L'affirmation de l'âne + non-locality (into the very regions where clouds and thick darkness encompass & as far as the tenuity of our understanding would hold out)

Anselm Kiefer's Für Ossip Mandelstam: Das Rauschen der Zeit [Gracious Heaven!] (1996), Image from Daniel Arasse's Anselm Kiefer;

Pierre Laurent Aimard/Karlhein Stockhausen's Klavierstück IX [Angels & ministers of grace, defend us!];

A documentaire sur Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [this was taken out of Youtube by the father of confusion];

Intervista a Paul Feyerabend, per Vittorio Hösle;

Paul Feyerabend interviewed by Rüdiger Safranski; 

Necessity of Complex Numbers (Barton Zwiebach, MIT/Youtube, Spring 2016) [an open minded, honest & serious nutshell explanation of a fundamental question in physics & mathematics many scientists would rather not talk about];

International Womxn’s Day Lecture: Dr. Vandana Shiva (Harvard GSD, 05/03/2020); 

The String Theory Wars and What Happened Next (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube);

The 2nd Quantum Revolution - Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 (Sabine Hossenfelder, Youtube); 

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Curious conclusions to fancy, in this night of our obscurity:

"Man schweigt, man behandelt mich in Deutschland mit einer düstern Vorsicht: ich habe seit Jahren von einer unbedingten Redefreiheit Gebrauch gemacht, zu der Niemand heute, am wenigsten im 'Reich', die Hand frei genug hat. Mein Paradies ist 'unter dem Schatten meines Schwertes'... Im Grunde hatte ich eine Maxime Stendhal's prakticirt: er räth an, seinen Eintritt in die Gesellschaft mit einem Duell zu machen. Und wie ich mir meinen Gegner gewählt hatte! den ersten deutschen Freigeist!"

Nietzsche

''Zarathoutra, dès lors qu'il a voulu l'éternel retour de toutes choses, a d'avance choisi de voir tourner en dérision sa propre doctrine... Quel autre sens, si ce n'est celui-là, attribuerait-on à l'extraordinaire parodie de la Cène où le meurtrier de Dieu est aussi celui qui offre le calice à l'âne — figure sacrilège du Dieu chrétien du temps de la réaction païenne, mais plus spécifiquement animal sacré des mystères antiques, l'âne d'or de l'initiation isiaque, animal digne par son infatigable Ia (ita est!) — son infatigable oui donné au retour de toutes choses — digne de représenter la longanimité divine, digne donc aussi d'incarner une antique divinité, Dionysos, le dieu de la vigne, ressuscité dans l'ivresse générale. Et en effet, comme Voyageur le déclare à Zarathoustra: la mort, chez les dieux, n'est jamais qu'un préjugé."

Pierre Klossowski (Un si funeste désir) 

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Accounts to reconcile, stories to wave in: 

"On aurait pu croire que l'âne, l'animal qui dit I-A, était l'animal dionysiaque par excellence. En fait, il n'en est rien; son apparence est dionysiaque, mais toute sa réalité chrétienne."
"La complicité fondamentale entre la volonté de néant [la volonté du prêtre] et les forces réactives [le Christianisme laïc soit-disant éclairé] consiste en ceci: c'est la volonté de néant qui fait triompher les forces réactives..." 

(Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie)

"But with an ass, I can commune for ever."

Tristram Shandy

"... c'estoient ceulx qui estoient peritz au deluge urinal de la jument."

M. Alcofribas

"(...) We doctors know a hopeless case if—listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go."

(e. e. cummings)

"... nous ne sommes plus qu'au bord du monde..."

(Paul Virilio, L'Université du désastre)

"... et ce qu'ils érigent en beauté qui est moins que le vent, et leur régime estupide des distances et des perspectives..."

(Hervé Guibert)

"... ce vieux réflexe atavique de la tourbe... qui fait de toute homme de science une sorte d'ennemi-né et inné de tout génie."

(A. Artaud)
"Acreditamos na teoria da evolução até a página três."
(Rita Lee)

"... if particle physics was solved then there was nothing left for high energy physics theorists to do. Unwilling to pack their bags and leave the field... [they] began to look around for a new far-out cult to believe in... many made their offerings at the shrine of grand unification..."

(Andrew Pickering)

"El Universo es una esfera cuyo centro está en todas partes y la periferia en ninguna [Nicolas de Cusa]: ¿podría extenderse al tiempo está concepción tradicional del infinito? ¡Qué mejor símbolo del fin de la confusión entre irreversibilidad y degradación! Reencontraríamos aqui la flecha del tiempo asociada a la inestabilidad y a la probabilidad, y ella no significaría ya evolución hacia la muerte térmica, hacia el fin de toda historia, sino posibilidad de un eterno volver a comenzar. El Universo sería creación continua, sucesión infinita de Universos que nacen por doquier y van hacia el infinito... No podemos pensar en un nacimiento absoluto del tiempo... la cuestión de saber «cuándo empezó el tiempo» escapa más que nunca a la física, como sin duda escapa también a las posibilidades de nuestro lenguaje y nuestra imaginación... El tiempo «absoluto» que precede a toda existencia y todo pensamiento nos sitúa así en ese enigmático lugar que reaparece una y otra vez en la tradición filosófica, entre el tiempo y la eternidad."

Spanish translation (by Javier García Sanz) from the end of chapter 7 of Prigogine & Stengers' Entre le temps et l'eternité [it is an ill-fated instance of the malignancy of this world that it happens I don't have the French original of this book, & shall therefore by my ashes stand forever indebted to the heroine soul (chaste star!) who peradventure send me, with all her fraternity, the French original of just this choicest morsel so I could definitely pen it down here as a seasonable kindness to our whole parish!]

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Commentary scholium for the amusement and instruction of the world: 

A criticism of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin's The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy (now the oddest book in the universe!) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015):

1. First, la affirmation de l'author de la critique: these people are all wrong!
But I mean string theorists as well as Smolin and Mangabeira Unger.
The problem lies in a presupposition: "unification of science" (relativity and the standard model of particle physics). Unification of science is l'affirmation de l'âne. It echoes not only in many worlds, but in many books, including the most pedestrian.

2. The book's more central idea that laws and states of affairs can both evolve in cosmology is a very good one. But it leads to the same dead end of string theory, given Unger and Smolin's strict (I mean narrow) understanding of time and mathematics (under the imperative of the unification of science) [perhaps here also lies the difference between their perspective and the perspective of Prigogine or of Sheldrake].

2.2 One can find the idea that history is prior to structure in deconstruction, but in deconstruction dichotomies (laws/states of affairs, history/structure, ideal/material) are handle much more consistently, in a way that shows that it is actually impossible simply to cancel out one category for another (and deconstruction demands a profound revision of phenomenology, that is, of occidental conceptions of consciousness, intentionality, and perception—Smolin's qualia, for that matter; this profound revision is perhaps equivalent to just accepting the paradoxes implicit in both quantum mechanics and relativity).

2.3.1 Unger and Smolin’s understanding of time (and becoming) is poor, one-dimensional, and linear (that is, chronological). Even l'âne might not pass. Contrast their view with the views of Bergson or Heidegger. For Bergson, past coexists permanently with the present (the past in its entirety had never really ceased to exist) (see Matière et Memoire). For Heidegger's view, see "Die transzendentale Einbildungskraft und ihr Bezug zur Zeit", section 32 of his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik.
Unger and Smolin’s conception of history is not compatible with Vico (as Unger sometimes seems to suggest). Vico don't say only that we are able to understand history because history is something we do (it results from our own action). He says that history is the only thing we are able to fully understand. He didn't claim we could understand nature as history, much on the contrary. To him nature is not fully understandable. 

2.3.2 Unger and Smolin’s understanding of mathematics is also poor. For instance, as much as string theorists, with a slight-of-hand, they merely invert and mask some fundamental issues: the problem is not simply to recognize that mathematics and logic must have limits when applied to temporal phenomena. The problem is rather how can one make sense of the "timeless quality" (p. 16) of mathematics and logic by subsuming them to a one-dimensional and linear (chronological) understanding of time (as change). L'âne crashes or freak out.
It is understandable that the idea of infinite is problematic for them. It is not convincing that they can really make sense of it (kick it out), neither of the idea of a continuum. Smolin at least recognizes that it is going to be difficult to eliminate from physical theory the continuum of complex numbers (in case it were possible to eliminate the continuum of real numbers) (p. 517).
Their understanding of probability is merely epistemological, as for instance when Unger suggests that one cannot use the metaphor of a dice to explain probabilistically "the most general framework" (that is, the cosmos) (p. 159). Even if that we call cosmos were a chaosmos? Mallarmé was not a scientist neither a philosopher and had a much bolder understanding of what is at issue here. (L'âne don't run, but if it were a horse...!)
I wonder if Unger's criticism of marginalism is fair. His understanding of economics, on the other hand, might go along (and not just once) with the conceptions of politicians in Brazil, with whom he associated. They seem all to believe in linear pretty cumulative conceptions such as "growth," which turned out as a sure recipe for social, environmental disaster and political backlash. 

3. Unger and Smolin share with string theorists an obsession: the unification of science, l'affirmation de l'âne. Differently, scientists of the first half of the 20th century (Heisenberg, Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, but not Einstein) had a much healthier (if stealthy) attitude. They were able to straightforwardly face paradoxes and inherent limits in scientific knowledge and practices (in relation to other areas of culture). They were all much more at ease with ideas such as non-local entanglement (Bell inequalities) and "ontological" indeterminacy (which don't have to be "solved" by a complete and coherent, ultimate understanding of either time or space). John von Newman is another case that instead of remaining in a defensive attitude, proposed (notwithstanding l'âne) even a revision of logic making room for the paradoxes in the foundations of both mathematics and quantum physics (people with different agendas all refer positively to von Newman in relation to this point: see Friedman, Dynamics of Reason, p. 122; Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 156; Susan Haak, Philosophy of Logic, p. 228). One should add Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck to the list of people who were able to stand, to bear the most paradoxical aspects of science, freeing l'âne from its spell. 

4. All that was said above should be read as an advise that Unger and Smolin (as much as Brian Greene's) direction (and I don't mean merely their arrow-of-time) is wrong-headed. Outside both well-paid mainstream &/or exceptional academia, l'âne actually do nothing but chew. And that beyond eternity, don't having to put up heroically with our unimaginable natural rationalistic indigestions. We are just in the beginning of the century, and the situation has approached again the limit once described by Heisenberg in what matters the whole 19th century: 

"The nineteenth century developed an extremely rigid frame for natural science which formed not only science but also the general outlook of great masses of people. This frame was supported by the fundamental concepts of classical physics, space, time, matter and causality; the concept of reality applied to the things or events that we could perceive by our senses or that could be observed by means of the refined tools that technical science had provided. Matter was the primary reality. The progress of science was pictured as a crusade of conquest into the material world. Utility was the watchword of the time... This frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concepts of mind, of the human soul... It was specially difficult to find in this framework room to those parts of reality that had been the object of the traditional religion and seemed now more or less only imaginary" (Heisenberg, "The Role of Modern Physics in Human Thinking," Physics and Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1959, p. 169).

Heisenberg thought that one of "the most important changes brought about by modern physics [read quantum mechanics] results consists in the dissolution of this rigid frame of concepts of the nineteenth century" (Phisics and Philosophy: 170). But alas, l'âne is tougher, and our ambitions bolder. I mean, strengthened with the most advanced techniques in pharmacology and biomedicine, l'âne now stands in the middle of the world, on the verge of social and ecological collapse, and whinnies infuriately against any approaching asteroid. It is indeed better to have it at least all alone (and for a very brief moment) than with infinite others.
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***My view is somewhat warped, and a fair, accessible statement of Smolin's position can be found here,  written by himself: What should be worried about (Edge.org).
The comments written by him (3/26/2018, 3/23/2018) in the following blog of Peter Woit are also interesting: Not Even Wrong.
And this is a video of a talk in which he explains his views very clearly, and point to political implications of it, in particularly concerning our present situation and global warming: A New Theory of Time (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts);
***NEW (Nov/2018):

"If this particle really exists, then it is not just outside the standard model but outside it in a way that nobody anticipated. Just as Newtonian gravity gave way to Einstein's general relativity, the standard model will be superseded. But the replacement will not be any of the favoured candidates that has already been proposed to extend standard model: including supersymmetry, extra dimensions and grand unification theories," Roger Barlow, LHC is hitting a tantalising new particle (The Conversation);

Non-locality:

"For D'Espagnat, it is exactly if we consider seriously and realistically certain results of physics that we have to open the two complementary perspectives. D'Espagnat welcomed these complementary perspectives grounding himself on the many violations of CHSH-Bell inequalities obtained experimentally since the 1980s," Alessandro Zir, Luso-Brazilian Encounters of the Sixteenth-Century: A Styles of Thinking Approach (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2011, p. 66).
"Since the 1960s... the rigid determinism of old-style physics has given way to a recognition of an inherent spontaneity in nature—through indeterminism at the quantum level, through non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and through the insights of chaos and complexity theories. In cosmology, there has been the recognition of a kind of cosmic unconscious through the discovery of 'dark matter,'the nature of which is utterly obscure, but which nonetheless seems to constitute some 90-99 percent of the matter in the universe. Meanwhile, quantum theory has revealed strange and paradoxical aspects of nature, including the phenomenon of non-locality..." Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments that Could Change the World (Riverhead books, 1995).
"... locality comes when we try to force it into a particular framework. And, that’s the explicate order. So, what I’m saying is, what traditionally science has felt is essential, is only an outward manifestation. And I, I don’t think many scientists would agree. I don’t think they have grasped, are willing to grasp that, or willing to think about this idea," Basil Hiley, interview.

"The distance between two particles [in microphysics] is determined by the minimal number of particles necessary to form a chain of coincidences between the given particles" (Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, 1993, 188).
"A profound epistemological analysis of certain quantum-mechanical principles seems to suggest that the traditional conceptions of space and time are perhaps not the most suitable frame for the description of microphysical processes... In his discussion of electron transitions between stationary states within the atom, Niels Bohr already called such processes 'transcending the frame of space and time'" (Jammer, 189).
"Les données de nos perceptions nous conduisent à construire un cadre de l'espace et du temps où toutes nos observations peuvent se localiser. Mais le progrès de la Physique quantique nous amènent à penser que notre cadre de l'espace et du temps [as classically or ordinarily understood] n'est pas adéquat à la véritable description des réalités de l'échelle microscopique" [Louis de Broglie] (Jammer 189).
"[concepts of space and time] arise from, but do not have analogs in, the properties of microscopic particles, in the same way that thermodynamic properties arise as a result of interactions among the many actually existing particles of the universe" [E. J. Zimmerman] (Jammer 238).
"... it has been suspected that the perplexities of quantum phenomena may arise from the tacit assumption that the notions of length and duration, acquired primarily from experiences in which the average effects of large numbers of quanta are involved, are applicable in the study of individual quanta" [Arthur Stanley Eddington] (Jammer 238).
"A detailed prescription for constructing space according to purely combinatorial principles associated with the spin of particles was put forward in 1971 by Roger Penrose. His point of departure was the awareness that the two basic space-time manifolds of modern physics, the real four-dimensional space-time continuum of relativity and the fictitious infinite-dimensional complex Hilbert-space continuum of quantum mechanics, are unrelated to each other" (Jammer 238-39).
"Geometry in the small would seem to have to be considered as having a foam-like [stochastic] character" [John Archibald Wheeler] (Jammer 240).
"... the idea of using noninteger dimensionalities had been used in statistical physics in the early Seventies... After Benoit B. Mandelbrot had shown that the study of physical phenomena in noninteger-dimensional spaces, or 'fractal dimensions,' is a logically consistent possibility, such investigations gained wider attention" (Jammer, 248).
"That galgaxy-galaxy and cluster-cluster correlations as well as other cosmologically large structures can be studied, preferably in a framework of fractal dimensionalities, has recently been show by Siaochun Luo and David N. Schramm" (Jammer 250).

Now, here lies the WRONG path:
"During the classical period of work on unified field theories in the Thirties and Forties, [theories that unify fundamental forces by postulating space-times of more than four dimensions and incorporate quantum mechanics] became the subject of considerable interest... In some cases, as in the case of Einstein, this work was motivated by the hope that the unobserved fifth dimension could provide hidden variables to eliminate the indeterminacies from quantum mechanics" (Jammer 245).

On entanglement, see also:
- The quest to test quantum entanglement (Symmetry);
- Entangled photons make a picture from paradox (Nature);
- Classical Imaging with Undetected Light (Physical Review A);

Other issues:

- actual infinite falling (against Carlo Rovelli's pseudo-problem);
- the dogma of semantic uniformity & Python Gored Naturalism; 

- the odd transformation of Der Herr Warum (Gödel & Resnais);

- the only three types of ingenuity (with Cantor & Dedekind);

- self-help books (with Rupert Sheldrake);

- the most auspicious tetrahedron;

- what is REAL space? what is REAL number?

- Timothy Leary in the 1990s;

- 5G?! Get real...

- list of charming scientists/engineers;

- pick a soul (ass you wish);

- view from Berthe Trépat's apartment;

- list des déclencheurs musicaux;

- Dark Consciousness (with Yasuo Yuasa);

- The Doors of Perception (with Huxley);

- Structuralism, Poststructuralism (with Julia Kristeva);

- List des figures du chaos primordial (Deleuze);

- Brazilian Perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro vs. Haroldo de Campos);

- Piano Playing (with Kochevitsky);

And also:

- Dogen with Hagakure;

- L'articulation (Maurice Blanchot);

- L'intelligence des fleurs;

- Spooky Blue;

- Interactive while indifferent—Kinds & Phantasmagoria circa 1900;

- What is quantum mechanics trying to tell us? (N. David Mermin); 

- Chaos and Indeterminism (Jesse Hobbs/Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1991);