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OTIL: Beyond Biocentrism

Subtitle: Every Chink in Our Understanding of the Universe is Undeniable Proof of the Monad

Beyond Biocentrism takes a few mysteries of modern physics — like quantum superposition, and its staggering dependence on the experimenter’s observation to determine reality — and expounds them into a theory that all creation exists as a product of mind: that our conscious observation of a thing is all that creates it, that mind itself is the stuff of the universe.

Time, the book states, is not real. Since relativity, we’ve known that different observers experience time differently depending on their relative speed and the force of gravity acting on them. Time moves measurably faster in the mountains that at sea level. Intuitively, we might suppose that time merely vacillates intermittently around some objective yardstick — that there is a “real” time somewhere unifying all its observers. But no such yardstick exists. Without an objective measure, time itself doesn’t properly exist.

Space is a bit dodgy as well. Since the discovery of quantum entanglement — spooky action at a distance between quantum particles — we’ve had to revisit the basic presumption that objects can only interact when they are proximate. But with quantum entanglement unifying the behavior of particles light years apart, we must revisit our assumptions about what space itself is.

Causality is a bit suspect as well. Since the presence of the observer itself can completely alter how quantum particles behave, we have to conclude that something about consciousness is messing with the basic gears of reality.

A tantalizing entree. What is the main course? Why, the pat assertion that obviously, the only conclusion left in the face of such doubts is that the universe is entirely a fabrication of one infinite, timeless consciousness. Thank you. We would talk about how to better prove this model in the future, but the future does not properly exist.

Beyond Biocentrism takes a few of the ineffable mysteries of modern physics and uses them, with ample latitude and disappointing self-assurance, to justify that the stuff of the universe is mind itself. There’s a kernel of an idea in there that’s quite offputtingly gilded.

A few thoughts on the new album, Lady Catastrophe, out now everywhere

Lady Catastrophe is a 10-track LP broadly about what you do with yourself after the end of the world. It’s on bandcamp here and through all streaming services here. Stylistically, the album vacillates between folk, indie, and art rock. Thematically, it straddles the personal and political, both mythic and of-its-moment. Process-wise, it was a good time in a small room.
The lead track opens with a long whistle leading into an air raid and an atom blast. In the long winds, you hear a tinkle of banjo, a few distorted bars of singing. The drums drop in and you’re propelled through this long, eight-minute track, Here Comes Catastrophe, that acts as this kind of fever dream of cultural disintegration. As Lady Catastrophe descends, we’re hearing this rapid fire litany of all the ways our technological power is exploding while our cultural power atrophies. The outro rings, the beginning’s near, the beginning’s near.
By the end of the disc, you’re back where you started, as the audience’s applause falls apart into familiar blast winds, an ominous church bell, and the melodic forethought of that long whistle from the beginning.
In between, we go through:
  • Little Thunderstrokes: a short and sweet meditation on watching your child gather self-awareness.
  • Judith Shakespeare: an ode to the mythic heroine postulated by Virgnia Woold in A Room of One’s Own.
  • Giver: about what happens when a woman is pushed too far.
  • American Loneliness: a mythic journey through a disintegrating cultural landscape. In three verses, a trio of folk wanderers follows through the age of information’s collapse, where the wire killed the highway, past the void king and his army of identical individualists, until they are back where they started, somewhat less real to themselves.
  • Sophia: when the loved one finally returns, too late to be loved again.
  • Beast Ain’t Sleeping: a political howl at the inhumanity greeting the world’s growing migrant class.
  • Alludica Patiens: a short instrumental, set to a muffled poem on the physical disc (omitted from streaming).
  • Hammerfall: a nostalgic, piano driven tune on the breakdown of the class system, a tribute to your own downfall.
  • Hell Dust: an ecstatic ode to running out of options, and just reveling in your addictions.

Thanks for listening. I hope it warms some little corner of your imagination.

OTIL: Moonwalking with Einstein

One Thing I Learned: Moonwalking with Einstein

Josh Foer’s investi-memoir about the world memory circuit, Moonwalking with Einstein, offers a few intriguing insights into how the mind works into its quick tour – a year in the life of a journalist who decides to give mental athletics a try, and surprises himself at how practical the mechanics of extreme memory are – and raises a few more possibilities that linger with me.

The core insight of the book is that memory is a function of how sticky an idea is to our human brains, or how sticky we make it. This might mean that if we want to recall something that the brain is naturally poor at – numbers, e.g. – we might try to associate that information with something the brain is uncannily good at – spatial recall being the biggest classic example. Hence, the “memory palace” is a physical space that one might mentally revisit, and try to code other information into what the brain already finds sticky in spatial terms. One mentally fills the rooms of one’s childhood home with those things that we don’t want to forget, and upon revisiting that space mentally, we find that the associations we’ve made between the childhood bedroom and the data in question is much stickier than the data in question would be on its own. Likewise, if we can manipulate the data, or code it, to resemble something much stickier to the mammalian brain – arrange that string of digits into some kind of lewd sex act, e.g. – we find that, however absurdly constructed the association is, it returns to us.

[The second principle on which memory arts functions is chunking – that is, creatively assembling several pieces of data into a single datum, allowing us to store more and more inside what feels like a small number of things to remember. If, e.g., I ask you to remember the digit string 7-1-0-2, you can probably do that with some small attention. If I reverse those digits, though, and tell you to remember the year 2017, it’s a much simpler task.]

There is a recurrent theme about synaesthesia in the text that I find fascinating and unfathomed. A number of famous natural mnemonists describe their synaesthetic experiences – intuitively associating one sense with another, drawing relations between numbers and colors, colors and smells, smells and time. Those associations, in principle, starkly resemble what the trained mnemonist tries to manufacture – laboriously constructing associations between places and things, sounds and images, personages and concepts – so that the desired information has a web of mental associations constructed around it that would allow the multipolar mind to grasp it in some sixteen different ways.

This, to me, seems to resemble how all intelligence functions: by a thick bedding of associations, we integrate every dimension of a thing, some of which dimensions are just sticky enough for us to remember, and which lead eventually to the whole network. It is a rich attention that finds thirty different intuitive associations with the Habsburg monarchy, even if several of them are poetic nonsense. It is the densification of associative logic that allows one to reach insights across disciplines. The more interconnected our concepts, the more creatively we can deploy them.

Which brings me to generative AI, seeing as that’s on everyone’s minds these days. Like many, I’ve tinkered with the newest toys from OpenAI trying to find how they’re useful or threatening. And like many writers, it’s become apparent to me that generative AI is not currently in the running to be even a poor fiction writer. That might be intuitive when we consider how generative AI is constructed: it functions on algorithms that are trained to find the most probable construction of language and ideas in any context. That is, it takes gajillions of pieces of training data, and sifting between them, finds the most well-tread, overdone, tiresome path leading out of any possible prompt. It should be no surprise that generative AI is not yet capable of writing prose that entertains, because entertaining prose is not very probable. In response to any series of prompts, the chatbot still returns the most technically proficient, wooden, tiring recitation possible, by design. Its imagination is blinkered at every turn by what seems likelier: the prosaic or the magical.

Which leads me to an interesting query: if we want to train the next generative AI to be truly creative, should we not be systematically strengthening its associations between unlike concepts, disparate disciplines, the weird and the prosaic? And if we were to do so with deliberate intent over many probably nonsensical intermediate versions of the beast, might it not just learn to mimic a human imagination, but suggest to us things that we would tire long before imagining?

Though this technology, seemingly for now, rests in the hands of a technocratic class trying to maximize its profit potential, it would be very, very timely for artists to start trying to understand how they might lend their understanding of imaginative processes – the types of associations it thrives on and how they are selected for – to its development.

OTIL: Yes, God, Yes

One Thing I Learned: Yes, God, Yes

At the film’s climax, we expect our heroine to confess to her Catholic cohort. She’s supposed to own the scene before leaving it. That is, to abandon her religion, she must first master and then dissect its precepts on a stage where her mastery can be tested.

She doesn’t. She doesn’t owe them that stupid energy. We don’t have to overmaster the architects of bullshit systems just for permission to leave a bullshit system. It’s a rinky-dink game they play with us, requiring superhuman grace and intelligence to move beyond their control. Flawed, weak, inattentive humans can still be smarter than their overlords, and they deserve to get out, too.

It reminds me of a lot of bullshit systems that demand overwhelming attention, patience, and sacrifice to unman their weak and pissy claims at authority.

OTIL: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

One Thing I Learned: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Saintliness is quite sterile; or, the dead buy forgiveness cheap.

What it means to forgive, apparently, can mean quite different things to different people.

In a justice-based theory of forgiveness, contrition must be expressed in a way that persuades that the wrongdoer fully grasps the depth of their wrong, and an act of restitution must be made that at least gestures towards the scope of the healing that is required. That is, forgiveness is not a unilateral act, it is cooperative. When this is undertaken, it permits the wronged party to rationally assume that the wrongdoer has legitimately reformed, and can be trusted in a reconstituted relationship.

When this is not undertaken, the wronged party can devoutly say, “Oh, I forgive,” but they cannot truly say they trust the wrongdoer not to repeat the offense with themselves or another that they hold dear. They cannot subject themselves or others to the risk of the same harm with a spirit of intimacy and vulnerability. The act of magnanimity may look good on the cover of a magazine, but it is hollow if it cannot be linked to a reconstituted relationship. It is as much as to say, you are no longer the object of my anger, because I am above being hurt by you.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood gets around this, of course, by killing off the sinner in a hurry. It’s bargain basement prices for forgiveness when you’re not going to be around to hurt people in the future.

OTIL: The Round House

One Thing I Learned: Louise Erdrich’s The Round House

The adolescent perspective is not unique in harboring childish thoughts. It is unique in its incapacity to sort, compartmentalize, or subordinate them. Our thirteen-year old hero deals with tragedy and revenge in a head that cannot quite order the gravity of these things above its childhood crushes, its star trek fandom, its boyhood escapes. The hierarchy of these priorities fluctuates almost charmingly throughout the novel. The tragedy, then, is completed when adulthood seizes center stage, and the child cannot give it full berth. The child, in the final pages of the novel, struggles to allow adulthood the space and attention it requires, and falls apart in its final self-defeating attempt at escape.

Coming-of-age is marked by an original sin. If the child doesn’t hurt someone in a way that shocks them, that makes them first realize and recoil from their own power, then they haven’t really come of age at all. It is the first regret that makes us adults. It is Cain looking dumbly over his brother and moaning.

New LP: Uncanny

“Uncanny”: a little 8-track LP I’ve recorded this September-October, pulling exclusively from tunes completed this past year. It’s been a year for some big themes: a little death, a little birth. I had just over the statutory limit of LP playtime in tunes written since last November, and a free copy of Ableton Lite I’d been putting off learning anything about. As I polished off the last tune for this package — and it was a Halloween tune, because that should be a bigger genre — the title “Uncanny” felt fitting with all the reflection on life itself, on its limits, and what we make of it.

A little note for Halloween, because that’s today: Who Goes There is our little haunting psycho-sexual closer here. I’ve always been a Halloweenhead. The supernatural, to me, poses all the same existential questions that religion does — what’s after this body, what’s there in the invisible world, who’s pulling the unseen strings — but presented as a mystery, not an answer. In that sense, it’s both delightfully anti-authoritarian, and an invitation to take these irreducible fears and approach them with a spirit of play, to make them somehow lighter and shared. That we do this as a community, that we do this with children, just seems like a really undersold tradition.

The album is now on my youtube, and will be on all streaming services within whatever technobureaucratic lag time they each impose. Listen and share, and come see me play a little hole in the wall sometime.

The Century-Long Grief

We are used to hearing that climate change is impossible to feel and respond to for people, as a century-long threat. But to those who see its scale, it is rather a century-long grief. Today is another grief day.