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.

Defining Music, Again

I keep coming back to this issue (previously: Defining Music). Which is fitting, considering it's a large part of my thesis. I explained the basic idea to a friend recently in a way that seemed clear, so I'd like to preserve that clarity in text.

Before Ethnomusicology, western culture believed music to be universal amongst civilized peoples. Ethnomusicology helped people see that music was more local and less global. Around the same time, Cage encouraged people to hear things for themselves as music: saying that it is extremely local, to the point of being defined by an individual.

I would like to propose a reversal to Cage's position (or, at least, his language). I believe music is built out of correspondences between sounds and other things. Over time, these "other things" have been comprised of innate human impulses, society-specific tradition, and individual preference, in that order. I would like to add "everything else" to that category of "other things". This means that music exists without humans, as sounds always have context. Individuals do not decide what is music (this is the reversal), we can only decide what is noise. We do this by identifying acontextual sounds — and the context we use for understanding sounds is continually changing. Wind chimes ringing during a cool autumn walk have a different context to us than they do when we're trying to study next to them, or trying to hear past them.

As context-creators, of the general category of conscious non-omniscient beings, we define music only insomuch as we misunderstand some of it as noise.

Pranks and Pragmatism

Some excerpts from "African Rhythm and African Sensibility" by John Miller Chernoff.

African drumming is renowned for the ability to express the tonal structure of their spoken languages, to the point where rhythms are imbued with complex semantics. A great illustration:

During my first day practicing with Gideon, I was following him well until he suddenly performed a rather complicated series of rhythms and then went back to the basic rhythm he was showing me. A few minutes later a man who passed at that moment returned with two bottles of beer. (p 75)

There is a short passage discussing the difference between "false meaning" and "intended meaning", due to a prank:

Ibrahim Abdulai's son Alhassan, who was assisting in my instruction displayedgreat ingenuity duringan extended prank in which he tried to confude me in my work by inventing false meanings to fit many rhythms in Takai [a dance/beat from the Dagomba in northern Ghana]. Many of the rhythmic styles a Takai drummer beats are played only to make the music more interesting, but the language Alhassan supplied matched the rhythms so perfectly that I began to think Ibrahim was withholding the meanings. When I persisted in my questions, he said, "We have a general name for the whole Takai drumming, but only a few of the rhythms have names. In Zhem [another Dagomba dance/beat, played "during the "installation or funeral of high chiefs"], all the drummers will be making speeches, but in Takai the rhythms are mainly to make the dancers strong. The name given Takai is for the different rhythms combined together, and all the rhythms are equal. Anyone who wants to tell you words for these rhythms is lying. Anytime I want, I can just listen to the sound of the dondon [an hourglass-shaped talking drum] or gondon [sic? "gongon"] and compare the music to something in the Dagbani language [of the Dagomba], but it is not the same as making speeches. As for the styles you have been learning, I am the one who has been bringing all these styles when drumming Takai, and I am the right person to give them meaning, but I have no name for them. So how can another person give them meaning or say that this style says this or that style says that while I was not making speeches when I got those very styles?" (p 76)

Another example is given of a "false meaning" for a dance, Bangumanga, that is regularly accepted by "junior players":

The drum language is Bem bo ma, be pam boma je ("They will search for me, but they will not see me"). One false meaning is Man daa yeli, mam bi lan yeli ("I said it; I don't say it again"). The meaning is a "secret" because of the seriousness of the war. In its truth, Bangumanga recalls the blood that was shed in the war... (p 206)

Sometimes the meaning of rhythms is simple misunderstood.

If you play gagedega instead of gagedegi when executing a phrase on Atsimewu [a tall drum that acts as a lead], or if you miss the pitch when beating a dondon, you may have a more serious mistake than you think. Indeed, one of the reasons why repetition is so important in African music is that repetition of a rhythm often serves to clarify its meaning. When rhythms change too abruptly, the music can lose some of its meaning... (p 80-81)

This tendency to court misinterpretation can be heard just by listening to the complex polyrhythms of any West African dance:

The effect of polymetric music is as if the different rhythms were competing for our attention. No sooner do we grasp one rhythm than we lose track of it and hear another. In something like Adzogbo or Zhe, it is not easy to find any constant beat at all. The Western conception of a main beat or pulse seems to disappear, and a Westerner who cannot appreciate the rhythmic complications and who maintains his habitual listening orientation quite simply gets lost. [...] Actually, if we try to apply Western notions of bars and time signatures, the music seems much more complicated than it really is. [...] The individual rhythms are simple, but the way they are combined can be confusing to Westerners. (p 46-47)

I see these stories as beautiful metaphors for, and examples of:

• Information having a noisy character (the beer story)
• The difference between intention in sending and receiving
• Our ability to find structures that have a different cause than we expect
• Repetition as the foundation of meaning, a type of contextualization that allows us to separate "signal" from noise
• The interaction of repetitions producing more complex structures than the sum of their parts (in the case of polyrhythms, it's their least common multiple)
• Our ability to misunderstand a system based on the wrong contextualization (the last example of Westerners misunderstanding polyrhythms)
• Combinatorial music in general

Stars and Bubbles

Astronomers have recently realized that galaxies are distributed in a sort of "frothy" or "bubbly" structure. That is, the large scale structure of the universe can be described as consisting of strings of galaxies with big spaces in between.

A projection of this structure onto the sky of any planet should look highly web-like as well. From these webs, we've created constellations. One of the features that has helped give rise to similar constellations from separate traditions is locality: 參, the ancient "three stars" asterism from Chinese astrology, matched the belt of the Greek constellation Orion. Within traditions, "guideposts" are also established, creating a coherency to the stellar structures.

Various religious traditions have identified constellations as prophetically or genetically relevant to their beliefs. In 1884, Joseph Seiss laid out his "Gospel In The Stars" system, describing the relevance of the zodiac to Christianity. Authors like John Kotselas will argue that the structures act to justify belief in Christianity. Today, new patterns are identified and the old ones still argued.

Strange Loops

Hofstadter's strange loops are a very accessible subset of coherentism. I say "subset" because self-reference, at first glance, seems to be a only one type of reference. This is only true if you make claims from a perspective. If you make non-perspectival claims, there is only self-reference (meaning is only established recursively).

Closer Than Any Other

One of the reasons I appreciate Java is the way the documentation is written. Consider their definition of e from java.lang.Math:

static double E The double value that is closer than any other to e, the base of the natural logarithms.

Helter Skelter

Charles Manson had an intricate interpretation of Revelations 9 that predicted he was the returning Jesus Christ, and that the Beatles were somehow involved in the coming apocalypse. From Wikipedia:

Verse 17: "And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone."

breastplates of fire = the Beatles' electric guitars
fire and smoke and brimstone out of their mouths = the Beatles' powerful lyrics, the power of their music to ignite Helter Skelter

A reminder that some more ambiguous prophetic texts are notoriously difficult to discuss in a non-coherentist manner.

Positively Divine Understanding

From the Wikipedia article on the Japanese painter Hokusai, some thoughts on understanding and sharing the natural world:

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

MOOKDFJLAL

Take a photograph in your bedroom with a pillow on your head. Upload this photo to the internet (like on Flickr). Tag the file with: MOOKDFJLAL. When you search for MOOKDFJLAL you will find photographs of people wearing pillows on their head. David Horvitz, May 18, 2009

If you search for 241543903, you'll find another Horvitz creation ("people putting their head in the freezer."). It's been called a "meme", but I feel like that's a secondary characteristic of this entity. Memes have origins you can point to and say, "There, look at that — isn't it funny? That's why everybody's been copying it." But 241543903 and MOOKDFJLAL exist primarily because of the photos, not because of David's original instructions. This is coherentism in action.

Unknown Passwords

My friend Byeong Sam sometimes uses his Latin-covered keyboard to type Hangul. I asked if there are any connections between the Latin consonants and the way they are used to form the Korean characters — he said no. Furthermore, there are some passwords that he knows in Korean but are stored using Latin characters. He doesn't really pay attention to what these passwords are, just the gestures that form them.

Ways of Defining Music

The "is-ought" problem is common to meta-ethics and linguistics. In meta-ethics: are we describing how people act, or how they ought to act? In linguistics, some people describe grammar while other prescribe grammar. I imagine the same approaches to understanding music:

1. Descriptive definitions of music, which take into account various musical traditions and extrapolate common themes within and between them.
2. Prescriptive definitions of music, which involve reflection and thought-experiments — philosophy, really — sometimes accompanied by experimental compositions.

To explore the first without the second is superficial, and to philosophize without context is unrealistic.

1/26/08: "Noise" has the same issue, describing how the word "noise" is used is very different from prescribing definitions. Describing things can be difficult, but prescriptions can get really messy. It's probably best to set out a goal for a prescriptive definition before seeking/giving one. Prescriptions might be about: unifying themes of descriptions, offering a new definition that illuminates others, expanding or restricting the dominant contemporary definition...

Defining Music

"Music" has always been "meaningful sound"; but the definition of "meaningful sound" has not always been the same.

• Pre-Cage: meaning is found in your local culture. One culture's music is another culture's noise.
• Cage: meaning is found in your personal experience. One person's music is another person's noise.
• Post-Cage: meaning is found in contextualization. There is no noise, only sound that is more or less contextualized.

12/27/08: I still agree with the distinction between the three stages above. I'm less certain about "music" being "meaningful sound". By extension, "art" is anything with meaning. However, there are many things that people with pre-Cage (pre-Duchamp) — or even Cagian/Duchampian definitions of art — would call "meaningful" but not "art". The beep of a crosswalk has a meaning, but is not often called "music". Is there anything in common between Cage calling the crosswalk beep "music", and a pre-Cage audience calling Debussy "music"?

Have we ever called meaningless things "art"? Very briefly, when Cage or Duchamp were busy with 4'33" or "The Fountain". With those transitional exceptions, then, "art" is a subset of "meaningful things".

Three sets:

1. A Art.
2. M Meaningful things.
3. U The universal set.

Three steps (where ⊂ means "strict subset"):

1. Pre-Cage: A⊂M, M⊂U
2. Cage: A=M, M⊂U (not quite right, because of the crosswalk problem)
3. Post-Cage: A=M, M=U

1/22/09: Music is not necessarily "meaningful sound", but music is "named" the same way meaning is "named". Naming, and meaning, has always come from contextualization, but we've imagined contextualization differently over time.

1. Pre-Cage: societies are the contextualizers, deciding what is meaningful, what is music, etc.
2. Cage: individuals are the contextualizers (remove society).
3. Post-Cage: nature itself is the contextualizer (remove the individual), and humans identify subsets of these relationships.

Transcoding-based art (i.e., visualization, sonification...) and highly analogical explorations (e.g., VJing as an analog to DJing) can be heavily Post-Cage in that they acknowledge the many possibilities, and that they are sampling a subset of those relationships.

8/18/09: Attali has a note on these ideas in Noise, p 25:

In fact, the signification of music is far more complex. Although the value of a sound, like that of a phoneme, is determined by its relations with other sounds, it is, more than that, a relation embedded in a specific culture; the "meaning" of the musical message is expressed in a global fashion, in its operationality, and not in the juxtaposed signification of each sound element.

In short, while considering the origins of music, he identifies the pre-Cage contextualizers (society/culture) as bestowing meaning upon music.

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?

Desire and Justification

Is it possible to do something for some reason other than simply wanting to do it?

It seems as though, for any action we may take, if we keep asking "why?", the answer necessarily reduces to "I wanted to." This includes actions we take with an ulterior motive — we follow through with the initial action because we have a desire for something else.

Are some wants better than others? Is it better to, for example, want things that allows future generations of humans to inhabit this planet? Unless we have some external rubric, we cannot say — this want is no more justified than its antithesis.

What's more, if we have a rubric, would we want to follow it? And if we didn't want to follow it, could we say there is something wrong with that? If we frame beliefs as actions (knowledge-actions), we must admit that we similarly have no better reason for believing things than wanting to believe them. That is, even if there is a "rubric" for what desires are "best" to have, we would not be able to justify belief in it.

Purism

Sometimes it's easiest to understand a perspective when you hear it from someone who believes it. But no one is a purist. That is, almost no one is solely Platonist, Cartesian, Marxist, etc. To be a purist, you would have to accept one approach in favor of everything else, rejecting even unknown philosophies.

The only possible non-naive purist would be one who can account for new philosophies and make an informed evaluation of them rather than simply rejecting the unfamiliar.

Truth Seeking as Contradiction Resolution

For a while, this is all I've had:

• Questions are worth asking.
• Every mode of understanding is worth acknowledging.

The first one should be relatively clear. The second I realized first — by "mode of understanding" I mean intuition, experience, and reason. There may be more or less modes — maybe I should include emotion, or combine experience and intuition, I'm not sure. The principle is the important part.

Today I realized there's an assumption I've been making unconsciously:

• Actions and beliefs requires justification.

This assumption is revealed when I ask "But why are questions worth asking?", only to produce: "Without answers, we cannot justify action or belief." What if this assumption is false?

I think I've misunderstood justification. In Jain epistemology, they recognize every truth claim as coupled with a perspective; making it silly to talk about the truth claim apart from the perspective. If we look at each mode of understanding as representing a perspective, the issue is no longer justification. Each of the Jain blind men gathered around the elephant has a justification — their perspective is the justification.

• The man by the leg says the elephant is a pillar.
• The man by the ear says the elephant is a fan.

In the same way:

• My intuition says there is hope for all things.
• My experience shows that some things are hopeless.

Since all these claims are justified, the question turns to resolving the contradictions. We understand how contradictory kinesthetic perspectives fit together in the case of the elephant, but I don't know how different "understanding perspectives" might fit together. Can we formulate a similar principle? Maybe the the modes of understanding have well-defined relationships to each other in the same way spatial perspectives do.

Without a general principle to resolve the contradictions, what should I do? The same thing the blind men do: discuss. They discuss because there is a contradiction, and act/believe when they have a resolution.

So now I have two axioms and a consequence:

• Every mode of understanding is worth acknowledging.
• Contradictions are worth resolving.
• Questions are worth asking.

Truth (as far as we can understand it) can be defined negatively as noncontradiction. Now when I ask "Are these things important: compassion/love/selflessness, truth/trust/honesty, and passion?", and my intuition and experience say yes, while my rationality has no way of saying anything — there's a truth there.

At first it seems strange to see truth seeking as contradiction resolution, but I think it's just because I was distracted by justification and failed to realize that each mode of understanding is already justified in itself.

Beliefs About God

From Kierkegaard's "Provocations":

...no one becomes a believer by hearing about Christianity, by reading about it, by thinking about it. It means that while Christ was living, no one became a believer by seeing Him once in a while or by going and staring at Him all day long. No, a certain setting is required — venture a decisive act. The proof does not precede but follows; it exists in and with the life that follows Christ. Once you have ventured the decisive act, you are at odds with the life of this world. You come into collision with it, and because of this you will gradually be brought into such tension that you will then be able to become certain of what Christ taught.

Let's say you're in elementary school, and the teacher gives you an address for a penpal. You send the first letter on your faith in your teacher, and you receive a "proof" of the penpal's existence in return (a response). There is another type of "proof", though: as you correspond with your penpal and develop a relationship, coming to understand each other better, you receive proof of their character.

I can imagine trusting your penpal before you really know their character — there's a kindness to that — but it makes no sense to trust someone before you even know they exist. Of course, this metaphor isn't perfect, it's even more extreme in the case of Christianity: we aren't asked to trust God the way we would trust a penpal, we're asked to give up everything. I can see how proof of God's character might "exist in and with the life that follows Christ", but it doesn't make any sense to devote yourself to something without some initial reason to believe it exists (and especially not if you have reasons to disbelieve).

Native American Messiah

At the end of the 19th century, while white Americans were busy decimating the Buffalo population, some Native American shamans shared a vision of what is called the "Ghost Dance":

All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring the Big Man come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young man, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Big Man comes this way, then all Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can't hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way high up, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. [...] Indians who don't dance, who don't believe in this word, will grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and be burned in fire.

There are some obvious parallels to the Christian notion of the Second Coming, but what I find more interesting are the differences. Through various tensions and misunderstandings, the movement was dealt its strongest blow at Wounded Knee in 1890 where the US Calvary killed at lest 153 Sioux. The Ghost Dance movement quickly fade in response to this defeat. When prophecies aren't fulfilled, shouldn't they be ignored? In this respect, the faith of the Native American seem more reasonable than Christianity (excluding extremely liberal interpretations of "Christianity").

Justified Subjective Belief

I met this guy recently, Eric, who prefers to make the distinction between being a Christian and a Paulian. As a Christian, he doesn't try and defend Paul's writings (or scripture in general), but stands by Christ's central teachings. It's questionable what Christ's central teachings are (and how original they are), but Eric says it's just about love. He sees this as objectively defensible, but it seems like the teaching is dependent on the character of Christ: if Jesus was just a person, believing in "Love" is not being "Christian", it's also being Buddhist, Confucianist, and a host of other things. On the other hand, if Jesus is God incarnate, He has a privileged understanding of the nature of humanity and the ethics that follow. Arguing for the latter requires a shareable (objectively defensible) argument for Christ's God-nature, which would have to be founded in scripture.

A more general question that arises from this regards the nature of personal belief. Eric believes more than he can share (again, objectively defend), but isn't worried about not being able to share it. This concerns me: when, if ever, are we justified in believing something about the nature of reality we can't defend to someone else?

Self-Satisfaction

It seems reasonable to assert "a theory of truth is itself true if and only if it fulfills its own criteria for truth" (I'll call this the "self-satisfaction principle"). If I say "x is true if God said so", this fulfills the self-satisfaction principle. However, if I say "x is true if and only if God said so", this does not (precisely because I made the claim, and God has not).

Traditional theories of truth don't fare well:

• Correspondence: the theory is an abstraction and cannot possibly correspond to anything concrete
• Coherence: the theory initially stands alone, and has nothing to cohere to
• Pragmatism: is it pragmatic to be a pragmatist? Outside of an initial assumption of order and uniformity, coupled with a utility function, no.

I propose the counter-example theory of truth as a response to the self-satisfaction principle: "x is true only if there do not exist any counter-examples to x" (where counter-examples includes counter-proofs).

Unfortunately, creating "only if" theories of truth that fulfill the self-satisfaction principle is pretty easy (if I say, "x is true only if I say so", if I write "x is true only if I write it"). A real theory of truth would have to fulfill the self-satisfaction principle and describe an "if and only if" relationship.