Re: <documenta X><blast>artificial constructs
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Wed, 23 Jul 1997 10:32:50 -0400
At 09:08 PM 7/22/97 -0500, you wrote:
>
>At 12:01 PM on 7/22/97 Morgan Garwood wrote:
>
>>One can honestly say that all human experience is virtual, it is
>>an artificial construct.
>
>Hi Morgan,
>I am honestly having difficulty understanding how you mean this . Could you
>elaborate a little more? I am aware that certain Eastern
>cultures/philosophies believe all "reality" is "virtual". But I don't think
>you're speaking from that point of view.
>
>Do you believe that only human experience is virtual, or are the
>experiences of all cognitive beings virtual as well? (what about machine
>perception? the geological record? birds? molecules? termites? genes?)
>
>I agree with you that objectivity is wishful thinking (and a construct
>created to support specific power structures) but I'm not sure that
>objectivity is the same as experience (I suppose I'm defining experience as
>a "package deal" composed of perception/cognition/somatic response). It is
>widely believed (at least among many artists and a growing number of
>scientists) that we all operate from subjective standpoints. I'm not sure
>it's necessary to distill experience into some virtual essence or mappable
>neuropathological framework to understand that human experience is a
>gloppy, gooey conglomerate of uncertainty, approximation and indeterminacy.
>Your reference to "a pattern recognition matrix" makes sense to me.
>
>Eve Andree Laramee
>
it is a cognitive fact of life that physical reality is unknowable without
the intermediation of a reality processing unit (i.e. a brain). There are
no colors "out there", red, blue, green, simply don't exist. They are
products of consciousness... they are the brain's way of mapping
differences in wavelength of light. But there are no "red" photons bouncing
around, only photons of differing energy. Once the photon energy becomes
too high, ultraviolet, the brain can no longer map it and it becomes
invisible. The exact same holds for all the senses... no pitches exist, no
c sharps or b flats, only vibrations in matter that the brain maps as
sound. Sometimes users of psychedelic drugs report that they become aware
of the deeper level processes by which sensory input is converted into
experience, as raw data from the outside processes its way to the higher
centers of consciousness, where it finally becomes abstraction and
conceptualization. One participant in this group had difficulty with the
idea that some of the newer work in genetic algorithms might resemble the
circuitry of consciousness, but my ideas of the moment are that the brain
does indeed act in this way... that there are probably thousands of tiny
nuclei that carry out a continuous process of matching the map, what's in
the brain, to the world, the real stuff out there. Of course, this is a
philosophical insult to certain frames of opinion, that feel human
transcendence is threatened by operational descriptions of consciousness.
Consciousness is the most virtual thing in the known universe, and easily
the most complex. "Eve Andree" is a label a whole lot of cells between your
ears place on stable states, "attractors" in chaos-speak, that you
experience as your identity. Were you to have a malfunction and become
schizophrenic, those attractors might disperse, and you would have an
amazingly hard time knowing who "Eve Andree" is.
One argument in favor of the intelligent, and conservative use of
psychedelics is that the experience instills a certain epitemological
humility in the student... he or she begins to understand the contingency
of consciousness.
However, I've also personally known gifted psychics, who've been able
to know and describe things completely beyond what could be intuited from
personal contact. I know the daughter of a once highly place russian
general in their strategic rocket forces (their equivalent of out I.C.B.M.
system) who insists that the Soviet Union (remember them?) did have an
ongoing program working with psychics, and that they felt the results were
valuable and often accurate.
Keeping an open mind in the matter, I'd prefer not to become
overinvested in the idea, nor would I summarily reject it... either extreme
can veer into the neurotic... however, the results and anecdotes at least
suggest that there is an alternate pathway to knowledge that is not
directly mediated by sensory processing...
Once I tried a cognitive enhancer marketed in Europe as Olmiphon
(adrafinil) which is a cerebral alpha-1 receptor agonist (is has no effect
on peripheral alpha-1 receptors, or it would behave as a sympathomimetic
and raise your blood pressure, which it doesn't); one of the odder results
of ingesting Olmiphon was that I started to become slightly, but detectably
precognitive... I'd tend to be thinking about people or situations about
twenty minutes before I'd run into them... I have no explanation for why
this should be, but I refuse to discount it because there's "no theory to
account for it".