Sound and Color

• God Doesn’t Play Dice
• Null Test
• Prenumbra
• Superposition
• Local Highs
• Something From Nothing
• Keep Your Eye On The Ball
• I Might Just Be The Lunatic You’re Looking For

God Doesn’t Play Dice

I once read a delightful anecdote about Oscar Wilde. I believe he was being introduced at a dinner party in France when his host, slipping into French for his fellow guests said something along the lines of “And you’ll forgive Mr Wilde, for he will have to converse in the inferior English tongue!”, to which Oscar responded, reportedly in perfect French “Yes, please forgive me, I will have to lean on the lowly language of Shakespeare”.

I remember a quote that went something like “People used to believe that if you had enough monkeys at typewriters, eventually you could produce shakespeare… The internet proved that wrong”.

My first time hearing it I found it really witty. Then over time I thought, “well, who’s checking”? Who has gone to every monkey’s computer and checked if they produced something worthy of shakespearean highs? What if some monkeys are still typing? What if most have given up and are just flinging poop but there were a couple of very stressed out monkeys onto something?? What if tehy speleld eevry wrod wnrog? Would they get partial credit? Who’s the judge? When would we know? When would the news reach us? Mark Twain said a lie can travel half way across the world before the truth can get its shoes tied.

Do you believe in monkeys?

Null Test

The picture above shows a sine wave. The Y axis is for amplitude. In the context of audio amplitude refers to “volume” or more literally, air pressure concentration.

If you duplicate this sine wave, the amplitude will double, causing it to be much louder to our ears. This is because the peaks are now overlapping with one another and adding up to more signal than there was before. Two trumpets are louder than one trumpet. Makes sense.

But, what if you inverted the signal of ONE of the tracks? That is to say, what if you took every peak and made it a valley, every positive number becomes negative and vice versa. What happens then?

Well if the audio tracks are lined up perfectly in time, it would mean that the original tracks’ peaks would be canceled by the inverted track’s peaks. Every sampled interval would sum to 0.

And that makes sense. Newton was onto something will all that talk of conservation of energy momentum, equal and opposite forces, etc. But the thing is, We’re not all just sitting around in piercing black silence. There is something instead of nothing. So the question is: why?

Prenumbra

Light heads in one direction through a medium, but that doesn’t mean it can’t bounce and scatter in a way that creates a prenumbra. It doesn’t mean that specialized lights such as a source 4 spotlight used in theatre can’t be shuttered (on the opposite side by the way) to change the dispersion of the prenumbra and bright spot. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be chromatic aberration in certain parts of the signal.

Think of the crystalline lens in your eye. It directs the light that reflects toward your eye towards a focal point, a point at which everything is in focus - just like a camera obscura. Your muscles contract to change this focal length as you look around. The light that is sensed as signal by the rods and cones in the back of your head are then transported via the optic nerve to the visual cortex where the data is then transposed into a format we understand - that is to say we orient it and splice it together and see both eyes as one cone of vision in consciousness.

Double slit is no mystery at all.

Superposition

Imagine typing the search “Schroedingers cat is” and seeing the following:

Schroedingers cat is…

Schroedingers cat is… DEAD

Schroedingers cat is… ALIVE

The superposition-ists among us 👀 would say that both are potentially true and false at the same time. But like “potential energy” in newtonian physics, “potentially true” is counter-productive language. Taking a guess between yes and no and saying you’re 50% certain shows you don’t understand the meaning of the word “certain”.

There is an answer to the cat question. The cat is either living or dead. Our ability to measure it does not change this reality. Believing everything to be possible until it is decisively proven otherwise is god of the gaps fallacy.

So what would the “right” answer be? For someone who cannot see the contents of the box, the correct answer is to say “I do not know”. The next person who sees the box may invent X-ray goggles to find out.

Local Highs

It is said that Socrates once met a blind oracle who proclaimed him to be the wisest man in the world. He said, “You’re mistaken, for I know nothing”. To which the oracle replied “You’ve just proven me right”.

The socratic method is the rhetorical version of the scientific method. Both are about posing a question and seeing what will become of the inquiry. Were more discoveries made? Were we wrong? Were we right? The question can be posed by nature itself - what curves will be carved into the river this year by erosion? Which species will survive through random mutation and natural selection? Does that resonate? Is that true?

Time will tell.

But here again language can trick us. Lets say you work for company A. How sure are you that you work there? You have staked your life on the ability to pay a mortgage based on your income from the company. You’ve been there every day for 10 years. And yet, what if tomorrow the plan was to fire you? Do you still work there? Does that sentence mean the same thing now? What % certain are you?

We have to make judgement calls with incomplete information all the time. Think of every person as a search algorithm searching for meaning. Some people will end up in localized highs. Is it all just energy being released back into the universe? Entropy of a mysteriously swinging pendulum destined to cancel itself out, completing the the most banal, meaningless circle? And what we call life was a brief spark of frenetic, useless color and sound…?

There was a book about 15 years ago that was available on airport shelves called The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. The core claim of the book was that the network effects of new technology democratized power and that, essentially, all boats rise with the tides.

Something From Nothing

When you light a candle, you are causing a chemical reaction to happen. All energy and mass in each moment is accounted for. Each can be reverse engineered with equal and opposite vector maps. And yet, is there the absence of light? No. It is because the reaction leaves a remnant. This remnant (the light) is directly correlated to the signal that produced it. In other words, the quality of the light is directly tied to the material of wick, the pigments in the room, etc.

Whats the equivalent in the audio example with sine waves? If you remember, we created equal and opposite forces and it created silence, nothing. The absence of signal. But, what happens when you introduce a remnant of this procedure? Something that will carry on in time.

As an example, in logic pro X I recreated our test case. If you introduce reverb in one of the tracks, instead of nothing you get something.

What is reverb? Reverberation is just a series of echoes over time - happening so fast that your mind interprets this as one signal (see granular synthesis for more info, or think of pictures moving to create a movie). You can have the reverb repeat the exact same signal, but often reverb processors are designed to modify the signal - to take away lower and higher frequencies - to introduce distortion or impulse response clapback. In other words, to introduce noise to the remnant’s signal. This makes sense because if you hear reverb in a room, it won’t be the exact same signal bouncing back at you - it will be a warped replica - morphed by a myriad of variables in the room.

Keep Your Eye On The Ball

For the longest time I was not a believer in the explanations presented for the monty hall problem. I felt like people were just getting tricked by the phrasing.

A riddle was posed to me by a family member once:

Three friends pay for a $30 hotel room. The manager realizes the room should have only cost $25 and gives the bellhop $5 to return. The bellhop keeps $2 for himself and gives each friend $1 back, for a total of $3. The friends have each paid $9 ($10 minus the $1 they got back), for a total of $27. The bellhop has $2. $27 + $2 = $29. The riddle asks, "What happened to the missing $1?

I thought the monty hall problem was like this riddle, phrased to be illusory. The switch is done with rhetoric, implicitly swaying the listener’s mind to confuse money that was given and money that was returned.

In reality, the money was always there. 25 dollars to the hotel, 3 returned to the friends, 2 in the bellhop’s pocket. The only reason that the riddle is perplexing is because of the phrasing, or to use another word, framing.

What % chance are you certain it will rain tomorrow? If you have no idea, the answer is not that it is equally likely to be 1%, 2%, 3%, etc.

If the only fact humanity had ever known was that from the time the earth was cooling it had rained for roughly 1/3 of the days, then the best guess we could reason scientifically would be a 33% (or 1/3) figure. If however we learned that during the last 2000 years it has been raining much more, and that is what is responsible for the average skewing towards 1/3. If you just look at the last 2000 years the figure would be closer to 1/2.

Now Occam’s razor would turn. Before we would have reasoned that by best available information it would not rain, and now its a toss up!

Now, lets say that the area you’re currently in is the Sahara desert, and that it has actually only rained in the Sahara 1/20 days since the dawn of time. Now the razor would spin back, well, we can be almost certain now right? Almost certain… 🤔

But then what if you looked outside and saw rain? Would Occam’s advice seem as important as what your eyes could tell you? Would you doubt the sanity of your perception?

Whats that line about all tools being flawed but some still useful? 🍎 Occam’s razor is sharpened each day we accumulate more information, but it is not yet a tool we can lean upon fully. Before we can reverse engineer intuitively we have to do a little more forward engineering.

What if I told you that some tools were meant to be used in tandem? That a razor as beautiful as Occam’s should be accompanied by a counterpart.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur

Necessity is the mother of invention. The degree to which something may happen, it will. A subtle rephrasing of Murphy’s law - one in which we can acknowledge that not all outcomes are equally likely — in fact — this discounts the string theory, time traveling, multiverse bs lol. Each “decision” is no decision at all. It is simply a chemical reaction where energy is following the path of least resistance. Gravity.

Free will is an illusion. There are no parallel universes. The universe is a chemical reaction, and like physics simulations, it is all simply math. We are atoms, stardust with emergent feeling — the same way as a plant grows towards the sun. This emerging feeling we call consciousness. It is the process that our physical body uses to process information from our senses and make decisions. The brain is a mechanical system like a backend server with a database. With each operation the process goes line by line, moment by moment, streaming through consciousness, being influenced by the stored weights and balances. It creates a remnant, we feel this filtering process working. Its like feeling a dryer hum when you place your hand on it. The vibration produces a sensation, a resonance. The filtering process of readjusting weights needs only one dimension in which to move - positive and negative over time. Consonance and Dissonance. Push and Pull.

Have you ever been very angry only to find you’re actually just hungry? What about anxious, then you realize you need to pee? We contextualize feelings with ideas. What do we covet? We covet what we see every day. Its nurture, naturally.

I Might Just Be The Lunatic You’re Looking For

Perhaps I am just dazzling myself with rhetoric, unknowingly confusing myself for my own amusement. I guarantee you that not all ignorance is bliss.

But I hope that maybe even if I’m wrong it can spark something true. I hope, by god, it resonates with you 🙂

meme = datum

meme + anti-meme = non sequitur (cancellation, silence, no resonance)

meme + meme ~ enthymeme (gestalt, compression) 2+2 = 4. Because we have 4, we can get back to 2 and 2. In other words, we’ve compressed all that meaning into one symbol: 4.