Pointing at the Ether

Why in fact there is no process containing the ether

Image of the Mandlebrot set — An infinitely recursive set analogizing the more you try pointing at the “ether” the less about the world you resolve

From the moment fire was ignited man discovered phenomena reciprocates to antecedent, thus birthing the promethean imperative to lay siege onto the ether in all permutations manifest. No more was the universal an abstraction beyond cognition, but rather an amalgamation of particulars waiting to be assembled. As man watched the apple grace its way down the tree radiating itself onto man’s spatial temporal schema, man was led to believe by capturing the particulars of reality with maximal precision, man could command not only its peripheries but also its essence. A singular point source identifying its ether node wholly discriminate from all others only to be deceived by pointing at an apparition, whilst the rest of his mind, body, and soul dissociated from his being leaving behind just a finger wagging into the void of space. Alas, in his folly be believed he had found the ether but in fact it was only an illusory feign masquerading as the purported ether.

The Ether

This sentiment of identifying this point source “ether” as a telic imperative has foisted itself upon nearly all permutations of contemporary living, thus giving rise to managerialism, bureaucracy, scientism and even the procedural rigidity found within spiritual institutions. This same ether-pointing exercise has been credited for the material surplus present in modern life as both an animating force and process behind the technological progress that has seemingly created everything out of nothing. However, this process is merely illusory, as “pointing” at this “ether” mandates for the phenomenon to predate the observer doing the pointing, thus this process results only in extraction, antithetical to the act of creation.

Within this guiding paradigm, for any phenomenological observation to hold credence within these “ether”-identification axioms, it must be entirely replicable otherwise its rendered null-and-void as if it never happened. These assumptions has fostered the conditions found within contemporary social media mandating we must bask in the perceived novelty of self-derived truth, while recognizing qualia is resultant of an underlying biological primitive that must be documented and later replicated, otherwise the experience is considered invalid and rendered insolvent by outside observers.

Alas, the self is only as solvent as the last documented reference point. Thus arises the paradox that individual experience is incontestability immutable but validated only by external reference points. Any physical reference point the self might be able to attach itself to must ephemerate to the weightlessness of digitization, thus binding the self into the confines of a technocratic process yielding only an illusion of freedom through its material surplus.

Beyond just the immediate ramifications of process dominant thinking, it is a reference frame that's permeated throughout the entire corpus of society. As a culture it would appear we sacrificed the will and consequently story for process, as the precondition for story necessitates the sentience of agency for forward propagations to occur at any decision point. Collectively, we’ve become idle in defaulting to rote path boundary conditions, rather than animating ourselves in the lore of indeterminacy at the nexus of choice.

The larger problem is that we believe this ether can be pointed at and identified indubitably when in fact the “ether” exists between and through us. We cannot separate ourselves from the system we exist in, however there’s been a great fallacy in believing we can function as non-participating indiscriminate observers. Each time we preface a sentence stating “anecdotally speaking” we further separate ourselves from this system, implicitly admitting us as individuals do not have the capacity to enact change onto the world, thus the only valid means of interrogating any truth claims must be resultant of some technological process never of our own intuition and or will.

While we must differentiate between signal and noise at an individual level, absolutely speaking, there is no noise. It’s all part of one melody, a single script, a single verse — the universe.

Fixation onto the Ether

The “fixation-onto-this-ether” has cost a toll on the collective human psyche as we’ve used the premise of a deterministic process to singularly apply our life force into the discovery and identification of said phenomena only to then abdicate our will and agency giving ourselves false reason to surrender, thus absolving ourselves of responsibility, meaning, and dignity. By seeking “ethers” we create coping mechanisms for justifying impotency rather than seeking them out as an opportunity for greatness.

History aficionados will identify how empires fell, writing with definitive conviction and vivid luster into what they believed was the cause for said empire to fall. However, when it comes to changing the course of history themselves in the here-and-now, most if not all will shudder at merely the thought of action, reminding themselves how enemies of a regime get punished for failed attempted revolutions, thus preferring to hide back into the pages of history cowering away from the possibility of discomfort.

Priests will give sermons in the most delicate of prose and reverential of language, opening the Bible to the exact page with the most immaculate of prescriptions for ridding the ills of the community, however, solely pointing at this theological ether is not enough if the parish does not take amends to change their ways. It’s as if the priest is expected only to inform the parishioners on the optimal theological processes, rather than summon the force necessary to enact functional change on his congregation.

Political doomsayers and conspiracy theorists will concoct a masterclass of an intellectual exercise, venturing into what they believe is the source of all problems, reaching what they purport to be the end of ideology only to give themselves self-prescribed justification for why change cannot manifest thus defaulting back to the status quo order they detest. Their ability to identify the “ether” becomes a source of their ego and a signaling mechanism against the intellectually “inferior” plebs, thus in their formation of the world all the undue suffering is resultant from the collective amnesia of the masses not wanting to discover absolute truth.

Much of contemporary discourse follows this trendline thus eventually converging down to the primitives of biological and or environmental determinism alongside more sophisticated theories that synthesize both deterministic permutations in varying proportions. Regardless of the proportion between the aforementioned determinisms, the assumptions are still unchanged as there’s an aggregate process resultant in any said phenomena. We most especially see these themes in the hotly contested discourses involving athletic and scholastic ability, relegating causation to either their training regiment in the form of a cultural process or genetics via the identification of said responsible gene(s).

Modern education focuses only on the residue of knowledge, never the animating force directing that vector through space time as the personhood of the scientist is mostly discarded from the fruit of their achievement outside of nominal attribution to the experimentally-derived constant or observed phenomena. Scientific theory is taught solely in the purview of its outputs as the inputs are haphazardly discarded under the presumption that they’re entirely interchangeable as any other set of inputs would yield the same output under a different set of conditions.

Even when education is discussed in the aggregate, emphasis is placed on the efficiency of acquiring said educational credentials via some academic process rather than the ideas and content animating the education itself. Something is fundamentally broken for us to have reached this point, but given that ideas and discoveries are treated as commodities rather than appreciating assets, it’s no surprise that this type of behavior has manifested.

Under this imperative to point-at-the-ether, a collective entitlement has arisen towards expecting any said measurement to be transactionally pattern matched. Once any seemingly sensible sequence has emerged out of said measured phenomena, a hyper-completion automatically ensues thus defaulting to any prior analog test-case as a reasonable surrogate to the base rate phenomena being observed. This is hubris masquerading as knowledge rather than anything resembling reverence and humility towards interrogating the natural physical world with any intellectual honesty.

Consequently, learning does not become an integration event indistinguishably unifying the person with said knowledge and it’s origin node propagation, but rather a zero sum exercise via the perfection of a process. You’re limited only to extracting and deriving from a preexisting construct, never generating anew from first principles. This process is empirical by nature, but is only ever interested in sampling a “good enough” trendline without ever interrogating the fundamentals of the curve itself.

False Dialectic between Knowing & Doing

The “fixation-onto-the-ether” metastasized into the false premise that knowing and doing can be entirely separated as if they’re two discrete non-overlapping entities, thus forging the managerial class in its wake. There’s an apt quote by the historian Thucydides capturing a similar sentiment, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools”. While war may be a less frequent occurrence in contemporary first-world living in contrast to the age of antiquity, this same dichotomy referenced by Thucydides exists in the modern world between the managerial “knowing” class and the engineering & services “doing” class.

The doing is frowned upon by the managerial class because all doing is assumed as entirely interchangeable, thus belittling any surplus willpower expended as senseless toil because the optimal process had not been discovered. It’s almost an anti-human framing of the world, analogous to demanding a specific outcome to a story before even setting eyes on the first page. It’s like robbing the oxygen from the author of a novel before the whiff of the title cover has yet to seep onto your face.

While managerial language can loosely describe business requirements of what should be done, what the managerial class fails to comprehend is that the creative act exists independently outside the machinated boundaries of the knowing-doing dialectic. There’s something non-replicable in the tango between the creator and the created. Whether that’s a designer envisioning a mockup, an engineer building a prototype or a blacksmith smattering steel, the cadence of the creative act follows its own episodic sequences, thus operating on its own prerogative and never that of the manager. When man tries bending the fabric of reality to his will, mother nature will operate on her own timeline dictating how things will unfold regardless of how resolute we are in imposing our cause onto the world.

There’s no reason to create a barrier between building and doing, rather the “knower” should build until they’ve reached their wits end. Neither should there exist a dialectic between knowing and doing but rather a unity between visionary and craftsman, instead of a contrived dialectic between manager and worker.

The founder, at least the true founder that has fully surrendered himself to the vision is a model archetype of what the manager should be. The founder does not create epistemic boundaries, they do what must be doing to summon the vision into being. Unlike the manager, optimizing the perfect process is anathema to the founder, rather, their only internal metric is whether or not a perfect manifestation of their vision has come into being. In that sense the founder is like the artist or musician whereas the only functional difference is the founder orchestrates a union of people into said vision while the artist and musician contends mostly with themselves for acquiring the specific skills to bring into the world the most virile permutation of their vision.

Ultimately because the managerial class has decided to place this barrier between knowing and doing, they find no great struggle to commune with thus becoming too timid to chase greatness, too fearful to take a leap of faith, too arrogant to build anything with their hands, and too numb to ever acquire wisdom.

Primacy of Process

This imperative to “point-at-the-ether” has culminated into a primacy towards process that begins first by defining that which is not. Thus by indefinitely separating assemblages piecemeal via negation within latent space, the world continuously gets dissociated into infinitesimally smaller indiscernible pieces. The “primacy-of -process” rejects universally integrated worldframes, thus eroding meaning itself mandating that the irreducible essence must be an atomized particle rather than a contiguously formed whole. Consequently there can’t be formed persons acting onto the world that directly intervene between cause-and-effect but rather there can only be a singular point source predetermining all propagation.

The primary gravitation towards process is its idempotent immutability, thus adherence to process in the aggregate mandates down-regulation of the will and obligation towards an invariant universal output. However by pointing at the ether, one becomes subject and defined to a particular thus becoming unable to induct a particular into a universal — a recursive self-abdication of personhood. Process to its logical conclusion necessitates there can be neither incongruent indeterminacy of the will nor individual usurpations operating outside the confines of process.

Within these aprioris, achievement can only be distinguished as a checkpoint in part of a larger process. Greatness for its own sake standing outside the constructs of space-time becomes castigated for there is no process that can yield such outcomes. This “primacy-of-process” down-regulates actions onto a predictable bounded space, for if it cannot be measured or foreseen, it’s better discarded as noise than to even consider it be a kernel of hope to draw inspiration from.

The “primacy-of-process” has enabled the false dialectic separating the knowing from the doing, thus culminating into a world where people are more inclined to donate money to an organization with documented processes under the purview of greater effectiveness than to take matter in their own hands by enacting change themselves. While the organization could indeed be more effective in resource allocation towards improving said cause, collectively people have been beaten down into subservience, falsely believing they themselves are unable to enact change onto the world when operating under these worldframes.

The internet schizo archetype exists as a rebellion to this process-dominated world, attempting to deny the self by becoming a transducer of all signal. Rather than containerize and reframe phenomena into ever reducing boxes, the schizo spontaneously integrates everything, even at the expense of their personhood and sanity by denying their own capacity for agency to enact change onto the world. The schizo rejects the singular point-source propagation but then falsely rejects themselves in their introspective prognostications. What the schizo gets incorrect is that agency does not come at the expense of awareness as those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

The famous Harvard Address “A World Split Apart” given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, encapsulated a similar sentiment towards the “primacy-of-process” when he criticized the ardent legalism of the contemporary West proclaiming the written law reigns above any and all common sense. We can give diagnosis but without clarity, we can give legal authority but without common sense, and we can give explanation but without meaning. We see this same phenomenon taking shape in the gender debates over legalistic dialogues of what specifically is the point-source of gender. Regardless of what your eyes, mind or heart might tell you, the final say of what the gender in question is must come down to some point-source measurement (ex. hormonal ratio) and nothing else.

The Intrinsic and the Apparent

What the “ether” in all its many permutations represents is the emphasis on the apparent rather than the intrinsic. “Pointing-at-the-ether” is the logical conclusion of demanding to resolve only the apparent at the expense of the intrinsic regarding formalized prescriptions of what the world is and how it ought to be.

This same dialectic applied to the manifold of story resolves into an “ether” camp of the “apparent” fixated onto the periphery via the physical descriptions of the characters alongside the superimposition of archetypal superstructures typically at the expense of foregoing the essence of the story that is understood only through intuition rather than measure.

The analogy of the “apparent” applied to language resolves meaning by fixating at the point source of each word rather than its amalgam thus resulting into linguistic outputs entirely bereft of meaning. Language cannot be an isolate “ether”, for the cross-pollination of language mandates projection and subsequent prognostication from the linguistic exchange from one embodied being to another, as there’s an unbroken continuity from the spoken utterance and culmination of the speakers life up until that point.

This “ether” analysis of language also has major implications in the consciousness debate. An ardent contingent of people argue that the LLM is an example of emergent consciousness due to the coherence of the sentences being outputted within machine-human dialogues. Other examples follow that since an LLM can use first-person language that in-of-itself is evidence that the machine is becoming conscious. If the fundamental irreducible representation is a particle and not a formed essence manifest as a human, it’s easy to then assume consciousness must be resultant of some mechanistic physical process rather than something intangible like a soul. These conclusions become possible if the “apparent” takes precedent over the “intrinsic”, **however, neither does this mean an analysis done via the “apparent” does not have a valid function in the appropriate context.

Even within theological institutions you can see this same emphasis on the “ether” especially in fundamentalist permutations where people try approaching holiness by physical proximity, almost forgetting that salvation transcends the physical body. Christians will pilgrimage from around the world to venerate a holy relic, almost treating the veneration as some type of intermediary to expunge them of their spiritual ills by physically being closer to holiness. While this fervor is more accurate towards the fundamentalist variety and is not part of official theological doctrine, this behavior does communicate towards a theme of the imperative of an immutable process— the identification of the “ether”.

It’s not hard to see that one parent forcing their kid to venerate a holy relic as an accelerant towards salvation is not at all different from another parent sending their children into a summertime math program as an accelerant towards scholastic success and or a Nobel prize award. Taking action through a self-generated character (LARPing) is fundamental to the human experience, however the question that is being posited here is whether that arose organically from within or rather is something more akin to a peacocking exercise done out of a false imitation.

Conclusions

“Pointing-at-the-ether” has resulted in the creation of a class of people with enough wit to identify problems but not enough courage to manifest solutions into being because the identification of the “ether” has given them ever more the reason to acquiesce into obsolescence.

“Pointing-at-the-ether” is getting stuck at the immediacy of the apparent whilst entirely missing the intrinsic regarding any phenological claim.

We see this happen when people read books as they try transliterate the conclusions of said text by attempting to recreate the environment via artificially contrived boundary conditions. Every action that happens in physically reality is idempotent, you functionally can’t recreate anything. The authors retrospection was resultant of said authors life in the amalgam, thus any attempt to extract and recreate the animus of said words describing the lived moment post mortem will fail.

This is like attempting to engineer greatness by envisioning yourself as Albert Einstein when he was a patent clerk spending hours on end imagining himself as a ray-of-light traversing through space-time. You cannot be something that you are not, we can and should be inspired by great acts of man but this surrogate of actually replacing greatness with a process has been profoundly destabilizing to the human condition at large.

We must learn to believe and trust ourselves so that we don’t become slave to process. This means we read said stories, internalize them as much as practically possible to then thus forge our own stories and operate on our own cadence to then see what derivatives we may arrive at in our retrospections post mortem.

We’ve sacrificed story for process, willpower for boundary conditions and created hollowed-out shells of humans that have lost touch with their humanity seeing themselves entirely interchangeable with a machine and or algorithm. By doing this we cannot enamor ourselves in the resolve that man can muster, thus we can only see athletes as an output of a specific training regiment and or particular set of gene(s). Human greatness has to be cast out to the wayside because this “other” thing in the form of a said process becomes the attribution for that greatness.

Process taken to its logical conclusions abjectly kills meaning and the human experience, thus we must find the resolve to believe in ourselves once again such that we stop assuming that circumstance and the inexorable externalities of life define us. We can and must believe we can impose our will onto the world and that this will is not by accident nor something beyond the immediacy of volition. We go from subject-to-object, person-to-process and eventually man-to-machine. Before one can realize, by down-regulating all intuition for process you must eventually start hating that which cannot be recreated without reprise, thus being forced to hate even beauty for much of the beauty in this world cannot be explained solely by logic and reason.

When you see the apple grace its way down the tree, let us stop the urge to “point-at-the-ether” and let us commune again with the mind, body and soul to thus create beauty, plenty and fruit with that same finger that was once pointing into the ether of space. The time to generate is now.

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