On Chaos and Order

Day 35

We have a picture of a world which is like one continuous logical field, where each things is itself and no other thing. We call this a small mind. We also have a picture of a world which is like many smaller and discontinuous fields all existing together, where one thing, or gem, is sometimes itself and sometimes something else, depending on which point of view is being called upon. We call this a large mind. Small minds are generally simple and ordered, where everything has its place and nothing substantial ever changes about the world. Large minds are generally very complex and full of changes, full of areas of stress between the various logical fields, or areas of stress in the order of the world. In a large mind, originally minor changes can have a cascading effect, where the resolution or shifting of an area of stress re-orders nearby logical fields. The re-ordering is like a release of energy, which leads to a further release of energy, and so on until the entire complex world-structure has a new stable form – at least until the next change happens. We have described an emotion as a way of seeing the world, a way that the world appears to be. The way the world is is also another way to describe a logical field, so that changing emotions can also be understood as shifting from one logical field to another. An adequate emotion can be understood as a change of emotion large enough to result in a type of energy cascade, or world-shift. The capability of having separate emotions is thus also presumably like being a large mind. There is more to it then that however – we also stated that a pattern which repeats can be just as dangerous as a pattern which never changes. This pattern that repeated can be understood as a multi-logical path where one goes through various emotions or ways of seeing the world in a certain pattern, but never escapes that pattern. Thus, one can have what looks like a large mind, which is in fact a type of small mind. One could presumably also have, for example, a series of different types of anger under which you always operate, which would be another way of describing this situation. Thus, we can understand that it is not just a repeating pattern that you can have, but also a limited pattern.

You could argue that the world itself constitutes a certain type of limited pattern, but this would be partially incorrect. The world can and does represent a limit amount of world-space, or a limited amount of possibilities, but while this is true of a complete world, the world as we understand it is not complete. An incomplete world still contains the possibility that one can escape any pattern or any limit that lies upon the world. This is why we said that the ability to feel an adequate rage is important, and not the actual feeling itself. Because we may live in a world in which certain things never happen, in which we never go beyond certain limits without even knowing what they are. This might be a physical limit like never seeing ultraviolet light, a knowledge limit like never knowing if aliens exist, a feeling limit like never experiencing love, or an ability limit like never being able to fly. There are certain emotions which we may never experience (and certain emotions we hope you will never need to experience) However, it is not necessarily the cutoff of those emotions that is most dangerous, but the cutoff of the possibility of those emotions.

What is a world without danger, and what is a world without safety? Both are a types of world which has lost something, which has lost the ability to live in some way. Notice also that both are extremes. I argued that one should experience adequate rage, and not adequate anger, because rage is by its nature a sort of overflowing experience. One can be angry and still sensible, but rage – rage is that step too far, that sense of mania which can lead to hate. As any fan of star wars knows, hate leads to the dark side. So, presumably, a world without hate is a world without the dark side – but what kind of world would that be? Would you want to read about it? I daresay that you would, and that you could, and that babes learning to read do. Yet, we don't act that way for very long. We try and move beyond, we try and overflow our boundaries. We try and live, because we are not books; we are stories.

A story without any surprises is still a story. It is a story which we can read once, but not a story that we will read a thousand times. A reason to read a story many times which I often have is to learn something, either in the story or because of it, or to re-read a story again because I have forgotten it. 'May you live in interesting times' is an old Chinese curse, but I wonder if living in uninteresting times is just as worse, only in a different way. Is being bored a curse like that of being terrified, and which is worse? This of course is not a new thought, and not a new worry. We need change and not eternal repetition or sameness in our lives. We could hardly be said to be living then, if we never ran into something new, either from outside or that we had made ourselves.

One character type I have run across in books is the character who has been cursed with eternal life, but who now wants to die. You should be careful what you wish for, and all that. The idea has usually been that either someone is bored and has seen everything before, or that one has seen everything pass too often to be able to bear it any more. The first is understandable as any one who has been interminably bored can attest to. When we are bored in our lives we generally feel that the boredom is not lasting. Except for those unfortunate few who are tortured by something like solitary confinement in a featureless room, every one of us experiences a change on most days. It may be a minor change, a random piece of news perhaps , but it is a change nevertheless. For some people, small changes are fine and dandy – they are happy where they are, and something like a change of weather, the shifting of seasons, or the growth of a garden is enough. Others would find a life like that intolerable, and seek out new experiences or new things to learn and experience with a desperate abandon. Sometimes wisely, and sometimes not. The trope character of the eternal man has, broadly speaking, done all of the seconds which are possible, and now only has a life of the first type, a life of eternally walking the same paths in the same gardens, and of never seeing a season that he has not seen before. If you understand the despair and ennui of the eternal man in this scenario, then you understand by proxy and imagination – by a type of logical field which can imagine his life – how horrible being bored can be. If you cannot understand the eternal man and a life of gardening is amenable to you in all its neverendingness, then good for you, for you are perhaps braver than I would be after thousands of years.

The other side of this trope is the eternal man who has lost everything. If to live in a garden is terrifying, how much worse would it be to outlive all your friends? To outlive your family, your civilization, your language and so on. To outlive not just your original friends, but also your second set – and your third set. To know that no matter where you settled, no matter who you knew, that it would all fade away to dust one morning. If a life of eternal gardening is a life within limits, then a life of eternal passing is a life with only one limit - that nothing lasts. This too would be a cursed life I feel. How willing would you be to meet new people, to experience new things, after a thousand years? We, all of us, have lost pets, family, or precious items, and each time the heart breaks a little. Eventually the scars heal over and we can be happy again, but as I'm sure you've noticed, this takes time and each scar goes a little deeper. It is one thing to know that you will leave your friends and lovers, but another thing entirely to have them leave you.

A gardening life is a kind of ultra-stable life, a life that is as stable as we can have yet still contains some sort of change so that we can say one is living. A life of eternal loss is a life which is as unstable as we can have, a life which only has one known limit. Each of these types of life contains wonders and horrors. The gardening life is an issue because the world of the gardening life is a closed world, a world which cannot go beyond its limits, while the life of loss is an open world, a world which is forever open. Both of these types of world are ones which we are able to describe within our current system, and which looks like a type of world which we have talked about before. We have spend some time on reasons why a closed world is not preferred by me, and why a closed world is not something amenable to free will and thus to being alive. We have also talked about how a repetitious world is also a closed world, and how a repetitious life – a gardening life – would not be preferred. What we have not yet talked about are the costs of an open world.

The open world invites instability, it strongly suggests that there will be changes in the world, and that the world will, at least partially, break. It requires a brave sort of soul to accept such a world, but such a world also has the promise of at least not always being boring. Yet, it also does not have the promise of ever being a place of safety or a place to heal from our wounds for a time. We appear to have a tension between our two world extremes.

Yet, the open world I have talked about so far is not really the extreme of an open world – or rather, it is the extreme of an open world, but not the extreme of our system. We stated that a life of eternal loss is like a world-space with one sure limit, that nothing lasts – what happens if we remove that limit? If a world is a space under the limit on a graph of possibility-space, then if there is no limit there is no world. Or rather, the world becomes limitless – the world becomes a place where everything appears possible. Not just a place where everything which is possible is possible, but a place where everything is possible – do you see the difference? The limits of the world become the limits of reality, and yet a place where we also know nothing, since if we know something it exists inside the world. Thus, even by getting rid of the world, we don't know anything about reality. The 'I' that existed becomes a bare I, a bare unknown that was at the center of the gem of I, and yet the unknown is still an unknown, because we don't know anything. The 'world of ultimate chaos' is not really a world as we know it, a world under a limit or with a logical field, but rather a place of chaos.

So what are we to do? A Place of pure order, a closed world, seems awful and dull. A place of pure chaos, a limitless world, seems seems something else, seems a sort of Buddhist nirvana – but prehaps not one I can live in. Too much stability is no good, and too much disorder is also no good – we seem to be stuck in an open world, in a world with limits but also possibilities. A place that changes and moves, that contains life, that constantly gallivants between the killing fields of a horrific chaos and a terrible order. One may prefer those extreme sort of places – I do not. There is plenty of advice running around for you to read or listen to which will inform you about how to get to either of those places, and prothlesize to you about their various virtues. I believe them - but I also believe myself, and I see vices and costs as well, due for a position in each place. I certainly don't know what to do, and it seems that we aren't going to be stuck in this current life on earth and in this world, this limbo (where we do the limbo), forever. What I want to find, or make, is a third path - a way out of limbo that neither leads to heaven, nor to hell.