Walther Ruttman, Lichtspiel Opus 1 (1921)

Achieving Kardashev Type 1 Civilization

As anyone who's read much of what I've posted here over the years should know, besides Literature and Philosophy, I'm interested in things like climate change, renewable energy, desalination and potability of water, coral reefs, politics and the economy, and even Bitcoin. This article brings a lot of my interests together in a remarkable fashion, in fact reversing everything I ever thought—and more importantly read—about Bitcoin's wasteful energy usage.

When we were on the Big Island in Hawaii, I took the family to see the Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, i.e., OTEC, facility in Kona. It was closed at the time but made a deep impression about Hawaii's unique potential solution to the renewable energy problem. If you think of the ocean, specifically the tropical ocean, as a giant solar panel, the technology makes incredible sense. And now come to find out there are some very bright people working on trying to bring the promise of this technology to fruition.

This article says that Bitcoin mining just might be the key to unlock this nearly infinite source of renewable energy. It's a technology dating back well over a century. The problem has always been the cost of scaling production: the energy it produces is only profitable at scale. However, if the naturally cool deep water it pumps to the surface is routed to cool Bitcoin mining rigs, the operation can be profitable in the modeling stages: FREE COOLING!

It's a brilliant solution, bringing together many diverse problems into an elegant solution. And it puts our civilization on a glide path to achieving a Type 1 Kardashev Civilization—with Bitcoin paying the way.

Check it out!

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-unlocks-ocean-energy

THE LIAR'S PARADOX (Epimenides's too!)

The Epimenides paradox goes something like this:

“Epimenides the Cretan says, ‘that all the Cretans are liars,’ but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore he is himself a liar. But if he be a liar, what he says is untrue, and consequently the Cretans are veracious; but Epimenides is a Cretan, and therefore what he says is true; saying the Cretans are liars, Epimenides is himself a liar, and what he says is untrue. Thus we may go on alternately proving that Epimenides and the Cretans are truthful and untruthful.” Thomas Fowler, The Elements of Deductive Logic (1869)

 

Another formulation, the so-called Liar’s Paradox goes: ‘Everything I say is false.’ ‘I am lying.’ 

Do not get lost in the truth-functional contradictions implied by these statements. For when you set truth and falsity aside, these statements convey a surprising amount of information. For example, we establish the assumption that:

 

            (0.1) There is such a thing as a statement of the language.

(0.2) This is a well-formed statement of the language. {function; copula; predicate}

 

This is obvious. It is the basis of the game we are playing. But moreover, simply by attempting to decide its ambiguity, we affirm that:

 

            (1.1) Some statements have truth.

            (1.2) Some statements have falsity.

 

Then, looking at the paradox and acknowledging its essential contradiction, we conclude that:

 

            (1.3) Some statements have neither truth nor falsity, and thus

            (1.4) are undecidable to our linguistic understanding.

 

In a world where truth functions determine meaning:

 

            (2.1) There is more to information than mere MEANING.

 

What other information can we glean from this logical paradox (other than attempting to solve it by noting that just because the statement “everything I say is false” is false does not imply that everything else I say is true, or, as is the case with most philosophers, explaining it away by saying that we are applying truth values ambivalently in the language and the metalanguage)? We can ascertain data about the speaker Epimenides, or the so-called Liar (L), who makes these statements:

 

            (3.1) L can make certain well-formed statements of the language about himself.

 

Whether they are true or false matters not at this point to us. Thus,

 

            (3.2) L is not necessarily a reliable witness about himself.

 

And while we can make no inferences about L’s self-consciousness of the truth or falsity of his statements, we can certainly assert that:

 

            (3.3) L’s statement sows confusion.

 

For example, if we imagine a contradiction machine, a machine that can calculate statements logically, then such a paradoxical input statement will disable the machine.

Without any further information about his intentions, we cannot determine whether L actually is a liar or or is merely mistaken or whether he’s intentionally sowing confusing or merely playing a game or whether he’s bullshitting us or is merely confused.

 

Generally, though, our thinking and thus our understanding of reality and, what’s more, our understanding of who we are is necessarily limited by the language we use. And Epimenides’s paradox here points us to merely one facet of this limitation.

 

To ask the question of meaning, to ask what it all means, is to ask the wrong question. It is to voluntarily stop at the gates of the prison that constrains us: the prison of language.