ORGANELLE

Our ‘modern’ experience subjects us to a ‘shotgunning’ effect which is the result of becoming bound with electronic stimuli — the result of our ‘broadcasting/reception’ technologies such as streaming services and ‘social’ media. We should notice that cell phones effectively destroy cells. Smart phones make us dumber in an iterative vortex. When ‘we’ meaning moderns, name our technologies one imagines either a tongue in the cheek or a more lethal arbiter of nomens.

In this walk and talk I examine the problem of ‘measuring the gap’; our natural vulnerability to interpreting anything resembling a pause or change of (expected) tempo in all of our communications endeavors. I am arguing that these technologies actively de:synchron:ize our interior and relational contexts — and profit wildly from the result — which is the ironic isolation they tend to produce, accelerate, amplify — and »represent’ the opposite of all the while.

Which reminds me of a joke I once heard about money … and what’s actually ‘valuable’…

The argument from metaphysics is simply this: physical existence is a minimal domain where other domains, and their origins and relations, are expressed. “Timespace cannot be and is not fundamental.” This is the death knell, in physics, of materialist doctrine. And though such dogmas are lethal, like a fine medicine carefully titrated, they are, where they do not blind us, indispensable.

∞ “It’s more like the soul gets the opposite of a kite. It gets a body, which is a thing a soul can use to explore the material aspects of being, which are otherwise largely unavailable to it, and which exploration is a developmental adventure that causes the soul to develop new faculties and abilities that would otherwise be either very difficult or impossible to acquire.”

— infraheard

∞ If the world changes now
Saturn was always the secret sun
And I run like water through these dreams
Rivulets; shivering, branching, uniting again
The shout of a rose shatters the moon

∞ Our language is the fossilized history of the evolutionary phases (and ways of being) of human consciousness. For those who can read the fossils, and follow them to their sources, there awaits an epic adventure. For those who cannot tell the difference between the prints and their echoes… madness, or hubris, instead.

But the treasure is right before us, in every word. A secret lives in these tokens… underneath… and before their popular shells. A secret too dangerous to imagine, and beyond all human expectation. It lives, in every word… and again in each mind that produces or receives them…

Here Sir Roger Penrose explains his ‘three world’ model, one of the most important and insightful perspectives on the relationship between ‘the physical world’ ‘the mental world’ and ‘the world of Mathematics’ and how ‘a very small part’ of each of them extends into (and becomes) the others in a sort of triangle that demonstrates this relationship between them…

There’s a lot of rich material in a relatively brief interview here.

Penrose is one of my intellectual heroes… I find his thought and concerns inspiring. He is a (meta)geek in the sense that in some ways the most important aspects of his existence orbit specific questions about the nature of reality, cognition, and mathematics…

“What are conscious experiences? Can they combine to form new experiences? What are conscious subjects? Can they combine to form new subjects? Most attempts to answer these questions assume that spacetime, and some of its particles, are fundamental. However, physicists tell us that spacetime cannot be fundamental. Spacetime, they say, is doomed. We heed the physicists, and drop the assumption that spacetime is fundamental. We assume instead that subjects and experiences are entities beyond spacetime, not within spacetime. We make this precise in a mathematical theory of conscious agents, whose dynamics are described by Markov chains. We show how (1) agents combine into more complex agents, (2) agents fuse into simpler agents, and (3) qualia fuse to create new qualia. The possible dynamics of n agents form an ( −1)-dimensional polytope with vertices—the Markov polytope ℳ . The total fusions of n agents and qualia form an ( −1)-dimensional simplex—the fusion simplex ℱ . To project the Markovian dynamics of conscious agents onto scattering processes in spacetime, we define a new map from Markov chains to decorated permutations. Such permutations—along with helicities, or masses and spins—invariantly encode all physical information used to compute scattering amplitudes. We propose that spacetime and scattering processes are a data structure that codes for interactions of conscious agents: a particle in spacetime is a projection of the Markovian dynamics of a communicating class of conscious agents.”

∞ Our exposure, through media, to what I will call ‘generalized others’ is profoundly deceptive and disorienting. It caters to fears, biases, and, over time, produces expectations or evaluations of ‘what people are like’ (in general).

There are forests of problems with the processes and habits that produce these results, but I want to mention a few specific issues that would probably be beneficial to anyone who is interested in gaining a clearer perspective.

The vast field of other humans is not like what we are shown in media, and the limited and intentionally distorted perspectives projected by much of modern media have vastly smaller populations associated with them than we are led to imagine. What media usually shows us is an image of ‘the worst common denominator’ not of people, or humans, but some specifically selected group(s) or cohort.

Humanity is an astonishingly broad field of persons across every age and ethnicity. The intentional selection of the worst actors for the purposes of acquiring and mediating our attention is a symptom of a disease that tells us little or nothing about humans in general, but it tells us a great deal about the priorities of media companies.

The simplest take-away is this: don’t take the ‘worst common denominator’ that news creates as indicative of the thinking, behavior or humanity of people in general. The fact that there may be relatively broad cohorts of racists and other arrogantly self-aggrandizing people is not indicative of what the general population is like, actually cares about, or is doing. Though there may be exceptions, it’s important to imagine humans as a topology or field rather than a single derived quality or behavior.

In the field of human existence, there are high mountains of actual excellence, and low valleys of vulnerability and ignorance. But the field itself is extremely complex, and never really resembles the crude derivations that media serves up in order to hook, divide, and deceive us.

Always remain aware that when someone else is adjusting the focus, scope and perspective of our view on distant situations and persons… they’re nearly never doing this for our benefit. Rather, they have some other agenda. This usually involves profit, overt manipulation, and intentional deception.

Resist the urge to collapse your idea of humans, or even Americans… into the cohorts who behave least intelligently or humanely. Yes, there are populations who are ignorant or hateful, and some of them are strident. But if we actually looked at people in general, we would find great diversity, care, humanity… and some confusion as well.

When presented with an image of the worst common denominator, it’s a good time to remind each other that this image is constructed on purpose, and isn’t actually much like people in general. In fact… there are no people in general. It’s a concept, and one too easily used to occlude, rather than reveal… the actual depth and diversity of our human nature and experience.

∞
In a small town on the edge of nothing
My head became a map that caught on fire
All the names of the locations were my moments
It never rains when your head is a burning map

Raccoons and opossums gathered at the windows
They chirped and growled like ghosts of the night
Upstairs a small girl dreamed she was an ancient tree
The roads made sparks come out of my bones

The map finished burning but my head was a toad
He croaked like zen busted by some rotten cop
Girls and ashes. Wings and functions.
I live now in a capsule at the edge of a secret book.

∞ I can remember, as a child, when ‘today’ was the only phase of time that was in any way real to my awareness. ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Yesterday’ were undifferentiated. They were simply strange words that both meant the same thing. Time, as a child, was not linearly distinguished. Mostly, time became either what I was doing, or what I was aching to do. Time was the content experience of being. It wasn’t separated into intervals or sequences. Except for the adults. And there was no tomorrow. Or any real yesterday. Not then. Not in the beginning. In fact, the identity of place was exceptionally fluid, and was more the emotional and relational character of the situation than it was tied to the location. Location had not yet properly emerged to formal awareness. But relation was immediately obvious and compelling.