Allowing for Presentiment, a Sketchy Sketch

You will likely not know about this, but there is an interesting polemic brewing about what would constitute adequate proof that presentiment, or awareness conditioned by events which haven't happened yet, is possible. Well, if you've been reading what I write, then you will know all about it, but that doesn't change the odds much, since reading me now demonstrates more likelihood that you've never read me before. (I have statistical proof of that if you're interested),

Meanwhile, consider this: Much if not most of what constitutes the readiness of a mind to consider a thought complete enough for utterance actually exists beyond what are ordinarily considered to be the boundaries of the mind. I should say "persists" as in things outside of us stay relatively put, and so we hardly have to keep checking in on them.

Living things move around more than inert objects, and virtual reality is less reliable than the real kind. There's no need, in other words, to stow whole chunks of reality "in" the mind since we can easily assess that it's likely still to be there when next we check. Words we utter simply require a stable reference and must draw attention reliably.

Inanimate objects moving without agency generally would give us the creeps. Most of us will want lots of testing before we're willing to cop out and call it ghosts. A similar thing is true about presentiment. Even if we just think we sense it, it's creepy.

We can pretty much assume that when someone turns their head as though in knowledge of our gazing at the back of it - they seem to have some kind of sensation that we were looking at them - it's because of occult features - simply unknown features - of the environment which indicate how something changed by the fact of our looking.

Maybe it's what's happening in other peoples' eyes, or maybe it's a kind of complex reflection or refraction beneath our conscious ability to make note. Perceptual trajectories bending by the gravity of our attention.

Maybe it's something in the shared surroundings which made us look at that person in the first place, and they simply sense that they are at its epicenter. Who's to say that we are the deciders in any particular instance, as opposed to responding to things happening around us that we haven't learned, consciously, to accommodate.

If there is a shifty portion of the world around you, it will change the valence for holding a thought inside, and for tagging it mentally as not ready to be part of any utterance. The more abstract they become, the more we might struggle to grasp the usage of words. Some instruments require much more practice before they're mastered.

Things about us which don't cohere may escape words altogether. We might be left with Wow! or Yikes! Sometimes intentional action is like taking steps into some empty seeming space which you can't resolve enough by your senses to be confident that the ground will be there. Even when it's always been there before.

But if something forces the issue, like say a fire at your back, you may leap as the better option against what you know with certainty.

After whatever was going to happen has happened, if it was a life-or-death matter, you'll clearly be confirmed in the correctness of your decision. The alternative is, in a trivial but silly sense, unthinkable. In a small way, of course, the ability to toss the dice well has to be considered a part of our strategy, individually and collectively, to come as far as we have.

But that's not what survival of the fittest means. It's our genes whose fitness is being determined, and we only count to the extent that our continued stability enhances the overall likelihood of our distributed gene-pool to persist. And even then our clan's persistence might be contrary to the interests of the greater good.

Surely our selfish happiness functions in relation to our retroactively confirmed presentiments about which would be the best course. Happiness wouldn't even be possible without a relatively fixed cosmos of possibility; suffering would never be worthwhile without the prospect to alter certain of those aspects which would make our happiness seem impossible.

Things outside our minds which matter to us are said to be held "in mind." When they change our mind changes. And when we know they will change, though they have yet to change, we might still change our mind before they do. In that case, our mind has been changed as much as we have changed it ourselves, and yet the change which caused it has yet to happen. This is only presentiment when the assurance can't be described or prefigured or calculated.

Now must it be that there is a known causal relation between our assessments of future change, and what eventually does happen? What about when a change to a third thing changes the relation between two things already held in mind without awareness of the third? New knowledge, in other words, might change the relation of the two already held in mind without anything needing to happen, eventually or right now, to the two not touched by the third.

Our actions can cause the changes we anticipate as much as they might respond to them ahead of time. And if this change occurs in mind prior to our conscious awareness of it, that would feel a lot like presentiment, right? Once caught in the act, we'd be likely to rationalize as though there were no choice.

Now proof is offered that things are still more mysterious. I'm liking it, but I find myself at a loss for words. Yes, the structure of the cosmos admits of mind apart from matter. It changes nothing except at the fringe where will and helplessness collide. At such moments consciousness arises.

The Lost Mind, a Valuable Experiment

It's hard for me, but when I lose something, I try to forget about it for a while. Sometimes it seems that the need I have to find that thing that's lost causes it to be held too tightly in mind, and so like Bose noise cancelling headphones working on my overall perceptual apparatus, I can't see the blasted thing, though it might be right in front of me.

Other times, when all hope is lost to a rational mind, I look anyhow, and plenty of times I do actually find the thing. Once it was my brother's contact lens, lost while skiing in fluffy new snow. Another time it was a friend's engagement ring, which survived falling out of a boat turned upside down upon a car which had driven many miles along a bumpy and windy road. The ring was improbably lodged in the bumper.

These findings, when they occur, feel very much as though something mysterious about the cosmos is being tapped. When I turn away from the search, often enough the thing appears as clear as it had been in my mind all along and I am amazed I could have missed it. When something surely lost appears, impossibly among a camouflaged backdrop or despite having been discarded, it feels like a gift or an answer to a prayer.

And yet I don't doubt that Bayesian theoreticians will always be right when they debunk the work of Psi researchers. Precisely because they account for frames of mind.

Surely there is no impact of our mind alone upon the future, nor any kind of impact back in time. I can't imagine that my very need to find something can have an impact either way upon its appearance. Except, of course, that I wouldn't bother to look if I didn't care to. I can pretty easily make things stay lost forever by not bothering to look. And by refraining from running a vacuum and holding on to my need for the object for a while, I can be pretty certain, eventually, to find whatever's been lost.

So the trouble with Psi experiments is that they're testing against the wrong hypothesis. It's no good to test for whether choosing door "A" or door "B" can be done at better probability than chance depending on whether one wants to see what's behind it. One should test instead for rules of containment for the mind.

My mind cannot be precisely located within my brain. That seems settled fact. But the notion that my brain should contain fully one hundred percent of my mind seems highly problematical. Most of the structures which allow me to make sense of the world around me and to navigate it successfully don't need to be brought "inside" my mind by some representational process for them to serve my needs.

As long as they stay reliably put, and my mental apparatus can locate them regardless of the state of my moment by moment sensory input, they can stay right where they are on the outside. Take them away altogether though, and I might have a serious case of vertigo. Soon enough, I'd start hallucinating or in ordinary parlance, I'd lose my mind. Sensory deprivation experiments demonstrate this as fact.

So in this Psi experiment I've been reading about - speaking very metaphorically here, and oversimplifying shamelessly - male subjects were asked to identify where the pornographic picture would be before the computer had actually made its selection, which would be done post-hoc by a truly random (and not pseudo-random, which is the best that computers can do all on their own) process. Thus the chooser would have no way to know ahead of time which door would reward his choosing even were he able to get insight to the machine.

The results seem convincing that the subject either influenced random or that the future disposition of things had some sort of retroactive influence on the subject's choice. Either possibility is offensive to ordinary rules for reality.

Careful readers will immediately be reminded of Bell's theorem and the experimental testing which has demonstrated, convincingly to all the investigators who count, so far, that it is not only the case that measurements disturb the thing being measured (the weak version of uncertainty in physics) but that the thing itself doesn't even exist as a measurable object before the act of measurement. This is offensive at first perhaps, but apparently true.

Now of course I'm allowing Bell's theorem to stand in for all the strangeness which comes along with quantum physics, but then I'm writing in all sorts of shorthand, since the alternative is, well, offensive which you can easily demonstrate if you care to look backward in time through what I've written.

Even though there may be loopholes through which designers of experiments have allowed themselves to be fooled, I'm still taking it as factual that at the extreme reaches of scale it will be necessary to forgo precision in the description of the physical universe. It will also be necessary to discard strict notions of causality in the direction of time's arrow right along with definitions for simultaneity. In simple terms (ahem) when one is describing something at the extremes of scale in relation to the describer, the things described are neither here nor there.

In some sense they exist only in relation to other things, and in particular in relation to the uses to which they are being put, in this case for the purpose of understanding just how things work; beyond a fraction there just won't be an answer, Zeno!

Plenty of people speculate that this strangeness must also be a part of what is meant by consciousness, which also exists at the extreme, certainly, of some scale of mechanical causality. There is a very powerful seeming quality to our conscious freedom to choose, intentionally, between this and that: here or there.

Relations in our minds seem very much like those relations among quantum implicated entities. Indeed, they are identical. But it is the "transmission" of "information" that is problematical, not the definition of a conceptual relation as something apart from time and space. That's what mind means - a relationship without physical connection among the concepts apprehended (comprehended?).

But wanting them surely doesn't make things so. Not without a lot of work intervening; a lot of motivated cause and effect.

Now let's propose that in principle it's impossible to circumscribe, in any discreet and stable fashion, that boundary between what's inside and what's outside the mind of any individual. Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense. The stars, if I perceive them, are also in my mind, but not, perhaps, the imaginings of my lover right beside me; those would be in hers.

Still, there would be plenty of signals for what goes on in others' minds, and plenty of attenuated evidence for the sound trees make in forests when no-one's there to witness their fall. But that chaos and complexity prevent, in principle, any smooth tracing back to cause. That princess's pea is but a fiction.

And yet the tree did make a noise if it did fall, because if that were not the case, well, we'd lose our mind. We'd have to imagine things differently while our backs are turned than they are when facing forward. We'd have to hold everything on the inside - in our mind - which would leave the falling tree in a very very strange spot on the outside of our field of awareness.

Now you can surely see where I'm going with this. That porno picking pixilator (the computer which invokes random selection after I've made mine intentional) is in no wise on the outside of my mind. I've turned my back to it, or its workings have been shrouded, but to the extent that I as subject know what I'm expected to do, and even though I haven't a clue what's going on inside it, I do know that there is a picture picking machine which might reward my desire depending on how I pick.

Ah, but what about random? That by-definition a-causal method for choosing sides. If a part of my mind is but randomly connected to the shifting sands of reality outside it, then any fulfillment of my mind's desire is but a figment of my imagination. Like finding a lost and valuable object as the answer to my prayer. Its seeming doesn't make it so.

Unless random isn't random. Unless it's not just the computer which can only do pseudo-random. Because, you know, in order for a computer to come up with a coin toss, it has to look outside itself, picking something from the real world. And that's the world of my mind.

My favorite experiment from the world of quantum physics is the double slit experiment whereby there's no conclusion possible other than that photons are both waves and particles. That is to say that photons must both extend themselves in space and time as though there were some ether (which there demonstrably is not) for their propagation defined by field theory, and limit themselves to some more discreet and particle-like position and velocity.

So I'm looking for an experiment in the realm of consciousness which performs the analogous test. To demonstrate that the mind must be both a part of and apart from the randomly interacting stuff all around it. Gong-fu demonstrations won't cut it, since they'll be dismissed as sleight-of-hand tricks of magic.

One thought would be to replace the true random with the computer's internal pseudo-random number generator. That way, the computer would be more precisely cut off from any of that stuff around him which informs the intentional selector's expressed desire. Would the results diverge, and if so how?

I do believe that right there is the distinction without a difference between the Bayesian analysis of the results and the non-Bayesian regression analysis of divergence from chance. Each team wants to have its cake and eat it.

My goal would be to test the hypothesis that there is no sensible and consistent way to define the mind as bounded by the brain the body the skin the limits of perception. Rather the mind would be implicated, and intentionality could be abstracted. Surely I respond to random insults happening all around me. And just as surely those happenings become less random when I exercise my will upon them.

But the question becomes where, then, does will originate? I take it as a given that there can be no discoverable location either inside or outside the mind. The only requirement, for consciousness, is that there be some consistency in my responses such that I can be identifiably me. I have to operate at some remove from random in order to be said to exist as a conscious being. And for this narrow purpose I would have to consider the informed reactions of sentient animals to be extravagant extrapolations from random, but random nonetheless. Or perhaps less random than human behavior, since we can know them only by their actions, and we can know one another by our faces and by our words and by our style (it may be simpler for a human to enact another human and to make a fool thereby, than for any animal to enact another).

But it seems fairly certain that at the reductive level at the extremes of scale where consciousness is supposed to exist, there will be no extensionless location for the mythical "I". And there will be, therefore, no directionality to time. Intention arises from the stirring of yin/yang relations "in" the borderless mind. And it's carried forward by the random motion of character's momentum, which already got its start elsewhere.

So here's how to re-construe a misguided test for precognition as a proper test for divergence from chance in the operations of desire: learn to read. Fall in love. Find a truth that's non-metaphorical and then believe in it.

Or, if you would be less a fool, then bet a head against a long running string of tails and try to maintain a straight definition for properly unbiased coins. Your wager will always be against your trust and never against your future (if you can find a distinction there).

This, as it always shall be, is a matter for choice and not for testing. Would you step out into the void, apart from any of those other spinners of discourse webs, to prove that you have free will? Or would you thus be left alone, the only free willy on the planet, though dead for that, among a multitude of servants.

It is a condition of my consciousness that I remain blind to my future. A noble test.

Consciousness Explained!

Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Yet another book which magically escaped my attention, though reading it would have promoted my understanding of so much. Better late than never, eh?

And as always, there was no program to my finding it. An old re-met friend rather, who must have been remembering me as I once was well over 30 years ago, lent it to me. He thought the book had my name written all over it.

Indeed! Nor do I wish to lay claim to that identity I would name for myself, acknowledging readily that most of what I call myself is at best character-based response to happenstance. As to the enactor of my conjectured character, we may forget him as readily as that creature which eats its brains once they've served the purpose of lodging it.

I can find nothing with which to disagree here. Astonishingly to me, I also find that consciousness has indeed been explained. I have no further questions, or rather the questions can be left aside and the work turned to more interesting matters.

Such as, for a quick instance, how is it that we can rid our minds of those harmful parasitic memes which would harness our apparently hard-wired self-aggrandizement compulsions. What political arrangements might make us act otherwise than to incorporate any and all techniques for manipulation of the symbolic discourse of money toward our maximal individual corporeal advantage at the expense of any cultured ground?

For so long as the Big Questions remain unanswered, there will always be some convenient jog to excuse whatever local pleasure or convenience we can buy at some discount from ever-attenuating meanings for value. Profit extensible to infinity on misdirection alone such as would cause P.T. Barnum to blush. Let me sell you self-confidence with that logo.

Quite simply, whatever consciousness is, it will not outlast our physical implicated being which is continuous with the Earth together with whom we have evolved to this point. My mind extends - there are no bounds - into all of that stuff which can be understood in principle, but also into that which cannot be comprehended. Chance will forever exceed my grasp, else what's a meta for?

It is the stuff of chance we will destroy for so long as answers remain deferred. There will be no end to our manipulations of words, of money, of tools of every sort because, as with a siren pitching ever higher, we will not stop. There is no ending, and so enthusiasm for ever-more is the only forever.

Enough! I mean honestly. Just as it sets out to do, this book defines the question and along the way discards those questions which still compel so many among us to defer our very responsibility because it is so pleasurable to imagine more perfect unions.

If, in other words, there were to come about some critical mass of readers who have mastered this work, we could finally begin engagement in those discourses which might wrest humanity from the degeneration which is attendant upon inhabitation by those memes in whose thrall our brains now labor.

And in that sense, this must be the most important book I, for one, have ever read. By limiting the field for proper questioning it has in fact already answered that which by its end remains, its author claims, conjecture. Will enough of us learn to read it before it's become too late? It makes a nice dream that enough of us shall, which finally will not only explain consciousness but create it.

Nice work!!





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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?