mind

I've been feeling odd lately. Too odd to complete a blog post on time? maybe, maybe not, but I at least tricked myself into thinking that I could not do it when I should have. (in regards to last weeks blog, which I did not complete) In all honestly I've been feeling pretty damn sick over the past week. Odd symptoms mixed with nerves and panic over those symptoms. I'm not trying to make excuses for a missing blog here, I have a point. Over the past week I've been having some interesting experiences over the the minds power to create, or alternatively control or reduce symptoms. If you get some chest pain and start to think for even a second that you're having a heart attack, it's likely that your arm will all of a sudden start to hurt. A rather unfortunate confounding-effect, or maybe you actually are having a heart attack. Sometimes I feel like my heart could stop beating entirely, and as long as no body told me my heart had stopped, I would be fine. I just finished reading "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" which is basically all about the human mind. this also brings me back to TTTE in which a scenario in described in which a person is immersed in water that is the same temperature as the human body and then left in total darkness and silence. This apparently leads to the feeling of separation of mind from body. The passage also states that most people cannot stand it and ask to be let out quite quickly. I want to try it. I can see some problems, I myself am very familiar with water, all one would really have to do would be to kick around and splash up some water. In his short story, Dick basically creates a flawless version of what TTTE describes. Another thing I wonder is what brain activity would be like from the inside if all body activity was removed. It's said that when one sense is lost, others become stronger to compensate for that loss. spend one hour outside on a dark night and that statement proves itself. So I try to imagine what it would be like if all the senses were lost. would all that extra computing power be put to the remaining brain functions, which basically boil down to imagination and self meditation, or is the type of computing power that can only be put into sensations? Would it be lost without its intended use? is imagination a sense in itself? I tend to think it is and that all that brain power could lead to some interesting results. The closest I suppose I've ever been to this is a dream. I've even had a few experiences of somewhat lucid dreams in which in I have a supernatural control of my surroundings. The dreams are not as long as I would like them to be and often my control is flawed of fails all together. I've also always wanted to have a dream lasting a long time take place in one night. Time is very subjective in dreams, but mine have never seen to last more than a few hours (it seems) that I can remember.

Now, onward to something completely different, this is sort of related to Postsingular, but only in the way black is related to white.

I got a strange idea up in the woods on Saturday night, here's what happened. Me and a few of my friends walked up to the tower in the arboretum at about midnight with no flashlights or cellphones. we just walked and relied on our night vision and in few cases, I followed Seth purely by the sound of his footsteps, though he was about fifty feet in front of us, which is not something I believe I am capable of normally. Anyway we made it to the tower and there were a few other people up there enjoying the night. I couldn't see their faces, not tell their race. It was like they were shadows with voices. So the idea I got from it was a way to meet new people. Two people enter a pitch black room, not too big, but not claustrophobic. These people find each other, and my idea is that they hold hands in the middle, like a hand shake sort of, but frozen. Then these people just talk and get to know each other, no physical judgment would be possible, and those things are much easier to get past once you know someone by their character and personality. If you were feeling really bold, you could even get your friends to set you up on a "blind date" (har har). I ran the idea past my room mates and they brought up potential issues of trust, which is legitimate, so naturally you would want this to be a somewhat controlled environment. Any way, I had been thinking of that along side Postsingular where the orphidnet lets people see everything about each other. Black vs. White. Obviously it wouldn't be for everyone, but I would be willing to give it a try.

I guess that's it for the class-mandated section blog. It hasn't been easy for me, and I'm not real proud of most of my entries. I'll probably still post, but infrequently.

scribblings of little or no consequence.

Right. Animals. Let's talk about animals. Animals as in the animals in the books we've been reading. Maybe by getting to know our fury friends we can learn a bit more about their less-hairy counterparts, or maybe, no the other hand, I'm just a bumbling idiot. Let's find out. If we follow Tony's handy syllabus we would get to "The Ticket that Exploded" before encountering any significant animal-characters. Morel seems only to have bugs (not to say that bugs are not important, they just are not particularly important to TIOM and therefore not entirely important to understanding the other characters.) and if there are any significant animals involved in Alterity that I am about to leave out, please forgive me, I still have a difficult time picking out the important parts of the book, but I do not think animals were invloved. At any rate, TTTE invloves several odd creatures, we could call them animals, actually I feel like we could call every character in that book an animal of sorts, with each one being almost as important to the plot as the next. Since I'm already on the subject of TTTE, let me go into the virus somewhat, as it seems unaviodable when TTTE comes up. this raises a potentially interesting question: does the virus make the characters in TTTE animalistic or were they that way before hand? (before-hand itself is an interesting concept in TTTE, one that I'm not sure I could describe, what was life like before the virus hit? did they live in a world like ours? Maybe its just the fact the world Burroughs has created is so incredibly different from our that it is difficult to compare it with anything we are familiar with) Animals and viruses both have that icredible desire to live and carry on that we only are aware of becuase we share it with the rest of them. Only two things have ever been so damn succesfull in doing so that they kick everyone else to the curb. I am of course referring back to viruses, as well as humans. Put the two of them together and you end up with machines telling men that they are viruses as well. TTTE gives us a world where everything seemingly has some version or mutation of the same virus, which is has either made the desicion not to, or is incapable of, destroying all life outright. Life therefore blunders on, and some of humanities more violent, animalistic tendencies have seems to come forward.
Next there's ribofunk, which although is also under complete control of the slightly different virus, the urb, has a distinct view of "animals" within its pages. The splices, or cultivars as they are also called, are main characters throughout the story, or rather stories. Of course to simply call them animals is rather ignorant of several of the main parts of the storyline in which these creatures are fighting for equal rights against there human creators. The splices hint at an ongoing struggle that has been occuring on this planet for quite some time. Di Filippo seems to be suggesting that even once humans have reached a tenative equality with thier own species, that they will simply create, or already have created, something else to subjecate. The fact the Di Filippo uses creatures that contain parts of human DNA make his take even more interesting. the most intruging example of these characters is little worker. (I personally wanted to learn more about krazy kat, but oh well) Little worker developed her own agenda somewhere down the line and accomplishes what she wants to with a combination of human wit and animal ferocity. I also feel the evnts that take place in "after school special" to be relevant here. We have two children who get "spikes" what we would call body alterations perhaps. this involves antlers for the boy and a column of coral for the girl, coral being of course a living thing. Even when they are inside the digital body learnig its anatomy they take the form of disney characters, many of which are based of animals. In a seperate chapter we have a girl who wants to become and giant cockroach. I find this desire to be animal-like among the Ribofunk human population very interesting when juxtapositioned beside the ferocity of the splices who are of less then fifty percent human DNA, which apparently makes them more animal like then the humans wish to become.

Thats all for now, allthough thats only two of the five books I still want to take a look at. If you actaully bothered to read this, I suppose you could expect more later.

Don't bother.

I need to give some credit to Drew Miller for this one. We were walking back from English on day last week and we started talking about the sounds of science videos we had watched that day (the octopus and similarities between length and time). We both thought that the octopus was pretty damn cool, but Drew decided, and I agree, that it is tougher for us to understand octopus than similarities between length and time (if that's not the correct title, I apologize). we figured that this is because the human brain understands linear relationships and ideas better than naturally occurring things, that is, the body of an octopus is not very linear, nor is say, the inner workings of the human body. We both found this pretty interesting since this idea of something being linear, measurable, or otherwise solved is a human idea that came about after human evolved the large brains we have come to love so well. I figure this adaptation to the linear must have been trained into the human brain over hundreds of years. Personally I figure it probably started at about the same time agriculture did, but I could be way off. What is the basis of linear thought though? In some senses I feel that its just a means to see the patterns of things in the natural world, those patterns build on each other and you end up with physics and calculus. If that is correct, than the human body certainly has pattern to its functionality. (patterns being something that can only be recognized after being seen repeated a few times. Otherwise its just a speculation). While humans are undoubtedly the most pattern obsessed creatures it seems to me that many other forms of life can recognize patterns. I think that Pavlov's dog is a good example of this. Indeed it seems that intelligence is judged by one's ability to learn and decipher patterns. Chimps are taught to count, numbers being yet another pattern, than they are put in front of a computer screen with numbers, say one through ten, on it. They get to look at it for a few seconds then the numbers go away and the chimp has to touch the blank squares on the screen where the numbers used to be, in order. Chimpy wins, chimpy gets a banana or a marshmallow or whatever, and most of them do it better than most humans too, which I find funny. In reality, I feel that our measures of "intelligence" are pretty absurd. These days I feel like its just another way for people to judge each other. As far as I can tell, intelligence is determined by two things, your grades, early in life, and your paycheck later in life. Grades are pretty nasty, everything you do is rated. I feel like in a lot of cases its just a way for the education system to force their ideas on you, tell you what is "correct" as they see it. In the best cases grades are used in the hopes to get students to improve themselves, but I have found said cases to be rare indeed. Then there is standardized testing, which is just wonderful. For those of you who don't know, that's where they line you up like robots and compare you to everyone else. If you don't function the way you're "supposed" to, well they don't kill you, yet, they just sort of pretend you don't exist. They are plenty of people out there, though, that are more than willing to "fix" you for a few bucks. What good does being able to regurgitate all your knowledge onto some damn scantron? Then you get older and if you manage to get a high paying job, people will think you are smart. If you end up doing what you actually want to do, despite a lower paycheck, society will most likely consider you a failure on some level. "look at him, he only owns one car, he must have done poorly an his SATs, quick kids, study study study, in fact why not just have schools teach soloey how to take this test, that will surely lead to success and intelligence." Washington had this problem with the WASL, but I think we got rid of it, not that the same problems don't occur with the SAT. Most highschool students pay extra to take prep classes for the SAT and the ACT... should that really be nessecary? Not that I'm saying I know a better way to run it, I think I'm more for abolishing it completely. Can't we just accredit our various education institutions and let the diploma's speak for themselves? I'll accept the current grading system as the lesser of two evils here; just that teachers should be wise about how they grade things, and not base classes on a few silly tests. than we're just back to the whole standardization process. So somewhere down the line, I guess this turned into quite a rant, and got way off topic from class. oh well.

just write they said...

Write I shall. Well I'm pretty damned stressed right now. I have this spectacularly lame speech outline due Wednesday. The speech is on the benefits of supporting local art. I need four non-internet based sources and its god damned tough to find them. not too many people give a shit about art and also want to write about why its cool. I also don't think there are too many hard facts on why supporting other people's expression is good for both parties, but I don't think I can get away with changing my topic this late in the game. I want to do this one justice as well. Shit. So there are basically two things I do when I'm stressed: I swear more and I listen to lodger. I swear plenty when I'm relaxed but this stressing really brings the sailor out in me, so forgive me if this blog gets vulgar. Lodger is this cool Finnish indie band that I discovered one day during my travels of the inter-network. They are pretty pessimistic but I dig the sound.
I will now be taking suggestions from the studio audience.
There seems to be a lot of talk on plurk about how class was operated today. For me it was really no big deal. I actually liked the old timey feel it had to it. I am in no way trying to say that I don't like all the media that Tony uses but I'm used to classes similar to the one we had today. I felt like it was somewhat easier to follow what direction the conversation in the room was going. I don't want every class to be like that, but it was cool. People were also saying that we didn't discuss the books as much as we ought to have. I find this odd. I feel that we did in fact discuss the reading, or that what we discussed was derived from the reading. Also I've have always been under the impression that if you want to discuss something in 238, just say so; especially if it has to do with assigned books. but what the fuck do I know.
Thats all I have to say about that.
I went to the Shins concert last Saturday. It was a great show. pretty damn rainy. The opening act was called Delta Spirit. they were good, I had never heard of them before; the lead singer kind of has a bob dylan/willie nelson voice, but he screams it out sometimes. they had a cool sound. Some people complained about the rain but I thouroghly enjoyed it. Rain doesn't bother me that much, I guess that makes sense with my choice to come to school here. For some reason I expected the lead singer in the Shins to somehow look different than he did. I don't really know why. It does not matter anyway, just odd the way our imaginations give us funny preconceptions isn't it?
Thats all I have to say about that...
I think I just figure out what I should have spent this entire blog talking about: this suggestion that aestetics makes us animals.

"Levinas used to recount that in the camp where he was a prisoner, in the living form of Bobby, a dog, some humanity was bestowed upon him. Marching back to the camp at night after having endured the plight of phisical labor, Levinas was suddenly greeted. Bobby came running up to him, recognising him, while the nazi guard treated him like an abhorred dog."

I'm not quite making the connection between aestetics ans animals at the momment, but I think what Kac and Ronnel are trying to get is that aestetics, which are undeniably important to Life Extreme, can put us into social groups we have not anticipated, as well as alienate us from those we do not necessarily want to be alienated from. I realize that the nazis are an odd example of the latter but that Bobby seemed to recognize Levinas as a dog seems to back up my idea. I also realize that of course Levinas did not want to be treated in a way that would allow a dog to identify with him, I think the point is that he was able to find some humane treatment and comfort despite the extremely poor conditions he was living in. A very optomistic view indeed. Perhaps the animal factor comes in in the sense that we have the tendency to form "packs" based on similar aestetic tastes. Packs lead to a pack mentalitiy and are often risky to less established members of society.