Saturday, July 8, 2023

Friday Thinking - 7-7-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 

It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 




I've been reading a couple of science-fiction novels lately. 'The Doors of Eden' (2020) by Adrian Tchaikovsky and 'Star Maker' (1937) by Olaf Stapleton - almost a century separates their publication and it's hard to say which is a better account of the 'living possibilities' of vast time-spaces. 

This quote from Olaf Stapleton:
Star-Maker - p.224
We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colours that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being. 

The sense of the fated incompleteness of all creatures and of all their achievements gave to the Galactic society of Worlds a charm, a sanctity, as of some short-lived and delicate flower. 

And it was with an increasing sense of precarious beauty that we ourselves were now learning to regard the far-flung utopia.

And if we could apprehend our uncertainties. In a way that comprehends our actual context of infinite possibilities, even if we limit our imagination to a concept of a linear-plane of an unfolding. We may come to perceive how indeterminant any existence is. 

and finally -
the comprehension -
of the sanctity -
of life -
that arises -
with the apprehension -
of its precarity -
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click) 

And it is this indeterminacy, this precarity to change - transformation - that is 'the sacred' of life. No matter the scale with which we measure. Any moment of glimpsing - life's fractals of fragility and our wistful ifs of memory - reveal the form of the sacred. 

This re-calls to my mind Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower' - and her visioning of 'God is Change and we can Shape Change'. Change is irrevocable, implacable, inevitable, unpredictable - and we have agency enough to nudge affordances - to shape experiences. And it is this 'choice-making will' that affords us - the nudging.  Of a god - that is not a god - and without a god - the force of a sanctity that is a secular illumination for re-linking a-part to what is beyond parting. 

To end this moment of pondering, I want to contextualize it with another recent science fiction - 'The Ministry For The Future' by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is a magnificent work. Everyone should read it.

Everyone should read all the books I've mentioned.

Ministry For The Future illuminates the essence of the challenge of climate change for humans. For us it is a crisis of consciousness - to grasp and embody the reality that we humans - are one species, on one planet (or ultimately in one solar system, one galaxy - turtles all the way). 

A paradox of a secular raising of consciousness of the sanctity of our fragile life. 











































































mhm

Friday, March 17, 2023

Friday Thinking - 3-17-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 

It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 



It seems the attractor of my minding this week is the prompt about values as they are embodied in moral-cultural contexts. The way a culture can enable values to constelate in a variety of coherent strange attractors. 

I enjoy being able to have some sort of accounting of my own processes - the quantitative-self thing (including the cloud of unknowns it lives in). And maybe this is related to the reality that I've never had so much control over how i am able to structure my time as i choose. 

Pondering what "taking measures" means?
I continue to feel, that the analytical metrics of my fitbit dashboard suffers large standard deviations, in the 'sensing-analysis' accuracy of the measures the fitbit, can take to sense my self-enaction.

And then i thought about how, there might be an emotional tone in my day. One that i may not be aware of. And this embodimeants of emotional  tone, could be key to measurements it algorithm-I-zes of to determine a rating of stress-level. 

The floating-fluctuations of anxieties - like currents generating resistances to the mediums-of-flows - frictions and heat -like imflamation. 

And then i remembered my moment - of a glimpse into eternity of - almost one second, of enlightment. Later i could only describe this moment as "resistanceless presense". And now i re-cognize that the moment was a blink of the liberty within "awareness of awareness". 


I was preparing to participate in a conversation of honest accounts about values. This is a somewhat regular-ish effort amongst a group of elder-ish minds - mostly retired intellectuals and professionals. So I've been pondering moral frameworks and how they frame our relations-in-the-world. 

I think current marketing - whatever the product - shoes or news - seems to work best by tailoring the 'choice architectures' of any market in ways the enable tuning a repertoire of 'nudges' for shaping narratives. 

Watching the news and it's a-mazing to me.  Grasping that every compelling narrative has to  exude a coherent-rightness, to anyone for whom the moral-framing is used to navigate viable-enough social existence. 

And then trying the question: "Is it possible to determine which moral frameworks lead to which types of results - short-term and long-term."  That immediately asks another question: "Whether and/or how - other coherent-rightness moral-framing can exist?"  

It could well be that a socially-embodied moral-frame-space operates a core self-reproducing MEME - a bio-cultural attractor.  



One night this week my 30 neuro-diverse daughter raised an interesting question related to a narrative she uses and develops as a core to her creative career that help her life flourish. The central character - her alter-ego-hero, must save a comrade trapped in a "Dark crystal" - like world (dcw). The question is whether entering the 'other world' would their bodies have to transform to look familiar to the world's inhabitants. 

Immediately i understood a concern that if the rescuers did not transform their bodies into local forms, they would horrify the inhabitants of dcw as 'Alien Invaders'.  She loves H.P. Lovecraft and this concern seems so normal in that context of a 'Lovecraftian liminal encounter between dimensions'.  

So i let my imagination flow. A sensory-embodied world, with sensory-stimulation protocols enabling response-able, information ecology, as a base condition of re-productive success. The survival of fit ecologies-in-conditions of living. The emergence of cultural learning co-creates a sort-of sensory-shaping field. A meta-protective protocol. 

And so what are the choices of an invador's - species-re-productive survival. The challenge should be felt-as-stress by the challenging-invader. When is that stress 'redeemed'? And what protective mimetic-field is needed to structure the social-protocols of agencies for collective response-abilities for evolving survive-ability. 

Sensoriums of living systems would be shaped to evolve that can organize viable enough mapping protocols, that in turn enable viable interactions-en-vironments. So the question of how aliens become re-cognized and re-cognize first contact encounters and how they evolve further environments. How do cultural memetic environments perceive evolution enaction? 

drifting -
through the cloud -
of un-knowing -
moral frameworks - 
socially-constructed -
sensorial-stimulations - 
organ-eyezed -
entangled-empirical -
sense-making-worlds -

proto-calls -
fore -
 aliens-in-a-strange-land -
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click)

Of course an elemental attractor to pondering moral-frameworks is the progressive-conservative, left-right, social-private, collective-individual polarities of moral-political-belief spectrums. And alwasy and everywhere is righteousness. 
The challenge of an open mind is finding a foundation for confindence in the right-righteousnees of our observation-and-judgements. 

Political Moral Framing
I wondered about the vigilant and eternal quest of - re-searching for the arc of evolving democracy.  Shouldn't the very conception of a democracy inevitably shapes a flourishing of a wealth of diversity. Perhaps increasing growth in the wealth of diversities - each-and-all response-able to evolving and entangled conditions - can provide some useful measures of social-cultural civilizational health. 

Pondering Moral Attractors
I was looking the different constelations of 5 moral values deemed universal (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity) that arise when people are asked to rate then. The easiest constelations to imagine are the very liberal vs the very conservative. 

These two constilations also correlate with Democracy vs Patriarchy and Nuturant Parent vs Strict Father Family Models. 

According to research  
![[Pasted image 20230318001014.png]]


 

Liberal Democracy weighs - fairness-care as co-equals - with a vital importance. This makes sense, as democracies consider all equal (at least before the law) and thus invites ever developing diversities - welcome. 

Conservative governance weighs loyalty-purity-authority - as co-equals - with vital importance within a tight 'center-mass' of reduced importance of care/harm and fairness. 

I can't seem to help myself from always drifting into complexity. Thinking of the bio-cultural processes of a metabolic-allostasis  or memetic value constelations. The social process of enact-meants of ideological re-production. How the value-relation algorithms have to have a tune-able capacity (like turning knobs to increase-decrease relational statuses) for each value spectrum. And that's exactly what the chart seems to identify - like different cultural value-strange-attractors. Like chords-with-feedback-afford-dancing - melodies.  

This episode of Friday Thinking ends with a wonderful ereka-moment i experienced watching Poker Face with/by Natasha Lyonne - Season 1, Episode 8. In the first episode I thought that Natasha was channeling Peter Falk in his television role as "Columbo" - a low-key rumpled classic 'gumshoe' dectective. 

In episode 8 with a brilliant performance of Nick Nolte (being an old Nick Nolte with a fidelity to honesty that only he can convey) illuminated an archetypal - god-like role - of the unplacable, unremiting - confessor. Damming those who don't take the opportunity she offers to embrace the honest accounting of their deeds. 

literally -
holy-shit - 
poker-face - 
s1e8 - 
'columbo-the-confessor -
of accounts' - 
brilliance -
even at its most -
obvious -
interio-or-ogations -


end of transmission

each night -
i play - 
my small wind -
chamber - 
of one note -  
another song - 
of multi-dimensional -
diverse-ariety - 

Last pondering thought.  
Pondering my twitter stream. My customized stream - but for who, is it customized? 
And the ghost of my feeling - once ago - of how I felt connected with real people. There was an easy to use stream that actually let me sample and shape enough to stay current with network-communities.  Now - it just seems random without easy ways to shape the view of the stream. 

i remember feeling like it was my own sort of personal newspaper. And now Twitter is the future of news. Will it continue to shape us into marketing incanted rational-zombies - dreaming of life-blood. 

Then again - there is too much to know - and moore over - there is a moore-to-different phase-transition liminal space - what is on the other side of this phase transition. 

Whatever happens we are all anticipating better personal instrument panels for sampling and shaping streams for our entanglemeants and our own stream of experiencing and scheduling of attentions.








































mhm

Friday, March 3, 2023

Friday Thinking - 3-3-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 

It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 



Was watching a Grand Boxing in the WWE-MMA spectacle tradition taking place Saudi Arabia. A big-oil spectacle. And yet i think i smelled or caught a whiff of a sort-of  'Fin de Siècle' atmosphere. Fin de Oil-Siècle - just a few pixels of.  And there was something grotesque about this spectacle - past-peak slavishness.  


During another time I pondered - about a point-of-view perspective that is enacted by every part of a living system.  Everything alive, every living system - Eats and Shits - something. 

That is how the energy to 'run the system' is harnessed. The self-running system is the measure of the system to be alive. Despite that, being alive, changes the conditions of being alive next - moment. Life is an energy harnessing system. 

The question is: Does this produce more or less energy?  Because while energy may balance within some unknowable ultimate boundary that is the whole. But that doesn't work as a construct because it enacts a distraction from a desperate fear that must avoid the possibility of infinity. 

A calculate-able logic starts at the place where there has to be some boundary-bounded space. Whether in the direction of that goes all the way up-down. But I think such enactmeants are unknow-able, because of eternal sensitivity to initial conditions - butterfly-turbulence. 

but that doesn't work -
because it avoids -
the possibility of infinity - 
compelling some boundary -
at spectrum scales -

future enact-meants -
are unknow-able -
because of afford-dances -
in eternal sensitivity to -
butterfly-turbulence - 
initial conditions -



And I wanted to get back to the economics of metabolism. That every living thing eats and shits. It metabolizes what it eats to harness the energy released by its own livingness. Does the living system simply rent? Or does it create? The energy released and dissipated throughout what is an entangled living-in-environment-system. 

So what can it mean when  energy reservoirs are empty ? 
And a prime Axiom is that energy is neither created or destroyed. And another prime Axiom that matter is energy - M=E 
So the only trick is how to rent-surf-shape the dissipation of the energy through living matter.  



Re-minded that my thinking of eating and shitting actually paraphrased one of my favorite thoughts:

The key idea in evolution is survival; yet living organisms, by definition, are dying all the time; they live by dying, which is metabolism.
  
Biological "survival" is a grand, breathtaking, and accurate metaphor, but only a metaphor. Nothing of a gene is surviving in material reality when it reproduces; what "survives" is a piece of abstract information, the sequence {pattern] of nucleotides on the DNA chain [none of the same atoms or molecules]. My liver dies and resurrects itself every few days. It is no more "surviving" than a flame.

A billion-year-old chunk of granite would, if it could, laugh at the lunatic claims of an organism to be "surviving" by hatching eggs, or by eating and excreting. …Yet... there is as much limestone, built from the corpses of living organisms, as there is granite.

A mere phantom – a pattern of information – can move mountains.

And if so abstract, so spiritual a thing as that pattern can masterfully determine the structure of large chunks of matter and the whole surface of our planet, why should not the even more abstract and metaphysical entities of goodness, freedom, spirit, soul, divinity and beauty? And has not the success of the epic-composing societies borne out this strange fact in the realm of human history?
Frederick Turner - Epic: Form, Content, and History

Every living system eats and shits- metabolizing what enables the shaping constraints that dissipate a flow of energy for its self-reproductive survival of its own living. 

This of course changes the environment the living system is entangles within and by. This asks for a spectrum of membrains rather hard boundaries of private property. 
When energy reservoirs are empty? Living systems are search engines to seek out new 'know how' about niches that can be energy farmed. And if we believe that energy is neither created or destroyed, that matter is energy - does that mean matter too will evaporate? 
Can the only trick be to re-cognize that matter and energy will all-ways be abundant and to be alive is a 'grey'-matter (puns afforded) of Know-How - for metabolizing more ways to metabolize a wider diversities of afford-able matter-energy transformations. Or simply new forms of eating and shitting.



I check my spam folder regularly. I like to keep it empty. This evening I deleted two tweets about 'defense gutters'. And I re-cognize two things: 
  • I've been getting this type of spam regularly and
  • the information mil-bloggers use to identify events-places
Linking those two things and re-calling how, this winter, as a home owner I've noticed-worried about the ice-dams over some of my roof eaves. I've been comparing other homes to see if this is normal. 

The re-cognition? That advertisers are linking real-time satellite data on local conditions of identifiable internet user home addresses. Has anyone with an address Not had something shipped to them. 

Of course - how can I possibly be surprised. What I think the real question is why aren't we able to know how to use this data for our collective well being. How can we ensure this Common Wealth of ours enables a more robust and useful public infrastructure. 




I made a #micropoem about what I literally heard a mainstream news broadcaster say: "Things went left the went wrong". And immediately my George Lakoff alarm went off. 

things went left -
they went wrong -
the news got it -
right -

this is what -
i think i -
herd -


Maybe it was only me - but i sense a micro-muscle twitch of cognitive dissonance has the broadcaster heard his own words. 

On Jimmy Kimmel the other night, he had a person-in-the-street interview bit. Asking what the last book a person had read. The bit ended in a brilliant comic-jazz. 
When asked, the person said that the last book he read was: "The History". Probed again he described it about "the community, the world" and when as who wrote it the person said, "America". 
Amazing and I wrote this #micropoem

wow -
the history - 
the community - 
the world -
by America

sort-of -
brutal honest -
reflex-admission of -
America's -
orientation -
framework -



I am going to end this drift of Friday Thinking with a channeling of one of my many beautiful intellectual heroes.  The inspiration are the new horizons being revealed through the play with generative afford-dancing of 'stochastic parots and automated statistics' (Bruce Sterling phrase for AI).

if McLuhan -
were writing today - 
he would call -
his mcluhanisms - 
prompts -
fore -
collective-intelligence -























































mhm

Friday, February 24, 2023

Friday Thinking - 2-24-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 
It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 




Of course, there is no 'neutral politics' or economics or even science. Religion has been how we enculture a faith in values. Politics is how we align our power among ourselves with our cultural values. Economics is how we rationalize the credit-and-debt of our interdependencies in relations to our valuing of values. Science is how we search for and develop the reliability of what we value.  

The question of the - __re-conciling the accounts__.  I find fascination in looking at the moral and religious palettes embodied in basics of the accounting tems in economics. The invisible hand of moral religiousness of economics. The sacredness of  dedemption of our obligations in our socie-ties. 


I am reading 'The Ministry of the Future', just past when Frank dies. In hospice. A slow fading, slide out. Podering this membrane moment of evaporation.   I feel there can be joy in the simple - of presencing. Awaring and awaring awareness - without judgment. 

And then there is Adience. Audience-share. A shadow of the atomistic - isolated -self-ish - individual. The mutualism of performer-audience measures. 

The foundation of a democracy is more than the vote. And the vote is not for leaders, maybe that's even a contradiction - do followers vote for leaders? 
Rather, the vote is to appoint representatives, with a duty to formulate the laws we want. And the stewarding of the public institutions that provide for our public flourishing. It is far beyond regulating the 'private-sector-market'. It is the formulation of the rules  for enacting our collective will - the general will. Our representatives at all levels are the scribes for encoding laws of self-governance  - for public good. Not to be high-priests of the invisible hand of private goods. 

Institutions are the organs of the demos - the polis - the political-economy - the social-moral-economy. The core of a political-economy lives through the systems of accounting for the value of our values. The time-space-matter constraints of valueing. The systems of accounting - assets and liability - credit and debts.  

Currency isn't a free floating commodity. It is an institution of accounting credit-ability - credit-worthyness - credit-redemption from obligations. And a sense of liberty. And for what? From what? The shadow of liberty, is it enslavement? Or is it the absent of relationship and connectedness.   

For a credit to have value, social relationships have to be trust-worthy. Social-relations have to be able to enact credit-able means of redemption. 


Could one read Adam Smith as imagining a most plausible enactment of democracy, in the context of monarch-empires. Shifting toward a self-organizing commons, enacted by moral beings, for moral beings. 

Capitalism is a game of compound network-effects - the more x you have, the easier it is to get more x, till you own the house - in a ponzi-way. 

And a subjectivity-based agency, whether in the context of a 'natural' nature or in the context of a technology optisms, have the same shadow. It is the looming - liminal-finality of a dissolution of self. This imbues the dark ecology of mind.

and subjectivity-based - 
agency - 
framed-in -
polarity of -
nature-vs-technology - 
have the same shadow - 
the looming - 
liminal-finality of a - 
dissolution of self - 
the dark ecology of mind - 
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click)


but capitalism -
is a game -
of compound -
network-effects - 
the more x you have -
the easier it is to get more x - 
till you own the house - 
in a ponzi-way -
[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click)


From pondering a Smithian strategy aiming to shift a value-attractor for enacting an evolving of collective intelligence. The emergent constraint, that enables the regulation of ongoing living - is an anticipatory response-able shaping of allostasis. A quorum-sensing-stimulation, into being. 

A focus on a self-organizing market was one, plausibe enactmeant, toward a more democratic govern-mentality. A pre-Hegelian evolution of history. 



I don't really know, what i'll need - in order to find the pattern that connects. Which means that i don't know what belief constellations, will change what i know, that ain't so. 
Believing' is entangled with 'knowing' - a sort of credit-debt mutualism. This is a philosophical afford-dancing -with allostatic - for-see-ables - the sensing-stimulating ouburus.