~ Figmentalism and the Web ~ ID 1880 May 22, 2008 ~ Chapter 7 ~ Oh 1 Digital Press

Chronologically speaking I didn’t really learn how to operate a computer for about a year so it was well into 1997 by the time I felt proficient at it’s use and even then I had to take it to an expert every time it blew up and that seemed to happen a lot. In 1996 I photographed all my porcelain and ceramic sculptures because clay was my medium and as an artist I needed exposure so that’s the reason I got the damn computer in the first place. I paid some commercial computer bandit three years worth of income tax refunds for `93, `94 and `95 which amounted to $1700 for a Pine School computer that wasn’t much better than a 486 but was a 120 MHz with the slowest modem in the world and the whole thing was really junk but it was my first and I eventually learned all about it. In early 1996 I got a friend to write my first art web page with my sculptures on it and even though I didn’t even have a computer yet, I had an ISP (internet service provider) and a website. I went directly down to Foxnet and handed him the discs (two floppies) containing my website and paid for the service not having even the faintest clue as what I was doing and then began shopping around for a computer so I could see what I had just done. The first page was 2.2 megs and called `The Human Form’ since it mostly featured small nudes made of fired and glazed clay. It’s still available in it’s original form on the present web pages called Namronsoar.Com and Realrufus.Com in the `Computer History’ area. The market for ceramics used to be quite good but it seems that when people began to buy computers and games they stopped buying art or rather trinkets.. depending on how you look at it.

The website looked good and I always got a few inquiries from all sorts of places in the world but no one wanted to pay the prices I was asking even though it wasn’t really that much considering they were original porcelain figurines and quite rare. Local sales had ground to a halt and all the ceramics business in Thunder Bay closed and I found myself looking for something to do with the rest of my life apart from trying to solve where we all came from and what the hell we were doing here. There’s just no money in that.

The web in it’s early days required that men learn to type which was like getting a gorilla to fill out forms for his bananas. Men and typing just seems odd. At any rate I did learn and got involved in a variety of counter culture cyberspace movements in which I had to also become proficient at convincing others that I was correct and that in the anarchy of the web my words must be heeded. In the underground people can tell you to JFRO and there isn’t anything you can do about it apart from getting your cohorts to turn against them and these battles go on constantly and never end. In that part of cyberspace you can’t call up a cop and whine that you’ve been insulted or threatened and it happened all day every day and I got used to it. Rufus became a force to be reckoned with but some of the things he was involved in were decidedly dangerous and somewhat unsavory. I’m not going to go into details but the main battle ground was what is known as the newsgroups and the battle centered around the fact that forces in the world wanted to control the communication on the web and we didn’t want that. We still don’t and the battle continues but now it’s in places like P2p (Peer to Peer) called Bitcomet, filesharing and reverse engineering. Trust me, without hackers and other vandals you would give up the right to make any independent choice at all and some bible belt holier-than-thou would be deciding everything for you. Watch `Zeitgeist’ if you want to know what is in store for you should these forces take over.

Things in the newsgroups started to get pretty seedy for my other alter ego `Rufus’ so he decided to continue the battle above ground and built a web page on special hosting of 500 megs called Realrufus and has since grown to three times that size. That began in March of 2006 and the first page was a real mess but I was learning Html (Hypertext markup Language) all over again and trying to learn it the proper way as a well. That first page is still available as are all the pages in the history section. I have a real fascination for webpage writing and usually bang out one or two every day so there are over 500 by now (May 22, 2008). At some point (actually I lost track of when) it was decided that I needed two dot coms to accommodate both the galleries that I had and the written work that was piling up at a phenomenal rate so Namronsoar.Com was created on the 50 meg hookup space that you get with your internet connection and almost immediately became `The Institute of Non-Theoretical Science’. Nothing is stopping any individual from having their own on-line University so in a moment of brilliance INTS was created without any so-say from the establishment, no license fees, no registration fees, no nothing, bingo a Free University! and I like it that way. The establishment really sucks.

Non-Theoretical Science is the study of things without theorizing. In other words you must stick to only that which you know as fact and most educated people will tell you that can’t be done unless you consider things like the theory of evolution to be fact. Well it wouldn’t be called a theory if it was and almost 100% of science is only theoretical and none of it has ever been proven. As a student of art and philosophy since the age of 20 without the usual degrees holding me back, I have my own take on what is fact and what isn’t and INTS works on two main aspects of it. The first is based on the simple sentence "We Exist" and if you happen to be one of those that think that statement is not factual then you will always have a problem communicating because the very ability to question existence guarantees it. There is a semantic trap in facts. If you attempt to portray something that is false in words and I’m only talking about scientific and philosophical things it is very difficult to make a mistake without it being exposed in the jargon. As an example for years learning institutions made their students of philosophy learn the axiom "There are no absolutes!" meaning that "there is really nothing that you can know for sure". Look at those two statements. They are purporting to tell you a fact that there are no facts! That same thing works for modern day theories. For the most part they cannot really be put into words without using unknowns. Examples; "Space is infinitely large." The word infinite means `question-mark’. Try to describe the edge of space and you will be invited to describe what is beyond that... You can’t. "Space just goes on forever." is another dead give-away in semantics because you are invoking time while trying to describe distance. Another well known one is; "Creatures evolved through spontaneous physiological changes." The word spontaneous also means question mark. "The point mass of the singularity underwent cataclysmic atomic or molecular changes" means basically nothing at all. It isn’t even a theory or statement. The other area that INTS works in is `practical non-theory’ and in this area the pronouncements could be considered a bit tenuous, somewhat political and biased against waste, pollution and money.

Figmentalism is the main thrust of INTS and the result of the study of non-theory and it’s offshoot anti-theory. The meaning of all three terms have pretty well been coined by us and to some extent usurped from other places where the meaning was unclear or misused. Which came first is unknown but it was probably Figmentalism and it was used to replace the terms Idealism and also Solipsism that are also misused, old or unclear terms. Solipsism comes from the word solo and is unlike Figmentalism in that it does not recognize others but does see the world as imaginary. As a philosophy it has largely been undeveloped whereas figmentalism has created the laws of reality and ventures a complete explanation of all things short of thought itself.

The big kahuna in the world of philosophy regarding the imaginary nature of reality is known as Idealism but has two main problems that I considered enough to have it replaced with the word Figmentalism. First of all the word Idealism doesn’t convey what the `ism’ is all about. It sounds like it’s about being idealistic or having high ideals but it’s not. It’s about the world being an `idea’ and that too is wrong because an idea is a conjectural thing and the figmental nature of the universe isn’t conjectural. The other problem is that the term `Idealism’ goes way back to Socrates and Plato and there is no real consensus on exactly what they meant by it. Later on many other philosophers put forward their own description of what `Idealism’ was and almost all of them added a word in front of it like `Personal Idealism’ which was something like Solipsism and probably most like figmentalism but we don’t really know so I just dumped the whole lot of the historic terms and went with my own. So sue me.

In the world of philosophy no one will talk to you or pay any attention anyway unless you happen to have some huge reputation and I don’t know how you get that in the first place. It’s like going from job application to job application and they all say "You need some experience" or the publishers telling you can’t have your book published because you haven’t had one in print previously. The world of science is closed to everyone except a choice few and trying to communicate is very difficult. When I discovered the laws of reality I sent them to the American magazine `Scientific American" and they just sent back a short reply saying `no’ and didn’t even bother to reply to my further inquiries.

Figmentalism and the Laws of Reality are not theoretical. As I have shown before, everything else is, and once you identify the theories and find the opposite to each then you can know that you have a fact. This is what we know now. You awake from a sleep and in your dream you knew that you manufactured all the people that you saw and all the situations that occurred with nothing more than thought and they seemed very real. With your eyes now open you suddenly feel that the world is not manufactured by you, but you by it, and you make this leap of faith and think you are correct. Neither your dreams or your wakefulness has any constituent of intrinsic matter and is entirely imaginary created by the entity of which you are a part of. All else is speculation.

Namron Soar

Chapter Eight      Chapter Eight Plain

INTS    http://www.namronsoar.com

General Interest Galleries    http://www.realrufus.com

Namron Soar    Nsoar@tbaytel.net

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