On creating new systems, new languages

constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Still a stranger here, no doubt, but I do find this place to be a sort of haven. Much of the talk of music floats past me, but I very much admire the sustained curiosity and intellect on show here at dissensus. Presumably like many other latecomers, I drifted this way thanks to the enduring orbit of Mark Fisher.

I'm a young and insular one, which may explain the zeal and naivete here, but I do get the sense that developing new ways of being, of moving through the world, is not only possible but perhaps perpetually necessary. How long can we remobilize and reanimate our inheritance before it ossifies?

I want to throw something out there, for anyone who may be interested in theorizing new(ish) systems (of thought, of being, what have you). Any opinions on this in general? This is of interest to me, in and of itself. The following is just an attempt to articulate certain theories I am working on.

The working concept is "nootopology", which would be a study of the disciplinarity of the intellect. For the proof of etymological labor: "nous" is taken as intellect/organ-of-understanding, "topos" balances both place and subject matter, and "logos" is taken as reasoned discourse.

The hope is to create a sort of "motherboard theory" that can be forward-compatible, to whatever extent, with future implementations and developments of, so to speak, "daughterboard theories". It would, in principle, allow for two levels of innovation.

Perhaps the primary axiom is that there exists (virtually? As in, Deleuzian virtual?) a potential for infinitessimal complexification, and that we, as subject-processors, preconsciously project the very throughput (objectivity?) that we consciously process, resulting in a kind of auto-cybernetics (?), a system whose environment is a sort of functional hallucination. That said, our processability is measured by how effective our account of our apparent world is, a precision that is always climbing.

The species-intellect would be a sort of rhizome / proto-plenum (I take plenum as the pure rhizome - but I'm only a skimmer of D/G, and I suspect much of this work as already been done by them), the negative space of which takes up almost all the space, so to speak. This negative space could be figured as Apeiron, and the species-intellect, as a spreading structure, would be an "apeirotropism" that "turns" or grows toward this negative space. This could be elaborated further, with the "head" of each "branch" of the species-intellect representing a psychic singularity, embodied in human wetware (?), which metabolizes Apeiron into the body of the species-intellect.

I wonder if anyone has thoughts on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and of this notion of the Omega Point. If I were to appropriate this into the aforementioned terminology, the Omega Point would be the point of "near-infinite growth in a finite time" along the exponential trajectory by which the intelligence system comes to a (psuedo-)complete understanding of its environment, a sort of cosmic oneness. If, on the other hand, we take this trajectory to be arithmetic (if I understand that dichotomy correctly), then we can see how there can be a recursively scaling chain of intelligences that each boast a complexity orders of magnitude "more" than the "lower" intelligence.

More on the disciplinarity aspect. The term I am currently using for the mode of understanding specific to a given discipline is "epistechnics". Thus, the discipline takes as its manipulandum a certain topos, to which it applies a more or less unique mode of understanding, an epistechnics. We can, perhaps, frame the scientific method as an epistechnic genus/motherboard, in which is nested some number of fuzzily defined species epistechnics. Mereology, I would imagine, would be a crucial approach to much of this.

I've seen the word autotelic here and there, but I haven't seen "allotelic", which I would take to mean "having a destiny/end in the other" rather than in itself. This kind of circuitry, which could be called circular, might be necessary in order to implement such any such psychic revolution (if you will humor the grandiosity here, although I am, perhaps predictably, all too serious). For this, something of an "Ouroborology" might be in order (or at least fun to say), which could also apply to circular systems or circular elements in systems more generally.

Perhaps the ultimate goal here is to render complexity more palatable - the front to push would be the compression, transmission, and decompression of concepts. Decentralization of complexity-processing, yada yada. The "daughterboard" theories could include a political praxis oriented around the optimal processing of Apeiron - although, the haunting question is: how can this be reconciled with egalitarianism? Mass allotelization, accelerating insularization (or perhaps that will only make us more depressed).

At the very least, I'll have had a grand old time tinkering with words. I thank you for reading this far.

And I must say, I'm not quite sure where to turn for feedback here. I figure, and hope, that this may be the place. If not, I will gladly resume my lurking tendencies. After all, I'm no local.



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Potentially useful newish concepts

Nootopology - The study of the disciplinarity of the intellect.

Epistechnics - The means/methods, particular to a given discipline, of understanding a given subject-matter or topic. An epistechnique would be a knowledge-extension device or tool.

Fuzzeme / Fuzzemble - A system for ambiguous constitution, a mereology of fuzzy objects. If something can be considered-distinct (considered-distinctly?), it qualifies as a fuzzeme, the base unit. If multiple fuzzemes can be considered-en-masse as a collective object, that collective object is a fuzzemble (fuzzy ensemble). If a fuzzeme can be dissected into more elemental fuzzemes, it becomes a fuzzemble. Thus, the fuzzeme is the provisional element here. Fuzzembles can be combined into fuzzembles, without requalifying anything. Not quite sure about the practicality of this system yet, but it takes as axiomatic that there is no absolute base element.

Perhaps a lead here might be the "psychon" as a unit of thought (?) as proposed by Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch ("a psychon can be no less than the activity of a single neuron.")

Ouroborology - The study of circular progression/logic/substantiation/causation/etc. The study of circularity, that bane of science. Applications? For making sense of autotelic being/knowing.

Autotelos - The end in itself. Teleological autonomy. Concentration of telos into an inner singularity?

Allotelos - The end out of itself, in the other, in the environment. Diffusion of telos across the cosmos?

Apeirotropism - Something which turns/grows toward the unknown. For instance, if we figure the species-intellect as a hive-mind rhizome, expanding within a sort of matrix, and if we figure its negative space to be Apeiron, the species-intellect would be an apeirotropism if it "grows", even asymptotically, into the territory of Apeiron. If we argue that the negative space is infinite, and we argue that the growth-rate of this apeirotropic species-intellect is exponential, then there must be a point at which the growth rate (which would also be the fill-rate) of the species-intellect achieves nearly infinite growth in a finite duration, at which point the rhizome would nearly purify, nearly becoming a plenum, nearly unifying intelligence with its world.
 
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C

catalog

Well-known member
some good words there - i'm gonna look em all up later. the thing that's interesting, i suppose, or one of the things, is how these new/little used words are still rooted in ancient (ie greek) language systems. I mean, if we wanna make the future, do we need to bin the whole lot of what we've been working with and go for something entirely new? I dunno if this help you in any way though, soz!
 
shiels

shiels

_
So you seem to want to use dissensus to build a kind of holistic mode of analysis above the level of eg the scientific method, psychoanalysis, mathematics, theory?

Yes, I’m up for it. I have a couple of meetings in the afternoon but let’s go. You might have to break things down a lot because we aren’t as clever as you think.

You seem to have set out a few definitions, but I don’t know what exactly you want to escape from or where to.
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
catalog said:
I mean, if we wanna make the future, do we need to bin the whole lot of what we've been working with and go for something entirely new?
Click to expand...

I see what you mean, and I've had trouble with this. The problem of trimming the branches without pulling the roots - but I'm not convinced, at least so far, that pulling out the roots in this sense is even possible (Language born in "one fell swoop" etc). Perhaps the closest we could get to a "new" language is merely a novel set of recombinations of the more primary languages. Perhaps the combinational capacity of these primary languages has not been exhausted yet, and must be before something new can be born?

Or perhaps this is closer to what I believe: that we can only asymptotically disroot existing structures, and that progress closer and closer to the asymptote becomes, perhaps, more and more intricate. Not sure if I believe that completely, but I am more inclined to think in terms of asymptotes than in terms of reachable/tenable points.

The working theory, regarding this problem of re-inheriting the seeds that grow into the thing one is setting out to renovate, could be this: That perhaps a certain linguistic pseudo-bedrock can be triangulated (which is to say, close enough to the aforementioned asymptote - a sort of heuristic). Something about etymology collapses all words, of seemingly quantitative and qualitative difference, into a common plane of (almost chaotic) combinationality (?). From here, we can see how words can be broken apart and recombined in seemingly novel ways, which is to say, novel enough (What would "theometry" entail? Perhaps fodder for that Kabbalah thread).

Perhaps a level "up" from word roots would be concepts. Here was can combine concepts from seemingly disparate disciplines (The metabolism of Karma (Dharmic metaphysiology?), eternal re-expenditure of karmic debt/credit - the economics of Samsara; etc.). Collapsing the totality of concepts (not sure how I would define "concept" here) into an effective coterminous and compatible toolbox, a compatibility of unprecidented extremity that could, in theory, permit the creation/combination of "new" concepts, the potentiality of which otherwise resting beyond the scope of the disciplinary intellect.

I do apologize if the the sense of direction gets bogged down - I'm constantly losing track of it myself. It does seem like one can try, I would argue effectively, to establish certain cognitive feedback loops that can grant the intellect clearance into higher levels of abstraction. Depending on how we define intelligence (qua "smartness" rather than "processing capability"), it seems that it can be rendered ever-more upgradable (?).

shiels said:
You seem to have set out a few definitions, but I don’t know what exactly you want to escape from or where to.
Click to expand...

Perhaps what I think we need to escape from is sedimentation of difference into essence. I am of the notion, for example, that the "psychic singularity" is uniform, and that all psychic difference is incidental. When we conflate the essential component of the psyche with the incidental component, all psychic difference is supposed to be essential. Because of this conflation, we believe that psyches are essentially different from one another, but the difference, I would argue, consists of the incidental stuff (of ego, and all that informs ego, such as genetics, etc.). An unfalsifiable claim, albeit, but one that could be promising in alleviating inter-psychic conflict.

Maybe I'm overlooking something, or giving it all too much purchase, but it seems like a sufficiently stable ground to build on, theory-wise. That all difference is incidental (I've been taking incidental, here, to mean non-essential).


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Moreover, what are the thoughts on the purportedly Deleuzian take on philosophy as the generation of practical concepts? Whether or not we define philosophy, even provisionally, as the production/generation of concepts, I do think this production can be fertilized and accelerated.


As this all pertains to disciplinarity, I think that if one becomes familiar with "epistechics" in general, then they can effectively hit the ground running in any discipline they try their hand in. By constantly grafting/translating "epistechniques" from one discipline into another, one can begin to sense the particularity of each discipline's mode of understanding. Instead of committing to one such mode, why not learn how to shift gears between them (assuming they can't all be synthesized)?

It seems to boil down to a kind of science of metaphor, with metaphor being the transdisciplinary dimension that can one can learn to traverse much more fluently than the mere occasional analogy between concepts of "different" disciplines.

I wouldn't say that the disciplines, insofar as they are generally recognized, are siloed, seeing as inter/multi/trans-disciplinary approaches have been explored for a while now. That said, such approaches take as their point of departure the existence of disciplines, and this presupposition is, perhaps, the thing I am trying to challenge here.

Just as someone argued that the concept of bisexuality doesn't radically disrupt gender binaries, because it takes such a binary as its point of departure, and merely challenges it. Is there a more radical approach to innovation that can bypass this taking-as-point-of-departure of the thing it seeks to innovate? Or is that a necessary component of critique? Is, then, critique a necessary component of development? Or is it merely an expedient? Quite the wealth of inquiry, here.
 
K

kumar

Well-known member
constant escape did you see the McLuhan thread from a few weeks ago? This series was famously discussed for a brief second where Pierre de chardin appears in the context of mcluhan’s account of the Incarnation. We didn’t quite get round to collectively realigning the sensorium on that thread, perhaps this is along the lines you’re getting at?


The Catholic position, according to McLuhan, is very different. The Incarnation of Christ has already redeemed all of reality, and to have faith in the Incarnation is to truly behold it. The problem is epistemological not ontological. We have willingly allowed blinders to be placed on our perception.

But, in actuality, individual perception itself is the entire process in miniature. Perception is Incarnation. The body and sensory apparatus of every believer and non-believer alike is truly the mystical vessel of Christ. The new media is inexorably leading us towards a single point of mass realization.

McLuhan's ideas about this have undoubtedly been deeply shaped by the philosophy of the Jesuit scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin's views may have reached McLuhan through McLuhan's former student and friend, Walter Ong, but explicit, though not uncritical, references to de Chardin can be found in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

”People of literary and critical bias find the shrill vehemence of de Chardin
as disconcerting as his uncritical enthusiasm for the cosmic membrane that has been snapped round the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses. This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence”

De Chardin's vision of a redeemed yet "technological brain for the world" resonates deeply with McLuhan's earlier celebrations of the transcendent potential of the electric media. Along with his hope, however, there is great dread. The "Manichean" or "Gnostic" vision of the fulfillment of history in the perfected unification of the World Spirit is strikingly similar to de Chardin's "Catholic" vision of the Cosmic Christ.
Click to expand...
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
My reply to the others is still pending posting, but here is what seems to be that which I want to escape from: The problematic fusion of incidental difference with essential identity. Not sure how much I can elaborate without completely mirroring the pending post, but it seems like all difference can be figured as being non-essential, and that much of our dismay can be attributed to the continued positing of this difference as essential.


kumar - regarding the noosphere: this was one of the more explicit influences here. Now, about how much we should take from what has already been laid down: I am inclined, now, to simply build off of that concept, the noosphere, rather than construe (or perhaps reverse-engineer) an equivalent. I was starting to move in the direction of "nooscape" in keeping with topology, or "noomatrix", which might be a bit redundant, depending on how we define "nous" here. Perhaps these terms can function in their own right, but maybe not supplant the role of the nooscape. I'm not being very clear, and for that I apologize.

I admit I've only skimmed through that article, broadly connecting the dots (Crowley, Joyce, among almost innumerable others) to get a sense of things. I haven't gotten into McLuhan yet, and seeing that connection between McLuhan and Teilhard de Chardin was completely novel for me.

And I did not see the McLuhan thread, but I can take a look. This does seem to push in the direction I have in mind. With Teilhard de Chardin, though, I wonder how much of it is expressed in Christian (or even Jesuit?) terms, which may or may not prove to be a disconnect.

If anyone has insight into the scope of McLuhan's thought, I would appreciate some elaboration. Perhaps it is one of those too-close-to-the-sun cases, wherein one cannot even distinguish such thought from their reality.

Or Joyce, for that matter.

Also, if anyone has anything to say on Jean Piaget, who seems to have done a bit of work on transdisciplinarity, I would like to hear it as well. Perhaps much of this can be distilled down to expressing a pseudo-Teilhardian evolution of intelligence (perhaps even similar to Hegel's spirit, as if we aren't deep enough into it) in terms of disciplinarity.


Also, something that I would imagine would be met with great appreciation here: I just found this lecture, from the Embassy of the Free Mind, about Philip K. Dick and Jacob Bohme. Not having read anything of Dick or even heard of Bohme, I found it very interesting. Whitehead was even mentioned in conjunction with Dick's interpretation of Bohme's "universe as consisting of yay and nay" theory as a proto-computational binary theory, something about a light that flickers on and off every trillionth of a second, and how everything else can be built from such a foundation (much like binary computation, from what I gather). It then went into a sort of oscillation between extremes, as yin and yang perpetually overtaking one another

Another point that I found interesting was this concept of a decoherent and "bipolarized" intelligence that is divided into a "mindless being" and a "knowing", and how this interplay/"combat" is what "builds up" intelligence. If anyone is a Heidegger buff, I would be interested to hear any thoughts, for that is the direction I would feel pulled toward.

Anyway, here is the video, should anyone be interested.

video
 
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constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Thanks - thats good stuff. I'm working through the GfG essay now.

Also:

TELEVISION KILLS TELEPHONY IN BROTHERS BROIL

Video killed the radio star?
 
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constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
kumar said:
constant escape did you see the McLuhan thread from a few weeks ago? This series was famously discussed for a brief second where Pierre de chardin appears in the context of mcluhan’s account of the Incarnation. We didn’t quite get round to collectively realigning the sensorium on that thread, perhaps this is along the lines you’re getting at?
Click to expand...

Just got through it - quite the gymnastic lightning tour. Thanks again for sharing it. I didn't even notice its mention of Bohme when I scanned through it earlier.



McLuhan (as quoted in the GfG essay) - “This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction.”

Granted, I am taking this McLuhan passage out of context.

That said, I’m not so sure I agree with this interpretation of the noosphere. It seems, here, that McLuhan takes the noosphere as being definitively-essentially technical, whereas it seems, to me, to be definitively-essentially intellectual. If what defines the biosphere is, admittedly presumably, organic mater, then what defines the noosphere would be, again from mere speculation, intelligent matter. What, then, distinguishes organic from intellectual is a difference, perhaps, of complexity. Although this gets into the Epistechnics I mentioned earlier. Perhaps the essence of the noosphere is at once technical and intellectual - or perhaps the latter is classified under the former?)

I would say that the “externalization of our senses” merely (albeit magnificently) amplifies the noosphere, but by no means qualifies as its essence. Perhaps the “externalization of our senses” is the midwife that eases the nascent noosphere into being? What would the essence of the noosphere be? In physical terms, perhaps the singularity along the trajectory of organic matter’s complexification, after which point there coalesces/emerges a seemingly qualitative difference: that between biosphere and noosphere?

Could "technical" describe the manner of the individuation, and "intellectual" describe the manner in which this individuation is experienced?

Please help here, because I can’t shake the feeling that I am missing something in McLuhan. Again, I have not read into the context of this excerpt. That said, the theories regarding touch as the transcendent/synthetic sense were quite interesting, and the mandala is new for me as well.

I would have loved to see some Simondon in that essay.



Some pertinent stuff from Teilhard de Chardin’s Appearance of Man:

“To sure his metaphysical dizziness, man once likened to consider himself as standing ontologically and spatially at the very heart of the Universe. Today we can reach the same result, more seriously and more fruitfully, by recognizing that, for man and from man onwards (not because of any marvelous properties i the human being, but by virtue of the fundamental and general structure of the evolutionary force), the world behaves toward its thinking elements with the perspective and accumulative care of a convergent system.”


Taking “convergent system” as a system in which the interplay of components coalesces into emergent evolution, it seems that the matrix in which intelligent matter is spawned/begotten assumes something of a maternal, “car[ing]” role towards such intelligence. Nothing like a good etymological do-si-do.

This is quite profound, and I am glad you posted what you posted, otherwise I would not have gone on this foray.




Also from the Grapejuice essay:

“And common to both McLuhan and the occult is the key idea, paradoxical to strictly linear thinkers, that every one of these extremes when pushed to its limit may suddenly flip to become its direct opposite.”

What are the thoughts on this? Perhaps one of the more confounding elements I’ve found at play in our existence period.

I had been expressing it, insufficiently, in the following terms:

Where there exists some array of items, onto which categories can be imposed, uniform-category (extreme homogeneity?) is identical to each-their-own-category (extreme heterogeneity?). Thus, the extremes are actually congruent, the bipolar spectrum revealing itself as an ostensibly severed loop?

A very confused elaboration of this dynamic of spectrum looping. I had taken desperate recourse to the analogy of Mario, in the old jumping-under-pipe-knocking-over-spikey-thing game, wherein you could walk offscreen to the extreme left and loop around to the extreme right. We were looking at a bipolar depiction of Mario’s circular world.

There was some Zizek lecture on Lacan where he went into something like this (not Mario, although that wouldn’t be surprising). Something about sexual difference. Zizek was talking about how male represented/mobilized/symbolized a uniformity-with-an-exception, and female represented/mobilized/symbolized only exception, with no consistency - but this extreme lack of consistency amounted to something of an extremely pure consistency. Anyway, it was revelatory at the time, causing an overdue reevaluation of the articulation of the Mario theory.

I may seem to be stressing this unnecessarily, but this seems to be one of the fundamental dynamics that permits, yet contradicts, our logic of linearity and goundedness.

Back to Ouroborology - perhaps there is something here worth looking at. How the hell does something like this work? How can it underpin a logic that outright demonizes it? It seems like linearity is at once a privilege, a ground, and an illusion, all afforded by an underlying circularity that would appear anathema to the doctrines of its own superstructure.


I just now recall, from Ulysses, the "ineluctable modality of the visible". It is taking on a whole new meaning, thanks to this GfG piece.
 
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constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
version said:
This is worth a read,

https://realitystudio.org/criticism/notes-on-burroughs/
Click to expand...


“It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.”

Very interesting - thank you. I hadn’t a real understanding of the importance of junk in his thought, but this starts to paint it more clearly.
But what are your thoughts on cut-ups (or “fold-ins” which is also new for me)? Isn’t it a bit of a totalizing category, if you really press it? Haven’t we forsaken the possibility of a pure/consistent narrative? Then again, maybe cutups contributed to this forsaking.

Anyway, the focus on techne here as extension of intelligent faculty/agency is in line with the stuff above, insofar as I can tell.

As for any implicit concern regarding the One God Universe (“He can’t go anywhere because he’s already fucking everywhere” -Burroughs, I forget where) (or Architectonic Order of Eschaton, for that matter), which seems to be, as it were, what Burroughs would be positioned against, I’m not quite sure how to approach that. or how to integrate it into a new system. What kind of approach can be taken that would account for such a cosmic arrangement, without being axiomatically bound to it?

I get that this is a deviation from the McLuhan piece, to some extent, but it seems to be the larger (or possibly largest) context here. There was even some “toposophy” elaboration at Orion’s Arm that seems to offer a similar take. Perhaps the cosmic Planck-nexus-brain-being is our best guess at what the extremity of intelligence’s individuation would entail. I certainly can’t prove it wrong.
 
version

version

Well-known member
constant escape said:
But what are your thoughts on cut-ups (or “fold-ins” which is also new for me)?
Click to expand...

A fold-in's just a cut-up that's been folded rather than cut. You fold the pages so that new sentences appear.

constant escape said:
Isn’t it a bit of a totalizing category, if you really press it? Haven’t we forsaken the possibility of a pure/consistent narrative? Then again, maybe cutups contributed to this forsaking.
Click to expand...

I'm in two minds about this; Burroughs was working to break systems of control so it strikes me that any pure or consistent narrative would appear to him as a system in need of breaking. That being said, if the cut-ups are a totalising category then they're arguably a consistent narrative in their own right.
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
version said:
A fold-in's just a cut-up that's been folded rather than cut. You fold the pages so that new sentences appear.
Click to expand...

Ah, similar goal, differing method.

version said:
I'm in two minds about this; Burroughs was working to break systems of control so it strikes me that any pure or consistent narrative would appear to him as a system in need of breaking. That being said, if the cut-ups are a totalising category then they're arguably a consistent narrative in their own right.
Click to expand...

Well this seems to bring us back to identity of extremes:

“And common to both McLuhan and the occult is the key idea, paradoxical to strictly linear thinkers, that every one of these extremes when pushed to its limit may suddenly flip to become its direct opposite.”

Perhaps, then, the cut-up only succeeds at consistency-breaking so long as the process is perpetual. The difference between inconsistent and consistent arises only in the doing of the cut-up, and this difference dissolves once the cut-up is done. Its an ever-mobile qualification, perhaps - quite like capital, as I understand.
 
version

version

Well-known member
Perhaps that's why Burroughs was forever revising the cut-ups, branching out into other media and so on. It had to be a continuous process.
 
version

version

Well-known member
In a 1961 typescript he identifies his writing as a war machine for time travel out of time itself: "This is war between those of us who want out and those who want to keep us all locked in time. The cut ups are not for artistic purposes. The cut ups are a weapon a sword. I bring not peace but pieces."
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
There was some other source, in the vein of Lemuria, ccru and maybe Y2K and all that jazz, where his work is argued to have been marginalized (by some representationalist orthodoxy?) as being science fiction or some such pasteurized fodder. In effect, the interpretations surrounding his work were manipulated and orchestrated by some agents of control, in the interest of subduing and disarming the kind of resistance he was working at. I never figured the cutup as being such a cosmic tool/weapon

Might've even been someone at this forum who led me there - not sure.

Ever make a dreamachine?



-----commencing concept dump (not entirely unrelated, I suppose)



“Current Analysis” as a morphology of power (or power’s asymmetrical distribution)

Another potential factor in this prospective newish system might be a sort of “current analysis” - currents as in directional flows, directionality here being teleological.

So we have a pool-matrix, wherein currents can actualize in whichever direction. This would represent the agency of an actor, according to their will. They will their world in their preferred direction, with whatever degree of potency. As we experience ideological difference, so these currents experience directional difference.

This amounts to a sort of arena, an agon of tides, wherein contending currents crash into and subsume each other. The more powerful tide subsumes the less powerful tide, and as a result its directionality shifts, if even slightly, according to the directionality of the swallowed tide. Dialectics conceptualized in a polythetical crash pool.

Naturally, there arises the occasional current which becomes so powerful that its reign/duration may exceed those of the other currents exponentially. This dictator current can reach the point of (more or less) predefining the default-current (which begins as neutral) of the whole pool, proactively midwifing nascent currents in accordance to its own will. The pettier currents yield, conform, and even default to the “way the wind blows”, which only crystalizes the reign of the dominant tide even more.

Can this “current analysis” be figured as a morphology of power? Taking the Foucauldian sense of a "power relation" as a sort of proactive determination/sculpting of the maneuverability of the adversary. If you can prefigure your adversaries set of options for future action, chiseling off their options that actually threaten your dominance, you effectively secure the power relation, and effectively protract/extend the longevity of your dominance. Because the dominant tide influences the default “canvas” of the pool-matrix (a sort of hegemony force?), any resistance against the will of the dominant tide becomes increasingly synonymous with resistance against normativity.

That said, the appropriate concatenation of counter-currents can, under the right circumstances, coalesce into a revolutionary mega-current, thereby disrupting and potentially dethroning the dominant current and, by extension, altering the dominant normativity.

We can perhaps figure normativity, here, as determined by the current that passes the threshold of volitional supremacy (?). Perhaps another way to phrase it, the loudest voice can seem to bend the wind. Another yet: Once a current becomes strong enough, once its influence carries wide enough, such influence becomes indistinguishable from reality - it becomes the default, and thereby actively affects the development of all other currents, and prefigures the development of nascent currents.

What would be interesting would be the identification of distinct/singular patterns or orchestrations that arise in such a pool-matrix. How does the upper-bound of power potential, as informed by the history of the pool-matrix, develop over the course of such interplay? Would such an upper-precedent develop exponentially, or arithmetically?

What if we figure this pool to be stagger-nested within/above a larger pool, and that pool within an even larger pool - and its turtles all the way down? Then the so-called revolutionary current-concatenation would amount to an “overflow” of the vital substance from the smaller pool into the larger pool, the larger canvas/matrix, into which the revolutionary residuum-current would amount to but a petty pawn current in yet another nascent interplay of currents? The biggest fish becomes an average fish in a bigger pond.

Perhaps this is merely an interesting metaphor, but there may be something to it. In collapsing all ideologically-willed action into a coterminous abstraction, perhaps we can, with greater sobriety, analyze how these wills actualize and unfold. Can currents run absolutely parallel, or can they, at most, achieve a provisional and heuristic harmony, aligned by a common enough directionality? Is it s game of pure proportion? That is, if current A, at size 10, moves northeast, and current B, at size 5, moves northwest, and they collide - is current A, at size 15, having subsumed current B, now aiming slightly more west?

Moreover, could this interplay be figured on multiple scales? Intra-psychic and inter-psychic? Perhaps only the currents above a certain size are felt consciously? Or perhaps not - perhaps size is a measure that is not directly correlated to consciousness?

If the intra-psychic matrix-pool can be identified as a stage of individuation, could the inter-psychic matrix-pool be too? Would this be the individuation of the species-intellect? The individuation of the noosphere? Of intelligence most broadly?

What would a fractal pool-matrix entail, rather than a recursive nest-chain of pool-matrices? Currents composed of currents composed of currents? This all opens doors for cybernetics as well.
 
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version

Well-known member
It's interesting you use the metaphor of a pool. Did you see the thing shiels posted the other day re: "Pond and the Pump House"?

shiels said:
What is Psychedelic Information Theory?

The general theory underlying all of PIT is that psychedelics create information when introduced to human neural networks. The spontaneous creation of new information is the essential function of psychedelic activation, and this new information is imprinted into memory and reproduced as music, art, or stories shared with other people. More specifically, PIT presents physical models which describe this generative process, and the dynamics of various psychedelic phenomena like complex hallucination, shamanism, and group mind.

How does PIT describe psychedelic action?

One way to visualize what I’m describing in PIT is through what I call the “Pond and the Pump House” metaphor. Imagine a perfectly round pond with perfectly still water, with a small pump house sitting on an island in the center. When the pump house is turned on it sends out perfectly circular ripples through the water that, over time, create a neatly ordered standing wave of activity. In this metaphor the pond is the surface of the neocortex; the pump house is the body, heartbeat, and respiration; and the ripples are waves of sensory perception seen in an EEG reading of cortical activity. When the pump is on and moving at different speeds, the ripples on the surface of the pond are active and take on different coherent patterns; when the pump is turned off the ripples fade and the pond becomes still and quiet. These are metaphors for consciousness moving from waking to sleeping states.

Now imagine we add a psychedelic to this model. PIT proposes that psychedelics alter the wave patterns of consciousness by creating a tiny tremor under the pond that vibrates the entire structure. Adding the psychedelic to the system creates a competing standing wave that can be seen immediately in the ripples on the surface. The pump keeps pumping, creating its usual standing waves, but because of the tremor there is a new layer of complexity to the ripple patterns. The tremor adds energy to the system, and as it does the standing waves in the pond become more chaotic. Instead of simple coherent ripple patterns, you begin to see overlapping patterns and fast transitions between multiple standing wave states. The complex interference patterns overlap on themselves and exhibit the formal qualities of nonlinear feedback system, such as fractals or cellular automata.

The interference pattern in the ripples of the pond described here is how PIT models a competing tryptamine agonist (a hallucinogen) in the finely timed aminergic system of perception, modulated by serotonin and dopamine. This complex interference pattern is what I am describing with the Control Interrupt Model of psychedelic action. According to PIT, each hallucinogen creates a slightly different tremor or vibration in the signaling pathways of multisensory awareness, which in-turn creates a unique and distinct interference pattern in the standing waves of perception. Some hallucinogenic tremors may be big and rolling, others may be quiet and subtle, others may be sharp and disruptive. The difference in tremor speed and feel created by each psychedelic molecule would be accounted for by the differing receptor affinities and metabolic pathways for each hallucinogen.

How do psychedelic interference patterns relate to the techniques of shamanism and psychedelic therapy?

Let’s go back to our pond metaphor. Assume there are sand dunes created at the edges of the pond that correspond to the long-term memory of the standing wave patterns created by the pump house. If you check these dunes after each psychedelic tremor you might find new tiny fractals, spirals, curves, cracks, and filigreed patterns etched into the sand. These sand etchings correspond to the memory of the psychedelic experience now embedded in the patterns of the neural network, and these memory patterns then inform behavior, change beliefs, and are presented over and over again in art, music, and philosophy. That is a metaphor for transformative psychedelic therapy.

Now let’s assume there is a tribe of people living at the shores of this pond, and this psychedelic tremor hits once a week. It would be perfectly reasonable to assume that these people would adopt the psychedelic sand patterns as a kind of tribal identity, and embed those patterns into their clothes, tattoos, face paints, pottery, and so on. This is exactly what tribes who take psychedelics do; they embed the colorful fractal patterns created on the surface of their brains onto the surfaces of their bodies, their artwork, their walls, and their world. The physical spilling over of complex psychedelic patterns from a single underlying ripple effect is the foundation of PIT. Psychedelic Information Theory studies the movement of complex information from the genesis of initial hallucinogenic interference pattern to the outward organizing effect on belief, personality, behavior, and tribal structure.

Now, to go one step further, assume that whenever the psychedelic tremor strikes, the tribe of people living at the shores all gather in a circle and begin to sing, or stamp their feet, or beat large drums in unison. The songs produced by the tribe will naturally fall into harmony with the tremor and begin to shape the ripples in the pond through harmonic interference. Over time, if the tribe sings loud enough, they will produce a standing interference pattern, or group hallucination, in the ripples of the pond. This can be described as a shared state of consciousness locked through a standing resonant feedback wave. Shaping interference patterns in consciousness through singing or resonant feedback describes the basic ritual techniques of psychedelic shamanism. Through resonant feedback the shaman and the tribe can master the nonlinear dynamics of the interference pattern to work various forms of magic on the surface of the pond.

The Control Interrupt Model reduces hallucinogenic action to a high speed sensory attack and decay envelope. Why did you decide on that model?

While studying the effects of various hallucinogens, I would always notice a carrier wave, or a high-pitched frequency, or a pulsing, or a throbbing, or a tingling, or some kind of stable interference that was familiar to that substance. And after studying various trip reports for various substances, I realized I was not alone in recording these simple observations. This stable interference is often reported to permeate all sensation; touch, hearing, vision, the entire body. I began to measure the frequencies of these pulses and tingles for different hallucinogens and realized that they all fell into alpha and beta states of consciousness, between 4 to 30 pulses per second, and each drug had a slightly different timing and feel to the way the pulses came on and interrupted consciousness. The slower the interruption, the more of a throbbing or stuttering I felt; the faster the interruption, the more of a tingling, vibration, or high-pitched tremor I felt.

At some point in my analysis of different drugs, I would always say, “That stable interrupt frequency is interesting, I should take a closer look at that,” or, “Isn’t it weird that I always feel this throbbing on this specific drug, which feels very similar to the pulsing I noticed on this other drug.” And then as I began analyzing that one simple pulse interaction, I wondered if pulse interruption in frame perception was all that was needed to produce hallucination. Mind machines produce phosphenes within a small range of light pulse frequencies, so what if hallucinogens did something similar in the same pulse range? What if those pulses were the drug’s only action, and the throbbing was the perceptual aggregate of modulatory interference at sensory binding junctions? During the process of formally describing the action of these pulses, it became obvious that the pulsing interference was a carrier wave for hallucination, like the flickering frame rate of an animation reel. The pulses created an overlapping hallucinogenic flicker, or an overlapping modulatory ripple, in multisensory awareness, that creates the chaotic substrate for complex hallucination. It was an extrapolation of psychedelic pharmacology that scaled up to make sense in gross perception, which was the exact kind of model I was looking for.

The more I analyzed the various properties of the flicker or pulsation for each drug, the more I realized that this specific pulsing function was the thing that caused each drug to produce unique geometric hallucinations, like Chladi forms taking on different standing wave patterns on steel plates resonating at different frequencies. I then realized that each hallucinogen could be modeled with a unique interrupt frequency and properties of saturation attack, decay, sustain, and release (ADSR) to describe the onset and feel of distinct hallucinations. An ADSR envelope is a wave modeling technique used in electronic synthesizers to shape the tones and sounds of various musical instruments, but can be used to model the “voice” for any standing wave. The ADSR envelope for each hallucinogen corresponds to receptor agonism and affinity, which naturally shapes the tone and feel of each hallucinogen’s unique sensory patterns. After reducing hallucinogenic action to a function of wave interference in perception, it was then only natural to extrapolate hallucination as a cascading event that starts with a small, stable, perturbation in perceptual feedback that grows in amplitude over time to entrain the functional output of the entire system. This model does not rely on anything other than targeted receptor agonism to drive the resulting emergent process.
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constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Fascinating. I hadn't heard of PIT. Sure ramps up the interest in physics. I'll dig through the psychedelics thread a bit more.

I love it when metaphors are expanded beyond their initial application - you always seem to get interesting results. This interview makes me wonder about the potential of willed transmission of certain frequencies, and whether or not this can be exercised by means of some meditation techniques.

Yeah the dreamachine didn't amount to anything more than a cool lamp in my case. Granted, it was half-scale, and I never spent any considerable duration sitting before it.
 
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