Lacan and the Ma(W).

This is a bit of poetry from a friend. He says he wrote it without intending for it to mean anything. The comic, that he did not create, is part of the bricolage aspect of it, it accompanies, clarifies, and unifies. To me, it is essential that the comic be inserted before the last line. To him it probably didn't matter and the comic was an afterthought. But art doesn't care about the artist. Art only cares about me. So this is the way it is.

1. Mother spins the Web minus the Baby. If M, then All - infant= 'WE'

The We entraps the negative baby, negative baby fails to see The Ma(W).
The Maw can see it all at once. In blindness, there is language.

The end time of language is the vision of blindness.

Blindness is the appearance of the Maw.

Lacan and happiness

So I am now reading Lacan. And while I haven't read enough to know whether what I am about to say is inherent in or already part of Lacanian psychoanalysis, I will say that, for me, it certainly seems to be a natural corollary to it.

And that is:

Happiness is the annihilation of the self as subject.

By "subject" here, I mean subject in all of it's multifarious senses: the linguistic subject created by the inside/outside division of self-predication, the fleeting ghost-like experiential subject of self-awareness, the lacanian split (or barred) subject as precipitate or breach, as a noun-ified-signification/signifier-complex entity, and yet also as a verb/process.

Happiness is fleeting because it exists only as a lacuna between the subject as chooser and the subject as self-perceiving understander. The act of choosing may not be conscious, nor must the subject exist temporally or logically at the moment of choosing. However, in the role of "understander" the mind is self aware of the process whereby the subject is recognized to be, retroactively & ex post facto, the source of the positive choice that created the causal condition(s) in which self-annihilation was possible. This entails, in Lacanian terms (I am guessing) the traversal of fantasy via the relation between the symbolization of the choice as an act and it's relation to the subject-less experience that was perceived after-the-fact as happiness. Happiness can be viewed as the signifierization of the Lacanian "Real" leaking into the symbolic order - but like quantum velocity or position, it doesn't exist until AFTER the measurement has been made, violently forcing it into the symbolic order.

Via the traversal, happiness can encompass a broad range of self-reported positive human experiences; from the satisfaction of reflecting on the successful accomplishment of complex life goals and also the simple decision to focus on warm pleasurable sensation of wind blowing on a spring day, etc...

When the self is annihilated the illusion of peace is created after the fact. It is, of course, a false peace, as it is transitory and ridiculously unstable.

Which brings me to the point... there is a broad family of self-annihilation seeking behavior, of which happiness-seeking is only one relative. People say they want happiness, when what they really want is the pleasure of self-annihilation. This accounts for the seemingly contradictory behavior of people and their paradoxical choices on a day to day basis. The alcoholic who loves hugging his girlfriend while drunk, knowing she is repulsed. The workaholic who won't make time for her boyfriend even though he brings her happiness. The environmental sustainability expert that creates superfluous poly-amorous relationships that she is incapable of sustaining. The spiritual tourist visiting the idea of meditation without real effort exerted to achieve the focus necessary. The decisions and behaviors and internal monologues all seem contradictory and competitive, when really they are all just decentralized expressions of the same pursuit.

And if people think that the goal of life is happiness, and happiness is really just a first name for a family whose last name is self-annihilation, perhaps one of the siblings, parents or cousins might be a better and more efficient path to get there.

Immanentizing the Eschaton via Superposition

Quantum superposition is a state whereby an object (a particle, atom, molecule or grouping thereof) takes on two (or more) states (or properties) at once - like a light switch that is both on and off. Superposition is one of the weirdest things ever discovered by humanity and it will have profound ramifications for years to come - the latest example being quantum computers, which are in their inchoate stage of evolution but will probably be fully formed in 10 or 20 years.

In any case, superposition ends when the Schrödinger wave equation collapses, forcing the superposition to fall into a "normal state" and pick one of the "opposing" states to fall into. The problem is that Physicists have NO idea what makes the wave collapse. Which, you would think, would be a problem that every particle/quantum physicist would be up all night every night trying to solve. Instead, they shoulder shrug. Bizarre reaction if you ask me. Anyhow... Supposedly, it is interference from the immediate surroundings of the object in superposition that causes the wave collapse. Up until recently, only incredibly microscopic particles were thought capable of being put into superposition because there is so much "interference" from the external world that anything larger than a particle is quickly knocked by gravity, or electro-magnetic forces, etc back into a normal state. The idea being that the world is filled up with all sorts of "interfering" influences. Now, it turns out macroscopic objects CAN be put in superposition (which, if you have half a brain, should at the very least be startling):

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18669-first-quantum-effects-seen-in-visible-object.html

I repeat: This means that macroscopic entities can be put into superposition. Hypothetically, we will soon be able to actually turn a regular cat into a REAL Schrödinger's cat (Schrödinger's cat was created as a thought experiment and so was meant and thought to be only a hypothetical possibility). This means that, very soon, we may be able to ask "What is it like to be in superposition from a subjective point of view?". In other words if you yourself were put into superposition, what would that be like? What would it be like to be in an environment that is in superposition - to be in a room where the light is off AND on? To think a thought and NOT think a thought?

Evidently the key to magnifying the effects of superposition is a "qubit bridge". From the above article:

The key was to connect the resonating strip to a superconducting qubit – a tiny electric circuit that can easily be prepared in a quantum superposition of two energy states. "The qubit acts as a bridge between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds," says O'Connell. By tuning the frequency at which the qubit cycled between its two states to match the resonant frequency of the metallic strip, the qubit's quantum state could be transferred to the resonator at will.

Which brings me to the thrust of my posting. If:

a) it is the surrounding local environment that forces a superposition to end and

b) the effects of superposition can be magnified and

c) this magnification effect can be created to cascade such that condition a above is suspended in the immediate local area where b is happening and whereby this step c leads back to step b in a ever widening sphere of influence then

d) the whole universe could be put into superposition resulting in

e) a state whereby there is no outside locality with which to force the quantum wave collapse resulting in

f) the end of the causal universe since nothing can be truly said to happen if nothing is causing anything else meaning

g) the universe is destroyed because nothing is happening. Technically the universe would still "exist" but it would exist at that point only as a potentiality.

If the effect of this propagation occurred at the speed of light, in literally less than a second, the earth would be placed in superposition effectively stopping life as we know it and, assuming the effect grows without stopping, then the earth would be at the center of the propagation and would never fall out of superposition as the sphere of influence grew wider and wider, so even if the entire universe was infinite and it took an infinite amount of time for the effect to propagate throughout the entire universe that fact would have no bearing on earth where the propagation started.

What if the effect grew to the solar level or the galactic level and then collapsed back? Who knows? Maybe everything would snap back as if nothing had happened, but I doubt it as the time that would have elapsed would have been significant and then the question becomes "What happens to complex systems that are placed in superposition over extended periods?". My guess is that everything gets scrambled like an egg.

Three parting thoughts:

1) This all is yet another reason to fear science and/or the large hadron collider.

2) Maybe the rapture that Christians speak of is merely the superposition of all humanity.

3) Maybe being placed into superposition will be like a drug. Maybe it is an amazing unverbalizable orgasmic and yet terrifying religious epiphany. Perhaps within years we will have a whole new counterculture of superpositional addicts and superpositional psychonauts. Who then will be the Albert Hofmann of the future?

Destroying the Universe

Quantum superposition is a state whereby an object (a particle, atom, molecule or grouping thereof) takes on two properties at once - like a light switch that is both on and off. Superposition is one of the weirdest things ever discovered by humanity and it will have profound ramifications for years to come - the latest example being quantum computers, which are in their inchoate stage of evolution but will probably be fully formed in 10 or 20 years.

In any case, super position ends when the Schrödinger wave equation collapses forcing the superposition to fall into a "normal state" and pick one of the "opposing" states to fall into. The problem is, that Physicists have NO idea what makes the wave collapse. Supposedly, it is interference from the immediate surroundings of the object in superposition. Up until recently, only incredibly microscopic particles were thought capable of being put into superposition. Now that is no longer the case:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18669-first-quantum-effects-seen-in-visible-object.html

This means that macroscopic entities can be put into superposition. Hypothetically, we will soon be able to actually turn a regular cat into a REAL Schrödinger's cat (Schrödinger's cat was created as a thought experiment and so was meant and thought to be only a hypothetical possibility). This means that, very soon we may be able to ask "What is it like to be in superposition from a subjective point of view?". In other words if you yourself were put into superposition, what would that be like? What would it be like to be in an environment that is in superposition - to be in a room where the light is off AND on? To think a thought and NOT think a thought?

Evidently the key to magnifying the effects of superposition is a "qubit bridge". From the above article:

The key was to connect the resonating strip to a superconducting qubit – a tiny electric circuit that can easily be prepared in a quantum superposition of two energy states. "The qubit acts as a bridge between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds," says O'Connell. By tuning the frequency at which the qubit cycled between its two states to match the resonant frequency of the metallic strip, the qubit's quantum state could be transferred to the resonator at will.

Which brings me to the thrust of my posting. If:

a) it is the surrounding local environment that forces a superposition to end and

b) the effects of superposition can be magnified and

c) this magnification effect can be created to cascade such that condition a above is suspended in the immediate local area where b is happening whereby this step c leads back to step b in a ever widening sphere of influence then

d) the whole universe could be put into superposition resulting in

e) a state whereby there is no outside locality with which to force the quantum wave collapse resulting in

f) the end of the causal universe since nothing can be truly said to happen if nothing is causing anything else meaning

g) the universe is destroyed because nothing is happening. Technically the universe would still "exist" but it would exist at that point only as a potentiality.

If the effect of this propagation occurred at the speed of light, in literally less than a second, the earth would be placed in superposition effectively stopping life as we know it and, assuming the effect grows without stopping, then the earth would be at the center of the propagation and would never fall out of superposition as the sphere of influence grew wider and wider, so even if the entire universe was infinite and it took an infinite amount of time for the effect to propagate throughout the entire universe that fact would have no bearing on earth where the propagation started.

What if the effect grew to the solar only level or the galactic level and then collapsed back? Who knows? Maybe everything would snap back as if nothing had happened, but I doubt it as the time that would have elapsed would have been significant and then the question becomes "What happens to complex systems that are placed in superposition over extended periods?". My guess is that everything gets scrambled like an egg.

Three parting thoughts:

1) This all is yet another reason to fear science and/or the large hadron collider.

2) Maybe the rapture that Christians speak of is merely the superposition of all humanity.

3) Maybe being placed into superposition will be like a drug. Maybe it is an amazing unverbalizable orgasmic and yet terrifying religious epiphany. Perhaps within years we will have a whole new counterculture of superpositional psychnauts. Who then will be the Albert Hofmann of the future?