The Centre(s) of All Being

October 16th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Writing after the acceptance of the Newtonian conception of space as infinite and boundless, and the location of Earth and of Man as nowhere in particular, Pascal described the universe or Cosmos is ‘an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere’. This image was not comforting and did not reflect a positive embrace of Newtonian cosmology, but was rather, as Borges wrote, a ‘fearful’ proposition. However, a more positive spin to be placed on this observation is that, whilst the universe may not have a physical centre in the usual sense that one visualises the Earth as having a centre, or of an apple having a centre; a single specific point separate from other points, it nevertheless contains the important sense of centrality. Each point in the cosmos has equal claim to be central, and that claim is accurate in every case; and since all points in space are also the central point in space then all points in space are, in this sense, the same point. There is only one centre and it is everywhere.

This interpretation can be extended to the centre of being that marks a particular way of looking at the notion of the ’self’ or ‘consciousness’. We may imagine ourselves to be, beneath all of the layers of socialisation and acculturation, of genetics and biology, an infinitely minute point at the centre of our being. With a little imagination we can visualise our ‘essential’ self as existing not as some kind of substance, or as any kind of object at all, but rather as a point in space at the core of all that we are and all that is. Once we have mastered the imaginative leap that allows us to see ourselves as fundementally a point at the centre of the cosmos (and that is, after all, what a naive interpretation of the evidence of our senses tells us), then it is a comparatively small step to recognising the centrality of others and the inevitable sharing of centrality that we have with those others. All centres of being are ultimately the same centre of being. At heart, there is only one of us and we are everywhere.

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The Impossible Blog of Borges

September 15th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is a blog somewhere on the web in which the entries vary enormously in length, but regardless of the number of words each posting is carefully labelled with keywords; search terms that unite the smallest with the largest. One entry, concerning the nature of presence, has over 1000 words and is captured by the three search terms evolution, neuroscience, metaphor. Here is another entry, consisting only of the quotation from Hermes Trismegistus ‘All is One’, yet the number of search terms which lead to these words, the number of ideas which require this phrase to be included in their orbit, is much greater, numbering over 100.

People say (usually those who have read too much Borges) that there are two entries on the blog which no-one should read; which should never have been written, which should not have been possible to write. The first consists of all possible words in all the languages of the planet, arranged in all the orders which could ever be grammatically correct. It is perfectly coherent, perfectly self-contained. The number of labels attached to this entry is zero; there are no ways into the infinite entry because there is nothing outside it. The other impossible entry consists of no words at all. No concepts, ideas, perceptions, sounds, thoughts, feelings, or attitudes mar the perfect surface of this empty space on the screen, and to read it is to be dissolved. The search terms which lead to this space exceed the limits of the spell-checker, and to collate this list would take longer that there are moments left in history.

These two imaginary and unimaginable entries are the pillars between which all the writing is strung. One pillar is labelled ‘Carbon’, and the other is marked ‘Mathematics’.

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A Handful of Metaphors

October 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie

“It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors”. (Borges. 1964. p.224)

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Existential Zugzwang

October 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Borges writes about the infinite library of Babel, in which all possible volumes are contained All combinations of characters are combined in the books of this library, so all arguments are made, all thoughts expressed, all narratives told and retold. This universal library, which seems at first fist to be pregnant with promise, is a dystopian vision however. The sheer number of books is so vast and the overwhelming preponderance of books which contain only gibberish, or untranslatable cryptographs, or which are written in dead languages, means that the chances of locating a text which is even readable, let alone useful, approaches zero. The librarians of this hellish repository have long since lost faith in ever finding meaning in their universe of books; they are a dying breed, prone to suicide and existential angst.

There is no evidence that such conditions afflict artists in this world, at least notyet. And this is despite the fact that creative practices have been compared to the wanderings one might make within a space similar to the library of Babel, as indeed has the natural creative processes of evolution and adaptation. Dawkins notes that ’searching for something within a sufficiently large conceptual space is indistinguishable from creation’. By inference, artistic creation is a kind of searching through the conceptual space of all possible artworks, with the work of the artist being akin to that of an explorer or colonist; each innovation a beachhead, each artwork a landmark, each genre a new found land.

A significant difference between the aimless wanderings of the librarians of Babel and the evolutionary perigrinations of the natural world is that whilst the former are cursed to go without map and compass, the evolutionary journey of exploration is significantly guided. Every step that life has taken has been accompanied by the ‘warmer, warmer’ whispering of the environment, such that these steps never lead to random and meaningless places, which is the curse of Babel. Evolution never lets any creature evolve to a location in conceptual space where it makes no sense; there are no existential zugzwangs in the natural library of possibilities. This is not to say, of course, that individual beings are not doomed to die, possibly alone and unloved. Not is it suggested that evolution has any kind of ultimate goal, there is no equivalent in evolution of the divine book at the centre of the library of Babel that Borges describes as ‘a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls.’ Each step in evolutionary history falls on the spot which is appropriate at that moment. The journey is always at an end, each point is the centre and the end of creation as it exists at that moment.

The travels of the artist through conceptual space does not fall neatly into either of these schema. The individual artist is neither doomed to a lifetime of unguided search, which would entail the relentless production of random artifacts. nor is there an environmental voice calling forth these artifacts by winnowing each step and thought.

‘From a computational point of view, evolution is simply a special kind of search algorithm. Some argue that for evolution to be considered creative, it must traverse its search spaces in a creative manner, i.e. it must be innovative or efficient in its search. Exhaustive search and random search are examples of noncreative techniques. Evolutionary algorithms are good examples of creative search.’
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/P.Bentley/BEC6.pdf

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