Put aside consensus histories of mathematics for a moment: when and where the notions of zero and infinity are supposed to have first appeared. Where do we have boundary-without-boundary? Old Suwa Nna Phum (i.e., pre-pre-modern Southeast Asia -- with a vengeance, perhaps, in the region between La Nna and Sipsong Pa Nna) and n-dimensional manifolds with their p-forms. Understand that translations of the ancient manuscripts were provided by translators with less and less understanding of what they were translating as each new generation told what these manuscripts “really” mean (not to mention re-writes presented as new-writes). The null set of boundary-without-boundary (coordinate-free exterior derivative: the partial of the partial of the set constituting the boundary is an empty set: boundary of the boundary compact without boundary, a closed set of open sets) used to be called ma-skyes-pa -- except that the latter term applied to set-theoretical properties of temporal boundaries no less than spatial. The domains referred to in the Buddhological text, the Traiphum Phra Ruang, (“phum” = domain) are ordered temporally (three-fold operator-time) by boundary-without-boundary “before” (this “before” being ontological, i.e., the logic of Being, not a temporal “before”) being spatially ordered by boundary-without-boundary. Contextualize like this: Tantric projection, T, of a tul-pa is to no-sound-“speak” interior Musculpt, M, so someone else can “see-hear” the signifying term employed. This transpires by long-range phase correlation (acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes) between brains (the induction of which being related to a significant slice of Tantric practice, often mistakenly understood as “left-hand path” in nature). Now think of the diagrammatic notation (involving abstract indices and markers) for tensor, T, algebra and calculus being vastly improved by use of dynamically-transforming polymorphic forms, colors, and sounds. A tul-pa is an oriented configuration of one such polymorphic form in the corpus of such p-forms composing n-dimensional Musculpt (this corpus being order 2^n under binary logic; 2^mn, under m-valued logics). Sounded-spoken languages devolved from Musculpt -- via the root homonym ma (see Huynh Sanh Thong on the role of ma in origin of all “natural” languages: “Mother's Tongue and Slang: Why and How Thought and Language Began”, parts 1-3, Journal of Unconventional History, Fall 1990 and Winter and Spring 1991) -- as conscious access to the neurological capacity for m-logically-valued processing was lost under prescriptive enculturation and resultant glutamaturgic-cascade neural and perineural etching. Sacred space, ma, animistically prefigured Buddhological space, Buddhological geography, Buddhological maps. This was no mere Andersonian “imagined existence”, the involved imagination being capable only of qualitative understanding. Too, too reductionistic. Think of the Buddhological map as equivalent to the complex plane upon which a “plane view” of the n-dimensional manifold representing the oriented configuration of the p-form tul-pa is provided. Pilgrimage space! Feng Shui placement of the temples along the Way establishes the particular coordinate patch being employed on the given march of the given function. The complex plane was the gardener/geomancer's vocation: Zen aesthetics of the abstract landscape as garden art (and preventive medicine). Profane space, profane geography, the territorial arrangement, and the very notion of kinghood/emperorship were a functional map into the reduced symmetry group projectible on complex-plane view. My Lord! How did we lose all those axioms? Where have those "Eight-No's" gone? The pilgrimage of the function being, in old Shinto, mi-chi-yu-ki along the steppingstones of unknowing -- “ki” denoting the operators, logical and temporal (the notion of “ki” as naga/dragon “energy” is ontologically “after” the fact of this). Though exposed to this as a child, I did not begin to understand it until studying Japanese gardening under a practitioner trained at the end of the Meiji era: how to geomantically “build” the design-space for the “garden”. The involved space is a full-fledged configuration space (see MOON, Vol. 2, pp. 532-4) regarded very much as Julian Barbour treats his “Platonia” (The End of Time, Oxford, 1999). One way to get into this is to have five books simultaneously open on your desk. Two of them should be read from the inside out (middle to start and finish), so as to properly orient the mind: Siam Mapped (Thongchai Winichakul, U. of Hawaii, 1994) and Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (Peter Galison, Norton, 2003). Think of how much Poincaré was undoing (not non-doing) remnants of the Buddhological map in his communications to Saigon from Paris (and how much war and genocide ensued as a consequence) while, in his own reference frame, how much Einstein was doing to restore the temporal fundaments of that very same Buddhological map. This cannot be understood, of course, without the three other books being open: any good text on homotopy theory of n-dimensional manifolds (where import of the m-valuedness of ma, sacred space, is not suppressed through holomorphic cancellation and compactification); The World as Power (Sir John Woodroffe, Ganesh, 1974 edition); and Matrix of Mystery: Scientific and Humanistic Aspects of rDzogs-chen Thought (Herbert V. Guenther, Shambhala, 1984). “Nna” (as in naga, the serpentine ln of the underworld) suggests “spirit”, connoting the diaphanous, the apparitional, the ghostlike, the Being of nonbeing, the Non-being of being: the import of m-valuedness. If you think this implausible, then I would suggest you are, with good reason, being abjectly reductive relative to contents of Samadhi states. As the title of Woodroffe's book indicates, Western notions of power have been so thoroughly misattributed to the Buddhological world construct and its precursors, on back of the lost understanding, and political concretization of that lost understanding, from one generation to the next of Eastern translators, that all hope of recovery seems presently moot. Those most reductionistic are often those from the cultures being most reduced (because, otherwise, one would have to admit how small direct experience of the implied “states” there presently is -- not to mention the implied demand to acknowledge how unmitigatedly grievous has been the human trajectory, not only over the last 400 years, but over the whole of recorded history).
Whether or not you concur that at some time in the past a higher dimensional and higher logically-valued cosmology/life-world was represented in lower-dimensional and lower logically-valued -- geographical, political, economic, artistic, musical, bronze drum, textile-garment, ceramic -- Musculpted “forms”, you must admit that the notion is very much what present global circumstances demand: not only is our evolving worldview construct unreservedly higher dimensional and decisively gravitating upon becoming higher logically-valued, but it is abundantly clear that the human species cannot harmoniously live in a multi-dimensional/m-logically-valued Nature, while at the same time living in a lower-dimensional/lower-logically-valued life-world analogically embodied in an institutional base demonstrably incapable of managing a degree of complexity it is inherently incapable of representing. Full application of m-logically-valued monetary units, for instance, would be impossible absent the implied higher-dimensional relations being represented by the requisite metareferencing Musculpted “forms” -- geographical, political, economic, artistic, musical, textile-garment, ceramic, and so on. The species could not use such money were its life-world not properly configured relative to that money's essential properties: such “configuring” requires multiple employments of higher-dimensional configuration space, employments across the full spectrum of cultural dimensions. Such employments are the “multi-utilities” generated by cosmological metareference: synaesthetic tropology. There are many “directions” in which the hyperdimensional analogue must be “built up” (after being arrived at by insight into decompositional involutes).
I am telling you that, not only are these issues deeply involved in the present global terrorism-insurgency against the very idea of the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system, but also that the Viet Cong severely beat the American military machine by employment of the hyperdimensional and higher-logically-valued notions being discussed here. Conscious awareness on the individual level is not required for the notions to be collectively operative. The organizational algorithms utilized by the Viet Cong (Political) Infrastructure (VCI), in substantial measure, evolved out of these notions. My earliest awareness of this came from studying VC boundary changes at CICV (Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam), and the realization that the VC notion of a boundary was very different from that employed in the modern world. Further studies at SRA (Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-Headquarters) revealed that changes in all their bureaucratic variables were highly correlated with constantly-ongoing boundary changes. Boundaries that do not stand still. Bureaucratic functions were mapped on “boundary without boundary”! Properties of the unbound boundary contained all the (bureaucratic-organizational) information in the space demarcated -- just as does a fractal boundary. This is so apropos of n-dimensional manifolds that one cannot possibly escape the association. I was aware in 1968 that a “different way of thinking” (i.e., different logic), a different concept of space, and a different notion of identity (i.e., animistic identity transparency) were involved. A completely different idea of governance was thereby directly implied. One of the main themes of Edward Said's academic career was that Western notions of power have been, and continue to be, imposed upon interpretation of non-Western cultural histories. The interpretation of Said's theme offered here is that these cultural histories have been flattened by lower mind -- first by lower mind of non-Westerners, later by lower mind of Westerners (including, but by no means limited to, that of communists). What the present GWOT will yield out of this cognitive soup is a process involved with something like this: already the CT and low-intensity-warfare experts are counseling adaptation of “netwar” technique, by which cells of the terrorist-insurgent can be penetrated and systematically destroyed. Netwar organizational doctrine and concepts of operation involve preponderant reliance on indigenous personnel (the “El Salvador model” of death-squads, which roving CT-teams under one designation or another carried out in South Vietnam beginning in the mid-to-late-'50s), small-unit integrity, and highly flexible operational rules (of engagement and otherwise). Not only “The Matrix”, but also complexity theory and chaos theory have been major players in generating the notion of netwar. Such war is envisioned as transpiring on a “fitness landscape” like that modeled by Santa Fe Institute and offered in application via consultancy -- a landscape where borders are constantly changing (therefore to be considered no operational barrier) and fractal in nature. Outcome of netwar will be a measure of evolutionary fitness. Unfortunately, netwar-informing chaos theory is a lower-logically-valued treatment (order 2; the fitness landscape, 2^n) of m-logically-valued processes (order M^m; the reference space potentially of infinitely infinite order, M^mn); whereas, by virtue of non-simple animistic identity transparency, the insurgent back-reaction against the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system is (tacitly) informed by traditions derivative of the full m-logically-valued case. Demonstration, for instance, that Aymara, the ancient language of the Andes, is based on a 3-valued logic goes some distance in support of this contention. Netwar will marshal a shadow of higher-order “stuff” so as to enforce compliance with lower-order “stuff” -- or at least such an attempt will be made. If you doubt there is any such connection at all, I can only submit the fact that the Prologue to Roger Penrose's book of 2004 -- The Road to Reality (London: Cape) outlining application of the n-dimensional manifold (but not m-logically-valued) aspects of the higher-order “stuff” -- describes a very destructive tsunami as drawing animistic views of the cosmos into question and providing impetus to the rise of science. The first paragraph of the body of the book asks the question: “How may this knowledge help us comprehend the world and hence guide its actions to our advantage?” Fully in conformance with the Cartesian-Newtonian take, Penrose does not ask how this higher-order knowledge can guide us as to how to live in harmony with Nature.
Buddhological geography -- most elaborately so of the precursors of this geography, one must surmise; in what is presently Southeast Asia, during the period before rise of the Hung Kings -- though an abstract landscape, was not a “fitness landscape”. Just as the boundary is not the boundary, so the geography is not the geography! The physiocratic-Jeffersonian, virgin-land, Turner-thesis “Garden of the World” in 18th and 19th century America, though an ideal, was a concrete ideal -- a concrete ideal with little metareferential-tropological reach. Because the ideal was far too concrete, it had too small a heuristic value, and in the end was proven by experience a myth (brilliantly explicated by Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land, Harvard U. Press, 1950; many of the “subtleties”, like genocide, being far too concrete, thus apparently having been ignored by Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, Bantam, 2000, who was reared in the shadow of the 3-logically-valued Aymaran Andes). During the same period, Buddhological geography also succumbed to existential denial -- but not for the same reason. The abstract Zen landscape garden is a model, and a model only, of how it is that the geography is not the geography. This sort of garden does not employ “borrowed space”; it is a borrowed space into which higher-dimensional “rock gestalts” (tacitly) of higher-orders of logical-value are metafunctionally mapped on a subspace. Metafunctional Landspace! (as Derek essayed in MOON, Vol. 1, pp. 335-7). In the general case, the notion of boundary employed is derivative of the very idea of what identity can be as a metaphysical category, and this very idea as to identity, itself, is determined by the order of logical-value employed for apprehension, cognition, and comprehension. “Boundary without boundary” is a lower-order fashion of speaking about the non-being of Being and the being of Non-being inherent in animistic identity-transparency as mapped to the metaphorical-referent medium: concrete geography (and the habitus of its inhabitants): a notion, and a cosmogenetic methodology, already deteriorated by the time it became Buddhological. Examples of this in the greater Buddhological (and precursors) “Garden of the World” are clothes and cloths: analogues of covering surfaces, in some cases, perhaps, even of a universal covering surface. Illustrating this, I quote from a recent lecture, “Textiles as a Material Lexicon of Tributary Relations in the Lao-Tai World”, given by textile scholar Patricia Cheesman-Naenna (to the Northern Thai Group, December 14, 2004):
The extraordinary homogeneous quality of the textiles from certain regions correlating with the locations of ancient Lao-Tai muang has been the focus point of this research and the basis of my hypothesis that textiles can be studied as a material lexicon of tributary relations in the Lao-Tai world… The uniformity of data gathered in each region has enabled this author to chart the textiles of these ancient muang in a fairly logical system, with the conclusion that the people in each tributary muang originally used some, if not all the types of textiles in the style of their governing muang for the basic needs of life and for the embellishing of their cultural beliefs, regardless of ethnicity. It has been possible to identify the artistic style of the textiles and dress codes of several muang and the ethnic groups in each of these muang that follow these codes. It is the politico-geographical muang provenance information that sheds light on existing textiles and alternatively, existing textile styles can be used to map emigrational histories. Most Lao-Tai self-appointed names are toponyms (names which derive from the topographical features of the area where people live) and relate directly to the muang of origin…
The concrete geography is imbued with higher-order references, and part of that imbuing involves “the artistic style of the textiles and dress codes”. “Muang” means, according to Thongchai Winichakul (Siam Mapped), governed spatial unit. Let me run out a few terms in Thongchai's definitions and then I can give some indication of how I think the geography was not, and for those in the right “state” still is not, the geography. “Phum” means space, domain, land. “Khetdaen” means boundary, limit, limited domain. “Anakhet” means limited domain of power. “Ekkalak” means identity, common characteristic. “Ekkarat” means supreme king. “Traiphum” means three worlds. The spacetime laminate, the “layered transparent”, is tropologically stacked on the metareferential medium: concrete geography. Every cultural dimension is involved in resultant superintegration of the stack of tropes. First, let me point out that “common characteristic” is a condition of identity, not identity per se, let alone a particular identity. Choice of the term “common characteristic” as indicative of the meaning of the word “ekkalak” suggests to me a modern mode of apprehension, cognition, and comprehension: this choice prescribes, and conforms to, the modern notion of what identity can be as a metaphysical category. And this notion is not embraced by animism. The modern notion of ethnicity, by direct implication, was not the pre-pre-modern notion of ethnicity. In the animistic notion, ethnic identity was signified by the “toponym”, not only because permitted by the prevailing notion of what identity can be as a metaphysical category, but also because, by generative-empathic identity transparency (not based on binary-logic definition of “common characteristic”, but mediated by m-logically-valued modes of apprehension, cognition, and comprehension), the topographical feature was the identity of the corpus of the ethnic group, as directly experienced by given percepts and propriocepts. But this identity was not referenced to what the modern temperament regards the concrete geography; it was referenced to processes transpiring in the “layered transparent”, the stack of tropological references having more and less subtle states of being and non-being. For instance: “toponyms” derived of local topography -- in Southeast Asia, like in native-American North America -- relate to infrasound signatures of geographical features used for local homing by migratory birds (and very early on by humans). The hearable sound of the spoken toponym was mimicked from the “unhearable” infrasound signature human beings once were sensitive to. Every significant geographical feature has an infrasound signature (micro-barograph arrays developed during the mid-'70s at Cornell's Neurobiological Behavior Labs in collaboration with the Atmospheric Science Department demonstrated this): geography in sound of no-sound. Sound of no-sound inside of sound of no-sound! The higher-dimensional pre-pre-modern life-world was Musculpted -- far more aural (not only in oral tradition) than is our modern lower-dimensional life-world. Who can doubt this listening to late-night frog and cicada symphony performed in the Rainy Mountains whereby full awareness dawns that conventions of Jew's harp grace notes were taught to man by frog and cicada? Smell, hearing, touch, taste were once full sensory dimensions -- not only sight. And, far enough back, these dimensions were synaesthetically articulated, fused: higher dimensional articulation space mapped onto geography as earthwork sculpture. The normative modern temperament has no experience of this whatsoever. Each of these dimensions of the geography as medium, as painterly canvass for tropological signification, could have metareferences stacked upon it. Earthwork without moving any earth! Living in this hyperdimensional semantic geography generation after generation, percepts and propriocepts were given relative to the full stack on the “layered transparent”. What the modern temperament perceives as the concrete geography was directly and immediately experienced in given percepts and propriocepts as a hyperdimensional topography by the pre-pre-modern animist. And given the prevailing notion of what identity can be as a metaphysical category, the percepts and propriocepts were not those of the modern person: “my body” and “your body” were not perceptually and proprioceptually experienced in the fashion experienced by the modern temperament. I could not per-proprio-ceptly distinguish by touch your foot from mine! There were no such categories available for sensory processing: identity transparency. Shift with regard to these body-image per-proprio-cepts apparently began globally in the period 3,000 to 2,500 B.C. (prior to rise of the Hung Kings). This is discussed in great detail and very convincingly by Shigehisa Kuriyama in The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone, 1999). Also a useful reference here is Sir John Woodroffe's commentaries on the relation between yantra (formful) and mantra (soundful) and transformations between the two: The Garland of Letters: Studies in the Mantra Sastra (Ganesh, fifth edition, 1969). When the ancient text says “Eternality of Sabda (root sound)”, the reference to higher dimensions cannot be denied: eternity can only be conceived as relating to a higher temporal dimension. Infrasound toponyms -- the actual sound of them -- as the basis of onomatopoeia, likely generated the root homonyms (like ma for sacred space) from which spoken (un) “natural” (lower-logical-order) languages digressed (digressed out of Musculpt as higher-dimensional aural “geography”). Given that the dialect peculiar to the ethnicity came from the infrasound “spoken” by the topographic feature, and that this was understood by all members of the ethnic corpus, that topographical feature was the source of ethnic identity as encapsulated in language-as-geographical-Musculpt. Boundaries between muangs were heard; they were standing-wave fronts generated by interactive infrasound signatures. Thus was this dialect spoken here in this muang, not there in that muang. Political geography came much, much later.
“Muang” means governed spatial unit. What kind of space? Governed by what? Before political geography, I say, the space was laminated higher-dimensional configuration space mapped on a tropological articulation landscape. This was not done by numerical procedures in the modern sense, but by “sounded forms” perceived directly by “entering” with immediacy the space collectively predicated-denoted-projected as cosmogenetic amnion. Carte blanche to trophotropic brain mechanisms -- blocked by the ergotropic insistency of the modern temperament -- accomplished this. How maintain interest in Japanese gardening when it has become apparent that earth moving is not required to make a Metafunctional Landspace? There it is, the higher-dimensional landspace everywhere everytime one goes for walking meditation! All the means of present-day higher mathematics and physics would be required to replicate this technologically via multimedia and VR. Polytope n-dimensional modular unit of the laminated tiling pattern as mapped into Euclidean 3-space governed by what? The modern word put upon it, likely the modern Western notion connoted by the word, is “power”. “Anakhet”: limited domain of power. “Daen”, according to Thongchai, means area, domain; “dindaen”, territory or area; “khetdaen”, limited domain; “phum”, domain. Terminology employed in the Agama Sastra, as explicated by Woodroffe in The World as Power, similarly frustrates the translator with distinguishables inadequately distinguishable. This is because the space being described is dimensionally-nested with resultant categories of limited domains non-viewable in lower-dimensional read-out accessed by lower mind. Categories of limited spatial domains governed by what? Time. Operator-time. Dreamtime -- the time drawing the infrasonic songline boundary-without-boundary. Three-fold operator-time governing the nest of limited-spacetime-domain categories: “Traiphum” through which involutory and devolutory processes cascade, cascade like a waterfall onto the tympanum of a bronze drum which generates in response Sabda and its overtone series. This involution/devolution being the decomposition and recomposition of the m-logically-valued reference space under three orders of operator-time. What is the tropological value-stack on the metareferencing articulation space? It is the “store of merit”! The higher the order of logical-value engaged, the greater the merit. “Ekkalak”, the supreme king, is that entity possessing the greatest store of merit: the physical region singularity about which processes of self-organization spontaneously constellate. Political geography came much, much later.
Yes, examples of how the import of m-valued functions has been falsified are legion. A particularly graphic example is use of the term “scale-free network” in chaos theory. Self-similar patterns have been identified operating on multiple scale levels. Chaos theorists did not make this discovery; the discovery was made sometime before the Vedas were orally transmitted and the process of mathematically describing it began in earnest during the 19th century (neglecting the sorts of things described by Sir John Woodroffe). Recognition of the import of this played large in instigating the Unified Science Movement of the early 20th century -- before the back-reaction set in during run up to World War Two. How is use of the term “scale-free” a falsification of the m-valued functions involved? The patterns operating on the multiple scale levels do not remove the involved scale levels; they complexly operate on those scale levels. Calling such operations on scale levels “scale-free” removes implications as to the logical properties of the identity of the scale-dependent entities so operated upon by self-similar patterning. The term “scale free” expresses a psychological orientation to m-valued functions which regards import of such functions as somehow equivalent to the import of single-valued functions. This psychological orientation removes the necessity of considering m-valued logics in evaluating m-valued functions -- and hence all the implications of m-valued logics can be escaped by chaos theorists. I regard this choice on part of chaos theorists as psycho-neurotically and politico-socio-pathologically motivated.
No, don't know nothin' 'bout no Sanskrit or no Pali. Studied Sanskrit from a housewife (hence couldn't mention her in the credits to MOON) in D.C.-no-Washington for six months in '74-5, but forgot everythin' immediately. Studied Pali from a remote princess in Chiang Mai (as noted in the credits to MOON) for several months in '92, but immediately forgot ever'thing. The housewife lived in the Maryland suburbs and I lived in the Virginia suburbs; after six months of after-work rush-hour commutes on the beltway, I simply had to give it up (though the invites to dinner were hard to put behind me). The brief Pali studies were mainly to clarify meaning of terms like those explicated by Tongchai Winichakul, some of which I had been exposed to in '91 while living at the base of Doi Ang Salung Chiang Dao near mouth of the dark cave and where water pours out of hidden depths of the mountain. Within hours of my arrival an exquisite Burmese girl let out a piercing scream, and I, apparently, was the responsible agent. As my old friend, the Thai lady of the house, later explained: the 19-year-old girl had just finished stuffing a pillow for me (as an open-air bamboo-and-thatch meditation and sleeping hootch was nearing completion) when she suddenly remembered that she was having her period. My Lord! Red rice on a day lucid white with crystal clarity. Hence the hysterical scream. Pushing stuffing into a pillow at time of one's period means that the first child will not come out: the two motions are opposed to one another. The fact that the pillow being stuffed at the inopportune time was my pillow meant that this exquisite girl and my personhood had some intense unresolved past-life karmic entanglement and that all sorts of heavy-duty stuff in the subtle realms was going down between us. Hello! In such a fashion had my appearance been made at the sacred site of Doi Ang Salung Chiang Dao, a place Buddha Himself, apparently, had had for Him a pillow stuffed (before, thus-gone, being served bad pork at Fang: something which, according to legend, literally happened to Him, but only figuratively to me). As I attempted to resolve the activated subtle entanglement by penetrating deeper and deeper into its causes, more and more Pali terminology was thrown at me by way of explanation, these explanations wandering off into every kind of Buddhological sacred space. It was then and there that I resolved to study Pali, but only a year later did I find a qualified instructor.
“What's this you've been telling everybody about two Thai girls killed on Chiang Dao Mountain?”
“No, no! The day before I left, two tigers were killed on the mountain. Didn't much feel like staying after that.”
Sorry, but I do not speak to role attributions, only the missing person; and nevermore do I pass again over fallow ground, except as does the falcon.
Let me again step out according to the same logical march I employed in 1968: VCI boundary changes, DNA, Musculpt. I will do this via Richard Grossinger's Embryos, Galaxies, and [other] Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2003), wherein he (p. 364), by quoting Erich Blechschmidt's The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy, explicates:
…the direct motors of phenogenesis [the genesis of the phenotype]. It is the task of kinetic morphology to provide an understanding of these motors. In any phase of development, changes in form and structure must result from the complex movements of particles of a molecular and submolecular nature.
Which involves, according to Grossinger (p. 363), a “…yet incomprehensibly advanced, thermo-quantum index”, regarded by me as the m-logically-valued reference space or fractal screen grid upon which the game of life is played. Whereas, again according to Grossinger (p. 350), “…topokinetic shapes become acts, acts engender rituals, and rituals bear messages.”
For the southern Vietnamese communist apparat -- the underground Vietcong political infrastructure (VCI) or terrorist network, that is -- structures were disposable, discardable, in bureaucratic evolution from the united front format to the pre-government to the proto-government; only functional requisites of the heuristic model of three-stage national-liberation war were held inviolate. Structures were, in fact, so disposable that boundaries and their correlated bureaucratic variables (tripartite lateral disposition; vertical double-stacking of party cellular apparat upon bureaucratic functional elements; multiple, redundant chains of command; role superposition; fluid job descriptions; reverse representation only when local management fails; et cetera) were in a near state of constant flux, invoking a significant quotient of distributed control. VCI self-organization was based upon functional schemata, not structural schemata. This is precisely captured by Grossinger on page 50 in quoting Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin (“Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biology”, Science, Vol. 66, June 1969, p. 277):
It is the hallmark characteristic of evolved biochemical systems that there are typically multiple routes to a given functional end, and where one route fails, another can take over.
This was made possible in the VCI case by how boundary changes expressed strategic and tactical modulations in response to a changing combat environment. To intelligence analysts working at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-HQ, boundary changes were the clearest revelation of enemy intentions. Grossinger again captures this pristinely (p. 224) in quoting Richard Strohman quoting philosopher Michael Polanyi (“Maneuvering in the Complex Path from Genotype to Phenotype”, Science, Vol. 296, April 2002, p. 701):
Polanyi illustrates his concept of levels of control with a metaphor from the game of chess [and I should note here that “human chess”, filled with metareferencial tropes derived from classical Chinese literature, was regularly played in the pre-colonial villages of Vietnam as a communal consensus-building algorithm, as was cockfighting with its rich strategic and breeding tropology]: “The strategy of the player imposes boundaries on the several moves which follow the laws of chess [written in relation to a square tiling grid], but our interest lies in the boundaries, that is, in the strategy, not in the several moves as exemplification of laws.” Molecular biology, in identifying control levels, has focused on the “moves” of genes and proteins but has largely ignored the strategy used by dynamic protein networks that generate phenotype from genotype.
Grossinger says, as earlier quoted: “…topokinetic shapes become acts, acts engender rituals, and rituals bear messages.” The notion here is that the principles involved in governing embryogenesis are exteriorized as system invariants, shapes of style, semantic gestalts in socius, polity, and economium. In “human chess”, strategy imposes boundaries and the boundaries thus imposed bear messages, take on meaning via tropes referring to the classics, the corpus of the “book of life”. What are the tropes nature employs by which the boundaries of her limited spacetime domains, her laminated tissues, bear messages? In order to illustrate just how important this question is, let's stroll into the middle of a heated contemporary controversy stoked by Barry Commoner (“Unravelling the DNA myth: the spurious foundation of genetic engineering”, Harper's Magazine, February 2002) and stoked again by Ronald Bailey (“Is Biologist Barry Commoner a Mutant”, Reason, January 30, 2002) and arbitrated by Grossinger (p. 257):
Even when a gene has been successfully grafted and its desirable characteristics are expressed as predicted, other elements have been thrown into new uncertainty states. Deep changes in molecular structure and biochemical activity have already been set in motion in billions of transgenic plants with little concern for long-term consequences to the biosphere.
This is Commoner's basic argument in his Harper's article -- that the permutating complexes that direct RNA and specify protein synthesis in plants will be disturbed, when translating bacterial genes, in a way that produces far more unintended than planned proteins and, by the law of averages, more dangerous than beneficial ones. The rebuttal: plant biotechnologists ask for evidence that this type of genetic subterfuge would be any more of a problem in biotech crops than it is in ordinary horticulture and agronomy. Nonbiotech plant breeding has produced many mutants, some of them by using radiation and caustic chemicals, without any demonstrable poisoning or other ecological or health damage for more than half a century. Technicians claim that their crops [Grossinger here quotes Bailey] “cannot be different from… [and] must be substantially equivalent to conventional varieties before they can be marketed… Every single differently shaped leaf of lettuce, every different color of bell pepper, every new variety of citrus fruit is the result of genetic mutations that produce different proteins which were noticed and then selected by conventional plant breeders.” Additionally, natural retro-transposons in plants, just as likely to generate randomly altered proteins, have not poisoned the biosphere over the history of botanical evolution. If a protein synthesis machinery is badly enough damaged by artificial (as opposed to natural) transgenes to produce toxins, then it won't generate the desired traits either, let alone hide the toxins under such traits; in fact, most often, no offspring at all will be produced. The biosphere is too healthy, vast, and resilient for us to damage by our meager intrusions.
I quote in full this long passage because it is, by far, the best summation I have yet encountered. Now for rebuttal of the rebuttal. The tropes nature employs in deriving messages from boundaries are histologically-specific frequency response windows of superconductant DNA (as explicated in our mathematical model of DNA response to environmental radiation). Familiarity with the corpus of relevant literature produced over the last 25 years indicates that this thesis has substantially been experimentally verified -- even though the involved experiments have not specifically addressed the model in question. That there should be redundancy in immunological signifiers of biological self-identity (between discrete stereochemistry and continuous waveforms) follows, not only from quantum complementarity, but also from the rules of Shanks' and Joplin's “redundant complexity”. Crux of the question argued by Commoner and Bailey revolves around “index of invasiveness” and “shear numbers”. Manual pollen transfer -- or the equivalent -- undertaken by bee or man, and widely employed over the history of botanical evolution, as well as natural retro-transposons in plants, do IN THE VERY LEAST disturb frequency-response-window modulation relative to the quasi-stable natural radiation environment. Biotech breeding with radiation and caustic chemicals, of course, also so disturbs, but NOT IN THE VERY LEAST -- as do viral methods of inserting codons to produce transgenic organisms. Frequency response windows exist on a cone of fractals: environmental, interorganismic, intraorganismic, intercellular, intracellular, intermolecular, intramolecular, corpus of free-electron parcels, corpus of free electrons, and, likely, so on. This cone is its own ecosystem, an ecosystem of radiation tags with minimum times for spontaneous localization and other critical collective and cooperative phase transitions. The shear number of NOT IN THE VERY LEAST disturbances to the quasi-stability of the ecosystem of radiation tags is how critical phase transitions are reached -- altering minimum times for spontaneous localization within the given ecosystem. Manual transfer of pollen by man, for instance, is not too likely to produce “billions of transgenic plants” in a temporal window narrow enough to significantly stress quasi-stability of radiation tags in a given ecosystem before that system can adequately adapt, whereas biotech methods likely are -- and maybe even already have. Since research in the relevant areas has been systematically “under-funded”, it is not surprising that there is no evidence of “demonstrable poisoning or other ecological or health damage”.
Frequency-response-window tags to morphological boundaries (without boundary) generated by harmonic oscillators are the essence of Musculpt.
So, more massive support for the mathematical details of our superconductant DNA model, and by direct extension, of course, the cascade theory of tornado genesis -- this time from the new field of “synthetic biology” (see: “Life, Reinvented” by Oliver Morton, Wired, January 2005). In designing DNA sequences de novo and synthesizing them nucleotide pair by nucleotide pair, the “biobrick” was created, a non-naturally occurring module of bioLOGICAL architecture: not-nature's internal built environment. But when the biobricks were put together, function did not follow form. Structures successfully articulated, but the expected functions did not “emerge”. Back to the drawing board they went. It was not Mark Rothko's Multiforms they sought, but m-functions of the unit length in genetic dimensioning, something FLW found readymade in medieval Japanese residential architecture, the genesis of his Usonian Automatic. How could multifunctions be carried out by identical modules or biobricks? The answer they came up with? Pop goes the weasel: PoPS, polymerase per second. This is the rate, according to their lights, that RNA polymerase transcribes DNA. The lights of brown-end engineers, surely. And still the functions didn't emerge: the connections “remain to be worked out”. Meanwhile, back at Caltech, signal-to-noise issues in “the sorts of noise that interfere with a cell's ability to send and receive signals” are being “worked out”. Helping DARPA -- which funds this “science” -- create its nanowarriors is not exactly high on my agenda. Nor is helping the “lifelong Logo fan” or the civil engineer who says, “I like to build stuff… I'm a kid in that regard.” So, I'll let the reader fill in the blanks here. The “kid” -- Drew Endy, a name absolutely as apropos to the field of synthetic biology as West-more-land was to the Vietnam war -- faced a Kierkegaardian Either/Or:
…“go back and understand a whole bunch more about the science of the organism…” Or he could take a more radical approach: tear apart nature's work and reconstitute it in a more logical, malleable form. “I thought, Screw it,” he says. “Let's build new biological systems -- systems that are easier to understand because we made them that way.”
Screw it, indeed; end it. “The goal, as Endy puts it, is nothing less than to 'implement life in a manner of our choosing.'” Who said fundamentalists can't be “scientists”? They may not believe in evolution, particularly by natural selection, but they just know DARPA is Jehovah incarnate. “The Cubists were out only to recreate perceived reality in a wholly new way.” (See: John Golding, “The Artist in Search of Himself”, The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2005, p. 40). Golding's mal-assessment of Cubism comes 85 years after rediscovery of m-valued logics, approximately a century after Husserl's “horizons”, and more than half a century after Jean Gebser's “concretion of time” (which has a great deal to do with PoPS). Synthesis of science and Pop Art. Subjects-as-objects and objects-as-subjects readymade by prescriptive enculturation and associated glutamaturic neuronal etching: that's the real goal (because m-valued logics are just not kid stuff). On what basis could we expect anything but Endy Times? And on the Large Glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
Well, it's obviously an issue of near-universal fixation at the moment: should a brain-damaged species be given access to right-to-die euthanasia?
I take it you strongly believe in just-in-time protein labor randomly bicycling discrete hand-carried key-to-lock messages through vast reaches of the built cellular environment, and even intercellularly via outsourcing -- the far from equilibrium dynamics of this emerging market being financed by off-shore venture capital invested in ATP factories. Personally -- during a certain period having frequently traveled on classified courier orders -- I regard this a possible-world logic, but one elaborated in the cognitive Flatland of big pharmaceutical companies. Someday, biology will get to Sphereland; after that, Hypersphereland -- if we survive that long. Problem is: Homeland security needs perfect secrecy, early warning radar, multitasking stealth hunter-killer teams for snatch-n'-snuff stuff. And, My Lord! some of these cytokine-releasing hunter-killers -- dendritic cells, macrophages -- engage in mutilation behaviors: they publicly display bodily fragments of their hacked victims in order to foment genocidal lynch-mob behaviors! If I am not mistaken, this was discovered about the time of Romeo's Rwandan misadventures. Being not exactly a full-fledged Luddite, still, it seems strange to me that, like steam engines, quantum cryptography did not exist until created by engineer/scientists -- in spite of the quadripolar waves radiated by pi-electron clouds of superconductant DNA and theta-e surfaces associated with the storm clouds of tornado genesis. Cloud entanglement: writing and erasing the quantum signal by “teleportation” between source and sink as “superconductant exchange of hydrothermodynamic properties associated with a limited domain of the atmosphere”? Can't be! not at THOSE scale levels. The required stealth and perfect secrecy -- matters of little interest to Nature, a strong advocate of the open-source philosophy -- is, of course, totally dependent upon the Heisenberg uncertainty relations being written only under the 2-valued order of m-valued logics (such limited writing being absolutely dependent upon Schrödinger's wave-function being interpreted relative to probability amplitudes). With the Heisenberg uncertainty relations recursively rewritten over and over under m-orders of logical value, however, the fundamental physical constants become m-valued (i.e., non-self-identical Gödel numbers) and what, under only 2-valued logic, was “uncertainty” becomes the tip of the iceberg of skew-parallelism/perpendicularity (manifestly “uncertain” to 2-logically-valued ratiocination by virtue of n-tuples of non-selfsame fiber bundles stacked on a point numbered with numbered Gödel numbers) resulting from the topological operations of three-fold complex operator-time. Zero-point motion simultaneously in all the m-phase-angle poles specified by the decompositional involute orchestrated by temporal curl. In this fashion is the universal cover blown, stealth and perfect secrecy lost -- to the greater good.
A recent Ph.D. in biochemistry had a look at the superconductant DNA paper and the immediate response was: “You know, I have to take on faith what the quantum physicists have to say.” Meaning: he doesn't believe a word of what they have to say. The response was reminiscent of an earlier one provided by a quantum physicist turned biofeedback entrepreneur: “I am not interested in quantum approaches to brain function because I am an experimental scientist whose business is to create innovative products; probabilities and products are hard to match.” These statements, I think, reflect the predominant attitude toward quantum physics throughout academia and corporate culture, including amongst many working quantum physicists who simply ignore the larger implications of their work. And no one -- except those few Schrödingers among us -- attempts to apply the ignored larger implications in their immediate proprioceptive and perceptive experience; such “attempts to apply” being one prerequisite to overcoming the need “to take on faith”. Indeed, the exact opposite is largely the case (all but a few refuse to look through “the telescope”) and this is especially visible in the neurosciences and how their findings are pitched to the public: the March 2005 issue of National Geographic, for instance. “Beyond the Brain” by James Shreeve begins with big-print sidebars: “The mind is what the brain does” and “Corina's brain: all she is… is here.” How these corollaries are “beyond the brain” ain't exactly clear: nonetheless, this is a clear example of postmodernist rhetorical technique (a sub-discipline of black propaganda and a kind of collective suicide, or a prefiguration thereof). Less apparent to the uninformed is how specific content of the article (as reflected in contemporary neuroscience research strategies) is exemplary of the back-reaction against the larger implications of quantum physics. Judicious separation of data from noise, accomplished by selective attention on part of the neuroscientist and his funding sources, is demonstrated in the sketch provided of how the brain handles visual information. This is done in such a way as to protect the consensus interpretation of Schrödinger's wave-function, an interpretation which limits the “strangeness” of the larger implications (the small residual of “strangeness” consensus allows being regarded so thoroughly disorienting it has simply to be taken on faith). Though in Shreeve's article it is noted that various areas of the brain are involved in decomposing and recomposing the visual input, that the visual cortex breaks down the image delivered from the eyes into color, form, orientation components, that the frontal eye field brain area is involved in establishing position of the object seen by the eyes, and so on, treated as optical physics and neuroscience noise is the fact that optical physicist Luneburg in the 1940's demonstrated in his lab at Columbia University that there is no such thing as localization in visual space independent of “constant factors of the personality of the observer” because visual space is a non-Euclidian metrical space with a limiting velocity and Lorenz contraction (like that of Einstein's Special Relativity, not like that of junior high school geometry). The distance functions for this metrical space Luneburg designated as “psychometric distance functions” because they vary with psychological factors. Luneburg's “noise” was initially hugely disparaged (even his death seems to have been a bit, well… and his work published only posthumously under good offices of colleagues) but is now universally ignored because the experimental and mathematical complexity of his work, and the many successful replications of his experiments by colleagues, makes the “Luneburg theory of binocular visual space” extremely difficult to assail. More easily subverted is Piaget's work, particularly his thesis that “object constancy” (which requires localization in visual space) is a learned psychological behavior, a stage in cognitive development (wherein “Euclidean invariants”, presumably cybernetically encoded prerequisites of many brain functions, particularly those involved with perception, are hypothesized to be psychologically assimilated, i.e., automatized to cognitive structures, by the developing child). The larger implications of the intersection of Luneburg with Piaget are far more than merely “strange”, so an emergent property of the neurosciences, forced by this circumstance, is obsession with disproving Piaget's thesis. Quoting Shreeve's article as reproduced from below the big-print sidebar “baby knows” (p. 25):
Traditional behavioral studies have implied that infants lack a sense of object permanence: When an object they've been looking at is suddenly hidden from view, they behave as if the object no longer exists. But Babylab's high-tech hairnet records a burst of activity in babies' right temporal lobes as they watch the train disappear, similar to activity measured in adults who are asked to keep an unseen object in mind… Does this mean that object permanence is prewired in the brain? Perhaps. [The seed having been sown, now comes the endline disclaimer, all according to black propaganda techniques pioneered by the Office of War Information.] But Kauffman [the scientist conducting this research] prefers to see the development of mind as a fecund interaction between nature and nurture, as an infant's innate predispositions guide it to seek out experience that in turn nourishes and tunes specialized neural networks.
Such scientific “preferences” allow, for instance, decomposition and re-composition of the presented image to be treated as if decomp/recomp is parallel processed under 2-valued logic, not a matter of m-logically-valued quantum wave-effect processing. Also, the neuroscientist can retain the notion that the object imaged somehow has objective existence independent of cognitive development and constant factors of the personality of the observer. And this, moreover, in face of the 1999 demonstrations of Anton Zeilinger, Markus Arndt, and their colleagues at the University of Vienna, that not only elementary particles, not only atoms, but molecules beamed through a diffraction grating exhibit wave-like interference patterns, and thus conform to the rules of quantum mechanics with all their “strange” implications, including those associated with the “measurement problem”. Stick to the standard interpretation, you goofball! Then everything will be all right.
Given these patterns, why wouldn't I think such highbrow intellectual gobbledygook has to do with the origins of mass warfare? This little reflection here by me is like one of John Nash's newspaper clippings pasted to the wall with arrows scrawled across it. Conspiracy theories implied, if only “unconscious conspiracy”. Pretty psychotic, wouldn't you say? Been doing this sort of arrow-drawing all my adult life. To the person regarding nature as selfsame (itself-and-only-itself, not simultaneously not-itself) and by extension regarding him- or herself as similarly selfsame, any fundamental creditable challenge to the worldview construct embraced, whatever that worldview construct might be, is experienced as a mortal threat to continued existence of the selfsame self claimed and identified with, and hence immunologically marked. The immediately experienced proprioceptive phenomenology of this mortal threat is indistinguishable from proprioceptive phenomenology of threat of physical death on the battlefield, the difference in intensity of the two phenomenologies being a function only of how fundamental is the creditable challenge to worldview construct. There is a challenge threshold above which impulse to physical murder (or suicide) as evoked response to worldview challenge becomes inevitable. No one committed to selfsameness in identity is exempt, though height of the critical threshold varies from person to person and from occasion to occasion for the same person (interaction between many psychological and somatic variables establishing this height at any given time). How verify this? Autosensory-autoemotive-autocognitive observation on the battlefield and under varying levels of denial of existential confirmation. Try honing one's capacities for self-observation through a series of love triangles, conflicted because one or more participant is over-committed to selfsame identity, for instance: an aspect of Tantric yoga practice.
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