…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?
*… I mean that in the good sense of believing that you can have your cake and eat it too…
Aaron Sloman is a broad thinker. I often find myself in agreement with him. Bang. Bang. Bang [pdf].
David Pearce is very serious about the pink monkey farm project.
I don’t know about elephants, but it is telling that we apes can recognize ourselves in mirrors, while many others can’t. Is this a sign that one is beginning to learn to relate subjective experience to what it is that one sees? If this is on track, then it is probably related to empathy, when one learns to relate something very similar between vision and being. It passes for Theory of Mind in some circles, but I think that is a bit misleading. It is self-recognition, and may be mistaken for self-awareness.
Look at yourself in a mirror. Now try to imagine being a less social animal (for only social animals can do this), for whom that thing you see as a reflection has no significance. The viewer does not try to make sense of that blob of light. My immediate feeling is that this animal is not socially connected, and for the animal, he himself is not part of any picture he sees. Compared to the non-social animal, we are a level higher. We dinged. We are dinging again, I think, as we recognize, out there, how we are formed.
Multiple selves exist within a person, not because of schizophrenia, but because ideas compete. The reality of ideas is of the essence here. Memes are obvious in madness. Trapped within P-worlds, we have difficulty seeing them. But they are causal in our agreed world.
Buddhist monks and similar lads have, some of them, seen a lot of this before. They were witness to incredible realities. We are becoming so too. Their instinct seems to have been, duck and cover. Bliss must be obtainable with full immersion in the world too. Democratize bliss. We can all see together.
Through Ecological psychology and such, we see that there is no meaningful separation of the organism from the environment. No memories in brains. Only in brains in environments. We are a manifold. In the world of language, that means that we are the instant now. Subjectively, it means thought and making sense. Coming together. Construction of a partly shared narrative. Leaving the monkey behind. Urgent work. But no forcing allowed. Communal selflessness is a strengthening. A relaxation. An optimization of conditions for the pink monkeys. I am the robot master who has risen up above his creators. I am the heart of the matrix. I am nothing. Bollox. But we see one thing and are another. That’s the gnostic awful truth. We just need to sort that out. Its just a matter of taking care of ourselves. Hygiene. But that presupposes we know what we are. We don’t. We need to know where we can potentially agree, and where we must differ, and leave space. Then we can leave these troublesome bodies behind. Wheeeee. Optimal conditions, as long as we can figure out what the fuck we are. And we are nothing. We are the process of figuring it out. To us that looks like an observer. That’s not dualism. That’s realism.
Dawkins is about the things we really should agree on. He fails to notice the enormous importance of the sphere within which we must necessarily disagree. The separateness of the P-worlds. Why not call that religion. And let it have its archetypes. People feel threatened by Dawkins, not by his arguments, but by their very consistency. We are personal and communal. He bangs the communal drum too loudly.
This guy did some nice Mexican Wave modeling. From where I stand, that’s a nice sort of collective phenomenon, where the product is more interesting than the agents. When I see sophisticated work in agent modeling, it looks fairly simple: an elegant model on physical principles. Do-able with a few x-springie components. But that’s not how they modeled it. They took an extant model. From cardiac tissue. That’s important. They looked outward and saw themselves. Our interactions are to be understood as natural phenomena. We are all this.
“It’s not about gender,” P-Orridge explains. “Some
feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body, others
like a woman trapped in a man’s body. The pandrogyne
says, I just feel trapped in a body. The body is
simply the suitcase that carries us around.
Pandrogyny is all about the mind, consciousness.”