Back to the Important Stuff

With my professional life once more going in the right direction, I nonetheless find myself floating in a state of limbo. Although I gave notice at my current position on Friday, my current overlings were not so gracious as to simply fire me on the spot, thus requiring me to spend the next two weeks in a job that I don't want, managing matters that will - in the very near future - become someone else's problem. As I make no bones about my status as a professional mercenary, the only regret that I feel is that some other warrior will be the one to wield the weapons I've gathered against the Plaintiffs when several cases go to trial. Alas. Alack.

The end result of this professional limbo (with it's slight salting of professional regret) is that I really have no great impetus to do anything remotely resembling work. Thus, I expect to be posting on these pages quite a bit in the coming weeks. I hope this will satisfy the only person who reads these pages.

Now then. People who know me and who don't generally give comparable assertions of shock upon learning that I don't have what most Americans would define as television. I do have a TV, upon which I get about 5 1/2 channels through my improvised rabbit-ear antenna. No satellite. No digital cable. No cable. While there are two or three shows that I'd like to be able to see, I don't even miss TV, and I note that, lacking 1000 channels, I have a great deal more free time for other pursuits.

But I do have quite a few DVDs, as one of the beauteous things about Las Vegas is the multitude of pawn shops, from which one can outright buy a DVD for not much more than one would pay to rent that same movie. While one cannot generally go looking for a particular title to take home, any trip to any relatively respectable pawn shop (the respectability of pawn shops ALWAYS being relative) will yield a DVD purchase of opportunity. So, over the years, my collection has been filled with some notable classic films, and a great many more films which *I* consider to be classics.

As an extension to my prior thoughts about mankind's remarkable ability to delude itself, and as I was going through my movie collection over the weekend, I considered the Allegory of The Cave, as expressed in Plato's Republic. In brief, the story holds than men are savages staring at a blank cave wall. Behind them, the sun is shining into the cave, against the wall that they are looking at. This setting is being taken advantage of by Puppet Masters, stand behind the savages, and use the cave wall as a screen, upon which they project a shadow-puppet screening for the unenlightened masses. The message is that what people perceive has only a passing relationship to reality; we do not see the sun, nor the Puppet Masters, nor even the puppets themselves. All we see is the shadows that are being cast into our line of sight. Plato goes on the hypothesize that no chains other than those within our minds bind us where we are, staring at the shadow puppets, and that it is probably within our power to stand up, turn around, and behold The Real World. In doing so, our initial response would most likely be pain in looking at the world we had to the point perceived only as a shadowy reflection. Pain would be followed by an attempt to go back to being a simple observer of the shadows we have for so long been familiar with. That would followed by acceptance of the "enlightened" state of accepting what was really going on. This would probably be a lonely state, since all our friends would still be caught up in the puppet show, and would be too involved in it to even consider the idea that the illusion is not the reality, much less work up the cojones to turn and look at the reality itself.

For a spectacular modern-day rendition of the Allegory of The Cave, complete with the gamut of emotional responses from the One who actually stands up to see reality, just rewatch The Matrix, which in many ways seems drawn directly from classic Plato. The illusory world, peopled with subjects who unknowingly embrace the illusion. The One who awakens to reality, and the associate pains. Even the result of another's (Cipher's) attempt at - having awoken - returning to the illusion. There is also the expression of combined interaction of the subjects of the illusion and Masters of the puppets: the human audience, although completely at the mercy of The Matrix, are nonetheless active participants in the tableau being projected. They go about their lives in what they believe to be full autonomy, and they interact with each other and with the projected construct, bound only by the in-built limitations of the construct, which they are unable or (in a more Platonic vein) unwilling to transcend. They do not even perceive the nature of their bondage, except for the few who feel the splinter in their mind, the undefined, inexpressible feeling that Something Is Wrong. The Matrix Puppet Masters, rather than being gods on high, are merely slightly more awakened; they perceive the construct not as something to break out of, but merely as a tool to influence and control the subjugated populace. They are down and dirty, not standing on high acting only through the puppets, but working directly with the subject audience, and - as Agent Smith - becoming more and more like the sheep of their flock. The movie truly is a wonderful expansion of the ideas offered by Plato several thousand years ago, and is another prime example of the unappreciated brilliance and depth of modern American culture, perhaps the moreso because "Plato" does not - to my knowledge - appear in the credits. The Matrix, of course, holds a place of honor among my video collection, and not just because it involves a Carrie Anne Moss wrapped in skin-tight vinyl. Although that helps.

But, instead of our possibly residing within a computer-generated dream world (a contrivance extrinsic to the Platonic tale, providing The Matrix with villains and also a back-story within the grasp of the lowest-common-denominator movie-goer), consider what recent science tells us, and consider the substance of the reality in which we find ourselves: To the best of human science's ability to determine, the universe as we know it is only a facade. Conceived at its largest and at its smallest, our universe defies description, and there is simultaneously more to it and less to it, than we can explain.

From the broadest possible perspective of the world's leading astrophysicists, the universe doesn't make sense. It moves wrong. Unless, that is, you adopt the postulate that 95% of the universe (by mass) is unaccounted for "dark" matter and energy. Now, there is the distinct possibility that somebody simply fucked up the math; Newtonian physics is more or less incapable of mathematically modeling the gravitational interaction of more than two bodies on each other, and there are a lot more than two interacting gravitational bodies in the known universe. There's also the chance that - and this is a much more likely scenario - we've managed to overlook a necessary part of the equation which explains the phenomenon we observe. But as it stands now, science tells us that the physical universe we can perceive acts like something that, mathematically, is more than an order of magnitude larger than what we see. In short, the universe, viewed on a broad scale, is internally inconsistent with itself, and becomes consistent only when you accept that 95% of the universe is beyond normal perception. Thus, the inconsistency is not reality, but merely a failure of perception, engendered by our misconstruing of events as they unfold in the shadow-puppet theaters. At least now we have demonstrable, mathematical proof that most of reality is beyond our ability to observe. Does that not make you wonder what really is going on in the 95% of the universe that is NOT visible on the cave wall in front of us?

Now take the narrowest possible view of the universe, as seen in the behavior of subatomic particles. The cutting edge of particle physics (do a wiki search on "string theory") holds that, at the most basic levels, matter is composed of nothing except vibrating "strings" of energy, and that the matter formed by the strings is defined not by the structure of the string, but by the energy of the vibration. The primary difference between a human-perceivable photon and a purely (at this point) theoretical graviton is not primarily of structure, but of energy flowing though the structure. While string theory offers a solution to the "dark" matter and energy quandary addressed above by postulating the structure of reality based on interaction of eleven spacetime dimensions into our perceivable universe (those dimensions form the "dark" matter and energy), what it boils down to is that matter at its most basic levels is not defined by it's structure, but by it's energy. Energy, by definition, has no material form; it is merely an inequality of potentials that exists relative to points. In string theory, the inequality of potentials is provided by the aforementioned interaction of eleven dimensions across every point of realspace, which converge into strings, and thereby form reality. This is, of course, a huge oversimplification of a theory that is really only understood by a handful or so of exceptionally intelligent people, but I hope that the point will come across: according to the best minds on the planet, the universe as we perceive it is comprised of the energies generated by the competing influences of multiple, imperceptible dimensions intersecting in every point of the known spacetime continuum. Again, the puppet theater, with forces we can scarcely imagine coming together to show us the abundantly clear and tangible pictures of reality that we see every day.

Finally, there is the human portion of the equation. I've already noted mankind's remarkable ability to pick and choose the realities is deigns to believe in. How much of what we see is merely a result of what we choose to see? Mentalists have demonstrated that a body under deep hypnosis, which is told that it is being touched with a red-hot iron, will form blisters as if burned, even if the actual object used to touch the subject is a pen, or a rolled-up newspaper, or a fingertip. It's an old parlor trick for a hypnotist to put someone under, stick a pin through their hand, and tell the subject to bleed on one side of their hand, but not the other. It works. Further experimentation with group-minds (which downplay the role of the individual, and thus paradoxically heighten the individuals psychic involvement) have suggested limited abilities of levitation and telekinesis in the current stage of human evolution. What does this suggest not only about the universe beyond our percetion, but our ability to interact with that universe?

Now then. Look at any object on the table in front of you. Imagine if you could move it without touching it. Imagine it sliding across the table into your waiting fingers.

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It didn't move, did it? Don't worry, you're not alone; it almost never does.

Now ask yourself, how freaked out would you have been if it had moved?

Do you really lack the abilities of telekinesis or telepathy, or is your mind simply unwilling to use the ability, out of fear of the consequences? How terrifying would it be to so suddenly stand up and look at the reality behind the puppet theater we have grown so used to? Without the lies and illusions about which we wrap ourselves, how would we cope? It is no coincidence that the greatest examples of phenomenal behaviors are seen in children; they haven't yet been convinced of the inflexibility of our "reality," and can ply the fringes of their own abilities without bursting any programmed in socio-religeous bubbles. When a child tells you that he can read your mind, is he saying it because of a juvenile flight of fancy, or is he saying it because the shadow theater hasn't yet convinced him that such things are "impossible." As adults, we take for granted that there is, in fact, the spoon, and that bending it is more than just bending ourselves. Further, we teach that reality to our children. Alas. Alack.

Which brings us back to Plato. The underlying message of the Allegory of The Cave is to suggest that mankind endlessly strive, in whatever great or small means at his disposal, to look beyond the puppet theater. To find the Truth by taking of the chains which exist only in our own minds. And barring genocidal catastrophe, we shall; evolution turns endlessly, and our children shall inevitably be smarter, stronger, and faster than we are. But shall they achieve more because they're intrinsically better, or simply because they are one generation closer to being bored of the charade, and telling the puppet masters fuck off?