Today is Quintidi. Some notes.

5. Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us to awaken us.^{1 2} This other personality is the authentic waking self; the one we have now is asleep and minor.

1. I wouldn't say "divine counterpart" rather, that we have the ability to reunite with the reality principle, despite schisms.^a I would also emphasize the metaphorical nature of the dangerous magician...

   Hmm. Do you have a view on what it's a metaphor for?

   A metaphor for the difference between our gravity-inflicted liner-temporal universe, as opposed to the "universe" of the isotropic entirety?

   *looks up "isotropic"*^b

   So, okay, given your physical take on this, is it possible for us to reunite with the reality principle while still alive? Or do we have to wait for the heat death of the universe before that happens?

   We have to wait 'till the death of the universe, physical reality as it is currently constituted (or observed to be, I suppose) is antithetical to the reality principle. I don't like saying "heat death of the universe", but that, I feel, is really more a difference in opinion, and attributable to differences in personal aesthetics.^c

   I mean, I suppose we could reunite with the reality principle in our lifetimes, we'd just have to find a way of collapsing the universe into a singularity in order to do it (: ^d

   NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE, PEOPLE ARE JUST NAIVE

1. I'm reminded of the apparent distinction between the Christian "let God fix you" vs the Zen "you must walk the path alone", which *sound* like opposites, but which I currently feel are different ways of saying the same thing. The "grace" / "divine counterpart" thing, it seems to me, is about not worrying too hard about attaining salvation, just letting it happen on its own time, which is good advice that we express differently ("just sitting", "neither trying to think nor trying not to think", "there is no such thing as Enlightenment").

2. "Isotropy is uniformity in all directions."

   I think of it more like "patternlessness", you could also think of it as pi,^e the significance of which I think I've under-appreciated, yet at present I don't feel like I have the tools at my disposal to remedy that.

   Have you seen the movie of the same name?

   oh indeed

   Something's going on. It has to do with that number. There's an answer in that number.

3. Okay, what would you call it? The singularity?

   Mm, I feel like that term is already too broadly used. Agree Actually, I'm not sure if I have a term for it, I should look in to it... I'm sure, if I have one, it's been written down in the hope hammer...

   Huzzah!

4. Seems to me that we would very quickly cease to be alive if we did that, though :)

   "alive" in our limited, Yaldabaoth-defined sense, yes, probably.^f

   Others would view it as a birth, or re-birth, if you will. I contend that none of us is truly alive until the apocalypse...

5. o_O

   I think I had a dream recently where some guy was flipping through the pages of a book of the digits of pi, showing me how many he'd memorized.

   I'd love to have that book (:

   We can make that book! How many pages should it have?

   "practically, a physicist needs only 39 digits of Pi to make a circle the size of the observable universe accurate to one atom of hydrogen"

   o_O

   Mind you, what we actually *need* is to make a circle the size of the observable universe accurate to within the Planck length...

   no doubt, aye?

   Of course, don't we have the information at hand necessary to determine just how many digits of pi we require to answer this question?

   *investigates* "The visible universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28 billion parsecs (about 93 billion light-years)." "78 billion light-years: This is a lower bound for the diameter of the whole Universe, based on the estimated current distance between points that we can see on opposite sides of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). If the whole Universe is smaller than this sphere, then light has had time to circumnavigate it since the big bang, producing multiple images of distant points in the CMBR, which would show up as patterns of repeating circles. Cornish et al. looked for such an effect at scales of up to 24 gigaparsecs (78 billion light years) and failed to find it..."^g

   I feel like my body was so low on energy that it doesn't even have enough to digest the food I just ate, "I can't give blood 'cause of my hepatitis, but I can't afford my hepatitis medication unless I sell my blood"

   otherwise: Care to say that same thing again, but using different words? (:

   We can see things that are about 46.5 billion light years away from us (according to current theories), so that a "circle the size of the observable universe" is about 292 billion light years in circumference.

6. Hmm! Would you agree with my intuition that from the perspective of the "isotropic entirety" there is no such thing as time, such that my original question is, in a certain sense, meaningless? ^h

   Yes! Indeed! In fact, because our entire existance is predicated upon, and encased within "time", it's exceedingly difficult for us human beings to comprehend the true nature of reality, and can thus only describe is impressionistically (:

7. Conclusion: Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 63 digits

   Well then! Haven't we figured it to, like, 14,000 digits, or something?

   Lu Chao holds the current world record for *memorization* of pi at 67,890 digits. *THAT'S THE AMOUNT HE CARRIES AROUND IN HIS HEAD*^{i j} As to the amount we've figured out: "Between 1998 and 2000, the distributed computing project PiHex used a modification of the BBP formula due to Fabrice Bellard to compute the quadrillionth (1,000,000,000,000,000:th) bit of π, which turned out to be 0."Hee

   holy jesus

   [note that that's bits, so only the *pushes buttons* 301,029,995,663,981:th decimal digit :)]^k

   'Irish. This poem gives pi to seven decimal places: Níl i mata, a shaoi, eolaíocht nó feidhm. ("Wise one, mathematics has neither science nor use.")'

8. "His name is Sanskrit, and means: All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense."

9. ... can we really distinguish between vast quantities of stored data and sufficiently efficient live computation? :)

   Uhhh... well, if he suddenly stops at 67,890, then yes; if he just gets slower and slower as he goes on until he stops bothering, then no :)

   so have we responded enough that y'all have the source material for a blog post?

   Well, I have *source material* but I'm just going to wait until the thread naturally dies... I was figuring to post the results on the same weekday of the *following* week (i.e. 15 March / 25 Ventose)

10. Mmph. Uh... Dan, how big (in bits) would a binary representation of that float be? Floats are a complicated pain in the ass; it would be *at least* (decimal)225,525 bits, but beyond that it depends on what format you use. I only know of two standard floating-point formats, 32-bit and 64-bit, which obviously can't handle this :) Or trinary?

    (decimal)142,291 trits.

11. OH. Holy shit, this guy is carrying around a 67 kb float in his brain!?

    No, that's the "quadrillionth bit" in the second paragraph I'm talking about. Chao has devoted about 27.5 KB of brainspace to pi.

2. Reminded of this: "Plato described [the Nous] as the immortal, rational part of the soul. It is a godlike kind of thinking in which the truths of conclusions are immediately known without having to understand the preliminary premises."

We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison³ controlled by the demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion.

3. There was something... ah! Here! 'The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective... A Stoic of virtue... would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy," thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole".'