Jeux

Debussy's Jeux fascinated me when I was younger. I even wrote a piano piece inspired by his bricolage technique - blocks of sound and gestures woven together in a tapestry which gradually builds up to a sensual climax. The blocks of sound are pretty obvious from looking at the score - which you can see here: 

One of the most impressive things about the piece is that once it is in flow, the sense of time passing is very fluid. It is a classic example of "moving through a sculpture": the sculpture is fixed; we create the movement and tell ourselves a story of how time passes, how something "grows". 

John Torday has repeatedly said "evolution is homeostasis". How can that be? How can something which "obviously" seems to get more complex (once there were bacteria, now there is New York), actually be simply maintaining stability? Was New York "in" the bacteria? Is it so crazy to think that it might be?

I had an interesting discussion with colleagues at work today about DMT and the geometric hallucinations it induces. 

What does that tell us? Is that "reality"? The philosophical position that this invites is determinism - but actually it might not be. Determinism itself is based on successionism - on one thing happening after another. But how can we talk about that if everything is there all the time in some kind of structure?

Debussy might have written one thing after another (we don't know how he did it), but ultimately his judgement is about the whole, which somehow was revealed to him. So Stravinsky saying the Rite of Spring appeared in a dream is perhaps not so ridiculous. 

The really profound thing is that this doesn't just apply to music. It applies to life, to events, etc. All is a structure. 

In my talk to the Metaphorum group I said that a distinction is a point, a line, a boundary and a space all at once. We can't perceive that kind of simultaneity. That's why we need to make up time in order to process the complexity. It's also why AI may be a very powerful scientific instrument which itself embodies a geometric structure of simultaneity, and which unfolds in its emerging patterns of utterances which appear like our own. 

I think there is an epistemological revolution coming. I was hinting at it in my talk (https://Metaphorum.org) last week:

 

Life on Venus

... Would be hot!

But does that preclude life? Could a planetary dynamic at 464°C still have the fundamental topological properties of a living system? Even if our living system did not have the perceptual apparatus to recognise it?

Paranoia

Getting involved in the commercial world can be a bit of an eye-opener. One of the real issues concerns transparency and trust. Once trust breaks down, there's really not much point in going on. Before embarking on any venture, it's not unreasonable to ask "is it a trap?", "is it a ruse which serves others' interests rather better than my own?". The signs of things going wrong are the same as the signs of any relationship going wrong - attenuation of communication, double-binds, and an overwhelming failure of imagination. We get an early warning in our guts. Always worth listening to.

So for any new venture, the only way to proceed is with a combination of enthusiasm and caution. I'll need eyes in the back of my head, and the ones at the front of my head increasingly don't work properly either! So caution will have to be the driver - and that is likely to upset people. But paranoia can be a good defence mechanism...