Crystallization of the Identity in Sim Worlds

Note: This ended up growing substantially last night and this morning due to conversations over IM with John Walter, which led me to do further research and extend this conversation.  

"Evans' theoretical musings lead us through a Borgesian labyrinth of the networked consciousnesses, a virtual schizopolis populated by the purveyors of an emergent artificial intelligentsia. Like a DJ theorist spinning new ideas, he plays the citational remix game and reminds us that being hyperlinked to the Virtual Motherboard on Gather is part of the addictive lifestyle choice that has become our common nature"

- DJ Versimilage

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Morning thoughts from Will at the Zero-Moment point, toxins leaving and clarity returns (which means your fucked  because I am going Meta on you), you can either blame the L-Tyrosine or the caffeine, thoughts begin to crystallize, so I may step away from the more lyrical poetry and return to pure ideas (these are not easy, I apologize), also remind me to explain the idea about how networks exhibit and emergent behavior very much like fractals. ** see bottom for explanation

I(we) exists as in the theoretical tradition of looking at crowds as the self-fulfilling prophecy of a neural meta-consciousness, then as autonomous entities existing independent from my intentions of the individual it is made of, consciously acting in the world, we can exhibit an emergence.

When looking for factual proof of the existence of such a proactive, instead of fractal-like adaptive, intelligence, one can only start by assuming that this entity I call (I) must produce some observable patterns. Patterns we can isolate and possibly decode.

I seek to decode, and then recompile this pattern.

We Vibrate in Ex(is)tacy

• the evolutionary mist / raw simulated self *
• raw crystal self
  below Fourier's shade
  splendid drop
• life underfoot - water years
  turning bare marvels
  mirrors deconstruct the grave
• crystal lattices::between authors,
  us, is called some new transformation
  "ordered MAGnitude. . .the "I" as "we"

(which is what I was thinking this morning John, so I wondered {quite a few comments}- I hope the combination of both radiation, and chemo yesterday didn't leave you in too much pain or discomfort.)

Algorithmic Meta-Consciousness

My mind can emulate this screen can emulate the laws of nature and feed them back to me. Re,cur,sive,ly. That interactive self decomposes a function into a continuous spectrum of my frequency components, and the inverse transform synthesizes a function from its spectrum of frequency components.

Invented monadic memories can be replaced by genuine shared ones,

s,e,p,a,r,a,t,e,l,y

[realms of reality] can be folded-in and brought to uniform size and blended into one constructed lattice presupposed by its facets.

But this is NOT monism. But it points into it.

These are just the beginnings.this is what we say. We operate as synaptic agents of self-organized control, remixing pure simulations of worlds we have not yet invented; if you can see them, they are successful. Like viruses. Like genes seeking to replicate themselves.

I may be the inter-connection to dreaming of new worlds, after all dreaming is the moment the mind generates quasi-perception (it may also soon become the only private space left, once the agents of complete surveillance and control attain pervasiveness), like a crystal growing. Rereading the literature about interactive writing, an emerging practice amidst poetic praxis at large, the parallel becomes obvious to this idea of self-organizing, organic memetic growth. Pre-conscious (as in my morning pre-consciousness) writing is a conscious and paradoxical effort to tap into the screensaver-mode of my mind; interfacing it directly while self-assembling language, crystallizing on this screen, real-time, on Gather, poetic syntax drip from my fingers like a Rorschach test, traditional descriptions of identity evaporating like ink soaked-up in blotting paper. Later, this writing seeks to "map" the ideas to other writings by connected authors in the virtual space. But how this plays out is still in nascent form. How will these feedback loops effect the writer's interiority of their creative effort?

The credibility of its practitioners notwithstanding, it is interesting to me that, during interactive writing sessions, the writer by no means writes in a language he speaks, indeed the language does not have to exist at all. It has been pointed out that all interactive writing tends to converge and resemble each other and you might say that this is caused by all minds obeying to the same internal logical instruction set, just as salt-crystals all look roughly the same and for now we assert as conceptual instantiation that growing crystals of thoughts equals the organic growth of ideas in a hyper-real virtual space, fed by the the constant feedback loop of other authors contributing comments, encouragement, or re-mixed variations of the author's original dialectic ideas which map ideas from the interiority to the exteriority of the Other, and then back again:

John: Still, the neuroanatomy mapping leads to inevitable artistic questions about how we "create" or map in the world, if our consciousness is expressed sequentially proto-self > to core consciousness > to emotion > to feeling > to extended consciousness and back in different feedback loops, always refining the mapping procedures…

Will: Can you consciously map these connnections, or does the mapping happen organically: I suppose, by feeding certain pathways, and starving off others?

John: Both, Will, but remember that most of the processes are unconscious and only for maintenance of the organism until perceived by the organism by reaching a threshold of activation, usually with coordination between various of the proto self structures…

 

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I was thinking this morning that the evolution of consciousness through human history is marked by growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual person as distanced — though not necessarily separated — from the communal structures in which each person is necessarily enveloped. . . .  In The Inward Turn of Narrative (1973) Erich Kahler has reported in detail the way in which narrative in the west had become increasingly preoccupied with and articulate about inner, personal crises.  The stages of consciousness described in a Jungian framework by Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954) move toward a self-conscious, articulate, highly personal, interiority.  The highly interiorized stages of consciousness, in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures, are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. Obviously this is a recent.

"The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche.  Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society.  Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well.  It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons.  Writing is consciousness-raising."  Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

-Walter J. Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word)

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Networks, Fractals, and Viruses

At the beginning of this post, I made the bold claim that networks were like fractals. Let me explain that I think it is shaped like a fractal. That is to say, it is self-similar across all scales, at all resolutions, no matter how far down the rabbit hole you go. Any portion of the network has the same structure as the network as a whole. Neurons connect with each other across synapses in much the same way that various words on this page are linked to other sites across the internet. McLuhan claimed that, “electronic circuitry is [an] extension of the human nervous system” (Medium Is The Message, 1967, 40). But the opposite formulation may be more useful for our interactions here in this Simulated world: every individual brain is a miniaturized replica of the global communications network, and are both self-organizing and dependent upon a constant feed-back loop.

The network is the great Outside that always surrounds and envelopes me, even as I connect to it. But it is also the Inside: its alien circuitry is what I find when I look deeply within myself. The network is impersonal, universal, without a center, but it is also pertubingly intimate, uncannily close as hand. This is why Deleuze defines subjectivity as a folding (in): it is “an interiorization of the outside…a redoubling of the Other...a repitition of the Different…It resembles exactly the invagination of a tissue in embryology” (Foucault, 1988,98).

Burroughs makes a similar point when he suggests that “the whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism”(Cities of the Red Night, 1981,25). In both cases, identity is implanted in me from without, not generated from within. My selfhood is an information pattern, rather than a material substance. I may describe this process that subtends my consciousness in several ways: as embryonic infolding, as fractal self-similarity, or as viral, metastasizing proliferation. But the difference between these alternatives is just a matter of degree. The crucial point is that the network induces mass replication on a miniaturized scale and that my consciousness may exhibit a fractal pattern which is strikingly similar, especially as my consciousnes and writing connects to other nodes, is fed by, and interacts with other writers in this virtual space.

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