…thinking is a miracle…at least as I understand what makes miracles miracles…whether or not those are divine in some or any of their origin

…if it’s just random chance threading the right needle in the haystack of the things every time with a rope made of camels…even if what that really means is the same as unremarkably inevitable because we’re actually looking at it backwards…& any number of things can fall on a shallow slope around a small hole but only the ones that hit nothing but net are going be what you find down the hole…so given all the variables in a system the size of a universe…in the units of time you need to fit the uptime clock on a display…whatever the trick to it is…it’s weird it doesn’t seem to have happened more…maybe more than it’s weird it did happen here

…not least because it seems to compound in a way the current AI hype-cycle suggests we’ve in large part collectively mistaken for a slower version of moore’s law about the exponential improvement in computational performance for a broadly linear gradient trending towards making a thing that thinks that doesn’t live

…& “we” have

…I know the way I go on about that shit suggests that I don’t believe that…but that isn’t because we haven’t…it’s a function of the way we talk about stuff while torturing the terms with contortionist definitional demands so dynamic in their bullet-time gymnastics that to plot the process across a single article or discussion would probably require a topology with more dimensions that we consciously deal with in our temporal or spatial frame of reference

…what we haven’t done is make “intelligence”

…I don’t mean “that kid is intimidatingly intelligent but not in a way that makes them any friends because they make everyone feel stupid in a way that means they’re no fun to be around” or “real intelligence would be if they were smart enough to be fun to be around but also didn’t have to be less intelligent” any more than I mean “book smart” or “street smart” or “too smart”…or “academically intelligent” or “emotionally intelligent”

…we accept that because the world makes sense to us & we’re the sorts of things we are…that there are other animals that possess intelligence…we even split them up based on the ones we’re pretty smug about having been able to find differences between in terms of how we think the way they’ve turned out means they understand the world & their relationship with it…so we kind of rank those

…we also know we are pretty importantly wrong about how that looks from the other side…if you have some spare time & it wouldn’t make you grind your teeth or pull your hair out or fall asleep without ever getting to the end until you think it might make you lose your mind…or generally induce the sort of response that reading another of these would…unless you think that would be a point in its favor…in which case scratch that last one…there’s a great thing by a guy called nagel on what it’s like to be a bat

…perhaps a more popular parallel is the way a certain sort of geek argues about why we “do aliens wrong” in everything…or just about everything…where there’s aliens…the tl;dr for which helpfully we’ve already run through for a warm up…to “do aliens” in a thing-for-people whatever the point of the has-aliens aspect it has to have a way to fit into a for-humans thing…cf.  the uncanny valley…&/or ozymandius’s project for the print ending of watchmen now I think of it

…so…do pets have character…& personality…to us, certainly…to other animals…presumably more…almost all of which operate on a more-different-than-not basis…that we *can’t* know from the perspective of what it’s *actually* like to be that thing…because that’s not how knowing things from a deterministically-subjective PoV works

…are they, therefore, in every sense bar the “terrestrial carbon-based life” one…intelligent aliens among us?

…some of which…if we move from pets to wild ones…live in environments that we would die in…like immersed in water…some of them are octopi…at some point it’s not even weird any more to think of them as alien life

…even so…even as smart as some of those aliens seem to be from the perspective of being as smart as we’ve figured out how to be…to an extent R A Wilson…in some pretty non-academic books…ragged on in much the manner probably more people laughed at when it was gary larson doing it with cows…or that great one with the bear telling the one about the two hunters & the cave…we are more than slightly cocky about how the only thing we think ever figured out thinking to the part where it thought *about thinking* in a self-aware way that went beyond pitting the minds doing the thinking against one another as the things in competition & pitted the thinking against other thinking…until stuff like math fell out…& the universe expanded exponentially like the big bang…was us…& just like that we only really know anything about that from a little bit after it happened because it sort of stands to reason that for reasonable reasons reason gets stood up that way

…of course if we tried to remember to think all this through before we got from opening our eyes at what we hope will prove to have been a civilized hour in a civilized day in a civilized world…or at least two out of three…& remembering whose eyes those are & what they think would qualify…we’d go fucking spare…so we don’t…well…most of us don’t…& the others…hardly ever…really…that’s worth writing home about…uhhh…honest?

…I mean…speaking totally theoretically & definitely not because I once lived such a supremely coddled life that for several years no one was allowed to get mad at me if I just sat about doing nothing but thinking about stuff because it suggested itself to be interesting stuff to think about thanks to a great many people over a great many years in a great many places who had managed to cook up the absolutely genius scheme of getting it declared officially “productive” for academic purposes

…& once you call it that most people stop paying attention to anything you say after that because thank-fuck-we’re-not-at-school-any-more

…which is fair enough in loads of ways…& truly bloody stupid in at least two

…there’s…as far as I can make out…nothing there isn’t something to learn from…while conversely there may be no upper bound to how much there is to learn about anything…so…to borrow shamelessly from the towering work of philosophical genius that is the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy…or…possibly technically from so long & thanks for the fish…wonko the sane…with the inside-out house…the part he thinks of as inside the asylum…that’s school, folks

…anyway…I’m not the teacher here…I’m just another student that maybe took some of the same courses & not others…I know my way about some of the place & maybe a little bit more of the library than that…but one of my teachers once upon a time…when I was so young I’d never heard of bruce lee but might have watched a lot of the green hornet show on the telly & thought kato seemed pretty cool…she told me that the thing she liked best about math wasn’t that she could find the answer because there was one…it was that were so many ways to get to it & that made it easy to check your answer & *the* answer was the right one

…maybe you don’t think that’s made up of some stuff that has something in the mix you’d find in bruce’s approach  to crossing the traditional streams when it comes to the cultural appropriation of neat applied physical discipline that derive from the ways different people found you could come off better in a fight

…but…at the risk of embarrassing our resident red panda…or possibly bipedal turtle…here’s why of all of those the tradition that seems to me…not necessarily in a learn-this-to-win-all-your-fights way…but…maybe that way too if you put the time in & respect the process enough to mean that alters the set of fights you’d even be in in the first place…just…superior

…that…more or less…would be tai chi…& here’s for why…if there’s another tradition of martial arts out there of which this is true I’d be delighted to learn about it but all the others I’ve come across at some level come down to working from the starting point of “you’re in a fight so you need to win that which probably means being able to beat down the opposition” & boldly claim theirs is a system to give you the best chance of that in the most of those to the extent that one of those can do that in advance…& to some extent it appears to bear out…not altogether simply…is this “style” better than that one or is one guy just better/younger/fitter/faster/able-to-soak-up-punishment-like-rocky or whatever…but that’s just going by what’s broadly trial by combat & agnostics will tend to find that a less useful indicator

…one of them…begins with the idea that the particular impossible-to-achieve solution…arguably elegantly…states it differently…what achieving perfection would entail would be that however many opponents you faced…for however long…you would suffer harm from none of them

…you don’t even have to batter the nerve endings in your extremities to insensibility while increasing your bone density by a similar process to the way muscles get built in gyms…which is nice

…& in true shoot-for-the-moon style…the thing you attempt to encode this wizardry in…is a sequence of movements…&…some people say…that although the sequence has a beginning & an end…in a sense you generally begin & finish with…if you were the perfect being &  you’d perfected the style…you wouldn’t have to

…I don’t claim to understand how they meant that given the whole “gotta eat sometime” thing…or the other side of that coin…but the conceit holds if you’re familiar with those enough to find them comfortable…& in that the form of equilibrium sought & found & stewarded to perfection…means it costs you no effort to…as captain america might say…do the “I could do this all day” dance…for the rest of your days…which…if you were that sort of perfect person…would according to the prospectus be maybe the same as all the ones yet to dawn upon the earth…though…again…I strongly suspect that if you take that entirely literally generations of ancestors of several highly respected families will snigger a lot in a place you don’t hear them

…so…I never met any of them & I couldn’t talk to them if I did because they all speak a bunch of dialects that are largely evolved more or less beyond recognition even to the people that speak the dialects that make up the modern day language we call the same name

…which I also don’t speak

…but

…I like their thinking

…& one of the reasons is that I can watch the way someone moves generations later in a totally different world…& still see how the way that’s different to the way people move based on a different sort of thinking…& get what made them pick their way of going about that

…like…& this isn’t unique to tai chi…nor as I understand it is really any single element of the stuff that makes it tai chi & not something else…even though it also is a thing unto itself in ways that are unique…but also different depending on which set of chinese whispers brought it to your eyes & ears

…even though watching it or talking about it or reading about it is as much like understanding it as…say…casually glancing at the surface layer of the comments as an afterthought if you ever think about them at all…compared to living in those mentions like it’s your personal aquarium

…& for me…not trying to speak for anyone else…but for me…that is the hallmark of a thing derived from an intelligence

…& that’s the sort of intelligence we not only haven’t made artificial however much we *really* want to be able to believe we might soon enough to help us out if we just go all-in on it enough…but mostly do not apply…or in more cases & senses than it seem reasonable to suppose are merely an unfortunate compounding of errors produced through inattention…to how we see our world or attempt to derive iterative improvement through eternal patching of legacy systems to make them interoperable with shiny new cleverer ones

…put it this way…if you got actually everyone together & asked them to make a list of all the circumstances in which it stopped being a bad thing to kill a person…& then wheeled in people who had done serious thinking about all the things all of those brought up…& really nailed down what people meant by what they went with in their first answer…& then went around & maybe took some off the list…or started having more columns…or little branching outcome trees…& then played rinse & repeat for a bit until the difference between the last round of answers & the next round was getting hard to see daylight between

…if after that you did it all over again…but this time you started with all the ways there are for something to kill someone…ad infinitum…but the neat thing about hypotheticals is they don’t have to be things it’s possible to actually do…just to think about…which…is possible…even if maybe I can’t write it up in a way that  lets you do that the way it happens to have happened to me sometimes

…even if you can’t really do either of those things even in your head…my guess is you have a guess for this next one…assuming you have in fact done both those things…& you say the point of society is to take everything from the “could kill you” column that we could make a difference to just by people choosing to make doing “being people” work differently just…off the board…& designed the rules to that so they did that…would that look like the rules you can play by where you live & not wind up with you dying from an acute case of being away with the fairies?

…I’m gonna go out on a limb here & say it would not

…&…maybe…if…& it seems like as big an if as the why in why haven’t we found life elsewhere…but if…we make that kind of intelligence…but it isn’t alive…so making it do all the boring hard stuff & just give us the answers so we don’t have to do our homework & can goof off all the time without feeling guilty about doing that…isn’t bad the way it is when you do that but with the sort of walking, talking, living dolls that have been getting played with so far…that’s a good thing…if you thread that needle with your rope of camels

…but also maybe…there’s a reason just about everywhere there’s been people has some version of the thing where who had the best way to not get your ass kicked going was considered justly famous for that & other people tried to make sure they didn’t forget how it worked

…& maybe…even more tenuously…there’s a possibility that while all that money gets spent in quantities it starts to get hard to believe might not have been enough of that stuff to move some pretty useful shit out of the impossible column when it comes to what we’d consider to be avoidable hardships &/or actual death in terms of their statistical incidence on a global basis…& subjectively we’d call the sort of unnecessary suffering & misery that might make anyone on the sharp end feel like they’d been cut loose by whatever governs the social contract…when ideally no one would ever need to feel that way even once because simply by virtue of being a person they ought to know in their bones that the baseline is that they’re never stuck having to deal with anything entirely on their own that way

…& that seems like it makes no sense…but…thinking is a bitch…& even if you have very nearly everybody agreeing about how something they think in a way that doesn’t even really need thinking about should work…& all of them agree the way it currently works isn’t the right way…if a few people want it to work that way anyway…& they do nothing but think about it…more often than you might think when you see how small that nipper with the slingshot looks compared to the akira-blob that is goliath in this absolute apocalyptic monster of a mistreated metaphor…the way it continues to go is the way the people who thought about it the most thought about how to make it go

…& what you think about that…whether you mean the that you just read or the that it was about…or any other that…will be a matter of how from your perspective all of that works based on how supervenience operates in the hierarchy of your particular collection of personal faiths & what that means about your personal philosophy…& what you think about that…to the extent that you have…even if part of yours is to persist in the assertion that you haven’t got one…possibly as dictated by your faith…because I have some news you won’t like about how that works…in…more ways than not, really…because there are…a lot of ways if you start trying to see how many anyone ever could have thought of…won’t ever be known by anyone but you & sort of might not be said to exist anywhere outside your head by lots of terribly serious people who talk earnestly about this sort of thing for entire careers…but…annoyingly…lots of the same ones will then flit back & forth between all the ways all that thinking of yours & how conscious &/or introspective a thing that might be in your case…also informs the physical reality & the cultural framework within which all our best guesses churn around to produce the emergent properties of perhaps the only thing we think we are that’s more complex or less well understood than our own minds & brains & whether or not one of those should or shouldn’t be said to be the same as the other

…& maybe…when it’s all numbers flickering back & forth on invisible abacii faster than an eye could follow dynamically self-adjusting weighting recursively in neural nets…that’ll make a robot that perfects tai chi *& could teach you*

…but…I for one won’t be holding my breath while I wait

…my kung fu ain’t that good

…so…speaking of not holding your breath…I might yet get around to festooning all that wittering in a blizzard of links & embeds & quotes that might have been swimming about in the wherever-the-fuck-all-that-comes-from…no end of candidates & it wouldn’t be the first time…but…between you, me & the gatepost…I had a bit of a rough one yesterday…not looking for sympathy…just…providing context without sharing receipts that aren’t mine, I guess…& today is a day that…as the song has it “in the town where I was born”…they get their remembrance on

…11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month…first two minutes is silence

…so this is only accidentally late for the ones after that pair

…&…clearly my head is somewhere not altogether constructive this morning…but…it’s sunday…fuck it…everyone know the watchmaker theory of creation?

…short version…if you’re in the desert & you stub your toe on a pocket watch…they don’t generally specify how many jewels in the mechanism or anything…but…it’s reasonable to assume you needed some sort of intelligence to have intentionally created the artifact before you…it didn’t just evolve its way there…&…presto chango…the universe is a wicked complicated bit of clockwork…so…must be a god

…in a comic by a man less liked than perhaps he used to be but probably still liked by more people than had really heard his name when he wrote the comic…there’s a story about a kid who adds to that the belief that if the watch you find is broken…you fix it…& in his story as it’s told in a hostelry between realities as the price of board & lodging…in a world of such nominative determinism that their devil is called boss smiley because his whole head is a smiley face from before those were emoji…a kid whose mother named them prez could be the second coming in the shape of the youngest ever president of the united states of america…it’s…presumably…a metaphor of some sort

…but the “if it’s broken then you fix it” part…I like a lot more than some people these days like the guy that wrote it…you don’t know who or what might have made it…or if they’re still around to know…but you can work back from just the thing itself to seeing how it ought to work & from there to why it isn’t & from there to getting it ticking away again the way you can’t with “the ol’ ticker”…& one way to pay your respects to the craft & ingenuity & effort of the original watchmaker…is to keep their mechanism keeping time

…&…pretty sure it was albert with the mad hair who said that imagination is greater than knowledge…because knowledge by its definition must perforce be a finite thing…while imagination knows no bounds

…&…politics…some call the art of the possible…but the thing that makes the difference between some things being in the possible section of the options rather than the impossible…is that if someone has the imagination to see the impossible as a temporary label…then the realm of the possible gets that much bigger

…& sometimes that’s a good thing…& sometimes it’s a thing so awful it will haunt generations

…&…potentially…that sort of thing might even be a sustainable feedback loop…when you do imagine it that comes with it seeming like things you want to be one way might be another…so…when you hear someone say it’s…say…politically unimaginable…you…maybe don’t think it’s unimaginable any more…maybe you don’t even think it’s unimaginable to the ones saying it is…maybe they find it all too easy to imagine & they want it evicted from the collective imagination like nailing it into the impossible section…& sometimes it’d be good if we could but lots of times it would be good for people things are pretty fucking good to & pretty fucking dire for the way the fuck more people it wouldn’t be good for

…&…I don’t like *their* thinking?