Category Archives: Future projects

North Korea: Lessons for us

I’m watching an amazing documentary on North Korea (Part 1, find Part 2 yerself….).  When Kim Jong Il dies, the world is going to have a hell of a problem on its hands.  The form of collective being is different there.  It is telling that words I am highly suspicious of, such as “belief” and “emotion” seem to mean something very different in that context.  The partitioning of experience into things like “perception” and “emotion” is just a cultural convenience.  This is memes ganging up in a slightly different way.  The individual really is a unit that is up for grabs.  And we need to understand the resonant properties of nervous systems if we are to get a hold on the different stable forms of P-world co-existence.

Resonance…….

Gibson thought the world of ‘resonance’, but he never cared to define it, nor could he have. It is intuitively appealing. A dynamic, resonant character to … experience. But it bears thinking of a little more literally. The graveyard of fools, I am well aware. A tune that resonates. Popcorn. Who owns it? I can objectify it, but it is still within this weird privileged world of subjective experience. Things in there typically ‘are’ me. They are not objectifiable.

But hold on. I can objectify that tune.  In fact, my difficulty in stopping it at will is proof (!) that I can objectifiy it.  It is not part of me.  But it is unquestionably an activity, a behavior, of my nervous system.  A resonance.  A real phenomenon, transmitted between P-worlds.  A part of subjective experience that is not really so personal, but has a shared quality.  A repeating echo, faltering from one repetition to the next, but always playing out in real unreal time.

Chasing memes

Google Search Trends is a fabulous instrument for observing ‘physics-like’ regularities in our communal intercourse. I saw the tool, and thought of phenomena defined over P-worlds, and immediately inferred that there would be search terms, which alone or in conjunction with others, would give away physics-like regularity defined over P-worlds. (This is what Kelso is after too). So I started trying to think of pairs of search terms that would reveal oscillation. Continue reading Chasing memes

Empathy…

…is cold.  Empathy is cold. We have seen empathy in nervous systems.  It is neither ‘love’ nor ‘surrender.’ But empathy is the engine that drives us forward.  The more we see of it, the more we will align with it.

To what extent should our children be like us?

Reconciling our singular and collective selves

It is hard for us to acknowledge the reality of our collective nature.  One big problem with this is that we have developed a morality based entirely on the individual.  This in turn gets some all too willing reinforcement from a subservient psychology.  How might we shift towards a more balanced sense of self?  Morality is not ready to be upturned yet.  Pictures of starving children waiting to be adopted (Hello, Sambo) are still crowd pleasers.  Learn to distance ourselves a little bit from vision.  Vision misleads.  It has a necessary center.  We don’t.