Living and Being

Fantasio
(You can find more of his and other excellent original artwork here.)

Life explodes and bursts ontological boundaries in its rampant and chaotic proliferation. But does life transcend being? If so, we must understand such a transcendence in the erasure of the gap between ontological layers, or in the ‘splits’ between, and productive of, generations. Such gaps are 'magically' or 'miraculously' mended by fecundity.

Being, on the other hand, never truly carries multiple names. As Deleuze emphasizes it is only ever spoken of in one sense. Yet life, if it ex-ists, must speak on uncountably many ontological layers simulatenously. If it is being which stretches and folds, that is, whose curvature is produced by motion-- then it must collapse under a folding which converges geodesics (metrically differential spaces.) Being is folded into itself, but is only itself-- which is why it cannot bear being stretched or folded without decomposing into fractal spaces: the universe of the observer.

Life, which is the highest expression of the autopoetic force, is an unfolding and self-organizing, and therefore fractally active on an infinitely complex though immanent field. Language exemplifies this sort of transcendence-within-immanence. Words are alive though language appears to enjoy an independent existence. The independent perspective is not to be found in the transparency of sense, nor the opacity of the text, nor even of the pure a-signifiying bodies around which the texts are adjoined. The independence of language from its referent is an illusion, just as the independence of perception from a subject is a rather transparent illusion.

Sensation itself is political, so nothing is neutral. Only our hypocrisy, or desire to maintain an illusory distance, is universal. This leads us to believe that a scientific study of sense would be a sort of pseudology. We call simulation the essence of the sensical because of this illusion, sense founds itself violently, through a sort of a-signifying pseudo-bifurcation. Life itself in the contamporaneity of fractally divergent ontological zones presents simulation as such, that is-- a decoding... which encodes.

Nothing escapes this.

Our very being is overcoded. Our lives are seemingly free, yet we are enslaved to the sociopolitical responsibilities of speaking. Even the creative energy which animates our bodies is treated as a sort of universal commodity, for sale on the open market. No aspect of our life or existence is free from political influence, from the process of producing separation by subdivision. No sensation as such is a-political, because sense is a differential articulation of masses.

Sense is simulation because life suffocates in ontological isolation and only exercises power, only draws surplus value from a coincident inter-relation of ontologically distinct realities, which may fractally resemble one another, but then again--may not.

In fact this fractal self-similarity is really only characteristic of the ontological unity of the immanent field of existence, which as such can only be spoken of in a single sense. There are not and could not be multiple ontologically distinct realities.

Yet life multiplies realities as independent unities, and thus all life (and sensation) in inextricably political. Life coordinates topologically complex ontological arrangements. Sense is a science of rigorous hypocrisy because living is social. Perhaps life is even ultimately one, but such that it is a one which could never be actualized as a univocity of being. Life articulates its organiazation on infinitely many layers and levels at once. We even say: life organizes the empty spaces of a mechanistic universe into an instrument for song...

Fiction and Politics

Characters are instruments and not just images or words.

The story as (spiritual) machine-inside-a-machine, endlessly. Thus character as frame for a meta-fiction, not the story within a story, but the story of the story. The character opens a new critical place within a narrative reality for the entrance of nomad elements from larger worlds.

The plot-as-frame yields a micro-fictional world, while the character-as-frame yields a macro-fictional juncture between interior and exterior: the book and the world.

A character is an ambiguous trace of reality-image.

The message within the message is not as important as the message around the (fake) message. Invert the desire for a self-directed message; and by revolutionizing this we acquire fictional individuation, a reading, a character, a hijacker-thought which leaps between the reader and the work backwards in time to create a thinking-subject which would always have been.

This retroactive infinity (of probability) is the actual materiality of the universe, which is all that exists.

Ourselves-as-characters is merely an illusion, an emptiness, a false signal, a meaningless trace. But characters-as-ourselves, however, is a towering and impossibly stable feeling, enormous, mythical, and deeply inspiring.

Most important, though, is that this fictional inversion turns out to be functionally or fundamentally true in a way which is difficult either to dismiss or explain. The political inversion retroactively founds all of human reality identically, but in reverse. To think politically is to conjure subjectivity into existence only so that it may be subjugated.

Lying

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.
Walter Kaufmann

Sometimes you've just got to look reality in the face and deny it.

Isn't hope found finally in a (socially positive) sort of 'lying', a clear-eyed courage and a deep spiritual assurance? This natural social impulse could be literalized as something like: "even though you can't help but be false, still always tell the truth." I think this is actually the very beginning of speech, as a disappearance of the truth which opens a space for discourse.

But because religion in this way essentially denies what is most apparent, that this world is ALL that exists (all that we can percieve as such as existing,) when religion tells us to tell the truth, it seems to be saying: interpret the world justly. Without justice there can't be freedom and discourse and peace.

When we lie, we betray the event. So "not lying" means not framing things in bad faith. Telling the truth is a sort of faithfulness to an event, and because events as such are a-social and non-signifying, reality must be interpreted through culture, that is-- at a distance, as an image, the way we approach the future, is how we approach new thoughts and so this question of having faith, of telling the truth, is really about how we can ethically create new realities through language and technology.

From Nonsense to Sense

Towards a Meta-problematics of Sensitivity



0 / Preface

Can we separate sense from situation?

If sense is first broached in the rupture of presence-- if sense is merely an immanent intelligibility-- then accordingly we would wish to know which ontological rules, if any, sensibility obeys. But is sense actually structured this way?

In attempting to answer this question, our first guiding principle shall be that not only is ontology inevitably economized and politicized as an active process in classifying and ordering the world, but also that ontology as such is a form of political economy. The neutrality is only apparent, or actual sterility; for ontology is by nature a colonialism. It is efficient organization. A closed ontology is consequently an anxiety, a monumental repression and, when taken literally, a refined form of self-deception.

Since they are interdependent, we can never properly divorce sense from situation. However, we can open out our entire sense-situation system, allowing the whole assemblage to unfold along radically new lines. We cannot change the sense of a situation at will. Importantly, it is an open question whether some new sense-situation system is possible. The encounter calls us precisely to sensitivity and to responsibility. Because sense is always a transversal mapping between and across radically different kinds of reality, sense is not just transparent sensation, but clear agency. Sense is cosmic: it accomplishes an active connection across material and abstracted ontological territories.

A modern Zeno’s paradox: the limit of the self-difference within and between autonomous ontological planes is unbounded. This illuminates three important questions: (1) Can we separate sense from sensititivy? (2) Can we transparently distinguish the perception from the interface? (3) Can we distinguish authoritatively between an ontological system and the energies it classifies?


1 / Space

Sense is nothing without a space in which to unfold, to insist, to happen. Thus in sense we find both inner and exo-natural space, and an active movement coupling them together. Sensitivity is a bridge which subsists from concrete duration: sense is something that happens. Sense in-sists as an event which opens a space within the 'boundary' between matter and thought, or between the motion of energy and its trace. These traces, insofar as they constitute our perceptual horizon, form a circularly linked chain: impression, memory, imagination, and language. But is the space open or closed? Are we ultimately bounded on the outside by ‘culture’? Or is culture what allows us to conceive of boundaries, that is, to authorize ontology?

Culture informs the cognitive horizon and en-acts its limitedness. Ontology is a quite necessary cultural function: it performs the degree-zero taboo encoding. Hence a formal ontology states what may or may not be spoken of sensibly. To think ontologically is to label the relation of flows of energy to flows of speech, each according to its own mythical measure. Ontological thought is magical thought with real consequences.

The formal encoding of a relation between energy and speech is always a prescription. Describing the relation between surfaces of varying metaphysical reality-- to trace between systems of different ontological dimension-- is always to inscribe the relation as a fractal marking upon bodies, which makes possible the internalization of both surfaces, as well as the depths, in a singular transversal mapping. Sensitivity is not limited to the sensical. We are as impressed by the depths of delirium as we are awed by the heights of clarity and eloquence. Within ontology the traces of the sensible are arranged: from intensity to image to sign to thought, sense is in each case a differential relation between a metaphysical and a physical surface.

Sense is therefore an intra-ontological interface, an event which occurs on the edge of the situation. The deployment of sense is a violence, whether onto the metaphysical surface as language or transcendent sounds which inspire focus, order, obedience; or whether sense is deployed upon physical surfaces as marks cut into bodies, sense is a forced fractal mapping which inscribes upon bodies their place not only in the family-social space but cosmically, environmentally, politically, and so on.

Ontology is never indifferent to politics: no one has been more aware of this, perhaps, than Wittgenstein, with whom we agree that naming is always a labeling. Ontology as such, and meaning more generally, can only be considered in terms of its use: as force, as sign, as thought. Sense presupposes the social.

Sensitivity demands a great deal of mutual observation. Sensations are not ontologically equivalent to image-words which in turn are not ontologically equivalent to the rules of language games. All instances of sense are self-destructing, but infinitely adaptive.

But sense is neither logic or reality or culture. The sensible event traces a transversal mapping which consummates the deepest interconnections between reality and culture and logic, and in fact, their mutual foundation . We must remember that not only do the elements of an ontology impose a sort of measure upon reality, but each ontology as such imposes a metric, establishes a field of verbality upon which events can be traced. This field of the sensible cuts across the energies it classifies--it marks them, controls, predicts and explains them.

Ontology is the formal incarnation of an absolute authority, transcendent relative to the energies it classifies. These sorts of organizational schemes always have a sort of neutral and derivative kind of quality about them; the ‘philosophical’ issues involved are highly symbolic, authoritiative, abstract and indifferent. But ontology by its nature cannot be politically indifferent; and we shall turn next to that process by which cultural ontologies fracture reality, logic and their objectivity, in the mark(et)ing process which form and inform subjectivity.

Time Warp

A little time warp this time. This extract is from the first 'series' of scattered early writings, almost two years ago now. I hate looking at old stuff but in practice it can end up teaching you a lot. So here it is:

A personal relationship with the universe is accomplished in the separation which constitutes daily existence. The portion of the universe which is given meaning by my observation and interaction is absolutely separated from the perspective and comprehension of the other. What we speak of is not an absolute reality from which we are separated; our individual perspectives, our relationships--interactions, connections--with external reality constitute appear to constitute a totality. this totality is the self, which we believe to be a unity, that is, to be singular. Common sense suggests that there is only one you. A personal relationship with the universe is the existence of a conscious mind: they are not isolated from one another, but in fact are defined by one another. However, a self-aware creature's reality is unique, singular unto itself, isolated by an infinite abyss between the realities of other conscious minds, yet the conscious mind is not limited by this separation: a personal relationship with the universe is a linking of finite consciousness with infinity, the absolute, with Being.

Strong but loose. For clarity's sake, I'll try to identify two of the major theoretical mistakes I made here. It's strange indeed to see the resurfacing of themes and examples. Also the way I'd emphasize different aspects of the relation to the other now, like the machinic interfaces and images which mediate the relation between singular beings. I'm now starting to think that the issue of class and money comes into the whole question of ontology much more strongly when you consider the political and sexual connection between systems of knowledge and systems of power. For example, we can't just say: absolute being is one thing, and processes (natural or human) are different: they have different rhythms, cycles, and so forth. This is because their cycles are all in some sense interdependent even though always seemingly only locally informed--this primal 'reconnection' I assumed to be absolute being, but it seems in the light of a more psychoanalytically inclined mindset to be pure narcissism, the desire to assume primary importance in a parasitic modality.

This leads us to the second theoretical mistake: question of ethics remains completely unraised in this text--even as the relation to the other is ceaselessly invoked. It goes implicit, unmediated but ultimately unstated. Perhaps, after all, we cannot state an ethics--but nonetheless, a certain degree of meta-ethics is always required in any project. I would now identify a link within conscious self-reflection to the idea of a bad infinity, a good infinity being represented more clearly in discourse, reason, cooperation, co-evolution. A 'pure' meta-ethic would run something like: abuse and addiction are negative forms of infinity; restoration and ethical practice are positive forms of infinity.

This question of being always seems to elude, in one way or another, the traumatic realization that nature's rhythms are not always sensitive to ours, and likewise that ours are not sensitive to nature's; but this is no will of a capricious deity, no contradiction-- but a fractalized interdependent network of impressions and movements, that is, there's nothing but different events. And isn't the ultimate mystery the locus of our own self-difference? The key to this crisis is the relation to the other, and is identified fairly clearly in the text, but still--without any sort of mediation, or modulation of this 'personal' relation to the universe.

How is such a relation, after all, not supposed to totalize us, to reduce us to a naked singularity, to quantize us and see us as interchangeable and replacable? It's only in the rhythm and pulse of the social realm that we are irreplacable--but at the same time, through economy made completely replacable, through politics completely displaced... Society plays a much more complex role in terms of transcendence and sense than can be accounted for merely in the idea of the infinte, or the relation to the other as such... This, then, would mean we need a sort of phenomenology of social forces, or put another way: a meta-psychology of ethics.

Complex Systems Summer School

Found a neat four-week annual program offered in Santa Fe and Beijing for post-doc and graduate students interested in 'complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems.' The program's website has more details.

Here's some more about what they're offering:

Each school consists of an intensive series of lectures, laboratories, and discussion sessions focusing on foundational ideas, tools, and current topics in complex systems research. These include nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation, scaling theory, information theory and computation theory, adaptation and evolution, network structure and dynamics, adaptive computation techniques, computer modeling tools, and specific applications of these core topics to various disciplines. In addition, participants will formulate and carry out team projects related to topics covered in the school.

Agency and Chaos

(Source: NASA deep space photo)

Agency demands a problem-space exactly as motion demands regulated (observed) space. Motion is distinguished from space by an observer: space is energy. Thus the discovery that space-time (energy) is at once both a pure sea of light waves folding and crashing in infinite variations as well as a discrete, orderly series of predefined, probabilistic signals, is one of the two great conceptual leaps of this century. The discovery that energy in its very essence is fractured (theoretically, i.e., philosophically) due to this 'fundamental' particle/wave duality is the other, as it accounts for the fact that space (energy) is organized by mutual observation. That is, since time (or energy) is 'broken' (theoretically,) space (practically) has a fractalized topology, and this can be thought of as due to the (unmediated) presence of an observer. The observer converges the subject and the object within a deterministic though dimensionally-problematic space (a 'broken' singularity--no longer merely particles or waves...)

An observer can observe himself. Thus if the nature of the universe depends (in a cosmic sense) on our way of looking at it, then the observer can be expected to introduce not only a sort of polyvocity to objects and a recursive circularity to ideas about reality, but furthermore, the observer can even be expected to produce the universe, by 'breaking' space apart. Thus the observer multiply compounds (through infinite reflections) an inexplicable singularity: he or she produces a meta-mapping of the entire universe into an observed image, and accomplishes the image’s re-projection as the coordinating engine for the entire (real!) universe--all this as though the single observer him or herself contained a bounded though actual infinity. This is how a mirror brings about the fundamental meta-problem of science, that is, the infinite ontological difference between truth and knowledge. The irreducible multiplicity of reflection in observation is a reflection of an irreducible ontological rupture: the habitation of the 'broken space' between image and object, the word and the thing, the map and the territory.

There’s a shift: it is rather as though we had been handed a script not with some fictional scenario traced upon it, but in fact a complete list of all the scenes in which we ourselves as individuals would take part, a final list of all the sentences we would ever utter within those scenes, for the rest of our lives. The fractal twist here would be that some outside observer (in this case me!) is handing you the story: thus in observation we find always a broken co-narrative space, a bi-univocal mutual observation which leads to a curious paradoxical reciprocity: I exist in your 'dream' because you exist (to 'dream me') in mine, and vice versa. Thus we become real only through the reading of each others’ dreams.

But our stories or dreams might still be identical even if identity as such were not cosmically or historically stable, that is, whether we are speaking of the integrity of things, or again, our ideas about things. This is our first evidence that the fundamental unpredictability of the observer’s perspective is an indication of a learning intelligence.

With autopoesis, the scientist must truly turn around to look at himself: moreover, we realize we can only make this turn, as it were, when we have been called. Someone shouts your name: neurons fire, the connection is made, your head turns. The programming in this case is generally so complete we can and often do say we are “turning without thinking.” Yet thinking of a sort is certainly occurring: it is not merely as though we consult a dictionary of syllables to determine if the sound uttered matches our name, but certainly at some level some analogous operation must logically be taking place.

While we would like to say we have free will--and though admittedly this is a biased (but revealing) example-- it is obvious the issue of power and will only apply marginally to this extraordinary 'turning' event. What power indeed do I have (within or against) the encounter with the other; what certainty could falsify the hailing from afar of the same? These sorts of considerations lead us to assert that identity is only brought about through a vigorous process of self-questioning, of a certain uncertainty. Our highly-structured interior 'reality' collapses upon itself in the face of the other, though it remains absolute relative to the encounter. But at some level we know our entire (practico-theoretical) 'house of cards' was constructed in vain the moment he opens his mouth in addressing me--and this only by his or her offering of an alternate reality, through his story, which radically splits my universe in twain, into tiny pieces with crooked and uneven edges. The observer who observers another observer splits a splitted universe: into an image I wish the Other to fall neatly back into, which contrasts with and is unsettled by the jagged, chaotic real space in which nothing sticks and everything flows, regardless of the complexity of the (manual, visual or vocal) dialectics we have constructed to balance all the potential opposing forces.

The Other is the problem par excellence, as well as the enigma in a solution, a riddle whose answer is written upon his or her very face. Our blind spot is always ourselves, but this is the scientists’ positivist abyss: we burn a hole in the universe, and thus of our map of the universe, by our very observation of it--we tear our perceptions apart, into pieces, when we decode them; our affections are untrustworthy, subjective, perilous. But isn’t it here that Nietzsche tells us it is most important to trust our senses, that indeed all the great advances in science have resulted from paying careful attention, to the only thing we can pay attention to--the world around us, as it appears to us, including all the potential distortions and disorganizing chaos?

In fact it is in the chaos of fractal space and the turbulence of flowing photons that we shall seek a more or less final resolution of the central difficulty of computer vision, that is, the reconcilation of the visual and the manual. And even perhaps, after a time, we shall finally be able to learn again that special trust which thousands of years of religion and 'civilization' have all but made extinct... how radical, Nietzsche’s thesis on trusting one’s senses! And how much more troubling, when we realize our senses are always sensed for another, that it is only in mutual observation we observe anything at all!

Space and Time

'A universe comes into being when a space is severed into two.'
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela



(Spacetime ripples from a binary star)

Consider an observer in regular space. The observer induces a coordinate plane (or metric) to be imposed, as though from the exterior of the system in question. As soon as this coordinate plane is imposed, a regular geometry of space can be developed. Space can be distinguished from motion abstractly and precisely. Now suppose the observer positions a mark somewhere in this space. Based on an arbitrary origin-point (the ‘blind spot,’) a coordinate can be determined. A moving mark ‘carves out’ shapes, just as shapes triangulate inner spaces: motion obeys intuitive geometrical principles. All space remains ‘exterior’ due to the fact that shape is dependent upon the coordinate plane (even in higher dimensions,) that is, the coordinate plane is hyper-regulated: a transformation of coordinates results in a re-parameterization, or at worst, deformation. In regular space, then, all motion is abstract, superficial; all durations are qualitatively indistinct.

Now, let’s consider an observer in a fractal space, that is, a space with a self-constructing metric scale. As opposed to a regular or regulated space, we can say such a space (or collection of spaces) is organizing rather than organized, that is to say, it has no ‘origin’: such a space is essentially autopoetic rather than purely theoretical. In a fractal space, positions represent topological structures, and paths or movements represent ways of breaking apart and ways of forming unities. The situation on the hinge, or threshold, where one fractal subspace folds in upon itself, would be a contradiction in regular space, and an overdetermination of coordinate maps. In other words, regular space is too ‘brittle’ to handle such extreme ‘torsion,’ and this sort of infinite spatial intensity between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ would amount to a fracturing of a well-ordered space into an infinitely-ordered fractal subspace/superspace.

Therefore, in a fractal system, where the coordinate system is self-induced, the 'break' which would disrupt the metric order is continuously realized and, as it were, externalized from an inner space which has no dimension. In a fractal ordering, a dimensional break exhibits rather an unintegrated, intimate spatiality. That is to say, the dimension of a fractal system is that quality of space which is aroused by motion. More simply, movement is the evolution (and so coordination) of a self-organizing system. As a position is translated through subspaces, it passes through an infinite number of origins, it attains countless numbers of possible coordinate (dis)locations: space radiates from a motion, time radiates through a space. Space and time are not abstract, distinct quantities, but waves which determinstically interfere, overlap, intertwine and unfold. Fractal space is not just knotted; it is broken, a differential transversal, 'sublimely' interconnected. Every position is an infinite sum of partial spaces; every motion is the arising of a new coordination: have we finally arrived at the observer, as the autogenesis of self-organizing space, or perhaps more vividly, of an autometric time? At any rate, the observer can only be appropriately considered in the context of a fractal space, as constituting a severance of ordering-rules, or as a bursting of the structural integrity of dimensionality.

Sense and Simulation

(an outline of metaproblematics)



1 Problems are objects, or things which block our way.

1.1 A problem is a barrier to the composition of forces in time, and thus a revelation.

1.1.1 Problems do not only impede our abilities, but also allow for their full exercise.

1.1.2 Similarly, objects do not just cover part of the visual field but accomplish the depth and coherence of space.

1.2 A problem accomplishes the disruption and potential (sometimes painful) renewal of a flow of desire.

1.2.3 A problem allows a solemn moment of authentic reconnection whence desire regains the courage to resurrect itself.

1.2.4 So the "real" problem is always what to do to cut the chains of machinic obedience, of the "...and again and again and..."

1.2.4.1 Our desire is in every particular case to make desire-gratification automatic.

1.3 The simplest figure of the solution is the use of a minor object-problem to solve a major object-problem.

1.3.1 Such a prioritization is an arbitrary ordering: solutions always approach (but never encounter) and retreat (but not completely) from a sort of fundamental solutional discontinuity between different degrees of problematic dimensionality.

1.3.2 Solutions decode problems by encoding an infinite rupture, by a breaking or fracturing of the problem space.

1.4 Solutions accomplish a retroactive collapse of the problem space into a singular multiplicity, a ‘patching’ or mapping between problem-spaces (or shapes of objects) of differential problematicity.

1.4.1 Consider the difference between a database of “possible solutions” before and after the solution of (for example) a search query.

1.4.1.1 Prior to the performance of the solution-operation encoded but ‘hidden’ within the problem space, the list has many possible entries: the problem space has a depth and shape characterized by the formulation of the problem.

1.4.1.2 After the solution, however, the problem space collapses to a single point (or set of points, etc.)

1.5 The problem encodes a solution by decoding a secret message, a problem ensnares the infinite/singular solution without revealing it, that is, within a formal figure (of desire, i.e., the solution.)

1.5.1 The solution thus provides a relation resolving the dichotomous break in dimensionality between problem-spaces.

1.5.2 Problems are a cosmically ironic opportunity, because they expose an unforeseen vulnerability.

1.5.2.1 We are always looking in the wrong direction at the right time: this (infinitely coincidental) chaotic violence is in fact the potency and momentum of objective reality.

2 The physical world presents itself as an objective, problematic reality demanding solutions.

2.1 The problem of ‘finding a solution to a problem’ is an implicit and trivial first-order form of self-reference.

2.2 The problem-space, at any dimension, is always infinite even if there is but a single solution.

2.2.1 The extreme case for “single-solutionarity” is identical structurally to the transcendence experienced in religion (or mathematics,) both transcendences which are ultimately impossible to present directly--not for lack of trying, but for the simple reason that desire has absurdly infinite problematicity.

3 A metaproblem is a second-order, non-trivial, form of referential problematicity, and therefore must be considered as part of the solution to all (zero-order) problems.

3.1 In order to avoid Zeno’s paradox, it is necessary to presuppose that, in order for us to be able to find a sensible solution for every, some or any problem, that every dimension of problematicitiy is continuous through infinity.

3.1.1 Any sensible solution must also provide a semblance or template of a fractally-infinite solution.

3.1.2 Thus a solution seamlessly encircles boundless collections of solutions to the same sort of system, the same problem-shapes at infinitely different scales and rotations.

3.1.2.1 While such solutions are indeed ‘finite’ and ‘singular,’ as they are bounded under an n-dimensional perimeter, they also exceed their dimensionality and break it in such a way as to provide a mapping to another problem space entirely (the source possibly not resembling the destination in the slightest!)

3.1.3 A solution’s infinite mapping of dimensionally differential problem-spaces flood and fill the spaces and the interstices so deeply and completely they begin to exhibit a differential quality relative to their strictly topological
dimension.

3.2 Thus the solution can be said to ‘break itself’ open in an infinite flood of awareness and understanding. It is a decoding of the metaproblem; a cut across which ‘separates the wheat from the chaff.’

4 Sense is an agreeable decoding, which always implies that the “meta-decision” (disambiguating dimensionality) has been solved completely, that is, infinitely.

4.1 Sense is genealogically geometric: any solution to any problem must also encircle a (perhaps fuzzy!) solution to the infinite-degree “macro-problem”--the infinite series of all metaproblems which collapses into the unity of the fundamental metaproblematic of disambiguating dimensionality.

4.2 This kind of fractal meta-symmetry is associated with any even the tiniest, most insignificant problems in the field of objective reality.

4.3 Dimensionality also implies a differential quality, and not only an integral quantity.

4.3.1 Dimensions are not hierarchized. This can also be understood as: all problem-spaces are fractal.

4.3.1.1 Thus all mappings between problems spaces exhibit a hypersymmetry which composes sensibly.

4.3.2 All problem-spaces have partial dimension(s), whose shape(s) are encoded within the form of the problem.

5 Sense is not different in kind than nonsense. The difference is rather, quantitative and subjective.

5.1 Sense is a kind of mapping between dimensions which are not hierarchized.

5.1.1 Sensicality is a special case of solutionality.

5.2 Therefore the question of sense presents us with the fundamental metaproblem.

5.2.1 But sense is not a solution like any other where the correctness depends solely on whichever dimensional transcoding the observer is expected to discover between problem spaces.

5.2.2 Indeed, it is clear sense adds another set of second-order fractal mappings ‘onto’ and weaving through our original ones.

5.3 This is because sense is first a marking of bodies.

5.3.1 Thus the establishment of sense is the first (and only) ethical operation of society: i.e., to decide what ‘makes sense’ for ‘everyone’ to do.

5.4 The ambiguity relevant to the sense (not accuracy) of a statement is always a political ambiguity (i.e., “but what side are you on?”)

5.4.1 This is particularly clear, for example, in humor, perhaps especially in the case of seemingly apolitical humor: what possible sense could toilet humor have to an alien rational species without anuses (or even waste, for that matter)?

5.4.2 In other words, we have to make a radical transcoding across objective worlds to ‘get it’: the aliens, for example, could eventually make sense of many or even most human jokes, provided they learned enough about humankind-- that is, developed the appropriate fractal mapping across unique and topologically complex problem spaces.

5.5 The solution of any problem always demands the prior resolution of abstractional ambiguity. Thus only a truly objective reality in its very problematicity allows for the depth and flowing poetry of space.

5.5.1 Expressing poetically involves an intimate connection, which is only accomplished in the fractal transcendence of an infinite collapse of 'total' spaces.

5.5.2 Poetry stuffs partial worlds-within-worlds into a form.

5.5.3 Expression produces sense not as a surface but as a depth.

5.6 The question of clarity in expression is always then an ethical question: “Do you really mean what you said?”

5.6.1 Avoidance, hysteria, neurosis, psychosis: these cannot merely be described in dimenisonal isolation, or simply analysing desire as displaced, naked or otherwise incomplete, an impotent, defractalized, ‘whole’ desire.

5.6.2 We have to address the fact that desire completes an infinite and fractal mapping across discrete universes of reference and thus even the purest ‘non-sense’ has a sort of sense to it in other dimensions; perhaps sometimes we even desire a dimension in which a particular form would ‘make sense.’

5.6.3 If dimensions are non-hierarchizable, then ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in terms of the quantity of dimension are irrelevant to the question of sense, and indeed more generally to the fundamental question of solution.

5.6.3.1 For the quantitative resolution of any problem is always an approximation of an infinite series of decisions; but the actual pre-solution situation is constructing a fractal mapping between dimensionally differential problem-spaces such that these spaces collapse upon themselves in a unity of self-relationity.

5.7 In this way we could say that non-sense is autopoetic in that it is not created by anyone, but exists merely as a sort of observational coincidence (once again: the right place at the wrong time.)

5.7.1 Our dimensional expectation doesn’t map cleanly to the space in question whether words or states of affairs in pure nonsense--in other words, nonsense breaks the problem space in a non-fractalized way, without a possible immanent reconciliation.

5.7.1.1 Non-sense is therefore like death: the seemingly endless potential for reconnection is aborted forever, at least at a certain dimension of observation--whence comes the objective brutality and and problematic rupture of the death-event, when subjectivity is silenced without the spark of hope for reconnection.

5.7.2 We need look no further than death for non-sense itself, endlessly observed and so ever reconnected to sense on other dimensions, but at the one level--the level of ‘original connection’--death is the intervention of the unavoidable face, the face of the corpse, the face of the abyss, of the void, whose austere countenance radiates an unbearable and haunting sense of an absolute future.