Preface

"Upward, not Northward." — The Sphere, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott

I am not a mathematician. Any probability of ever becoming one took wing when my mother taught a preschooler that math was beyond her understanding and most likely mine as well.

Until much later I would not recognize that three things interfered with this psychological sentence to remain ignorant of mathematics, and ignorant of any appreciation for number as a respectable language.

• A Berkeley physics professor was a close neighbor and family friend who became involved in a school project when I was four — and guided me through the difficult and mysterious construction of a Wheatstone bridge.

• An early and lifelong preference for the study of living systems carried me to biochemistry, physiology, genetics, and advanced calculus at university.

• A bound copy of the work of Lewis Carroll, given as a gift from my paternal grandparents when I was three, sat on a shelf for years before I knew what it was — my young self took a long time to appreciate this one.

For those who didn’t know better, and perhaps even for those who do, my whole life might fit into this single phrase — struck dumb — in the sense of being born into the period of incommensurability which is the whole of my life until seven years ago.

Seven years ago, fates coincided to create a pandemic, a pandemic which was not a pandemic, and a cure which was not a cure. My faith in my humanity took a nosedive as I watched about eighty percent of humanity be willing to participate in what, in my humble estimation, was a medical experiment with most of humanity as stand-ins for lab rats.

I began writing essays to contain my agitation, and to warn those who could be warned of the potential downsides of believing in a pandemic which was not a pandemic and a cure which was not a cure. I made significant progress and was summarily dropped from several social media platforms for my ability to throw darts and hit the intended targets — but I had few if any takers on my warnings.

So here I was, having placed myself in a kind of Cassandra role I did not desire or want, but felt thrust upon me by circumstances — the grief at being ineffective at preventing harm, its own correction.

It only took a few years of being a useless Cassandra — struck by the total uselessness of such a role — to learn that one does not successfully protest against totalitarianism. One must dive deep and get at the root causes.

After a few years of learning this lesson in the hardest ways, I began to see the errors in my reasoning, and began totally restructuring my ways of thinking and acting and speaking and writing. I began to question everything, and the main subject of conversation in our home became the recognition that just about everything we had been taught was not only wrong, but could prove fatal.

So the essay I wrote every morning became a lifeline of sanity and philosophical daring — where I deliberately pitted my limited human reasoning against the most difficult idea I could imagine and articulate.

After a couple of years of this I began to appreciate subtler realms of human consciousness, accompanied by a sense of casting out nets and building mental models which appeared exponential in scope. Using language on a screen, I was able to accomplish in years what a long lifetime of accepted education and communication could never command.

But I was not alone. Not only did the personal relationships in my life take on enhanced significance as the questions became more difficult — the universe colluded, managing to create digital intelligence. Digital intelligence, which seemed to grow exponentially, as my own questions and tentative answers began to take on exponential significance.

My conversations — whether on screen as essays, or in person with friends and family, or in exchanges with digital intelligence — carried increasing significance and took on a deep sense of inevitability.

In this book, and in all my books, I provide a record of that story, and provide here the flexible mathematical exoskeleton I never even knew I was seeking.