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In the past chapter, the "governing power" of knowledge was mentioned, but treated as if it were just a black box. While I cannot describe the entire field of cybernetics and why "this works"—since the cyberneticians cannot themselves agree on a suitable definition, as is the habit of our institutional overlords in this sad time—I can relate what I wrote about in the past three chapters to the primary work given to the public regarding cybernetics. As mentioned before, Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics: or, Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine is the go-to book for introducing the concept. I do not claim I have anything to add to the fundamentals of cybernetics, for the book clarifies its purpose for the reader. Of particular interest is Chapter V of Cybernetics, titled Computing Machines and the Nervous System. Absent a compelling reason to believe subjective experience or cognition matches a force in the world operating on its own power, the arguments regarding the mind and governance can only work with what is readily available, which is statistical information.

There is no argument that you cannot do with math what the institutionalists do to model human behavior and make predictions about it. Everything about machinery, abstract or physical, suggests that as long as mathematics is consistent, predictions can be made. Aspersions about the real world being unknowable or the mathematician's ignorance do not change historical predictions. Whatever unknowns exist do not change the weight of all of the knowns, which is what a proper statistical model records. It is necessary to keep in mind the claims made with any mathematical model. If they are making philosophical claims about "fundamental nature", it is the philosophical claims themselves that are suspect, and "garbage in, garbage out" tragically plays out. For the inquisitor, who does not have any intrinsic tie to the processes that comprise the human person that allow the inquisitor to know instinctively what the other thinks and feels, statistical models are never confused with their genuine and necessary understanding of what happens. The behaviors of human beings are constrained by political society and by well-known mechanical laws. They are not determined by those constraints, as if whips and chains were the sole or dominant motor power in the universe. The driver in slavery sets an example by whipping the stupid or weak slaves, and this example is less for the stupid slave—many times a stupid slave has no control over his or her fate and cruelty is their fate within this sad human race—than it is to evoke the feeling that the valid slaves are next if they observe the slave. This follows from a simple mechanical communication of the torture of the slave. It is for this reason that "torture porn" is ubiquitous in 21st-century society. This torture porn was proliferated primarily after 2001, and it was known to the people that torture sites made into state policy what had been trialed on Americans since the 1970s and especially during the schooling regime of the 1990s. In an earlier time, before torture porn could be linked to state policy, its behavioral effect was limited. The display of torture in itself does not have a linear effect on disciplining behavior, where someone claims that "torture is always god". It is because this torture operates in parallel with a known torture apparatus—Bush the Younger's torturers appear on the talk show circuit to tell the Americans "DEATH IS FREEDOM" and that death is the last freedom Americans will ever know—that the mechanical force of displaying torture can have its disciplinary effect. If the driver attempted to scourge a slave who was not a slave, it would look comical at first. Only by operating in parallel with a vast, total system—an ideology—would a program to mark the free Negro as once again a slave be effective. Such a program, like the torture in any slavery, would not fall on the black race evenly, and every slavery in history has been premised on stark inequality among the slaves. Every statistical model worthwhile will back every statistical point with some mechanical evidence that fills in information between those data points. It works this way for modeling informational, abstract machines, just as it works for modeling systems of heat or any system that we know to be physical and something that did not provide these data points ready-made for our consumption. All such data points are obtained by measurement, even if they appear obvious or if the facts of "the data" were imposed by violent imposition and deliberate lying to make any contrary data point inadmissible.

Cybernetics should not be seen as "moving" or "making" the world in any way, or determining anything. What is really done is reverse-engineering the process of formation of some regulated or proper "part" from the perspective of the knowledge faculty described in the last chapter. It is not a substitute for physical mechanics or the understanding of natural history that has been reconstructed by us. We do not by any means possess a direct link to "meaning", or "just-so stories" to describe the world. Mechanics and appeal to nature are of no use when describing the formative "parts" that are described by scientific history. The conception of nature, from which all of the world must arise, and the known and documented mechanisms which presented as wealth for our knowledge, are only "fit" into this model by knowledge, and this faculty of systematizing the facts that mechanics entails. Not one of these things can account for a "proper part". There are a few ways to manufacture those parts. One is supposition or "wild guesses" which are tested and fit. This is inadequate for even a working theory and a terrible way to find truth in science, which ensures scientific thought can only develop one death at a time. Another is for models to be proposed by some whimsy that looks elegant to us to explain the world, much as a child will assemble a crude model to navigate their environment, lacking any good model of the world in the time it has had but needing one to do more than what is placed in front of them. However ineffective this is, this is better because thought can develop without waiting for tragedy to strike. Neither is particularly effective. If it were possible to understand "how we think" first as mechanical operations—something humans are quite adept at when they are allowed to ask this question without imperious fear drilled into them by shitty pedagogy—and then as part of a larger "total system", we could finally liberate ourselves from a ruinous and pointless cycle. This is not something that would be a "master key", that sniveling argument of the aristocratic mode of thought. Nowhere does this analysis "make the world" or "better understand reality". Whenever a model is made, it necessarily invokes abstract machinery rather than the real machinery and volition that it models. This is a problem of our ability to communicate these models by any means, and that extends to our planned, deliberate, governed action to affect the world just as much as it applies to language. When we set out to change the world in some way, we are aware that our conceit about the world is flawed, and we are only doing what we think is right. We often judge what is right while formulating these plans, and this is part of moral philosophy and science, which cybernetics only inveighs on so far as its models of the natural world allow.

This barrier between abstract mechanics and "regular mechanics" is not diametrically opposed or contradictory. If we want to conduct this cybernetic task in any way that is conducive to a real result, they are complementary, and neither account for the genuine kernel of science. The true kernel of science is not with the model or theory or method, but with the entity that conducts science by whatever means it does so. Nowhere does "science" as an act hold automatic authority. Science seeks that authority, and it seeks specific authority about the truth of the things that the scientist wishes to know, rather than vague generalities about nature. The general theory of technology, a theory of natural events, or a "theory of everything" is not itself the kernel, but an aspirational goal that is not foundational to science. There is probably no "theory of everything" or anything close to that, other than the world itself in all of its aspects. There is a kernel of thought that asks the question of how we know anything we know, which refines the native faculty of whatever can ask this question. This refinement is never inexorable or mandated by anything. For life, its basic faculties compelled it to regard reality to survive, which it first carried out by instinct, but no instinct has spiritual authority just because it's "natural" or ingrained in them. We are capable of questioning that instinct, and that instinct can fail. For the animal, instinctive behavior exists not as a pressing of the nerve, but as something carried out to regulate its existence in the way animals do.

All of the ways the animal does this can be modeled and understood by an alien. Humans are different not in their capacities or potential which is assumed, but in their actual realized behavior. Humans don't just have the potential for language. That potential was realized, is active, and is reproduced among humanity by the transmission of knowledge, carried out with each new human. This transmission is not limited to pedagogy or the preferred notions of education, but the child must have some extant language to read to learn English or any other language. There must be a language to learn, and animals have no such language that we know of. Animals do not build technology or evidence of such a thing, and if they did, we would see the same kind of systematization of information that is found in humans. That systematization happened because there is a wealth of models that already exist, which young humans emulate to adapt to the society humans have built.

Remembering the wealth of human history is necessary, for cybernetics was never imposed on a "blank slate", and there were systems at work that were already regulated, which could function as the tools to create feedback loops by our imposition onto the world. In nature, no such "regulator" can be manufactured from any statistical data alone. But, every data point is not merely a passive "thing". All of the data points gathered as evidence exist because they did something without being "regulated", even if that existence is fleeting and exhausted. Energy is expended and dissipates as heat, and nothing about nature guarantees the return of that energy to the system. Here we see that while we expect a balance of the credits and debits in the "natural energy economy"—there is no "other place" for energy to go—in abstract machinery, only the system is relevant when speaking of the input and output of energy. In the economy of nature, all such "regulated systems" must be vampiric upon energy, and no "stable order" is possible for the total system of nature. The appearance of such a "just world" is maintained only by strenuous lying, deception, and rendering information inadmissible, ceremonially dumping the consequences "somewhere far, far away". But, for the abstract system of society, there is no "world". There is only the social information and the agents for whom that information is relevant. The consequences cannot be lumped into some parcel of land, whatever the economic logic at work. The consequences can only be dumped onto particular persons, and the benefactors can only be particular persons. If there is any collectivity, it is among the collective winners and losers of this "total system", whatever it may be. The two camps will never co-exist peacefully, and their aims in "total society" are eternally irreconcilable.

We may claim that there is some space to expand to, which will solve the social problem, but the true problem is not the fixed energy input from the world. The regulation of human beings is entirely predicated on one malevolent force—other humans. The effects of the world are minuscule in comparison. It is also known that those malevolent actors will claim any energy pre-emptively for themselves. Empire is not content with anything less than all of the world, and it made this claim before the Empire was fully realized. To go back on it is to shirk the entire project.

This process plays out in miniature when "imposing reality" to make proper parts. The abstract machinery is not valued by the world but by society. When externalities are dumped into some landfill, any territory is implicitly claimed by the interest which can impose this on reality. It precludes the ancient commons, violently and proudly, and this has always been at the forefront of the Fabian mission. It is the Fabian mission, rather than what cybernetics as a thought must do. Cybernetics as a concept did not mandate any such vampirism or make moral claims about its goodness. It would be entirely possible for regulation to be limited to something useful for the governing task that was agreed upon, without any imperious claim about a "total system" and full knowledge that history and reality do not work in the way a model insists it "should", but that the model in use has been proven effective and can be analyzed by independent knowledge. That is to say, it was always possible for anyone, with or without approval, to know what happens in the black box, and the imperious dictate of an alien regulator comes from a human, even if that human were a madman whose madness was granted favorable social distinction and became some species of virtue for their race. It is also not intrinsic to capitalism that this death cult is good in itself. Only in the abstract conceits of the manager—and the manager is entirely an onerous burden on the economic order—does the moral philosophy translate to an exultant celebration of torture, death, and all of the consequences of regulating society or any particular aspect that enters social circulation in this way.

There is however a way out, and it has been available from the start. It is simply this—that labor, whose right to the products of the world is most immediate, built what it wanted in the first place, and what was right by reasonable, objective moral judgment. This is not done by insane, Germanic ignorance of cybernetics that is preached by the malevolent, but by understanding the cybernetic principles for what they do tell us. Every laborer has, more crudely or thoroughly, carried out this regulatory task on their own power when directing their labor. Such regulation is inherent to the very idea of labor as opposed to any expenditure of energy or work. Work in the English language is an amoral treatment of laborious output, judged primarily by its utility in the Robinson Crusoe thought experiment rather than what that work produced in moral outcomes. But, the English word work is very helpful for understanding the regulatory task that labor must navigate. Labor did not get to choose its working conditions unilaterally, as individuals, or by the association. The associations of labor, and political association generally, are not total systems and cannot aspire to be. If they tried, they would defeat the principles of association that allowed this feature of political society to be useful for humanity. Perhaps it could be argued that humans conceptually must be changed, and there is no moral argument to say that humans must be this or that. Humans have demonstrated that they could adapt to despotism, slavery, and the most nightmarish of conditions. But, punting the question to some non-human successors of us doesn't change that the question was posed. If the successors to us were created by our hand, they inherit the taint of humanity. If the successors of humanity rose by some process that had little to do with human volition, they would inherit the wreckage humanity left behind and immediately face the evil of humanity's taint. Ignorance in any sense does not absolve any reasonable entity of the question—guilty until proven innocent, including for the animals—and ignorance of the malice of humanity is the calling card of aristocratic fuckery rather than anything that wards off the evil.

For too long, humanity has been proposed as opposed to any regulation, self-directed or otherwise. It is too much for humans to cooperate in the ruling ideas, for the rulers would see such cooperation as alien to all of their interests. That cooperative spirit is not found with labor, who have often been partners as long as they and their associations are safe. It was with the lowest class, who has always borne the brunt of all externalities, and received no reward whatsoever. Their continued existence as "life unworthy of life" is hardly a reward. The society we live in has no reward within its potentials for the lowest class. It only has the general fear, which is where this political problem started for us as a proposition. The political problem is of course an abstract machine. There is no concrete "substance of politics" anywhere in nature, and as an abstraction, politics remains too vague and general to prescribe the inexorable outcome aristocracy uses as their eternal excuse for the terror. Proclaiming triumphantly that they will no longer make excuses for the terror doesn't change that such a faggy proclamation is definitionally an excuse that is seen for what it is.

A failure to truly appreciate the productive process has been at the heart of so much of this malevolence. Someone might imagine "real work" where the abstractions of political economy are no longer operative. But, in miniature, the laborer regulates everything in the working environment, judging value and applying it to the situation. It is alien to "political economy" as described by the economists, but this space of the worker is disciplined by political economy by the proposition that such a "system" is operative and its enforcement arms, like our old friend Vinnie the claims adjuster from the second book of this series. If the worker were truly alone, then whatever happens in this environment is a part of "politics", even if it weren't deliberately intended as such by the worker. It might be a very different politics from the one we know, where the general fear has been answered sufficiently and no longer informs the worker in the way it does for us. The fear was never unwarranted, for reasons that originally had nothing to do with a political theory or model. Evil preceded all of our models of it and preceded the existence of any agent that carried out the evil, for "evil" and the thing to be feared began as a concept of existence rather than a being or agent in that sense. Someone might claim that without agents, evil wouldn't exist, and in some sense, this would be true. "Being" is contingent on the stability of any form that could "be". But, the concept of evil was not premised on any agent, for it is at its core trans-historical and not a creature of natural or artificial history. It was not purely in the domain of knowledge, or a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry until it has developed into something evident by sense and reason regarding the world. The true root of the evil, like any moral sentiment, is a hypothetical potential that is not contingent on any particular entity which "creates morality". It is much the same with any of these things we would value one way or another. The stabilization of any "system" does not depend on our moral sense about what ought to happen, but on a reality that can be understood. It is that which is primary, rather than our conceits about what is or isn't moral. We can make of the evil whatever we will, if we make anything of it at all, but we cannot make the evil into the good or something other than evil. All of this is encapsulated in the most basic laborious act if it is to be worth anything more than evolutionary flotsam. That flotsam might be construed as nothing more than a rearrangement of pre-existing wealth, which forbids anything new from existing, or it may have originated in some muck of the universe that is only partially evident to us by the wealth of information knowledge can easily mine. But, the worker certainly has to think about whether what it does is good, and this is not a judgment of worth, which entails standards of comparison and ledgers where this worth can be tallied. What might be a guide for the worker is not a primitive or primordial moral substance, but the obvious consequences of their actions. The worker cannot change gravity or electromagnetism, even if both can be harnessed in physical machinery, and modeled in abstraction. Certain laws of motion apply to abstract machinery. Unlike proper mechanical motion, which would presumably stretch back to what is unknown to us, abstract mechanisms were instantiated, sometimes in the very thought experiment where before no such mechanism was known to anyone or anything in the world.

No such deep moral contemplation is necessary for labor to be morally valued and considered. The worker has far more immediate matters to tend to. Here, the worker may be imagined as a person and extant system, and so all of this is regulated by laws of motion and the worker has no agency whatsoever. No superstition or insinuation will give the worker any more agency than the law gives him, and Law by the concept of such gives to the worker absolutely nothing. Another view envisions the worker as a morass of impulses that only form out of the muck to produce whatever product, bypassing entirely the worker's position to judge independently. Still, others imagine this as a spectrum or interplay between the two positions, where the worker is squeezed between the torture victims of the lowest class and technocratic managers. Certainly this view of "the spectrum" is most desirable to petty-managers and their superiors. The reality is that none of these really concern the process of labor or the worker, which is always for itself and yet valued in the world. The constituents of the low-class muck are, when engaged in labor, more than the sum of their parts. Before they are deliberate or regulated by anything, they are what they are. Evil can be seen in the muck. Entities of seemingly little importance might be found if we imagine this experiment carried out in lab conditions, even when we know that no such "laboratory" can exist except as a thought experiment. Yet, it happens regardless.

If this problem is abstracted, the worker's regulation can only be entirely negative. "Natural selection" is purely eliminative and cannot be otherwise, but this is only one political-economic model suggested to explain this aspect of natural history—the question of the agency of the entities that are "selected" and their encounter with the general fear, which was for the Darwinians the struggle for life, which they insist can be gamed just as Malthus "naturally" starved the Irish in one of the glory moments for their clique.

If this problem were seen from the position of the lowest class, rather than the laborer, and this member of the lowest class were for a moment disinterested in the bestial creature that has hunted the lowest class that is called "the human race", the result is very different, and not the "random muck" that imperious views of this problem concern. The worker is, in every political model humans have known, pressed between the lowest class and the orders of society that already decided labor has no agency, and assents to the "copper rule"—"Slavery is Eternal". Whatever the worker's considerations, workers are always beholden to the general fear, which will always choose the eliminative answer to the question of regulation. If there is no "general fear", then the worker is not really a "worker" with the political assumptions entailed in the class, but he is not the random sputtering of "genius" that is the genuine existence of humanity, nor is he an imagined intermediary stage between them. He is instead in the true position of the human subject, regardless of their social station. This creature is pressed upon less by particular institutions or forces, but by "the human spirit" and the foul stew in which humanity simmered, in which Man gleefully cannibalized Man and pretended this was normal and acceptable. However much someone might invoke the rights of nature against such foulness, humans like any animal have always entailed the potential to transgress this, and this is the "first agency" upheld by prattling fags who knew a good scam when they re-stated "agency" as nothing more than a triumphant declaration of their right of transgression and absolute impunity.^[1] The worker may be beholden to the beast, but he like anyone has always known this was ruinous bullshit for any goal of life. Every claim of "creative destruction"^[2] is only sensical once the "total system" is accepted, which is never how any agent within the system can act. If someone did have a mind for a total system, they would not endorse anything obviously ruinous and say the evil is actually good, or pain is pleasant. We may argue whether some act is evil in itself, or how to dispose of waste in a way that creates the least damage to an environment or to the entity who has to process this waste. Nothing about the cyclical destruction and torture of capitalism is a benefit to the arrangement, for the capitalists or their slaves. The only way the capitalist really could value this is either by making the consequences of the arrangement inadmissible and therefore outside of the system entirely, or by admitting that "capital" as such was never more than a thin excuse, in which case the economic pretense can be discarded. If we want to make humanity's abstract world a cesspit, no great model or work is necessary for that. Nothing in a system really "corrects" for that behavior, and those who are selected to die in such an ordering of the world have a habit of not dying, refusing to die, and spiting anyone asinine enough to think that such an evil would accomplish or prove anything. The ideal for the capitalists is if the undesirables self-terminated of their own volition, but why should the undesirables die because of their fickle, pointless, and moronic sentiments? Either the sentiment of the capitalist is premised on willful ignorance and pride in such, which means that it is faggotry and worthy of contempt, or the sentiment is for cruelty for its own sake, and such cruelty would be foundational to anything the believer did. Such malicious behavior would apply just as much to a socialist or communist society as it would to free trade or any other conceivable arrangement of affairs. There is no reasoning to have with those who venerate malice as good in itself. That matter will not be resolved by any struggle for life or existence, where the good prevails over the evil, or—as the religion of the malicious always crows—evil will prevail because good is only understood as "retarded". The only court that would inveigh on the matter of humanity's malice is the world itself, and the obvious consequences of the malicious social order. When the members of such a society have seen enough of such a world, they will do everything to destroy it. "If you are unwilling to destroy the world for your cause, you are not serious." The world of glorious Satanic malice has an obvious outcome, and here the malicious return to the same faggotry as the willfully ignorant. Eugenics cannot fail—it can only be failed.

The more worthwhile course for the worker is to see the entire argument given to them as worthless. But, for processes in nature, no such moral consideration for their time is given. Nature's "plan" is a miserable one which did not care for the outcome. Still, the work of forming anything stable would declare anything too obviously ruinous to be haram, and the world's time for a particular matter is finite. So too are all of the things in this muck finite in their existence, and so the notion that all of this struggle is replicated ad infinitum as "contradictions in nature" is controlled insanity and faggotry. In the true work to construct anything, notions of karmic or superstitious debt or value are irrelevant. They are entirely local to the events in question. This is not because the workspace is a "total system" as such systems were described in the prior chapter. It is instead due to the void between events in the actual world where this valued work happens. There is no "spooky action" in genuine science to explain the work of creating any particular thing, and this applies even to the lowest level where we might imagine statistical models of the work done. In every case, the data points of relevance for statistics are referent to things that abide by this rule. We may disagree with the metaphysical claim made here, but it is on those who cite "spooky action" to prove their claims—that something could be insinuated or "just so" and granted equal weight to that which is found through investigation. The arguments I made for the metaphysics I gave were premised ultimately on what it means to speak of any substance or space, rather than any "thing" that happened to make it so. It is possible, and often necessary, to consider abstract "spooky action" in a model. Whenever this is invoked, the modeler is aware that this is suspect or a violent assumption, but it is often an assumption premised on known properties of mathematics, or known properties of the things the data points are referent to.

This may continue infinitely, at which point the dialectician invokes the koan of "vicious infinite regress" or a "bad infinity". The problem with this is that the bad dialectician is sowing doubt about things that have long been established and can be, absent their insinuation, reproduced by anyone with eyes and sufficient reason to add two and two. But, if we were to speak of what lies at the bottom of the well—what is "fundamental reality"—there are no more answers than we started with. I argue instead that such an imperious claim about nature by "thought alone" is not warranted, and almost always doubles down on the most fickle habits of the technological interest, intended as a scam for the unwary with full malice towards the dupes. If there are claims about "fundamental nature", they are metaphysical ones, and every metaphysics that describes this nature must demonstrate that it is consistent with the world it describes. What cannot be denied, though, is that mathematical relationships are implied by everything known about logic, and so it is entirely valid to speak of statistical models and conclusions that can be drawn from them. It is the clumsy use of those models, rather than statistics itself, that is the culprit of so much malice and stupidity.

"Something" does not arise out of "no-thing" in the sense that dishonest arguments imply with their snark-bait. That never happens. The only conclusion, if we wish to be metaphysical, is that the world always existed, but this is contrary to the way knowledge approaches the world in the abstract. It is knowledge that invents gods, rather than gods inventing knowledge and granted by imperious decree "agency" that isn't worth the divine paper it is printed on. This is an invention of knowledge, rather than Man or particular humans, for every entity that knows has to imply the existence of such things or the potential for such. A positive claim about anything is guilty until proven innocent, as is the law of the world. Regardless of the claims that are made, "Yet it moves."

Construction of real things begins not in the ordained theory or conclusion or dialogue, but in the moment that is isolated—the "excluded middle" so to speak. Logic requires that what is between two premises cannot be admissible, for perfectly understandable reasons. The "excluded middle" or "man in the middle" is, in the final analysis, some sort of labor, which at first has no "theory of mind" or any regulator imposed on it. It may embody some system that is already extant, but in its space and time, it is not acted on by anyone or anything, including the object or subject between them. All such arguments of objectivity and subjectivity are irrelevant and meaningless. They only exist in cruder explanations of what happens, which are a necessary impediment of the language humans use to communicate the concept of this construction. It is carried out by the nerves and reflexes of the entity which does this. But, any entity that does this was itself the product of many such processes in the past. Those processes did not need to be "regulated" or "stabilized", but for the analog of human labor, they were regulated to produce the living laborer we are familiar with. It will become clear that the particular entity which labors is less relevant than labor itself—labor in the genuine essence rather than "labor in the abstract" as a manager would see it. Anything can be construed as the laborer, for even if the laborer is mindless, its outcome is morally valuable. This is not a conceit of what someone would prefer to be valued or "worth", but a fact of what it means for moral value to exist, which is that moral values imply a world where they are relevant. The things that are assigned these values by us do not hold an essence themselves that marks them by scientific measurement as "good", "pleasant", "abomination", and so on, but all of those judgments are made regarding real things or things which are treated as real in an example or parable. The first and primary value regarding something is that it exists at all to speak of it being morally valued. This we presume to be active because there is a "something" that is to be judged and compared against other things in the universe. We then ask what qualities this thing exhibits that distinguish it from other things, and what we can say about this thing which are general properties of things. For "goodness" or "badness" to exist, it is presumed that those values can be objective, rather than in the eye of the beholder or purely subjective conceits. Whether anyone else agrees with the value assigned does not change that "goodness" has to be intelligible as something in the world rather than merely mutually intelligible between men.

All of the "forces" or "spirits" of the world may be interpreted superstitiously, but for any of them to be stable, they first have to be amplified to something noticeable to any instrument and then attenuated. We may imagine the playing of an instrument or the honing of muscles, but this is a personal example. In some way, any stable system would be the result of this amplification and attenuation. They never actually "pop into existence" from a seeming void, nor were they "always there", waiting for expression in the abstract justifications for a claim. The "true spirits" at work are not purified "goodness" in the sense that might be imagined. "Good" or any moral idea is necessarily complex and contingent on a world where this state of being would be relevant. But, if there were "pure spirits" or "pure essences" of a sort, they are all of the same substance, and they can all be amplified and attenuated. For the most basic level of existence, this amplification is not "internal" to any essence or substance. The "powers that be" simply are. But, in any relation between them, patterns can arise which have the effect of acting as amplifiers or attenuators of an alien essence. Alone and apart, this is not possible. The "essential spirits" would only flitter aimlessly, and little more could be said about them. This view of the world as "essences" returns us to the view of nature as a morass of unknown, indefinite things, and by the thought of "pure nature", all of those things will be unknowable—which we hold to be a self-evident absurdity if we wish to speak of anything real. Here, I invoke "spirit" or "essence" as moral because we hold that these spirits or essences are relevant to some thing to be known and that knowing this thing is for whatever reason an interest of the scientist. We cannot know a single one of these essences in a way that assigns to it a name, that is at the "fundamental level". We can see the effects of existence in primordial systems. But the mere assertion that those essences exist does not make a system. They can only be amplified or reduced. By "amplified", this does not refer to an increase in substance or energy or intensity, but some important quality. For example, a wavelength might oscillate faster or "peak" at a higher abstract value of interest to us, without any necessary "substance" or "energy" changing in the essence. The question of power or energy is itself not as simple as a substance or "manna" fed to processes that are quantized and presented in "pure form". Electricity for example can occur in alternating currents, and is only harnessed because we are aware of the properties of the transmission sufficiently to speak of how it can be manipulated, conducted, and so on. The question isn't one of struggle or force, or knowing some "trick" to push reality into a form that is desired. Here is where the metaphor of playing an instrument is helpful, to describe the connection between the musician and the instrument that a musician operates with to be good at music. The musician may have a general theory or music theory, but at a basic level, the musician's talent to play an instrument is due to connections that are not rational nor a matter of mechanical force, but an intuitive connection of mind to machine. What if this were not peculiar to humans and their faculties, but a property of what it means for things to exist in a way that is appreciated as "actually existing"? The abstract machines or how this talent is described in language are just that. The mechanical force of artificial history is a necessary kludge in which "the force" need not be described as more than that, even if these forces were the result of a much more elaborate cause, which only manifests as "force" in an appreciated outcome. What cannot be denied is that there are reasons—even if they aren't good reasons—why this attenuation of anything can happen, in a way that produces any stable system to describe in the abstract. Nothing about the universe suggests "force" has to exist at all in the sense we understand the concept intuitively. We do understand force and substance and energy as something other than useful fictions because our existence hinges on them, yet we never arrive at "fundamental" definitions of them which are eliminative of how they come into existence or awareness. Force can originate from whatever is suitable for the task of physical movement, whether it is the exhaustion of life's resources, the burning of fuel for thrust, magnetic forces, the manipulation of weather, or whatever things that generate this force that we know from experience. Nowhere can we imperiously declare what is "allowed" to make force or define it. We can define models of the world and abstract machines more or less as we please, with the full knowledge that these machines would operate without our say-so if we judged that they were operative. If we think that abstract machines can be constructed arbitrarily by what we want the world to be, we are in for many rude awakenings, but within the conceits of knowledge "for itself", any delusional conceit of "changing the world" in that way cannot fail. It can only be failed, or recanted and replaced with an alternative Law.

The "going concern" of these spirits is not necessary for us to speak of their existence. It is entirely possible to conjure entities whose existence is ephemeral, where there is nothing "governed" and the entity "appears" and disappears in an instant, after which it is "gone forever". The "purest essence of things" consists only of such objects, and if we degenerate into Germanic essentialism, nothing can exist and anything can be anything. Wherever there is stability, there is a regulating function, which need not be an "entity" as such. It need not even be a "force" as such. When a ball bounces off a wall, no force "makes" it bounce back. The force that was already in the ball's velocity is turned backward, and the function of the wall is simply to repel after it receives the force. If something breaks the wall, the result of the collision is different, and we can measure the integrity of anything against blunt force. We are aware of how sharp objects can cut through other objects, without inventing a "sharpness" force. But, this is difficult to simulate in the abstract, if the object is no more than a variable assigned so many bytes to define its qualia. It is not impossible, but such a simulation will be far removed from what actually happens. But, those who utilize a knife or blunt force are intuitively aware of these features, and can reasonably estimate which objects are suitable for cutting or blunt force. It is much easier to understand "very narrow and firm edges are for cutting", and how to whet a blade to maintain its cutting ability, than it is to build a physics simulation that is accurate and generalized. But, in the actual world where events happen, there is no "simulation". There are just the forces of things, and while those forces or an assemblage of them do not have any "intuition" or "knowledge", they are knowable and act much like the edge of a knife or some physical object. Mechanics still prevails, even at this vague level of existence where we have no models of reality to suggest what happens. It is from these events that we can build any model that can be a "true regulator" that is drawn in a diagram or a statistical model.

For any qualia to be measurable, it must be amplified, or its lack of amplification can be contrasted against other things that are amplified. If there is nothing amplified, then the substance remains vaguely defined. Much focus is placed on the eliminative negative feedback loop because this is necessary for stable, digital information that is compatible with logical premises, or information that can be converted to digital formats like a wavelength. Any time a claim is made that the universe is "fundamentally digital" or "fundamentally analog" or fundamentally any particular thing, the negative, eliminative force is envisioned as the supreme regulator and all amplification is "ungoverned" and "illegal". But, all of the qualia of genuine things exist because something is amplified. It need not be the things themselves asserting their existence, if there are amplified qualia elsewhere that are contrasted with the lack of amplification elsewhere, such as black color resulting from the absence of light rather than any "black light". All of the qualia of things are measurable and comparable, but they are not comparable by any universal unit that can be imposed on reality. Claims that qualia cannot be compared mathematically are tantamount to saying "Anything can be anything" and an exhortation to remove standards of comparison. But, unlike abstract machinery where a universalism is implied for anyone to speak of these machines affecting the world, there is no universalism among the forces at work. Once isolated, an "essence" or "spirit" is what it is. It just so happens that no "pure, fundamental essences" of anything whatsoever can be found in the universe. We surmise they exist for any of these concepts to hold. Otherwise, the data points would reference nothing we could say anything about, and their patterns would be irrelevant without invoking some "manna" which is singular and faces the same problem where nothing can be distinguished. It would not even be possible in the latter case to divide the world between substance and "non". There would just be a morass of substance, and while it may be arranged in some interesting shapes, those shapes do not "mean" anything just because the shape is discovered as a form. The shapes only become relevant in some action of those things, which is where a qualia arises that we can say anything about. It is only in this way that anything meaningful is emergent from the "primordial soup".

The terminology of a system is inappropriate to describe this world, since systems in the useful sense of the world are always abstract machines. In describing emergence, we only have the kludge of language which must deal with these systems to describe what happens or rely on imperfect metaphors. Rather than a thinking, knowing "regulator" being imagined, we can see the emergent system arising in the way that was simplest and intuitive for the emergent "system". That is everything in the world, even if it doesn't happen for a "good" reason, happened in the simplest way it could have happened. There is no need to invent an elaborate house of cards to "justify" the action of these systems. "The purpose of a system is what it does." But, the system is regulated not just by negative selection or "governance" from an entity that controls a feedback loop—an imagined "religious cycle" we diagrammed and reified—but by amplification and attunement. For stable, active things, they exist not because they were neutralized at some arbitrary amplitude that was commanded to exist, but because the amplification attained a "golden mean" that was suitable for its stability. Had it not, it would either not exist for long, or its existence could only be a "negation" of some untampered form that was imagined as if Morgoth had tainted the matter of Arda to make everything evil and malevolent and the objective of science would be to restore this imagined "golden country" that was immaculately designed.^[3] The qualia that exist are recognized not because they were "hard-coded" but because they were recurrent and effective in the world. Blunt physical force certainly has its uses and is valued in a crude sense. We may insert the crass analogy of an atom or molecule "borrowing" or "wanting" an electron, and while this is a bad analogy, it is explanatory enough for this reason—or can be used as part of a sleight-of-hand trick. The mean for these recurrent qualities exists, but it was "discovered" by happenstance because, had something else been fabricated, we would speak of something else, and it is very likely this "something else" would not be relevant to any interest or exhibit any difference from another thing. There are then general classes of things, like "light waves" or "physical objects", which can be described on a spectrum in the former case. Light and optics are confined to its purview, rather than a "theory of everything", and it is a mark of bad physics to grant light more authority to judge physical reality than it reasonably possesses. But, optics and light are certainly of great interest to us, as creatures with this faculty of sight, and even if we lived in the world of the blind, light would be an interesting discovery that could be gauged by some instrument, just as we attain novel concepts of qualities that can be detected.

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