Been slow lately. Chinese New Year, weeklong “vacation” making me sleepy and automated. Plus I’m a bit burnt out after that last set of posts.
But many drafts are in various stages of completion, so hopefully new content will be up and coming soon. Stick around, and Kung Hei Fat Choi!
These are my notes from a portion of the Playboy Interview with Marshall McLuhan, in specific regard to privacy and taboo in tribal societies. This ties in with a lot of the ideas being explored here (and elsewhere), and I thought it was worth putting up here as well. Bold means I think it’s important, bold + itallics more so. Itallics alone in parenthesis means it’s my own comment, usually.
From: http://folk.uio.no/gisle/links/mcluhan/pb.html
PLAYBOY: Accepting, for the moment, your contention that the United States will be “Balkanized” into an assortment of ethnic and linguistic ministates, isn’t it likely that the results would be social chaos and internecine warfare?
McLUHAN: Not necessarily. Violence can be avoided if we comprehend the process of decentralism and retribalization, and accept its outcome while moving to control and modify the dynamics of change. In any case, the day of the stupor state is over; as men not only in the U.S. but throughout the world are united into a single tribe, they will forge a diversity of viable decentralized political and social institutions.
PLAYBOY: Along what lines?
McLUHAN: It will be a totally retribalized world of depth involvements. Through radio, TV and the computer, we are already entering a global theater in which the entire world is a Happening. Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container of people, is being transformed by these media and by space satellites into a living organism, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature. (see: http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_056.html) The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or “applied” knowledge, of “points of view” and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers — a simultaneous, “all-at-once” world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electrical field, a world in which energy is generated and perceived not by the traditional connections that create linear, causative thought processes, but by the intervals, or gaps, which Linus Pauling grasps as the languages of cells, and which create synaesthetic discontinuous integral consciousness.
The open society, the visual offspring of phonetic literacy, is irrelevant to today’s retribalized youth; and the closed society, the product of speech, drum and ear technologies, is thus being reborn. After centuries of dissociated sensibilities, modern awareness is once more becoming integral and inclusive, as the entire human family is sealed to a single universal membrane. The compressional, implosive nature of the new electric technology is retrogressing Western man back from the open plateaus of literate values and into the heart of tribal darkness, into what Joseph Conrad termed “the Africa within.”
PLAYBOY: Many critics feel that your own “Africa within” promises to be a rigidly conformist hive world in which the individual is totally subordinate to the group and personal freedom is unknown.
McLUHAN: Individual talents and perspectives don’t have to shrivel within a retribalized society; they merely interact within a group consciousness that has the potential for releasing far more creativity than the old atomized culture. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalized man can lead a far richer and more fulfilling life — not the life of a mindless drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence and harmony. The implosion of electric technology is transmogrifying literate, fragmented man into a complex and depth-structured human being with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all of humanity. The old “individualistic” print society was one where the individual was “free” only to be alienated and dissociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man’s psychic and social needs at profound levels.
The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony — the customary life mode of any tribal people.
PLAYBOY: Despite what you’ve said, haven’t literate cultures been the only ones to value the concepts of individual freedom, and haven’t tribal societies traditionally imposed rigid social taboos — as you suggested earlier in regard to sexual behavior — and ruthlessly punished all who do not conform to tribal values?
McLUHAN: We confront a basic paradox whenever we discuss personal freedom in literate and tribal cultures. Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism — thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity; print gave man private habits of individualism and a public role of absolute conformity. That is why the young today welcome their retribalization, however dimly they perceive it, as a release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man.
PLAYBOY: Are you claiming, now, that there will be no taboos in the world tribal society you envision?
McLUHAN: No, I’m not saying that, and I’m not claiming that freedom will be absolute — merely that it will be less restricted than your question implies. The world tribe will be essentially conservative, it’s true, like all iconic and inclusive societies; a mythic environment lives beyond time and space and thus generates little radical social change. All technology becomes part of a shared ritual that the tribe desperately strives to keep stabilized and permanent; by its very nature, an oral-tribal society — such as Pharaonic Egypt — is far more stable and enduring than any fragmented visual society. The oral and auditory tribal society is patterned by acoustic space, a total and simultaneous field of relations alien to the visual world, in which points of view and goals make social change an inevitable and constant by product. An electrically imploded tribal society discards the linear forward-motion of “progress.” We can see in our own time how, as we begin to react in depth to the challenges of the global village, we all become reactionaries.
PLAYBOY: That can hardly be said of the young, whom you claim are leading the process of retribalization, and according to most estimates are also the most radical generation in our history.
McLUHAN: Ah, but you’re talking about politics, about goals and issues, which are really quite irrelevant. I’m saying that the result, not the current process, of retribalization makes us reactionary in our basic attitudes and values. Once we are enmeshed in the magical resonance of the tribal echo chamber, the debunking of myths and legends is replaced by their religious study. Within the consensual framework of tribal values, there will be unending diversity — but there will be few if any rebels who challenge the tribe itself.
The instant involvement that accompanies instant technologies triggers a conservative, stabilizing, gyroscopic function in man, as reflected by the second-grader who, when requested by her teacher to compose a poem after the first Sputnik was launched into orbit, wrote: “The stars are so big / The earth is so small / Stay as you are.” The little girl who wrote those lines is part of the new tribal society; she lives in a world infinitely more complex, vast and eternal than any scientist has instruments to measure or imagination to describe.
PLAYBOY: If personal freedom will still exist — although restricted by certain consensual taboos — in this new tribal world, what about the political system most closely associated with individual freedom: democracy? Will it, too, survive the transition to your global village?
McLUHAN: No, it will not. The day of political democracy as we know it today is finished. Let me stress again that individual freedom itself will not be submerged in the new tribal society, but it will certainly assume different and more complex dimensions. The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture — a hot box in a cool world — and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and would thus consider the casting of a “private” ballot in a shrouded polling booth a ludicrous anachronism. The TV networks’ computers, by “projecting” a victor in a Presidential race while the polls are still open, have already rendered the traditional electoral process obsolescent.
In our software world of instant electric communications movement, politics is shifting from the old patterns of political representation by electoral delegation to a new form of spontaneous and instantaneous communal involvement in all areas of decision making. In a tribal all-at-once culture, the idea of the “public” as a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way, like interchangeable mechanical cogs in a production line, is supplanted by a mass society in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus. The election as we know it today will be meaningless in such a society.
PLAYBOY: How will the popular will be registered in the new tribal society if elections are passè?
McLUHAN: The electric media open up totally new means of registering popular opinion. The old concept of the plebiscite, for example, may take on new relevance; TV could conduct daily plebiscites by presenting facts to 200,000,000 people and providing a computerized feedback of the popular will. But voting, in the traditional sense, is through as we leave the age of political parties, political issues and political goals, and enter an age where the collective tribal image and the iconic image of the tribal chieftain is the overriding political reality. (see: http://futurismic.com/2009/01/16/will-obama-usher-in-the-age-of-digg-democracy/) But that’s only one of countless new realities we’ll be confronted with in the tribal village. We must understand that a totally new society is coming into being, one that rejects all our old values, conditioned responses, attitudes and institutions. If you have difficulty envisioning something as trivial as the imminent end of elections, you’ll be totally unprepared to cope with the prospect of the forthcoming demise of spoken language and its replacement by a global consciousness. (YEAH!)
PLAYBOY: You’re right.
McLUHAN: Let me help you. Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. The current interest of youth in astrology, clairvoyance and the occult is no coincidence. Electric technology, you see, does not require words any more than a digital computer requires numbers. Electricity makes possible — and not in the distant future, either — an amplification of human consciousness on a world scale, without any verbalization at all.
PLAYBOY: Are you talking about global telepathy?
McLUHAN: Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? Via the computer, we could logically proceed from translating languages to bypassing them entirely in favor of an integral cosmic unconsciousness somewhat similar to the collective unconscious envisioned by Bergson. The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace. This is the real use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems but to speed the process of discovery and orchestrate terrestrial — and eventually galactic — environments and energies. Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.
PLAYBOY: Isn’t this projection of an electronically induced world consciousness more mystical than technological?
McLUHAN: Yes — as mystical as the most advanced theories of modern nuclear physics. Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
Here is part 3 of this little escapade. If you haven’t already, you might want to read part 1 and part 2 first, as this basically concludes the thoughts from there. Also, I have not yet read Tim’s major post on what looks to be this same topic, as I wanted to bring my own thoughts to a close first.
We’ve looked at surveillance as a means of potentially getting to know our split (quantumly-superpositioned) selves better, and we’ve inquired whether the ability to switch our experience of reality from one person to another would be at all a good idea, despite sounding like a whole lot of fun. Now I’d like to tie these two ideas together, and try to answer some of the questions brought up by them.
It seems to me that the core problem inherent in switching perceptual fields is the possible loss of our identity while doing so. If our sense of self is not combined and focused enough to survive moving from one perceiving center to another, then we may run into cases where the constant flux of information causes people lose their “self” and end up either insane or permanently stuck in a infantile state of mind.
Luckily, as explained in the first part of this series, a world of open ubiquitous surveillance (a proto-version of which we are already living in, due to Web 2.0 and social networking sites) is a place where we can observe ourselves and others objectively, and change our behavior in accordance with these observations.
Although I have not read the entire PDF, the recent publication of Dana Boyd’s PhD thesis seems to shed some light on this process as it develops:
“As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens’ engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.”
Social networking sites (i.e.: voluntary open surveillance) as a way of learning about ourselves, and technologies reshaping people just as people reshape technology (in a quantum sort of ‘observing-changes-the-observed’ kind of way)? Sounds like maybe someone’s been cribbing from my blog! (she wrote that when? um…never mind…)
The digital world seems like a pretty safe place to learn about who we are and how to interact with others, something we need to do to develop any sense of a social self at all. And since it’s not real, there is a much smaller chance that we’ll ever mistake that online persona as our own. The ease with which online identities can already be created and changed should be a hint that we might be better off considering all identity creation as just a story that we tell ourselves and others.
At the crux of these two ideas is our sense of “ego”, how we choose to define our “self”. The ego is necessary, to some extent, as a way of communicating who we are and what we want in order to successfully interact with others. But this success quickly changes into suffering as soon as we try to permanently base our sense of “self” in any one of these external “things” (whether this is a physical object or a set of conditions). This is illustrated by the Buddha’s second noble truth: “The origin of suffering is attachment”, and this suffering will become exponentially problematic in the world where bodes (i.e.: centers of perception) are interchangeable. If our entire perceptual field is shown to be impermanent, on what can we place our sense of having any kind of self?
What is necessary, then, is a way to integrate the development of an ego as part of the process of becoming a complete being. If we stop looking at “ego” as something bad that we need to transcend and get rid of and starting looking at it as something good that we need to develop and outgrow, we can create a worldview where ego growth is applauded as a step on the path toward true identification of the self-as-perceptual-field but is not confused as the be-all-end-all of identity.
Such a worldview integrates all the parts of our society which are based on supporting ego growth, while still allowing us a way to collectively move beyond the ego to a truer sense of self-as-beingness. This is where we need people pursuing #whatworks, rather than #whatmerelylooksgood, so that proof of the value of developing and outgrowing the ego exists.
Now, I do not mean that a complete, 100% conscious understanding of the self-as-perceptual field is required, but without injecting at least a subtle intuition of what this means into the culture, we risk being dissolved by the deluge of information that the future presents us with.
As we become more and more aware of the fact (whether consciously or subconsciously) that our identities are malleable, we become that much less likely to confuse these identities with any kind of “true self”. What we’re left with is either a screaming trip into the void as our “self” is sucked away from us, or a blissful state of true-self as-emptiness if we can let it go. This is our original face that we had before we were born.
So, from the looks of things, the internet is our way of training ourselves to take our “selves” a little less seriously, and by doing so, it is preparing us for the coming “rapid descent into novelty”, whatever form that may take. Let’s work to make it a good one, cause at this point, no one has any honest idea as to how this will all turn out anyway.
This is something I wrote while working on the 3rd part of my 3 part piece, but it seemed like too much of an aside from my main point, and it was also too long to leave in as just an aside. Luckily, I have a blog, so any semi-coherent piece of writing I manage to churn out can immediately be published for public consumption!
One worry that has been voiced here by Ted, and which I agree would be a very bad thing were it to occur, is a scenario where everyone ends up constantly jacked into a world wide internet, ala the Matrix, while the nature and the real world fall by the wayside.
The trouble with this is that people on the internet require content, and that real world content is the best there is. No one prefers purely computer-created content, no matter how real it can be made to look, and no one likes content that has just been recycled from the internet either.
It all has to be filtered through a living mind, and infused with new meaning and interconnectivity, in order for people to value it. It is the stamp of personality on the information that gives it value, and personality can only be created by struggling with real-world embodied emotional challenges. The more we use the real world as a resource for content (content = meaningful information groupings), the more we will come to value it. All technologies have a good and a bad side, and it’s our job to maximize the good effect and minimize the bad, until it emphemeralizes into a stable level of higher complexity (more thoughts on that are coalescing as well, and will be focused on after part 3 is finished!)
And so, the Matrix scenario is, I think, a focus on only part of the growth pattern of internet technology in general, taken to it’s extreme logical conclusion. But it’s this part only, without any outside sources acting upon it during it’s growth process.
Due to the wonder of dependent arrising, this isn’t possible. As long as people are worried about such a negative outcome, and they act on (or at least voice) those worries, a Matrix-type scenario would be easily avoided before it could ever start.
His response was to turn to human talent.
The spreading of open information sharing is leading back to the re-valuation and appreciation of natural human talent as the best source of true content.
Mixing 2 opposing ideas is impossible. If you start with ideas that are separate, if you try to get things from “here” and “there” to combine, you will never be able to achieve a unity.
In doing so, you are only confusing yourself, because the orgins, the root causes, of your ideas are already held by your mind to be separate things. To “mix” or “combine” things implies that they begin as separate, and if they begin as separate, any permanent unity between them is impossible. Only things that are already always combined can achieve a lasting unity.
In order to truly achieve this union of opposites, the co-origin of both ideas must be discovered. Think of a bar magnet. At the ends of the bar are two poles, which repell each other. Yet both poles spring from the center of the bar, where they meet and combine with no fuss at all.
As the Buddha said, “All component things in the world are changeable“. If a thing can be described as a “thing”, it must be separated from all other things, and if that separation is confused with permanence, instead of being realized as just a trick we are doing with our minds, than we suffer.
The only thing that IS, is IS-ness. What Rob Bryanton calls the 10th dimension.
Willhem Reich’s work fits in here as well. Tension in the body is our attempt to separate different parts from each other. It is our way of “componentizing” the body(in the sense of ‘all component things are changable’). We think we have achieved a way to separate our organ-based emotional intelligences, but this just gives rise to suffering, illness, and unhappiness. If we relax the tension between the various parts of our body, these componentizing barriers will disappear. And we become all one again, just as we truly are. This is the wisdom of the body; it is the form from which we learn already-wholeness.
Look at the angel. Each jug, each “thing which holds” is connected to the other by a stream of water. We try to hold water in jugs, and pour them from one to another, when all along we do not realize we are standing in a stream.
For the second part of my three part series, I had planned on discussing some recent experiments where people’s recognition of their own body or face, which we imagine as key components of our “self”, were shown to be easily distorted or displaced. Once again, however, Tim Boucher has beaten my to the punch. No matter, I still want to pursue the topic as it relates to the themes I am exploring here, and a crossing of ideas never really hurts anything anyway.
The first I heard of this was an experiment mentioned on physorg (my best source for all science news):
In the first experiment, the head of a shop dummy was fitted with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of the subjects’ eyes, so that they saw what the dummy “saw.” When the dummy’s camera eyes and a subject’s head were directed downwards, the subject saw the dummy’s body where he/she would normally have seen his/her own.
This was also soon reported on by the NYTimes, which has this to add:
“The brain is so easily tricked, they say, precisely because it has spent a lifetime in its own body. It builds models of the world instantaneously, based on lived experience and using split-second assumptions — namely, that the eyes are attached to the skull.”
Now, this seems at first to point to a way to experience others as our “self”, that is, to take on others appearances as our own identities. Tim has done some work on this as well. The idea appeals to me almost as much as it seems to appeal to Tim, particularly as he describes it.
However, another article from physorg reveals some of my concerns on this topic:
The study reveals that recognition of our own face is not as consistent as we might think. The participants’ ability to recognize their own face changed when they watched the face of another person being touched at the same time as their own face was touched, as though they were looking in a mirror. Specifically, when asked to recognize a picture of their own face, the picture that people chose included features of the other person they had previously seen. This did not happen when the two faces were touched out of synchrony.
If we believe ourselves to be what our sensory input tells us we are experiencing, what happens when we can control that input to such a degree that we can cut ourselves off completely from the actual lived experience of our bodies? If we can fail to accurately identify our own faces after tricking our brains in such a manner, what happens when our entire sensorial experience becomes interchangeable with someone else’s?
If we can fully experience someone else’s reality, would we have any reason to come back to our own? Would we slowly begin to lose our ability to function on our own, to recognize and find meaning in our own lives?
What I fear is a world where, instead of reading about celebrities in a magazine and living vicariously through them via the paparazzi, we can actually live vicariously through their broadcast experience. True reality entertainment, ala Strange Days or Existenz (from all the way back in the 90’s, no less!).
And if we are able to slip out of our reality, how are we ever going to learn from confronting and dealing with our own problems? Is there a chance that reality might lose all it’s meaning for us altogether?
After all, one way to separate humans from animals is by our highly evolved ability to recognize patterns and attribute meaning to them. This pattern recognition ability, in conjunction with our memory (and later with writing, which was our first “external hard drive” for the brain) is what allowed us to capture and hold beneficial elements of the world and transmit them on to future generations through the use of culture, ritual, and law. And in fact, this pattern recognition habit of ours might even be looked at as an extension, or an ephemeralization, of the same workings behind biological evolution, in that these beneficial traits are now passed on and developed at a much faster rate than mere biology could ever handle.
More on this idea of the evolution of pattern recognition can be found from Michael Shermer here:
In my 2000 book How We Believe (Times Books), I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns.
Michael’s article brings up the fact that, as useful as our ability to create meaningful patterns is, sometimes we also get it wrong. This is called pareidolia, as Rob Bryanton says:
“Where is the dividing line, then, between pareidolia – sensing things that aren’t really there – and the leaps of intuition that allow us to see things that are hidden from view? This is a very blurry line indeed. If any of us can look at a picture of a particular mountain or a particular piece of toast and very clearly see the face of Jesus, does saying “but that’s not Jesus, it’s just some coincidental shapes” make us stop from seeing the face? “
If we’re already so bad at finding accurate meaning in our normal, moment-by-moment time-line existence, what will happen when we explode into a time-space existence, where the information presented to us by reality is no longer restricted to just the area of time-space in which our consciousness happens to exist, via our body? With such an immensely greater data set from which to pull information, are we more or less likely to continue to find patterns of useful meaning in it?
And how are we to put those meaningful patterns into action, without a contextual grasp of actual reality within which to do so? “I have no mouth, and I must scream” indeed…
A flood of information and multiple perceptual realities may soon be unleashed upon the world. Will we be able to swim in it, or will our consciousness be torn apart by the deluge?
More to come (possibly some answers!) in the third and final part of this three-post piece…)
NURSE: Heave-ho! Heave-ho!
DOCTOR: Looking good. Looking good.
PATIENT: Everything’s starting to look distorted.
(from Pink Tentacle)
Over Thanksgiving, my girlfriend and I took a trip to DC, just for the hell of it. We had a couple of days off and wanted to be somewhere else for a while. I’ve got some other pictures from the museums we visited, which I’ll probably post here eventually, but first, I wanted to post these pictures of the Washington Monument.
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At first glance, it was just a lucky time of day to be there. The skies were clear and the sunset was beautiful. But once we got closer to the monument, I noticed something really strange.
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In the sky next to the monument was a line of shadow that seemed to be floating in midair. I’d never seen anything like this before, and I still have no idea what it was. Sure, it could be the shadow of the jet contrail you can see above it, but why do shadows ever hang in the air like that?
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Here you can see a sort of west to east panorama, showing that the shadow seemed to be pointing to one of the buildings on the Mall (which was probably the Smithsonian Museum). I was thinking, hey, maybe the monuments’ shadow points to some secret Templar treasure or Grand Masonic crypt that’s hidden there! But later, as I got further away, I noticed that the shadow was not connected to the monument at all:
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Maybe this is an example of how “The pyramid changes the structure of space.”? Who knows…
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But from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, it could definitely be seen as a symbol of the divine masculine, reflected in the pool of the divine feminine below it. An eternal cosmic porno, all put on display for the viewing pleasure of good ol’ Abe…
I think what I am trying to get at here is the emphemeralization of language. We need to find a way to structure and communicate our thoughts such that the communication mimics to the point of indistinguishability the thoughts in all their interconnected detail.
We should be able to send and receive communications that consist of holistic states of mind, rather than needing to simplify our thoughts in order to make them fit into a common linguistic pattern system. I want to find a way for us to say exactly what we’re trying to say, more accurately and completely, using the same amount of brain power we currently do to communicate. We need to get our language to emphemeralize enough that the Logos can incarnate in it directly…
Check this quote from McLuhan. It’s exactly what is happening around us now. We just have to figure out how to fit ourselves into it…
TMBCHR ’s recent piece on surveillance as a key factor of ubiquitous computing sparked what was a large pile of undifferentiated research I’d been hauling around in my online presence of email, google toolbar bookmarks, and unfinished wordpress posts. Here is the first of what I hope will be another three-part-series of essays on the topic.
To start off with, surveillance is only a bad thing if you don’t trust the people doing the surveilling. Given the popularity of social networking sites, blogs, and pretty much all of web 2.0, we actually do want people to know what we’re doing. We just also want to have a little more control over who sees it, and what it is that they see. However, at the same time, we are totally fascinated with being able to see what other people are up to. Like animals in the zoo, our own unique experiences are becoming things of fascination for others to immerse themselves in. See the 80’s “Cult of Personality”, or any of today’s reality TV shows for evidence of this.
The true desire I see manifesting itself in these different ways is, in the end, to have an honest objective view of both the self and of others. Sure, people tend to lie on their myspace or facebook accounts, making themselves out to be better than they are. But really, they’re lying to themselves just as badly in real life. If we were to get to know them, we’d become aware of this pretty quickly, and once we see through their fakery, we realize that what is actually being shown is that person’s own conflicted view of themselves.
What we’re slowly beginning to realize is that it’s in our best interest to give up any kind of false pretenses. This can be seen, for example, in the world of the lesbian porn/female MMA fighting circuit: “In my own fighting career, I was initially asked by my manager to keep the queer porn under wraps because a lot of the MMA circuit is run by pretty conservative and homophobic people, but we both soon realized that in this day in age with the internet that really isn’t possible. So now, I am pretty out about it all.”
And we realize that this feels good! The truth is a much easy foundation for the self, because “Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained. “
In a larger, more social sense, truly representing ourselves to others will allow for the best possible decisions to be made by everybody. Good decision making is based on truth, on knowing what is actually going on around you. It is in your best interest to portray your self as accurately as possible in the world, because it allows others to react to you honestly (and also because it encourages them to be just as honest).
Honestly reflecting the view of reality from within your own perceiving center for others to reference is how we all get to know each other, and how we get to know ourselves. This is how we can find the splits in our own quantum-like-self, the flaws within our interpretations of (and passage through) informational reality. It is a higher-dimensional echo-location-sonar type of thing, closely related to Marshall McLuhan’s echoing tribal space. And it’s base function is honest representation at every moment.
In a world where surveillance is ever present, we will all be on our best behavior. Because not only is “Big Brother” watching us, but so is everyone else! And in the end, if we’re all watching each other, than we will all also be watching out for each other.
We might see someone we dislike, yet who interacts with many other people, and who seems to get along with all them. This makes us think, “hey, maybe I’m wrong about that guy”. And the same goes for seeing someone we like behaving badly towards others. This leads us to give them honest feedback on how their behaviors effect us, and allows them to adjust themselves accordingly. It almost forces us to move toward better behavior, as long as the channels of communication are kept open in both directions.
This might not sound like a lot fun. After all:
“The only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always “be on your best behavior” in public. Frankly, that’s no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No – not unless you’re willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning.”
But in the end, the more open we keep the lines of communication, the more quantum-like our behavior will become:
Being watched will force us to justify our behavior, like photons in a double slit experiment. We change based on observation anyway, and more observation simply means we will change more quickly. As we all begin doing so, we will discover that those who behave honestly and openly are those who are actually happy, because again, “Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained. “
As our desires are made manifest, and their results are shared with more and more people, we will be forced to begin to heal the splits in our personalities. Why do we work hard to get something that doesn’t make us happy? What does actually make us happy? Don’t know? Look up people on the internet who truly are happy, who are voted by the global tribe to be examples of the best humanity has to offer.
Think that this just means we’re all going to eventually become like vapid debutantes and celebrities? Well, that’s only going to happen if no one steps up and does it the right way. What do you think works better, someone who’s actually happy and satisfied in their life, or someone who only reflects others false goals back at them? Eventually, #whatworks will always triumph over #whatmerelylooksgood.
We are all already super-empowered individuals. So, if you think you’re better than some of those celebrity types, prove it! We have reached the most technologically advanced, richest state of civilization in recorded history! START MAKING USE OF IT! (peak oil and collapse of civilization aside, we are still culturally richer than any past civilization has ever been)
And the coolest thing? This isn’t something we have to put into action. It’s something that has already begun, and the best way to deal with it is to accept and help bring it into being. As McLuhan said years ago: “We (must) comprehend the process of decentralism and retribalization, and accept its outcome while moving to control and modify the dynamics of change.”
(on update Jan 18th: Just a little editing, plus corrected the link to Global Guerrillas, had the wrong article previously…)
(on update Jan 21st: A little more editing, plus: “oooh! pictures!”)
Potential futures must be created as a mental abstraction (ie: pulled out of the fifth dimensional information-matrix of possibilities), ritualistically brought into being (coalesced around your physic-locality), and then combined in the empty I-Amness of your consciousness in order to be manifested.
Depending on what you’re trying to manifest, bringing your desires into being might be incredibly difficult. It all depends on the alignment between your actual physic-locality and what it is that you desire.
What we’re talking about here is conscious time-path-manipulation (previously known as time travel), or the ability to decide your own destiny. Of course, you have to have already identified with I-Amness in order to be able to do this properly. As Gurdjieff says, “Life is only real then, when I-Am”.
However, if you’re afraid of any part of one of these perceived future-conditions, then you won’t be able to actually manifest them. Including being afriad of your own empty I-Amness, or your actual ability to manifest…
Most people interpret this inability to manifest as not being ready for what they want, but really, if they actually wanted it, they’d already be ready for it. In truth though, if you really do think that it’s something you want, but you still can’t get it to manifest, then there has to be a part of your ego which has unconsciously found something in the desired outcome which it does not desire to occur.
And the only way you’re going to be able to work this out is to accept the fear, resolve it honestly, and then decide if you still desire the same thing. Was the desire one one of horn, or one of ivory?
Duncan at The Baptist’s Head tells you how to differentiate between the two here…
And if it turns out that you don’t want what you had thought you wanted? Perhaps your desire for it was just your subconscious’s way of tricking you into facing that fear, in order to help you become happier! Once the fear is confronted, the desire dissolves, and you can get on with what you really want to do with you life!
(on edit, Jan 18th: Added the note after the link to Duncan’s article, about false desires, cause it didn’t occur to me until later!)
A snark is a bridgeless cubic graph (i.e., a biconnected cubic graph) with edge chromatic number of four. (By Vizing’s theorem, the edge chromatic number of every cubic graph is either three or four, so a snark corresponds to the special case of four.) Snarks are therefore class 2 graphs.
These are all Snarks. Thanks to Speedbird for the original 4 color theory connection.
See also: Quintessence/Aether/Void…
And just to test it out: TMBCHR
(batsignals in action here, people)
(in reply to this comment)
First, I definitely don’t think you’re missing the point. The only thing I would question is whether these things could be considered entities in their own right, and only because I’m not sure if we can say that they have a will/consciousness of their own (outside of our own feelings about what they represent). I guess similarities can be drawn between this statement and that last post regarding my stance on AI in general as well.
But that may just be a bit of nit-picking. Because I think you’re definitely correct in the conclusions you draw from that. Part of what I’m trying to get at is that these “things we should/want-to/must/would-like-to do” are all just possibilities external to our self. Every attempt we make at reconciling them reminds us that we are actually the space within which all these options combine. It makes us more whole, and more empty at the same time.
I guess what I’m trying to get at with the “informational body” metaphor is the realization of the mind and thoughts as things completely external to our “self”. I would eventually like to work out a way to “see” our own minds, like we can see our bodies. Or at least more reliably, metaphorically, visualize them.
To do so, I think some kind of common visual/information/language would be helpful. That’s what started off this whole stream of explorations. If we can find a better way to objectify our thoughts, we would have a much easier time seeing them as separate from our true self.
But obviously our current system for interpreting reality doesn’t do this, so I’d like to figure what possibility-waves we can coalesce into being around us to better help us realize that this is what were always doing anyway!
Also, I’d just like to add that these ideas are all just ideas. It’s something that I feel we’ve all stumbled upon, sort of collectively, and that I am doing my best to put together the pieces here as I see them. Therefore, I value everyone’s comments, even more so than my own opinion, because by adding them here, you’re expanding my own viewpoint. Just as I hope I am expanding all of yours.
Eventually, we might actually be able to figure out what kind of elephant we have here…
The attempt at creating an AI is an accelerated attempt at creating models of our experience of consciousness, or “God’s” consciousness, or consciousness in general (ie: the super (supra?) human mind) with the intent of both better understanding it and of pushing it further.
Just to be brief about it…
I drink a lot of coffee. A lot. So these two recent articles on Physorg really caught my eye:
Midlife coffee drinking can decrease the risk of dementia/Alzheimer’s disease (AD) later in life.
Particularly since they discuss dementia, on the one hand, and “hearing voices” on the other. Of course, I’m not saying, “lets all drink coffee until we hallucinate, then we won’t get Alzheimer’s!” nor I am suggesting that hallucinations might be a cure for dementia.
But it still seems to me that an important concept can be pulled from the two articles. The main point to focus on is that caffeine is a stimulant, and therefore that it increases our ability to perceive and react to external sensation.
Too much stimulation (7+ cups a day?) can lead to hearing voices as well as an increase in the production of the stress hormone cortisol in response to stimulation. And stress, while perhaps not a cause of dementia, is definitely related. I know that when I’m stressed, my memory (both for short term attention and long term recall) suffers pretty badly.
On the other hand, the other study found “that coffee drinkers at midlife had lower risk for dementia later in life, compared to those drinking no or only little coffee. The lowest risk (65% decreased) was found among moderate coffee drinkers (drinking 3-5 cups of coffee/day).”
So, it looks like the ideal is to only slightly enhance awareness through stimulation, but to stop from going too far with it. Tying this in with my information is a drug metaphor, a better picture is painted of how much memorization, the actual conscious realization and retention of facts, is necessary.
That is, that our minds act like a stimulant for our bodies. Our conscious thoughts are there to motivate us to action, to gradually change our whole being in one way or another, so as to maximize our ability to be-in-the-world. But the mind must be connected to the all-that-is. Otherwise we’re lost in the field of good and evil, rather than seeing that all good and evil is purely possibility. Rob’s post which I’m linking to here is great, read the whole thing!…including my comment… ;)
So yeah, basically, it seems the whole “reality interaction” thing should not be run on entirely conscious thought, as conscious thought is itself an abstraction of the very reality we are experiencing and interacting with. But obviously we should not get rid of conscious thought altogether, or no awareness is possible at all. Instead, it is our job to bring the two together, Purusha and Prakriti in contant union.
See also:
- My recent focus on learning to meditate properly by balancing between intense concentration/focus and relaxing to follow my breath. I think this is an important thing for me to watch. (see also my note on intention vs will on the research site).
- the interiew with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of “Nudge”, over at Amazon: “Those who are in position to shape our decisions can overreach or make mistakes, and freedom of choice is a safeguard to that.”
- see Kafka’s rather negative take on it from his Blue Octavo Notebooks. I guess that’s what happens when you insist on separating the two. Personally, I’d rather think of them as one umbilical cord, rather than a couple of chains, and that the “original chaining” is something we happily volunteered for, rather than a mistake. Still, it’s a nice metaphor.
Thanks to Technoccult, I was reminded of a brief phrase in college where I was fascinated with Parkour. I went around the internet last night, collecting all the old videos I could remember, to pull them together on the Research Site today (check it out and enjoy, a bunch of fun stuff).
And while I was doing it, I realized a sort a similarity between Parkour and what I was discussing in that last major post. I’m seeing this stuff everywhere I turn, which must mean that it’s at least partially something I’m bringing with me, as well as something that’s just culturally “in-the-air”, as they say…
What really brought it home was the last video on the research links page, and the text alongside it. Parkour teachers the practitioner how to stay in control, even when they make a mistake. It’s that same idea of committing fully to the experience, and placing the emphasis on maintaining momentum irregardless of what happens along the way.
It moves the focus from making the perfect to movement to being more focused on the skillful means used to handle the information your body is collecting from the environment as you move through it, in order maximize interactive pleasure and minimize delay. The ability to flow your body along your environment, just as our minds so easily flow through the internet.
And check this New Yorker piece for more in depth reading: No Obstacles
As it is said in the Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra: “…thus the Bodhisattva lives Prajna Paramita With no hindrance in the mind. No hindrance therefore no fear. ”
And at APK, their basic tutorial on rolling begins with: “Rolling is a foundation movement; you can’t land from height properly if you don’t know how to roll, or if you are not confident in your roll.”
Same thing. The exact same thing…
(on edit: Jan 18th: Fixed the quote from the Prajna Paramita Sutra….)
Our current educational system focuses on learning facts, retaining information, and completing a full “body” of knowledge.
And this is definitely not what I mean by the phrase “Information Body”.
I’m not exactly sure what I do mean, but I hope to work on that on this site with your help (thanks for the many helpful comments and conversations thus far), and also in conjunction with Tim’s work on the MandalaOS over @tmbchr, which is what started my thinking down this path in the first place.
(In fact, a recent post from Tim included “I’ve learned that the best way to learn large sets of information isn’t necessarily through wrote repetition…”)
In our current way of looking at reality, we think of knowledge as fuel-to-burn, so that the more info we have in our brains, the better we’re able to function. But this comes from a component, plug-in type of thinking where information is removed from reality, put into our brains, and then recalled at a later date, information thought of as something apart from us that we have to later consciously recall in order to make any use of it.
But as the amount of information available increases, the simple accumulation of knowledge will only serve to weigh us down more and more, especially when it becomes dead weight as things change with more and more frequency.
Perhaps this misguided attempt to hold as much information as possible is what is causing Alzheimers, senility, and even those simple “senior moments” where the memory simply, and momentarily, fails. It’s because we’ve burnt out certain regulatory functions in our brains through the accumulation and retention of too much knowledge. A poisoning we brought on ourselves by the long-term mis-use of the drug “information”, which we have been continually refining for aeons and aeons (and which the universe was refining long before humanity came on the scene). It has reached such high levels of concentration, that consuming it is no longer an option. Time to start mainlining….
John Robb over at Global Geurillas points out that our current system of, as he puts it, Industrial Education, will be made obsolete by the coming collapse(ed), and the rise of resilient communities. In fact, he repeats a lot of my arguments there, under a slightly different context.
My main claim here is that rote memorization the not the most efficient use of the brain’s memory-function, and that the alternative is to focus instead on our ability to handle and manipulate information, to increase our motivation and our ability to learn, rather than focusing solely on increasing our knowledge base ad-infinitum.
It takes longer to get this kind of mental functioning to work properly (and reliably), but the momentum and motivation of our thoughts won’t slow with our increasing ability to handle information, as they slow when we try to store and recall more and more information on command.
It’s like an electro-magnetic field: the more electric power is put into it, the more the magnetic force can push or pull. And it’s a wholistic way of thinking, where all things are connected in the present, and a total understanding of the present (and whatever the present contains), is therefore valued over and above the accumulation of past knowledge.
This is seen by the popularity of advertising certain video games as brain trainers. These games do not require the accumulation of much information, as they are quite simple to learn and to play. Rather, the focus is on the processing of new information as it comes up.
If applied across the board to all puzzle/stratedy type games, we can propose that video games are training people to create sets of rules in their minds for faster and faster the processing (or ‘through-putting’, to use a bit or corporate speak) of information. The information being handled becomes of less importance than the skillful means used to handle that information.
And so I say that we have been using the brain wrongly. Memory is only one of its functions, and it’s a function that we would be better off using in a more subconscious manner, given the vast amounts of information that are readily becoming available.
To continue to spend time forcing more and more information into our memory-storage for later conscious recall will only serve to stress this function of our brain unduly, leading to it’s early burnout and senility.
Because really, our current way of describing our “interaction” with reality is actually pretty stupid! We think that we have to take information from our data-rich reality, extract certain facts which we consider to be important, and record them for later use (and in doing so, separate them from reality).
Then we repeatedly expose ourselves to this captured (dead) information, as a substitute for real experience. This stems simply from our own lack of faith in reality and the mind to meet and combine as necessary when necessary (because it’s always necessary!).
When the memory function is placed in direct contact with reality (instead of being used as an information storehouse that is separated from reality), it works more as a reality augmentator (that is, a creator of an augmented reality). It functions similarly to the way hyper-links work on the internet (which I think is training our minds in order to bring back this connecting function).
This is what is meant by the diamond mind, the vajra thunderbolt, and ITS SOMETHING WE ARE ALREADY CAPABLE OF DOING, we just have to stop not doing it.
Right now, we think of the conceptual-mind->reality relationship as a type map-and-territory relationship. One represents-but-is-not the other, and we create the map in our heads by learning about the territory through direct experience. Now I agree, “the map is not the territory“, but honestly, we only function from a map. We can’t even SEE the territory (it’s an at-least-5-dimensional time-space, a much too large data-set of information).
Therefore, we must give the map up to the territory, and allow the territory to fluxuate the map. For more on this, see Alan Chapman’s Coments on the use of the Holy Guardian Angel in his variety of Magick: “I’ve said it is important not to end up focussing or holding on to a certain feeling/sensation/experience, but the act of genuine surrender or devotion is to allow whatever sensations to come and go as they might, because you are no longer a concern. You have given yourself over. This mediation is not on one feeling, but all feelings; not one sensation, but all sensations. In order to do this, you must get out of the way whilst remaining aware of the present. “ A useful metaphor, in the very least, although how much so really depends on your own feelings about Magick…
Computers, the web, electronic media, it’s all been designed by our subconscious to massage us back into McLuhan’s echoing tribal electronic syaestheticsphere. “History” or “dominator culture” only happened so that we could develop memory as a tool of the whole. Because conscious memory is necessary for traversing a fourth dimensional time-line, but not so important for navigating fifth dimensional time-space…
Lastly, Overcoming Bias’ has a recent post regarding regarding his ideal AI as something that “set(s) up a world that works by better rules, and then fad(es) into the background, silent as the laws of Nature once were; and finally fold(s) up and vanishing when it is no longer needed.”
This, I think, is exactly the type of behavior we want from our own consciousness (and, I would add, might be the whole reason-for-being-conscious in the first place), and I think that we can achieve this kind of consciousness through making information storage more (but not completely) unconscious and training our mind to process information straight from realty more and more efficiently. And I don’t think we need a computer to do this for us, but that’s just my take on the matter. AI is definitely not my area of expertise, so, take that for what it’s worth.
This, then, is more what I mean by the information body. It is something that we use to move through information-space, rather than something in which we store any information. And in the end, it’s something we’ve been capable of doing all along.
This is acting from within the realm of no-thing. It is knowing the male, but keeping to the female. It is being negatively capable.
Pisces = Water & fish. God and man. Dante’s pilgrimage.
Aquarius = Man pouring water out from a jug upon the earth. Noosphere, perhaps, despite it’s connection with thought rather than emotion? Emotion/spirit poured out from man to nourish reality. The cups suit in Tarot, whose color is blue.
Or we fuck it all up and are drowned in a flood, despite God’s “rainbow warrior” promises to Noah?
Maybe both… We pour our spirit across the earth, and it us up to us to make that spirit as pure as possible, since we will have to learn to swim within it.
No one tells you what to do, but then again, no one can tell you how to do it either…
The concept of the divine is a shadow you follow to the light. All shadows lead to the light. We’re all just jewels lit up by divine, panes of glass. Concepts are there to both shield us from it’s brightness and to lead us back to it…
And I’ve been busy elsewhere trying to get the non-digital aspects of my life in order. So just a few minor revisions and clarifications here on some of my recent thoughts:
1) Mediation (continuation of this):
Turns out that there’s an easier way of doing this. Rather than trying to do all these things together, I was pointed toward a simpler kind of practice during my face-to-face interview at the retreat. The key mistake with all of what I said before is the “trying”, which as a huge Star Wars fan, I really should have realized… “Do or do not, there is no try”, right? So yeah, less pressure cooking, more letting the breath lead me. I just have to calm myself down enough to find the point where the breath breathes and I just listen to it. Not that the other practice didn’t get me some good results, but balanced movement is the key here, I think, to stop the old automation from sinking in.
2) EarthOS -> CosmOS via MandalaOs:
This would be better described, I realized, as EarthOS<->ManadalaOS<->CosmOS. Or to simplify:
A bit corny, perhaps, but I think it’s worth mentioning for the funny coincidence alone…
3) Intro to “The Informational Body”:
Don’t know how I could have forgotten these terms in my little introductory list:
- The Invocation Holy Guardian Angel as described by Alan Chapman, who’s advice, when stripped of it’s occult qualities, sounds a lot like “Sit down and shut up” of Zen Master Dogen…
- The 6th, 7th, and 8th Conciousnesses are involved here, although I think what I am describing here may be more of a process of going from the 6th to the 8th, when looked at this way. See Mind Monkey and Journey to the West.
- Also, the very concept of connecting the divine and the earthly through the human mind pretty much IS what yoga means. It is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning “to control”, “to yoke” or “to unite”. Translations include “joining”, “uniting”, “union”, “conjunction”, and “means”.
4. And as for mind moving through time at the speed of light, I’m not so sure about that now. I’m still sure that it works best when doing so, I’m just not so sure that it is doing so, not yet…
Anyway, enough of me making revisions. To bed for now; I will catch you after morning meditation…
