Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 8)

Hello and welcome to the final session of Quernomics, Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality with Nick Land. Here he is. Can you hear me, Nick? Yes, yes. I sort of suddenly lost video quality, but I don't think anything disastrous has happened. Can you still hear me? Yeah, you're loud and clear. OK, that's great. OK, hi, everybody. Congratulations on getting this far to making it

to this point in things. So obviously, this is our last session. And I'm assuming a lot of what we might want to do this time is kind of wrap up discussion on all kinds of things that have occurred from either of the two modules. But I want to introduce one new element. I'm not sure it will be new to everybody. but I think it's a necessary piece of semi-autic machinery to throw into the mix, really. and it addresses the question if QWERTY is a kind of spontaneously organized

massively distributed cultural communication um how do we start uh getting a solid sense upon the the code that we're dealing with if we if there's any i know the word communication is is something that from the delers and quatari side is a is a problematic term but but if if we're in a mode if a kind of preliminary cryptographic mode and we're dealing with some kind of alien signal how do we start in some systematic way processing that signal and how it works and

And let me just make a crucial link here, which is, I hope everyone has seen Amy's diagram. It's not, I think, available on the actual NCRNP site, but I've been sticking it up all over the place. it's I've when I did my own UF blog announcement of the course I put it up there quite large I hope it's legible I don't to be honest I don't think I think

once you get what it's what it's saying you it's not that it needs to be read more than seen but it's important to understand what it is that you are actually seeing in this diagram and this is really my my attractor for this for this early first part of the session just to try and get a get across what this diagram is doing why it's important why it has I think the claim to be the fundamental and authoritative diagrammatic I'll say representation of what

QAnomics is about in this sense that we've been exploring in the in the second module obviously the first module I don't think you would need this it would seem extravagant and bizarre and perhaps a little disturbing to have this diagram introduced when when dealing with the history of typewriting machines and the lock-in of the QWERTY keyboard but I but I think when we're at the stage we are now and we're actually trying to rather than talk about the lock-in of some kind of distribution in general of which QWERTY is simply an entirely arbitrary example when we're moving beyond that and say well given that this

is what we've got how to actually work diagram becomes absolutely crucial and um at the risk of boring everybody I think I'll go back to things that I've said a lot in various different times and just apply it in this is starting with the fact here in fact I went I went stop there I'll take one step further back and I'll and I'll read a section from the Geology of Morals if that's

okay and which we'll come back to and this comes late in the in the essay and And it's talking after having turned itself primarily with the strata, it starts to talk about the outside of the strata in a slightly more focused way. And this is on page 70 of my edition. the plane of consistency retains just enough of the strata to extract from them variables that operate on the plane of consistency as its own functions the plane of consistency or plenomenon is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed matters but neither is it

chaos of formed matters of every kind so yeah i'll go back over it rather than trying to gloss it as well as really it is true that on the plane of consistency where there are no longer forms or substances content or expression respective and relative de-territorializations but beneath the forms and substances of the strata the plane of consistency or the abstract machine constructs continuums of intensity there their emphasis there it creates continuity for intensities that it extracts from different forms and substances beneath contents expressions the plane of consistency or the abstract machine emits and combines particle signs that set the most a signifying of signs to functioning in the most de-territorialized particles

beneath relative movements the plane of consistency or the abstract machine performs conjunctions flows of deterritorialization that transform the respective indexes into absolute values the only intensities known to the strata are discontinuous bound up in forms and substances the only particles are divided into particles of contents and articles expression the only deterritorized flows are disjointed lives continuum of intensities combined emission of particles or particle signs conjunction of deterritorialized flows these are the three factors proper to the plane of consistency they are brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of de-stratification

um so i don't think that this discourse is um easily tractable it i think i think it's demanding um but i think it's possible to uh make some progress with it and i think it's very deeply connected with our um our problem or our task in this in this module especially of the course um so how do we go about systematically um engaging this material i mean simultaneously the

the text that I've just read and our problem of the what is the actual semiotic the code of the of the of the QWERTY apocalypse and as I'm sure people might predict or anticipate my inclination immediately is to treat it as a critical problem in the traditional sense and to move towards a solution through the construction of a diagonalization matrix and I want to say

straight away that I think destratification and diagonalization I'm going to treat as being basically synonymous. So how does this very abstract critical apparatus operate in the context that we now find ourselves? Well, I think, perhaps surprisingly, there's an extremely cogent way that this of the of the problem of QWERTY into a piece of critical machinery and to critique. um or immanentization can take place and that to take and that involves a series of

of translation exercises which we i think were especially touching upon last week the clue is a connection between the fracturing breaking of intensities on the one hand and consistency in ordering between the two systems that we have available which is to say that if you're going to transmit a model of broken intensity

with the implicit coding resources that we have in QWERTY, given the fact that the alphabet exists as a precursor and therefore we have this double semiotic system implicit, is that if any semiotic assemblage is not consistently ordered in the two systems, then it is actually communicating a specific breakage of intensity. so if we were going to do our diagonalization matrix it would not be

I think extremely difficult we have we have of course I'm going to treat it minimalistically which I think is always helpful and is in the best philosophical tradition of this problem so we have our our grid of um four cells two by two that grid is set by the fact that we have consistent and inconsistent pairs of signs in both the alphabetical and the QWERTY arrangement so any particular it's if it's again in

the sake of simplicity I don't think we lose anything methodically in doing this because things can then be built up systematically from this basis if you break things down to the combinatoric atoms you can pair each character with each of the other characters and so you have a total possibility if we're taking the whole of the alpha numix series it's a total of 1260 pairs of characters and if we're just if we're just dealing with the alphabetical section it's 650 pairs and there there might be reasons

to take either of these but i think that the the is not affected particularly by that decision as long as it's made clearly and each of those pairs of characters is going to fit into a cell in our two by two grid it's going to actually be alphabetically ordered or disordered and And in the QWERTY arrangement, it's also going to be ordered and disordered. So any particular combination of characters is going to either be disordered in both, alphabetically but disordered in QWERTY, disordered in QWERTY but disordered alphabetically or ordered both in QWERTY and in and alphabetically

i'm going to just provide another little link here which i think might be it's unclear what this would be without the context that i've just given but maybe in this context if it's clear so The content of this is encoded comprehensively within Amy's diagram.

It's, I think, and I'm saying this without huge confidence, I'm not sure what's at stake in this anyway, so I'm not going to agonise. I think it's complete. I've tried to be systematic about it. and one of the interesting things in trying to complete this this the complete set of letter groups which are do not involve repeated elements that are consistent in both the alphabetically and in quality and it's a surprisingly small a set that's not just two letter groups that's the that's the complete set of

all groups it obviously falls off quite fast because to be a three letter combination to be consistent is obviously much more demanding than for two better group to be consistent and as you get longer that becomes more and more constraining. So just to get back to what our diagonalization matrix looks like, if we're just doing it with two letter combinations, we have a list in each of the four cells. I'm going to take it, and this might be something

people would want to argue about, but I'm going to take it just, again, out of the critical tradition, that the first cell, elements that are disordered, both in the alphabet and in QWERTY, can be basically discarded. You know, this is the cell that I think corresponds in the Kantian system to um analytic a posteriori judgments that they're just it's just there for the sake of conceptual completion but they but it has no content it's a it's this kind of null the null

cell in the in the system the the ones that are i think interesting for us coming out of the strata is is that the ordered in one but disordered in the other the two uh cells like that that again if we're using just a kantian analogy correspond to the traditional um the traditional judgments of analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori judgments those are the pincers that those are the strata those that is the vocabulary the combinatorial elements of fractured intensities

of discontinuous fractured intensities and what you find in the final cell the diagonal line on this table are what Deleuze and Guattari refer to in this thing emphatically as we've seen as as continuums of intensity they are consistent in both dimensions so they extract from the strata they extract from the systems of discontinuous intensity and a this double consistency that means that they are

outside the pincers they don't break into structures of content and expression forms and substances, codes or particles, all of this all of this stratic articulation is. So um Amy's diagram you can see a this is a diagrammatic representation of exactly the same conceptual system that we've just been talking in philosophical and and in in sort of paralinguistic terms because any can any any continuum of intensity

we know from de leuze and qataris uh writings if not from elsewhere is going to be a consistent series of envelopments that that's every intensity when you have a when you have a conjunction of intensity it is always a relation of envelopment and and and and um are therefore these uh these sets these continuums that have that are divided internally by thresholds and that when you cross these these thresholds it internal to the intensity

um there is a change of nature from from one state to another within a continuous quantitative axis with quantitative obviously in the intensive sense, quantity being that which cannot divide without changing in nature as opposed to the strata sense of quantity where it's opposed to quality and quantification in the strata index is always a machine of homogenization standardization regularization that allows that allows units to be aggregated without changing the nature of the system considered

so on the diagram we can see any consistent series of envelopments that happen on that correspond to a term in the diagonal box of our diagonalization matrix, and they will correspond to a term in a dictionary of consistent alpha quotient consistent terms. All three of those things are all interchangeable and inter-translatable. um so actually my inclination at this point if it does

that seemed to be slacking up too much to people is to pitch out of to address anything that people think is but I don't be interested in what people how people want to elaborate off of this question or other questions that we've been I think I think this machinery that we've looked at however briefly within these three aspects is the is the basic channel of cryptographic access to the QWERTY system and to what the quernomics are in there foreigners in a certain sense this for me at least a capstone of quernomics as an enterprise it sort of

gives that it gives us our basic definition basic theoretical structure for what we're doing dealing with with this this science system I think I'll I'll hand it over to people now. So kind of on the topic or as a way of triangulating this in terms of diagonalization,

and what the sort of proper practice of dealing with this immanentizing problematic is. I was thinking actually like a half an hour ago, I kind of realized that the AQ encoder, the Anglossic Kabbalah encoding of various phrases and words and so forth is something which has to be, is obligately synthetically constructed. Because even if you use a computer to like, you know, match and produce encodings and so forth, It's not going to be able to render anything but some superset of possible things from which someone will then go and have to check and put things together and code them to certain words. It's an intrinsically synthetic network that needs another machine to be producing it and to be produced in tandem with it.

And then that that is precisely analogous to the way in TX, the natural number line has to be synthetically constructed. like you have to go through the process of counting primes and of factorizing in order to do it in the first place and so it requires this machinic loop and I that you know that sort of definitely reminded me of what you said about anti romanticism in relation to diagonalization that synthetic process I'm just wondering is there a way to cash that out in terms of chronomics as being the same like especially with these letter pairings then sort of how to use them together or how to manipulate their consistency is there like a similarity is that another example something that has to be synthetically done if that makes sense yes this is an interesting thing I look of the of the

examples that you've given in in talking about this Jake mm-hmm when you were talking about alphanumeric cabalism is the one that i would sort of most yeah i i can i can see absolutely clearly that the tx system is like is like you say you just simply don't have the number line as something sort of intuitively given in that system and can you can i just kind of get from you again what what you think the analogous element is it seemed from what you're saying that you're saying it's the selective process from that there's the selective process

is somehow the synthetic process in that is that is that i just like so that yeah and here is or well i guess it's yours like your um aq dictionary and sort of the process of so i pick a specific phrase that like comes up in conversation that just strikes me I put it in there and I get like a series of encodings there's no way for those strings of connection with a particular encoding to be constructed in any way other than synthetically right like even like you have someone you have to spontaneously bring in like an actual exterior impulse to check a particular number to check a particular phrase and phrases in particular become part of like a dictionary of this. Yes, the dictionary, I guess, is the right way to put it. The dictionary for

AQ or any particular dictionary has to be path dependent and synthetically constructed. It's an obligate synthesis is involved, no matter how many actors are involved in constructing it, even if they use computational tools, sophisticated ones for doing the arithmetic ahead. It has to be constructed that way. And that just reminded me, and triadically as well, between the numbers and especially between two agents or any, I guess between the numerical series, the disunified agent, which is anyone else using or constructing this dictionary, and my insertion into it or like search query into it form this sort of triadic progression in terms of constructing particular series of equivalences that sort of spark semantic meaning or something.

and that seems to function both as like within that general matrix of diagonalization and in terms of the synthetic diagonal which is the construction of the natural number line in Tx which has no natural existence in it. Right. Yes, I mean there's something I'm inclined to throw in here actually because it's obviously that the Kant synthetic analytic distinction is not uncontroversial as we know you know and especially within the analytic tradition there's been a tendency I think obviously the most famous landmark on this is Quine's essay calling it into question to really sort of try and

dismantle the whole thing and say it's badly founded and I don't think Kant is very helpful in certain regards on this especially when he's in the area closest to us on saying that these elementary arithmetical calculations you know his exam seven plus five equals twelve is is he says patently synthetic because it has content that isn't analytically available in any of the elements there I don't think he's making the strongest case for the distinction in doing that and I think you we now have a much stronger supportive structure for the

analytic synthetic distinction that comes out of asymmetric cryptography and it's obviously very close actually to the Zenit Asian example you give yes Yes, Wanyong is totally right. Where these cryptographic functions, trapdoor functions, now they're extremely useful to us because obviously a trapdoor function is actually the same thing as a lock-in event. You know, if we go back to the start of our course, the whole the whole historical lock-in structure is is deeply deeply isomorphic with the with the

function of trapdoor with with trapdoor functions in um cryptography and and the classic example of a trapdoor function is asia so you you have an asymmetry and i apologize to people if this is all very obvious but it just I'll be really quick so there's this crucial and crypt cryptographically extremely valuable and functional characteristic which is that it's vastly simpler to do the arithmetical production of two numbers to multiply any two numbers by each other compared to the task of

factorizing those numbers and the or sorry factorizing the resultant product um um which which takes a lot a lot more work and work here i think is in exactly the same sense so it's it connects without uh difficulty to the way that work is used in in modern cryptography to do with with proof of work um so the the work you have to do is exactly this kind of um is the the the reverse slope the painful slope of this asymmetric arithmetical relation yes one-way hashes there's a whole um you know a set of arithmetical uh possibilities for this um

yes if we've got I didn't say anything about SHA but SHA is completely appropriate to this cryptographic hashes in general as as Adam says and so what I want to propose is that this the The trapdoor function is the most solid and reliable of an analytic synthetic distinction. That the analytic side is the side that is relatively effortless and the synthetic side is the difficult side. this kind of this super abundance of difficulty on one side of the trapdoor function is the act

is the sort of cryptographic grasp of the analytic synthetic distinction um so anyway sorry i i probably shouldn't go any further down this line but it's just to say it seems obviously relevant to the kind of things that that jake is saying here that we want to find um if we're going to talk about an analytic synthetic distinction at work in these in these various systems we want to find where there is some kind of trapdoor function at work where the production um vastly more effortless than the um tempted obviously to say analysis but that would be extremely unhelpful then the decomposition or

or the actual thrashing out of the puzzle set by that product. I think the blockchain or the cryptographic process of the blockchain, I really love in comparison there because it's kind of a zipping together of three processes of in tandem analysis and synthesis, which is value, time, and cryptographic step, essentially, or the process of finding primes. And so by zipping those together, by being able to equate the steps in the equation to signs of time, or signs of the time,

and then put that into a value system is kind of what creates the machine. It's that triad of syntheses, like thermodynamic cryptographic and computational I guess would be the time since computational time those syntheses like zip together or what allows it to do actual work and to sort of expand itself as an autonomous abstract machine yeah we're looking for that place where those three sit together which with QWERTY you know maybe you just throw out as layout you know alphabetic ordering and QWERTY ordering something along those lines you could point it out in other places as well like these sort of three plane intersections. So I think that's right and you can see that we're actually always talking about time production, time synthesis.

When you generate through a trapdoor function an asymmetry and therefore an irreversibility, you're actually looking at the production of time and so as we'd always expect from the transcendental philosophy this our analytics synthetic problem and the sort of philosophical investigation transcendental analysis of time turn out to be the same thing with a robustness that can obviously be carried into history wherever we see a lock-in phenomenon we're

actually seeing not only something happening in time we're seeing chronogenesis actually happen in that process. And sort of similarly to the linear asymmetric sort of like lock-in providing this basis for chronogenesis it seems like that as a secondary product you could also say produces other not as we simply linearly asymmetric forms of time that are like on the keyboard like there in terms of hands pounding things out on the keyboard that is sort of a moment like a time of corny and then if you look at what makes it so like what kinds of associations are being struck or being keyed every time these movements happen they're dictated by these recursive loop relationships

among the among the keys in terms of their of a sort of double asymmetry their asymmetry in each direction creates these loops of these loops of keys which define a sort of consistent time or sort of time strata of the keyboard which is itself made possible by the sort of global asymmetry of lock-in chronogenesis yes sort of a stratic stack there i guess yes and if and if we're expecting it if we're expecting then this system to talk about itself then it should be able to actually um it should actually be able to model

locking processes so it's not only that it is itself the outcome of a of a lock-in process but the phenomena in general of lock-in of these asymmetric thresholds becomes something that is is a kind of content for the for the code potential that we're we're dealing with Is that the articulation of two senders, or is it more necessarily more complex than that? You have to just lead us off on a tangent.

Yeah, I have no follow-up. So I think Theodore was saying he couldn't hear you, Jake, on your point. I was waiting for you. I was just saying, sorry. Is that the relationship of two senders, that sort of double asymmetry that makes a basis for encoding possible? We said sort of like a message sent from X to X. And then sort of what are we, so as the, again, analysts is like now an overdetermined term, but as the navigator. I don't know, I think that's a complicated question. Isn't it? It's a really complicated question because obviously the message The basic message is the

actual cryptographic Protocol so to speak in that is itself It's self encrypted and so what our initial task is actually to engage in this in this initial decryption process which is just actually to to to try and get some purchase on the actual cryptographic protocol itself and so then the question of well are we dealing with messages in terms of particular applications protocol I don't know that it's a really interesting question and I don't know I mean you could obviously say everything every semiotic a whole a whole archive of

alphanumeric semiotic systems is is then retrospectively structured as as set of messages that can be approached through this I think yeah So if you're tempted by the extreme quernomic thesis, once you have actually begun to kind of hack the actual cryptographic protocol that the Quernet Apocalypse has delivered to us, then you would just be running through your library archive, running all of those concrete semiotic systems through this protocol.

And the whole of a culture would now have this unconscious, this quonomic unconscious, that is being probed through this system. but I think we're I'm taking it we're not there yet you know in the sense that I think we're in a more preparatory stage that that might be presumptuous of me to say that and of course what any of you are up to but so that was just my default hypothesis yeah and I think the idea was like before that

idea of a preparatory stage was to sort of rather than figure a two-place relation to like start with of sort of us probing on one end through the system versus this unconscious that it's risen if we sort of like end the figure that I post in the sidebar is like if our entire semiotic archive was found you know stripped of context or just like honored something by aliens what message or what set of messages would it be so if we imagine ourselves as like sort of deciding what is what triangle are we forming yeah this sort that would this x's message to do this exit because even if aliens found it it wouldn't be a set of messages to them right or it wouldn't be a mess of messages from anyone like any patterns they might extract from

and any you know would be sent by so I don't know where that goes but it's a way of seeing ourselves as trying no no definitely I think that's really really good I mean like if our alien if all cultural continuity is extinct except for the fact that this archive still exists at least in sizable fragments and all our aliens have is a few legible keyboards and the alphabet or the alphanumeric series could they on that basis what could they on that basis

alone extract from the archive of all alphanumerically encoded information deposits and again I think that the extreme economic thesis would say they could they could ultimately extract everything you know but they would extract it from the back door where all our conventions of kind of communication would be would be embedded within this kind of cultural machine code of how

this of how this actually has been almost like geologically geologically deposited through this through this implicit this implicit I'll say discourse on stratification which you know they can they can get an exact they could do an exact complicated quasi geological diagram of all of these messages consisting purely of stratograms that's we know and within those stratograms that they I mean the implication of the of the extreme chronomic thesis is

within those stratograms would be contained everything that is a topic geological moral so that would include the whole of the alloplastic stratum and therefore within that the whole of the whole history of interest species human communications but approached out of the machine rather than approached out of human cultural as we as we ourselves see it um can I throw in perhaps a really basic question at that point it does seem connected to where we are where where are

the models in the geology of morals I'm sorry can you just repeat that question because your audio is terrible in the gap oh no okay so it's a different location yeah it's brilliant now no suddenly brilliant yeah okay the actual question was where are the morals in the geology of morals because I can see the geo over the place I see the call out to Nitschke all over the place but the actual specific so beyond that being would play on the semiotic sort of download of the entire cultural archive sort of question so I I thought I would... Yes.

I'd just be interested to... Yes, no, it's a good question, actually. It's a very good question. You know, sort of, as you say, taking for granted that there's a play on each other, that can't be the end of the question. So you assume they have some positive reason to preserve that word. Yes. and I don't know I I've now prejudiced myself by what I've just been saying you know and so I'm not sure I can any longer attain the level of detachment would be required to to answer that question well I mean do you have any any

I was struggling with it but I think it's an interesting angle yeah I'm not sure if lose track which one is Jake and which one is Theo in the the hidden behind us I don't stay on a right the lobster of the sidebar here but judgment yeah yeah um is actually a really good angle on it um so I'm not sure if they wanted to open in it's the question more coherently than I think I can at this point I mean my only guess really is the judgments of God thing like that's

or that's the only thing in the text that I remember that jumps out at me is potentially having a moral equivalency or elephants they become like like encoded commandments after the you know that's that sort of the structure of this did it the chronomic analysis of ATP into a search for like thanks nice It's also like methodologically taken from the genealogy of morals because it's a genetic account of individuation in a way, wouldn't you say? Like it's a genealogy of like, well, yeah, I mean to use the language that Nick was using last week, compensatory structures.

So I guess there's a methodological link. Right. Yes, but geological moralists in a way saying that we're not dealing purely with something ethological in talking about morals where we're not doing anything different when we were talking, I mean in Jake's terms, we're talking about judgments of God all the way down so we don't have to fundamentally change our transcendental conceptual apparatus when we cross out of the realm of recognizable human cultural concerns. I mean is that in tune with what you're saying Amy or am I just taking it off in a certain direction? Yeah, no, that's exactly what I was saying. But I also have like a deeper, weirder interpretation

of this because I've been obsessing over it all week. Great. after going to a philosophy conference last week where I did a panel with a friend who I often collaborate with and we always write these ridiculously synergetic papers and we haven't realized how close they connect until we actually give them and it turned out that he was giving his paper after me about the geology of morals and the gates of the silver key and the kind of like Nicole Carter Challenger story. And he was obsessed with this line at the end, which talks about Challenger's poison garden.

Right. And he's writing a kind of thesis on sorcery and Nietzsche. And the first thing he connected it to was the fact that Nietzsche's share house, his first share house in Baloo was known locally as the Poison Hut and had somehow threaded this through Deleuze's enigmatic references to Nietzsche's secret in some of the essays that are published in Desert Islands and Lucelieu apparently having said that Nietzsche's secret was without giving away what it was that it was somehow connected to the horror of the eternal return. And so that kind of started this whole weird line of investigation about this kind of reference to the poison garden, which led to me, like talking about

this kind of methodological way of dealing with these different kinds of individuation, whether they're sort of moral, cultural, chemiophysical, biological, alloplastic as they're kind of termed in this particular chapter, led to me looking at the French version of the chapter. And it's really interesting because the line about this particular line, so it's on like the second last page. In my version it's 81, but in the more common edition it's 73. The line that says, disarticulated, de-territorialized, challenger muttered that he was taking the

earth with him. Mysterious world is poison garden, which in French reads like this, which is really weird because poison garden is jardin venomous. Two different words for poisonous or venomous. that is applicable only to plants and to the plant world in the vegetable world and one that is applicable only to animals. And so the French for the plant world is veninue, which is not this one, and the French for poisonous animals is veninue. So it's weird

because they've deliberately referred to this kind of organic place, the garden, as being poisonous in the way that an animal is poisonous. So there's kind of you know this idea that there's a sort of the garden that he's going to is this kind of cross animal vegetable assemblage or it doesn't have a kind of differentiation between those two ways of thinking about things which kind of corresponds with the methodological position. But it's also interesting because when you think like a French person would think about it as the garden having some kind of sentience, a sort of like inhuman will, a creepy like a malevolent kind of will.

So there's this strange way of referring to the garden. And you know there's a whole other bunch of weird lines that that led me to follow including references to Challenger having a poisonous, poisonous comportment or something like that in the Arthur Conan Doyle books, here it is. Right. But anyway, we're, I'm in the midst of this like kind of idea that there's some kind of nature conspiracy going on in this particular chapter but that's as far as I've gotten with that particular way of thinking of it Adam but I have yeah without going it's like somewhere that's

even worse than that so I'll just stop now sorry somewhere worse somewhere worse than what somewhere worse than where you've taken us so far I don't know, when you say worse, can I just at least get an abstract sense of what worse would mean in this case? Well there's two levels of worstness. I can share the first one because it actually supports the extreme chronomic hypothesis really well. disconnected from Nietzsche. But the other strange thing that turned up reading the French

original was that Challenger then, a little bit further down the passage, so Challenger or what remained of him slowly hurried towards the plane of consistency, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assemblage setting as a drum gate, the particle clock, with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute. The figure slumped ugly into a post just guess the human and became curious, fascinated, sort of shuffle towards the coffin-shaped clock, etc. So I started trying to answer your question, Nick about what happened in Three Novellas and kind of started with the

clue about body posture. There's a line a little bit further on about the inhuman posture of Challenger and reading it through the kind of the lines with their different forms of the secret that are sort of taxonomized in the Three novellas chapter. But I found this particular really interesting difference in the French translation when I was trying to figure out what the hell the drum gate was. So in the French it gives this So a drum gate is a portes d'ombre which is like literally in French it's a gate drum or

door drum but it actually means in French a revolving door so you basically the machinic assemblage that leads to the plane of consistency is described as a revolving door which you can probably like diagram like this completely connects up with the rotating beacons and This is really like the fact that this is in the Wikipedia article that I just posted. It says, like I assume that this is enough of a platitude about revolving doors that you can put it in a Wikipedia article. It says, Which translates as, in most cases, the rotation of the doors goes in the opposite direction

into the hands of a clock. Right. Which I thought was interesting. Yes, yes. Interesting. Suggestive, yes. Yeah. And then I guess that's level two. And I kind of put together a little sort of description of what happened, which I can post into the sidebar. I mean everyone I miss it's clear you're on this but everyone remembers this thing about the I always lose this thing this thing are the machine assemblage rotating in all direction

like beacons yes that's 73 of mine well I've sort of repeated so much last week so maybe I don't need to but obviously this which looks like beacons definitely seems to connect with this clock this clock issue a lot doesn't it um yeah I just checked it out um on the on the aq and got like immediately got a trifecta of 245s which was the first time that's ever happened to really blew me away but um it gave me this right so i'm gonna go i couldn't yes i mean and then i guess that kind of leads to like a question that maybe kind of connects back

with Jake's question about what the plane of consistency is and how it's connected to time um are you are you um yes were you suggesting in the in the last session that the number the like the number line is the plane of consistency here and that the the escape route out of the the the led the strata is through the reading beacons which lead you back to the kind of the homologue in in terms of the 69 of the number line um yeah obviously I want to be cautious about it a little bit but yeah when you're looking at it in these terms it's

really compelling of course because you you do have them you have it is actually literally a plane of consistency in that it when approached from that angle yeah So sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no. I mean, that was the, I was asking that question. So then is that, I guess the thing, this is maybe just a like understanding Delores and Guattari question. Yes, Adam's thing. Sorry I lost your audio there. challenges, he gets his info from his friends, the Dogons. Is there just one plane of consistency? So I mean if this is the plane of consistency that we have

in a particular Transcendental Cognitive Engine, is it, is it like, can you kind of understand that particular way of grasping the plane of consistency as something that is is consistent across all strata like they all come back to this particular plane of consistency or is it just applicable to this to our particular query arrangement I I don't know I think it's a really difficult question this because obviously it's a map isn't it I mean in the sense that so so what we're dealing with is already in a certain sense within a system of cognitive stratification that is threatening that if we are over hasty or

or incautious about the whole thing to to escape into a certain type of transcendence like that um you know it would obviously be a mistake to just think because we have here a map of the plane of consistency that that some arrival some um unconditional arrival at the plane of consistency has taken place but on the other hand obviously we we can't we also can't rest be on some comfortable division between between the map and the territory that is itself also totally stratic and it's a it's a would be a pathetically

an adequate map if the map of the plane of consistency was itself just um entirely um stratic so to be honest i'm i'm sort of tormented on this point a little bit exactly how you know what it means really to say that it is if it if it is um if we take the extreme thesis and it is a fully transcendental um horizon of our cultural system then it has to it has to connect with the with the real plane of consistency

surely i mean i don't see that we can avoid that conclusion and look and so what is the what does that connection what is that connection well that connection clearly is the story that is being told in the georgia morals that's now i mean if you know challenger challenge is mapping the strata and in doing so is himself on this stationary voyage to the plane of consistency and but but that again is folded into representation so you can sort of it it can be taken into comforting terms yeah sorry i'm just

babbling I know I'm not really adding anything to this this question well there's this like I mean at the very last bit of the page they refer to they call it the mechanosphere or the rhizosphere and then maybe telling me I don't hear again oh can you hear me a little bit better Hello? I can hear you clearly. I can hear you. Okay. So, the plane of consistency is then referred to as the mechanosphere or the rhizosphere at the very end. And on page 69 of the Geology of Morals, they write the different figures, they're talking

about this kind of rejecting this idea that there's a sort of cosmic evolution. And they said the different figures of content and expression are not stages. There's no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same mechanosphere, which kind of makes makes you think it's just one. And then I was thinking about the kind of the fact that they use this particular Lovecraft story and they use it again later on in a couple of other chapters. This is actually, this is not even like level two of Westness, but this is kind of working into weird historical speculation now. I was reading about

Lovecraft writing this and apparently he was like possibly reading theosophy. He had connections, family connections to the Masons. And there's also the sort of contentious story that his wife Sylvia hung out with Crowley in New York, and perhaps communicated some things to him. But there's this definite like sense of the journey of the adept climbing the tree of life and going through ego death happening in the background and through the gates of the silver tree, the silver key, sorry. So there's this kind of combinatorial array embedded in that through like the kind of all of these particular mystical teachings that deal with the tree of life, which is the decimalism through the ten sephirah.

And so there's this kind of, I mean, obviously, there's a decimalism in our plane of consistency here too. So I feel like there's almost this kind of very vague haunting of this particular set of 10 elements in the story as it's told as well funneled in through through Lovecraft which maybe backs that theory up in some contentious way yeah you're saying you're saying that decimalism is is passed through mediated by the tree of life and the kind of mainstream western esoteric tradition yeah well at this point yeah after 10,000 BC right yeah I mean I don't know whether everyone thinks this

connection has totally been made and and I'm just being completely retarded but um I think this anti evolutionism thing and the clock and the clock question obviously really closely connected so I think in a certain sense that the kind of standard clock time of development and evolution and all of those things that they're criticizing is being located on one of our in one of our stratic cells if we're looking at it as a sort of diagrammization problem or we can re-articulate it in any other you know any other term and it's and as such

the thing about evolution or clock time or any of these linear temporalities is they are always compensated there's always when you when you actually assemble the whole stratoanalytic map you will find a zone of compensation that will cancel that so you know that's why it can't ever be a line of absolute de-territorialization or a line of escape because of the fact that there is some compensatory structure to it on the on the other pincer so so you need to find a normal considerate map yes i think that that that that i would my

temptation is to well the interesting thing is in a certain sense and this is why i think that georgia morals you know it's all about the strata but it's the most extreme story of de-stratification that they that they tell because if you do if you there's very little difference if you look what's happening in in in challenger's journey through that thing you know he becomes this pincered being for sure it's not as if he's somehow just avoiding the strata is it it's it's that in the process of strata analysis and the fact that you capture you capture the whole compensatory system you're not um you're not positioned on one side of compensatory

of a compensatory mechanism and therefore you know trapped by the fact that you are elsewhere compensated so just by becoming double it's really the same thing as becoming destratified that the very moment where challenger has his has his double pincers and his double nurses at its most extreme and he's most fully um manifesting the strata is also where he's entering the most sort of intense phase of this of this voyage of destratification and I think it's the same you know this is the reverse this is the reverse clock issue you know

it's that it's that as soon as you've got your clock and your and your anti-clock you have the you have the machinery for a voyage of de-stratification of voyage outside evolutionary time and outside temporality like the that double that double compensatory system of of temporalization and counter-temporalization taken as a whole is your toolkit for destratification. There's a cryptic reference in the three novellas chapter about so the form of the secret in the second line though the supple segmentation is that of the double

but it's not the true double so it's not until you get to the line of flight whose form of the secret is the form of secrecy is the clandestine so in the first line the couple there's one plus one in the second line the double there's one that becomes two and then in the third line there's the clandestine where one becomes many and they refer to that particular becoming as the true double right what you're talking about yes but yeah that's um that's that's actually really really really good really helpful for me anyways that um that clandestine is the true double amy that definitely reminds me i've been like

clarifying more in my head this sort of the other person that you encounter in a uh in an a few dictionary which even if you're the only person who uses it right you're encountering doubles like ghosts of past selves and encountering like collections of these ghosts you're encountering future steps in this sort of path you're walking through the labyrinth of the dictionary I think this and then if you have you know other people who are using them hell you might have forgotten which ones you put in and which one for it's there's this like absolute anonymous clandestine discontinuum that you interact with every time you use it which seems kind of to work at that level. Oh I also had a question, so like for you Amy, so how about the French English thing?

Like in terms of having been written in French and now like in terms of trying to track it through QWERTY, what is the significance of that transfer from French to English? Do we have to sort of try to track both, or does the French, like once you include diacritics and like different sort of word base, does, I don't know, is the French like irrelevant, not irrelevant, but is there like, do we have to track fundamentally different things, and if so, how do we differentiate them, I guess is the question. Yeah, I think that's a good question. I mean I've got other than just signposting it as you've done I I have nothing to say really um yeah um but but obviously yes I mean because obviously you don't as well as Amy and others

have said I mean you do it is a a dirty in French anyway isn't that so you you're on it's a double it's a double disturbance it's a disturbance both on the on the prior language level and then also on the sort of techno reconstruction level yes yes

I mean, this is making me think, this conversation about the possibility that perhaps a slightly paranoid way of thinking about this is that one implication that you could take from this is that there is a kind of there is an anti there's compensatory anti-culture that we don't have access to but that we could strictly and rigorously predict from this kind of this kind of analytical work

would show us that insofar that we have these kind of stratic cultural assemblages that they they imply a compensatory counter assemblage at some other inaccessible level or zone that is actually working with what is culturally accessible to us to make of our culture a kind of stratic caging system and obviously this could be done I guess in more or less entirely in terms of time if one wanted to but yes

so is this to kind of agree with Delos and Guattari and A Thousand Plateaus that there is no absolute de-territorialization there's just ways out of the um the set of compensatory strata that you might be stuck in to another set of perhaps counter i don't know i i i'm not sure i take them quite as saying that absolute deterritorialization is um continua of intensity so it seems to me that you know you've got a sim a space for absolute deterritorialization that's fairly sort of timed as soon as you have you you set it all out on a diagonalization matrix

that relative deterritorialization is possible when you're in one of these two split zones you know these two zones of of inconsistency and that relative deterritorialization is always found and that but there cannot be compensation in a in a on the plane of consistency i mean so when they you know i mean again just to go back i won't read the whole uh section again but because it's it's so long but this long passage that i started with where they they say um um Let me just find the most relevant part of the S.

So for instance, okay this isn't coming from the other side, but when they say, beneath relative movements the plane of consistency or the abstract machine performs conjunctions of flows of deterritorialization that transform the respective index into absolute values. and I think it's it's absolute because it just can't be it can't be compensated and it can't be compensated because it's not a split intensity and and every system of compensation is a is a split intensity and has to and has to be manifested on it's a system of content and expression and so yes maybe I'm being sort of

obnoxiously I'm sort of resistant to this to their suggestion but yeah I think that I think you know that the it's only saved basically that the earth as matter is absolute de-territorialization continuously you know and not in any it can't be a it can't be a kind of evolutionary outcome or or an origin i mean any of that any of that type of time structure as we've as we've seen is something that only can exist within the strata and is always compensated um but outside the strata that the earth is always absolutely de-territorialized.

In those terms, sort of like going to the earth there, which I mean a lot of people in the literature Richard pointed out is a difficult thing for Galois and Guattari, because of course, like the literal physical earth is not absolutely de-territorialized. You have all kinds of stratification processes happening. But just like going way back to sort of when I proposed this set, the sequence of all keystrokes made on a recording keyboard ever, if we could just sort of postulate that as an object. You made like the perfectly, you know, the important response that there's no fact of the matter as to the simultaneity or non-simultaneity of keystrokes. And that's true, except in the, or the largest frame of reference in which that's not true.

The only one that has any chance of capturing all cord and strokes is that of the earth. Like in that frame of reference, I think it's true that there is a fact of the matter as to the simultaneity of every cord and keystroke ever made. because even the ones that happen in orbit still happen within its frame of reference I think right and then sort of transmitted through GPS satellites as well you know our sort of further which is approximations of the reference of the earth I don't know how that's exactly relevant to the lozu which are these important somehow yes I mean it there's a whole bunch of complicated things going on at the same time like I'm very sympathetic to Amy's cell

reference here that that when you say the earth is always subject to these processes of destratification well okay but but metal the fluid metal core of the earth I think in their terms is a body without organs I mean and it's and is destratified and is and is um it's obviously crosses are you know coming in the direction that you're more inclined to with this question because of the fact that it is a um electromagnetic motor so since the whole you could just do you could if you were again get back to our

hypothetical aliens and you your mode of perception of the earth was purely in some kind of sensory dimension that all it could pick up was electromagnetic waves and so the whole of the technosphere now would be this complicated tangle of more or less more or less stratified electromagnetic systems and communication grids but but the core of the earth you know the the which actually of course makes the earth a kind of polarized giant polarized magnet it seems to me it's you know definitely escapes that process of stratification it's a it's a it's it's

this uh system of convective vortical metallic swirling um that is the is the actual motor of electrical production of the of the kind of inner body of the earth and i don't think that that's something that could be um you know you couldn't penetrate with a stratoanalytical description down to that level i would i would say um you know well no especially since biological uh strata couldn't exist without it like that geomagnetic envelope is what made it possible in the first place for genomes to be not just so bombarded by radiation.

Yeah. And then also I sort of noted in the sidebar that if you understand a reference frame with respect to an object is just being within this space-time gradient towards its center, which spatially coincides with the core and in terms of mass and of the origin of the accretion of mass which is the planet is the the root or the original seed so there's like at least a triple coincidence or dependency there yes yeah I mean and obviously life in all kinds of ways is it is a kind of bioelectrical phenomenon and continuously immersed in the in this terrestrial

electromagnetism in a way that is not um in probably in any detail understood but but we know in principle that you know magnetic fields obviously extend right out to whatever it is the van allen belt isn't it or whatever i I mean, so, and in fact, I think even at the extreme intensity is defined as all space, but two different degrees of intensity. So I'm not even saying it has a particular punctual point of disappearance. So the whole of the biosphere is inside the electrosphere.

and and and inside the uh radically yeah i actually i have a friend who's in electro does her phd research in electrobiology um studying fish marine animals mostly and that's like absolutely like her number one thing that she tells you is that we don't understand like a damn thing about electro biological phenomena she did like neuroscience research before that dealing with like seizure patterns in rodent brains again it's like an electrical storm phenomenon so she's got kind of a threat of interest in this that just even the even the phenomena we know about we don't we mostly lack good explanations for much less the ones we don't yes it's no that's a great way of

putting it though in terms of electric storms being as a nested complex of electric storms understood on one on one level yes in terms of seizures like I don't know this is slight TMI or something but I take a bipolar mood balancing drug that started out like long-term management started out as an epilepsy long-term management drug because what they have in common is preventing like cyber positive feedback loops between cortices of electrical activity yeah which is also in linking bipolarity with the storms is also interesting yes yes that's good that's really interesting so you see that so these these fits actually are um

a kind of uh bioelectrical cyclone phenomena that that go into a positive feedback dynamic and yeah and the interesting thing is that you know i mean you've got multiple kinds of seizures like the ones that you're thinking of where you fall on the floor and like have certain spastic movements is a tonic clonic seizure but you also have absent seizures where the particular kind of storm just makes you blank out like whatever position you're sitting in whatever you know you don't even close your eyes you just go abs right right yes I mean I don't

I don't want to push the link with possession but it's definitely hanging there yes I think so too I mean this is you see this is like this is the strata are we we've seen repeatedly going through this through this that we're it's very easy to get into certain kind of topological confusions about it because the the topological structure is in a way um there's always a kind of level of disinformation about it and and when you're in the strata there's there seems to be a certain geometric and and and crudely topological structure that is missing the the the real pattern

that is at work and that their constant sort of gesture in that in the children morals is to is to try and complicate these topological structures isn't it whether the plane of consistency is always in a certain sense perpendicular to the strata such that even though it at one level is an epistrata and therefore seems to be kind of horizontally sort of sandwiched by the strata and runs the strata by being the kind of machinic continuum between the processes of the two strata. It's also on the other side strata and outside the strata. and this is I think comes out a lot in this in this geo electrical framework for sure it's like

what angle possession come from there's no it's like it doesn't sort of it doesn't come from above or below terms it comes from the fact that there is always this bioelectrical diagonal line that is actually that actually fuses onto the liquid iron eternal night ocean of the earth you know there's nothing sort of sort of speculative or about that it's just simply a straightforward a fact that

there is this sort of electromagnetic structure that is that is that in which we are continuously involved even in that even into the most intricate sort I don't know it's the most intricate synaptic activity is is is still on this basic electromagnetic machine so yeah sorry this is all a possession riff yeah fantastic So the way it flips the question of physical explanation and supernaturality over on its

head and now it's not how do lights flicker on and off, how do information patterns started out in one place and there's no known mechanism for them to migrate from one brain to another. It's a plane of absolute means or absolute instrumentality for anything that's imprecated within it. It's a means of autonomy of purely abstract genes. Yeah, sorry, abstract genes. Machines, sorry. Oh, machines, machines, yes, yes, yes. So genes in terms of like telefactors in a very abstract way is also kind of cool. You could have taken me down a line of abstract genes probably

But abstract machines is definitely safer You Yeah.

So, while everyone's just in a pause mode, I think it, I would just like to just point out that if you look at what I'm going to call for the purpose of this course, the diagram, a set of integrated intensities on the alphabetical-quanomic relation. The pattern that comes out in this diagram is in the pattern that we've been talking

about you know in previous immediately previous weeks about the actual arrangement of the keys obviously on the and and I think confirms the fact that this row is is of is of crucial importance to us and and and I think I don't know where to what extent I'm taking a kind of controversial what would count even as a controversial step at this point but this but this i'm hoping isn't hugely controversial is the fact that that you can you can actually see looking at the at the diagram how um homero is acting as an epistratum that an epistratum or

or the machinic assemblage on its face into the strata that it seems to be an interstratum and yet it has these characteristics of the plane of consistency that it still preserves this I maybe can say legacy although the temporal language is going to be complicated of unbroken continuous intensities. You can still see that there is a... you can see the effect of a continuum of intensities that is inserted into the strata from one point of view or

that is pulled into the strata from another perspective, but certainly operates that the The consistency is required by the strata. The strata have to have a plane of consistency. The strata have to have a machinic interchange that allows the two, the superstratum and the substratum content and expression to be operationalized relative to each other and to become a functioning machine. And I think that it's like, you know, therefore, there is this intuitive translation that we can take between this diagram and the keyboard that actually shows us how that home row functioning

in the terms of a stratogenetic machine. Yeah, actually, no, but okay, because I've already taken this off an angle. What do people think about Adam's point about Mars colonization? Because I do think that's a really interesting question. Because people obviously say, in fact, I read just recently, I bet I can't unfortunately find it immediately. I found an article that someone had said humans should forget Mars and

the object of practical colonization and go for Titan because Titan is geologically active and Mars as we know is not. There is that, there is this kind of, I think, this whole level of debate about that. You actually, you know, what is it to colonize a geologically dead planet? Can a geologically dead planet have a biosphere at all? Like there was a recent Nautilus article about this, about the Gaian hypothesis and saying that that a planet as a whole is either alive or it is dead that life isn't something that happens

on a planet satan happens to a planet and that and and there's a strong suggestion in that piece too was that geological activity is is that is a necessary part of that so if humans did colonize Mars, would it actually be that that Mars colony was only actually a tendril or extension of the terrestrial, of the terrestrial, I feel inhibited about using the word biosphere now because obviously the D&G tactics about that, but the kind of this electromagnetic that is the Earth

would actually have extended tentacles onto the surface of Mars. But Mars itself, you couldn't in a certain sense become ever a native Martian. Because Mars is not a planet that allows that to happen. Mars can only be an outpost because it doesn't have its own abstract machine. I mean, if we take as a hypothesis, and I can't medically defend this, right,

but it's certainly been hypothesized that you could, basically you structure your life with enough radiation shielding and you take you take much higher radiation hits but that's but because of the atmosphere and so on you can still get enough protection on Mars to not immediately die in like a year or whatever and you can have some sort of biosphere there it's not dismissed as a yeah well okay some kind of bias right so so in in that you have so producing

biological life you know whether it's people's seating right ah right once you have that I'm not sure if I mean I that seems to me that's a critical sort of threshold that's been passed right and and yeah it's interesting for sure it might be right that there's no native Martians but you you have probably a self-perpetuating colony at that point you have a you have bootstrapped that into a into another state and and and the the dependency on earth is more of a path dependency rather than a sort of you're always requiring input from the

the earth's system Mars system yes it is a path but you know if you then click this this path dependency language onto this whole question about time and stratification and the anti-evolutionism and anti-developmentalism of the Deleuze Guattari perspective, does that raise some, does that complicate this question about path dependency? past dependency it's you know that's to say if you strip them is is there a level of implicit

depend uh development theory in the notion of past dependency that you want to strip out to fully rigorize that notion transcendently and if you did strip out that developmentalist level would it then mean that let me try and do this sort of with a graphic image like if you had professor challenger on mars doing his doing a lecture on stratification to a bunch of his of these martian students and they had some kind of sort of self-perpetuating

biosphere here but would his of de-stratification lead back in inverted commas to the earth is it that there is actually a kind of possible zone of fully de-stratified matter that could be native to mars that would then you know sorry maybe this is a sort of this is a question that's a bit hard to quite scan but it just seems to me um yeah no no it's going back to your original question it does it matter that mars

is and can't ever be a body without organs in the same way that the earth is. Such that ultimately it's a kind of, it's a, it's a para, it's some kind of parastrattle structure from the earth, even if it is, attains a certain amount of biological and social autonomy on this new, in this new thing, which is not so different as if you were in a just simply orbital space station, is it? I mean, that too, I'm assuming. If you had a large enough space station orbiting, let's just take it a little bit further out, orbiting some other planetary body of any kind,

even in an unhappable one, let's say Venus, and it was large enough to become biologically self-sustaining, is there any difference between that in principle and a self-sustaining Mars colony. The interesting difference with something like a space station, there is that you're carrying your own sort of electrosphere with you in a way, and you're living within that sphere very clearly, right? I think it's almost... Yeah, and then you can argue about what is that? I mean, it's more clearly that sort of body without organ structure that you're sitting out though

from one angle, but I guess the other way is that it's a highly structured machine if it's a space station, right? Where's the the core, the sort of liquid core? Whereas on Mars you're sort of spread out. There's no the the electrosphere is not it's not a sphere really i i guess no no and it would be very tenuously connected to the earth by i'm assuming there'd be some signal traffic but extremely extremely tenuous strands of electrical communication with the earth

And just in terms of like, you know, big local constraints, if you don't have that axis, then like in terms of electrodynamics around you, like you don't have the axis generated by a dynamo core, then electrically you lack a direction, like or an axis with respect to the rest of the solar system. Like, you know, on Earth there is like a magnetic as well as rotational, you know, Earth and South. And so in that EM sense, you have an absolute position with respect to the solar system in some ways the universe yeah but you wouldn't in that dimension on mars no no exactly so would you still that i guess my question is this thing would you still actually be an offshoot of terrestrial of the test terrestrial electromagnetic absolute

and given that you can't that there is no comparable thing on Mars maybe that we think realize how alien we were and we would find out the only answer I'd be able to give yeah Is that sort of your threshold for then alien-ness? That you are totally outside this system of, you know, the body without organs or the electrospheric sort of plane of consistency?

Well, it's kind of, or one way is that it's kind of this question of the, you know, the archive, what kind of message is it to aliens? Again, it's because you take this path dependent coding that like, you know, derives its structures of meaning from a context, which includes the plane of consistency. And then you transplant it, like cut it out and put it into a void, sort of like the void which is the complement of that particular encoding of plane of consistency. and now it has this whole space of recoding and mobility and sort of, yeah, like a sort of xenomobility or an alien mobility that couldn't be predicted in advance and like sort of asymmetrically connects to this original path dependency. It's just like it's a break with asymmetric sides.

I don't really know how to describe it quite yet, but there's definitely a strong threshold of almost like ontological alienness happening. Yes. I mean, I'm sort of tempted obviously to sort of start talking about these clocks again. Like, you know, the path dependency, the easiest way, the reason that path dependency doesn't upset people too much as a notion is that you can sort of track it within a sort of relatively, commonplace evolutionary and developmental time system in which in which you've just got your sensible clocks you don't have your anti clock

you don't have particle clocks of the silver key kind and so everything seems to come come out of the past and it's not particularly problematic to think that you could then you know develop on the earth leave the earth extend into orbit all of this kind of thing but on the on the in your counter clock which is obviously basically seems like extreme teleology, the ultimate destination, the kind of scattering into outer space, colonization of Mars,

whatever other kind of destiny that you might have, becomes the actual causal driver of this whole process. and this is what i'm saying about if you're doing you know even if you're orbiting even if you're orbiting like we've had i don't know whether pluto complicates it but let's okay i'll risk i'll risk pluto with some nervousness even if you're orbiting pluto and you're giving your you're giving your challenger lecture the annual challenge lecture on destratification um you're that the error of time the inverse error of time in this case

is is is pointing you causally to the earth isn't it from that retro from this retro chronic point What's happened is this whole human cosmic diaspora is being sucked down of the Earth and glued onto this electromagnet in the center of the planet, almost as if that machine was literally magnetic and it was a giant cosmic attractor that was pulling all of this disparate,

you know, schismogenetic biological material in a convergent way down onto the earth, where it could then be saturated in electricity and pushed down through the history of evolution back into some bio- so i'm just saying is the notion that that you're sort of leaving the earth is itself tied up with your clock working in a certain direction and and and your clock working in that direction is just because you're on one side of this stratic compensatory assemblage it's not

something that can be trusted once you get deep into this stratoanalytical lecture. Are you kind of saying that there's two directionalities for time and then there's the plane of consistency? And then that's kind of our complete map of temporalities Or is it more complicated than that I'm sorry, I mean can I get you it's not I sort of I thought I could hear you

But somehow it just neurologically the the glitching was enough to mean that I did Quite get asked you to repeat it Yeah, um You kind of saying that there are there are two linear temporalities opposed to one another. And then there's the plane of consistency, which is outside of time. And that's the map of the temporalities that we have. Or is it more complex than that? Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm sort of influenced a lot because I'm just reading this. book which is kind of interesting. It's interesting because it's so simple actually by a guy called

Hugh Price. It was recommended to me and it's about time. It's cool. I'll maybe just put it in if anyone's interested. It's about trying to sort of be rigorously time symmetrical. called times arrow and he's got an ampersand. Oops. I mean, I'm not, on one level I think people find it sort of philosophically kind of rudimentary almost but it's also extremely interesting and and he's trying to say look all micro physical

processes are time symmetrical uh you know you if you if you're handed a series of sort of micro physical events there's absolutely no way of knowing what your hour of time is and people for interesting reasons that he has certain hypotheses about always have a a kind of of time asymmetric orientation and smuggle in what he calls a double standard where you you treat certain things as if they naturally go forward in one way of time rather than the other way of time um so i'm sort of partly thinking in terms of this clock thing like like this i mean And his sort of implication is that you should always, if you're just doing rigorous physics, you should always have an anti-clock.

Like if you're talking about a process, you should be able to talk about a process going in the other direction with absolute equal confidence. and if you don't you're doing this double standard thing you're betraying you're betraying the peculiarities of your own perspective in such a way that you're denying yourself objective detached um physical insight this is what he calls the archimedes's point of this so i guess you know that's that's sort of what is just immediately serving as my kind of um bank of imagery on this question and why your sort of forward and backward clock thing was so relevant to it um so sorry i'm in terms of your original question i don't know

from what i'm saying now it's probably more simple than what you're saying actually rather than being more complicated but i but i suspect that um you could get more complicated quite quickly yes i know it's the same because i sort of now wonder i'm pretty sure that it's giving me lots of resonance this book that's making me think maybe this was on razer's reading list i couldn't remember because i know it was So he definitely included Hugh Price stuff at the start of the year. Because Hugh Price talks a lot about Boltzmann exactly in this way, yeah, for sure. I'm not sure if it was on the specific reading list

for the event in the middle of the year, but it's something that's right. He's mentioned a bunch of times, or at least in complexity context. Right, right. It makes lots of sense, yes. Definitely. as Amy see this this whole Boltzmann issue because because Because you might think Boltzmann almost got this and was really tortured by the fact that The temporal asymmetries of thermodynamics were not really philosophically um so yeah i think it's really interesting i i'm i'm sort of yeah deeply tangled about this because

because this time asymmetry question just in this uh just this week just in our last couple of hours obviously has come in in these various different ways um you know one way that time asymmetry time asymmetry i would want to say i think as a kantian is time you know and that what hugh price is trying to do um is is annihilate time i think that this notion that um in this universe of absolute reversibility that such a thing as time exists at all is is simply unhelpful and it's so removed from the sense of time that we get from

transcendental philosophy that it we should just discard it so but but at least it does I think helpfully suggest that there's a certain sense you know since we're talking about our clocks that time asymmetry in the sense of time orientation that you naturally think of things going from the past into the future of time how times arrow is it as it's minimally put just just as in terms of it being a direction rather than a set of them a set of them one-way functions we I think have to have to see that as being compensated in the strata

um you know i don't think there's any ultimately we cannot think what it is to disintegrate an intensity without thinking of it having a clock an anti-clock attached to the to the two mutually compensatory functions so it's not just like successive time and then whatever is outside of that it's successive time backwards successive time back i mean backwards are useless is a useless term but and then maybe what's outside of that if there is well i think succession is complicated i mean look i i don't want to be at all dogmatic about this because i think it's all

it's also intricate but my tendency is to do the opposite and to really say that there's no true notion of succession in geometric time if succession is just being geometrized on a timeline you should stop calling it succession because succession is an illegitimate temporal reference and what you're really talking about is a spatial relationship so the timeline and its geometric expression does not have succession at all succession is a relation of envelopment it's intensive you know and and an actual order of succession is an intensive

continuum it's not a geometric line it's not a fourth dimension um so that would be the way i would do that in terms of vocabulary and would just see that the that succession doesn't there's never actual succession in the strata that's that it's always reduced into some kind of um it's geometrised yes

I mean, the thing about coming back to the Earth, I'm happy enough with what you're describing about you run the arrow of time backwards or you... Oh, sorry, Adam, I've lost your audio. Oh, sorry. So for the concept of, from the perspective of, you can sort of have an anticlock view and you run it from the anticlock

and then everything comes back to a plane of consistency on the earth, right? Whether lobsters colonize the galaxy or whether we do or whatever, you know, lobster robots, etc. The. It's the direction of time I. I get. I think, but the. It the thing about it that's really striking is it just is sort of disappointingly local in a way. Right. That we it's you know, it all comes back to the earth as such, which is so localized. Is that just a matter of that that's just how it is?

That's what we have. Right. Necessarily imperfect and local information, and that's just a recognition of it. Yeah. But look, in terms of what you're saying now, it's interesting, obviously, surely, that they're calling the Earth the absolutely deterritorialized. So it's always the, you know, this notion of locality is complicated by that. And, you know, I totally get what you're saying. Like, it's just one planet and why should we be, this particular speck of metal and rock be given this particular dignity?

so it's not that I'm wanting to just fend off that but I think at the same time we can't we can't attach a straightforward notion of locality to it in their in their terms that in a certain sense that's to that's to transport sort of stratic conceptuality beyond its zone of geological applicability and when you're actually on this fluid electro metallic machine it it's just not local in the same in the same sense

that we we would you know it's it's not local in any territorial sense so I think you could take the two directions right you could say that there it's not the plane of consistency it's a plane of consistency and there's other planes of consistency that may not be liquid and metallic but I'll you know have that same body without organs sort of plane of consistency property somewhere within the universe however you slice it right doesn't have however you slice it or you can say that it is the plane of consistency and whatever other and you

sort of get back to that no matter what that it's somehow that's some property of the universe which yes earth as such I mean is it that the core of the earth is itself in a fusion or relation and share a cosmic plane you know so that are as isolated in space is a stratic optic and that on the on the plane of consistency instead cosmic plane

with you know modes of machining engagement which are which are cosmically comprehensive and which we were incapable of ascertaining out of a strata So you're pretty choppy just then, Nick, but I think you were saying that you could perhaps consider the Earth as in the planet Earth sort of a strata on top of some other plane

of consistency that is that is more cosmic in nature which would kind of relate back to the challenger story in a in a funny way because that's sort of what the setup there is yes yes or and and i think also this lovecraft context this kind of gate of the silver key type context that there is there is no sort of territorial boundary on this cosmic voyage um you know carter sort of uh fuses with the yogs off off you know it's not that so there's nothing like narrowly terrestrial

about this intensive axis. You know what I mean? It only appears like that because we're applying this kind of static geometric conception on it from where we are on the surface. And it's a kind of topological error to see it. I think I saw people talking about this maybe right up in the thread, that it's not inside the Earth. in a in a in its in its true cosmic topology it's not in the middle of the earth it's like that that is the way it looks to us because we're not approaching it in intensity we're approaching it in terms of these strata

coordination systems you I think fusional takes on a pretty cool double meaning there, you know, especially given that the metals that make up the core, the reason the core is able to be what it is, is that metals are, you know, terminal in sequences of fusion processes, both in the sense that they kill stars and that they are like unfusible, like in almost, yeah, there's always a last instance where there's no particular kind of stellar sequence that can end up fusing them i mean and in general like iron is one of the most common uh causes of supernova

um and then you have the sort of double sense of funeral in terms of seasons of planes of consistency and into larger series of chronogenesis you know star formation is a kind of chronogenesis i think in terms of um yeah yes i mean obviously it's kind of slightly mind warping and where we're expected to follow this line of thought and i'm not totally sure but but but your suggestion is obviously very plausible in the sense that look the what is this lump of metal in the in the center center of the earth it's it's a it's a congelation that has a kind of stellar genealogy doesn't it i mean

so it's you know it's not our sun that built it um it's right it's an earlier generation of different kinds of stars there's almost like a titan god sorry i can't are you And It's a kind of metallurgical talking I Actually missed almost all that you I you broke up Okay, yeah, I'm sorry. Maybe my end is getting bad. Yeah, I don't know No, just just off and on so what did you just look the last like 30 seconds or so Yes, I'm just saying I'm basically just repeating your point

okay but what is this matter it means and if you see this the full if you got this time and neutral perspective on certain sense then what a that a linkage to the core of the earth is a linkage to this whole metallic plane that we know has had its kind of cosmic genesis distributed over a large local galaxy yes I'm sorry is my signal still cracked yeah I'm getting I'm getting more of the

key parts this time before it was just like I wasn't even sure if you were talking um i'm you guys are cutting out a lot for me too i don't know why it's suddenly going so bad yeah definitely just like it's almost like the constraints on what's possible on what it's possible for a metallic core to do and like so which makes perfect sense as the article a further stratic relationship would dictate the way the stratum of the core was able to dictate or was able to determine things about it right so that makes sense that you would see in like the very properties like the specific elemental composition of the core that drove its specific contingent behavior on the strata that it's able to generate you know is a is an echo or a shadow of these larger stardef processes or like yeah stuff that's intrinsic to the fusional series and things like

that as spread over space um yeah but no like as far as the mind warping like my next my only thought like next is to just sort of imagine all these things as the eyes of yogsothoth you know bubbling through different strata of the involutions of matter so obviously this is going nowhere good well I don't yeah no we're good at all but probably in the right direction and nevertheless they would think because that I think that is that is the answer to I do think that's the answer to Adams problem you know I think I don't think there is an art in the strongest and most contentious way I can I don't think that is an answer to Adams problem probably that doesn't actually at least in vote

Hey there, Nick. Hi. Sorry, can you... I think we can hear you. It's just... Of all of the audio errors, that was the creepiest, just so you know. Oh, really? It's hidden from me. It's hidden from me. But I can sort of get a, I guess, tell because you guys are some really odd words. Electromagnetic disturbance elbowing in on the conversation.

So you're going to say... Thank you. Okay, I don't know. I think we're sort of approaching our last lab. So does anyone

have anything to say that's going to help to nail Quornomics down firmly and securely everybody's memory do you think that would be great you should we should we try to make an effort to claw our way back from from kind of iron synthesis and supernova back to the keyboard or are we too far gone for that

now to make any sense let me just have a look at this oh yeah yeah yeah it's true what they're saying that that that's the final statement and at least i hope i mean look this stuff is very um difficult for me for sure and i i hope it is also difficult for other people um so my modest hope on this level is that is that seeing that diagram now it makes some it makes some kind of sense what it's doing and why it is that the that that

diagram has been broadcast to us out of this chronomic apocalypse whatever we whatever we make of the thing that's rigorously where it has been sent for in terms of its principle and and it does certain kinds of theoretical work though I would be the first to admit that where we enter uncut jungle very quickly and following those lines you

Oh, is everyone totally silent for intelligible reasons or because my audio is completely collapsed? We're here. We can still hear you. Oh, yeah, good. That diagram link that I posted before, by the way, is open and editable. If people want to mess around with it, I have copies, so, you know. You're all welcome to fuck with it if you wanna try and figure it out or play with it. I'll stick it in the classroom maybe. This is the link that you just put up, like just now? Yeah, it's an open Google Doc.

So you can, and it's like a, I think it's a Google image, forget what program it's on. Or maybe it's the PowerPoint app. But yeah, it's open, it's not restricted access. Yeah, pass it around. Yes, I mean, it's an extremely abstract map of course everything we've been talking about. And then the hypothesis is, is it an extremely abstract map of everything in the geology of morals which I'm sort of I think implicitly saying is the case and but I can see that that's a you know a hypothesis of

such extraordinary kind of recklessness that it it shouldn't be taken on trust by anybody and then is the geology of morals basically the only chapter that you need of anything in Deleuze and Gattari and does it also explain everything? Yes, I mean that speaks obviously There's a secondary level of Yes, yes, I mean you know, I don't know whether I should be apologising for people for being focused so tightly on that chapter and whether it's just me in saying it seems so peculiarly attuned to our questions and in this course, you know, and maybe someone could find something elsewhere and say, well, why surely this is also like

Very relevant to what we've been doing in the last few weeks So yeah, I don't know One of the conversations I had this week that um I mean This was completely mad well, but I was talking to to my friend and he was, I'm saying that the reason he was so obsessed with the geology of morals was because he went to one of those huge Deleuze conferences a few years ago. And there's a guy called, I think his name is Ronald Vogue, who's a Deleuze expert, expert, who's been, you know, writing on Deleuze and Guattari for decades. And he said he gave this three hour lecture on that chapter. he was convinced after reading everything that it was the only thing that mattered and he was going

to commit the rest of his career to writing and thinking through that chapter so just okay some backup to that hypothesis there's nothing online coming out of that is there something that can be looked up I think this was the name that I got. I think it's spelled like that. Maybe it's Roland. It could also be Roland the Berg. Okay. I'll try and follow it. Yeah. If I find something, I'll send it. I wonder whether that's how that's gone. It's only been a couple of years.

you always do worry a little bit about people's mental health when you hear about these sort of programs now maybe it's because I'm getting old but I just think I've got poor guy you know like I hope he's got a supply of tranks with it yeah maybe we should check off I'm sorry what's I think theodore's asking me something yeah I don't know I think that's a I might my guess theater's got this question would I support the extermination of the night native bios

to run you said first we're going to at least hypothetically accept that that is tied up with the fact that um there is a that titan is geologically active um and if we're if we if we're then taking that step i think we get into strange time issues that make it probably a kind of question a bit like as a time traveler would you kill your grandfather it's like it sounds like a kind of moral it's ultimately not

it's a question about time structure that's the sense that if you found yourself in a position that you could kill your grandfather and find that your time circuitry is malfunctioning. It's just not, it's more an indication that you're misconceiving the situations that you could possibly find yourself in rather than an actual dilemma. So that would be my assumption, that it would be simply that you could never find yourself in that situation and the fact that it looks like you could find yourself in that situation is the index of a confusion about the function of time but

that's probably a bit of sounds like a bit of a cop-out I think you know there's other levels all the levels in which I cannot I can sort of answer it more as a moral philosophy question I think just seem a bit trivial by comparison like I I guess I'd have to say well what is this what is this biosphere you could obviously be overawed by it to an extent where you would come back determined to exterminate the terrestrial biosphere so it doesn't get in the way of the Titans and I wouldn't be able to rule that out April or I so you don't have any closing remarks I think that that terraforming question

may have erupted out of a different part of me the another new center oh yeah is there is there another course going on in the new center that it's based on terraforming at the moment not that I know of yeah okay still to happen last remarks well my my last remark is obviously to be expressed enormous gratitude and appreciation for everyone who's who's been doing this for the last weeks and say that I've really enjoyed it and learned masses from it and so

body for that and Theodore you've done a fantastic job on keeping the whole thing together on various levels yeah thanks to both of you yeah glad to help out thanks a lot it was really interesting guys thanks a lot alright I'll post this in the classroom too and then if people want to post more chronomic findings there, that might be a good place. Right. Yes, I will desperately definitely try to be as conscientious as possible about checking in on the classroom regularly if anyone's

got anything they want to see there. And I hope people have my contact details if they want to send things down to other channels. And so have a good Yule everybody if I don't communicate with you before it's been great super thanks everyone okay bye bye thank you