Monthly Archives: April 2008

The uncanny valley

Here’s an anti-resonance phenomenon for you: the uncanny valley. The creepiness is an error signal for a process that tries to see itself. That’s why the mirror system is so bloody important.  WHen it works, its a resonance phenomenon.  You can practically see it in the fMRI images, pulsing, as it strives to ‘recognize’ itself.  That recognition is a reverberation.

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.