imagine

Imagine yourself as being presented to a social 'throng' as a collectible action figure 'still in its packaging.'

living outside the quantum tether

Perhaps, big perhaps, consciousness, that is, the thing humans do in their self-awareness routine, can only exist if it breaks a tether with other existing consciousnesses in the universe, meaning that consciousness is a compute intensive activity for the universe in such a way that two of them cannot exist simultaneously within the same speed-of-light updatable way. In other words, if the speed of light is the distance requirement for quantum multiplicity to exist and update itself within the universe, then consciousness is a singularity, which collapses the multiplicity, and to do so it must sever the quantum tether with it's multiplicity--other consciousnesses. 

I'm a first-rate bullshit artist. 

Sartre conjuring actor network theory

"The collective object is an index of separation. This would emerge more clearly if we took as our example a more complex market (in connection with the conjuncture, with State intervention, with the existence of semi-monopolies, and taking into account advertising, the weather--and consequently, fluctuations of production and tooling-- etc.), but this would require a treatment beyond the scope of this study" (pp. 288-289).

As quoted in Jean Paul Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume One"

The miraculous occurrence and quantum computing

An argument in creationist circles is that the number of factors that lead to the complex human organism is a miracle that could have only occurred through the intervention of God. A evolutionist argument to counter this is that any given discrete decision in the life of a person and the surrounding context, environment, and history of actions leading up to this specific decision is just as complex to consider and these are happening every day. 

Stepping off from where the evolutionist counters the creationist's view of actions in the world let us look at something like art. What is music? A guitarist touches strings and the fret board in some combination at some time signature. The touching and the sequence of this touching that the musician does is something anyone could conceivably do if he/she is physically capable of moving his/her fingers along the fret board and the strings. That being said, what makes one a musician, making music, and the other just mucking around, making noise? Time. An investment of time and physical discipline by the musician makes his/her playing of a song look so effortless, whereas a person without any real understanding or physical discipline cannot put the symphony together, per se, but can conceivably make all the discrete sounds of that symphony, just without orchestration. 

This analogy aside, we can look at a number of phenomena in the world as simply the configuration of matter and energy in temporal sequence, like a lock tumbler, which given a desired outcome reveals the value or effectiveness of this configuration. A thought, be it Einstein's equation, or a workaround for not having a cake making ingredient are simply thoughts. So is someone's meaningless daydream. What makes one thought more valuable than another requires both a context and a time investment to get to that state, which makes one thought more valuable as an outcome than another. Even further back, the identity of one thought over another, as a matter of neurons in a three-dimensional configuration, firing in a persistent thought pattern just doesn't seem to bear out the content of what thought it contains, per se, but we're getting at a hard ground for just what memory is as a physical manifestation of experience plus some active reproduction of it is and what brain activity is. Just as a lock is simply a barrier to both opening a latch and a door, what that lock contains and the mechanism that keeps it locked are a simple and potentially random arrangement of things, which have an occult feature, which keeps them 'locked' or hidden from being discovered. 

Two things: this characterization seems to drag the whole metaphor into the payoff, making the description a retroactive evaluation of its function and occurrence in the world. An Einstein equation, thought for the first time, makes that mundane, happenstance neural network somehow more important than that of a fruit fly's, a gate operators, or a symphony conductors to a manner of degree. All could be powered by a hamburger. All are broken down into states of matter in some configuration, yet some have an identity that render them more useful to know completely over others. 

Blah, blah, blah. The tie in to quantum computing comes from its native ability to try out multiple configurations simultaneously in order to do what has been occurring at the atomic level since the universe began. To square with the metaphor, a quantum computer, beyond its code breaking capabilities, is picking locks to the nature of the universe, finding more effective molecules for specific applications, to optimize for the quantum states of atomic structures. This is its big and interesting pay off, and it reveals something that reality, as we know it, has achieved and built up from the given environment over the course of billions of years. That the molecular soup of a young earth could give rise to discrete, self-replicating cells both refers back to the miracle that creationists see behind what we are and the world we inhabit and to something larger, spread out across the universe, seemingly 'baked into' it. 

To find humanity uncovering truth, unlocking a meaning built into the universe casts a reflection upon us, as a part of that universe and but one form that universe takes in self organization, which is itself a form of 'understanding.' 

Identity

I am beholden to answers based upon empirical data. I hold to a view that the identity fluidity of a generation coming of age now was influenced by character creation screens and the gaming environments they inhabited for the measure of their formative years. 

Content whale

 Art is Melville's whale being turned into oil in the era of content. 

we're all billionaires

We're all this brand of billionaire. We're all spare time billionaires. 

Some observations

I see mathematics relying upon:

1/x

x²

√x

This observation also falls prey to my interpretation of numerous glazed-over math presentations. 

I am finding that much of what mathematics does is to calculate or analyze plots in a three dimensional volume.

Finally, as we've been beholden to 2 dimensional graphical means for representing thought/calculation/analysis so long, the big discoveries in the past century have been attempts to transcend those 2 dimensions while working within them representationally.

Computers allow us to serially compute vast points in three dimensional volumes in order to test hypotheses about the probabilities represented by those points in space as a matter of a behavior imputed to those points. 

Quantum computing represents the next step in modeling points in a three dimensional volume such that it need not go through step-by-step modeling, via math, of points in three dimensional space but can do multiple points simultaneously, thus adding 'volume' as a baked in feature of its compute cycle. 

Classical computing is flattening of calculation to logic gates on atoms-thick wafers to maximize serial calculations within two-dimensional space. Quantum computing pushes through that miniscule control arena of two dimensions into quantum space, thus opening up multi-matrix calculation by having qubits masquerade as the control conditions for information. 

This is a mess, and I will return to it. 

Sartre on the human investment absorbed by material objects

"In this way, society in its most concrete movement is shot through with passivity, and unceasingly totalises its inert multiplicities and inscribes its totalisation in inertia, while the material object, whose unity is thereby recreated, re-discovered and imposed, becomes a strange and living being with its own customs and its own movement" (p. 169).

Later Sartre writes, "This is not a metaphor. To preserve its reality as a dwelling a house must be inhabited, that is to say, looked after, heated, swept, repainted, etc.; otherwise it deteriorates. This vampire object constantly absorbs human action, lives on blood taken from man and finally lives in symbiosis with him. It derives all its physical properties, including temperature, from human action. For its inhabitants there is no difference between the passive activity which might be called 'residence' and the pure re-constituting praxis which protects the house against the Universe, that is, which mediates between the exterior and the interior." (p. 169)

from Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1"

Man and machine in the process of totalization

"Determination of the present by the future, oscillation between the inert and the organic, negation, transcended contradictions, negation of the negation--in short, developing totalisation; these are the moments of any form of labour, until--at a dialectical level that we have yet to consider--society develops the division of labour to the point of the specialisation of machines. The process is then inverted: the semi-automatic machine defines its environment and constructs its man, so that the inorganic comes to be characterised by a false but effective interiority, and the organic by exteriority. Man becomes the machine's machine; and to himself he is his own exteriority. But in all other cases, the dialectic appears as the logic of labour." (p. 91)

From Jean Paul Sartre's "The Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume 1"

Technopolyps

 Technopolyps/technopalypse

When one considers the religious/existential implications of interfacing with a device that has processing power enough to addict oneself, keep oneself coming back, and to enforce an identification regime, we've reached the status of technopolyps/technopalypse. 

What this means. 

The term describes the time/space/attention commitments that people have to interactive devices, content delivery devices, attention consuming devices that, to the extent that they have sway, erode people's commitments to a society and make them into users, not citizens. Imagine one day when the streets are empty (a foregone conclusion resting upon its predecessor) and the only people engaging with the world are those indigent, homeless, and drug abused, shuffling like a zombie horde about the homes, nee cages, of the 'residents' all of whom are quietly alone before a screen. Here I stand, before a screen myself, scrawling upon the walls of my 'gilded-information-age cage' a cry for revolution resounding to all, alone, as a singular cry for help. 

To become a technopolyp is the preceding condition to becoming the soft-pot upon the chassis of ascendant technology. In becoming a technopolyp, one establishes boundaries around one's identity that exclude others and include only those engaged with a specific game, streaming show, news outlet. And only to the extent that others engage together they form a community, and in doing so exclusively of others they form an army against outsiders. Without guns, without enmity, this army fights a quiet war to secede, like a Texas, from a larger community entirely and only on the basis of its time and attention investments in a given interactive medium. 

But having a community apart from others solely upon one's interactive media choices still establishes a power-based conflict. To reduce that to it's basic unit, to cellularize it, is to use computing power to tailor media specific to each and every user. Thus rendered from others, and over time to a shared language and world, the mind becomes severed without surgery from its physical environment and its body in such a way that face-to-face interaction becomes a disease whose symptom is pathological isolation. 

Yet here I stand, before my screen as if before the altar to a domestic god 2000+ years ago, hearing the admonitory voices from afar or apast, heeding their call to some place outside of one's immediate space and time. Completely untethered from the day-to-day needs of a community, severed from self, awash in a sea of 1s and 0s and soon to become qubits engaged in a keyboard, gestural, voice activated ceremony to a self-reflective God standing amidst an army of none. 

Life, self-knowledge, entropy, space-time

Life is an ordered system maintained through the intake of energy against entropy and the stochastic imprint of time upon its development and evolution. Regardless of how the universe achieves self-meaning it will find it in the persistent organization of space-time at some location. Given the exploded nature of all the matter in the universe, the question begged is how much of the universe is required to be organized for it to achieve self-knowledge?

Brain-Universe Interface

Let's propose a starkly material version of consciousness as the product of the brain activity devoted to it. This not only describes the nature of consciousness as housed within a brain's neurological function but also sets the upper limit of consciousness and what brains can conceive. To end this discussion abruptly, the universe can only be conceived up to the limit of the brain. In so far as a brain's synaptic connections can be quantified and measured in terms of astronomical units, that is, 'stars in the Milky Way,' this rough analogy for understanding the size and complexity of the brain also displays the total possible complexity of what it can understand. And so we have to ask if there's an entry level into consciousness of the universe that the universe itself produces for the sake of its own existence. If it is a forest it has to produce a tree and finally an onlooker in order for a logical chain of events to substantiate its existence and its dynamics. 

Social order in a culture predominated by schizotypy

"For schizophrenia, whether one illness or many, is in its florid stage practically defined by certain characteristics which we have stated earlier were the salient characteristics of the bicameral mind. The presence of auditory hallucinations, their often religious and always authoritative quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog 'I', and of the mind-space in which it once could narratize out what to do and where it was in time and action, these are the large resemblances.

"But there are great differences as well. If there is any truth to this hypothesis, the relapse is only partial. The learnings that make up a subjective consciousness are powerful and never totally suppressed. And thus the terror and the fury, the agony and despair. The anxiety attendant upon so cataclysmic a change, the dissonance with the habitual structure of interpersonal relations, and the lack of cultural support and definition for the voices, making them inadequate guides for everyday living, the need to defend against a broken dam of environmental sensory stimulation that is flooding all before it--produce a social withdrawal that is a far different thing from the behavior of the absolutely social individual of bicameral societies. The conscious man is constantly using his introspection to find 'himself' and to know where he is, relevant to his purposes and situation. And without this source of security, deprived of narratization, living with hallucinations that are unacceptable and denied as unreal by those around him, the florid schizophrenic is in an opposite world to that of the god-owned laborers of Marduk or of the idols of Ur.

"The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a culture. But he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle of mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is a mind bared to his environment, waiting on gods in a godless world" (pp. 431-432).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Cultural convictions and belief in oracles

"The application of this general bicameral paradigm to the oracle at Delphi is obvious: the elaborate induction procedures, the trance in which consciousness is lost, the ardently pursued authorization of Apollo. But it is the collective cognitive imperative or group belief or cultural prescription or expectancy (all of these terms indicating my meaning) which I wish to emphasize. The immensity of the cultural demand upon the entranced priestess cannot be overemphasized. The whole Greek world believed, and had for almost a millennium. As many as thirty-five thousand people a day from every part of the Mediterranean world might struggle by sea through the tiny port of Itéa that snuggles the receptive coast just below Delphi. And they, too, went through induction procedures, purifying themselves in the Castilian spring, making offerings to Apollo and other gods as they persisted up the Sacred Way. In the latter centuries of the oracle, more than four thousand votive statues crowded this 220-yard-long climb up the side of Mount Parnassus to the temple of the oracle. It was, I suggest, this confluence of huge social prescription and expectancy, closer to definition than mere belief, which can account for the psychology of the oracle, for the at-once-ness of her answers. It was something before which any skepticism would be as impossible as for us to doubt that the speech of a radio originates in a studio that we cannot see. And it is something before which modern psychology must stand in awe" (p. 325).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

The Old Testament as a loss of the bicameral mind

"The story or imagined story of the later Khabiru or Hebrews is told in what has come down to us as the Old Testament. The thesis to which we shall give our concern in this chapter is that this magnificent collection of history and harangue, of song, sermon, and story is in its grand overall contour the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium B.C." (p. 294)

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Hebrews are vagrants?

"Some perhaps were still trying to follow inadequate bicameral voices, or clinging too the edge of settled land, fearing to launch out, becoming breeders of sheep and camels, while others, having struggled unsuccessfully to mingle with more settled peoples, then pushed out into the open desert, where only the ruthless survive, perhaps in precarious pursuit of some hallucinated vision, some back parts of a god, some new city or promised land.

"To the established city-states, these refugees were the desperate outcasts of the desert wilderness. The city people thought of them collectively as robbers and vagrants. And so they often were, either singly, as miserable homeless wretches stealing by night the grapes which the vine-dressers scorned to pick, or as whole tribes raiding the city peripheries for their cattle and produce, even as nomadic Bedouins occasionally do today. The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes hebrew" (pp. 293-294).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Words and the human condition

"Let no one think these are just word changes. Word changes are concept changes and concept changes are behavioral changes. The entire history of religions and of politics and even of science stands shrill witness to that. Without worlds like soul, liberty, or truth, the pageant of this human condition would have been filled with different roles, different climaxes. And so with the words we have designated as preconscious hypostases, which by the generating process of metaphor through these few centuries unite into the operator of consciousness" (p. 292).

As quote in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Poems and uncertainty

"Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds" (p. 256).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Control and Uncertainty

"In the contemporary world, we associate rigid authoritarian governments with militarism and police repression. This association should not be applied to the authoritarian states of the bicameral era. Militarism, police, rule by fear, are all the desperate measures used to control a subjective conscious populace restless with identity crises and divided off into their multitudinous privacies of hopes and hates" (p. 205).

- from Julian Jayne's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

2000 B.C. emo poetry

"One who has no god, as he walks along the street,

Headache envelops him like a garment." 

- Assyrian cuneiform inscription circa Tukulti's rule

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," (p. 225)

Hive pheromones and god symbols

"Like the queen in a termite nest or a beehive, the idols [of deceased god-kings] of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones" (p. 144).

 - Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

occult door

 The bright light of chaos casts a long shadow on the occult door of consciousness. 

on living in your head

My imagination is declaring its sovereignty.