A Misplaced Postscript

In the fog of my own considerations, I failed to mention that my other blog, "A Transit of Contingencies" will remain active while this blog will remain dormant.
http://tarnsitsandstations.blogspot.com/

Moving On

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
-Yogi Berra

I recently visited Paul Kimball,s website, "The Other Side of Truth" and perhaps not surprisingly, he was moving beyond the constrictions of blogging on the subject of the paranormal spectrum, in order to explore the other contingencies of life in general, to pursue other interests.
For some time I have been following a parallel path to Paul's diminishing interest in focusing all the energy and effort to what is a liminal subject in relation to experiential reality, which was evidenced by my own increasing ambivalence to sending material to other venues, posting comments on other blogs. Some of this was due to others who I felt had interesting perspectives dropping out, such as Eric Quinlett's still commanding and under appreciated "Parasociology " . The death of Mac Tonnies was a harbinger of my own narrowing set of choices to enjoy challenging, interesting and more artful perspectives on the subject.
The lack of feedback was another arbiter in recent months, whether it was good bad and or indifferent, it's absence diminished my impetus to send more material that simply became fodder for image searches on Goggle. Another reason is that I had said what I had to say, and the writing of this blog and the material I sent out in the internet did not match popular or peer produced material that tended to be a continual rehash of  old subjects, some of which extended back more than a half century as a nearly obsessive compulsion to publish for the sake of publishing.
I still remain convinced as in the beginning that there is a commonality in all paranormal activity albeit a complex one, that I hinted at on my last post on the role of the atmosphere in being a medium of energetic exchanges between the mind and it's host the physical brain. I am considering writing a book that jells all of this into a coherent theory.
This blog will remain as long as it is hosted and one interesting aspect that was rewarding that a consistent 8% of the readership spent more than an hour here, so at least what I have written was expressed in other's interests.
This was never a commercial venture and I may look for another venue to express myself should one turn up, but I am not holding my breath. The blog will turn into a self published book simply because I would desire a hard copy of my own efforts as a record. There are many folks to thank and I will leave this for the last post, which will serve as the preface for the hard copy. I will be doing some editing here in preperation for the hard copy and that will be the extent of my activity here henceforth.

Best Wishes As Always
Bruce

The Bright Sun of Dark Clouds

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

As many regular readers know one of my interests in the investigation of what comprises the personal experiential realities and even those of what I term the genome of the universe is memory and it's role in emergent behaviors and processes that eventually become observable or if you will, materialized. This also has a great deal to do with the relationship of the physical brain and the mind informing one another along paths dictated by various forms of memory. Even the developmental processes of our species in relation to learning how to learn is not immune to memory of course.
With all this said and written, here is the harbinger of another issue that this blog has focused on which is the pathology of not only determinism but that of control in relation to the uncertainty principle when analyzing not only feedback but the act of perception itself in relation to the dictates of identification, association and general semiotic dynamics as steered by language.
Imagine my reaction when I read this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120322161251.htm

My friends and peers over at Before It's News added this..
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1952/373/Micro-Chipping_Agenda_RFID_Chips_Are_Being_Implemented.html

The number is 666?

The Atmospheric Medium of Anomalies and Emergent Processes

Do atmospheric anomalies of a unidentified nature bear a striking resemblance in their observable behaviors to the characteristics of the medium in which they are found? And if so, does this has some bearing as to their true nature?  Our planet's atmosphere is an energetic membrane that of all the states of energy as the essences of the ingredients for living systems that are emergent, condensed into forms that are visible and senate, (such as water, trees, fire)  it could arguably be described as one of the most fluid and plastic medium we are exposed to that is also mutable into a solid, a liquid and a gas.
It also is the medium by which the radiant solar energy of our sun as well as other energetic waves of influence are metamorphosed and reflected, absorbed and turned into ingredients that are very similar to the essences of various foods obtained from our digestive system. It creates clouds that relentlessly roam, vanish and reappear that contain stored static energy, distributed across the sphere of our planet's surface as well as the centripetal diffusion and storage of it' solids through evaporation processes. From time immemorial the atmosphere has been the harbinger of catastrophic disasters as well as life sustaining mediums for the preservation of our species. The location of visions, the home base for Gods, the literal heaven as a verticality of a higher plane that served as a metaphor for the survival of the mind after the host body had returned to the Earth in the trajectory of a human life. One could say, the seeds of modern anomalies were long ago organized as an architecture in the physics of semiotics within information as a state of organized energy irradiated into wavelengths, creating "spooky actions at a distance" as observed in PSI effects..

 It is no surprise that it also is the medium for many a strange projected anomaly that also exhibit the very similar metamorphosing characteristics of the atmosphere itself , from the plastic nature of what is observed as being entangled within it in the very specific nature of the forms that are indelibly linked to our species associative and identifying processes as being metaphorically and theoretically viable within it rather than to witness elephants or coconuts being tracked from the surface of this sphere being carried hither and yon by it, whereas to say, that the atmosphere is the only medium that completely encircles the entire cartography of every square inch of surface area we are aware of.
Anyone familiar with the preeminent waves of weather arising from the atmosphere will note both emergence phenomenon as well as what seems to be a randomized distribution system if it were not for the variance in the unequal pressurization of it's forces driving it's distribution, much like the fluid variety of unidentified atmospheric anomalies that seemingly, again mimic the nature of the medium which contains them. Is this all simply coincidental, the sort of lazy suspicion that one is entangled in the other is simply a post it note as a reminder that there may be more a method to the madness in the atmosphere when we cease categorizing these anomalies as being separate from  the medium which not only sustains them but also seemingly provides the dynamic template by which it becomes visible on a temporal basis only to vanish back into an invisible gaseous form  from a semi-solid.

 As Dr Presinger pointed on in "The Weather Matrix and Human Behavior, far from being autonomous, our psychology and physiology while being entangled in one another are also emergent processes from atmospheric conditions as part of a dynamic that is not frozen into sharp distinctions and boundaries when we move away from defining our behavior as being separated from our environment although we recognize that it sustains us, as if we have missed the relationship of sustainable from  the environment from the effects it as as we are an emergent process arriving from and influenced correspondingly from our saturation being within it as a portion of the whole.We could perhaps suggest that the emergence of the human species in relation to the environment has had profound effects, some of them clearly recognized, some of them denied some of them being more profoundly subtle that yet are one of many drivers of the influences that are also entangled in the physiology of perception. In a sense we use division instead of multiplication when we analyze the compounded effects of embedded multiple forces within and without us that we navigate by being an isthmus or lens of them by their passage as a portion of what ourselves are composed of. In this sense we have an implicate ordering of effects that we define as being separated by the caricaturisation of constituent components that have no relationship subtle or otherwise to us, as if we ourselves had this all backwards, that we ourselves were the drivers rather than ourselves being a emergent process of effects, that we are effects in of ourselves of our environment, and there are few choices involved in our physiology or psychology that we can wrest from it's origins in nature as a living emergent system. All of this has a great deal to due with the nature of unidentified atmospheric anomalies, as there is nothing in nature that is not natural to it other than what we attribute to strangeness when we are unaware of the processes that are entangled to create these fleeting moments of the phenomenon between phases of it's semi-solid nature and it's proverbial return to the invisibility of air, inasmuch as we are crib blind to what is closest perhaps to our own jugular veins.

 What are the correspondences between dream states and the cellular intelligence of the inhabitants that exist there is sensate form as simulations and those observed in a waking state as if the mind could be entrained by the resonance of converging influences that utilize the same processes that are exhibited by PSI effects?
Effects as emergent processes that are not currently defined as being carried by the energetic fields of the atmosphere as a carrier wave for the self organized energy of the mind to have remote specific effects in a common medium by "spooky actions at a distance." Only in this case we have the network of millions of fractal minds all connected in a network wherein all are individuated stations or processors in the physics of information that are invariably linked by physiological and cybernetic patterns in their similarity may have a capability to influence probability by the convergence of  a linkage from  fluid and seeming random atmospheric effects, that co-join with a proverbial pressure system of temporary coherence that arises in the field of potential observers in an analogous "perfect storm, rare comparatively, but just as cogent and just as fluid that like the atmosphere itself can exhibit various states of solidity, even invisibility but none the less, all express the medium that produces the message of effects we can observe whether it is water or ice, or a gas as observable spectrum's of their materiality. Is there a relationship between the range of altitude wherein these semi-solid anomalous forms are created and the nature of the  atmospheric energy found there in a correspondence to a subtle wavelength found in the physiology of the energy produced in the physical brain as organized by the extra dimensional qualities of the mind? All of this seems to indicate favorable conditions between mediums to find an expression of coherence in both that are exceptions rather than normalized states of either one. It reminds me of a tumble lock wherein all the cylinders must align in correspondence to move the latching mechanism to an open position, or at least that's what my intuition appears to be expressing to me.

More to follow...










..

The Issues Of Language In Popular Paranormal Studies

 The last few posts have had the theme regarding the mindset of investigators of the paranormal as to regard the analysis or false assumptions of purpose versus emergent phenomenon as well as the psychological drives of instinct and the desire to fulfill unmet questions with linear narratives. All of this contributes to a personal subconscious mythology that can derail the most ardent arm's length analysis of either a personal encounter or providing an explanation for those that remain enigmatic. Jason in commenting on the last post, asked indirectly why I distrust the mechanics of language in regard to the paranormal and I felt his question deserves a more fleshed out answer.
One aspect is argumentation in relation to rational logic and reasoning and anyone who has been exposed to either refutation or postulating theoretical explanations will be familiar with Nietzsche's observation that "The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we are trying to do in the first place."
Again, rereading the first few sentences of this post will more than likely provide a tentative framework for recalling one's experience with digressions, personal or otherwise aimed that are so far off the aim of the analysis that was allegedly occurring, they become largely moot, circular dialogs rather than exchanges, which in turn relates to the opting in of both in terms of game theory, which I suspect few in the paranormal realm are familiar with.
What is the major flaw is the nature of language being almost always inexact as a referent combined with dysfunctional conflict strategies, that again echo the quotation cited above.Another is a lack of respect or lack of knowledge in subjects that are seldom discussed and never acknowledged as being vital to the exploration of the unknown, which is probability analysis and the nature of it's relationship to randomness and chaos theory. Another is studying the subject  with subject itself as the only analytical means to determine it's nature, as if UFO's could study themselves.Another way to look at this lack of functional exchange is to apply the term of a zero sum game which again removes probability and randomness factors from the analysis.
Another issue with language structure is inference based on pseudo-terminolgy such as my pet peeve which is the use of vortex which I doubt any of it's users could describe  how an actual vortex is formed, what it does and so forth and yet the term is bandied about as a pseudo-referent. All of this is inference based on a non existent set of principles. Anyone who uses this term is using language that has no basis that is measurable in any potential way, yet it has become one of countless examples of mythical terms.
You may rightfully ask in our customary binary framework is this really an issue of language structure or of the user?  I would respond by saying it is both entangled together as language is notoriously inexact and most who have tied themselves into personal mythologies have no self awareness of a specific aim they are seeking from such a study as most see this as a vicarious entertainment or hobby from an existential point of view. One could say this operates on the same set of dynamics in terms of the human condition as the architecture of theology was superimposed on as a architectural frame of formalized inferences.
Another issue is bias in relation to certain words being used that leads one to seek clarity by reductionism as if you could cogently explain how an automobile works in one sentence understandable to all by way of reductionism.What I have seen most often is the irresistible temptation to use reductionism to have an architectural framework that while being understandable to the majority, is actually creating imaginary inferences or false associations due to the explanation being so simplified, it is neither cogent or a explanation. One could call this imaginary terminology , or a imaginary explanation.
Another pet peeve is the use of the word demon and the understandable lack of a cogent explanation for the use of that term other than it being entangled in the architecture of theology based on inference or the phenomenon being demonized by those who are vested in such entanglements of language use. Most times a Zen approach of neither attracting nor dismissing the phenomenon is seldom utilized due to the fact the experiences in effect, program their own outcomes due to instincts, etc as high emotional states tend to exaggerate the effects proportionately. So the words, demon and vortex are issues and of course, Unidentified Flying objects. The only word that is accurate is unidentified. No one has proven they are solid objects nor that they fly based on any known aerodynamic principle or motive force or both.
Yet the word is used with a second thought which determines as a predictor how the range of possibilities has been containerized, even going so far as to become a pseudo-theology of architecture based on anticipation by the use of language , and then there is the inference of intent, which goes back to the earlier post I had written on the superimposition of purpose upon emergent phenomenon.
You can perhaps understand why I have moved away from the main body of discourse in relation to popular discussion regarding paranormal subjects. Most discussions from this point of view are pointless except, as Paul Kimball noted some time ago, they are more apt for the study of sociology.
The last issue with language is related to cybernetics specifically in the structure of language that creates the phantasm of self referential logic which in my own subjective opinion is the worst of the lot in taking mindfulness from the table and becoming a hermetic dictate of how we structure the illusions that are just as pronounced in rational logic used without this qualifier. I could go one on this issue but one only has to read some of Gregory Bateson's work in this field to get a taste of what I am relating if one is unfamiliar with the subject.
The dynamics and entanglements of language are daunting but a little discernment would go a long way toward avoiding the maintenance of circularity in regard to the squaring of the paranormal and raise the bar on the structure of dialog whether it is "popular" or not. Again this refers to the conversion process of proving this or that in the evangelistic strain of paranormal studies as if making everyone think in the same manner actually changes anything other than to create a new language of stereotypes that inhibit critical thinking.
I suppose in terms of belief systems, as R.A Wilson said a more accurate way to describe this motive force is to formally recognize them for what they are, suspicions.Nothing more nothing less, suspecting this or that without making suspicions as pseudo-edicts for potential conformance, which then leads one off the road into the ditch , or "dry canal" of selectively experiencing realities according to rigid tenants that have no utilizing purpose other than to pretend there is no uncertainty principle involved in life itself which then becomes almost a state of psychosis.

The Squared Circle of The Paranormal

The Tragicomedy In The Subsistence Farming of Determinism

I have seemingly have separated myself from the main body of popular discussion regarding unknown phenomenon, and while the majority of those I once considered peers seemed to have woven a spiders web of self created mythologies as an allergic reaction to the entropy of new ideas coming into the field, busying themselves with hermetic discussions in the popular parlance that endlessly repeat themselves by goosing this lack of momentum with variegation of  set themes. I recently questioned the logic behind a certain theory and was told that this was an attempt to "sound intellectual" while the questioning of the premise that I posed remained, interestingly enough, unanswered. This struck me as a spider's web that simply caught the flotsam floating past to promote the flavor of the month as a temporal set piece that in abeyance to it's self referential footing could only resort to condescension of style rather than the ideas that were addressed as a potential refuting of  it's premise. This is the art rather than science of the paranormal as it stands, albeit in a wobbling miasma of half baked stereotypes borrowed from the caricatures of cartoons. As the situation presents itself, I seem to be in a Zen of a third world that does not equate to the logics of my time that are reeled in from the dead civilizations of centuries past as the genome of  spawning yet another emergent tragicomedy of mistaken identities, bald  faced reductionism and a lack of behavioral consensus in consensus itself , another sort of  toxic Zen applied to our natural state of perplexity.

Undoubtedly there are six degrees of separation in the flood of fixed ideas and associations tacked onto the subject of unidentified atmospheric phenomenon as fractals arising from the original imprint of the subconscious of unmet psychological needs arising from our planetary isolation just as there as as many attached to a monarchical series of Gods, each one aligned with the fog of purpose as an outgrowth of anthropomorphism.

"Encho was a famous storyteller. His tales of love stirred the hearts of his listeners. When he narrated a story of war, it was as if the listeners themselves were on the field of battle.

One day Encho met Yamaoka Tesshu, a layman who had almost embraced masterhood in Zen. "I understand," said Yamaoka, "you are the best storyteller in our land and that you make people cry or laugh at will. Tell me my favorite story of the Peach Boy. When I was a little tot I used to sleep beside my mother, and she often related this legend. In the middle of the story I would fall asleep. Tell it to me just as my mother did."

Encho dared not attempt to do this. He requested time to study. Several months later he went to Yamaoka and said: "Please give me the opportunity to tell you the story."

"Some other day," answered Yamaoka.

Encho was keenly disappointed. He studied further and tried again. Yamaoka rejected him many times. When Encho would start to talk Yamaoka would stop him, saying: "You are not yet like my mother."

It took Encho five years to be able to tell Yamaoka the legend as his mother had told it to him.

In this way, Yamaoka imparted Zen to Encho."  -Zen Koan

 In the last post separating emergent phenomenon from the term "purpose" has fogged the myopic vision of many a theoretical posture toward the unknown as the same could be said for the many varieties of monotheism, that have descended into the realm of stop gap propaganda, all aligned with the promotion of this purpose or that, based on the buried pragmatism of the same unmet needs that are seldom or never acknowledged outside of their architectural  faux logic as a self referential terminology.
The emergent phenomenon of unidentified atmospheric anomalies have nothing to do with purpose as we define it in a narrow and small bookshelf of theoretical posturing. If anything even remotely resembling an anthropomorphic purpose has emerged from the subconscious of it's observers, is the human condition itself, isolated, mostly lunatic and prone to overlay questions with liminal mythologies.
My point being that we ourselves lack a precise definition of purpose and so all that follows is a side show of our own weak psychological condition, ready to follow the twelfth monkey off a cliff all due to the faux architecture of language, which is as abhorrent to me as most of my fellow specie members are in their consensual lunacies. And so the story as convoluted as it is begins where it ended in an alley past the stroke of midnight in the darkness of the human condition, roving past Poe and Hawthorne toward the twilight of acceptance that lies beyond the boundaries of this town's provincialism's, customs and isolation that yaw and pitch adrift in a coming storm of entropy and revolt that will neatly desconstruct itself by way of a butterfly effect once again beginning at it's original state to once again play the memories that afflict it, and so another cycling of another generation of the tale will be based on the the genetics that reconstitute the dry bones of lies to once again flourish under a foreign sun.
Roses, roses, roses, as they say remain in the ground of hubris, fertilized by myth as a perpetually emergent active phenomenon as psychological as any pathology of an animal species.
The hidden hides in plain sight as it always had.

Materialization and The Mystery of Emergent Phenomenon

"Rules, or laws, have no causal efficacy; they do not in fact “generate” anything. They serve merely to describe regularities and consistent relationships in nature. These patterns may be very illuminating and important, but the underlying causal agencies must be separately specified (though often they are not). But that aside, the game of chess illustrates precisely why any laws or rules of emergence and evolution are insufficient. Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict “history” — i.e., the course of any given game. Indeed, you cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the “system” involves more than the rules of the game. It also includes the players and their unfolding, moment-by-moment decisions among a very large number of available options at each choice point. The game of chess is inescapably historical, even though it is also constrained and shaped by a set of rules, not to mention the laws of physics. Moreover, and this is a key point, the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, “purposeful” activity."-Peter Corning. (2002), "The Re-Emergence of "Emergence": A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory"

 The Cortex of The Paranormal In Nature
What are the synapses in the nervous system of all things as images of what we cannot see, as literal ghosts manifested in regard to our limited  animal perceptions?  In this perhaps, nothing is immutable. Is there a physics of consensus in relation to coherence whose density dictates the quantification of materialization?  I am reminded of Lyle Watson's quote being placed on a more global platform when he said “If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.”
Everywhere I turn there seems to be a desire for narcissistic reductionism.To make the complex dumbed down to the extent we can reinforce our denial that there is a hole in the bucket of our desire to create a Newtonian universe of robotic certainty. Heaven help us if we did.

What is seen and what is not is the arbiter of prosaic considerations and yet this is not the measurement that holds true, so as of late I have been thinking of the paranormal in terms of a emergent phenomenon and this is perhaps a subject that requires several aspects or observations from several points to describe a very difficult and yet interesting aspect to all subjects as objects of what is in play as a spectrum of the emergent. Is the UFO phenomenon an emergent process? I suspect it is beyond the fact that the utilization of language as in similar to or a stop gap representation is like the snake that eats it's own tail in terms of word associations irregardless if there are unintentional or happenstance. Many of those I formerly considered intelligent peers appear to be swimming in place furiously to make an architectural statement on the plasticity of the fluid dynamics inherent in making the astonishingly complex, a linear narrative. No respect for the surrealism of prosaic reality as if to wave it off while competing in what R A Wilson called "who has the superior language".

This is not an attempt to ingratiate an audience with retreading our own ruts of peer induced camp fire stories, which seem to be deeper and narrower by the moment, and so I expect that what I am writing about, probably very few will bother to read or comment upon which, in of itself originates with Aristotle's "Metaphysics " and remains difficult and unanswerable and yet is worth pursuing with a sort of quixotic despair and dire curiosity. One word. Purpose.

 I can almost envision the concept of Jung's narrative of "Piktor's Metamorphosis" in relation to the transmigration of an a observer in variegated emerging forms as related to a verb rather than a noun as Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions. In other words, the realm of the sensible world is one based on relationships that are always emergent, fluid and within a spectrum rather than a fixed state, which seems to be the case in the paranormal realm as well.
Call this transmutation if you will. The sun as seen by our Paleolithic ancestors is the same sun we observe yet it is not the same sun they saw. The act of observation materializes an entire spectrum of emergent processes.

Is everything completely materialized? Of course not. Is the manifestation of memory as a fluid and plastic series of fixed images in series as they are manifested, strictly a human attribute not found in the greater nature in which we reside? I doubt this although unable to prove it.

The materialists of the paranormal as solipsists entrapped in languages written by repetition remind me of this analysis of the surrealism movement in terms of emergence as an observable quality that lends a definitive bias to measuring it.

"Among those who do not comprehend surrealism are people who look upon the real as verifiable, as something to be checked against past experience or observation. These individuals fail to see that for the surrealist the dimensions of the real cannot be gauged by reference to the familiar. So far as the real appears to have limits, they are foisted upon it by the mental, emotional, and imaginative limitations of spectators accustomed to measure the possible by the already known. For this reason, surrealism and many of its contemporary opponents remained inevitably at loggerheads. The one group insisted on estimating the scope of reality by its possibilities. The other condemned the real to be repetitive of what the past had shown them."

JOHN HERBERT MATTHEWS, The Surrealist Mind

 Then there is the incomparable Ibn Al Aabi  whose ontology is that the necessary being is God, the one reality who cannot not exist because his quiddity is being which the term God as a incommensurable level of self organization that appears to be  as emergent as energetic principles that have no correspondence to our anthropomorphic stereotypes of being as an image of ourselves ......rather than ourselves being prototyped as a equally emergent process as one feeds the other in the dance of the immaterial and material as reconciled by states and stations of energetic interaction or "spooky actions at a distance" that seem to have no locality in particular as to their origin.

Impossible things are things which cannot exist as phenomena although they may subsist in the imagination as emergent intermediaries that have subsistence only by eating thought as a food that produces what is eaten by the architectural constrictions of personality.
Possible things are things which become 'existent entities' (a'yan mawjuda) when God as defined as a a state of being chooses to give them existence; their existence or non-existence at any given time depends on his will, or force of differentiation which appears to be placed upon relationships in emergence.  They have, however, been known eternally as 'immutable entities' (a'yan thabita). This latter term is rendered by Affifi  as 'fixed prototypes' and Izutsu ) as 'permanent archetypes', expressions which suggest that like the Platonic Ideas they are the original models of which objects in the phenomenal world are multiple copies.
 Chittick as Arabi's cheif Western translator, objects to this on the grounds that although the 'immutable entities' actually become the 'existent entities', they are the things themselves prior to their being given existence in the world. Although I have adopted his translation as closer to the meaning of the Arabic, I have reservations about his interpretation, for there are passages in Ibn al-'Arabi's writings which seem to imply that some of the immutable entities are universals.

None of what I write is new but the same question that haunted Kant haunts this writer although I suspect that there is a form of myopia in this that is unavoidable in terms of the questions that are posed between the material and immaterial ends of a paranormal realm.

“ In such a natural product as this every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole, that is as an instrument, or organ... The part must be an organ producing the other parts—each, consequently, reciprocally producing the others... Only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product be an organized and self-organized being, and, as such, be called a physical end.
-Kant
Is there a cortex of nature that transceives the physics of information? A mind like and yet unlike our own, that transcribes, organizes and balances the spectrum of radiant energy not unlike our our own cerebral cortex but is incommensurable in the spectrum of it's energetic scope? David Chamber's wrestles with Emergence as well..http://consc.net/notes/emergence.html

Mr Chamber's writes:
"Emergence is a tricky concept. It's easy to slide it down a slippery slope, and turn it into something implausible and easily dismissable. But it's not easy to delineate the interesting middle ground in between. Two unsatisfactory definitions of emergence, at either end of the spectrum:
(1) Emergence as "inexplicable" and "magical". This would cover high-level properties of a system that are simply not deducible from its low-level properties, no matter how sophisticated the deduction. This view leads easily into mysticism, and there is not the slightest evidence for it (except, perhaps, in the difficult case of consciousness, but let's leave that aside for now). All material properties seem to follow from low-level physical properties. Very few sophisticated people since the 19th century have actually believed in this kind of "emergence", and it's rarely what is referred to by those who invoke the term favourably. But if you mention "emergence", someone inevitably interprets you as meaning this, causing no end of confusion.
(2) Emergence as the existence of properties of a system that are not possessed by any of its parts. This, of course, is so ubiquitous a phenomenon that it's not deeply interesting. Under this definition, file cabinets and decks of cards (not to mention XOR gates) have plenty of emergent properties - so this is surely not what we mean.
The challenge, then, is to delineate a concept of emergence that falls between the deeply implausible (1) and the overly general (2). After all, serious people do like do use the term, and they think they mean something interesting by it. It probably will help to focus on a few core examples of "emergence":

• (A) The game of Life: High-level patterns and structure emerge from simple low-level rules.
  
• (B) Connectionist networks: High-level "cognitive" behaviour emerges from simple interactions between dumb threshold logic units.
  
• (C) The operating system (Hofstadter's example): The fact that overloading occurs just around when there are 35 users on the system seems to be an emergent property of the system.
  
• (D) Evolution: Intelligence and many other interesting properties emerge over the course of evolution by genetic recombination, mutation and natural selection."

Again I am ruminating on the potential memory of our universes, and the transcription of this memory by way of material effect, whether it is a tree or an aphid or ourselves? In this I was pondering how little effect as a proportionate cell of the whole that we consciously steer and yet assume the mantle of a determining factor. Are we poised to effect such a memory, and if so, as if to change the biochemistry of the universe as a self organizing invasive species or as an outgrowth of our our comparatively embryonic, seeded state?

Controlling The Ghosts Of Memory
The materialization of the ghosts in the machinery of the physical brain has been a sub-theme for the last several posts, whether it is the recreation of a vanished, remote town inhabited by the ghosts from an artist's childhood,  the intermediary nature of  ghost architecture by it's material reliquary in Richard Nickle's work against the vagaries of space, or the ghosts of liminal perception synthesized by Perry Hall,. All of which lead back to painting with photonic light, and the video of Gregory Sam's personal insight on the literal interpretation of Solaris in regard to the painting of the genome of our planet's living systems through the reinterpretation of memory in relation to the dynamics of a planetary environment which never sits still for a portrait beneath our feet.. as we dream of it's conquest.

Perhaps all of these are addressing the illusion of a now versus a then as a present tense and how this is addressed by both the subliminal and the alchemy of attempting such an impossible portrait of a continuum, to flash freeze space itself as a decidedly human attribute.

Within The Frames of A Film
All of this relates to the physics of information as we experience it, and create a portraiture as a mimicking of what has been implanted as a seed in the womb of the mind, as it is seeded"above" in a decidedly non human universe from the invisible ghosts of stagecraft  to materialization of a awe inspiring spectrum, that always must return to their arc of an original state..... to be yet re imagined in a eternal metamorphosis of expression by way of memory a strange art wherein all images are interconnected and yet no two are alike, with the exception of their intercommunication that only exists in relationships. Take away one and the dream becomes a parallel universe of the delimited affixed to the fractal nature of memory. A green house versus a red house yet both are houses.

Spooky Actions At A Distance
How odd this is, that is to say how odd it is what we consider prosaic, as if we were all amnesiacs in regard to no longer trusting our eyes in favor of the entrapment of language. The rub is in the physics of information once again This a theme that emerged from writing about memory as a sort of pliable script that hints of a certain fatalism placed on a sacrificial altar  in an entombed possibility. To write about such things is to comb the hair of the materiality of images as they relate to an odd portraiture of our situation as poor and needy mimics.Are we ourselves to one another, in effect synapses of a living network of relationships whose power of manifestation as a station of  a potential state remains untapped due to the signal noise of instinct, the entrapment of language, consensus constrictions etc?

In this situation, perhaps nature does not require our permission as it is even more self organizing in it's capacity then we, it's subjects in taking our own physics of imagination and materializing them in a third state not completely material, not completely insensate. Our consensus of imagining, or imaging that is unconstrained by language or even conscious thought may be expressed as the inner becomes outward as the outward becomes an inward incompatibility as if we are blind as to who threw the ball. It was ourselves and yet not in the physics of information.  Fairy folk, the grotesques of Aliens, the cryptozoological  equivalences of precessing dopplegangers wrested from the ghosts of memory are  perhaps not as compartmentalized or containerized as we assume.

 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46629393/ns/technology_and_science-science

In this we have quantum locks and keys that require cultural consensus as to images that can travel through our enormous network of synapses, all being similar and yet no two alike, also connected into the larger environment that reach intermittently to become coherent by way of a tipping point of density like the centripetal diffusion in relation to the saturation of it's medium by the similarities of self unaware images. A Lathe of Heaven by Consensus in strictly intermediate terms as an expression of a spectrum of materialization's, as they say, some more solid than others. We dislike the idea that we are in a very fluid and plastic medium and so cling to our neat compartmentalization of such phenomenon even to go so far as to suggest it's bolted together like a ships hull we could navigate over these images to wrest complete control over what we both suspect and fear in a driver-less carriage we sit in..

The Arc of An Unknown Trajectory

"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." -Hamlet, Scene Two

The Nameless has been given thousands if not millions of names, calculations made, symbols drawn, conferences held, much rhetorical prosey pushing the air in front of it, wanting to superimpose one's needs, one's desires to make the incommensurable an entertaining gossip, a  puppet to move on command as to affirm our contradictions, to make uncertainty blameworthy as if to make the air we breathe a solid like granite we could place under a glass jar and congratulate ourselves prior to suffocation. This is by in large the demented aims of those who are drawn into the paranormal realm. Their own unknown arc of a trajectory matters not as if to suffice to say, one brings all the garbage pail, all the worn and heavy baggage with us as we seek to fall off the edge of the world while being provided with an itinerary, guidebook of all the famous sights in a linear narrative worthy of a grade school primer. Dick met Jane. Simple things are never simple if it were not for simple minds, simple critical assumptions that we have what it takes to discern what is real when the real would be unreal to us, and so we would circle like a bird around and around in the updrafts of verbiage completely clueless. This much is true, this much has no humility within it, like a hot air balloon cast here and there by whatever pulls it, whatever pushes it, whatever fascination draws a awkward conclusion. Logic is provincialism in this.

"Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.

There is a deeper nothing in which even the laws of physics are absent. Where do the laws come from? Are they born with the universe, or is the universe born in accordance with them? Here Dr. Krauss, unhappily in my view, resorts to the newest and most controversial toy in the cosmologist’s toolbox: the multiverse, a nearly infinite assemblage of universes, each with its own randomly determined rules, particles and forces, that represent solutions to the basic equations of string theory — the alleged theory of everything, or perhaps, as wags say, anything.

Within this landscape of possibilities, almost anything goes..."

-There's More To Nothing Than We Know By Dennis Overby  (New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/science/space/cosmologists-try-to-explain-a-universe-springing-from-nothing.html?_r=2

 Old wives tales repeated by pretenders, poachers and insular fantasists,  those would make dreams a sort of weaponry. I was reading Attar again in relation to The Conference of The Birds, which should be required reading for most who seek little gnomes to explain their navels to them.  The paranormal realm is so full of irretrievable space junk, one might as well go back to Dell Comics for inspiration.

Moths gathered in a fluttering throng one night
To learn the truth about the candle light,
And they decided one of them should go
To gather news of the elusive glow.
One flew till in the distance he discerned
A palace window where a candle burned --
And went no nearer: back again he flew
To tell the others what he thought he knew.
The mentor of the moths dismissed his claim,
Remarking: "He knows nothing of the flame."
A moth more eager than the one before
Set out and passed beyond the palace door.
He hovered in the aura of the fire,
A trembling blur of timorous desire,
Then headed back to say how far he'd been,
And how much he had undergone and seen.
The mentor said: "You do not bear the signs
Of one who's fathomed how the candle shines."
Another moth flew out -- his dizzy flight
Turned to an ardent wooing of the light;
He dipped and soared, and in his frenzied trance
Both self and fire were mingled by his dance --
The flame engulfed his wing-tips, body, head,
His being glowed a fierce translucent red;
And when the mentor saw that sudden blaze,
The moth's form lost within the glowing rays,
He said: "He knows, he knows the truth we seek,
That hidden truth of which we cannot speak."
To go beyond all knowledge is to find
That comprehension which eludes the mind,
And you can never gain the longed-for goal
Until you first outsoar both flesh and soul;
But should one part remain, a single hair
Will drag you back and plunge you in despair --
No creature's self can be admitted here,
Where all identity must disappear.

The disparagement of language and it's dispensations seemingly poke at me with a stick and my own lack of patience is a lead weight.  I read what is posted on the paranormal and most of it is as paranormal as a bus ticket or as intriguing as a stop sign. Why is this? Perhaps it's time to move on "where all identity must disappear..."  The question remains like a rusted fish hook or a clotted paintbrush, what lies behind all of this verbiage of images drawn from the cellar of a fish oil salesman.? It remains to be seen or not seen or to remove the divide once and for all in the provinces of the mind as the sun warms my back,
My fading self  as a slovenly passerby across the river, pulls the collar up against the prevailing ...not looking back once to curse at phantoms....nor to cajole them. Perhaps silence is the highest form of sincerity.

The Materializations of Ghosts

The Spacial Characteristics of Memory As An Art Form

The last three posts had the theme of  three artists materializing various sorts of ghosts using the mind at play within a play they co-authored as melding experiential reality as a composite creation of deep subjectivity, which allows us to experience the core of what we consider the fringe of all of our endeavors in an act of pragmatic denial, that there is no script nor fated narrative to uncertainty that we can learn, master or pretend that we know what the morning will bring, or withdraw. We are as much the artists as they in this, by painting the landscape with our box of brushes on a bare canvas. The quantum of attraction and entanglement.by way of processing delimited potentiality even in such a tiny frame as ours.

Consciousness posed as a imprisonment of the mind or  a complex doppelganger of dreams or an isthmus of an exchange where material becomes immaterial or the material is all material albeit in the energy bands found in the processes of an infinite number which is in essence, non numerical yet sifted through the spectrum of the human lens in apportionment, or further adrift in the recollection of memory..... creating those that do not exist directly whether it is stretching it's reach through the parallel processing of software that Perry Hall uses to induce the cross referencing of the senses by  a synthetic synesthesia as a composite experiential radar.. as a brushstroke of electrons...or Lowell Davis in creating a haven for the ghosts of his childhood with the stagecraft of abandoned buildings arranged with the artist's eye, or Richard Nickle's gathering of the evidence of Louis Sullivan's spirit to deter the devaluation of the human spirit in brick and mortar.

Memory is certainly a ghost. Without memory, we could not function in our material adaptations to the material and so we possess perhaps an inverted funnel of orientation in that we function by way of being possessed by ghosts who direct an artistic creation we dub your "experience." entirely directed by the immaterial to be made material by our greater or lesser gifts of using a brush. How odd all this seems to be if we took off the blinders for a moment. More strange than anything dreamed of in our philosophies.

But then does the raw materials we are given  imply that the physicality of our canvas is a proverbial landscape of pointillism, pixels, and photons that are grafted onto the webs through the forms of living  planetary systems that suggests that they are in a sense borrowed as a expressions of an organic pigment, which in turn, expresses a subjectivity worthy of the range of the artist as a planet. Perhaps some are cubists, some are impressionists some are surrealists. After all what is this sort of odd pragmatism that seemingly cannot make up it's mind what the final image will become?   Perhaps this is worthy of seeing what sticks as a proper portrayal..and this may be why we cannot understand nor relegate the universe to a purpose similar to that of building a model airplane, or rolling on rubber tires to a fast food franchise.

Here is the gallery of ghosts along the ellipse of Earth before the sun rises along the long corridors of space, hung in light above us in the maw of night. Look further in the imaginal real and this may be the portrait of a crowd as seen from above rather than viewed from below. A pointillism of light in space. As above, so below. No left,no right, no rule but the expression of  the unseen  making the webs of material creations float and waver in the wind. What they will catch is anyone's guess. I suppose it's a matter of quantized taste as painted as if by memory...condensing and evaporating images of the ghosts that circumnavigate the sea within a cranium..lit by dreams.

They All Fell Down

Dedicated To The Work and Memory Of Richard Nickle

" It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it.."
-Louis Sullivan

It is a rare individual who has the inner wherewithal to determine a course of action whose purpose is not only unappreciated but is for the greater public good. In particular, having a purpose driven life dedicated to values that have no popular, pragmatic rationale at the time. Further, an individual who faces what others would consider incredibly daunting odds in opposition to this purpose. Add to this an individual who gave his life in this quest and you will discover the narrative of Richard Nickle. The disposable consumerism of a market economy waits for no one in relation to evaluating what one's values represent, whether it is profligate waste, greed or simply bartering memory and  history for more is better. Richard dared to differ and this became his quest, which could be called the human scale of spirit amidst the transit of time, of which, he was a keen observer.The significance of the seemingly fleeting insignificance, a moment in transience posed in the continuum of past, present and future tenses.

 Richard Nickel had never given architecture any serious thought, or even heard of Louis Sullivan, before he enrolled in a photography class at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the early 1950s. There, photography teacher Aaron Siskind gave Nickel and his classmates a simple assignment: go out and photograph Sullivan's buildings. It was an assignment that would change Nickel's life as he became captivated by Sullivan's decorative details. As he continued to photograph the buildings, he began to devour Sullivan's writings. In Louis Sullivan, Richard Nickel had found a kindred spirit.

Nickel's brother Donald remembers that Richard was an outsider, even in his own family. "He read a lot. He'd be up all hours of the night playing Bach and Mozart, and of course, my folks didn't know Mozart from the man on the moon." By the time he was 25, Nickel had already been married and divorced, and had served time in the Army as a paratrooper and photographer. Now he was living in his parent's attic, which would remain his home until he died twenty years later.

Nickel began documenting every known Sullivan building. But the buildings began coming down almost as quickly as he could document them, and it soon became a race between Nickel and the wreckers. Then it dawned on him: it was not enough to simply take photographs. He must save as much of the actual buildings as he could. In 1958, Nickel met two young architecture students, John Vinci and David Norris, who shared his devotion to Sullivan and were eager to help him salvage pieces of other buildings. They recall, "He'd come with his Chevrolet with a bucket in it. . .and a crow bar, a couple of hammers and coal chisels." He enlisted his brother Donald's help as well. "I thought he was crazy," Donald says. "You know, I didn't know Sullivan from Mr. Magoo." Nickel stored the huge pieces of salvaged ornament outside his parents' home in Park Ridge, despite complaints from the neighbors about, as Nickel wrote, "the unsightly appearance of the yard."

By 1960, he was exhausted, discouraged, and ready to give up the cause and get a regular job. But then he learned of plans to demolish Sullivan's 17-story Garrick Theater building to make way for a parking garage. In all his years of saving ornament, Nickel had never attempted to stop the wrecking ball and save an entire building.

But the Garrick was one building he could not bear to see torn down. He fought hard, but in the end the building owners prevailed in court, and demolition was approved. Losing the Garrick took a great toll on Nickel; he was mentally and physically drained. They were all falling down. His striking photograph amidst the demolition of the Garrick Theater reminds me of the white bones of a great cranium exposed, the spirit having escaped the mass which animated it..

 But when he heard that Sullivan's Stock Exchange building was in jeopardy, he entered the fray one last time. Unable to stop the demolition, Vinci and Nickel were able to save a significant portion of the building's ornament, including the complete interior of the Trading Room, which was later recreated at the Art Institute. Even after the official salvage operation ended, Nickel kept returning to the site for more pieces. On April 13, 1972, he disappeared. A month later, after a protracted search, his body was found in the rubble of the building. He had been crushed when the Trading Room floor collapsed.
Today, walking into Chicago's Art Institute to see the reconstructed Stock Exchange Room and to realize Richard took each fragment each piece in the trunk of his old car beggars one's  belief that such a thing was possible..Yet, it is there.

One could say with no small amount of justification that we are all for the most part, self absorbed. You could say the same for Richard Nickle and his quest to preserve what he considered the beauty of Louis Sullivan's art. However, he left us a gift in his wake, the appreciation of craftsmanship and the sort of beauty that has nothing to do with cosmetic surgery or an automobile commercial, or attempting to be forever young. This is something I think is worth ruminating upon. There are those whose names we will never know who have a singular vision and are indeed visionaries and that is some solace to me. Perhaps to you in an era of disposable valuations in an imitation of life and what one person saw, where others saw the aim of endless rubble and aimless progress.Like Proust, like Thomas Wolfe, I am certain he knew you cannot go home again, but you can compare, you can valuate you can preserve comparison. If not this, then what?

 http://www.richardnickelcommittee.org/