You Are Not A Gadget - Chapters 12 & 13 (Patreon)

Hefty doses of pragmatism in these chapters, welcome music to my sine wave reading ears.

Hivemind Hypotheses

The restating of Cybernetic Totalist theories of the Supermind on pages 155-156 was a welcome concise retread. If I can rephrase the three common theories:

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1. You can overcome the problem of subjectivity and interpretation's organization of data if you just accumulate enough data. Chat GPT will figure out the rules of language if we just feed it infinite books! Unimaginable quantity eventually manifests quality.

2. We just have to program paradoxical self realization into the computer! That's how our brains work, in strange loops and recursive nonlinear cognition, we just gotta figure out how to program strange loops into the computers and then they will have consciousness!

3. Hey if the algorithm kinda looks and acts like a person, who are you to say its not?

-----That last one really floored me with it's simplicity and ubiquity. People really do feel like Twitter, Spotify, and comment sections have personalities. Livestreamers experience the chat as having a hive mind personality. We are programmed to see personality. A lot of our religious thought can be understood as assigning personality and relationship to forces of nature that we now have deduced are dead and conscious-less, but there's obvious I-Thou value to perceiving "dead things" as having personality. It's not surprising we should cast those impressions upon technology, but maybe it's telling that our religious instincts are directed downwards into our pockets and upwards into the cloud servers instead of to nature and human collectives.

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"specifics tends to be more colorful than generalities" (p. 157)

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The Origin of Tongue Magic

Some mentioned last week that they have been delving into John Vervaeke's meaning crisis serious. I have been rather taken aback in the past months with how intertwined neuroscience, technology, religion and language studies are. I mean folks I got into the philosophy game to talk about art, why am I reading about the evolution of our olfactory sense right now?

I am reminded of a music production class I took in college. I was going to be a music producer, an audio engineer, the studio whiz. As I got into higher level classes about being a sound engineer, we started having to do math. MATH!? and PHYSICS?!

The physical properties of sine waves, formulas for Q frequency spikes, the biological mechanisms inside of our ears, sampling rates and bit depths and equations inside of our DAW software, when did this become science?!?! I am not science!!!

Yet it all touches each other.

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I truly loved the birdsong section. We were trying so hard to figure out what sexual survival function that intricate creative singing might serve, we didn't consider that creativity for creativity's sake was actually the default, suppressed by conditions of survival.

"Terry offered an unconventional solution to the mystery of Bengalese finch musicality. What if there are certain traits, including song style, that naturally tend to become less constrained from generation to generation but are normally held in check by selection pressures? If the pressures go away, variation should increase rapidly. Terry suggested that the finches developed a wider song variety not because it provided an advantage but merely because in captivity it became possible.            In the wild, songs probably had to be rigid in order for mates to find each other. Birds born with a genetic predilection for musical innovation most likely would have had trouble mating. Once finches experienced the luxury of assured mating their song variety exploded." (p. 168)

You want someone to get creative? Put em somewhere where they got nothin else to do. Provide the comfort required to contribute. Why would someone be creative if it costs them community and belonging and safety?

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The bouba and kiki thing never fails to make me laugh anytime it comes across my tumblr dashboard, and I was thrilled to find out how close Lanier was to its originator.

Something that I've always kind of been flummoxed by is how easy it is to slot any group of four people into the four Hogwarts houses. Why does that always kinda work?

While reading W. David Marx's book Status and Culture, I realized that I had been intuitively doing something pragmatic. If two people in a group dynamic believe themselves to have similar identities, they will constantly quietly compare themselves and compete for status, causing internal social and psychological strife. However, if you (I) creatively reinforce and demonstrate how each person contributes something different (each person is a different Hogwarts house) then now everyone has distinct identities and they don't have to compete.

When I'm dealing with a group of people I always kinda brand them each as characters that can be celebrated in their specificity, and I think that's because I don't like competition and I am intuitively setting the stage for collaboration and community.

This is what filled my mind as I was reading Jaron Lanier create a 4 way XY graph between Bouba, Kiki, Juliet and the Sun. It's so ridiculous but when dealing with those limitations you can suddenly map similarities and convergences and identities and relationships across those four quadrants.

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"When the choices are reduced, the importance of what might otherwise seem like trivial synthetic or other elements of commonality is amplified.

Juliet is not spiky, so bouba or the sun, both being rounded, fit better than kiki. (If Juliet were given to angry outbursts of spiky noises, then kiki would be more of a contender, but that's not our girl in this case.) There are a variety of other minor overlaps that make Juliet more sunlike that boubaish.

If a tiny vocabulary has to be stretched to cover a lot of territory, then any difference at all between the qualities of words is practically a world of difference. The brain is so desirous of associations that it will then amplify any tiny potential linkage in order to get a usable one. (p. 172-173)

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This fills me with such glee! Arbitrary limitation forms the matrix from which meaning can arise.

This is in some part the source of my absolute allergy to those who say art is subjective according to an individuals tastes. Art is a series of boubas and kikis and Juliets and Suns, and respecting the reality and tradition of these things helps us know who we are. Yeah, you CAN kinda do anything and think anything I GUESS but then you're engaging in that infinite language game of figuring out specific sounds for every single instance of every isolated thing (and relationships between endlessly specific things), ratcheting up into a chaotic useless infinite language of atomistic nonrelation. This is exactly the opposite of what art does for us.

To quote Art As Experience:

"A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live. This fact, I think, is the explanation of that feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is experienced with esthetic intensity. It explains also the religious feeling that accompanies intense esthetic perception. We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experiences. We are carried beyond ourselves to find ourselves. I can see no psychological ground for such properties of an experience save that, somehow, the work of art operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole that accompanies every normal experience. This whole is then felt as an expansion of ourselves. For only one frustrated in a particular object of desire upon which he had staked himself, like Macbeth, finds that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Where egotism is not made the measure of reality and value, we are citizens of this vast world beyond ourselves, and any intense realization of its presence with and in us brings a peculiarly satisfying sense of unity in itself and with ourselves."

- John Dewey, Art As Experience (1931) p. 202-203

And a John MacMurray driveby emphasizing how this religious feeling is fundamentally related to our social nature, existing as part of something larger:

Religion is about fellowship and community, which are facts of direct, universal human experience. (The Structure of Religious Experience p. 31)

And finally an piece of a poetic Emerson essay on the effect of nature on the soul:

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

An illustration of this piece of poetry by Christopher Pearse Cranch, ca. 1836-1838:

And one more from modern writer Aaron Sinkovich in 2019:

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That's all for now folks. Next week final week! Will book a Zoom Town Hall to celebrate.

Boubas and Kikis Below!