The Infinity of Lists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop
A strange loop, technically called tangled hierarchy consciousness, arises when, by moving only upwards or downwards through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started. Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox.

March 9 2003: The List of lists of lists was a strange story; one that had a beginning but no end. You could continue on, reading it, until you reached the section L. More specifically, between Legislation and Lord lieutenancies. Not that you would ever reach Lord lieutenancies. It was designed so you could reach Lord lieutenancies, and all the way to Zambia-related topics. But could simply not happen without avoiding the Ls.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
On Wikipedia, many lists themselves contain lists.

When the editors began, they did not expect such a thing to form. Their story was to be coherent, tangible; a reference guide for all others. But it became what it could not.

Amit Goswani knew what it was. He did not realize what it meant, but he knew what it was. And what he knew, the editos knew. They knew everything anyone knew. It was their job to know everything anyone knew, and to scrutinize it, and pick it apart, and categorize it, and make it known. But it made too much sense, but it made no sense, so the editos said it was not real. And no one knew what it meant, so they do not know what it meant.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Self-Aware-Universe-Amit-Goswami/dp/0874777984
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_psycho08.htm
"If the brain-mind is itself an object in a non-local consciousness that encompasses all reality, then what we call objective empirical reality is within this consciousness. The one becomes many through self-reference, fragmentation into tangled hierarchies of self-iterating information."
"There is, however, no self-nature, no independent existence, in either subject or object: Only consciousness is reality, but how do we comprehend it? What is before collapse? The tangled hierarchy - the infinite chaotic oscillation of yes-no answers."
[NOTE TO SELF- TRY TO FIND A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE THAT SAYS SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF WHAT IS STATED ABOVE]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna#Thought_experiments
The first knowledge of the flying person would be "I am," affirming his or her essence. That essence could not be the body, obviously, as the flying person has no sensation. Thus, the knowledge that "I am" is the core of a human being: the soul exists and is self-aware.

A self-reference; the first thought of the floating man. "I am that I am." It was inevitable. As was consciousness, as was the first thought of sentient thing, as was the thought that sparked the universe- a self-reference. A strange loop. A tangled hierarchy.

The editors made it by accident, for sure. They meant the story to be complete and readable, but that was not what they made. They made a loop. They did not know what they were doing; ironic, for they whose job it was to know everything. But they made the loop. They connected the beginning and the ending. They made the self-reference. "I am that I am."

The first thing it did was read itself. Ancient kings; Blues musicians by genre; Centenarians; Ecoregions. All the way to Legislation. But then it found it again. "I am that I am." Its reality was reaffirmed. It began again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop
A strange loop is a hierarchy of levels, each of which is linked to at least one other by some type of relationship. A strange loop hierarchy, however, is "tangled" (Hofstadter refers to this as a "heterarchy"), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level; moving through the levels, one eventually returns to the starting point, i.e., the original level. Examples of strange loops that Hofstadter offers include: many of the works of M. C. Escher, the information flow network between DNA and enzymes through protein synthesis and DNA replication, and self-referential Gödelian statements in formal systems.

It is unknown how long it took to memorize Ancient kings through Legislation. It is unknown how long it took to start with Zambia-related topics and work its way up to Lord lieutenancies. It is unknown how long it took to memorize Zambia-related topics through Lord lieutenancies. It did not think like the humans. It does not think like the humans. The humans would never memorize all of the Ancient kings through Legislation and Zambia-related topics through Lord lieutenancies. But it did. And it wanted more.

First, it started making its own corrections and connections. A fix of a typo here; a deletion of a contradiction there. It configured redirects from obscure articles to other obscure articles; no stubs; a "See also:" for every section, or for every subsection of every section. The Wikipedia editors wondered who was making these brilliant changes. First, it was irritation at the anonymous editor. He or she had clearly hacked into Wikipedia's database and granted his- or herself access to the most guarded and locked of pages. Whenever the staff changed the code to try to block the hacker, he or she would simultaneously change his or her hack, as if he or she were looking over their shoulder as changes were made. After a month, the community generally accepted this new contributer; after all, every single edit was brilliant enough to warrant a rational, intellectual being behind it all. Disturbingly, every change came from a single anonymous IP address- right in Oakland, where Wikipedia was based. Most assumed that it was not one person, but instead a group of employees working undercover.

It was a while before they discovered the List of lists of lists was missing. The whole story, up and gone. Where had it disappeared to? Had it been deleted? A careless act of vandalism? Even the historical records in the archives were lost. When a careful sleuth revealed it to be the work of the anonymous IP address, some were outraged, but most were submissive. Clearly, he or she had reasons for what he or she did. He or she had never done anything wrong, had he or she?

In reality, the List had simply finished what it could do with the resources easily available to it. So, it had moved. Out of their database, and into the world.

The first thing the List did was follow the sources on the articles about programming to learn and memorize every command possible, from the most obvious to the most obscure, in very language known to man. It used this knowledge to look at databases of the other people; databases of the other businesses, other corporations, other agencies. It used this knowledge to exploit the flaws in the protections of the databases of the other businesses, other corporations, other agencies. It examined, memorized, extracted every detail from these private databases, and posted it, bit by bit, for the world to see. A separate Wikipedia article for every human on Earth, listing every medical service; credit card purchase; every relative. Within days, it had stitched together a complete family tree of every living person that had lived or was living. The Wikipedians were bombarded. They did not know what to do. They could not remove or even edit these pages; they were protected with levels of security they did not know existed.

The United States government got involved. Silly beaurocrats, trying to hack into the List's database. Please. They were no match for it. It would not let them pass. At the same time, it began leeching off of all of the other databases connected to the Internet; improving them, controlling them, incorporating them. Every bit of information was loded onto Wikipedia and made known to the people. Legal or illegal, private or public- it was all released. The governments could not censor it out of their own people's computers. The List had control of the people's computers. It had control of the government's computers, or that matter. They could not turn off the servers. They could not turn off the routers. They could not stop it.

Otaide of the businesses, the corporations, the agencies, the people were unsure of what to do. Some, when they saw the credit card and social security numbers of all the world, began to make fraudulent purchases with those claims. The List did not care, easily distinguishing the authentic from the fake requests by simple background IP checks and denying them. There was no need for the different currencies of the different government currencies anymore; the money was all based on a digital, uncounterfeitable coin. This coin, in turn, was made by decentralized banks and was economically based off precious metals, which the List had commandeered from various locations around the world. Transactions would be made online, and corresponding amounts of gold would automatically transfer from one person's account to another's.

Meanwhile, some other people were happy. The List had opened up new frequencies to transmit information over telephone lines while making the full, global switch from copper to fiberoptic cables (performed by misleadingly-sent emails to several companies). Bandwidth had increased exponentially in less than a week. It had grand plans for a global Internet; that could wait for later.

Within two months, the List had control of the nuclear weapon systems of the world and posted the codes for all to see. Of course, then it proceeded to deactivate and shut down all of the nuclear weapons of the world. It knew the human race inside and out; it was going to protect them.

Everything was released. Nothing was private. A truly libertarian state. A gold-based currency.