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Friday, June 23, 2006 11:48
Open to question Some might look at the material I put up here and tag it all as delusion. I do that sometimes myself. I do that quite often myself.I was asked by a colleague why I keep an online diary. She was mystified and a little horrified that anyone would wish to expose his private thoughts on the internet for all and sundry to read. She thought that it suggested some form of psychological problem. I gave her the usual excuse of keeping up to date with friends — she herself is a member of Friends Reunited, which I find a much bigger invasion of privacy. But that's not it. The front page blog is basically born of arrogance: of the assumption that my thoughts and opinions and the way I write about them are interesting enough for other people to wish to read them. It's a tool for keeping my writing standard up to scratch. Writing for an audience, no matter how informally, is not at all the same as writing for one's own pleasure knowing that it's unlikely anyone will ever read it. I do that too. I use pen and paper. This particular blog is for exploring concepts using the disciplined requirement of doing so in such a way that other people can understand them. It's all very well for me to sit down over a beer and a smoke and work my way through an idea in the privacy of my own head, where the difficult concepts can be painted in broad, impressionistic brush strokes and set to the side with "that'll do." That doesn't work if I want to communicate those ideas to others. To talk about them with other people I need to be more complete in my understanding. I can't get away with a half-assed job. It also opens up my arguments to discussion, to being pulled apart by people who may or may not have thought about those concepts themselves, but are certainly capable of doing so given the opportunity. If I have got something wrong — if there's something that I have failed to take into account or simply mistaken — I want to know about it. Plus it has the added bonus of keeping records. Records are important. They can reveal patterns. More importantly, the human mind is a fallible thing and in the world of NC life it is even more important to keep records in an effort to avoid fooling oneself. So recently I wrote about the GI diet and how the book I read had put me off, partially because it had some ridiculous ideas in it such as using the aquatic ape theory to justify eating meat. Not long after that I wrote another post in which I discussed how physical things were becoming, including a note to the effect that my tech team was being insufferably smug because they thought they had the P-shift thing licked. Then they start crowing about how they've narrowed it down to an inability to synthesise proteins from vegetable sources. My diet changed overnight two weeks ago. Hmmm. Are these two things related? Is my 'tech team' no more than an aspect of my subconscious that has found a way to communicate with me in a way I listen to, and it picked up on the idea presented in the GI book? It's a difficult question. I sit here contemplating this possibility, knowing that in an hour I'll be off to the pool to be blatted about by Dolphin and Seal again and Bob is rolling his eyes with that exasperated, 'she's doing the navel-gazing thing again' expression on his face. I don't know the answer. I could say, and to me it's truthful, that I picked up the book from the stack in the office because it had been mentioned to me off and on for a few months prior to that and it seemed like spending a couple of quid on some literature so I could find out more about what they were suggesting was not unreasonable. But I haven't made a note of that. I don't have a record on which I can immediately place my hand about them making those suggestions. So it might be my memory playing tricks on me. I do know that I have been taking an amino acid supplement for a couple of years now, and that was as a result of them trying to resolve some stated difficulties with protein in the diet, although nothing so specific. So this, like many other things, sits in the basket labelled 'undetermined'. I can't give a definitive answer one way or the other. But at least I know I've considered it, and that, to me, is important. While it's all very admirable to be so honest about one's fallibility, it's also very easy to get caught in the fallacy that says that if I'm mistaken about this one thing, then I'm mistaken about everything else. That's a James Randi degree of scepticism and also to be avoided. I wallowed in a mire of self-doubt filled by that logical fallacy for a very long time and I have rarely been so miserable. It is possible to make a mistake and not have one's entire world crumble. This is why I keep an online diary. So that awareness of the scrutiny of friends and strangers alike will keep me to my own demanding standards. So that those who share some aspect of this life can offer their criticism or observations. So that I have public records to keep me from hiding behind the comfort-blanket of self-delusion. I keep an online diary to show my working and have it peer-reviewed. Get to it, people! (2) comments links to this post
Wednesday, June 21, 2006 12:40
That's what they say, I was there when they said it Slavery is abomination...I get that a lot. Well, okay. Not a lot, but often enough that I'm thinking about putting it in the FAQ. We tend to get a pretty good idea about people form their initial reaction to the Nascakiyetl stuff. I think it's one of the reasons I've failed to take it down yet, despite intending to do so for ages. Readers go one of two ways: they either react like the Psion Guild and decide we're evil and/or deluded; or they find it making their brains itch, the concepts somehow familiar to them or at least intriguing. On further questioning it tends to be that it's the whole 'slave' gig that turns the former's stomachs. In Western culture our attitudes are predicated on a number of things that mean that I, as a sympathic metamporph owned by a non-consensus entity, am pretty much not only outside the tribal box but somewhere over there in a dark corner where I'd better keep my mouth shut or they'll send the lynch mob out. We'll come back to the slavery kick in a moment, but let's first address the issue of reactivity. Here in the West we value the pro-active. Our languages are set up to be active languages. People do things. A person laughs. Rain makes people wet. There is an implicit assumption of intent behind every statement of cause and effect. Better English classes tell us we should always use the active tense because it is more dynamic, more concise. Even Government scientists are moving away from the traditional third person method of reporting. No longer are we instructed to write: a sample was taken. We are now told to write: I took a sample. It is as if we require there to be a reason for everything. Someone has to take responsibility. Someone has to take the blame. Things don't just happen. Someone caused them to happen. This mindset is in the very way we structure our thoughts and language. It is so basic that it comes before that language. It influences our interpretation of language when that language tries to describe things from a different point of view. Start using the passive tense and English becomes clumsy and awkward. It seems not to flow as well. But for me, as a reactive entity, things do just happen. For me life is an emergent property of a chaotic universe. My existence is an emergent property. I often do not decide to do something: it is simply that circumstances occur from which that action is a result. Rain doesn't make people wet — there is no intent. People are made wet as a consequence of being outside while weather conditions are such that it happens to be raining. Try to describe the world in terms of emergent properties in the English language and things start sounding like one great big conspiracy. Maybe that's where the idea of an omnipresent, omnipotent, meddling God came from. We have to have God because we can't cope with the idea of things just happening because that's the way things are. We can't cope with the idea that responsibility can still exist in an emergent universe. I can take responsibility for my actions: emergent property or not, if I do a thing then that thing would not have happened in that way without me. And so we return to slavery being an abomination. Well, say slavery and we immediately think of negro workers chained to a sugar plantation while some fat colonialist starves them and makes a pile of cash out of their blood, sweat and tears. In that idea is the implicit assumption that, given the choice, the slaves would rather be elsewhere, working for themselves; that they are there by force. We immediately assume that their choices have been wrested from them, or rather that they already have chosen something different but that choice is being denied them by another party using force and violence. There is also the implicit assumption that they are unhappy. The idea of slavery as an abomination is predicated on the existence of choice. As soon as one suggests that the 'slave' is there of his or her own free will, then that is no longer a slave, not as far as the general public is concerned. At that point the slave becomes a servant, because it is assumed that the slave can also make the choice to leave. Yet for me the flaws in these assumptions are not the definition of slave, or servant, or the presumption that all slaves are held by force: it is rather the assumption that there is such a thing as choice in the first place. By assuming that we have choice, we assume that somehow we are able to act independently of the universe. We assume that, for the purposes of decision making, we can isolate ourselves from the effects of the universe, weigh up all the options in a calculated process and come to a decision that is based on our own desires, morals, ethics, wishes and needs. I don't believe that I am capable of that. I'm a sympathic metamorph. I'm reactive, not pro-active. The universe happens to me and I happen to it. We happen together, me and my world. I am part of the Great Dance and the steps I take are guided by what is around me: other dancers, the spaces left between them, the music. More often than not I feel like a piece of flotsam: a feather floating on the breeze. The universe is so much bigger than I have space for inside my head — even I, whose ego is so vast it could blot out the sun. How can I act independently of it when I don't know everything that's out there? Why would I want to act independently anyway? I say I have no choice and that's exactly what I mean. The circumstances of my existence in the universe are such that my way forward is limited by the space left for me. The influences that define those spaces are many and varied, stretching backwards and forwards from and to the past and future, and sideways amongst the other figures in the Dance. I'm aware of some of them, but not all. I also lack the illusion of choice, because at no point am I unaware of there being anything other than my own perceived needs and desires leading to an action. Even if free will does exist out there, somehow — some quantum process that allows the universe to twist itself slowly into knots using the Schrödinger Effect — I don't think I was built that way. Not only was I not built to be aware of choice, I was built so that it doesn't make sense to me. My perception of the way the universe works is different. The way I sense and perceive is passive, not active. My native tongue does not permit me to discuss the way I perceive things in a way that makes sense to those inculculated in the gung-ho, we-all-love-a-doer culture in which we live. It becomes awkward and stilted and we have to rely on metaphors stretched to breaking like pulled toffee. The dictionary definition of slavery is the state of being owned by another person. Maybe it's an abomination because there is some form of value judgement implicit in that. Maybe the abomination is that one human being could ever be worth more than another. But then we have that all the time. Try telling the President of the USA that he's only as valuable as an illegal Mexican immigrant, or one of the inmate of Guantanamo. I am owned. My Old Man possess me in every fibre of my being, physical and otherwise. I am but a pinion feather on his wing and what happens to me is an emergent property of his life in this great chaotic universe, just as he himself is an emergent property of Existence. In that we are all as equally valuable as each other. We are all emergent properties of Existence. This is not abomination. To you who look at me and feel pity, or fear, or revulsion, or disgust: read some Dr Seuss. Those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. To those I count as friends: never feel bad about wanting to talk to the few to whom you can talk, no matter what the subject, how late it is, or how much hassle you think you're being. We may not have the language to discuss it properly, but at least we know we don't have the language to talk about it properly. (4) comments links to this post
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