Category Archives: P-worlds

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.

All we see are memes

Madness, Memes, P-worlds

There is a general belief around that we can see persons and that there is something fishy with a theory of memes, as we can never see a meme.  Actually, we can never see a person, and all we see are memes.

Here’s a small picture to illustrate this:

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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… →

What Bataille was after….

Art, CSP, P-worlds, pink monkey farm, Sex

Georges Bataille has always revolted me.  Much more than the Marquis de Sade. But then it struck me that it is a good idea to explore the following thought:  Given that any rationale anybody can come up with for morality is so weak, what if we were to adopt a frame of mind that knew nothing whatever of good or evil.  That looked dispassionately at what we know.  That would indeed be a useful point of view. Neither good nor bad.  Not of that.  Dispassionate.

Its nice when things work out

CSP, P-worlds

Marshall McLuhan, as described on Wikipedia, famously gave us the quip: The Medium is the Message (later altered by him to the Medium is the Massage… lovely little book). His 1964 stance is reported thus:

at the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.

Now, as we talk more about subjective experience among ourselves, we will come to develop causal stories about the content of consciousness. But this will inevitably look as if we are being pushed around by our own ideas. This is what is meant by the Medium is the Message. It bears responsibility. It plays the role of agent. The memes, goddamn them, won’t go away. This is the empirical level mentioned above: the level we can reach consensus on, because it is based on things we can each of us measure in our P-worlds, and report, and agree. There is lawfulness there. Unfortunately it seems to be a lawfulness at odds with our images of us as the free agents in charge, who fuck up when we associate with bad ideas, but hey, basically we are all free individuals, right? But our P-worldy experience of things is captured by his other two elements: the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness. I don’t know what those two labels mean. For me, this would simply refer to the P-world from the inside, where things have personal meaning, like the ability to induce fear or lechery.

Could we please undo the split between what we call emotion and intellect; repair the rift, and recognize personal meaning for what it is. It infuses basic category structure, dammit. It is the way we perceive the world, not as some lifeless CAD model of the furniture around us, to which a verneer or gloss of emotion is added.