Thoughts on Mindfulness

It's been very interesting to watch the subtle changes in the decor at the local 24-hour Fitness, and in the fitness industry in general in the past few years. Modern "mindfulness" is definitely creeping in to every corner of commercial scene, complete with the well-composed, aesthetically satisfying yoga photos and cute tips like "stress is bad for stressed out bodies! don't stress!" Certainly, I welcome any increased awareness of holistic health in a society that has for far too long been obsessively reductionist.
What I've found bizarre, in a hard-to-put-a-finger-on sorta way, since I first became aware, some years ago, of the mindfulness movement [or is it just an industry?] is that it is in every way incongruous with the big picture of industrial life. Slowing down and smelling the roses is completely antithetical to what our controllers/managers/rulers would have us do in their ideal universe. Mindfulness, pursued authentically, would be extremely dangerous to the current socio-politico-economic order. When you start to reflect deeply enough to realize that huge amounts of collective stress and anxiety drive not only every-day production and markets, but culture, you're gonna have a tendency to take a step back and go, "wait, what the fuck are we doing here? does it really have to be so unpleasant?"
If the answer you find is "yes," then the goal of mindfulness will always be a farce, just a pose struck for the camera to fit in with a crowd or to sell another magazine: "10 great new de-stressing techniques! Learn them all and be your own master! Take control of your life! [Only $9.99! I'll take one]"
If your heart sings "NO!", you will tend to become interested in political economy in a way that puts you at the forefront of societal innovation; dangerous shit for those in power. They have an interest in stifling the true spirit of mindfulness while using it as just another management technique to maximize the efficiency of their labor force.
We can also interpret mindfulness not exactly at its word, but as just another trend in consumer entertainment, and we can see the figures in the photos as iconizations of ourselves, motivating us with their big, hyperreal, bolder-than-bold relatability. The big powerful slogans, the fit people looking all serious in their cute little outfits. It coheres into an impression of being part of a big important collective project. I also get the feeling like a Big Sibling is watching me from those posters. [And it's barking - "get to work! get fit! let's go! move it!"]
What are your thoughts on the modern mainstream mindfulness movement? I'd love to hear your comments below!

On Therapeutic Supersomatics

The following refers to Thomas Hanna's conception of somatics. Read about it here:
http://somatics.org/library/htl-wis1
SUPERBODIES
Organismic bodies, that is, those which are capable, in their immediate environments, of producing 'copies' (or 'versions,' iterations) of each of their volatile parts, that is, those which are expended in the motion of life. This notion of indeterminate 'immediacy' tends to inform the perception of a "body as a dynamic whole" strongly; ultimately, we expect every organism to die, so its historical wholeness is not complete in the sense that it will forever continue to reproduce its vital elements.
We seem to have come upon a choice in possible delineations of "bodies," in the sense relevent to this piece, i.e. the every day somatic sense of one's whole body, referred to both in theories of dance and in pop songs. One branch leads towards a focus on the immediacy of the organism's capability to reproduce itself, taking into account energetic and geometric/functional aspects of its whole home. It happens to be that for most life, whether autorophic or not, the limit of production is ultimately the sun's power output, or perhaps more precisely, the flow of energy that occurs when sunlight filters into chlorophylous bodies (again bodies, but of far less complexity than human ones). We can then speak of the "immediacy" in terms of daily power throughput.
Another branch is to mention the expected eventual death of the organism, which has a certain theoretical elegance over the other branch; there is no need to awkardly wield traditionally set-theoretic math by relating an organism to its "total free energy" whether or not it is measured by any organism in the system. Mentioning the organism's historical partialness does not however make the resolution sharp; it just reminds us that there are some components in every organism currently being used/expended that may never be replaced or resynthesized.
These two branches may be travelled freely back and forth as anyone sees fit, to form a shifting description of organismic life.
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All this theoretical biology behind, we can define a "superbody" as simply many organismic or subjective bodies which acknowledge one another in some way. It is a literal "coplex" in that it is an evolving system of contacting parts, their motions mutually affecting one another. However, it is not again a "body" in the sense just described. In fact, when organisms "wear out," there is no necessity that they will be reformed, that is, that "new versions" will replace them due to the whole motion of the cosmos. Species go extinct; genotypes disappear from living motion. The structure of DNA does not engender itself; life does that. Furthermore, we have absolutely no basis on which to assume that the whole of the biosphere will die, the way we do with organisms. Indeed, it hasn't yet. It takes much more sophisticated and precise theory about cosmology to predict the eventual exhaustion of all living motion. To see this: For if we don't refer to that theory, what's to say Earth won't just head down some wormhole into another universe which is "less advanced," in the sense of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and to continue this reincarnation eternally? We must look farther out into the cosmos than Earth to predict complete death.
We have then, no reason to assume a subjectivity emerges from the coplexity of superbody in the same way it does from the coplexity of the body. So whatever theories and practices of body we have discovered and used, ways of generalizing them to superbodies are not clear, and we should first examine what aspects of the body are involved in control of it. Perhaps it'd be advantageous to find a relation between the mathematics of the organism, and those control schemes that have been observed in social organisms. A monogamous, two- or three-child family will be large enough to form a clear model.
The subject necessarily occurs on a sort of "surface" of the whole organism. Awareness feels itself as an interface with the "outside." There is, too, the possibility of interfacing between insides, at least in big mammalian bodies like ours, which become aware of bodies-within-the-body, that is, organs, such as the beating of the heart, or the use of the tongue, the grumbling of the stomach. These are again felt as closed surfaces, that is, geometrically without border. [And here, classic modern topology has suddenly become of great use: The project of a complete classification of such surfaces, up to deformations which preserve access (and inaccess), was completed long ago. We can notate them using just two integer parameters. In fact, the actual bodily situation is simpler, because algebro-topological torsion is completely foreign to somatic experience. The ocular mind, of course, finds non-orientable geometries amenable and harmonious, having been made familiar with the phenomena of optics, but the motions implies by torsion connote bodily pain. It seems to me this is a consequence of the geometry of the universe, the fact that there is no plane of complete reflective symmetry; at least I have not come into contact with one. Projective geometry would be appropriate for somatics along that plane in such a mirrorsphere, as one would experience the right and the left parts as precisely one part. Here I'm referring to the third person as well: "what went in to the plane of symmetry as left and right" become one in the first person. Multiple subjectivity is likewise foreign, as would occur as the subject moves out of the mirror. The basic intuitive objection to torsion in bodily homologies is the distinction between left and right sides of the body, or any of its chiral parts, at least in bilateral somatics]
Losing focus on these inner bodies, or parts, one experiences the body as an undifferentiated whole, a "simple extended substance," as philosophers used to like putting it. Focusing first on the mouth, then anus, and tubing in between, one finds oneself a torus, corresponding to a gastrocentric mode of somatics.
Relax and lose focus, be present with your self, and allow the hole to fade.
We can now notice our nostrils, fusing continuously into our whole ventilation system between the lungs and open air. It is only by third person inspection of lungs that we find a branching pattern of tori with increasing numbers of holes as we branch our awareness further towards the inner surface of the lungs, though our nervous system does not penetrate far enough to put more than 1 or 2 handles on the "normal whole" bodily sphere. Discounting the septum and closing the mouth, one finds still just a sphere, ultimatley, with the lungs a cup depressed within the open nervous dermis.
Lose focus and come to wholeness. Now we focus on our skin to the edge of available ocular resolution, to reveal that "all flesh is like grass." We imagine millions of pores and cracks in the skin-matter, making it seem rather inaccurately conceived of as a sphere. Indeed, we can now postulate the body as a many holed torus, "in truth." It is not, however, the case that these cracks can be felt; touch a finger to your skin, or something smaller. Move the point of contact the smallest amount you can visually confirm. Was there a gap of sensation as the motion occurred? No. The quality of contintuity will most certainly vary with the nerve density of the tissue, but the continuity does not "rip" anywhere. It is also not the case that there is a true figure-ground dichotomy of body-matter and "hole matter," and in fact we find that these visual complements are formed alike by patterns of clustering cells, which again would appear, under microscope, as little bodies, also with porous surfaces. Assuming a sequence of finer resolutions approaching quantum mechanical limits, we find that this roughness of the imaged "body surface" never disappears, only morphs into fuzziness at atomic scales and below, the common ground being emergence of geometrically "sporadic" phenomena.
Relax and let a deep breath out. Come away from the cosmic, back to wholeness.
The point I'm trying to focus on here is the point of focus: where you focus it matters. When we are least focused on any part, and the whole coheres as a "simple whole," we can focus on the quality of wholeness. Re-focusing elsewhere, we find this same quality is present at every point of focus, ocurring as the somatic ground for parts to emerge upon, or in. The body partitions itself not by dividing and destroying the whole, but by resynthesizing the whole-as-part-collection using an abstract framework - specifically, it is focus on many points of focus in parallel - "This hand-figure on everything-else, AND/OR this otherhand-figure on everything-else, AND/OR these foot-figures on everything-else, AND/OR ... " etc. Such expressions fit poorly in linearly ordered text, for the claim is that there is no order to their expression.
Every way we can partition ourselves, it would appear there is some definite volume involved. Yet every partition only adds subinterfaces to the whole, hence does not allow a continuous 3-dimensional reality to form. Closed surfaces are only ever turned into many "smaller versions of themselves" in mutual contact, at least insofar as they remain closed compact surfaces.
There may indeed be some "inner dimensions" of feeling, such as those apparent when sensing warmth or tension emanating from within. However, it is not clear how far these sensations are hooked up to any regulatory apparatus, as is this obvious case in the dermal sense-motor network, and even the awareness along the surface of the esophagus. Lacking this clear and persistent self-feedback, such "emanating" or diffusing sensations can be distinguished from somatics as explored by Thomas Hanna and myself. Somatics is not a complete theory of consciousness.
SUPERSOMATICS
Having framed organisms as surfaces, it's now natural to think of superorganisms as "products of surfaces," but not just abstract products, rather multiple distinguished surfaces situated within a larger structure to begin with. Placing the environmental structure as ground for the figures of the superorganism's constituents, we can consider the combined surface with an abelian algebraic framework, so that the number of subjects is equal to the first Betti number. Assuming subjects don't "cross," and are sufficiently aware of one another, we have this as a superorganismic invariant across the perspectives of the subjects involved. When organisms stay in contact but their subjectivities disappear to one another, a "rip" occurs in the cybernetic structure and the former superbody "breaks." Note that such traumas in no way alter the raw coplexity of the system; it merely becomes less aware.
The natural economic topology of bodily motions then suffices to determine how mechanical control is exerted by the superbody participants upon one another. "Raw" classical mechanics can in no way predict the whole evolution of the system, but can completely describe each interface action to the participants, up to the limit of resolution. You can see this by meditating upon how you learned to type. The keyboard has a very static resolution built in, so that any forceful enough depression upon the "surface" of the board will result in a linear symbol sequence which can be translated between machines and organisms, a faithful recording of the motion of the interface. Many more examples can be thought of. Whenever material is organized into human useable products, somatics is ultimately involved, allowing construction of narratives solely in terms of tangible and abstract efforts, and it is by tracing the somatic history that we abstract "economic actions" and their resultant tangible-abstract "products." Automating the processes of organization blurs such histories, which may have profound cybernetic implications in itself.
We have a way to think of one another, as surfaces within a common surface, and a way to think of how those surfaces "touch." The superorganism emerges as clearly as this continued touching tends toward some "function," a phenemenon whose presence at least can be agreed upon by all participants, out of sheer necessity: it is in some way powerful, potentially useful or dangerous. A military victory is an obvious example of such functions: All the soldiers, whether victorious or defeated, agree out of practical necessity on the outcome of the battle, if not the fate of the war.
A less violent and more fundamental example is the "function" of a family. To cite an empirical example: family roles are iconized in American and British (at least) television sitcoms, and through their fictional coplexity, the family is hyperrealized as a persistent superorganismic entity. In these family sitcoms, the camera always orients itself around the main web of tensions and accords that arises between regular characters. This shifting web "is" the superorganismic "soma," in reality a plurality of minds acknowledging one another and coplexing.
In the same way as we can consider the control we exert over our individual physiques, we can ask what control we exert over the collective physique. The essential logic of therapeutic somatics is unaltered, so long as we phrased as it only in terms of signal and response. If I have tension in my neck and can't fully relax it, I have lost some amount of control there, or perhaps never had it. If somebody holds my arm down, I have lost some amount of control there. If my nervous system degenerates, I lose control. If people tie me down and give me depressant drugs, I lose control.
It is clear that human superorganisms can sustain only so much violence before they stop functioning as superorganisms, rather devolving into a mere population of (perhaps hostile) coinhabitants. Hence one's control over the collective physique does not increase forever with one's willingness to use force on coparticipants. It is also clear that control is completely lost if one has no will to use force at all, as in the typical organismic case (although "will" is applied awkwardly to plants, it does mechanically analogize).
Therefore signal languages, the corresponding cybernetic schemes, thoughts and emotions must be taken into account in supersomatics, as these tend to have irreducible roles in the methods of control. A modern example is the boot camp drill sergeant. The psychomechanics simply don't work the same if he or she doesn't keep up a certain veneer of strictness.
In the same way then, as we can seek to come to a desirable understanding of our bodies, we can seek to come to a desirable understanding of the superbodies we participate in, so that their quality is good for all subjects, so that "function is enhanced," to speak with the modern jargon.
This practice may scale up arbitrarily with the underlying logic, as one can proceed to find biological coplexes at all scales up to the whole planet. We see that this action of "scaling up" provides an ecosomatic understanding of the biosphere, as interfacing beings within a matrix of their own arrangement, the "whole Gaian superbody." I again stress my opinion that the whole biosphere is indeed not a subject, not a "true organism," as Lovelock would have it. It can, however, be understood as a "true" superorganism, to the extent that its pieces are aware of one another and exert mutual control.
I think this stream of thought and feeling offers great promise. Starting from partnerships toward the family, and extending to so conceived political bodies to ecosystems, the logic of therapeutic somatics may have radical ability to alter the course of history, by tending towards blurring and eventually eliminating the lines between human identity and biological identity in general.

POST SCRIPT.
An interesting linear question ocurred while typing, when I couldn't decide on what verb to use when describing participation in somatics.
Does doing somatics involve thinking, or feeling? It doesn't delineate. There is an irreducibly unexplainable aspect to it, always. Don't waste your time trying to say "what it is," because it has already changed by the time you're done saying it.
"THE STRUCTURE. DOESN'T. DO THAT." The body doesn't delineate itself. Probably, nothing does or can; it has always been an idealistic pipedream. It does however, become ground for parts, which appear, visually, delineated in their form and function. There is a trope springing from explorations in visceral horror, which in some way relates to this. Each part appears as a powerful mechanism unto itself, but the whole network of control between them feels eerily uncertain. "What if the arm was left to its own devices? What if my constant exertion of force upon each part is the only thing that keeps them in check?"
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The piece of mass media that inspired this particular entry was the sitcom "Good Times," the 12th episode of the first season. The relevant characters are mother, father, and children. The father has become stressed out and abrasive, to the increasing dysfunction of the family and detriment of the furniture. The mother and children form on one side, worried that he has hypertension. There is a chilling moment in which the mother experiences loss of control over the father, after which he continues to escalate in his rage towards interpersonal violence.  Finally, on the cusp of a further escalation, she yells in desparation, stop, and he stops. Soon, the father/husband reveals something of the psychospiritual knot he's in. This conduit re-established, and the signal having been allowed to propagate throughout the family, gradually the tensions begin to resolve, and the rest of the family is restored to their proper authority over the father. They get him to a hospital which allows a revealing moment of hyperreal cultural interface between the Black family and the white doctor, resolving in the reassertion of working class blackness upon the cinematic space. The doctor's ultimate advice was the imperative "relax." It occured to me at this point that therapeutic somatics might be extended between so conceived political bodies.
 An irreducible component in this fictional mechanical example is the mutual familial love on all sides. One thing I genuinely enjoy about family sitcoms is how little tendency they have to rationalize family dynamics. The best writers know when their audience will settle for sentiment.

On Memetics and Mimesis: Turning McLuhan's tetrad upon social media

As the internet evolves, I become ever more fascinated by it.
Applying McLuhan's tetrad to social media, just to see what happens to the theory when its pushed beyond its historical limit. Textual hashtags and pictorial memes serve the media differently, the former being rather more concise and compact, but they represent a similar departure from the dominant 20th century media: Audiocast, cinema, telecast, comics, and printed periodicals of various periods. [Let me know what I'm missing].
The obvious qualitative difference is to be found in the distributional schemes corresponding to mass publishing and networks organized by hitting the "Accept request," "post," and "comment" buttons. One class of schemes strongly favors centralized economy, the other not so much: it has radically weakened the value of hierarchy in the publication process.
Let's examine the tetrad. This is only one way to focus the lens, however. I'd be interested to see any differing analyses.
1: Pictoral memetics enhances the everyday process of abstracting narratives, themes, and characters from our immediate surroundings. Even our most fleeting thoughts and impressions become the figure of social media.
2: The practice makes obsolete the format of scheduled entertainment. It's all just stacking up in your feed, waiting for you to look at it at your own pace, and it organizes dynamically into a continually shifting "whole" no matter the level of throughput. This flexibility and dynamism is the new "ground."
3: Concisely, reality returns and supercedes hyperreality. The personal and subjective finds itself at last vindicated. From Vaudeville-infused stunts to mic'd and lighted studio (cybernetically transcoded, mixed and mastered by specialized labor force) to Hollywood spectacle in the cushioned, sugared, and perfumed theater, the trajectory towards the hyperreal has been apparent in cinema since the silent era.  Away from the tiny, neurotic, hidden being, and towards the iconic, bold, spectacular event. The trajectory is there in radio, television, even to some degree the popular song [culminating in the radio-rave anthem, think Swedish House Mafia, but that's another story], although this is hardly an innovation belonging purely to the machinic screen: Long before conservative Christians lamented Hollywood's lack of moral integrity in the era of the action spectacle, Plato lamented the psycho-social potential of reciting Homer in public. Odysseus is a hyperreal hero; no human, who works during the day and finds entertainment come evening, would expect to accomplish what he accomplishes. The referenced war had passed into legend by Homer's time, freeing him from any impulse to historical accuracy or realism. He is important to the audience not because he stands for the actions of an actual hero of theirs, but because he represents an ideal of heroism that any audience could learn about by watching: "he" operates on them by telling them the right things to do. Of course, adhering to rationalist aesthetics, we might find this thought objectionable. Morality must be decided upon according to principles, after all, not simply followed blindly!
Even in the most apparently mundane of genres, the family sitcom, we find not an actual family, but a hyperreal, aesthetic ideal of a family: Always cracking jokes and making fun of one another, ocassionally fighting about important issues but always coming back together at the end of the arc. They are an icon, economically, of stability and growth at once, psychologically of the pleasures of life itself, and socially, of all those qualities the hazily defined but nonetheless actual mainstream audience is supposed to judge virtuous in families. And this "supposed to" is at the heart of the modern paradigm: Supposed by *who*? By whoever prepares the media, of course, that specialized and rarefied class of professional entertainers and engineers. Though the sitcom family members go through life changes over the course of the series, their changes in situation are only used to more fully explore the persisent qualities of their character, which must be agreeable to the broader economic and psychosocial narratives. Anyone who wants to discover the true dynamics of bourgeois whiteness and color in America need only trace the history of people of color operate within the frameworks of the sitcom. At every stage, this must be lock step with the real interactions between subcultures, or the show will tend to be cancelled. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for example, is about how blackness works in white space, and as such must bow to certain white ideologies, at least within the space of the explicitly given story. A book could be written on that show alone.

[Allow me a digression here.
The camera is more or less forbidden from depicting Smith's character in his native setting of the opening song, in a largely black and brown West Philadelphia neighborhood, presumably. I don't mean to say that the show is not conscious of Blackness, which it surely is. What I mean is that its events could plausibly take place wholly within the white imagination, without reference to the perspective of the Other. It uses the images of blackness that were familiar to average, NBC watching, middle class white audiences at the time. Seeing Will as anything but the black-one-out would detract from the show's exploration of its themes. This is not because black people had not been portrayed in sitcom before 1990, but because that is not an actual place in the canon of the show: The observed motion takes place only in white psychological territory. The entire account of his hometown given in the song would appear to symbolize white discomfort with urban black life, and the resulting tendency to understatement: "And all shootin some b-ball outside of the school. When a couple of guys who were up to no good started making trouble in my neighborhood." [Compare to 19th century depictions of slaves as happy go lucky entertainers.] But Will's not one of *those* black people, that we hear about selling crack and packing heat on street corners: He only got in one little fight before his overprotective mother took extreme measures. Having removed him from the dangers of blackness and inserted him into bourgeois white society, we've made the actuality docile enough to laugh about in comfort. A similar narrative prevails over the life of his uncle Phil, which much more closely resembles the life of a historical person. At every bend in this fictional biography, Phil's blackness [activism, reading Malcolm, listening to James Brown] bows and bends one piece at a time to the prevailing white aesthetic bias, eventually giving way to an almost Uncle Tommish veneer: And what does the show say? Look: it worked for him, here he is with a manor in Bel Air, raising a good family, a secure and impressive sounding bourgeois job, all due to the merit of his hard work. The subconscious message received is to just give in, to cease to be Other, and the rewards of white privilege will be yours. Absolutely fascinating.]

In this way, sitcoms can be used as proxies for all sorts of middle class attitudes. Likely an even lengthier book could be written on the interaction of gender and sexuality within the sitcom.
The common thread is that whatever human question we wish to focus on through the lens of sitcom, we find the answers that come back are iconic and comforting, coming with all the same connotations as the concept "family friendly." This trajectory has everything to do with mid-century economics, which I will leave here undelved. By centralizing and forcibly collectivizing the answers to questions of family, the genre has become impotent to speak powerfully to the organismic reality of family.
Again, the comic book has branched out from voyeuristic, visuo-visceral delights to the full blown graphic novel, every bit as sophisticated in its conception as the Great Novel of modern tradition. This is the essence: A graphic novel of the stature, of say, Watchmen, cannot be undertaken in a merely whimsical way, simply because it takes too much work. Stick figure drawings are for whimsy; hyperrealist noir landscapes are for overhuman icons. It is simply too seriously undertaken a work to deal with issues at any other scale than the spectacular, in analogy to the development of the 2 hour movie.
What has been retrieved by pictorial memetics is the capacity for expressing the subjective over the objective.
4. We now come to the most remarkable aspect of pictorial memetics as pushed through the lens of the tetrad. Pictorial memes, when pushed to their technical and psychosocial limits, flip into *reaction memes,* which merely break the rules which has been adhered to. Turing-mechanical digital pictorial and textual memetics is a stable medium. That is, the medium is in some way a categorical limit. It is unique from the historical media McLuhan considers in that no line proceeds from it to some distinguished medium which rests on it in terms of technical abstraction. We have instead classical Turing computation as limitting the living interface with the medium, and instead must branch into entirely new philosophy, mathematics, and science to see new meme-media emerge: Quantum computing and biocomputing offer two possible places of departure. But it's not clear whether these modes will emerge as social network infrastructures unto themselves, or whether we will again re-route into the old structure, or stop using social media altogether relatively soon. Having never observed the flip from classical determinism into radical non-determinism on a societal level, we cannot even establish a probability distribution over these possibilities.
So we find the theory must dissolve itself when pushed to the limit. I think this is only another form of the intuition that Land called accelerationism, which appears more or less as an idea that Western society must ultimately force itself out of existence (and further, the '-ism:' what could be more just?). However, the supposedly inevitable singularity has not happened, and doesn't appear to be yet on its way at all. It has become less clear over the past couple of decades whether anything is accelerating at all, whether there is a tendency towards anything at all. There is intimate relation between the bursting of Land's philosophical bubble and that of the tech bubble, though it is too complex to delineate within the rectilinear confines of this blog. That seems to be the paradox of critiquing linear extrapolation using linear extrapolation: Using the theory itself, one can only say what it must be bound to do. But that was the trap we were trying to avoid! Clearly, Western rationalism is not its own solution.
You see, the above paragraph has become confused and only sporadically sensible to any audience of large enough size. However, it does deeply express thoughts and feelings that occur to me daily. This is because what I am attempting to explore and express pushes beyond the limit of the technology we are using: I am trying to refer to actual thought and feelings, which are poorly conveyed with this machinery. And we already know what plastic and metal do when they are pushed past their structural limits, without embarking on this analytic trip.
However better the 2-hour theatrically released movie is suited to conveying heroism, the economics and organization of such works prevents people from interfacing authentically with those heroes.
Posting pictures that directly reflect an abstraction peformed is a way of iconizing oneself and interfacing directly with the resulting "hero" or "idol" via comments, likes, shares, creation of reaction memes, or whatever else might happen in the social medium.

As a consequence, an older superorganismic mimesis returns, older than recorded history almost by definition, and of a far more radical sort than when an orator is situated centrally in an auditorium of designated listeners, allowing humans to simply regurtitate raw surface impressions "at random" without regard for any notion of ultimate meaning or any anxiety that every utterance must fit into an unambiguous, rationalized, linear historical narrative, ordered from beginning to end by the Western philosophical concept of causality. If it doesn't fit a form or sequential casual narrative, there need be no question of "what it is;" it "is" this: a continual motion in silica. Philosophy has dissolved; long live philosophy!

On Living Mathematics

LIVING MATH

    It is often said that math is somehow transcendant and objective, but I prefer to take the opposite view. It is a phenmonenon found within a clump of wet, throbbing tubes striving to continue its throbbing and indeed, enjoy the throbbing. Since the profession and discipline of mathematics has come to be within the total of our human body/mind, we can study mathematics from a biological perspective, as an aspect of an organism.
    The first thing we have to realize is that every organism might understand math at lesat slightly differently, that is, to have a different math system. Yet, we, being different, can communicate in some way, and concede when we have been corrected in certain cases. Other times, one refers to a concept that comes up empty for another, or mismatched. Sometimes, one person thinks a theorem is obviously true, another person thinks it is "counterintuitive." The notion of partially corresponding mathematical systems itself seems to be mathematical, hence may seem less plausible to you than to me. If you agree to look at mathematics from a material stance, you'll find that reading even a single formula proves the partial correspondence. 1+3=3+1. Of course, I cannot convince you to step back altogether from another stance, if that's what you wish. [Platonism is a popular philosophical position in the community of pro math'ers]. It suffices that you entertain my perspective for the duration of this piece.
    We can think of a living body as positioned "somewhere" with some trajectory. Insofar as any animal can think this way, it can understand itself as participating in its moving environment: Here will become somewhere through action. Animals discover which cavities they can fit into, what fits into their cavities, and necessarily find ways to infer such properties by visual recognition, touch, and other acts of perception. Risk and fear are other essential concepts for any animal, coloring places and shapes with qualities of painfulness, repulsion, panic, etc.

We might expect that certain geometric and topological concepts would come to be in almost any motive and sensitive organism, so long as its body provided opportunities for complex enough interactions with the environment. So, organismic mathematics can be distinguished as dealing with the concepts that arise uniquely from being a self-sustaining organism in nature. Concepts such as fuel and force derive unambiguously from our organismic existence.

    When organisms communicate and cooperate, a certain degree of self-awareness is necessarily present. One must at least make the necessary motions to communicate, then navigate the world successfully while completing some collectively defined task. It requires some minimal abstract awareness of the body's position within the whole. We can thus distinguish "superorganismic" mathematics as that which would only tend to arise when organisms are aware and allied to one another in some way. Concepts such as rule sets, truth values, and hierarchies derive at least in part from the superorganismic aspects of our existence. Modern mathematical economics has a decidedly superorgansimic flavor. Genuine superorganismic "computations" can only be carried out by multiple people at once, as a discourse, interaction, or mutual observation of some kind, though theoretical work can be done alone. For instance, we can individually understand a law's stipulation that in certain trials, we are guaranteed a jury of 12 peers. But a verdict must then be carried out by no fewer than 13 people, including the judge.

    Since humans are social animals, it easy to see why both the organismic and the superorganismic should be found throughout the history of math. It is far harder to imagine suborganismic mathematics or math which is non-organismic altogether. What would a self-regulating but non-aware part calculate? How can we think of an organ as perceiving and thinking? We must broaden the traditional definitions quite a bit.

    "Sense" may be generalized so that any perturbation to the evolution of a (locally) closed subsystem counts, and "memory" may be generalized so that any structure maintained at the (local) expense of free energy counts.

    A cell very obviously senses and remembers as it participates in the body, to be sure, but a cell is not a very good example - it is not so unambiguously partial as a heart, which is too complex for a basic example. Consider instead some inhabitants of the nucleus.

    We find the genetic apparatus of a cell "sensing and remembering" epigenetic actions, which naturally depend upon the cell's interaction with its ambiguous environment. The science is somewhat new but an agreement seems to be that it is reflected on the effective topology of the chromosomes - parts of the DNA sequence are switched between "accessible" and "inaccessible" for the purposes of synthesis. Rather than "knowing" any mathematics behind the regulatory apparatus in the sense of a self-aware creature, we can think of the available epigenetic "states" [as it is put by the biochemists] as encoding possible "life plans" for a working cell (and we are indeed assuming the relevant nucleic acid apparatus is part of a living cell).
     In actuality, the cell likely lives by continually modulating between these "life plans". *Human* mathematics of the cell could attempt to compute the effect of a sequence of life plans on the cell's constitution or behavior (given assumptions about its environs), but "nucleic acid mathematics" could not. It could "know" the maintenance of the cell's processes, but it doesn't know how it is maintaining the cell's organization, or even the cell in the first place. *We* know that. The protosymbolic structure of the nucleic acid apparatus ensures that a wide range of conditions/situations and mechanical traumas can be withstood without disrupting the total operation, since the apparatus has evolved in part to maintain and repair to cell's structures, and it is there we should look for anything that could qualify as mathematics. The notion of regulation is very close to that of computation, involving some idea of "reading" or "sensing" some structure. The analogy with human recognition alone is what seems to allow that mathematics may be generalized from human activities to those of living systems. In this way, every living (or partially living) system can be thought of as a (partially) self-computing "machine," whose "output" is its continued life in materia, its input being its raw fact of existence/configuration. In physics parlance, it is "prepared" in a state which will prepare further states to prepare further states to... Speaking this way, we presuppose subjectivity somewhere within nature, that is, we are interpreting nature. The apparent implication of teleology in the phrasing should not be taken too seriously.

You can see why suborganismic mathematics is so difficult to conceive of: if it exists, it is not conceived of by any organismic mind, which is practically to say, it is non-conceptual. [For how could you speak to a body part? You cohere only in their plurality]. Perhaps insight can be achieved in so-called altered states of consciousness, rather to contract consciousess closer to unconsciousness in some way. Dreams and fraction-asleep states may hint at suborganismic organizational schemes. What do you think? Even more difficult is to conceive mathematics beyond life altogether, which might be used by some type of natural abstract actor, which persisted in a non-organismic way, that is, without the ability to organize itself. Perhaps they are just projections and phantoms of the autopoietic. I think it may be impossible to imagine. Perhaps digital intelligence would be a version of it. Can self-awareness be simulated ... to itself?
    In the limit towards complete knowledge, mathematics would simply limit to actual mechanics, or "whatever actually is." Taking quantum mechanics into account, we cannot characterize nature as having well-defined configurations at "instants" in time, so human ideas of a complete sequence of pictures of nature wouldn't constitute absolute mechanical knowledge - the Truth wouldn't be visible. Nor could it be tangible in the bodily sense, since it would have to concern every possible body [including bodies that are part of bodies - a radically parallel existence in comparison to conscious life] The idea is that a god of whatever sort could understand the state and motion of nature as a whole in terms of its raw being, so that it could be written in terms of the absolute. As organisms are self-guiding *parts* of nature, we cannot hope to grasp mathematics of the absolute. Likewise, the "mechanics god" could not hope to grasp us our worlds, since it could not help but see those of our cells and every last bacterium that participates in our bodies superposed. Such a perspective would show every possible world at once - ours would be but one infinitesimal point in its would be perspective-space.

What if we were to deal with the world at "coarser" scales, rather than "finer" ones? Can we, as organsims, get an idea of super-superorganisms, super-super...-superorganisms, and the like? That is, when groups of people attempt to coordinate as distinct entities, or when many coalitions of tribes attempt to form a nation? I would argue that these are much more difficult than smaller social organisms for one person to coordinate. In reality, they are better coordinated at the correct scales: Superorganisms re-configure themselves to better fit a super-superorganism, rather than one organism attempting to discern how to best micromanage each superorganism in order to satisfy its desires as well as those of the larger overgroup. When would be collaborative political projects are attempted with a dictatorial approach, the subordinate parties tend to have their goals frustrated. Even without ill will or greed, peoples understand their interests better than do their neighbors.

So we see an interesting thing - as our notion of mathematics "scales" up and down in organizational capacity, we lose sight of what we are trying to imagine. Either there is so much detail to every small moment as to overwhelm our capacities, or it is too broad, too diffuse, evolves too slowly and over too many subjects to get a clear grasp of it from within the organism.

MAPS


Shapes, motions, symmetries, harmonies, and symbolic quantities seem to have occupied mathematicians for most of history. The dawn of these concepts from animal experience pave the way for understanding nature in terms of navigation, aesthetics, economy. Human mathematics has wrapped itself comfortably between these, but there is no reason to believe that these concerns alone serve to represent the mathematical in the most general sense.


Anything organismic, that is, any aspect of experience itself, of the mind, may be 'noticed,' in such a way that it may be related to other things that have been noticed. There appear to be no limits or borders to these acts of analogy, aside from those which arise as a natural consequence of the bodily substrate. This affords any minds like ours incredible power to modify their own realities. It is in principle limitless, given a limitless resource flow to the organism (preferably in a way it is accustomed to).

One broad consequence of the second thermodynamics for life is that once a form finds the ability to produce a version of itself from its environment and self alone, life tends to spread. I mean this in the sense that so long as free energy is injected, life tends to turn it into more life. [Perhaps this is the true source of the notion of Freudian libido, a relentless energy, which manifests in modern economics as scarcity and the "tragedy of the commons."]

    The corollary for organisms that must guide themselves, then, must be that whatever grasp of mathematics they find, it must grow with their form. In the same way that an ecological "safety cushion" can result for a population from a combination of solid ecological "strategy"/niche and low population relative to [expectations for] available resources, I argue that well-functioning and well-fed minds will have more room to experiment. The reasoning is more or less identical: When one need not work too hard to live, more organismic energy is available for "mistakes" of all sorts, whether they be exploring unknown regions, taking new routes, or trying new maneuvers. I have a feeling this would, over many millions of years, select for animals which had a propensity to get bored in times of surplus and safety. This is simply because the bored ones would take more risks when they had the luxury. Of course, "risks" must be interpreted more or less economically, as anything that is less certain than some "safe" strategy to produce good outcomes, whether they are expected or not.
    If all this lines up, it wouldn't be surprising that animals could come to sophisticated ways of thinking about the world before they were ever ready to use them: the bats would never have survived with wings if they didn't know they could be used to fly. [Did not humans learn to fly by pipe-dreaming?] It must come to an idea of flying as a motion in the world at least in parallel to the development of wings. God, that's a mystery though, isn't it? Tempting as it is to blame the apparent shift from tree-dweller to sky-walker on some creator, I actually don't think it solves the problem. That answer doesn't remove the necessity of the evolution being carried out in materia, which still has to work out mechanically some how, whether or not it was all designed to take place. I think truly, the essence of the modern argument for a creator is that the story of evolution seems implausible, which I disagree with.
    Navigational schemes must develop in parallel with bodily forms. A tardigrade navigates its world very differently than a worm; just watch them. [Youtube.]
    So we should expect a cornocopia of mathematical forms corresponding to the beauty of the biosphere, and my primary question is how mutually intelligible they could possibly be. Mathematics across the same species is pretty easy. "Give me four of those. I'll give you three of these." "But I gave you four in advance last time, remember?" "Fine! Here's six of these then." Across humans and other apes species, it is a little more difficult, but still possible for those who think most like us. Across from humans to other intelligent species, like crows and dolphins, communication is even more difficult, but it is absolutely evident that we use some concepts which are mutually intelligible. All three groups of organisms live in different ecological domains, yet have come to similar understandings of abstract organizational principles. Rats, raccoons, octopuses, and other birds and mammals of diverse types display at least some ability to navigate rectangular human worlds and operate some of the apparatus of human organization.

Certain geometric concepts appear unavoidable. If not points, there are at least places, or things in places, which definitely differ from one another so that they can be assessed, selected, and navigated. If not lines, then at least curves or paths; thinking things make plans to walk in a direction. If not planes, then surfaces - the surface of the land, of a tree, of a prey or predator, and of course, of the body. The only essential thing for a foraging organism to understand is that is interfacing with the environs. There must a notion of bordering the environment, of the skin as a boundary of the self. The body can be thought of as going right up the border, as filling a volume, but the self-on-the-boundary is the site of interface with tangible reality.
If one makes complex enough use of a body, it has to be mapped in a topological way, that is, we must have some way of knowing what places are near which, ideally to have an idea of the total nervous structure of the body. From this, we find the "surface" of our bodies. If you trace a path along the surface with a finger, what you are feeling is this constructed topology: you feel everything near its neighboring points on the skin. The degree of access between two points on skin is known merely by feeling distinct sensations there and there.
    If a stranger slides their hand slowly up your leg on public transport, you may find it disturbing, or perhaps frightening or more. When they pull away after you glare at them, and say "I didn't do shit," you will know they were lying whether or not you *saw* them do it.
Probably this topological method is used extensively by Terran animals, but I am for more interested in the subtle differences that may emerge as we attempt to study the problem. That is a large project, enough for a life's worth of research, so I will leave it there. For a more complete understanding of ecosystems self-organize, we would ideally understand how every inhabitant maps the surface of its body [if at all, obviously].We should remember that our modern mathematical understandings of surfaces have been flavored irreducibly by the development of the rest of culture through history, and we should suspect any population would be similarly influenced in their understandings of mathematics by the psychological, emotional and social realities a population must cope with. Aside from our cognitive differences to begin with, this would inevitably cause obstacles to communication and understanding.
    Anything which eats special forms must find a way of recognizing them, as well as motivating their meaning. Mammalian brains, at least, tend to associate in any possible way, so that a shape once linked to a taste can evoke the taste on sight in the future. Thus symbolism is another basic animal act, constructing from the raw geometric picture a directly accessible world which consists of potential symbols which gradually resolve to genuine symbol-copies if the perceptual process happens to compute that way. The symbols are felt by whatever it is they might be thought to "do" or feel like.
    Complex-bodied animals, whose environments are persistent relative to the times scales of their actions, will benefit from remembering where everything "was." One then must construct a topological map of the home as well, with easily bodily-accessible world-places corresponding to mental places that feel close. Each "point" on the map can be made to correspond to a hypothetical places are felt by what was there, either in terms of geometric forms or symbolic ones.
Since one inevitably comes to a practical theory of motion in/around places (i.e., how to navigate shapes one finds in the world), its plausible to treat places-maps as containing some sort of information about possible ways to navigate a place. The smallest or shortest paths, or motions, through a place are its accessibilities, or "infinitesimal open sets," in classical-modern parlance, which can be thought of as generating a topology upon any place in a world. Such motions are purely from a bodily perspective, and may take into account gravity and other "forces" of the environment. Most maps will also attach abstract "motions" to world symbols, when materials are encountered and symbolized, such as food, water, types of shelter, plants, animals, rocks, landscapes and planetary/ecological forms of all sorts.
Regardless of how these maps have been learned, they contain easily accessible abstractions as the organism navigates the cosmos.
*
This is an incredibly large and fascinating topic, but I'm stopping here. This small piece is meant only to introduce the notion that mathematics can be understood as part of a biological process, which plays an immensely important role in the mechanics of evolution and ecology. Moving beyond our very mode of existence, we can think of life, hence mathematics, perhaps even more abstractly as a component of a physical process. That is to say, biological forms necessarily "compute" their future selves, and math emerges with awareness of self-guidance. I encourage you to explore and critique what I have suggested and asserted here, particularly in the final paragraphs, so we can begin study of the general organismic "mapping" process, and explore what it suggests about the ecosystems we participate in, and about our relationships with our own mapping processes.

On the Topology of Human Worlds

I just love a comfy, warm bed at the end of the day. However I may run and shout during the day, I always seem to find myself back in the cave of Hypnos, straddling the banks of the Lethe.
EARTH
The mind has a "shape," although its would be "full form" is never glimpsed nor felt. But it is known topologically all the same, by the paths in and between its regions. One may find circle-like paths, loops which may amplify into themselves or route freely into other paths, and the difference can be thought of topologically. This is like Mandelbrot's "ramification" of a point, the number of paths leading from a point.
It should be no surprise that the topology of the mind resembles that of fractals. I am often aware, while heading down a more or less straight path, of a multitude of possible roads-not-taken. It is true that at any time, they do not have the infinite depth and recursion, and if we could picture the whole shape, it would not exhibit invariance across an infinity of scales. Nonetheless, any path noticed can be taken by effort or whim, or whatever it is that allows us to guide cognition. Some lead back into others, but there is no obvious limit on the branches from a particular thought-place.
It is as if the structure were already present, and we simply wandered it, charting its curves. Of course, we are constructing and permuting structures as we go. The conditions are indistinguishable "from the inside." With this picture in mind, it is not hard to imagine the cognitive topology as continually reaching towards a fractal shape, though in the long run it can only permute itself into itself, seeming to reach ever towards different "limit shapes"; its capacity for growth of mental structure is limited from below by the smallest molecular structure employed and above by the constraints of the body's total size.
Who knows? It could very well be that even one body can host enough growth that it need never "overwrite" or modify its substrate in a typical human lifetime. I'm not equating cognitive paths with bodily structures, but I do assume that a given bodily structure allows for only so many possible cognitive configurations; there seem to be natural constraints.
Perhaps the most familiar paths feel more solid, perhaps they are comfortable. I feel myself often at familiar junctions, with knowledge of where certain obvious routes lead. Some places feel more free than others.
I have come to believe what is perhaps an ecological equivalent of Maturana's claim about life and cognition. It is that the topology of cognition necessarily mirrors the topology of the environment. Of course, this is necessarily the case only when the organism persists for extremely long periods of time ("...the probability goes to 0 as t goes to infinity").
I am not positive this means that the overall cognitive structure must resemble the topology of the planetary landscape to a creature, but we can be certain that a certain implication must hold: If the environment is a compact space, so is the cognitive system.
The mathematical proof is trivial: The body is always a compact space; the mind has nothing but the body and its environment to grow upon.
In nature's organizational topology, "compactness" corresponds to a system which is clearly finite, given some perspective: The sum of all parts of the space (= the space) can be measured by a finite number of discrete acts of measurement.  In the day of satellites and jets, we conceive of our planet as a finite space. We can calculate this by imagining a sphere around our body, an intuitive representative of our awareness, connection, and nearness to objects. It is a fuzzy object, never exactly certain, but discovered to some degree, often with various dependencies, by each organism via organismic equivalents of Monte Carlo methods.
Factoring out time, it's phsyically conceivable to touch one's sphere to every part of the planet's surface, whether including liquid surfaces or not (in practice, every relevant or passable part of the surface). Either way, the ocean would be a challenge, but it's hypothetically possible. We can imagine a finite amount of configurations would in this way "cover" the accessible planetary sphere. One could visit every human-defined "place" in the environment in a finite number of steps.
In reality, many places would be impossible to enter safely for legal reasons. Legally, those are not technically open places to you; you cannot go there; visiting them cannot be inside your experience. Considerations like this alter the constructed topology, and one intuits "holes" in the envioronment. Considerations involving gravity and velocity can "cut off" the edge of a balcony, for instance (unless you have a parachute or a squirrel suit perhaps - but these flying devices also have their apparent environmental limitations in their functions to allow persistence). One often has the physical freedom to act against such restrictions, of course, but these people tend not to persist in thes relatively free configurations.
In this way, modern industrial states have become as a force of nature. The algorithm has been instilled since childhood: Trespass the law enough, and the consequences will be inevitable and forceful: Detainment and physical punishment. Creatures who choose certain paths tend not to persist in their former society. (Although they may enter new societies persistently in places of detainment).
It's worth mentioning that for an extremely small organism, even small regions of the planet are virtually infinite, not compact when speaking topologically. This is true for small creatures, and for many people in a social sense; we will never practically run out of people to meet.
It's also true of the globe, on average, in a practical sense. The living structure of the surface is extremely important for humans - plants can be climbed or block passage, seeming to add or delete paths. If one were to attempt to ascertain the condition of the globe, taking the shortest possible path, one would inevitably find that things had changed by the time one returned to the starting point. Plants have grown or died, animals have moved around, made new homes, had children. The only way this could be avoided is to start from a completely dead environment - by definition impossible for a human.
Abstractly, it is the old problem of having a carpet too big for the room: You can never get every corner down without lumps somewhere.
This is why beliefs, not only about "what is out there," but about the consequent constraints on safe, healthy, or possible action are so influential on a person's life. They can turnt the planet into a small town or humanity into a few hundred. They can turn the world into a football game, with star players and sore losers. If one believes oneself stuck in a certain societal position, one either tries to leave or immediately alter the situation, or agrees to live within the believed constraints, to acknowledge their reality. We compactify the spaces of our daily lives to make decisions tangible and urgent.
It perhaps does not immediately follow from the compactness of the body, but it's just a leap away to intuit that no cognitive path can be built but that which starts from some base point, and none can ultimately farther away from it than is allowed by physical constraints. One can only build off experience, only take a path so far before it turns back on itself. This zenith, "the farthest you can go before you start coming back" implies a symmetric reverse path; if this trajectory repeats, the experience may feed back, gradually altering, but unwavering in its essentially circular topology. No matter how quickly you run, you can' t achieve escape velocity.
One thing that makes human life seem infinitely varied is the apparent non-compatcness of the social space, the fact that it is not biologically conceivable that one could account for every living human on Earth. Another is that the mind can take such a variety of shapes, find so many ways to operate in its world. Its only necessity for persistence is that its mind slides often enough over some understanding of "actual" aspects of its environment. The rest is negotiable.
SPACE
Perhaps a compact space is not enough for some, claustrophobic or distasteful. Chaotic, wet, dirty, gross, savage. What fuels the zealous dreams for space travel among our people? Cold war propagandists and Hollywood producers wished they had the ability to craft a dream so beloved; they merely tapped into an old cultural structure.
I like Earth. No place in the observed universe like it. There are insane problems, it is true. But surely, any traveller in the sea of space would eventually get homesick and circle back? What beautiful nebula, what awesome star, what grand and distant, if lifeless, galaxy could squish the nagging anxieties back? Leaving earth permanently (and surviving) would not only be a miracle of ecological engineering (alternately, an irreversible theft from Earth's living sphere), it's fighting millions of years of emotional evolution. It's self torture.
What solution is there? Detachment? Exploration of undreamt psychological realms? Transcendent self-disintegration? Deep space as isolation tank? Works great for sci-fi. Works the best for tragic sci-fi. Besides, insanity and nirvana work just fine on Earth.
Let's try another route: Roam the abyss with a partner or commune of like-minded individuals?
So one is alone in a confined island (compact, however large) of survivable space with other humans, with their own dreams, desires, plans, theories, morals? Is science and exploration powerful enough to draw people altogether away from the town square? What of political economy (who will do what work?), conflicts of interest, clashing beliefs about course or research focus? What of governance?
Perhaps a single like-minded syndicate seems to much like a societal monoculture. What then, does one build a relativistic city? One only amplifies and intertwines the political complications, runs high risk of a larger (and repressive) monoculture.
Okay then, how can we fix this? Send many cities or nations in separate vessels, with their independently developed cultures and attitudes?
Golly, can't see how that could go wrong. Immediately, questions, disagreements, heated arguments: should we allow them to freely board and leave our vessel? We have surplus and they a need, do we use their desperation to gouge them?
At some point one's forced to beg the question - just how much of Earth are you willing to take with you in order to get away from Earth? The only demons out there are the ones you take with you.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a good thing that there is so much non-human, uncontrolled noise in our planetary lives to dampen our pained vibrations.
We can't reach for the stars without reaching inside ourselves. I almost wish such a trite sounding phrase didn't summarize the situation so efficiently.
What better way is there to progress, if that is possible, than to start, right now, in each possible moment, to heal the wounded human tissue that huddles in clumps on the humid, wet rock, Earth? To embrace the world where we can, with all its sticky consequences? To attempt as soon as possible to re-arrange our society, state and economy into something which is not only ecologically sound, but, dare I say, pleasant?
Human worlds remain necessarily compact topological spaces, not only geographically and societally, but psychologically, emotionally.
But this does not necessarily entail that it is finite, limited, scarce. The geometry of life and society is necessarily fractal to continue itself; it has always been this way, that is exactly how it got here. Wishing to keep it between rectangular lines and bound by hierarchical control circuits is always a paradox to start. [The bourgeois dream is wet]. This organizational form never quite gets off the ground, despite its enthusiasm, its fervor. Always, the humans are in there, living components, sliding fluidly over the rigid organizational structure like they do the cement-asphalt-steel skeleton which is the symbol and substantiation of its persistence.
Like those goddamn tenacious rose bushes. My height in half a year, sheesh. Spilling petals all over the place and everything.

On Emotional Abstraction in Music

Music has special power in the depiction of fantasy. It does not merely describe a scenario - it *is* the scenario, it produces the scenario.
One of the fundamental problems in imagining  a future paradigm is the lack of conceptual links with current ideas. Even if we could see the lives of our future descendants in advance, we would not see through their eyes. How many of us have ancestors who would disapprove of our acts and beliefs, were they to see us through their own eyes? I for one might be burned at the stake for the heresies I frequently speak.
But if we were to listen to the music of the future on its own terms, without expectation, we may perhaps learn something about the emotional identities of the participants without the differences in worldview (conceptual connotations of grammar and vocab) coming between the expression and the audience. Perhaps music can be used to communicate about our visions of the yet unseen.
When we look at a painting, we must first resolve the blobs of paint or pixels into hypothetical world-objects. One must judge a bending oval to be a clock before one ascertains that it is absurd or surreal (or as perfectly reasonable given the circumstances). When we hear a story in a native tongue, we resolve the phoneme-complexes to words, word-complexes to grammar, and grammatical complexes to thoughts, feelings, objects, actions, and links to further descriptions.
Music itself does not describe (although lyrics may, technically), but is itself what would be described. Like a painting of a landscape, it is depiction for its own sake, rather than attempt to convey some "other" message.
Rather than 'resolving' to visual social cues or cultural place-time motifs embodied in acts and situations of actors, music resolves to feeling itself; the very desire production of the cognition machinery itself.
Newer dance forms and modern abstract art are the same in this - they seek not to code for a code, but to directly access the codes of daily emotional life - the unspoken necessity of relating to one's situation in th world via an emotional identity, integrated from the unconscious to the awareness of desire as patterns which can be recognized, predicted, and shaped by conscious modulation of through-routing.
Music subscenes these days tend to start as this authentic, nearly asocial endeavor. The music strikes you because it is fresh and true - a truth you have not heard in that way before.
But "music" itself is a code for these emotional truths-as-objects, as well as the importance of acknowledging them, (hence the tireless repetition of the quote "one good thing about music...") whose social value is high.
So as the truth is recognized by more, fewer see primarily the emotional truth of the music, but rather its social signification - whether you like it or not, listening to the music puts you among the body of people who listen to that music. The act of listening to and sharing music becomes a social motif which insinuates emotional awareness commensurate with the scene's dominant aesthetic, whether or not this is personally true for the listener.
Therefore it's not always unambiguous what a sound or lyric *means* in scene music - is it an emotional truth, or a social cue?

These categories do not exclude one another. One might well understand that listening to certain artists opens one up to ridicule from a particular social group - but one may still enjoy it on its own terms in secret.
In musical cultures in which sampling is expected or tolerated, popular samples often emerge, and it can be difficult to distinguish whether someone has used the sample because they loved how it sounded, or because they thought people would think it associated them with The Cool. Folks like Riff Raff play on
this ambiguity (sometimes extremely profitably).
And yet, all the social posturing in the world will not change how a person experiences the music for themselves. They may attempt, through mimicry, to act out an experience other than their own, for social purposes, but this cannot negate the experience of the music itself, which, in that case, would be thereafter linked with the experience of posturing, and may continue to evoke such a response in the future.

The process of The Bious

There is a surface and a flow over it (through it).
The surface is composed of self-stable microparts. Frozen, the microparts remain unchanging in their geometric relations to one another. Changes upon the frozen surface are engravings, geometric records of the past flow to a viewer who supposes an initial frozen state.
The surface transforms under the flow; parts are permuted, each micropart constituent stable in its algebraic identity whether or not it flows into or out of the surface.
There is a partition of the surface in which every part may be re-produced by further permutation of the surface under the flow. Differences in flows over reproduced parts alters them away from "perfect" identity with their. The surface maintains connection (and integration) under continual permutation by "reversing damage" via replication. This goes as much for "locally stable" components such as cells as for fluctuating components; a body with ATP maintains itself by destroying ATP ad producing more ATP under a digestive flow of glucose-transformable material (and its atmospheric-gravitational flows).
The flow may be altered slightly without altering any of these aspects. But if it is constrained enough or increased enough in any "direction", the surface will cease to transform under the flow - it loses its ability to produce itself. As irreversible damage to this ability increases, production approaches disintegration. Simply withdrawing thermoynamic energy from the system by cooling it is one way to disintegrate production: continuity of connection ceases with motion.

We want to allow the flow to change at different times, particularly in multi-stage organisms. They might grow parts or abandon them; hence strict uniform reproducibility doesn't capture a life cycle. In fact growing systems are the rule - you have to have grown to be grown.  This generalization is easy to state.
For an organism, we expect a path has been taken through the environment (even if 'stationary' geographically, the changing of sun and seasons constitutes a 'change of place' over time) which resulted in a flow at every moment. We expect (original!)/copy/spore/zygote which permuted under a changing flow to the current state and flow. Since parts' flows vary based on their situation with respect to one another, not all variation in production/flow is "external." Flows allow parts to produce versions of themselves more quickly than they die; heterogeneity of flows over even nearly identical copies (regardless of whether modulation originates 'inside' or 'out') may lead to differentiation and specialization, with the ability to self-produce.
We expect at any moment, parts were reproduced the available flows in the past, or partially present at the origin. Hence a living system may be unable to reproduce every component within it in the presence of future flows; in fact we expect to one day die and stop self-producing altogether.
Furthermore, present and future flows may allow growth of parts not present or producible by permutations under present flows. A starvation flow may not allow self-production, but if increased before crucial points (irreversible transformations), future growth and production can be expected.
In this way we can separate death from dormancy. For instance, a seed need not have growth flows in order to be considered 'alive.' Given a future flow, it will have the ability not only to self-produce but to birth versions of its current self, either alone or by coupling with another seed's products. So long as the life cycle is unbroken, life "is happening."
Therefore it is clear that any population is as much a living system as any of its constituents. Indeed, any group of organisms, even the entirety of life on Earth, constitutes an unbroken genealogical chain of production, with the reproduction of the ability of self-reproduction as the intersection between productive chain links.
Life is a continuous phenomenon; if reproduction stops, it will not tend to restart.
Life's current persistence implies continuity since its first birth (or births).
(What do I mean by a "flow over a surface"?
The microscopic body is porous on many scales (in different places). When energetic material connects, it may fit through these holes. Such holes, in elastic structure, may simply be energy transferred through it, from inside to border to outside. Many of them seem to be more or less deliberate pathways, particularly in cell membranes, a vital counterflow to the aquatic or half-aquatic environment established to pull in particular molecular configurations. Establishing body pressure to counter the environment's is a way of doing this on a macroscopic scale. Any structure which keeps material out/in (serves as a barrier to some part of the environment) can have holes through which the environment flows.
A "surface" is simply a connotative word for a persistent and otherwise (without heat) solid geometric structure which intersects a flow.)