9 Stances of 1ism

The Last few months have offered a special time to look back and observe life.

Observe it in its most peculiar way and from a very close distance. When  that happens little time is left to think or ponder about what is going on. When that happens the aftermath is usually a rich experience in which a lot of things come together fuse and unify. Those moments can take several shapes and usually they have come in the shape of texts, but this time I wanted to do something different.

I made the 9 stances of 1ism, and old crazy project that has been around for a while. You can listen to it here.

Back to an old turf

As of late, owing to certain twists and turns in my existence, I have found myself  in anther city having a completely different routine.
It all started with the Telepathic sessions but since all is still ongoing I found myself with the opportunity to go back to an old passion of mine, radio. So I made a small 10 minute segment which aired in the show of a friend of mine over at mycy a Cypriot radio station. The show is in Greek except for my segment which starts around minute 41. You can listen to it here.
 And here goes a gratuitous pick of the city I am in. Just for those who wonder where on earth I could be.

 

Transmission 3

  Homo sacer, Lamella, or pure life, devoid of any rights. Those are words and concepts I would much later learn, but right now in my void emptiness something had changed. There was something, and that something felt very unique.
  In fact I was feeling myself. I was feeling that there was a dividing boundary, that there was a craving to fill my insides with whatever it was that was in the outside. And that further I could not keep it in, still and quiet, I needed to empty it. One transition giving way to the next, one only being fulfilled by the other, and the other only being possible because of the one.

There was no consciousness of any state, just the transitions. My insides did not feel full or empty, they just needed to be filled or emptied. No awareness of the end result, only of the transition. Only of the action, not of the purpose of it. I did not inhale to fill my insides, I inhaled because I had to. I did not exhale to empty my insides, I exhaled because I had to.

I was being driven, my will, whatever that may be, was of no importance to any of this. I could not stop breathing, I could not stop crying, I could not change the way I did nay of this. I was trapped in something, that though I had no control over was telling me what it was doing. And I could not stop that information from arriving. Who, what or how could I ask for it to stop. There was nothing but me, and I just was.

Transmission 2

The plate was packed to the rim, steaming hot sitting on top of the table in the small cold room. The day outside was bright, but windy and cold.  So cold the humid locked house felt just slightly warmer than the outside.  He sat at the chair in front of the plate, and shoveled steaming spoonfuls of chicken rice and fried fish in absolute frenzy. The steam from his breath mixing briefly with the steam coming from the spoonful that he was shoveling in.

He did not flinch at the temperature of the food, as if his mouth, like him, was devoid of any feeling. Shoveling food in as if filling the whole inside. There was no purpose to the eating, he just ate. No attention was paid to the dog that was standing on its hind legs waiting for scraps to fall. The chewing was tough and restless, not hurried nor purposeful.   As if in every spoonful from the heaped plate his life depended on.  

Bread was then grabbed by the mouthful, barely leaving time for the spoonful of rice to be swallowed. Chewing was being alive, and it could not stop. Any stoppage in that activity was the end of the world, so the split second there was some room in the mouth it was filled with another heaped spoonful, or another mouthful of bread.  More steam coming out of the plate  mixing with the exhalation, mixing the inside and the outside as a single continuous.

  Eating as if the void was never filled.

  Eating as tomorrow may never come.

  Eating as his life depended on it.

  After the plate was emptied, he reached for an apple. Snapped the twig from its top and bit into it with a thunderous crunch. There again mastication was a costly process that could not be interrupted, chewing non stop in the same cadence as if the apple had committed the most horrible sin of existence and needed to be redeemed.

  As if death by mastication was the only penalty for the mere crime of existence.

  As if he was the only judge, juror and executioner in the world.

  All living and formerly living matter left for his perusal and enjoyment.

  Life for the sake of life, for the sake of his own existence, all was there to be devoured.

  All was there to satisfy his only craving, the filling of his inner void.

Transmission 1

My eyes opened, I opened my mouth and felt a very unique sensation.
I became aware of a hole in the middle of my face, there was nothing underneath and between my eyes,  the outside and the inside where connected somehow.
Even those ideas were unclear to me, what was inside, what was outside.
The inside was itching, I became aware that the inside was there, because of how it reacted to the outside that had gotten in.
Then I made a noise louder than anything else.
I was aware, somehow, that I made the noise but I had no control over it.
I had to expel the outside, and that, I somehow knew how to do it.

Then an ocker smell filled my insides.
My insides now filled with that ocker smell where itching even more.
I carried on crying only interrupting my cry to gasp at the outside and try and grab as much of it as possible to fill my inside.
As if my insides where empty and all that I could do was try to fill that void.
As if it was necessary, somehow for my insides to be filled, regardless that they itched.
Regardless that the itch was unbearable and I had to eject the outside that had gotten in.

I gasped again,  as my eyes closed, filled my lungs again, the inside was constrained, then I cried again loud as to release my inside from the itch.

As I was gasping for air another sensation appeared, it sat outside me, it was a repetitive unorganised noise, many years later I would recognise it as a thunderous noise, as a noise close to a thing called rain.
Yet through my eyes I only saw bright light. Nothing more that a bright light.
The sound was omnipresent I could only hear it during my gasps, my crying drowning it entirely.

I cried and gasped from what seemed like an eternity, in fact for a whole lifetime.
For the whole of my lifetime so far.

Then I could not hear a thing, I was back where I came from.
What had that all been?

I re-lived the sensations, now with more calm.
As if They where not in the boundary, as if the outside and the inside where just abstract notions.
As if all was a drill, as if all was being told to me without a language, but I was not experiencing it.
 
Then all became dark and uneventful.
This unbounded continuity was what I was accustomed to, How things had always been.
I had no idea of even what I was, let alone consider the who that I would become later on.
This infinity, was my home, this void was what I was.
No boundary, no sensation, nothing but an awareness of existence.

That was perhaps the weirdest of all, where was that awareness coming from.
What had that ocker smell been?
What was it all about?
What was it in the first place?

How had all of this appeared in the void?

Ode to the geek

The true power of the geek is that of being capable of taking ownership of its environment and circumstances, and not be afraid to introduce the changes that may be necessary. This ownership is not exercised in a tyrannical myopic and destructive way, but rather in a comprehensive way. In a way in which the scratch complements the itch, and fulfils it, but does not leave a rash behind. This is due to a profound understanding of the space in which the itch is present. The myopic decision-making that generally contributes to the destruction out of an over simplification or of a fiduciary drive disregards the itch in order to consider it as an opportunity. This difference from itch to opportunity is what has driven a lot of the big business but it fails to take place in a world in which to be in touch with reality, the reality that incommensurable values bring, is a lot more valuable. It is then to look at the world as a space in which we live, as a place which supplies and environment for our existence, as a vessel that contains us, that feeds us and clothes us, not as a mine from which we extract all that we want without returning its due. As a place from where we can watch the stars, and not count them to impose on them a virtual ownership. As a big roller-coaster ride that provides us with our joys and our sadness and all the experiences that we live. A place in which love comes out of understanding and experience. Out of opening the mind to imagination and itching the way through life fixing one problem at a time. With each problem and each solution, finding a new understanding, a new element that makes us proud of who we are in the space that we have transformed, out of a selfless act of creation. The geek gives more than takes, for the geek understands its environment. It is an intellectual in a modern age in which the language and knowledge are technological, but not devoid of a human component.

The subtle interplay of Information and Immortality.

As humans we aim for the only thing that we truly cannot have, immortality. The only thing that remains after our existence is information. But information needs a support. The only place in which it is truly alive is in our heads. Computers have gone along way, they are good at storing and transmitting but true inference and creativity through intuition is still miles away.

As it stands the only shot at attaining immortality that humans have is information on two different supports genes and memes. Or ideas if you prefer the old fashioned term. Those are the only ways of leaving a imprint past our existence. In Milan Kundera's novel Immortality the main character seeks immortality in the media using it a as a tool to spread his ideas, yet being caught in the frenzy he is just a fad, and the true pain starts when he realises. It is always painful to realise its own mortality, forcing us to seek other ways of achieving the same goal through alternative routes.

The information represented as both genes and memes make for very different legacies. Each one of them fulfills very different roles. Genes shape our bodies, vehicles of our physical existence. What they perpetuate are our physical traits. Through much of the last century after the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick. And later the genetic code we have some understanding of how our bodies are made and how the information that drives the process is stored interpreted and propagated through time. Also much understanding has gone into the role that genes play in certain illnesses. Besides giving us a shot at immortality it has also allowed us to improve our standards of living and to better diagnose certain illnesses.

On the other side Memes are stored in language which may itself be persisted in another form of representation. But it is only inside peoples minds that they are manipulated, and that new ideas can be created. Their spreading and storage is greatly helped by technology. A considerable amount of effort has gone into developing such technologies. Making more and more patent our drive for immortality. Memes are exchanged, traded and valued in our civilisation with great repercussions, the next evolution of mankind will be driven by how we deal with public or common knowledge. On how we share the ideas and on how we benefit from their implementations.

We have then that the two ways of passing on information that makes us, hence perpetuating ourselves, are in two completely different realms ruled by different rules. In Espinoza's ethics the restrictions between the two realms are made quite clear. An idea can only be bound by another idea, and a physical object can only be bound by another physical object. Once we start implementing an idea it creates artefacts that obey to the restrictions of the physical world. This does not apply to the representation of the idea, just to the artefact originating from its implementation. So if we apply this restriction to us, unless our minds can modify the genes, and the genes our minds the two ways of passing on our legacy are completely independent and can not interfere with each other. This is not so black and white, obviously, we know from science that there are interactions between the two. And more and more is know about those, but we will deal with those later. For know it will suffice to say that the body and soul duality still holds to scrutiny if we look at things as Spinoza did.

But why did we come to develop such an idea, why has that problem plagued philosophy for such a long time. Duality appears as a natural consequence of our perception.

At the end of the day we have no awareness of the internals of our bodies. There are few sensations that transcend that barrier. Most of them are hard to describe in the form of a discomfort or pain.

Further we do not have a blueprint or a mechanism to consciously alter our bodies. We can not do things like re-route nerves after an injury, slow our heart or breathing rates to a determined pace. We can, through controlling our ideas, relax our bodies, but that is a capacity which requires practice. If not our bodies are mostly in auto-pilot serving the desires of our minds. The mind driving at a very distant level. It is this lack of awareness and rational control which builds in our perception the fact that our ideas are separate from our physical bodies.

In reality our existence is traumatic, we displace the world around us but inside the physical shell we have a void of perception. This emptiness is due to how we perceive. We only perceive the out not the in. Leading us to believe that the world of ideas can not filtrate into the physical world. Since that is not possible in the thing that we are the most used to, our bodies. Hence setting up a frontier demarcating two worlds. But it is not impermeable as Espinoza would have it.

The same way that an artefact can be the implementation of an idea, in the human body a mood can affect the health and a chemical imbalance create a depression. These crossings of world boundaries are due to causal relationships in the functioning of the physical world. That is, ideas are an epiphenomenon of the functioning of the brain. This creates a one way causal relationship. However from the perspective of the ideas the transition implies a change of rules between the elements on each side of the boundary. Ideas are restricted by ideas and physical bodies are restricted by physical bodies or so was the idea of Espinoza. The boundary is broken in the other direction, or at least it appears so, when an artefact is created. For this the constraints of the physical world are internalised, to make sure that the artefact is possible. This is generally called thinking ahead. This is possible due to capability of abstracting away from the real world in order to manipulate ideas according to the physical reality. This of course requires practice, but it is where Espinoza stops or at least the simplistic understanding we had of his postulates for his ethics.

This capacity for abstraction that the mind is capable off, that is of abstracting and making symbols out of the perceived reality, is the core of the premise of I am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter. The world of ideas being more flexible can incorporate the physical world and can help manipulate it. We do not have control over which of our genes we pass on. At least not naturally though we have developed technologies to do so. Again following this drive of becoming if not immortals passing on the best of us. But we do have a big saying into what are the ideas that we pass on. For that it suffices to publish them or to act according to them. The former being less likely to leave an imprint but much easier to control.

Of course the only way to strive for immortality is to believe that we are immortal. To ignore our mortal condition in a truly decadent way and go through our existence as if nothing happened. But that is of course unreal, it is part of dealing with the trauma of existence that we forge such mechanism. Illness or death puts things into perspective and points towards the only true immortality, that of information.

Illness also bears a close relation to the information that we pass on. Illness is implicitly and explicitly genetic. In that illness is a reaction of the body to an internal or external stimulus being the expression of the genes, in an environment. It hence the genes or their mechanisms of expression, also described in the genes, that bring about the illness. Illness can also prevent the passing on of the genes, hence our impossibility to be immortal.

The role of memes in illness more subtle. There is mental illnesses which can be due to a physical problem. A chemical imbalance in the brain generates or fosters certain kinds of thoughts which are then recognised as symptoms. Certain medications have effects of cognitive nature, euphoria, mood swings etc. The one way boundary crossing from physical problem to mental symptom is clearly established. The other direction presents more and more evidence. It is now known that a good mood helps the recovery. However the ideas of mentally ill person, unless of ground breaking nature, think Nietzsche, will also be regarded with caution. Much like knowing that a partner has a genetic condition.

So where does this leave us, or to be more correct where does this leave our existence. We are nothing but the interplay of information. Information in the shape of ideas and genes which we only get to be aware off when they do not work. When we realise in our decadent approach that we are not immortal. Realising that our only shot at immortality is to ensure that our true nature, information, in one way or the other is what will remain. This is obviously painful if not traumatic to realise. This pain lying inside the world of ideas can only be addressed by coming to grasp what reality is. And this can only be done through the interaction with others. Through the realisation that indeed all we are is the emerging property of the interplay of information in different forms. One in the physical world, the other amongst other human beings based on language, and ideas.