Comments on: PS2 Note #1. Talking to Objects.

By: e. ian allen

e. ian allen — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:40:59 +0000

“Tina Darragh - Collective Lament for Banishing Animals from History (2′20″). As the lexical surface perforates, and smug assumptions about our species, its history and boundaries, dissolve, the noises of the one big animate union steal through, creaking and buzzing and clucking. Great performance of an amazing poem. • Recorded 25 January 2007 at the University of Maine (some ambient office sounds audible, appropriately enough).”

from soundpoetry site http://www.thirdfactory.net/lipstick.html#feb9

By: e. ian allen

e. ian allen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:51:20 +0000

by asking the ‘right’ question, we bounce The Mind into an answer to what we really want. the questions are wrong, but why? but we swim against the magnetic field hiding the right question. i think we are approaching the right question, it’s a huge (”massive”) metaphoric-linkage in the mind of “god” (The MindSystem, ie This Place), it’s not just Moore’s Law and Vingean Inevitability or McKenna’s 2013 — it’s all of that and it’s the feeling of directing the Mind at a kind of weak-spot or ‘bug’ being debugged, a thought that is removed every time we get closer to thinking it.

“we are in some kind of lucid-dream cybernetic simulator: it has glitches, giveaways, oops-es, trapdoors, goofy jokes, and wierd markings made by intrepid explorers from the pasts and futures. oh yeah, timespace is BIG, too.”

By: Rudy

Rudy — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 01:49:59 +0000

Nice Article on panpsychism by journalist Jim Holt in the NY Times magzine last Sunday. I wonder if he reads my blog. I did a search on Holt, and he writes about lots of issues that interest me. Would be nice to meet him some day. He wrote a book on the history of the idea of infinitesimally small quantaties, Worlds Within Worlds, that was published (maybe) by Four Walls Eight Windows but is now unavailable in the US. There is a British edition from Fourth Estate. I may order it from the UK, which seems like a hassle. If Jim Holt is reading this, I'd love to get a copy of your book in exchange for any of my books you want! Thanks to Nick Herbert for tipping me off about the article.

By: Steve H

Steve H — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:55:47 +0000

Rudy, did you ever read Zelazny’s “The Great Slow Kings?” The mammals have to stand in the throne room for generations while the dino-like overlords ponder, finally going extinct before the question is answered. Silps might not be on our time at all.

I think about memory and consciousness a lot; my son has a pervasive developmental disorder. As a baby he had as much memory and processing power as any other child, but for some reason he didn’t start using it for a few years (he’s 22 and codes web pages now). So giving a rock the power to think might not be enough. I’d say you need installed software along with the lazy-8 memory or you’d have a zen rock garden that did its own meditating.
And why would each pebble have its own memory? More efficient to have all rocks share a big memory, and all fire, etc. So the beans might roll away from the pot, but when you boiled them they’d just make their last entry to the log, or upload themselves to virtual beandom. Your socks might be in a chatroom as you walk to work, griping about your cheap detergent. Fires are too transient; they’d see their inevitable entropic destruction as soon as they became sentient and panic, try to spread, so it would be better for them to be part of one Universal Fire. Light a match and talk to it; the next match remembers your question. Branca could do a symphony for 100 guitars without hiring guitarists, and maybe if he played the same guitar enough it would compose a sonata without him.
Really, I think talking silps would be rare, and silps with something to say even rarer. And you might have to give them a nudge to start them off thinking. Probably someone with a wizard hat, going along with a wand and tapping rocks and streams and waking them up. Didn’t Treebeard say Tolkien’s elves wanted to wake everything up and talk to it?

By: glenn branca

glenn branca — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:54:15 +0000

While I was reading your ideas for the new book I couldn’t help but think about Alan Moore’s historic run on Swamp Thing during the 80’s. If you haven’t read it I think you’d find it very interesting. The entire story arc
covers 7 volumes (more than 40 comics) but it’s worth it. Towards the end
some of the SF extrapolation was very avant garde.
By the way I love your groovy site (or should I say wavy).

By: rs

rs — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 00:53:42 +0000

interesting questions
maybe there is no need in the story to identify consciousness so tightly with an object. e.g., when a log burns the consciousness identified locally there might experience a great release into the freedom of being the air, and then a merging into the consciousness of the air which previously in sensed only dimly.
i’m also wondering if you are looking at, or have already looked at the idea: when something like a human dies that it may ghost for sometime as the memory persists in the matter that made up the body? Could a body reform itself?
it seems to me, and I think you may be thinking something similar, that consciousness centered in different kinds of objects would have differnt motivations. does a rock need to be unhappy in the same way a human might be if s/he never moved? Would objects made conscious be happy, or it would it still only be humans that are unhappy with their fate?