The Teaching Machine.

sufi

lala
my point is that if we saw shiels face last night we'd have been enticed to form a radical mass action (probably)
immanent/incidental or intentional communities
cyborgs not morphs
 

luka

Well-known member
the algorithim may well get better, more successful, at distracting us and channeling our attention to where it wants it to go, but we don't want our attention channelled necessarily, we don't want to be show 'cool stuff' funny stuff, interesting stuff at all.
 

luka

Well-known member
Isn't it the classic freedom to eat cake, to diversify an assumed lesuire and to choose out of the diversity which is precisely the commodity-spectacle of a predisposed array, clearwrapped in unitised portion control?

Isn't the supermarket the correct analogy where the consumer is generically trained to value a freedom of choice precisely fetishised by the brand alternatives of late capitalism, the wonderfully smart play of vacuity by which the reader if the labels can rustle up preference, advice, loyalty, thrift, all the bound emotional habits of an old humanism now afloat within the play of signs within which the consumer's arbitration is a highly efficient instrument to maintain market saturation and to ration the efficiencies of decision control?

JH Prynne.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I think an important thing to remember is that any kind of ostensibly exterior machine is a sort of limb of the human, but an abstract limb. In fact we could argue that abstraction itself begins with the formation of this limb, techne. (edit: abstraction as a function of cosmic organization. I would consider language as a subfunction of techne here, which perhaps gives rise to semantic issues)

But it is also important to note just how external it can feel, no? As if our interfacing with the artificial/abstract portion of our body is becoming so robust it is as if we are interfacing with another entity altogether. "Body" in the sense of the total set of means of manipulating matter, perhaps.

This corpus was once limited to the organic body, limited to our extremities/digits, but now stretches far beyond them, and the stretching-beyond would be the work of techne. Attaining an ever finer manipulation of matter than can be achieved by the hands.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
And yeah I find it difficult to speak of ways to engage with any kind of higher-order spirit of things that doesn't involve submission. In a way, submission is a necessary symptom of any such insight - to sense something that much larger than yourself and not submit to it is a sort of hubris.

That said, there is a role for hubris, such that submission alone is not the answer. Submitting to this is one of the keys of enlightenment, but the hubris part of it is how one can perhaps impart traces of their will into this higher order. The hubristic subject has more of a say, more of a vote, a stronger nudging force, than the totally submissive subject. Although, having just typed that out, I'm not so certain.
 

luka

Well-known member
you can posit stacked systems though. so submission to the mammalian territorial system precludes lifting yourself out of that system, acheiving the meta view of that system, and thereby landing in the 'next one up'. that's how Learys 8 circuit thing works for instance
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Techne, as a sort of progression, seems to have spawned from the rib of the brain. We can probably define it in a number of useful ways, but I am currently handling it as if it denotes any kind of extension of the will by means of physical modulation/manipulation. Even modulating EM waves, as in speaking, if physical, and thus qualifies. Extension of the will? The will here being the matrix of the intended future, perhaps. The arbiter of which-way-to-become.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
you can posit stacked systems though. so submission to the mammalian territorial system precludes lifting yourself out of that system, acheiving the meta view of that system, and thereby landing in the 'next one up'. that's how Learys 8 circuit thing works for instance
But then the painstaking part of me would audit the means by which those layers are distinguished. Arguably, the manner in which those layers are stacked, the diagram we create, is itself loaded with the kind of human artifacts indicative of any number of those layers. Not familiar with Leary though, so perhaps this was taken into account.

Perhaps superpositioning them all into a single polymorphous layer could be helpful, provided we can intersubjectively identify it. Intersubjective identification, conception, would involve a common language to refer to it, or at the very least a common enough sensibility underpinning individual languages, which I do think we are building toward.

But the energy at work within these efforts is just as important as the intricacy and mastery of the effort itself. If we are approaching this as some kind of prison break, arguably we are our own unconscious warden. Might need to eradicate desire before really mobilizing here, if mobilization is indeed possible without desire. I think it is.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Recently it feels as if I've reached a sort of plateau, the sort that one doubts even the existence of.

I think it involves being able to retrace your stream of consciousness, mapping out the associative links between fuzzily discrete thoughts, and essentially being able to rewind back to a certain branch-node, and then take the alternative branch. Doing this seems to effective bracket pathos as some kind of psychic flavor, desire as a kind of fuel.
 

luka

Well-known member
i cant follow. i dont know what pathos means here? can we use simpler colloquial english perhaps? i didnt go to school.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
i dont understand that sorry Stan.
I mean, If we are to separate out various levels of systems, we may be privileging unessential aspects. Sort of like occam's razor, now that I think about it, but not quite. Its not just that we are going for the simplest model, all other things being equal. We are also going for the model that posits as essential the most essential, which is arguably an eternally ongoing task.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I mean pathos as any kind of emotive, qualitative state other than unperturbed, unrippled neutrality. Positive extremity being a sort of ecstasy, the negative extreme being a sort of agony/misery. The fluctuation between those extremes often completely bypasses the neutral state. Plus, we condition ourselves to seek the positive.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
So we are always straining toward the positive, when it is actually just as deviant from neutrality as the negative is.
 
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