The Edge of Logos

Day 1 of my adventures took me up to LA to visit Sharon. Turns out by coincidence she had a party that evening, so I caught up with a bunch of other friends in LA, and made a few new ones, which was great. But the plan was never to go no further than LA, so the following morning I needed to decide where to next. Sharon suggested: why not Big Sur? She’d done a ton of research on the area for a trip she’d taken earlier and knew where I could get a little cabin with no advance reservation. I made a few phone calls that morning, and voila. All set. I’m here till the 17th.

The Big Sur drive from LA would be over 6 hours factoring traffic, according to the Google, so I needed to get moving if I wanted to get there at a reasonable time that night. I quickly reloaded the van and after goodbyes, headed up the 101.

The rain was torrential, as expected. Traffic existed but wasn’t as bad as it could have been. As I got distance from LA, the scenery got better and better. I happened to time driving through Pismo Beach just as the clouds broke briefly and a gorgeous sunset emerged.

Darkness came on fast thereafter, and the rain got heavier and the road windier. There had been many little rockslides and rocks ranging from golf ball to beach ball sizes were on the northbound lane of the US 1, sometimes in both lanes. In the dark rain they came on fast, and I dodged. I hit one with a wheel. It was about the size of a tennis ball and when the van hit, it made an impressive WHAM. Rocks, not mud. Got it.

Weaving and meandering, and rediscovering the value of high beams, which are really awesome on the van now with the new composite beam headlamps, I got to the cabin. I was running on about 4 hours of sleep, so I basically conked out once I took possession.

And onto today. It’s really pretty out here and the cabin is just what I wanted, primarily: quiet. I’ve been incredibly productive writing all day; the words are just flowing out of me and I feel more confident about the success of this project than ever before. I made particular progress on the chapters applying semiotics to computer science and on the Antikythera mechanism. I’ve got a very good start on the outline of the book, so the overall structure and flow is coming along too.

I’ve been having trouble communicating out here; phone service is mostly nonexistent–I get a feeble bar of 2G once in a while–and WiFi is only in the cafe, closes at 2pm. I found a restaurant nearby that has WiFi now, which is cool. At the moment I’m eating dinner at the Fernwood.

Been missing Heather though. Being alone is just what I wanted and neededfor this phase of the trip, but I still do.

Jason Wells friends, nature, philosophy, technology, travel, writing

Hey there. Now that I’m officially on my Highly Unstructured Vacation, I’ve got plenty of time to write. (I am eager to get on the road, but there’s no hurrying the laundry.) Much of it’s going towards the book, but I do intend to make things a bit more active here too. I don’t give myself much time ordinarily to blog, which is kind of a bummer since I like communicating this way. Trouble is, it’s time consuming, and my time this year has given way to such priorities as:

• work (i.e. an abundance of fascinating and perplexing conceptual, visual, engineering, marketing and management challenges culminating in the release of Semantica Enterprise 1.0, as well as voluminous technical research in support of it)
• quality time with Heather, family, friends
• Mom’s death
• travel to exotic new places down lonely desert highways and across an ocean (see below)
• desperately hacking away at my email inbox, to which I am enslaved, in vain
• intermittently reading 6-10 books at a time
• numerous enhancements to Logos, which is finally starting to get pretty cool
• a new tattoo for myself, now finished and on my shoulder

…and there’s so much more, I’m just not inclined to write it down. (Too time consuming.) Now that I look back, it’s been a hell of a year! And as I do have a little time, I’m catching up on that which has long been neglected. Such as sharing the photography from the trip to Hawaii Heather and I took in October. Enjoy a few photos of Wakiki and Diamond Head from our hotel room in Honolulu.

Jason Wells hawaii, travel

Jason Wells math, philosophy, religion, science

Ever forward moves the arrow of time, and in its causal wake, possibility becomes actualized. Call these possibilities guesses. A guess may turn out to be right if it results in success, or wrong if it leads to failure. Some guesses succeed, some don’t.

Evolution produces natural guesses. When a frog is born, nature has unconsciously guessed, as would be put in words, “this frog can succeed.” If it does–if the guess proves right–it reproduces and its offspring are new guesses. Via growth and reproduction, evolution rolls guessing into an ordering principle. The guesses are random but possibility is constrained by the starting conditions, by what is available this iteration, that is, the successful guesses of yesterday. Guessing is how you get iterative creativity, a creative process rather than a one-off event, using past outcomes as raw material.

This guessing is blind; there is no design or intent behind it. The energies coursing through the physical world evoked it. Evolution is just a powered mechanism, constructed physical causality that emerged for no particular purpose. Solar energy hitting the surface of Earth found physical expression in an complex form, but nothing intended it. It just started happening given what was possible. Evolution is a natural machine that forces rocks into hawks using sunlight and water. Why? Since it’s not the product of reason, the question can have no answer. The beginning was unplanned and the end is free of goal. It simply does what it does.

But now, things are different. with the advent of reason, there is a new form of guessing. A person makes guesses, but not the same way evolution does. Evolution has to roll the dice every time to determine success or failure. Every guess has to be acted upon in order for it to be a guess. No so with people. People can make guesses based on information rather than brute actualized fact. If there’s a sign warning of rockslides in the area, a person can change their plans and take a different route. A worm on the same route, not planning its journey or knowing of any danger, continues on heedlessly and gets flattened. The worm makes for a bad guess, but the person made a good one. The person saw two possibilities and actualized one of them; the worm saw neither, and actualized just its one. This is such a powerful advantage that it ultimately led to human empire, of humanity having monopolistic dominion over Earth, just as once dinosaurs did, and even before that, plants.

The rise synthetic biology makes my point more concretely. Here artificial selection–reason’s answer to natural selection–is elevated from the realm of rose gardening to something to be heralded as godlike power. Blind evolution is joined by designed evolution. Purpose and intent enter the biological arena, and now our guesses can begin to stand shoulder to shoulder with those made naturally. And then blast past them, for they are more highly ordered. (That’s not to say the guesses are infallible or even good! It’s just that they can be informed.)

This is the irony of evolution. We evolved naturally, equipped with a power that allows a single species–just us!–to run a parallel guessing game, but with different rules. The relation between these games is difficult for me to tease open, and it seems each contains the other. But whatever the relation is, it is clear a natural revolution of incredible significance is in progress; a natural Titanomachy. Or so it seems to me. A revolution from evolution. This dwarfs the ragtag battles between one tribe and another as breathlessly reported on CNN. We’re in the middle of a natural struggle of far greater importance, and I wonder if anyone really notices?

So the introduction of reason is new kind of guessing about the future, a new process born of evolution, that is, produced by the world itself, evolution’s nursery and theater. The world is making better guesses now, ones that are more likely to be right than before. (And through education, one that gets increasingly accurate.) One guessing process culminated in a new guessing process, the first based on do-or-die, the other based in objective and intent. Because purposeless guessing can be a massive waste of energy, as it turns out. The cosmos conserves guessing, and reason produces tighter results.

That is what having a mind gives. Reason is the guess-filter. It allows for much more success than just throwing darts. I aim for the bulleye, and in doing so, skip all the pointless throws across the room. I narrow down to what I think are the best guesses and actualized only the most promising. So do we all, every day. It’s amazing.

Jason Wells nature, philosophy

Today I found myself at my wit’s end. And then, rubbing my eyes, I thought: why isn’t there a place called Wit’s End? It could be rustic and folksy, something Tolkien-pun-intended, like a pub frequented by demented hobbits, with bawdy singing and loony raving….

At Wit's End?

But surely I wasn’t the only one to have equated the mental state with a physical location. Mildly curious, I googled about. Turns out there in fact is a Wit’s End Pub. But it just doesn’t work, with the boxy corporate architecture and SUV parked out front. Plus, it’s in Canada. But given my current whereabouts, this drips with irony: there’s another Wit’s End, right here in San Diego. But it doesn’t fit my mental picture any better, at least judging from the photos. Looks like some generic Hillcrest bar.

So skip the pub notion… what about something more like a vineyard? I’m thinking golden sunshine, foliage rustling in the gentle breeze, and… madness, if available. And guess what?

At Wits' End.

Jackpot. Wits’ End Vineyard, there you go. The best part? It’s a Willamette Valley pinot noir. That’s what they do, that’s all they do, and it’s my favorite varietal from the best region for it. As to the lunacy, I can’t vouch for it. Not yet anyway. Now to track down a bottle…

Jason Wells cool