There is No Spoon, or, Spoonlessness.

[ixion]

Like so many other techies, I was a huge fan of 'The Matrix' when it came out. It was sad to see them degenerate so rapidly with each sequel, as the Wachowski Brothers apparently turned to Hallmark Greeting Cards for script writing, but I digress. The original, the slightly gritty, slightly sterile, bleeding-edge-hip original was a classic.

And a quote from that movie "There is No Spoon" has become a meme in our vernacular akin to a pop Doctrine of Maya (Life is but a dream). The really cool thing about this meme, though, is that it's true. There really is no spoon. There is simply a collection of atoms with very tight orbital patterns, aligned to a common frequency, and thus bound together in mutual affinity. If you added up the amount of space in between the nucleus and the protons, there would actually be more empty space than matter.

Thus, if a solid object is mostly empty space, imagine just how ethereal a human-manufactured concept might be. An example of a concept like that would be Civilization. Another example would be Religion. And still a third example would be Politics. These aforementioned constructs only exist insofar as we allow them to. Outside the realm of semantics, they're just so much thin air. That is, you can't point to some quantifiable object and say: "There. That is religion." It is an idea -- a construct -- and is therefore unquantifiable in an objective, ontological sense.

I elaborate on this in order to provide a framework for the construct of Spoonlessness.

Spoonlessness is the idea that we are in control of the ideas or constructs we create, rather than vice-versa. It is the Master Key of Idea. Spoonlessness is a state of understanding wherein you can see the virtual 'atoms' at the core of the construct, and retain lucid control of the way they manifest. Spoonlessness states that a construct may be 'tweaked' in order to improve performance, or as a result of the emergence of other newly-discovered ideas or constructs.

Spoonlessness has only one law: There is no Spoon.

http://neofeudal-notes.blogspot.com/2011/08/there-is-no-spoon-or-spoonlessness.html

[Hestia]

1. This article is Hermeticism in a nutshell

The ALL is Mind, the Universe is Mental. As Thoth taught - do ye not know ye are as gods?

[ixion]

2. There is definitely that component to it, but there is also a societal

aspect as well. The whole point of the piece is that we need to change.

Disclaimer: I am a bit of a Hermeticist. :)

[Major Hogwash]

6. There is no nutshell, just a bunch of nuts.

Bada-bing!!

LoL

Groucho does Socrates -- "I drank what?"

[bemildred]

15. I would say: all that is social is also mental.

And most of the world we live in, being social beings living in large communities, is a social construct, and therefore is mental, and as a consequence somewhat arbitrary.

At root, "spooonlessness" seems an attack on Cartesian dualism and reductive rationalism. Hume would agree that "all is mental", but that is an extreme position, akin to "all is physical".

[ixion]

23. Not really an attack, although I can see why it would look that way

It would naturally be a perceived threat to any previous construct which it might invalidate. And the goal isn't to invalidate anything necessarily. The goal is simply that we control what we create, rather than pretending it has the power to control us. We seem to be soft-wired to abdicate responsibility for our own minds, our own lives. That is almost a social more, almost a global constant. It's the source for all Mythology, as Joseph Campbell pointed out in 'The Power of Myth'. And it's something we've not been able to throw off after many millennia, which is why I'm skeptical. It will take an enormous precipitating event for that to ever change, I think.

But Spoonlessness isn't really trying to attack anything directly. It's simply asking for some floorless time. :)

[GliderGuider]

25. It's hard to position nondualism in the realm of the everyday

Taken on its own, "spoonlessness" can be seen as an attempt to negate Cartesian dualism. And since dualism is so obviously the underpinning of our everyday perception of the everyday world, nondualism is easy to dismiss as irrelevant sophistry. To those who "get" nondualism however, it's anything but irrelevant - it can be a very fruitful way to view the world.

I use a paradoxical expression of reality that's captured in two pairs of opposing statements that are both simultaneously "true":

||Everything is real||Everything is illusion||
||  Everything is   ||      Nothing is      ||

The first pair expresses the truth of both the everyday dualistic perception of the world as well as the nondualist awareness that the appearance of separateness is an illusion. The second pair expresses the simultaneous truth of both Spoonfulness and Spoonlessness. To me reality doesn't feel complete unless all four perceptions coexist. That can be the hard part...

The Indian nondualist sage Nisargadatta has a famous quote about spoonlessness: "Love says "I am everything". Wisdom says "I am nothing". Between the two, my life flows."

[bemildred]

29. I will attempt a full response tomorrow.

:hi:

[bemildred]

34. OK, first off, ITA.

Second, this is neither a full nor a coherent argument, that would be a large book, I just want to sketch a certain constellation of ideas and point in certain directions.

Thirdly, this is my somewhat my choice of nomenclature, so I am "putting words in the mouth" of other people when discussing their ideas, and one ought not mistake what I have to say for what they intended.

---

Archimedes said "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth". The problem is, of course, that there is no place to stand, and no sufficient lever. This is illustrates ab initio the fundamental gap between theory and practice.

Descartes, when the chains of religious dogmatism were broken, set out to find some philosophical "place to stand" - to reason from - and came up with "I think, therefore I am", which begs the question it purports to assert, that there is a "real" I, which forms a philosophical "place to stand". As many persons who have considered that question carefully have said, our "I" is not a thing, it is a process, in which our continuously changing mind and body are coupled to the continuously changing inputs from our sensory apparatus, and our "reality" is the "image" created and maintained by that process. This is what Hume arrives at. It is often mistaken for solipsism. In fact it takes no position about what is real "in itself", it merely points out the limitations of our physical means of apprehension. (Freud later pointed out that much of even that "image of reality" we create is not ordinarily available to our consciousness, and hence to our "rational" thinking process.)

Kant did not like Hume's radical epistemolological relativism, and set out to demonstrate the existence of a priori knowledge, things that must be true in themselves, using ideas such as that "Even God cannot make two times two not make four." -- Grotius (1), that mathematical truth is one form of absolute knowledge; and he also talks of the fundamental laws that must govern any system of perception. This is Kant's attempt to find a place to stand, to find knowledge that is "absolute", to escape from relativism. (2) This argument continues to this day. I think Kant is wrong, he has a "bootstrap" problem, to justify "reason" self-referentially, with the fruits of reason. One can certainly justify "reason" by its fruits, but that is an empirical and pragmatic justification, not an absolute one.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." -- Immanuel Kant(3)

We now shift to Einstein, who addressed what I analogize as the same issue in the context of Newtonian Physics, and found that to be consistent with observtation, one must discard the notion of an absolute inertial frame of reference, and accept the Principle of Locality: "an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings" (4), no action at a distance. That is far from unambiguous, and Quantum Mechanics has picked some holes in it, but it makes the math match up with observation remarkably well.

Now consider the issue of highly scalable networks in computer architectures. If one has some indefinitely large number of computers of power P that one wishes to network, like the Internet, with some network transport (wire) of a certain maximum capacity B, a condition of that networks operation on a particular link is that traffic remain less than B. Also each link to a node has a certain cost, C, to maintain and operate it. Then it is clear that each node can have direct links with at most P/C other nodes, and also each link can connect to traffic from at most B/C other nodes. Again, no action at a distance.

Now, If one allows that there is no action at a distance, then it follows that "reality", or our perceptions of it, however one chooses to construe things, need not be globally consistent, that there is no perceptual or cognitive absolute "inertial frame of reference" either, one might say that "reality is local." I would also add "reality is temporal", the world today need not be consistent with all that went before it, or the future.

It's Alive! Scary, isn't it?
:-)

There is also another long jaunt through Goedel's Theorem, Turing Theory, and Mathematical logic that I am not up to today.

[GliderGuider]

35. The moment you want to prove there is a place to stand, it all breaks down.

Thanks for the philosophical tour!

You're right, the place you end up isn't solipsism exactly, but it can look like it to the the uninitiated. The problem with "I think therefore I am" (or its complement, "I am therefore I think") is the assumption of "I" on both sides. All formal systems are built on that same unprovable assumption. It's like the famous cartoon of the mathematical proof on a blackboard, with one box in the middle of the logic chain labeled simply "Here a miracle occurs" - except that in this case that box is at the beginning of the chain, sitting in the writer's chair.



I admit to being quite partial to the concept of a universe that is fully interconnected at all levels, and where B is infinite and C is 0. It seems just as reasonable to jump straight to that endpoint as to get hung up trying to prove that "I" exist. Of course, just a little further down that path we find the idea of a fully conscious multiverse whose every aspect is co-created by the intelligences that constitute it... Then we are truly out where the buses don't run.

If we simply allow division by zero we can prove anything we like.:silly:

[bemildred]

37. Yes, that is the core of it.

"I can see that you see."

As Hofstadter discussed some decades back(1), self-reference leads to chaos and complexity (good things in their way), and without it there is no place to stand. You have to assume something, you have to start somewhere. Mathematics, as you mention, is 100% tautological, in all it's forms.

And that same issue crops up in different forms over and over again, whenever you try to reason your way out, which I will now forgo to list, ...

I don't take a position on "a universe that is fully interconnected at all levels", I just know it doesn't look that way, and it's futile to talk about it. Underneath it all, it's a mystery. Clearly the Universe is not as limited as we are.

Another axial subject that gets too little attention is scale. At the quantum scale the universe clearly IS NOT like it is at the galactic scale, scaled up or down, inertial frames do not look the same to physics, apparently. Much of computing theory centers around finding algorithms that scale up well. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's nice little book "On Growth And Form"(2) explains it as physics. Kirkpatric Sale's book "Human Scale"(3) examines the issue in terms of what we are evolved for.

[GliderGuider]

38. I'm completely captivated by the mystery

For all the rationalist pretensions I display on the internet, in my heart I'm a mystic. I love the filigree that spins out from the central, insoluble mystery, but I have to admit I'm much more fascinated by the mystery itself. It has more personal value to me than all the ornamentation the universe provides for our amusement. Everyone has very different priorities and paths in life, which is one of the great magics and also makes learning possible.

I'm going to become more familiar with Hume (beyond the Is-Ought exposure I've had) because of this discussion. Thanks for sharing.

[bemildred]

39. I would recommend the "Learning Company" tapes for Philosophy.

I read a great deal, but most Philosophers like Kant and Hume are very hard work in their native prose.

Do let us chat again.

[bemildred]

3. +1.

Mr. Cowan nails it.

[saras]

4. If there's no spoon, can we still bend them?

[DCKit]

5. Not sure about the bending, but they've been twisted all to hell and back. nt

[ProfessorPlum]

7. there is a lot of bad science, just in this little clip

the protons are in the nucleus, so I think he/she meant "electrons" there.

And I have no idea what "atoms with very tight orbital patterns" means, nor what having atoms "aligned to a common frequency" means. All garbage.

But I get the idea trying to be conveyed here. Yes, the world is a strange place when you get right down to it.

Hopefully the philosophy part is better than the chemistry, which was terrible.

[ixion]

8. There is only one correction in your series that is valid

and I changed it. It was simply using the wrong word (a mental type-o, of sorts), my bad, and thanks for pointing it out.

The fact that you don't understand the frequency theory stuff is your own fault, not mine, but I can tell you there is science around it.

And you did, in fact, miss the point of the article, which is NOT that the world is a 'strange place,' but that we can change what we create.

Thanks for being all snarky, though, rather than gentlemanly about it.

It's not a chemistry piece in any case. It's a sociological piece.

[ProfessorPlum]

9. sorry to come off snarky, Ixion,

I didn't realize it was your own piece. I appreciate you using the science as a metaphor for a sociology essay. I would just encourage you to be precise with it or it will turn people who hit that language off to the rest of your piece.

I admit that there is a lot of solid state physics and materials science that I don't know. Can you explain or point me to research that explains frequency theory? It sounds just a little bit like the water/ice crystals/thought hooha in "What the %$^& do we know, anyway?", which was not real science. Thanks.

[ixion]

10. No problem. Appreciate the apology.

And I agree that if I'm going to use science as a metaphor that it needs to be correct, and I really did appreciate you pointing that out. When I'm writing, the creative/literary side rolls on, and I need to go back and fix the glitches as it were. Again, much appreciated!

The frequency stuff, while steeped in scientific fact, would not be considered proven scientific fact as such, and I understand if you don't want to accept the theory, which is all it is at this point. I need to go through my notes so I can make sure and explain it correctly. I'll post it later today.

Thanks again! :toast:

[GliderGuider]

12. It's funny, I run into exactly the same problem with using science as a metaphor

In my writing I tend to get loose with the science as well, and that can keep the scientists in the room from getting the point.

I noticed on your blog page that you're a software engineer, as am/was I. I wonder if there's a hint in there as to why this happens to both of us. Algorithms are, after all, metaphors, and the field is only loosely (quasi?) scientific compared to physics or chemistry. As a result, SE may be especially attractive to people with a certain kind of mind.

[ixion]

18. I think you're right...

When you deconstruct the user experience, it looks very much like an interactive story, and the same applies to architecting an application framework. You imagine a set of objects with a distinct set of abilities and/or attributes, and then you set to creating these objects and hooking them together to create the workflow.

Before I was an engineer, I wrote fiction -- short stories and a few novels. When I started getting serious about writing code, at some point I realized that I would have to put novels on the shelf, as it were, until I retired, because the two can't share the same headspace. Novels require a tremendous amount of memory when you're writing them, memory that must be allocated and locked towards that purpose (in order to maintain a consistent narrative voice). Coding, especially if you're writing in different languages, requires memory be more fluid so you can load in the languages and particular application you happen to be working on.

Common wisdom is that mathematicians make great programmers, but I don't think that's entirely the case. Math is critical, for sure, but you also need to be able to think with both sides of your brain equally, rather than one side or the other, in order to visualize the object-orientated nature of the application. I think that is what attracts people like us to software. :toast:

[ixion]

24. to bemildred's suggestion I would add:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler -- The Physics of Immortality, specifically.

And then mix in a generous portion of String Theory, in particular supersymmetry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

Basically, the idea is that it's common frequency that binds us to this dimension (RNA, the programming language of DNA resonates at a given frequency), and a common resonance that binds objects.

Again, it's just theory based on many hours of reading, and wouldn't be considered accepted scientific fact at this point. The suggested readings will hopefully help illuminate it for you.

Incidentally, part of the theory is based on the words we use to describe human understanding. Illuminate is a good example. We call someone who is intelligent 'bright', and so on. There are many examples of this in the language.

And then, of course, you can't discount E = MC2, which essentially states that all matter is just energy lacking the requisite velocity to become energy. Energy has a frequency (a wavelength), hence matter has a wavelength as well. I did the initial research for this for a novel I wrote (eek) about 14 years ago, and I think it was E=MC2 that got me to thinking about it.

From a scientific perspective, it's a hodge-podge across a dozen different disciplines, but that's what I like about writing fiction in general. If you need to take people to a place to show them something, you can do that. Science will only go so far in that regard.

[bemildred]

16. "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"

http://quanta-gaia.org/reviews/books/wuLiMasters.html

:thumbsup:

[ixion]

21. Great example. Thanks!

:toast:

[GliderGuider]

11. I've always been fascinated by the noetic qualities of the human world

You mention Civilization, Politics and Religion as illustrations, and I agree completely. To those I would add Money, Ethics, Language and Mathematics. They all arise from elaborations of our shared agreement on the meaning of particular arrangements of objects, perceptions and ideas. A little further down that road, the Self and even Meaning itself are revealed to be absent.

The idea that there is no Spoon (or anything else) forms the core of nondualist neo-Advaita philosophy. It can be a very accessible opening to the rabbit-hole leading to Nirvana, but of course as with any human concept it introduces a whole set of new philosophical/spiritual traps of its own...

O8) :evilgrin: :wtf: :silly:

[ixion]

22. Yep. There are many, many such constructs

And I really wish we would treat them as such, rather than as things written in stone.

I've used Money as an example in earlier writings and verbal debates, and it's one that we should really take to heart these days, because we're about to sink the boat based on that alone.

Language is one of the most fascinating constructs we have, although I'm not entirely sure that it's ours, per se. I think it's hardwired into carbon-based life (at least). I've read much of Chomsky's work on the Deep Structure of Language. It's amazing stuff, albeit a bit difficult to work though. Chomsky, in those days, would create sentences that ran on for a couple pages, and you have to build the construct as you went along to 'get it' at the end of the sentence. But when you got it, it was worth the effort. :)

I also agree that it's a powerful tool for opening up the rabbit hole, as you said. The hard thing is passing the information of just exactly how to do that on to others. It seems most people have never even bothered to crack open the Users Manual for their Brain, which is why they snuggle deeper into the blankets, as it were. Every time I try and explain this totally objective practice that is akin to mental weight-lifting to people, they just glaze over, or look at me like I"m nuts.

As such, I don't really bring it up these days, unless someone is actually interested. Nice to be able to talk to someone about it. :toast:

[alterfurz]

13. Chester Arthur Burnett explains in layman's terms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0aIjyX7vwI

[Hestia]

14. I agree with the constructs you point out but how to change to society to understand it?

There would have to be a total upheaval of societal thinking. Look at the thread answers below - nitpicking the science but totally ignoring the message. We collectively create "reality" even though this actually isn't reality, it's a dream-state that we choose to live in. We'd have to navigate our own Songlines.

We'd have to somehow totally change everyone's vibrational state. How would that happen?

[GliderGuider]

17. I actually think it's happening already.

There is an undercurrent of awakening that appears to be getting stronger as the interwoven global problems become worse. That strengthening may be one of the things that's creating a backlash on the "other" side of the house - the one that's inhabited by reactionaries of every stripe. It's like the more reality tries to pull off their blankets, the more they resist and burrow deeper into sleep. Most people have to be either quite brave or a little desperate to risk waking up out of the dream of global industrial civilization.

I see much evidence of the awakening out in the real world. In his book "blessed Unrest", environmental writer Paul Hawken describes a globally distributed meta-movement consisting of two million or more small, local environmental and social-justice groups. It's a leaderless, grass-roots movement in which the groups form spontaneously in response to perceived local problems. The groups exist in every city in every country on the planet, no matter how free or totalitarian, no matter what the economic or political ideology of the country. They are not linked not by any overt organization, but rather by a shared understanding of what's going on and a common set of values. Many members also seem to hold some sort of "reconnective spirituality" that's based on Buddhism, indigenous spirituality, Deep Ecology or a generalized nondualism.

As best as I can tell the "movement" is expanding by 25% a year or more. I call the groups "Gaia's antibodies".

[ixion]

20. Transhumanism

although I like 'Gaia's antibodies' :)

This is why I was so excited when we entered the (very, very short lived) Age of Information. Finally, I thought, people would have access to all the information they needed to evolve mentally, collectively, to the next level and bust us out of the rut we've been living in since the Dawn of Mankind. I was very sad to see this Age destroyed by the onset of the Neo-Feudal Age, an Age that appears poised to be dominant for at least the next decade barring some watershed event.

And I think you're spot on with the 'reconnective spirituality' concept. That describes my spiritual beliefs almost to a tee. I would toss in some Hinduism and Taoism, but other than that, I totally agree.

[GliderGuider]

28. "Transhumanism" gives me the squinchies ever since Kurzweil put his stamp on it

I hope for transcendence too, but of the mind/spirit rather than the machine/body sort.

I started out with Zen (via Watts) in the 70s, and after a number of explorations ended up at Taoism and Advaita Vedanta which is a form of mystic Hinduism. Sounds like we're on the same page.

My website is Approaching the Limits to Growth

[The2ndWheel]

30. You want ascension, not evolution

Evolution is messy, it goes in all sorts of directions. Ascension would be a controlled busting out of collective humanity from a self defined rut to the next level by using a predetermined needed amount of information to accomplish the task.

[ixion]

31. Evolution is capable of ascension

tending to move in dramatic fits, but yeah, I think you've got the gist of it.

[Hestia]

26. Agreed with everything you say - it's just gets disheartening to watch

"their" side play out day after day, year after year, to the masses who seem to be bedazzled by them.

It's interesting how you phrase "the more they resist and burrow deeper into sleep" - it would seem they are fighting their destiny (?). The more you fight the more it comes up and slaps you in the face.

Love the Gaia's antibodies.

[Hestia]

27. Also, for anyone who is interested in Hermeticism

http://www.gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm#CH

Introduction

The Hermetic tradition represents a non-Christian lineage of Hellenistic Gnosticism. The tradition and its writings date to at least the first century B.C.E., and the texts we possess were all written prior to the second century C.E. The surviving writings of the tradition, known as the Corpus Hermeticum (the "Hermetic body of writings") were lost to the Latin West after classical times, but survived in eastern Byzantine libraries. Their rediscovery and translation into Latin during the late-fifteenth century by the Italian Renaissance court of Cosimo de Medici, provided a seminal force in the development of Renaissance thought and culture. These eighteen tracts of the Corpus Hermeticum, along with the Perfect Sermon (also called the Asclepius), are the foundational documents of the Hermetic tradition.

[rocknrollgangster]

19. Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts

Funkadelic - Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts

http://youtu.be/UGGVy4RkUs0

"Travel like a king
Listen to the inner voice
A higher wisdom is at work for you
Conqering the stumbling blocks come easier
When the conqueror is in tune with the infinite
Every ending is a new beginning
Life is an endless unfoldment
Change your mind, and you change your relation to time

You can find the answer
The solution lies within the problem
The answer is in every question
Dig it?
An attitude is all you need to rise and walk away
Inspire yourself
Your life is yours
It fits you like your skin

The oak sleeps in the acorn
The giant sequoia tree sleeps in its tiny seed
The bird waits in the egg
God waits for his unfoldment in man
Fly on, children
Play on

You gravitate to that which you secretly love most
You meet in life the exact reproduction of your own thoughts
There is no chance, coincidence or accident
In a world ruled by law and divine order
You rise as high as your dominant aspiration
You descend to the level of your lowest concept of your self
Free your mind and your ass will follow

The infinite intelligence within you knows the answers
Its nature is to respond to your thoughts
Be careful of the thought-seeds you plant in the garden of your mind
For seeds grow after their kind

Play on, children

Every thought felt as true
Or allowed to be accepted as true by your conscious mind
Take roots in your subconscious
Blossoms sooner or later into an act
And bears its own fruit
Good thoughts bring forth good fruit
Bullshit thoughts rot your meat
Think right, and you can fly
The kingdom of heaven is within
Free your mind, and your ass will follow

Play on, children
Sing on, lady

Yeah"

[saras]

32. So there's no spoon. There's plenty of coke. Use a rolled-up hundred.

[GliderGuider]

36. "I snort therefore I am..."nt

[DU GrovelBot]

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