Glue

Causality,

 The glue that holds events together

A predicate for time and its relentlessly forward direction

And time itself the canvas upon which events are arranged, imprisoned by causality.

…  Yes, …and for us animals,

Memory holds time together.

While it strengthens time,

It defies it

Lashes out at it in anger.

Appearing unbidden

Like the chaos of the ocean.

Entropy

Entropy is the unmitigated "or".

Collective Consciousness

As you read this post, my words are your words. My thoughts are your thoughts.  If a congregation is reciting a prayer at the same time, that is a collective consciousness. When listening, you are temporarily giving up your ability to think your own thoughts so you can think mine.  With the use of language, on a temporary basis, the "and" gains hegemony.   Of course, the "or" is always pulling.   The "or" is saying, "I don't want to read this," "I don't want to hear this".   And eventually the "or" becomes dominant when you stop listening.  Thus, in communication there is a constant shifting of dominance from and dominance of the "and", to the dominance of the "or", for from "Andian mode" to "Orian" mode, a drifting into and out of the collective. Constant tension, constant streams into and out of these modes.  And a person who is never in Andian mode is isolated.  On the other hand, a creature of the mob, one who lacks the courage to think for oneself, is a coward, pathetic, and eventually becomes spent, needing a moment for himself.  Somehow obtaining a balance is what we should strive for, as I've said before.



Thus, there is no single overriding collective consciousness.  There may be several collective consciousnesses.     If everyone thought things lock',step and key, would there be one collective consciousness.  To an extent, reading a newspaper or published book is an act of participating in a collective consciousness, or sharing the thoughts or words others had at one time...

Diversity

When the "and" and "or" thrive, there are many "the"s and many "other"s.

The Parentheses

Parentheses are the ultimate embodiment of the and/or.  They group together those that are inside them, and simultaneously separate them from those on the outside. And they do this in the world of numbers and words.  Our bodies, our skins, are parentheses, separating our organs and ourselves from others, separating each living thing from every other living thing. And maybe cell membranes serve this function as well, separating that on the inside from that which is outside it.   But it seems like parentheses, like the "and" and the "or", underlie everything.  Like the "and" and the "or", they underlie all reality.  And as the perfect fusion of the "and" and the "or", parentheses are God.

Borders are holy.

Thoughts on the Andorian basis of Quantum Reality

We can try to place the andorian basis for quantum reality within a number of possible schemas in space, one in which an electron's location is viewed in relation to the other, and another in which we view andorean forces as affecting the electron's relationship/location to itself.

The first is relatively simple and straightforward.  The and is moving the electron toward another and the or is moving it away from another.  If we viewed the "and" and "or" as forces that pull, it is possible to view them as canceling each other out and the electron as not moving at all, something that quantum physics says is not the case. Thus, this schema does not work.  If, rather than seeing the and and or as pure movement, rather than force, the electron is simultaneously moving in two different directions, one towards another particle and the other away from it.  Under this schema, the electron is in any number of different places at the same time given the relative speeds of the and and or.  This does allow for both a particle and wavelike quality and could coincide with quantum reality.

 The other possible schema, its relation in space in relationship to itself, (rather than to another) takes some more vigorous thinking but seems to work best.  The or doesn't "want or allow" the electron to be wherever it seems to be at any given time. Rather, it refuses to be in any given place at any given time, but wants to be or tries to be somewhere else.  Since it refuses to be anywhere at any given time, but is always trying to be somewhere else, at any given time it exists, when unaccompanied by the and,  as poor possibility.  In essence, it doesn't have a corporeal existence but only exists as possibility or probability.  The electron's andness, on the other hand, wants the electron to be somewhere and elsewhere, or more accurately everywhere, at the same time.  Thus the "and", when unaccompanied by the "or", makes the electron be everywhere, and thus be everything at any given time.     Since the andorean schema provides that both the "and" and the "or" are operative, the electron's orness is making it exist nowhere at any given time but only exist as possibility, while the electron's andness is making it exist everywhere at any given time.   This weirdness, this simulaneous existence and nonexistence, this being everywhere and nowhere at the same time seems to correspond more with fuzzy quantum reality, and is more likely the best schema within which to place it. Of course, we have to trust our senses to some extent, and our senses tell us that matter exists.  And in a sense, the "or", taken alone, is not saying that the electron does not exist; it is simply saying that it doesn't exist here.   While the "and" is saying that it exists everywhere.  Thus, this schema weighs more heavily, overall, in favor of existence, but a more fuzzy existence.

More thoughts on Creativity

A precondition for creativity, besides intelligent beings, is a certain degree of diversity.  In creativity, the "and" and the "or" cooperate to increase diversity.  Or we may say that diversity perpetuates itself through the "and" and the "or".   In any event, creativity involves the "and" gathering the disparate other together, and the "or", which wants to escape itself, split away from itself and become other,  modifying the boundaries of each individual other so that each of the separate pieces can become intertwined, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.  And through sufficient work and time, the pieces become completely welded together until the separate identity of each piece is no longer recognized, and a new single piece is created.  In sum, the process of the "and" gathering pieces together, the "or" modifying each piece, and the "and" taking advantage of that modification to link them together, culminates in the entire melding of these separate pieces into an entirely new piece, which the "or" separates from other pieces, ultimately increasing diversity.    Of course, there is a temporary sacrifice, or murder, if you will, involved in creativity, in that the formerly separate pieces, the disparate others, who have already been assaulted, lose their identity when welded together.   But not to worry,  their separate identity continues to exist in memory and can be reproduced if need be.  

Creativity, of course, has various degrees.   Take the example of a songwriter (me). I will take various tunes I may have heard before, modify them (change their boundaries somewhat), and meld them together, using bridges between tunes when necessary, to create a song.  Something with a higher degree of creativity,  such as a new musical genre, occurs when the separate pieces have been so modified and so melded together that their former separateness is no longer apparent.  And of course, the geniuses are few who have played significant roles in the birth of new musical genres.