Multisense Realism

The Doctor Prescribes Brian Eno – Blog of the Long Now

In the video, Brian Eno brings up two points which relate to the last posts about intelligence, wisdom, and their relation to entropy.

“I think that one of the things that art offers you is the chance to surrender, to not be in control any longer”.

Right. That makes sense. Art debits the private side of the phenomenal ledger. The side which is concerned with the loaning of time to be returned to the Absolute with interest. Wisdom, especially in the exalted forms of Eastern philosophy, is all about surrender and flow. Dissolving of the ego. The ego is the public interface for the private self, and the seat of the kind of intelligence addressed by causal entropic forces – machine intelligence, strategic effectiveness. Important locally but trivial ultimately, in the face of eternity.

On the other side of the ledger is the chance to strive and control using intelligence. Western philosophy tends toward cultivating objectivity and critical thinking. It is a canon of skeptical intelligence and empiricism from which science emerged. Clear thinking and resisting the desire to surrender are what debit the public facing side of the ledger. Art and Science then, are the sense and motive of human culture…the tender and tough, the wag and wegh, and yes, the yin and yang.

Eno also says “The least interesting sound in the universe, probably, is the sine wave. It’s the sound of nothing happening. It’s the sound of perfection, and it’s boring. As David Byrne said in his song, Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. Distortion is character, basically. In fact, everything we call character is the deviation from perfection. So, perfection to me, is characterlessness.”

Aha, yes. Tying this back to the Absolute, it is the diffraction, the shattering of timelessness with spacetime (aka Tsimtsum) which creates the third element – entropy. The Absolute can only be completed by its own incompleteness, and entropy is the diagonalization of experience into public facing entropies and private facing reflections of the Absolute…quanta and qualia, science and art.