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Recently I decided to leave social media for good, a decision that was a long time coming if you read the earlier blog posts on here. Maybe leave is a bit of a misnomer, since I do still want to keep in touch with a close and private circle, but beyond that I have no wish to participate further. The accounts are solely for archival purposes, and eventually I hope to delete them altogether (I've already downloaded my data).

I kind of regretted the way I made it known. Honestly, I wasn't even posting art on an active basis and it felt as if I'd made a fuss over nothing. In fact I'm adamant that, to the people that matter to me, nothing is really going to change. I'm not going to drop off the grid or shut myself off from the world, far from it.

I also mentioned that I wanted to migrate away from proprietary services completely, and I definitely regret phrasing it like that, because I don't even think that a strict, 100% free software only lifestyle is practical for many people, including myself. Especially artists, because many art programs (whether for painting, design, or music) simply don't have an industry-standard FOSS (free and open-source software) alternative. Not to mention if your school or workplace uses services like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, there's not a lot you can do about it.

But I still believe in doing your utmost to become independent from proprietary services. Not even really for ideological or purity-spiral reasons, but because libre software makes you a better user of your computer. You are able to have access to programs and systems at a lower level, and therefore can adjust things to your liking. You actually have an idea of what's going on in what would've been a total black-box, if you were using proprietary software. I think that's one of the most important things to me—the ability to know what is really happening, and the ability to change it.

I'm done with finals (a harrowing experience that I'm very glad to be done with for the next few months)—and I've been teaching myself some LaTeX formatting so I can transcribe a PDF of this book which I will convert to an EPUB. (There are no decent EPUB versions of this book out there from what I could see, so I'm planning to upload the file onto my site.) The book itself is called The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler. If you've ever heard of the concept of a holon, which is any system that exists as a whole but is also a part of a larger whole—a kind of recursive definition with an example being atoms that construct molecules, molecules then constructing polymers, those polymers then making up even more complex structures, and so on.

Anyways, The Ghost in the Machine is the book where the holon basically originated from. It's a little dated, but still a great read for someone who is interested in psychology, consciousness, cybernetics, even some linguistics... Koestler covers a variety of things.

On the topic of making ebooks or even just improving on existing EPUB/DJVU files, here (Dec 2023 edit: this is a dead link) is a resource I've found very helpful, though I believe the tutorial itself (using pandoc, etc...) is directed towards people using UNIX-based OSes.

Wikipedia list of thought experiment demons, because I find it really amusing imagining a little guy messing up fundamental processes/structures of reality. Like Maxwell's demon is just a critter that laughs in the face of thermodynamics while sweeping molecules around with a broom, that's awesome.

I like learning and talking about theology, especially Christianity and Islam. (I'd love to learn more about non-Abrahamic religions, or even the smaller Abrahamic religions, like Druzism, but that's a topic for another day.) I was raised Catholic, baptized, and basically everything but confirmed. I've considered doing RCIA for a while and I'm learning a lot. But ironically, sometimes it feels as if the more I learn, the more it seems like trying to square a circle. Catholicism is something very close to my heart, but I can't confront it fully, and so it feels as if I'm doing it a disservice. So what, go back to being lapsed? Leave the church entirely? It's difficult to say, the kind of question that needs to be mulled over, but only for so long.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest, a theologian, a paleontologist who was involved in the discovery of the Peking Man, and a scientist — in short, a veritable renaissance man — who lived and died in the late 19th century to the mid 20th century. The concept he is known for is the Omega Point, a kind of scientific-religious-theological eschatology (too many -ologies, jeez) similar to the idea of an eventual singularity. In other words, Everything That Rises Must Converge, everything that exists will bend towards (and be subsumed in) Jesus Christ.

Teilhard de Chardin's theory is structured by four invariants:

• Humans can, and will escape the eventual heat death of the universe.
• The Omega Point exists at the edge of the end of time — it is not constrained by the lifetime of the universe.
• The Omega Point can be visualized at the bottom of a cone. As one approaches it, the volume of the cone converges into a single point without dimension.
• The cone is an entity that has finite boundaries; therefore its volume is also finite.

At first glance The Omega Point might come off as nonsensical, unscientific, maybe even conspiratorial, nothing more than a haphazard attempt at reconciling Darwinian evolution and Christianity, doomed from the start. Teilhard de Chardin, along with philosopher-in-arms Vladimir Vernadsky, coined "noosphere", which to me had an almost psuedo-intellectual connotation, the likes of "homeopathy", "polygraphy" and "morphic resonance" [1] — words whose Greek etymologies and officious syllables bely their snake-oil insides.

This doesn't mean that the Omega Point is of zero academic (or even scientific) value, however. Consider the theory of the Big Crunch. Granted, it is also controversial and still a conjecture. But the Omega Point could also include an interpretation where the singularity isn't necessarily physical/spatial. What about John von Neumann's technological singularity, which has long since been a subject of debate in popular culture? The gray goo and ice-nine of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle are objects of fiction; the rhetoric surrounding AI is obscured and marred with fear-mongering and a lack of nuance.

Yet the technological singularity is not something that goes away when ignored or talked over. Vernadsky popularized the term "biosphere" in 1926. Almost a century later, we live in a world where the fundamental building blocks of information — DNA nucleotides, semantics of language, binary bits — are able to live alongside each other in increasingly symbiotic relationships. Regarding Teilhard de Chardin, on a scale of utter fantasy to unconventional prescience, I'd lean towards the latter.

[1] Morphic resonance is a psuedoscientific concept by former Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. It basically posits that telepathy is real, among other equally fringe things. No one takes Sheldrake Senior seriously, but his sons are another story: Cosmo Sheldrake is a successful musician, and Merlin Sheldrake is an accomplished author and scientist whose book about fungi, Entangled Life, won many accolades.

Programming and Art

November 13, 2022