Besides the usual suspects, those social effects associated with the 1960s counterculture, i.e. lots of questionable metaphysical speculation and sex, one of the things I've read that was supposedly a direct result of the psychedelic era is the huge explosion in information processing that's taken place, especially since the advent of the personal computer. Things like object oriented programming and the Internet as we know it today were, according to some, not possible until a bunch of the right sort of folks (those with a peculiar com sci predisposition) had shifted their neural processing, ever so slightly, in a way that allowed for a particular brand of visual logic that could be shared by a community of researchers and dabblers, and who would carve out the world we are living in today. Hence, the primary skillset driving this change was a highly attuned visual imagination, something traditionally associated with artistic ability.
Along my own travels, I've also noticed that musicians (people obviously tending more toward auditory than visual inclination) often have a tremendous intuition for data processing as well. I worked with a couple of concert level pianists, who were about the best programmers I've known. One was so close to being among the very best performers in the world that he gave up playing altogether, for a number of years, out of grief. The other was even odder, he could read in about nine different languages (most of which he taught himself) and was rumored to belong to some cultish spiritualist organization. I had a tape he had given me of one of his compositions, that he had played himself, with a few string players, something that reminded me of Debussey or Ravel, not anything overtly challenging (afterall, he was a COBOL programmer) but rich enough to inspire strong admiration on my part.
During this same period, the models of cog sci have filled out as well, going from Miller's, Gallanter's and Pribram's sequential TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) model, to complexities like Conceptual Blends, Emergence, Self-organizing Systems, etc., and even a term like "cognitive" has mutated from something akin to explicit rational thinking to a hydra-headed and self-reflexive analog system functioning mainly on the unconscious level.
But none of this should be taken too seriously. What we have here is no more than the current mythology. In fact, it might turn out that our current notions of complexity in the sciences are nothing but our recent scientific worldview trying to take into account those phenomena that only superstition could talk to previously.
Where once we had day and night, light and dark, Apollo and Dionysus, we now have conscious and unconcscious processes (not 'minds', anymore, btw).
I'd like to point out, however, that just because the sun shines on things, and makes them more available to the eye, doesn't necessarily make the world more sensible. Rather, the enormous amount of information that becomes available can in itself become a source of delirium. The god of poetry and medicine was (is?) just as much a drunkard as his wino brother, therefore. And the proof is that his spokeswoman, the Python Priestess of Delphi, often communicated in word salads which took a team of specialists (priests) to unscramble.
Once a poet, always a poet, but people usually don't think of Apollo as a Surrealist (or schizoanalyst).
What this comes down to is that there may be no such thing as gods and goddesses, darkness and lightness (other than relative perceptions), order and chaos, or even a conscious and unconscious mind. There are certain types of thoughts, perhaps, that are possible to be processed consciously, but they tend to be the simplistic kinds. The purpose of the conscious mind may not be thinking at all, but only awareness, and using the thoughts derived at from other functions to guide us.
The only way something becomes conscious is through distortion, overgeneralization, and filtering most of the information out. This is how we begin to distinguish polarities, such as black and white, Israel and Palestine, work and the rest of life.
One should remember, as well, that the Sun is only a star that's close enough to seem to take the night away.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Thursday, September 13, 2007
That Gray Place
Truth is I don't know if it will ever be possible for you to feel great about your job. It's reallly kind of a sticky situation. I, myself, would much rather be spending my time reading and writing poetry, perhaps even pushing large boulders uphill, than doing what I do at work. The whole idea of it gives me a terrific sense of horror at times.
Other times I get caught up in some of the things I do when I'm there, helping people, solving problems, getting an idea across successfully. Granted, I'm not generally helping people in ways that are life-altering, nor are the ideas and solutions I'm offering earth-shattering. But the fact that those things can happen, somehow helps me get through the day. And besides that, it puts a roof over my family's heads and food in our bellies. Leave it at that.
But I can't leave it at that. Beneath this drab exterior is a person who is obsessed with changing the world (though rarely does he do anything to express this obsession, not outwardly, I realize). Maybe it's only really about being desperate enough. I'm not asking much, but I do at least want to ask, how might one change one's day job, so that a chain reaction goes off in one's life. And how might one set a chain reaction in other people around us so that little by little the virus is spread, and somehow we are living in another world?
It happens. We're obviously not living in the same world we were living in say 50 or 100 years ago. Everything's changed, the music, the technology, the way we transport ourselves about, even the way we treat other people, at least as far as our institutions go, or at least as far as they're supposed to work.
What I asked you to imagine last time I posted was perhaps quite a difficult task, I realize. Perhaps not even difficult, maybe absurd is a better word. Yes, quite loony and off the wall, I'd say. Mad as f@#k. I know because I've been trying it too. I'm along for the same ride your on, if, in fact, there is anyone out there at all, anyone listening in to the maniac behind the blog curtain.
On the surface it sounds like kind of an odd, but not too abnormal request, to consider what it might be like at one's day job, if you could transform it into a world that you would really want to live in. But how could such a thing be? Not for most of us. For most of us, it is the biggest compromise of our lives, possibly what makes it a lot less meaningful and pleasurable.
But from another point of view, this is what it takes. It takes a terrible leap over the chasm of unreason and into the land of the absurd. It takes something akin to dementia, schizophrenia, but not dementia or schizophrenia, but something opposite of that. This is what I believe Deleuze and Guattari are pointing at, to some extent, when they talk about deterritorialization, becoming a body without organs.
What I'm offering is not self help, not something that will especially improve one's performance, but just as easily self hurt. More likely neither, but a form of experimentation that is hopefully outside the categories of either side of the dilemna, something to do instead of.
This doesn't mean that there is no chance of a kind of satisfaction to be derived from such efforts. But these satisfactions will be different from those one ordinarily plans for and achieves by rote, or not.
These are not the satisfactions one already knows and can plan for, nor can expect in any way, shape or form. This is what you do not yet know how to experience.
Other times I get caught up in some of the things I do when I'm there, helping people, solving problems, getting an idea across successfully. Granted, I'm not generally helping people in ways that are life-altering, nor are the ideas and solutions I'm offering earth-shattering. But the fact that those things can happen, somehow helps me get through the day. And besides that, it puts a roof over my family's heads and food in our bellies. Leave it at that.
But I can't leave it at that. Beneath this drab exterior is a person who is obsessed with changing the world (though rarely does he do anything to express this obsession, not outwardly, I realize). Maybe it's only really about being desperate enough. I'm not asking much, but I do at least want to ask, how might one change one's day job, so that a chain reaction goes off in one's life. And how might one set a chain reaction in other people around us so that little by little the virus is spread, and somehow we are living in another world?
It happens. We're obviously not living in the same world we were living in say 50 or 100 years ago. Everything's changed, the music, the technology, the way we transport ourselves about, even the way we treat other people, at least as far as our institutions go, or at least as far as they're supposed to work.
What I asked you to imagine last time I posted was perhaps quite a difficult task, I realize. Perhaps not even difficult, maybe absurd is a better word. Yes, quite loony and off the wall, I'd say. Mad as f@#k. I know because I've been trying it too. I'm along for the same ride your on, if, in fact, there is anyone out there at all, anyone listening in to the maniac behind the blog curtain.
On the surface it sounds like kind of an odd, but not too abnormal request, to consider what it might be like at one's day job, if you could transform it into a world that you would really want to live in. But how could such a thing be? Not for most of us. For most of us, it is the biggest compromise of our lives, possibly what makes it a lot less meaningful and pleasurable.
But from another point of view, this is what it takes. It takes a terrible leap over the chasm of unreason and into the land of the absurd. It takes something akin to dementia, schizophrenia, but not dementia or schizophrenia, but something opposite of that. This is what I believe Deleuze and Guattari are pointing at, to some extent, when they talk about deterritorialization, becoming a body without organs.
What I'm offering is not self help, not something that will especially improve one's performance, but just as easily self hurt. More likely neither, but a form of experimentation that is hopefully outside the categories of either side of the dilemna, something to do instead of.
This doesn't mean that there is no chance of a kind of satisfaction to be derived from such efforts. But these satisfactions will be different from those one ordinarily plans for and achieves by rote, or not.
These are not the satisfactions one already knows and can plan for, nor can expect in any way, shape or form. This is what you do not yet know how to experience.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Utilization
Now that we've got a little bit of a tool box to call on, I want to perhaps suggest a little thought experiment. First something to get us started. I'd like us to think of how we might apply the categories of both Mr. Dilts and Mr. Burke to things we've talked about before. On the Belief/Value or Purpose level, I'd like to propose that we think back to Jean Genet, and the way he transformed every event of his prison life into something sacred and beautiful. The fact that his environment, and his actions as well, were in utter contradiction to the way we generally think of Christian paradise and saintliness, only makes his story more poignant, meaningful and real for us. He had such a need to live in a world permeating with love and the miraculous that he in essence made it happen.
On the level of Capabilities or Agency, we have the Curves or Strategies one uses to negotiate one's environment and to initiate behaviors. There are innumberable varieties of these, everything from tracking the spoon coming to your lips with your eyes, to making necessary adjustments with your hand, arm and neck to get it into your mouth, one for deciding how to judge whether the food you are eating is worth the effort, several for deciding whether this post is worth your time to read, a bunch that you use just to read it, which overlap with other curves that you use to make judgments about what is plausible or entertaining... I can go on forever.
What is significant here is to attempt to find some alignment between the Agency part and the Purpose part. Since there are a lot of things that you do with your mind, with your entire nervous system, in order to get through your day, there must be a few things that somehow correspond with what, in your heart of hearts, you'd like to believe is true about yourself and the world, as well as what you value.
Chances are, there is no task in particular, in your day-to-day work life, that serves your deepest core desires. You answer a phone, make copies on the copier, keep notes at a meeting, clean up after people, drive nails through wood, but none of this really has anything to do with that stuff that hits you now and then, when you hear a story from a friend, or even through the media, and it chokes you up, either makes you sad or suddenly misty, as if you were reminded of something you had meant to do in your life but had forgotten.
But there might be something in the WAY you answer the phone, or drive nails, or yell at the copier, or treat someone in need with tenderness, make an off-color joke, or snap the last stroke of a spitshine, that conveys something of that impulse.
Here is your assignment. All I ask is that you try for no more than an hour, no less than ten minutes, at some convenient time, if a convenient time happens to arise, to imagine what kind of world you would like to live in, not so much on the global scale (just yet) but within an environment you are familiar with, say your job for instance, and how you might paint that space with significance, as Genet would, in order for you to feel as though you were living in that world. And then imagine what things that you do, on a routine basis, and how, that might communicate to someone that you were part of that world, or that you were creating that world, just by living that way. And which things don't you do, that you could do, and how you would do them, knowing what you know about the world you are living in and want to live in, and what things, if there are any, might you even perhaps, if necessary, be willing to make tremendous sacrifices for, and not only for yourself, but out of a belief that it would bring something of great value (if that is possible) to those in your community, who you are a part of, and to those even beyond that.
Remember, there is no commitment involved in this. It is purely for entertainment. But what you entertain in the process may have a lot to say about the difference between where you are at the present, and who you could be at any moment.
On the level of Capabilities or Agency, we have the Curves or Strategies one uses to negotiate one's environment and to initiate behaviors. There are innumberable varieties of these, everything from tracking the spoon coming to your lips with your eyes, to making necessary adjustments with your hand, arm and neck to get it into your mouth, one for deciding how to judge whether the food you are eating is worth the effort, several for deciding whether this post is worth your time to read, a bunch that you use just to read it, which overlap with other curves that you use to make judgments about what is plausible or entertaining... I can go on forever.
What is significant here is to attempt to find some alignment between the Agency part and the Purpose part. Since there are a lot of things that you do with your mind, with your entire nervous system, in order to get through your day, there must be a few things that somehow correspond with what, in your heart of hearts, you'd like to believe is true about yourself and the world, as well as what you value.
Chances are, there is no task in particular, in your day-to-day work life, that serves your deepest core desires. You answer a phone, make copies on the copier, keep notes at a meeting, clean up after people, drive nails through wood, but none of this really has anything to do with that stuff that hits you now and then, when you hear a story from a friend, or even through the media, and it chokes you up, either makes you sad or suddenly misty, as if you were reminded of something you had meant to do in your life but had forgotten.
But there might be something in the WAY you answer the phone, or drive nails, or yell at the copier, or treat someone in need with tenderness, make an off-color joke, or snap the last stroke of a spitshine, that conveys something of that impulse.
Here is your assignment. All I ask is that you try for no more than an hour, no less than ten minutes, at some convenient time, if a convenient time happens to arise, to imagine what kind of world you would like to live in, not so much on the global scale (just yet) but within an environment you are familiar with, say your job for instance, and how you might paint that space with significance, as Genet would, in order for you to feel as though you were living in that world. And then imagine what things that you do, on a routine basis, and how, that might communicate to someone that you were part of that world, or that you were creating that world, just by living that way. And which things don't you do, that you could do, and how you would do them, knowing what you know about the world you are living in and want to live in, and what things, if there are any, might you even perhaps, if necessary, be willing to make tremendous sacrifices for, and not only for yourself, but out of a belief that it would bring something of great value (if that is possible) to those in your community, who you are a part of, and to those even beyond that.
Remember, there is no commitment involved in this. It is purely for entertainment. But what you entertain in the process may have a lot to say about the difference between where you are at the present, and who you could be at any moment.
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