Stimulus-Response Follies: The Ordering of Time

So I'm reading this book by Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Good stuff! So far it's doing a pretty darned good job of laying out the problem of consciousness and putting to rest some unnecessary and sometimes foolish assumptions which have been used as props along the way toward addressing this problem.

A major burden of the book is to put to final rest the notion that the mind must be precisely located. But while he blurs the boundaries which might have the mind bounded by the brain (it seems pretty clear that it has to incorporate sensory inputs which are distributed at least throughout the body), he draws the line at allowing it - the mind - to spill out from the body altogether.

This restriction can be restated by his statement early on (p. 115) that "Unless there is 'precognition' in the brain (an extravagant hypothesis we will postpone indefinitely) . . . " In other words, the mind must be contained within the bounds of the skin.

Here's why I make that my contention. Precognition could be redefined subtly but trivially if we were to allow that matter outside the corporeal self might also be considered a part of rather than apart from the mind. Why is it that I must suppose that objects outside of me must somehow be represented in my mind before I can be said to have become conscious of them?

Surely I need some sensory stimulation before I will be willing to make a verbal or other commitment to the presence of objects outside of me. But essentially that only means that I must be pretty sure that someone not me would also be willing to make the same commitment.

There are also things inside of me about which I might be similarly reticent to commit, even in my brain, but would prefer to defer to some other observer, say a surgeon, before committing to anything like conscious knowledge about my sensations.

So if I don't need anything like a mental representation, then why not just leave the stimulus where it belongs, outside my body but inside my mind.

If I can be allowed to talk that way then suddenly it becomes unproblematical to think of something like precognition actually occurring. In other words there are configurations to the mind which won't ever, or at least not in time, raise to the level of consciousness but which nonetheless trigger apparent responses.

When asleep, or when buffeted by the wind or when Doctor Maxwell taps our knee with his reflex hammer, there is no need to bother the notion of consciousness with the fact of a response.

Still, it remains common to speak as though response requires a stimulus even when, as in the case of complex systems describable by chaos theory, say, it would be deuced hard if not impossible to tease out the cause from the effect: the stimulus from the response.

Without resorting to terms like chaos or complexity which might for all I know have highly technical definitions at odds with my usage, the same thing can be said of any system where it's hard to attribute cause (or intention or directionality). Sexual response, gravitational interactions, the weather.

It may be that the notion of directionality is itself a predilection - a mental construct imposed on reality and not  derived from it.

Anyhow, it strikes me as unlikely that conscious acts are ever the unambiguous result of stimuli. It seems much more supportable that we act, or invoke intention, when and only when there is some conceptual relation in our mind (even using the word "in" here goes a step too far) which makes sense enough to act.

This might happen on reflection, as when I suddenly remember that I left the stove turned on though I am too remote from it to have felt any heat. Though who knows how such thoughts are themselves initiated? But things not necessarily in the mind might also arrange themselves conceptually, let's say around the periphery of my physical limits, such that I respond as though to stimulus, when "in reality" the concept has formed itself despite me.

Rather than to act because of something held "in mind" or which came "to mind" I might act because something happened around me, like say I found myself walking into a wall which presents (not represents) a certainty that I must turn around. Now the wall need not actually be there, so long as my mind is certain that it is. But my turning, if I decide to turn and initiate my turning before the laws of physics cause me a bump, is initiated not by stimuli but rather by the conceptual in-formation of a wall as if held in mind.

This matter is simply not problematized. Very few of us are so abstracted as to walk into walls (well, it has happened to me once, finding my head turned by a pretty woman). But perhaps it should be. Depending on your rate of forward motion, turning aside from a looming wall probably (this could be tested) doesn't require any conscious intervention.

So, what has been tested by these recently celebrated Psi experiments purporting to demonstrate precognition is not the ability of mind to guess things that haven't yet happened at some frequency greater than chance. What has really been tested is the notion that there is any process outside the mind which is really fully provably outside it.

Sure, you need powerful, um, stimuli, like pornography or looming walls colliding with which might cause sudden and immediate harm. But nothing at all like precognition has to be proven, since you can't exactly prove cognition in the first place when it's just stimulus-response.

In Praise of Tinkering

I absolutely love, as in desperately, to tinker with machines. Motors, computers, ideas, the works. Right now I'm tinkering with language and consciousness, but I'm happy as a clam working on a car or woodworking my old and now departed wooden boat. These are things which, ultimately, make some sense and pose a challenge to me that I can resolve.

What I really enjoy is to be faced with an insoluble like, say your girlfriend runs your car dry of oil when you're in China and the camshaft gear disintegrates. You have no money for either the complicated repair or a different car or even for the parts. Or if something breaks inside your laptop. Or like when the canvas sunshade over the glider rots out.

What I really really hate is giving in. I hate going to the store to solve the problem with money. I hate having to look for the official solution, especially now that there isn't a store on the planet any longer which stocks stuff to fix things. Almost. What I really hate is buying a new one since it's always schlockier and WalMarty no matter how hard I try to resist. But I'd hate it even if there were good stuff around. Honest.

Last time the generator (that's how old it was - I do mean generator and not alternator) on my boat stopped generating I was able to find a shop that would rewind it and which still had ample stock of the Bendix (maybe?) parts which once were standard. Farmers still used these on their aging tractors. Old farmers.

I knew the shop would die with the old guy I was dealing with, who charged me the reasonable fraction of the cost of a new part which is what he grew up with. Maybe $50, but I know it was something I was thrilled to pay. Especially faced as I would be with a very expensive 12 volt alternator conversion for my 6 volt system, which at one time was all the rage. I'd held out! I'm so virtuous!

The coolest things was when I saw my exact engine, even painted with the same paint which I'd scrounged from the boatyard dustbin, on display at the Adirondack museum as an artifact from days gone by. Sure, I suppose there's some likelihood that somewhere in China they're now running a plant from the tooling they bought lock stock and barrel (a merism for replaceable, manufactured, interchangeable parts stuff, if you ask me), from the shuttered plant on this side of the great East/West divide.

Or maybe there are still enough farmers to create a demand for what I need. Well, except TSC, catering to ex-urban wannabees will take care of that along with the agribusiness folks. (do they really count as folks? I guess if Al Qaeda does then they do, eh GWB?). We tinkerers are being driven out of business, even as we get catered to.

Yeah yeah, Harbor Freight is like a walking wet-dream to me, but it makes me feel really really guilty. Like I don't want to be caught in there. Still, I can't help myself, buying shitty Chinese tools just because they price them below the threshold of impulse. Even knowing that I'm contributing to the destruction of Western Civilization.

These are guerrilla tactics now, being deployed against us all to keep us on the grid. State-sponsored terrorism to keep us all down on the farm as consumers. No really, I mean we all live on a consumer farm, as in we're the crops and it's worse than the Matrix. Way worse, because in our case we don't even have a prayer to come awake now.

Well, don't ask, don't tell because at the end of the day I'm not about to give up drinking coffee. And you can always find some comforting pabulum to sooth your mental agitation. It's all good, right? Things will work out in the end.

But that frame of mind which requires abject openness to the stuff around you, whether confined in the space of a garage or a boat at sea, or the space of your bank account, that's when human energy comes alive. There's nothing like the satisfaction of fixing the doo-hickie with a whatchamajigger. Especially when it feels as though the fix came from the sky.

There's even a New Thought theory about that called the Law of Attraction, which just simply has to be so much bullshit like Scientology of something. But to me, whatever you want to call it - call it Jesus for all I care - it's a lot nicer than that new car feeling the globe's all still so crazy about.

Maybe I'm math challenged, but a new car to me just feels like a big huge burden of indentured servitude to pay for it. Or maybe I'm just discipline-challenged and never did save up enough so that I could pay from ready cash.

Or you know, maybe this really is the money driving us all out of business. I think there are maybe no more new gadgets that I need. I think that lots of people are bored with Facebook anymore, and wouldn't trust a Chris Lee style blond bimbo as far as he could throw her. How do you even really know what sex you're dealing with? Everything's been shrink wrapped!

So, whatever. I consider the tinkerers impluse to be noble, in effect. It's a resistance against the machine, by taming it and making it human. It's a way out from the helter-skelter of needing always more and newer. It's the opposite of sublimated eroticism.

But it doesn't get you hired, nor make your ideas into bona-fides. For that you need a tenured position. Oh, wait, those are being done away with too. Darn!

Anyhow I can tell you this for certain: It's not humanity which is winning the survival of the fittest race. We've consistently misconstrued that as a contest. It's not a contest. It's the context and so far our lusts are being used for the survival of the machine memes. It's our inhumanity that's winning.

No mistaking that it's the basics which ensnare us. The same stuff which powers evolution by tricking us into reproduction for the sake of our selfish genes. Our tool-making has allowed it to run amok and now we're all in service to our tools, um, yeah, just like we always have been.

OK, gotta go back to practicing my iron crotch kung fu. Inside joke. Sorry.

Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers - an allegory of the mind

I was shocked when I watched Hero. It seemed that history had been flip-flopped yet again and so Qin Shihuang was not a despot anymore. I can't remember if Mao used him that way, or if this would be a way to rehabilitate Mao. And then the Olympic ceremonies really really confused me.

Was the director of Hero, this Zhang Yimou, unreservedly contributing to Chinese chauvinism, or was he playing off the panic he would cause in Western audiences, showing hordes of exquisitely choreographed drummers, smiles lately pasted on, but still in imitation of our nightmare yellow hoards?

Finally I did remember which movie I'd wanted to watch before Blockbuster goes out of business for good, and there are no other from virtual shelves to browse (I can't find anything on virtual shelves - it takes all the pseudo-random out). I watched it first without subtitles, just to see how well I would follow. The subtitles added a few things, but not so much, to the illusion of understanding.

This is a martial arts film of sorts. If nothing else, the martial arts are ways to decenter consciousness in the acts we commit for self-preservation or in the name of a cause. The body becomes trained to respond as if with foreknowledge, taking advantage, one has to presume, of the faster neurological response at the preconscious level than the one which follows conscious calculation.

In the mythic realm, these reactions seem like pre-cognition or some awful meshing with the workings of fate. One moves as if by accident to some stimulus which it is not quite conceivable one could have reacted to.

In The House of Flying Daggers, the protagonist seems blind, in imitation of that state where you finally do get your mind out of the way and become one with the flow of the qi. The movie's all about seeming, though, especially where protestations of truth and loyalty are concerned. Saying the wrong thing turns out right, and the love connection goes contrary to the rules you would suppose.

Following on the Beijing Spring of 'six-four,' when so many were injured or killed for their effrontery to the Party, it's almost impossible to view this film as other than allegory. But it's hardly necessary, So many more films have been produced which are that much more direct in their politics.

And even though Zhang Yimou clearly and decisively demonstrates his mastery of classical sensibilities in all of his depictions as well as in his dialog, and thereby establishes that he might . . . no, that he must . . . be deploying ancient and refined arts of indirection; analogs from world of letters to the arts deployed by Gong-fu masters. He invites you to read into his images for some central truth about what really is going on.

Except that the material stands frustratingly on its own. And even of the Olympic show, Stephen Spielberg has this to say:

At the heart of Zhang's Olympic ceremonies was the idea that the conflict of man foretells the desire for inner peace. This theme is one he's explored and perfected in his films, whether they are about the lives of humble peasants or exalted royalty. This year he captured this prevalent theme of harmony and peace, which is the spirit of the Olympic Games. In one evening of visual and emotional splendor, he educated, enlightened, and entertained us all.

Thus turning everything, as he must, into Hollywood twaddle. As if it were all about peace and love and harmony, but I'm sure Zhang would never want to contradict Spielberg.

Anyhow, peace and love have nothing at all to do with Olympic contests. These enact struggles to the death and in that sense are as real as the absurd martial arts sequences in Zhang's films. They also rehearse those things which have kept us and all species alive in the wild. Good reflexes and the ability to construct reality as fast as it happens to us.

If the films could not stand on their own, apart from allegory, they would be unwatchable. No matter whether or how they might pass muster with government censors. In any case, there is no censorship in China that's any different from the kind that we deploy in the West. So long as you are helping to build the economy without taking direct potshots at the Party, there's not much you can't say or do.

And why would anyone want to take direct shots? There's way too much power always on the ready for deployment; Power to keep things moving along they way that they already are.

What does a little freedom of speech really matter when everyone's being so distracted by things which need doing right in front of them.

At least the Chinese movie-goers understand what we don't: that there's no truth to the illusion of truth. And therefore they can move ahead without any illusions about the stakes or about the consequences. While we here in the West can continue to indulge creative fictions that because our misery has been moved offshore, it's not something we have anything to do with.

Which makes us here rather more subject to dictatorial whims than they are there. After all, the Party after Mao and Deng is not controlled from some single man. It resembles more the human brain, which delegates out to nerve centers more near the action what it would do in cases near enough to numbingly normal that they don't need to be dealt with by the self-conscious mind.

Back to that pseudo-randomness I like so much on shelves of books or DVDs arranged for my perusal. Of course eye-level real-estate is the most valuable, and as any grocery-shelf stocker will tell you, there's nothing at all random about the arrangement of items on shelves. This is easy enough to demonstrate to oneself by going back and looking again for that thing you never saw but subsequently remembered the title for.

The trouble with virtual shelves is that you feel too much in control when you don't want to be. Something needs to at least seem to stand still. Otherwise you feel like you're hallucinating reality. You can get kind of desperate looking for things when the shelves all shift and change their sort according to what kinds of keyterms you type in.

* * *

It's fairly unproblematical historically to refer to the Chinese written language as the nervous system for the state. It allowed administration to be centralized for a people spread almost amazingly far away in geographic - and also temporal - space. But it's also easy to suppose that this function could be filled by any written language.

In one sense of course it could be. Orders from the center and feedback from the periphery can be reliably rendered in any kind of written language. But Chinese has afforded a dialect and spoken-language--community independent means for "transmission" by abstracting from the spoken language a differing written form.

That form is not simply like Latin in that it stays relatively stable and has been mastered only by a priesthood. It represents a much more radical economy by incorporating strict and ideological controls on any proliferation of its forms. Well, as with all things, until recently.

What the Chinese written language enables is for any official anywhere along the chain of "transmission" to reliably anticipate what the center would say or will say or is likely to say if and when it gets around to it, or finds the need for it.

This is a powerful difference from any written language elsewhere in time or place. And it means that the overall entity called China can function in a manner more analogous to the human "mind" than can we in the West. Our language remains in thrall to the transmission of information in just the fashion that we remain in thrall to novelty, authenticity and origination of any sort.

Some day shortly I'm certain that there will be an ultimate crystallization of sense in English, say, to where all religionists and Republicans and atheists and freethinkers will all have to agree because of some powerful scientific finding. But, um, I'm not exactly willing to hold my breath in waiting.

Meanwhile, we suffer dictatorial and centralized controls much moreso than do the Chinese for whom all meaning is already known to be allegorical, though without priority as to which is the real meaning and which the allegory. Ironically enough, there is no center in the Middle Kingdom, just as there is no real democracy over here.

Irony abounds!

HOLLYWOOD (the sign) Won't Go Away!

I first saw the sign "in person" after climbing up a long set of steps from the walk of stars in Hollywood. The steps took me inside what I think was a shopping mall, but I'm not so accustomed, yet, to the strange inside/outside mix that is Southern California.

Although there weren't many people gawking the way that I was, it did seem as though the architecture of this place was designed to frame the iconic sign up in the hills. It also allowed a view out the scruffy back door of the place, and I suppose the sign itself isn't that big a draw anymore.

You'd think there would be an exclamation mark on the actual sign. (Oh! There almost was!) It stays put though, as though the place might prove as ephemeral as its productions were it to stop promoting itself. It was never a planned thing; having been erected by a real-estate developer, it used to say "HollywoodLand."

I just witnessed our annual mass-mediated (not massive enough this year is what I hear) contest to sort out who's best among those who've already won  at the Oscars. I gawked along with the rest of us who are certainly not in the game. But it's not like an Olympic contest. I could do what they do, right?

This is ground zero for style in the midst of all the uplifting story-lines of the year. People are crying out against dictators "enough already!" Rampant capitalism is chastened by oil spills and media exposes of direct harm caused to people by careless scrambling after winners' gold. Even in China. The usual stuff.

The Oscars are all about style - even in our choice of what to watch in the documentary department. Michael Moore is out, Banksy is in. It's not quite cool to promote yourself on the backs of real social issues. It's cooler to remain Anonymous (losing must have been part of his plan) and just to poke fun at the process of sorting out the cool. Everyone gets punked, especially if they think they're talking to the Big Studio Director (you've always gotta watch out for sleepers from Buffalo).

I'm still looking for a good replacement for the term "po-faced" to describe the bizarre condition of someone in an ironic posture to the world who feels himself in earnest. This is the condition of religionists being indistinguishable from satirists, or like that Kung-fu special I saw on the "Iron Crotch" school, where you train yourself to lift weights with your penis. Hey, you really can't make this shit up!

The thing I really want to know though, is how come we're all so obsessed with contests? Technology in service to winning?

Our economic system is organized around winning, a contest of value and production. This all starts in school where standardized testing helps to predict who might be a winner, and funnels them to the most privileged position at the head of any class. Which is fine as far as it goes, and as long as you don't have to sleep with the producer to get there, but what about the rest of the students who really just need some feedback about what they need to work on?

Well and so the world is being neatly divided between people with an ironic posture on everything and the rest who are either Born Again, Republicans, Chinese Communist party hacks, Chinese elite Nationalist students in America, Singaporeans, or just plain old machines. No irony.

See a machine would never be able to equate gold with poison thus:

ROMEO

There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.
I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none.
Farewell: buy food, and get thyself in flesh.
Come, cordial and not poison, go with me
To Juliet's grave; for there must I use thee. 

Exeunt

And crazy people all over the place are still wondering what will happen when machines become conscious. Sheesh! Look around!! You don't need the Hollywood hi-tech special effects version. You don't think it's humans wrecking the earth, do you?

Anger Making Machinery

The proper response to an Internet search which turns up nothing is anger. The field of expectation has been created that it is worthwhile to go looking for things, without any countervailing road-map about what sorts of things won't be found.

I know it would be silly to go searching for plumbing insights, but it seems more plausible to seek out ways to use Chinese on my smartphone. There are ads, but there are also shortcomings in addition to cost for using fat and cleverly created bits of software. I pay the plumber, though the instructions are trivial to find by searching. The smell is too costly in reality.

I shall persist, but this dissonance between the field created by technologies, and the confusion one faces in attempts to occupy that field, is as old as the written word. It's not just that post-modern defenestration impulse. It's the overall illusion that the word once written can provide the way to ultimate revelation of The Word as handed down from God.

This is precisely the same mistaking of identity for comprehension which informs political anger or the anger of love's betrayal. There is no answer to it other than to depart the field and look for ultimates elsewhere. And investigate only dispassionately those things which reward investigation.

Like, for instance, the written word itself, whose modality for production now is universalized as a keyboard. Gone are styluses and pencils, brushes and ink. Interactions now are all mediated by those same twitching fingers which pull triggers or caress or which shape a ball of clay. But allowing nothing of character through other than by elements of style.

A crumb falls into my keyboard, and the "R" key is disabled. I blow, it moves, and now I can't work the shift key. Crumble. The stylus offered a more certain connection to its output. The calligraphic character I once would have been required to cultivate before I could claim literacy in Chinese is as remote as in my facility with English handwriting. A relic. Quaint.

Once upon a time, in imitation of my older brother whom I idolized in all things, my handwriting was neat, but slanted in the manner of a lefty. A southpaw. Rectification meant the end of neat, and so my character is scrawled and lacking. There was a time.

What happens, though, when Chinese written characters lose their kinetic inform-ation of our consciousness? Will we then become trapped as it seems we are now already believing in some form of human consciousness which is, in fact, as remote as that final Word? That thing for which the absence of interpretation and translation does not denote the actual Word of God, but in fact denotes absolute and ultimate solipsism. An absence, a private without its public.

Enter Watson, the Jeopardy confounding machine. Anger is the proper response. We have already become unconscious. There is no more possibility for human consciousness any more than there is for God's Word unvarnished. I wax poetical, and wane with the keystroke of finality. And yet I cheer him, it, us.

Fame!

China is all over the news these days. People with a somewhat longer memory than normal here still remember the events tagged by "June 4" back in 1989. We now watch China carefully as the MidEast - where China is so a-politically invested - enters the global tide of people-power. It seemed that China started it all way back when the walls came down all over Europe.

China started just about everything! But they themselves had no notion that such was the case until the West held up the mirror. Gunpowder, the compass, paper and the printed replication of authoritative texts as carved on blocks. Stele-rubbings to carry far and wide and forward those inscriptions on the landscape of Chinese antiquity. Heaven brought to earth as wen 文 which were regular and stable patterns with the human heart 心 at their center 中, or zi 字 the child in the temple of his ancestors. Literature and culture have deep roots in the Middle Kingdom.

Chinese, in ignorance of our personal God and Savior, developed a meritocratic system for selection into the ranks of government service. In the West it would take until the paroxysms of political revolution, themselves descended from a knocking away of the barrier of literacy between the folk and the lettered priesthood. And even then, only America would really confront, directly, the notion that some deserved to be closer to God than others.

Gutenberg is credited in the West with combining the fruits of the metal-casters' arts of endurance with the wine-press of the fruiterer's arts of intoxication to create a vehicle for the widespread dissemination of alphabetic words. The Word, which only recently is thought ever to have existed apart from interpretation and translation, could be rendered in the vulgar tongue. God could be brought closer to the masses, or the masses closer to God, so long as the Word could remain sanctified and sanctioned without divine hearings. Without interpretation of history or language or truth or illusion.

Along with the nobility we pushed out from their palaces, we also displaced the notion that those at society's pinnacle should behave in noble fashion. We thought we might engender a natural aristocracy, and have struggled ever since to find quasi-scientific ways to take the measure of a man. In the end, we still and always worship the marketplace, where the true measure of a man is his fame or his fortune, either of which alone or combined with the other will suffice. Even word-smithing is evaluated by the marketplace.

That is as near as we can come to some method to distribute power and authority which will encourage the best among us to the fore. Of course, it has always been an embarrassment that Jesus himself would be left behind by this method, and that so many who rise to the top show themselves concupiscent and greedy. The Chinese seem to have done, marginally, better over the years.

Recently, the Chinese have faced a much more sudden change than we went through here in the West. Yet even in the face of Western gunboats, they remained smug in their confidence about their cultural superiority, right up through the very day when their long-lived empire finally crumbled. They had to turn around their history on a dime.

In fact it was the discovery of individualism which most changed China. I have been indulging in a fairly concerted read of documentation about China's impact against Western style industrialization, at the lead of which, as in the West, was the printing press. Individualism is obsessed with personality and with personal histories of the sort which could be and was ignored except for the literati in China.

Now, with the help of Joseph Needham, the Chinese could rehabilitate some long forgotten artisans: inventors, proto-scientists and mathematicians. History was suddenly forward looking. The Word became as much a promise as an archive. Literacy had escaped the bounds of what the imperial center could sanction.

Chauvinism remains. Even as it struggles to contain the exuberance of its individualistic seekers after fame and fortune, the one thing still most constant about the Chinese people seems to be their smug certainty that they are the center of civilized humanity. So long as they can hold order in the face of chaos.

Labors are nearly complete now to rectify the Chinese collective memory. Tiananmen the massacre, or Tiananmen the public square, clean and safe and open. So recent in historic memory.Orthodox subversion of the historical record for purposes of order.

Now our own highly irresponsible political rhetoricians would have us afraid of China. These players on the registers of our emotions are the real terrorists. Perhaps we should be fearful all the time, but one still should wonder why, when our most important export after blue jeans is the individualism which they celebrate, and whose destruction, they feel, is imminent.

It's individualism that rocks the Middle East now, and not its proxy: a craving for freedom. And that's what's rocking China. Our political rhetoric can even make us angry about our anger. It can confuse us about collective comforts. Maybe we need to learn to read a little bit beneath our own surfaces.

Celebrity style and authorial cool are the things which now run the globe, and running up on Oscar, why then is it that we must be so nervous? These are American triumphs! We should and must be gloating.

I don't suppose that it could be that the titans of cool, the pinnacle occupiers in this the early 21st century, are as desperate as the Koch brothers or Steve Jobs to stay on top. Their days are numbered, sure, but there is no limit, clearly, to the desire to win. Perhaps at any cost.

If the printing press is the exemplar, avatar and enabler of industrialism, then the Internet is the same for post-industrial reality. Cause and effect must be discarded in favor of a more Foucault-esque delineation of our Grand Controlling Narratives. Text is the operator. Humanity the operand.

Single-party rule in China mocks the ascendancy of financial power; iron fist in velvet glove with the mockery of politics at home enacted by the Coke/Pepsi dance of Republican v. Democrat. It's all about the money, stupid! China's leaders also want to maintain a creative fiction of poise - to preserve a glorious constructed past in service to a still more glorious future.

And interestingly, it all comes down to a differing preference for the way the written word gets rendered. To have a name is to be famous. Alternatively, one is a "mouth," a consumer, to be counted but not to count. By the Confucian tradition, names are to be rectified (chaos ordered) and the count of written words to be contained. By the loyal heterodoxy of Taoism, the name that can be called such is not the eternal name, just as the way that can be followed is not the everlasting way.

By means of its proliferating and lavishly funded Confucius Institutes, the Chinese wish to lay claim again to their traditional written form. Long presumed a clumsy obstacle in the way of mass literacy, it also continues to  serve the purpose it always has served: to define and to unite a culture, a people and a civilization.

Here in the West we descend inexorably away from those unifying original words. We're left only with ideas, to be realized in some distant future. And so the battle is joined? Why could it not be resolved into something more in manner of a love affair, one has to wonder. Ah, but the terrorism of the Word would have to be subverted. Players would have to relinquish the cheap and easy victories of mass motivation by tweets, bumper stickers and mass-mediated sloganeering.

Names proliferate in these fallen times. Words, words and more words, all as media for money which renders power by way of fame and fortune. The party would remain poised at the intersection of conservative and liberal forces. All parties are deployments of wealth.

Yet at this moment, historically, we all do and must seek something other from fame. Something human. Something lettered. Something of character. Something more collective than individual, but at the same time something not collectively rendered. Ironically true.

Now, back to reading. I'll report back to you when I find it. Or you can report to me.

Just What is Real anyhow? Learning to Make Sense

As I learn to write, I have an awfully hard time finding the balance between working out thoughts for myself, and distilling something into readable prose. You might think that I'm incredibly clumsy about it - I certainly do - but it's really hard to let go of the things that haven't quite been worked out yet, in order to stick to a narrative that has completion.

Or is it the other way around? It's easier to "complete" things which have a shape apart from reality. Sometimes so-called "ideas" take off and dictate a narrative which becomes more compelling than what it's supposed to be about. It can be hard to hold onto some point, some direction for the writing.

Now I have New Yorker magazines - the paper version - strewn about to distract me, and I forget how interminable their analyses can be. You can't read on a laptop for too long, and I was happy to read about Scientology in the recent issue. It demonstrates yet again that narratives don't really have to be so much true - as in capable to sustain evidence gathering and refutation - as they have to be complete.

Scientology as a system is clearly nuts, but hey if it works for you, why dig that deep? Some of their surface "technologies" undoubtedly "work" for reasons most likely unrelated to the bizarre explanations behind them. But who, really, wants to know at that level where you can just trust that some expert has worked it out.

The system is complete, but you don't really have to complete your reading of it to make sense of it. In the case of Scientology, you just have to keep paying more money and getting closer to the inner inner sanctum of the Great Man's writings.

People should really read more Tibetan literature, you know, where peeling back the layers of the onion leaves you with no onion, but a great adventure on the way to that great awakening.

Last night I watched this cool movie, Catfish, which explores the creations we can make in our head from some scanty evidence gathered across the Internet. It's fun. It's in the vein of Exit Through the Gift Shop, or that lousy Joaquin Phoenix Hoax, where you have no way short of face-to-face actually to determine if you're being had or if something really interesting and exciting is going on. It explores the specific dangers of our human capacity to fill in blanks and fill out our own personal cartoons to something which might be real if fully understood.

The Catfish movie does the most interesting job, at least among these three films, I think, of tackling the problem in earnest. It exposes the trap of Internet technology for what it is. Following what seems to be genuine serendipity, you seem to find some solid ground right along with the film-makers about what really is real among the stuff we might concoct in our heads.

In the course of the filming, the film-makers track down the person who wants them to fall for their creation for whatever crazy or sane reason. That core reason can never be uncovered, but neither can any nefarious or self-serving motive in this case.

The subject of this documentary falls in love with an utterly fictitious female hottie made of purloined beauty shots and dialog and music. While the social networks - Facebook in particular - make this kind of fraud almost trivial to accomplish, the Internet also made it equally trivial to expose it before too much damage was wrought.

The plot started to unravel when the subject Googled a song which just sounded a little too good. as sent him by the fictitious "friend"  He found that it had been produced not by the beautiful woman with whom he'd started to fall in love (and who didn't actually exist) but by some actual and accomplished singer.

In the case of Scientology - or people in love with actually beautiful women - adherents don't seem inclined to look too deeply into something which is clearly working for them. Surely it just may be the case that the truth of the matter is never quite so important as its believability.

The processes of scientific investigation are mostly useful to true our collective believability matrix. Gradually, we all start to occupy the 'same page' about how stuff is really put together. If we took a careful look, we'd really have to agree that the premises of Scientology are plenty nutty, as is the likelihood that the character of a beauty is really true to the illusion of what it is you fall for.

But it also may be that having something to believe in, whether Jesus or the person built by virtue of internalizing a beguiling manner in refection of whatever everyone else is seeing, is less nutty than to have nothing other than the clingy belief that eventually we'll have all the answers. Skeptics among us seem to feel that in the meantime believing in anything at all is the nuttiest thing to do (read four times fast!).

I mean really, stop to think and the nuttiness of our existence at all has to hit you like a ton of bricks. Why not Thetans left over from a time when souls were incinerated to make more space on earth or whatever gibberish these Scientologists spout? It's laughable sure, but does it really make any more sense to suggest that some day some how, we'll have the real answer, documented and believable both.

Not everything about the comic historical record is likely to be retrievable by methods archaeological or instrumental.

I mean, why not Scientology in the face of the nuttiness to which Christianity seems (and the seeming is the important thing here) in thrall? It just may be that the creative fiction on which their "technology for going clear" is built provides a foundation for something actually more useful than believing in a personal savior. Just like antibiotics are more useful than witchdoctors. Even though the notion that all disease germs can be eradicated is itself a dangerous fiction.

Scientology almost certainly does work if you're an actor and need to learn how to drive your body the way you might drive a car. (Going "clear" in Scientology terms seems hard to distinguish from telling a really earnest lie wherein you, the liar, pretend to be a really really good person and where's the harm in that?) You learn to be detached from your actual emotions and you can really act with commitment, the way that Ronald Reagan did. And look how far he got, once he left the little stage and climbed up onto the Big One.

I guess for me the trouble with religions is that they expunge irony, and in this, at least according to the New Yorker report, the Scientologists are no different. But neither are many scientists. They earnestly do believe that all can ultimately be revealed by diligent and emotionally detached investigation. That consciousness - whether machine form or organic - will ultimately push everything out of the cosmos.

But you know, cosmically, it really is all a joke. It's as foolish to believe in ultimate answerability as it is to believe that humanity was plunked on earth a mere 5000 years ago.

Though hell, maybe we really were plunked here 5000 years ago, in at least the sense that that time-frame pretty much delimits the inception of our most powerful (and most masculinist) toolset, the written Word.

We now know that we cannot know apart from our emotional posture in relation to the world "outside" us. We know that reality is a mirror, at least in part, for what we bring to it. The way we act surely is a reflection of our own reflection reflected in the social norms and standards of our time. Imagine how different a Rubens subject would behave, see herself, and be poised in today's more neotonous world of slender beauty.

Such also is the world of physical reality. Even without difficult and scary notions for the really raw stuff of quantum reality, the macro reality of life on earth is clearly showing signs that we'd better get our act together, and, like, quick! What is it we really want to do with the reality - the Earth - we live on?

Among the reasons for our dangerous predations against the ground for our reality is the notion that there will be some rational realization at the end of all this progress which might compel us individually and collectively to behave in ways not quite so detrimental to our futures. As but one aspect of this stance, is the stark conflict between what we earnestly wish for our personal and very local comfort and pleasure, and what would be good for the planet and thereby for humanity as a whole.

Clearly, the planet and the rest of its species might prefer that we were not so damned effective and efficient at developing technologies to meet our needs (and not incidentally, to enhance our species' very local - in historic terms - profile for evolutionary success).  The planet would like us tribal, or maybe organized with more misery among the lower classes so that the really destructive technologies could be reserved for just a few regal prospects at the top. As it was and ever will be, world without end, Amen.

Religions and science are reasonably identical in promoting dreams for eternal repose as we struggle toward variously defined pinnacles. Yes, it's worrisome that the swamp at their base encroaches. But surely there will be something close to enlightenment as we approach those peaks.

Or, as I suggested the other day, it might just be that what has proven so successful in its natural evolution is not so much humanity, as it is a viral meme riding on humanity as host. It may be that what has really proven so successful is a kind of mechanical thinking, promoted by the written word.

The written word enables all these technologies for domination. Money renders our individual wants collectively.  Our collective pursuit of those things which money can both buy and make available is apparently limitless, until the basic resources run out.

We are already enslaved to machines, in other words, in the same way that we are enslaved to all those things which entrap our senses and divert us from the hard work of being human. Those machines got their start with language. Increasingly, we are in thrall to unchanging logic, and utter predictability. Life as in the Life Force is giving way to full descriptions and mechanical interconnections.

It seems that there is nothing that will or can come in the way of this evolutionary triumph. Well, nothing other than random chance. Something like an asteroid to destroy our ecosystem, or a bug to wipe out just our species. Or we could just keep on keeping on, and then an accident will be almost certain to wipe us out. Eventually, if you create enough complexity, failure is a virtual certainty.

It is our desire to be kings combined with our strange altruism about making the same pursuit available to as many people as possible which provides the exploding living pool on which machine consciousness has been riding now these couple of millennia.

OK, so that's disturbing. The written word as the tool of the devil, but what about Tibet? What about spiritual peoples who live to do no harm. What about the Shakers? Everything about us now seems bent on increasing the population of humans on the planet, which can serve the survival of our species only if it doesn't destroy the overall ecological niche (surely a misnomer in this usage) we evolved to fit.

And silly transhumanist notions of evolving beyond this deadly mob-species would require not enhancing our bodies and minds with machines, but rather stepping out altogether from the deadly machine-form which now already uses us as substrate for its far more successful "consciousness."

We would have to become more, not less, bio-logical. We would have to find new ways to survive apart from the machine. We would have to demonstrate superior consciousness of a sort which is ours and ours alone, where consciousness is just that thing which defines us as human and not some other animal.

It would have to be our desire and not our genetic capability to mate which would determine this Brave New Species. It would be this removal from the thrall of seeming physical perfection and earthly beauty. Individually, we would have to leave behind the attraction of mere beauty and combine our genes instead with those we might encounter by random chance, or random choice of words.

Just like we always have. Life is powered by irony. Machines are powered by entropy.

The End.