a philosophy which explains everything, or rather , enough things sufficiently well, becomes a science which becomes a technique

science has world universal abstractions, philosophy has its own abstractions, and technique deals with only real world objects.

when a philosophy-turned-science-turned-technique achieves subscribers and a single point of power and authority and then a hierarchy, it becomes a religion.

the first philosophies/abstractions were  stories  - and oral societies and religions formed around them.
then came the text symbols stories and their religions of the books
then came math ,and industrial societies. all three of them coexist today.

but capitalism and division of labour is still a religion, a faith in God that one believes, and assumes that it explains our life and things that happen to us.

today's newspapers and journal articles tell us stories embedded with numbers to indicate that a math machine is behind the scenes working.

the newspapers of tomorrow will be equations and graphs, and the dashboards are already being built - the gdp equation, the health equation , the war equation, the currency equation....

( I guess it follows that the newspapers of the future will be read only by computing machines - this must be true at some level - with machines reading user stats of cat sites and remarking 'oh quite!' )

a side-note, though obvious - math is the bedrock of science.  all of science involves capturing behaviour in symbol arrangements.

a religion acquires subscribers, then a hierarchy and power structure amongst them, and then followers and recruits and the lay. we can call it head and body for the sake of convenience.

philosophies which don't benefit all require partial knowledge on the part of the body, and just like the 80/20 can be applied to the 20 of the 80, partial knowledge on the part of the 80 of the  head.

we can call it the brain and senses, or supremo &  party,  or  king & ruling family.

a lot of social abstractions are like money in the bank - you can see it as long as everybody doesn't ask to

a horse is a social abstraction. each horse you meet will deviate from the definition of the horse that you might form, and with each horse you see and whose features you add to you definition, each future horse would deviate from it in some way. ultimately, what a horse is is only a set of features in your head that you just say is a horse.
 the 'just comes into play, say, when boston dynamics will ask to run its horses in the derby.
 the 'just' is also the key word here, and your opinion should never be 'just', as per pirsig and kant.

i see from my window that the Bangalore smog is back, and the horizon of squat ugly concrete buildings is hidden, thankfully.

a philosophy generator, therefore , need no universal truths or agreed upon abstractions to work with, rather  it just needs to generate patterns with a base set of 'elements'. hence the runaway success of the I-ching.

a philosophy generator might be a strange idea, but a hypothesis generator is not.

 prevalence of  genetic programming is proof of this.

you see, we live in a world where symbol lists can produce real world changes.

the symbol list that you know  as 'real' , for eg, "Manuel, bring the car around" or "would you like fries with that"  is only a specific version of the general symbolic logic framework you swim in,like water, oblivious.

earliest symbol lists were things like 'Offler needs a sacrifice', then came printed word 'the country needs you', and now we have 'you have x new messages!'

and we can compute them very fast now.

functional programming brings us closest to dna, and godel, church and turing were talking about manipulating such sequences long back.

come to think of it, dNA is a symbol sequence made of matter, rather than being electro-magnetic  like the text in this document.


'We live in a mediated world'. - William Gibson

abstractions grow on your mind and become a body  in itself. the better more exhaustive it is, the more it mediates. eventually all reality stops passing through the jvm of abstraction and does not reach the bare metal ever. Some cultures manage this platforming too.

computer programming has many parallels to this abstractions/symbols becoming reality

meditation seeks to undo the damage of the abstractions on the brain. de-semantic-ize symbols, scrub meaning from them, so to say.

(Java successfully adapts whole new paradigms into its existing syntax. it might be possible to learn new things with existing human language, but sapir-whorf might disagree)

side -note : if you consider a person growing up and 'learning' things (this is always in a local, specific way - one learns what one's nearby people   and subscribing organisations know or allow to know),

then when one leaves those circles, 'unlearning' is needed. The abstractions/symbols need to be un-mapped. If you consider the abstractions to be 'stratified' when unlearning is required, then reading this - (art :delanda's destratified ) will explain the success of LSD in curing mental disorders, or increasing creativity.

side-note : all art is just representing reality differently, or rather showing equivalence of abstractions.

side-side-note :  The most important thing in art is The Frame. - Frank Zappa

side-side-side-note - a thing is defined by what it is not, eg borders. hence consciousness lives only in borders.

like programming languages, most reality eventually passes down into your abstraction

side -note : while most programming languages  go down the Tao scale towards myriad things, LiSP ascends towards the Tao, with less  ).

five colors blind the eyes, five notes deafen the ears ..

it follows that songs and stories are the most potent of tools of control. and a bard would be the most powerful at organising people until religions drew in song and story within its fold inside the stone walls of churches or mosques.

when you play, a different part of your brain lights up in your head, than when you recite a rote poem. only when you attain skill enough via rote-repeat does this first part light up again.

inside out - the abstract thought chamber. too much thinking 'flattens out' an imprint and makes it dessicated, as abstraction is the removal of all real world connections. (SICP)

cultural assist:

tao te ching . John C Wu Translation . Terebess

Autumn Leaves, Eric Clapton, Gabriella Quevedo(youtube)

ran prieur - LSD overdoses cure bipolarity , lyme disease pain etc ...

version control for writers. never throw anything away.
 “What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.    Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.”  ― E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

problem with software engineering is that it's an art masquerading as a science.
the source of neurosis is the belief that things are determinate.

Arting allows cross pollination of abstractions and allows a viewer to get free of the particular manifestation of the abstraction.hence all growth is via art


Slava akechmet - shakespeare as important as e mc2


How can lsd cure mental conditions? It rewires by messing up the traijing sets of the bio neuralnetworks


It follows that bytes in the brain form our realities like in a compiter


Humans are pattern recognizers, all kodels are false some are useful


Just like the mel programmers are pushed aside by compiler optimizers, data scientists who know which model to apply will be pushed aside by shotgun blasts of genetic programming or algos


Is it true is it right is it good ?
Is it permamnent is it universal is it appealing to almost all ? Does it match a story you ready have in your gut ? Is it something others will tolerate you doing ,even appreciate ? Will it bring profit ? Is it legal? Will you have fu doing it?


When a component can detect its own action, we have feedback, the basis of intellihence


Weiner was a 'made' genius, the kindninaspired to be, by memorising 2^64

People in Chicago wear t-shirts to hide for the fact that their souls are ever wearing a suit.

The structure of writing — there’s a start , then comes a middle, and then an end.

The challenge will be to write a lot of pieces, and adhere to the structure above. The simultaneous challenge will be to keep the story meaningful.

Zinsser said you’ll never write anything definitive. Aim to bite of a corner and make it your own.

Adding a constraint of ,say 300 words — a hundred for the start, same for the rest. A picture for each ? no, adding images, drawing , scanning ,cutting to fit, attributing — no end of distractions. Though it might work if required as an editing step.

The art of working in a straight line, from conception to finish — don’t fool yourself- it is a skill and a craft. If not present, the duty to make it so is incumbent upon us. There is no greater line to adulthood, to maturity, than this.

An aside on straight lines. There are none in nature. Apart from the zero, the straight line is mankind’s biggest invention. It functions both as an abstraction , and also a guide wire for the experiment of thought.

straight lines gave us maps that don’t represent the territory, yet allow for infinite conquest and transport networks.

writing is a form of thinking. it’s uses the simplest form of symbol capturing/ memo ing to record that one has thought.

shipping is the moment of truth. only when you ship can you know where you stand. it connects your work and the real world , only after you ship can you mark
remember our formula - act, measure, mark, exceed

JVM platforms hide the bare metal from you, making you a consumer, a mediated citizen. Java libraries do the work for you, leaving you the job of creating objects and feeding them to the priests to feed to the machine. earlier ( hackers,levy) big metal had acolytes to feed the machine the  cards.
today we have the JVM and its million libraries.

it is not for nothing that it is said " low level programming is good for the programmer's soul"