Coincidence and Woo Woo Disclaimer

Since I feel like my place in the Gemini ecosystem is to

provide non-tech content for interested minds, I will be

writing a lot of stuff that is downright weird [1].

I am fascinated by patterns and coincidences, and so I will

write about them, but this not be taken to indicate that I

believe there is anything "behind" them. With a large

enough set of data, including sensory experiences, all

sorts of things can crop up.

My operant understanding of the the joy of life and its

magical feeling is they come from emergent properties.

This is what Douglas Hofstadter was trying to get at in a

lot of his work. If read well, his work gives a good feel

for how arbitrary substrates following arbitrary rules can

lead to emergent wonder.

I have no problem learning about substrates. Doing so is

one kind of pleasure -- an austere beauty on the

mountaintop [2]. But emergent properties play by their own

rules or, to use a different metaphor, follow different

grammars. I like to celebrate that they do and that we

are living in the world that we in fact are.

Maybe the future is Disneyland Without the Children [3],

but in the meantime I will be human and create my human

writings. I just do not fall into the all too common

pretension that my writings speak for the Gods.

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[1] I am actually a big fan of weasel words like "may,"

"could possibly," etc. But in this case I can be emphatic

because I *already* have an established habit of regularly

writing weird stuff. The only thing that has changed is

that I now have another place to publish it.

[2] Robert Pirsig on the side versus the top of the

mountain:

> To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the

>sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.

>Here’s where things grow. . . But of course, without the

>top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines

>the sides.

[3] Nick Bostrom.

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I'd love to hear from people. My email is the handle minus

"net" (work by Voltaire that starts with "c"), at sdf.org.