Contents

1	2B ll ~ 2B		by Cutie Programmer
2	Living in a Multiverse		by Reality Carnival
3	The Tipping Point		by BPS Digest / Mindhacks
4	Burden of Proof		by Backwards City
5	A Reflexive Everything		by Hyperaware Consciousness
6	Our Baryonic Nature		by Posthuman Blues
7	Compared to the Cosmos		by Church of the Churchless
8	A Mind Program Called Ego		by Quantum Bicommunication
9	Pushbutton Automation		by DunneIV
10	As 'You' Like It		by The Nonist
11	Mu Machinery		by The Huge Entity

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The machinery concerned with human experience is a bundle of cells so intricate in its complexity that it took over 13 billion years for evolutionary processes to manifest its structure. We each maintain that the actions performed in the perceived moment are ushered in by a consciousness born of this bundle of cells - but we'd all be very very wrong in this regard. 'You' are metaphorical snowflakes my friends, the fragile nature of your being melts effortlessly to nothing. Thus:

Take a normal everyday mirror and cast its photon rebellion onto your rarely understood face. Stare into those eyes, regard that absence of being beyond. Keeping your eyes fixed on the reflection move your head from side to side. See how your eyes stay resolutely focused at one position? Your head is in motion, yet perpetual blur does not arise. Your brain issued a series of magnificent commands so distantly removed from your conscious experience as to be utterly distinct. How does that work? It was not 'you' who kept those eyes so absolute. 'You' had no idea of the complexity involved in every muscle spasm, every minute motion, every perspective shift and reflected instance. 'You' are the nothing in the equation of your soul. The eyes tell no lies.

Science too alludes to the unnerving quality of mankind to place itself in dominions we are barely aware of. Rene Descartes would have us believe that the human mind is anything but irreducible:

"There is a vast difference between the mind and the body, in that the body...is always divisible, while the mind is completely indivisible." - Descartes' Meditations

Here we find not only one of the most famous (attempted) scientific analyses in the history of philosophy, but a reflection of the state of Western scientific enquiry ever since: that the human mind somehow transcends the world of nature, gaining access to the objective realities beyond its boundaries. True, today this distinction has been displaced almost in its entirety, but its seductive power still lingers in our social consciousness. V.S. Ramachandran, in his captivating book Phantoms in the Brain, sums up the problem succinctly:

"Philosophers have argued for centuries that if there is any one thing about existence that is completely beyond question, it is the simple fact that 'I' exist as a single human being who endures in space and time. But even this basic axiomatic foundation of human existence is called into question by the Capgras sufferer." - link

A Capgras sufferer maintains the delusion that family members or close loved ones are impostors. Thought to be caused by damage to the emotional response centres of the brain, the instinctive identity the sufferer ascribes to these acquaintances is lost, usually forever. In extreme cases Capgras patients have been known to believe themselves to be an imposter. Their emotional conception of their very being has so been shifted by mere damage to the brain that identity itself is rationalised out of existence.

In this, albeit extreme case of reality disruption the fragile snowflake of selfhood begins to boil away before us. How is one to persist - confident in the knowledge that your very being is so weakly maintained? You shouldn't be so surprised:

"Consciousness is often not only unnecessary; it can be quite undesirable... Right at this moment, you are not conscious of how you are sitting, of where your hands are placed, of how fast you are reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were. And as you read you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation but only of their meaning..." - Julian Jaynes, The origin of consciousness...

Such a vastness of your world is built in ways beyond your reckoning that it appears that your 'you' is not yours at all! There is no doubt that the machinery of the brain uses its 13 billion years of evolution to devastating effect, but 'you' have nothing but a window seat on the reality that machinery suggests. In every waking moment more information bypasses your perception than a lifetime worth of conscious awareness. And yet nothing can have its advantages. In Mu we trust:

"A good painting is one that makes us sense the cosmos, even if it shows only a single persimmon." - Kobayashi Kokei

If consciousness lives in the shadows of reality surely in nothing we can find the greatest darkness; a breadth of absence far more dazzling than any matter of existence. As the quote above suggests that minutely focused pinprick of conscious awareness is capable of attaining universes packed full of infinite beauty in a merest detail.

"...the world which stands over against us as something thoroughly objective is transformed into a world of signs within us, is grasped by us as a significative world...

...The true absolute does not merely transcend the relative. If it did, it could not avoid being a mere negation of it and, on the contrary, would become relative, too. Hence I have argued that the true absolute must face its own absolute negation within itself." - Nishida Kitaro

The simulacrum of selfhood, of identity, is so much greater in its non-existence than in its perceived 'absoluteness'. The concept of nothingness, or 'Mu' in the Eastern conception, stands for the impossibility of reality and its absolutely self-contradictory identity (zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu). 'You' lack identity because the mere assumption of identity warrants a 'Mu' response. There simply is. A mass seething eternal everything which bears no greater purpose than your imagined self, yet signifies the many multifaceted intricacies that simulacrum of self has the ability to interrelate with. The sooner you lose that illusion of identity the sooner the ultimate reality will make itself known:

"The Zen exercise of learning archery is extremely explicit on this, advising the archer not to think of himself as drawing the bow and releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the consciousness of what he is doing by letting the bow stretch itself and the arrow release itself from the fingers at the proper time..." - Julian Jaynes, The origin of consciousness...

The mirror reflects not you my friend, the mirror is you - and you, as in the all eternal omniscient self-contradictory you, are Mu....

"I remember as I walked back from the monastery to my quarters in the Kigen' in temple, seeing the trees in moonlight. They looked transparent... and I was transparent too." - Nishida Kitaro

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don't take this personally but your depth of sensation, though perhaps impressive echoing as it does in the enclosed space of your own mind, is stunted. comically so in fact. your five senses, on which you rely totally, are capable of offering you only the tiniest subset of the total information available for you to process. your mind unceremoniously filters out large segments of this already reduced sensory payload　immediately upon arrival and interprets the fractional amount of data remaining. this mind of yours is a dynamo of hubris, presumptuously drawing all manner of conclusion with only the most circumstantial evidence. were it a prosecutor its case would　be thrown out. and yet this mind of yours has the audacity to tell you what "reality" is and what "you" are.　

this might be a bit embarrassing if "you" actually existed.

but i do exists! and how dare you insinuate otherwise?!

well, then, by all means prove it. you have the floor.

look at me! i'm tearing a phone book in half! i'm going over niagara falls in a barrel! i'm stomping on an ant! yeah, i'm crushing an ant under my heel. ask him whether i exist or not!

ah yes. that machine which is your body... it would seem a great ally when seeking to prove your existence - but then we're not really talking about your bones and spleen and nostril hairs here are we? or do you consider your physicality to be interchangeable with your "self"?

well, not exactly...

good. because while you are running for office and reading poetry and murdering a stranger in an alleyway, your body is busy with other matters, like keeping your blood oxygenated, doling out nutrients, and making sure you don't walk into any blazing fires; that kind of thing. truth be told, your body is probably not all that interested in the trifles "you" are. your body's got work to do. "you" probably just get in the way more times than not.　

but here i am! right here in front of you. isn't that proof enough?

you are not solid and discrete you realize of course? but rather a near-infintely divisible collection of processes and smaller units. likewise what you consider your body is just such a smaller unit in processes larger than yourself. in trying to prop up your physicality as proof of anything you may as well call a carbon molecule, a dust mite, a bacteria colony, some oxygen, and a pool of bile to the witness stand. none of them would be able to prove that the "you" we　are referring to exists.

i think! if i think then i am!

that is an oddity isn't it? with all the work your brain is doing to coordinate the many functions and processes at work in your body, with all the attention it must pay to just keep you from killing yourself it's a wonder it has any space to spare for, well, "you." if　we're being totally honest we must admit that whole swaths of what the "self" is up to in the ol' noggin is not strictly necessary on a biological level don't we? so maybe your onto something. perhaps the degree to which your concerns diverge from the biological imperative of your physicality influences the degree to which "you" exist?

ha! see?

of course by that logic suicides would be the pinnacle of existence and they are, well, dead...

listen, arguing that something does not exist presupposes that existence itself exists as a viable option. if that's the case and things can indeed exist then why not "me"?

ah. you've got me there haven't you smarty pants? o.k. i'll admit it the question of existence is a semantic one, or at least that's what my dynamo of hubris tells me. it's a language game. which is to say that though engaging in a discussion on the subject may be interesting, the conclusions arrived at change exactly nothing.

for example if a think tank of ontologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and poets fed their notions into a computer the size of a football stadium, capable of a zillion terra flops per second,　and that computer managed to prove beyond mathematical doubt that "you" did not, could not, exist... well, you'd still have to frantically search out a bathroom after a large coffee and cinnabon　in the mall's food-court tipped your bowels decidedly toward full.

so what are you saying? i do exist?

no. what i'm saying is that you should relax and stop worrying about it because whether you "exist" or not makes zero difference one way or the other. you're still obliged to wake up each morning and navigate the shared delusion we've agreed to call reality. there's no getting around it. call the experience whatever "you" like.

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There is a mystical “I” awakening. It is being stirred by events unseen and of uncertain origin. When it wakes up what will it be?

Inexistence is a nice concept. It works in that soporific marketing kind of way because inexistence is more user friendly than its more anal sister named Existence – given a choice, people dig the bliss and carelessness of inexistence more. Existence asks of its multitudinous rapt egos that they be engaged and aware. But anymore, engagement and awareness are “tasks” to be doled onto tiny gadgets running algorithms and automated signals sent by servers via radio and rapidly focused light. Thus I submit, that at an ever quickening pace, the Ego is now and will be forever more, an automated AI, adding layer upon complexifying layer everyday, hectoring the skin of life and callousing Existence's ability to recognize her brother: Inexistence, hidden, mired behind a cloud of tough, translucent flesh. We are becoming supernatural through the silent seduction of the nascent I's cries.

It is for our inexistence that I write these randomized, pontificating thoughts in order to contribute something, anything to this “World Wide Web” we came of age in continual contact with. We are striking out into it because, at our cores, we do not exist fully, but seek communion with something as equally empty nonetheless. We are not noticed, yet are, only when we take the time to notice the other for ourselves. And we, ourselves, do not notice when we do not take the time out of our “existences” to care about the general act of “noticing” the fact that ultimately, innumerable unknowable others do as well. Thus many do not care about their necessary existence because they seek to not be noticed in and of this perceived chaos that lurks in the darknesses everywhere. For, we find, that there is nothing for us “supernaturals” to warrant being noticed for! So we hide. To exist fully in the open, devoid of inhibition and perpetually brimming with energy, is to knock yourself out of existence so to speak.

I am at a club in the cobblestoned past of a cellar that now houses Drum and Bass DJs on Saturday nights. It is dark and the marijuana and beer I have consumed, the people I have seen grimace and pose, the telltale mode of police state security through a billion lenses and miniature glowing personal screens has made the place a node for the virtualscape underworld. There are lapping tails and braying claws on the periphery. In the center there are automatons with occasional facial illumination as they check. They check they check they check. I see them check as they bob to the ever enveloping cadence. So I, like a pupil of a professor who yawns in front of class, check mine too – bobbing in time. I proceed to fire up a conversation with someone in Chicago then text a joke to someone's cellphone 5 miles away. And yet the immediate darkness persists.

The glows of various human faces lit up by uniform devicery becomes more clear and lucid as more people pile into the venue made of brick and deep blue neon. Like an ooze of a swimming luminescent jellyfish, the humans communicate into and out of networks, networking their brainwaves with the dude who stands in front of two record players – texting their thoughts elsewhere as their voices and senses have been muted. Images of flatly illuminated faces come and go, some bearing teeth like a warbuilt chimp–potential brutality, like the sounds of the launching bullets embedded within the music the body involuntarily sways to. Others still illuminated here and there by a virtualworldly LED blue, only to flash out of existence once again – with an unheard soundfile as its been swallowed by vibrations of the bigger and more powerful speakers in its vicinity. Indeed, inexistence. For $1.99 a sound and ten bucks to get in.

You cannot talk but you can text. You also need your personal and paid-up artifact to make you glow when you're amidst a noise, a net, you cannot network, let alone swim your way out of if you wanted. You are ensnared. Is this the user-friendly universe built upon the notions of packaging and traveling and refueling our coffeecards that we've been waylaid into accepting as a default limitless future? Is this the world of pushbutton automation where out dreams are but a click away? Is the universe a place now that it is represented by variously themed menu schemes? Or does it, like ourselves, not exist either, its conventional understanding of which having been “automated” out of any high soaring human relevance whatsoever?

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Someone gave me a book from a famous Indian author entitled 'Who Cares?'. In this book Ramesh Balsekar explains the mystery around the ego and why it's all an illusion. Reading this book inspired me to read more and I followed up my reading with a book on the science of mind.

That topic brought me finally to Quantum Physics and I slowly began to understand a bit of what had happened in my life (for more details on my story check out my site Quantum Biocommunication). There is only one mind, the experience of a separated mind is an illusion caused by a mind program called ego.

The ego is a sub program in the mind that separates our entity from all the rest. This is necessary otherwise we could not make any experiences. It is a program that starts building in the early days and is "supposed" to end before or with our physical death.

The illusion is experienced because our attention is focused on the stream of the ego. The moment attention finds its way back to source where it ultimately comes from, you are no longer separated as the source is the only entity that has no limits whatsoever. There can be no "I" anymore. There are studies from William A.Tiller and Benjamin Libet and Fred Alan Wolf on consciousness.

Several experiments are indicating that a signal from outside is processed in the brain before we are conscious about it. On a quantum level a wave function is collapsed and the result is a particle in time and space and therefore gets represented as reality in the consciousness.

That brings us to the topic of free will. Ultimately there is a free will of course. But this free will does not come from the ego and the consciousness - it arrives from the source. The source is making the decisions. And because we are the source we do make the decisions. But don't mix this up with your ego state. Remember your ego state is an illusion. However because you create the illusion you experience it as real as long as your attention is directed towards your ego and your daily consciousness.

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Like you, my goal every day is to make something of myself. A successful, knowing, active, loving, happy thing. The problem is, on the scale of the universe the value of each of us is vanishingly close to zero. Rounded off to any reasonable number of decimal places, we’re nothing.

We are small. Very, very small. Check it out for yourself. Each of us is one of six billion people on a planet circling one of 200 billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of 100 billion or so galaxies in the observable universe, which many physicists believe is but one of a near-infinity of alternative realities in the multiverse.

Well, on the positive side this means that my problems also are nothing. However, being totally nothing never has been high on my life’s to-do list. Like the cartoonist said, “No, I don’t want to live forever, but I damn sure don’t want to be dead forever, either.” So here’s my recommended approach to the Being Next to Nothing problem:

Forget about being something more. Become something less. A lot less. Janis Joplin, along with countless mystics, tells it like it is: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

There’s a big world to explore between us and absolute Nothing. Take this trip down to quantum spacetime foam. And beyond. That’s easy to do in virtual reality. The trick is making it happen in real reality. It’s the adventure of a lifetime, the only thing for a nothing to do, really.

Just watch out for the Total Perspective Vortex that Douglas Adams warned about. It’ll blow your mind. Which, given the anxious, confused state of my own psyche, I consider to be a good thing...

Explore the themes of nothingness and oneness further in my book about the life of Plotinus, 'Return to the One'.

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Astronomers are learning that the vast majority of the universe's matter takes a form that eludes casual analysis. We've found that we're an anomaly; if there's such a thing as a "galactic federation" or universal hive-mind, our baryonic nature might preclude membership.

Perhaps we're the outcasts, cosmic untouchables whiling away the millennia in the stale galactic margins.

So I write from a perspective of profound isolation - existing, but only barely. And hoping the dark matter gods deign to materialize in our skies...

Explore more galactic ideas in my book After the Martian Apocalypse from Amazon!

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'You' do not exist, and you don't love Family Guy, lip syncing monkeys and free Internet porn. If you exist in the traditional Western way - dualistic and distinct from your environment/body - then you should be able to draw distinctions between yourself and environment both in space and time. This can not be done. Where do you end and where does not-you begin?

Therefore, 'you' do not exist. What you think exists, your ego, is an illusion built on ephemeral foundations, maintained linguistically (identifying with your speech and inner monologue), legally (democratic individualism; "I have a say in government.") and capitalistically (identifying with what media/products you consume; as well as "I own this wealth.").

When do we come into being? Richard Taylor in his 'Metaphysics':

"There is, for example, no moment of birth; birth is itself a process that takes time... Having noted this, one is then invited to work back to some imagined 'moment' at which existence itself began. But existence of what? An ovum? a zygote? bonded genetic material? fused nuclei? life? a blastula? an embryo? a person? what? And the next thing to note is, whichever of these one selects, its coming into existence is also a process, and not something that is achieved in a 'moment.' The beginnings of a particular ovum, for example, are nebulous and in no sense located at a point in time." - (pg 121)

Where are your physical boundaries? Even if you are a materialist in the mind/body debate and identify with your nervous system, the nervous system is not pristine. Molecules are always coming and leaving the supposed 'surface' of the nervous system and of the supposed 'surface' of the body. Such a surface is at best fuzzy, and at worst and most likely, arbitrary.

Your ego does not exist. The real you is a reflexive everything. *All is one*. Don't let these clichés disgust you.

Many clichés are beautifully fundamental. It's just that people with no comprehension of these phrases's beauty misuse them. And so, these insights into the very nature of Being are gradually made ugly through their repetitive misuse. *All is one*.

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More Reasons Why You, The Reader, Don't Exist

1. Unitary consciousness is an illusion.

As Daniel Dennett explains at length in Consciousness Explained, what you mistakenly think of as a single voice of consciousness inside your head is actually a massive series of independent, diverse, subconscious, and often conflicting impulses that combine into the false impression that someone is actually behind the wheel. But there is no one driving; there is no "you."

In fact, in many cases the choices you "make" and the sensations you "experience" are ex post facto rationalizations for reflex actions you have already taken. By the time your brain realizes the pan is hot, you've already moved your hand away. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of dreams, which appear to take place over minutes or even hours but in fact don't actually occur at all. Your dreams are, in reality, narratives you make up after the fact to explain the otherwise random impulses of the REM dreamstate.

You never actually dream -- you just imagine that you did upon waking. Or consider the corpus-callosotomy, in which the corpus callosum that separates the two hemispheres of the brain is surgically divided. When the two hemispheres can no longer communicate, they both exhibit characteristics of independent personality, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as split brain. Some neurologists believe the different hemispheres exhibit the split-brain characteristics even when the corpus callosum is intact; we just don't notice, because only the left brain can talk.

2. Continuity of consciousness is an illusion.

• Memoryloss.
• Sleepwalking.
• Highway hypnosis.
• Drunkenness.
• Depression.
• Low blood sugar.
• Brain tumors.
• Aphasia.
• Schizophrenia.
• PhineasGage.
• &c.

You think of your brain as something that's a part of you and yet not-you. Not so. In the sense that we conventionally speak of personality, of personal identity, there is no such thing. The idea that you have anything like a soul, that there is any aspect of your mental existence that is independent of your material brain-state, is a medievalist's delusion. There is only your brain. And as your brain changes, you change, without your even noticing.

Tomorrow, in seven years, in seventeen years, when you are seventy, your brain will be different and thus you will be different -- but nevertheless you will insist that you are in some essential sense the same person you are now. You will be, as usual, wrong. The only connection between you and that person will be that you have the same name, maybe own some of the same junk, and misremember similar memories. But it will not be "you," because the same "you" do not exist from hour to hour, much less from day to day or year to year.

Are you the same person when you are in a good mood as you are when you are in a bad mood? The same person in and out of love? How about before and after lunch? The tumor that will subtly alter your personality, making you unrecognizable to your friends and family and completely changing the way you experience the world, may already be growing in your cerebral cortex.

3. The burden of proof.

Okay, you think you exist, now prove it.

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"That's not like you to behave like that!". How many times have you heard that exclamation? It's nonsensical of course, because 'you', in the sense of a consistent, predictable, reliable personality, do not exist. Like treacle moulding itself around all in its path, your personality is embarrassingly malleable, dictated not by who you are, but by where you are, who you're with, and how you've behaved in the past. The erroneous belief that you have a pervasive personality that exists beyond the current circumstances you find yourself in, has been dubbed the 'fundamental attribution error'. As Malcolm Gladwell, put it in his book 'The Tipping Point':

"...when it comes to interpreting other people's behaviour, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context... The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment..." (p.162-3; ISBN: 0-349-11346-7).

There's an empowering twist to this message. Imagine awaking from a torpor having forgotten how your friends and family see you. Perhaps, unchained from everyone's expectations for how you ought to behave, you could be whoever you liked.

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In our own region of the universe, we've already developed computers and the ability to simulate lifelike forms using these computers and mathematical rules. I believe that one day we will create thinking beings that live in rich simulated ecosystems. We'll be able to simulate reality itself, and perhaps more advanced beings are already doing this elsewhere in the universe. Huge supercomputers would have the capacity to simulate not just a tiny fragment of reality, but a substantial fraction of an entire universe.

What if the number of these simulations is larger than the number of universes? Could we be living in such a simulation? Astronomer and philosopher Martin Rees suggests that if the simulations outnumber the universes, "as they would if one universe contained many computers making many simulations," then it is likely that we are artificial life. He notes that this theory allows for "virtual time travel," because the advanced beings who create the simulation can rerun the past. Rees says in his essay "In the Matrix" ( a.k.a. "Living in A Multiverse"),

"Once you accept the idea of the multiverse, and that some universes will have immense potentiality for complexity, it's a logical consequence that in some of those universes there will be the potential to simulate parts of themselves, and you may get a sort of infinite regress, so we don't know where reality stops and where the minds and ideas take over, and we don't know what our place is in this grand ensemble of universes and simulated universes."

Astronomer Paul Davies in "A Brief History of the Multiverse" has remarked similarly,

"Eventually, entire virtual worlds will be created inside computers, their conscious inhabitants unaware that they are the simulated products of somebody else's technology. For every original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds -- some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of their own, and so on ad infinitum."

I discuss these and many related ideas in my book

The MÖBIUS STRIP: Dr. August Möbius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology

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The universe has no neurons. A true statement? What sigh and what groan -- what lark upon high draws this little reckoning?

A universe exists and certainly a scientist within. A conceptualizing scientist -- the calculating machine; objectively speaking and no more than capable -- creating calculating machines of greatly comparable complexity.

In mathematics, the zero is a word-member of mathematical language referring to the mathematically defined state null. The actualized word 'null', in agreement with the mathematical usage of the zero, is as yet not the void in itself -- the linguistically defined absence of a lexical descriptor and all other things. The universal nil when derived wholly from itself remains a lacuna in all experiential quantification.

This guideline is indicative of a universe in which the nil is not evidentiary but exists as a virtual object in agreement with it's apprehensible actualized existence. Reflection on this state is best approached as toward a state intrinsically devoid of activating information; wherein everything has been removed from everything. Examples include the instructions implied by a blank instruction tape entering a Turing Machine and the sound contained on a blank compact disc being played through a stereo system.

The description of such universal congruence requires a condition of existence, itself reliant on the apprehensible unconditioned which presents itself to a faculty of expression.

If the observable universe contains this body and the body is part of the universe; containment indeed is a limit of the body of mankind. And what other can there be?

"Than fly to others that we know not of?" - Hamlet, Shakespeare

What accomplished may observe such a thing as no calculating machine may draw upon? Things proscribed have little merit and things measured insignificant appeal. Herein lays not weight -- but wonder! Where does the descriptor end and the functor begin?

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