Electro-mechanically, the square wave is produced by a circuit that when it is on, turns itself off, AND when it is off, turns itself on. So i imagine a buzzer, a circuit that turns on an electromagnet that pulls a lever against a spring until the circuit is broken, and then the spring pulls the lever back and closes the circuit again - on and off forever.

Whereas, (I'm guessing here) for the memory circuit, there would be no spring, but instead 2 electromagnets that operate a dual switch that turns one on and the other off and contrariwise, vice versa.

And then we come to imaginary values, and my best guess is that it relates to the p expression you mentioned above.

Suppose we now arrange for all the relevant properties of the point p in Figure 1to appear in two successive spaces of expres- sion, thus.
P'p
We could do this by arranging similarly undermined distinctions
in each space, supposing the speed of transmission to be
constant throughout. In this case the superimposition of the
•two square waves in the outer space, one of them inverted by
the cross, would add up to a continuous representation of the marked state there. — P.61

I'm too lazy to correct the expression - you know what it is...

Anyway, two undefined expressions one under a cross give 2 square waves exactly out of sync, give rise to what looks like a stable 'on' but isn't.

And that is where my understanding ends. How one gets from there to frequency doubling and halving is beyond me.

One thing though: wallowing is pleasurable or comfortable, and reading Crash is definitely not like that, and was very clearly not meant to be. — Jamal

Fair comment. Mind you, that's not to say that writing it wasn't pleasurable.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in — Bob Dylan

And “there is enough x in the real world as it is; I don’t need to see it in art” (a fair paraphrase, I hope) seems like an argument against all works of art, no? Well, except those that distract us from the real world with alternative visions, I guess. — Jamal

I don't think that is a fair representation. Primo Levi records real horror; George Orwell warns against dehumanising ideology. But they don't wallow in depravity. Perhaps that is an unfair characterisation on my side, but it is the impression I get from what you are saying.
Or consider P K Dick's work; an evocation of paranoia, but always with sympathy for the paranoid subject.

It seems to be the dehumanizing effects of technology combined with the pornification of relationships, and the psychopathic nature of the suburban landscape (“psychopathic” here meaning anti-social and dehumanizing). — Jamal

All I can say here is that if one has to struggle to understand what one is being cautioned against, the cautionary aspect is not very successful. But there lies the rub: to a misanthrope, dehumanising is a good thing! But that's enough pontificating from my unassailable position of total ignorance, hopefully others who have read it will have more interesting things to say.

Why did you read it?

I haven't read it, and do not intend to read it. Ballard was one of my least favourite sf writers, and one reason was a sense of misanthropy and moral nihilism that always seemed to come through his writing.

So as he says, it’s a cautionary tale. — Jamal

Is It? What are we being warned against that we are in danger of? Have you found something in society and or in your psyche that you were unaware of before? Or are we being shown the dangers of delight in cautionary tales?

what is in front of your face is horrifying, psychopathic perversity described as if it were normal. — Jamal

I find there is more than enough horror and psychopathic perversity around and within. One does well to acknowledge it, even to confess it perhaps, but one does ill to indulge it. I speak from ignorance, of course, but nothing you have said thus far has given me the least reason to think I ought to read it let alone want to. I haven't read Lolita either.

Quite simply, swapping places does not imply swapping perspectives, because the unique particularities of the being brings a lot to the perspective. If swapping perspectives was just a matter of swapping places, you could take a dog's perspective, or a cat's perspective, by taking that creature's place. But this is all wrong. And that is why "walking in someone else's shoes" is a matter of understanding the other person, not a matter of swapping physical positions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, you are quite right. Even the map-reading is not simple; the information is there in the contours, but working out what can be seen from where is complex. Similarly, one can know something of a persons's economic position, social and psychological condition and perhaps work out to some extent their psycho-social 'perspective'. And if one understands a dog's sensibilities, the same applies. That you bring up such particularities shows that you can do so to some extent, and shows, again, that they are features of the world.

I think this is what the thread is suggesting; that the objective world is an abstract theoretical construct, and to arrive at the real, one has 'to put' back the subjectivity that has been discounted.

How can it be extrapolated? That a person's psychological, social, economical situation is also a type of topography? — baker

Well, I would like to suggest that social and psychological situations along with social constructs are all real, but I don't have that map to hand, if there is one. Humans are territory rather than map, is more my point, whereas physics is map.

I have flagged your post so a moderator will notice it, and hopefully sort you out.

It belongs to some random guy who runs it for his own entertainment and sponges off his friends to pay for it. Probably not for you, if you need official seals of legitimacy.

Here is a good model of awareness as i find it: there is a blank space of unawareness at the centre, and the frame of the picture of which one is aware expands from the centre to encompass the observer and eventually the whole universe. Everything is the contents of awareness, even blank unawareness, and the observer is also part of what is observed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_%28M._C._Escher%29

One is awareness, the other is content. One is seer, one is scene/seen. It is important to make clear what we are bringing into question then when we question the self. Is it the subject itself, or the self-idea? — petrichor

Is there awareness without content, or is the container produced virtually, or imagined, as the limit of the contents? "The subject itself" has plenty of emphatic repetition but if it is not part of the content of awareness, who can say anything at all about it as to existence or anything else?

Some weird leaps occurring here. — NOS4A2

Amen to that.

I never use the concept at all. Give it a try sometime. — NOS4A2

Yes you do. you're using it right now to argue with me. You know exactly what is being talked about and for a free speech absolutist you're more than a tad prescriptive about what people should talk about. Unfortunately for you one cannot forbid talk without breaking the prohibition.

I propose we stop actualizing it. See these abstract, pseudoscientific concepts for what they are and abandon them in both thought and use. — NOS4A2

So why haven't you?

Now picture the same scene — but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity — any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene. — Wayfarer

One can do something close to that. It's called a map. From the map, if it is a contour map, one can construct elevations along a sightline and thus reconstruct the perspective at any point in any direction.

I therefore conclude that perspective is not personal (as @Banno points out if we swap places, we swap perspectives), but a feature of topography.

Everybody has to be somewhere! — Spike Milligan

The trick, as always, is not to confuse the map, where one is not, even when there is a label saying "you are here", with the territory where one has to be, with or without a decent map. In general, theoretical physics is in the business of map-making, whereas engineering alters the landscape. New telescope produces new perspective, produces new physics.

Race is a so-called “social construct”. Race cannot show up in pictures unless one approaches the picture with this construct in mind, and uses it to differentiate between two or more individual people according to it. — NOS4A2

Correct. and that is what everyone in the world does, and then they use it to explain to themselves why blue men cannot sing the whites and the orientals are inscrutable and orange people are pathological liars. Money and private property are social constructs, and I bet you recognise them too, you dreadful propertist and financist.

That there is no genetic base to race does not entail that there can be no genocides.

Your guru so fat, if she invaded Crimea it would sink.

My logic's logialler than your logic 'cos you ain't got any logicalicity, an' anyway your mama...

Call me a skeptic, but it seems like 'color-blindness' was only claimed as a virtue by white guys when they wanted to push back on affirmative action, reparations, Critical Race Theory, etc. They weren't promoting 'color-blindness' as a virtue when blackface was the height of comedy. — GRWelsh

You're a sceptic.

I'm a sceptic too. I don't think even colourblind people are racially colourblind. Race shows up even in black and white photography. Claim it doesn't have any meaning all you like, but don't pretend you cannot see it, unless you are actually blind.

Trumps bombs were righteous and friendly bombs.

OK I think all that GSB is saying in that paragraph, in simplified terms, is that re-entry doesn't allow us to use the arithmetic to solve for the value of an expression because re-entry creates an infinite sequence which doesn't allow us to substitute the marked or unmarked state for all cases within an expression (given that the expression is infinite). — Moliere

I think that's right.

We see, in such a case, that the theorems of representation no longer hold, since the arithmetical value of e' is not, in every possible case of a, b, uniquely determined. — P 57

Reentry produces kind of fractal/recursive infinity. The last case of P.56 that you had problems with produces an indeterminate value, and this means that when there is reentry, the calculus cannot always reach a determinate answer. Could be flip, or could be flop for example, or could be oscillating. The algebra still works, but the re-entered expression 'f' cannot be substituted by mark and then by no mark and then, 'there is no other case'; now there are other cases.

Perhaps like Christianity, Marxism too has not been tried because it was found difficult.

There is no problem — Ali Hosein

Oh, good.

I assume that blind people live in the same reality as me. And bees likewise.

The reality that you perceive as honey is probably completely different from the reality that the bee perceives as its product. — Ali Hosein

How would you know? You're not even in my reality.

The reality of light for us is completely different from the reality of light for bees, but maybe if we could understand the language of bees! He probably acknowledged with us the fact that there is something, even if the reality is different for both of us. — Ali Hosein

This may be your reality, but my reality is different. In my reality, bees do not talk to me or tell me about their access to light. They are too busy making honey. But i find it it easier and clearer to say that bees and I experience the same reality differently. We both see the same flowers differently, and eat the same honey differently. I have mine on toast.

Reminds me of that G.K. Chesterton quote: — Tom Storm

Chesterton is an old favourite, very human and a great writer. But the Christianity he was talking about is not a system at all. In the hypothetical evolutionary marketplace of social systems, forgiveness, and love cannot compete with rape and pillage. Here is a fable.

An idea arose and became ubiquitous in Europe, beginning in Britain especially, that combined empiricism and rationality in a form that excluded morality and feelings. It was called "science". This philosophy discounted empathy entirely and as it became dominant, state sponsored piracy developed into an industrialised slave trade and worldwide exploitation that led to the industrial revolution as commodities became more and more plentiful. The modern US and Canada are of course off-shoots of this global exploitation that encompassed The americas and the Caribbean, almost the whole of Africa, India, Australia, NewZealand, large parts of the far East, and the subjugation though never the conquest of China. This triumphant system can be be called "Utter Ruthlessness", or "The British Empire" or "The White Man's Burden" and has been adopted by every other country as the only way to survive in a world where it has arisen. The only weakness is that the lack of all feeling allows it to literally destroy the whole of the global environment on which it depends.

What makes anyone think that there is a system that works? What even is the measure or criterion of 'working'? What constitutes failure? Are you and yours the measure of success?

I don’t know if perspective is a concept at all; it’s more that perspective provides a necessary ground for any concept. Certainly in non-dualism there is awareness of states of ‘contentless consciousness’ (nirvikalpa samadhi) but not having realized such states then yes, I am still a dualist. It’s the human condition, I’m afraid. And as such I have to use reasoned argument to point to that which is beyond it. That is all philosophy is good for, as far as I’m concerned. — Wayfarer

I watched the "is reality real?" vid in your notes, and the arguments there were all towards indirect realism, which posits a Kantian objective reality to which we do not have access except via 'constructive' senses. What I was hoping for, but the above comment seems to deny me, is an inversion of that, such that the constructed sensed world is the real, of which the 'objective world is a mere abstraction:— that just because we are participants in the unfolding of the world, we have direct access to it, and the objective world is an impoverished world that 'works' but does not 'care'.

It just wouldn't work with imaginary forgeries would it? Everyone would notice.

Are you joking? this link is wine shop website! — Ali Hosein

A joke, but it got you the attention and a proper answer.

Alas, I find myself stuck again at the same place as last time. I think i understand how re-entry introduces time and square wave oscillation, and sort of how more than one re-entry is required for two oscillating values to cancel out to produce an imaginary value. But then it all becomes incomprehensible circuitry, and I cannot find the reality of the theory or the theory of reality any more.

Halfway down P.65 at "Modulator function" I just stop following. E4 is just too complicated and too big a jump for me, and I cannot recognise its translation into what is looking much like a simplified circuit diagram. I can just about see the translation of the example without re-entry bottom of P.66 and top of P.67. I have been hoping that someone could help me out at this point with the translation of E4, and then its further implementation using imaginary values.

Illusions are real.
Hallucinations are real.
Fantasies are real.
Copies and forgeries are real.
Appearances are real.

What would human life be like if we never had to work? — T Clark

The devil would make some work for idle hands.
Or in modern parlance, ennui leads to mindless violence and destruction, much bombing etc, until there is some work to do clearing up and fixing things. :sad:

The one true religion obviously does not conflict with true science, because the truth cannot be contradictory.

It's all the false religions and all the pseudo science that conflict. :wink:

Its a big long book about one word. The authors arrive at a list of about 16 different definitions in use by "reputable philosophers" not counting its use in phrases like "the meaning of life", mentioned in the op, which they dismiss as meaningless.

I had a peek and that was enough, thank you. — Amity

A sign of wisdom! A book defining a word uses several thousand other words, each requiring a similar book length analysis to establish the meaning of. For the wise, a peek is enough, the very foolish like me have to read the whole book, and complete idiots have to start all over again on the exact same damn word.

You'll have to read the book to find out.

Try telling AI to start a new 'school of art'. What is happening is industrial plagiarism, and industrial forgery. It has an empty feel because it is clever copying and there is nothing creative happening. That does not mean it is possible to tell the difference, though. Plagiarism and forgery have long traditions too and can already be hard to impossible to detect. So it goes. Art has survived printing and photography, it will probably survive this.

the Meaning of Meaning.

Read the book O ye lovers of definition, and despair.

The existence of God. — A Realist

Some people think God is real, and some people think God is unreal, and they are all correct?