Browntown

pt. 51

2011-09-29T18:40:00.007-06:00

"The team then injected a virus into some of the mice that inserts a gene called GluR4 into mPFC neurons. GluR4 amplifies transmission of electrical signals – a key step in strengthening connections.
Up the ladder

When the dominance tests were repeated, previously subordinate mice that had received the virus were propelled to the top of the social ladder."

this goes toward the fictional idea i am working on about language being a virus from outer space (based on the famous quote from william s burroughs.) it's not at all unreasonable to posit higher language as developing out of a mutation, it makes sense in terms of evolutionary theory, if you take an internalist perspective a la chomsky, where the idea is that at around 100,000 years ago give or take a chiliad or a myriad or three, one mutant happened. one mutation happened that made him intelligent, creative, etc. this trait ends up being so advantageous that it spreads like wildfire. all of the products of a higher collective consciousness are rooted in this and develop once the creativity mutation spreads and the new species emerges.

so that part i have down. i'm working on a fictional world and stuff but a lot of it will be realistic, which is to say completely insane. not as insane as reality but you know. anyway so now i know how to say it. the virus enters the organism and inserts a gene which is then passed down through the generations. for a long time the idea was that these kind of things could not be passed down, this was considered lamarckian fallacy. however, there have been studies like this one and another one, this one specifically on the heritability of post traumatic stress that seem to show that things that conventional evolutionary theory thought couldnt be passed down actually can be.

that the serotonin uptake of future generations can be adversely effected by the trauma of their progenitors is important and meaningful, as a lot of the other discoveries that will probably happen also will be. i mean, this really sheds light on my reread of the genealogy of morals, which i am almost done with. man i love that one. some of it is outrageous or ridiculous but some of it the power is so undeniable, the insight almost blinding. i want more like that. to that end i am getting back into dostoevsky. starting with the possessed.

pt. 50

2011-09-29T15:42:00.001-06:00

note to self. refer back to this article for riff on burroughs' "language is a virus from outer space." with the angle being that language was caused by a mutation but the mutation was caused by a virus that injected a gene into the human code. the article linked to this text involves mice who are infected with a virus which then inserts a gene that causes submissive mice to become dominant, socially. while mouse social orders outside of kafka are much simpler than human social orders, this was not always necessarily so. in fact human social orders did not become so much more complex than nonhumans' until humanity proper evolved, due to mutation caused by infection.

pt. 49

2011-09-22T07:50:00.004-06:00

there are a few books that i read and reread and that i think about a lot and perhaps try to imitate in my own writing, and with these books, the ones that really change me, it's like even when i'm not reading them i'm still reading and rereading them, that i have internalized my experiences of them, and remember them as essences, and as books, and stories, and remember so much that is not simply the hard memory of the actual verbiage.... but certain scenes, or ideas, or characters.... and i learn to read my own life by way of the stories that have become such a part of it.

the worst is when you do that with a book that you read when you were young and then you read it later and you realize it sucks lol.

pt. 48

2011-09-21T06:53:00.005-06:00

"The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures."

-- flannery o connor

i'd like to work with this notion of shock but think that i need a radically different definition of what is shocking. i mean, i dont feel that it's about sex and violence, though those may be a part of a shocking narrative. what i really want to do, in a general way, that i dont know how to do really, is to create a shock effect by pointing out that which is obvious but that which people are, en masse, choosing not so see, sub- or semi- consciously or whatever.... this notion of denial in certain relationships and situations, that's an easy example, but everyone knows about denial, and i think that within the greater delusion the concept of denial and a lot of our concepts of reality, perception, and mental illness, that within that greater delusional culture, there is a knowledge that everybody is in fact insane and that the only reason why it's okay is that it is practiced by the majority, but this knowledge never quite takes leave of us even though we suppress it and repress it in ourselves and others, and it tends to build.... and we release and tame the energy by way of both spontaneous (not consciously structured in advance) and ritual (structured in advance) scapegoating. we're in the process of creating a mass delusion that will be as delusional as any religion but with the element of god taken out. but god is just being scapegoated as a means of reinforcing our notions of ourselves as "realistic" and non-delusional, he's a sacrifice meant to redeem us of the original sin of religious delusion, but this is obviously superstition, and we are obviously more defined, in this day in age, by the superstitions that shape our actions (/nonactions) in a way that we prefer not to talk about, as it is often obviously inconsistent with what we say about ourselves, which is considered "self expression," while our actions are not.... because there is this quality everywhere of words and images taking over everything and creating a replacement for reality that is obviously very false but that people just go along with for a lot of complex and fascinating and hilarious and terrifying reasons.

i feel like i should finish reading the anti oedipus and get back into the genealogy of morals and rene girard to get the coherent theory together. re: girard.... mimetic desire is one of the things that is obvious about social behavior and we see it but we suppress our knowledge, which causes pressure to build, which we blow off by scapegoating people for being unoriginal in their desires or expressions....

pt. 47

2011-09-19T04:07:00.006-06:00

redefining freedom in the service of control:

"for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership."

click text to read original document. it's from an old internal memo from the architects of post ww2 policy.

"At the ideological or psychological level, in the struggle for men's minds, the conflict is worldwide."

this document is an essential part of the biggest advertisement coup of all time. the co option of the word and concept "freedom" by Power. it's about how if we are going to run the world, we have to do so in the name of freedom, because the insidious red threat is trying to do it in the name of slavery...

and to this end, everything must be controlled. instability anywhere, "the absence of order among nations" is intolerable, and because of this we must take over the world. this is transparently self serving and yet these were all intelligent men with no little into human psychology and yet there is an absence of self awareness, or even more than that, the presence of a delusional ridiculousness, made terrifying by the fact that it was written by actual people in power. it's not just that these people are assholes, which is bad enough. it's that they're fools. so you cant trust them not to fuck things up, which makes them more dangerous. in the same manner in which an animal who spooks easily can be more dangerous than one who is predictably aggressive.

the thing is, if you read through the strategy outlined here, so much of it ties into how the words freedom and choice are used all the time by everyone, because of how the usages of this memo have made their way into ordinary language. so that there are all these usages of freedom and choice, oh and liberty, which are about the freedom to make money. look at milton friedman's use of the word freedom, which he equates primarily with property rights. it's all about capitalism and private ownership. so the plan, which is still in effect, is that the word freedom is an advertising slogan for a control freak foreign policy (which the intolerable instability of other nations has thrust upon us) and for capitalism in general.

there is a whole subculture in washington devoted to how we should use the word freedom. look at what george bush did with it. you put the terrorists where you had the communists and you say that they hate our freedom, just as the communists did, and you use this justification to strip away people's civil liberties in the name of protecting them from those who threaten to take away their freedom, and even though none of those who are said to threaten that freedom actually take it away from you, and the people who are saying that they are protecting actually do take your freedoms away from you, and do a lot of stuff to other people in your name, and in the name of your freedom....

if i find the time i will go through that document more thoroughly and write about it. there's so much in there ripe for commentary. just look at the repetition of variants on freedom in the first sentences of most of the paragraphs. fucking ahabs.

pt. 46

2011-09-17T06:32:00.003-06:00

interesting angles on recent themes from around the internet and the greater world

why does the mind dream of someday capturing its own dreams?

google, facebook, identity, names, power, control

there is so much in the power of the name and we do not often acknowledge how little there is to it because we are still not tuned into the subconscious superstitions that drive us. i should try and write about them.

pt. 45

2011-09-17T05:54:00.005-06:00

my friend celina from the internet and a few other places back on earth. the is the queen of psych so she moved from texas to scotland, where a queen can get her proper respect.

relevant thread at the public discussion forums at www.cormacmccarthy.com discussing mindless violence vs. the violence of the mind, where the name might be considered an act of the violence of the mind, but the breakdown of the identity system seems like mindless violence

there is some error here that is hard to account for and i think it's funny just because of the themes in the material recently discussed.

pt. 44 do you remember the castle, barton fink? (once in a lifetime)

2011-09-16T20:30:00.004-06:00

the castle, by franz kafka

the memory of the castle is somewhere high up on a mountain in your mind, shrouded in a mental mist, so much so in fact that the castle itself is not actually visible, though that silhouette high up in the distant mist could be nothing else, you tell yourself, and you set out to survey the land that you may map your own mind and insure yourself against future losses of the memories of great books, and when you attempt to secure the proper permits that you need in order to survey the land you encounter a bureaucracy of mental processes whose ostensible purpose is to clarify your existence, and yet the more experience you have with this bureaucracy the more it seems like it was deliberately constructed in order to obfuscate the world, so you ask one of the locals about the guy in charge, because you want to know, who is in charge of my mind, i would like to have a word with him, so you ask the barmaid at the restaurant where you can find him, but not without ordering a beer first in order to be polite, and the beer is stronger than you're used to, if you are used to any kind of beer at all, because you dont even drink that often as you dont like the feeling of losing control that it creates, because you are a neurotic and skinny little man in perpetual ill health mental and physical, one of these phthistic early 20th century european fragile genius types that i adore but whom i see as a cautionary tale similar to the cohen brother's barton fink, john goodman running down the hallway screaming i'll show you a life of the mind, i'll show you a life of the mind, i'll show you a life of the mind, and you run fleeing down the hallways as the walls burst into flame, but quickly your consumptive lungs begin to burn and you falter, and stumble, and you stumble three times under the burden of your own brain, and this is the age of anxiety of which kafka foretold, i'll show you a life of the mind, but before it can all catch up to you and swallow you, just as the world begins to fade to some unendurably intense and terminal incandescence unto nothingness and absolute white, i'll show you a life of the mind, you make it to a staircase and you stumble down a flight of stairs but somehow do not fall, and you are drunk on your own thought and you bounce off a wall and change direction and stumble down another flight of stairs i'll show you a life of the mind, water flowing under as the days go by, and your glasses they teeter and the slide down your nose but they do not fall, and you make it down to the bottom of another flight and knock yourself off of another wall and change direction and stumble down another flight of stairs and down another flight of stairs and through an open doorway and out into a vast bright space i'll show you a life of the mind, but soon your eyes adjust to the bright and out of the dazzling antinight of that seemingly placeless space an immense and complex structure begins to emerge, and you take off your glasses and you rub your eyes, twisting your fists into them and replacing your glasses and blinking a few times as if that will help you make sense of what you see life of the mind, it is a city of mirrors that reflects your body in its surfaces as you wander through it and your mind reflects its architecture perfectly and abstractly as the days go by life of the mind, and there's nobody chasing you anymore but yourself through your own mind water flowing under, and lost in the reflections of yourself all around you, on the surfaces storefronts and rising skyscrapers, you hear the sound of destruction and construction all over, cacophony of jackhammers and traffic and yet nothing around you seems to move but your own reflection, life of the mind, and lost in this you lose track of that which is right in front of you and you stumble down a staircase into a shadowy subway and there is that strange warmth of subway airs that gives you memories and by this point you do not even remember what you were trying to remember in the first place, and the memory of your desire to find the castle in your mind recedes into the mist around the subway river water flowing under, life of the mind, there are no tracks in this subway it is composed of a network of canals, though the canal barges still resemble trains, though they too are made of mirrors, convex and distorting everything unto fatness in the ghostly blue undercity light, strange codes and hieroglyphs written over them in shadows life of the mind, and that warm urban subterranean air it smells like memories but does not contain any or emanate from any, it just really smells like them somehow, and the memory of the original impetus for this journey that you are now so deep into, which was itself a quest for another memory that you could not hold onto, has completely disappeared water flowing under, and you hear the intonation of a fake bell, an electric reflection of the sound a real bell thinly resonating, announcing that the barge is about to leave for parts unknown, and you board the barge and sit down among the others, people made of mirrors, their skin and eyes and clothing all of mirrors reflecting you back, faceless but for your face, with a large variety of form but none whatsoever of feature life of the mind, water flowing under, and the barge begins to move and a young woman in a short skirt moves mercurially through and you admire the contours of her strange and featureless forms and you lustily perform mathematical operations upon the ratios of her proportions and she disappears into another car life of the mind, and a man next to you is talking on the phone and his language is full of the same infiniplected detail of phonetic form as our own and the fineness and complexity and brightness of the details are like a dmt vision in sound life of the mind, and yet none of the words or cadences resemble any language that you have ever heard and you have lived all over manhattan life of the mind, and it's the most foreign thing you've ever recognized for what it truly is and the lights flicker in the barge as you flow and the days go by, water flowing under, and the barge begins to slow and a woman across the barge from you gets up and then when the barge comes to a stop the momentum knocks her down and she breaks into a million shining tiny starry pieces and scientists call them atoms life of the mind, and the boat has stopped moving but the water's flowing under, and you may ask yourself, how does this work? and you walk off of the barge and out into the suburbs same as it ever was life of the mind, and the mirrors are gone now and yet all the different houses reflect one another with a threatening and mute-tragic perfection of resemblance and do you remember when you learned to manufacture things of pure mind away from the waking world merrily merrily merrily life of the mind, and if you default on your mortgage you may din yourself living in a rotgut shack life of the mind, water flowing under, and the barge pulls away and there is nobody standing beside you and all of the houses have eyes same as it ever was and you walk, marveling at the sameness of it all, how it no longer reflects you but reflects that reflective quality of human experience that you have now become so lost in do you remember the castle no you move, same as it ever was, moving, water flowing under, and the cars reflect each other and the streets reflect each other and the part of you that does not resemble the resemblance of suburb to itself begins to stick out and glow with an eerie light as the sun sets over the suburbs as you walk, and you smell your body and you kind of like it but you are afraid that the suburbs will know life is but a dream and you come to a river you may ask yourself, newspaper taxis appear on the shore go away newspapers go away pop music life of the mind, but the pop music will not go away and it overgrows everything with a glittering extraterrestrial kudzu life of the mind but you build yourself a boat, your glasses sliding off and into the water sometime during that precious process and you leave them where they fall water flowing over and there is a smell of a barbecue coming from somewhere and you feel comforted by the suburbs where a man's home is his castle and the castles all reflect each other do you remember and the taxis they all fall apart into black and white words in a strong wind and swirl about in a storm of the day's stories getting caught in the kudzu as the days go by and your boat is woven out of fragrant plants and patched with their resin and you briefly paddle with your hands the cool water row your boat floating slowly and then you lay back in your dream hemp hammock boat and you close your eyes and float, once in a lifetime, and you forget things as you sink into the darkness and you sleep same as it ever was, and you dream once in a lifetime, and in your dream you cant remember where you got there, and you cant remember that you are sleeping in a boat on a river same as it ever was water flowing under, and you're trying to find your way out of a castle on top of a mountain high up in a mist life of the mind and you dream, somewhere a jester jingling merrily merrily merrily and he walked on down the hall crazily singing this is the end, my friend, merrily merrily merrily, verily, but a dream, tiny belltones tinkling off the cool curved stone walls of the turret tower as you almost fall but catch yourself upon a sconce that slides downward as a secret door slides open and the slow sound of sliding stone through the hallways of the ancient ages same as it ever was water flowing under and you hurry through the doorway down a spiral staircase and into a deepening darkness and you are about to just turn off the computer but instead you just abruptly snap out of it and watch some videos

pt 43. mindless violence vs. violence and the mind, or thoughts on blood meridian by cormac mccarthy, originally posted tonite @ www.cormacmccarthy.co

2011-09-14T21:44:00.002-06:00

this is a takeoff on a phrase i used in some post a while back. i'm doing some writing on stuff that isnt about mccarthy per se but i wanted to explore the ideas vis a vis blood meridian and figured i might share my exploratory process here with anyone whose interested. this is essentially another variation on the theme of the tao of mccarthy which i occasionally write about here.

so in blood meridian we can think of the kid as mindless violence and the judge as the violence of the mind.

"He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence."

not only is he described as violent and as existing outside of written language and nomenclature. he has no name and cannot read or write. this connects him to "a time before nomenclature was and each was all."

so we can think of the wordlessness as being connected with the notion of primordial natural unity. and we can think of "All history [being] present in [the] visage of the nameless. and holden seeks to erase all of history and replace it with representation. so he kills things and writes them down in his book and he erases that petroglyph. he hates freedom from mind. much like bibliophile thomas jefferson, who said in this letter to william henry harrison (with whom i actually share a bit of blood, coincidentally enough, the harrison line traveling down through the generations and mingling with the delews and the caldwells and finally the browns, which i find hilarious and terrifying):

"When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families... ...In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history..."

a thing without words, which is what holden hates and wants to control. history itself is a thing without words and the judge seeks to destroy it. cf dacus' idea on the death of history (and mine on the birth of the posthistorical economic age) in some thread on here a while back. but, as that dude in the gardener's son says, "history is fugitive." like the kid. in terms of deleuze and guittari he wants to code the kids flow.

so the kid is nameless, mindless. he is history. the history of real people, not the conquerors. and the judge is language. the battle here is between real history and language. real history is an infinite flux.

the judge (language) serves to differentiate history. the idea of language as differential is essential to modern linguistics. in modern linguistics (chomskian generative linguistics) language is analyzed in terms of combinatoric mathematics, which involves recombining discrete units. language in generative grammar is defined as a system in which a discrete and finite set of units can be recombined to form an infinite number of combinations. through recursion etc. chomsky applies modern discrete mathematics (as developed by guys like cantor, godel and turing) to von humboldt's idea of language. the

this from the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry on von humboldt says it very well:

"Humboldt's approach differs radically from that of his predecessors. 'The Nature of thinking consists in reflecting... ...that is, in the act by which the thinking subject differentiates itself from its thought.' ...This basic fact that every person can easily verify by performing such an act is the starting point of Humboldt's deliberations. Now, in order to reflect we must in our mind arrest the continuous flow of impressions in order to concentrate on something, comprehend this something as a separate 'unit' (Einheit), and set it as an object over against our thinking activity (thesis 2) As a next step, the mind can now proceed to compare several of these 'units', divide and combine them in different ways. In drawing the conclusion (thesis 4) from this state of affairs, Humboldt lays the ground for a radically new notion of the sign that anticipates (and points beyond) Saussure's definition given in his Cours de Linguistique Générale. Thinking consists for Humboldt 'in segmenting its own process, thereby forming whole units out of certain portions of its activity, and in setting these formations separately in opposition to one another, collectively, however, as objects, in opposition to the thinking subject'. In other words, in this process of segmentation not only are different objects are created, but With it the very subject of this thinking activity constitutes itself. Up to this point we seem to have been moving very much along the lines of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre—the 'I' positing itself in the act of thinking—but in thesis 5, Humboldt's argumentation takes a sudden Kantian turn: 'No thinking, not even the purest, can occur without the aid from the general forms of our sensibility (“allgemeinen Formen unsrer Sinnlichkeit”); only through them can it be apprehended and, as it were, arrested.' What Humboldt is saying, then, is that the mental acts he has described would not have been possible without assistance from the general forms of our sensibility. But how precisely do they make these acts possible? thesis 6 offers an unexpectedly suspenseful answer that builds up to its culmination in the very last word which is: 'language': 'The sensory designations of those units, into which certain portions of our thinking are united, in order to be opposed as parts to other parts of a greater whole as objects to the subjects, is called in the broadest sense of the word: language (Sprache).'

in this story, language is completely corrupt. language as "a thing corrupted by its own success." (whales and men)

the judge is a creature of the barren landscape of the desert and completely sterile. excepteth a corn of wheat from dying and it abideth alone and will bear no fruit, to paraphrase john 12:24 / dostoevsky (opening epigram to brothers k etc.). (you can go to town on the numerological stuff with that one). the ego/cogito ("the 'I'" in the above-quoted passage) which denies death and the greater realities of the natural world and seeks to replace the natural order with its own reductive, simplistic and self serving version.

and we can think of the embrace at the end as a circumscription, like language hugging history to death (cf the jefferson letter above and also foucault's terminology).

this seems to make sense to me. there are other ways of illustrating this tao. the kid and the judge remind me of other pairs. i wish i could divide this into columns:

the judge is like the male sun ("the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus" [BM]), which differentiates the world in terms of making objects visually identifiable and therefore divisible into discrete nameable units. the "ten thousand things" of lao tzu. the kid is feminine and undivided. the judge is canine (he's an alpha dog establishing a top down hierarchy) and the kid feline (nocturnal, doesnt listen, cat owners know what i'm talking about).

the judge i associate with permanence, "lidless fixity" (like the eyes of an insomniac etc), parmenides and stone. nothing changes. chamberlain's holden was known for his love of geology. "bald as a stone" when introduced. holden asserts that the anazazi disappeared because they didnt build things from stone. not coincidentally, the anazasi where weavers who cooked things by throwing hot stones in water held in woven baskets). stone and war endure. "War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone." "war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence." but the unity of existence is primordial and only someone who thinks that language is reality and that reality is language would foolishly think that unity needs to be forced upon existence. judge holden thinks that "words are things" and that natural things are words. "He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things." notice the judge's need for solidity and discrete divisions. he creates borders, that's why i like the idea (from wallach? i cant recall) that there is a "border tetralogy" including blood meridian instead of just a border trilogy.

and the kid i associate with heraclitus, or flux. water. this pairing is discussed at length and to glorious effect in plato's phaedrus. i dont see there being any dialectical progression though as there is no teleology or movement toward anything, just a play of forces swirling. cf all the vortex imagery throughout the ouvre beginning with the watery whirl in "a drowning incident."

the judge is hierarchical organization imposed by military force. top down organization. a forcing of unity by way of circumscription, language, stone, walls, borders and wars. top-down. pyramidal, inorganic.

the kid is anarchic, not a soldier but an outlaw. the archetypical outlaw. to the hierarchical he would appear chaotic, like the world itself. connected to the chaos that precedes "[the universe']s ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos." "autonomous," which, like the flight of birds, the judge finds insulting. Autonomous. but in the judge's view, autonomy exists in "pockets" that must be circumscribed and replaced by representation. he also sees the orbits of celestial bodies as being determined "by the length of their tether."

the kid is the natural order and the judge is human order. the judge might see otherwise were he to once even dream. "Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way." i think he does the image of drawing strings through a ring at that part (i dont have any books on me i'm quoting what i can find on the internet). that seems to me an image of circumscribing the infinite weave. the idea of the natural order being woven permeates mccarthy's works.

apropos of the image of the ring: the judge is the eye of sauron and the kid is a little hobbit. or, if you prefer wagner to tolkien, in wagner's ring cycle whosoever chooses power must give up love in order to do so. circumscription as faustian.

and finally, the judge is whiteness and the kid is blackness. the whiteness of the european conquerers and the blackness of the enslaved peoples. the white guys call indians niggers. whiteness of daylight and the blackness of night etc. the two play in a tao, which i distinguish from dialectic specifically by the lack of teleology or progress.

"I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom." -- cormac mccarthy's venomous fiction article, nyt

the kid is souled and not sold. he is the soul and the judge is the body. the judge believes in physicality, solidity, and the quantification of humans through violence and commerce, commerce being ultimately rooted in the violence of the mind. after all this is a gang that makes money selling scalps. notice that even in the above quote the imagery is consistent with the rest of the things i've asserted. the notion of harmony (as well as language, in terms of breath and phonetics) involves dividing sound into discrete parts and arranging them in terms of mathematical proportion. tempo involves mechanical divisions of time. after the man's heart stops the watch still ticks (paraphrased from suttree). freedom and the human soul appear to be valuable things to him.

too many words. i ought to sleep. i've got to travel across some borders early in the morning.

also i'd like to apologize for missing the wallach josyph reading. i have a problem getting places "on time." heh.

thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to explore this. i totally did not achieve the goal stated at the beginning. not always good with destination. i guess deep down i prefer the journey.

pt. 42

2011-09-12T18:22:00.002-06:00

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/16-robots-invent-their-own-language

they should put the word language in quotes. it's nothing like real language but still very interesting. and it includes robots, our future soulless overlords.

pt. 41

2011-09-02T21:53:00.002-06:00

pt. 40

2011-08-21T08:04:00.001-06:00

download a novel i wrote a while ago if you want

pt. 39

2011-08-11T06:02:00.004-06:00

pt. 38

2011-07-17T05:50:00.001-06:00

pt. 37

2011-07-16T13:57:00.003-06:00

"What is General Nature? is there Such a Thing? what is General Knowledge? is there such a thing? Strictly Speaking All Knowledge is Particular.

To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess."

-- william blake

i'm stricken lately by how much humankind has, throughout history, sought to reduce the wildness of the wilderness of the world in all it's chaotic glory to a pure white geometry of easily and clearly delineable and denumerable abstracts, and i love the simple beauty and proportion of it all, the sense of ideal forms in it, and i love the notion of abstraction and generalization as tools, but they appear to have become more than tools. in fact now it often seems like we have become their tools. this raging need to purify it all into the conceptually manageable by shearing away the smelly hairy glory of the dirtstorm of our existence.... it makes sense. it is through general principles that we have learned to construct houses and grow food and tame fire and water and protect our children from predators and shore ourselves against natural disasters. but it's like this feeling has run amock and we are not only guarding against chaos but pre emptively striking where we fear it may strike first. to that everything is overinsured, overscheduled.... shorn "clean" of all the wild and hairy life of the wilderness just in case, because we are engaged in this endless and ridiculous quest, chasing this dragon, trying to turn everything into a perfect theory without always admitting that we get too lost in the self-referential allegory of the funhouse mirrors of our own mind, which serve to obfuscate the obvious more often than clarify the complex or penetrate the mysterious, so, like, sometimes it's just more fun to make robots out of garbage or just focus on the concrete in general, if that makes any sense, lol. cya

pt. 36

2011-07-13T08:16:00.009-06:00

wittgenstein on anti elegance. from the blue book writings.

"(d) Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive.'

(Think of such questions as 'Are there sense data?' and ask: What method is there of determining this? Introspection?)

Instead of 'craving for generality' I could also have said 'the contemptuous attitude toward the particular case.' If, e.g., someone tries to explain the concept of number and tells us that such and such a definition will not do or is clumsy because it only applies to, say, finite cardinals I should answer that the mere fact that he could have given such a limited definition makes this definition extremely important to us. (Elegance is not what we are looking for.) For why should what finite and transfinite numbers have in common be more interesting to us than what distinguishes them? Or rather, I should not have said ”why should it be more interesting to us?" -- it isn't; and this characterizes our way of thinking."

this is to me reminiscent of william blake. we erroneously think that the qualities that we abstract from concrete experience actually exist outside of our simplistic abstraction.

wittgenstein says it thus:

"The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the ideas that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful."

pt. 35

2011-05-31T20:23:00.001-06:00

you and i escaped from jail
...we picked our locks with fingernails
and ran into the sunset with no money and no future
but we had a plan
and we ran
away
everytime i try to hide the devil in my darker side
i fall into a river and
nobody wants to hold my hand
but
i will live to sing
and we will something
i havent figured out the lyrics to my life
just
yet

part 34

2011-05-26T17:18:00.003-06:00

part 33

2011-05-24T20:12:00.002-06:00

piece on betterfarm by myabc50's holly boname. my cousin nicole is interviewed and there is great footage of the house and i get interviewed while painting and there is some fiddling by the great brian purwin. this is all part of it.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 32

2011-05-23T19:42:00.007-06:00

Robots learn to create language

<=== click blue headline for source article

Robots learn to create language
May 17, 2011 by Katie Gatto weblog

* article

Robots learn to create language

(PhysOrg.com) -- Communication is a vital part of any task that has to be done by more than one individual. That is why humans in every corner of the world have created their own complex languages that help us share the goal. As it turns out, we are not alone in that need, or in our ability to create a language of our own.

Researchers at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology have created a pair of robots who are creating their own language. The bots, which are being taught how to speak but not given specific languages, are learning to create a lexicon of their own.

The bots, which have been aptly named Lingodroids, consist of a fairly basic setup when it comes to hardware. The robot consists of a mobile platform that has been equipped with a camera, a laser range finder, and a sonar setup that allows for the mapping and avoidance of obstacle. In order to allow them to talk, they are also equipped with a microphone and speakers.

The Lingodroids develop language in the way that most human languages have probably developed, but making up words to name the places that they visit, and then share that name with the other around you. The bots basically find something that they have not seen in the past, create a word based on a random combination of syllables, and then tell the other robot the word that they have just created. Then the robots memory files will link to the word to that specific location.

Currently the robots are learning new words by playing games, and can only name locations, but the researchers hope that in the future these Lingodroids will be able to create a more complex language.

More information: Research paper: Schulz, R., Wyeth, G., & Wiles, J. (In Press) Are we there yet? Grounding temporal concepts in shared journeys, IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development

via IEEE

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

so it's language in the rudimentary sense of naming and signaling. i wonder how i could get my robots to recite poetry....

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 31

2011-05-23T18:19:00.001-06:00

morning glories planted in painted piano as planned

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 30

2011-05-23T11:46:00.002-06:00

these doors are part of it too

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 29

2011-05-23T06:24:00.002-06:00

ricorso

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 28

2011-05-23T05:36:00.003-06:00

i tried to explain my overall thing to someone who asked me. why i bother any more is beyond me. it's hard enough explaining an obsession when you can name the object of it.

folksll ask me what i do when i meet them. this is generally how people gauge you in modern society. it's wrong, allegedly, on the surface, whatevs, to categorize people by race religion or gender, though if course everyone does it underneath if they are at all intelligent or even just intuitively understand the difference between manners and the social complexities that they serve to manage, which i guess might make them intelligent indeed by some definitions, but not the kind of definitions that get you a piece of paper from a school that says you are worth hiring for the kind of job that, when someone asks you what you do, you can say, "well, i have an intuitive understanding of manners," because when someone asks you what you do, they mean what do you do for money. that is one of the ways that we gauge people. it's part of figuring out how you relate to the person. most people just do it because it's how you talk to people, especially in the middle class, where people change out of their work clothes and into their civvies, and the civvies are samey, samey as can be, usually, because there are these weird surface norms involving conformity and homogeneity, and it all seems like bullshit, to someone like me anyway, but the way that these people maintain identity among saminess is through their understanding of themselves in terms of their occupation and finances and by way of winning at the race to ultimate saminess, where the goal is unattainable, this like platonic form of ultimate excellence in conformity trophy that the upper middle class chase mindless and crass as dogs, and, like, "what do you do?" is how they smell each other's asses and piss on each other's turfs in order to establish a properly pyramidal social hierarchy, which should not be mentioned while in civvies, and etc., while eh whatever i'm gonna go do something else

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 27

2011-05-23T05:16:00.007-06:00

" May 23, 2011

Black holes spin faster and faster

(PhysOrg.com) -- Two UK astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the centre of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe. Dr Alejo Martinez-Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Prof. Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford made the new discovery by using radio, optical and X-ray data. They publish their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

An artist's impression of the jets emerging from a supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy PKS 0521-36. Credit: Dana Berry / STScI "

source article at physorg

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 26

2011-05-20T17:35:00.005-06:00

some robots i am making. like scarecrows, except instead of scaring crows they will scare things that are scared of awesome psychedelic robots, like evil spirits and such. the final coats of paint will be composed primarily of sagesmoke.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 25

2011-05-19T20:59:00.007-06:00

"On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658"

-- Jorge Luis Borges

"Practice not-doing,
and everything will fall into place." -- lao tzu

i washed the windows on the first floor today and worked on some art projects outside. the sun is out after about a week of rain and everything is drenched and alive. bugs feeding on me in the dusk. now it's late and the frogs and the whippoorwills are going strong. my skin still has some of the heat of the sun in it. been thinking about how i like having a garden around myself of things that i make grow and blossom as i go between them. the lazy bee that weaves a colorful world.... eventually. projects are just what i do in between other projects. i will post some new robot pictures soon and maybe write about some of my art projects and how they relate back to and are originally rooted in the theory.

check out the dogs, practicing not-doing, falling into place

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 24

2011-05-18T00:56:00.005-06:00

"Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift."

-- gilles deleuze

the featureless face has emerged as a theme out of some spontaneous art stuff i brought in. i'm not looking to define it but it might be fun to riff on. the white featureless mask from the photocomic about reading that i posted recently and the photo from last post with the features blurred out of my face seem to echo this quality in each other. the second picture was accidental.

the featureless white mask in the book reminds me of the michael meyers' mask from the movie halloween, and also the mask that tom cruise wears in vanilla sky.... and the blurry face in the recent photo of me is reminiscent of the movie jacob's ladder. i dont really know what to make of all that.

the phrase itself, "featureless face," makes me think of the body without organs from the philosophy of gilles deleuze.

i dunno. maybe this part should mean more. no. crabwise by cancerlight. worry not. the featureless face is an egg. endlessly echo the disintegreatness of upwardcrumbling creation. weird to the other.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 23

2011-05-17T18:57:00.011-06:00

"He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight ... Innis makes no effort to 'spell out' the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits, like a symbolist poet or an abstract painter."

-- marshall mcluhan on harold innis

"A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations."

-- paul valery, regarding the perfectly unfinished nature of the theory of self referential allegory

here's another picture kind of like the pictures from before. conceptual echo of the featureless face.

also check this out:

lyrics:

she once whispered fever blistered
mysteries i missed the mystic meaning of
i get confused easily

glistered crystals in her pistil
petals peeled back to reveal the pealing of
churchbells that keep teasing me

do do do do do do do
do do do do do do do

glimmering chrysalis's metamorphosis
waiting for christmas's orpheus orafice
isnt the isness the business of christening
kissing the mist while the missus is listening
silvergold secrets of moonlight and noonlight
enlightening and frightening it's too much it's alright
the being of seeing and choosing the music
a prayer in the air you can use it or lose it

in the night time
always never alone
i am small
but i will call
without no telephone

aaaaaaaaand this:

<--- source -- Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence (1990) by Julius Thomas Fraser at google books an interesting angle on some of the stuff i've been thinking and writing about.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 22

2011-05-17T07:10:00.003-06:00

turning my dog into a druid so that he can help me pick mushrooms and frolic among the wee folk in the forest.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 21

2011-05-16T15:26:00.009-06:00

there's a nice echo logic between the f5 region in the brain of the macaque monkey, where mirror neurons were first observed, and the region of the human brain known as broca's area. they're anatomically homologous. homologue is an echo of the term echo within the theory. the logic of these echoes is the subject of echology proper, and the theory of self referential allegory may be said to be a theory that places a good deal of emphasis upon echological relations and seeks to interpret phenomena from an echological viewpoint.

an echo is also a shadow. they are reduced versions of a thing that still yet retain its essential shape and identity somehow. reflections fit into this category of phenomena and can be thought of as high definition shadows. in terms of the theory anyway. they are both reductive representations. somehow lower-dimensional.

click here to see a quick demonstration of mapping higher dimensions onto lower dimensions by way of shadow projection.

this is essential to what our thoughts and senses do. shadowmath and echology.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 20

2011-05-15T10:44:00.007-06:00

i found this book out in the woods while picking mushrooms.....

i tried to read it but there was only one word and it was in a language that i could not understand....

wait.... what?

i'm not sure if this is actually a real book

or maybe this is what reading really is

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 19

2011-05-13T19:02:00.007-06:00

my friend sarah joined in. we've made art together before. i'm going to weave her in. we need some variation in the echosystem.

i like collaborating with other people and this is the kind of thing that benefits from some interactions. spontaneously emerging orders are essential to the theory. this was a wonderful spontaneous surprise :D

also now i can tell the guys that sarah and i had textual intercourse. thanks, sarah!

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 18

2011-05-13T16:26:00.009-06:00

the previous post was a play on a famous chapter from as i lay dying by william faulkner: "my mother is a fish." as i lay dying is told from a bunch of different first person viewpoints in a family dealing with the death of their matriarch. some of the story is told by the youngest member of the family, a boy named vardamann, who is 8 or nine years old i think. earlier in the narrative vardamann catches a fish and cuts it up. he's a little kid and the style is stream of consciousness. when he cuts it up into pieces he sees it go from "fish" to "not-fish." the fish is associated with his dead mother and the disintegration of the family that constitutes the core of the tragedy. now, it isn't the relationship between the fish and addie bundren that is relevant here, though it is, of course, relevant, and enriches the whole echosystem, but if that were all there was to it i wouldn't bother bringing it up. the metaphor extends further and there is a good example of self referential allegory of the type that i am primarily (though by no means exclusively) theorizing about. maybe i will try and get into this element in blood meridian and moby dick too. possibly the crying of lot 49. maybe the entire harold bloom american apocalyptic canon as laid out in his book "how to read and why" lol.

anyway though, what interests me about as i lay dying in terms of the theory in terms of the theory is that the fish isn't just symbolically linked to the mother it's symbolically linked to an aspect of the work that lay outside of or underneath that kind of relation. there is a structural element, like in that one sentence i wrote, where if you replaced every letter in the entire book with an x, you still get the essence of the story if you pay attention to the structure, which is fragmented in a way that mirrors the fish, and the mother, and the fragmentation or disintegration of the family with the death of the matriarch.

before the narrative, the integrity of the family was embodied in the imperial living mother in the same way that the king in ye olde englande was thought to embody the people and his death or displacement leads to the breakdown in social order as we find in shakespeare. the structure of the book is an artistic expression of this on a different level where one can remove almost all semantics from the language and still see the essence of the story. the weak link is that the structure alone cannot convey that the perspective is constantly shifting. in fact many books are broken into chapters. so it's not purely structural. one must have knowledge of that element of the work which, while it is not completely self-evident in the chapter structure, it is something that can be summed up in a sentence or two. "the perspective shifts radically between 15 different first-person narratives in 59 chapters." then if you look at the chapters themselves you can see how disproportionate they are in terms of their various structural qualities. even with the names x'd you can tell when a person with a certain # of x's in their name is narrating. darl dominates the narrative. he's the bard or chorus.

addie, the absent/omnipresent matriarch, narrates only one chapter, the opener, chapter zero. from the coffin the absence speaks. weird melville intertext here. in the end of moby dick the vortex spews forth queequeg's empty coffin and that empty coffin serves to save ishmael by way of it's buoyancy, and the absence of death within it is like the presence of life; and in the beginning of as i lay dying we have addie bundren narrating chapter zero as she dies and her firstborn son cash is making the coffin that will carry her through the rest of the novel, and her presence in the coffin, that absence, will be the axis of emptiness round which the whole tornado turns. the not-her is the eye of their universe, and being that close to that kind of thing is dangerous as the vortex moves faster the closer you get to the still center. they are torn apart into fragments (the fragmentation structurally echoed in the radically disproportionate lengths of the chapters.)

in terms of semantics and poetry the distilled essence of this theme of disintegration is found in the chapter/line: "my mother is a fish." in moby dick melville calls whales fish. he explains why early on. fast fish chapter i think. therefore we can only logically conclude that there is a supernatural system of literary reincarnation created by god by which ahab is reincarnated into addie burden. ahab dies in 1851, the year that moby dick is published, and addie burden dies in 1930 upon the publication of as i lay dying, at which point, by such unquestionable logic, i judge her to have been 79 years old. which i think means she had most of her kids in her 50's 60's and 70's.

anyway though, this recurring theme of disintegration recurs not just within the plot-time of the narrative or symbolic-poetic relationships of the words, but also outside the time of the narrative and the words in the structure within which the narrative is embedded. we have it in its most distilled poetic expression in vardamann's five word chapter and we have it on a scale that is practically outside of the text. a greater agreement between form and content, syntax and semantic. it's like the book has a body language in addition to it's verbal content that amplifies the work, or it's like onomatopoeia, where the sound of a word expresses a meaning that can be understood without knowing the more strict semantic definition of the word.

through this self referential hendiadystic transformal allegory (let us define allegory as a thing that means something other than itself) the work seeks to reach beyond itself. in doing so it expands the mind that experiences it. like acid.

there is a marshall mccluhan, medium is the message quality to all of this. i'm drifting off now though…. my eyelids dropped shut for a few moments and i saw some rebus hieroglyphs but then i opened my eyes again.

interestingly, mccluhan often structured his books so that the chapters could be read in any order. he called this the "mosaic approach." burroughs uses mosaic techniques too. naked lunch has some weird chapter order stuff in its history and structures alike and like in mccluhan's book you can read the chapters in any order and still get it so long as you are not too square about it all. maybe i should dive back into that one that could be fun.

keep in mind though that as i lay dying, as fragmented as it appears, can also be clearly expressed the form of one continuous line of language one letter after the other from beginning to end. there's a strong sense of this:

this is fundamentally different than a mosaic structure. the structure of the theory ought to allow for both those types of structures within itself at the very least.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 17

2011-05-13T16:08:00.001-06:00

my mother is a wish.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 16

2011-05-13T15:59:00.003-06:00

when you get close to the axis of stillness around which everything turns that is where things spin fastest, and the the momentum is greatest where motion and stillness are nearest. this seems so complicated and paradoxical but tornadoes understand it completely and they are just big dumb animals spun from thin air.

this is not all that true in some ways but it's very true in others. convection is both extremely simple and extremely complex. it's profound. chaos theory has its roots in some deep insights about the nature of convection and recursive self-reference.

there is no real still axis in a tornado. it's a low pressure column that is like a stillness compared to the whirling vortex of the hurricane but it's not actually still. the only true stillness is at the eye of the universe.

if i were writing this as a conventional realistic novel i would have there be a physicist character and a theosophist character and then have them do some dialogue. but i've tried that kind of thing and find it to be too much work. also i think that if you are trying to translate ideas into characters you have to be really good and i am just not that good. i mean dostoevsky, or melville, or thomas mann…. those guys could write some philosophical fiction! cormac mccarthy too. i don't think i would have the understanding of the internet that i do if i hadn't read the magic mountain. and i wouldn't've learned how to love the damn dirty world with all my heart occasionally if i hadn't read dostoevsky.

and without melville there would be no theory of self-referential allegory. i don't know where to begin to talk about moby dick. maybe chapter 47.

"I [Ishmael] say so strange a dreaminess did there reign over all the ship and over all the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were The Loom of Time and I myself were a shuttle weaving away of my own Free Will into these unalterable threads. The fixed threads of the warp seemed Necessity -- and here thought I, with my own hand I weave my own Destiny. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword hitting the woof, first one way, then another - - this savage's sword must be Chance. Aye -- Chance, Free Will, and Necessity -- all interweavingly working together."

;)

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 15

2011-05-12T06:53:00.000-06:00

theosophy. from the greek theosophia which is compounded of theo, meaning god, and sophia, meaning wisdom. people often associate theosophy with madame blavatsky and her theosophical society, though i personally have other favorites. it's much older than blavatsky's society and all of that stuff is really interesting, most especially vis a vis a close reading of yeats' poetry, which i'm very fond of. he was too occultist for me though. and he might not make my top ten faves. that's personal though and i would not bother to question his obvious greatness as a poet.

anyway though enough of that crew. check out this drawing by jakob boehme

and check out this quote from the very beginning of his "http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/cjb/cjb03.htm." this captures the feeling of chasing the dragon and the spirit of my theory very well.

"ART has not wrote this, neither was there any time to consider how to set it punctually down, according to the right understanding of letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in haste; so that in many words letters may be wanting, and in some places a capital letter for a word. The Penman's hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did often shake; and though I could have wrote in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, yet the reason I did not was this, that the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it; for that fire comes and goes as a sudden shower. I can write nothing of myself but as a child which neither knows nor understands anything, which neither has ever been learnt; and I write only that which the Lord vouchsafes to know in me according to the measure as himself manifests in me."

i'm going to leave off commentary on this stuff until some other part. but this too shall recur.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 14

2011-05-12T05:41:00.000-06:00

thank god i can sleep. if it were just like this all the time, with the words, i'd fly apart into pieces.

i awoke this morning with a strong sense of disbelief in the stuff i'd written before going to bed. this is satisfying. i'm not sure how true i'll make the physics elaborated in parts 12 and 13. i mean within the fiction i can make it as true as i want. so for now i guess i will say it's kind of true. in terms of truth and the fictional forces, the weak fictional force can be defined as "kind of" true whereas the strong fictional force can be defined as "more than" true. this is pretty much the most logical thing i've ever written.

i think the better way toward the real reality of the fiction of the theory might better be approached through an alchemy or theosophy or something like that but i dont know. hm. i'll get back to it. until then check out this note on the method of the notes on the theory. the recursively embedded note-within-note aspect of the previous sentence was intentional and the comment thread will loop back to it :D

the two people i am talking to are men i've been talking about life and books with for years but have never met "in person." but i consider that an inconsequential detail. david and/or peter if you read this let me know. will actually post a link to this post back in the comment thread that i posted the pictures from, but i will not screencap the thread with that link then added and post the picture here because while this may be a comedy of infinite regress auguring a rabbit hole through the looking glass of the real into the bizarro but that does not mean that the feedback loops should be obvious.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 13

2011-05-11T20:18:00.000-06:00

the eye of the i is similar to the eye of the universe. the world of the world and the world of the mind are both infinite, but the the world of the mind is of a lesser degree of infinity than the world of the world. but their are similarities across magnitudes of infinity, the largest and smallest of which will always seem infinite, though the largest will seem most nearly absolutely infinite, though there is nothing absolutely infinite or perfect in the entire universe. except everything.

in the space between zero and one on the numeric continuum there is an infinity of real numbers that is of a greater degree of infinity than that found in all the natural numbers up to infinity plus.... -- oh wait cool check it out:

hyperreal numbers

"Such a number is infinite, and its inverse is infinitesimal."

so that's got an interesting correspondence. sometimes just clicking through links and searches yields such interesting fruit!

the movement of the smallest particle of animacy traces the longest possible path, leaving the eye and returning to it at the one point in each world that is closest to the eye and therefore the other point who are the twins whose incest birthed the turning worlds. i think that their mother is the dragon. i dont know how i'll figure that out. maybe i can check the pre existing peer reviewed literature.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 12

2011-05-11T19:10:00.000-06:00

i can imagine a bizarro world that would really help me understand things. the bizarro world is the opposite of this world. by world i mean more than the planet but less than the universe. the universe contains and permeates all worlds within it. there are some really smart physicists who would call it a multiverse but i am thinking of a greater universe in which two worlds interact like the tao and at the where the general shape, defined topologically, is a torus deformed to something resembling an hourglass where the sand passes through at the narrowest possible opening between worlds, and there is only one particle in the entire universe that can do this, it is the spark of divine light or dissonance, of animacy, and after passing through the narrowest point in the hourglass it takes the longest possible route back to the eye of the hourglass around the universe. the hourglass in this case is a torus shape, recall. hopefully the animated image will help you envision the shape i am talking about.

quoth feynmann: "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."

But there is a geodesic/geodesic aspect as well. so we have continuity and degrees of locality. (click on either side of the axis of asymmetry for one of two possible definitions of "geodesic.")

this smallest particle (which is also or spark of animacy is the dragon that physicists will chase through infinitesimals and cosmologicals until humanity goes extinct. the furthest distance and the smallest point are almost a pure physical unity. the one unit that can fit through the one smallest loose stitch in the weave that binds this world to that other. if you were the dragon you would see it as the eye of the very needle through which you appear to be threaded. the earthly idea that an ultimate particle will actually be found soon is just the kind of excited thing that a hunter-gatherer will babble during the high thrill of the chase at it's best.

i think the bizarro world hypothesis just might have some legs within the greater theory. this pleases me.

i think that this tiniest crack of difference also accounts for the extremely wily nature of the problem of the distribution of prime numbers in number theory. there is no largest possible prime number how is that hm. pretty sure the zero is the eye of the hourglass and also the shape of the universe. a typographical zero being a lower-dimensional map of a torus or whatever.

lol.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 11

2011-05-11T16:27:00.000-06:00

i'd like to learn more about mirror neurons. i've read a bunch of things here and there about phenomena involving them.

in primates (including humans) there are neurons that fire both when something is experienced and when it is witnessed. there are a lot of really impressive experimental results involved and there is a lot of latent meaning in the data already but there's not a good theory yet that harmonizes this obviously meaningful data within the greater symphony of science.

"Last August, scientists confirmed culture in chimps in a study published in the journal Nature. They found chimps naturally copy their peers well into adulthood, suggesting they develop cultural behaviors by imitating each other. " [28 feb 2006]

this is mimetic behavior and we mark the first identifiable human mimetic art in part 10 of the theory at 32,000 years bce with the chauvet horse paintings. that chart is from a recent article in national geographic.

with mimesis comes peer pressure and social structures where the self becomes a unit.

"Like us, apes are influenced by popular opinion. Scientists have observed cultural traditions that last for generations, and some that look more like short-term trends.

Traditions between groups vary, similar to human cultural differences. In the wild, one group of orangutans living by a river pounds stones and branches to crack open nuts. Living just across the river are apes that, by chance, haven’t picked up the nut-cracking technique.

Cracking nuts is one of more than 40 behavior patterns scientists have observed that does not appear to have any genetic explanation.

Cultural behaviors stem from popularity, the environment the apes are in, and pure chance. So what makes one group more cultured than the next?

'The answer is very simple,' van Schaik told LiveScience. “How much there is to eat." [ibid]

robert sapolsky has some interesting things to say about this stuff in his incredibly stimulating behavioral biology lectures. lemme find some good stuff from that. i guess when i get back i might write about something else. i dont always maintain a line for more but i am very fond of recurring themes. as long as i live i will work on the work in order that it may be as perfectly unfinished as possible. through recurrence we echo the image of the stitch in a way. you cant always say what's going on on the other side of the water. but there are patterns in what break through the surface from the depths. forms emerge and the shapes of the lines drawn between them constellate greater forms by which i seek to navigate. brb

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 10

2011-05-11T13:21:00.000-06:00

this intuition is like a dragon i tell you. one of those dragons that sheds its skin. so maybe it's just a giant imaginative flying snake. no i'll go with dragon. dont reify your own creative process it defeats the purpose. usually.

anyway yeah it's a dragon. i've been chasing this dragon for a long time. there is nothing like the thrill of being near it and there is no question that i have been, am and will be addicted to this chase for a while.

getting really close is fun. i never succeed but occasionally i grab hold of the skin just as it peels off into my hand and the dragon slips away. and it seems to completely disappear. but i still have this shred of skin in my hand. they are saturated with an infinite complexity of detail but before i can get a good look they decompose into pure nothingness.

but it's not a failure it's the nature of the endeavor. that is the perfectly unfinished quality. you can never really catch the dragon. even though she is constantly pregnant and molting there is just no way. there is more of a chance of a star passing through the eye of my urethra than there is of me ever catching the snake.

language through this lens is a mimetic snakeskin. every scale has it's own deeply musical properties.

the thrill of this chase seems to motivate me more than the idea of something that i could actually succeed at or finish. the scientific literature supports this. i recently read an article in a prominent journal about some scientists who turned a giant las vegas casino into an enormous retroencabulated magnetic resonance brain scanner and found that people like gambling even if they lose. there's dopamine to be had in the thrill of the chase.

this makes me think of our early years as hunter gatherers. back then i believe we lived off of horses. they are the subject of the world's first known cave art.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 9

2011-05-11T08:06:00.003-06:00

it might help to define or explode the term theory as i use it in my title. possibly both. in order to define a theory it helps to have a metatheory or greater theoretical framework that helps to define the theory, though even better than that would be a meta-metatheory. etc. obviously there is a wildness to this kind of logic that leads to a feedback loop of infinite regress if we dont have some axiomatic or grounding principles. so i'm going to make the grounding principle my own intuition, of which my own intelligence and creativity are merely more refined forms. so there's our definition. i'm chasing an intuition.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 8

2011-05-11T06:13:00.003-06:00

one of the ways in which people most commonly rationalize their unfair prejudices against the dirty is by making the claim that it amplifies the risk of infectious disease. this is classic bleached reasoning. in my own life, which is mostly messy, i have been accused of creating biologically threatening environments by way if my disregard for cleanliness and hygiene, but i dont have a disregard for the dangers of infectious illness i have a disregard for cleanliness. the concept of cleanliness, much like our ability to build weapons or markets, was awesome until we let it somehow subjugate us. sometimes man seeks to subjugate all things and most of all himself, and to this end he created abstraction and mechanism, and he continues to make this terrible new god by some other name who lords over us more abusively than yaweh himself. it's annoying i tell you. but anyway, i dont have a problem with cleaning in situations where infection is an issue. the place where this is an issue is the kitchen. i share a kitchen with housemates and i am conscious of why cleanliness in the kitchen is a good way to avoid the spread of infectious diseases and so i clean up there, because as i said i do not have a disregard for the dangers and needless suffering that an infectious disease can bring into a household.

so if i come over and you can tolerate having someone who chooses to look and smell disreputable as simple defiance of the injustice of the mindlessness and (more often than i can abide by) malice involved in the social phenomenon of reputation in general. reputation should be useful. like say you're out in the yard and your baby cracks in half, you can call your friend and ask her if she knows anyone who can fix a cracked baby before all the cuteness dissipates into the atmosphere, and the person says omg this is a completely unreal illustrative example but despite the implausibilities involved yes i do know this guy who can fuse a cracked baby with minimal cuteness dissipation, he fused my brother's baby back together and is a genius. so that's the good version of a reputation system. then, before you hang up to go deal with your catastrophic crisis situation, she mentions that the man's sister sleeps around and that rumor has it that she once tried a horse because men just werent big enough for her, which makes you pity her. perhaps the reason you pity her is so that you can feel better than her but you rationalize it by telling yourself that you're compassionate, and you think that your pity is a sign of your goodness because you're not being overtly judgmental and mindlessly condemning a woman as a slut and saying that she will burn in hell for defying the women-as-property notions of the old ways that we still need to get free of culturally and psychologically, or whatever, but your pity only seems noble in that kind of context, where the reasoning is that you couldve easily done worse were you a bad person without a more cleanly defined sense of ethics and morals, but compared to not actually being judgmental what you are doing is still closer to the burn in hell type crap. and in terms of reactions against sexual freedom the dangers of infection are invoked.

but here's the thing with that kind of reasoning -- if you're smart, you can learn to separate causation from correlation and hollow labels from more meaningful verbal usages, and people know this. and yet i have had people, not unrecently, try to explain to me that both the disregard for hygiene and sexual promiscuity put others at risk and are therefore selfishly inconsiderate behaviors. that is how these kind of things are often framed. you're a danger to the collective. you care about you more than us. i can understand this but it's completely atavistic. if people want to talk about the spread of infectious disease they need not do it qua cleanliness and sexual mores. there are exceptions of course but this applies to "developed" devoid of mysterious epidemics etc. well i guess we have a bunch of mysterious epidemics but they are not actually clearly defined infectious diseases where the agency of illness can be so clearly and cleanly identified. though of course we can point to behaviors that will put people at risk.

though this is not always true. there are certain epidemics that are not borne by easily identifiable infectious agents. autism spectrum disorders in children, attention deficit phenomena, depression and anxiety, the new general bipolarity, etc... but these are different. most of this crap comes from stress. autism spectrum disorders though are really puzzling doctors and scientists because they cant figure it out. but look at the vaccine scare. false certainty tends to be easier than true ambiguity, and certainty is often a way of circling our wagons around the people and concepts that we love the most for fear of losing them. this is another one of those things that was very useful in the past but has gotten out of hand. so many emotionally charged things just close people's minds right up. this is practically a fixed action pattern.

in general people dont understand germs and the fear of germs is a common phobia. the commonness of phobias can actually seen as symptomatic of the epidemic of fear loathing that plagues the united states and the world in general. there are some interesting ironies and recursive structures in this. let's get back to this idea of defining a unified organism in terms of a membrane or skin. we dont want certain things in our skin. if the wrong thing comes in my immune system attacks it. not always very successfully.

this is a property of much more ancient and simple forms of life than ourselves. here is a picture of how a bacterium takes a shit.

full article

so i mean even bacteria have this thing where they like to keep out the dirty insiders who threaten them. copper is one of those things like e coli. it's neccessary to certain metabolic functions but can also be harmful. like how the difference between medicine and poison is often one of dosage. like the very notion of cleanliness itself. it's useful and wonderful in its way but if you let it get out of hand it sucks. like technology or religion or whatever.

it's ironic here because we often think of bacteria as the dirty unwanted ones whose presence in our body is unwelcome. and we often think of the dirty people as subverting the mission to keep the germs out. but the truth of the matter is that we are only human by virtue of our belief in the boundaries of our skin. our bodies have far more bacteria in them than "human" cells socalled. if you have time i recommend this highly enjoyable talk on quorum sensing by bonnie bassler. or you can just watch the beginning where she talks about the ratio of human cells to bacteria in the human body. this has a lot of implications and will be fun to look at from different angles. i have heard scientists say that this means no human is autonomous but people who say that dont really understand what's going on.

so that's the shinola on that.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 7

2011-05-10T16:56:00.003-06:00

now, i'm not sure if this is related, but i fail to see why that should stop me, and if this theory is about anything, it's probably about the failure of vision in general, which would not be a failure but for our failure to see it, which is to say i guess this is related, it's just hard to find the thread sometimes because i am so messy, but that's how it's always been, and while i have been criticized, often unduly harshly in my own opinion, for being messy, or even dirty, and yes, sometimes rather smelly, and admittedly yes downright filthy more often than most, but it is in this very messiness where i find my greatest strength, and i think that it is a testament to my spiritual robustness and strength of character that i have not allowed the cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness crowd to defeat me, and the irrepressible character of my messiness has won in its way, and i'm thankful for this, because the people who unfairly judge my people are blinded by their ignorance of their own visceral judgmental impulses, of which the common american cleanliness bias is clearly one, and if this sentence is about anything, it's about the failure to see when you're not seeing things properly, and i understand that this probably isnt important to most people, and that that's just how it is in the world today, nobody has time for the less spectacularly persecuted, who cares about the plight of the slobs when there are children being bought and sold as rape objects all over the world, and nations full of real people, some of them slobs, are being laid low by natural disasters and crazy dictators and the constant large scale warmongering by the wealthiest states and businesses, and the rich are exploiting the poor, and the strong the weak and the best seem to have lost all conviction, etc., like yeats said, so it's silly to expect sympathy, and it's even understandable that people would scapegoat you because they think that you are somehow responsible for the messiness of the world itself, and you cant really blame them, because they cant even see that they cant see, and there was this one guy who never showered who was said to have said forgive them for they know not what they do, and this dude taught a morality rooted in embracing the low and the exiled and the rejected, and he said they are blessed, and this gospel he preached from the top of a pile of dirt, and i dig this guy, i've learned things, and the sermon from the dirt is an important part of my life, and i've tried to tell people but they dont understand, and i dont even mind if people make fun of me because i'm greasy, or because i'm smelly, or because i dont comb my hair and almost never wash my clothes or linens, or because they're stupid, or myopic, or frustrated, or power-starved, or obsessive compulsive anal retentives or whatever, but it's not just me, it's all the slobs, and it's the principle, and i hate the mindlessness of other people's prejudices and prefer the mindlessness of my own thank you very much, so if we are to judge something unfairly, let it be judgment itself, because if this sentence is about anything, it's about bad judgment, because if i'd had good or even neutral judgment at any given time i would have cleaned it up a little and not just given into my weird visceral impulse to create confusion and clutter, tho i prefer to leave the structure messy as it serves to communicate what i am trying to say in such a way that the structure would still convey messiness even without any words, which is one of the methods of the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory, syntactic structural metaphors, which should work even if you were to change every letter in every word in this sentence so that a reader looking at it would be able to see that it was a long and rambling sentence structurally, which is to say syntactically a bit messy, though by no means wrong, but it adds another layer to the expression is what i'm saying, and if this sentence is about anything, it's about expression is what i'm saying, about anything, dont not see it, dont react impulsively to the slop of it, because something about slop is just so damn fertile, but i cant go into it now anymore as i grow weary, it's late in the night and it's been a very long and very messy day, i think i'll just lay back and listen to the backs of my eyelids, see what kind of music i can see when i stop looking, which i guess is as good a way to end it as any. cool. goodnight.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 6

2011-05-10T15:24:00.003-06:00

i'd like to draw attention to the fact that this is a work of fiction. i hope to incorporate other creative works of mine within it. self-reference is essential to it. the sense of interconnectedness is essential too. i should build it like wikipedia in someway where it has this groovy internal structure of self-reference between all the different parts and articles. but instead of trying to make a factual encyclopedia online i am making a fictional one. so it's like a borges fiction. specifically, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" but with hypertext. in the greater scheme it's all just representation referring to itself. so it can be like wiki(me)dia as metafictional meditation. ficcipedia lol. i put that in italics so it would seem like it was from some other language. which it is. the one that i just made up five seconds ago so that i could say that it comes from another language. which it does.

anyway, here's some self reference: this is a link to a self portrait i painted in february 2011 and posted on this blog. it is now in an art gallery in watertown. the eyes are mirrors and the face lacks proper borders. i think of it as psychedelic expressionism. coocoocachoo. i linked to the picture to draw attention to some (hyper/meta)textual elements but in the future if i can i will include my pictures in the original post.

if any of these links go dead or anything just give it a very brief moment of silence and move on. i'll do what i can.

for more on the horrors of link rot click here.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 5

2011-05-10T14:41:00.005-06:00

here is an example of a species where mapping does not get so out of hand. "Sea turtles use magnetic maps to navigate oceans" - February 25, 2011

this is interesting to look at in terms of a deviation from a more harmonious equilibrium. looking at things in terms of how they displace a pre existing order. of course, the idea of a natural balance is problematic because it is a conception. the idea that man can disrupt natural orders is inextricably linked to his own conception of his place outside the natural order, which is, as near as i can tell at the moment, both true and false. but you can think of it as something like a natural disaster being seen as a violent disruption of a more peaceful order. so like an earthquake and tsunami are like that. in some ways human language is very much like that. the tsunamis from that disruption of the pre existing order are still rolling in from that one.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 4

2011-05-10T13:51:00.003-06:00

this is an excerpt from the unpublished work by cormac mccarthy. this expresses an essential aspect of the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory. it's a great verbalization. i'm not giving it gospel status or anything but it's good to understand this concept in general. the nature of representation as examined here is important.

here is a somewhat related quote from the crossing pg. 82-3

"He'd had a dream and in the dream a messenger had come in off the plains from the south [of the border? --mb] with something writ upon a ledgerscrap but he could not read it. He looked at the messenger but that face was obscured in shadow and featureless and he knew that messenger alons and could tell him nothing of the news he bore."

this already has the weird recursive and paradoxical awesomeness here such as we find throughout the crossing. the dream is a medium through which he receives the message of the messageless messenger.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 3

2011-05-10T09:59:00.004-06:00

part of this is that i allow it to be discontinuous. i like the idea of stitching as a metaphor here. we never see the whole weave, just stitches. the stitch can be seen as an incompletely observed waveform broken by a plane of nothingness, chaos, noise, everythingness. we can think of this as an investigatory convention or an actual metaphysic. it's okay to take an heuristic dip into the unsolvable and just swim around sometimes. the idea of any truly discretely bounded truth or observer is a fallacy though. you can think of the plane as being like a cartesian analytical plane with water on one side and air on the other, with portions of some greater reality visible in part just above the surface, such that one sees the backs of seabeasts, strange chains of islands, and/or tips of icebergs that are also the crests of waves which can be discretely divided into crests and troughs by the analytic plane in our needlessly complex metaphor here. it's like how people have a bunch of stuff going on inside but you notice what the express or externalize. check out this video on the physics of vibration. there's not a lot of math and some really intriguing audiovisual demonstrations. it's not necessary to comprehending a theory that is necessarily incomprehensible but it makes everything deeper. of course a lot of physics nerds already know all of this stuff. the themes of waves and stitches will appear occasionally and then sink back below the surface of our metaphorically reflective waters only to recur endlessly throughout the unfinishedness of The Work. anyway though dig the. free education from MIT. guy has a good sense of humor too. try and figure out where the plane is in the visual demos. pay attention to the words oscillation, periodicity and equilibrium. also notice the way he maps higher dimensional phenomena onto lower dimensional phenomena by way of shadowshow.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 2

2011-05-10T08:10:00.003-06:00

focusing on something and separating it from the rest of an environment so that one may reasonably react to it is something that life wouldve had to learn to do very early on and that may have homologues in inorganic behavior (as opposed to mere analogues. you have to locate sources of energy to stay alive and reproduce. in a given environment containing living and non living elements the living element must locate a: food and b: death threats. in higher animals the ability to avoid death threats gets very complex and is essential to the underlying structure of ecosystemic organization. this stuff is very complex and there are a lot of things that scientists have trouble figuring out. generally a good theory of life origins has to account for eating and reproducing. just as avoiding predators can be considered a subtype of avoiding death in general, avoiding death in general can be considered a subtype of reproductively oriented behavior. the sense of separation described in the first part of these notes is used to define higher consciousness but it is also essential to a good working theory of the origins of life as near or far as i can tell.

wikipedia entry for prokaryote

as with any other wikipedia page, you can get a lot of insight into the subject by clicking the discussion link at the top of the page and reading what the editors communicate among themselves as they create, maintain and upgrade the page. this is especially fun to do when the topic is controversial among ubernerds like cold fusion lol.

i think that the membrane is one of the foundational developments of life. within the micro environment contained and calibrated by the membrane chemical reactions involving amino acids and ribonucleic acid the building blocks and instruction sets for proteins. the evolution of the nucleus seems like recursive scaling phenomena and the nucleus an echo of the membrane. membranes are permeable by degrees and what they do is let some part of the environment in and keep some part out. so even here we can look at it through the lens of self/other and identity/difference and signal/noise and stuff like that. seems to me the origin of biological interiority is related to the cognitive interiority of human thought.

protobionts

note that the above link is unsourced. this is addressed on the talk page accessible by clicking the discussion link at the top of the main page. i would recommend it as it contains more info from a dude who points out that the main entry is copied verbatim from a biology textbook lol. but it has some interesting stuff on prebiotic selection, though the language usage is so poor that you may need your orphan annie decoder ring to cipher out the good bits. try and separate the signal from the noise and observe what you are doing when you do so.

this sense of difference and identity is essential to the perfectly unfinished theory of self-referential allegory. the human version of a cell membrane is a skin. i mean we have tons of cells with membranes and membranous tissues and organs and stuff but the thing that creates our unit identity as a single organism is the spacial boundary delineated by the epidermis. but we are highly differentiated in terms of personality as well and there is some analogous process involving the differentiation of personality both within the individual and in social groups (there's a bit of scaling phenomena going on here where the bigger and smaller things have a sense of congruity that seems like an echo or an image. little things and big things can seem to represent each other in crazy ways. for instance -- brains, which are small, represent the universe in infinitely many crazy ways. brb.

notes toward the perfectly unfinished theory of self referential allegory pt. 1

2011-05-09T20:41:00.007-06:00

<---- animations of an algorithm that is related to this:

" Humboldt's approach differs radically from that of his predecessors. “The Nature of thinking consists in reflecting”, he states in thesis 1, “that is, in the act by which the thinking subject differentiates itself from its thought” (im Unterscheiden des Denkenden vom Gedachten). This basic fact that every person can easily verify by performing such an act is the starting point of Humboldt's deliberations. Now, in order to reflect we must in our mind arrest the continuous flow of impressions in order to concentrate on something, comprehend this something as a separate “unit” (Einheit), and set it as an object over against our thinking activity (thesis 2) As a next step, the mind can now proceed to compare several of these “units”, divide and combine them in different ways."

--- from the entry on wilhelm humboldt in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, section five. this is a wonderful verbalization of a phenomenon that always fascinates me. click and go to section five, trenscendental semiotics. i am not that into 20th century semiotics anymore though i think that a nonsemiotic analysis of the semiotic trend in 20th century thought might yield much great fruit if the right lens is chosen. anyway the illustrations above the quote are computer illustrations of the merge sort algorithm. i'm gonna try and post a bunch about this stuff today lol. i'm taking notes for a big project and trying to write a lot about subjects that i am learning about as i am learning and thinking about them.

the post i made before the beginning of the great unfinishing

2011-05-09T16:50:00.008-06:00

put up a tin roof on a human birdhouse today. it is actually designed to be a human sized birdhouse and there will be a giant perch on it under a window that we havent cut out yet. i took this picture of scotty. i portrayed him as an eclipse.

man i got sunburned.

i was pleasantly surprised to find a link to this in my twitter feed when we'd finished up and gotten back online. the key part of this thing about the chimps is that they can "distinguish between events that they cause and those outside their control."

so do they dream about loss of control? i do that all the time. the good version is the recurring flying dream and the bad version is one anxiety dream with ten thousand faces and no name. but anyway check it out --

Self-possessed chimps

"In a new twist on a contentious issue, researchers say that chimpanzees display a key mental building block of self-recognition. Three apes living at a research facility can distinguish between events that they cause and those outside their control, say graduate student Takaaki Kaneko and psychologist Masaki Tomonaga, both of Kyoto University in Japan. Each chimp manipulated a cursor on a computer screen by using a trackball, while another cursor moved on its own. Chimps identified the cursor they controlled, the researchers report in an upcoming Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and showed signs of comparing trackball movements to the extent and timing of position changes observed for both cursors. —Bruce Bower"

from here

2011-05-03T20:04:00.003-06:00

justice/revenge as dopamine fix. follow link within this more simple article to full text of original study.

2011-05-03T19:57:00.001-06:00

bin laden death vis a vis girard's notion of violence and the sacred.

2011-05-03T08:55:00.002-06:00

"These findings complement those of a previous imaging study that reported enhanced activation in dorsal striatum (caudate nucleus) when individuals punished defectors (by delivering ‘punishment points’) in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma ...game21. In the present study we observed activation correlated with revenge in ventral striatum. This difference in evoked activity in dorsal and ventral regions of the striatum is likely to reflect the different nature of the tasks used. In the previous study21 subjects were required to select an action to administer punishment, whereas in the present study subjects passively observed a cue indicating that a defector was receiving pain. These findings are consistent with the different functions associated with distinct regions of the striatum: afferent projections to dorsal striatum are thought to be crucial for learning correct actions so as to maximize reward, whereas projections to ventral striatum, including nucleus accumbens, have a key function in reward prediction and pavlovian learning18-20,23,24. The findings of enhanced activation in ventral striatum to a signal indicating that a defector is receiving pain are in agreement with the hypothesis that humans derive satisfaction simply from seeing justice administered15,21, even if the instrument of punishment is out of their control."

click the text to see the full study. neurology of justice and revenge

work in progress

2011-05-01T10:43:00.001-06:00

hecy check out my psychedelic garbage robots in progress

2011-04-12T09:42:00.001-06:00

exp

2011-04-09T21:30:00.013-06:00

language is intriguing

with the kind of robots that top popular hierarchies in social belief interactions

and comparison is the example or experimental mental animal experience.

is consciousness recognizably decentralized so that the central i's are a bifocal dyad

most often in flux, with occasional periods of equilibrium

whose difference in position within the self is mathematically

biologically and spiritually related

to the capacity for inward depth perception?

this loop i'm of has chaos/complexity stuff amongst far differences.

bang is a typical conflation of emotionally heated and highly figurative interactions

but she likes me to use highly technical language during sex too

so why don't you have a separate religious-looking meaning of elephants?

actually that's an order.

a natural order.

((((nothing makes vibrating vibrating makes everything.))))

now.

with the world it's the system's distinctions between stimuli

which studies in foregrounding, noise vs. signal and gestalt have

shed much rainbow monkey butter upon.

and even still there are some constantly different cars with scars

while he of course likes you bad like cocaine chocolate drunkfood.

but of course i know that you would be i get it don't worry

and there are those who "want" conscious simplicity

if they learn to breed in accordance with lunar cycles

and do not fuck with the irs or the hydraheads of national security

where the cry of a baby is a spray of red scare that drowns a sweet swirl

of pure white feathers from the once cradling spirals of energetic airs

and by localized years jakobson was one of "them"

baboon music and people, "jacob's son" --

structures in and of heuristic experience experiment

and the the can seek itself. world.

primarily awareness

and so in still ways. brains have collective

wide learning rich languagelike unity in instincts

made of chemicals.

nonconscious you will fly like a fly

into the spiderweb why of our being

or be a bee in a beehive

behaving with an i

toward human observation.

a one on one mouse the very metaphor so involved

a we-concept spanning what borderlands

as a conclusion made of confusion.

interesting to animals that

the between guess some won't correspond to

like destructive constructions

deconstructing fictional restrictions to no avail

though at least there are literal animals

and maybe through the now-full sense

of prose deep in figures and von scientists on acid

the wild fears of the while will simply while away fears

or will away the while

or will they?

no unshared vibrating.

shake your brain loose

and dance, motherfucker

to mindless gods

that something conceives

and simplest systems

toward a far neural nature

somewhat human and to where

the danger of refinement follows

something pure but indistinct

for we are twice like bees

a hived and honeyed thing

prone to buzzing.

truth like formal as a percentage or fact:

how through this all people metaphor.

the verb, metaphor.

through ostensibly chaotic living we breed

among social self-observation

and would reproduce language

reproduce language

so that through our souls

the living word would

be fruitful and multiply?

recognizing systems as engineers

and careening toward the death of the self

in the nietzchean sense.

a help into and among things

but doing truth stuff can be dangerous

or at least tiring.

we are becoming the medical religious

while they mouse around with jazz cat scat chat.

and stuff.

but seriously

(semi)metaphor data points are primarily interesting

and flee against reductive communication while

poetry hurries to fill the water of your wake

with weird and wondrous light

that recursive biologists trace

in feedback loops through green time.

that's all it ever was is or will be.

I, eye

2011-02-26T17:29:00.001-07:00

free original music

2010-12-02T17:21:00.013-07:00

listen to and download songs of mine for free at archive.org
fall
fadestar
all your parents are on the wrong drugs
you will hear me
peach
isness
climb the sacred acre
me
moneycomb
wheely
lammikinsey
needlequeen
leaving town
night snake mama
crystal difference
spaceship in my head
abstract imaginary apartment kid divorce blues or is it
eggbraindrugsinfryingpan!
gleam
gawn
it's alright
life without alice is i'm a dipshit
child
born
return to sender
brothermother
stones
hang onto your eagle
intelligenter
rhyme
brown light brown heat
little wizards
she
pretty
twinklesnow
honeygaze lovegun
apocalypse brownage
nowhere

2010-12-02T05:09:00.002-07:00

new stanford study on the relationship of listening to music and making sense of the world

2010-12-01T13:26:00.001-07:00

read the spiral in the world of mccarthy

2010-12-01T11:40:00.001-07:00

2010-12-01T11:36:00.001-07:00

2010-12-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

2010-11-30T02:32:00.001-07:00

scale of the universe interactive map. really cool.

waveforms

2010-11-28T20:15:00.003-07:00

two neutrino oscillation probabilities graphed as waves

now, as most of you probably know a wave graphic is a static visuospatial representation of something that happens over time. lol i love that. anyway it's like an eidolon or visual symbol. the shape of the wavelengths corresponds to temporal periods. you could graph astronomical periods in a similar pattern according to the durations of orbits and axial rotations and such. this would include things like meridians.

so the match up in waveform shapes involves a correspondence of certain periods between two proportions that are a bunch of orders of magnitude away from each other. this is where we get into the territory of things like logarithmic spirals and mandlebrot sets. one of the really cool things about seashells, say, as valery, the great symboliste, philosopher of consciousness and student of math and science writes, is that you see this same shape in seashells and galaxies, micro and macro. i always liked that valery is one of the epigrams at the beginning of blood meridian.

well this waveform is similar. we're finding lots of groovy correspondences here with shapes and the ocean and outer space. how cool is that? mccarthy uses spiral stuff all the time. i always think of the thing around the guy's neck in the orchard keeper, something ammonoid in form. the word ammonoit comes from the old egyption god ammon who had ram's horns, spiral shapped. this word also lends it's name to the ammonoid nautilus. it's a logarithmic spural. logarithmic spirals are fascinating shape of the ammonoid nautilus, one of the older creatures on earth commonly found in fossils. saw a bunch of great fossils with them at the tuscon gemshow recently. the southwest is geological treasure trove i tell you. as a shape the logarithmic spiral has the mindbending mathematical property of being able to extend infinitely inward. the mandlebrot set can be endlessly inscribed within it's own perimeters regardless of the order of magnitude. until maybe at quantum levels geometry as we know it goes out the window. or does it? lol that's what is cool about these new articles and stuff. the old idea was of an infinitely hot and dense dot with nothing before it and an absensce within itself of physical laws / kantian categories like time/space caus/effect.

so there is a chance that some of the waveforms of plank length oscillations like what guys are talking about in string theory etc are not unique to the quantum realm but exist in both micro and macro worlds, such that these shapes constitute the closest extant thing in existence of the platonic forms! how cool is that? i dont have much love for chris dacus' fondness for hegel but i share his love of plato and love that these implications exist.

my question would be, for rick or any of the other uberfans here who have read whales and men, which i have avoided -- is there any mention of this kind of crap in there? i'm curious. okay i will come back and write more. thanks for anyone who is taking the time to read all this stuff. i am trying to do research and come up with ideas and i get excited when it gets like this so i'm sorry if i didnt make much sense or made gross typos like homophones or leaving out entire phrases i do that sometimes lol.

oh, also, the "blood meridian would be a peak in the wavelength represented by the heartbeat." for those like ken into taoist and chinese folk medicine interpretation this has a nice ring. i think it would be an excess of yang or the active principle, represented in the classic yin/yang symbol by the color white. the judge is the peak of the active principal. sleepless, pure energy without boundary. so he seems evil but he's just too big to be contained. which sucks. and the kid is the yin at it's lwest point. you might say guys like christ and buddha came at a point in history back during when passivity was peaking for guys who made history if you are into a nietzchean/yeatsian type interpretation. there's a lot to play with.

the funniest thing is i have not written or thought about this stuff in years but if you go back to the old seeds of light threads a lot of stuff like this is in there. i may refer back at some point. this totally excites me especially in how physics matches up with old creation myths. the narratives include themes of unity/chaos represented by liquid and then an event that divides things into the myriad forms of the tao or the split waters of genesis.... i think in the vedas it's just a blink that gets it all rolling. so if we came from it and shall return to it hence at the heat death of the universe (this version of it anyway) (if the laws of thermodynamics are as real as they seem) that represents the biggest current knowable and hypothesized period of time, or the most macro. the smallest really hasnt been found i dont know if we can find these things because of the nature of technology and human observation.

oh and to go back to jackalupe's contribution -- the seashells and the galaxies did not learn or consciously choose to conform to these shapes that we can consciously identify but there is the idea that these orders emerged over time. emergence science is quite popular at the santa fe institute from what i've read. and the idea that we may be consciously learning physics is up for debate. and besides, whalesharks more consciously understand shape than plants that exhibit fibonacci ratios in the radial distribution of their stems -- maybe -- and plants may be more conscious than the allegedly inanimate matter that forms galaxies which exhibit the logarithmic spiral shape, but that is entirely debatable. or rather, consciousness itself may work along these lines where it is a shape along orders of magnitude, metaphorically, and it's biggest in the most conscious things, i.e. human beings (as far as we know so far anyway though that's arguable too lol), but less present but not absent in allegedly animate matter. and the reason i keep saying allegedly is that i am suggesting that there is something that animates and orders all things with form motion and dance and keeps it form being merely antic clay. that dances to the wavelengths you see. and this thing is the fire that mccarthy refers too. the divine spark that dances through all things. do you feel me? shape is a form of energy according to the laws of thermodynamics. you have to put energy in a system to maintain order which is inversely proportional to entropy. i think it's lyotard who coined the term negentropy. i like that one.

now the thing is, man is perhaps out of order with the rhythms of things because he peaks and flashes out, exhausting himself at the noon or meridian of his own most blazing incandescence. we get drunk on power and it is our downfall. that is why the american money and war machine must be fucking stopped and why aden should be a left winger. we live in a culture where passivity is shunned. as someone who is occasionally considered lazy and who came of age in the slacker generation i find this infuriating though i only express it by way of passive agressiveness. just kidding. or am i? did you know the term passive aggressive was made up by the military to describe people who couldnt follow orders? like the kid? well it's true. it's all connected you see.

alright i'll come back i have to take a bath and read. i actually have some mccarthy on me in the hotel here so that is fortunate. it's been a while. remember. the judge is a white flash. the big bang. the waters are the dark yin. the road is the aftermath of a white flash. as is the epilogue of blood meridian. the orchard keeper opens with darkness. iron and the negro. and ends in a fiery vortex. vortex lol. like in moby dick. spirals you understand. okay i'll be back.

!!

2010-07-16T14:15:00.000-06:00

NUDITY NOW!

2010-05-03T13:44:00.000-06:00

remix of a rose

2010-05-03T09:55:00.002-06:00

new song "intelligenter"

2010-05-01T16:38:00.000-06:00

antimatters

flesh is a form of fire
and thought is electricity,
literally. enjambment is
a metaphor i use to know
myself. for what's a meta for?
to go outside the selfhood
of the literal and look in.

insight occurs in flashes
and souls continue to be born
though god be dead. this
is important. people need
to know. we need to learn
the children how to sing
the song soul-inward
or within five generations
we'll be pitied by machines.

the human joke must try
to write itself a punchline
that will redeem
the wrong turns
of its telling. a
showbusiness messiah
seems so silly. but
what else should we
expect. pray to the
internet. connection
is your distant
and indifferent
weaver god.
scream.

a giant eye
that looms above
the warped world
that we've woven
out of things
resembling words
devoid of poetry.
wail.

and children bloom
out of simplicity
and into sex. and
insects swarm
in mindless droves
as faithless fads
make markets mad
and drive me
wailing drunk
back into me.

shit.

2010-04-15T22:19:00.001-06:00

get sic mikedelic

2010-04-14T14:04:00.000-06:00

2010-04-11T07:43:00.001-06:00

2010-04-05T01:29:00.001-06:00

nevermind

2010-04-01T20:50:00.001-06:00

the wasteland in hypertext

2010-03-28T06:30:00.000-06:00

2010-03-28T06:29:00.001-06:00

Gleam (2010)

2010-02-13T07:18:00.001-07:00

new version of "gleam" by me dig it

pictures of january

2010-01-31T22:41:00.004-07:00

Travelin

2010-01-30T18:00:00.001-07:00

travelin

2010-01-23T20:55:00.004-07:00

leadville mining museum

vegas

2010-01-19T22:49:00.003-07:00

yes

2010-01-19T15:35:00.001-07:00

yeah

dreamin

2010-01-16T20:04:00.001-07:00

yay

2010-01-15T19:06:00.001-07:00

2010-01-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

CANYON ROAD FTW

7 year curve

2010-01-11T15:18:00.001-07:00

new song and video

filmed and edited in vail colorado

2009-12-27T22:33:00.001-07:00

portrait of self as delightfully evil

2009-12-22T20:56:00.002-07:00

Self portrait with mischief

2009-12-22T17:33:00.001-07:00

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY

2009-12-11T17:27:00.001-07:00

2009-12-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

My Demon Lover.mp4

2009-11-29T22:48:00.001-07:00

me n scott. he did all the film i did all the music

2009-11-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

2009-11-19T16:58:00.004-07:00

leaving town

2009-11-19T08:13:00.001-07:00

dream machine style video do not watch if you are prone to seizures or anything like that

it's Alright

2009-11-09T08:21:00.001-07:00

video remix by avdj

Brainwashing Experiment

2009-10-14T23:17:00.001-06:00

her

2009-10-13T07:43:00.001-06:00