Sea of the Unreal

"Reality is, you know,
the tip of an iceberg of
irrationality that we've managed
to drag ourselves up onto for
a few panting moments before
we slip back into the sea
of the unreal."

- Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000)

The World as a Neural Network

"If the entire universe is a neural network, then something like natural selection might be happening on all scales from cosmological (> 10⁺¹⁵ m) and biological (10⁺² − 10−⁶ m) all the way to subatomic (< 10−¹⁵ m) scales. The main idea is that some local structures (or architectures) of neural networks are more stable against external perturbations (i.e. interactions with the rest of the network) than other local structures. As a result the more stable structures are more likely to survive and the less stable structures are more likely to be exterminated. There is no reason to expect that this process might stop at a fixed time or might be confined to a fixed scale and so the evolution must continue indefinitely and on all scales. We have already seen that on the smallest scales the learning evolution is likely to produce structures of a very low complexity (i.e. second law of learning) such as one dimensional chains of neurons, but this might just be the beginning. As the learning progresses these chains can chop off loops, form junctions and according to natural selection the more stable structures would survive. If correct, then what we now call atoms and particles might actually be the outcomes of a long evolution starting from some very low complexity structures and what we now call macroscopic observers and biological cells might be the outcome of an even longer evolution. Of course, at present the claim that natural selection may be relevant on all scales is very speculative, but it seems that neural networks do offer an interesting new perspective on the problem of observers."

- Vitaly Vanchurin
The World as a Neural Network

Ice Mountains in Motion

"I’ve walked a lot in the mountains of Iceland.
And as you come to a new valley,
as you come to a new landscape,
you have a certain view.
If you stand still, the landscape doesn’t
necessarily tell you how big it is. It doesn't
really tell you what you’re looking at.
The moment you start to move
the mountain starts to move."

- Olafur Eliasson (1967 - )

On the advice of a local glacier guide that we met at the Skaftafell terminal before embarking on our "photo tour," my family and I took our car another 45 min east of the terminal to explore the Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon. For someone who has seen icebergs floating in ocean waters only two other times in his life (both times were in Alaska, and, even then, the icebergs presented themselves more as onesie and twosie "teasers" than sweeping panoramic clusters), Jokulsarlon is - and lives in - a world wholly its own. Icebergs, small and large, span one's view from wherever your feet happen to be planted on the shoreline to the vast ineffable infinity that defines Iceland's remote interior. A subtle but omnipresent hiss and crackle permeates the otherwise quiet air (save that for omnipresent chatter and soft shuffling of tourist's feet) as the ice breathes and slowly meanders about the lagoon. Occasionally, one hears a loud "pop" in the distance, followed by a splash as a chunk of ice falls into the water; or the whirring of engines powering the ubiquitous Zodiak boat tours. Photographically speaking, the glacier lagoon is an angst-filled delight. On the one hand, there are countless compositional opportunities that present themselves literally anywhere one looks; an obvious "delight." On the other hand, there is an accompanying and unsettling angst of knowing that it is simply impossible to do any sort of artistic justice to this breathtaking always-subtly-moving landscape of ice mountains in water; a lifetime would not suffice. While we didn't have a lifetime to spend at Jokulsarlon, we did take away a bit of the timeless awe of nature that this beautiful lagoon leaves all those who take the time to experience it. Thank you, Iceland 😊

The Original Mystery

"Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus… of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.

Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record. 

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. This is indeed amazing. Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

 

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i. e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself

It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps, in view of the form in which we presently take ourselves to exist, the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing to question.
...
Thus the world, whenever it appears as a physical universe*, must always seem to us, its representatives, to be playing a kind of hide-and-seek with itself. What is revealed will be concealed, but what is concealed will again be revealed.

* unus = one, vertere = turn. Any given (or captivated) universe is what is seen as the result of a making of one turn, and thus is the appearance of any first distinction, and only a minor aspect of all being, apparent and non-apparent. Its particularity is the price wo pay for its visibility."

- G. Spencer Brown (1923 - 2016)

Laws Of Form

Cognitive Fantasy

"It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
A Wild Sheep Chase

Hegelian Dialectics

"...life, beginning from a non-developed unity has run through the circle towards perfect unity. The world and the possibility of separation stood over against the non-developed unity. While evolving, reflection had always produced more opposites so as to reunify them by satisfying impulses until it has set the Whole of man in opposition to itself, until love transcends reflection in total inobjectivity, until it deprives the opposite of all foreignness, until it discovers life itself without anything missing to it."

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)

Borgesian Batesonian Patterns II

"These similarities would seem
to suggest, among other things,
that there are spiritual patterns
at work in the universe,
at least as far as we can tell,
and these spiritual patterns announce
themselves with impressive regularity
wherever human hearts and minds
attempt to attune themselves to
the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.

- Ken Wilber (1949 - )

Hibernation

"If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, 'Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.' And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently."

- Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)
Quoted by Walter Isaacson

Borgesian Batesonian Patterns

"It turns out that

an eerie type of chaos

can lurk just behind

a facade of order;

and yet, deep inside the chaos

lurks an even eerier type of order."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Metamagical Themas:Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new "Ice Forms" portfolio I've posted on my web gallery. On the other hand, the image below - which shows an amalgam of the 16 photographs in this gallery - has a curious aesthetic all its own.

 

Apart from my lifelong attraction to "order within chaos within order within..." (both as photographer and physicist), the Borgesian Batesonian in me is drawn to the all-but-invisible emergent patterns that connect the patterns we (only partly consciously) weave. While the individual images hold no more relation to one another than the fact that they were all captured along the same 10-foot-long shoreline of a local lake during a single happy hour of searching for "ice forms" a few days ago when the temperature dipped into the single digits, the "amalgam" is at once both strangely familiar (as though I had "seen" it lurking somewhere within the frozen water) and alluringly alien (since, though it is undeniably something my camera "captured," it is also something I could not have possibly observed). It's random-yet-not-random frozen forms and eddies hint at some mysterious (creative - living?) froth that periodically dispenses with aesthetically pleasing patterns that photographers "catch" glimpses of and then call their own.

Winds of the Heavens

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

The Prophet

Liminal State of Awareness

"There is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters… It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an “impossible realm” where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond."

- Nick Cave (1957 - )
Faith, Hope and Carnage

Starstuff

 "The nitrogen in our DNA,
the calcium in our teeth,
the iron in our blood,
the carbon in our apple pies
were made in the interiors
of collapsing stars.
We are made of starstuff.
...
Science is not only compatible with spirituality;
it is a profound source of spirituality."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

Beyond Mere Doctrine

"All beings by nature are Buddha,
As ice by nature is water.
Apart from water there is no ice;
Apart from beings, no Buddha.
How sad that people ignore the near
And search for truth afar:
Like someone in the midst of water
Crying out in thirst,
Like a child of a wealthy home
Wandering among the poor.
...
Go far beyond mere doctrine.
Here effect and cause are the same,
The Way is neither two nor three.
With form that is no-form,
Going and coming, we are never astray,
With thought that is no-thought,
Singing and dancing are the voice of the Law.
Boundless and free is the sky of Samádhi!
Bright the full moon of wisdom!
Truly, is anything missing now?
Nirvana is right here, before our eyes,
This very place is the Lotus Land,
This very body, the Buddha"

- Hakuin Ekaku (c.1686 - c.1769)
 The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Hakuin

I Am a Dreamer

 "I am a dreamer.
I know so little of real life
that I just can’t help re-living
such moments as these in my dreams,
for such moments are something
I have very rarely experienced.
I am going to dream about
you the whole night,
the whole week,
the whole year."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881)

White Nights

Connecting Patterns

"We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose. "

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)

Mind and Nature

Beyond the Tangible

"Abstraction allows man to see
with his mind what he cannot
see physically with his eyes...
Abstract art enables the artist
to perceive beyond the tangible,
to extract the infinite out of the finite.
It is the emancipation of the mind.
It is an exploration into unknown areas."

- Arshile Gorky (1904 - 1948)

Poetic Truth

"To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth."

- Minor White (1908 - 1976)

Postscript. In full disclosure, and unlike the "fabricated" (and eventually retracted Tweet by) physicist Étienne Klein - who playfully claimed that a photograph he took of a slice of chorizo taken against a black background was that of Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years away, as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope - the image above is emphatically not a photograph of some spectacular celestial object! It is, in fact, just a Minor-White-like "poetic truth" rendering of ice-on-asphalt, bathed-in-red-light, as "seen" at some point a few months ago during a winter walk during sunset 😊

Fragmentated Wholes

"As has been seen, fragmentation originates in essence in the fixing of the insights forming our overall self-world view, which follows on our generally mechanical, routinized, and habitual modes of thought about these matters. Because the primary reality goes beyond anything that can be contained in such fixed forms of measure, these insights must eventually cease to be adequate, and will thus give rise to various forms of unclarity or confusion. However, when the whole field of measure is open to original and creative insight, without any fixed limits or barriers, then our overall world views will cease to be rigid, and the whole field of measure will come into harmony, as fragmentation within it comes to an end. But original and creative insight within the whole field of measure is the action of the immeasurable. For when such insight occurs, the source cannot be within ideas already contained in the field of measure but rather has to be in the immeasurable, which contains the essential formative cause of all that happens in the field of measure. The measurable and the immeasurable are then in harmony and indeed one sees that they are both ways of considering the one and undivided whole."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Harmonious Unit in Itself

"There is not a
fragment in all nature,
for every relative fragment
of one thing is a full
harmonious unit in itself."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

 

Kandinskian Cacophonies - Part II

"It seems to me that we live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherent, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherent. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like."

-  William Golding (1911 - 1993)

Postscript. Regular followers of my blog will have noticed by now my recent focus on "leaves in ice"  abstract-like compositions. Of course, most of this has to do with the fact that the seasonal weather (in northern VA) has just not allowed any other kind of photography. But another important reason is that the morning walks my wife and I have been regularly taking through our neighborhood since the start of the (seemingly, never ending) pandemic have over time uncovered a kind of aesthetic bestiary that I've learned to both appreciate and revel in. Quiet little scenes that would normally be "invisible" (literally, since there are parts of our neighborhood I've rarely been in before we started our walks) have gradually revealed themselves - and their compositional possibilities - to me; microcosms of an ethereal beauty all their own. I hesitated taking "real" photographs for a long while (apart from a few quick snapshots with my iPhone). While the natural galleries of haphazardly arranged Kandinskian forms and colors  mesmerized and fascinated me (and, obviously, have continued to do so), I was unsure of my ability to find compositions in such "busy and confusing" cacophonous worlds. But after each walk ended, and my work day got started, I soon noticed myself thinking more and more about lost opportunities. And so, eventually, inevitably, I succumbed to the creative process. I embraced the cacophony. These kinds of compositions - in which multiple elements (mostly form and color; less so, luminance) compete for attention - have never come easily to me, but when they work, they are very satisfying 😊. This is also one of those times that I especially miss my dad, the artist, without whom - and without whose aesthetic sage wisdom - I have now been for 20 years (as of this March). His eye for these kinds of compositions was second to none, with perhaps Kandinsky being the sole exception (and to whose art the New York Times once traced my dad's aesthetic lineage).