Consciousness

Daniel Pinchbeck and Russell Brand on consciousness.

“Pop Deliverance”

Not going to upgrade, so click here to hear…

From the album Dirtier Metrics, The ELP. Check it out here.

Dirty Metrics

A few of these images have been seen before but they now go together. This is a short story about an awakening with a not-so-pretty ending…

Skullfucked RGB

I’ve completed a short graphic.

Skullfucked RGB took me 5 days to construct and 13 days to edit and publish. It was inspired by novel stimuli, but to call them vague terms is raping the beauty and possession. I can’t tell you more than one is muse and the other is better on fire.

There are 36 slides – 8 guides and the remaining 28 an entheogenic, neuroscience fiction.

The images are my own photos, altered to induce perceptual distortion. I haven’t decided to release originals for comparison. Art or science? That’s the question leaving me solving.

So, Skullfucked RGB is sort of a game. It has two playlists, although there’s a third order of song accompaniment in the dimensions but not included as an audio player.

Yes, there are a set of dimensions, of which the guideslides are a part. The “dimensional” framework is complete to my parameters of fiction and perception. There are at least 5 dimensions spanning open audiovisual space and digging deeply out of the viscera waiting to be discovered by you.

The object and subjects of the game are the same but the point is to hear and feel as much as see and think.

Start with Skullfucked RGB and the top playlist, then open the dimensions.

Neurological Strange Attractor

“A Nissl-stained, strange neuro-attractor in the reticular formation with a SEM at 100 pm resolution.”

An Anarchaotic Clarification

Ending in Aweha!

Critical psychologist Dennis Fox requested a link to a critique I wrote on a Bruce Arrigo and Christopher Williams paper one year after I first contacted him. Before sending it, I read through the dense, common lingo and discovered a need for some clarification. The rest of the anarchaos critique exhibits a linear development of anarchaos psychology, more self less social.

Anarchy as a dual quality incites polar, chaotic responses. What results from the incitation is a term, a fixed concept of stabilization and order – a strange attractor. Everyone is waiting for it, but I consider it more organic and personal, something in the brain and something wholly evolutionary – homoplasic neuropathy, right now.

What is homoplasic neuropathy in reference to anarchaos? It’s neurological damage caused by similarity of naturally, divergent characters.

What is similarity of naturally, divergent characters? Based on an evolutionary paradigm, divergent phenotypes and genotypes are advantageous to reproductive fitness. This is reflected as species variation in physiology and morphology, with humans and their culture at an apex of selective, environmental cohesion.

But an inversion has surmounted. One communicative device has bound human sociality to homoplasy, changing our neurological topology and sensitivity to initial conditions by rearranging human evolution through chaos.

As anarchy is popularized, a strange attraction to chaos distorts, damages and begins to restore the brain using homo-exogenous cues of political, environmental and social mimicry. What looks like a reliable power, or powerless structure of mutuality, diversity, cooperation and kindness is actually a temporary status. For example, attraction to a 3D vibrational facade and the depth of the structure easily fractures, as can be seen with energy dependent hierarchies figuratively and literally. The product glows green, so alive and graphically vivid as to appear real. There’s no need to touch because my eyes have seen the movement before. Except not like this, not in these random revolutions and nearly back-to-start-bounces before stability.

The divergent instinct of brain and genotype faces a phenotypic, neurological dilemma – social illness or mental adaptation? Are ‘we’ static or flexible? If we’re indeed at another convergence of human evolution, will it involve an anatomical or environmental pressure called ‘illness’ or ‘adaptation’ as propagation? Couldn’t the inspiration for the next state of human evolution be both physical and social? Mutated brains and fluid, sensory perception?

What is neurological social illness? Instead ask, what if 600 million people were bonded by the same connection? Neurons physically adapt to intercommunicative, exogenous cues – zeitgeber. We’re all connected randomly throughout our day, synching to particular patterns of attraction and interconnected media. There are stable sources of information online, those attracting the most attention, locations where people meet and visit without ever saying a word. A conversation with a piece of plastic, digitized expression and image, not included. Without you connected, are we alone? Is this a truly exogenous cue, or are we again resorting to endogenesis by keeping communication inert and hoping for telepathy? Solitude is what led to sociality. Solus setus atque socius, alone different from friend.

How does neurological damage lead to free sociality? When communication is dependent upon what we know about each other – or social cognition – there’s less influence from us on what constrains it – difference. That is, when someone aware can grab free sociality and mold the process for anarchic purposes, a social reification occurs. Free sociality is yet to be determined on the interweb but’s happening by mentally adapting publicly rather than deeming it a social illness.

At a time when Darwin and Freud (among many other semioticians) entered the academic and theoretical frame, ‘illness’ had become foray, the classification of inert being. There was Darwin, who aimed to describe life in a consistent, survival pattern, and Wallace, who viewed survival with similar consistency but derived from extraspecific influences as well. This pattern placed time into an entirely different framework, treating a person’s life as common while placing more emphasis on how different each acted and where it came from – umwelt. A stable society makes for unstable individuals. Freud enters and decides illnesses are commonly unique, in that everyone has one, just rooted and sprouted in different developing brain areas. Not only are we physically-delineated from nonhumans and each other, we’re also so individual as to possess one of infinite patterns of personality including the illness. A society full of neuroplastic organisms who believe they’re so very different now have one very common thing waiting to be noticed – awe or aha?

I was watching “The Atheism Tapes” and a conversation between Jonathan Miller and Daniel Dennett. After a wave of interesting discussion about evolution, creation, ratchets and fear, Dennett says this, “the hindmost may be a great many people…and we might have the chaos that these people fear.” He’s referring to chaos as an embodiment of atheism and Miller knows it when he smiles and says, “that’s it!” and points to a “whoa-ho”ing person off-camera. I also watched his episodes with Richard Dawkins and the others (Arthur Miller, Colin McGinn, Steven Weinberg, Denys Turner) and while he’s quite gestural, Miller was never quite as satisfied at any moment as with Dennett. The talks are plural, engaging and intelligent while retaining candor.

Awe and aha.

Çatalhöyük, Post-Primitive

Shit On The Plaza? I Revolt You.

What is post-primitive living?

Don’t think of time linearly, but post-primitive living nears Çatalhöyük historiography. There’s added complexity within a framework 9 to 7 thousand years later. James Mellart was the first to theorize about the settlement’s history and culture (also see Ian Hodder, Colin Renfrew, Marija Gimbutas and others who extended Çatalhöyük to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) theory and Ice Age civilizations).

Earth is denuded and the intricacy of techno-social relationships remains mysterious. Our social consciousness can’t yet deliberate evenly. But the term ‘social consciousness’ is interesting to Çatalhöyük.

There are advanced facets of Çatalhöyük’s culture and Kurgan PIE lifestyle:

social and gender equality or worship mom?

single room clay house, ‘comes with hearth/oven^Ⓡ and storage room(s)’

three forms of waste – ash, food scraps and feces

primary role: hunters, secondary role: pastoral cereal husbandry

creative exchange

“meet on the rooftop plaza”

We’ve contorted the faces with complex resurperficialization:

socioeconomic and orientation equality and worship dad?

25 bd/7ba w 2 car garage, heli, theatre, court/gym, pool/spa, full bar…

The forms of waste – nuclear bacteria! what the, how?

primary role: consumers, secondary role: borrowers

screen-socialization-scenario (the SSS)

“see you at Christmas”

Read each chapter under the heading. I might write them…

When thinking about social evolution and cultural adaptation, I worry consciousness doesn’t exist. We’re connected, at each other’s digital disposal, but do we want to be? Resorting to mass, digital space is requital for lost touch. Try to visualize a ‘mass, digital space’? If anything, Çatalhöyük reflects social bonding to earthen survival rather than material compensation for crafting the material toys of destruction. If any two pieces of matter collide with one another, one or another don’t matter. Creation doesn’t come from destruction in linearity, creation is rooted in a climb to the roof from ground to stars, with feet and eyes, brains and hearts.

A lack of social consciousness is ‘endemic’ and ‘totalitarian’. The ancient, Anatolian settlement in Turkey is a model for its redevelopment. Yet, the environmental conditions and social pressures are quite different this time. Sustainability wasn’t considered then, hence our arrival at aggro-industrial techniques and bulk, resource usurpation. Explanations for Çatalhöyük’s constituted abandonment include climate maladjustment, tribes and larger settlements more violent and complex, and population, a boundary to developing a similar settlement and sentiment today. I mean, what do we do with all of our shit?

Waste is a primary concern when restructuring lifestyles into a radical nature when compared to the common styles of sacrificial seduction. Eliminating we as animals for the transient tricks of the toy trade is a constant mind-bender. Worry about feces, don’t get me wrong, but worry about destructive information. We receive it on paper by mail, on screens via commercials, through subliminal scripting in entertainment, and from obnoxious and misguided peers. Disconnecting outlets doesn’t disable our sense of the shit. I smell it coming from everyone, even me.

Çatalhöyük smelled of fire, food, sweat and sex. They ate smells traversing to the agglutinate’s arena of aerated accommodation, the plaza.

Packaging and plastic abounds! so much so I’m suffocating. Grow and join the cycle of the unpackaged and the pulse of the productive. Otherwise, resort to currency and the current of capitalized, carbon conglomeration.

Where has our social consciousness of the obvious gone?

The solutions for entering a state of sustainable resistance are at hand for individuals, families, communities and post-primitive settlements of 5 to 9 thousand, with State and Nation having no choice but to adopt the obvious obfuscation of what once was.

So many expressions for the bewilderment of our present form!

So many levels of dead molded into a social consciousness on – ¡Çatalhöyük! – shitting less.

Silverfish Firebrat or Americanhardmind?

DichotoPollute

For Ted Rall

Can’t Choose Or The Options?

The Personality Status of Revolution

I’m in a State.

After reading Ted Rall’s “The Anti-American Manifesto”, I went to bed composing the perfect jacket quote, albeit one not entirely positive. I’ll try to reiterate it here, though not as good as it was before bed. ‘While Rall’s book is a sober request for assembly and a methodical review of USAn political blunders from the last 10 years, the revolutionary spirit remains chair-bound. Where’s the action and movement, Rall?’ I’d never actually  write that to him. As a journalist, he’s speaking out passionately for political revolution, calling into question the very media machine providing him space for the answer.

In the book, Rall recalls taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test and it turns out he is a “master mind,” an INTJ. So, naturally I decided to take the test myself. Call it mirror neurons, call it a renewed interest in a subjective interpretation of the complexities of human psyche, or an update on any possible changes to my personality since taking the MBTI 7 years ago.

I’m about 50 questions in and I hit a statement which says, “You have good control over your desires and temptations.”

Until now, I’ve wrestled back and forth with the language and content, or the lexicon and semantics of the test. Each statement offers the classic dichotomy, either a yes or no answer. Upon this limitation – not least excluding the third answer ‘both’ – there’s also semantic duality, upon other distinct, mistaken linguistic and philosophical subjects. A possibility of being either metaphrand, and layers of metonymy, present confusion about the type of indication set forth with limited, statistical breadth and a novel, yet classic Jungian model of caucasian psychology. In any mistaken circumstance, the important outcome is what side of the charge you’re on – yes or no. Or…

Do I have good control of my desires and temptations? Should I judge or perceive them? Doesn’t perceiving indicate I retain a level of commonality with my fellow humans rather than take a stance against by judging their definitions of desire and temptation? I live in a Judeo-Christian, Anglo-American stronghold, so my idea of desire, and especially temptation, may slightly differ with extreme sarcasm. I will say, after simply reading Rall took the personality test, my desire to take it was immediate. Do I want to do something sexual or euphoric, which are temptations at 10:21 a.m.? You bet I do. Will I? Or…

I’m pleased with the Manifesto. It’s one of the few new texts I’ve enjoyed thoroughly in some time. Maybe it’s because Rall’s comic strip was common visual banter to me during G.W.’s tenure, or because he’s recognized and made a strong stance to upset our boredom with activity. It’s time to pull up some streets, fairways, parking lots and drive-throughs to make room for earth, farms, parks, gardens, compost heaps and bike paths. Imagine if we got rid of a fast food joint’s drive through and put in small vegetable gardens for selected menu items. The stoners, lunch crews, fatties and cheap-ass, lazy people would stop driving through. They’d finally make the leftover pasta, eat the canned veggies, bake bread and drink some water. But Rall stayed with bigger ideas, mostly political and mostly from the boundaries of his educational background, just like me.

We’re standing around, pacing, sitting and writing, waiting for something to happen. He says this early – do what we can. In reality, we’re limited to space, time and effort. Some of us can’t afford to make infrastructural changes and resorting to primitivism just isn’t within physiological or environmental possibility. We have time, but we don’t have timing. Going out and chaining yourself to the backhoe about to rip up the street and sidewalk to replace underground plumbing with a huge sign reading, “END CIV, BEGIN FIRES” won’t reverse civilization but will get you arrested. Maybe if 1,000 of us did it all on one day, we’d get some media coverage. I could disassemble the machine in a covert, late nighttime, wrench-armed, anti-development mission, chancing capture but guaranteeing temporary prevention of continued destruction for the oncoming day. Maybe 1,021 of us could doing it at the same time, preventing 21 more breakers, grapplers, skidders, augers and buckets on the sticks of excavators from raping trees, desecrating dirt, piercing earth and suffocating lungs. Twenty-one because that’s how many more people were turned on to us after we’d gotten out of jail and vowed something more detrimental after a few months practice with disassembly and preparations with pro bono, legal counsel. Maybe I could let one trample me or auger into my skull and become a momentary martyr. I mean, aren’t they already doing it anyway? Or…

That’s out of control.

Turns out I’m a ENFJ, a teacher. For years I was Intravert and tended to score that way unless purposefully answering for Extravert. Funny enough, I was much more social and interactive then. Speaking of communication, iNtuition or Sense? Hmm, I could’ve been both at any point. Maybe more sense because I was empirical as a budding scientist, and now have more intuition because of the creativity involved in full-time writing and imagery. Along with creativity comes emotion, and Feeling should figure in more prominently in nearly everything I do in comparison to Thinking. I still think as often as I feel – aren’t they constant processes? – but which one do I attend to more with my brain involves uninhibited absorption and true contact with physicality. Now, where I worry a bit is with Judgment and Perception. I was mostly skeptical with the statements because of the antimonous nature of several words. I’ve also retained the rare belief that my ability to perceive is appropriate and I avoid judgment. Could the judgment be directed at self? Is that something Jung would ask? Would I be happier if I was ISTP? Or ESFP? Or…?

One statement from the MBTI test and my response sums up Rall, Jung and I well: “The process of searching for a solution is more important to you than the solution itself”. No, but it gives the waiting time meaning. Or yes, the process is the solution. Or, no, I mean both. Or – fuck this!