Re: <documenta X><blast>focus on problems
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sun, 22 Jun 1997 13:32:30 -0400
one may be able to un-see to a certain extent, which is to say, one may be
able to see newly, or in a fresher way, less burdened by immediate context.
The centrally embedded values (the *context* of oneself that goes whereever
we go) cannot so easily be discarded, unless one is so unfortunate so
suffer extreme cognitive impairment ( as with the alkaloid scopalamine
which temporarily eliminates memory by stupefying the hippocampus ) or
brain damage. These cases get written up in neurology textbooks or by
Oliver Sacks, but none of them, sadly, have emerged smarter, more capable,
or better off than before their trauma.
A case can be made for psychedelia that it makes one conscious of the
*mechanism* of thought, the rather Buddhist perspective that
*consciousness* is a construct, but sooner or later one must return to
Earth with what one has learned, and get on with business.
The big push in computation now isn't to see more stuff in the same way,
but to snap cognition up a logical level, so that the elements of thought
which were once specifics (i.e. let's see how Mr. X behaves in environment
Y with stimulus Z) becomes *categories* (let's create Intelligent Agents
and turn them loose in siliconspace so that they behave like 10,000 Mr.
X's, then tweak around with the environmental Ys and the stimulus Zs until
we understand what will get a population of Xs to, say, go to war, and what
level of aggression can Xdom be exposed to before it responds, then develop
a foreign policy accordingly)
Such a *logigal level* shift then begins to transpose something more
akin to physics onto somthing more like political science or psychology.