Demring

I just found a whole bunch of amazing videos! To avoid flooding my Reader Shared, I’ll embed them all in this collection post. 

The first three of the following was found in this article about digital synesthesia (via Mind Hacks). The rest I found on my own (the last one a long time ago).

Skepticism does not lead to nihilism. It leads to agnosticism. This realization makes evident the fictionalist solution to the problem of skepticism: To evade the void of absolute agnosia by means of a certain leap of faith (or even just a short skip of faith).

It’s not inconsistent to be radically agnostic on an absolutely strict level while retaining a more useful outlook (such as standard materialism) on a slightly less scrupulous level, because these “levels” are parallel to each other: They do not meet, and cannot contradict each other. One mind can (and, I will argue, should) entertain a whole range of worldviews on different “levels of faith”.

I like to think about this as analogical to how fractals develop through iterations of its equation: Think of the range of worldviews as developing from completely faithless agnosticism through gradual iterations of faith. If absolute certainty is all you’ll accept, you’ll be left in absolute darkness. With a cautious number of faith iterations, the moderately admissive materialist outlook produces an image far more complex and informative than the simple “I don’t know” of radical agnosticism. At the aft end of the range, magical thinking, with its very lenient attitude with regard to faith, is capable of producing the most beautiful, intricate and exciting sorts of fiction, with the cost of sacrificing accuracy in how reality is interpreted (in fact, the interpretative pretension can be dropped altogether).

Here’s a demonstration of how a Mandelbrot fractal develops (I think it goes up to about 200 iterations in the end):

Both extremes (of doubt and faith) are far less useful than the moderate position (at least when it comes to science and most practical purposes), but they both have significant strengths as well: Radical agnosticism is philosophically interesting (in much the same way a black hole is interesting to a physicist, even though he/she has no wish to live anywhere near one), and the latter is psychedelically interesting (in the literal sense of revealing the soul). Here’s a demonstration of how incredibly deep and rich the Mandelbrot fractal can be with a whole lot of iterations (watch in high quality):

The analogy fails to capture one important factor, namely the strong correlation between faith-satiated worldviews and psychosis. Hopefully, virtualism can, if not vaccinate against it, at least build resistance to this tendency. Because faith-satiation is key to a lot of good things as well.

Here’s an explicit list of levels that I alternate between, from the strictest to the most lenient:

• Black hole agnosticism: I’m completely and utterly agnostic about absolutely everything. I can’t say if the sun will rise tomorrow, if there’s a hippapotamus in my room, not even if 2+2 equals 4. I acknowledge no truth, not even logic. This extreme level of agnosticism would, if lived, render a person completely dysfunctional. (In a schizofrenic way, I guess.)
• Philosophical agnosticism: Hume’s fork appears. I still don’t believe that any statement about reality is true, but math, logic and the entire virtual realm is trusted to be stable and safe. This is where I try to be when doing philosophy.
• The rational level: I accept a lot of science as true. I’m a materialist, and try my best to disregard speculative nonsense surfacing from my subconscious. What I’m interested in is communicable general statements that are very precise in prediction. 
• The irrational level (or range of levels): The scientific method is disregarded. I’m free to immerse myself in naive realism, practice some mental dancing, or believe in free will. As a formula: I’m a character in a play or a game where I also have producer powers (as opposed to how it is at the rational level, where I’m trying to be objective). My fictional world has to be internally consistent to some degree, but there is very lax requirements with regard to reality-fittingness. In fact, I’m almost indifferent to reality. All that matters are my circumstances, both external and internal.
• The magical level (or range of levels): Even contradictory things can be believed. Dreams typically dive into this level. It can be very enjoyable, but the experience is usually too fragmented and confused to be of any value beside relaxation.

This picture of a range of parallel levels can make it a lot easier to avoid some of the classic mistakes, like hypostatizing ideas or allowing faith-based thinking to interfere with strict philosophy. Even the most threatening of all, that of becoming coerced by skepticism into an impoverished and bloodless worldview.

A short discussion on Conscious Entities inspired me to compose a text too long and too off-topic to post as a comment there. So I’ll post it here, and link to it from there in case Peter or anyone else is interested. If not, at least I got a lot out of writing it myself. For context, here’s the two relevant comments from the comment thread:

My comment:

The physicalist account of qualia is that it is, in principle, reducible to the physics of brains. But here’s a question: What brains and what physics are we talking about? Is it brains and physics as experienced interpretatively by the physical brains of neuroscientists? Or is it the true or real brains and physics themselves, which, so far at least, are far outside the grasp of science?

Physicalist monism seems plausible to me, but very impractical as a frame of mind. I’m not suggesting that we take ontological dualism seriously, but I don’t think we can dispense with some kind of dualist conception, at least not just yet. What I propose is a dualism of true reality on the one hand and virtuality on the other, the latter here being understood as the experiential or phenomenal reality rendered somehow by real brains and real physics. Viewing experience as a virtual reality in this way allows one to identify more directly with one’s experience (as opposed to thinking that a more true approach would be to do like the Churchlands and try to translate experience into neuroscientific terms), because one is this virtuality. Trying to reduce it to physics is of course crucial for science, but it is derailing for the sense of self, and unnecessarily so. Subjectivity as we know it today is not something illusory that will be disposed of once we get our theories right, but the very stuff of our subjective being. Virtuality is a kind of fiction, to be sure, but not one you can dispel without at the same time dispelling subjectivity. I’m even inclined to use the word soul in connection with virtuality, devoid of the Christian connotations of course.

I think that even when (or if) we reach a physicalist explanation of subjectivity, a virtualist or fictionalist dualism of the kind I’ve tried to sketch out will continue to play an important role for us, for practical reasons. The same practical reasons that I think lead many to fight for ontological dualism today. A future theory of subjectivity will be too complicated for our modestly equipped brains to handle, at least for practical purposes. Like quantum physics, it will be so strange and difficult that it will be irrelevant for everyone except a few frontier theorists, for whom the relevance is almost entirely theoretical and detached from the rest of their lives.

I believe that to acknowledge the value of dualism in a virtual variety would be very good for the physicalist cause. What do you think?

Peter’s reply:

In essence, I agree, Gorm. I don’t think many people, even materialist monists, would claim that a single account of the world can exhaust everything there is to be said about it. We certainly at least need to address the world on different levels of description - in fact, on more than just two. So in practice any sensible view of the world has at least two and usually many more aspects to it. It may well be that this is what impels people into dualism; but philosophically, dualism is one of those concepts (like omnipotence, perhaps) that is just drawn too strong to make sense, and needs dilution for safe use. So while I basically agree with your point, I wouldn’t call that dualism. It might be that the best thing would be for us all to stop worrying about whether a theory is ‘monist’ or ‘dualist’, and just discuss the theory itself.

What would be interesting would be a good attempt to explain why the world needs different levels of explanation, how many there are, how they relate, and which levels are fundamental in any particular sense (it looks as if the account given by physics is fundamental in some sense, for example). Alas, I don’t know of any good theorising along these lines that gets very far.

And finally, my text, where start out trying to address the above problem from a virtualist point of view:

According to virtualism, there are no fundamental explanations about the world, because all explanations are in the end merely fictions that fit some relevant portion of the evidence we have available. Fittingness is not a fundamental quality of these fictions, because it is dependent on empirical investigation. The currently fitting fictions may suddenly become unfitting in light of new evidence.

Some distinctions: The kind of fictions that one tries to fit with reality should be distinguished from the kinds of fictions that are more or less indifferent to reality. A further narrowing of the former category would be those fictions that are trimmed by Occam’s razor and experimented with in accordance with the scientific method. Left out would be common sense, mysticism, religion etc, all of which are influenced by other aims than that of fitting with reality (e.g. the aim of making life more comfortable), at the same time as they are competing with science in trying to make sense of reality. (To some people, science is the obvious winner of this contest, because science is more sharply focused on the all-important fittingness issue — while to others, the unscientific theories are superior, because they allow for a more complete and habitable worldview, in that they satisfy more than just the fittingness requirement.)

To think of these different kinds of explanations in terms of degrees of truth or even degrees of fittingness, would make it into an empirical question, and like with all empirical questions, answers can only be provisional until all possible evidence has been gathered. Only then can one compare and make a final judgment about exactly how well and in what way the proposed explanatory fictions actually fit. This gathering is, of course, a task for science, not philosophy.

What philosophy should do instead is to look into the nature of fictions, stripped of their explanatory pretentions and independent of reality. The realm of philosophy, then, is virtuality, a term that includes everything – when disregarding any pretension of reflection of or correspondence with reality. That is to say, even frontier scientific theories are completely virtual, if you view them as models. The same goes for everything we can understand, even everything we can experience, because we can only understand or experience anything in terms of virtuality. This is of course a basic tenet of virtualism. (I’ll try to deal with the problem of justification near the end of this text.)

An example: Gravity. There are several theories of gravity in use in physics today, none of which are useful to our daily lives when dealing with the reality of gravity. In fact, most people live with the outdated Newtonian theory of gravity, or even the Aristotelian one. The truth of the matter is irrelevant to us in our limited circumstances. General rule: What we demand from models of reality in terms of fittingness is usually limited to what is useful in our circumstances. More information than this is cumbersome and distracting us from whatever it is that we’re doing (unless it’s theoretical physics, in which case it’s our job to find out about reality; or philosophy, in which case it’s our job to be encumbered and confused).

But circumstance-fittingness is not the only or most attractive quality in fictions. More important for us is whether or not the fiction in question allows immersion, whether it allows us to believe that it’s real. And in this, circumstance-fittingness is only one of several factors, three of the other being a) the dramaturgical quality of fictions, b) their aesthetic quality and c) our social context. All of these need a bit of explanation:

1. What I mean by the dramaturgical quality of fictions is that fictions need to be engaging for us to be interested enough to immerse ourselves in them. Typically, a story-like fiction is what does the trick. We’d love to belive of the world that it is in fact story-like, where we play a well-defined part etc. For most of us, this is hard to take seriously, but in pre-scientific times, it was a very important factor of what fiction or set of fictions could survive.
2. The aesthetic factor I would define as the balance of simplicity/elegance against complexity/elaborateness. Too simple is boring, too complex is overwhelming. A simple worldview needs to be stimulated by some kind of ornamentation. A difficult worldview needs to rest in minimalism.
3. The social factor is simply that it is harder for us to really believe that our fiction is true and that we live in reality, when people around us voice conflicting beliefs. Relativism kills immersion. When our fictions and those of people around us are mutually exclusive, we have to find some resolution, in order to maintain the illusion of being in true reality. We might group up with those that agree with us, and try to battle off those who don’t. Or we can modify our beliefs to be more vague and compromising. Most often, this manouver weakens at least the dramaturgical factor and the fittingness factor, something which is felt as a severe loss — but the fiction on its own is practically worthless if we’re not able to immerse ourselves in it. So the price is paid, again and again. 

This last factor is why, together with the gradual development of civilization from tribe to city state to empire etc, cultural development has become more and more vague, abstract, distant and impersonal.

The fact that fictions are shared is what makes possible things like sports, our money system, philosophy, physics etc. All cultural things has a virtual existence that is shared by a significant number of people (things that are not shared also have a virtual existence of course, but it’s not a cultural one until it lives beyond the individual). Fictions are like programs that run on brains. Our ability to synchronously run identical or very similar programs is the bedrock of culture.

In conclusion: Privileging science is advantageous for a lot of purposes, but this privilege shouldn’t degenerate into an ontological claim. Science is in the end merely a set of tested and useful fictions. Where it’s counterproductive to apply it (e.g. where it becomes way too complicated), we should be able to go with a more practical alternative, even though it’s false in the eyes of science. Fictions have strengths and weaknesses, and we shouldn’t artificially restrict usage of them. Believing that one branch of fictions (e.g. science) is true would be exactly such a restriction. Truth about the world is not accessible to us, because everything we can say must necessarily be said in the language of fictions. The best we can have is thus justification, on the basis of fittingness or otherwise.

Virtualism itself, as a metaphysical framework, should be judged in this same light. It should be justified in empirical terms. Just like with scientific theories, metaphysical theories should be judged as more or less plausible on the basis of certain results in neuroscience, physics, AI research etc.

Metaphysics is, according to virtualism at least, the field of metafictions — the fictions that are supposed to encompass all other fictions, as the operating system of life. It may resemble religion or mysticism in that it’s speculative, but I am quite confident that a satisfactory justification can be found. And if not, well, it’s simply indispensable, so I guess I’ll have to become religious.

A couple of months ago, I wrote to Mike Earl, suggesting that his position is very close to Kant’s. He responded with this video (where he reads out loud what I wrote to him, making the video accessible for anyone):

I think it’s a great idea to make our discussion public. That’s why I’m posting this my (embarrasingly late) reply here:

Hey Mike. Thanks for giving my suggestion serious consideration. I’m sorry it has taken me this long to reply. I’ve tried several times to compose a text, but found it very hard to do properly. I now see that my attempts failed because I was trying to dig into too many issues at once. This time, I’ll try to keep the focus on the central issue you bring up, about compositeness.

The number analogy was a bit confusing at first, as mathematical and empirical objects are understood by both Kant and myself as belonging to completely separate realms (in Kant’s terminology, a priori and a posteriori). I think I understand what you’re saying though, at least when you relate the analogy to things (like the table). But you’re wrong about Kant’s position:

First of all, Kant didn’t see numbers as “out there” in the empirical world, whether composite or singular ones. He did view mathematics as objective, but not in the sense of being external, only in the sense that it is true regardless of which subject is engaged in mathematical thought.

Secondly, things-in-themselves are not viewed by Kant as having definite properties like for instance spatial extension or causal relations to other objects. Properties such as these are supplied not by objects but by our cognitive apparatus when we’re viewing objects. The particular ones I mentioned are “transcendental concepts”, the full set of which I think could be called “the necessary and constitutive optic of experience”, by which I mean that experience would be impossible (or at least unintelligible) if the transcendental concepts (extension, duration, causality etc) hadn’t been applied. The application of transcendental concepts is a minimal requirement for cognition, and are thus present in all functioning humans. This is the ground for Kant’s peculiar form of “physical objectivity”, where the objectivity in question is similar to mathematical objectivity in that it contains no claim about external reality.

Kant would probably sympathize strongly with the view you attribute to him, that things-in-themselves are composite entities, but his own system prohibits him from any positive claims about noumena at all. The concept of noumenal reality is in fact defined as radical negation, as a resounding “I don’t know” to the question of what is the source of empirical appearances. To Kant, the answer to this lies beyond our cognitive limits, and we have no choice but to be agnostic about it. The only thing we can obtain certain knowledge about is the rules of cognition (math and the transcendental concepts).

You claim that “independent of our experiences, there are only prime entities”. I sympathize with this view, but just like with Kant and his opposing (hypothetical) preferences above, I too have to suspend judgment, because the claim is a metaphysical one. Strictly speaking, agnosticism is the only viable position here. (But of course, there is no reason one has to be this strict all the time! I’ll come back to this important point and elaborate in a later post here on my blog.)

“Green and hairy” is to Kant not a priori categories. A green and hairy experience is to Kant just a confused one. If the confusion is overcome, the experience becomes clear and distinct, but not because one has connected somehow to the noumenal realm, not at all. Clarity or purity of thought is merely an internal matter of mental discipline, not about taking part in noumenal reality. 

To your last point, the one with the painting analogy: I wholeheartedly agree, and I think this is a profound and very important issue. Not that I think it would change the course of scientific research a whole lot — because science needs communicable results to progress, and must therefore limit itself to what’s quantifiable (in other words, it is necessarily materialist, at least methodologically so) — but it certainly would be very valuable for scientists to frame the problem in the way you describe. I think their theoretical intuition would benefit. But the most important consequences of “physical subjectivism” is for philosophy. I see it as an intellectually fertile new “platform of the age”, much like how Kant’s system was in the 19th century, but in an improved, modern skin, complete with clear language and the possibility of direct connection to frontier sciences (in particular neuroscience and computer science). I think you’ve done a wonderful job explaining the basics of the theory, particularly in the first two videos of your Emergence series (for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, see my previous post). I’d love to see more videos from you on the subject. And I’d like to make a serious contribution of my own. This fall, I started on a master’s program in philosophy, and hope to be writing my master’s thesis on “virtualism” (as you know I prefer to call it). I won’t be starting on that until next fall, but it is, of course, constantly present in the back of my head. And any discussion that relates to it is much appreciated.

One last remark, about Kant: I’ve been having second thoughts about him lately, because of a class I’m taking where we’re reading the Critique of Judgment. I now think his whole “critical approach” is flawed, in that the posited transcendentals are given a status that is far too high. They should not be priviledged and set apart from other concepts (like table-ness or redness or personality etc). The so-called transcendentals are elevated above the rest of our perspectival capabilities only (it seems to me) in virtue of their quantifiability. And this is a rather arbitrary attribute, as can be demonstrated by how technology conquers new ground in what can be quantified, e.g. in neuroscience.

Instead, I now think Nietzsche is the closest to both our positions. I recently read an excellent unpublished essay by him called “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” that I think is very opportune for me to recommend in this context. It’s not very long, and can be found in its entirety online, here.

I’m curious of what you think of Nietzsche. How familiar are you with him, and how close do you think your position is to his?

Watch these two brilliant videos:

This guy, Mike Earl, is the first living person I’ve found that agrees with me on this issue! And what’s more, his explanation is very valuable to me, in that it is far more comprehensible than my own attempts so far.

Phenomenalism is one of the two core components of virtualism, the other component being computationalism. Sadly, Mike is of a different opinion on that one.

I think he’s trying to tell me something…

A great talk on memes by Susan Blackmore has just been posted on TED. You have my guarantee it is worth your time.

In addition to rejuvenating some old fears of mine, her talk made me realize how memetics is perfectly consistent with virtualism, even complementary! I need to read up on it, fast!

Mind consists of Forms: The brain is a machine running a software programmed with the language of Forms, and the living mind is best conceived of as a virtual reality — a continuously updated model of external reality (among other things).

Another name for the Realm of Forms is “Ideality”. But I think “virtuality” is a lot more suitable. One, because this word makes evident the connection between Platonism and computationalism, and two, because the word evokes an immersed, subjective point of view (through association with computer simulation).

Virtuality, then, is understood to be the very substance of mind. This is opposed to external reality, which is transcendent, i.e. entirely incomprehensible unless translated into the language of the Forms. Reality can’t be accessed at all except as a virtual model, constructed as an interpretation of raw sense data. In other words, we never interact with our environment directly: All of what you take for granted as external reality is in fact more correctly viewed as an incredibly powerful “virtual space of orientation”, continuously updated to fit with incoming information.

This picture seems to present an answer to the question of why physics is unable to describe reality with perfect accuracy: Because our minds are restricted to the simplicity of Forms. Our virtual models are necessarily simplistic, because of their computational restraints (limited time, energy and hardware size). Because of this, we can only hope to approximate truth. There’ll always be aspects left out by our descriptions.

I think it’s useful to think of reality-modelling as something that can be approached in a spectrum of ways, from the mathematical and unambiguous to the mythical and ambiguous. Both of these extremes have serious weaknesses, but their strengths complement eachother: Mathematics offers precision, while Mythos offers meaning. Therefore, the two approaches need to be reconciled. This, I think, is one of the most important tasks of philosophy today. And I think virtualistic epistemology can accomplish it.

Today, it is one full year since I last touched cigarettes or alcohol.

The spartan lifestyle will be generalized and continued.

I just recently discovered how great Al Jazeera’s YouTube Channel is. It’s outstanding. Grab the feed. I insist.

For those of you interested in the Middle East (which should be everyone), LinkTV is also highly recommended. Here’s the feed.

Comments are closed because of spam.

According to my proposition for a Rational Calendar, the first day of spring is today. What a marvellous opportunity to tell you about this calendar, as well as the closely related decimal time system!

I’ve presented this before, but only in Norwegian. Since then, several important changes have been made. The current version I call Rational Time, 2nd Edition. First on the list for the next version is coming up with a less pompous name :)

Decimal time

The general idea is to simplify the measure of time by decimalizing it. Our current time system obscures the passing of time to us (we the users of the base-ten numeral system) by measuring time with several different units which relates to eachother non-decimally, namely seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. This is obviously completely irrational, and as with so many irrational things, this also has its basis in tradition — one that can be traced all the way back to the Sumerian civilization of approximately 2000 BCE.

The decimal time system reduces the seven units of time to two: Day and year. Hours, minutes and seconds are replaced with decimal places of the day. For example, a milliday is 1.44 minutes, and a centiday is 14.4 minutes (the question of what names to use is of course a disputed issue). The details of decimal time I leave to this outstanding guide, to which I almost completely adhere. The exceptions (decimal week and perhaps time zones) brings me to my proposed calendar:

The Rational Calendar

First of all, a reverent nod to the French Republican Calendar (read the Wikipedia article, it’s very curious). What I’ve done is simply to modify the Republican Calendar to satisfy my own preferences. Bypassing the details of what is original and what is not, I’ll cut straight to my own proposal:

The year is divided into the four seasons, each of which has 90 regular days and 1 or 2 extra days at the end. Days are called by their season, like for example: “the 91st winters day” or “the 11th day of spring”.

The beginning of each season is anchored to the exact moment of winter solstice in the following way: Winter starts at the date of winter solstice, spring starts on the date produced by calculating exactly a quarter of a year from the moment of winter solstice. A quarter of a year is approximately 91,3105 days, which means that when the winter solstice falls on an evening, spring will have 92 days instead of 91. The true spring equinox doesn’t actually coincide with the beginning of spring according to my calendar, but close enough: I will refer to this time as the ‘mathematical spring equinox’. Needless to say, the same logic applies for summer solstice and autumn equinox as well.

This way, the placement of leap days is decided by the actual length of the year, which — when constrained to the four seasons — results in an orderly enough pattern.

A week should of course be ten days instead of seven. I have yet to find a better idea for names than oneday, twoday etc. There are nine real weeks in a season. All “tenth weeks” of one or two days are holidays.

Just as days can have the time of day displayed as its decimals, years can have seasons displayed: 2008.25 is approximately this very day; the summer of love can be written as 1967.5; Jesus was born about 1.01.

It is of course silly to use the birth of one particular religion as the starting point of history. I would like to reform this as well, but haven’t found a great candidate yet. Some people would like the year of Hiroshima or the founding of the UN as year zero, but I think we should be cautious of making the world too young. Someone might be inspired to go on some kind of a “purification spree”… I’d much rather like to see year zero be defined as the beginning of civilization, perhaps 10 000 years ago. The event could perhaps be linked to something like the Pyramids or the earliest known fragment of the Gilgamesh? Or perhaps it could just be exactly 10 000 years from the year which we decide to change the starting point of history? That way, we both get an easy number and a long history.

The three circles of time

Imagine the year as a circle with four quarters in clockwise succession: Winter solstice would be the absolute top point of the circle, the winter season the upper right quarter, spring the lower right etc. The same applies to the circle of the day: Midnight is the absolute top point of the circle, night the first quarter, morning the next, followed by day and finally evening. In this way, the relation between the day and the year becomes intuitive. Spring is understood to be the morning of the year, etc. Time immediately becomes more understandable.

The third ‘circle of time’ is that of time zones. On this subject as well, I appreciate most of Lyle Zapato’s reasoning, but would like to add that I think it would be valuable, conceptually if not practically, to introduce four quarters of the Earth. As I will demonstrate, this makes it easier to calculate from one local time to another, by the analogy of the other circles of time. The four quarters could be given the following names: Pacific, atlantic, occidental and oriental. The pacific quarter is the first because the International Date Line serves as the top point of the circle.

Now it’s possible to determine approximately what time it is in the oriental quarter when you know it’s evening in the occidental quarter: The oriental quarter is the one after the occidental, therefore the time there is one quarter of a day later. This is a superbly practical shorthand when thinking about time zones. But to be absolutely clear, I’m not suggesting that these quarters should be used as time zones. For that purpose, they are far too crude.

Noise from my neighbors and my laptop made me consider buying ear plugs. The first thing I did was to search the net for some advice. I found this superb series of reviews of several different kinds of ear plugs, and was convinced that it was worth a try. I went out and bought a small set of Quies foam ear plugs [picture] from the local pharmacy, and was very pleased to find how well they worked in terms of noise reduction. They greatly enhanced my concentration under my less than ideal circumstances, but were too painful to wear for hours at a time. Naturally, having gotten this small taste of tranquility, I decided to go ahead and test the supposedly best ear plugs on the market, Hearos Ultimate Softness Foam Ear Plugs (pictured below). I ordered 20 pairs online, and was not disappointed. They are a lot softer than the Quies product — which is not to say that the pressure in the ear is completely gone: It’s still there, but less annoying.

Ear plugs immediately became something of a revelation to me. I think I’m going to make use of them for the rest of my life. And so far, Hearos is my preferred product.

Some people might worry about whether putting a 2 cm long object into the auditory canal might damage the ear drum. I did, and asked a doctor about it. She ensured me that its not dangerous, because the ear drum is out of reach for most ear plugs. And even if it were to be reached, it will withstand a careful poke.

How to use foam ear plugs:

• Wash your hands. Roll the plug into a compact cylinder, and push it into the upper back side of your ear, toward the north pole of your hair. It will probably help also to pull your ear in this direction, to better expose the entrance of the auditory canal.
• Take them out carefully, be sure to let air through, so that your ear drum won’t pop.
• The plugs might be a bit filthy the first couple of times you pull them out, but that would probably be mostly ear wax you’ve managed to push inside the auditory canal with a Q-tip, not a native product of the canal. Q-tips shouldn’t, by the way, venture beyond that which is reachable by your smallest finger. The canal cleanses itself of wax (by the movement of your jaw), so don’t worry about it.
• To clean the ear plugs, just use water and regular soap. In my experience, the plugs become bloated while wet, and slightly harder to compress when dry, but still possible to use. I don’t yet know for how long though.

The movement of one’s body to music (dancing) is associated with mental movements.

The act of dancing function as an emotional amplifier, or perhaps more like an accompanying instrument in an emotional composition: The motor coordination parts of the brain sings along with the music.

Watching other people dance can produce much of the same mental movements (because of mirror neurons, I suppose). Accordingly, mental dancing is not at all conditioned on moving one’s physical body. Even imagining dancing (or the visuals of someone dancing) should be enough — at least with some practice.

The kind of dancing I have in mind here is not the modern discotheque mating ritual. And the victorian rhythmic display of social altitude is hardly any better, as the mental sensitivity is dulled by the social motivations involved. Ballet and modern dance are more like it, I guess, but I prefer to exemplify by pointing to tai chi and sufi whirling, because these are explicitly contemplative forms of bodily activity. It needn’t be all that complicated though, and definitely not mystical. Nor need the whole body be involved. — I think the best way to approach this is by giving a few experiments:

Put on some music you like. If that’s not possible where you are right now, just imagine the music.

1. Move your disgusting larynx in accord with the melody, but don’t make any sound. Also, make almost imperceptible facial expressions reflecting the emotional qualities of the music (almost imperceptible because no more is needed than a hint, and it’s a lot more socially comfortable that way). I suppose most people do this instinctively (although not so much on purpose).
2. Move one of your hands to the music, like this: Open the hand on higher tones, close it on lower. First practice some precision. Then add emotional expressions to your hand’s movements. (Interestingly, this works best when you don’t look at the hand.)
3. Don’t move anything, but try to imagine vividly that you do. You’ll probably need a set of rules for the dance, or else the imagination will be absorbed in the tedious task of ex nihilo creativity (— freedom is cumbersome).

Firstly, it is worth noting that even a very narrow spectrum of muscles can create mental dancing with some success. Secondly, and most importantly, attend to the fact that merely imagining dancing with (some part of) one’s body augments the emotional response to the music — this suggests the possibility of the dance to completely detach itself from the body. In other words, it should be possible to teach the imagination itself to dance, unmediated by the body.

In fact, this could probably work as a description of what the mind does every night, when we dream — “imagination’s dancing to the melody of the signals from the sleeping body”, perhaps? — From such a point of view, it seems that mental dancing might just be a question of allowing the mind to become absorbed in selected strands of its continuous (but “suppressed”) imaginary production. Meaning that it is as much a question of letting go as it is of disciplining. The neuroscience of jazz improvisation seems to confirm this. However, I do wish to stress the importance of simplicity and formalization when setting the stage for an attempt at mental dancing. Concentrated imagination can be demanding. You don’t want to overheat your hardware.

I find imagined visuals to be the most interesting: Real-time visualization of an imagined scene or story, like spontaneously creating a music video. It is very important for the depth of absorbtion that this is both real-time and improvisation. This can make quite a toll on a tired mind, so it’s best to keep it to simple ideas. Practical examples:

• When listening to Radiohead’s In Rainbows, I kept imagining Thom Yorke as a puppet outside in the night. On one song he’s dipping a fishing float rhythmically in the ocean, until the song makes him jump in the water and sink to the bottom, while, with a dreamy fatalism, he watches the fishes on the way down. On another song, he’s standing in my fathers backyard, singing, while the landscape is doing the dancing: The sun rises and falls repeatedly, the mountains grow, the ground dries up and cracles etc.
• When listening to Tinariwen’s Aman Iman (which, by the way, is highly recommended), I imagined a North African desert giant walking in my footsteps, personifying the music with his facial expressions and walking rhythm. This was when I was walking outside, something which makes it harder to imagine the more detached, far out stuff.
• Visuals can also be very basic and transient, almost like visually augmented emotions: Things like imagined dimming of light, imagined lightness of the body, sparkles of light, artificial joy in the stomach etc. These are a lot easier on the brain power, but harder to remember vividly. The same logic applies as to dreams: Keep it somewhat anchored to reality, and you will recall what it was like a lot easier. A personal recommendation of music for this kind of brain dance: Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air.

The learning curve of mental dancing is similar to that of bodily dancing or juggling: It starts out depressingly low, but rises rapidly with practice.

I don’t believe a lot of people consciously immerse themselves in the imaginary, but I think they should, because 1) it’s relaxing, like yoga for the mind (try it after a long day), and 2) you get to know thyself. Furthermore, as Kermit can attest, it’s just plain groovy:

Thanks to information aesthetics for the find. Perfect timing!

Meaning is merely an aesthetic quality.

Exploring the relation between the physical eye and the experience of vision, Isaac Newton conducted the following experiment on himself:

I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles r, s, t, &c. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye [with the] point of [the] bodkine, but if I held my eye & [the] bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye [with] it yet [the] circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I removed [them] by moving my eye or [the] bodkin.

If [the] experiment were done in a light roome so [that] though my eyes were shut some light would get through their lidds There appeared a greate broade blewish darke circle outmost (as ts), & [within] that another light spot srs whose colour was much like [that] in [the] rest of [the] eye as at k. Within [which] spot appeared still another blew spot r espetially if I pressed my eye hard & [with] a small pointed bodkin. & outmost at vt appeared a verge of light.

The eye was not hurt. — By this experiment. He almost blinded himself on another.

Note to self: Memorize for future discussions of psychonautics!

I registered for Google Apps yesterday. When asked if I wanted to purchase a domain, I decided to waste two seconds on a chance in hell: I wrote ‘demring.com’. — And lucky me! It was available! I am now the proud owner of said domain, and the suitingly brazen email address gorm [α] demring.com (among other things).

I have set up redirection from wordpress to blog.demring.com, and it works perfectly! Exactly like I have dreamt of for some time now.

But this is only laying the first stone. More changes will come in proximal future. Mainly in the direction of integrating the blog with static web pages at www.demring.com. In particular, I am hoping to set up a wiki-ish network of philosophy pages, explaining things like virtualism, so that I can use them as reference when blogging, among other things.

To pun the truth: It’s a new dawn!

Let the democratic minority govern the undemocratic rabble.

Physicalism is the philosophical position which holds that all of reality, including the mind, ultimately will be accounted for by physics. Seeing that our current physics is far from approaching this ultimate point, physicalism hinges on a guess. Absurdly, it seems physicalism in fact is a metaphysical position.

A metaphysical position which I happen to hold.

Now, what follows is a simplistic exploration of my metaphysical physicalism:

1. The Big Bang occurs; the universe is created. Complexity increases for a couple of millions of years, until the original plasma has coalesced into atoms and the atoms condensed into stars etc. The evolution of material complexity decelerates.

2. A limit is reached. All potential material complexity has been realized. But it doesn’t end there.

3. Complexity continues to increase, no longer in the material dimension but in the virtual. The evolution of virtuality is the evolution of life: The ability of virtuality is what sets the living apart from the dead. Humans call their experienced virtuality “mind”.

Admittedly, this drawing is a more than a little problematic, as the development graph has become crowded with conflicting significations. The reason I chose this flawed solution is that it shows 1) the reflexivity of virtuality, and 2) the continuity of material and virtual complexity. The drawing is problematic, but key, so I should explain it in some more detail:

• A: This is some sort of measure of what we still don’t understand about reality. Things like quantum gravity, consciousness and what have you.
• B: This is the part we do understand. We understand a lot.
• C: This is the part of virtuality that has little or nothing to do with scientific understanding of reality. It deals with the imaginary. Dreams, music and philosophy. All the good stuff. Notice how the imaginary is pictured as a prerequisite of a grasp of reality.
• Compare C with B: This hyperinflation of the imaginary is intended. A highly developed mind is playful.

4. At this hypothetical point in time, reality will be completely accounted for by virtuality. Absolute physical truth is attained.

Parenthetically: Since true physics/physical truth must be a description of reality, completely distinct from reality in itself, physicalism could be viewed as a rather unusual kind of idealism!…

Once again, the drawing is less than perfect: In order to show that reality is completely understood, the representation of virtuality would have to envelop not only the material reality, but also itself. — I really wish I had a clue of how to draw that!

5. Virtuality has moved on, reality is altogether left behind. What this future might hold is ridiculously far removed from my foresight.

But if the god-minds of post-ultimate understanding are anything like us, they will probably miss the old, dark and cold place we call the universe, and create new and slightly better ones to occupy themselves with.

Political economy has a huge problem, that of rationality: How to design an intelligent system which can achieve both justice and efficiency? The basic solutions on the table are:

1. Institutional intelligence (planned economy)
2. Swarm intelligence (market economy)

Both of these have great and well-known flaws. Planned economy is too slow and clumsy, market economy is too unrestrained (i.e. evil) and also vulgar. On top of that, both systems have their peculiar ways of corrupting the power and infantilizing the people.

A third solution is to make a compromise, where market forces are intelligently restrained, that is, where a government institution strategically adjusts taxes and other regulations. This might be a good idea, but it can’t shake off this final leg iron: the demand for computation inflates the bureaucracy.

This, of course, is where computers come in. Today, I can make a user friendly database with functionality only dreamt of ten years ago. And ten years from now, my guess is that Google will provide a universal database, which one can feed complicated queries in an intuitive query-language (that is, not code), and 0.06 seconds later, recieve intelligent reports from. If there is geographical information in the report, one can immediately switch to GIS-view. If the information has a history, one can view it as a graph. If one has opted for a high-security Google account (or family of accounts), one can safely put in one’s own classified information, and so use it as a personalized database. This will be divine grace to all bureaucracies (the threat of hackers notwithstanding).

Ten years after that, then, AI will have reached a broadly functional level, and therefore it will quickly be omnipresent — a lot quicker than the Internet managed this. The details of how this massive change will manifest is impossible to foresee. But I suspect it will be a powerful advantage for all things bureaucratical. I dare say this augurs a rapid regeneration of institutional intelligence. Maybe this time the dream of a truly conscious society will be (technically) realizable.

Political platonists of all sorts should rejoice.

A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt that I was a swarm of lesser creatures (specifically, neurons), perhaps inspired by this NY Times article on the subject of swarms. I felt explained, but at the same time explained away. I understood myself, and disappeared. I was completely immersed in this hippie perspective, but then I woke up, and these thoughts were reduced to a curiosity.

But last night I recieved what I interpret to be Act II of the same story. In this dream, I was split into several creatures in a world rendered in pleasant animesque (like this with a hint of that). Three of the creatures were designated as main characters:

• The largest of them was absent-minded, silent and generally unexpressive. Built like a bear, slow and completely occupied by conflicting inklings. I interpret him to have represented my intuition, because of the character’s clear similarities to my experience of being absorbed by what I usually call intuition.
• The next largest one, or at least next tallest, was slender and brightly colored, with a clean appearance. He had a noble, if a bit proud (arrogant), posture, and was clearly not a very easy man to be around. I interpret him to have represented my position — a word which I here define as including sociality, material situation, comfort, etc.
• The smallest of the three had a large head and wide eyes. He was curious and refreshingly clever. In the dream he crouched all the time, and so he might have been taller than I remember. I interpret him to have represented my reflection, i.e. my experience of being absorbed by an inquisitive and reflective mode of being.

The lesser creatures were not as powerful and not as consistent as the main ones (they could transform or split in two or disappear). Most of them were simply jumping heads. I interpret them to represent the aspects of my personality which are present, but not dominant. Examples:

• absurdity/sillyness
• maximization, meaning my tendency to take thoughts and values to their extremes
• visual expression of logical relations

In the dream, Reflection discovered that Position had severe heart problems. It seemed the group for some reason had to go back to a malign, metallic building from where they had just escaped (sadly, my memory is vague at this point). Everyone looked to Intuition, who was doubtful, but unresponsive. If he had anything to say, he would not need to utter the words — everyone would just know. The decision was made by Reflection, possibly affected by some kind of some kind of lesser creature of pity.

First, the group went to the pharmacy. They cheated the waiting line ticket system, with considerable bad conscience. It was Position that went up to the pharmacist and bought the two pieces of medicine Reflection said they needed. Then it was off to the malign building, where metal plates somehow ajust, intelligently, to make and unmake rooms and stairs and ledges etc, as the house sees fit. The group found a small ledge somewhere they judged to be safe. It was not an ideal place for heart surgery; it was too small. A conflict within the group arose, where the lesser creature of maximization was the most vocal proponent of moving to a newly formed large ledge just a few meters away. Intuition put his mark on the atmosphere: Everyone felt how he was against the suggestion.

At this point, the dream changes focus to an alien creature spying on the group. This alien creature was not part of me, it was something else, and like the building, malign. It was confused by the group’s actions. Why did they go back into the building?

Anticlimatically, I woke up. But the dream followed me around today, until I developed it, in this way: The same kind of split that created all these creatures from my self, can also happen to each of these creatures. And so all of them can be powerful. The creatures of visual logic, for example, can split until it is a veritable swarm, exhausting the entire theater of consciousness. In more rational terms: All parts can absorb the self, if only for short periods at a time.

This dream has created a conceptual foundation Id like to use everywhere I can, but I dont know where I can! (I wish I had connections in the animation business!)