Some Thoughts

 *First published on 21.11.2023 and removed for personal reasons*

I often save up inspiration for particularly rainy days, and today it is raining both outside my window and inside my head. When I cannot sit at a desk and perform calculations of fields, I just allow my mind to follow some type of random walk, which is what you are reading here.

We all have endured a period of rapid change. Whether it be through experiencing isolation, loneliness, disenchantment, the deaths of friends and loved ones, or just the flow of time, we are being propagated towards a different state than the one we started out in. Could we construct an equation that describes this push, the same way we do for fields? I may invoke arXiv:2203.13246 and several others, but the fundamental idea remains plausible even without this material. If so, what initial condition do we assume? I’ve recently had a conversation with my friend about the strangeness of trying to recall one’s own initial condition. Since we cannot make sense of a world in which there is no causal relationship between events, i.e. we rationalise such acausal phenomena out of existence by postulating rules in which they never become meaningful, it is of paramount importance for us to identify a logical string of events which explain how we got to where we are. Unfortunately, if we cannot recall anything before our own existence (logically), and are furthermore pitifully far from having complete knowledge of events even within our own lifetimes, how could we even believe in causal phenomena? We have no evidence. We cannot be sure that things outside our immediate perception remain the way they were when we last looked at them, so how can we be so sure of causality? You may invoke Occam’s, but this is more of a crutch than a real answer.

I think a good approach for living a balanced life is to treat your behaviour and response to the conditions of each day as some kind of propagator. Just as a harmonic oscillator ‘remembers’ its perturbation from an equilibrium for some number of oscillations before returning to some steady state if henceforth left alone, our instantaneous experience as a conscious entity is affected by what happened in the ‘immediate’ past. As life goes on, we learn better methods for changing the form of this propagator, i.e. there is an implicit time dependence. We convolve the propagator with every day we exist for, and what we are left with is a complete sequence of events in life. We have here a function that depends nontrivially on itself, and also on the unfathomably many other such propagators associated with humans, animals and particles, any number of degrees of separation from ourselves. It is the most complicated feedback system in the universe, or, in other words, it is the universe. We know from control theory that a feedback system with some time dependence is in reality a system with NO time dependence which is overdetermined, i.e. contains one control variable which is affinely related to the time. To elaborate this point, when we give a pendulum a push, it executes a time dependent response, but the form of this response (the propagator) is conserved over time, i.e. a swing-set will swing n times back and forth regardless of whether or not it was pushed yesterday, today, or 4.5 billion years in the future, ceteris paribus, where the affine time-variable relates to where you put t=0. Furthermore, the condition of ceteris paribus can just be nested in a different, also time-independent relation one dimension higher than the previous, and so, like taking a vertex and moving it perpendicular to a hypersurface containing n-1 other vertices to construct the n-simplex from the n-1-simplex, we can always rationalise away any time dependence, provided we accept causality. Therefore, we can postulate that anything that will happen was always going to happen.

It would seem that causality and free will are irreconcilable concepts. Barring any further knowledge of where my assumptions in the previous reasoning fall apart, we are faced with a choice between an unfree existence or an absurd existence, i.e. one in which, despite knowingly possessing consciousness, we cannot affect future events in any other way than the one in which we were already bound to affect them, or one in which we could not affect future events because the very idea of something affecting something else is an unsound assumption. Perhaps these two ideas are one and the same. For now, the only answer to this predicament is to not think of the universe in which ‘Hitler cured cancer, Morty’.

I bought a synthesizer about two months ago. When I learned of how the envelope generator affects the signal, I was led to an interesting string of thoughts about determinism and causality. When the sequencer is not executing any note-pushes, or when no keys are pressed, the oscillators in the synthesizer are still running at the frequency of the last played note, they are just doing so unamplified. As I write this, my synthesizer is unplugged and unpowered. Were I to flip the switch and turn it on, the tone one will hear at the output is completely determinable by looking at all of the knobs on the front. One COULD perform a monstrous calculation to figure it out without ever even touching the synth. The same cannot be said of conventional instruments, because these do not play themselves. Therefore, the analogue synth is unique in that it is the only instrument truly separate from the player. I like to think of it as a black box, another being that can speak and be spoken to, but in its function indifferent to my presence. This is why electronic music is so damn interesting to me. The music that these machines make is of an entirely different quality to ours. It exists as a thing in and of itself, and, much like mathematics, is both discovered and created, by both man and machine.

Anyways, I think the palinopsia is acting up again and I ought to go outside and get some fresh air. One last thought. The preceding was a complete and utter ramble, and I wonder what my English teachers may have thought of it. It is the opposite of a pragmatic answer to an abstract problem. The only reason I am externalising these thoughts is because my mind is becoming infected by them. I don’t even believe that I have a responsibility to motivate these ideas. I reject the notion that text has to exist for a reason. As far as I’m concerned, I didn’t even write this. It wrote itself.

 And yes, term is going ok.