This is that

The resolving power is a power arising from reflection - matter is referred from the effortless coping of automaticity when events are anomalous, unintelligible.

The Easter events are interpreted many different ways in the new testament, but almost always the interpretations draw on earlier writings. In Acts 2, Peter uses the formula 'this is that' (of which the prophet spoke) to declare the meaning of the sign of tongues as good news. This is that announes and creates or enables a recognition.

The second 'this is that' is the declaration that shapes society, according to John Searle's elegant formulation. 'This' is legal tender (in our community). 'This' is a crime (in the context). Once established on a background collective intentionality and network of values, these institutions (money, marriage, manners, nations).

The way we work means that the way we each work can be quite like the way we all work. (Marvin Minsky's
Society of Mind is probably an interesting point of reference.)

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Whenever it is damp, drizzly november in my soul

The perfect answer to a damp drizzly May:

And of course, sitting in the warm living room blogging with my feet on the coffee table.  There needs to be a fair bit of that too.

Kant

ITunesU has an 8 lecture Kant course (with interesting side notes on strangely neglected prebyterian minister Thomas Reid of a similar time) by Dan Robinson. It is a walk through the critique of pure reason. I must now read that.

I won't try to summarise what little i've learned, but the synthetic unity of apperception (the experience of being a united self) seems connected (to me) to the unity of the blank universe filling field of neurons of which i have written before. More to come, i hope.

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Obama's Oresteia

Aechylus' Oresteia is a three-play account of the end of the curse on the house of Atreus. Plagued by tragedy and murder, revenge for revenge for revenge, their plight is finally resolved by the Gods, and is found to have mirrored a rupture among the Gods.

Rational Apollo, bright sun, is ascendant, and all of Greece has turned his way. The Furies, older Gods, bloodier, more passionate, earthier, more feminine spirits are resentful - they are no longer esteemed, no longer hold a place in Athenian minds and hearts.

A similar predicament faces Obama. Rational, doing all for the best, he has given no breath to the darker passions, the selfish, prideful, properly possessive, protective furies. Palin is almost an ideal voice for this force, irrational but strong in defensiveness, shrill in pride, secretive but self-publicising. And not defeated by rationality - so Obama has no weapons against her.

His major success against this energy is the death of OBL, demonstrating and satisfying some of the dionysian/demoniac energy in the furies. But I think he needs more.

The Oresteia asks the Furies to attach their pride to Athens, to its laws and Government. The current obsession with American exceptionalism, religion and the Constitution are fascinating correlates, but somehow Obama is unable to be Mr America in a satisfying way to people. I think he needs an account of himself as a tragic hero of rationality, doomed by Dionysian reality.

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Theory for a Tristrapedia

Zygotsky:  "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals."

Harold's Big Announcement

Like the great prophet Zarquon*, I'm slightly late to the end of the world, but still, no one has put this out there yet:

Deuteronomy 18:20-22 (New International Version)²⁰ But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death.”
 ²¹ You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD?” ²² If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.

Harold Camping needs to stop with the specific dates right now. Atheists are not needed to disabuse him and his followers - conventional, scriptural Christianity is perfectly capable of judging false prophets.


(On the question of whether 'bible interpretation' is prophecy, I say yes, you presume to prophesy when you say the Bible says something it does not plainly say.


PPS.  Readership Lunatic Fringe - this is an Old Testament Law.  Jesus died for Harold Camping.)


*Douglas Adams Reference

The Past of Shopping

I see some reports at news online (murdoch, don't visit) that people are shopping online too much and that the retailers of Australia are in despair. People apparently feel a retailers contribution is worth 5%; many retailers routinely mark up furniture etc by over 100%. Something has to give.

And what is giving way is the non-internet market. All the hand-wringing won't help - as long as rents and labour costs are high, internet marketing will win. This has been obvious to me for years. The property boom and the commercial property boom with it have probably set unrealistic rent goals. The only thing opening or continuing to run a shop had to recommend it was that people are creatures of economically irrational habit. But economics is only possible because that breaks down, because rationality breaks through.

I will be interested to see whether the IT revolution really leads to devaluation of human labour, or whether we find ever-more connectivity that demans judgment and skill available only from human beings. I am inclined to read the destiny of human labour under dwindling demand from the destiny of people in film and tv. There is less work overall, and more of that little is low skill (reality tv), degrading (reality tv, 2.5 men, home shopping), and false (home shopping, current affairs). There is always room for some highly creative, highly skilled work, but only a small proportion of people actually see success through coincidence of their skill and the world's need.

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The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift

I watched this film in two stages and my review is in two parts.

Part 1. This is a terrible film, full of godawful sexism, meaningless machismo, teenagers who should be working hard in school and feeling angst but aren't, and dialogue that sometimes seems written as a stanley fish parody of itself.

Part 2. Despite the above, I liked it. It knew what it was - a jingoistic hymn to being 18, driving fast and being transparently too interested in girls. It hit its story points, and the creation of the last racer from the wreck of his father and the wreck of his dead mentor's loaner was a genuine story turn, not a stupid farrago like the similar car upgrade in Grease.

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The nation state is a power machine made of violence

Yesterday's front page at the age quoted this lovely expression translated from a senior chinese general. I couldn't have put it better myself. Of course, it's easier for him - he lives in China.

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Torture in Gene Wolfe

One of the difficulties in recommending The Book of the New Sun to friends is Wolfe's approach to torture. Severian, the main character, begins as an orphan apprentice of the Order of the Seekers after Truth and Penitence commonly call the Guild of Torturers. In the Matachin Tower, the guild maintains an ancient trade in the Commonwealth serving the single ruler, the Autarch (the self-ruling). They are one of many ancient guilds in a future world in which every scrap of the earth has been mined and turned to machinery, broken down and been buried and mined again - and in politics too every system has been tried, and every tradition and mode of living and structure of society is still to be found in some form. The Guild of Torturers have their place. The secret of their Guild (spoilers!) is that in all the ancient rotting corrupt commonwealth of institutions, the Guild alone is the only sound stone, the only truly obedient, never inflicting more pain, but never less, than ordered. Only when a man will do the unthinkable do you have his complete obedience.

(Compare with George Orwell in 1984:

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"
 Winston thought.
 "By making him suffer," he said.
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them back together again in new shapes of your own choosing....In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything.")

When an Autarch tells old Master Palaemon, Severian's old teacher, of plans to reform the guild, the following dialogue ensues.

“It will not avail. If I offend you, Autarch, I ask your indulgence for my age...but still it will not avail. You will find in the end that you require men to do what we do.  You may call it healing, if you wish.  That has been done often. Or ritual. That has been done too.  But you will find the thing itself grows more terrible in its disguise. Will you imprison those undeserving of death? You will find them a mighty army in chains. You will discover that you hold prisoners whose escape would be a catastrophe, and that you need servants who will wreak justice on those who have scores to die in agony.  Who else will do it?"
“No one will wreak such justice as you.  You say our mercy extends from sun to Sun, and we hope it is so. By our mercy we will grant even the foulest a quick death. Not because we pity them, but because it is intolerable that good men should spend a lifetime dispensing pain.”
His head came up and the lenses flashed.  For the only time in all the years I had known him, I was able to see the youth he had been. “It must be done by good men.  You are badly advised, Autarch! What is intolerable is that it should be done by bad men.” 

Here there are two arguments. The first argument for torture is pragmatic - that a society will always have reason to inflict suffering on non-conforming people (which is most economically inflicted speedily - note the massive imprisoned population of the present-day USA), and the second is that frankly admitting what is happening makes it the least terrible - perhaps because it is easier to see that prisoners should not be tortured than that they should not be 'exploited for intelligence.'  Even today, many prisoners would prefer to take lashes or lose a finger or perhaps suffer a waterboarding as an alternative to prison.

The fundamental distinction between Wolfe's world and that of Orwell.  Wolfe's Autarch stands for so many things that are wrong, and yet is the last human ruler, and the hope for a new sun for urth. The Autarch represents a system that is Human, accepting and incorporating everything a human has in him or her - a congruence which is Good, even Holy. The non-conforming person is anti-life, evil.  Orwell's Party are fundamentally anti-human, aiming to strip away everything except power, and the power of suffering.  And yet, the resolution of the Book of the New Sun leans against torture because a day is coming and has indeed come and the time is short.

But none of this is the difficulty: I have no problem publishing this argument myself.  The real difficulty is that Wolfe does not shy away from portraying the horror of torture, the exercise and refinement of skills to produce suffering and degradation for their own sake. Unless you are a student of primitive mythology or the practices of ancient peoples (e.g. the Romans) in their cruelest mode, you should find parts of this series disturbing, even mildly traumatising. They are unspeakable.  In this Wolfe is like Severian himself, able to inflict the unthinkable in order that the object might be achieved.

The darkness

Gene Wolfe, in 'The Book of the New Sun' gives a wise nun opportunity to analyse a story.  A good man had turned bad, after some changes in his life.  The nun explains that the plant of a man's life does not grow up into the light unless it also puts its roots down into the dirty darkness of the earth.  It is redolent of the parable of the sower.

This is reminiscent of Giant Despair from The Pilgrims Regress, who showed people their insides as things of horror.  Pilgrim realises finally that it is because things from inside should not be visible - if they are visible, something horrible has happened, and rightly, they are tainted with that horror.  But in modest darkness one's bowels do their dirty but wholesome work and we live on.

Heidegger explained with differential equations

A differential equation is one that captures the relations among relations.  The rate of change of this is determined by the quantity of that. The amount of heat lost depends on temperature difference, and as heat is lost, the temperature difference reduces. Differential equations are essential tools for engineers.  But, they don't specify actual behaviour - the actual behaviour is a solution to a differential equation.  So the temperature D.E. might look something like dT/dt = -kT where k is a constant representing something about how big the exposed surface is and how well it emits etc etc.  (It might not look anything like that actually, I struggled with DEs).

That differential equation doesn't tell you what the temperature is, though.  You need to know the starting time and starting temperature, but it still isn't an equation that you can just read an answer off.  To find that, you need to make a leap - what kind of equation might satisfy this DE?  We remember that d/dx e^x = e^x, and it gives us an idea that d/dt e^(kTt) might look something like e^kTt and thus enable us to make a derivative function that can be equal to the function its a derivative of.  And so on.  (I really need to brush up on this stuff, gosh, I'm flubbing this explanation of DEs terribly.)

Anyway, Heidegger reminds me of differential equations.  He's interested in the way everything is always already in relationship, and he tries to see through the visible behaviour to the deeper, 'more primordial' structure.  The 'ontic' is the e^x. A good description of it will make your fortune and give you a law.  But the ontological is the DE.  The 'ontic' exhibits a complexity and richness that draws you in: but the DE shows you something more general.

Spirituality

Chelle at RedDress has posted about 'spirituality' in some modern re-adoptions of mystical Christianity. This is an interesting subject, because I always feel that the word spirit is one which stands for 'something that we don't know what it is' in a lot of Christian thinking. Chelle has provided me with the first explicit definitions I think I have ever read.  The quotes and discussion concern the mystical/experiential approaches to knowing God.  I don't have much direct experience of that practice of contemplation, and reading her post through was nowhere near enough to connect with it, so I'll touch on it only briefly.

I think the english word is given its most intelligible meaning in the phrase 'the spirit of the game'.  The spirit of soccer is the promotion of flair of the feet, graceful intersecting arcs of ball and head, adroit slide tackles, discipline, tough defence, running down the clock.  The rules as written can't help but permit a 'run into the box and fall over' approach - but it's not in the spirit of the game.  The spirit of AFL is different, more about being a mob and outrunning and outfighting and outcatching and out-kicking and out-teaming your opponents on a huge field over a long period. Bumping between players without the ball is intrinsic to AFL, anathema to soccer.  The spirit, then, is a set of background values on certain feelings, gestures, images, movements, which exist behind the rules and represent the life, the framing good thing attained when the compact to play by rules is entered into. It is a shape for the collective intentionality of the playing community.

Evil spirits speaking through man of Gadarenes said: 'My name is Legion, for we are many.'  This is a chilling verse for me (Gene Wolfe has an excellent short story about this too, btw). The best interpretation of this man's affliction that I've heard is that he is casting himself out of his community, and his cutting and stoning himself is enacting his cast-out-ness, by the many, who live in him. Jesus then casts out his cast-out-ness, rejecting what should be rejected, freeing him to return to a community. Somehow, casting out by many was so rooted in this man that it gave itself a name and presumed to answer questions for him.  It was a large and complex, self-maintaining shape in his intentionality, a sinister one, a person or more.

Conversely, Jesus said 'My words are spirit.' What Jesus says enters one's intentionality, it becomes part of the aboutness possible to one, it builds up a stance one can take. They are the words of eternal life, of great resolving power.  Paul says 'It is sown a mortal body, it is raised a spiritual body.' The spiritual body is permanent, perfect and powerful.

I think spiritual being has no gap between its meaning and its being.  I think it is these intentional patterns and shapes, poorly realised in human grey and white matter, but perfectly realised in the new matter of the resurrection.  (I do also think there is enough process going on in the air and earth that a spiritual being need not be bound to a human mind, although a mind becomes is a natural home.)

To return briefly to contemplation, what little I know about the psychology of meditation is from John Kihlstrom at Berkeley.  His account is that serious meditation disrupts established habits (specifically, automaticity of them), and that makes it easier to learn new ones. To my idea of the spiritual, this could be powerful.  By contemplation of the cross, I break down a habit of self-condemnation and self-indulgence.  By heavy contemplation in a rigorous course of meditation, perhaps I break it down more deeply.

Anyone follow all that?

Leslie Cannold

At ABC Religion Online, Leslie Cannold has another polemic against 'scripture' in schools, and once again she is clearly angry and confused.  She is angry about two things: first that there is a system of religious instruction by religious people in schools, and second that Christians unfairly dominate it. She is also angry about the funding, presence and role of school chaplains.

First, does secular government schooling necessarily exclude religious belief?  It depends on the model of secularism. As per my previous blog post, I believe that secularism is maintained as a compromise between people of all kinds. But I think education that doesn't include answers to life's big questions is inadequate.  So I think for the sake of all our children, it is worthwhile having as fair a system as we can construct to introduce children to many of the alternative universes their community inhabits.  This is, I am told, the English enlightenment view of secularism. Secularity is a concession we all make so as not to try each others tolerance too much.  The French enlightenment view is that maintaining king and god-free space is the job of the state, once you chop their heads off - hence the bans on the burqa in schools, which seems to most Australians to be too much state power over the individual. I don't think children are immune from life's big questions. I think education can and should open to the whole human experience to the educatee.  Obviously there are different priorities, but there is no fundamental reason that religion should not be taught.

You may be saying 'Of course not, comparative religion, teach that.' This will not serve.  The authentic voice of belief must be heard, and viable (if available) modern believers should present themselves. Third-person presentation of a system includes as the frame a rejection of it.  Religion is a worldview, a complete(-ish) idea of being - a whole human believing it is the phenomena you want to present.  Leslie is terribly anxious about evangelism (explaining the gospel in its own terms) and proselytising (converting people), but I think that's the point.  People in our society find systematised answers to life's big questions (whether thought-through atheism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc) helpful.  Christianity is not for everyone; but neither is atheism.

On the second point, that Christians unfairly dominate it, I have no strong objection, except to point out that it's the government that shells out the money.  Christians are very magical (not really) and sinister (sometimes a bit), but this (funding religious education coordinating bodies and chaplains for each school) is the action of ministers and public servants.  It is a real shame that the Christians involved took advantage.  They shouldn't have - it would have put them on firmer footing now. But it can be corrected in years to come.

The Desktertainment Proposal

Secretary Desk Unit

This is designed simply and is intended to be simple to construct, and to use inexpensive materials. I estimate I can make it (badly) myself for around $1000, including purchasing some tools.

I intend to put some electronic music equipment on the top ‘drawer’ and leave the bottom drawer as bare workspace. It is used either as a desk with a laptop on the sloped surface, or, with the sloped surface raised, as a music workstation. When not being used, it sits in the living room and is acceptable to my wife.
The component pieces are:
 A base of 1800 x 450mm.
 Two symmetrical end walls, 450 base x 230 height, with a large triangular truncation from 60mm height on the front edge to 200mm from the back edge. This is about 124 degrees.
 A two-part front panel joined at a long piano hinge.
o The upper part 1775 wide by290 deep.
o The lower part 1800 wide by 75 deep, mounted so as to be flush with the bottom of the base, protruding slightly above the line of the upper part.
 Two desk-surfaces mounted as drawers, able to slide out for use as workspace (loaded with about 10kg, so fairly strong drawer slides would be preferable). These are 1770 (allowing 10mm for each end wall and 5mm for each drawer slide etc) x 410 deep.
 A 110mm deep fixed internal shelf mounted on the back wall 80mm from the inside top.
 A back structure with two long windows (for power cords) one above and one below the fixed internal shelf. Overall 240 x 1800, but this could be made from parts.

Materials:
 Inexpensive real wood – probably Pine? This is a prototype more than an heirloom.
 The design was drawn using a standard 10mm thickness, which was probably a mistake. It will be workable with material up to 20mm thick.

Joinery:
 This plan makes no real allowances for joinery. I have assumed that dowels, nails and screws can be used that require no additional volume (e.g. corner bracing). It is box shaped, so as long as the material is stiff enough, it should be reasonably strong.
Finish:
 a translucent white (blue-grey tint) wash which is matt and allows some of the wood grain pattern to be seen. This would match some existing furniture. If not, I can paint it a basic white myself.
 Chamfering: either none, or simple 2x2mm 45 degree chamfer.
Variations:
 Given the low budget, changes to use standard cuts of wood are desirable.
 Any stupidity on my part should be corrected.

In situ on filing cabinets / Ikea Alex drawer units. With home entertainment center. An earlier version with a three-part front panel. A good piano-stool / coffee table combo is needed.

This view shows the cutaway and the kit slid out for use.

Ahh, detailed drawings.  These are from a second version of the model.  The lid is in the 'open position'.

Back view, showing windows for power cords etc:

This rather confusing image shows an endwall foregrounded for some dimensions. There are better images further on.

The lid has simple studs at each end which run in the track at the top of the endwall:

Front view with front panel raised.

Some of the dimensions are slightly out, probably because I picked off the wrong point. 229.8 should be 230. 79.8 should be 80, etc.  I'm hoping that when downloaded, this detail is regained.

Excerpt from Philosophy as Metanoesis

p12 "True self-consciousness cannot come about through one continuous medium joining God and the realive.  The real awakening of self-consciousness in its religious or existential dimension comes only through 'death-and-resurrection' of a negative transformation that takes place between the absolute and the relative. A transforming mediation between self-surrender in metanoesis (repentance - ap0) and resurrection by Other-power can, together with the evidence of self-consciousness, provide philosophy with an objective ground.  As the sole self-mediating realization of philosophy, it seems to me that metanoesis is, therefore, open to everyone.  There is no other way of providing philosophy in the future with a sufficient transcendent ground for its absolute independence that to take the experience of action-faith-witness (gyo-shin-sho) as the starting point of our philosophy."

Sympathy and Parasympathy

I've been thinking about stress. I have a tendency to get stressed pretty easily, and also to neglect behaviour that would do me good.  I procrastinate, apparantly below optimal stress, and then have to focus a lot of energy in not enough time to finish as I'd wish to.  The sympathetic nervous system (as I understand it) is set up to help you run up your energy system, to increase the activation. Part of how it works is to see elevated excitement and elevate it further.  I imagine this is the reason I can't do any strenuous exercise for a couple of hours after receiving a shot of allergens as part of my desensitisation: while my body damped down a stress reaction to a sudden invasion, if it noted that I also had a higher core temp and sharply increasing metabolic rate, I might go into anaphylaxis.

The parasympathetic system has the damping-down power.  It keeps your powder dry.  I think it is responsible for 'cool' in people, and why we like to be around them.  As long as we're awake, we're stressing ourselves and keeping alert.  The cool are doing it a little easier, have a fair bit more in reserve.

I would like to be cooler, to run smoother. What is good for this?  Exercise above 30% of VO2 Max sets off some parasympathetic systems, apparently.  Meditation and yoga-style exercise both seem to help.  Cutting out stressors in diet and lifestyle (coffee, alarm clocks, low-nutrition foods incl alcohol) are all indicated.

Beyond this though, I think there are practices, disciplines which need to become second nature, to be part of how we live.  I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger in his vanity pic 'Pumping Iron' saying:

'If someone steals my car right now, from out front, I can't be bothered with that.  It's insured, I'll call the police, but it's gone now and I've got a competition coming up.'

and also:

'In a way it was sad, you know my mother rang me from Austria and said 'Arnold, you must come home, your father has died.'  The competition was in only six weeks!  I said 'I can't do it, the competition is only six weeks, I can't take any time off. He's dead now, anyway. I'll come see you when I've finished.'

In a way, it is sad.  But it is Resolution: its the ability to say 'This matters more than that - I'm not going to tear myself apart on a dilemma.'  This is something more to learn.

Readings

Currently reading 'Philosophy as Metanoetics' - Hajime Tanabe, student of Heidegger, and, it turns out, reader of Kierkegaard. Also 'The Sunset Limited' a playform novel by Cormac McCarthy.

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Tyre

Grabbed a Schwable marathon plus bike tyre today. It is heavily armoured, so should outlast my bike. It will want to - at $75 it is probably 50% of the residual value of the bike (which is artificially aged by neglect and me weighing over 100kg).

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Buses

I am the only person on this bus. It will be full on the return journey, but the roads this evening are choked with single occupant cars and now, a single occupant bus. Don't tell me we can't do better than this.

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Robot Defense Free

Today i completed the 'huge score' achievement of 50,000,000 lifetime points in Robot Defense, one of the more popular Android games. Given it takes me about 20 mins even on the highest rated game available to accumulate 200000 points, this is at least 80 hrs investment, and probably much more.

The game is well-balanced, and a very good model of drama. In the course of the game you make many choices in the dilemma of apparently equal goods - missiles or ant-air cannon? Augment the slow tower or convert it to a mine? And the opposition steadily mounts until you fail, a tragedy, for which the seeds almost always appear to have been sewn early (poor layout, not enough anti-vehicle, not enough anti-air, oh my foolish and misplaced enthusiasms!). If you complete 100 levels intact, all is well after all, a comedy, with the affirming moral that human, not robot kind will forever dominate the earth.

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The look

Frances of Bookish asked about the rather lairy site design.  I quite like it, but it is very high-energy.  The main point of reference on this subject for me is public appearances from Jim Hacker from Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.  If you have some very upsetting change to announce, if you want to depart radically from the established way of things, you announce it with a background of many leatherbound books and an atmosphere of rich mahogony*.  If you have no initiatives, solutions or changes to offer, if you want to hide the fact that its more mealy mouthed wittering and more of the same reality by dictat of the civil service, you need a high energy yellow wallpaper, and synthesised intro music.

*little Anchorman there.

Mother's Day

Hi Mum!
Happy mother's day.

Eccentric, Deluded.

My father requests a post on differentiating normalcy, eccentricity or oddness and delusion and detachment from reality.  So here goes my whole interim yet not original theory of consciousness.  There are four parts:

Experience, Recognition, Analysis (a word for what Consciousness does, but still looking for a better word), and Acts (things you do. Not resting).  You can crudely put them in a diagram.

The ERAA 'loop'

This is a very simple structure:

·         Experience really happens to you, the real you’re in.

·         Perception brings it into mental handling: there are some problems with it, so it gets its own arrow.

·         Recognition is the basic way we relate to the world.  It draws a collection of situations and the practices appropriate to them.  It is continuous, fast, parallel and automatic.

·         That collection of situations and practices is the background – a non-representational totality of familiarity accumulated from experience, which stands under words and thoughts in understanding.

·         Recognition Refers interpreted situations minimally to the conscious understanding.  The very familiar is assumed, and the unchallenged assumption becomes very familiar.

·         The Analytic part of the mind, the consciousness, is a slow-time, one thing at a time zone.  There are a bunch of different faculties and intelligences up here, and the decision making space in which you can revise understandings.

·         Resolve.  The resolving power of consciousness is often referred to as decision making, but I think it manifests a little differently for different personality types.  An insight that enables understanding can be referred to the recognition to reframe a perception and render it familiar.

·         Automaticity of recognition and of action is obvious in walking and balancing, in the way we understand other people immediately by their expressions.

·         Controlled actions are under moment to moment supervision from the analytic consciousness. We use them where there are no automatic resources available.

This structure is modestly well supported in a few fields.  Philosophy (Hume, Hegel?, Heidegger, Searle) furnished the Background.  Heidegger describes most of this, but I believe he would find the separation of a box for analytic understanding troubling.  It is a little like the notion of the pure subject at the heart of all of us, which he would say is just an artefact of things we are familiar with.  Automaticity is a well-supported interpretation of some well-known psych experiments (e.g. Stroup interference - with the off colour words (Green, Brown) words).  The whole thing is not too far from the decision ladder in Cognitive Work Analysis, nor from Recognition Primed Decision Making in Cognitive Task Analysis, although anything with Cognitive in its name is probably in some denial of Heidegger's point that the background is not fully representational - you will find it exhausting to try to enumerate the knowledge embodied there. This point is also supported by Wittgensteins investigations into how things mean. It is also mappable (in military theory) to John Boyd's Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) 'loop' and to the Act, Sense, Decide, Adapt loop of the Adaptive Army program.

So then, to a question my father asked about eccentricity, oddness and delusion.  These are problems with recognition.  A paranoic has a problem with their brain chemistry and their world is almost literally a nightmare.  Because of the intensity of the psych distress, their recognition reads the world as situations appropriate to that.  People around them are either enemies or allies, and people who they should love but feel nothing about, they may assume are robot replacements. The problems with recognition occur when your background of practices and experiences are not applicable to your world.

Within the communal background, we stake out our little patch, and we tend to do it as if in a campsite – watching our neighbours cautiously, setting up close but not too close. Eccentricity is, I think, about taking a space at a distance from the center of gravity, but maintaining (at least in affection for it) that it is the center of some deeper reality as an important personal commitment, a defining comitment.  The eccentric may choose to move as they move through life.

Delusion afflicts us all when we misrecognize.  Delusion as mental illness is being trapped in misrecognition either because the referring function is ineffective, or because the conscious- analytic parts are not able to find a resolution, or because the resolution is ineffective.  These situations can develop because of brain damage, drugs, or commitment to propositions that are not part of the conventional background. Bad 'propositions' (in which I would include deep ideas, inchoate senses of self etc) can be received from the outside world or manufactured to protect and paper over weaknesses, flaws and incapacities.  

Zizek says the lesson of psychoanalysis is that 'our story', the account we would like to give of ourselves to justify ourselves to others, is a lie we manufacture so we can stand the sight of ourselves.  This, though, may be true of the person crowding into the center as much as the fringe.  

I feel like the question is a good one to set up an Intervention on me for maintaining a delusion as a philosophic blogger...  I may keep you posted.

Neitzsche

Poor old Nietzsche said some funny things.  'That which does not destroy me makes me stronger' is a popular one, opening Kanye West's song 'Stronger'.  'Do you go to a woman?  Remember your whip,' is usually saved for "[Category], what stupid jerks they were/are" where Category takes the value men, philosophers, 19th Century men, Germans, people with syphillus, people who go mad and so on... Still another: 'A woman is a thousand riddles, and the answer to all of them is pregnancy.'

The thing is, he is saying something that not everyone always believed was false.  In this post I will try to give a miniblog example for each which shows the sense of it.  All of them are also indefensible nonsense in many important modern contexts.  Please, ladies, there is no need to comment on that.

"That which does not destroy me makes me stronger."  Andy Morgan of Yale Uni has done some research on post-traumatic stress disorder which shows that people who are resistant to it have a high ability to produce and release neuropeptide Y, which damps the response to cortisol/stress reaction and helps people keep their heads.  It is the physical equivalent of the psychological moment of 'the fear is there to help me respond well.' Neuropeptide Y and other stress control hormones (DHEA, Testosterone) and patterns grow in strength by being released regularly but not exhausted.  If exhausted, they start to kick in later and the stress becomes higher and when they do kick in they are inadequate. You need to be stressed, but not exhausted, and you will grow stronger.  (One way to practice releasing them is exercise to beyond 30% of V02max)

'Do you go to a woman? Remember your whip.'  When I was engaged, my fiance asked how I was feeling about the approaching nuptials.  I was excited but very anxious about maintaining my autonomy, and likened marriage to being trapped in a cage with a tiger. (She was happy to hear that.)  I think that is the true sense of this.  In marriage, romantic notions of smooth peaceful self-sacrifice quickly give way to the alarming realisation that you are sharing your living space with a top predator, a member of the most successful species ever to walk the earth (except beetles I suppose. and bacteria.).

'A woman is a thousand riddles, and the answer to all of them is pregnancy.'  To save this one, I'm going to have to make it gender neutral.  My example is the ADFA cadet who distributed video of sex with a woman to his friends.  They are just an example of the theme picked up in this essay in the Atlantic - that men seem to want sex to be more. If offered sex on generous terms, there seems to be an impulse to go for more. Video her - now she's really ****ed.  But of course, she's not. Or at least, not in a way that doesn't leave you even more so. Why why why would this be part of what men do?  I think the answer might be pregnancy. It takes a special kind of motivation to cause a pregnancy, given that, as an alarming work colleague once described it 'Some o' that shit (pause to marvel horrifiedly) you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.'

Well, that should be a lesson for me.  Never try to defend the indefensible.

Pax Techne

In the days of man's innocency, it is believed that there was little or no war, because there was always some new land to settle. New lands could be settled, and while there might be confrontation, real killing seems to have been rare. This stage lasted tens of thousands of years before the world was so full people were squeezed to the margins and space became a matter of life and death. (This discounts the extinction of early hominids as non-war.)

Is there now, in a transition to an information age, a new landscape to subdue? Is the possibility space of humanity a new frontier, a new world? Might it extend away to infinity and give living room to everyone?

Information is tricky stuff. I rather like Claude Shannon's information quantification. He suggested that each bit informs to the extent it confirms or expectation, and a sequence of bits as much as it confirms or denies the combined probability distribution for messages. The quantity is a log of the number of bits (assuming each bit is unpredictable - probability 50% of 0 or 1) - this seems to catch the way information multiplies as it aggregates.

Being is a matter of ways, a subject for 'hows'. It is something that technology fits perfectly. The practices we learn should make us a little more capable, the knowledge of ways to be allowing the living room on actual, scarce earth to grow. The possibility of transition to a new background, a substantial one of the base material of the universe, no longer mediated through a biosphere, of knowledge taking us into a future without war is desirable.

But we'd have to get comfortable with Us. And for that, Techne is a false god.

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Of hunger pt1

The overhead light blinks.  The man looks up from a microscope.
'We have any more of those?'
'No.'  The woman gives a tight-lipped smile.
Him - 'I think its time.'
Her - 'Because of the light?'
He nods.  'We're running out, love. We can't stay down here.'
She gives the same tight smile.  'You know we can't go up there either.'
'It's time to try.'

They eat a meal - corned beef, mash made from powder, the last wine. In the morning, they toss a coin.
'Heads'
'I win.'
'And just wait till you see what you've won.'