Posted by: Edward | November 30, 2007

Pragmatic Phenomenology

I call my worldview Pragmatic Phenomenology. Phenomenology is a scientific or analytic approach to reality as embedded in subjective consciousness. A pragmatic philosophy is one that endeavours after functionality or affect rather than truth. Pragmatic Phenomenology then is a self rigorously pursuing subjective functionality. Pragmatic Phenomenology does not seek merely to observe reality from the subjective lens but to adjust and change the subjective experience of reality to ends decided upon by the individual. This approach is justified by its usefulness. That is to say we aren’t looking to see if some believe or approach is ultimately true but rather looking to see if it is justified by its use.

As a Pragmatic philosophy we don’t build a theory and then find the practice. Instead we start in action and refine the practice through what we call theory. Theory arises out of action and informs it. We start our acts of theorizing already engaged in actions to maintain and improve the conditions of our experienced existence. For this purpose the test we apply to information is not whether it is ultimately true but rather are we justified to believe it by its usefulness. If we assume a particular belief are our actions in relation to it successful?

Reality is the result of a process of perception and interpretation. We can never know from our subjectively embedded position what exists as really true. We only know what we perceive, how this affects us and how what we perceive is affected by us. We are only ever in contact with the noemata or targets of mentation. In this context it can be just as useful to alter the noematic contents of our awareness or the noetic process of our awareness as it is to attempt to alter what is normally considered external reality. External reality is experienced as a special sort of mental content.

We have through a process of pragmatic exploration formed a distinction between the physical and the mental but we only ever experience either as mental content. The distinction between external reality and internal experience can not be concluded to be true from this fact but rather that this distinction is useful. The usefulness of this assumption is not necessarily absolute but rather is useful in some applications. A noetic process that does not assume a distinction between internal and external sensations could still be useful and therefore justified for certain situations.

A primary part of this process of exploration is the formation of distinctions. Language is predicated on the formation of distinctions. If you have two different words you are forming a distinction between what those words are used with. Generally this is an indication that you mean the two words refer to different objects in the physical world. Sometimes the two worlds refer to the same object but what has shifted is the connotation. In the case of connotation the distinction is not between the objects but between how you think about the objects.

Connotative differences denote a distinction between different noetic processes. For an example consider the difference between a ‘slut’ and a ‘sexually liberated woman’, both words can be used to refer to the same woman but the distinction is in how we are thinking about or judging that woman. This formation of distinctions in response to experience is theory emerging out of action.

This matter of connotative distinctions crosses over into another meaning of pragmatic, the linguistics subcategory of pragmatics. Pragmatics investigates language’s ability to communicate through implicature and the speaker’s ability to use language to get things done rather than strictly looking at communication as communication. Pragmatics looks at what language is used to accomplish rather than assuming it is always pure communication.

The Phenomenological concept of intentionality is that the processes of mind are pointed at or acting on some mental object. This mental object could be a thought, feeling or sensation that we normally distinguish as external to ourselves. There is no reason to conclude that we can’t point a noetic process at another noetic process. This meta-cognition is a powerful tool of Pragmatic Phenomenology.

The system of distinctions that you have formed in the process of exploration and through education is what Kenneth Burke calls the terministic screen. The terministic screen forms the assumptions that guide our mental processes. Placing the distinctions that form our terministic screen as the target of our intentionality would be a way to quickly and powerfully affect our experiences. Some things are divided only because we think they are and by changing the distinctions you have shifted your ability to act on things. Other times making a distinction allows you to increase your options for dealing with them.

On thing to realize while you examine the distinctions that your terministic screen is made of is that every distinction represents a choice. Every distinction was a choice made for a purpose, a solution to a particular existential challenge. The conditions of that particular choice may no longer be in effect. There may be more sophisticated distinctions that you could use now given your greater experience to pull from in navigating your existence.

Pragmatic Phenomenology is the study of the subjective, the intersubjective and the experiential world from a perspective embedded in subjectivity and in terms of functionality and goal achieving. While the mental frame work of Pragmatic Phenomenology is relatively easy to establish, the actual practice would be a highly personal unfolding. This process of exploration is such that the act of exploration opens up further territory to explore. That is, the start is well known but the end point is individual and possibly unknowable.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Burke

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Posted in coreprinciples, existentialist

Posted by: Edward | November 1, 2007

Traffic Dragon

While I don’t necessarily fall under the aegis of the term pantheist I do tend to see life or intelligence at play all over the place. I tend to posit a kind of emergent intelligence in systems of sufficient complexity. The city itself is certainly complex enough for emergent properties to take on a semblance of intelligence. Additionally traffic takes on this kind of complexity. The different kinds of interacting components in the system of traffic includes cars, the roads, traffic lights, the weather conditions, pedestrians crossing streets, and so forth. Traffic is a system that communicates in terms of speeds and timing. Clearly if Traffic has an awareness it does not think in human terms.

Delays can propagate very quickly through the system. As each car slows earlier in sequence than the one in front of it the car at the end of a line must brake quickest and go slowest. If any car brakes later in sequence than the one in front of it it crashes into it. This slow down tends to be more total. Groups of cars will also tend to clump and group as close together as possible while avoiding impacts and then a gap and another clump.

Reading the traffic system is largely going to be about the behaviour of cars. Looking at the speed they are traveling, looking at the relative density and clumpiness of the traffic flow. Most lights are relatively fixed features ignoring the pedestrian controlled crossing. To start working with Traffic you start by watching it. Find a place where two busy streets interact or maybe where the regular road system meets the highways. Watch it. Watch it at various times of day so that you see varying repeated patterns. Learn to feel the difference between rush hour, weekdays, weekends, and the middle of the night. Find other places to watch traffic from. Look for what stays the same what changes depending on changes in time or location. What you are trying to do is internalize the language of the streets. Don’t try to look for words, traffic may not be speaking at that high of level of complexity. Try to learn how to feel the MOOD of traffic. Not the mood of people in traffic but the mood of the beast itself.

Once you feel like you can read the mood of traffic its time to try to talk to it. In order to talk to it you need to place yourself where you can have an effect on it and read the reaction. My suggestion is a pedestrian controlled traffic light that changes rather quickly. The quicker it changes the closer you can control the timing. As the effect of your triggering the crossing will create delays behind the cars that stop for the light, you can watch for the changes where you are. I do suggest you cross the street if you used the signal. It seems disrespectful to do otherwise and you don’t wish to draw ire from people in the cars you have stopped. Try to vary the timing of your signaling. Spend all day there saying hi. Look for patterns and differences in the effect or response to your signal.

Another way to talk to traffic is to get in a car and enter the system. This allows for much richer signaling on your part than the binary switch of the crosswalk. However this places you as much more subject to the system of traffic. If you have gotten the attention of the traffic dragon, if you have angered the beast this might be a dangerous time for you. My suggestion is to drive around the streets with no direction or schedule in mind. This will allow you to see a wider range of street conditions and frankly if traffic has noticed you, getting to anywhere on time may be difficult. During this time it might be a good idea to use the car only for communicating with traffic and use public transportation if you need to get anywhere.

Up to this point we’ve been acting as if all cars are the same. Common sense tells us of course that they are not. Emergency vehicles are an interesting special case, they have greater effect on traffic conditions than it generally has on them because the law legislates that other vehicles must get out of their way. However, the emergency vehicles can be summoned by traffic when a vehicular collision occurs. Another special case is that of public transit vehicles. They have a set path through the networks of roads and should in general have a consistent effect on the traffic around them and could operate as a system clock to show how much the traffic is slowing down their predictable circuits.

The traffic dragon has millions of little sense organs, they are called drivers. The nervous system of car drivers includes the ability to recognize certain types of vehicles and to discern colours. Try watching traffic for certain colour or colour combinations. The more you watch traffic the more you will see intelligent acts of sortilege. Creations of patterns that you can read and interpret.

The purpose of the foregoing work was to build up an adequate model of traffic behaviour in your brain. Once you have done this there are many other ways to access the traffic entity. An important step to take is to start acting or thinking about traffic as if it is a person or person like. The reason for this is we have much more brain circuitry available when we are thinking about people or people like things than we do if we seem them as inanimate. Asperger’s Syndrome folk may find the other way around easier. For an assistance for reading the mood of the roads, is to after looking at the conditions visualize the face and body language the traffic dragon would be making. In general it will be easier to read the mood of this visualization than the streets themselves. If you have built up an adequate model of traffic operations in your brain, you will find your traffic face to give you very useful information.

Traffic Dragon Image by Ray Carney

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Posted in art of memetics, cybernetics, neuroscience

Posted by: Edward | October 24, 2007

Becoming Uber

A little known fact is that the expression “whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger” was actually written by Nietzsche. He didn’t mean that anyone who faced something became stronger for it, some people are emotionally crippled by facing criticism. Criticism didn’t kill them and it didn’t make them any stronger either. Nietzsche was talking about himself and his nodal concept the Ubermensch.

The Ubermensch is not perfect. He is perfecting. Whatever doesn’t kill him makes him stronger. He is engaged in a process of becoming perfect but he never arrives. Perfection is a limit, you can approach it but you can never be it. Nietzsche didn’t consider himself perfect (most of the time) but he was working very hard in that direction. His philosophy is an eminently practical one. He advises his reader to figure out what climate, diet and routines makes them the strongest, healthiest and happiest. His superman is perfecting because it faces the situations it encounters and learns from them, compensates for them.

The Nazis, all other confusions aside, were not supermen, they were not ubermensches. The Ubermensch was not prone to following orders but to deciding on a course of action and applying themselves to it. Nietzsche’s was a philosophy of nobility not slaves. Hitler was even more definitely not an ubermensch. He was incapable of handling negative feedback and failed to learn from his, or anyone else’s, mistakes.

To be ubermensch is to be a self-correcting, self-perfecting, organism. We can play our own becoming-uber if we face the world, set our own goals, and take negative feedback we are offered, from failure to rejection, and learn from it, grow by it. Accepting our natures as imperfect beings we can still be perfecting ones through cybernetic self-correction.

“Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”

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Posted in Deleuze

Posted by: Edward | September 28, 2007

Forget the sabbats, find the rhythm of your life

Pagan Ritual was deeply embedded in the rhythms of their existence, the seasons of a farmer’s life. With festivals directly linked to cycles of nature and the social activities that related to them. The life of a modern city dweller is lived by very different rhythms than the pagan villagers. In many ways the rhythms we participate in are much faster than theirs were. It behooves us as sorcerers to understand the cycles we are subject to and to take them into account when constructing our rituals and practices. We do ourselves a disservice if we perform rituals based on the long forgotten assumption that the either festivals of the wheel of the year are relevant.

Our lives relate much more to the twenty-four hour news cycle, the work day, rush hours, the television season, the two seasons of fashion, and the various overlapping sports seasons. The other thing to take into account are the rhythms of the body, the circadian, ultradian and digestive cycles as well as the timing of various phases of attention and memory.

Only if we start working with these cycles and their interactions do we start to make truly contemporary systems of sorcery. The archaic technologies still hold their value but we need to apply them to our lives as we live them not in terms of a cycle that is irrelevant to our existence.

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Posted in castaneda, cybernetics, situationist | Tags: ,

Posted by: Edward | March 29, 2007

Seven Dwarves as psychological aspects.

For the sake of convenience I’m going to ignore a great deal of what is in Snow White but if you are interested the piece is filled to the brim with great material to work with. Really I just wanted to give an example of the type of work that can be done with pop culture tropes. I actually think I bit off more than I could chew due to this stories much longer history as a folk tale.

I’m going to look at the primary characters of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a psychological model.

The Seven Dwarfs are components of a human bioregulating nervous system and brain. Happy is the positive emotions, Grumpy the negative, Sleepy is the sleep-wake and other cycles, Sneezy is the body’s health monitor, Bashful is the social emotions, Dopey is prelinguistic playfulness and, finally, Doc is the directing intelligence. The person represented by this is unique, someone else might have had a Mopey instead of a Grumpy and a Flirty instead of a Bashful.

And while this person is able to feed, clothe, and make it to and from work, a look at their cottage/mind tells you they don’t have it all together.

Then Snow White enters the scene. Snow White is Royalty, comes from the castle and can communicate to the animals. Put simply she is the Soul or in Jungian terms the Anima.

At first the Dwarfs are resistant to this new influence on their lives but before long they are cleaned up and ship shape, and generally working together better then ever before. She gives them a reason for being, a purpose.

More later when I talk about the Queen and the Prince… and at least one way to work with this for self-change.

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Posted in jung, mythic

Posted by: Edward | February 11, 2007

Dianetic Auditing as Recapitulation

The Scientology or Dianetics technique of auditing is the same as Castaneda’s technique of recapitulation. Both the method and the purpose of the practices are highly similar. The purpose is to release energy knots relating to past experiences or interactions. The method is to move backwards re-experiencing the past occurrences and releasing the energy that has remained stuck with them. The main differences in the methods is that recapitulation is more often done alone and concentrates on interactions with people while auditing is usually done with a specialist auditor and concentrates on experiences of pain.

In all likelihood the average Scientologist has no awareness of the pedigree of the techniques that they engage in and therefore now awareness of what could be added to them to make them more effective. Dianetics is firmly rooted in the European medical concept of vitalism. The preface of Science of Sanity even acknowledges the connection by referring to Henri Bergson. What is missing from L. Ron Hubbard’s formulation is the awareness that the energy is bodily. Scientology suffers greatly from the Cartesian error of mind-body dualism.

Castaneda’s Sorcery does not suffer from this difficulty, although the character of Carlos Castaneda as presented in the books does. Scientology recapitulates moments of pain to free the energy entangled in them and increase the person’s clarity of thought. Castaneda’s recapitulation frees the energy from social engagements under the model that it is our socialization that keeps us from meeting our potential. I personally suspect that the e-meter would be a very useful tool if used while auditing social interaction in addition to pain engrams.

There is also the question of the relative worth of solo auditing as opposed to being audited by another. First there is the concern that the kind of material it would be useful to recapitulate would be personal and sensitive necessitating a great deal of trust in who one shares it with. The potential for abuse or blackmail is significant. The second is the danger or power relations between the auditor and subject distorting the material or creating its own engram of entangled energy.

With a great deal of freed energy available it would be very easy for a strong connection to be created between the person who is recapitulating and the person assisting them. If this interaction is framed in terms of hierarchical power relations there is a distinct danger of cultic behaviour. I wonder sometimes of the similarity between auditing and catholic confession, particularly first confession that usually occurs in early adolescence. The potential for a confession or recapitulation of what one is ashamed of to free energy in the young catholic is encouraging. The potential of the power relation inherent in the confession context to tie that young catholic to the hierarchy of the church is, to me, rather disturbing.

It seems that partnered recapitulation is too powerful to ignore completely but too abusable to use uncritically. One possibility is to partner with someone and take turns auditing each other, thereby equalizing the relationship. This should guard against cultic abuse but it will probably leave you with very strong ties to your recapitulation partner. One way to minimize the impact of this is to partner with someone you are strongly connected to anyway, or would like to be. Alternately you could solo recapitulate your relationship to this partner later.

Recapitulation can be a powerful method but it should not be pursued exclusively, rather combined with other mind-body-energy practices.

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Posted in bodywork, castaneda, scientology

Posted by: Edward | January 15, 2007

Tilting the stimulus-emotion-feelings loop

I have personal experience of the link between body state and my feelings. I’m the kind of absent-minded professor sort who can forget to eat on occasion. Sometimes when this happens I get in a particularly bitchy kind of cranky mood. Every thing irritates me and I start snapping at people. Not surprisingly it was people around me that noticed this pattern first.

If Damasio is right this feeling is my body trying to communicate. The obvious thought is that the body is trying to tell me to eat. I have come to the conclusion that by the time I’m feeling cranky my body has decided I’m too thick to get the signal and is now trying to get someone else to tell me. I also get a similar mood if I am short on sleep and should go to bed.

Castaneda has claimed that sorcery is applying one’s will on the joints of a situation. Joints are the hinge points that bodies turn around they are the connection tissue between parts. In aikido control of a joint gives you control of the body. Applying this principle to ourselves leads us to look at how the various processes link up into nested feed back loops. From these loops we locate those connections or turns over which conscious effort can exert an effect.

In the stimulus, reaction, feeling, thoughts and images sequence there are several places that we can apply pressure. We can, upon experiencing a feeling, concentrate on thoughts and images congruent with the feeling of our choosing to provide the stimulus for the next iteration of the loop. We can, upon noticing our physical emotive reaction, change them or adjust them more to our liking. With the physical reactions adjustments are easier than direct changes. It is hard to turn activation into calm but easier to adjust fear into excitement. The last place we can use our influences is on the association between stimulus and emotive reaction. After reflection we can associate stimulus that has triggered unpleasantness with more favorable reactions.

Some people might be bothered by my supposition that my body was using my feelings to communicate with other people but evolution has no qualms about groups. Humans, as other animals, evolved in terms of the pack or grouping that existed as their species evolved. Any feature, such as feelings, that evolved at the same time would have evolved in terms of the animal and its group.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

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Posted in cybernetics, neuroscience

Posted by: Edward | January 9, 2007

Alexander Technique your Emotions

Damasio confirms my supposition that memories are emotionally tagged for decision making (144). He also discusses the use of this emotional decision making and how it functions in the case of blink cognition. Essentially the brain compares the current scenario to what has happened in the past and sends you the feelings of the outcome of various options. This makes one option feel better than another.

Damasio makes the claim that the sequence of feeling production goes stimulus, physical reaction (emotion) and last experience of emotion (feeling). He also states that feeling is a long process taking between one second and one minute to occur and extinguish.

The trick to emotional engineering is to recognize an emotional stimulus before it has time to cascade to a full blown feeling and interrupt and replace the physical actions of the emotional reaction. Further you could train yourself to always have the preferred reaction to the stimulus by associating them through a technique such as NLP’s anchoring. While feelings and emotions are useful and evolved because they served our ancestor’s well being and survival, what Spinoza called conatus, individual reactions can be disadvantageous particularly in our contemporary social context.

Take for example the scenario of the boss who habitually yells at his subordinates. Perhaps you have experienced this. You probably associated this stimulus with what is commonly called a negative emotion, the fight or flight reaction or activation syndrome. The problem is that in a work context you can neither fight nor flee your employer. This physical double-bind of reaction and suppression is a major component of stress and is very unhealthy over the long term.

If you were to notice the physical reaction of the oncoming emotions, generally a change in muscle tension, posture, facial expression and breathing pattern; you could interrupt them and replace them with the reactions of an emotion more appropriate for the situation before the feelings and ensuing thoughts overwhelm you. You could even precondition yourself to react in the manner of your choosing to your boss’s unpleasant habit.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

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Posted in neuroscience, NLP

Posted by: Edward | January 8, 2007

Feelings are your Dashboard.

“Go to your bosom; knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” Shakespeare.

Rather than being based on lack as such the drives are based on health. They are part of a homeostatic cybernetic loop. We maintain our vitality rather than pursue what we lack. Feelings are a status signaling device like the dials on a plane dashboard. Connecting the feelings back up with the drives and motivations they derive from would give you greater ability to interpret the signals.

Damasio defines a feeling as “the perception of a certain state of the body along with the perception of a certain mode of thinking and of thoughts with certain themes” (86).

If we talk about ‘The “feeling” of a certain musical note, we actually are referring to the affective feeling that accompanies our’ perceptions (92). Feelings are strongly related to somatosensory activity but are distinct from tactile sensation (106). Feelings arise from the maps of body-states not the states themselves (112). That is, feelings are metadata about our sensations rather than sensations themselves.

Feelings and consciousness are mutually arising phenomena. Without consciousness feelings as such do not exist but self depends on this sense of feeling (110). You don’t choose an emotion they happen before you are conscious of the stimulus (60).

Both External events and mental images can trigger an emotion, “if the stimulus is emotionally competent an emotion ensues, and only the intensity varies” (57).

When some of the pattern of an emotion is performed the rest of the pattern arises to complete it. The emotional response “process spreads laterally into parallel chains of events and amplifies itself” (65). Feelings are interactive perceptions and because of the feedback effect, the act of feeling changes the feelings experienced. This is where there is an opening for us to effect this process. In empathy and emotional simulation, a virtual map is overlain on the real map to create a new composite map (116).

Feelings are gestalt signals of complex and multifaceted bodily conditions that are organized in an abstract functional fashion. They are subject to feedback loops and are at least partially amenable to conscious selective activity.

Damasio, Antonio. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

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Posted in cybernetics, neuroscience

Posted by: Edward | December 30, 2006

Memory in the Neural Architecture

A first step towards Neuro-Sociological Programing: a Post-Occult Practice

Memory is an associative network of emotionally tagged distributed fragments of experience which are accessed nonlinearly but can be reconstructed into a linear narratization.

The experience is broken into separate fragments as it is processed by the nervous system, so no whole memory is ever stored. Additionally as the limbic system processes the sensory input it tags the fragments emotionally, so there is no memory free of emotion.

Categorization takes place in three different manners, by grouping associationally linked items, by which processing region of the brain this fragment is tied to or finally by the emotions with which the fragment of experience is tagged. As such categorization of memory is fuzzy.

Memory is different every time it’s accessed, it always has to be reconstructed in present time and in context of the present neural configuration. You can never step into the same river twice.

Consciousness is a meta-layer over top of the non-conscious processing of sensory input and motor output. It is primarily concerned with forecasting future results of actions and evaluation of past actions.

Narratization is a primary component of consciousness. So when we reconstruct a memory and bring it into conscious awareness we usually impose a linear narrative structure on it. Unfortunately large numbers of people mistake this story that they have just made for what actually happened in the past.

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Posted in neuroscience

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