The Ghost Within

(or " Pueraria Thunbergiana )

Generally speaking I like to begin these essays with a joke or two to settle the audience down. I have a book "1,001 Jokes for all occassions, for Dummies" that I refer to for that purpose. Then on to some chit chat about current events which I use to establish my credibility as someone "tuned in" to the real world. I drop a few names then, without being too judgemental. This establishes my objectivity, which is vital if I am to step out of the internet blogger/hacker genre and crossover to the mom and pop/joe six pack market which is where the real money is.

Then the deep and serious stuff begins where while talking about stuff that seems big time I remain purposely confusing so as to not alienate any potential readers. At that point I also throw in a lot of conjunctions, such as ,"Nevertheless," "In any case,""For example" and "On the other hand." This is because,like all professional writers I hope to be paid by the word, especially in the more lucrative reprints, such as "The Wit and Wisdom of Tamlin," and "More of the Wit and Wisdom of Tamlin, Part two".

Then I close with the ever popular dream section, which is good for another two hundred words and establishs my radical credibility. Throughout the essay and mostly in the middle, confusing, part, I constantly, in every essay throw in the line "I don't get paid for this." It's a subtle hint, or as subtle as needs be, to those who pay people for putting words together that I am looking for a part time job and am willing to write in the style and voice of anyone they presently pay money to, for half what they pay their present employees, and without health benefits or vacation days. I do this for the love of the art, you know.

It's a formula that should dovetail nicely with the virtual intelligence driven essay writing computer programs currently in development. I figure if I can hack a beta and cut a deal with Newscorp I should be able to retire in comfort in a year or so, which is my goal in life.

But the following has no intro section and no concluding dream sequence, because I ran out of room. So to the VI coders I want to mention that they should leave this one out of the formula development database as it is atavistic..

"Given the choice of the divinity of God or the presence of God we invariably choose the former, at first at least. Because it's a lot easier to deal with: we can interpet instructions and directions more freely, the entrepreneurial among us can sell train tickets for the glorious voyage on the heavenward highway.

...but the aura that distance lends of divinity grows weaker with time and so we find ourselves moving a little closer to the divine. This takes from us our individuality as well as our freedom to perceive and understand the divine as we would like and not as it would have us understand it. It stinks, but the pay is better."

TBATA Book Two, chap 2, vs;12-13

The first third of the following paper may seem abstruce and you don't really need to read it if you don't want to. It has to do with the historical background of mental associative relationships in the context our understanding of the physical world. I jest that from time immemorial wisemen and a not a few hucksters have promised to teach acolytes the "highways to the inner mind." I on on the other hand am trying to get as far away from the inner mind as possible.:-)

The inner mind, where things don't have to be proven, only believed is the home of superstitions of all kinds and I am not sure we wouldn't be better off without it.(Heh) But nevertheless it is there and we must deal with it.

Another word for the inner mind is the unconscious. As you may have guessed my understanding of "what is going on" is about as different from the norm today as Freuds was in his day. As to free will, I can't say. It's not a question I ask myself about. As to conditioning, and as importantly as to the physical and mental needs that force people to, in effect, condition themselves, I feel I am on firmer ground.

As i have said, by now a hundred times, the master is consciously aware of what is controlling the servant, slave or whoever on an unconscious level. You will only be free from the chains that bind you when you understand how they do so. You cannot break them because you make them and the same energy spent breaking them is put into strenghtening them. In time I have come to believe it doesn't even matter that much who put the chains on you. Trying to talk those who enslave us into changing their minds about things is a fruitless effort, Attain freedom first.

Revenge is only desired by those who have not overcome the initial wound

This whole thing is taking on a quasi-religious tint, but don't be misled. The Cyberpunks who formed alot of my basic understandings eventually drifted into NeoVictorians, that is to to they see the information revolution as like the industiral revolution and aside from conclusion number one, which is you'd better watch your ass because no one else will, they came to consider that one of the problems with aceelerated growth is a lack of teaching of very basic moral ideas. People don't respect those ideas anymore. Truth is what you can get away with. Power is the only goodness. In that context old fashhioned ideas like duty and loyalty however corny seem better then chaos or religious cultism.

At the moment I can't see how it will pan out. All I'm concerned about is taking care of our people and using whatever leverage brains and devotion gives us.

Today we will speak of one the most common means of information distribution on the planet- the human voice.

Form is form Content is content
Form is not form Content is not content
Form is form Content is content

So goes the ancient syllogism and on one level at least it tells us that actions may be identical yet different and by different we don't mean different in terms of motive, nor even context but different in relation to the being who performs them and their effect on others..

The whole question of form and content is far too complicated to discuss in depth here. Lifetimes have been devoted to contemplation of it. In a stone form is the shape of the stone and content is the material of which the stone is made. That's simple enough, but for instance, on an atomic level while content can be thought of as the protons,neutrons, electrons, form is the way they are arranged, as form changes then so to does content and in that case how can we claim they are two distinct things? The answer is we cannot, except sometimes, meaning that the distinction can be made in those periods of the cycle when form and content are distinct.

It sounds redundant and it is. Like I said this a involved idea. The organizing of thought into a coherent system which we call "life" can be seen the same way. It cycles in and out of chaos, or existance and non existance. As to whether any aspects of previous organization remain through the dissolution I cannot say. Another word for that is, of course, reincarnation. (As an aside, quantuum information theory raises some interesting possibilities in this direction.)

In the past for instance we thought of mind and body as two different things. Today we still think of thought and physical reality as separate. Information on the other hand occupies a sort of middle ground. It is like karma, defining the parameters of what can be done but not neccessarily what will be done. I say this in the knowledge that I may have some western prejudice in favor of the belief that man may overcome his own destiny, so to partially compensate for any missperceptions lets say that the variations between or within karma (or information) can be attributed more to chance then to volition. You could also say that volition is like a subsystem, meaning it is as likely to create the opposite of the intended action as the action itself.

To give a trite example a gambler is playing poker and they would very much like a certain card to appear when they draw. The cards the gambler holds are his or her karma and as many a card player will attest, wanting a card does not appreciably effect the probabilty of the card appearing, but the desire can be read by other players to determine the strength or weakness of their opponents hand. Hence the eagerness with which a person desires a specific card becomes a contrary factor in the game, as it indicates vulnerabilty.

The central question of existance is "Why?" Or to elaborate,"Why does anything happen at all?" Even more elaborately "If things are constantly using energy why don't things just gradually come to a halt?" The fact is a lot of things do, as predicted by the second law of thermodynamics, gradually come to a halt. Among such things are the nuclear furnaces found thoughout the universe called "suns" or "stars." It is too easy, for my taste, to suggest that those things that self organize do so at the behest of the ubiquitous thing called "mind."

This raises the same sort of unanswerable question (for me at least) as refered to above in terms of form and content. To wit "Does the mind create reality or is the creation of reality that which we label mind?" For my purposes, and perhaps yours, the question can be reformulated and specified to "As a member of the slave class how can I trick the fortunate into giving me enough money to survive?"

It is at this point, having stated the essential question, that we may proceed to the essay proper.

There are several key concepts to be aware of. First is subversion. Once the burdon of the assumption of risk is recognized that risk must then be understood. In the classic and best case scenario this means a situation where if you lose someone else pays the price and if you win you reap the benefit. Although this sounds like an ideal case, impossible in reality, experience shows it is quite common.

Where there is a need there is invariably something, or someone, filling that need. By subversion we mean not that one expends energy in blocking the efforts of others to satisfy such a need but rather that one fills that need in a simpler way. This is sometimes referred to as the castration principle.

As to how one locates the means of subverting the present need/satisfaction modality there is the general and the specific application. The general application is simple enough, you are at present reading an example of it. It says, that, propaganda to the contrary, the one who succeeds within the human social system is not signifigently smarter or more capable then those who don't. To say they succeed because they are liked is really an insufficient explanation. One of the basic tenants of advertising, or for that matter government, is that the stated opinion of the target does not matter, what matters is if they buy the product.

We've spoken in the past of the role of coincidence both in science and in information theory in particular. The way we ascertain whether there is a causal relationship between factor A and factor B is to ask if the results are consistant to the point where they can be attributed to more then coincidence.

Chance, probability, coincidence; these are all terms that seek to quantify the difference btween chaos and order. Here we are verging precariously onto the territory of the alien. There is little potential danger however since the perceptual mechanisms by which ALF receives stimulae from waves of probabilty do not exist in the higher order earth life forms.

Before I broach the next topic, or concept, I'd like to mention three preliminary notions. It is by false, or imposed, association that the hypnotic spell is woven. The bedrock of propaganda is the premise that if you say something loud enough, often enough, and you prevent others from contradicting you, nearly anything can be made "real" in the minds of the hypnotic subjects. That is why our opponents spend hundreds of millions of dollars and why I am not paid for this.

First, the word relinquo, from which get the word "religion" refers to the connection, however defined between this reality and the supresensible reality, eg heaven, or the world of spirits. There is the earthly plane and the heavenly plane and they are linked in some way. This idea of commmunication is at least as old as the spoken word.

Secondly, Syncronicity which says the earthly (temporal) and heavenly (eternal) planes overlap but remain in separate dimensions.

Carl Jung , in recording the dreams and perceptions of his patients was, over time, eventually convinced that the similiarities of the imagery were so great as to point an actual substratum of reality which he called the collective unconscious. Whether we view this as palpable fact or as metaphor in the ideal makes a difference but in the real does not. To refer to common sense whether you are paid because what you say has value or only because the listener thinks it has value does not matter. The only thing that matters is whether you are paid.

Now, suffice to say, other analysts dealt with the same type people Jung did and did not come to believe there was a common collective mind, so we can at least suggest that there's a good possibility that, as a colleague of mine in college remarked, "Jung was a space cadet" who imposed a fictive order upon actual randomness. Again, the question is not that important. It is like asking if Jesus was divine or human.

One calls to mind those occassions when Carl Jung and Albert Einstein would have dinner together. I jest "mystery" was Albert's explanation for the inspiration of his work and in listening to Jungs theories he probably found a good deal of that:-)

Neverthless, as you probably know, Albert hit the jackpot by suggesting that light and time traveled in waves, like boxcars, and these boxcars, photons, or moments, expanded and contracted in relation to others which were either stationary or moving in other directions. One could suggest his perception was shaped more by the Monads of Liebnitz then the constants of Newton, but such, as my father would say, are mere quibbles.

Jung picked up on what Einstein said, the monads and waves at least, and suggested that we might think of light and time as traversing a grid. Waves interact with each other, sometimes they cancel others out, sometimes they reinforce others, as any good surfer will tell you the most ridable waves travel in groups. Therefore time and by inference events can be thought to in someplaces overlap. The simultaneity he called sycnchroncity.

Einstein was emminently practical and is, if anything, noted for his lack of philosophical speculation as to the implications of his work beyond the immediate physical world. So, like Feynman years later, he simply said of the suggestion that he didn't know, He may have just been being polite however. As anyone in show business will tell you "Don't believe everything you hear." Where we don't know we must guess, but it's neccessary to never mistake the guess for the truth.

So to review. we have religion, the linking of heaven and earth, when true messianic teachers die they don't get buried, they ascend . The world tree has it's roots in earth and it's branches in heaven. We can think of this as a vertical connection.

Synchronicity can be thought of as a horizontal connection. As if rather then having two planes of reality , one above the other, the planes are interwoven.

Right, well, so all this stuff is old hat. The notion of relativity, and later the uncertainty principle changed the way we think of the world forever. But it also raises a problem, which is there are no longer any absolute truths. Before you freak out though if there are now no absolute truths then there never were and we have managed to muddle through this far by ignoring that, or inventing our own. This goes to the heart of my efforts here and to the heart of what most people do, whether they know it consciously or not.

I was online one time and this guy in Korea was talking about a piece of music software that had a sampler, synths, sequencer and mixer built in and he said it was a like a nuclear reactor. So too the power to delude people is so much greater today it is like the difference between a 155 howitzer shell and a tactical nuclear bomb.

And the science that matters increasingly differs from that of the last century. Then it was airplanes, electric power and bigger guns, now it is, to stay with the military metaphor, more accurate, and deadly, guns. In terms of electricity the directions and goals are not ever bigger, more powerful generators but smaller, more pervasive, and more complicated devices.

In terms of quality of life the external, practical, question is how can we improve the lives of that small percentage of the population that operates the systems, or machinery. Neural networks, artificial intelligence, information gathering, chaos theory, game theory are all fields of science that did not exist fifty years ago. What they share is they are not about making things, but rather about identifying them and assigning them value.

With a jigsaw puzzle for instance a brute force method would be to take a piece and then one by one try everyother piece until a fit is found. Now what we do is we first survey every piece of the puzzle and identify it in proceedingly more accurate terms and once that process is complete the actual assembly of the jigsaw puzzle is almost instantaneous.

Before we go to the third concept of what we may call "precursors of the self organizing principle," a little background.

When Whitehead and Russell finished Principia Mathematica they went their separate ways. The first world war was brewing. Russell opposed British participation while Whitehead supported it and lost his son in it. Bertrand Russell was never to do more work in applied mathematics. He developed a theory he called Logical Atomism about communication. He said while it remains true that no perfect communication, especially via words is possible, if both sides of the communicative gap have agreed beforehand what given words mean then those words can be used to say what the agreed upon massage was and, importantly, nothing other then that. It was a very common sensical solution, although not very elegant, to the question :"What is language?" It is the solution that nearly everyone uses even though most don't delineate the actual structure of the assumptions required for speech to work.

Whitehead was an older, more experienced and probably more objective mathematician and he saw hints of some of the zaniness that was going to come about with the discovery of non euclidian math. The axioms of Euclid had been around over two thousand years. They were considered axiomatic because they were at the baseline of proof. They themselves could not be proven but they could used to prove mostly everything else. Almost as old as Euclids axioms are Zeno's paradoxes which pose questions the axioms can't answer, but did not create a problem in most cases because they needed infinity to really kick in. Since no one has to deal with the infinitely small or large, they remained simple brain teasers.

Mandelbrot, Godel,even Schillinger, view mathematical relationships in an entirely different way from their nineteenth century and earlier predecessors. I've spoken previously about how the strange attractor, as it goes past or through the spiral cycles, varies in it's proximity to the hypothetical norm. This variance, which cannot be perfectly described, gives us the fractal forms by which coastines lines, leaves and even human bodies can be identified and replicated to some degree or another.

In the not distant past there was a belief in the west of the indian rope trick, wherein a fakir would perhaps play a flute and a rope would ascend from a basket into the sky and the the fakir would climb the rope to the top and thenforth continue climbing into the cloulds where he would dissappear. It's an old (Prehistoric) legend related to more well known story of Jack and the Beanstalk. That's communication at a basic level. Like Jacobs ladder it tells us about the link between the earthly and the celestial realms.

This, as I've indicated, can be called the relinquo, or direct connection, paradigm.

In the Star Trek series a machine dematerializes characters and they appear somewhere else. In most electronic information systems the same thing happens. a fax, for example goes in as a sheet of paper, become electrons and the comes out somewhere else as another sheet of paper. There is no direct transmission of the original sheet of paper. Radio, televison, the internet are basically the same in the sense theres a sender and receiver. So if we think of monads of information as monads of time. The first method, relinquo, climbing the beanstalk takes some time to happen. The second method pretty fast, actually it happenes at the speed of light, although invariably there are things that can slow it down, like transducers or routers. We can think of this a sycncronicity, which for intents and purposes is simultaneous.

This is the syncronic paradigm. The difference between it and relinquo is very easy to understand. It is the difference between a letter taking a week to travel between cities via stagecoach, in the 18th century, and it happening instantaneously, via fax, today.

Quantuum information transfer leads to ideas that are way over my head, such as, for instance, information arriving somewhere before it is sent and likewise though we bandy around the ideas of non euclidan space, where in this world can it be found? It's not like you can create a black box and make within it a zone of noneuclidian space, the way you can, for instance make a zone where the less stable elements of the periodic table exist.

I jest that to a mathematician numbers are not equal. Numbers vary in import if the system is binary, decimal, or hexadecimal. Prime numbers are somewhat "aloof" A musician who either plays around with scales or multiple harmonization knows there are "Wolf tones" These come about when the overtones of played notes clash in extremely disharmonic ways, creating an apparent exponential increase in volume. Even on a simpler level an instrument playing playing a wrong note will be easy to identify.

Whitehead noticed that certain calculations yielded unusual numbers. In math this is not supposed to happen. He said that the junctures at which they accured were evidence of concrescence, or "bunching together" of numbers. The process of this happening he labeled novelty and the process of trying to indentify when, where and why it happened he called novelty theory. He could not know it but he was talking about what in chaos theory and artificial intelligence/life is called the self organizing principle.

So, that's our third concept. Connection, simultaneous connection and novelty.

In the first stage it is the "solidity" of the connection, whether the bridge, so to speak is wood or steel that matters. In the second stage it is the number and power of connections that matters. This is where we're at now. Goebells called it the big lie, we call it the data fog, less generous voices call it the government/media/corporate conspiracy.

Obviously a world without some truth is an uncomfortable place. Not only that but, I don't know if in the not so long run it would work. I've survived thusfar in an unfriendly world because both I and my parents saved up. You might say I am running on yesterdays equity in the hope it will project me into tomorrow, But for me the present doesn't work. I don't get paid for this. ALF doesn't get paid for what he does and it is not because we're being persecuted, it is because there is too much junk in the air and there is no way for the ordered society to sort things out other then according to the whims and dictates of the old order as represented by the power and pervasiveness of the inherited aristocracy and those whob have latched on to it.

Cervantes may have written the greatest and most accessable novel ever, but in his era he was a non entity. Again, he was not singled out and persecuted it was the social order simply failed to indentify what he created as worth anything. They had other things to do.

However as power and information distribution increases exponentially the importance of the novelty pardigm begins to overide that of the big lie. As the old soldiers say when strategy fails logistics comes to the rescue. It's something of a cliche' among executives that they are not interested in the quanity of information but the quality of it. I do not underestimate the ability of the old systems to generate quality in terms of evocative, undeniable persuasiveness. Add to that the data sifting of neural networds and you can create very powerfull messianic figureheads who can in effect, "sell snow to eskimos." There is at present no dearth of Harvard grads that like to be paid large sums of money.

But novelty theory does not place a supreme valuation on quality. I am winging it here but what novelty theory "likes" is charm. That is a more multifactored element. I feel like I am giving away trade secrets I haven't discovered yet, but that is where the conditions seem to point. Because as I've said, we as a species have managed to muddle through so far and the reason why is because a golden vase is of no value to a starving man on a desert island. In other words people know what is important and there are limitations to hypnosis. Does the butterfly have buddah nature? Let's hope so:-)

.

Novelty calls to mind the observation of Darwin that any deviation from the norm that is not extinquished becomes the new norm."

We cannot wish things into being. I don't mean to argue with those who believe in the power oif prayer, but only mention that it requires a third party, a saint or god, who is the active force, (or as a friend long ago called himself the "active matrix.")

I would not say the power of thought is overrated, but rather call to your attention that battle we are fighting is what direction thought goes. For example Madelaine Bunting in the Guardian recently suggested what is, for the slave population at least "thinking the unthinkable." What was the good , she asks, spending weeks prying into and weeping over the recent Tsunami? Did it teach anything? But being, syncronic as soon as the story appeared, it vanished

I'm not even going to approach the implications of the fear of terrorism and how that has been used because I believe those who understand me know what I mean and the rest are not ready to learn, The conspiracy theorists are in full bloom and perhaps not unexpectedtly their conclusions are all over the political map. The scientific answer is, if you don't know don't say.

Getting back to novelty then, it is like a pinball game, we would "wish" the shiny ball to go this way or that and sometimes even"tilt" the table, but that doesn't add up to much. What is of value is the ability to identify the speed and direction of the ball. Again, we have a chaotic field, a soup so to speak, within that soup an island appears, we can either pay attention to that island or look for another one. To, upon finding an island try to wish it into habitability and then wait to see what happens is like, uncool man. What you gotta do is find the island, or novel event, that appears to have the characteristics of islands that develop into habitable zones.

An example of the relative weakness or transience of the syncronic paradigm within the data fog can be seen when for example as soon as the hypnotic full court press needed to elect a candidate is removed his, or her ratings drop to a more realistic baseline. We don't have elections anymore. We have instead battles of wizards, as the hypnotists call forth their minions and powers to create the spells needed to shape the actions of the zombified population. The bright side of this is that the data fog is so intense that whereas in the past the indoctrination would last awhile, now it is swept away with all the other garbage.

Of course it doesn't matter. Centralized power means you don't need the consent of the governed, only their aquiesence. It's very likely that given unlimited resourses one could maintain the same degree of "love" for the messianic figure over a sustained period of time, but why bother? As well it is usefull to remember that the continued carreers of the messianic figures are not the goal of the new world order. They are expendible and can be replaced. The goal of the new world is the transfer of large sums of money into as few hands as possible. Therefore after the pieces are put in place the "wizards" turn their attention to the implimentation of such policies as will expedite their true goals.

The advantage or superiority of information found in a (pardon the pun) novel approach is that it not only does it not die or fade away when the forces promugating it are removed, but in fact it continues to grow, hence the alternative name, self activating principle. It is not absolute truth, but I am not uncomfortable with the idea that it is a more truer truth then anything available via the syncronic paradigm alone. And if I may be vulgar for a moment those truths needing to be enforced by power, such as the diety of Ceasar, or Reaganomics, often appear absurd, in the light of reason uncoerced.

Interlude The preceeding may have seemed esoteric but I justify it by saying if you are looking for something the first thing you must try to do is figure out what you are looking for. The interest oif the technostate is to negate our individuality and our interest is to avoid or subvert those attempts.

Here's a question and a suggestion. The question is,"If I could stop crime in an instant would that be a good idea? For most people the answer is a no brainer.

In actuallity opportunities for old style crime are vanishing rapidly. Gone is the rich man with several thousand in his wallet. Street crime for the past two thousand years is based on currency and hard currency will soon be mostly obsolete. Then you have surveillance and databases, both of which operates against what a criminal needs most, which is to not be detected. DNA banks, retinal scans and soon instead of the thralls collar, the criminal will have their tracking device implanted subdermaly. It's not a big leap from there to implanting drug delivery devices so that when or if a person does not do what the authorities want they are either rendered immobile, unconscious, or perhaps even killed.

The policemen, the lawyers, judges, jailors are all going to be out of jobs and they will have to retrain. Likewise the would be criminals are going to have to find something else to do. For the masses neither of these things will cause any great lack of sleep. i choose crime as an example because it plays a role in our thoughts in most cases larger then in our lives. We've all seen tens of thousands shot on TV or films and yet few have seen even one person shot in real life.

I'm not going to answer the question. As Bill Joy of Sunn Computers and a major software designer had stated "The future doesn't need us" More an more work is being done by fewer people and the question as to what to do with the rest remains unanswered.

From our perspective, that of the virtual state, it doesn't have to be answered.

The suggestion, which is really more a fact then a suggestion is against the power of the technostate and it's information technology the individual doesn't have a prayer of a chance, For the very intelligent there will be opportunity, but for the other 95% your future will be decided by the time you reach high school and will be determined entirely by the economic status of your parents.

In music, the field I know best there's a program by a Spanish company, in wide usage by the major firms which has analysed successfull songs over te past few hundred years and and can either judge the likability of a song or make a song more likable by correcting mistakes. It's an example of artificial intelligence in daily life. Another example is one's credit status. People seem surprised how much credit they can get but in fact the decision is not made by the bank it is made via a neural network and by and large it has proven it's reliability by the relatively low number of people who default.

In filmwriting, the Hollywood joke of the past decade is the poor screen writer who says "Boy, am I tired of people overcoming obstacles." Joseph Campbell has had a large influence on story telling. His discovery or thesis is that physical states of the body are reflected in stories and conversely the way we feel about our physical bodies can be effectedby the stories we are exposed to. In this way of thinking every storu is a permutation of what he calls the monomyth, which is simply, hero has problem, heros ventures into the underworld to discover boon , hero returns to former reality with problem solved.

Then you fit that into what is called 20-60-20, meaning 20 minutes of action, sixty minutes of exposition and twenty minutes of action and presto, there's your script.

The monomyth however in the past was primarily a religious paradigm, concerning what Jung calls individuation. It does not allow a lot of room for the development of external characters, prefering to view them as archtypes, meaning they have value solely according to their ability to help or hinder the hero in his or her attempt to attain bliss. I jest Campbell never had children, or much to do with them and they would have given him a different notion of bliss. A child, no matter how much they hinder the seeker on the path to bliss cannot be simply discarded. Children are beautiful teachers if only for the fact that they don't care about our bliss.

I choose to mention this aspect of the power of suggestion in stories rather then the more common fears of subliminals, or people hooked up to alpha/beta wave readers and gsr meters, or audience survey sheets because I think it relates to a more common and dangerous misperception. Measurement is essentially neutral. Where drama parts from religion, especially in it's highest forms is it doesn't show the way. Shakespears characters for the most part are successful portrayals of failures. They do not attain bliss, they either die or endure. Even Henry V is someone who pays a price and changes into a more expolitative character as he ages and comes into his uwn.

Oedipus may attain attonement at the very end but it doesn't change the fact that for most of his life he screwed up. Sophocles was physically and mentally healthy all his long life and what was offering was a cautionary tale, not a role model per se.

I jest that the notion that because you have lost five pounds or given up smoking you have become a better human being is a little difficult for me to accept. We, or some of us, complain about the bringing of religion into politics, but religion having the individual as its core, spills over into other things as well, medicine for instance, and such overlapping is indicative not of the power, but the failure of the religious answer to solve the individuals problems.

Nevertheless, to summarize, the technological "feel good" solution works. I liken it to administering opiates for a headache. The head ache is gone, but the desire for the continued administration of the drug remains. Happiness is a warm gun, yes, it is.

and now, the pragmatic section.

The challenge that faces us is to develop sustainable responses that will subvert the social mechanisms of the technostate and are not contingent on extraordinary resourses. Let's put it this way, consider the possibility that things overall are not going to get better and that the vast majority of the population are going to remain, for whatever reason, dedicated to the continuation of what they know and are taught to know. Some people compare it to the industrial revolution. If this assesement is too pessimistic then that's all to the good.

Certainly, in the ideal companionship needs ought be fullfilled in ordinary living, but I liken it to nutrition. We should get all the vitamins and calories from fresh food but if we can't we have to do what we can via suppliments.

This is not saying that there's planned malevolence or some cadre of plutocrats scheming to annihilate the unfit. It's more like an old alcoholic. You see the scars on his face, he's in and out of hospitals, dead broke and yet he's got a twinkle in his eye and the notion he could have lived differently he finds offensive. Or any addict, a money addict, a junkie, they are very much the same underneath. Alone on the velvet throne. You get some guy who's living in a half million dollar house, he's got a wife or two, kids, and for intents and purposes he has "made it." He is not going to turn around and discover or decide that all those who don't have what he has suddenly matter in the grand scheme of things..

The old boozer can't imagine what life without the juice would be like and old Mr Moneybags feels the same way. That he's unable to conceive of or admit the harm he's done to others we can understand and even expect, but we can take it a step further. He is unable to understand the harm it has done him. It has changed him, transmogrified him and with each step up that ladder to success he takes a step away from understanding what it is to be a human being, untill finally he's a warlord, Darth Vader, Jack Welsh, or anyone of thousands of identikit big shots. They give a thousand to charity, but not a dime to the bum on the street.

What we see as disgusting character flaws he sees as virtue. In his mind he is shining, resplendent, the mud of the world does not stick to him. He is either truely guiltless and a saint among men, or little different from a raving psychotic.

Such characters are the type of people who are being superempowered by technology.and society eats it up. The hero with a thousand faces. Everyman is a hero. everyman a king as long as the drugs hold out.Hieghty Hieghty Hieghty Ho.

It may seem the path of glory to think you or I will depose Ceasar. Heh, get in line. In the interim though we might consider as well doing a litle individual good.

On the lighter side this is not to put down people who drink, or own homes or have families. You can't judge people you don't know, although it is tempting:-)

What I am really saying is we can expect no help from Democrats, Republicans, ABC, CBS, TW/AOL, SONY, or any of those things. They are the drunkards. That they themsleves impact negatively they will never accept. Individually there may be decent people involved, but collectively and corporately they are not our friends. They are friends only to each other and they will admit it openly and seek to co-opt us at every stage so as to destroy our very chances of survival. Nowhere in the balance sheets is there a line item for doing nice things because they are nice things.

One of the basics of the Virtual State is we can help others but others can't help us. All systems are flawed, but there's is more flawed then ours.

That should be easy to understand. It goes to the heart of one of the essential factors, which is rationality. We are opposed to it. I'm not saying to disregard self interest, survival is primary, but every dependency we allow to grow weakens us. If they offer you a free soda pour it on the street.

We've gone over this before, if every component in a system strives for it's self interest and only it's self interest then big fish will eat little fish, and in turn be eaten by bigger fish, untill there's only two fish left and the bigger of the two will eat the smaller and then what? Can a fish eat itself?

That's the problem. That's what the idiots don't see. That's the game . It cannot be won. We must create a new game and in the new game there must be room for giving and this giving must be done without reward. That is why we say it is not rational. Institutions cannot understand. It is transrational. But there is a sense to it. It's like saying instead of wagering everything constantly you keep most of what you have and give away a percentage. If you do not do that then the system has no energy source, i mean in terms of organizational energy - that energy which transforms chaos into order, the transformation of which we call self organization.

About five years ago there was some talk in the community about mind hacking. Like early artificial intelligence it soon vanished because it promised way more then it could deliver. It was an outgrowth of social engineering. Social engineering worked to the extent it did because the target of the exploit did not see the person they were talking to and as well was not aware that their system may have been compromised. With mind hacking the minute some geek with long hair, or youth, or sneakers, came into view the alarm bells are going to ring.

Someone could suggest, as I think someone did, that a box be created that instantly altered the harmonics of a voice. That's an idea that will happen, as soon as voice recognition systems become more common ways to replicate the important frequencies can be developed. But that won't help you with phrasing, with tone of voice and vocabulary. Whether being interogated by "the man", a prospective employer, or whoever they are going to take a certain amount of time before they pass you through to next level. If you go in with street slang you will be written off as trash almost instantly.

The way we speak is a form of hacking. It's always amusing to me to listen to Orson Welles speak of knocking on the doh-ah. Spanish speakers, British english speakers, and all speakers have their ways of pronoucing words hard wired. The portion of the brain that controls pronunciation stops evolving and growing at about fourteen. This means if you learn a foriegn langauge after that age you can never speak it without an accent. However you can vary the way you speak your native language.

There are various dialects available on televison, all of which are of little use, because A) the tempo is artificially speeded up and B) you don't get enough of a constant flow. It's sort of like the freebie porno clips on the net. It's difficult enough to fantasize about a girl on a screen without having having to do so in fifteen or twenty seconds.

In terms of the battle it is very much a stuggle against isolation. We're all like astronauts in spaceships on long voyages. Plenty o' dials and switches not much human contact. That's why big companies and major media want to be your friends. Interestingly there's infotainment and edutainment but there's no phrase in common usage for the entertainment aspects of government, although one way it has changed, as the democracy collapsed is it is now constantly going about it's business in our faces. That is neccessary if the messianic leaders are to circumvent the former political process, by going direct to the public, but as anyone who's ever worked in government will tell you it's pretty boring stuff, so now it has to be jazzed up with the figureheads delivering heartfelt messages as the self appointed spokesmodels for the soul of the nation. Govertainment doesn't ring right. Gov'nortainment sounds better. Or even Guvotainment. In any case whether lies or truth it is trivial and meant to perpetrate the myth that we are in control and hence must know all the crap they tell us.

So we come to spoken books.

The painter Rubens used to employ people to read to him while he was working. He spoke several languages and so he had a variety of things that could be read to him, He was no doubt literate but for hundreds of years the reading aloud of tales was a commonplace. In my younger days I would not consider listening to a book. There's an American expression where to denote that someone is stupid you say "Their lips move when they read." In fact I knew a grad student who did his doctoral thesis on the idea that subvocalization while reading increases retention, but I never found out what became of it.

But in reading aloud a book there's a great skill involved. I've always liked persona drama and when you get one person reading and simulating the voices of different characters it can involve you. You're not listening to the book so much as to the story teller. Usually authors don't do a particularly good job. One exception to this is, surprisingly John le Carre who does not have the gasp and wheeze of someone his age and pronouncs all the foriegn terms and names correctly.

The best job on a spoken word novel I've heard was done by Tim Curry, professional actor and it was on a by no means exceptional novel called "House Atredies" written by Frank Herberts son, Brian. Curry had at his command six or seven distinct voices and impeccable timing.

A text, or non fiction book, I prefer to read and the genre i like to hear spoken could be called surrealistic/science fiction/fantasy. Naturally most of them have a high proportion of elves. Straight classic rocket ship science fiction like Arthur C Clarke tends to put me to sleep. I confess Issac Asimov never interested me too much because while the science was accurate he didn't seem to use enough big words. Robert Silverberg is one of the more underappreciated writers of our time. His subject is more then just technology or new environments and ventures into what those environments do to thepeople who inhabit them. Philip K.Dick is too clever for me. Bradbury'a a good story guy, but like Asimov, not a good writer.

Terry Pratchett's always amusing. Vonnegut I've read everything and am still waiting to hear what the Tralfamadorians think of Italian cuisine.

My background is conventional but unique. Most people don't read epic poetry but that's one of my main things and different life forms and forms or magic and supernatural intervention happen there all the time. Epic poetry is to me a world in flux, dreamlike and I don't get much of a sense of eternal verities, if anything, in Homer or De Troyez what is contantly being made apparant to the characters is that things are not as they had supposed them to be and whether the characters like it or not they must attain some cohabitation with or vanquish those whom they meet.

Short form poetry, ten or fourteen, is okay sort of, if the person knows what they are doing, but precious few do. I hate nature poems. (Wordsworth is not a nature poet) I hate reflective poems. In short I hate poems about being. To me they are extemely solipistic, selfish, and what is even worse, rude. I want to be told something other then "I am" God is "I am" and anyone who presumes to take that vantage is immediately on my bad side. I don't want to hear it.

Hmm, rather an odd way to end, but what can I say? We're always looking for ways to get around what the world has in store for us. Neal Stephanson quotes Samuel Colleridges poem about the raven, in "The Diamond Age" It is an interesting example of syncronicity. Ravens mean different things. To the Irish they are the companions of Macca, who thoughtfully consume the corpses of the dead on the battle field. To the norse the raven is the companion of Oden one eye. But Neal says that Sam is using raven not as the raven, or heaven forbid, a raven, but raven in the same way indians of the southwest speak of coyote.

It is syncronic because it is nearly impossible to suggest that STC knew raven as the indians of the northwest did. As to whether this is a true synchronicity, a coincidence, or a psychological artifact of Stephansons upbringing, one cannot say.

But i call this to the readers attention in the interest of aiding those who would understand the works of the Alien Life Form in their true meaning.

A little caveat, or clarification, here. When I was fourteen the art that I and the kids I went to school with, those involved, cared about was DADA and Duchamp. Warhol was very big but his work had a distance from us because it embraced and did not judge those things that we, as adolescents did judge. With books it was like Kafka, Camus and Sartre, in other words guys who complained about things, which kids are wont to do. In college one girlfriend had a part time job in a gallery, so I go there and there's bales of hay on the floor, in the next room it was railroad ties. These are called installations and they are mind art. So audio mind art would be having a person read the phone book. That would tell us something.

I mention this because I've studied the question of how to remain sane within the technostate for a long time. Big pendulums swing slowly and over a long time. Few, if any can escape the prejudices of the era they inhabit. As an aside for instance, the US has been developing tools and strategies to fight in the middle east since the late 80's. It is based on an underlying assumption which is that it cannot under any circumstances allow the supply of oil to go AWOL. It would end the American way of life. This is fifty year planning. Maybe cold fusion or something will come along but that will take time and is a gamble. So people expressing surprise or indignation at how things happen there are really fooling themselves to the extent they believe their opinions matter. These things are factored in and we can at least be thankfull for one thing, which is it is understood that by retaliating against contrary voices one would only strengthen them, which means we don't as of yet have political gulags. The retaliation is certainly there but it takes the form of selective, measured punishment, just enough to remove the contrary voices, but not so much as to make them martyrs. And, like shrinkage by attrition, it is seemingly painless. Meanwhile those who demonstrate the greatest willingness to repeat the slogans, whether they believe them or not, are rewarded.

But the computer hobbiests and whoever, are small fish. We have to remain small, below the radar. That is our best safety. Learn to deny. Become ex-hackers.

Next, when the SLA wanted to turn Patty Hearst, or when the North Korean Communists wanted to turn GI's the first thing they did is isolate them. Lock them in a closet. Sever their connection to the world. You have to first break down a persons sense of who they are, then make them dependent on you, and rebuild their psyche and beliefs in the way that serves your interests. This is elementary.

That is why the technostate stresses that each person is responsible for themselves, for health care, education, housing and now retirement. The basics you should already know, bowling alone, latch-key kids, "reality" television, dual parent employment: it's all related.

Let's take our quick and dirty metaphor for the technostate, it is basically a concentration camp with nicer wall decorations. In prison when you want to punish someone you put them in solitary confinement. It's the same as the first stages of brainwashing except you don't have any interest in reformulating the mind of the prisoner.

I pondered this for a long time and in particular remembered an episode of the twilight zone where a prisoner in a POW camp fought the brainwashing by developing in his mind a stick figure mnemonic of a house. He outlasted his tormentors that way and the story had a happy ending when he was released and saw the ideal become real. But such is TV, in real life, once the captors realized he would not crack the logical thing would be to kill him.

Suburbia can be a cold place and it is especially indifferent to those who do not fit into the married with kids mold. So, for me mysticism provided walls, mental walls that repelled the insinuations of worthlessness that were directed at me constantly, and interestingly enough once I left that environment my interest in deep meditation became unsustainable. It was no longer neccesary.

But that interest, when needed, was sustained by disciplined, in depth study, which was possible because I had access to books and time.

This access is not available to the people we want to help. Here is the key realization. Before we do anything we must survive. The system, the pendulum is huge and slow. Activist hackers are not going to make things substantially change. In terms of mind hacking the idea that a mneme, or truth will trigger a viral reaction throughout the information system must be seen in the light of the multiple filters, duplicators (hydras, or co-opters) and masking procedures, all of which are dedicated to insuring that a truth, even if it should get through, is indistinquishable from the rest of the data fog.

From the vantage of information theory it is interesting. Let's say the technostate developed a method of ascertaining what it regarded as unwanted truth, the recognition of that would in turn trigger other events, So in a hypothetical room full of people, rather then sending a half dozen "officers" to arrest the guy with the sign saying "One plus One is two", a proceedure which would not pass unnoticed, it is the technostates wiser course to fill the room with other guys with signs, each of which stating that One and One is other then two.

We have to learn to hack our own minds.

I don't mean discover truths within our minds, but rather, like the guy in the prison camp, "fool" our minds into believing we are not alone. In some regards that's what Jesus did, he replaced the quantitative evaluation of people as slaves and citizens with a qualitative evaluation of them as souls.

Audio books create a linkage between the voice of the speaker and that of the listener. The story is important, but by no means all important. For the effect to happen it has to reach below the surface of consciousness. I don't care much about self help tapes, or subliminal teaching tapes, to me they seem corny. Audio books are good because they have been reviewed by conscious mind and for the most part don't incite people to jump off bridges.

They are not the answer. Some might say, "If you are lonely, join a group" I find that a little silly like saying If you are hungry buy some food. If you could buy some food you would not be hungry. The premise that anyone who is dissatified with their life is so because of decisions they made and can be made better by other decisions lets the rest of the world off the hook.

We are encouraged by the efforts of others, to write a book, to speak the words. Perhaps the rational mind places these efforts into the cause and effect circle but the inner mind doesn't work like that. It just knows that something happened.

The inner mind is grateful for anything that keeps it from absolute nothingness. The technostate whether or not it creates isolation is more then willing to fill the isolation with it's solutions, nationalism, community spirit, consumerism, whatever, and I jest that religion and secular power are like jealous suitors vying for the favors of the individual psyche.

It's not who takes her to the dance, who dances with her, who buys her presents or even who protects her. It is who she loves that will determine the future.

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Long live the Virtual State

-Tamlin

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