The Futility of Fiction

I once again had some extra time on my hands, and I vainly tried to fill it by reading fiction. I have had a lifetime struggle with fiction. In school, it is always assigned and held up as an essential human academic venue. But I could see only it’s futility, and furthermore, I derive no pleasure from it. Feeling, however, the pressure of public opinion, I periodically try to force myself to appreciate fiction and literature. I have tried the Dickens, Twain, Melville, as well as the Vonnegut, Dick, Asimov, etc. Whatever genre or time period, I make it about 1/3 of the way through any fiction before I am irritated and bored. Now, I do appreciate music, visual art, and poetry, and by extension cinema (which is mostly visual and musical with the thinnest butter of story), but fiction per se has always remained opaque to me.

Well, having some time on my hands, I set about to read fiction. Since I like movies and science, I figured maybe science fiction would be more successful, so I attempted to read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, said to be one of the greats of speculative fiction, with three pages of glowing critical reviews as a preface. About a third of the way through, the book is already in the recycling/donation bins outside. As to the specifics of this book and why it tired me so, I shall go into some detail. First, it must be remembered that this book is supposed to be 12,000 years in the future. It must also be remembered that this book was written in 1951, and I will judge his “world-building” according to that time frame. In the beginning, there is a trial of the psycho-historians. These historians are predicting a doom (sort of like global-warming scientists), and the government is accusing them of having political motives rather than scientific for their studies. They are cross-examining Hari Seldon as to the number of scientists in his employ, to prove that his actions are political and not scientific. The government asks him how many scientists are in his employ. Seldon replies with a small number, and the government quotes a figure four or more times that. To this (in paraphrase) Seldon replies that those are just women, children, and support staff (other races/slaves). So, even though Asimov should have been aware that M. Curie won Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, and women had won the right to vote in his youth in the twenties, he goes on to create a world 12,000 years in the future where women are mentally incapable of being scientists and have no political power? And though Gauss made important mathematical contributions as a pre-teen, children cannot make contributions to mathematics in 12,000 years? And the same lack of consideration of the intelligence or political weight of non-white races is still present so far in the future despite Asimov’s awareness of folk such as Langston Hughes, the Harlem renaissance, and the earliest blooms of the civil rights movement in a decade? This is not a credible world. In the very next section, a great worker on the Galactic Encyclopedia is cataloging his findings on paper with a stylus, even though the first computers with punch cards are already in play in the 50s, and Max Mathews is already doing his early acoustic research on early IBM machines. This is not a credible world. Furthermore, despite the 50’s fascination with the glorious future of plastics and synthetic materials, which is well known to a man well-versed in science such as Asimov, there is a grave discussion regarding mining and the necessity of steel for every construction paragraphs later. This is not a credible world 20 years in the future, let alone 12,000 years. Also, the aliens gather into a Christian church with a Reverend next. When we live on a planet where few people give a shit about a psychotic Jew who lived 2000 years ago, we are expected to believe that distant planets 12,000 years in the future will embrace Christianity? Furthermore, at one point a character mentions that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that the ancient wise man who discovered this (Einstein) has been forgotten. But a meaningless Jew 3000 years prior to Einstein with no contribution to human knowledge is remembered and revered? Talk about Mr. Asimov’s distorted personal lens. The fact is that this great of science fiction creates a sloppy, unbelievable and tiresome world with no credibility heavily weighed down by his lack of vision, racism, sexism, failure to understand ecosystems or holism, and a genuine lack of appreciation of the true nature of scientific research or the interaction of science, society and government. Not to mention that the two-dimensional characters, lacking convincing psychological motivations, sexual or self-affirming actions, stuck in a third-world industrial hell, are mere cardboard cutouts to move a facile plot of no significance forward. Like most speculative fiction, it seems to be the play-world of pre-teen power fantasies projected at large with a curious disregard for other people as people versus mere manipulations for the author. I feel sorry for these people’s families.

To me, drama or supposedly realistic fiction suffers from the same problems. The characters are often abnormally aware of the importance of their mundane action, like visiting the parson for tea. In real life, when you go to someone’s house for coffee, you don’t know that very act is part of some grand drama. Some days it may be mundane, some days it may be the beginning of a complicated drama involving the bombing of some buildings in New York with airplanes. You can’t savor the moment a priori with psychic awareness the way novelists do. In some ways, the comic book American Splendor by Harvey Pekar is much more convincing than any work of literature, as the mundane, like finding a jazz album we are searching for, is the drama and grand event to us individually, though absolutely mundane to everyone else. Furthermore, the characters in literature, due usually to the narrator’s grand god-like awareness, have entirely too much knowledge of the contents and motivations of other people’s heads. Whereas, in real life, I am often unaware of the contents of my wife’s head while we speak about some grave and serious matter. Also, there is the constant plague that none of this is real. The people aren’t real. The events aren’t real. They certainly aren’t going to help me build a fence or feed my children. And given the lack of verisimilitude of the characters, their awareness of others, and their prescience of the significance of the mundane, I question as so many blindly accept, that such input could in any way help you deal with real people in real life with any authenticity. I believe fiction sets up an arrogant, solipsistic world for the heavy reader that is flagrantly anti-social in that other people are mere objects for the manipulation and enhancement of experience of the self-centered.

I suppose that is why I think religion is stupid. Religion is fiction. The Bible is fiction. The world was not created in six days. The circumference of a circle is Pi times the diameter, not three times (1 Kings 7:23). Hare do not chew their cud. (Lev 11:6) There was no world-wide flood. Bats are not birds. (Lev 14:11) The sun does not move or go around the earth, but as we know from Copernicus, vice versa. (Joshua 10:12, judges 5:31 and many others) The earth rotates on its axis. It is not still. (Chron 16:30) Human thought is in the brain, not the heart. (Esther 6:6) And that is a short list of Biblical errata, as everyone knows. These are just stupid, made-up stories by pre-scientific people. The Koran is fiction. There are not eleven planets. (Koran 12:4) The sun does not move, the earth is not flat, and the sun does not go to bed in a muddy spring. (18:86, 90) The earth is not still, but rotates on its axis. (27:61) The moon is not its own light, but reflects light of the sun. (71:16) Again, the Koran is a fiction. The Koran is just more stupid, made-up stories by a backward, pre-scientific people.

Only fundamentalists try to say the Bible or Koran is true, the word of God. But for a omniscient being, God doesn’t seem to know much about the world he created, suggesting these are not God’s stories, but the stories of men who lived in ignorance of reality. Many believers, understanding the need to not fly in the face of reality, prefer to say that these stories are poetry, and while not literally true, still have an important core message. Let us look at the core message of both the Bible and the Koran then. They, fortuitously, have the same core message, so we may dispense with both of them at once. Both the Bible and the Koran say that God exists and created the earth and man. When you die, you will be buried and stay there. At some future time, God will blow the whistle for “end of game,” the dead will be pulled out of their graves, and the living and the dead will be judged on their actions and belief affiliations. The good will go to paradise or reward, and the bad will go to the good ol’ lake of fire. First of all, there is no god. Second of all, the dead will not be resurrected. Third of all, there is no punishment or reward. Both scriptures said the end was very near, but it never came and it never will come. If there is an “end of game” for the people of earth, it will be when the sun red giants or subsequently supernovas, and we will all be in a lake of fire, regardless of what book you read or what club you belonged to. And this time of demise for the planet and the heavens is so far in the future that it is entirely possible that we may simply colonize a habitable planet or man-made space colony. So I suppose the scientists who take to the stars will be saved from the lake of fire, and the religious scrabbling with their old books on a crumbling earth will burn in the lake of fire. The real core message of Islam and Christianity, the resurrection and judgment, is an absolute utter fiction. And this intelligent, non-material being called God is a pure fiction. The only intelligence comes from firing neurons in a nervous system, something a non-material being couldn’t have. Furthermore, there is the old “ghost in the machine” problem of how a purely non-material being could interact with a material world.

Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism are utter fictions and nonsense too. There is no reincarnation, as our personality and identity is a by-product of our human brains. There is no human intelligence transferable to a non-human brain such as a roach. The number of species and beings is not a constant, so are some souls being made fresh and some recycled? Buddhism is absolutely contingent on belief in reincarnation, because seeking Nirvana or freedom from rebirth is the sole point to the Noble Eightfold Path. As to pantheistic notions such as Taoism or Hinduism, there is no universal spirit or connection between all things no matter how close or distant. If Alpha Centauri explodes today, the only effect that would have is a peculiar twinkle in the sky some thousands of years hence, because no communication or effect can occur faster than the speed of light. So there can be no instantaneous, magical connection. The only connection between us and something else must occur through the exchange of bosons that determine the four fundamental forces of nature. Any object too distant is limited by the universal speed limit of the speed of light, and therefore such interactions are negligible and slow, and most certainly completely material.

Why people persist in maintaining the utility of fiction is beyond me. We live in a real, vibrant, and beautiful world, full of wonder and greatness. These religious fictions are simply for the control of others, for generating fear and misery. We should embrace reality and the wonder it is.

What Religion Can Do For You

Here’s a sad article from the BBC about a 19-year-old boy who was apparently planning a suicide bombing. Thankfully he was found out before he could go through with it; now he’s facing charges of terrorism.

You know, it’s hard to be a teenager. He was new to Bristol. He’d recently converted to Islam.

When I was a teenager, when you wanted to piss off Mom and Dad, you just read the Tao Te Ching or something. Now kids are strapping on vests full of explosives and sharp objects. I think I prefer Taoism as a form of teenage rebellion; at least there’s nothing in the text that can be construed as encouraging violence.

Some Muslims will insist that the Koran doesn’t, either. But if that’s so, then how come so many have killed in the name of Allah? (And lest anyone think I’m claiming Christianity doesn’t, trust me…I know plenty of violence has been done by both Christians and Jews, too…I think they’re all nuts.)

And I’ll also give credit where it’s due: the article states that the kid was picked up after an investigation following a tip-off from within the local Muslim community.

The Green Movement Welcomes Homer Simpson and Everyone (Who Wants to Live)

Here’s a funny op-ed at the BBC website (which we check daily to keep in touch with the world…we haven’t watched the news or read much in the way of newspapers for a long time). It’s from George Meyer, a long-time writer of the Simpson’s, and uses humor (on the mature list of Freudian defense mechanisms, Maj reminds me frequently) to talk about the rather serious predicament we as a species find ourselves in, creating the climate change that is going to threaten our survival (or at least our life as we know it) if we don’t get our act together in time to reverse it.

Sony Music and other giants use up to 1/2 pirated software!!

Sony Music and other music giants have been caught, with up to half of their software for production being pirated.  These companies sell no-talent, crap music and then have the audacity to lead aggressive legal campaigns against music and file sharing . . . when in reality they are stealing their very means of production despite billions of dollars for the payments for proper use of this software, stealing the money out of the hands of the programmers that struggle to exist.  Then when small individuals with limited means seek to share a copy of a song or video with a friend (a perfect legal act for the owner of the material) they crack down with the wrath of God.  It turns out that the music industry of course has no principles, unless you count greed and hypocrisy as principles.

Here is the full article:

Lost verses of Lao-Tzu

Two fun selections:

1

“Man’s desire for control is always greater than his desire for justice.  Therefore:

The people submit their freedom for stability, the control over disorder.

The government commits any atrocity for wealth, a greater control over more subjects.

And the mystic seeks to understand, to gain control over confusion, rather than confront.

And so folly is heaped on folly until we learn to desire justice more than control.”

2

“Every day a young man took a fishing net to the river.  He would fill his net with a certain number of smooth, small river-stones.  Then he would lift the bag from the ground clear over his head with a mighty push.  Every day he added one more stone to the bag, day after day, year after year.

He noticed that sometimes he was sad, but he would lift his duty of stones easily.  Sometimes he was happy, or maybe had too much wine and fun the night before, and the stones would be hard to lift.  He learned that his being happy or sad was like a dream.  If it didn’t matter to his own arms and legs, what did his happiness matter to his wife, his children, his friends, or his government?  He also learned that when something weighed on his mind, he had to put it aside, or that burden and the stones together would be too much to lift.

In this way the stone-lifter grew very strong and very wise through work and duty.”

Lady in the Water: M. Night Syamalan’s a Genius!

We finally watched this movie. It was incredible! We looked up the writer/director/producer on wikipedia (discovering that he also played one of the characters), and I was saddened but not surprised to read of the negative critical response (as well as disappointing box-office figures) that it received. We all thought the movie was amazing.

I suppose I’m not surprised. That which is truly good is seldom well received by either the establishment or the masses. (I’m sure his treatment of the film-critic character in the movie didn’t help his standing with the film critics, but it sure had all of us rolling in our seats, laughing.) But I think the movie is perfect and Mr. Syamalan is a genius. It’s recursive, and funny (not just the part with the film critic), and just scary enough to be exciting, but not tediously so (like *I am Legend,* which we watched recently and had to take breaks from, as the tension was making me and my daughter nearly ill). And it was uplifting. Just magic. That’s what movies are supposed to be like.

We Are the Most Lied-To, Gullible Populace on the Planet

Wowsers. This book of Noam Chomsky’s, Failed States, is just chock full of facts that show up our media and our government as a pack of liars.

The list of atrocities committed by our own government (like the 1985 bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which was actually committed by the CIA, a known fact at this point, though the media never bothered to correct the perception they created by passing along the government’s story that it was a terrorist) just boggles the mind. Presidents from both parties over the years have protected the oil companies’ interests in the Middle East with crime after crime against civilian populations over there. Some of them we’ve never heard a word about, some we’ve heard about but with a twisted slant to blame it all on terrorism. Wherever, in the Middle East, South America, or Asia, real democracy has flowered, we’ve stamped it out in favor of fascist regimes (like that of Saddam Hussein, who was put in power by JFK in the 60s) willing to cooperate with our interests.

If you want to know the facts about what’s really going on in the middle east, get this book. Like they’re stamping on our mail these days, those words of one of my cousins however many times removed and however imperfect himself, John Adams, “Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.” We need to wake up as a country and deal with the fact that we are living under a long-term fascist regime that started long before any of us were born, right back to the founding of our country, which purports to value freedom but which only gives it lip service, and which is actually set up to benefit the few, the super-rich, who head these multi-national corporations. It started with cotton. Now it’s oil.

The primary obstacle to progress for us as a species is America and our corrupt government. This is not a partisan issue, either. The Democrats are just as complicit, though BushCo, with its clumsy handling and constant underestimation of our intelligence, has certainly taken it to new heights, or should I say lows?

Please, let’s stop acting like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a load of BS. Let’s seek the truth, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Illuminati or reptilian hybrids. It’s got to do with money and power.

President Bush and John Quincy Adams: Soulmates of History

The Monroe Doctrine begins and ends with a president’s son:

As has been noted before, there is a lot of similarity between George W. Bush and John Quincy Adams. Both men were presidents as well as sons of presidents. Both fathers were perceived as rather ineffectual or undistinguished. Both sons got involved in controversial wars in other lands, and both wars were ethically questionable. Most importantly, it is my contention that both men are terminal points in the life-span of the philosophy of the Monroe Doctrine. John Quincy Adams is the beginning of a string of presidencies that assume the validity of the Monroe Doctrine; George Bush’s presidency is the last.

John Quincy Adams was Secretary of State under President Monroe from 1817-1825. As such he was involved in the formulation and first use of the philosophy of the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine officially dates to the state of the union address of President Monroe on December 2, 1823. Officially, the Monroe Doctrine promulgates the philosophy “that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” Hence, it officially is a clarion call for independence of the Western Hemisphere from European colonization. However, there are more than a few holes in the official statement. First among these is that the original speech only references the Russian influence in the Oregon territories and the Spanish influence in Florida. Oddly enough, this stern warning that we will protect North and South America from any colonization (being the true lovers of freedom we are) seems not to affect Canada, which was a thoroughly British colonial area, securely controlled by our most probable enemy as proved by the then-recent War of 1812. John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State, helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine, the causes of which may be found in the first conflict with the Seminoles. There were three Seminole wars in Florida, 1817-1818, 1835-1842, and 1855-1858. So John Quincy Adams helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine while Secretary of State during the first conflict. It was mainly needed to justify the actions of Andrew Jackson, who in official response to the Scott Massacre, set about to attack the Spanish, villages of freed slaves, to exterminate towns of Indians and execute British citizens who were nuzzling in on our trade profits. There was no question we wanted Florida, as Adams was engaged in purchase negotiations with Spain for Florida prior to the first war. Adams used double-speak, finger-pointing, and Orwellian word re-definition to make grossly offensive and atrocious actions justifiable, in short, supplying, as does Condoleeza Rice today, the mental gymnastics to justify a war, about which even General Ethan Allen Hitchcock had admitted, “The government is in the wrong, and this is the chief cause of the persevering opposition of the Indians, who have nobly defended their country against our attempt to enforce a fraudulent treaty. The natives used every means to avoid a war, but were forced into it by the tyranny of our government.”

“So Adams let the Spanish protest, then issued a letter (with 72 supporting documents) blaming the war on the British, Spanish and Indians. In the letter he also apologized for the seizure of West Florida, said that it had not been American policy to seize Spanish territory, and offered to give St. Marks and Pensacola back to Spain. Spain accepted and eventually resumed negotiations for the sale of Florida. [Suddenly turning face, Adams began] defending Jackson’s actions as necessary, and sensing that they strengthened his diplomatic standing, Adams demanded Spain either control the inhabitants of East Florida or cede it to the United States! An agreement was then reached whereby Spain ceded East Florida to the United States and renounced all claim to West Florida.”

US State Department website on the Monroe Doctrine

So the financial boon that had been sought all along had finally been obtained by public misrepresentation of the conflict and justification of the genocidal means to the American and international community as twisted self-defense. This conflict was enshrined in American policy as the Monroe Doctrine. While the overt reason for the Monroe Doctrine was self-defense and freedom from European colonization, the true subtext was desire for profit, economic monopoly, justification of immoral violence, and a blank check for future southern expansion of the young American empire.

And what about our glorious freedom from European colonization? Isn’t that the real point of the Monroe Doctrine, that America believes in free, self-determinate nations, and will stand like a beacon protecting the Western Hemisphere from being used by European, Soviet, or any other imperial power? Would it surprise you to know that the Monroe Doctrine was crafted with the British, mainly to limit French and Spanish profits in exploiting the New World at the expense of any loss to British or American wealth?

“British Foreign Minister George Canning proposed that the United States and the United Kingdom join to warn off France and Spain from intervention [in any of the recently freed colonies: Argentina, Chile, Columbia, or Mexico]. Both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison urged Monroe to accept the offer, but . . . Adams also was quite concerned about the efforts of Russia and Mexico to extend their influence over the Oregon Country, which had already been jointly claimed by the Americans and British. At the Cabinet meeting of November 7, 1823, Adams argued against Canning’s offer, and declared, ‘It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war.’”

wikipedia article on Monroe Doctrine

This clearly is a chronology of an economic arrangement with the British regarding the exploitation of the indigenous peoples and Spanish Americas, with the inspiration by Adams that America was mature enough to administer these economic prizes. Adams, in formulating the Monroe Doctrine, is writing future presidents a blank check to attack the other peoples of the earth for the sake of American profit. He also has set the course of crying self-defense and security while clutching slaves and dollars to a bullying chest.

The parallels between this conflict and the Iraq war are many. Apparently the war was decided ahead of time for economic reasons. The American public was lied to about the origins and true goals of the war. Such similarities illustrate how the doctrine of America’s right to use violence for material gain was now enshrined in American political philosophy. The actions of Andrew Jackson, seen by many of his time as a frightening enemy of freedom, the American Napoleon, had now been given the veneer of philosophy and acceptable expression in international affairs.

Theodore Roosevelt extended the Monroe Doctrine to Latin America. “In 1928, the Clark Memorandum was released, concluding that the Doctrine gave the United States the right to intervene in Latin American affairs when it perceived a threat to its interests or internal dangers, even without European interference. Internal dangers included events such as elections as acceptable justification for intervention.” It is not surprising that the reach of the Doctrine keeps growing, as it was in origin a blank check to commit violence for economic gain. Kennedy extended the Monroe Doctrine to justify the Cold War. “The Monroe Doctrine means what it has meant since President Monroe and John Quincy Adams enunciated it, and that is that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere, and that is why we oppose what is happening in Cuba today. That is why we have cut off our trade. That is why we worked in the Organization of American States and in other ways to isolate the Communist menace in Cuba. That is why we will continue to give a good deal of our effort and attention to it.” The same logic is next extended to Nicaragua by Reagan. It is apparent in the judgment against the US by the world court that the Monroe Doctrine had always placed us philosophically as aggressors against other nations in disdain for morality or international opinion.

The true legacy of the Monroe Doctrine is the inherent belief that the best government is the one that maximizes power and wealth. This is why governments like Bush’s seem so fascist. It is the close relationship between government and the economically and socially powerful in these governments, and the way their decisions only benefit the wealthy and powerful (like Chevron or Haliburton), not the common man (who sends his son to die in Iraq). I suppose Bush is not consciously fascist, or he would show less disdain for friends like Saddam Hussein, but he shares the characteristics of proto-fascism. “Semiotician Umberto Eco attempts to identify the characteristics of proto-fascism as the cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, cult of action for action’s sake, life is lived for struggle, fear of difference, rejection of disagreement, contempt for the weak, cult of masculinity and machismo, qualitative populism, appeal to a frustrated majority, obsession with a plot, illicitly wealthy enemies, education to become a hero, and speaking Newspeak, in his popular essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt. More recently, an emphasis has been placed upon the aspect of populist fascist rhetoric that argues for a “re-birth” of a conflated nation.” But I believe our presidents have simply been guilty of the viewpoint that since they are rich and powerful, as are all who are not marginalized in our society, that benefiting such individuals by continuous acquisition of power and wealth would necessarily be the best course. Now, ideas in public discourse emerge such as how Americans are less secure thanks to Mr. Bush’s unilateral actions in Iraq which have galvanized terrorists, how we Americans are not having our needs met in education or health care, or how we fought a war for oil, but pay over $3.50 a gallon for gas after obtaining a monopoly on Iraqi oil reserves and production, since our gas trophy is being used to control the oil markets of Europe and Asia for the profit of the same few. So how could I have fought a war for oil and money, which I and most Americans find morally objectionable, while at the same time have no money to show for the selling of my soul? Only by following the Monroe Doctrine, which has implicitly guided America in every choice to seek to maximize wealth and power at the quality and expense of human life and happiness. In this respect, Bush is an excellent president, for he has fulfilled the Monroe Doctrine in fullness. As Madeline Albright says, “every president has a position much like the Bush doctrine in his back pocket, but it is simply foolish to smash people in the face with it and to implement it in a manner that will infuriate even allies.” In his interview with Jeremy Paxon, Noam Chomsky relays that “Henry Kissinger for example described [the Bush doctrine] as a revolutionary new doctrine which tears to shreds the Westphalian System, the 17th-century system of International Order and of course the UN Charter. But nevertheless, [this interpretation of Kissinger's] has been very widely criticized within the foreign policy elite. . . on the narrow ground the doctrine is not really new, it’s [only more] extreme.” Bush is merely the logical culmination of the Monroe Doctrine, it’s fullest expression. We can now see it for the justification of horror and non-responsibility to the needs of the everyday American people that it truly is. Bush may someday be remembered not as the worst president, but rather as the very best at expressing a very bad and very dead idea, that government’s job is only to accumulate wealth and power to its very limit. Instead the president of the future will be judged by how he or she has met the needs of the American people.

The DNC Are a Bunch of Fools

Here’s a BBC article to ponder. It’s about the confusion in Florida over the primary and whether or not they’ll be able to have their delegates at the convention. It seems there’s a power struggle between the national party and the Florida dems over control.

I didn’t think they could do it, but I’m afraid they’re going to hand it to the Grand Old Poopheads AGAIN. I’m afraid we’re going to end up with McCain, with his crazy ideas and lack of understanding of personal freedom, just because the Democrats can’t get their heads out of their heinies long enough to see past next week. I’m so exasperated.

Topology — I’m the Map!!

Topology is the mathematical study of sets of objects classified as open or closed and transformations of such sets and classifications. From this simple beginning, we can derive space, functional analysis, connectedness and compactness concepts, as well as tools useful in the study of quantum physics, psychology, computer science and more. Topology began with the study of the bridges of a northern city, literally, map-making. How is this act of map-making the act of sets of points and their transformations? Well, the points of an actual city are grouped into classifications like parks, counties, connected or separated areas, and then these points (taken from a 3-D globe) are transformed, or related to, the points of a 2-D sheet of paper. So map-making raises the general questions of this intellectual activity. Furthermore, certain transformations of a city, like road maps, preserve some information, like road connections, but lose other information, like elevation above sea-level. In general, we explore ideas like open, closed, connected, separate, information-preserving and information-sacrificing transformations. These are the very ideas of space, time, and measurement. It is therefore no surprise that quantum physics has made extensive use of topology. Furthermore, our minds are maps. We don’t actually experience the world as it is. For example, we experience light reflected from various objects mapped onto our occipital, or vision, cortex in the back of the head. Some information, like red-wavelength light absorption, is preserved in this mapping, and some, like x-ray radiation, is not. So it is no surprise that neuropsychology and neurology have made extensive use of topology. In his TED lectures, Steven Johnson, writer of the book Emergence and occasional participant in The Daily Show, illustrated how making a map of London was essential to understanding the source of cholera outbreaks, leading to great changes in public health and allowing the evolution of large cities that were livable. Topology is a root discipline that touches fundamentals of physics, mathematics, logic, psychology and social and political theory. Because topology is a fundamental exploration of transformations of sets of objects and the information (limit points) lost or preserved in that mapping, and our experience of life is a topological transformation of the world onto our mind, topology magically touches every discipline of human knowledge.

The beginning of topology is the definition of a topology, given a set U and collection of subsets T:

1) U and {} are in T

2) The union of any elements of T is in T

3) The intersection of any finite elements of T is in T

This collection is a topology.

For example, consider the set U = {1,2,3,4}

Here is a topology T= {1,2,3,4},{},{1,2},{3},{1,2,3}

Of course, things are much more interesting, with a infinite number of points like in Euclidean space. All sets of a topology are defined as “open”. I see and remember this by thinking of the objects in the open subsets as flowing freely into one another. The topological basis (a concept we can’t go into here) of Euclidean space is the collection of open space-balls. Any space may be constructed of overlapping balls of space of different size. Functions are seen as transformations of this topology. Questions of continuity and differentiability of functions in functional analysis also find a home in topology.

Anyone wishing to learn more should consult Topology by Munkres, or Topology by Hocking.

“I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map, I’m the map. I’m the map! . . . And which character would be singing that? . . . ” Brian Regan