The Hole at the Bottom of Math

Hi Ghost. Ex Machina is fun, & worth a watch. It’s Prometheus Unbound (Percy) & Frankenstein (Mary), ancient impulse “modernized.”

Matrix in the Skynet with Diamonds, too, has almost got to be the dystopia that control freak utopianism – across scale & up/down continuum – wreaks…even if it never ends up looking exactly like movie versions, Orwell or Huxley visions.

Or the dusted off & polished Westworld (another Crichton story): The good doctor “creators,” let alone everyone else, don’t stand a chance against “their” creations.

Also the symmetrical angle that doppels the gangsters (& ripple effects outwards from them), “explains” motivation, of control freaks sometimes – often? – wanting, at day’s end, to be dominated: the Giamatti character in Billions is U.S.Attorney for the Southern District of New York, powerful, greedy for more, totally corrupt – & a submissive masochist in the bedroom-torture chamber.

Or the classic hero cancelling antihero motivation, as shown again, by Cool Hand Luke, in The Hustler:

But maybe he’s a learner. Implied. There was a sequel.

((Current events. I’ve wanted, ached, to “be among them” at various times over the course of the past year. Even tho I’ve been there, & done that, & been plastered thereby. Compulsions are the gravity that keeps this flat disc stuck spinning in place. “It’s a great feeling.” Oceanic. Swimming out too far just doesn’t seem possible – or, even if it is possible, not important. But it is possible, is important. And contrary the standard advice, not keeping light under a bushel is a good way to get harvested.))

Even the Epstein types, that dominate little girls, etc, push it until something bigger, more dominant, gobbles them up.

This die•namic may be looking into the abyss & not being able to handle it, losing it, worshipping at the altar of Pogo Possum.

Maybe subconscious Opposite George is pulling those strings to get the puppet to self-destruction-fulfilling prophecy.

Yin & Yang are always depicted as weighted equivalently, but seems one is always stronger. Hubris is always stronger. Strongest of all seems Freud’s death wish: that energized bunny doesn’t stop the search until Charlie Bronson is found & “*he*” stops it.

Dmytryk on film editing: Rule One: never make a cut without a positive reason &…never talk about fight club:: death by a thousand, delicious, micro-expression-agression, cuts.

Compulsion, the antithesis of free will pretense-theses, rapist & raped, that begets all the sin•thesis – and all the “distorted introduction to the world” that therapists & bleeding hearts emphasize to exclusion of all else.

But distorted distortion is conception-tortion, twisted helices, & heresies, so all that is, & comes, *before* distortion is parents, who were also distort-conceived -torsioned … & then all that’s left is random rolls of the dice out in tiny tails to get some few apples that fall far from the pursuing trees.

It’s a numbers game.

And game animals are “made legitimate quarry by state or other law.” By predators, iow.

But by now maybe not so black & white & yin & yang, them & us, as that, is it?

“Susceptibility to manipulation….” Sociopaths bent on perfecting sociopathy – & sociopath’d dependent can only want that, too (The Commitments: “Mickah Wallace? I hired him to do the door. Security. You’re mad, Jimmy! He’s a savage! I know he is. But he’s our savage.”).

Artificial people are real, artificial intelligence is real, maybe because artifice is real while art is just a term of for too many.

from your math-myth clip:

I have not seen Splice. I’ll look for it. Some of what I wrote above shows up in what you’ve clipped.

Just started DeLillo’s Zero K. Immortality. Transhumanism. Billionaires.

“I must have the wrong door,” I said. He gave me a hard look. “They’re all the wrong door,“ he said. It took me a while to find my father’s office.”

“When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge & violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down & pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.”

“I’m aware that when we see something,we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see. I don’t know the details or terminology but I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full truth. We’re seeing only intimations. The rest is our invention, our way of reconstructing what is actual. I know that research is being done here, somewhere in this complex, on future models of human vision. Experiments using robots, lab animals, who knows, people like me.”

“They would come & take her. They would wheel her into an elevator & take her down to one of the so-called numbered levels. She would die, chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition & arrogance & self-deception.”

“Is it any different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew & never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.”

“The room in the long empty hall. The chair, the bed, the bare walls, the low ceiling. Sitting in the room & then wandering the halls I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense.”
““What we have here is small, painstaking & private. One by one, now & then, people enter the chamber. In an average day, how many? There is no average day. And there is no posturing here. No warping of the body in remorse, submission, obedience, worship. We do not kiss rings or slippers. There are no prayer rugs.”

She sat crouched, one hand grasping the other, each considered phrase an emblem of her dedication, so I chose to think.

“But is there a link to older beliefs & practices? Are we a radical technology that simply renews & extends those swarming traditions of everlasting life?”

Someone on the benches turned & looked my way. It was my father, giving me a slow & knowing nod. Here they are, he seemed to be saying, two of the people whose ideas & theories determine the shape of this endeavor. The vital minds, as he’d described them earlier. And the others, they had to be benefactors, as Ross was, the support mechanism, the money people, seated in this stone room, on backless benches, here to learn something about the philosophical heart of the Convergence.

The man began to speak. There was a tone, a ripple somewhere nearby, & his words, in one of the languages of Central Europe, became a smooth digital genderless English.

“This is the future, this remoteness, this sunken dimension. Solid but also elusive in a way. A set of coordinates mapped from space. And one of our objectives is to establish a consciousness that blends with the environment.””

That’s as far as I’ve gotten. Pretty good.