The Garden of Forking Paths

version said:

Interestingly, the final section of that interview talks about bifurcation.
WALK SOFTLY AND CARRY A LITTLE LAND

As they say, they key word here is not wisdom, but caution. You don’t know what happens at bifurcations. You have absolutely no control. The smallest fluctuation can make things go wrong. The predictive power of humans and technology is nil near bifurcations. All you can do is approach carefully, because the last thing you want to do is get swallowed up by a chaotic attractor that’s too huge in phase space. As Deleuze says, “Always keep a piece of fresh land with you at all times.” Always keep a little spot where you can go back to sleep after a day of destratification. Always keep a small piece of territory, otherwise you’ll go nuts.

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suspendedreason said:

this bit too is good and relevant:

There might be an ethics here: how to live your life poised at the edge of chaos, how to allow self-organizing processes to take place in all the strata that bind you. In your life, you could create maps of attractors that bind your local destiny – those behaviors that are habitual and so on. And try to find those bifurcations that would allow you to jump, if not to complete freedom – that doesn’t exist – but to another set of attractors less confining, less binding, less stratifying. Or learn to lead your life near a bifurcation without ever crossing it – the lesson of being poised on the edge of chaos.

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luka said:

this is why me and shiels were talking about the psychedelic experience as trauma.

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suspended reason said:

Here’s the structure of Horney’s neuroticism: an improper environment in childhood causes a deep, underlying anxiety (or feeling of precarity) which leads the child to seek anxiolytic and palliative coping strategies at the cost of real growth. We can call this development non-acute trauma, referring to the banal way an environment routinely shapes one’s priors about self and society, such that when one leaves the conditioning environment, previously adaptive strategies become suddenly maladaptive. In an extreme case, and ancient archetype, the soldier returns home, bringing with him an adaptive jumpiness which while useful on tour, causes him to hear gunshots in slammed doors and backfiring engines. We can look back to Euripides’ Herakles for a portrait: Herakles comes home and, perception befogged by madness, mistakes his children for enemies, slaying them with poisoned arrows.

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simpolism said:

[In ancestral environments,] these events were potentially cyclical: a tribesman might experience war repeatedly throughout their lives. However, the current state of modern war leaves veterans returning, psychologically prepared for another go at war at any time, but without any real likelihood that they’ll be sent back out in the field… the developed priors become useless, rather than necessary preparation for the next conflict. We can also consider how ancient tribes may have handled “bad” prior formation by considering ritual experience. The sacred, the psychologically powerful, as a means of restoring a more “normal” psychic equilibrium.

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