Ear Training/ Mnemonics

This is more for me than any of my readers (do I have any??)

At almost 32 years of age, and with more projects on my plate than I can handle, I’m considering beginning a serious new training in developing my musical ear. My theory is: one builds coordination between

eye
hand
brain
ear
voice

And the more each of these is developed, or pairs of these, the higher functioning the musician. Most of us can sing relative pitches in our favorite songs, and I suspect that there are ways to develop perfect pitch, even if you’ve been told you do not possess it. So one necessity for becoming a successful (read: competent) musician is to develop fluency with an instrument you already possess with voice. This will take years and a lot of practice. I do not have the most developed ear, although I play difficult pieces on piano, and am slowly learning to read notes on guitar, as I learn chords and rhythm patterns. I am deciding on a single voice instrument and I will begin learning to play it as an extension of my voice, completely by ear. I’m split between recorder and oboe/English horn. The recorder extends whistling, in a sense. It is simple and easy to carry and is featured in a lot of baroque ensemble music I enjoy. The oboe has such a beautifully distinct sound, a very solitary sound too, and is beautiful to look at and hold. Judging from this beautiful range chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_(music) the tenor recorder and the oboe have about the same range, but the oboe wikipedia page shows the range of the oboe going a bit higher. As I have wanted to play double reed instruments my whole life I think I may go with an oboe.

A simple, well designed ear training program should be very easy to write and should be easily available, though I haven’t found one. I’ve been working with big ears today, working almost exclusively on the minor 10th. I have given each of the 9 minor 10ths a name, corresponding to something the interval reminds me of.

C to Eb LOW [self explanatory]
C# to E NAMELESS [the last one to be named]
D to F AWKWARD [don't know why]
Eb to F# PENTATONIC [they're both black]
E to G FUGUE #10 [bach, of course]
F to Ab MOZART [f minor broken chords in K333]
F# to A GOLDEN [trying to recognize the pitch A whenever I hear it!]
G to Bb STANDBY [G minor is my default key for improvisation]
Ab to B HARSH [this B sounds distincly more harsh than the other notes]

So this is one of my favorite things to do: invent far more theory than is necessary or relevant. I love mnemonics (see for lack of a word). I hypothesize that I will learn the difference in these 9 minor 10ths by identifying them according to the mnemonic that pops up in my head when I hear each. We’ll see how this goes. I want to keep expanding this, and soon I want to be able to sit down with an oboe and play any melody that I can sing, or that I’ve just heard. This is my goal.

While I’m at it, let me share with future me a note to Maggie about teaching Ella piano, along a similar vein.

My take: the method books are garbage. Analogy– SCALES and ARPEGGIOS:MUSIC as PUSHUPS:KICKBALL. What’s also garbage, in my snotty opinion, is books that teach insultingly banal songs to children, such as go tell aunt roady, pop goes the weasel, etc. Kids who learn from those books will appreciate that music is to be appreciated, but they won’t appreciate music. I think the music should be rich enough to be incentive by itself, and as children easily learn very difficult piano, the praise and attention incentive is also there with serious classical music, and is not there with the two line steam boat willy strut.

I started Ella reading a chopin mazurka. I was careful to find an A minor piece, as key signatures take some work, but my philosophy is a good teacher can teach advanced material because
a) there is something to take away from it, even if it’s not a polished piece. Especially if the teacher ENJOYS the music, and can share some of that.
b) kids, Ella especially, are super fast learners.
c) the teacher being proud is an incentive to a student like Ella, and being proud cannot be faked. Setting the kid up to surprise you a bit is a good thing.

I try to teach a whole lot at once, but mainly: proper fingering and reading intervals, occasionally I would discuss a symbol such as ff, or a sharp sign as need be. I found one thing absolutely critical:

USE FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE AND BE ABSOLUTELY CONSISTENT ABOUT IT.

so I will say at some point “big step down,” or “stretch and 2, stretch and 3, and finish the arpeggio” or “thumb goes under and walk up to 4″
The actual descriptions matter a lot less than the consistency, 1) in saying exactly the same thing at the same place, and then 2), if you can manage, try to be consistent about saying “big step down” about some fixed large interval, i.e., each time you come across it. The latter point is not necessary and having a few descriptions for the same interval is probably good.

I’ve found that using natural language like this fools my student into thinking I’m just talking them through it, as opposed to always saying “a 3rd down” “a 4th up” “3 consecutive major seconds down” which would get repetitive and tiresome. But the consistency allows the student the ease of having mnemonic devices, subconsciously handed to them.

I started actually jotting down phrases in the margins of the mazurka, so that the same phrase could be recalled a day or two later, at some specific spot. Also, I played with abbreviating and finally omitting some of the comments. They are training wheels after all.

Fluency of reading is important at this stage, so just allowing her to build that transparent relationship where she sees intervals and almost instinctively jumps the right amount is good. Discourage learning each of the notes and where they are on the keyboard, that skill is a detriment to her development. Encourage singing, identifying pitches, thinking ahead to work fingering out herself, and furnish her with questions and comments about what the musician is doing. If you can make that sort of dialog fun you will set her up to be a pupil with the brightest and the best teachers, because that is what they will do. I’d say finally never let her get bored with it, since there are a thousand things to be fascinated with, but also don’t be afraid to be less of her best friend and more of her teacher when you are teaching her. Teachers who respect their students have high expectations, and my hope for her is that she learn a bit of the self-discipline that is required to make it far into music.

I can send music for her to listen to. She might want to hear some pieces and pick something not too difficult to play. It’s important that she only play music she cares about.

My challenge now is to get good enough at oboe and get Ella good enough at piano that the above is more than just bullshit.

Blah Blah Blah

Blah Blah Blah
or why I hate ideology.

I spent many years around ideological people, mostly the young liberal revolutionary anarchist feminist variety. Occasionally a libertarian. The media will bombard me with ideologues and eggheads and flapper faces from the right, when it gets the chance (I made that last one up, it’s pretty meaningless).

I am an artist (read: aesthetics and quality of life are important to me), and a bit of a hedonist. I can spend a long conversation delighting in a completely alien political system. Here the conversation is interesting; it is bonding myself and my peers together; it will change the way I see the world in a minute yet permanent way. I can even get upset with or against my colleagues, as has happened, but I’m very critical of politics for the sake of politics and more so, of arguing for a completely different system, from the ground up. Finally, I am the most critical of those who act as if arguing is what will make it so.

I can understand radical collectives and political strata of subcultures on a variety of levels. Some are more favorable, of some I am more critical. I like that kids have choices in music that get them thinking about politics, for example. I am thinking of the band Crass. But I don’t have much patience for blatant hypocrisy, and usually ideology and blatant hypocrisy go hand in hand (the example of Crass not withstanding this allegation). Further on I will argue that it makes sense for us to care about those things we understand and can impact. If you have lived your life following a dozen newspapers and understand history and politics like few others, then your game might very well be extremely general and, from your propositions, might look as if from scratch. I abstractly respect Chomsky, for example, and Buckley and many others in the same weight division. I respect Tolkien too, and Raoul Dahl, though their game is much different, they have reasons to world build, as well, and they honor those reasons by being good at what they do. I’m a bit of an elitist in this regard. When someone with dubious education and questionable thoughtfulness espouses a radical solution to life on earth, I worry that details have not been accounted for. Furthermore, I look more at them and less with them, if you get my meaning. I’m more inclined to psychoanalyze, to the extent I can, the person and their motives. I’ll understand them more as a sociological phenomenon and less for their content. As well I should.

This here is a bit of a style guide I have offered in the face of what I am calling ideology. Some of it is just about politics and about conversations you’d rather not have about politics.

context determines importance– one cannot demand attention simply because the topic is of dire importance to someone. If you find yourself sharing a 12 pack and a stupid political conversation with a friend, where it would almost seem the fate of the world is dangling by the outcome of the conversation, remind them that the point of drunken conversation is fun, not world policy making. Because X is important it does not follow that discussing and deciding on X is automatically important. The factors contributing to race wars in Sudan are important. That I don’t know what those factors are is not. Am I making a case for ignorance? I don’t think I am, but we pick our battles and if yours is pontificating to random american party goers about Sudanese politics over beers then I think you probably picked the wrong battle. What’s all this talk about beer? Well, I like beer. It’s a battle I have chosen.

ethics is ugly– sitting around dreaming up hypotheticals that involve people in great pain is frequently gratuitous, unilluminating and often grotesque. For law makers, for citizens in general, occasions come up to discuss details which are unpleasant. Sometimes we indulge merely out of fascination. An airplane goes down in the Andes; some survivors eat others to live; a movie is made about it; you see the movie; after the movie you talk about similar dilemmas over a latte at the cafe–okay. Not everyone needs to know in advance what they think about cannibalism. See *to have a thorough ideology is impossible.* I have chosen a mild example, to avoid blatant hypocrisy. Fill in what your imagination (or experience) will. If you want to talk about something unpopular, go right ahead. I would and do. But with reason. Only certain demands on your audience are reasonable. Others are not. Weddings are frequently not the best place to settle the problem of AIDS deaths in Africa. I mean, maybe, but probably not.

“slippery slope”– when I hear this phrase I cringe. What is not a slippery slope? Binary, the difference between 0 and 1, for example. In natural language, in politics, in economics, in philosophy, we scrutinize the fuzzy boundaries. Take away the slippery slopes and you’re frequently left with something idiotic. Use binaries all across the board, by all means. I don’t argue that they are inherently too rigid. But for god sake don’t tell me something is a “slippery slope.” Instead, make a judgment. I think we’re so indoctrinated not to be judgmental that we try to delegate judgment to ideology. If I’m okay with A then I must be okay with B, and I am certainly not okay with B, hence A fails by “slippery slope.” Uhh, usually false. This must be a classic fallacy. So I’ll shut up.

“necessary evil”– another one I don’t have much appreciation for. I like solving problems. When I’m not all shits and giggles I like being effective and responsible. How can a solution like prison or the federal government be a “necessary evil?” It’s stupid, right? We don’t say “an umbrella is a necessary evil, because it’s better if it doesn’t rain.” You can, but I think it’s sad. I’d rather buy myself a styly umbrella and be glad I did, or go without and enjoy the rain. I’ll grant one necessary evil, just one: evil. It is necessary, because life is meaningless without it. There are no others.

style is not irrelevant–one cannot ask for an audience and then belabor their ears with incessant politics simply because the topics are important to someone (sound familiar?). You can distinguish idea from polished essay, as you can distinguish math from poetry. Sometimes you get clunky and awkward just to get an idea across, sometimes a beautiful idea. (Could I be guilty of hypocrisy with this very piece of writing? Probably on a few different counts). Still, style is something to aspire to. Style is respect for your audience and their quality of life. It’s the best way to ask for an audience. Style is Fun.

to have a thorough ideology is impossible– You might find webpages where diligently democratic citizens list there views on every political topic. This is like a bullet list, and depending on the sophistication it will have between half a dozen and a few dozen bullets. Abortion. Gay Marriage. Border Policy. Prison. etc. Okay, yay for critical thinking, but it strikes me as artificial that each of these people has a paragraph, a decisive paragraph, on each of what are being considered the topics that matter. I don’t think policy for a nation of 300,000,000 people is that simple. Policy for a household of 4 is complex enough that it can consume as much time and thought as you’ll give it. But other things… You know about things you care about, your passions; the place you work and its politics; medical conditions that effect extended family members, and policy around those medical conditions; something as trivial and insignificant as policies that your local museum holds that will be encouraging or prohibitive to your favorite artist(s). I happen to care about gay marriage. I have reasons to. I don’t care much about genocide in Sudan. ohhh, genocide bad. fat cats bad. military bad. Well, I am suspicious of people who care about everything and anything that sounds worthy of care. How can you care about something you don’t know about? By making things mind-numbingly simple, then you can enlist young angry people to join in. Likening political figures to Hitler, that’s one we all still enjoy. When a ballot comes out, that is an impetus in itself to care specifically, but even then I vigorously defend my right not to know enough about any particular topic to care.

Is that enough? and, I’m done.

God vs Human, in judgment

God vs. Human in judgment.

The atheist debates seem by and large to be rehashed arguments that all of us have heard or considered our whole lives. I’ve found some debates amusing, particularly Christopher Hitchens, who has a nice sharp sense of irony and a good sense of timing. Though, I have a hard time believing there are people swayed by these debates. Christianity has been built up to such a complex system of circular reasoning and non sequiturs that no amount of reasoning will convince a believer that they are completely misguided. Nor will any argument given with the authority of the bible sway an atheist or agnostic who has thought at all about these matters. However, there are a few questions which I have not heard posed to Christian apologists, and while I doubt they would hesitate to answer them, these questions are obvious to me and they do not seem amenable to simple answers.

1) What is Christianity without guilt? and how can a faith which demands guilt claim any worthwhile spiritual guidance.

I do not see how it can.

I find regrets in life, and frequently reflect on my shortcomings. I cannot say I live without guilt, though I try to. When I imagine an omniscient god who will judge me at the end of my life I imagine only a being which feels compassion. I can also imagine a malevolent deity, and I have no choice but to oppose such with what feeble might I have. But a god I trust in, a god who understands me inside and out, this god will not find evil in me that I myself cannot find, but to the contrary has felt each decision I have made and understands the reasons. No need for supernal lawyers, or a redeeming speech I might make soon after death. I have lived my own defense. I have worked with the scraps I’ve been given. So I picture myself taking the fifth amendment come judgment day, and I picture myself condemning any judge which does not understand me. This is my own circular reasoning which cannot be argued from me. To those of orthodox faith I suppose I damn myself with such self-righteousness. But I have never said “I am a sinner,” I have never excused a lifetime of gratifying myself against my better judgment to that ultimate cop out. I say, “if I am made, then I am how I was made; and if that creator does not have the highest compassion, then I will be righteous against it, for the sake of goodness, for the advocacy of myself who is innocent in the context of not-fully-compassionate gods.” In saying this, I can’t help but feel more devout than the majority of Christians. Not only am I allowing the possibility of an all-powerful deity but I am demanding it is on my side, in the deepest possible way. But what if it is not? What if it disapproves of me? What might it disapprove of? It could be a wholly alien entity to me, whereby it might disapprove of the clothes I wore or the structure of my face. It might loathe me for my adorning mixed fibers or eating shell-fish. It might have hatred for a single color of which I have worn, without scruples. What would I be to sympathize with such hatred for myself–such arbitrary hatred? Such a ridiculous scenario! What if its expectations came much closer to my own, for myself? Suppose god expected me to be ever the stronger in situations where I could exercise courage. What defense do I have then? None, we are in agreement, although we both know I was stronger than I might have been, if that is the issue.

I cannot understand a fear of judgment, and I go so far as to say those who fear judgment fear it because they judge themselves, and fail in their own eyes. Any god worth worshipping has the power to see not only from the outside but also from thine own eyes. If you fail in your own eyes, you fail in your creator’s eyes, no doubt. Although, in my religion, when I have this particular religion, my god forgives you with pity, compassion and understanding. The reasoning is circular, I admit: I expect from my god–per my image of godliness– total understanding. Could you worship a less pure god?

But I could not.

(more objections/questions to come…)

Art is Shit

This evening I came across a facebook group promoting recognition and discussion of Wikipedia Art, a self referencing work/Wikipedia page (notable because of the cultural significance of inviting the controversy it baits on wikipedia for not being notable or culturally significant) whose creators insist is conceptual art. Throughout the discussion is the tireless debate of what constitutes art. I was intrigued and even a little bothered by the undeniable assertion and the implication. (Maybe it is enough to admit it is “art,” but if that means anything, then some implication should follow: I should care; I should support funding for it; I should support recognizing it on par with any other work of art, etc). So I did what any good unwilling participant observer would do: I went to vandalize the page, to highjack the work and reclaim my agency in spite of (and in homage to (ah, the levels of irony!)) my being enlisted as participant. Alas, the page had been deleted without so much as an archive’s history of the deletes and debates that the artist cited to justify the work. I didn’t get to vandalize the page, but I had too much fun posting a response on the facebook group, which I’ll boastfully repeat for you:

Wikipedia Art

Demanding a contrapuntal dialog of vigorous affirmation and inherent denial, the artist insists on the de facto status of Wikipedia Art as conceptual artifact, creating a dissonant ontological reassignment from extinct referent to extant rhetoric. While indisputably manifesting itself, recursively, as Art, both in referencing itself and in referencing that which does not exist, the audience’s apathy is commandeered as medium. Where previous artists have relied only on the milieu of controversy to maintain a similar status, here, the indifferent critic is slightly uncomfortably forced to ask himself the question “why should I care?”

Cf. Manzoni, Piero “Merda d’Artista” (1961) ; Tetazoo, James “No Knife. A study in mixed media earth tones, number three.” (1984)

See, I don’t mind. I’m having fun. Denying meaning is a meaningful way to engage with a piece. So I am guilty of justifying this work as I mock it, fine. As much as the view that criticism is part of art preempts serious criticism and absolves artist, it can also liberate me as critic and justify my objections. I just need to play by the rules, such as admitting it is art and I am a part of it. And in admitting this, I stretch the boundaries of what is art, because now art is a cheap laugh, a strawman soaked in fuel, a can of shit. Art is that which invites the novice to momentarily pontificate and jeer and ultimately something that he can forget. I’m okay with that. I understand that people will always highjack the symbols of virtue for cheap gain. But the symbols can’t keep themselves up. They sink down, to the low down things they are stuck to.

(See Christianity, peace, the swastika, art, Country music).

A poem from Sep 2006

When skeptics scoff at claims of psychic threads
A voice of reason sounds its trumpet’s bell
“To delve into the depths of one’s own mind
One knows the thoughts that in like minds do dwell”

Introducing: the Remcorder and the First Oneironaut

Occasionally I have extremely vivid dreams. These dreams tend to be both visceral and intellectually complex. They are usually lucid. I wake from them with a collection of characters, settings, and ideas that are interrelated in a way that seems cohesive, but as the morning progresses the cohesiveness falls away and I am left only with a few jumbled details. I’m not in the habit of writing these down, though I’ve tried a few times, with varying success. Often, by the time I get to writing, there isn’t much left to salvage.

I also occasionally suffer sleep paralysis, which, for me, is the experience of being partially awake, but physically paralyzed by a stifling and pounding pulse of sound and light. The sound is deafening, and while it is happening I wonder if I might not psychosomatically rupture my eardrums. The visual is hypnotizing, usually concentric circles of shades of grey, collapsing in on itself with a rate of about two bands per second. It feels as though if I give in I’ll be smothered, so all my instinct has me resisting this dreadful pulse. I am familiar enough now, at 31, that I recognize this pattern with lucidity. It happens when I am extremely exhausted and simultaneously on edge. It happens in a very light mode of sleep. I’ve learned to override the instinct to resist. Instead I acquiesce, sort of looking my fear in the face, and allowing it to pass through me (to use Herbert’s litany). Meanwhile, I am aware of my surroundings, and frequently there is someone close to me I can hear and want very badly to communicate to. “Wake me, damn it!! I’m afraid I’ll die if you don’t!” I’ve even learned to wake myself, by gently rocking my body back and forth, until it is actually moving. When I wake up, I usually find that the people whose voices I heard so clearly, are not and were not around. That more of it was a dream than I had thought while was happening.

Both of these phenomena have led me to think about dream recording technology. With our knowledge of the brain as limited as it is, the only hope I see is a sort of Morse code recording device, worn either on the finger, placed on the upper arm, or attached to the eyelids.

This from a report by dream specialist Stephen LaBerge (see http://www.lucidity.com/SleepAndCognition.html)

Evidence of voluntary control of other muscle groups during REM was found by LaBerge, Nagel, Dement, and Zarcone (1981) while testing a variety of lucidity signals. They observed that a sequence of left and right dream-fist clenches resulted in a corresponding sequence of left and right forearm twitches as measured by EMG. However, the amplitude of the twitches bore an unreliable relationship to the subjective intensity of the dreamed action. Because all skeletal muscle groups except those that govern eye-movements and breathing are profoundly inhibited during REM sleep for, it is to be expected that most muscular responses to dreamed movements will be feeble. Nonetheless, these responses faithfully reflect the motor patterns of the original dream. Similar observations have been made by Fenwick et al. (1984).

Now, as far as I know, these specialists have only used a very rough Morse-like code to correlate certain REM states as detected by the EEG with reported lucid dreaming by the subject, at the same time, via the EMG. Their findings suggest that it would be difficult to send sophisticated signals, say, encoding actual sentences with something much more Morse-code-like. Yet the human’s ability to learn skills such as musical instruments or foreign languages suggests, to me, the possibility of training oneself to communicate from beyond wakeful consciousness.

I set to work to understand how a device, such as an EMG, would work (to buy one is beyond my means), and if a very crude homemade device would be accurate enough. I might start with a glove, with a gripped ball under the fingers, such that it fits snugly into the palm of a (my) relaxed hand and such that a circuit is completed upon a gentle squeezing of the ball (closer to a mango seed in shape than a ball, in fact). With interests in mathematics and language, I also set to work on a code, so that words could be communicated in the most efficient manner. It seems like for efficiency I would pay the price of learnability, since the most efficient codes would involve inventing a new language, or at least allowing for variable character length (e.g., “e” being the shortest) and possibly even variable escape codes to signal the ends of characters and words. This becomes an interesting exercise on its own, but the problem of actually recording words from the dream state requires only a first step: try to record a recognizable symbol, as was done in the study above.

I haven’t found the time to do this, but I have found time to daydream about authoring the first book of poetry written from dream. I’ve also thought about setting up a live website where visitors write words which are turned into signals and somehow sent to the dreamer (me) (maybe by sound, maybe by touch), so that the dreamer can respond. The first oneironaut! sending back messages from that great unknown frontier. I’ve even fantasized that occasionally I’ll have a mathematical idea in dream that is profound, and I might incorporate some mathematics into my coded lexicon, to record these.

The device might be called a Remcorder. Now, some ideas are worth acting on, and this may be one of them. Unfortunately I have my hands full with other things, so this idea is only worth the entertainment one gets from reading or hearing about it. However, if someone is interested in trying this, please let me know.

Film Stock of Life (FSL)

Andrew Marshall on Religion:

“For me, the ideas in orthodox religion were something to celebrate; to play with and to subvert and to own. For most of my life I have considered the great questions about deities and afterlife to be beyond the jurisdiction of logic and sense. Instead of calling this out-of-bounds, as many do, I’ve welcomed the freedom. One can invent a different religion for every day of their life and never be wrong. So I have done this.”

-Fictional interview, ca. 2020

To make a great work of art one has to make a great mess. The intricate configuration that is left, after the mess has been cleaned up, is some fraction of the materials used. The rest goes to the scrap bin: ruined canvases, over exposed negatives, shreds of paper, 6 months of writer’s block, the lives of 99 out of 100 people, or 9999 out of 10,000, if we can be so crass. (I mean only to distinguish the gems, not to deny the value of human life). I have often found myself scripting and acting out the film of my life and though it is bound to be an entertaining feature-length production, the majority of it is spent on film stock destined for the incinerator, or more likely the dust covered catacombs beneath some Heavenly library.

The artists who print, control the number and quality of each edition. They have the ability to run unlimited editions, or offer blemished prints at discount prices, so that the poor can furnish their homes with the same artwork as the rich. But they do not do this, and when they do their work loses its value. I would not mind putting a director in charge of editing my life, but it would have to be one whose skill was undoubtedly better than my own. I’m tempted to allow for an immaculate director, the one who crafts the perfect film from the footage offered. But the more reasonable side of me acknowledges the impossibility of such a craftsman, so I begin to wonder if we can’t just keep all the stock around, and invite a new director every few decades, to make their own story from it.

Film Stock of Life (FSL) is quite different than actual film stock, of course. The primary difference is that FSL does not record a specific point of view. To illustrate this point: the difference between a film about person A and one about person B is a difference only in what is done with the footage. This is the difference between 2 points in a continuum. Many decades from now stories with no central characters may come into vogue and these will be examples along some such continuum. However, today there is still an appreciation for the hero narrative, and its many variations, and of the films which involve me, I am most interested in those that feature me as (at least) a central character.

In the afterlife I would like to be a director. I could spend as long as necessary learning the techniques, say a few years or perhaps a few decades. At some point I’d be ready to market my product. My chief export would be interesting and flattering biographical films, and I would sell them to the citizens of Heaven. But I would also work for the judicial system and probably also make films that would end up on the black markets of Hell. The judicial system pieces would be indictments against those I find reprehensible. I would juxtapose the most despicable aspects of the defendant’s life. I could get most of these down to 30 minutes or so, just a series of outtakes. A few confessional speeches, a few short actions of cruelty or cowardice. The Hell-bound films would be similar, but ridiculous, full-length features with narrative and plot and lots of antiheroes. A lot of John Waters, a bit of Todd Solondz. The audience would find the characters enjoyably loathsome or hilariously pathetic.

Documentaries would be very enjoyable to make, as well. “Origins in Technology,” stories of firsts from the rising civilization of mankind. I’d include the first fire deliberately built, the first seed deliberately sowed, discoveries of electricity, radiation, irrational numbers. It would have to be a series, there are a lot of firsts.

That’s all I have now, though I will keep planning for eternity. It’s not the kind of thing you want to just happen to you one day, before you’ve thoroughly prepared for it.

Theory and Emergence in a Deterministic System

A cellular automaton is, in a clear sense, the simplest of universes. As such, it is a useful setting to apply and test ideas from philosophy. The cellular automaton universe (CAU) seems the least allowing for emergence (without considering trivial universes, e.g., an empty universe), since every phenomenon follows from the evolution rule. I will argue, here, that in some sense language–and therefore theory and thought–organizes and communicates structure which is emergent, even in a cellular automaton universe.

Context-dependent definitions
Suppose our CAU contains a large number of collections of contiguous on cells, which are roughly the same size. Suppose these groups move in different directions and at different rates and that their design and the rule of evolution is such that when two collide either they are both destroyed (every cell is turned off) or they bounce off of each other. In this setting we could define a term particle for these groups of cells which appear to move. How do we define particle so that we can make unambiguous statements about the nature of particles? We might specify size: particles are between 1 and 10 billion cells. We could specify shape, say in specifying the size of the boundary, or in specifying the ratio of longest diameter to shortest diameter. Of course, there is necessarily some structural requirements for the property that particles bounce or mutually annihilate, but it may not be clear what exactly these requirements are. Even without these requirements known, we consider it meaningful to observe the bouncing and annihilating of particles.

If, on the other hand, our CAU had every possible bounded arrangement of cells, each an infinite number of times, (e.g., a random initial state on an infinite space) it would be extremely tedious to have a theory about large groups of cells and in fact it would not be of any use, since for any two differing bodies there would be many bodies which were intermediate (a geodesic might be a path of single flips which never flips a cell twice) and different macro behavior would necessarily come down to the difference of a single cell. In that setting a macro theory is pointless. In a more limited CAU, as the first described here, a macro theory is useful and meaningful.

We might notice that roughly half of the particles are hollow, that is, have a cavity of off cells near their center, and that particles are only annihilated when exactly one is hollow.

When a hollow particle and a non-hollow particle collide, the two are annihilated, otherwise a collision results in the particles bouncing off of each other. (1)

Are the terms of this statement shorthand for statements about individual cells? They are not. To reiterate, in translating this statement in terms of individual cells, one necessarily gets a ridiculously cumbersome statement which contains no more information than the rule for evolution, which we may imagine is a very small piece of information.

What happens if the cells are too small to be observed or detected? Certainly here the best we can do is make empirical statements, such as (1) above. We are unable to discern two arrangements which differ by a single cell, but frequently we don’t need to, because a vast set of arrangements is absent from our universe. In our universe we recognize some objects as existing on a continuum, such as photons, but do not concern ourselves with the continuum connecting any two objects, such as a continuum connecting photons to protons, because such continua do not exist in nature. With the absence of said continua, nature suggests particular objects for naming. We have a name for a species, say horse, and we do not have names for each intermediate object, say between horses and cows. In hypothetical contexts, the proposition “X is a horse” is fuzzy, not well defined. Yet in the context of animals on earth, this proposition is perfectly well defined.

Things are further complicated if you imagine the scientist and the audience to be immense arrangements of cells. Supposing our universe is a CAU, the human eye cannot detect a single cell, by a long shot, but recognizes a discrete alphabet on this page. The human ear is never hit with two identical sounds, yet discerns discrete phonemes of speech from extremely complex and subtle patterns of changing air pressure. The brain is in two distinct states every two utterances of the same word and every letter ever printed is a different configuration of ink on a different surface of paper. It’s a bit of a miracle we discern discrete structures at all.

What is the observation that some particles are hollow and some are not, if it is not shorthand for arrangements of individual cells? We’ve said it is somehow dependent on the observable arrangements of cells, it must also be dependent on the available variety of people and the fact that each one is affected similarly by viewing a picture of a hollow cell and by holding an aerobie frisbee, that some abstract quality is registered in both cases. In this way we can view the quality of being hollow not just as a simple property–albeit fuzzy–about a particular physical object, but in fact an extremely complex property of affecting the human brain in a particular way. Abstractly we can say hollow is a property of shape; contrasted with solid; it describes objects which are lacking a large part of their interior. In any of these definitions we need not make the mistake that those terms are well defined solely in terms of the physical form of the object. We can recognize that these terms, too, are meant to reference the experience of the reader, and that although there is a relationship between solid and hollow, it only makes sense to define hollow in terms of solid if the reader has had some experience with solid, and can conceive of its opposite.

A theory that has simple words with simple relationships (e.g., of hollow and solid particles), which is deconstructed into a much finer physical system (e.g., cells of an automaton) only in an incredibly complex and intractable way (e.g., by including the nature of human observation, consciousness and language itself, each having to be further described in terms of cells) is emergent in some sense, is it not?

The objection could be raised that “emergence” is just a point of view, a priori as valid as its contender: “all effect is the cause of the rule of evolution.” I don’t disagree that recognizing “emergence” is merely a point of view. Yet science is in the business of choosing an appropriate point of view. And the people interested in science are extremely complicated, physically. To these people, some layers of cause and effect are easy–easy to understand, with limitations. From these a foundation is lain, from which to understand the other layers. So “emergence,” as far as I understand, is not just the state of things being incomprehensibly complex, but also the fact that from incomprehensibly complex systems, simple structure can emerge.

For Lack of a Word

This from an encyclopedia entry:

*** is a notyetcoinedologism which refers to the practice of imposing structure on or between sets of data, in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Generally certain semantic cues are followed, resulting in a theory which is partially natural, while many connections will be found only after the choice of structure has been chosen. In its most natural degree ***ing is the process of observing structure that would be similarly observed by any from some large pool (e.g., humankind). As such, it is the bedrock for scientific theory of any kind. In its less natural degrees ***ing can be used to author mnemonic devices. It can also be used to mine new relationships between disparate sets of objects for the purpose of creating artwork, literature, music etc. An instance of *** is called a *** map. Pseudosciences may qualify as bodies of ***, although usage of the term *** presupposes a motive of playfulness and creativity. One does not *** to produce an irrefutable theory.

The origins of the word date to the year 2009 from a blog posted by Andrew Marshall, although the actual term was suggested by one of the blog’s readers. It may be a portmanteau of, or take inspiration from, the following words: algorithm, supervenience, append, arbitrary, map making, giving birth, theory weaving, superlogic, artificial, imposing, forcing, analogy, metaphor.

Examples where the modeling is mathematical include the imposition of a total or partial ordering on a set of real world items (or categories of items); the assignment of numbers to the members of a set, where qualities of the numbers are taken into consideration; the use of directed graphs to account for and suggest adjacency or local partial ordering. However, the product of *** is not usually entirely mathematical, as the natural language value of the objects involved is not forgotten. Frequently two sets with some similar interrelationships will be identified, whereby the modeling is almost entirely at the natural language level.

Concrete example: a piece of music with movements will be identified with a region containing counties. The (standard) duration of each movement gives a natural order to the movements, and the land mass of the counties gives a natural order to the counties. The two are identified accordingly. It is then noted that duration and note count are roughly correlated, as land mass and population are. We may then ask to what accuracy is population correlated with note count. As we scour the data relevant to the music and the land we might find that the number of sections in each movement corresponds precisely to one greater than the number of large rivers passing through the interior of each county. Upon such an observation, we will find a way to identify the land masses between rivers with sections of movements, perhaps still according to our land mass:duration correspondence, perhaps according to some other distinction. Having made such an identification we will observe moods of the movements and find ways of seeing each county as embodying that mood. We might, finally, write a short story involving people, each from a different county of . These characters’ personalities will share perceived moods of their corresponding musical movements. We will give a clue or two in the story, possibly referencing the piece of music in some telling context, but the *** map is regarded, here, as scaffolding around a building or the wax prototype of a bronze sculpture. Some of it will not survive.

The Posthuman Condition

In the essay The Posthuman Condition, by Kip Werking, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is quoted:

at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

This idea is a lot of fun.  I accept the truth of the conjunction, but reject the (implicit) implication that it may be likely we are simulations of essentially, our posthuman descendents.  My money is on (2) but to cover all bases, I would have daily doubles on (2),(3); (2),(1); and a triple safety bet on (1),(2),(3).  I think (1) is false, but I believe I can defend (2) and so if (3) is to be true it is not our posthuman ancestors who are administering the simulation.  Therefore (1) might as well be true: some programs just self-destruct.  

I like this idea of multiple levels of simulation, very much. My problem with (2) is that it does not allow for necessary hierarchies of complexity in the levels of simulations.  Let the administrators of this rat maze we call the universe be called , where we are .   Suppose ’s universe is not deterministic, in the sense that its nature forever remains a mystery to them.  Then by what we understand about chaotic behavior, it seems unlikely that any simulation (leading to  and beyond) will parallel the evolution of .  Perhaps such a scenario still qualifies as an “ancestor-simulation,” however different the initial conditions and rules of evolution. But the time scale which separates  from their ancestors who may have resembled  is vast. It seems impossible that an approximate system would parallel ’s universe enough to qualify as “their own evolutionary history.”

 

On the other hand, suppose lives in a deterministic universe, meaning a set of rules can be found, and from these the precise nature of the universe is determined.*  Suppose further that this determinism is discrete in space and time and finite in rules of evolution.  With such strong hypotheses surely we are capable of allowing miniature accurate simulations of the universe, and in fact simulations within simulations.  Yet even here we have a problem of resources.  The universe cannot be embedded as a proper subset of itself, let alone run, as a simulation, at twice or ten times the speed of the ambient duplicate.  If it could be embedded as a proper subset of itself than an infinite regression would be necessary, which presupposes self-similarity and precludes a discrete universe.  Maybe this is okay.  Maybe  will get sufficient information by looking at some proper subset of the universe.  Still, with all the quantum computing  may have at its disposal, it cannot compress the universe, since it would have to compress the behavior at the quantum level, too, et cetera.  So in this case the smallest a computer would have to be would be several times as large as our solar system, in which case a lot of tricks would have to be used to seal off the outside universe (such as visual simulation of distant galaxies).  The engineering that would allow such a structure is nearly unfathomable, but even permitting such a computer, what hope is there for the existence of  or ?  So the fantastic idea of many levels of simulation relies on the levels being qualitatively distinct.  

 

Of course, we made the assumption that the universe is discrete to be generous to the possibility of running faithful simulations.  In the end it was used in our argument that such simulations can hardly be faithful.  Let’s suppose that the universe is not discrete.  Then, for example, it may be that the natural laws repeat themselves in self-similar ways, all the way down.  In these cases it may be possible to embed a faithful model of the universe as a proper subset of itself, but there will always be the problem of construction and of setting initial conditions.  How does one construct and program a computer that faithfully simulates a universe with an infinite regression of physical states and laws?  Only very roughly, and that with exceptionally fine tools.  In conclusion, I cannot argue against the possibility of universes within universes, and simulations within simulations, but in these cases the different levels of simulation are qualitatively distinct, and therefore it should not be possible for a posthuman species to run simulations of earlier stages of its species with any sort of accuracy. 

 

*[We might call this weak determinism, as it does not necessarily follow that states can be predicted before they occur.  As far as the distinction that there is but one future, I don't believe this definition is well-defined, since in any universe a hypothetical oracle, (e.g., future us), there is tautologically but one future.]