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Image of the Week
We had lots of sunflowers when we had the farm. I’m posting these in support of Ukraine.
Quotes of the Week
“Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.”
— Martin Heidegger
also:
“Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”
― Martin Heidegger
A while back, every month for 25 years, I wrote a back-page column in Dr. Dobb’s Journal called “Swaine’s Flames.” One of the recurring things I did in the column was fake interviews. I was missing that exercise, so I wrote a new one:
Swaine’s Flames
Doctor Turner Explains Everything
The invitation read:
“Doctor Turner requests the pleasure of your company this Thursday at eight o’clock PM at his laboratory to discuss his latest discoveries in the field of topological universalism.”
I knew of the legendary Doctor Cwlwm Turner, of course. I had in fact interviewed him on more than one occasion, and had even struggled through his thousand-page magnum opus Science Reinvented, but I hadn’t heard anything about him lately. Always reclusive, the Doctor had in recent years seemingly dropped entirely out of sight.
Everyone knows his history: a child prodigy, leaving high school at sixteen to study and make contributions to quantum field theory before abandoning it to pursue his own exotic theories on the fringes of physics. His colleagues during his few years in academia at Cal Tech and the Institute for Advanced Studies described him as gifted, brilliant, profound, cracked. Richard Feynman once said, “Keep an eye on this one.” Although that may have been because Turner allegedly stole some exotic fish Feynman had been breeding and passed them off as his own. And everyone knows that he never publishes in peer-reviewed journals because he has no peers. I replied eagerly to the invitation, but not without some trepidation.
These days “his laboratory” appeared to refer to a castle-like mansion in the foothills not far from where I lived.
It seemed a fairly ordinary night when I left Denton that late November evening. It’s true there were dark storm clouds — heavy, dark, and pendulous. But I hadn’t had a night out for a while. But this would be a night out I would remember for a Very Long Time.
Doctor Turner met me at the door and led me to a dimly-lit room that looked more like a library than a laboratory, three of its walls lined with books on a bewildering variety of arcane subjects, the other heavily curtained. After pouring each of us a generous tumbler of what he described as grain alcohol and rainwater and inviting me to be seated, the Doctor settled in behind a massive oak desk and dove immediately into his subject. And it was a deep dive indeed.
“I must begin,” he began, “by explaining that I have developed a revolutionary method for communicating complex ideas to common people. Topological universalism is too revolutionary a subject for the mundane mind to grasp at once.”
I remembered this voice: academically crisp, but given to excited outbursts. Right now it was in full lecture mode.
“Fortunately, this is a problem that I have encountered before in my career: how to reach the common intellect. I applied my intellect to it and of course arrived at the solution. I now know how to introduce even the most radical and innovative ideas to the conventional mind. My method is to start with more easily apprehended ideas and develop from there.”
“Cool,” I said.
He gave me a suspicious look, but went on. “In topological sociology, as I define it, the individual is merely a node in the network, meaningful only as a mathematical abstraction.”
This business didn’t sound all that easily apprehended, but I held my tongue, which was burning from the grain alcohol.
“It is the network alone, its connections, its topology, that is the subject matter of the science of topological sociology. Individuals become valueless interchangeable nodes.”
I had to object to that. “But people are not interchangeable: it matters whether it’s Napoleon or Nero at that node, doesn’t it?”
“Precisely. That has been the weakness of all previous work in sociology. That is why the field has never been a real science. Until I took it on. It is this problem of people that my work has solved.”
“The problem of people?” I set my glass down on the side table and pushed it as far from me as I could.
“To eliminate the individual,” he went on, pressing his fingertips together and looking up at the tessellated ceiling, “we simply add more links. As an individual, you are infinitely connected and defined by those connections. Every instant of your life has been intersected by instants in the lives of others. Every molecule in your body has been in other bodies. All these connections are part of a network. And these connections completely define you.”
“That seems awfully reductive. Some say there are aspects of a person that transcend the physical.”
“Of course; don’t be obtuse. Science is reductive: that is its power. It restricts itself to the observable and the repeatable. And I have now scientifically and topologically derived psychology from sociology as a special case. And not just psychology but also physiology, biology. The network defines it all. All of this!”
Here he strode to the curtains and threw them open, revealing the immensity of the black sky. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled.
“The network encompasses everything!”
“Um, these networks of yours sound incredibly complex,” I said as he closed the curtains and returned to his desk.
“Not networks, network! All sciences, the physical universe, human thought and emotion, they are all the network. Everything is connected. Rather, everything is connections. Because this everything is nothing but the connections.”
“Huh?” I asked.
“The things connected are completely defined by their connections. They have no independent reality. Only the network is real, only the connections.
“But you’re right, this is complex. And I do not fear the complexity, I embrace it in its most universal and all-encompassing form. I stare it in the eye! And contemplating this complexity has led me to the greatest insight of all.”
“I have discovered the true nature of science. The very meaning of truth has been revealed to me.”
At this point he leaned back and slid a drawer open on the desk, from which he drew a length of string.
“It’s all about knots. This is what I have been working on for the past three years. I’ve been working with knots. Here, try this.”
For the next half-hour he demonstrated various knots, knots that disappeared when tugged on, knots that deformed into apparently very different knots. A lot of knots.
“So you understand?” he asked. “If you pull on the string at any point, it deforms itself. To untangle the riddle of a knot you often have to tug on it, deform it, until its topology makes sense to you.”
Ah, back to topology. “Interesting,” I said.
“And my researches with knots brought me to the ultimate truth: The network is a knot, a knot so large and tangled that you can’t grasp all of it at once. Pull on the string at one point and it deforms itself, affording you a perspective that you label as truth. Of course you do. Why? Because it is in accord with reality. What else is that but truth? It is truth indeed.”
“But pay close attention now. That perspective is the topography of the knot, not its topology.”
He delivered the next line as though quoting from Wikipedia:
“Network topography,” he said, “refers to the physical structure of the network as it is visible, not to be confused with network topology, which is the logical structure of the network.”
He switched back to his usual crisp academic voice. “Now pull on the string at a different point and it deforms itself differently. You see? Now that’s your truth. It also accords with reality, so it is also truth. And that is the truth about truth: Truth resides in the various topographies of the universal network. Have you seen the Mandelbrot set? A different object at different places and degrees of expansion. That is the nature of understanding: it all depends on where you pull on the string.”
“Or on the leg,” I muttered. He didn’t seem to hear this.
He suddenly rose, strode to the door, and threw it open. “Go! Go now and write this up. The world needs to know what I have discovered.”
So I did.
BEFORE YOU GO…
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Coming Attractions
The AI Revolution: How We Got Here.
Notes
Cwlwm, a Welsh noun, means both knot and node. It can also refer to a connection between people.
Turner, J M W, 1775–1851, is acknowledged as the most important landscape artist in the history of art in the British Isles. Turner had a particular genius for finding meaning in the topography of a region. In the topology of Wales, Turner found his great inspiration.