Norwegian Dreamworks 2
November 9th, 2014
Certain Quentin the Sweetheart (knowers of Lithuanian language will easily recognize whom I’m referring to) has posited, that nothing, except contingent things, necessarily exists – in other words – only necessary being is Chaos.
How so, one asks, if reason (science, mathematics) shows us, that things are orderly?
I want you to imagine being in a dream – that you are almost simultaneously a robot in 2500 AD and a nomad of 5000 BC. Certainly both experiences are nothing alike, and while certain order is found in both of them, it probably is a different order for both kinds (of experience).
Ok, if it’s still not clear where I’m going – these are two parts of Chaos, for robot – nomad experience wouldn’t make sense, for nomad, well, obviously, vice versa. They are both orderly only from certain spacetime point, let’s assume, from me being woken up and thinking of both (overlapping) dreams. Here we find third order. Third part of Chaos.
It seems like Chaos wants us to see order, yet have no clue of an experience of different possible world inferred from the rules of this order.
Everything is orderly, but doesn’t make sense.
Nothing is orderly, but (it) makes sense.
Wouldn’t it be somewhat in character of Chaos to have a part of its existence that necessarily wants to show/see other parts as consistent, as orderly? A sort of an eye of Chaos, that is possible for very specifically configured spacetime. Necessary contingency that sees itself as contingent necessity. For a chaosmic second. Which could last a human life, perhaps some more. A part, which at some point undoubtedly will stop existing, chaos, thus and then, becoming blind.
To understand and to feel are two different things, yet, we feel like we can understand, and we understand that without feeling, our orderly acceptance of spacetime flow becomes nothing. Like a mimicry of chaos without its seeing part.
I can understand you, but i can’t feel you – this is a maxim, which delivers us from evil. And good.
I can’t understand you, but I feel you – this is a recognition of our humility and chaotic humanity, or, simply put, Chaos as existing through its eye.
There’s a space here for ethics and politics, but the time is not yet.
As I conceive those things in a half-dreaming state, I ascertain myself to explicate what I mean, because it all suddenly makes sense, yet I keep getting sleepier and the thought of Quentin the Sweetheart makes me sad. As if I had lost a friend (which everyone has done) in a chaotic misunderstanding.
I am now a robot in its dying stages, but since I am a robot (I, at the time), in my dying moment I know myself as a nomad, as butterfly and as a failed half-mad, and probably a bit more stupid than that, writer. I also know myself as many more things, some violently necessary, some gently contingent.
The beeping of a by-flying empty spacecraft sucks out my last moments of awareness, subsequently killing me.
I live no longer as a robot. I die as one.
Perhaps I will, in some distant dream, be reborn as an already dead famous French philosopher, who is best known for having inspired shortly, but widely lived political stance, which main slogan proclaimed: we can’t understand robots, but you can try feeling them, which, for its part, will have had inspired endless scholastically oriented debates about the meaning of a first self-portrait of a robot (of a dubious authenticity), signed with transelectricaly engraved equation: 1+1= ↑
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