[ Sunday 25 December 1983 - Saturday 18 December 1983 ]
[DREAMING 23/2/82 -> = DB 1 page 119]
To Adelaide and back. ... Monastic dreams again. Some interesting thoughts on homosexuality, consciousness, related themes. Work: prepare report for alternative uranium inquiry [Australia and the Nuclear Choice, TEC, June 1984]
[page 120]
So to consciousness and relationships.
Happiness and stability are preconscious qualities. Are dreams visual versions of the words of the bicameral mind? All contents of the mind are manipulable symbols, references in the ultimate analysis to experience.
We write poetry under stress. We write. Writers are the stressed ones, the people at points of tension in the community, the experiencers and resolvers of conflict. We talk under stress, we fight under stress - stress is the drive to communicate, and if we fail to communicate the stress can become destructive. All these things are conducive to the development of a wider society. Unfortunately we tend to communicate by competition, which requires an excessive degree of secrecy.
One of the characteristics of consciousness is more rapid change of ideas than preconscious. People no longer need to be killed for their ideas of behaviour, since they can change or be led to change - hence relearning of a complete culture, from mediaeval religion etc. It is a painful process, akin to death, though, and people are very reluctant to undertake it on a large scale.
[page 121]
...
Dreams, voices and gods. Dreams are pre-verbal.
Sleep as unconscious, preconscious.
A book must be capable of absorbing all my creative energy while I am writing it.
Complexity and ah hocery - non academic painting.
This is where rock and roll has the drop on Bach.
[Creation, The Metaphysics of Peace DB 20]
[page 131]
Hence honesty leads to a buildup, bigger and more complex structures, by positive feedback, differentiation, etc. Hate leads to eventual degradation of structures. Violence leads to short term degradation, with possible long term rebuilding on different, and possibly better, lines.
[page 132]
Other things being equal, a more complex system, with higher variety, will be able to outmanoeuvre a system with lower variety, since there are more places for it to go. It is like being able to move into a fourth dimension, having ideas or behaviour that the other side cannot track.
Universe is always one, like an immaculate porcelain egg, which starts off with entropy zero and gradually differentiates into an increasing number of ever bigger particles, which by their complex relationships to one another increase the entropy and complexity of the whole setup, without ever compromising its unity. Detail increases enormously.
...
[Creation, The Metaphysics of Peace db 20]
[page 133]
A problem (or perhaps a plus) for Jaynes.
Jaynes.
The Gods speak, but bicameral civilisation must have predated
the origin of speech. On the other hand the invention of speech made
possible the internal dialogue that is called bicameral. Prior to the
gradual development of words, people thought in images, etc as dogs
must do. Words, with there added versatility, made possible the
eventual development of software for reflective self consciousness.
Why do people sing poetry? Group selection takes over when the performance of the group if
more important than the performance of individuals, and so diversity
counts and the group carries individuals because they in some way
contribute synergistically to the surviving whole. Same as individual
cells of the human body. Team spirit. Widening area of competition.
Fixation of the whole. A human being is a heap of group selected
cells [system].
[page 134]
As one looks around the home village [one sees] its halt, lame,
mad, incompetent, in fact generally defective people. But we would
not be without one of them. It takes all sorts to make a world, or
any part of it. It is one of the massive defects of the mass society
that it is too simplistic to have a place for everybody. The number
of niches is artificially limited by the mono (theistic) (cultural)
etc outlook of the setup.
Newspapers, books, literature and cultural information in general
are the input to cultural "DNA". What are called classics are in
effect active codons in the majority of the population with a fringe
of "dubious" ideas motivating some and set of ideas actively hated by
the "thought police" (cultural immune system) which is necessary to
maintain the purity of the culture whatever it may be. Old,
preconscious monarchical religious systems like the RC Church have a
very well developed thought policing system and a set of punishments
for those who allow their minds to stray too far.
[Creation, The Metaphysics of Peace db 20]
[page 134]
Difficulty of seeing things and the
creative nature of knowledge are clearly demonstrated by the fact
that many things are discovered by technologists before they are
found
[page 135]
in nature. Hence the technology is a sort of 'concrete hypothesis'
by which we gain an understanding of the characteristics of something
(eg sonar, in bats) so that we are then in a position to recognise
the characteristics of them in our perambulations through nature.
Hence the article in Nature 306:20 3 November 1983 on parallel visual
computation. Ballard et
al.
...
"In a book the words and language are very much like a coordinate
system used to express an invariant structure,. Minor differences in
the use of words etc may constitute small rotations of the axes.
Change of language means a major shift/rotation of axes. The function
of intelligence is to deduce both the axes and the invariant
structure.
Tuesday 27 December 1983
Wednesday 28 December 1983
Why do children like music?
Everything must have an evolutionary explanation. If it costs, it
must pay for itself, or be linked to something which pays for itself.
Thursday 29 December 1983
Friday 30 December 1983
Saturday 31 December 1983