Language is the playhouse of imagination and reality. They provide a conceptual space for thinking.
Morality is a symbolic foundation for action. Morality coordinates the habits of people with regard to matter. Morality influences people's attitudes toward things and events because it influences their meaning through a ritualized observance. Ritualized observance is any recurring behavior. Morality is loosely defined as an axiomatic vocabulary, which is draped upon the world. Key to understanding the power of morality and its cyclical reproduction through time is the method by which it enlists the world as the originating symbol for human motive. One such method is to place observed, common sense reality upon a cosmological framework suggesting an ultimate origin. The cosmological framework works as a tether pole fabricated out of time around which a family of related concepts form and are used to build a story about everything that relates practically to the identity of the person. This is experienced as a terminus in the prosaic matters of everyday life. Out of these varied and disconnected moments a classification scheme gives semblance to occurrences and grants them meaning as typifying moments. And in being typical, these moments get symbolized in language and interact with the symbolic imagination. From this people derive motives and motivation, thus driving their action as ritualized in conception and experience as events in the future perfect tense (i.e., I will have ...). The future perfect tense suggests a reliable sense that something will recur because it happened before. That it happened before may offer some understanding of the cyclical nature of events. It may also point to the actions of memory and imagination whereby individuals craft names for experience and reuse them as similar experiences arise (e.g., birthdays). This continual process of naming and experiencing is what typifies the activity of a self-conscious humanity. It also flavors the experience with what could be called time travel, that is, reliving the past to make sense of the present and to plan the future.
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Monday, December 14, 2015
Polygon war, a war with many sides
I've had in mind a quote that suggests that war is a continuation of politics by other means. And by politics I have in mind any source of power normally circulating in groups of people and used asymmetrically by some factions of a group to enforce meaning and shift a course of action to a faction's preferred end.
These are not necessarily new ideas, nor is the notion of 'everyday politics' that much outside the ken of anyone who has spent time with other people and bore witness to or participated in a conflict, no matter how petty, over the meaning of things and how to act upon that meaning.
Let us fast forward a bit from some generic context to a specific context in the near future, which is just beginning to dawn upon us. We see this kind of crisis as it is a consequence of our brand of modernization, which leads to a greater reliance upon technical expertise, centralized control, and a robust infrastructure. Heat, light, water, food, shelter--these are the petri dish basics, which are gussied up into so many lifestyle products offered to everyday consumers at varying prices. But behind all that, having unbroken access to these basics helps to anchor an existence, which contributes to a person's view of one's self.
As we move forward what I am witnessing is a sophistication of this infrastructure for providing people with their petri dish basics. For this reason I will fashion a term 'petristructure' to describe those elements of modernity, which are provided for the sake of sustaining a life. Heat, light, water, food, and shelter are the basics. The sophistication of our society also adds more petristructure, such as transportation and communication technologies to alleviate the problems resulting from a shattered village and family system whereby most any member of a family of working age is doing so, or compelled to do so in order to maintain a comfortable life with some lifestyle amenities to it.
Now war, as we all know, is a method of politics in that groups of people decide for salient reasons to obliterate each other due to a belief in the threat they pose to one group's 'way of life' or to the depletion of resources and so on. But a war in a fully sophisticated modern society need not pick sides or require groups to organize in order to conduct it. No, in the sophisticated modern society the very infrastructure of modernity is used to wage individualized war against individualized consumers suckling upon its stainless steel teat. Cutting power, water, internet, and communications are effective means of punishing and vanquishing individuals who have very little means to interact with others outside of a software environment that is available on a pay-to-use basis. As noted components of our petristructure without power, water, internet, and communications the individual's self-concept is challenged and changed by forced changes in the environment. As the absence of a sustained and secure environment continues the individual's self-concept languishes. Polygon warfare doesn't always require the death of the body but the destruction of that body's will and its means to act meaningfully for itself. And those meaningful actions as they're more closely and pervasively intertwined with the petristructure of modern society almost always consist of economic actions. As we move further we can expect a few more specific cases of this kind of warfare.
As we move deeper into the information society, computing is being used to drive cars. These smart cars can and will kill their drivers or take them to a predefined Auschwitz if an entity powerful enough to access the car's computer overrides its orders. The level of centralization and the cession of agency to computation that drivers of modern automobiles have begun submit provides us with a specific template for a loss of control over one's basic needs for agency. They are sold as 'amenities' that 'free' us from worrying about specific dangers attendant to automobile travel, and basically now they're being used to parallel park for us. By finding a prevalent weakness or insecurity in the driver's habit the manufacturers are finding purchase for selling greater computer-control to the automobile. With the trickiness of the DMCA's language and the expansive definitions of 'intellectual copyright' drivers are beginning to pay a company, not to own, but to lease its services, which have a greater and greater control over the vehicle. The owner is beginning to own more of a legal concept of a car such that while the services it runs are wholly owned by the company that built the car, the owner or driver of the car simply has the material components, which are increasingly useless without the intellectual copyright controlled computing power and software support that allows it to function as a vehicle.
Let us move on to an earlier iteration of the hardware platform, which supports an essential function of daily life, which we buy in order to further purchase access to a communications network, buy data by the lot, and accept the continuous 'improvement' and imminent obsolescence of that platform by continuous software updates. That is what is today's smart phone. We are already at the cusp of the cellular phone with a powerful enough battery to classify it as a bomb. In a near future phone users can be irradiated by a stuxnet-type of virus that causes the phone to produce overly strong radio frequencies that may cauterize neurons and brain tissue or slowly mutate neural DNA, resulting in cancerous tissue. Finally, as battery power becomes powerful enough, that stuxnet-type virus can also trigger a battery overload resulting in its explosion. This will be made worse if the virus triggers this attack while a user has the phone pressed to his or her ear, causing skull and brain damage. These sound more like the old war model from which this polygon war borrows its metaphor. But like the car example above, a component of computing, computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and the behavior-shaping reward structures that define much of how we participate in computing today is there with the smart phone. Therefore, any number of very subtle attacks can lead to a person thinking that he or she has 'complete' internet access while still being systematically left out of communication or adequate information retrieval. What is unfettered access to a collection of information that dwarfs the capacity to comprehend it? Few can provide an adequate answer to that. But we do rely upon our favored search engines and the algorithms that shape our social networking experience. Millions of computations shape how our online experience evolves. As that is controlled for specific ends that are inimical to the individual the result will be anomie and a systematically distorted view of the world.
This final scenario has already come to pass in our contemporary world. People can and do go to self-defined ghettos with makeshift perimeters cobbled out of programmable algorithms that administer to our 'tastes.' People can and do enter social worlds completely abstracted from any real living situation where they can and do discuss, in a rarified context, 'items of great import.' In doing so, they associate with people without any moderating influences of different opinion and so act without the attendant need to at least practice decorum. As a result the influences of group polarization take a person who was once a gun owner into now becoming a gun zealot who stockpiles guns and survival supplies. Another confessed vegetarian and member of the animal rights community finds that fluoridation of the water supply makes people more psychologically malleable and so this person buys an expensive and completely hokey water purification system and after it breaks down, subscribes to a water delivery service, going so far as to water this person's garden with that water when needed.
Warfare like this, as with its classical form carries a heavy psychological component. Classical warfare needed a strong form of identification through clan, village, and eventually citizenship structures in order to make the desire for defense strong in the individual soldier. Warfare outcomes like defeats and victories move beyond mere quantities of loss and destruction. The will of each side must be strong enough in order for it to continue, and that will is a measure of one's psychological fortitude. In today's warfare some purely cognitive methods are in place in order to achieve a similar form of identification and will, and most of these are purchased literally as a result of consumer choices. Gun owners go to war, for now metaphorically, with gun safety or gun control advocates. Christians go to war with aspects of our 'godless society.' Carefully edited videos add substance to an already keyed up Christian phantasm of a baby holocaust happening in their midst. Media portrayals amplify the threat of teenage Muslim men joining a cause that reinvigorates their sense of belonging and purpose in a society that has modernized them into various forms of inequity and unemployment. An anti-terrorism behemoth profits from immediately labeling anyone using the words 'ISIS' in social media as a threat to a 'way of life.' These purely cognitive modes of warfare happen mostly in the minds of the participants, spill out into their consumer choices, and end in explosions perpetrated for or against its participants. This willy-nilly call to arms is a social media and global communications phenomenon, and as long it is idealized in the minds of the 'soldiers' of this war those fires burn oh so bright.
And the one sad entry that breaks from this set is the day when the sky is darkened by armed drones launched from several hundred countries. Each country conspired to launch millions of drones coordinated to strike a mutual target, the White House. Many crash or stray of course. Others are downed. Others simply are duds. But of the hundreds of thousands that still make it within the vicinity all release their weapon upon a target. And when even ten thousand drones strike at once the effect creates a small firestorm at the target site. The first drones test the defenses but the successful ones raise the threat of attack by striking with effective force. The next waves, lightly armed, simply help to deplete the defensive batteries in and around Washington. These waves are staggered to test the readiness and deplete the readiness of military air response. The final waves, consisting of two thirds of the total assault contingent dedicated to this attack, strikes with depleted uranium projectiles that pierce targets and poison the area with radioactivity.
These are not necessarily new ideas, nor is the notion of 'everyday politics' that much outside the ken of anyone who has spent time with other people and bore witness to or participated in a conflict, no matter how petty, over the meaning of things and how to act upon that meaning.
Let us fast forward a bit from some generic context to a specific context in the near future, which is just beginning to dawn upon us. We see this kind of crisis as it is a consequence of our brand of modernization, which leads to a greater reliance upon technical expertise, centralized control, and a robust infrastructure. Heat, light, water, food, shelter--these are the petri dish basics, which are gussied up into so many lifestyle products offered to everyday consumers at varying prices. But behind all that, having unbroken access to these basics helps to anchor an existence, which contributes to a person's view of one's self.
As we move forward what I am witnessing is a sophistication of this infrastructure for providing people with their petri dish basics. For this reason I will fashion a term 'petristructure' to describe those elements of modernity, which are provided for the sake of sustaining a life. Heat, light, water, food, and shelter are the basics. The sophistication of our society also adds more petristructure, such as transportation and communication technologies to alleviate the problems resulting from a shattered village and family system whereby most any member of a family of working age is doing so, or compelled to do so in order to maintain a comfortable life with some lifestyle amenities to it.
Now war, as we all know, is a method of politics in that groups of people decide for salient reasons to obliterate each other due to a belief in the threat they pose to one group's 'way of life' or to the depletion of resources and so on. But a war in a fully sophisticated modern society need not pick sides or require groups to organize in order to conduct it. No, in the sophisticated modern society the very infrastructure of modernity is used to wage individualized war against individualized consumers suckling upon its stainless steel teat. Cutting power, water, internet, and communications are effective means of punishing and vanquishing individuals who have very little means to interact with others outside of a software environment that is available on a pay-to-use basis. As noted components of our petristructure without power, water, internet, and communications the individual's self-concept is challenged and changed by forced changes in the environment. As the absence of a sustained and secure environment continues the individual's self-concept languishes. Polygon warfare doesn't always require the death of the body but the destruction of that body's will and its means to act meaningfully for itself. And those meaningful actions as they're more closely and pervasively intertwined with the petristructure of modern society almost always consist of economic actions. As we move further we can expect a few more specific cases of this kind of warfare.
As we move deeper into the information society, computing is being used to drive cars. These smart cars can and will kill their drivers or take them to a predefined Auschwitz if an entity powerful enough to access the car's computer overrides its orders. The level of centralization and the cession of agency to computation that drivers of modern automobiles have begun submit provides us with a specific template for a loss of control over one's basic needs for agency. They are sold as 'amenities' that 'free' us from worrying about specific dangers attendant to automobile travel, and basically now they're being used to parallel park for us. By finding a prevalent weakness or insecurity in the driver's habit the manufacturers are finding purchase for selling greater computer-control to the automobile. With the trickiness of the DMCA's language and the expansive definitions of 'intellectual copyright' drivers are beginning to pay a company, not to own, but to lease its services, which have a greater and greater control over the vehicle. The owner is beginning to own more of a legal concept of a car such that while the services it runs are wholly owned by the company that built the car, the owner or driver of the car simply has the material components, which are increasingly useless without the intellectual copyright controlled computing power and software support that allows it to function as a vehicle.
Let us move on to an earlier iteration of the hardware platform, which supports an essential function of daily life, which we buy in order to further purchase access to a communications network, buy data by the lot, and accept the continuous 'improvement' and imminent obsolescence of that platform by continuous software updates. That is what is today's smart phone. We are already at the cusp of the cellular phone with a powerful enough battery to classify it as a bomb. In a near future phone users can be irradiated by a stuxnet-type of virus that causes the phone to produce overly strong radio frequencies that may cauterize neurons and brain tissue or slowly mutate neural DNA, resulting in cancerous tissue. Finally, as battery power becomes powerful enough, that stuxnet-type virus can also trigger a battery overload resulting in its explosion. This will be made worse if the virus triggers this attack while a user has the phone pressed to his or her ear, causing skull and brain damage. These sound more like the old war model from which this polygon war borrows its metaphor. But like the car example above, a component of computing, computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and the behavior-shaping reward structures that define much of how we participate in computing today is there with the smart phone. Therefore, any number of very subtle attacks can lead to a person thinking that he or she has 'complete' internet access while still being systematically left out of communication or adequate information retrieval. What is unfettered access to a collection of information that dwarfs the capacity to comprehend it? Few can provide an adequate answer to that. But we do rely upon our favored search engines and the algorithms that shape our social networking experience. Millions of computations shape how our online experience evolves. As that is controlled for specific ends that are inimical to the individual the result will be anomie and a systematically distorted view of the world.
This final scenario has already come to pass in our contemporary world. People can and do go to self-defined ghettos with makeshift perimeters cobbled out of programmable algorithms that administer to our 'tastes.' People can and do enter social worlds completely abstracted from any real living situation where they can and do discuss, in a rarified context, 'items of great import.' In doing so, they associate with people without any moderating influences of different opinion and so act without the attendant need to at least practice decorum. As a result the influences of group polarization take a person who was once a gun owner into now becoming a gun zealot who stockpiles guns and survival supplies. Another confessed vegetarian and member of the animal rights community finds that fluoridation of the water supply makes people more psychologically malleable and so this person buys an expensive and completely hokey water purification system and after it breaks down, subscribes to a water delivery service, going so far as to water this person's garden with that water when needed.
Warfare like this, as with its classical form carries a heavy psychological component. Classical warfare needed a strong form of identification through clan, village, and eventually citizenship structures in order to make the desire for defense strong in the individual soldier. Warfare outcomes like defeats and victories move beyond mere quantities of loss and destruction. The will of each side must be strong enough in order for it to continue, and that will is a measure of one's psychological fortitude. In today's warfare some purely cognitive methods are in place in order to achieve a similar form of identification and will, and most of these are purchased literally as a result of consumer choices. Gun owners go to war, for now metaphorically, with gun safety or gun control advocates. Christians go to war with aspects of our 'godless society.' Carefully edited videos add substance to an already keyed up Christian phantasm of a baby holocaust happening in their midst. Media portrayals amplify the threat of teenage Muslim men joining a cause that reinvigorates their sense of belonging and purpose in a society that has modernized them into various forms of inequity and unemployment. An anti-terrorism behemoth profits from immediately labeling anyone using the words 'ISIS' in social media as a threat to a 'way of life.' These purely cognitive modes of warfare happen mostly in the minds of the participants, spill out into their consumer choices, and end in explosions perpetrated for or against its participants. This willy-nilly call to arms is a social media and global communications phenomenon, and as long it is idealized in the minds of the 'soldiers' of this war those fires burn oh so bright.
And the one sad entry that breaks from this set is the day when the sky is darkened by armed drones launched from several hundred countries. Each country conspired to launch millions of drones coordinated to strike a mutual target, the White House. Many crash or stray of course. Others are downed. Others simply are duds. But of the hundreds of thousands that still make it within the vicinity all release their weapon upon a target. And when even ten thousand drones strike at once the effect creates a small firestorm at the target site. The first drones test the defenses but the successful ones raise the threat of attack by striking with effective force. The next waves, lightly armed, simply help to deplete the defensive batteries in and around Washington. These waves are staggered to test the readiness and deplete the readiness of military air response. The final waves, consisting of two thirds of the total assault contingent dedicated to this attack, strikes with depleted uranium projectiles that pierce targets and poison the area with radioactivity.
Friday, December 4, 2015
things and spirits
Organization is the transcendent property of substance.
Anecdotes from learned individuals that consider their thoughts as last week's potato tend to submerge or conflate the consciousness to the atoms making up the body housing it.
This is a short sale.
Let us consider that rhyme and rhythm are at their most fundamental form a method for transitory existence, through time, by the physical indent of a symbolic activity. What rhyme does 'physically' to symbolic activity is set up a preceding condition by word and initiate an anticipatory response to expect a homonym in kind. And what that does is bridge two moments in time. Likewise, rhythm provides a sound pattern, which also suggests an anticipatory response if only because the pattern repeats, and that is enough. Repetition is, like our rhyme above, an anticipatory response, which allows us to perform an action of memory in order to transcend moments.
The thing that is life is a monument to time, yes, and to biology, hallelujah, but that thing, that artifact, is also a memory of organization. Brain is a plastic substance, a response, literally, a reflex set into a time-delayed network, a plachinko-effect of input pinballing around a human neural network the sum effect of all that friction of that first input leading to a cognizant reality.
Yes, here is the rub, the symbolic exists apart of humanity. And as we happenstance to touch upon its harmonic frequencies we tap into this deeper intelligence. It is only our self-motivated and reflexive return to these harmonies that we begin to form an existence, a mode of being above and beyond substance. Being is a condition preceding substance. Likewise, intelligence is a property of things for physical reality, or things, rest upon this preceding condition. The relationship of objects and their perception suggests that objects precede their existence as perceived if one is a realist. An idealist may suggest that the properties of objects have a narrative overlay, a subjectivity required as a formality of their perception to the extent that outside of their apprehension by beings capable of observing and classifying them they are to themselves and to other objects basically 'indifferent.' But let us suggest that objects are the substance of the perception in that they furnish the elements of an intelligent consciousness that establishes the basis for perception. There is no intelligence per se, but objective complexities of structure that reflect an age-old interface between, first, sensory cells, then reflexive cells, and finally an organism that comprised them both, which evolved, for many years, bathed in a cellular and sensory environment from which it compiled an effective apparatus for intelligence of that world. It is effective because it promotes survival. The survival of the organism rests upon its requisite complexities for addressing environmental contingencies. The reflex to duck from a loud noise requires an organism in an environment that cultivates that response as a requirement. And so if we are to extrapolate greatly out from there, the cognitive capacity of a human being to manipulate abstract symbols and to essentially make use of time brings us to that early attempt to transcend time through rhythm and rhyme. A brute blankness of substance characterizes both the simpler origins and the overlooked complexity of current organismic existence. Our ability to create and invent powerful artifacts for our advantage reflects an identity that struggles with relevance in relationship to a history and a culture that provides it with symbolic substance. Secondly, it also reflects the physical possibilities of our world and our mental relationship to it. But as we reach a limit of our terrestrial existence the environment that it represents reflects a great deal of the universe but simply not all of it. In order to expand our existence we have to leave earth. It is through novel interactions with new substances that we will expand our consciousness.
Anecdotes from learned individuals that consider their thoughts as last week's potato tend to submerge or conflate the consciousness to the atoms making up the body housing it.
This is a short sale.
Let us consider that rhyme and rhythm are at their most fundamental form a method for transitory existence, through time, by the physical indent of a symbolic activity. What rhyme does 'physically' to symbolic activity is set up a preceding condition by word and initiate an anticipatory response to expect a homonym in kind. And what that does is bridge two moments in time. Likewise, rhythm provides a sound pattern, which also suggests an anticipatory response if only because the pattern repeats, and that is enough. Repetition is, like our rhyme above, an anticipatory response, which allows us to perform an action of memory in order to transcend moments.
The thing that is life is a monument to time, yes, and to biology, hallelujah, but that thing, that artifact, is also a memory of organization. Brain is a plastic substance, a response, literally, a reflex set into a time-delayed network, a plachinko-effect of input pinballing around a human neural network the sum effect of all that friction of that first input leading to a cognizant reality.
Yes, here is the rub, the symbolic exists apart of humanity. And as we happenstance to touch upon its harmonic frequencies we tap into this deeper intelligence. It is only our self-motivated and reflexive return to these harmonies that we begin to form an existence, a mode of being above and beyond substance. Being is a condition preceding substance. Likewise, intelligence is a property of things for physical reality, or things, rest upon this preceding condition. The relationship of objects and their perception suggests that objects precede their existence as perceived if one is a realist. An idealist may suggest that the properties of objects have a narrative overlay, a subjectivity required as a formality of their perception to the extent that outside of their apprehension by beings capable of observing and classifying them they are to themselves and to other objects basically 'indifferent.' But let us suggest that objects are the substance of the perception in that they furnish the elements of an intelligent consciousness that establishes the basis for perception. There is no intelligence per se, but objective complexities of structure that reflect an age-old interface between, first, sensory cells, then reflexive cells, and finally an organism that comprised them both, which evolved, for many years, bathed in a cellular and sensory environment from which it compiled an effective apparatus for intelligence of that world. It is effective because it promotes survival. The survival of the organism rests upon its requisite complexities for addressing environmental contingencies. The reflex to duck from a loud noise requires an organism in an environment that cultivates that response as a requirement. And so if we are to extrapolate greatly out from there, the cognitive capacity of a human being to manipulate abstract symbols and to essentially make use of time brings us to that early attempt to transcend time through rhythm and rhyme. A brute blankness of substance characterizes both the simpler origins and the overlooked complexity of current organismic existence. Our ability to create and invent powerful artifacts for our advantage reflects an identity that struggles with relevance in relationship to a history and a culture that provides it with symbolic substance. Secondly, it also reflects the physical possibilities of our world and our mental relationship to it. But as we reach a limit of our terrestrial existence the environment that it represents reflects a great deal of the universe but simply not all of it. In order to expand our existence we have to leave earth. It is through novel interactions with new substances that we will expand our consciousness.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Nerf Guns for Girls
When I check my yahoo e-mail I get a listing of ‘searches trending now.’ Updated for the holidays, the list now reflects holiday gift searches that are ‘hot.’ Something is amiss in a world where a gun goes off in a theater and theater-goers think it was part of the movie previews, an employee returns to a holiday luncheon with his girlfriend and kills 14, and a man from Virginia drives all the way to Colorado Springs to take a stand against a fabricated video and narrative painting Planned Parenthood as ‘traffickers in babyparts.’
Then, as I listen to NPR, a very subtle piece of editorializing occurs as the reporter discussing the most recent ‘mass’ shooting noted that the guns used by the attackers are banned under California’s ‘very strict gun laws.’ Much as when Anderson Cooper responded to Bernie Sanders’ opening remarks on his platform by noting that ‘Norway’ has x-million people and the United States has 300 as if to cast false equivalence and an ineffectual stamp upon universal education and healthcare as feasible ideas to pursue in a political arena.
What kind of news is this? I used to complain that for some the ‘daily herald’ is their Facebook feed. Those who stand for the fourth estate merely represent another ‘network’ perhaps less friendly but nonetheless connected to us in so many ways.
And a reality emerges from these webs of significance, no matter how contingent or marginal they might factor into the lives of information consumers, leading those consumers to consume daily feeds of gun violence and to begin searching for ‘nerf guns for girls’ and rarely if ever make the connection.
Four hundred tons of irradiated water wash out to sea from Fukushima per day and what do we worry about? What Donald Trump said.
Maybe we should make America Great Again or maybe we should wake up and stop pretending that America was ever great.
Then, as I listen to NPR, a very subtle piece of editorializing occurs as the reporter discussing the most recent ‘mass’ shooting noted that the guns used by the attackers are banned under California’s ‘very strict gun laws.’ Much as when Anderson Cooper responded to Bernie Sanders’ opening remarks on his platform by noting that ‘Norway’ has x-million people and the United States has 300 as if to cast false equivalence and an ineffectual stamp upon universal education and healthcare as feasible ideas to pursue in a political arena.
What kind of news is this? I used to complain that for some the ‘daily herald’ is their Facebook feed. Those who stand for the fourth estate merely represent another ‘network’ perhaps less friendly but nonetheless connected to us in so many ways.
And a reality emerges from these webs of significance, no matter how contingent or marginal they might factor into the lives of information consumers, leading those consumers to consume daily feeds of gun violence and to begin searching for ‘nerf guns for girls’ and rarely if ever make the connection.
Four hundred tons of irradiated water wash out to sea from Fukushima per day and what do we worry about? What Donald Trump said.
Maybe we should make America Great Again or maybe we should wake up and stop pretending that America was ever great.
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