Lmst

“some #Asianthinkers (including Watsuji) even go so far as to say that this fixed, essential conception of #subjectivity is delusional b/c it suffers from a propensity to view each #human as a ‘self-sustaining #being’, abstracted or removed from their social, historical and climatic/natural groups”

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5zca2ola2zxpkw37w4f3wxtu/post/3me75e466pk2k

“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.”*…

Physicists believe a third class of particles – anyons – could exist, but only in 2D. As Elay Shech asks, what kind of existence is that?…

Everything around you – from tables and trees to distant stars and the great diversity of animal and plant life – is built from a small set of elementary particles. According to established scientific theories, these particles fall into two basic and deeply distinct categories: bosons and fermions.
Bosons are sociable. They happily pile into the same quantum state, that is, the same combination of quantum properties such as energy level, like photons do when they form a laser. Fermions, by contrast, are the introverts of the particle world. They flat out refuse to share a quantum state with one another. This reclusive behaviour is what forces electrons to arrange themselves in layered atomic shells, ultimately giving rise to the structure of the periodic table and the rich chemistry it enables.
At least, that’s what we assumed. In recent years, evidence has been accumulating for a third class of particles called ‘anyons’. Their name, coined by the Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, gestures playfully at their refusal to fit into the standard binary of bosons and fermions – for anyons, anything goes. If confirmed, anyons wouldn’t just add a new member to the particle zoo. They would constitute an entirely novel category – a new genus – that rewrites the rules for how particles move, interact, and combine. And those strange rules might one day engender new technologies.
Although none of the elementary particles that physicists have detected are anyons, it is possible to engineer environments that give rise to them and potentially harness their power. We now think that some anyons wind around one another, weaving paths that store information in a way that’s unusually hard to disturb. That makes them promising candidates for building quantum computers – machines that could revolutionise fields like drug discovery, materials science, and cryptography. Unlike today’s quantum systems that are easily disturbed, anyon-based designs may offer built-in protection and show real promise as building blocks for tomorrow’s computers.
Philosophically, however, there’s a wrinkle in the story. The theoretical foundations make it clear that anyons are possible only in two dimensions, yet we inhabit a three-dimensional world. That makes them seem, in a sense, like fictions. When scientists seek to explore the behaviours of complicated systems, they use what philosophers call ‘idealisations’, which can reveal underlying patterns by stripping away messy real-world details. But these idealisations may also mislead. If a scientific prediction depends entirely on simplification – if it vanishes the moment we take the idealisation away – that’s a warning sign that something has gone wrong in our analysis.
So, if anyons are possible only through two-dimensional idealisations, what kind of reality do they actually possess? Are they fundamental constituents of nature, emergent patterns, or something in between? Answering these questions means venturing into the quantum world, beyond the familiar classes of particles, climbing among the loops and holes of topology, detouring into the strange physics of two-dimensional flatland – and embracing the idea that apparently idealised fictions can reveal deeper truths…
[Shech explains anyons, and considers the various strategies for making sense of them. (They”paraparticles” like anyons don’t actually exit. Or we simply lack the theoretical framwork and experimental work to follow to find them. Or in ultra-thin materials physics, we’ve already found them.) Considering the latter two possibilities, he concludes…]
So, if anyons exist, what kind of existence is it? None of the elementary particles are anyons. Instead, physicists appeal to the notion of ‘quasiparticles’, in which large numbers of electrons or atoms interact in complex ways and behave, collectively, like a simpler object you can track with novel behaviours.
Picture fans doing ‘the wave’ in a stadium. The wave travels around the arena as if it’s a single thing, even though it’s really just people standing and sitting in sequence. In a solid, the coordinated motion of many particles can act the same way – forming a ripple or disturbance that moves as if it were its own particle. Sometimes, the disturbance centres on an individual particle, like an electron trying to move through a material. As it bumps into nearby atoms and other electrons, they push back, creating a kind of ‘cloud’ around it. The electron plus its cloud behave like a single, heavier, slower particle with new properties. That whole package is also treated as a quasiparticle.
Some quasiparticles behave like bosons or fermions. But for others, when two of them trade places, the system’s quantum state picks up a built-in marker that isn’t limited to the two familiar settings. It can take on intermediate values, which means novel quantum statistics. If the theories describing these systems are right, then the quasiparticles in question aren’t just behaving oddly, they are anyons: the third type of particles.
In other words, while none of the elementary particles that physicists have detected are anyons – physicists have never ‘seen’ an anyon in isolation – we can engineer environments that give rise to emergent quasiparticles portraying the quantum statistics of anyons. In this sense, anyons have been experimentally confirmed. But there are different kinds of anyons, and there is still active work being done on the more exotic anyons that we hope to harness for quantum computers.
But even so, are quasiparticles, like anyons, really real? That depends. Some philosophers argue that existence depends on scale. Zoom in close enough, and it makes little sense to talk about tables or trees – those objects show up only at the human scale. In the same way, some particles exist only in certain settings. Anyons don’t appear in the most fundamental theories, but they show up in thin, flat systems where they are the stable patterns that help explain real, measurable effects. From this point of view, they’re as real as anything else we use to explain the world.
Others take a more radical stance. They argue that quasiparticles, fields and even elementary particles aren’t truly real: they’re just useful labels. What really exists is not stuff but structure: relations and patterns. So ‘anyons’ are one way we track the relevant structure when a system is effectively two-dimensional.
Questions about reality take us deep into philosophy, but they also open the door to a broader enquiry: what does the story of anyons reveal about the role of idealisations and fictions in science? Why bother playing in flatland at all?
Often, idealisations are seen as nothing more than shortcuts. They strip away details to make the mathematics manageable, or serve as teaching tools to highlight the essentials, but they aren’t thought to play a substantive role in science. On this view, they’re conveniences, not engines of discovery.
But the story of anyons shows that idealisations can do far more. They open up new possibilities, sharpen our understanding of theory, clarify what a phenomenon is supposed to be in the first place, and sometimes even point the way to new science and engineering.
The first payoff is possibility: idealisation lets us explore a theory’s ‘what ifs’, the range of behaviours it allows even if the world doesn’t exactly realise them. When we move to two dimensions, quantum mechanics suddenly permits a new kind of particle choreography. Not just a simple swap, but wind-and-weave novel rules for how particles can combine and interact. Thinking in this strictly two-dimensional setting is not a parlour trick. It’s a way to see what the theory itself makes possible.
That same detour through flatland also assists us in understanding the theory better. Idealised cases turn up the contrast knobs. In three dimensions, particle exchanges blur into just two familiar options of bosons and fermions. In two dimensions, the picture sharpens. By simplifying the world, the idealisation makes the theory’s structure visible to the naked eye.
Idealisation also helps us pin down what a phenomenon really is. It separates difference-makers from distractions. In the anyon case, the flat setting reveals what would count as a genuine signature, say, a lasting memory of the winding of particles, and what would be a mere lookalike that ordinary bosons or fermions could mimic. It also highlights contrasts with other theoretical possibilities: paraparticles, for example, don’t depend on a two-dimensional world, but anyons seem to. That contrast helps identify what belongs to the essence of anyons and what does not. When we return to real materials, we know what to look for and what to ignore.
Finally, idealisations don’t just help us read a theory – they help write the next one. If experiments keep turning up signatures that seem to exist only in flatland, then what began as an idealisation becomes a compass for discovery. A future theory must build that behaviour into its structure as a genuine, non-idealised possibility. Sometimes, that means showing how real materials effectively enforce the ideal constraint, such as true two-dimensionality. Other times, it means uncovering a new mechanism that reproduces the same exchange behaviour without the fragile assumptions of perfect flatness. In both cases, idealisation serves as a guide for theory-building. It tells us which features must survive, which can bend, and where to look for the next, more general theory.
So, when we venture into flatland to study anyons, we’re not just simplifying – we’re exploring the boundaries where mathematics, matter and reality meet. The journey from fiction to fact may be strange, but it’s also how science moves forward…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Playing in flatland,” from @elayshech.bsky.social in @aeon.co.

Pair with: “Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?“

* Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

###

As we brood over the boundaries of “being” (and knowing), we might spare a thought for Bertand Russell; he died on this date in 1970. A philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual, he influenced mathematics, logic, and several areas of analytic philosophy.

He was one of the early 20th century’s prominent logicians and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British “revolt against idealism“. Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt [if ultimately unsuccessful, pace Godel] to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic. Russell’s article “On Denoting” is considered a “paradigm of philosophy.”

source

#anyons #being #BertrandRussell #culture #existence #history #logic #Mathematics #particlePhysics #philosophy #Physics #Science

A close-up view of a baseball with red stitching against a black background.

A black and white portrait of a distinguished man in a suit, holding a pipe and sitting in a chair, with a serious expression on his face.

So Lefebvre and Lenin then
“ There is no reason not to quote Lenin again ‘The beginning - the most most simple, ordinary, mass, immediate "Being”: the single commodity (Sein in political economy). The analysis of it as a social relation. A double analysis, deductive and inductive - logical and historical…“ …Henri Lefebvre quoting from Lenin’s On the Question of Dialectics.
#marxism #spectacle #being #dialectics everyday life #politics #philosophy

“Who you are is far more important than what you do.” Carl Rogers. To do lists do help us get things done. To be lists help us decide how we want to show up. Maybe a little less rushing, less forcing, more patience, more being, more self love. 🧡 #learning #kindness #being Art by simply anxious

An illustrated image titled “This week’s ‘TO DOs’” on a soft neutral background. Nine small paper notes are taped up in a three by three grid, each with a small coloured heart in the corner. The notes read: “less tryin more being”, “less rushin more savouring”, “less chaos more calm”, “less doubtin more trustin”, “less thinking more living”, “less forcing more flowing”, “less comparin more self love”, “less pressure more patience”, and “less ‘why me’ more ‘try me’”. The overall tone is gentle, reassuring, and reflective, encouraging a focus on how we want to be rather than what we need to do. Picture by Simply Anxious.

Every living thing has its own Church. It has its own way of connecting with the divine. This is not a matter which can be reasoned with or dictated to. To try is an invitation to conflict.

#religion #spirituality #philosophy #being

The Unfinished Work: Why Artists Demand Proof of Life

A playwriting teacher of mine once said something that has rattled around in my head for decades: “You can write a play, but it doesn’t exist until it finds life in the first production.” The Chair of our department disagreed with that assertion, and vehemently so. The script is the work, he argued. The text is complete in itself. The playwright’s obligation ends when the final period strikes the page.

Both positions carry weight. Both miss something essential.

The question beneath their argument is older than theatre itself: What is it about the artist that demands physical proof of life in the creation? Why do stories and ideas rattle and bubble and boil inside people until the inevitable happens and the work escapes the confines of the mind to take form in the world? The answer, I think, has less to do with ego or ambition than with the fundamental nature of what it means to create.

The Pressure of the Unrealized

Ideas are not passive residents of the mind. They do not sit quietly in mental filing cabinets, waiting to be summoned. They agitate. They accumulate mass. They demand attention at inconvenient hours and refuse to be reasoned with. Anyone who has carried a story for years knows the particular weight of the unrealized work, the way it presses against the interior walls of consciousness like steam seeking escape.

This pressure is not metaphorical. Writers speak of stories that “needed to be told,” as if the narrative itself possessed volition. Composers describe melodies that “insisted” on being written down. Visual artists talk about images that “wouldn’t leave them alone.” The language of compulsion runs through every account of creation because the experience of carrying an unrealized work is genuinely one of being inhabited by something that wants out.

The German word for this is Gestaltungsdrang, the drive to give form. It suggests that the impulse to externalize is not learned but innate, not chosen but constitutional. The artist does not decide to create any more than the pregnant body decides to give birth. The work demands its own emergence.

The Particular Problem of Drama

My playwriting teacher’s provocation cuts deeper in the context of theatre than it might in other arts because drama occupies a strange ontological position. A painting exists as itself. A novel exists as itself. But a play script is something else: a set of instructions for an event that has not yet occurred, a blueprint for an experience that requires other bodies, other voices, other interpretations to become what it is meant to be.

The playwright writes dialogue, but dialogue is not yet speech. The playwright describes action, but description is not yet movement. The playwright imagines a world, but imagination is not yet presence. Between the script and the play lies the unbridgeable gap of performance, and in that gap lives everything that makes theatre theatre: the breath of the actor, the attention of the audience, the unrepeatable alchemy of bodies sharing space and time.

This is what my teacher meant. The script is potential energy. The production is kinetic. Until the energy converts, the play remains a possibility rather than an actuality. It exists the way a seed exists before it becomes a tree. The genetic information is present, but the tree is not.

The Chair’s objection was equally valid. Shakespeare’s plays existed for centuries primarily as texts. Most people who have encountered Hamlet have encountered it on the page, not the stage. The script is not merely a delivery mechanism for performance; it is literature in its own right, complete with linguistic beauty, structural integrity, and interpretive depth that require no external realization to be experienced. To say the play does not exist until production is to erase the playwright’s achievement, to subordinate the writer to the director and actor, to treat the text as raw material rather than finished work.

And yet.

The Witness Problem

There is something in the artist that is not satisfied by private completion. The manuscript in the drawer, the canvas facing the wall, the symphony that exists only in the composer’s inner ear: these are achievements, certainly, but they are achievements that ache. They ache because art is fundamentally communicative, and communication requires a receiver. The work that is never witnessed is a message never delivered, a hand extended into darkness.

This is not about applause or recognition, though those desires are real enough. It is about something more essential: the artist’s need to know that the work can survive outside the self. The mind that creates is not a neutral container. It is biased in favor of its own productions, unable to see them as others might see them, unable to know whether what feels meaningful inside will carry meaning outside. The witnessed work answers a question the unwitnessed work can only pose: Does this matter to anyone but me?

The first production of a play, the first exhibition of a painting, the first publication of a novel: these are not merely celebrations or commercial exercises. They are tests of existence. They ask whether the work can breathe air that is not the artist’s breath, whether it can stand in light that is not the artist’s gaze, whether it can mean something in a context the artist does not control.

Creation as Separation

The Latin root of “create” is creare, to bring forth, to produce. But there is another sense embedded in the word: to separate. The created thing is that which has been separated from its source. It is no longer part of the creator but apart from the creator. It has its own existence, its own trajectory, its own fate.

This separation is what the artist demands when demanding proof of life. The work must be able to leave. It must be able to exist without the artist’s continuous presence, continuous explanation, continuous defense. A work that cannot survive separation is not yet a work; it is still an extension of the artist’s body, still dependent on the artist’s breath.

The playwright who insists on directing every production, who cannot bear to see the work interpreted by other minds, has not yet completed the act of creation. The novelist who must explain what the novel “really means” has not yet trusted the work to mean on its own. The artist who cannot let go has not yet given birth but remains in a state of permanent gestation, the work forever unborn because forever unseparated.

This is the hardest part of creation: the letting go. The recognition that the work will be misunderstood, misinterpreted, misused. The acceptance that the work will find audiences the artist never imagined, will be read in contexts the artist never anticipated, will mean things the artist never intended. The work must be released into the wild, where it will either survive or perish on its own terms.

The Boiling Point

Water does not boil gradually. It heats, and heats, and heats, and then, at a precise temperature, it transforms. The liquid becomes gas. The contained becomes uncontainable. The transition is not incremental but catastrophic, a phase change that alters the fundamental state of the substance.

Artistic creation follows the same pattern. Ideas accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate, and then something shifts. The story that has been rattling around for years suddenly demands to be written. The image that has been hovering at the edge of consciousness suddenly insists on being painted. The melody that has been humming beneath thought suddenly requires notation. The artist does not choose the moment of transformation any more than water chooses the moment of boiling. The conditions become sufficient, and the change occurs.

What are the conditions? Impossible to say precisely. Sometimes it is the arrival of a missing piece, the final element that makes the whole cohere. Sometimes it is the pressure of mortality, the recognition that time is finite and the work is not yet done. Sometimes it is simply the exhaustion of resistance, the giving up of the fight against the work’s demand for existence. The conditions vary, but the result is the same: the artist passes from carrying the work to delivering it, from gestation to birth, from potential to actual.

Beyond the Self

The deepest answer to why artists demand proof of life in their creations may be the simplest: the work is not complete until it exists beyond the self because the work was never really about the self to begin with. The artist is a conduit, a channel, a point of passage. Ideas move through the artist on their way to somewhere else. Stories use the artist as a vehicle for their own propagation. The creation creates the creator as much as the creator creates the creation.

This is not mysticism, though it sounds like mysticism. It is an observation about the nature of meaning. Meaning is not a property that inheres in objects or texts or performances. Meaning is a relationship between a work and a witness, a transaction that requires both parties to be present. The artist alone cannot generate meaning any more than a single hand can generate applause. The work must find its audience, must enter the space between minds, must become a shared object rather than a private possession.

My playwriting teacher was right: the play does not fully exist until production because existence requires more than being. It requires being perceived, being interpreted, being received. And my department Chair was right: the script is a complete achievement because it is the necessary condition for everything that follows, the seed without which no tree can grow. Both were pointing at the same truth from different angles: that artistic creation is a process that extends beyond the artist, that the work is not finished when the artist stops working but when the work starts working on its own.

This is what the artist demands in demanding proof of life. Not validation. Not applause. Not even understanding. Simply this: evidence that the work can live outside the mind that made it. Evidence that the boiling was not in vain. Evidence that the rattling and bubbling produced something that can rattle and bubble in other minds, in other times, in contexts the artist will never see.

The play finds its first production. The novel finds its first reader. The painting finds its first gaze. And in that moment, the work separates from the artist and begins its own existence, carrying whatever meaning it can carry, surviving whatever conditions it encounters, living or dying on terms the artist can no longer control.

That is the proof of life. Not permanence, but separation. Not immortality, but independence. The work exists because it no longer needs the artist to exist. The creation has become a creature, and the creature has walked out into the world.

#art #being #conflict #craft #drama #Gestaltungsdrang #howardStein #ideas #playwriting #stage #structure #tension #unrealized

Heidegger warned us against forgetting being. In a world of endless notifications, are we losing our sense of ‘being’?

#Heidegger #Being #Phenomenology

🌐🌏🩵💁🏼‍♀️*DEAR BELOVED FRIENDS IT IS ABSOLUTELY FREEZING ON THIS CONNECTICUT MOUNTAIN IN THE USA!*YET I STILL MAKE ALL EFFORTS TO FEED MY SPIRIT👉

#A #Living #Stone #Holy #People #rid #yourselves #of #evil #all #deceit #hypocrisy #jealousy #all #slander #Like #newborn #babies #crave #pure #milk #of #the #word #so #you #may #grow #up #with #result #being #salvation #GOD #Love #Jesus #Christ #Holy #Spirit #Savior #Light #World #People #Pray #Believe #Hope #Peace #Faith #Truth #Goodness #Strive

🌐🌏🩵💁🏼‍♀️*DEAR BELOVED FRIENDS GOOD FRIDAY MORNING!👉

#A #Living #Stone #Holy #People #rid #yourselves #of #evil #all #deceit #hypocrisy #jealousy #all #slander #Like #newborn #babies #crave #pure #milk #of #the #word #so #you #may #grow #up #with #result #being #salvation #Devotional #GOD #Love #Jesus #Christ #Holy #Spirit #Savior #Light #World #People #Pray #Believe #Hope #Peace #Faith #Truth #Goodness #Kindness #Hospitality #Helping #Everyone #Strive #For #Holy #Clean #Hearts #Souls #Minds

🌐🌏🩵💁🏼‍♀️*DEAR BELOVED FRIENDS AROUND THE WORLD GOOD FRIDAY MORNING!👉

#A #Living #Stone #Holy #People #rid #yourselves #of #evil #all #deceit #hypocrisy #jealousy #all #slander #Like #newborn #babies #crave #pure #milk #of #the #word #so #you #may #grow #up #with #result #being #salvation #Friday #Devotional #GOD #Love #Jesus #Christ #Holy #Spirit #Savior #Light #World #People #Pray #Believe #Christian #Hope #Peace #Faith #Truth #Goodness #Kindness #Caring #Hospitality #Helping #Others #Gentleness

A painting of a beautiful woman in variations of whites and blue designs

砂くず　Піщана підстилка
黒いキャンパスに散らばる砂くず
Піщане сміття на чорному кампусі

https://note.com/poison_raika/n/n236cc442f211

#sand #scattered #across #black #canvas #sparkling #color #chaos #people #look #being #heart_shaking #portrait #mysterious #magic

Dogfirmations with Doofie and Dingus: Being Yourself

Sometimes Dingus pretends to be normal, but it gets boring, so he goes back to being himself.

View Dogfirmation: https://dogs.blackcatwhitehatsecurity.com/?dogID=18

#Being #Yourself #Doofie #Dingus #Dogs #Pets #ArtificialIntelligence #Nature