Systems theory, social psychology

          Oh delicious knowledge. This is what I’m talking about when I say systems theory is gonna be everything, they can use the same equation series to model nerve excitations as well as turbulent/stochastic and quantum processes with the Fokker-Planck set: Hierarchical Modularity: The Description of Multi-Level Complex Systems as Nested Coupled Fokker-Planck Equations  I mean… come onnnnnnnn. We’re in the magic realm now with physics and supercomputing, and now even neuropsych is adopting systems models to make sense of things. If they’re as promising as they seem, the universe might very well be computable in layers. Now how’s that for meta?

  

What I find interesting about all the “multi level complex systems” coming out is their structures directly reflect the sentiments of the authors. I don’t know really how to describe that, but shit like this really makes me grind my teeth: Multi-level Modeling of Complex Socio-Technical Systems

  

In contrast to the first paper, which is so pure and optimistic, this second one is a complete arbitrary application of complex systems and is exactly why we should be careful how we use our wizard powers. This second paper is trying to apply the field to analyze defense and healthcare enterprises as well as look toward modeling a “policy flight simulator.” What I notice is what they give precedence to in their modeling, and it’s some bourgeois snidely garbage if you ask me. I shudder to think who’s taken this stuff seriously with the money to spend. I say that because when you simulate and possibly install policy based on arbitrary constructs and proceeding dynamics, especially ones centered on markets and defense policy rather than the general health of the society, you’re displacing the whole reason for having governance and markets and defense in the first place. Instead you’re basing your governance off a fucking conspiracy theory designed to help “secure defense communications” or to describe “large-scale public-private enterprises.” Makes my skin crawl.

 

There’s a godawful lot of assumptions and money needed to even begin thinking complex systems analysis is appropriate here, and that primarily revolves around mythologizing aspects of the social order into a control theory that someone is going to buy into and use to their own ends. That has bad results, man, and this is so on the nose of like what’s exactly wrong with politics over the past few centuries - illusions built on illusions! Plato’s Cave’s got nothing on this! AHHHHHH!!! *head explodes* Seriously, check out the documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis if you wanna melt your mind this week. This paper is only one of decades of similar research into systems modeling for governance and economics, and somehow I’m still shocked this stuff is in style.

 

What is a person who is in control of their illusions, but is not in control of themselves? *shudders* These fetishistic illusions built on illusions that try to escape reality for someone’s own ends ultimately only harm the source - the Earth we stand on and all its living things with it. As we look around day-by-day, we’re seeing the results of that magical thinking as it ravages the environment and our mental and physical health along with it.

 

The rotten social dynamics Patricia Williams points out in her book Alchemy of Race and Rights are present in everything now, we’re all in the shadow of our imperial beast as it grows beyond containment. I’m seeing the effects in the mental health world as I watch various illness rates climb in our country. A lot of people close to me are also in the squalor of their own possessive and habitual fixations, wrought on them by the powers and stressors in their life. It’s only getting better out there in the sense that our available tools for healing these problems are improving dramatically, but there are simply not nearly enough people who are educated in the reality of mental health and what a healthy mind really means to have the benefits reach a large scale.   
 
WHO: Depression Is Now the Leading Cause of Illness and Disability Worldwide 

 
           That’s partly why I’m writing an essay on wisdom as it connects to my favorite currently-practiced systems models of the mind and health, featuring Interpersonal Neurobiology as communicated by Dan Siegel, Primal Therapy as authored by Arthur and France Janov, Gotama Buddha's own Dhammapada, and the sage text The Corpus Hermeticum. I’m trying to slice through this jungle of mirrors and hearsay for everyone and get a realistic and intuitive but complex picture of life as it is and as it ought to be in terms of being wise, so it’s a lot harder to get lost in all of it and a lot easier to look out for others. I think we tend to ignore that framework-making and take it for granted (as if we can’t science out wisdom, mwahaha), or it only gets spoken about in bits and pieces.

Playing God - Conscious Computing

By CoBoi

Plain god : playing God

Conscious beings sand-boxing what it means to be conscious, only to find the other kids breaking the monkey bars.

1. A philosophical approach towards consciousness
2. The psychology behind How consciousness arises
3. Artful Intelligence consciously computing

Lost in translation

Before humanity was capable of creating a conscious machine, we asked ourselves what it meant to be conscious. In fact, we've been asking ourselves this very question since at least when people started writing. An interesting addendum to declaring an entity as conscious or existent, is that the declarer must be as well. I'm sure you've heard René Descartes famous line:
 
In English: "I think therefore I am", which means 'in order to exist, you must be capable of thought.'
 
But in French: "Je pense, donc je suis", means both: I think, therefore I am & I think, therefore I follow.
 
Did you know he actually wrote it in LATIN? "Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum". So what he really said was, 'Because I am capable of doubting my existence, I am capable of thought, which means I must exist.' As in, the very act of questioning Your existence is only possible if You already exists.
 
What's missed in English? There's an inlaid assumption in the derived, English phrase which seems to say, 'in order to exist you must be capable of thought'. That's ridiculous, though, it would imply that dirt doesn't exist. Which would mean that also earth worms don't exist.
I know what you're thinking, 'Descartes was, like, a philosopher, he was, like, talking about if his self existed'. good point! Descartes needed first to realize if he existed, before probing to see if anything else did. That's the truth choke-point that we're stuck with (as existentialists), so it needs to be examined first. Can you even draw a line between if you exist, or if just you self does? Are we ever truly qualified to define anything that doesn't come directly from Our Self? A question for another day, I'm sure.

From where does consciousness arise?

Neuro psychologists have been operationally defining 'consciousness', and you may be surprised at what they've found. Unfortunately for laymen, consciousness isn't as simple as just 'can it think', however they have come up with a model (that I deem 'close').
 
Integrated Information Theory defined some axioms which define and describe 'consciousness' scientifically. The first requirement is intrinsic existence. In order to exist, you must exist from your own intrinsic perspective, regardless of if there is any other conscious entity there to perceive it. The second is that every experience must have composition. An experience by a conscious entity can be broken down into smaller, simpler components. The third requirement of consciousness is differentiation, a conscious experience must be distinguishable from other separate experiences (barring Déjà vu, I assume). Given the previous axiom, it follows that a single conscious entity must also have an integrated, or unified experience. I don't know how I feel about their last axiom.
If you're interested to learn more, check out this image from the Integrated Information Theory - Wikipedia article 
  
From these starting operational definitions (deemed axioms), researchers have pushed into a very interesting discovery. They found that the number of neurons in a neural network is not directly related to the consciousness of that entity. Researchers believe that experience of consciousness arises from the number of connections in a neural network rather than the gross number or units. Do you want more proof, without having to dig it up yourself? Well you're in luck. People with damage to their cerebellum (where 60% or more of your neurons reside), often experience inability of smooth movement, balance, or in some cases even inability to execute planned or unplanned movements. In total, people have around 86 billion neurons, and the brain is estimated to have around 100 trillion connections (the network). that's around 1,000 connections per neuron. So each single part of this system is connected uniquely to (on average) a thousand other single parts?
 
These researchers didn't stop there, though, they integrated their research into a program that calculates entropy I have no idea how I would use it, yet, but I will find. a. way.
So where can we draw the line of consciousness? Just people? What about dogs and cats? What about butterflies and ladybugs? Earth worms? If you don't think worms are conscious, you may have a bone to pick with Darwin. Let's say, theoretically, you're still with me. If earth worms can be said to be conscious, then what about nematode worms? Fully grown at a size of less than a half of a percent of an inch (0.0039 in), the Nematode worm has a central nervous system composed of 300 neurons. For perspective, this worm's brain is far more complex than modern computing is capable of emulating (or at least was capable of when I wrote this).

Artificial Intelli-gentlemen

A hand written website can be composed of thousands of lines of code, and some of those lines (scripts and styles) reference other documents of even greater lengths. But editing and evolving a site with that much code on it is just not sustainable, which is why we use Content Management Systems (CMS - like wordPress). As you might imagine, somebody coming in and tinkering on one of these larger systems could break so many things in so many ways. The good news is that rookies are bound to make similar accidents, and are often easy for experienced developers to troubleshoot. The complexity of our entire internet (puny humans) is minuscule compared to the level of complexity in Gaia's genome (Cthulu).
 
Hacking biology We extincted a species of mosquito in Africa by infecting them with a genetic virus that rendered each mosquito sterile within 5 generations (~10 weeks). That's terrifying, we barely know how any of this works, and we're already implementing irreversible changes to life. Even though I am intensely curious about 'playing god', I also feel at my very core that tinkering with the biology of conscious entities is the next carefully balanced ecosystem that man kind will plunder through destructively. Recently, our friend the nematode worm was shown to be 're-programmable' . It was made to react differently to its only food source, salt. I can see that going wrong, and can imagine many other ways that clumsy men could mess everything up 'for good'. Humanity must be a cancer that's killing Gaia, and the people who are actually doing it won't stop no matter what. It seems like a constant community driving all life towards destruction. I only take solace in the fact that there's another which pushes in the other direction as hard as they can. As agents of unbalance, we are, together, balanced.
 
Never Not
They are a conundrum.
we are not.
Then are we?
Or are we knot?
 
There's no going backspace. So, who are our champions against those seeking rapid control through altering existing natural systems? Those starting from the ground up, who can build from scratch, create something from nothing. In the case of building AI, we have simulationists. So many intriguing interpretations of reality have been spun off of an idea of simulation, so let me clarify now, I will not be mentioning the Matrix... again... That's a simulation set way too far in the future to be tangible (At this time we cannot even create a nematode worm's level of neural complexity), Interestingly, you can't predict the outcome of a simulation/function, without running it. So is our life just made from some basic set of parameters, played out over an unimaginable number of iterations? Modern computing intellectual titans are attempting to understand this question by building computer simulations at the level of complexity of basic life. Others will recklessly employ techniques that 'work' in the short term, to their own ends. However, those that are laying this knowledge foundation may be able one day to repair the inevitable rampage left by big business genetics.

Intro to Hermeticism

Introduction to Hermeticism 85 min audio

This is such an interesting part of history, a brother of Gnosticism (pre-Christianity), I’m having an awesome time learning about it and you will too. This is the kind of stuff that made me want to be an anthropologist before I went the engineering route. It connects so many religions and disciplines as it’s the “religion of the Mind.” Some of the ideas are as old as civilization and still relate to the modern day.

    “You have to give the right words. That means you have to have the right relationship to that person. You have to address him the right way. So you have to address the Planets the right way, you address Nature the right way, you address all these guardians the right way. And by the addressing them the right way they will be compelled to withdraw and let you pass.

So. Two things. On the one hand, don’t identify with your surroundings and with your situation to say that ‘I am just a part of it.’ If you are just a part of the Planets, then you know what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to go round and round and round the merry-go-round forever and ever. And while all of us like to be in orbit now and then, maybe that’s not quite the orbit that you want to be in, you know? You are not part, you are not Cosmic. You are more than Cosmic. You are above the Cosmic. This may sound arrogant - it may sound inflating and all that and maybe it is, but a bit of arrogance, a bit of inflation is sometimes quite nice, especially if it’s based on something that is true. 

Don’t identify with it, don’t say ‘I’m just a blob within a bigger blob in with all the rest of the blobs.’ Recognize you are there as a separate being. But at the same time realize that there is a relationship between yourself and these other factors. And this relationship has to be conducted in a ???? (1:16:39). Hermes always negotiates, Hermes always interacts. There is always an Iron Tao in Hermes… So it is the overcoming of limitations by learning the right relationships with everything. Very tricky, very difficult - needs a lot of intuition, needs a lot of insight, and sometimes also quite a bit of knowledge of beauty.” - Dr. Stephan Hoeller

“In fact Alchemical, Magical and related Mysterious arts were subsumed under Hermetic Arts which was considered to be ruled by Hermes… These are really the part of the art of relationships with these powers. The magician can relate himself… to various entities… this is the way of relating, this is the way of understanding what they do, how they are, how to talk to them. And then one can overcome their power with knowledge. And transformation, which is the great art of alchemy.

These are the ways in which the doer of the hermetic work overcomes the world. But remember now, he doesn’t practice magic just in order to be powerful and to make money and get gold and lord it over people. That’s the work of the stupid wrong magician who eventually always comes to an evil end. And the alchemist also doesn’t do that just to make gold but learn the art of Transformation. These are the intricacies whereby it works…

There were two Renaissances, the Humanist Renaissance and the Hermetic Renaissance… Francis Yates was the great discoverer of this particular historical fact. Everything from the artistic Renaissance in Italy and the English Renaissance and so forth were deeply influenced by the Hermetic revival - the Hermetic Renaissance. And it’s really out of that Hermetic Renaissance a kind of spiritual and intellectual fashion - we have been living off that practically to the present time. There isn’t an awful lot left now anymore, we kind of sucked it dry… And now there is a possibility of another Renaissance…So in an interesting way we are part of that story.” - Dr. Stephan Hoeller

BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULLLLLL~~~

And a few more of my Genre class posts for ya

 Jan 20th

Newton’s theories of motion and gravity were inspired by the Corpus Hermeticum, the core root of the Hermetic tradition and thus European and Islamic alchemy. There’s an infectious and living wisdom in that series of dialogues between Hermes Trismegistus - a fictional fully enlightened being - and his closest students. They’re similar to, and as good as the Socratic dialogues in my opinion, if not a billion times more interesting. As long as you can use your imagination it’s like reading a fairy tale. It’s pure joy to play with the ideas, too, it’s no wonder they inspired so much gibberish. Sage texts are all about using your imagination to that end, not so much about taking them literally. I’m not at all religious but it’s an amazingly special thing that exists.

In fact here’s a link: http://gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm

And here’s the necessary and mind-altering commentary by the original translator: http://gnosis.org/library/grs-mead/TGH-v2/th203.html

The overarching goal of alchemy was to find the philosopher’s stone that could turn anything into gold. A lot of bullshit alchemy was like a combination of pre-chemistry and snake oil sales: just doing random things or imagining elaborate nonsensical rituals and processes until one looked or did something novel/magical enough - then trying to sell it for money or fame. Taken as a cheesy metaphor for transforming the mind, however, perhaps alchemy was really a hapless search for mending practitioners’ souls, thus transmuting their hearts and lives to solid “gold” - taking advantage of or experiencing any and all mediums of life and the imaginary as necessary for the transformation (see: 1985’s Weird Science). The Corpus Hermeticum taught that idea and oh so much more as evidenced by Newton’s viable, practical reading of it. That fact makes my spine tingle.

    Bringing that back to genre, above all the weighty abstractions: genre is, like any alchemical procedure, the form of delivery. It’s the type of communication used to deliver a world of thought into your mind just as any piece of art worth its salt. That can involve as many or as few senses and scales as possible, whether the genre is extremely specific like Vocaloid, or extremely abstract like Architecture or even the Set of All Sets. I’m rapidly improving my understanding and I’ll surely be able to cast some new spells on my readers after this class. Double, double toil and trouble! Fire burn and cauldron bubble! And now that I’m a bit over the word count I must stop here, so I’ll say one thing about myself: I’m going to be a real wizard.

March 13

Here’s another popcorn source: School of Life: How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things

These guys are so style:

Hurray for the Riff Raff - Be My Baby cover

This conversation, too, is pretty neato The first meeting between Arthur Janov and Raphael Montañez Ortiz. 

March 14

Mythology and the Spiritual Journey with Richard Naegle, PhD

Another profound addition, this podcast keeps on giving. The Best Of page is a gold mine.

And here’s another awesome piece of wisdom literally everyone needs to understand. Simon Sinek is becoming a very powerful speaker, too: Simon Sinek: Understanding The Game We're Playing

March 15

Here’s another couple neat nugs of wisdom, yo.

Ask why recursively until you can’t go backwards. - Simon Sinek

Also. Here’s the heart of humanism in a nice little ancient phrase:

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

"I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me."

• Greek Playwright Terence

Now go back up to the top of this weekly and read the commentary on the Corpus Hermeticum. The Corpus itself I recommend reading at least the first few dialogues to get the feel of it. You really gotta let your imagination run wild, this stuff plays on your intuition and bodily feelings more than your rational mind, which is the source of your imagination. Yes, you can write like that. Yes, it’s awesomely powerful. Yes, you need to be careful how you use it. 
 
Words are a technology that affect our brains and bodies via the relationship between transmitter and receiver. That’s a fancier way to say words are for communication, but writing it that way makes it easier to get a deeper and more rationally-usable intuition about it. See what I’m getting at? Should be basic shit but it’s so lost on so many writers these days. There is a word for this somewhere… 
 

Let me explain myself further, consciousness is currently best understood as the flow of energy through your upper (the cerebrum) and lower brain organs (the Limbic system and peripherals) as informed by your body and environment. Your lower brain, the oldest part with the brain-stem, surrounding brain organs (like the hippocampus and amygdala) and the rest of your body, is what’s actually conscious and is informed by your cerebrum, the big pink wrinkly part that fills most of your skull. That means your social, cognitive, and motor information are actually all unconscious, not the emotional information.

 
           The wisest most effective people are those who have understood that flow between their rational and emotional mind, or their thinking versus intuition and body, and learned to manage it themselves. Thinking itself is unconscious in the sense that we don’t know where the thoughts are coming from, unless we make those sources conscious (as in we have to get real familiar with the emotions associated and build proper abstractions for them internal or external). So, some people have such a mastery of themselves that they can master any medium (with the prerequisite physical training of course).  
 

Trauma and that stuff are hard because the emotions (energies-in-motion) are painful and distressing and can flood entire subsystems that we then disconnect from the rest to stop the pain, rather than process it in a healthy way. This is a very physical process. It gives the pain a life of its own in a sense, internal and external, it doesn’t just go away and we try everything to plug it - thus why people can have such odd or destructive behaviors afterward. Seizures can even happen just from these disconnections colliding with each other, like a short. Epilepsy can sometimes be a stress conditionsince stress literally causes brain damage. I have watched this happen to someone. Depression can be the result of a long-term stress condition in the same way. I’ve been down that road. Conditions can be changed.
 

Buddhism is literally about all this that I’m writing, at least if you go read the Buddha’s actual stuff. I’m not Buddhist but I had a good laugh when I realized that in my own reading, considering all the silly traditions and violence that have stemmed from its organized forms. Some ancient wisdom traditions are as human as humanly possible, just distorted over time.
 

The thing with inventions is we don’t have to know how they work for them to work on us. Words are so powerful in this sense, because who knows what internal abstractions and homunculi and intuitive motives people have in their heads to put forward their ideas. 

Those with a good enough set of those particular things that are informed by how the world actually works (even if they’re still delusional), they can often times do whatever the hell they want. It just doesn’t look or actually work how you’d think, the reality is completely unintuitive and upside-down we just navigate intuitively and with a top-down ego (which is modified by culture/context). We’re still stuck where we are as biological, physical, time-bound critters, we can just learn to move in any direction we want mentally and physically with a lot of hard work and finesse. 
 

The fringes of this type of thinking gets into remote viewing and astral projection and the like, which I don’t really believe in (partly because this is what Scientology sells and they have too much money to invent bullshit). However I have had experiences where I know a dynamic so well I can make accurate predictions far into an uncertain and turbulent future - that’s part of the point of learning. I’ve also had experiences with people I know super well where we can feel something’s up across time and space with no obvious indicators, or conversate without ever opening our mouths or looking directly at each other. That’s one of the wonders of having strongly connected friendships, by the way. That’s also why we need them in our lives.
 

Magic is just playing the mental flow dynamics management game. Magicians with their sleights of hand and misdirections and mirrors, it’s all timing and empathy, not much else really besides props. Both of those things are muscles that we ought to be training constantly.
 

    The only problem with talking about all this is I don’t have all my sources lined up, and people generally roll their eyes otherwise. I got hundreds I could/should reference, yo. I write for my own enlightenment and healing, or whatever I wanna call it, it’s just my process. Science itself is converging around the ideas I’ve painted for you because our minds work how the universe works, there was never a distinction. I keep up with the state-of-the-art and it’s a real trip. It also teaches me the vocabulary for our times that y’all should know too.

A couple more entries from my Genre class

Week 8. March 10

in·ter·lop·er

ˈin(t)ərˌlōpər,ˌin(t)ərˈlōpər/

noun

a person who becomes involved in a place or situation where they are not wanted or are considered not to belong.

    Just had the craziest month of my life! Wow! That word, that word is me. I feel great, and also don’t want to leave this couch to save my life. What does this inform me about genre? Haw haw. \

    I get real tired of being so far out on my own journey sometimes. It’s nice to stop off on people’s islands on occasion, even better to explore together. There’s a lot of things I’m learning that nobody can teach. My trajectory is far removed from all of yours, and it’s necessary for me to learn the way I’m learning it right now if I’m gonna make it to my next phase. Classes like this are becoming like white noise, background gibberish to help me focus on my real projects. I don’t mean that in some holier-than-thou way, I genuinely know this is the path I set for myself in all its loopy goodness.

Mostly I need willpower, that’s really it. That’s the only thing stopping me. This noggin is loaded with interesting stuff I need to get done. For my project for this class I’m trying to learn some tools on Python so I can show you guys the awesomeness of state-of-the-art neural networks and use it to help drive home a systems perspective of different fields and disciplines, as well as all of life. It’s stupidly useful, like insanely profound and I can’t stress it enough. It’s also my ticket into the R&D world as I start building a portfolio.

Instead I’ve been bled dry by life again, and by events so ridiculous and out of my hands I could throw up. That’s what happens sometimes when you put your heart into something, it explodes in your fucking face and you’re left feeling a bit hollow. Time is all you have, so it stings to see how much you lost in that process when you were so passionate and honest in the moment. That passion makes it terribly hard to admit your losses, and sometimes you don’t quit until you’ve lost a hundred-thousand more times. Was it worth it? Did you find what you were looking for? Did all of your questions get answered? Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but sigh and get on with other things, only able to wonder at the intent and meaning of it all and whether it was all just a dream. Clock’s ticking.

RKCB - Elision

https://soundcloud.com/rkcbmusic/elision

Karen O and the Kids - Hideaway (Cover by Scarlett Ketteman)

https://soundcloud.com/scarlettketteman/hideaway-karen-o-and-the-kids

Nick Hakim - Bet She Looks Like You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mbFxTXGnSo

Hurray for the Riff Raff - Small Town Heroes

https://soundcloud.com/ato_records/small-town-heroes-2

Satellite Stories - Sirens (Slow Magic Remix)

https://soundcloud.com/slowmagic/satellite-stories-sirens-slow

Wolf Saga - I’ll Believe in Anything

https://soundcloud.com/wolfparade/ill-believe-in-anything

March 11

If there's a God

I wonder what she looks like

I bet she looks like you

I bet she looks like you

Goddamn that’s a smooth lyric. From that Nick Hakim song.

True bliss, and a true experience of eternity comes from your ability to make connections. We have more connections we have to make today to understand this convoluted world in a total way. And we’re constantly told to stop growing our mindsets at certain phases, like all the basic-bitch high school politics we’re generally talking about - stuff that holds no water but sounds real or powerful enough to form a ‘complete’ picture and make us feel like we have a compelling and real story to tell. It’s just a sad joke to see people flailing for meaning this way in a socially and intellectually impoverished and manic world. A giant waste of time! You’re just putting it in someone else’s wallet! There’s actual suffering to worry about! There are new dreams to dream and new structures to build!

We have an infinite canyon in front of us just begging to be explored, yet we’re building walls and staring into mirrors. Can we bring that Wild West sense back to science and art? It really is the frontier. I consider myself a frontiersman of sorts. Maybe that would inspire the emotion-driven (energy in motion; e-motion) anti-intellectuals out there to get educated. I could write for days on what modern science has teased us with, like very recently published exploratory research that would rock your world.

The one lesson I take seriously from Buddhism is that your focus is your trap. Education is all about expanding and empowering that focus when it’s done right because we don’t know really about things like fields and interdependencies when we’re young, our focus is innately narrow. It also innately expands to form a full sense of self using whatever it got growing up, meaning it gets programmed by the environment to respond to the environment. That’s very hard to change. Yknow, it’s usually about makin’ babies and plugging the reward centers in our brain with food and flashing rectangles, often cynically too.

It took how many billions of years and society is how young? We have a lot to learn. The closer you work with the body and with science the faster and better you can learn, because those are how we get our best and self-improving approximations - and they need to be informing each other constantly as part of the greater system of life we inhabit. That’s not a dull picture of science at all, it plants it firmly in the realm of art as the most genre-ey of genres that ever genre’d. It’s fractal as fuck, too. Holy crap! Here’s a fun relevant video: Map of Mathematics

Maybe we haven’t found signals from other planets because life destroys itself in the pursuit of meaning, that we’re too slow and too few to keep out the ill-intentioned suffering-causing meanings - just look at the massive unconscious death drives we’re inhabiting to kill our planet and each other on every level. Read up on the Thanatos, too. Freud was pretty spot on with that, not all of his work is crackpot. Yet people still swear we’re better than that as a collective. I certainly know far more good people than bad, but they’re just as checked out as I am. Oh but perhaps that checked-outness was intended by someone else? Hrm hrm hrm!.

Your perception of time is relative to the problem you’re solving as proven by neuroscience. If your problem is how to give as much love in this short life as possible, you find things start to stretch out and take a bit more comfortable pace, and more moments last forever. Like actually forever, not just metaphorically. Take good care of that idea. Nothing gives a better sense of presence and permanence than being present and permanent for others.

Now here’s a poem I wrote a while ago.

A temporal fixation, a strange sensation, a strong anomaly.
A dance, a dash, a twirl, a twist.
A squiggle, a squaggle, a fritz and a zap.

Shock my heart and take my tongue,
crack my ribs and blind me.
Feed me poison, give me hope,
then take it all away.

I'll measure every shred,
search under every rock,
find the right needle and stitch the wound.
All my days my eyes will open,
and I'll still be loving you.

Did you know some artists seek out emotional pain to fuel their artsiness? I don’t, but I certainly get it. Still pretty deranged, that seems terribly destructive in the name of “art.” I’d also suspect these people of mania, but that would be a “label” according to them.

March 12

     Found this neat nugget of wisdom. Taking it evolutionarily, you have to be able to feel before you can think. That’s the point of Primal therapy. It is an interesting study, and very few people practice it properly. It’s not rolling around and screaming and going into sensory deprivation tanks, it’s a lot of neuroscience mixed with psychoanalysis. The idea is psychology is only the top layer, and that you can sift through the experiential layers to eventually get down to the source of the pain as gently as possible and heal it. Actually, here’s a podcast episode, it explains a lot of the stuff I touched on above: http://shrinkrapradio.com/511-the-primal-scream-revisited-with-drs-arthur-and-france-janov/

A few entries from my Genre Class Blog

Feb 16

“On Contact: The Power of Political Cartoons with Mr. Fish”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzvRQ8p_SpE

   This bit articulated a very important issue, and that’s how the oversimplified on-demand clickbait media we thrive on these days reinforces stereotypes due to the need to use shorthand to churn out more links. Since most online media relies on link clicks for ad revenue, this incentivizes them to put as little effort into the quality of the content and as much effort into the attention-seeking and panhandling. It dilutes the internet by making dozens of links for every trend, in hopes of scooping off a percentage of traffic to line their pockets. It’s insanely lucrative, big businesses both online and off spend billions each year on ads and even create false publishers to spread their label through coercion. It shouldn’t be legal if you ask me, but I’ve read the actual theories on crowd psychology and mass marketing - it’s cynical stuff that made the theorists (Edward Bernays most notably) a LOT of money.

   The acquisitions market has made that far worse when you take a sickening look at just how many companies groups like Bain Capital or Newscorp or Disney own (there’s 6 major conglomerates). What better way to mass-produce content than to parrot a dumbed down form of establishment politics and major trends then recycle them through all your networks for targeted user-bases? The loss of focus on the actual depth of real issues in favor of pleasurable money-centered practices is a great contributor to the myopic apathy you see among young people and the uneducated. We’re all in cultural bubbles reinforced by economic algorithms, and pathetically small bubbles at that. This is a serious issue to me, one easily approached in terms of genre.

  You can call much of the media we’re exposed to under the genre of “Establishment” or “Corporate,” not just by the content and its sympathies but also by the way it’s all structured to be delivered to you and what the juxtapositions are via websites and news stations. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that 6 conglomerates control 90% of the media being outputted (Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6). It also shouldn’t surprise you that up to 90% of the radio channels a group like Newscorp owns play the same things day in and day out like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Breitbart or Alex Jones among others. It then shouldn’t surprise you that owning enough media stations to flood certain areas with certain ideologies will greatly influence politics in that region. It’s a collective effort, too. The “competition” is a mere petit-bourgeois myth when there’s only a few hundred people at the very top all sharing lavish dinners and private getaway while they throw endless amounts of cash into politics to get political favors.

   

   I hate when we assume people’s beliefs are somehow geographically innate (i.e. “Southerners”) and not taught, and that society isn’t always the third parent. It completely alienates others from discussion and fuels the divide, as dumb as the “civil” versus “savage” arguments of the colonial days up to today with how a lot of Israelis view Palestinians or how a lot of Americans view Muslims and now all this Liberal vs Conservative nonsense. It goes both ways of course, and this “alt-right” crap (white nationalist sites get far more traffic than ISIS sites fyi) is really scary with the assertions of “Cultural Marxism” and the calls for more militarism and privatization in response. That particular narrative was manufactured by the likes of Andrew Breitbart and his team, and now it’s everywhere to make white nationalists sound clever because Breitbart is now the White House’s propaganda arm (something made legal again in the 2013 NDAA). Obviously militarism and privatization primarily helps those already on the top when you look at who’s objectively benefitting more, but many still pretend as if this economy is a blank slate for participation when it never was, and the poor and needy (and everyone else) only get their feelings and livelihoods stepped on and manipulated over and over and over again. The vast majority don’t or can’t do anything about it.

   We are in a seriously dangerous time, society has decayed somewhat via our inability to de-fragment our thoughts and agree on a discourse that doesn’t fit into slogans, pop-art posters, 2-line memes, 3-minute youtube videos, 5-minute news segments, or even a two page article. Real back-to-the-roots politics is only basic face-to-face interactions that are about bettering ourselves and our surroundings as earnestly as possible, not the 100 layers of economic, political, and yes sexual gaming that are producing our socializations, and our “knowledge” or “alternative facts” of current events, only created to meet somebody’s bottom line.

   You don’t receive an actual worldly education without first understanding the infinite (and up-to-date) depth of the ground and mind you stand on, and that’s worthless alone unless you freaking acting like it. This obsession with efficiency has not always been about optimizing well-being, but more often money and time for the rich. We’re so far into that way of life that it’s not even an option for many people to slow the hell down or they can’t even meet their own or their kids’ survival needs. That’s the real effect of poverty wages. Instead they default to socially-reinforced pleasure-seeking since they get maybe an hour or two of respite a day, and that programs people to be even more complacent about external affairs. This is a cultural epidemic, I assert that. You don’t have to look any farther than the White House to see the result of that type of complacency.

   It’s just… a mess. What a mess we’ve made. A society that needs mass-therapy like ours does is a largely destructive society with a painfully short life span if we keep it up. I do hope we get it together, I’m certainly doing my best to push my imagination for these issues.

Oh and since Prince was mentioned: Song of the Heart by Prince

Super cheese but I love it, the movie it’s from is so pure.

Feb 17

Here’s a pretty good lecture on how modern psych thinks by UCLA professor Dr Dan Siegel who runs his own research institute. It’s completely relevant to writing. This is the cutting edge of scientific thought (without leaping into the realm of pseudoscience, like quantum woo woo) and it’s beautiful, and so simple you might find yourself saying “duh”: Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human

I learned yesterday that the Romans would manufacture gods for conquered lands and force worship because Roman worship mandated that you give money and belongings to “appease the gods” that would funnel back to the empire’s coffers.

The manipulation of religion or spiritual sensation is something we always need to watch out for. We have real extremists in office right now, from the top all the way down. How do they get there? Well one of the primary functions of ideology is to be motivational, so they’re usually a bit better about playing the game than you or I. Then they repackage and sell that crap in a way that disadvantages everybody else. People with God complexes deny their own machinations, so they’re the least reasonable yet the best at psychotic dis-integrating populist doublespeak. Looking at you, Paul Ryan.

If you read Chomsky you find out that people like Bush Sr. and Reagan had handlers so they wouldn’t let loose their insane conspiracies at diplomatic meetings. We always downplay the role religion plays in global decisionmaking, but that only makes us unconscious of it. This is a lot more present in modern “Western” politics than we think, which developed out of 18th thru 20th century Continental (read: Christian) philosophy and neoliberal economics rather than, say, middle eastern politics where it’s economically and tribally motivated, or “Eastern” politics where you have a merger of Western economics with ancient authoritarian and interdependent traditions. What differentiates the “West” is how we approach hierarchy and organization, classical liberalism was a serious policy achievement in this respect.

Those who believe and know they can’t convert you to their insanity by conventional means, they may try to make you functionally (rather than cognitively) believe through any kind of suggestion - especially economics and violence. Sophism was the freaking school of this and it’s 2700ish years old, does it occur to you we’ve done a LOT more thinking since then on how to use words for power? There are some insane leadership schools out there now, too, especially in the military. We just really have to know who we’re empowering and where that knowledge is coming from, that’s the real power of a liberal or liberated society (for better or for worse), just look at the narcissist and his white supremacist lackeys we have running the executive branch now - that’s a failure of a discourse that ideally favors multiplicity in governance (which the extremists call “Cultural Marxism”).  Knowledge about knowledge is power as an MIT Artificial Intelligence professor once said, I really can’t emphasize it enough. Hell I even wrote an essay about it. To rip the starter quote from it: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

“Integration made visible is kindness and compassion, and these are the days more than ever that we have to have a distributed empowerment of young people… and all of us… because we are all responsible for each other, we are all responsible for the planet. And it’s a win-win-win situation, because when you start promoting this kindness and compassion, everyone will benefit… Literally, we need to work at every level of human experience. When you start realizing that you can collaborate together across the platform of humanity, then you start realizing instead of greed we have something called empathic joy... That’s the ultimate outcome of integration… And remember integration is the base of regulation.” - quote from Dan Siegel, from that talk I posted at the top of this day’s post. He means both self-regulation and social regulation. There’s soooo much more in that talk that y’all need to hear, he stands on real neuroscience even though it sounds a bit like self-help woo-woo at times.

Another interesting segment that came out today. This juxtaposes well with the neuroscience-based opinion in the above quote. Abby Martin is one of my favorite journalists today.

Empire Files: President Correa on His Legacy & Critics

“Not just in Latin America, but in the world in the 21st century, poverty is not caused by a lack of resources or caused by natural disasters that result in famine, etc. It is caused by perverse, exclusive systems. It is a moral obligation to fight against exclusion.” - President Correa of Ecuador

The theme is: integration, networking, systems, etc. Now get with it, these are the times.

Week 6. Feb 20

Another Dan Siegel talk from January this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEKUOaqf1XY

It gets real deep, makes a convincing claim to the definition of consciousness (with mention of recursion) and expands on the integration theme. I strongly recommend it.

I was poking around random groups on the internet.This one called the Middle Way Society is interesting, drawing from the Buddhist Middle Way. They have a poorly-viewed podcast that’s fairly interesting, but here’s a quote I found on their site that was quite awesome: “Power is the ability to make people do things they would not otherwise have done.” Simple and pure, always good to have the most intuitive definitions available for ideas like Power since it’s so omnipresent in our world.

Here’s a segment that demonstrates all the points I made in my political rants earlier that just came out: Medicare for All with Dr. Margaret Flowers … Ha.

Feb 21

One of the lessons of the media-centered world: If you’re socialized by Hollywood and marketing teams, you’re gonna act like it. I think this is more apparent in a place like Alaska where we tend to spend more time indoors with our flashing boxes. I’m totally cool with that, I can’t be bothered to leave my room half the time when it’s freezing or sweltering outside, but you gotta be mindful of how it affects your cool.

Feb 22

THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY HAHA

THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY HAHA

THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY HAHA

HEEHEE HOHO HOOHOO

You know you laughed, I heard you laugh,

You laughed and laughed and laughed,

And then you left, but you know now I’m udderly mad.

Woke up with that stuck in my head

Link for lulz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fn36l_z3WY

And now for something more serious and important, this came out today and I recommend the entire series: Global Empire - Afghanistan: War Without End by Tariq Ali

Feb 23

Another excellent segment that doesn’t get watched enough.

Media Review - The State of Investigative Journalism

Feb 24

Here’s another issue I care a lot about, USAID spending. It’s currently set up to favor profiteers and, yes, even Israel’s walls. My aunt can’t do her work establishing national parks in Brazil because all the funding has been diverted or ”cut.” Disaster capitalism is a plague, places like Haiti just became sponges for NGO “administrative costs” and selling bad contracts to more unaccountable profiteers. The real power of language is our ability to convolute it so much you can legally lie and steal.

Media Review - Business of Aid

    Another talk from that Dan Siegel guy (2012), this stuff is popcorn: Dr. Dan Siegel: Time In: Reflection, Relationships and Resilience at the Heart of Internal Education

Feb 25

Best Journalist ever? Best journalist ever:

On Contact with Chris Hedges: Assault on the Arts

“On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses the corporate state’s assault on the arts with theater director and writer JoAnne Akalaitis. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil examines calls to defund the National Endowment of the Arts.”

I also remembered this neato 2011 TED video on the actual functions of the left and right brain: https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain

I hate how prevalent the popularized version of left/right brain still is, this video shows how way more sophisticated the functions of the divisions of the brain are and what that implies for all of language and culture. I need to become this articulate in my life, I’d say I’m 10% there. I believe the best writers today are those who account for the human experience and history via every “Genre” of thought available, and that’s because some of the best works I’ve read come straight out of the highest levels of the sciences. Besides, how else will you really know what hasn’t yet been dreamt unless you’ve pushed yourself to the edge of collective thought? You won’t be the only one out there, that’s for sure. This TED talk cuts straight to the core of all that. “Rationality, we know from Gödel’s theorem, and we know from what Pascal was saying hundreds of years before Gödel, that the endpoint of rationality was to demonstrate the limits of rationality.” - Iain McGilchrist

Maybe it’s pretentious, but Myth Today by Barthes, as well as a great number of obscure academic psychology and physics papers (some linked throughout my weekly) I’ve read have been probably the most stunning, adventurous, beautiful works I’ve ever read. I tend to apply as much intuition into theory as I can, meaning I let the sentences take my mind on rationally-informed rides, sometimes for hours before I can flip the page. It only seems right to me, especially when it comes to language and psych theory, since it all applies to every waking moment I’ve ever had.

With theory, if it’s well written at least, the language is only as opaque as your imagination since it’s only meant to be an abstract framework for a cluster of examples. I didn’t get very good at thinking that way from science classes so much as in art (though I can’t really differentiate science and art anymore, at least from what I consider “good” art nowadays) and my most constructive friendships. I blame that on the regurgitative nature of a lot of my classes, more worried about standards and prestige than engagement and creativity, but I don’t get to draw the line on how I want to be educated in most classes I’ve had.

That makes sense for professional fields, especially in medicine and engineering, but perhaps not to the degree they’ve made it. Nursing programs are so intense I have no envy, but I also know that the super habitual robotic-type people fare way better which doesn’t actually translate to better professionals. That intense culture of rapid book study and achievement certainly stopped me from going the engineer route, where I expected more hands-on and better pacing.

At Cal Poly I was expected to do something like 230ish quarter credits over 4 years (like 18-20 credits per quarter of ultra-difficult classes), and the price of the school was damn prohibitive to pace that out for myself. People can do it somehow, but I felt that type of education was more to market to the extreme pace of the tech industry, so it was less about instilling some professional wisdom and more about appeasing market demand. That makes perfect sense on a vocational level, but you’re doing this to non-fully formed humans. The school was primarily about getting hired out of the gate to top level positions as a tech school, so it was quite in bed with corporate culture with all the banality and egoism, mute insecurity and baked-in advertising that comes with. Something just really put me off about all of it, and I wasn’t alone in that sense. Maybe if the cost was reasonable I’d have been able to enjoy it more, I could have actually paced myself plus San Luis Obispo is freaking paradise with perfect weather.

Me quitting that life was also because the aerospace industry is almost all militarized, and I have a lot of beef with groups like Boeing for their role in all this globalist tax-evading/appropriating nonsense we’re dealing with. They’re a “deep-state” player just like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, two companies most people have barely heard about. It’s just how it works, where the tech industry informs politics (because it’s the outer extent our collective abilities), but the incentives are all jacked up and just lead to more violence overseas and lately at home with police militarization - using our taxpayer money. You can’t sell more equipment unless the old stuff gets used up somehow, y’know, or politicians get so wet at the sight of new shiny weapons they just have to buy more. It’s definitely a strange mix of kleptomania and bad budgeting. I got to see a lot of the results of this during my time at NASA running around the military bases. F-35’s and F-22’s are pretty sweet, though, I will give them that.

Computer science is a lot more progressive but I really couldn’t be bothered with the degree program after a point, mostly because I found out how specific and alienated my interests were from the main courses offered here and online. Again, it came down to the industry. Psychology has a lot of backwards things about it in this way, too, which is also a slog, but I tend to redirect the conversation my professor is having if I’m really bored so it becomes more constructive. I’m really sly about it, mostly because I don’t want any attention on me.

I’m actually just trying to build up my willpower and self-study resources so I can drop college altogether to pursue my more creative interests, though I think I’ll just take it really slow and finish eventually. I want a technical major because it opens a lot more doors for grad school, and I’m basically doing graduate level studying at this point - thus this petulant boredom I’m having with my undergrad program. I dropped a couple classes this semester since I’m studying machine learning so intently now. I’ll only get something out of it if I go all the way, and that takes a lot of time. If only there were apprenticeship programs for machine learning or psych so I could study formally on a way more personal level… I don’t want to leave Fairbanks which is half of my problem.

Once we’ve learned how to learn it ought to become a much more creative process for students, and there ought to be a much louder culture about doing that. You haven’t really learned how to learn unless you’re integrating as much perspective and rigor as you can into your skill-building, and better standards of practice only evolve out of this realm - so you can expect integrity from these sorts of students. My fellow NASA interns and our mentors were all this way, it was really inspiring. Montessori in middle school was the best for teaching me that, too. I barely had to try in high school - except in calculus because I was so dense at math. I ended up taking way more classes than I needed to graduate because it was so easy, and I enjoyed the free education. I had to work really really hard to build up my abstraction muscles, though, as with calculus.

Now I’m 2 years into this linguistics and neural net stuff I’m studying and I’ve still barely scratched the surface because of how dense and abstract the concepts are. How hard you have to work with ideas tends to correspond to how well you’re able to articulate them in the end, though, so I’m pretty sure I’m on the up and up on that front.