Category Archives: CSP

The lunatics are in the house

Art, control, CSP, Madness, Memes, music, P-worlds, resonance, Silly

Most psychotics are harmless.  Lucky people get to be psychotic without harm.  Musicians do. Music is psychosis without the pain.  Best really listened to alone. But there is a serious point to this.  If there is continuity between the suffering psychotic and the happy psychotic, and both rest on an altered equilibrium between the endogenous dynamic and the exogenous one, then we could learn more by studying the felicitous ones.  Are there mirrors there when they are enjoying themselves?  Do advertisements inhibit enjoyment? What role do the various visible evidences of other similarly constituted dynamics give? It is a huge imaginative step to try to imagine a P-world that is not subjected to the influence of endogenous and exogenous dynamics.  It can’t really be done.  But recognizing this boundary does not rob the individual of autonomy.  Because there is no I in a P-world.  There, there is a boundary that marks the subject-object divide.  It has to do with nervous systems.  It is the mediation between perception and action.   Perhaps here is a way to reconcile personal and public.  The altered equilibrium referred to above is morally neutral. By studying the interface in the happy and the sad lunatics, we will learn more.  The word lunatic is about to get a new definition.  p.s. I now feel silly for thinking badly of people who listen to music in the background while they work.  There is no background.  No foreground either.  Experience is a shape shifter.  This was written along with some excellent Russian modern classical tones.

Addendum, over a year later, I stumble upon this in Charles McCreery’s work:

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Found here.

Exercise: disconnecting

control, CSP, Memes, Self

Here’s a handy little exercise you can try at home.  Or near home, because I need you to go to your local supermarket.  The one you shop in most.  Go in, and act you are doing your shopping.  Walk among the familiar aisles.  Now disconnect.   Stop acting like you are shopping.  Become aware of the physical space around you.  Note the volume of the building.  Now look at all the people around you.  Notice how all their behavior is dictated by the supermarket: this communally designed engine.  It tells them where to look.  It plays them like fiddles.  It develops their expectations and weakly satisfies them.  That much is easy.  Now, you just disconnected from the matrix.  You stopped being pushed and pulled around by the memes.  It may surprise you to learn that security are almost on to you at this point.  You will stand out.  Your behavior will register as abnormal.  You are now among the mad.  Retain enough common sense to disconnect where it will not seem weird if you just stand there and look a bit mad.  Have fun, and tell me (stonepharisee@gmail.com) how you get on.

Bring on armageddon!

Art, CSP, Future projects, Madness, Memes, music, resonance, Silly

The Church of the Stone Pharisee demands belief in the rationality of the lunatic.  The ‘delusions’ are none such, but result from a specific relationship between the P-world of an individual and those around him.  They often are being controlled by the ideas.  In hearing voices, they are merely being aware of some of the stuff going on in nervous systems (that annoying repetitive tune: do you own it?).  No wonder its confusing, and the stories come out peculiarly.  Therein lies the lack of the self: the P-world has lost some of its autonomy.

In this regard, I am highly amused to see that that gloriously batty compser, Alexander Scriabin, described Stravinsky as “Apostle” to the “Latin reactionaries”.  I have no ideas who these Latin reactionaries are, and I suspect that they do not constitute a natural kind. Scriabin was entirely incoherent, and that is interesting, because he was standing at an interesting point. He was immersed in a sea of cultural currents, and he dreamed of multimedia performance (Scriabin was a VJ long before there were VJs).  He was probably also a synaesthetic. He had tics as a child and was known for not sitting still (Children, pay heed!).

Before he died, runour has it that he was working on a big light and music job, to be played in the Himalays.  Once played, in the right setting, it would bring on Armageddon.  Anybody fancying having a go?  I’d love to try it out.

The uncanny valley

Art, CSP, Memes, neuroscience, resonance

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

control, CSP, Future projects, Memes, P-worlds

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…….

CSP, Future projects, Memes, music, P-worlds, pink monkey farm, Self

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.

Teleology…

CSP, Memes, P-worlds

..in pre-frontal cortical working memory. That’s the claim in this video. The information that is stored is unique to the goal, or prospective action. He goes on to say that the structure of WM is largely the same as that of LTM, such that a sensory stimulus to be retained in WM activates an LTM history, with all the associations of that stimulus. That looks like Proust to me, not teleology. The wispiness of the P-world as the present resonates with the past. Intriguingly, he links the cortical dynamics of WM to the perception/action cycle. That’s very Gibsonian in character.  But the  terms of the neuroscientist are becoming increasingly  odd-sounding to me.   Memory , as conceived here, is all in the brain.  If we view it instead as a resonance, or fit, between a neural dynamic and an environment, then the constrained environment in which typical WM tasks such as delayed-match-to-sample are done looks instead like an amplification of the neural pattern,  obtained by omitting, or clamping, the other halfof the equation.  I’m still working on my own vocabulary here, but ‘memory’ is certainly an area in which the received vocabulary appears to me to be in need of a severe overhaul. Continue reading Teleology… →