Rational and A-Rational: Mechanics and Alive

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 reason for me to start painting started in 2020, In the lab, I was researching probability theory and in parallel on consciousness. In statistics, and probability theory, there is a term called “Realization” and sometimes “Simulation”. In probability theory, unknown is represented by something called a distribution. When a unknown variable is observed, the unknown collapses into known. Probability theory, and the mechanical part of quantum physics, describe the mechanics of unknown. For example, think about two dice, each with 6 sides, 1 to 6. If each die is fair, when we roll the die, we know that the possibility of seeing 7 as the summation of the two dice, is higher than any other number. 1 and 6, 2 and 5, 3 and 4 , 4 and 3, and so on. But seeing 12, is only one setup 6 and 6. In this sense, the roll of the dice is our unknown, and through a rational process, we can start talking about odds of summation of two dice. This is what I mean by the mechanics of unknown. Pretty deterministic, right? we simply count possibilities of how 7 will appear or 8 will appear. But the essence of unknown existing in the setup is separate from the mechanics. If I roll a dice, existentially, I encounter a phenomenon called Unknowingness. and amazingly, when I roll the die, the unknown, in terms of future, comes to undeniable known. Which side did the die land on. In Quantum Physics, this is called the wave function collapse. Its a fancy term, or technically, the wave is a fancy characterization of the same thing we call a probability distribution on a die. The distribution of a die is usually imagined as equal possibility for all the outcomes. Now you can ask this question, what are the odds, that I see lightning today. And at the end of the day, either you see lightning or you don’t. Unknown collapses into known.

Now, pay attention, that there is an element there. Your observation. If you did not observe, unknown would have remained unknown. The nature of observation is undeniability of what is observed by the observer, its called Now in other words. Now reflect, on what you think of what is behind your back. You have an “imagination” of what is behind your head. There is a difference in nature of imagination and observation. Note, that you observe the fact that you are imagining. But the content of imagination is not the same as seeing nor similar to what is called “Hallucination”. A quick note, is that Hallucination is a irrelevant term for this conversation, because we are talking about subjective experience versus a verbal census on what is defined as “Objective”. And another quick note, is that, I can only objectively say, that I see only through my own eye and hear through my own ear and not through what I observe. Now, reflecting on all the accessible memories now, and all predictions of future now, they have this essence of imagination to me. Unobserved. Glimpsy. And the question is what mechanics govern, turning unknown to known. What is the mathematics of realization. I am convinced that this is the A-Rational. And the reasoning is the following: Any known mechanics we bring forth, that governs the process of realization, eradicates unknown and creates a chain of known processes, and turns enitrety of past and future into a predetermined chain. And the paradox of this, is that why unknown was experienced to begin with. Existence of unknown is A-Rational, and realization is A-Rational. In a deterministic reality, we cannot impose a boundary around subjective experience, and describe the rest as the other, as All is pre-realized by the deterministic process and reality becomes a frozen object, pre-determined. It is puzzling to me, that why in some schools of thought and especially in physics, there is a resistence to admitance of “Unknown” as a primitive definition. It is puzzling, why any investigator of reality, cannot admit, that before knowing physics, first they know of existence of unknown. Even multiverse theory is a sort of escapism from unkown and subjective experience, While existence of unknown is empirical statistically, by asking a determinist how many cigarettes are in my pocket as I am writing this. And if they are mistaken, then reality is not deterministic at least in Now.

Another argument for non-determinism as a null hypothesis model of reality is the argument of Generalization. Non-deteminism Generalizes determinism. Why? because a special case of Non-determinism is determinism and not vice versa. My opinion of a coin flip’s outcome can get close to, 99% Head - 0% Tail, or become 100%-0% in a non deterministic framework while in a deterministic framework, there is not 50% 50% model of a coin flip. deterministic processes can be explained through non-deterministic lense, but this is not through the other way around.

Understanding what I was thinking about back then, I can continue with the story. In the lab, understanding the A-Rational nature of realization, I started experimenting with myself. By writing numbers, avoiding any thoughts and trying my best to avoid patterns learnt in the past. And it was not easy, to be close to pure randomness. 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 tyrannical term “ Other Conscious” becomes bold. What are these images that are splashed onto the canvas to your absolute surprise. Surprise as narrative 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?

A Note on Alive and Unknown

One of the terms that repeats in our daily conversations, is the term “Life” or “Alive”. Here, I want to highlight a relation similar to philosophical zombie argument, by David Chalmers. What do we call alive? In wikipedia, last time I checked, there was a circular definition. Life was defined in terms of biological process, and biological process in terms of life. And somehow, in science, the word “Carbon" shines. But is the question of something living, a question of their function? or how they function? or what they are made of? I suspect, when we say alive, we mean conscious. And when we say conscious, we reflect on the quality of experiencing reality.

Now how do we find out if something is conscious? Do we examine its behavior? and if the behavior is similar to Me as the undeniable conscious being, then I can say that thing is conscious? But the definition of similar is subjective too. And if conscious reflects complexity of a system, then complexity is also subjective too.

I always bring my grandmother in this story. If my grandma, was a physicist, and there was cup on a table. And my grandma, knew all the forces to be known, the wind, gravity, and everything in the room, and the cup unexpectedly moved, my grandma would say a ghost moved it. Something else caused the movement. Now a physicist would look for a cause, but given the scenario, all observable causes were known, and still something acted on the cup and enabled surprise or change, to observables, agency is assumed on the phenomenon. Agency if understood as a chain of predetermined cause, loses its significance as a word in any dictionary. In essence, agency is the inherent unpredictability of an object, or independence of its condition or part of its condition, to a predetermined knowledge. In my mind what is unknown and has the quality of expression, to be realized, to unfold into an undeniable reality, is as good as free from my knowledge, and is as good as alive. And this quality, makes unknown of me alive to me. Independent of “Me”, and free of “Me”.

I is in continual observation of the unknown unfolding, and the rational mind, puts bounding boxes, or categories, on the unknown element, or aliveness. In the eye of the rational mind, one cannot separate the barista in front of me, and the count of coffee beans in the coffee machine. To me both are free from my knowledge and are part of a chain of relation. The coffee runs out, and the barista goes and fills the coffee. Two dice next to each, unknown to me with a somewhat deterministic mechanic for their unknowns to me. and both later become part of one scene, the observed to my eyes, colors and sound and whatever else, to another called the observer.

Inside A-Rational: Arts

and what is arts? what is science? science as series of letters written in a book, or the attempt to. Series of letters, 26 letters, infinite shapes to write even a single one of them. In fact what mathematicians call uncountably infinite. The category, and the reason, boxes reality, in series of finite number of categories, and attaches the categories together to describe, the “seen”. To memorize past, and to predict future. And I suspect, thats why, when I say “CAT”, you cannot see a cat in the word cat. Because the uncountably infinite details cannot be expressed through 3 letters; C A T. And I suspect that experience itself is a continuum, and recognition of letter C, takes a glimpse of it, and the word cat is never observed but in a glimpse, but the sound is heard in the continuum. And I suspect that these glimpses, are the suspects of the episodic experience which we have in reality.