A Pseudo Definition of Consciousness @ 3:10 AM

Don't believe the human eye

In sunlight or in shade

The puppet show of sight and sense

Is the Devil's Masquerade

- Principia Discordia

I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment,

And for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.

– Gotama Buddha.

Recognizing consciousness for what it is is hard, for why wouldn't it be? No one has ever solved it. Intellectuals to this day argue about not only what consciousness is, but even over the probabilistic timelines in our primordial primate past when the first simian recognized that 'This is mine, my territory, my space, my ego, MINE!'

We often do not stop at random and walk up to the closest bug and stare deeply into its five complex eyes that consist of hundreds of lenses and ask ourselves, 'Mr. Bug, do you willfully choose to point those lenses around? Or do you simply react to physical motion in an automatic realm of robothood?'

Self-recognition seems to be commonly one of the necessary and sufficient conditions (more on these another time) often used in the philosophical treatments that have been trying to establish a specialized jargon that all scientists and fellow academics can agree upon using. The debate of what words to use when defining consciousness is central to what I believe consciousness to actually be.

So, therefore it goes that since I believe consciousness to be something, it must then be a tangible thing. Something measureable and predictable, containing some form of manipulability, and all the other verbal categories that you may associate with this. Nagal's discourse,What it is like to be a bat?, had a diamond bullet that needs mentioning in this discussion of consciousness. Consciousness contains a wide range of intrinsic features that have been termed, Qualia, which is the way that external and internal sensations look and feel to you. The concept of qualia causes strange loops of thought to occur where it may be possible that what you hold in your mind to be the color "Red" may in fact not be the same shade of "Red" as anyone else's, and yet you continue to function as a sane individual.

Consciousness within the neurological field seems to take on a materialistic biological role as the sum of all the physical sensations that one perceives through experience. Those sensations are converted into chemical bonds and electrical signals that then voyage across the complex neurological circuits of the nervous system to reach the specially evolved areas of the cortex where the brain takes the stimulus information to be processed by the attention and memory systems that then allows for the selective construction and preservation of experience to be considered Real and Immediate, and all of this happens in milliseconds.

My brain then must have made up reality entirely on its own? Since transferring my ideas and thoughts to others is limited to language, I never really know whether others know really what I'm talking about. William James put it elegantly when he said; "The breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature". Which isn't that bad of a thing mind you. The good thing about attempting to define consciousness is that it isn't just about thought. Consciousness involves emotion, feeling, and empathy. I once heard that, 'We are not thinking beings with emotion, we are emotional beings that think'.

Emotion is another one of those necessary and sufficient conditions that resonate within the consciousness jargon pool. Emotion has been the main drive behind the prehistoric attempts in the study of consciousness, Gods, and demons, in an attempt to understand what it is and who they are. Shamans, Mystics, Monks, and Priests have willfully caused themselves harm and ecstasy through such acts as; fasting, Asana yoga, sensory deprivation and social isolation, the Kabbalah, pranayama, Tantric yoga, and other various masochistic practices in order to remove their egos and dismantle their realities with the goal of taking control over their own nervous systems and reprogramming their individual reality tunnels to match their cultural and ideological schema of things.

Oddly enough, I have a sense that the various occult systems from within the anthropological and theological record hold a stronger connection with the cognitive and computation theories of consciousness than the biological. This reasoning of mine comes from the concepts that these occult systems are simply other techniques of physiological and neurological experiments attempting to multiply and accelerate the development and evolution of our own consciousness. Israel Regardie described Magick as "a mnemonic system of psychology to train the Will and Imagination".

This strong connection between the mystical view of consciousness and the cognitive systems view of consciousness comes from their ability to incorporate the theories and concepts of quantum state-vectors and the non-locality principle into their definitions and theories of consciousness. Einstein showed us how the material universe is made up of smaller elements inside the larger. Quantum Consciousness, as Roger Penrose describes it, is the thought that the mental universe can be whatever we shape it to be. It's the larger inside the smaller. This line of thought then allows for a view of panpsychism to be applied, which is the claim that everything, including nonliving systems, has some degree of consciousness. Pansychism is favored amongst Strong AI theorists and can surprisingly be viewed in more traditional religions compared to the more popular book religions.

All this being said, I shall end with the words of two pioneers, and a music video, on the conscious thought about consciousness. Since my own musing obviously require more meditations and less aphorisms.

"The trick is to concentrate on the reality projected through the printed page. Every sentence is a signal from another world, a nervous system different from yours with which you can interface synergistically"

–        Robert Anton Wilson

"The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable … Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Farm Trooper Quoteage

A lone Farm Trooper has spent his spare time, between Hoth placements and stellar runs on a clunky EX-F, scanning the verse for random signals. Here is another piece of what his eyes have read, dictated at his ranch on Corellia.

Aztec Unconscious and Synchronicity Explored

I came across the following doodle amongst my notes as I cleared out a drawer. It was done by a friend and it took me a moment to recollect when exactly he had drawn it. I soon realized it was done during a cram session for a previous course on the Aztec and we were watching the documentary (which, I have learned within the Peep Diaries that a Canadian made the 1st documentary and another fellow Canuck coined the term) Blood and Flowers - In Search of the Aztecs.

What struck me about it was the interesting idea that I read this morning by Jung on defining the features of synchronicity. His definition is as follows, "Synchronicity designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychological physical events, which scientific knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common principle."  He admits how his term explain nothing, but this now allows for the idea that those chance happenings we experience are real and the enticement of them dwells within the waiting for the other shoe to hit. The when of the matter is what creates that aura of the unknown and mystical. Coincidences that I have perceived across time baffle me the most.  When it's the day after day similar theme within those chance happenings.

Getting back to the drawing. It was the collective imagery of the face within a face and the specific animals that he choose to use, which obviously was highly influenced by the documentary and his mood. The affective state is where I am curious as these are the inclinations that Jung was getting at in his discourse. By mentioning the JB Rhine psi experiments on predicting cards and such he points out how the affective state was correlated to the mood of the subjects. "An initial mood of faith and optimism makes for good results. Skepticism and resistance the opposite effect, that is, they create an unfavorable disposition."

That statement is at the heart of all paranormal research, hypnosis, altered states of consciousness, and even conventional therapy treatments.  Set and setting are the vitals keys to varying the viewpoint of one's own and others reality tunnel. Prehistoric shamans did this very often and many religions and nationalists today use these features to aid in  persuasion.  It is why all sides of the ideological landscape use the same, or similar, methods but for opposite goals, the tools that work are always utilized.

Some quick examples that come to mind on the influence of set and setting during emotional interactions are; Khalid Abdul Muhammad holding a political debate on the site of the Amadou Diallo shooting, the scarab beetles appearance during one of Jung's therapy sessions, rituals of isolation like the Temptation of Christ or the Xhosa peoples custom of male circumcision, the use of "Plant Teachers" as Cognitive Tools, and even maybe the glitzed up magic antics of Criss Angel.

Jung groups such synchronistic phenomena into three categories:

1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
2. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer's field of perception, i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterward (e.g., the Stockholm fire).
3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.

The first category is what I believe would be most relevant to the rediscovery of the drawn image and my day's readings and assignments.  There still remains in my mind though as to whether or not it was not simply due to the affective state of my mind in the morning and the priming features of reading Jung's article. Either way I was happy with the events.

Article:

Jung, Carl Gustav

1973, Appendix: On Synchronicity. In Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, translated by R. F. C. Hull, pp. 104-115. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

Glasses Fascination

It always gets under my skin how the labor day weekend always ends up giving me two first weeks of classes. Yes, this is menial and somewhat contrived. But for some reason it still bugs me. Like having to do forklift training twice in one year. It doesn't hurt but has somewhat reasonably left me feeling like the previous week didn't really count for anything.

On the other hand, while Bill McNeil was making naked phone calls the other night I was rummaging around /b/ and seriously could not stop laughing at how Free Google Phone Service in North America has created another opportunity for crank calls to get a little more personal. Worker's Of The World Unite! Must have read about at least 6 posts about managers being called and told quite frankly how much of a douche their daughters  were, how bad their toupee looked while on the can, and too seriously pop that zit on their forehead.  All in crystal clear sound and quality. For Free.

Oh ya, and I got new glasses and find that I look better in black and white.

Omnivorous Trifles

"An omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles" - sherlock holmes

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Nude Beach Thoughts

Peepers, Peepers, Where Did You Get Those Peepers?

I've started reading the book The Peep Diaries: How we're learning to love watching ourselves and our neighbors by Hal Niedzviecki and was taken aback by it and while reading it on the bus yesterday I could not help but realize that even though I was surround by people I was oblivious to them. My whole focus was reading about John Egly and Trading Spouse with the distorted presentational tactics that the TV producers use to make the show. The funniest thing during the ride was that I got a text from the Lady and made a comment about Trading Spouses. Later that night we chatted about how in the UK the whole concept of the average joe was more geared towards families of chavs and deadbeats moms.

The gripping part of the Peep Diaries that has grabbed my attention is that the book is full of subtle tips and tricks to use while creating and maintaining the online persona that is blogging, forums, social networks. These all form Peep Culture. I loved how he writes that the whole transition of the word peep has been transferred out of the negative connotations and becomes a regular form of pop culture.  Trolling craigslist personal ads are always great for a few minutes of laughs and WTF!'s.

That being said. I've got a new office setup at home and between school and work I'm going to attempt to transition the way in which I participate in this Peep Culture.