Funny, the way some of you are bickering here illustrates perfectly the point of the previous song on the album (right in two).
And yes, though there's a lot of 23 interpretations, given tool's previous chromosome references (eg, 46+2) I'd say that it's got something to do with the fact that each parent gives a child 23 chromosomes... and given that a lot of this album is about his mother (indeed, the title as well) this seems to make a lot of sense.

Maybe, but if you'll recall one of the fake tracklistings had a song called "23." When the real tracklisting was revealed, everyone freaked out about the similarity.

My guess is that the name is nothing more than Tool goofing on their fans by naming the track after something from a fake tracklisting, after the fact, just to amuse themselves.

UNIVERSAL DUALITIES. black.white.good.evil.boy.girl.?

no, 23 is a direct reference to the 23 enigma, enunciated by william s. burroughs and expounded upon at great length in the "Illuminatus! Trilogy" by robert shea and robert anton wilson and again in "cosmic trigger volume 1: final secret of the illuminati" by robert anton wilson..

at least one member of the band is aware of the second book (and therefore the first, since the 2nd mentions it numerous times) because it was on a recommended reading list buried somewhere @ dissectional.. look it up on wiki.. it goes much further than the chromosome matter.

I've been thinking. 23 is a funky number 'n all, yet ultimately derivative of a decal way of counting. Does anyone know if it has any proven dimensionless significance? As a prime, it is quite fascinating (if not particularly pivotal), but say, for instance, in geometry (albeit complete geometry and not that Euclidean stuff), is it a constant of some sort?

It'd be an awful shame just playing the pattern-recognition game with the whole Illuminati paranoia. Far too prosaic for my tastes. :)

23 really goes beyond the illuminati paranoia game, too.. like i said, burroughs was the first person to point it out, and he just thought it was interesting.. shea and wilson put it in their novel to satire the way conspiracy theorists and occultists make connections that (quite probably) aren't there.. but wilson writes at length about his experiences with it and his research regarding it.. in one sense it's like a rorschach test, but in another sense it seems to have some deeper significance to the occult..

i'll ask a friend of mine who's into sacred geometry and such if he knows of any applications of 23 therein.

Interesting. Keep me posted.

A lovely prime it is, regardless (if yer into that sort of thing :).

LOL @ "sacred geometry."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_geometry

stop trolling.

why is that funny?

hmm. do you even like tool? lol. if you have any knowledge of the band, you should know sacred geometry has had a fairly strong presence with much of the artwork/and music itself for a while now (and 10fold on Lateralus). have you ever seen danny's drums? hmm.