Cleaning Day

So, yesterday ross and i had made a committment to start yesterday with breakfast, then immediatly go get all the necessary supplies for cleaning the house, then clean the entire house.

We bought a hundred dollars worth of laundry detergent, trash bags, paper towels and toilet paper, a vacuum, a mop and so forth. We started in our kitchen and worked our way through most of the house. For the most part, all the areas that see traffic are now shiny clean and well organized. We even got a mail bin to sort house mail. It was a worthwhile project, but it took us all day, from about 1 till 6.

So, the house looks great and we might now have the tools to keep it that way. Needless to say i’m a little excited.

the 25 things list: comments

So i think its time for me to talk about the 25 things list. You have all seen these lists popping up in your Facebook news feeds, letting you know that yet another of your friends has succumbed to the pressure and followed the latest of internet fads. We know that fad is spreading. Every day more people post “25 random things about me.” What does it all mean?

First, I have to raise the issue of the use of the word random to describe these 25 things. Randomness, in the not-generated-by-measurable-pattern sense, is extrememely difficult to generate in the creation of a fixed artifact. Modern art went to great pains to do so, ultimately failing i think, until postmodernism put the artistic experience outside the frame of the artifact itself, calling on the viewer to complete the experience, thus, by the added complexity of the range of viewers and moods intereacting with the piece, randomness was more successfully recreated.

Really, each of these “random” lists is meant to convey a certain image of ourselves to our expected audience. Of course anticipated audience matters, we don’t share the same random things with our relatives, friends, and employers. Watch how lists change as the mix of relationship types in the expected viewership varies. Everyone has an agenda, so whence the word Random? I think we’ll have to look at the particular community from which i believe these lists have come.

Randomness in the “ZOMG Hi i’m N Jr High N I’m SUPER RANDOM ZOMG!!!!” is actually not random at all. Rather, it seems to be a calculated effort to convey an image and engage in a set of behaviors which lead observers to detect the undefined quality “random” and use it in their explanation of subject behavior. These kids actively seek random as a description of behavior.

I myself understand the tendency to automatically reject majority opinion simply to be on the wrong side of majority opinion, yet this quest for randomness goes beyond that. Most of these kids probably jsut substiture “random” for a whole set of discrete identifiers managing subject vocabulary, wardrobe, behavior, and any other observable pattern of interaction or communication with peer agents. Some though, i suspect have already come to understand the complex nature of the “randomness” game. These kids, in order to attain that quality “Random” would go about that challenge directly, by deliberately and systematically eliminating patterns in their thought and behavior.

I support the hell out of that project. In my previous discussions on worlds and controlled folly, i had commented both that we can arrange our world space and allocate the value in it, and that we could adjust the topography of the world as a whole in which we are agents. These are in fact the same processes. It is the form and content of your world which is the value system that shapes, for you, the external.  So, in trying to eliminate patterns in behavior and thought, they are flattening the landscape.  When they interact with the world at large, there will be no topography guiding their decisions.

Comments, questions?

Internet Vigilanteism

So, i’ve come across a very interesting story about vigilante justice on web 2.0.

Apparently, on sunday morning, Kenny Glenn, a 14 year old boy from Lawton, OK , posted a video on Youtube in which he beats his pet cat. Viewers reacted quickly to flag the offensive material and get it removed, but before Youtube responded, members of the “Anonymous” online community had already picked up the story and decided to take it upon themselves to rescue the cat.

Using standard internet research techniques, anonymous was able to connect the Youtube account to another online account which listed a physical zip code. With the zipcode and the name “Glenn,” taken from the zipcode account, white pages were used to find the names and addresses of several glenns in the lawton area.

By cross referencing images from facebook and myspace pages with images from the videos of abuse, the perpetrators were positively identified as Kenny and Weston Glenn.  Anonymous then contacted local police, providing their collected evidence, and the two boys were arrested later that same day. So, video up in the morning, producers in jail by night.

These boys are going to be prosecuted under felony charges of animal cruelty, but their punishment is social as well as legal. Anonymous has, from the begining, done everything in its power to share the information with the community at large, for support, and with Kenny’s own community, for the social destruction of Kenny Glenn. Kenny no longer has a presence in Web 2.0. His youtube account has been deleted, he took down his own myspace, and he has no facebook friends. Anonymous was even able to get an email list for students and faculty at Kennys highschool and send them links to video.

Basically, this is vigilante action. Internet justice if you will. The interesting thing here is that, though the community was able to locate the boy and turn him over to the authorities, those authorities had no control over the investigaton, and no control over the continuing online proceedings against him. These are the rewards and risks of networked communities. Through effective use of the powerful web structure of information processing, where there is no hiearchy to the data structure, Anonymous located the boys with remarkable speed and accuracy through the independent action of numerous agents. Yet, this same data structure, emerging into existence from the complex interactive behavior of the agents in the web, now follows goals which are not reducible to those of the actors themselves and can be thought of as its own.

Taken

So i can’t sleep. I think maybe it has something to do my viewing of the movie “Taken,” which turned out to be exactly what i had suspected from the commercials. Liam Neeson is retired former CIA. His daughter is kidnapped by sex slavers. He beats up sex slavers. It turned out to be an extremely fighting centric movie. Honestly, it was death centric, like  50 people die in this movie. On top of all the action there is the enormity of the fact that he is literally racing to find his daughter before she is lost forever in a global prostitution ring. Its was a very very intense flick, and kind of a downer ultimately. The underlying messagel is that it seems very easy for criminals to capture girls, and very hard to find them after that has happened. I am now very bummed out.

Seriously, go watch that movie if you want to have your faith in the good intentions of human beings shaken solidly.

Bus travel in Lansing

So as i tried to catch my bus to get home from town today, i noticed a commotion in the bus stop enclosure. One boy had his head down and his hand on the other boys shoulder. Leaning boy was pushing pretty hard, and he was loudly uttering syllables which led me to conclude initially that he was either a non-native speaker or intoxicated, likely both. Imagine my surprise when i finally got close and recognized an evangelixal’s prayer.

He was giving the boy at the bus stop a blessing to improve his grades. He thanked god for the students mind in the boy and thanked him for the opportunities the boy would have to improve that mind during the semester. He then went on to explain how through christ he had come to understand that the purpose of the miracle of creation was so that we might know and worship the Lord Jesus.

Then, in a Rite Aid farther along my journey home, i was stuck in a line, stopped behind an old lady who had entered into a conversation with the man at the register. She was telling him about her day, and how she was so glad they had stocked some item she needed but decided to pick up the next morning instead of that night because she was tired and she new she would have to go in in the morning anyway to pay her cable bill which was higher than usual and she didn’t know if that was because she got more channels because she didn’t think she did and did it have anything to do with these new digital boces because she heard that she needed a digital box but when she went to the store and asked the man kept trying to give her a plastic one and she didn’t know much about technology, but she knew the difference between digital and plastic. I have left out punctuation in the preceding sentence because the feeling of confusion, frustration, and boredom that comes from reading such a sentence is so similar to my feelings at this time.

I’ve been thinking more about worlds, and these two people, i think, help to demonstrate my point. We live in totally seperate worlds. Certainly there are a number of ways we are the same. I am not denying the exisitence of commonalities of human experience. However, the specific worlds we build for ourselves, the ones we use to make sense of our existence and provide goals to achieve, these are our own. Considering the way we get information, what information we pay attention to, and what we choose to do on that basis, we three bus travelers might as well be on different planets. All in all it was a decent trip though, not much waiting,  busses not crowded.

My new mission

I also wanted to post an announcement. I have a new mission! I have been spending the majority of my time carefully waiting for the next thing to do, and it has come to me. So, i’m going to try and enter into the department of Philosophy at MSU as a masters student so that i can pursue an interdisciplinary program in cognitive science.

This lets me stay in the Lansing aread like i wanted to, and also lets me really get serious about answering some of these questions about how people understand value. I’m very excited, and relieved to finally have some longer term strategizing on which to work again. I had been making my parents very uncomfortable, and that is always a source of anxiety for me.

Worlds

Yesterday i was talking about the man of knowledge as explained by don Juan in Carlos Castenada’s A Seperate Reality. From this explanation i was looking at the idea of controlled folly. In order to explain my understanding of the difference between folly and controlled folly, i used the notion of a landscape to explain the way we seek out value in the world.

Really, i should have been much more careful in my use of the word “world”.  Remember my concept of objects. Each object is simply a unit which can be defined. In the object framework, a world is any object populated by a number of smaller objects. Worlds can be of all sizes. In all worlds, the landscape model applies. Each object in the world is a place in that world. Altitude is determined by value, and proximity by association. It is important to be clear that places may be, and likely are, worlds themselves, but in a larger world, they are only places. Places are anything which has representation in a world, not only people, places, and things, but relationships between people, places, and things, descriptions of the history of people, places, and things, impressions of the our experiences of people, places, things. Anything i can represent with my mind, any place i can visit, exists in my mind. It will be right where i expect to find it, near all the other things with which it is most closely associated, as high or low as i expect it to be.

I am an object, and a world of some size. I am populated by biological and mental objects which interact and are interconnected in a complex way best described as Shane. Shane, as an object, certainly exists in a larger world populated by objects, just as Shane, as a world, is populated by smaller objects.

The places in worlds are shaped by our language. That is, each place, as an object, is a representation of an impression of ours, or a pattern of impressions called an experience or a concept. As i have said, these objects, or places, are arranged in our world accoring to how we form associations between them. So, it is our own thinking and language which builds our world for us. As human beings, we also use language to build bridges between our worlds, by sharing amongst each other our names for the places in our world, we create bridges between those places in our own worlds and those same spaces in the worlds of those around us.

So, we are worlds made up of worlds in the company of other worlds and constantly building bridges with our language to bring those worlds together. The way those worlds connect form new objects, which, like each of our own worlds, populate the many larger worlds. Language is not merely descriptive. It is by essence creative and destructive, simultaneously creating a world by a mere utterance and destroying a multitude of other worlds that are or that could have been. For us human beings, language is the world shaper.

I must be clear. Language does not simply describe new spaces or things, it literally makes them from nothing. Language creates space that did not exist before. Yet, creating a space, requires a boundary, so in the creation of a world, areas of thought are always  bounded out. Every utterance slices the universe of all possible forms into pieces, yet they breath life into the pieces, and the games those pieces play put the world back together again.  We are always making our utterances, and cutting the universe  into pieces, but it is always stiching them together again.

More tomorrow?

Controlled Folly

So, i have been reading A Seperate Reality by Carlos Castenada. In this story, Carlos is speaking with Don Juan, a Yaqui brujo (sorceror) about the idea of seeing versus looking. Don Juan continues to tell Carlos that he only looks, while Don Juan himself could see. Seeing goes beyond the surface of this world, and shows him an alternate vision of the universe.

Because he sees, Don Juan understands that his actions are futile and that there is no more value in one outcome over another. Everything in this immediate reality is unimportant.  As a result, Don Juan has detached from the world. Carlos asks him why not go into the desert and be a hermit,  rejecting all things if they are unimportant. Don Juan responds that negative attachment is still attachment.

By knowing that our actions are unimportant, and performing them anyway, with the utmost care, we do our best work as we are focused solely on the task, and not concerns over the results. This is what Don Juan calls controlled folly. It is folly because the actions are useless, but it is controlled because we choose them anyway, seeking not to transform the world, but ourselves.

It is only for men of knowledge to engage in controlled folly, according to Don Juan, as only men of knowledge can see. The rest of us, constrained to looking, are compelled to chase the dreams of this world, caught up in soaring victory and crashing  defeat.

I have been known to say myself that action emerges from understanding. We act in the way that we perceive to be the best, and our choice is constrained to those value peaks. Imagine the world is a landscape, and our attempt to maximize value is instead an attempt to find the highest point on this map.  In our landscape, the external world is the land itself, but it is flat until we add the element of mind. It is our own beliefs and values, either inherited or internally generated, that give shape to the terrain. We decide what is value and what is not, so we decide where the peaks and valleys are. This is our freedom as human beings.

Understand, the points on the ground are the same, we can not change the land itself, events in the external world are external, but we have some freedom in the rules of elevation. If we are all seeking the highest points then, we are drawn around the world by our beliefs, which literally create for us, the high and low points we are seeking and avoiding. Consider then the idea of the man of knowledge, who sees that all things are equal?

If there are no high points, where is he drawn? He is already at the highest possible point, yet he is also at the lowest possible point. All points in all directions are also max and min values. He can move any distance in any direction, or he may sit. The choice is his.  Life is folly, but properly understood, it may be controlled folly.

New books

If you read yesterdays post, you know i’ve been adding some new elements to my ongoing program to understand the relationship between identity, perception, and behavior. B says to look into animism. I tried that, and believe it or not the collective record has precious little to say about it.

I did remember a book i read that attempted to describe in depth the belief system and value structure of a brujo, or sorceror of the Yaqui indians. So, now i am reading a series of Castenada books. When i get another insight like the one i had yesterday, or when anyone at all posts a comment i can respond to, we’ll get back to that thread. For now, enjoy Rapture Raptor

He's a comin to get ya