Alucard

The bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame

In the see without lees
Standith the bird of Hermes
Eating his wings variable
And makith himself yet full stable
When all his feathers be from him gone
He standith still here as a stone
Here is bolth now white and red
And all so the stone quicken and dead
All and some without fable
Bolth hard and soft and malleable
Understand how well and right
And thank you god of this sight
The bird of Hermes is my name eating my wings to make me tame.

Source: The Ripley Scroll


An Aerial View

Originating from a 15th century Alchemy scroll, known as the Ripley Scroll, the story of the Bird of Hermes reached me through a modern interpretation from the Hellsing anime series. Putting that aside, the by now mystified sound of medieval English creates a very nice aura around a deep insight into human nature. I really admire the poetic strength and dignity which this short excerpt manages to convey, even though I primarily value semantic substance rather than presentational beauty.


View: Biology/Physics

In Biology, there is a hypothesis (one of many, forgive me for any inaccuracies) which postulates that all biological systems operate (or live) in a state of criticality. Some take this even a step further, claiming life is a self-induced and self-sustained criticality, which provides the physical basis for the development and coupling of the complex biological systems on Earth. Formally, Self-organized criticality is a property of a dynamical system which has a critical point as an attractor. Also, a critical point specifies the conditions under a phase boundary ceases to exist, or intuitively a point at which the system's behavior undergoes a significant change.

Examples are:

• The precise angle at which a chair balanced on two of its legs starts falling down under its own weight
• The temperature level at which a transition between liquid and solid states of substances occur
• The electric potential at which a neuron fires a signal through its synapse instead of being idle
• The frequency at which a beating heart stops oscillating and converges into a dead steady state
• Etc.
  

I will skip the mathematical argumentation here, since I am not in any way an expert in dynamical systems.


View: Psychology

Ah, consciousness. One could stretch the criticality of physical systems to mental models, though only as a metaphor at the current state of Neuroscience and the family of related Psychology subfields. That's not too important though. Consciousness is a very interesting concept to put under scrutiny, mostly due to the fact that the author has one of his own and it is dictating everything in his perceivable existence. The limits of consciousness are vague and multi-directional. To enumerate a few that come to mind: limits of perception, limits of understanding/reasoning, limits of experience, limits of misconceptions. How wonderfully misguided each and every human mind is deserves not a blog post but a book of its own. Many such books have been written of course, so let us not delve to deep into this precipice.

The limits, as addressed by the Alucard fragment of the Ripley scroll I did not mention however. Those are the limits of accepting. How far can the mind reach in knowing, as to remain sane, consistent and rational? What must we tear away, ignore, or blindly believe in our mental view of the world in order to stay away from the paths of insanity lurking in the dark corners of our psyche? Many mathematicians, philosophers and physicists have fallen down these paths, lost in their endless and ever deeper search for truth and reality.

Consistency, in our premature 21st century science is a luxury we don't have. Fragments and subfields struggle to attain their own internal coherence and stand-alone truth, yet putting all pieces of the puzzle together would lead to a "whole" akin to Swiss Cheese - with enormous gaping wholes, easily crumbling when touched. Alternatively, we could take small steps and carefully reassemble all pieces from the ground up, leading us to a reevaluation of the entire body of science way too daunting to be practical (e.g. describing the human digestive tract in terms of cell-level interactions). Is this not a fundamental frustration we as humans could never tolerate? How could we ever live with but scrapes of the schematics of the natural world and why would we ever stop the pursuit for its complete understanding?

Criticality of the mind would not be a misleading term here. In one corner: fear, laziness, hedonism, domination, religion. In the other: creativity, imagination, curiosity, secularism. Forces pulling in opposite direction oscillate our existence into a carefully balanced dance, saving us from going beyond our limits. It is always interesting to follow in the shoes of extremists, who try to suppress their innate, subconscious puppeteer in order to go beyond and see the "ultimate". Sadly, our strength suffices in but choosing a single dimension to "max out" in, and with limited success.

Conclusion? Fable applicable.
Salvation? Not just yet.

View: Artificial Intelligence (Computer Science)

Yes, yes, Artificial Intelligence. Yes, yes, the three laws of Azimov, and any other axiomatization of a formal reasoning system trying to reach sentience. The Alucard fable is still ahead of us AI-researchers, already postulating the need of sustaining criticality. It is just too early to discuss AI here and now, we need at least a first step towards meta-control and what I tend to call Computational Meta-Abstraction.


View: Philosophy

...
Understand how well and right
And thank you god of this sight
...


Traditionally, there is a need of an Oracle (typically mistaken with the concept of God), which could decide wrong from right, high from low, soft from hard, etc. The need of such Oracle already indicates how artificial these separations and boundaries really are. In a world too complex and too vast for our perceptions to fully know or experience, we need for artificially divide existence into boxes, categories, types, scales. We come up with such abstract divisions  in order to approximate a basic understanding of the small part of reality we actually do perceive. You probably already see the problem.

Our consciousness is inclined to establish and sustain a biologically motivated state of criticality, which by design binds us to a finite perception and understanding of an existence which is millions of magnitudes higher than what we can represent, experience and intuitively understand.

So, after the long interlude, the gist of the situation is in front of us. There are at least two ways of "feeling" about this predicament.

• If you are a naturalist, be greatly satisfied with the efficiency and gracefulness of biological systems which are self-perfecting physical masterpieces that set us a subconscious biological goal and gracefully allow us to indulge in hedonism if wanted.
• If you are a philosopher, despair at the limits of what is knowable and curse your materialistic nature. If one is bound to his reality and is denied all shortcuts to transcending into the underlying principles and metaphysics of their reality, then one is an eternal slave to his built-in ignorance.
  

Personally, I fall into the second category. And while I acknowledge the limitations of my sentience, I have some nifty plans in the back of my head. But I will hopefully write more about this in 2 or 3 years.


View: Zen

The exotic for last. I have always been keenly glimpsing into the world of Zen, whenever the opportunity allowed it. I was a bit disappointed by how the whole movement peacefully resigns to the limit of human sentience and devotes to a wholistic perception of reality with both consciousness and subconsciousness, missing out on all the juicy meta levels beyond. However, if all is one and all is Zen, there is no meta-level, there are no infinite chains of scales, divisions and classes. There is no need for all this misguided segregated approach to knowledge, as we are all Zen and we are one. It is a very attractive, yet dangerously limiting concept, which at least in my eyes, is worth indulging from time to time.

As far as the Alucard fable is concerned, Zen would completely deny it. Adjusting your strength to stay far from your limits is something you wouldn't be able to do. You don't know your limits, you don't know your strength. There are no limits or strength. There is Zen and Zen is you. There are no reasons either.

From Zen, Alucard is but a misguided bird, refusing to be as the part of the world it was meant to be, mistaking its power for a precipice rather than a feature of its complex criticality which has a well-defined and well-placed part in the world. After all, there is no bird and there is no world. There is just the oneness of Zen.

It is to be remembered, however, that Zen does not deny the flow of time, to the contrary it embraces it as a kind of pulse to the oneness of reality. And a contradiction lurks in the imminent duality of motion and immobility that hides beneath the surface... But I will not dwell on that here.






Final Words

This was refreshing. I really missed taking a mental stroll as I did tonight. I am sure my analysis was shallow at points, wrong at others and uneducated at third. I am not trying to convince anyone into a preexisting hypothesis which I have come to, so there is no problem with that. Instead, I am trying to jot down a series of questions and relations which could possibly serve as coarse lanterns down a yet-to-be-built path.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed going down the garden path as much as I enjoyed it myself.