Complexity of the Information Dimension

This past weekend I went for a bike ride on Butternut Road from Munson over to Burton. It was a perfect, bright, sunny and windy day and that road is picturesque. It goes through a handful of river valleys. The Chagrin, the West Branch of the Cuyahoga, and the East Branch of the Cuyahoga and has lumpy, rolling hills and open grassy fields with horses and other farm animals all along the way.

I'm on a geology kick lately and "see" the glacial deposition, which geologists gave a bunch of names like Kames, Hummocky Moraines and the like. That route passes over several different such regions, which are complex there because the road passes over three sandstone highlands. One of them even has a name "Maple Hill" which is Auburn Road near Cedar and Butternut.

The "experience" of riding combines with the maps I've been looking at for a couple of weeks to generate a new combination of observations in my mind, and my mind only, that is in the "information dimension" where my personal Thomas Anderson character exists. I have an understanding of the difference in elevation of the Cuyahoga Formation and the Sharon Conglomerate sandstone highlands and how that's filled in with glacial till because of the effort involved to climb various hills, or drop down various descents.

The (abrigded) etymology of "experience" is instructive here, it's "ex" (out of) "peritus" (testing). Also "expert", which is someone who had experiences basically. "Experiential" learning is much deeper than mere symbolic learning, which is basically a huge waste of time. It's wild that almost the whole population of a country like the USA flushes away their prime growing and learning years soaking in a soup of disconnected factoids preached by teachers who similarly don't "know" anything.

It makes sense that culture would go hog wild on these dumb fuck LLMs. The emphasis on a jumble of pure symbolic nonsense with zero experience goes hand in hand with rote "learning" and assemblies of facts. All the "actual" knowledge, like all the nutrition is in the experience not the words. That huge sea of information is not available to machines, it can barely be shared from human to human.

Anyway, this takes my back to an immense divide between "experts" and "dilettantes" and poseurs. The expert lives in the deep complexity of the information dimension. The dilettante lives "off the cuff" and on whims. I think the US ruling class is very toxic poseurs. I'm sure there's a bunch of such people, like CEOs saying things like, "What does the AI say about it?" in meetings all the time now.

The vacuum/negative space this black hole of foolishness is creating might give birth to another wisdom tradition in the US.

"The Way"

I recently watched a YouTube video about the vast cultural impact of Star Wars versus the zero cultural impact of the movie Avatar which was also a "mega blockbuster hit movie". The "Star Wars" topic is one of the things that got me started on the initial concept of this blog, which is humanity's mind model is inextricably bound up with mythology. Why is Star Wars a cultural icon while Avatar is not?

Star Wars is literally star wars which is the basis of a lot of mythological systems. I wrote a bunch of posts on this topic, but this one is a good summary. I'll jot down a few really obvious highlights. Millenium Falcon = the moon. X-Wing fighter looks like an erect penis. Luke literally shoots his load into the "death star". Rebels = solar imagery. The Empire is the world of the dead, that is, the Winter and last years sun and hoarded wealth, like the greek god Pluto, who's also a vampire. Luke (light) and Han are Horus. Princess Leia is Isis. Vader is Osiris/the constellation Orion. Every year the Rebels, the Sun, overthrows the Empire (the winter) and there's a big Ewok Party--Summer.

Avatar is possibly based on another old myth, but it's a less well known myth. It might be a twist on the Book of Enoch story or the story of the Nephilim which is also the basis of the Stargate SG-1 story, which is also the Atlantis story told by Plato, which is shown in bits and pieces in the movie 10,000 BC and is also in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica. That story is an advanced civilization came to prehistoric Earth and basically "engineered" humanity. In the book of Enoch, for example, the "watchers" teach humans "civilization". The nephilim enslave humanity, as in Avatar, an evil corporation sends an imposter to dupe the blue aliens.

For whatever reason, this story is not as widely known or celebrated, and all these entertainment products have niche fandoms, or no fandom, like Avatar, which was, ironically just corporate entertainment slop compared to Star Wars which was based on "The Contendings of Horus and Set" and "The Osiris Cycle", which are arguably products of the Nephilim. That is, the "seasonal religion" is a scam that's been used to enslave humanity for 1000s of years.

"Star Wars" also includes "the force" mythology, but in true Nephilim style corrupted it with the concept of "royal blood", which is the Nephilim/fallen angels myth. That is, "the force" is only available via biological and hereditary juju called "mitichlorians" or whatever. That's all a sort of grotesque corruption of concepts in Daoism. "The Force" = "The Way".

The depiction of "the daoist" comes and goes in entertainment products. I think corporations are not eager to promote it, nor are corporate types who are the people who make hollywood slop now. A classic example of this is Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu. The "Caine" surname and his origin story is drawn from the Nephilim story yet again (in the lore, it's the biblical Cain), but it doesn't fit the rest of the concepts in Kung Fu, nor the Shaolin Monk concept. Another similar, and corrupted example is the Ranger Aragon from Lord of the Rings who's the "secret king", but a ranger. The TV series the Incredible Hulk is yet another one where a wandering stranger goes around the world solving problems "outside the system". Of course Yoda and the Jedis are supposed to be Shaolin Monks who have a sort of stand-offish relationship with "the system" and have their own concerns about "maintaining balance" which is independent of the government's agendas.

"The Way" is the only way, so it necessarily supercedes religion, which is a pack of lies, and politics, which is also a pile of fraud and lies, and it really trumps all similar nonsense, like consumerism, or work anxiety, corporations, etc... It asserts itself in times of extreme madness, like in classical Athens during peak empire, or in ancient Rome in the form of stoicism, or now in the US where the "ruling class" is being revealed as utter trash.

Authentic Folklore/Imposed Folklore

I wrote a couple of posts about "kid knowledge", which I think is a great example of "authentic" folklore in the western world. A couple of examples of kid folklore from Chardon, Ohio are: 1) the story of the Melonheads; 2) the idea that there is a tunnel network connecting the high school, the court house and "Rocky Cellar" which is a sandstone bedrock outcrop off of Basquin Drive in Chardon.

The kid knowledge is "authentic" because it was generated by rando kids or adults over time and was handed down kid to kid through the generations. The "tunnel" story is almost certainly a jumbled up version of what was more or less an adventure story from the War of 1812, which was coincident with the founding of Ohio and Geauga County. An early county official stashed documents in Rocky Cellar to keep them safe from the British and Indian mercenaries of the British. Eventually that turned into a "tunnel to the courthouse".

The melonhead story is just a monster story, maybe about kids with hydrocephalus who lived near Wisner Road in Chardon, Township. It got embellished over the years to become a fantastical tale of a "mad scientist" run amok who was then destroyed by his creation, which is just a jumble of horror movie tropes.

Kids are motivated to tell and listen to stories for entertainment purposes, so the stories are lean on facts and more about being "cool" or interesting exercises of imagination. They also draw upon well worn story tropes and archetypes. I am guessing there is very little "kid knowledge" left of that kind. Instead it's turned into memes and funny stories and images on the Internet. 

I think the contemporary source of authentic folklore, or authentic human expression is the Internet, and specifically things like youtube videos made by actual randos, rather than astroturfed imitations of that generated by "ruling class" agents. Youtube is currently, far and away, the most watched entertainment medium.

 

The entire corporate entertainment industry is often a version of astroturf "folk lore" creation. The news is a version of that. PBS, NPR, etc... are just more versions of that. Essentially it's all a sales pitch from the "ruling class" about virtually every topic and is mainly meant to shape public opinion, or impose mind models that favor the ruling class or at the very least just impose their rando religious opinions on myriad topics.

Let's take the topic of "race relations" as an example. In the 70s and 80s, there was a constant drumbeat of government and "ruling class" propaganda about black and white race relations in the US, and a big effort to get white people to think "racism" was absolutely the worst sin and that anyone who had a racist opinion was absolute trash. I think that social engineering effort peaked in the 1990s with Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central, which was a huge hit and which treated the topic comedically and nonchalantly.

The main thrust of that propaganda isn't that "race relations" can be fixed or solved, it's actually that black people need the government to propagandize white people and "manage" the two groups, just as the blacks need the government for welfare, public housing, police at their beaches, their pools, and high school football games, etc...

In the early 2000s through today, though, lefty political people got extremely aggressive about the subject, so even the entertainment propaganda got extremely heavy handed and the concept of "DEI" started to show up all over the place. The concept shifted from the 70s/80s notion of "white and black people should learn to get along" to "white people are bad", which is also part of the management pitch.

That propaganda ran headlong into the Internet and youtube, which casually crushed it for a large segment of the white audience. White lefty women and men are the only people who are still onboard with the ruling class propaganda from the 70s to the early 2000s about black people, and in many cases, those white shitlibs live in a world of total nonsense and severe cognitive dissonance. For example, they live in extremely white areas, but imagine that somehow a "diverse" neighborhood is preferable, until they drive through black Cleveland, Ohio, and lock their car doors and drive as fast as possible to get back to their own civilization.

Anyway, I think it's not possible to keep imposing folklore on people. Eventually they notice it's fake garbage, which would probably indicate that all respect for "the ruling class" and their opinions is being lost.