Introduction Ignorant Wisdom is my own made up, often comedic, “Rainbow Warrior Philosophy of Ignorance!” which combines ancient Socratic wisdom with primitive Pragmatic Taoism and modern physics. A comedic philosophy incorporating physics might sound odd, but the practice originated among primitive tribes and is still popular today among millions of people who just appreciate the timeless slapstick of crap rolling downhill. That's because this genre of Contextualist philosophy relies on fuzzy logic making everything I write all the more dependent upon observations of nature to say anything meaningful. In fact, many of the jokes, metaphors, and caricatures I use are literally older than Stonehenge, still enjoyed by billions of people around the globe, and the ones I present here are merely popular modern variations. However, to the best of my knowledge, it still represents my own unique agnostic spin on the topic heavy on the physics, philosophy, and artwork, which I began writing down as one of the few remaining avenues left for me to explore my personal philosophy in greater detail. The TV game show, “Let's Make a Deal” is a good example of fuzzy logic. On the show the host, Monty Hall, offers contestants a choice between door number one, two, or three. After they've chosen a door he will then often proceed to show them a booby prize behind one of the two remaining doors and offer to trade the door they've already chosen for whatever is behind the last door that they haven't seen yet. According to classical logic and probability the odds are merely fifty-fifty and there is no advantage in trading, however, fuzzy logic suggests that because your first choice was between three doors it was even more likely wrong than now choosing to swap between the two remaining doors. In this way fuzzy logic can do an end run around the classic law of identity by associating the properties of any content with the greater context or evolving situation and, for example, it is used in games such as Backgammon and Go and used to prevent high speed elevators from throwing people around. Describing more of what is observable than classical logic alone can, what really makes fuzzy logic useful is it lends itself to jokes about any kind of logic casting entirely new light on what we consider funny and what makes sense. Socrates became famous for championing the poor by repeating the same fuzzy logic jokes over and over and by asking simple questions that made pillars of society look foolish, while insisting all along that he knew nothing. The Taoists were more subtle, but also became famous for using fuzzy logic humor in defense of the peasants. Eventually, the wealthier and better educated Athenians killed Socrates for his questionable sense of humor, while myths suggest that Lao Tzu may have wisely waited until he was on his deathbed to write the Tao Te Ching. Comedians frequently joke about audiences being tempted to lynch them, but whenever pride, money, and politics are involved any reservations about killing the messenger can fly straight out the window. Both Socratic wisdom and Taoism originated with tribal ideas where, among primitives, it can be common knowledge that, for all the knowledge and technology civilization offers, its people tend to act like the smallest toddlers with the simplest jokes going right over their heads and, bizarrely, flashing surreptitious guilty looks and mischievous grins even when they are good people who would never do anything wrong! Twenty-five hundred years ago those living in cities like Athens were more aware of the formidable humor of primitive tribals who can tell jokes that would make a porn star blush and run the other way, although, their wives tend to strongly discourage them. Civilization was just a lot smaller in Socrates' day and countless tribes still existed with Socrates himself believing in the “Memory of God” which, at the time, was a popular tribal worldview even in big cities like Athens. In stark contrast, those of us living in civilization today know less about our primitive ancestors and share less in common with them than ever before treating the truth, God, nature, and each other more like complete abstractions. It's gotten so bad there are now routine protests against toy manufacturers selling Barbie dolls so grossly disproportioned if they were human beings they would have to be seven foot tall to survive and fashion magazines retouching photographs in order to make already stick thin models appear even thinner. Hippies and others like myself believe civilization could use a few more organic metaphors for what it really means to be human. Sharing jokes and poems personifying mother nature and father truth are how some of us translate more organic tribal wisdom into modern western idioms including agnostic ones. As an agnostic myself, metaphors such as “father truth” and “mother nature” are merely poetic license that allows me to make the subject all that much more personal. Despite civilized people often thinking of tribals as backwards, according to forty years of surveys commissioned by the National Science Foundation one in five Americans insists the sun revolves around the earth. Ironically, academics keep complaining that Three Stooges and high tech just don't mix, while they continue to teach anyone who can pay exactly how to destroy the entire planet by ignoring their own sense of humor and diligently pounding away at the excluded middle. The excluded middle is the dualistic western idea that something is either true or false, but can't be both. Something might be a “gray area” or whatever, but the assumption is that anything that is equally true and false is just meaningless nonsense and academics attack anything that they even suspect isn't true just like a flock of chickens constantly pecking away at one another. What many of them fail to recognize, much less appreciate, is that humor and beauty are indivisible complimentary-opposites and a Theory of Everything and Nothing will soon ensure that academic slapstick will never be the same again. Utilizing classic dualistic logics, modern civilization has achieved its present lofty heights by focusing on beauty to the exclusion of humor and, as far as I'm concerned, the next scientific revolution just can't come soon enough because the current one is destroying the entire planet and its difficult to see how the punch lines could get much worse. Estimates are within twenty years commercial fishing will become all but impossible because there simply won't be enough wild fish left in any of the oceans and, within fifty years, every wild land animal much larger than a dog will either become extinct or only exist in zoos. At the rate we're going, by the end of the century, some eighty percent of the surface of the earth will become desert and these shocking figures merely represent the tip of the iceberg of all the bad news now facing our overpopulated and all too often dysfunctional civilization. While I believe both humanity and mother nature are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, these days, they could obviously still use all the help they can get. Anyway, against my better judgment I foolishly decided to write this book despite my only having a high school education and, frequently, describing myself as a brain damaged mentally deranged hippie dippy and ignorant agnostic raised on Gilligan's Island and Green Acres. Watching the entire planet being laid to waste and billions of people needlessly suffer and die within my lifetime is just not something I care to contemplate nor is waiting much longer for academia to acquire a less dry sense of humor and find new ways to inspire themselves and the world. Usually giving away the punch lines to jokes is counterproductive however, soon enough, the computers will reveal every punch line humanly imaginable. The Rainbow Family and myself sincerely wish anyone who desires to own the patents and copyrights on ignorance and ignorant wisdom good luck with that but, until then, this philosophy is even more obviously public domain than the usual fare and anyone should feel free to reproduce the poetry or make any more foolish ignorant contributions of their own. While I spout a fair amount of technobabble for anybody interested its all just basic concepts and, other than the basics, I avoid using traditional technobabble whenever possible and attempt to explain as much as I can in plain English as I go along. More than likely you won't find the word “syntropy” in any dictionary because its a technical word that never became popular and the only other exception is that I use the older definition for synergy which I explain as I go along. Other than those two words, every definition for every word is straight out of any common dictionary, although I frequently use the second or third most popular definitions merely because they are better suited for expressing the topic. Even the technobabble is mostly just basic concepts in physics, neurology, and philosophy that anyone can easily look up online for more information, however, my experience is that if people cannot openly discuss their own ignorance and agree upon the definitions of even the simplest two syllable words they are usually better off not talking at all. If someone is troubled or confused primitive tribes will sometimes recommend exploring their thoughts and feelings using the humor of cockroaches and chickens. Groucho Marx and Oscar the Grouch portray classic cockroaches, or raging egomaniacs, while the Three Stooges and Gonzo the Muppet are timeless examples of chicken humor which, when combined, convey the central role memory plays in basic networking systems logic and the rudiments of toddler comedy. Many cultures intentionally use cockroach humor to promote pattern recognition and systems logic, however, English speaking cultures are not among these. Still, we have great comedians who perform the exact same styles of comedy and having no preexisting cultural traditions just means I am all that freer to mix and match jokes and styles however I like. Jim Henson was a saint as far as many of us are concerned and Big Bird is NOT an evil commie plot! Its that same basic left-wing salt-of-the-earth Will Rogers style humor, however, tribals don't require complex organizations or explanations and tend to be even more radically left-wing and anarchistic which the comedy also expresses as infantile humor. The ability to laugh at ourselves and the naked man in the parade is something many of us consider a healthy expression of our humanity, while others insist it is political despite all the evidence indicating humor is innate and mathematical which I explain throughout the book. Among primitive tribes lightly salty adult potty humor is considered educational and entertaining and is neither thought of as particularly childish, political, or abstract physics but, rather, the only material any wannabe comedians among them have to work with and one of the very few forms of entertainment available. Physicists themselves have increasingly waxed poetic in this same infantile fashion with, perhaps, some unaware that they are embracing a popular tribal pastime and telling jokes literally older than monuments still enjoyed by billions around the globe. At times, it can be difficult for any of us to see the forest through the trees and making it easier to do so is what jokes, poetry, and philosophy are really all about in my opinion. Contributing whatever can be observed in the world around us, including modern physics, merely empowers me to expand upon the slapstick, and vice versa, producing a virtuous circle or vicious cycle depending on your personal taste in potty humor and physics. Contextualists like myself can simply assume that how much sense anything makes, including classical logic, just depends upon the specific context. One trade-off in abandoning the principle of the excluded middle is that everything imaginable becomes increasingly context dependent requiring somewhat less beautiful and more organic salty artistic representations of everything observable. The more we can rely upon using the principle of the excluded middle as just another tool in our tool box, rather than insisting it is the only worthwhile tool for every job, the more often we are able to glimpse the forest through the trees by taking into account more of what we don't know and can't know in any given situation. In technobabble, I use contextual vagueness to produce a straightforward Functionalist potty humor extrapolation of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stephen Pepper that assumes a paradoxical version of synergy, or yin-yang dynamics, applies to everything. It's a very different linguistic approach to physics, mathematics, linguistics, comedy, and philosophy that examines the Big Picture according to the standards of modern academics because, if it didn't, countless jokes would just go right over many of their heads. The artwork in this book is a Fractal Dragon equation expressing the dramatic “yang” perspective, which includes classical logic, while the sequel would express the more subtle receptive feminine Mandelbrot pattern of the I-Ching. If done well, this style can compliment the beauty of classical logic and mathematics while, in turn, classic logic can help to keep the fuzzier logic all the more honest and beautiful so its important to first establish in this book where the two overlap. Ironically, its usually easier for me to tell people that I'm a Contextualist rather than attempt to explain what Pragmatic Taoism is or even what being a hippie means anymore. Contextualism for me is merely about accepting that the greater truth, or greater context of our lives, determines all of our content and, for example, as a result words only have demonstrable meaning in specific contexts. Along with other descriptions I present of my philosophy, this one might sound abstract or be difficult to follow, however, that's as simple and straightforward an explanation as I can possibly give in plain English other than to say its all about surrender or acceptance. Any difficulty in understanding it can usually be ascribed to the concept being extremely foreign and, hopefully, as I go along it will make more sense to readers. Some claim Contextualism is merely a new axiom of logic, however, this specific axiom appears likely to soon be declared a law of nature meaning a new scientific revolution is now upon us. Despite all the loud objections from traditional philosophers, the Contextualists have been making steady advances within every branch of the sciences for the last half century and begun building the obvious foundations for the next scientific revolution that all of the metaphysical approaches have consistently failed to produce. The ongoing global impact of the steady rise of the Contextual sciences, such as quantum mechanics, can hardly be overstated, however, this book is about the broader philosophical implications and not any specific trends which so many others have already written extensively about. Its a book of philosophy first, and only incorporates technobabble, physics, poetry, and humor wherever they can be used to help expand upon the basic philosophy by bringing something meaty to the table for people to chew on and to expand upon the central theme of human ignorance and crap constantly rolling down hill. The Mother of All Voids Roughly half the world's population believes their own ignorance to be part of a singular void, commonly referred to as, “The mother of all", a paradox of existence responsible for all that exists and does not exist. The cool shade of a tree, the silences between the notes of a song, the spaces between our dance steps, and the pauses in our more heartfelt conversations are all believed to be lesser manifestations of one and the same great void that allows everything to be useful and meaningful. Hints of its nonexistent-existence can be found in the sounds of silence and within the invisible light in the darkness. A mystery that has no properties, obeys no physical laws, and is somehow simultaneously everywhere and nowhere connecting everything in the universe. That might sound like complete gobbledygook or mystical metaphysical mumbo jumbo about nothing in particular (as in zero, zip, nada, crap, totally meaningless bullshit about nothing to begin with!) but, its apparently a pretty popular and useful style of gibberish and a decent description of quantum indeterminacy. For over a century physicists have struggled to find an explanation for quantum mechanics, but the mystery makes perfect sense if we simply assume our own human limitations are a significant part of the problem. In the grand scheme of things all of humanity's most cherished assumptions about who we are, where we are, and what we are doing could be nothing more than a collection of popular myths, personal fantasies, childish nightmares, narrow minded misconceptions, ancient superstitions, tall tales, total fabrications, bizarre misunderstandings, elaborate byzantine approximations, and outright reassuring lies we all tell ourselves both individually and collectively for that which simply remains beyond all mortal comprehension. We are using nature to study nature and, like ants crawling up the Empire State building, perhaps utterly incapable of comprehending our own role in the grand scheme of things. Einstein disliked the idea and insisted, "God is subtle, but he is not malicious!" To which Allan Watts might have replied, "God is playing peek-a-boo, and he's really good!" Many considered the idea that nature treats us like drooling idiots insulting, nonetheless, it can be tested against many of our bedrock assumptions, such as existence and nonexistence, to see if they eventually fail to describe observations of the Big Picture. This is a contextual or systems science approach and since Bell's Theorem a mountain of evidence testifies to the fact that quanta are contextual or, in other words, in quantum mechanics the context inevitably trumps any content appearing to determine both its properties and very existence. Utilizing changing contexts to define the properties of any individual parts, Contextualism can do an end run around metaphysics altogether because the changing context alone suffices to describe everything observable and, in the process, can demonstrate that idealistic metaphysics are all ultimately indistinguishable from metaphors that only remain applicable in specific contexts. In other words, as we peer deeper into the abyss, because of the lack of a clear context, everything becomes progressively fuzzier, indistinguishable, and meaningless or metaphorical in bizarre, and even cartoonish, ways the deeper we peer into the abyss. In quantum mechanics this same effect is commonly observed when quanta change in discrete increments or might even appear to vanish altogether or instantly reappear somewhere else as if having reached the absolute limits of what constitutes anything meaningful in a given scenario and deciding to move on. Ancient cultural assumptions about truth, logic, reality, causality, and idealism are increasingly coming under attack and, in the midst of all the ensuing chaos, determining what remains demonstrable, useful, and aesthetically pleasing have all taken center stage by default. Demonstrable refers to anything can easily be demonstrated or, at least, anything that can be demonstrated with a significant degree of confidence. For example, the words I am writing on this page can be considered an obvious demonstration of the fact that I'm writing nevertheless, like any other words, their meaning can change and become more or less explicit because the opposite also applies and the more explicit the context the more demonstrable the meaning of any specific content. Just as quantum mechanics seems to always lead right back to the Indeterminacy of the system, the meaning of anything including causality and logic, leads right back to the mother of all voids as a necessary context for determining anything we might consider useful, demonstrable, and aesthetically pleasing. A simple example of how the context determines the meaning of words is someone saying “She's hot!” Without an explicit context the speaker could be talking about anything from a good looking woman, to an overheating car engine, a boat, or whatever. The more explicit the context becomes the easier it is to determine exactly what the speaker is referring to and the less explicit the more surprised and confused we can become when something we may have assumed was a reference to an attractive woman turns out to be a pet hamster with a fever. Because the context will determine its own content, as much as vice versa, you could say God or the Truth or the Mother of all voids plays a game of peek-a-boo with the changing contexts of our lives progressively revealing more of the self-evident truth that any demonstrable truth can only be shared humorously, as well as, graciously. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is famous for popularizing modern linguistic analysis and many describe his work as resembling reading a dry auto repair manual yet, on his deathbed, his last regret was never having formulated his philosophy as a comedy. Anyway, one story has it that when someone once asked him the meaning of meaning itself he replied,“What do you mean by what is the meaning of meaning?” Without a personal truth its just flat out impossible to discuss the truth, much less comprehend the humor in any truth because, while the lights might be on, nobody is home. Beauty and humor can be treated as the indivisible complimentary-opposites of humble simplicity and elegant simplicity which combined produce outrageous creativity. Expressing this same relationship between the humor of humble simplicity and the beauty of elegant simplicity Frank Zappa once remarked that, “Art is making something out of nothing and selling it” to which I would add that this kind of philosophy must be equally as rigorous as it is artistic. Ours is a universe of unceasing change where it can easily be demonstrated that the unchanging void must exist, yet, cannot exist by definition and is quite possibly merely another useful metaphor that implies all our concepts are metaphors or allegories for the one greater self-evident truth which only asserts itself within the silent void. Therefore, with the possible exception of metaphors like the mother of all voids, spontaneity remains the most demonstrable of anything ensuring that any complete pragmatic framework must stress both equally. That includes our own spontaneity which many describe as their most immediate and personal connection to their own humanity, God, nature, and the loving truth. At the very least, the void can serve as a useful metaphor for a bottomless pit of endless nonsense into which anyone, including ignorant agnostics like myself, can humorously surrender our own ignorance regardless of any personal beliefs. However, upon more detailed examination of the countless metaphors involved it can mean much, much, more in both abstract and more personal terms. In recent decades there have been dramatic developments in quantum mechanics involving the void and several long standing mysteries. Both the origins of human memories and brain waves, for example, have stubbornly resisted explanation until, this year, Roger Penrose's theory that quantum mechanics are integral to the functioning of the human brain was confirmed experimentally. Just as the context of our words can determine their individual meaning, we may soon be able to show the same is true for everything in the physical universe including all of our own thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires. Apparently, God, nature, the truth, or the mother of all voids also plays peek-a-boo inside our heads, as well as in the laboratory, and it may soon be possible to empirically establish that existence itself is apparently paradoxical and, by default, obeys yin-yang dynamics or what hippies like to call instant karma.
These are the first two chapters of a book I'm writing which I hope to finish sometime in the next year. The complete book is well over six hundred pages, but if anyone has any questions please feel free to ask.
