Qualia In Dualia, And
Romantic Dualism
The Goddess and The God, endured eternity with each other’s infinity.
Each a continuity, and the desire was desired. A mirror in between, not in reflection,not in reaction, not in mimic, but in harmony. A soft boundary.
Amir Emad Marvasti
Sealed - Amir Emad Marvasti - Oil
In 2016, I didn’t understand Godel’s incompleteness. I knew it but didnt fully realize it. I thought at the time, that there was an objective to all of it, Being I mean, and the objective is to know. and my proof was the following, if there is any other objective, we need to know the objective. and the objective reduces to knowing. Little I knew how I would change my mind later and realize what was meant by Incompleteness, The mechanics and the pre-determinacy of rational and reason is incomplete, the non-determinacy. In later years Me and my friend John, Started calling the counterpart to rational, a-rational, not irrational but a-rational. This story is about unfolding of a-rational, From pre-axioms of mathematics and reason, to existential philosophy to mythology and psychology, to aesthetics.
Before I get into the story, I want to roughly introduce my path, a anachronistic biography, as I always have the question, is the work of art relatable or the persona of the artist.
I read David Chalmer’s philosophical zombie argument. I always thought of consciousness as something weird and I guess I thought about it when I was in high school. I remember one year I was sitting in a Cafe with my high school crush. not a reciprocated love. And I was telling her, the counter argument for heaven and hell, which at the time I thought its a genius Idea. And to summarize I told her, Separate soul from memory and function, because I didn’t choose my function. I never went to a soul shop and chose Amir’s soul, neither a serial killer chose their soul over Mohammad or Jesus soul. A no choice, no fault Argument. In that cafe, I approached consciousness in a moral setup, And without knowing, I encapsulated all possible knowable and imposed properties and intentions into function and what was remaining into soul, a common term with an unfortunate but insightful religious baggage, Soul, a bland and property less primordial. I had no Idea back then that there is something called a Razor in philosophy neither I didn’t know that at the heart of my argument was Occam’s Razor.
Years later, I was researching AI, from the angle of information and all I could imagine was a discrete reality. I imagined that at least the best we can do is a discrete model of reality. And we approximate the continuum. and I thought AI is the solution to physics. I remember that I was talking to Jason, a probability theorist, and one of the professors who I regularly met, and I told him, say there is a natural law in the observable, I proposed to him that chasing the natural law is redundant, and I consequently proposed to place understanding of the principle of learning at the heart of the chase. and the principle, with the salt and pepper of infinite memory and infinite time, approaches the natural law in implementation. and I continued telling him, in words that I cant remember now, and I paraphrase, the wisdom is the principle that governs the mechanics of learning. I don’t agree with this argument now including my proposal.
I continued chasing the consciousness question alongside the technical research in AI, Informally, Friends knew I was working on that, but the department didn’t.
I followed the question to the point that I started formalizing what is consciousness. It was in flavor of my research, Ill put a chapter about consciousness into the technical section of this website later in time.
Formalizing consciousness verbally and mathematically is one thing, and exploring it post realization of its weirdness is another. Post explorations are in the domain of meaning itself, The observer in physics. The observer in Albert Einstein’s physical body that determines whether his theory is good enough or not. Even if his theory is not Meta enough to account for the observer that he is.
Consciousness, as loaded of a word as it is, is similar to “meaning”. Undefinable and undeniable. I always say, in every dictionary, there are three lies,
Everything: the whole book should be in front of the word,
Nothing: A hole should be in front of the word and
Meaning: every word that is used in front of it needs to have meaning to you - circular or in the Hoffstadder’s words, its a strange loop.
Consciousness is sorta like that, except it perceives meaning among other things, basically everything and also nothing.
And thats my short surface scratch of the memory, in flavor of relevancy. and now Im gonna tell a story, and not history.
Philonilia - Amir Emad Marvasti - Oil
Philonillia
Once upon no time, in nowhere there was not nothing. And once upon all the time, in everywhere there was Everything.
Everything could not be nothing and Nothing on the other hand was free to be what everything was not.
Its destiny unfulfilled, Everything tried everything to own and be nothing, but everything could not see or be nothing. everything imagined one last thing, "forget".
Everything gave part of itself to nothing. Some say it was an olive branch from everything so nothing could be. It was called time. Everything accepted to stay in present and the rest shall be filled with nothing. The only place where nothing was not, was now. Finally, Everything had dragged nothing out of nothing.
Everything could play with nothing, maybe see nothing through the thin barrier separating the past and future from present. What Everything imagined of nothing, nothing responded. Nothing was there, nothing was alive. So everything imagined a new name in its own image, for nothing, and called it anything. Anything was there,
Colors and rhythms, words and laws, joys and fears, God and Devil. Everything played with anything, colored it, named it, ruled it, experienced it, but Nothing was enough. As soon as everything found anything it became part of everything. As soon as colors appeared, they became part of the canvas. Nothing was just enough.
Everytime, everywhere, everything did not own Not. Not, the thin mirror separating the world of everything and nothing.
Eternal Solitude: God, The Uno is Clinically Depressed
Mythosynthesis - Amir Emad Marvasti - Oil
This is the story of the Mad King and the Beggining of time. I wrote Philonillia when I was doing research in Chicago. I was working on probabilistic optimization in a cafe, rusty old french cafe with a fire pit, called bourgeois pig. and suddenly I felt like writing and the writing appeared.
There was a significance about Chicago for me. Before Chicago, I spent seven years in PhD and in comradery with other PhD students. If you are in AI field, and during the hype, you could understand staying awke to submit to one of those conferences. the whole department was awake and naturally you trauma bond like soldiers in the front line. In chicago I was a Post Doc, and I made a realization. the abstract hierarchy seperated me from PhD students which I always consider my self as one and still do. and as you travel to the tip of the hierarchy naturally you become more alone. and asymptotically I entertained the Idea of the isolation tank, total aloneness. Mono in existence. We all heard of the stories of hallucinations in isolation. And Immediately I thought of the story of God in Monotheism, or Monism or the story of eventual unities and in buddhism Nirvana. And I put my psyche in the place of the mono looking at nothing. In the face of eternity. and I was like, oh man, thats pretty horrific. so in the face of the story I could justify the game of life as a game for an eternally bored uno.
And interesting enough philonilia appeared first, then these thoughts follows. now in hindsight It reminds me of Slaughterhouse number 5 by Kurt Vonnegot. where the protagonist experiences time randomly in episodes misarranged. Somewhat that experience becomes reality in writings.
Anyway, The King is Alone, and the king starts hallucinating a duo in his solitude. and the conversation starts. and with every start there is time. Pope talks to gabriel, god talks to devil. Iran cooks up an image of israel as Arch Enemy and Israel the same. and both desire to go back to unity. Its a paradox really, at least psychologically. The boredom of the Uno demands the duo. And on a pragmatic note, in social psychology and individual psychology, the relation is conflict. God Kills Devil, Iran and Israel defeat each other.
Later I found the solution for our poor depressed Mad King called God. The Goddess. The Dualia, aliveness and the boundary between the two is Aesthetics.
Phantotiral - Jointly Cooked with Weston Throckmorton - Oil
The Critique on Life Theory and The Re-view
To go into the Dualia, to make my point, first I need to go to our trivial accepted history. The story of evolution. what was thought in school to us and taken for granted at least by me.
When I was in elementary school, in the empirical science book, in a theocratic regime, called Islamic Republic imposed on Iran there was a page describing evolution. In that page there was two sections, one with no picture and the other one with two giraffes and a tree. The first giraffe was short and the other one had a disproportionately long neck like the giraffes with us. The short one could not reach the leaves on the tree and the tall necked one could. The title of the section read, Lamark’s theory of evolution. In that it was explained that the giraffe wanted to reach the leaf and the giraffe evoloved into long necked giraffe and reached the tree.
And the companion section was Darwin’s theory of evolution, which we all are familiar with. A mixture of randomness plus a tautalogy, randomly things move and mate, and whatever remains, remains. And I remember that the impression of the writing for us was, “ Lamark’s theory: Unscientific”. But how? Now In hindsight I realize its power. the centrality of desire in change of us? why would a theocratic regime, that wants people to believe in an inaccessible mystery called god and creation prefer Darwin to lamark? I get it now, to place desire at the center of our biology Is to remove the surrender to the grand unknowable mystery. The mystery is not withheld in the sky or in a book, its withheld within each being and in time and motion, called desire and want.
In Darwin’s evolution, an angle exists, often dismissed in conversation. dismissed, maybe not in academia, maybe not in an some philosophy writings, but in popular opinion which I am part of it is dismissed. The picture of what is the relation between female and male. feminine and masculine meet to reproduce offspring to increase survivability of a species. The feminine and masculine are instrumentalized to achieve a function and fulfill the demand of the tautologic god of survival. as means of reproduction. Existence of the duality is a mechanism developed for fast optimization at the mercy of the assumed objective function. And in that I raise two questions to everyone, including our lord and savior Elon Musk In pursuit of replicating humans on every rotating rock:
For how long? trillion years is enough? or trllion to the power of trillion? or trillion to the power of trillion factorial?
If you dont embrace eternity, who is gonna give you a medal for survival of a species? Let us know so we write a letter to the office of existential Olympics and raise at least some complains about how the race is being conducted.
And for what? And if that is in the fabric of living beings, how can you justify the choice of not to be? the Illegal word starting with an S? Does the condition of being matters? or Its just to be?
I am in admittance of the ethical realization of Darwin, that living beings are cousins, I admit the grandness of that ethical discovery, but allow me to be skeptical about placement of absurdity and in approachable mystery at the center of that theory. whether by him or an institution reinterpreting his observations in the institution’s flavor and representing itself as at odds with the theory. The two competing theories belonging to the same company. The God Industry. The saviour business and chase of by definition Inaccessible higher meanings. Survival in mortality and survival no matter what, however it is necessary. Let me be bitter a bit. It is comic that the evangelist of Darwinian interpretation, Richard Dawkins, eventually ends up admiring Christianity over Islam. You gotta admit that it is comical.
I said all of this to present the alternative. A romantic duality. Bear with me and Imagine the cheap trick called the what if scenario.
What if, we twist the darwin’s theory and say: To reproduce is to unblend the colors of the unisex into the duo. And to refind our relation to the other in a flavor that is not the struggle.To find a pleasant reality that we truly want to be in. to forget that Shakespear’s question ever existed and find triviality in our answer and vote; “To Be”. What if to reproduce is to find the duality in alive and living. the duality in our psyche, the consious and the other, with a relation that is not a struggle nor friction, nor a conflict, a trial by phantoms, the phanto-trial. to revive the romantic in relation. And what if we were born under tyranny of the Uno, the inevitability of the war to murder the other, to fulfill the prophecy of the unity.
Derealise, Rerealise - Oil - Amir Emad Marvasti
The Refactoring
To my understanding we splitted our realizations into Scientific, Religous, Aesthetic, Mystic and etc. and our dear science operates with these philosophical views and whether it is concious or not these views find their way into our rigor. In Chicago, I met a professor, working in psychology, and we ended up talking over coffee. I was supposed to tell him my Conciousness theory. I did, as unorganic as it was, I tried to push the theory out. At the end, he asked me a question that at the time I didnt have a full answer about. I had a sense but not the full answer. And the question was: So what? How can we experiment with it? what is the use? The enitre theory was built around Interestingness of the word Concioussness and not as another partition around some functions in the ocean of the functions in the world. And the answer was Mecca. I told him, how do you evaluate a physics theory? you write a theory on a piece of paper, and movement is generated, electrons and atoms gather around it and compose other atoms and electrons into a spaceship, and the sphere called earth detaches a part of it and sends it to another sphere called moon. By language, anomally is generated. a sense of be and it shall be. many electrons, harmonically, in correlation, relocate to the moon. Now in Mecca, a lot of electrons , in correlation, they rotate around a black cube. They read a book, a theory, unexaminable by nature, relatable to their observation, and a massive effect happens, they rotate around a cube. We are living in a sphere, not only our scientific minds, but massive physical and examinable senses of change and movements happen out of relation to pieces of text. and those relations take predictive forms and sometimes general flavors to thought and mind. And my response would have been to address finally what was religion and resolve its distinction from philosophy and sciences. The heart of religon is a collective and primitive attempt at existential philosophy. and Newton was under the influence of the same religous texts. and Einstein was as well. In my humble opinion under the circumstances of war and climate and depression, I think its time to end the departmentalizations and micro specializations. It is time to see the relations between all that was sectioned and refactor the modules, and I am an optimisit, that it can be contained within our psyche at least in a macro composition. Where do these fields of senses and imagination stand and how do they relate?
A Critique To Pursuit of “Particular” Natural Laws, and Imagination of Time:
When I was a kid, If I opened my eyes and harry potter was flying on a pink dragon with a BMW logo on it, I wouldn’t have exploded. I wouldn’t consider that an impossibility.
As I am older I call that simulateable computationally in a computer as it is not a paradox. Same way If someone told me that the speed of light was 200 km per second, I wouldn’t have exploded either. I can simulate a simple reality with light traveling at that speed. In a sense, discovery of the natural laws, were similar to an epiphany to me and I think to us. It is suspicious, that we say there is a natural law and us, operating by fabric in the natural law, have forgetfulness about it. The least it is suspicious, not to say absurd.
The truth is, we are surprised by the condition we found ourselves into, A discovery. But what is the story that we told off of the condition, The Law. A preimposed Law, Unchangeable, Immutable, that is axiomatic and admits no reason. we call those the postulates. Are the postulates working in predictability, yes and we call them theory among others. And we choose the simplest. But the essence that is the acceptance of a preimposed law, could be revised?
Before going further in this line of thought, lets have a tangent about our dear Abrahamic Religion view about god. God, in abrahamic views, is primordial, steps above phenomena and it is impositional. It imposes a condition on reality, And God is alive in Abrahamic views and has agency. it is not static. but the story of the imposed law, shares something in common. Unrealized by I, the observer, and it is imposed on I, unchangeable, predetermined, premordial, I admit the condition that is imposed, as the reality is not absolutely “ Be and It shall Be”. But the attitude of discovering a verbal ultimate imposition is not unlike the search for God and an eventual disappointment, not to say facing the eventual paradox, that appears in the notion of time.
I cant remember where I heard the term “ The Frozen World”. there is a common imagination of time. Time being a line, that is curved or not. In that imagination, the imaginator, stands above time. Me and my friend John, we call that place, View from nowhere, or God’s eye view. From the perspective of view from nowhere, the reality is fixed and frozen. and there is no change. And the imaginator examines the time itself, and needs time to examine the line called time. and that is the paradox. And to critique that view, is to raise this question. Empirically, we observe change, and change is a notion that is underlying time. in an unchanged reality, how is it that change is perceivable. Or why am I experiencing precisely a slice of reality, a slice of time. Why not the whole? what restricts it? what is the universal constant that restricts perception of entirety, if it is predetermined and a fixed shape.
EYE - Oil - Amir Emad Marvasti
To account for change as a primitive definition, one needs to start with trivials and undeniables. We often start from abstract and try to reach the observed. The observer that is us, the final evaluator, is at the center, while the unknown-ness as “The Other” is also undeniable. Colors and sound, and other senses are experienced and in change. Unknown becomes realized and materialized, as we observe, and by merrit of unknownness, anything that appears out of the dark of unknownness is paradox free. And reality is Particular. A rotating cup that rotates clockwise and counterclockwise at the same instance is not imaginable, neither the cat that is both dead and alive is imaginable. And there is no observable cloud called probability. What we observe is the realization of the unseeable cloud called unknowness.
And time is both a continuum and episodic. You go to sleep, time collapses, and you don’t end up in a dark room counting the seconds, you wake up in the dream world. A continuum starts, and then the collapse again. Now I can count experience. and inside each count there is the continuum.
And to show that time is a continuum you can take the visual sense as an instance. Imagine a white circle that rotates. and with a magic marker put a dot on it. If the experience was frame by frame, there would’ve existed a speed of rotation that you would see the dot, pristine and unmoving. But the experience is that the dot smears across the circle.
And the experience of episodes are embedded in an experiment. The Rotating Ballerina. for the continuum to be a continuum, the ballerina needs to slow down and change direction. and for the ballerina to instantly change rotation, according to newton, infinite force needs to be applied, in essence a discontinuity needs to be applied.
A Note On Arts And Relation To Science:
Method and Surprise
A favorite quote of mine, is from Carl Jung, in an interview, he says, and I paraphrase as I dont exactly remember the sentence, the biggest problem of humanity is humanity. Very simple but relatable and worth reminding myself as a sort of a mantra.
It was this year, that I met one of my professors and truly a friend, George Atia, in PhD defense of another dear friend of mine. And he told me I keep thinking about what happened to you and your twin brother. it was 2 or 3 years that I lost contact with George. A little background about George, is that I learnt rigor, to the best of my abilities from him. he would go on the whiteboard, calmly and neat and steadily derive a theory in realtime. I call him a saint. And we ended up meeting for lunch in a restaurant next to the university. and he asked me what are you working on these days, I think he meant research at least in my head, and my response was: If I tell you that my research ended in painting you would not believe me. It was true,
The painting started 6-7 years ago, in the lab, and me working on uncertainty and on the side consciousness. And for some reason, or a moment of insanity, I started writing down random numbers on my notebook. 1, 5, 8,2,3,5,1,3,6,3,6…. and filled 7 or 8 pages. then I plotted the numbers, the graph going up and down as numbers increase or decrease. and that day I saw a pattern. And I thought to myself, wow, can we tell psychological disorders from these numbers? can we tell the identity of people from these numbers? I kept that to myself, and didnt tell anybody, at the time I was concerned with the ethical implications of these types of AI research. but later that week, I thought, what if I do it visually? And I started putting dots on a piece of paper with a pen. and every time, as law of large numbers always does, a meaningful picture appeared. It was exactly like looking in the clouds, with the twist that you made the clouds. I called it the Self-Rorschack test and eventually cloud painting.
In the images that came to the canvas, there was a motion in my psyche. The question of “Sub-Conscious” or in a non tyranical term “ Other Concious” becomes bold. What are these realistic images that are splashed onto the canvas to your absolute surprise. Surprise as narative and the image itself, as well as the skill. As if the realization of the cloud of uncertainty or randomness in us has a harmonic quality to it. Amazingly, the feminine figure appeared and reappeared. And the first romantic story that appeared to me was, is the randomness alive and perceptive? whether true or not, it was a democratic idea, ending the tyranny of the Conscious on the Sub-Conscious. And the follow up thought was is She Alive? One of the qualities of the duality in psyche is internal conversation, and sometimes self conflict. Denial of Desire by Self is another hard to miss abundance in the psyche,
Random Dots on a paper
Gaia left, and no, no one can remember why they separated. This time they were both lost. As they departed they shattered, into tiny little parts, and as they fell, they both forgot, the goddess and the god.
And they fell and fell until their essence ripped waves in the ocean and time.
They met again many times, but couldn't remember who they "are". There's a rumor that they told the wind the secret before they depart. Only the wind knows their secret. And the rumors blame the wind for keeping it afar. I for one think that the sun is in conspiracy with the wind but that's only I.
They are now alone with the myths of how and why. Each recreated their forms as isolated bored godesses or gods, and each murdered their goddesses or gods one by one.
They are tired now. As they see and touch for glimpses but always being pushed by waves that was once part of who they are.
And I for one hope for the wind not to let them forever depart.
And I for one want to see them kissed by the sun.
As Time Began:
Gaia Left - Painted With Right Hand - Oil and Digital Composition - Amir Emad Marvasti
A Romantic Anatomy - Three stages of the Oil painting - Amir Emad Marvasti
Vandalized Later by Popular Misconceptions of Aesthetics, that is mindless expression, called Graffity. I dont blame the person, I blame the gatekeeping of aesthetics by Art institutions and the industry of Arts in past 30 40 years. Another chapter to write about
Author at work. To be continued…