Fluxus Extraordinarium

There is an old book I checked out from the library. But rather than identifying this book or being too explicit about it, I will say that it is a book concerning intellectual history, or the history of the development of certain ideas and the contributions of some significant thinkers in the fields of psychology and social science. The human social animal is a living being which it is possible for humans to study; this study, being about ourselves, may change or at least inform the way we go about our lives, for we each of us live inside this fluxus extraordinarium, the living and process-oriented universe, a world which seems to be rich in possibilities and interpretations, since we don’t necessarily know for sure what is going on. Sometimes our not knowing something seems funny, since we are failing in some way to deal with our environment.

Not a video clip

This is the age of the internet video clip. There could be a series of clips featuring a person or some location except that all of the footage is extremely shaky, purposefully so, by waving and shaking the camera around. There may or may not be anything going on, not that you could easily tell. Or perhaps you could tell from the soundtrack or other features. The soundtrack could be deliberately misleading. These clips would be made to be deliberately unwatchable. What is this? A cry against some aspect of the video clip age, or making fun of something that gets lots of attention, or the fact that we ourselves are not participating in it? Is this always the first kind of video clip that anyone or everyone tries to make? There could be a very long sequence of video clips wherein we see all the elementary ingredients that make up video clips - pushing buttons on the phone or camera, aiming it somewhere, trying to stay balanced on two feet, using phonemes to build up the sounds of spoken language, using a suite of muscle and limb movements to put together the varieties of human physical motion, seeing somehow the very electrons moving in circuits and wires, the operation of the human brain, everything that’s ever happened.

Problem solving

We might encounter something mysterious, confusing, or surprising - something that we at first do not understand: an unknown. We might consider to what extent this collection of things - the unknowns - is the same or similar to the collection of all things that are problems. Certainly not everything that is unknown is a problem, and not all problems will include aspects which are confusing or indistinct. But whereas things that are unknown are at least in principle amenable perhaps to understanding or to analysis - to becoming known (or better known) - perhaps also things that are problems are amenable to solution (or to becoming known better through analysis). We might therefore look at all the things which are problems or at least unknowns, and we might say that all of these things might admit of solutions or improvement (where we assume that coming to know something is an improvement over ignorance of that thing, which might not always be the case). Problems can be understood better and fixed, or at least improved upon, and things which are unknown, insofar as this is a problem or is the object of curiosity, can be studied and known better. Everything can be sorted out, or so we imagine, or so we like to think, or so we can try to achieve, even if ultimately limitations of time and human energy will doom this project to failure in the end. We look to achieve until finally we fail: this is the story of life.

And what is the “surface” of anything? A planet like the earth compared to one like Jupiter or compared to the Sun. What is the visible outer layer? And at different scales we will answer this question differently.

Character of life

Life, as I suppose most people would attest, is a mixture of the good and the bad. People might disagree about whether its character is mostly good or mostly bad, and certainly different people find themselves in different circumstances, and the same person in different circumstances over time, so that whether or not life is mostly good or mostly bad might depend on these circumstances, or else depend on one’s, as it were, natural outlook (which might itself have various causes, if it is caused by something). There may be, in short, no way to say whether life is mostly good or mostly bad. Or lots of ways to say either at any given time. Now it’s October.

What's happening

It’s just days before the election, when perhaps the world will end. The opposing candidates and the opposing political parties spearhead opposing factions within the society itself, and if you are not allied with one of the factions then you must be allied with the other. Many people stay off the streets. When the election happens either the candidate who has fixed the thing already will be announced the clear winner, or else the election will become contested, with each of the rival factions establishing its own claims and its own militias. Violence increases. Wealth is stolen where the opportunity exists to steal it.

Later, after the violence has increased to the point of the destruction of society, or else to the point where one side has seriously eradicated the other, a new order can be established. There could also be a cyclic rise and fall of violence as various things within the society sort themselves out, and while at times old orders might fall or fade away, to any given generation things will seem to change somewhat slowly. Or at least it used to be that way before mass communications and the digital age came along and speeded life up by another order of magnitude. We can’t help but burn out or burn up as much material as possible; this is pure vivacity itself.

An exception to every rule

One well-known rule is that there is an exception to every rule. Is this true? Now it could be that a rule, strictly speaking, is something which can never allow any exception (else it would not be a rule in the strict sense). Certain mathematical or logical rules could be of this type, or certain laws of nature. There can be rules that, by definition, allow no exceptions, in which case the statement that there is an exception to every rule must be false, with respect to rules defined strictly. Furthermore, if we find a rule that seems to have an exception, this rule is not a rule in the strict sense.

But perhaps our rule that every rule has an exception is true, in which case there can be no rules of the strict sort. Certain rules which can have no exceptions by definition must not be rules, but something else, call them laws, laws which the very structure of reality enforce, making them impossible, even conceptually, to break. Everything else is a rule, which while it might hold fast generally, can always admit of an exception. Thus, if our statement is true, there is no contradiction in the idea of it itself allowing no exceptions because it itself is a law, not a rule. If you say that every unbreakable law can always be broken, you are simply misusing language. If you say that despite the fact that rules generally hold true and laws (in the social sense) are generally enforced, there can always be exceptions to the rules or breaking of the law, you are only saying what is generally known. Rules don’t mean anything if they are always broken. They might be interesting ideas or conceptual curiosities, these always-excepted rules, if they are not completely nonsensical, but we know what rules and laws amount to in their various contexts. If we say that “there is always an exception” holds universally, and so there must be an exception to this rule, then that exception would be a rule in the strict sense, one that cannot be broken. If we say “there is always a way to find an exception to a rule with no possible exceptions,” then I am at a loss to know what this means. Perhaps if it were the case that the universe had never existed, all unbreakable laws would be void, simply because they had never existed in the first place. Perhaps we can imagine that not only has the universe never existed, but it is impossible for it ever to have existed, existence itself being fundamentally impossible. I am also at a loss to know what this statement means. [However, these concepts might still be susceptible to fruitful analysis.]

Science

Some people might argue that science can, in principle, explain anything. We will not worry about the limitations of any one individual’s lifetime or understanding, because science is cumulative and shared. Of course, human beings are probably always going to be limited in some way, and it could be the case that in order to explain anything science needs to be able to explain everything completely, and even if we were on some path towards this accomplishment, we wouldn’t ever actually achieve it. But anyway, if things in general seem to be connected, and if science seems to be enlightening in any way, even if that keeps changing over time, and if complicated things or sets of things can be explained (or at least somewhat explained) using simpler ideas or language, then why not imagine that science can keep explaining new things and more things better and better, as it has done? Even if we can also imagine that perhaps science as such, or at least how we practice and understand science today, can gradually change into something else, or what we would at this point consider something else, even if we don’t later, or if science comes to include more things that we don’t even know about now, or to speak in a language we don’t understand at this particular juncture…