Connected Everything

Here are some things I'm going to be covering in my thesis.

• All possible enumerations: "Wishing Well" by Eijssen and Klopman, "Borges" by Jochem van der Spek, Every Icon, God's Eye, Imagen, Magic Mirror, The End, 8-bit, 4-bit waveforms (also in hardware). The legal-political implications of these projects. Stéphane Mallarmé's "[dream] of a universal work, capable of encompassing all the others". Ablinger's conception of "all notes" as "white noise". Borges' Aleph. pppd and RC/NAND combinations toward the idea of a "functionally complete" synth.
• Possible permutations: allRGB. If you're enumeration everything, how do you arrange it in an interesting way? Anti-gray codes?
• Very long pieces: Pi house music (indefinitely long), Infinite C (indefinitely long), Soundtrack For An Exhibition (96 days), The Shapes Project, As Slow as Possible (639 years), Longplayer (1000 years)
• What is music? Of all the sounds that can be made, which are musical? Is there a connection between meaningful sounds and musical sounds? Considering noise as a human-centered phenomenon, or otherwise.
• McLuhan's symbiotic medium/message relationship: Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstrations. Glitch art as a method for uncovering a medium: Ceibas, MPF, CD-glitching from Oval and Yasunao Tone. The aesthetics of failure. "Looking at what's broken" is a technique regularly used in cognitive neuroscience, outlined by V.S. Ramachandran in "Phantoms in the Brain". Eigenradio. The role of transcription: ethnomusicology as a case study.
• The history of MP3, the language and the logistics behind glitching compressed formats. Remixing 4'33" for a new media (Only Everything Lasts Forever).
• Correspondence theory of truth versus coherence theory of truth, the connection between truth and meaning, meaning and music. MOOKDFJLAL and 241543903. Side channel attacks (especially TEMPEST), persistence hunting, and reality cracking. Buddhist "interdependent arising" as a "coherentist metaphysics". Autoloop as purely sonic coherentism. Jean-Jacques Nattiez' "symbolic web".
• The role of illusion in meaning, finding patterns in noise, and the "edge of chaos": Kanizsa triangle, dalmatian and cow illusions, Christian iconography, The Holy Toaster, the face on Mars, Einstein's Brain, the golden ratio as a guiding principle for beauty in nature and art, prime numbers and the Ulam spiral and Sacks spiral, equidistant letter sequences and The Bible Code, Haiku Finder, SETI@home and the definition of a signal, astronomical patterns and constellations, geographic patterns, the Voynich manuscript as a hoax. Working with Mark Changizi on evolutionary psychology. No Noise.
• Emptiness, and art everywhere: Cage's 4'33", Duchamp's "Fountain", Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" and the monochromatic tradition, including Malevich and Rodchenko. Nietzsche's "will to power" and Sartre's "existence precedes essence" as models of self-created coherentist meaning.
• Noise and copyright: illegal numbers, pi in binary.

The Eternal Questions

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

• love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
• humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
• knowledge, and wisdom
• what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
• faith as something reassuring
• free will and determinism
• redemption and salvation
• suffering and misunderstanding
• epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
• desire
• can we overcome confirmation bias?
• what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
• interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
• do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
• morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
• the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
• evolution
• the brain and consciousness
• government and anarchy
• originality and newness
• naivete and optimism
• sincerity
• do people change? what causes people to change?

Some Thoughts on Property

There's something strange about saying a portion of space and the land within "belong" to an individual. This extends to the idea of countries: how is it possible for a space to "belong" to a group of people?

Practically, we talk about "ownership" and "property" when something won't be taken away from someone. Yet the only thing we own necessarily are our thoughts. Our life can be taken away and our actions can be misassociated, but without our thoughts there is no "us" to own them.

Yet we still talk about certain objects and spaces as "property". Some of these others attempt to take, but fail either due to the owner fighting for ownership, or due to a misguided or misdirected attempt. Other things no one attempts to take, because they don't want them or have made an agreement not to. These are all very different types of property, and we should treat them differently (unlike some anarchistic philosophy that uses the term "property" very generally):

• property by necessity (thoughts)
• property by struggle (countries, civil liberties)
• property by contract (private land, objects)

I'm not sure what to call "property due to misunderstanding", but it must exist. Maybe something like the Christian or Muslim hope in afterlife — plenty of misguided attempts have been made to destroy it (through martyrs, etc.), while the only true loss of that hope is when believers convert from an afterlife-affirming religion to an afterlife-denying belief system.

Speaking of civil liberties as a property by struggle may be a bit extreme, but I think it's accurate so long as you're not making any other assumptions about the nature of humanity and its purpose.

What about thieves? The existence of thieves is dependent on the existence of property. In a world without property, one person may still take another person's bike, but it would no longer be stealing.

Love and Power

If international relations are ever going to change, the people in power will have to act in love. Unfortunately, those who love are not power hungry. And those who are power hungry win out for power over those who aren't. It seems like the only way around this is to put people into power involuntarily.