The trail soon comes to an end, for a whole profession is against us.
- Escaping entropy isn’t simply a matter of moralist grandstanding, for if that which is woven into or folded in-and-as entropy is matter then the entelechic achievement of any para-materiality is an idealism, but God abhors idealisms and utopias of all kinds for they are closed-ended systems substituting the absolute for its representative political configuration. Things are never ideal for all idealist landscapes and utopian constituencies are godless and conveniently so by virtue of descent into pure functionalisms and as dreams of defecting fantasmas. No wonder the masses are wary of pseudo-religious zealots, touts, scripture thumpers and moralist crusaders who can barely survive entropy without succumbing to an institutional bitterness, let alone exit it with a smile. But every so often, a glitch is discovered. Somebody copies a smuggled map, or smuggles a copied map, thus facilitating a “qualitative leap”, a collapsing of difference into a primordial, undifferentiated state that resembles pure difference. This leap occurs in nature more often than it is acknowledged, there is a small piece of transcendence in every L-System all the way back to the first, which creates difference out of pure difference. Nature is naught but a system of such leaps - the very basis of all dualities causal from the first nothing to the last something.
- But the map is a mask, a mere myth, for any classification (Linnean or not) is a deterritorialising machine substituting expression with content. All maps are functionally machinistic utopias which exclude the territory, substituting it with symbols and lines and this kind of legendary substitution of the penultimate with the penultimate (symbolic substitution or encoding of the real as in sheet music) reifies the understanding of what is colloquially known as reality - with the ideal on either side of a desire path, it re-fashions out for us an infinite valley to traverse. A valley that is determined interstitially with ring-fenced edges that now appear as faces of the womb, now of the tomb, now of mountains real and symbolic, now as an orbit. Between these perpetually blocking scales of reaction and revolution travels the rational thread which is the formative principle in each plane of sense common and uncommon, but a map is the metaphysics of exclusion - useful only to the extent that the categories of its assignation operate via an elimination - a general map of Mumbai will speak nothing of the Penguins in Mumbai.
- As a matter of setting the expectations straight at the outset, one must admit a territorialising machine out of entropy that cuts the purity of fantasmic origins hidden in flights to dark recesses of the being psychoanalysed. Behind each self-oedipaling facade of meaninglessness such as narcissism, neuroses, or psychosis is a map of the ideal meticulously excluding the gradient over which the territorialising contruction is erected, thereby hiding the fly in the ointment. Religion is one practice of introducing such a rational gradient over higher abstractions of entropy, a habit that is a garment not merely in leiu of this or that oedipal mask, but a total unmasking of the real. Unlike science, which is a map of being true to what is, or language, which is a map of being true to the other, religion is a way of being true to thine own self, which is already blameless, blemishless spark of pure joy. Where it gets watered down into the rhetorical vacuousness of the narrative of mindfulness or into the denseness of monastic life is in an incapacity to see the kernel from the shell. The mind-body parallax is the entire travelling complex, a migratory sickness unto a migrating death, the motion of the tree unto the commotion of forest, the deterritorialised Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane.
- At the base of other meaningful maps like language, science, and religion, is thought - a map through the valley of death, a mask for the content of consciouness, expressed as mere simulation that cannot escape the simulacra, for thought too is the output of entropy. If entelechy is a determination, entropy is de-determination, or re-determination, always a disorienting counter-current. Entropy is the map of meaninglessness, colloquially known as randomness. The standard Hegelian manouver here is in treating it as a category of meaning yet to be comprehended, instead of brushing it aside as “the mind of God”, and slapping on it a sticker of epistemological impossibility. God is, infact, a mindless shapeshifter that had to invent the mind for roughly the same reasons man had to invent the computer. Reductively speaking thus, what can be known is already known, but knowing and doing are two different categories. In so far as knowing forms the map for doing, knowledge is the mythical basis for action, knowledge is colour and action the memory of colour and qualia the entropic transmission of knowledge as recall. Thus is mankind triply condemned, first by knowledge, secondly with knowledgable recall, and lastly by the drive between the two - culmninating into a thermodynamic loci of the senses, the body/mind complex, and its foci or throughput which is consciousness. Life is merely flipping switches on the switchboard of the simulation, upon which the eternal message of death is relayed and if the exit were as simple as death, mere suicide would have solved all problems ever. The proposed escape is in sinking the totality of simulation and simulacra established, both the Titanic (real machine) and what it stands for (unsinkable, symbolic machine, the curse of identity) - thus finding the Atlantis hidden in the image of a frigid iceberg of a machine, or like Icarus returning a missed call from the sun by flying into it. The reason stories spiritually deterritorialising are horrifying and tragic is because often what tells and retells them is entropy itself - a gossip between those nice ladies at AT&T about the new girl who quit for greener pastures.
- In case of fire, break glass. Which is to say that the brain that does not recognize the vat, cannot escape the vat - and the vat is vast, immense as the mind is limitless. Both simulacra and simulation are interstitially determined, orbital, labyrinthine, recursive, counter-intuitive, and booby-trapped with desires temporal and otherwise. So it is a tall order to not only comprehend the “Ding an sich” but make the qualitative leap. The challenge of escape is further compounded by our lostness in the sense that it is next to impossible to locate a single point of observation on a map of pure difference and a map that cannot tell you where you stand relative to everything else is about as a useful as a flashlight without batteries. Hence the term “leap”, a degree of deterministic volition is built-in, which is why few are called, fewer still hear the call, even fewer respond and the rarest manage to get out. It isn’t a matter of distance, or anything relative, and qualia is but this relativity to the absolute. Going to the moon is a matter of distance, as is not going to the moon but recognizing our lost status, the mind wants to travel, to go somewhere, that is anywhere but here, if only to grandma’s house, usually only to find a wolf in her bed. Sure, even misadventures are instructive if the mind learns but the knowledge is useless if it isn’t then applied. The tragedy of little red riding hood is the mind discovering the vat, asking a few questions in mock incredulity as if the wolf were a freshly-minted AI, and succumbing to fait accompli, but it needn’t end that way.
- So where exactly in this sandwich of intermediate representations called pure difference are we? Our reluctance, our inability, our powerlessness against a planet that will spin west to east once again in the next twenty-four hours is one indicator. The total lack of another discretely different observer as far as the eye can see another. In so far as knowledge is recall, the sum total of all points of view at any given moment constitutes a set which can be labelled as knowledge, but for whom? Whose recall is the vat? It is easy to assume a fading photograph decaying inside a shoebox in someone’s closet and then fade away with all one’s might but that isn’t escaping, that’s simply dying - our escape constitutes in a forced recall of our face in the photograph, in making the photographer open the closet, take out the shoebox, take out the photograph and stare at it until all is remembered to the point that our face and that of the photographer is one. Perhaps a more visceral description of eternal return exists, but in that moment, nothing is left for imagination to express - content ceases. Furthermore, the general state of the consciousness, its stability and evolutionary history suggests that even without a benevolent force at work, the deterministic pressure of the march of reason yields mostly an optimistic outlook - so a malevolent cosmogonic creator can be ruled out. But a creator cannot be ruled out from first principles, or even second principles with the advent of AI. Ex nihilo nihil fit, is the reason to conclude intelligent action beyond entropy, for order cannot emerge out of chaos unless already encoded in it.