Greg Detre
Thursday, April 24, 2003
photographs
and musical notes as soul-shards, avenues to interiority
what has
interiority?
what is it like to be a tomato? J
where do people go when they die? mostly gone, but soul-shards left
around, distributed in people�s brains
Chopin
etudes, Schirmer editions, pieces of text, American critic, James
Hunicker(sp???)
favourite: Opus 25, no 11, sometimes called �Winter wind�
�small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should not attempt
it�
magnanimous being stepping on a minianimous
being (with the sole of a boot) J
continuum of consciousness � humans � senile/retarded � dogs � viruses
so what would
retard the growth of an adult soul???
Molecular
gods: how molecules determine our behaviour
�who pushes whom around, inside the cranium� �
Roger Sperry
brain
structures
list of physical ones
and also:
the concept �dog�
the associative link �cow� <-> �milk�
an object file (Treisman)
frames (Minsky)
scripts (Schank)
memory organisation packets (Schank)
LTM
STM
analogical bridges (FARG)
mental spaces (Fauconnier)
memes (Dawkins)
ego, superego, id (Freud)
look
up Tresiman, Schank, Fauconnier
Schank, 1982, Dynamic memory
perfectly
valid to talk about concepts (even though we don�t know how to define them as
physical entities in the brain), just as we did good research into genetics
before learning about the substrate
the goal is
to relate the software structures to the hardware structures
can a
thought push an electron around?
why didn�t
the domino fall?
because the previous domino didn�t fall
OR because the domino rally is a program for calculating whether there
are a prime number of dominos in the input zone, and there were a prime number
of dominos
different level of explanation in terms of the primality of an integer
dialogue �
the �careenium�
small yellow magnetic (SYM) balls
whether small things make the big things jiggle
(at high speed) or the big static-seeming things obstruct the small things and
make them pinball off (at low speed)
reductionism
(upward causality) + predictionism (upstream causality) = mechanism
holism
(downward causality) + goalism (downstream causality) = soulism
you can
just look at the universe at the atomic level, and not see it in terms of
functions � but without a model you won�t survive long
�teleological,
entelechistic shorthand is a sine qua non for survival in a complex world with
real-time pressures
this
shorthand is in fact the native language of the entities that use it. other
languages seem incomprehensible�
Waves in
the Berkeley series (frank ???) � two soup cans suspended from the ceiling,
placed inside a slinky
natural oscillator � energy is transferred from one to the other at a
regular periodic
normal modes
difficult to solve the differential equations for positions x1
and x2 as a fucntion of time, but easy to solve for x1 +
x2 and x1 � x2
superposition of normal modes???
sat in
front of a TV taking pictures of the TV for hours in 1977
see Edifying thoughts of a tobacco smoker
feedback
I�m the
most permanent thing in my life � that�s why my self-representation is so
complex � but I�m not actually the most obvious thing in my life, which is why
it takes a while
box of
envelopes
all together, feels like a marble � but no marble � tiny spot of glue in
the same place that mounts up
if you were only to trust your senses�, if you�re prevented from seeing
the lower level (i.e. look between the envelopes)
you can�t look into the brains, so all you�re able to do is see and feel
the �I�, which feels more real than anything else
unwilling victims of a hoax that there is some real thing called �I� in
the brain � at a certain level of description, the �I� vanishes
�cogito,
ergo ego� J ???
does the
nature of the neural substrate affect the way we represent ourselves at all, or
could it be any flexible, distributed, emergent, dynamic substrate that
instantiates the function of our self-representation???
interesting,
elitist off-topic issue that the Hunicker quote was really getting at when it
talks about small-souledness, i.e. what determines the size of soul of an
adult, normal human being???
he avoided the question � didn�t want to be pinned down on it (despite
the way he was talking about it earlier), or to try and measure a
�soul-quotient� � although he argued that society does make a sort of
evaluation of soul size when imprisoning or firing people
I was more interested in his personal criteria � he basically said it was
a matter of taste
tell Leon:
there is more than one way to sense �I� � he�s arguing that it�s different from
the �marble�, because you can sense that in more than one way
me vs I
(James) � looking out at the world vs looking into yourself
soul-shards:
it�s not just that memories of his late wife are in his brain, but that
actually some part of her consciousness
e.g. whenever he thinks about things that meant a great deal to her, it
makes him cry
very dilutedly (not deludely)
he talks
about AIBOs scoring goals as being 0.000000000001 conscious
but how would you quantify that???
is a
heat-seeking missile (briefly) happy when it reaches its target? probably not,
because its representational system is so impoverished
cf is a virus alive?