Wednesday, June 18, 2014

sending a message to the past

"Plato's Computer"
benjamin harubin 2014
digital photomontage




history been written and re-written many times by winners, losers and freaks.

in the future, your history will be re-written 15 million times.

i am learning to write in natural english for the first time.  you must forgive me, i am used to communicating in quantum fractal machine images.  

you think you are living sometime in the early 21st century, 
with a house, a wife, a car.

...


History as a discipline is not that much different from what you call physics, although physicists would beg to differ and claim they do it harder.  Whereas history is like a collection of stories, closer to art than to science.   Funny but astrophysics is full of stories of the past, like the Big Bang.  

Scientists are not standing around their tabula rasas, chalking notes impartially, describing strictly what they see.  Niet.
  
A computer brain can't even recognize what a triangle is- or if you're coming or going- without some serious algorithms, some sophisticated modelling.  This is what dumb evolution has provided for us as mammals. Now science is continuing the trend in the "conscious" mode.  This trend aims to increase the usefulness of our models, and hence our predictions, about the behavior of our environment and ourselves.  But you know it doesn't really matter if the models are absolutely true or not.  As long as they're beneficial, they are used.   There is a directional bias in the way that science evolves, as theories are modified and replaced.  The same can be said about any human discipline.  Who knows the ways of Fashion is the one who creates it.  The optimal scientific brain recycles, incorporates random elements and makes absurd associations.  The model (Relativity, say) is created long before the drama of matching it to observations is acted out.  And ideas go out of fashion.  In short, science is creative.  And we don't have such a handle on objectivity that physics and literature (art) are fundamentally different kinds of activities (especially from the viewpoint of the spectator, digesting a somewhat skewed and condensed version, and especially from the viewpoint of the participant, who can't see the forest because he's a dendrologist).    

When the fractal mathematics of these model building activities are better understood, will it be possible to re-write history, in actuality to violate the arrow of time, and send a message to the past

and say "hey, kid, it's gonna be alright"?  











No comments: