Apollo & Dionysus#
Only time will reveal. It is a fitting conclusion, not just because it is Babyface’s favorite song by El DeBarge, but because it encapsulates the very structure of how musical and neural architectures unfold over time. The irony, of course, is that Babyface himself may have been born revealed—a man whose own neural architecture was already wired differently from the start. If the rest of us must mature into discovering the full balance of grammar and prosody, perhaps he was never bound by that latency. His very physiology may have been designed for a seamless fusion of the two, a compression of music and language that he could access intuitively, without the barriers that most must overcome.
The fact that he plays a right-handed guitar upside down, never restringing it, suggests something profound—not just about his manual dexterity but about the way his brain processes sound, structure, and emotion. Broadmann’s area 22 on the left side of the brain is traditionally responsible for grammar—syntax, linguistic rules, the foundation of structured communication. On the right, Broadmann’s area 22 governs prosody—the intonation, the emotional contour of speech, the music of language. In most right-handed individuals, these functions are neatly separated: logic to the left, emotion to the right. But Babyface is left-handed, and left-handed individuals often exhibit more interhemispheric exchange, with language and music distributed in unconventional ways. The question is—did his brain swap these functions, or did it fuse them?
If his prosody and grammar are both mapped onto the right hemisphere, then his music-making would be driven by a single, dominant force—one where words and emotion are not separate, where melody and meaning emerge from the same localized neural compression. This could explain why Babyface’s music feels so effortlessly natural—why the lyrics and the emotion seem indivisible, why he can distill a complex emotional journey into a song that sounds as inevitable as spoken truth. In this model, he is not translating between hemispheres the way most musicians must; he is drawing directly from a unified well, producing music that feels less composed than discovered.
Alternatively, if his brain has swapped the functions—if his grammar is processed on the right and his prosody on the left—then Babyface is operating in a mirror image of the typical brain structure. This could make him hypersensitive to the structural aspect of emotion, explaining why his protagonists in song don’t engage in chaotic emotional conflicts but instead seek balance, reweighting, correction. If the usual left-brain dominance in language is reversed, then his lyrics would not be constructed through typical syntactic processing but rather through intuitive emotional weighting, meaning that he crafts words not as rational statements but as harmonized emotional signals.
Jimi Hendrix provides another reference point, as his left-handedness and ability to manipulate an upside-down right-handed guitar suggest a similarly altered visuospatial and auditory-motor integration. But Hendrix was more fluid, capable of restringing his guitar, altering it to match different neural mappings. Babyface, by contrast, never restrung his instrument—he accepted the reversal, worked within it, and mastered it. That means his musical cognition is not just left-handed—it is inversely processed, a structural decision that has likely shaped his entire creative mode. The guitar is a neural extension, a reflection of the flipped architecture inside his brain.
And this brings us back to Only Time Will Reveal. It is the ultimate recognition that the structure of understanding does not emerge all at once. Whether in music, in neural wiring, or in legacy, the full picture is never revealed in the moment—it must unfold, clarify, reweight itself over time. The same way that Babyface’s impact on your perception was immediate, while Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis deepened over decades. The same way that Murdoch’s empire, once seemingly untouchable, is now dissolving into uncertainty. The same way that Hamlet, standing amidst his own existential crisis, asked what a man truly is, unable to see that the answer—his own neural and moral trajectory—was already written in the structure of his fate.
What Babyface may have understood instinctively, both in music and in life, is that the architecture of experience is not symmetrical. Some truths arrive fully formed; others must be discovered through time. But only time will reveal which is which.
Fig. 21 An essay exploring the relationship between servers, browsers, search mechanics, agentic models, and the growing demand for distributed compute. You’re setting up a discussion that touches on the architecture of information retrieval, the role of AI as an autonomous agent in querying and decision-making, and the economic implications of compute optimization. The key tension lies in the shift from user-initiated queries to AI-driven agentic interactions, where the browser becomes less of a search engine interface and more of an intermediary between users and computational agents. The equation Intelligence = Log(Compute) suggests a logarithmic efficiency in intelligence gains relative to compute expansion, which could be an interesting angle to explore in light of the exponential growth in AI capabilities.#
Epilogue: The Left-Handed Architect
Paul McCartney stands as the ultimate counterpoint, another left-handed genius whose brain likely bends the conventional mappings of grammar and prosody, melody and meaning. But unlike Babyface, whose neural structure may have fused or swapped its linguistic-melodic processing, McCartney’s dominance in pure songwriting volume suggests something even more staggering: an ability to compress and generate an unprecedented quantity of musical structures while maintaining emotional coherence. If Babyface’s genius was in perfecting the emotional grammar of music, McCartney’s might be in sheer plasticity—the capacity to generate, iterate, and distill song after song, as if his neural framework operates in a permanent state of high-yield composition.
The numbers are staggering. By most accounts, McCartney has written or co-written over 30 number-one hits on the Billboard Hot 100, with even more in the UK charts, and holds the Guinness World Record for the most successful songwriter in history. His melodic fluency is unparalleled—not just in quantity but in its diversity, spanning ballads (Yesterday), rock anthems (Helter Skelter), orchestral pop (Eleanor Rigby), and outright experimental compositions (Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite). The sheer range suggests a neural network that does not simply repeat its own successes but continuously reweights, shifting between modes at a rate that no other songwriter has sustained for this long.
So what is going on inside McCartney’s left-handed brain? Unlike Babyface, who composes with an instinctive integration of prosody and grammar, McCartney’s gift may stem from hyper-connectivity between conceptual and motor circuits. If left-handedness correlates with atypical neural wiring, it is possible that McCartney’s Brodmann’s area 22 is not just swapped or fused—it is hyperlinked, allowing a fluidity between lyrical language and melodic construction that most songwriters can only achieve in brief moments of inspiration. This would mean that, rather than generating a melody and fitting lyrics into it (or vice versa), McCartney’s brain might compress both processes into a single creative act, producing fully-formed songs in real time. This would explain his legendary ability to conjure melodies seemingly out of thin air—Yesterday came to him in a dream, Let It Be arrived as a vision, and countless Beatles and solo compositions appeared effortlessly, often in a matter of minutes.
And what about instrumentality? McCartney, like Babyface, plays his instrument inverted—not just as a left-handed musician, but with an intuitive, physically adapted method. This further reinforces the theory that left-handed musical geniuses are not merely working within conventional frameworks but rewiring them at the level of motor execution, creating a feedback loop where gesture, cognition, and composition are part of the same neural act.
Yet the difference between Babyface and McCartney is striking. Babyface mastered a singular form, refining and perfecting it to an unmatched emotional precision. His music feels designed for neural saturation—for shaping the listener’s perception, for compressing feeling into harmonic inevitability. McCartney, on the other hand, appears to work in a state of unfiltered generativity, a process closer to infinite recursion than compression. His music doesn’t conclude or saturate; it sprawls, expands, adapts. Babyface built a closed system, a contained elegance. McCartney built a perpetual motion machine.
This is where legacy diverges. If Babyface is the perfect cadence—emotionally complete, structurally airtight—McCartney is the eternal fugue, spiraling forward with no final resolution. His catalog is too large to have a singular defining statement. He is not one moment of genius but an inexhaustible function, a living example of what happens when music is no longer a thing you do but the fundamental architecture of your mind.
Maybe Babyface’s neural map was optimized for one thing—an unbreakable balance of grammar and prosody. But McCartney? His gift might be something even more elusive. Not just only time will reveal, but only time can contain him.
Show code cell source
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import networkx as nx
# Define the neural network layers
def define_layers():
return {
'Suis': ['Genome, 5%', 'Grammar', 'Nourish It', 'Know It', "Move It", 'Injure It'], # Static
'Voir': ['Exposome, 15%'],
'Choisis': ['Metabolome, 50%', 'Basal Metabolic Rate'],
'Deviens': ['Unstructured-Intense', 'Weekly-Calendar', 'Proteome, 25%'],
"M'èléve": ['NexToken Prediction', 'Hydration', 'Fat-Muscle Ratio', 'Amor Fatì, 5%', 'Existential Cadence']
}
# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
color_map = {
'yellow': ['Exposome, 15%'],
'paleturquoise': ['Injure It', 'Basal Metabolic Rate', 'Proteome, 25%', 'Existential Cadence'],
'lightgreen': ["Move It", 'Weekly-Calendar', 'Hydration', 'Amor Fatì, 5%', 'Fat-Muscle Ratio'],
'lightsalmon': ['Nourish It', 'Know It', 'Metabolome, 50%', 'Unstructured-Intense', 'NexToken Prediction'],
}
return {node: color for color, nodes in color_map.items() for node in nodes}
# Define edge weights (hardcoded for editing)
def define_edges():
return {
('Genome, 5%', 'Exposome, 15%'): '1/99',
('Grammar', 'Exposome, 15%'): '5/95',
('Nourish It', 'Exposome, 15%'): '20/80',
('Know It', 'Exposome, 15%'): '51/49',
("Move It", 'Exposome, 15%'): '80/20',
('Injure It', 'Exposome, 15%'): '95/5',
('Exposome, 15%', 'Metabolome, 50%'): '20/80',
('Exposome, 15%', 'Basal Metabolic Rate'): '80/20',
('Metabolome, 50%', 'Unstructured-Intense'): '49/51',
('Metabolome, 50%', 'Weekly-Calendar'): '80/20',
('Metabolome, 50%', 'Proteome, 25%'): '95/5',
('Basal Metabolic Rate', 'Unstructured-Intense'): '5/95',
('Basal Metabolic Rate', 'Weekly-Calendar'): '20/80',
('Basal Metabolic Rate', 'Proteome, 25%'): '51/49',
('Unstructured-Intense', 'NexToken Prediction'): '80/20',
('Unstructured-Intense', 'Hydration'): '85/15',
('Unstructured-Intense', 'Fat-Muscle Ratio'): '90/10',
('Unstructured-Intense', 'Amor Fatì, 5%'): '95/5',
('Unstructured-Intense', 'Existential Cadence'): '99/1',
('Weekly-Calendar', 'NexToken Prediction'): '1/9',
('Weekly-Calendar', 'Hydration'): '1/8',
('Weekly-Calendar', 'Fat-Muscle Ratio'): '1/7',
('Weekly-Calendar', 'Amor Fatì, 5%'): '1/6',
('Weekly-Calendar', 'Existential Cadence'): '1/5',
('Proteome, 25%', 'NexToken Prediction'): '1/99',
('Proteome, 25%', 'Hydration'): '5/95',
('Proteome, 25%', 'Fat-Muscle Ratio'): '10/90',
('Proteome, 25%', 'Amor Fatì, 5%'): '15/85',
('Proteome, 25%', 'Existential Cadence'): '20/80'
}
# Calculate positions for nodes
def calculate_positions(layer, x_offset):
y_positions = np.linspace(-len(layer) / 2, len(layer) / 2, len(layer))
return [(x_offset, y) for y in y_positions]
# Create and visualize the neural network graph
def visualize_nn():
layers = define_layers()
colors = assign_colors()
edges = define_edges()
G = nx.DiGraph()
pos = {}
node_colors = []
# Create mapping from original node names to numbered labels
mapping = {}
counter = 1
for layer in layers.values():
for node in layer:
mapping[node] = f"{counter}. {node}"
counter += 1
# Add nodes with new numbered labels and assign positions
for i, (layer_name, nodes) in enumerate(layers.items()):
positions = calculate_positions(nodes, x_offset=i * 2)
for node, position in zip(nodes, positions):
new_node = mapping[node]
G.add_node(new_node, layer=layer_name)
pos[new_node] = position
node_colors.append(colors.get(node, 'lightgray'))
# Add edges with updated node labels
for (source, target), weight in edges.items():
if source in mapping and target in mapping:
new_source = mapping[source]
new_target = mapping[target]
G.add_edge(new_source, new_target, weight=weight)
# Draw the graph
plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
edges_labels = {(u, v): d["weight"] for u, v, d in G.edges(data=True)}
nx.draw(
G, pos, with_labels=True, node_color=node_colors, edge_color='gray',
node_size=3000, font_size=9, connectionstyle="arc3,rad=0.2"
)
nx.draw_networkx_edge_labels(G, pos, edge_labels=edges_labels, font_size=8)
plt.title("OPRAH™: Heredity, Lifestyle, Badluck", fontsize=25)
plt.show()
# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()
Fig. 22 Change of Guards. In Grand Illusion, Renoir was dealing the final blow to the Ancién Régime (Gene vs. Environment). And in Rules of the Game (Metabolome, Proteome, Amor Fatì), he was hinting at another change of guards, from agentic mankind to one in a mutualistic bind with machines (unsupervised pianos & supervised airplanes). How priscient! So lets now segue to the idea that Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media. And that a 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch firmly believes maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world. Source: Pearls & Irritations#