Mingling Back to Carry Forward: A Note to Rafael on Time, Information and Sacs a Poche


(2013) 

R., I'm borrowing your absent ear, first. An easy thing. You're likely the person who knows me best, almost. Certainly more than myself. Who better for the base stuff? Then S., though I still owe her a thing, for less ancient things, expressions of big networks, love, motivation, stuff like that.

   R.... that our connection might have to do with both the sort and timing of our adolescent mixing, late enough to be involved during a second social but also physical, epigentic, formation but preceding enough the development of inhibition and the influence of a small, annoying part of our brains near the front that becomes more influenced by other maturing parts and in turn begins to function as something of an enforcing calculator. A thing that might have, metaphorically, ended such a run-on phrase in favor of simplified inference. An opportunist. A senior executive. A politician. 

   Blending, then, runs deeply into what you tend to be both beyond and before circumstance, before you learn or are taught how to contain yourself into a hierarchy. The way you look at the world before creating a narrative around it, sometimes abstracting so ...that the narrative itself delineates what you perceive and do, mostly. The timeless part of what you are. Which, after all, largely defines the place you should be, where you effortlessly belong. And affect in that belonging. The story of stories that remains.

   That timing and mixing can be more or less determinate likely depending on the person or people involved. It's always a dialog in context, many dialogs really, always changing a little: a symphony -more jazz than not- of many networks, many instruments. Anyway. I've been fiddling with approaches to a thing.  At its base, the question: what is expression and why? The forms, expressive mostly, story and music. But largely revolving around the Pescara Jazz festival: who plays, who listens, who is in between - the facilitators.

   The overriding metaphor which should determine form is a stone skipping across a moving river and the interaction of the waves it causes with each bounce. A couple days ago I left a half undone note here touching on bottom-ish stuff, as in moving up from the rivers floor - why (a)  the discrete expression of time might be determinant to how systems of information recur to themselves, how they integrate. After reviewing it I'm a little surprised the only relevant part isn't as incomprehensible as I expected - you recall me - even though the note strayed a bit from that skipping stone image. (A bit silly, seeing as that's likely the easiest way to picture it. Maybe I should re-hash a bit. So...)

   Imagine the surface of a river flowing. Terribly original, I realize but assume its velocity is real time, its direction entropy, the water within is information as in i - this is conceptual so leave aside what - qubits, gravitons... - just leave it as a simple 'i'. From each skip, the stone leaves a wave or waves and within the water-i, that outgoing wave delineates what you see in the water swirling around, reversing like an eddy, integrating before expressing itself back out into the direction of the river. I'm kitsch, so call the time/entropy of the ongoing flow of the river 'b' and the point where those eddies express themselves '2b'. (Yuckyuck, 2b or not...2b. hawhaw.) Leave aside all 'i' that doesn't have that difference in time/space, that readable expression of integration. It wouldn't be readable, or can not express itself - except through influencing the entire river. (update 2024 - that could bridge entirely onto something flavorful regaurding quantum mechanical stuff, collapsing wave function and maybe consciousness as a state of information a la Penrose (Roger), but... that's for a bit later.)

   The river has a limit though, on one side, which determines T (sum of time expressed) or entropy of the whole. Now slide below the surface. You'll see those swirls from the eddies of integrated information above don't stay on the surface but swirl down before returning to the flow. More kitsch: Call the surface point where information entered the eddy 'c'; where it leaves below, '2c'.... (2 c or not ...2...c. Baddabing.) You'll also see the eddy of information extending like a giant twirling transperent sac-a-poche leading toward the boundaries of the river, a funnel-shaped thingy but not fixed - it's always changing form. The layers up and down in the i-water would be 't', or discrete expressions of time. At the low boundary, the smallest information that can be classically read or that has expression, therefore the smallest expression, of time. At the highest boundary way up there, sort of, all of 'i' and t are integrated. Anyway. 

   The point is that in this picture you need to have multiple integrated layers, 'c's', in one sac-a-poche across times for consciousness to emerge in any one time or flow, most importantly this flow, real time. When you're in a sac, you can't really 'see' up, though you can down, because the lower you go, the less information is integrated. Smaller systems. Consciousness...brings you down, as well as integrating up. Love, instead, (the definition to be brought up in a moment,) brings you up in this reference. Even if you can't really see the levels of information, the times, it's expressing through you, but downward. Let's swim out of the river.


   In those sacs-a-poche we, to, are mini sacs-a-poche... though maybe tornado is an easier image. Information is expressed up, at least what we can see, through but recurred down or out, following the direction of entropy. The tendency of that expression is to maintain energy or reverse entropy carrying representations across times. Expressions of integrated information in that way recur to the past, to larger systems, or referring up in that river even as it heads out of the sac. We carry information through time of a system that 'wants', evolved, evolves, will evolve - in constant dialog, to continue, to stay its dissolution. To remian. A - the - primary need. A mingling back to carry forward. A place to be. Not quite like Gatzby's leaning back in his gorgeous pink rags but not too far from it either. Now I will break for dinner. Risotto. Home made broth, gallina and veal bone, asparagus......

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