There Are Some Things Man Was Never Meant To Know
by Michael LeStrange

I wonder a lot about the unknowable.  Funny thing that - trying to understand what can't be understood.  

But at least it keeps me occupied.

From my earliest memories, my main concern was getting into and then weaseling my way out of trouble.  Trouble meant forbidden fruit.

I've always been exclusively attracted to the forbidden fruit.

Once, back in the days when I was a member of a Dutch Reformed Christian church, the pastor at the time called me into his office.  He was a nice guy.  Dutch, of course.  Calvinist to the bone.

"The problem with you is that you wonder too close to the boundaries.  While others are content to roam within, you are always exploring the edges."

Hmmm.  "Could be a trend...", is how I replied.

I was once told by a Baptist preacher that I wasn't a scientist.  Basically, since I was only sixteen, I couldn't possibly be a scientist.  Scientist were only those with formal education in the accepted arts.  Those who had credentials.  Those who were accepted.

It pissed me off and I went home and looked up the definition of a scientist in the dictionary.  He was wrong.  Unless you're some unimaginative slave of a higher learning institution, a scientist is always exploring that which has no previous knowledge.  That which is unknown.

All it takes to be a scientist is to be brutal in your ability to disassociate your personal beliefs with your theories.  Oh, and there's a lot of useful things that have already been discovered that are useful to learn.  Lot's of blind alleys and conveniently pre-existing analysis techniques.

It does one well to study that which came before if you want to understand that which is unknown.

And so it was probably that day that really distilled the previous years of my existence into a single purpose.

"Here be dragons"

It has always been music to my ears.

My downfall began from the moment that I became an independent entity in the physical Universe.  My umbilical cord was wrapped around my throat and they lost the heartbeat for quite a while while my current physical existence was birthed.  Apparently I was quite blue, and oxygen was given immediately.

My genetic father is convinced that this application of pure oxygen from the first breath is what twisted me forever.  Well, from his perspective, it wasn't what twisted me.  It's what gave me my advantage.

To me, it's what forever will haunt me as my entry into hell.  That first breath of pure, unadulterated, unmixed oxygen.  Pure.  No nitrogen, no trace elements.

Nothing but that which represented slack at the cellular chemistry level of our species.

Oxygen.

I think my body was extremely disappointed after the application of pure oxygen stopped when they were convinced I was going to survive.  From what I've been able to discern, this body has been consistently looking for that magical land of slack and pure oxygen ever since.

Unfortunately for my physical existence, I know that only Michael Jackson regularly enjoys jaunts to such a fabled land where oxygen is the only gas you experience.  Your metabolic byproducts that are the inevitable result of entropic energy conversion - something inescapable in this physical reality - are quickly whisked away by energy slaves and filtered out to prevent any impurities from destroying your personal oxygen experience.

From my perspective, I'm just not sure if I want to pay the price of having a monkey as a familiar - or the sexual desire for pre-pubescent boys for that matter.

We all have our limits, after all.

But that brings up the tenuous point I'm driving at.

What are the limits?  Not on just what we can do, but what we can know?  And I'm not referring to the limits imposed by my good friend Gödel, although I'm willing to believe this is just yet another recursive manifestation of this parasite.

I've often modeled group ethics with the following analogy.

Everyone is born with the equivalent of a magnet; one side is labeled "Good" and the other side is labeled "Evil".  Thus, your notion of good and evil are always self relative.  Intrinsically, you measure each experience and action relative to the orientation of your internal reference frame.

The formal name of this belief structure I would come to know as "moralist".  Which is a strange way of describing it.

When I learned enough physics, I found out about the group properties of spin dynamics.

You see, magnets - or spin - behave chaotically in groups.  A magnet on its own is free to set its own orientation against the predominate forces of the Universe.

A magnet in a large group of magnets is predominantly oriented by the prevailing orientation of the group.  But it can flip orientation in some strange circumstances.

Translated into ethics, this means that your orientation of what you consider right and wrong is predominantly determined by what the group you belong to considers right and wrong.

Unless you find yourself in an unpredictable chaotic attractor, that is.

A simple example is that of peer pressure.  "Come on.  Everyone's doing Heroin.  You'll love it".

It's every parent's nightmare.

And with good reason.  Taking my own experience as a troubled youth as a guideline, I think that every parent on earth should be terrified by the power that a group of teenagers has upon those of tender age.

The drive to be "cool", "with it", or whatever the current lingo describing the desire is today is almost overwhelming.

Luckily, I had no peers.  Not because I didn't want any, but I spent all my formative teenage years in an oppressive society that hated me.  Well, not hated but more despised.  I was the inconvenient one.  The one who asked too many questions.

Or something like that.

And it frustrated them to no end.  Which pleased me, as they frustrated the hell out of me.

So I became a group of one.

This meant, of course, that I had to split myself into multiple pieces, just to keep myself company.

I'm sure this adaptation is not unique.  Imaginary friends are not only common - they're expected.  Those among the human race that count themselves proudly as geeks certainly experience a rich fantasy life that continues till the day they escape this mortal coil

But it's proper to outgrow them by a certain age.  It's considered developmentally incorrect to keep them past childhood - or at least dangerous.

And I know why.

You see, we are a group entity.  Each one of us.  There is no singular thing that controls and guides our actions.  It's some strange consensus amongst our neurons that teases our consciousness out from the depths from which it is born.  It's the interaction and nagging internal conflict that gives rise to our defining moments.  That private dialog that when given physical action, forever attaches itself - like a parasite - to our physical existence.  Molding us like a potter throwing a vase from clay.  Hardening our positions, carving away that which does not fit into that which is the natural course for our actions.

A bump there, a bruise here.  A misplaced step which results in a spill which batters your internal organs, subtly altering your digestive system.  This subtly alters forever your nutrient intake and the capability to expel - or not to expel - waste products and unwanted or poisonous intake.

Which alters not only your general physical characteristics, but more importantly the chemistry of your brain.  Going back to that first blast of pure oxygen again - it's the chemistry in your head that largely determines how you develop.

Or are cursed to develop - as the case may be.

One of the things that I have learned in the 20 or so years that I've been architecting large scale distributed systems is that the decisions made early on develop this enormous leverage on the behavior and functioning of the system as time progresses.

This is why it's so important to get things right in the beginning.  As time progresses, the error of your ways only becomes more obvious - eventually dooming your creation to the trash heap.

If you're stupid.

Because it really only takes you once or twice to see this as clear as day.  It reaches up and smacks you with the clarity of a 20 ton bell being struck by the hammer of fate a mere three meters from your ear.

If you pay attention, the slender threads of ill fated destiny are clear to anyone who's looking.

But I digress a bit, as I often do.  The tendrils in this web of fate are hard to describe.  Serially, we simply can't express simultaneously.  Things that happen at the same time are impossible to put down in order - without some long and tedious description prefaced by "and the following all happened at the same time".

Only in retrospect, and with an  excruciating level of discipline, can we even begin to transfer this forbidden knowledge of what we experienced to another.

And there's a lot lost in the translation.  As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.  The right half of our brain understands intuitively that which we can only begin to express in words.

Of course the "left" side of our brain holds certain mysteries that can't be expressed in parallel, or in pictures as well.  After all, try to draw me a picture of the declaration of independence.

And so I'm led to one conclusion of the clever point of this rambling HTML page: Unity is at a minimum two.

The male of the species is just one half of the whole.  This is why we fall in love.  This is why we're drawn to mate with another.

Because we're not whole without at least one other person.

And I think there are fundamental mysteries that females understand that men simply cannot - or mysteries that would take forever to explain and so are for all practical purposes, unknowable.

I won't bore you with the obvious recursive ramifications - such things are protected by fields that cause immediate sleep in all who hear it.

One level is enough to appreciate the implications.

Which is why we have a corpus colossi - the nerve bundle that connects the left and right side of our brain.  The "phone" line and "communication highway" that our brain uses when the fundamental dichotomy inside us talks to itself.

This means that our "unity" - i.e. that which we perceive as "our self" - is a minimum of three.  It's a triangular relationship.

Conveniently, it is also a stable relationship.

In many, we are one.

But it gets better.  There is at least one more part of this relationship - the observer.  It is the "orienteer" that I was talking about - the point relative to the triangle I describe above.

Meaning that point that is doing the looking.  The one who is perceiving this, and sometimes describing what it sees - controlling your life.

(And I could get recursive about this as well, but I feel magnanimous tonight, so I won't cross that particular event horizon of boredom)

So now we have a minimum of four things which make up our perception of one.

One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

I feel very privileged to know the entities that I do.  This cloud of people who I interact with - who's input matters - form the real system that I've come to call me.

There are, naturally, a minimum of four of us.  Meaning that what I ultimately consider myself is composed at a minimum of four - it's a geometric necessity.

In society, this normally forms the couple of couples.  As I've mentioned above,  the first fundamental form is the dichotomy; the polarization inherent to every individual, and by extension, every distinguishable complex system.

After all, everything is spinning.

Spinning implies an axis.  An axis requires two antipodal points that define it.  These points are duals - twins, if you will.

The Good Twin And The Evil Twin

Which wraps us back around to the magnet model of morals.  The internal conflict we feel is likely just the result of the complex interactions that are inevitable in the system that we find our selves hopelessly intertwined with.

It's all just a necessary part of the process - so far.  Since we can't even theoretically reproduce something that encapsulates consciousness the way we do, so we can't say for sure.  Somewhere between us and a chimpanzee lies that which makes the sapiens.

I bet it was hell for the first humans who developed this capability

I mean, for all practical purposes, everyone else is now an obsolete species.  Another stepping stone along the grand turning of the wheel.

And they were in the minority.

And they were cursed, as far as I'm concerned.  Cursed to always wonder, to always be pressing the boundaries in this insatiable need to understand.

Cursed to always stick their tongues on subzero flag poles just to see if the stories are true.

Cursed to ramble aimlessly about nonsense that doesn't make any sense.