Part Four, the final one, about Wallace, tick tock polka dot, chess, meaning, and God
PART FOUR
The Chase, Chess
The chase as part of the game can come up short or empty. Persistent avoidance of the chase or the game or failing to come to terms with it is what can shorten circuits of those altered states of the electrons professed to operate in an explanatory mode producing the unexplained like : a stinking "Jesus", self-awareness that madness is just around the corner and the corner is coming at you, moralism as part of a syndrome shouted shamefully loud by tourists in some countries, swallowing almost anything, self-removal of parts of the self, and mathematics about the brain or Mind. The last is the delusion among scientists if left to their own devices. It is a fine madness. The game, they proclaim, is on.
Good show, Sherlock, though your play wasn’t in chess matches. You said Amberley schemed and excelled at chess. In the modern BBC’s "Sherlock" he does play chess with his brother. No outcome is known. To improve in chess or the game mentioned above, it behooves you to carefully consider the game while being aware of your understanding of it. If all is going well, there is zero need of hope. In lesser situations, those that seize the first moves of the game force something to happen. They must do it. The position may not warrant it. Often it is difficult to know where advantage lies. If you want to "win" the game of reality, then the skill to be employed isn’t entirely verbal or written - it has a vital component that is of the Mind, thought of and considered at that level. If you do think about how you are thinking, then you have altered yourself. If you search for the meaning of your position in chess or the other game, you can’t wait for the big problem to solve. You will get small ones, many of them. We are getting into the "opening" for reality, then a "middlegame" that can be extraordinarily complex, and an "endgame"that is more and more simple arithmetic - counting the squares (days) to death.
Meaning? It may be in the stories we tell ourselves. We usually improvise the narratives since we must go around or ignore the involuntaries. Most unwise. You get into should, ought, could and the game gets to : why play? Indeed, is the game enough? It confers enough meaning if you know the meaning of "enough". Your trapped, you rat, you put yourself in the trap. You have forced reality to be your servant. Truth is gone. An exciting falseness can always be found as a substitute.
E-NS traps you. Looks good, leaning on millions and millions of unexamined years. Are they going for a "win" against reality, or shaping reality into a "win"? Maybe a highly unsatisfactory draw will result, a bold advance takes on too much and the consequences of going on are feared. If you can’t have the best moves, then put in play good moves. In play against E-NS, one can, in a sense, play it into time trouble. In chess all may be well thought out, tactics and strategy are fine, but you have a time limit for all of your moves. If you wasted an effort on putting together structure and no sufficient meaning, the game is up. In the game of reality there is more time than the "t" of the equations or the tick-tock of the chess clock.
If you start the game well, you better your chances of a good ending though not necessarily a win. If you blunder, the game will be lost to you. Even more, you are out of the game. Where you went wrong will be beyond you. If you find simplicity of meaning, why must it rather be complexity? Never do you arrive at Ceteris Paribus. You could try to give it over to the computers. Computers play chess, not like human beings do, but computers win. Can computers play the other game and win? They may resort to hypertheory, but the computers don’t know what is hypertheory. We also don’t know what is hypertheory. Match a computer or computers against other computers to aid us in our game(s). Smart though they may be, what if it is a draw? If you want the final answer, use hypertheory. Otherwise, you get informed guesses. If hypertheory is inaccessible to us, the E-NS and Mind are as they always have been. Humankind is flummoxed and Goethe got it more or less correct in that if humankind is accepted as is, we have a worst case scenario, but if humankind could be otherwise, we become more like what we should be. Which will you control - acceptance, could, or should? You always need time to implement control.
Memory, Womb
However you go about it, you will not ignore memory. All is dependent on memory. With memories come space, time, All. So have one memory. Why not have one memory? "Sky is blue". No, you have sky-is-blue. So then, make it "blue". When did you know, remember, have “blue"? At birth? But there is other memory, the fleeting memory of perception. Perception starts at birth? Are we perceiving before birth? In the womb, we perceive? Ask what was your first memory and it might be "blue". But that is a remembering. First perception? You don’t know. Never will. And, someday, sooner or later you will have your last perception and you don’t know what it will be either. Unknown first and last. The incomprehensible, nothing, zero, nada, zipo - from start to finish? No, there is an in-between. Is it of God, angels, devils, planes, trains, automobiles, all of knowledge, experience, effort, triumph, or failure? The in-between of money, toil, and trouble. Warding off death, delaying death? Seizing this and that and having a "good" life? In the womb, perceiving, kicking, moving, we are perceiving before we know who we are. Is the perceiving before consciousness? Certainly we are perceiving before Mind. Fleeting memory is established and we get consciousness, self-consciousness, and Mind.
E-NS does not induce fleeting memory, memory of whatever stripe has no connection to E-NS, which is of structure, not sufficiently of process. There is no connection of it with perception before birth and E-NS will come; if at all, much later. There is a massive die-off of neurons before birth. Neuronally speaking, you are different. Once the excess is done away with, you can get on with birth. At this point, a new stage of existence is entered. Who stays in the womb? Mind isn’t there. It will surmount the involuntary and fancy itself Mind. A critical mass of memories is formed, beyond perception, independent of perception with self-consciousness as a stepping stone. E-NS isn’t in the picture, nor any accidents, nor any lack of meaning. Mind is all about meaning, perhaps the meaning is repressed, suppressed, ignored or thrown away but pattern, sequence, succession are there, be as it may. One can weakly respond and carry it forth and perhaps triumph or be fierce about it and run it into the ground, compromising it immensely. As usual, a better outcome is to go without fanfare or flair and be strong.
Meaning, God
In that meaning (not from it) is God, teleology and so on but not E-NS or atheism or perpetual hopelessness, endless cruelty and what not. What it is not about is repressive, suppressive, subtracting, deleting, and crippling. What it is about is a series of pluses, for example: urbanity, wit, reason, knowledge, sensitivity, ethics, education (in school or otherwise), endurance, play, heroism, sacrifice, and intelligence. What it is, is not is playing to one’s genius, not proclaiming one’s creativity, not rampant egoism. These destroy or lessen Mind and meaning. These activities put them in the service of a lack of acceptance of the involuntary. It may very well be a massive, an impressive, an exciting venture but, it is of itself. Mind, meaning, are rooted in the self for others. Do for them, period.
The meaning for Keats was a reaching out, the arms extended, not able to grasp with them what he wanted, his mind could not have grasped "it". The moonlight bears down but really it is a reflection - on us, meaning or not. Chess play also reflects Mind in an enterprise, combinational and strategic and of simple arithmetic, a game, but Mind plays very many other games. Chess cannot be concluded game after game after game. Mind, unlike chess, has a terminus, a final meaning, not necessarily all encompassing but finally over years, a day, an hour, a second. Idiot savants never got on base, but what lovely transition on the way there. Their minds are too specific without wit and urbanity and more. Finally, there are those who got out of the developmental stage but could not find a sufficient meaning, it slipped away. Some get very concerned with this sufficiency and lose Mind altogether since sufficiency alone is not Mind.
When they ask what is the meaning of this - the slaughter at Newtown, for instance, or they ask otherwise in many similar instances, what is the meaning of "this", usually life, and it was once a serious question but now it is often relegated to snickers and sneers, they are expecting a power, not necessarily God, to take over for them and supply the memories they need to acquire meaning since all meaning resides in each one’s memory. Remember, there is your meaning. For Newtown, as for all atrocities, of one or of millions, sum the memories, isolate one, any amount between one and all. It will never be none. There is no zero memory, zero meaning, or Zero Mind.
Animals can get away with it, not having meaning, by instinct, no thought required. Conscious and nothing more. Eat and be eaten. All without meaning. E-NS is done by instinct, it serves its purpose but never realizes itself, how could being be un-thought? You can think in terms of structure, of process. You can blend them in various proportions. No thought, then no process and since E-NS leaves out thought, actually, it never seriously considers anything other than structure. That is inadequate, wrong. So then, because there is Mind, there is God. How else could it be? God as Process, summed for us, in Mind. Proof of God is the Mind.
So then, no thoughts of God then no God? Atheists triumphant! He isn’t there, how could He be? If not thought, poof! This is the notion of continuity, รก la Berkeley, but of a different order perhaps. So if you are not thinking of God, no heaven or hell? If a sudden death, no God for you?
The brain dies. Do you die? Thought ceases? The Mind ceases? No thought of God, ever, then no God. Impossible for God to be. Not thinking of God, now? The no God, now. Did you think of God, once? Then is not there a God? Continuity. If you think no, no God. Then there is no God. If you did not think of Madagascar or Milwaukee or the Marquesas they can’t vanish. But once thought of, in mind, it is. Only what never was thought of, not of brain, thought, Mind is not. That is, what is that is "is not" is nothing. All of something is what is thought of.
If you deny God, heaven, hell, etc. - then gone they are. Nevertheless, all are in, of, Mind if once thought of. You may forget about Him and them, but there they are. Reduce them and Him to phantasms, OK, so they become. Think of them, Mindfully, and they are there, here, anywhere. You have heaven and hell, ah, curse the ill luck, while the atheist has neither. Believe in Me, He said and that is all. Pascal wrote the wager. It should be added to the Bible.
But what of the heathens and the pagans? The atheists deny God. How can having Minds be a proof of God if not thoughts, memories, or ideas of God are of the Minds of heathens and pagans? For them there is no God. Are they not proof of the non-existence of God? Yet no one knows the mind of God. We did, indirectly know the mind of Jesus as we know all other minds indirectly - from what was said and done. The mind of God remains unknown. His intermediary, on good authority, says that Mind can be known. Though very little, for a modern, is authentic in regard to that mind.
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What of the little bird on the thin branch? Poor little thing. Can’t fly now. Dreadfully cold. Dark as dark can be. The wind is strengthening. If the bird thinks of God, what of it? But an atheist reading about the bird thought of God, so, temporarily the atheist "had" God? Recall that the brain is the basis of thought. The brain is not thought, not thinking. Thoughts are the basis of Mind. Mind is not thought. Mind is certainly of thought. Thoughts are certainly of the brain. So, to an atheist it is only a bird.
In our day and age, the little bird is no longer on the branch.
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Tick Tock, Polka Dot
There is not a scientific Mind nor a religious Mind. It can be both, not wholly one or the other. It could be 0 to 100% of scientific intent or 0 to 100% of religious intent. One can be an atheist of a varying degree and that could be a scientific God or you can have a Biblical God and this is a religious God. A polka dot cow is a scientific possibility; it is not a religious cow. Science can make a polka dot cow. God has not. The world as is, is (was) the basis for God. Science goes where it may. You can have any God you want, the scientists can have God or cow. Non-scientists have "only" God, Science doesn’t touch the involuntary. God does, for whence came it? Has he changed them? Carry on regardless, science, without meaning. Religion, with God, has meaning. Carry on scientists, in all your aspects, Godless, meaningless - fad and fashion, "the latest" theory, data and on and on - no meaning ever enters in. You don’t need meaning, be happy, thus as in thrall to science, pick up the pebbles on the beach. You are animals, smart ones, maybe very smart ones but unlike animals, you knew the contrary to instinct, you knew the possibility of God and meaning. The worst of the bunch - you or the animals?
Mind need not be summed, not held hostage by a literal Biblical God, Mind is historical. E-NS is ahistorical, no Mind. God need not be historical, not chained to your time. His is a cosmic time. Mind, too, need not be time "t" of the equations, nor "humanistic time" but for Cosmic Time. The memory of God carries Mind there. Morality? Which time is it? So, then, we are tick-tock, clock on the wall or quantum "time" or Cosmic? Is morality of one of these three? Is it not tick-tock or nothing? Where is Newtonian Cosmic Time? For tick-tock it is horrid and meaningless and so for a quantum clock it is also meaningless. Cosmic Time is filled with meaning.
So if it is the scientific God, maybe 20% meaning will do you. If it is the religious God, there could be that nasty four letter word, h_ll, and if you don’t want to lose Pascal’s wager, better go for the high end. Like as in 80%. But then, what is an 80% of the bet if that is 80% h_ll? It is all in or not even a 99.9% God will do
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Afterword
Beyond your rights as an animal, you may have a need, some do. You want to resist the finite, the limited, an end. You want to cry and who can comfort you? You want understanding, knowledge and where does it lead?
Alfred Russel Wallace knew his needs far better than Darwin, Huxley, and the rest. They had no needs worthy of mention.
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