The Project

Hi all,

Angeli invited me to play in y’all’s yard, so here goes.

For a while now, I’ve been throwing around a collection of ideas I think of as the Project (yeah, capital ‘P’). Mostly, the Project rises in my thoughts when I’m asked about my religious affiliation. What follows is a rough, short list of the statements of faith I think of when I think of faith – the beginning of my answer. Each statement on the list could be expanded to an essay, or a book, or a life’s work; I know it’s simplistic, but it’s a start.

The Project

1. Life creates forms.
2. Forms can outlast individual life.
3. Information is more resistant to entropy than matter.
4. The potential information content of the universe is infinite.
5. The heat-death of the universe is coming; what are you doing about it?
6. Sentience creates novel forms
7. Sentience is anti-entropic.
8. The unique potential of sentience lies in the creation of novel forms.
9. The creation of novel forms is dependent on maintenance of existing forms.
10. Destruction of existing forms is entropic.
11. Sacralization of existing forms is entropic.
12. Religion can be entropic.
13. Religion can be anti-entropic.
14. Noise is entropic.
15. Lies are pure noise.
16. Truthful communication is anti-entropic.
17. Communication implies, creates, and requires community.
18. Involuntary restriction of access to information is entropic.
19. Voluntary reduction of noise is anti-entropic.
20. Art is the creation of novel forms, and is therefore sacred.
21. Art is the preservation of existing forms and is therefore sacred.
22. Science is the creation of novel forms and is therefore sacred.
23. Science is the preservation of existing forms and is therefore sacred.
24. The future is sacred.
25. Entropy itself is anti-entropic in that it is essential to life and sentience.
26. A moral code can be derived from these statements.

Working Definition of “Body Without Organs”

This is a link to a page with a working definition for BwO which I found to be helpful in understanding the concept. It seems like D&G are interested in a sort of “flow permanence” or “process logic” which jives with NLP, but they express it through particularly idiosyncratic language. There are, of course, other facets to the concept, and the author of the page goes out of their way to make a point that this definition applies more to Anti-Oedipus than any of the other areas that the concept appears, and I found it to be useful nevertheless.

Additionally this is a concept linked to the BwO (in my mind) which I came across while looking into the BwO. It feeds into an idea I have been developing internally regarding information throughput in social systems.

Filters

I found this quote in “David’s Sling” – a pretty good book altogether, in a similar vein with “Dune” in my mind. Anyhow, this quote has always been something I appreciated:In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING.
Filter the information; extract the knowledge.
Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance.
These filters protect against advertising.
Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.
Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects against the media.
-Zetetic Commentaries

As a different kind of set of filters, there are these 9 Well-Formedness Conditions for goals:

1: Positive – What do you want? (vs. what do you not want) Are your reasons for pursuing the goal clear?
2: Evidence – How will you know you’ve succeeded?
3: Specifics – How, Where, When and With Whom?
4: Resources – What resources do you have? (objects, people, role models, personal qualities, time, money) Are they adequate?
5: Control – Can you start and maintain the outcome?
6: Ecology – What are the wider consequences?
7: Identity – Is the outcome consistent with who you are?
8: Cooperation – How do your outcomes fit together? Are there any mutually exclusive or incompatible outcomes?
9: Action – What do you do next?

Organization and Collapsable Heirarchy

I have found the concept of collapsibility increasingly interesting, especially as it relates to networks of information.

It occurred to me yesterday that while we generalize, distort, and delete to experience the world, these three processes can be generalized to any set of information and any organizing structure. The best way for me to articulate this is to refer to the way we read handwriting. Handwriting that is readable (i.e. has an arbitrarily low level of noise) is read by identifying the idiosyncratic structure of familiar letters as interpreted by whoever created them. This rationalization of the squiggles and lines continues until we impose the nearest analog structure we have available to us (i.e. “t”.) We perform this task for an entire reference structure, generalizing on a number of levels (perhaps a short word). Once we have a reference structure, rather than repeat this process, we make a generalized version of semantic units- “the” something. As we move up in the hierarchy of generalized semantic structures, we begin to develop a limited concordance, we generalize the handwritten letter to whatever idealized letter we have stored in our mind, and then delete the messy scribble we are left to interpret. As we proceed through the process while we go through this process with the written letters (information) we are performing a highly analogous process to the information that the written letters represents, so that interpreting another person’s writing is a very personal process – we impose order and practice philosophical apohenia among other things, meaning we can never read what anyone ever wrote, we can only read what we put there.