Some Important Implications of the Chaon-Convolution Theory
by John Cryan
Anyone who has studied the history of science even casually knows science is not magic. It takes hardwork, discipline, organization, persistence, communication, resources, and luck. And students of science are increasingly revealing the human elements, and consequent flaws, of the enterprise – as it was, as it developed, and as the hollow behemoth it has become. That’s right, science has no central
core: no authority, no arbiter, no umpire. Never has. Instead, it depends on two things: success through numbingly boring repeat results – the more, and the more exactly similar, the better; and popular acceptance of those results. That, in itself, is a flaw.
Science is also a pink-, white- and blue-collar profession. Always has been. It historically has exhibited an extreme form of the hierarchical tendencies and consequent inequities found in other modes of human societal endeavors. Because it is a search for new knowledge, it is highly competitive. Its rewards are individual authority (generally becoming more and more narrowly specialized over time) and recognition, prestige, and the consequent power and resources that flow from these. All of this rests on the backs of new discoveries, their integration into the rest of science and its arts of application, and the reorganization of science itself through the syntheses of new and old discoveries.
Science, therefore, like everything creative in existence, is a compound-compositing process. A continuum of progress. Bricks of knowledge being laid one on top of the others. Running faster and faster. Or is it? What are the limits of science? Does science have an end?
The simplest way to answer those questions is to look at the other side of science. The other side of
science is the very thing science is designed to conquer: Ignorance. But science never conquers ignorance. There’s always more to know, better.
Then there is Forgetfulness. Decay. Loss of Information. The Death of Knowledge.
These are the parts of science, like our own deaths, scientists would rather ignore. No glory in them.
Nor is there glory in the loss of talent, of ability, of technique. Agency. Even reputations fade.
Fame is the goddess just behind the next bush. In science, as in everything else, Fate rules.
Sometimes that death is deliberately induced. No-one today could build a Fokker Triplane. Nor a
Supermarine Spitfire. These things exist, on paper, in the imagination, even as facsimiles or
restorations. But to build one from scratch, just like the originals? Not possible. Why?
Because the science, and its technological spawn, have moved on. As beautiful (and deadly) these
objects once were, they have been left behind in the rapid march of aviation science. They’re no
longer needed.
So the compound-composited Taj Mahal of ‘pure’ science towers pristinely above the factory ruins of the many eras of applied science it birthed in quick succession, scattered across the landscape, each abandoned as the next was built. And if one looks closely at that high edifice, it too shows the decay that comes from lack of maintenance and the ravages of spacetime. Chaonic Erasure is the Fate that rules all. Replacement is our only possible response. Replacement is our flawed human version of Progress. The price of Modernity is to abandon the past. This includes especially knowledge of the past. Talent of the past. Technique of the past. In this sense, from compound-composited buildup, to
abandonment and replacement, the physical universe moves on. Evolution exacts a steep price.
I am but a single person. The Chaon-Convolution Theory, as it is laid out in Moths of the Past, was my idiosyncratic attempt to solve a very specific, narrow problem: What’s going on with those Buck Moths? Yes, it exposed once again the existence of a larger problem: the Species Problem, or what exactly is a species? And contemplation of that problem, in turn, led to many of the other Problems in
Science, until they all mushed together in a giant snowball of mashed-up continua, and rolled down the hill, getting bigger and bigger ’til it ran into the Wall of Ignorance, smashing a giant hole through it and ending up in . . . the Land of Ignorance, of course.
The Chaon-Convolution Theory is a beginning, not an end. To create that end, or rather make progress toward a suitable End of Science (wherein we know at least what we need to know, or at the very least what we need to learn and how to learn it), I need help. I got it, in spades, from my old partner-in-art, Bob, my friendly neighborhood polymath who can turn anyone’s dross to gold. Otherwise there’d have been no Moths of the Past, and no new beginning.
This thing needs to be built out, fast. If for no other reason than when you link it with another solo voyager’s work, Jon Thoreau Scott and his Top-Down Tectonics, what comes out is we’re out of time.
To try to prime the pump a bit more, I’m listing out some of its biggest implications. There’s so many more waiting out there to be discovered and shown to the world. Please have at it.
The Past is Occluded
We will always have a Universe filled with mystery.
Free Chaonic Erasure is happening all the time. Spacetime is not only busy erasing information, it is
erasing everything it has created, even as it is in the process of simultaneously creating more physical stuff. The big question is how fast. The short answer is slow enough that we can be in denial about it,
at least down here on good ol’ Planet Earth, but fast enough that the past is occluded.
We attempt, subconsciously mostly, to think we can get around this fundamental fact of physics. We see ourselves and all of Nature busy procreating, and assume those copies are identical, more or less,
to their forebears. They are and they aren’t. They’re evolving. They’re different enough to make a
difference, sometimes a big one. They live, and will live, in a time and space different but overlapping with ours.
We leave little messages in bottles, in the form of books, other writings, music and art, and depend on the world to cherish and preserve them. We try to carry our cultures forward. We used to deliberately
bury lots of important stuff – in caves, barrows, under pyramids and mounds. We later unearthed it and
‘preserved’ it in museums. But it’s not – preserved, that is. Those little buggers, the free chaons, are busy demolishing all of it in slow motion. Heck, they’re busy demolishing us as we write and read this.
Nothing temporal is exempt from constant slo-mo erasure, not even light. Even when it’s the fastest mo in the universe.
What happens in the case of light, though, like paper foxing, is it redshifts as it goes along and ages. It gets weaker and weaker as the photons get smaller and smaller and their wavelengths get longer and longer, until they eventually disappear from free chaonic resistance, or gravity. Gravity eats light.
Science has decreed redshift has two causes: gravity (lots of it) or speedy recession. Those are just the
quickest and most obvious-appearing manifestations, the ends of their respective continua. The slower ones are happening to every light beam all the time. It just takes a lot of distance, and time (=spacetime!), for the simple movement of most light beams to redshift enough that we could measure it, if we could figure a way to take those measurements zillions of light-years apart in spacetime. Since we can’t, we will have to try a workaround to factor in the ‘normal’ aging of light as it travels long distances. The fact that our perception of light only happens when a photon crashes into a receptor, be it our eyes or a telescope or through a telescope to our eyes, means we have no idea what happened to
that photon while it was traveling. We only know it through its impact – a hit-and-disappear. The same goes for any kind of ‘particle’ detectors. One-stop shopping means one can’t compare the goods.
This fundamental limitation on measurement will crop up in many other discussions. Turns out single points of view, or measurements, are a fundamental cause of bias, and therefore error, in all the sciences.
There Are No Constants or Standards
Imagine that beam of light traveling through spacetime. Specifically, imagine one that makes it all the way to your eye, naked or vision-enhanced by a telescope, from deep space.
It has traveled through ever-shifting free chaonic densities and movements. It has been slowed and curved, mostly slightly, but in some cases, if passing near a black hole or other free chaon-dense area of high gravity, a great deal. Its path wiggles all the way from its origin in some faraway star to your telescope eyepiece. As it travels, that wiggly path vanishes behind its freed individual photons. Each photon, though coming from a common source, plows a unique way, the aggregate paths shifting like a streaming veil with the movements of the star and the spacetime matrix the light beam flies through.
There is no fixed point anywhere in this journey, no permanent, or even stable, landmark. Everything around each TTT-cycle-powered photon, and the spacetime matrix it passes through (and uses and discards to make its way) is in motion, moving in all different ways, velocities, and directions.
There seems to be a fixed point at journey’s end: your eye. When each photon from the light beam hits it, its life is over. Its kinetic mass and energy transfers most of itself to your eye.
The key to science, as opposed to just guessing (something most humans are actually pretty good at, but that’s another topic), is measurement. To do a measurement correctly, you need at least one fixed point (a constant), and a known length (a standard). Even to count, one must start somewhere everyone can agree on. That somewhere is the number one. All the other numbers are made of ones. (Zero is a special case.)
Constants and standards are things people have to agree upon. Otherwise, we’d each all have our own. There would be no culture or civilization, just individual cave people. Actually, we’d be extinct, or more precisely, would never have existed, if we could not agree on constants and standards. This is true of most animals, many plants, and actually, pretty much all of life. It’s the basis for co-evolution.
Constants and standards imply limits. The temporal plane is distinguished by them. Each of its innumerable constituent continua have them, in some form. The most common one is paradox, or continua distinguished by opposing endpoints: black-white, hot-cold, wet-dry, pH 0 to 14, etc. (Actually, there is no pH zero; that’s an example of how zero is an exceptional concept.) There are also seemingly unlimited continua, but that’s an illusion in the temporal plane. Cycles break; endless lines do come to an end; Gordian knots (yes, even ones made of software) can be unraveled.
Let’s go back to our light beam for a nanosecond. Yeah, we forgot something big – Time. Time has a way of getting away from us, or us from it, when we’re engrossed in writing – and reading.
When we take a measurement, we’re taking it in space and time. Spacetime. This is an absolute constant – true anywhere in the Universe. One of the very few. Why? Because spacetime is a living, breathing, constantly changing thing. It is in constant motion – all of it, down to every last free and bound chaon comprising it. Nothing stands still in spacetime. Some of it, though, seems to. Just long enough that we humans can use it as a semi-fixed point. A constant, or a standard composed of a bunch of those seemingly fixed points. This is the basis of Nodal Bias, the built-in tendency of humans to find, or create, constants and standards. Plato’s Eidos takes this tendency to its ultimate extreme. It is at once the glory, and the Original Sin, of the Western world, animated by the Allegory of the Cave.
That constant motion is Time. Time, the Force that gives life, and then takes it back.
And because of that constant motion, Time varies. The greater the aggregate motion, the faster it runs.
This is the basis of Time Inflation. It takes more Time to slow time’s passage.
And each instant in Time, no matter how small, the Universe is reborn. All the chaons are rearranged in spacetime. Each instant takes place in a different Universe. A New Universe, that comes from the Old Universe that preceded it. A Universe without fixed constants and standards. This is the Universe we live in.
But here, on the thin surface of rocky planet Earth that can support us, we experience the appearance of fixed constants and standards. That’s because they last long enough to seem unchanging in one human lifetime, or even many. Even events seem immutable, as they repeat with only slight variations: the phases of the Moon, the flow of the seasons, the transit of Old Sol, waves crashing on the shore. The rhythms of Nature. The cycles of life.
Earth is so salubrious a nursery that it has lulled us into a false complacency, even as we individually struggle to survive. The outcome of that complacency is a desire to conserve. To save the best, whatever we conceive that to be, of a beautiful world, and pass it forward. It is a feeling both noble and easily perverted.
One of its most noble products is the edifice of Science – what we have accumulated through a process of rigorous, multi-tested guesswork and managed to pass down over the past few thousand years. We call this lore Knowledge, because we agree that it is. We have converged on it, the way Newton and Leibniz converged on the Calculus, one of the glories of the scientific method. A way to converge on those nodal limits we call Answers. Solutions. Results. The opposite of Eureka!, which is the reward of the lucky observer or experimentalist. Science, like everything else, is a paradox, stretching in its continuum span from observation to explanation to prediction.
But because there are no eternal constants and standards, we must now re-open everything in that Book of Knowledge. To grow a new Science out of the old, we must take was was expedient, what worked, at least for a while, and for certain purposes, and find its limitations, its untruth. This will be a painful process, but absolutely necessary if we are to move forward as one people, the Human Race.
And we are out of time. There is no time for internecine conflict. There is little time even for rational thought and discussion. And even littler for effective action. The solution, ultimately, is to build a new science out of the old, as fast as possible, and use it to save ourselves and the rest of Creation on Earth.
We Really Don’t Know How Old Anything Is
That very first second after the Big Bang could have lasted a billion of our current Earthly years, or more.
Or less. We can’t be sure, exactly, but it was definitely a lot longer than a current second is. Why?
Because there was a lot more ambient Time around back then.
The Universe was full up on Time when it was born. It’s been heading to empty (= ‘Out of Time’) ever since.
That first, so-called ‘rapid,’ spacetime inflation was powered solely by Big Bang Momentum. Scientists call the state of that early universe a ‘plasma,’ which we know exists now as a sort of dense hot glowing gas in places like the Sun.
But actually, it was probably a ‘super-plasma,’ a state so hot there’s nothing like it left in our much cooler present universe.
It’s even possible the early Universe went through several unknown, and unknowable, super-states before cooling down enough to only have the ones we think we know now: plasma, gas, liquid, solid.
The physical states, of course, like everything else, run on continua.
So it would be prudent to leave room on the solid end to incorporate those additional states we’ll never truly know (i. e., empirically speaking) inside a black hole as well. ‘Chaonic magma’, anyone?
Or maybe they belong on the plasma end. Hard to say. Perhaps the physical states continuum is a circle. We may never find out, in a scientific way.
Spacetime is a wonderfully mysterious place, and is designed to remain that way. There are many things about it we will never completely understand.
One of them is Time Inflation. We can not measure it because we haven’t been around long enough as scientists to try. And even if we were, we have no frame of reference to work off of. We’re back to the
Measurement Quandary again, of no fixed constants or standards.
The second era of rapid spacetime inflation is what we’re living in now. By all recent astronomical calculations, we are well into it, perhaps even fairly close to The End, when the Universe breaks up and fades away. We don’t really know. By some observations and calculations (these days almost all astronomy is interpolated), parts of the Universe are moving away from other parts at greater than the (supposedly fixed, but not really; see the previous discussions) speed of light.
This second era is powered by Big Bang Momentum Plus. The ‘Plus’ is Photon Power: all those tiny light particles zinging around the Universe (or rather, wiggling; again, see previous) using TTT, shedding free chaons along the way. Photon Power is a sort of Ninth Force Manifestation: it embodies a transfer of force from Electromagnetism to Gravity. In studying that transfer, or at least modeling it, lies a key to uniting what seem like completely opposed forces (Gravity vs. everybody else), but aren’t. The other point of force unification lies in the true operations of Black Holes, particularly their enigmatic, central Dualities. As I’ve said before, it’s complicated. Convoluted, even. Mysterious.
Earth-years are the closest thing we have to a fixed constant. They were built up using Earth-days, which were divided into Earth-hours, Earth-minutes, and Earth-seconds. Since they don’t divide into one another totally cleanly, especially when you factor in Moon-revolutions and a religiously economic grouping of days known as the Week, the way we keep time here on Earth is a bit messy. Always has been. But we try. And we’ve gotten so precise at measuring it locally and temporally (i. e., over the past few decades, as opposed, say to the past million years [we should last that long]), we think we have a good handle on Time.
So we’ve gone ahead and built a lot of science on that. The problem is: it’s wrong.
How wrong, we do not know. But wrong enough to be a second, major source of Occlusion of the Past.
And definitely more and more wrong as you go back further and further in Time.
From carbon dating, to dating the geologic eras of the Earth, to trying to age the Universe, the errors magnify and deepen, past the point of uselessness to absurdity.
The margins of error are manageable for a window of a few thousand years back. After that, they pile up bigger and bigger, faster and faster. The reverse, or mirror, of the expansion of the Universe.
The reason(s), in a nutshell: Time Inflation, plus Chaonic Erasure. These two processes of expanding spacetime conspire to render the past unknowable in any precise way.
However, we can, and do, know something of the past. Just how much of that something we can salvage depends on a number of factors.
One, and perhaps the most important, is the existence of written and other physical, especially archaeological, objects and records. These serve as time markers based on Earthly annums.
After that, we’re on our own in a wilderness of shifting continua. We’re back in the Measurement Quandary quagmire again.
We are going to have to invent whole new branches of science to overcome Time Occlusion going backward into the past, and Time Blindness going forward into the future. It appears for now we can live comfortably only in a small circle of light, a time bubble, so to speak, centered on the moment. The Present. We are doomed to misunderstand the past, and fear the future. This is a fairly recent development for humanity. Not so long ago, we were worried about lions, tigers, and bears. Snakes and spiders. Our fellow humans, especially in neighboring tribes. Oh, yeah, that last one, we’ve not gotten past that yet (the ones before; we’ve wiped a lot of them out). But some of us are trying.
So far, we’ve identified some startling holes in what for many is settled science. It seems a Second Age of Ignorance is about to overwhelm us, first from the wholesale denial of proven facts driven by Internet-powered drivel (entertaining drivel yes, but deadly nonetheless), and now, from a new set of theories which may blow enough holes through the whole edifice to make it look like Swiss cheese, not science. And, our science-based ‘progress’ has put us on multiple, converging paths to extinction.
But not to worry. Humanity, and our biosphere, have faced tests like this before, and both have made it through. We have to focus on fixing our attitudes, and our science. We have the tools to do that. All we have to do is muster the drive, resources, and solidarity.
The Second Age of Ignorance
We now know enough to plumb much deeper into what we do not know. To learn its shapes and contours, its glimmerings of possibility and forbidden places, opening up at least parts of what remains (it’s bigger than you think) of that most mysterious realm, the Land of Ignorance. We also, using the Chaon-Convolution Theory, can build the tools necessary to make those dives. Just the few preliminary forays relayed here have shown how easy it can be to get started, and what startling changes to our current science lie in the offing. Imagine how exciting it will get if a whole bunch of artist-scientists, then the whole vast array, jumps in.
I want to start with one small part of the realm of ignorance, the Second Age of Genetic Ignorance. Mostly, because I know a little something about it, partly because it is very important we push back its veils, and a little bit because it involves my totem animals, the Buckies.
But first we need to be clear on what ignorance is. Yes. it is mostly what we do not know. But equally important, it is an attitude. You have probably heard the term ‘moron with an attitude.’ I have actually,
sorry to say, used it. Deservedly, I might add. We all do stupid things. Some of us do them proudly.
Most of those circumstances were less than scientific. They involved sudden, nasty encounters. They could have escalated into something worse, but, lucky for me, I was born with some restraint. The epithet usually followed the incidents, often by a substantial amount of time, in recounting to third parties.
The Second Age of Genetic Ignorance is actually much more vast than one would think in the era of
rapid-fire genomics and genetic profiling. This is partly due to another fundamental quality of science:
rather than being solely an edifice of the ages built up by many participants, it also is at least partially a teardown-in-waiting. Not only is it missing important things, but some of it is poorly wrought, built on a foundation not only of Knowledge, but Ignorance. The Land of Ignorance exists partially within the Realm of Knowledge. This is a treacherous thing to deal with, hard to detect and correct. Part of the reason is that the cousin of ‘moron with an attitude’ is ‘smarty pants,’ aka ‘too smart for your own good.’ Humility can be lacking, particularly in accomplished and decorated scientists.
At the same time, literally, all science, like all other aspects of existence, is of its time. For many reasons, it is hard to impossible for scientists to take accurate looks at times much before, or much after, the actual time they are looking. And the looking itself, the Quandary of Measurement, takes a much bigger toll than any working scientist now would like to admit. [Hopefully, that will change. Measurements need to take into account their own true limitations. The irony here is that in quantum physics, they do (c.f. Schroedinger’s collapsing equation; Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, etc.), not because the scientists wanted it that way, but because Nature forced them to.]
Another reason science is time-limited is due to the pernicious effects of money and its harlequin, politics. Modern science MUST get results, fast. And they must be PRACTICAL. Useful. Able to be immediately converted to applications. Technology. New tools. And ultimately, more money.
So investigations and experiments are largely short, fast, and dirty. Even very expensive ones. In contrast, the Chaon-Convolution Theory emerged out of one person’s ‘lifetime experiment’ for a reason. It bridged enough time, and caught enough phenomena that are fleeting, practically invisible, and leave almost no footprints, to reveal and connect some fundamental truths about Nature. The investigation was not bound by the usual strictures of modern science. There is a big lesson in that.
The biggest reason science is of, and largely good only in, its own time, and in addition, its own place (placetime!), in our case, on planet Earth (Earth Bias!), is because those times, and those places, to paraphrase Peter, Paul, and Mary, are always a’changin’. Wait long enough, and they’ve changed so much that most of the previously-accepted science is anywhere from slightly askew and inapplicable, to utterly useless, save as history. Why? Because of the ever-shifting hairball of practically infinite numbers of interacting continua that constitute the megadimensional matrix of Reality. Powered by the rapidly accelerating, outward expanding bubble of spacetime, combined with the pernicious effects of Chaonic Erasure balanced by the renewal of fundamental material creation spewed out by active black holes. The Hindus got all this right (creation, temporary preservation, destruction) millennia ago. That’s why they’re the only surviving major polytheistic religion. The structure of their faith kvells with Nature, to borrow a term from another surviving ancient faith that got the poetry of Creation right.
So why are we so messed up about genes? Mostly, because we worship them. They are one of the Holy Grails of science. The Philosophers’ Stone is another. And the Theory of Everything.
When Franklin, Crick and Watson came up with their astounding discovery, the godless, mechanistic 20th Century worldview, which, combined with the half-knowledge of Darwinism, had unleashed unimaginable nightmares, was still in full bloom. It had been tested in two World Wars, a Depression in between, and what seemed at the time an endless Cold War. Nuclear Stalemate. A Frozen Ragnarok.
Into this war-weary cultural environment came news that the master movers of life were little molecules. Not long afterward, popular media were officially proclaiming God was dead. And everyone in biology pivoted to pursue molecular mechanics. Natural history was out.
Cracking the ‘genetic code’ was in. The work was painstaking, and proceeded slowly. By the end of the millennium the human genome had been sequenced. The 21st Century brought what seemed more progress, as the sequencing became fast and cheaper. Genes began to be used to trace history, solve criminal cases, and figure out paternity and ancestry. Trial and error gene manipulation began, sped up by cutting and pasting techniques borrowed from bacteria and viruses. Progress was in the air.
Then a wall was hit. It turned out the master controllers were themselves controlled – by other molecules. It was not a hierarchy with genes on top. It was a very messy, complicated, convoluted web of physical and molecular interaction. More stunning, it was not confined to a single body, but involved the totality of life, from smallest to largest. Physiology and ecology had merged.
Still, there were spectacular successes. A bunch of them came together just in time to battle a killer virus that emerged suddenly from the increasingly hazardous and ever-expanding urban-wilderness interface. While the results were not as useful in the real world of realpolitik as the discoverers had hoped, the discoveries themselves kept alive the ideal that genes would be the key to understanding and manipulating life.
We find ourselves now at a genetic crossroads. We can keep pouring resources into the single-minded pursuit of the false Eidos of genetic control, or subsume the effort into a larger, more encompassing one that recognizes genes are but one part of a three-part system that includes the rest of the body and the environment that body lives in, including all other creatures, and the physical and chemical milieu.
In the end, the story of gene worship is a microcosm of human nodal bias. We keep looking for that Philosophers’ Stone, the easy thing that will solve all our problems. It doesn’t exist. Instead, there is the reality of a far more complex, dynamic Nature, that relies on interacting continua of processes.
The Genomic Fragmentation Reserve
Free chaons smash genes. They do it day-in and day-out. We call it mutagenesis. But it’s much bigger than that.
They smash chromosomes to pieces. They alter genes into new genes.
And they keep on doing it long after we, and the rest of life, are dead.
The result is a reservoir of tiny genomic fragments – swirling in the air, floating in the water, buried in the earth. The Genomic Fragmentation Reserve. It’s the Fort Knox of genes.
Money is the primary carrier of culture. It is the fungible template from which all else in a culture is built and carried forward. It depends on two things sometimes in short supply with humans – trust and good faith.
Genes are the money of ecology and evolution. Convolution. They are also the fungible templates of its culture. From these tiny packets all life is built, and carried forward. Genomes are like the plans for the Fokker Triplane. Activate those plans, and voila!, you have a Fokker Triplane. That’s called adaptation. Adaptation to a particular niche of spacetime. And not just adaptation – layered adaptation, with a history. And with the Fokker Triplane, a particularly perilous niche. Fast extinction looms.
Each living planet has a culture of ecology and evolution. Its denizens have planetary particularity. Its Convolution Culture carries forward memories of the past, encoded in its genes. But those memories get warped. Distorted. Recycled and re-used. Over and over again. This is the nature of the chaonic Convolution Web. Just as there is a Genomic Fragmentation Reserve, there is the same for Knowledge.
The recycling and re-using is primarily carried on by viruses. There are more viruses on our planet, Earth, than everything else living put together – exponentially more. Trillions of kinds of viruses. Burgeoning in the air, land, and seas. Even floating in outer space. Viruses can do this because they’re half-life. They occupy the pivot point on the continuum of life and death.
Viruses have a very bad rap, especially now, but the vast majority of viruses are ‘good’ viruses. That’s because they scarf up dead genes from the Genomic Fragmentarium Reserve and incorporate them into their bodies. Sometimes whole new kinds of viruses come from half-dead zombie pieces of chaon-battered genetic junk. Viruses patrol the shadow world between life and death, and turn death back to life. They are Earth’s equivalent of Tatooine’s Jawas.
Viruses mostly transfer genes to bacteria, their most abundant hosts. But they also do that to all other living things they infect, including us. This whole-gene, genomic-fragment, and occasionally, whole- virus, transfer supercharges evolution on top of the turbocharging done by chaonic mutation. It creates many more possibilities for natural selection to winnow, hone, or let spread.
Bacteria themselves also transfer genes to many other organisms, but it’s the viruses that do the heavy lifting. Viruses form not only the base of the food pyramid, but by escaping it so easily and felicitously, also its doppelganger, the gene transfer pyramid. They undergird and permeate both.
So the next time you think of a virus (most of us at this point never want to think about them again, but unfortunately, bad virus reality is not going away), please remember we can’t live without them, either.
The Fates of Artificial Chemicals, or, A History of Stupidity Revisited
Shortly after Trump won, I fired off a tongue-in-cheek screed to The New York Times called ‘A Brief History of Stupidity.’ It wasn’t published, of course, but it got a few wry laughs, I’m sure, and helped inspire a Times Magazine cover cartoon a few months later with a T-shirted Neanderthal and modern. The Neanderthal’s shirt had an arrow pointing to the Sapiens saying ‘I’m with Stupid.’
My essay connected a few obvious dots to arrive at our current calamity, the gist being we’re animals, animals are lazy and spend most of their time sleeping, our animal brains like quick and easy solutions, so we jump to often mistaken conclusions, and this is the basis for our stupidity. Basically, we’re fools.
After that, I transformed my wife’s cute little drawings of our newly departed pet rat Sammy into the not-so-cute Nite Ratti. I tried to do a two-panel strip a day, but I was retired, and therefore, officially not only free to be stupid, but also lazy. I quit after a hundred or so strips, amazed at how Charles M. Schulz had kept it up for 50 years.
I then got down to serious work trying to interpret the Buck Moth data set I’d collected for 50 years, offset about 10 from Schulz’ mighty effort. After that project blew up and birthed Moths of the Past, I gave ambition a rest. Now, in the wake of all the revelations explicated in that mini-opus, I realized I missed something. Something big. About stupidity.
Over the course of more or less the same time it took us to really +#%* up our atmosphere, and therefore the entire planet, we humans have created between a half-million and a million artificial chemicals, depending on if you include isomers, isotopes, and other variants. And we’ve unleashed these rare atoms and new molecules onto unsuspecting virginal Mother Nature without thought or heed.
We have literally no idea of their biospheric and human fates. Oh, sure, we’ve ID’d some of the worst offenders, and monitor them, sort of, usually in relatively rich cities. And we have, again, sort of, some idea how certain called-out really bad ones like DDT break down into DDE and God knows what else. But do we really know their true fates? Where they went, what they turned into as they broke down in various environments, and how they affected everything and everyone they touched? And each other?
The answer is a resounding NO.
To make matters worse, now that we know about free chaons, the ante has been upped. Those chaons are what’s breaking everything down, all together (now and always). How do the breaking-down new chemicals interact with the breaking-down old ones, the original pristine components of our Adam-and-Eve biosphere? And what about our Adam-and-Eve bodies? And, and here’s where the stupidity really comes in bigtime, brains?
One thing we know for sure: there are no more Adam-and-Eve bodies. Not now. Not for a long time. And with each generation, the situation is getting worse and worse. Our bodies, our fetuses, our babies, are born more and more polluted with each passing generation. This is the compound compositing from Hell.
Everyone knows how the Romans did themselves in drinking absinthe from lead-lined goblets. We need to spend billions, right now, finding out what those chemicals are and what they are doing as they are breaking down. They are clearly a big cause of our accelerating stupidity epidemic. Also a lot of other problems. The only solution is seek and destroy. Eliminate all the stupid chemicals we created.
Biodiversity is the Effect. Convolution is the Cause.
We just recently lost the Avatar of Biodiversity, the famous Harvard ant man and all-around ‘Super-Naturalist’, E. O. Wilson. In his 92 years on the planet, he did more to advance the public cause of a dying biosphere than anyone. He will be missed in the struggles to come.
One of his early legacies was The Theory of Island Biogeography, concocted with a brilliant mathematical ecologist who died young, John MacArthur. That 1967 book spawned a tiny cottage industry of special people looking at the relationship between geography and diversity. In summary, what they all found is you need more area to have more biodiversity. Makes perfect sense.
After reading that slim tome in college mid-’70s, I was inspired to team up with ace environmental attorney Lew Oliver and Don Rittner, among others, to make a push to save what had become my ‘Pine Barrens Home Away from Home’, the rapidly disappearing Albany Pine Bush. I realized if ever there was a place that qualified as a lonely ‘habitat island’, it was the Pine Bush, surrounded by the menacing, ever-expanding Capital District minilopolis of Albany, Schenectady, and Troy.
I came up on the spot with The Minimum Area Question, directly derived from MacArthur and Wilson’s equations in the book: How Many Acres, In What Locations and Configuration, Are Necessary to Save the Pine Bush Ecosystem and its Endangered Biota [like the famous Karner Blue Butterfly, described by none other than Vladimir Nabokov, and, of course, the Buck Moth]?
That question powered a series of lawsuits by the group Save the Pine Bush, which Lew won, every last one of them. They legally enshrined the nascent notions that cumulative environmental impacts must be examined, and that biodiversity depends on the amount of undeveloped area.
A decade later, the same tactic was expanded to stop all development in the Long Island Pine Barrens by adding an additional criterion to be considered – the amount of undeveloped land needed to preserve the sole source drinking water aquifers beneath the feet of over three million people. That megasuit was successful at the first appellate level, but lost at the highest state court, partially due to a scandal involving the then-chief judge, who heard the case but resigned before the decision. The plaintiff Long Island Pine Barrens Society then regrouped, and fought a vicious, decades-long legal and political battle to get 100,000 of the most expensive acres in the US acquired and preserved in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, the many destructive forces described in Moths of the Past (see esp. p. 34) set loose by humanity’s accelerating population explosion multiplied and metastasized. It is long past the time where even enormous fractional land or sea wars can be fought over biosphere preservation, one at a time, even if there were the money and dedicated people to fight them. We must deal with what’s happening to the whole world at once. And we must do it yesterday.
The reason is not so much we’ve boxed ourselves into a corner, though we have. It is that the biosphere relies on the entire surface of the Earth to function. Covid has illuminated that fact in a bad way.
And the function we’re talking about is Convolution. Convolution is the continuous, compound-compositing process of evolution that creates the nodal phenomenon of biodiversity – all those diverse semispecies that make up our current biosphere. Saving as many of them as possible is imperative, because future biodiversity depends on what evolves out of them. But it is not enough. In addition to that, we need to revive the Convolution process itself. It is near-dead, its delicate dance stilled without players or space to roam. Its resurrection requires the restoration of almost all of Earth to wilderness.
Unleashing High Energy on a Low Energy Planet
Earth has been receding from the Sun since it first formed, due to galactic free chaonic densification from increasing TTT. It has also been cooling since then.
It had just recently, in geologic time, reached the point where it got cool and geologically quiescent enough that a series of Ice Ages could happen. We evolved in this new era and environment.
But not long before, a bit further back in geologic time, things were very different. Our planet was an unrecognizable, rockin’-sockin’, high-energy engine. Much hotter, more active, and supersized than now. I’m talking about not only the famous Age of Dinosaurs, but also the ages that immediately preceded them, full of giant everything, from tree ferns and cycad-like things the size of redwoods, to enormous horsetails and club mosses, three-foot wingspan dragonflies, and foot-long cockroaches and mantises. We humans wouldn’t have survived more than a few minutes in places like that.
It took enormous amounts of energy to power these super-tropical, earthwide ecosystems. There had to be more sunlight, more oxygen, more carbon dioxide, more plant uptake of the carbon dioxide, more volcanoes erupting to produce the carbon dioxide, etc. A faster, much more intense everything: carbon cycle, water cycle (much more rain, in some places continuous), organic decay and soil formation rates, etc. The very plates carrying the continents moved much more quickly, too.
By the time we came along, there were still some very large plants and animals, but they were adapted to a much cooler, lower-energy world. They spent much more time at rest, because real winter had developed and deepened, taking over more of the world for longer periods. Hibernation, dormancy, deciduousness, thick fur, heavy scaling, warmbloodedness, sunseeking, basking – all the adaptations so familiar to us now developed during this more recent period.
But this was an era of diminution. Almost all living things were getting smaller, and at the same time, more diverse. Evolution had picked up speed because there were more free chaons causing mutations.
At the same time, there was less energy, cycles had slowed, and faster time inflation had kicked in.
We threw an energy bomb into all these gently continuous developments, by starting, then increasing, then accelerating, the burning of concentrated and decayed organic remnants of those earlier, energy-rich eras. The result is we made every single living thing on Earth, including ourselves, less fit.
We threw off everything – all the finely-tuned, continuous adaptive adjustments made by literally millions of semispecies, especially the larger ones, and the semispecies trying to emerge from them. We did it by dropping fossil energy from that high energy-density and -expenditure period into a low energy world. It’s as if all the quiet rustic folk had suddenly been thrown into a 120-decibel disco.
The discomfiture, disorientation and distress has been dismaying both to experience and observe. Everyone, and everything, have been desperately trying to get back to ‘normal.’ But normal no longer exists. Anywhere on the planet. We are watching ourselves, our loved ones, and every living creature save the most hardened and unfeeling (viruses, anyone?), die of dysfunction. It is a terrible way to go, because it is slow, painful, and inexorable. And there are no hot-earth creatures left to take our places.
Humans need to become a low-energy semispecies again. For most of our existence, we were. To do it, we will have to forego much of what we have, because it uses way too much energy. We can do it, but it will take love and determination. A will to survive, and to put what’s important first.
The Triangle of Survival
After receiving some quiet, back-channel encouragement, from a handful of working scientists, that our odd little publication Moths of the Past had more than a middling chance of containing deep truths, we
made the formal decision to go to free electronic distribution worldwide. That decision was affirmed and compounded when we discovered the linkage with Jon Thoreau Scott’s Top-Down Tectonics.
But before that, in that first pandemic year, we were sending out free copies to individuals, people we thought would appreciate Moths of the Past one way or another. One of them was Yoko Ono.
Personalized notes were appended to those messages in bottles. The one to Yoko contained a meditation on what imagining peace means. What it would take to actually bring world peace.
Out of that Aristotelian exercise in the practice of mock-continuous thought came an image: a final mandala. The ultimate triangle (triangles being the strongest structures): The Triangle of Peace.
.
. .
BIOSPHERE
. .
. .
POPULATION . . CLIMATE
We have artificially inflated our human population, way above what the biosphere can sustainably support, primarily through two means: the industrial revolution, wrapped in a series of ongoing agricultural revolutions. The first was fossil fuel-powered, the second by the subjugation and domestication of a mere handful of plant and animal semispecies, altered over millennia to a state of complete lack of fitness except to feed us, by artificial selection, or selective breeding, including lots of artificial Frontdoor Convolution, or trial-and-error hybridization.
The two deadly consequences have been and are regressive long-term dismantling and destruction of the Biosphere and its processes and functions which support we humans and all of life, and the equally regressive, but relatively rapid, alteration of our climate trajectory from beginning to enter another Ice Age to dropping a concentrated energy bomb from a long-ago super-tropical era on a cooling planet.
We are now living with the worldwide reaction of Mother Nature. She is pissed, and trying to kick us off the planet, going through gyration after worse gyration like a bucking bronco beset by big biters.
This is only gonna get worse – much worse, before it ends – very badly. Not just for us, but all life.
We think, or at least some of us think, we know that. We also think we know what to do. But even the most woke of us to our predicament don’t realize the half of it, or the third. We’re still in deep denial about what we have to do.
We have to win three giant weightlifting competitions all at the same time. The first seems, yes, to be abandoning fossil fuels, cold turkey. But there’s one before that. We have to get our human population down, way down, as fast as we can. And do it humanely, meaning voluntarily, rigorously, for a long time, and with all the economic and social adjustments necessary to protect all people, together. This is the heaviest lift by far. We can do it, we must do it, or it will be done for us. By Mother Nature herself. Even a good mother will sacrifice a bad kid for the sake of survival of the rest.
The Human Run
Before nodal Platonic ‘species’ were turned by Moths of the Past into mock-continuous strands of the Web of Life called ‘semispecies’, scientists, using the vastly incomplete and biased-in-favor-of- dinosaurs fossil record, estimated that the life of the former was a million to two million years on average.
The life of the latter, as attested by the Buck Moths, is much less. Thousands of years, not millions.
The million-year lifespans are for the mere Forms of ‘species,’ the images of their bodies in bedrock.
This is fair warning to us humans: Our days are numbered. We’re not doing anything to help with that.
We’ve already gone through our millions of years of proto-human warm-up stages. Woven as we were from the dozens of ancestral semispecies we replaced, we are now compound-composited into our final, ‘best’ form as Humans. We’ve reached the final, ‘Interlocken,’ stage, just in time to alter Nature so much that we’ve lost our fitness in it. We, and everything else alive, have been thrown backward, out of Interlocken, by the interlocking forces of human overpopulation, rapidly accelerating global warming, and the resulting rapidly accelerating loss of function of our life-sustaining Biosphere.
The putative ‘master’ semispecies Homo sapiens is ripe for a fall. We are in free-fall now. The fall we’ve devised means the end of most semispecies lines on the planet, not just us. In fact, we’ve already destroyed most of the semispecies lineages recently active on Earth over the past 50,000 years, since we emerged as the potent biological, and now, geophysical, force we are. Yes, the Sixth Extinction started in the middle of the last Ice Age with the Pleistocene Megafaunal Holocaust. It has proceeded to the elimination of most animals, most plants, most fungi, and a stellar proportion of the smaller-bodied domains of life, that were living here before us. We live in a vastly sterilized biosphere already.
That’s why it’s so imperative we heed the Triangle of Peace = The Triangle of Survival. Population, Climate, Biosphere. We must deal with them together, as one interlocking problem and solution.
The reason we must follow all the Ten New Commandments is the same reason we must bust out of nodal thinking into mock-continuum thought. Process. Specifically, Convolution.
Humans need to restart Convolution because we, and all other living beings in Nature, need to move forward. To keep up with the evolution of spacetime. All the selection pressures are in motion: ever-changing continua themselves. Driven at base by the Chaonic Universe = spacetime. Those chaons are not waiting. They will get us, and the rest of life on Earth, if we don’t get back in the game.
Respect the Process. Or rather, the interwoven processes. What’s true in good government, government by and for the people, is also true in Nature. As a matter of fact, Nature invented good government.
Life is many things, but at its functional base it is a challenge. A test. It was designed to be that way. If we get complacent (a form of stupidity) and drop the ball, it’s game over. Simple as that.
The most important thing to keep in mind as we gird our loins and summon our strength for this Herculean task is that there are two sets of rewards for success, but only one for failure.
One set here, and one in there.
Survival, and Immortality.
We Create God
When and where was the first recognizable image of God created?
Who were the first creatures to do it? What were the circumstances?
What prompted them to come up with such a strange concept? How did this happen?
None of these questions have been answered to common satisfaction. Which spawns a final question: If God is everywhere all the time, does it matter?
Our images and conceptions (and preconceptions) of God are literally infinite in scope and variety.
Conservative estimates have humanity inventing and elaborating over 100,000 religions (broadly defined as shared belief systems) during our relatively brief tenure here on Earth.
A better line of inquiry starts with: Why? What drove this need, this obsession? Why create God?
Most people who’ve studied the issue have converged on the notion that God came out of Nature.
We were this naked ape thrown out of our trees onto the ground to contend with the remnants of the megafauna that preceded us. Nothing but an easy meal. Kinda tender and tasty, too.
When we weren’t being hunted, we were shivering in the dark, under the moon and stars if we were lucky.
So the first image of God was – animals. Big ones. Bigger than we were. Powerful, ferocious ones. Even other prey had hooves and horns. And bigger teeth than us. By then we’d domesticated wildfire.
We’d also acquired tools. Some we modified into weapons. Soon we were hunting along with the bigger predators. As we honed our weapons and our skills, we became social hunters, like the lions, and the doglike creatures we found and befriended in almost all the places we migrated. Then we started hunting the other predators, and each other, our competition. Many we ultimately wiped out.
Our second image of God was the sun, moon and stars.
Now things got interesting. We had conflated animals with ourselves, understandably, as we were animals. We got puha and thousands of other words like that from animals when we ate them. The sun and moon were our light sources, and kept bad animals at bay, or at least made them visible. But stars?
In the stars we found not God, but gods.
A whole parallel world of super-natural beings. Just like us, but bigger. More powerful. Full of puha.
And concerned mostly with their own affairs, which strangely paralleled those of Nature.
We began making up and telling stories about them. The stories grew, and were passed down.
Certain members of the group were tasked with remembering them. Religion was born.
And wonder of wonders, thousands, tens of thousands, of years later, someone would create what seemed a new image of God, composited of all the gods, but actually made of all living things.
Imagine that, a Tinkerbell Theory of God. The God who needs us. Who can make us free from death and decay. After all, there is no heaven on earth. Simple experience taught us that a long time ago.
BONUS SHORTS
God Does Play Dice. With Ever-changing House Rules.
Along toward the nether end of the Continuum of Order and Chaos, lies the Region of Randomness.
This district varies from almost order to the breakdown of pattern. We often find ourselves subject to this domain. It governs many of the processes we’d rather not contemplate, like dissolution and decay.
One of the most important functions governed by this territory is the operation of Convolution. What makes Convolution work is the relationship between area and randomness. Both are two-dimensional.
It is a cousin of the relationship between area and diversity. In both, the more of one, the more of the other.
This fact explains why we cannot leave our Earth stripped of its natural Biosphere. We need to give our planet’s surface back to Nature to maximize Convolution’s chances of finding solutions through natural selection to the challenges of an ever-shifting Universe. Making new semispecies out of the old, as fast as possible. Producing, and elevating, those diamonds in the rough. We’re one of those.
It’s a Small World After All
Last year, the house was swarmed by tiny flies small enough to go through standard window screens.
They blackened the walls around the lights. We’d never seen anything like it before.
We quickly found their source: Everywhere. Outside, the incessant heavy rains had turned lawn to mossy bog. Growth and organic decay had increased and sped up. The flies got smaller to get in on all that decadent action. To make more flies, who help make more decay. Lots more, of both. Fungi too.
Irony was, at the same time we’d lost the biggest bug we had, our Cecropia Moths. Gone, mostly from seasonal cue disruption and overall warming. Cecropias need steady winters to develop and emerge.
If you can put the complex insect metamorphic process into mm-sized packages, more power to you. Overcomes seasonal cue disruption and global warming. The survivors will be tiny and fast-breeding.
Even Simple Equations and Formulas Have At Least One Constant
Many of those constants are not designated as such, but they function that way. Math equations and formulas wouldn’t work without ’em. Why? Because you need to tie them to something fixed.
This is a flaw, not a feature. It explains how Goedel got to his famous Theory of Mathematical Incompleteness.
It means normal math cannot mirror the reality of ever-moving spacetime that has no Locality – no fixed point save the spot where the Big Bang started (yes, that spot, the Singularity, the one and only).
So to try and get around that central fact, we began inventing mathematical work-arounds. Starting with the Calculus, and proceeding so deep into esoterica we now easily lead ourselves astray.
The moral of this story: Don’t Let Math Lead You Around by the Nose.
RANDOM MINI-SHORTS FOR YOU TO RUN WITH (be quick about it – there’s no time left!)
Religion’s Going Extinct Because of Time Inflation
No time left for elaborate rituals.
Cells Used to Be Huge
Think: dinosaur-sized.
Now they’re tiny, and getting tinier.
Those gentle molecules are really getting their act together!
Life Cycles are Getting Shorter
Much shorter.
Those tiny flies complete theirs in days. Faster than Drosophila!
Cecropias take a whole year.
It Was So Hot It Stayed Just Cells for Two Billion Years (Big Cells)
That’s why there were no multi-cells for half earth’s history.
What is the Ur-Religion?
What they all have in common.
Is it the Golden Rule?
The Golden Rule Plus (includes the rest of Nature)?
The Greek Gods Had No Heaven
They had Pantheon. Each other.
And they had Us (Mortals).
And They Personified Almost Every Aspect of Life.
Chaonic Erasure Propels the Arrow of Time
The Chaonic Deficit of Posterity
also ensures The Past is Occluded.
The Greek Philosophers had No Use for Theos
This is what got Socrates in Trouble.
Motivated Plato to create The Forms.
And inspired Aristotle to create Science.
If We Bring Convolution Back, New Semispecies will Emerge
Most will be smaller than their ancestors.
We humans will be able to evolve into post-humans.
Whole new ecosystems will form.
Teach Your Children Mock-Continuum Thinking
It will balance nodal bias and eliminate its worst effects.
Huge new insights and discoveries will come.
Our science will be invigorated and improved.
And the rest of our arts, especially writing.
We will achieve survival and peace. And Remember: SET YOUR GPS FOR HEAVEN!
Anyone can do it; you just have to practice. [It’s the only fixed point in the Universe]
