Tractate on Tracts of Indefinite Extent or Treatises

Tractate on Tracts of Indefinite Extent or Treatises

L. Edgar Otto    02 May, 2012

There are serious people out there who write or consult on issues of science fiction.  By Hoyle's and Assimov's example such treatment of their subject as if futuristic speculative fiction can be an aid to the popularization of the current issues in science.  But when the frontiers of science go beyond that frontier a looking back can show where the certain ideas we violated and thus they return as trivial assumptions in the masses as if a reality in myth or a logic of their own.

The extent of the residual myth on the order of the advancement in special effects in moves is somewhat a scandal to a generation of serious theoreticians as perhaps all such art in the medium which at best in ambiguous in the reality of the information that is the trade in secrets and competition between groups of people and nations.

It also is a problem for each generation to realize that in their childhood writers like for the Twilight Zone talked of dimensions, and dimensions of imagination.  Also, long standing problems still not solved after all this time and more geniuses in the world as science is also a scandal.  The dramatic situations seem to have an eternal source in philosophy yet these are enumerable as finite despite the endless variations.  Can we conceive a science fiction that is stranger than or exceeds that in our religious texts?  Although I have thought of and recognized new levels of sci fi I find that generalization hard to transcend in any of the faiths.

What then makes my recent tracts as a small book of treatises different from the issues of science fiction.  Tonight I saw the movie Species III and it too imagined a more advanced DNA which was resolved by the discussion of our search for contained hot fusion, the mixing of hydrogen and deuterium as a promise of unlimited and omnipresent sources of energy.  It differed from my mentioning the Fifth Element in that there was less emphasis on the issues and the idea of the utility or necessity of cycles of good and evil.  Yet what was the Andromeda Strain but the issue of encountering some of the basic elements from space of our gene material, or in general, not understanding the source of a message or its mechanism other than in the abstract we appeal to visitors from outer space, how even as a child the Man from Planet X seemed to me not a big deal, nothing to explain the thrill or fear in the audience, but the idea we communicate with such others by mathematics did impress me and about the same time as that movie came out another one where humans became mangled from the hidden contamination of the buzz word of the build a shelter hide under the small student desk day- that impressed me.

Still there is the logic of things, I mean, stating it again and it was among the few ideas not original or independently thought about on my part, if we were seeded or created by the aliens, then who created them goes the argument- that they may come from some future is perhaps a harder idea to wrap our minds and disbelief around.  The local idea of ghosts is perhaps easier to think about than distant angels or beings close to us in the vastness of space who we have not found but all feel the universe too big that we are the only ones.  On the other hand a movie like the Ten Commandments can have the effect of terrifying children, and its special effects in retrospect and armed with the maturity of science seems to me laughable.  Of course it takes a little big of high church to entertain the party line that strives to insist we cannot hold creationist views and evolution theory together in this conflict of tractable facts.

So sometimes in the meaning that shifts in our speculations or something as seemingly concrete as mass in science, these an indefinite tract that goes beyond our common intuitions on a trace, continuous or not, that at some point where things extend outward, mass as defined as extension ultimately after all, the old words at a given time may actually be better or come closer to some truth of things.  Can we presume that some indefinite region defined in vague yet not poetic terms like Energy is just the capacity to do work- is that a tract or a trace that reduces things to mere outlines?  The particles are treated as if they have that once mysterious substance called caloric when they technically do not, but as an idea it has its place in the enquiry and in the higher sense that things are intelligible it may take the top of thought again in our models of philosophic pendulum swings.  Or has that happened in a sense already for we now imagine the surface of black holes to have thermodynamic properties.

Can we see the world then as but information, perhaps not for the age old problem is there between the meaning and the information as if a unity, deep in our heads that we flip from the analytic to the synthetic, the indifferent objective to the  emotional fear or comfort to our metaphor of the gods.  But things will tend to be discovered and cherished principles gotten around, sometimes it is just ignoring or extending things into a different method where the exceptions work so we use them in different ways even if we do not understand them.

Ulla brings to the table the idea in vogue around the late 60's that discusses things as matters of intentions.  Beyond this being a philosophic issue par excellent it contains in the forecasting, fore warning of surprises, predictions, and generally the issue of purposes in this world such as the purpose of a photon is to seek its least action (Noether)  Does the mote of light have such intentions?  Do all such purposes move abstractly in a trace or a tract quite besides what we may think of our treatises.  Even the analysis in our languages of basic words or numbers space related that seem rather universal, including how we react emotionally within our own tribe or cultures is this issue of purposes or higher purposes and dynamic or as information empty as mechanical or even totally random- yet these issues are not resolved as physics- we can argue for example there is no random.

So do we extend our theories at least to the point they work at the exclusion of other theories with hope that in the end we have faith the preternatural paradoxes will surely resolve? Or in reality we find the surprise in the last word of the victory in the flow of the arrow of time that good triumphs over evil in the equifinality of justice and suffering, that our needles or circuits actually point to something, these as mere indicators as can be our purposes and intentions of the moment. Who can say it better than young Franklin that in religion we may expect reward in the here or the here-after? Or that chastity is to be used for health or offspring.  What a balanced view for a founding father.  Yet my experience is that intentions even at a distance can have effects in this world, although usually indirectly through the minds of others.

States being somewhat paranoid even when such things are the entertainment of the people they can afford to explore such things, such as remote viewing.  I recall an article recently that some tried to remote view the inside of an atom.  I found their visions vague but intelligible but to see this it takes quite a preparation in the survey of the many complicated theses of which to argue in its own language and symbolism we find a tract as an indefinite region that in the end justifies a simpler picture or a looping or relation of many thought systems and their design which still cannot as an issue of our vague intended theories eliminate the mystery of the world even if we find in depth sufficient understanding to know in the hidden things the reality of a mechanism.  Teleology seems to be built into the schemes either directly or in context, and that concerns such intentions with or without consequences or steps toward a more realistic model as it concerns existence and non existence itself fraught with philosophic or social standard of scandal including the vanishing of whole efforts of enquiry.

In our age the ideas of he internet as a medium, technical and social and as reliable so far as trying to treat ESP as a predictable science, seems also a matter of being a tract of things- that is some old philosophies come back through the back door of our imaginations and put things in some sort of order based on some indefinite model of things with the intention presumably of a better integration of our real life society if not get a handle on what we can learn from massive systems together.  They market the style and trace of things in the end or the desire to upgrade, or that in letting the system think for the users they can predict in the main their behavior or perhaps influence it and their intentions. I am not saying this is wrong per se.  I am saying that in the slow development of hypertext and programming that there is a great freedom and not so much a problem in that what we make in the web page is not like a page in a book- it is in fact a tract or an indefinite quasic region. In such space we have to redefine both touch and sight as aspects of geometry for the experience of touch can pass to the screen or presumably to other worlds remotely, or in effect we touch each others hearts.  The tracts as in these symmetry concepts and group concepts of physics know no intrinsic boundaries as the issue of what is local or non local itself has to be so redefined for in this world it seems a given that this is the unified and indisputable case.

But I did not expect something so prevalent would be capable of such analyses of a core metaphor.  I suppose we can imagine hidden things outside of our view, maybe as in the movie Forbidden Planet discover the old question of innocence and awakening and imagine the ID. This too impressed me. Intentions come with a foundational risk while it is not clear that they reach far into the real and solve our hidden states of mind, private or universal, or our moral stances, or as in our dream interpretations may point to something empty or worse in the greater scheme of things all such possible states of our universe as if they exist finds our unique situations of life and death of infinite purposes thereby in perfection such as symmetry implies to some, a pointless exercise in futility for purpose through the eyes of stars seen or unseen.

Again, humor is still a wide and little understood frontier and in a sense a release or escape into a fantasy- event there the effects of such humor shows differences. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it heals, or sometimes we become part of the canned laughter as if a cue that is not always caution but disruptive to thoughts as all such thoughts that can truly rise above our perspectives in this world and what is mundane now in our golden age of cosmology.  Humor can conceal the intent that is also a weapon, or indicates intelligence that can be a cue to expectations for a better sharing of Love. Humor seems to me a measure of both our intelligence and ignorance- but is that not somewhat true of foundational things?


(12:17:50 AM completed...)
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