The medium is the mesage

We tend to think of life in familiar terms, as objects separated by empty space, or at most air. When the space gets "thicker", such as water, some different things happen.

If we drag an oar through the water, or a spoon through our coffee, there is a persistent effect that remains long after the oar or spoon is removed. With the oar there are vortices, swirls of water that close on themselves and just keep on spinning for awhile.

If the medium is not only thick, but dense with stored energy, the swirls can do more than persist, they can grow stronger. A small swirl in the air on hot muggy day in August in Kansas can turn into a larger swirl, start condensing water and turn even larger, start sucking in more and more air and getting larger, and turn into a tornado.

No magic is needed - just a thick medium, stored energy, and a feedback loop.

So, when the passage of our lives is within a context, as it always is, it's no longer just "us" going through the world, but this trailing set of vortices we've spun off that we drag along with us, like a jet's contrails.

When we close the feedback loop and our actions end up causing more actions, the actions themselves become the actors - everything gets mushy.

So, here's some equations I'm about to explain below.

Here's the key to that
(1) Initially we think "I" did something, or got sick, or caused some result.

(2) we realize that I have a context as well, so put some brackets around the word "I"
to end up with [I] as the actor. (me and my context swirl.)

(3) actually, all our contexts are nested in larger contexts, so it's really
[[[[[ I ]]]]] that is doing the acting.

(4) and (5) - in fact, once the vortices around us get into motion, we can remove the oar from the water, or the spoon from the coffee, or us from the scene, and we get just the remaining
vortex, minus the "I" part, continuing to do the action.

The actor becomes: [[[[[ ]]]]] without the "I" any more in the middle.

Or, we can abbreviate that [ ] to the n'th power, or n-contexts, or [] to the nth.

Then, we realize that not only am "I" a context-laden thingie, but so are my actions. So, the "doing" part also has a context and we can write that explicitly, in (6) below. And contexts have contexts, so we raise that to the nth power, in (7) below.

And, finally, we realize that in thick, active media, the "doing" can sustain itself even after the original action is long gone. So we have an empty [ ] as the action.

We have ways to describe in shorthand the "spiderless web" I talked about a few days ago, or invisible causality with no "cause" still on the scene.

Finally, we can combine those and expect to find, in thick active media, causality with no actor (who is long gone) and no causal path (also long gone) but still in operation having effects AS IF there were an actor, a conspiracy say, and a causal path. (9).


Equation 10 closes the loop, where the object of the action is fed back to the cause of the action,
and the vortex becomes "self-sustaining" even without the original swirl-cause present.

The vortex doesn't "cause" itself, but once it has gotten started, it "finishes" or "completes" itself and then "sustains" itself and can grow and move, like a tornado or hurricane.

In such a world, we can have webs of causality without "spiders" that grow themselves, once started. We can have actorless "accountability" where the results of our actions feed back to us, without requiring "God" to see and act as the intermediary, for the result is the same.

In these social arenas of causality, where feedback loops are present and active stored energy that can persist the effects of our actions and echo them back to us, with interest, later, it is indeed "as if" God sees what we do and, for better or worse, feeds back a social reaction to it to us. Things we set in motion "take on a life of their own" and start running the show and firing the boss or company founder. No enemy agent is required.

This is a rather important thing to realize. We live and act, as people and companies and nations, in such a dense, living, active media. Actions and reactions don't require actors or reactors to be present to continue indefinitely or even grow stronger over time.

This really means we need to rethink how we perceive the world, and how much of what's coming back at us today is actually simply the amplified and delayed feedback response to what we did yesterday or last week or last year.