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:
Category Archives: Memes
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.
Mixing it up
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.
A stroke of insight
Dr Jill Bolte Taylor gave an inspirational talk at TED. She gets it. Nirvana as she sees it is a biological state. That’s the pink monkey insight. If we act wisely (farm) towards our corporeal selves, we can get on with being the much bigger thing that we all, collectively are. This woman had a real stone pharisee vision.
Teleology…
..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…
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