Arnofsky's Pi afterthought: Economics

It's going on 5 am and I haven't been able to sleep ... so might as well write and amp the hypomanic thought patterns up a little more so I really can't sleep lol

But, seriously, speaking of hypomania and over the top ... I think I have written on Arnofsky's Pi here before. If I haven't I will have to do that ... but I think I did when I wrote about the Person of Interest episode that used Pi.

Anyway, here is the thought I had while playing text-twist and solitaire trying to get sleepy:

The number is all these different things: the silicon identity of a nascent and still-born AI, the 216 digit name of G-d embedded in the Torah, and the secret to figuring out and picking the stock market. But I think it is interesting to ask which of them came first.

The stock market did. That is Max's project that led to the whole thing. So, what is the stock market? It's all about economics. I'm sure people much more erudite than I will ever be able to become in my life can say many things and make many clarifications about whether it's a cause of economic movements, or a gauge, or location of the movements etc. But, one way or another, it's about economics.

So, what is economics? Is it just "money"? What is money? Is it gold or minted dollars or bit coins or whatever? Money has only ever been a stand in for power ... the ability to acquire what you want or need. That's why I always laugh when people talk about those who seek only money and power, because they're really the same thing. So, is this post a ranting moralistic diatribe about power-hungry people, or how the search for power always leads to pain (Max's drill to the head etc)? No.

Let's examine it from another angle - the etymological angle. "Economic" comes from two Greek words: "oikos" (house) and "nomos" (law). So, it is "household law" (I got this from a professor while I was working on my MA). It's how things work in our day to day lives really, if you take the "house" as the whole society/civilaztion/culture/fill in the blank. It's the system of how we leverage what we have to get what we need to survive (whether physical survival by getting food, or emotional survival by observing or participating in the arts, what have you).

My main point of interest is that the whole thing in Pi begins with trying to figure out this practical-level system of how people use what they have to go about getting what they need (or think they need etc) to live, which is what economics really is. Max's search begins with the practical.

We live day to day doing what we do without really thinking about it that much on the theoretical level, how the system all really works in its interconnected complexity (a butterfly farts in Tanzania and it makes my team lose Sunday's game, that sort of interconnectedness thing). BUT, that is a survival mechanism. If we start to think too much about it on the meta-level like Max does, it can crush us, as it does him.

Just a thought. I don't know if it means anything. I guess it could be just a word of caution, or maybe a pet peeve being voiced about people praising understanding too much, and if some of us who have some hypomanic tendencies and feel a bit of a tug sometimes in the direction of Max and John Nash (think of that scene in Beautiful Mind where the numbers start coming of the screen at him), people sometimes act like we're crazy, maybe even immoral (with tropes that ease the mind, like how "we" are truly virtuous for seeking understanding, versus "they" who do not etc ... the same thing can happen with "honesty" - too much honesty can kill you because your own mind is actually very hard to understand, so it can become debilitating to try too hard to understand enough of it to be "honest" about what you're thinking, and then guilt complex ensues from feeling like a fraud ... these are real experiences for some phobics and anxiety patients who have gone un-counseled in a religious setting that offers only moral categories for interpretation).

Keep in mind that when I speak of understanding, I am thinking in terms of the thought of Paul Ricouer, who said that we exist in continual flux between the two poles of understanding and explanation. Understanding is "getting it" on an intuitive level, what the Greeks called "nous" (one immediate vision). Explanation is trying to communicate it discursively, scientifically. To see the difference, think about a joke ... you get the joke, but when you try to explain it, it becomes way less funny, because you have moved away from understanding, from the experience of "getting it."

I've sometimes thought of this "arc" Ricoeur talks about in terms of language - poetic language is understanding and scientific language is explanation. We always begin with poetic language (all the great epics are in verse, the Hebrew Bible is the first place we really find a development of religious prose). But we always strive towards scientific language to try to communicate ... an objective medium by which to be sure that the other person has "gotten it" too. And we always gravitate back to poetic language because the scientific has to have something to describe.

I guess what popped into my head tonight (or this morning now, or whatever time it is) was two-fold. The first thing is that the drive towards scientific language is a survival instinct. The second is that one of the ways too much understanding kills is by solipsism. Too much staying inside the private languages of one's own act of understanding without making the attempt at communication through explanation kills one. We see this in Max going nuts and the answers offered by those around him. Devi (the really cute mid-eastern neighbor woman) tells him he needs to get out more. Sol tells him to take a bath, like the Archimedes - who finally listened to his wife.

Anyway, there you have it, for what it's worth ... maybe a PB and J will help me sleep.