MY FAVORITE I-WORD

MY FAVORITE I-WORD

This essay is dedicated to Prof. Francesco Piantelli, who made most interesting discoveries regarding both New Energy and cancer research

 I love words. love them separately and love them even more

in good combinations, as in smart aphorisms, catchy statements,

inventive headlines and convincing arguments- all these being dense in ideas.

But it is a word that is my all-time and final favorite, an I-word.

It is not “important” but in a certain sense it is the most important

and influential word of all. However, its universality, uniqueness and ubiquity can be revealed only by a thorough analysis of the state of the word, of what we call reality-if we succeed to remove our many dominant memes – our relative truths.

It is a neutral word, not evil or good, but also very evil and good in some circumstances. It is NOT politically, ethnically, ethically

incorrect- it is NOT offensive to anybody, it is popular but NOT

populist. (N.T. I am writing NO and NOTalways with capital letters because these are my favorite N-words as I will tell you in

a following essay)

My I-word is not “important”, it is not offensive and it is not politically, ethnically, ethically, spiritually incorrect. It is in some respect, very vulnerable, but it is absolutely indestructible and unstoppable.

How have I  discovered this word? Somewhere, toward the end of my first career –in industrial research and consulting (socialist style: work and problem solving- yes, payment-no. or almost nil) I have decided to raise to a meta-professional status, to draw some general conclusions from what I have seen, learned, lived. To distil

my practical experience.

I have formulated the essence of what I know in this way:

“The World was built deliberately in order to satisfy the curiosity and the interests of the scientist, being infinitely complex and perfectible at all levels, thus opening him/her an unending area for thinking and action.”

In this wording- “built deliberately” must be discussed, a theist would think that scientists, using logic and reason are the Creators chosen people and this seems not a popular idea in some circles.

Agnostics, atheists, negatheists and bisincephalian thinkers are open to this idea and would accept it, being driven by the facts

of existence, not by memes.

My following experience, study and thinking has reinforced the idea formulated above and I succeeded to express it in the idea-dense form of septoes:

“ The Universe feeds our insatiable curiosity forever”

and

“The Universe is obsessed to be interesting”

Both septoes lead to the I-word, there are two reasons to call it so

It is too long (15 letters) and sounds much too “intellectual”

It is INTERESTINGNESS, it is about the idea or principle of the inherent, inborn, infinite interestingness of the the reality. It is a decent, grammatically correct noun, it gives almost 700,000 hits on Google.

Interestingly enough I came to the concept of the interestingness of the world independently, however in July 2004 I have discovered that an important and influential american scientist and thinker, Freeman Dyson has arrived to the same idea:

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail170.html

Freeman Dyson dixit: “As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so." 

I was honored and enchanted- he is a great man. I wrote him immediately- long live the Internet! He answered, thus reinforcing my certainty that people of real value are always nice, friendly modest, so was Arthur C Clarke and so is Piantelli now. Freeman Dyson wrote: “I thought that the main reason for which the people do not believe in Heaven, is that Heaven is annoying. A universe in which all kinds of evil would be prohibited would be very annoying. On the other part, an universe in which the Universe will triumph also would be very annoying. Therefore I thought that because the universe in which we are living is not annoying, perhaps it was designed to be as interesting as possible.” (not exactly his words, I am translating back from Romanian, the original message was lost due to a crashed PC).

So I could learn that religion has lead Freeman to this idea of limitless interestinghness, my guides were technology and science.  A case of double, shared, priority.

Matter is infinitelly interesting at all levels, living matter is even more interesting and thinking living matter (so are supposedely the human beings) has the very mission to add to this too- as Freeman Dyson has emphasized the idea.

Paradoxically enough, humans add a lot to the interestingness of the world just by trying to change or even to mutilate it- by

a)   oppressing, trying to make the world less interesting, complex, diverse, surprising, temporary unknowable than it is; to create sub-interesting things,

b)   on the contrary trying to increase, to exacerbate, to inflate the interesting character of some things, to create super-interesting things

Both procedures are widely used. In the first case simple explanations are provided for yet unexplainable phenomena and “good” solutions are imposed for insoluble problems. For example

creationsts know quite exactly how a very geocentric and human-focused world was created in six days and this includes the origin of life and the essence of awareness/soul. Religions (there are some 11,000 of them) give all the necessary explanations, there are no open questions. You can also learn that Intelligent Design has a load of certainties while Evolution is full of weak points. In order to compenste in part the lost interestingness, religions offer mysteries and miracles while science is full of unknowns and surprises. Shortcuts in the first case; long, tortuous, tiresome

ways in the second. Substituting  the interesting with something less interesting- what an interesting endeavor! Making a lot of people who don’t like the unknown and the dangerous- quite happy. Having the certainty of a good place after death is so much better than to accept nothingness.

Existence is interesting, then why not imagine some even more interesting ones?  The real interestingness is more intense than we could imagine, but this does not stop imagination from trying.So we create the strange the sensational, the thrillerous, the dirty, the kitschy etc. Super –interesting borrows the supernatural from the less- than- interesting and populates it with inexisting beings, usually evil monsters.

A very interesting image develops – the enemies of interesting- mutilated interestingness and malign interestingness (celebrity cult is the second’s most pernicious form) –unite and collaborate- sometimes very well.

Unfortunately my  two left brain hemispheres are unable to discover were enters Art- a legitimate and noble form of interestingness in this picture and scenario. I will ask an artist

about it  on the Web. Perhaps the Canadian painter Robert Genn

because I like both his paintings and his by-weekly art essays at http://www.painterskeys.com/ - I am reading them regularly from immemorial Internet times.

I find the world of science interesting enough, and will follow it up to my last intellectual breath. I think that I am alive only till I make interesting discoveries.