wikipedia page or social identity worthy of a Twitter account could be considered a plateau. They are packages of information which operate as a collective unit upon the world. You are a plateau, Mount Everest is a plateau, the hummingbird is a plateau, the coevolution between the pollinator and the flower is also a plateau. The concept has a fractal quality wherein it can contain sets of itself. The Earth, solar system, and Milky Way galaxy are all plateaus too, each with its own distinct features. This stratification of layers imprisons varying intensities into systems of resonance and redundancy, producing pockets of predictable behaviour within the ever-changing network of relations.
The structure of the rhizome is self-similar, so that the nodes on one level of analysis constitute the rods of another. Energy flows from people as well as through them. In some instances you act with agency and in others you are acted upon. The same goes for every bee, tree, and blade of grass. All are systems subordinate to systems and constituted out of other systems, be those cars or threads of a carpet. The totality of all these systems represents one entangled whole which is constantly acting upon itself. Individual entities are therefore correlations made by us, as they are all aspects of the same complex web of relations. Reality is nothing more than repeated iterations of distinction throughout a continuous process. As Deleuze writes, “the magic formula, that pluralism equals monism, must be arrived at through the necessary enemy of dualism,” with which we are constantly contending. That which sits outside of this totality is referred to as the plane of consistency, the inert grid upon which this entire unfolding is taking place.
Chapter Three: The Way
“Alright Mudjinnshin!” Cries the girl. “Enough of this, let’s try something else.” In an instant the green smoke and lime light have bounced back into the familiar form of the Djinn.
“Does he grant you as many wishes as you like?” You ask, a little worried. “I don’t want you wasting them all on me!” In the stories you had heard Djinns only ever gave three.
“Don’t be silly!” The girl laughs. “These aren’t wishes, mere requests. My great grandfather who founded UM was a very wise wizard, his only wish from the Great Mudjinnshin was that he serve our family as an even wiser wazir. But he made one thing clear: he who wishes for the unearned is a leader insincere, and will send our small town into chaos and fear. The Great Mudjinnshin has honoured his behest, and will only oblige the simplest of request. If you want lovers or riches, such nefarious acts are better left to the witches. The Mudjinnshin, however, will only show others what we already know ourselves. I have no interest in trickery or spells.”
The Princess pauses. “Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong. If it’s truth you seek, I’ll show it to you in the simplest way I know how.”
She steps down from her throne, leaving the lamp aside, and takes your hand, guiding you behind the great throne to a small wooden door sat just out of sight. She gestures for you to open it and you take the brass handle, turning it to reveal a small conservatory with a single tree growing in its very centre. The white marble floor gives way to green grass and despite the late hour, the room is bright with daylight. A small sun sits suspended from the ceiling, shining down upon the scene.
“My great grandfather who built this city planted this sapling as its first root. So long as the tree stands, the magic that protects UM shall remain strong. He believed that we are all like trees, starting as seeds that grow wherever the water flows and sun shines. The world shapes the tree, and in turn the tree slowly starts to shape the world. Maybe a bird builds a nest in its branches, or the trunk is chopped down and turned into a chair. You can’t control where things are going, but if you lean into the light you’ll give rise to the very best of what the world has to offer.”
“How do I know where the light shines?” You ask.
The girl takes your hand again and brings you into the warm glow of the sun.
You can feel it.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that things tend towards disorder, or entropy, over time. A glass once shattered is not easily reconstructed, and two liquids mixed together can't be teased apart. This means that as the universe unfolds it will become increasingly chaotic and random, requiring more information to represent the entire picture. However, within this chaos emerge pockets of self-organization, complex systems that reinstate order-from-on-high via emergent processes. Ants roaming the forest floor operate through colony dynamics which regulate their behaviour, and birds of the same species all sing a specific song. Things that appear to be disordered on one level of analysis are often ordered on another. A scoop of dirt from the ground shows only a tangle of roots and plant matter, but not the broader mycelial network they are a part of.
In digital encoding, information is compressed by discerning and omitting patterns of regularity. Video files record only the changes that occur between frames, creating a concise representation by emphasizing difference over repetition. These pockets of self-organizing behaviour produce a similar analogue in the natural world, creating patterns of predictability that temporarily decrease the local entropy within a system. This is what Deleuze is referring to when he talks about plateaus: they are layers of consistency which give rise to particular forms, be they flower fields or bee colonies.
There is, however, a difference between form and content. All matter is made up of subatomic particles which self-organize in different patterns of behaviour, giving them distinct qualities. The same material, such as a piece of mahogany, can manifest as either a tree or dining table. The underlying substance is the same but can have numerous expressions, each with its own set of attributes. Similar to how computer programs are composed entirely of 1s and 0s which are then compiled and processed according to a certain set of rules. Hypothetically, you could take the same underlying source code and run it on two different programs to generate entirely different results.
As a matter of fact, Alan Turing invented the computer while studying mathematics when he noticed that all equations consist of are data and instruction. He realized that if there was a way to encode the data and parse it according to a specific set of rules, then complex equations could easily be calculated by machines. A system is said to be Turing-complete if it can execute any algorithm using nothing more than 1s, 0s, and simple decision making principles. For instance, Conway’s Game of Life is a computer program consisting of an infinite grid of cells which are either “living” or “dead”. The game has a simple set of laws dictating how the cells interact with one another: a dead cell will come to life and live on if it has the right amount of living neighbours, but too many or too few neighbours will cause the cell to die again. Depending upon the initial arrangement of cells, the game can unfold in any number of ways: generating a stable pattern, oscillating between a few distinct forms, traveling endlessly across the landscape, or fizzling out entirely. In some special instances, the initial conditions form a set of relations that continue to expand and grow more complicated over time.
This phenomena is known as computational irreducibility, and the physicist Stephen Wolfram believes it possesses the key to understanding reality. Wolfram’s Physics Project is concerned with discovering the lowest level processes through which the richness of experience can evolve. His models of reality employ a hypergraph, or grid, representing an entangled web of relations which bear a striking resemblance to the structure of a rhizome. The notion of irreducibility means that one cannot analyze the initial conditions of a system in order to predict where the process will end up. The only way to discover how a program will unfold is to let it play out. However within this increasingly complex process are pockets of reducibility, or predictability, which makes the practice of science possible.
Thus, the whole of reality can be conceptualized as an information processing system, consisting of initial conditions and simple rules which compound into complex consequences and give rise to our experience. Every set of starting principles contains implicit corollaries and emergent properties through which the richness of reality is derived. The foundational forces of binary notation (aka. relation), compilation (the processing rules of the system), and energy are the basis of computers, virtual worlds, and laws of life itself. There is a meaningful relationship to be drawn between these ideas and the Christian notion of the Holy Trinity. The laws of the universe are the Father, the rules which are the basis of reality. The initial conditions which led to this particular formation and not another are the Son, the current manifestation of law. And the Holy Spirit is the necessary energy which pervades through the system, giving form to the formless and spurring it forward.
Energy is therefore the necessary ingredient which brings the program to life, making it active and real rather than passive potential. A computer program written on a sheet of paper has no computational power, it must be housed in a system that has the capacity to process it. In China, this is referred to as Qi, the vital energy force which creates and pervades through all things, breathing life and activity into an otherwise dormant universe. Patterns of energy interrelating is what gives things their form; all matter is composed of energy captured in a stable configuration. The fact that energy is limited is what gives things their particular structure, bringing about a need for efficiency which dictates the way natural systems develop.
An interesting takeaway from Wolfram’s Physics Project is the notion that space and time are fundamentally different entities rather than mutually entwined. Under Wolfram’s model, time is conceptualized as the process of computation; the successive application of rules which instigate phase transitions and repeatedly transform the structure of reality. The progressive principle is therefore baked into the universe. Things must proceed forward in an iterative fashion, and the notion of computational irreducibility means that it is impossible to predict beyond our current threshold. Even if you could derive and simulate the foundational axioms which created our universe, it would be impossible to “jump ahead” of the program to see where things are going next. There are no shortcuts to discovery, the only way to know where things are going is to let them play out.
Life is therefore not predetermined, but an active program. And your conscious experience is a meaningful part of the process. You exist on the frontier of reality and have the ability to influence how it unfolds, acting out a spiritual program of your own. We emerge from the interaction between forces in motion and cannot remove ourselves from the system or sever the bonds that make us who we are, but recognizing these strings of connectivity allow us to leverage them to our advantage. Our awareness is sacred and non-mechanical; we give rise to the world around us through observing and interacting with it.
With so many forces acting upon us simultaneously, the question arises as to what we should attend to. The sapling receives information from the surrounding environment but the environment is ever-changing and inconsistent, so how does it know where to grow? The answer offered by cybernetics is that by having a specific goal in mind, an agent can consistently adjust its behaviour in relation to new contexts. Like steering a ship through stormy weather, you must constantly turn the wheel to adapt to the wind and waves of the water. As Lao Tzu writes, “turning is the motion of the Tao”—you must be willing to adapt to reality if you wish to navigate it successfully. Any static course of action will atrophy over time and therefore can’t be a good guide for how to live. To be in harmony with the universe means you must be attuned to and operate in tandem with its natural flow.
So how do you know where to go? Just as the integration between two perspectives allow us to perceive depth, you will find the Way where Yin and Yang press up against one another. Experience is a consequence of contrast, and we have a natural barometer for knowing what feels good. As Robert Pirsig writes, “value lies between the subject and object.” A hot stove and your hand are value-neutral, but put the two together and suddenly you’ll have an experience that is unquestionably of low quality. A beautiful piece of music derives its beauty from meeting your ear, it does not need to be studied or broken down or analyzed in order to be understood as good. We impose these analytical tools afterwards in order to justify our initial reaction. Value is defined by experience, and if you seek the good in all the ways you can recognize it you will slowly but surely start to enact what is best. The path forward may not always be clear, but if you pay attention you will find that there are little clues everywhere.
This idea of pressing up against existence to find your path is incredibly important to me, I don’t think there is any other way you can navigate reality successfully. Holding one course of action as an unnegotiable ideal fails to allow you to adapt to the current. It’s only by separating yourself from attachments to conclusions or preconceived notions that you can interact with the world on a more intuitive and fruitful level. There are no right or wrong answers, only pushes and pulls which are constantly in motion. Language and concepts limit our understanding of the world while simultaneously being the only tools we have to navigate it. Differentiation between ideas both brings about meaning and obscures similarity; often things that appear contradictory on one level of analysis are united by the same underlying principles on another. That’s why this episode focused on breaking things down into their smallest possible parts, the fundamental features through which all else can be derived: data, rules, and energy. The code, compiler, and computer. The son, father, and holy spirit. That which unites all three is the very essence of reality.
Epilogue
Standing under the light of the little sun you are seized by a sudden urgency that causes you to rush out of the conservatory. The throne room is empty. The Djinn, no longer needed, has retreated back into his brass home. The lamp sits lonely, shining under the moonlight, beckoning you with a tempting gleam. And an unknown agency causes you to leap forward, grabbing the lamp and rushing out of the room in one swift motion. You run back down the long corridor but the once-empty halls are now filled with guards where there were none before. They swiftly tackle you to the ground and the lamp falls with a loud clang as you are left wondering what on earth you were thinking.
Continue to Season 2, Part 2: Justice
Wonderland is a free publication that outlines a philosophy and political vision for the 22nd century. To support my work and receive updates on new posts, sign up for a free or paid subscription.
I'm glad you put down the Peterson and picked up Deleuze. I'm interested to see what impact this shift in tone might have on assertions around economic systems and individual rights if you continue , as you did in1.1-1.10, from the metaphysical to the social-political.