Geometry for Ocelots

by Exurb1a

There is no knowledge beyond description.

Anaximander said, If I told you of a man who hunts through the refuse and rubbish every day selecting only matter he can eat, or breaks into homes raiding pantries, you would be no closer to understanding his motives until I mentioned the meaning of his quest. He is hungry. All the descriptions of his eye colour and his height do nothing to explain that. The wisewoman said, The universe is not a man.

“The difference between a hero and a fool is nothing more than the bias of the biographer.

A ruler must be wise enough to know his ignorance and unblinded to blind obedience. Who doesn’t have masters? For us it is the gods. For the gods, it is nature. True liberation is through the recognition of one’s unopposable oppressors.”

What had the theoreticians known of beauty? What had the mystics known of science? He saw suddenly that there was no sense in extremes, intuited there must be some middle way between sterile description of the world, and blind celebration of it

If I asked you in the midst of a tragedy, “Shall I end your suffering and make all well again?” you would answer, “Please do, I beg it.” If instead I asked you after the tragedy, “Are you glad you lived through it? Did you grow wiser from the experience?” you would answer, “Yes! Thank you for not stopping the thing prematurely.” Humans are not to be trusted.

There was no majesty to creation, only the majesty of her witnessing creation.

For just a moment she had seen emotion and sensation for what they were: no more than dirt one could effortlessly brush off from the lantern of pure awareness.

Was it that humans couldn’t live together in large numbers without degeneration, or rather that he and Ursula had simply built a society badly?

The true horror of existence is not the certainty of death, nor the threat of hell, but the knowledge that we will likely go our entire lives as impossibly complex machines, walking about in an impossibly complex universe, and never truly discover what it was all for. I don’t know is brave. I’ll never know is heroic.

The ‘explanation behind all explanations’ my colleagues and I are searching for is hardly much different than our ancestors’ quest to know the mind of God. Sometimes it feels like the answer is imminently close. On those days, I drink. Sometimes it feels like the answer is impossibly distant. On those days, I drink.

There is nothing obvious about the picture of the world we have obtained using the scientific method. Molecules, quarks, atoms, billions of stars and galaxies, meat that knows it’s sentient—what is this madness? And, of course, one might ask: is the scientific model of reality not just another kind of magic, another absurd, fanciful delusion? The answer is: yes. However, it also happens to be the only delusion that doesn’t go away when one stops believing in it.

“Unlike you, your holiness, I watch the world closer than I watch myself.” Leo said, “I’m not sure that’s—” “Shyness is just narcissism for introverts. You’d do well to remember that.”

“What is line and form?” Mriga asked. “Only mind externalised.” “What is colour and geometry?” “Only mind internalising.”

She wanted to go off bounding with this new supercharged awareness, but watched the want and waited for it to die.

There is nothing worse than to remain sober around those who are drinking. Their euphoria intensifies, while you only grow quietly embarrassed for them. At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving them of the bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching. The reaction is much the same from the gluttonous, rich, and powerful when one reminds them that the resources of the environment are not infinite. They might continue to plunder, but they will hate you for bringing conscience into their debauchery, for turning the light on during the orgy. Why, the house was burning down, but we were so enjoying the glow. . . - Excerpts from The Empirical Sutras of Lady Ursula

When the barrier to the right course of action is low enough, most folk will do the right thing.”

He had the terrible sense that if a system of describing the world such as mathematics became sufficiently powerful, the mathematicians themselves would grow convinced there was nothing beyond its scope—not unlike a blind man discounting yellow because he could neither touch nor smell it.

Is there a more opulent society imaginable than one that builds spaceships while its population starves?

That’s where we’ll live: between the beginning and end of everything, in the Sunshine Middle of the World.

You try telling the public they have to stick to sleeping on thin mattresses and walking to work just long enough at least that we can kill bivnik. It wasn’t the poor who revolted. It wasn’t the rich who overran everything. It was the fat, satisfied middle class, and their fat, satisfied kids. There was no revolution. There was only the promise that revolutions would never happen again and everyone could carve out a comfy little space for themselves and talk to their fridge and own a crystal communicator if they only turned a blind eye to the end of the world. The kids tried candy, and then candy was all they wanted.”

Be kind, and when you can’t be kind, be fair. And when you can’t be fair, be clever. And when you can’t be clever, please be kind again.

Some boats were misshapen, of the former Gearheart era when function won over form; others of the recent era when form and function had learned to share a bed together.

what’s wrong with deriving one’s moral code from reason and compassion?” “There would be no reason or compassion without religion.” “Nonsense, sir,” Marta said. “I choose not to harm because I know what it is to be harmed, and I’d rather not inflict it on my kin or friends or society. I don’t have to be commanded to do so. I choose to. If I behaved well just because I’d been told to, with the threat of hell or what have you, that isn’t really good behaviour at all, but a celestial hostage situation.”

You have no explanation for why there’s anything here at all.” Marta groaned, “And neither do you in the slightest, the only difference being that Gearheart is honest enough to admit that. I’m sorry if ignorance scares you. I’m sorry if you can’t stand the thought of dying before you’ve found the meta-yes. But that’s how this works, for now. And in the meantime, bookended by birth and death, riding about in bodies of carbon, loving, suffering, striving, for a short, short time, we get to be. If we’re forced to be in a mysterious universe, and that universe is mute on the subject of its own motivations for existing, I’ll still take living in honest ignorance over your metaphysical posturing any day. That’s real bravery. Not concocting blatantly contradictory stories to comfort oneself, not appealing to the vague transcendent every time you get your worldview in a twist.

The mark of a society’s stupidity is the degree to which it believes its own myths.

“The era of false gods is over. Nothing is sacred and everything is possible.”

It is without question that we live inside a dream. I do not mean this world is illusory or submissive to one’s will. Rather, you will have noticed that when inside a dream, despite the contorted narrative, and the sudden return of friends long dead, and a crack in the sky—for as long as you are asleep, the logic holds. It is only upon waking that you realise there was no logic to the dream at all. The waking world is no different. Yes, we are familiar with the presentations of light and sound and time. Yes, we are aware that two objects cannot occupy the same space, that eleven is a prime number, and so on. But what is the logic beneath these presentations? What is so self-evident about light or sound or time? The answer is: nothing. The world is not comprehensible. It is only that we have been asleep so long its incomprehensibility has become familiar.

The more complex a society, the more interdependent its constituent parts. Kill agriculture and industry falls. Kill industry and medicine falls. Kill medicine and governance falls, on and on until there’s no interdependence left.

The scientific method was a project begun as an attempt to understand nature’s splendour, but finished in total defilement. We started with trying to understand the mechanics of the heavens. We concluded with pleasure cruises and little plastic drinking straws. What had gone wrong? How had we learned to unhear the cosmic music? It was all fact without wonder. “So too I realised what had so bored me about religion. It claimed to be in the employ of truth, yet every time it was confronted with a truth it couldn’t swallow, it only stuck its fingers in its ears and sang until the problem vanished. For all its grandiosity, it seemed to consist of exactly the kinds of stories humans would tell themselves for comfort. It was all wonder without fact.

So, whatever happens next, allow yourself to be warmed, if only for a minute, by the knowledge that not even the gods know what dirt is doing here.”

Science did not kill magic. Yes, we've had to dispense with spells and incantations. Yes, the universe is more apathetic than previously supposed. But in return for accepting these losses, we have gained a picture of the world so unfathomably beautiful and mysterious that if God truly existed, He Himself could not fathom it.