vol VII: Notes
1982
Notes
[Sunday 13 June 1982 - Saturday 19 June 1982
[notebook DREAMING DB1]
[page 65]
Sunday 13 June 1982
Have remembered no dreams for a long time. . . . Portrait of an Abstract Man reorganisation seems good. Passion —> an alien life.
Why is the choice of a woman so difficult? From a genetic point of view, any one would do. Culturally not so: necessary to remain together for the nurture of the child. Also requires same species of memes, since we are as concerned to reproduce our cultural bent as our body. I have failed in this area - a product of high deviance no doubt. Meme - Wikipedia
Paradigm inside/outside, hardware/software, biology/consciousness. . . . don't appear to be any disciplined thinkers around the place who are likely to be able to make a novel contribution. Let it die and keep my energy. Have a chance to do something now - don't blow it by hasty decision, but simply plug on with current writing projects and completely avoid being deflected - live within means
[page 65]
and live monkishly, reflectively, keeping all neutrons in the core to get the chain reaction started.
I feel a bout of craziness coming on.
Monday 14 1982
Tuesday 15 June 1982
Wednesday 16 June 1982
Stoned - the Philosopher's Stone. . . . Maybe I am capable of creative writing of getting into an understanding of where its all at, of human nature and human interaction. To find and express an aspect of humanity - whence we came - to where are we going - a novel of sociobiology. The future of being, of human being.
. . .
The book is getting so I believe it - a genuine expression of myself. It has taken 9 years so far.
What do you think of me? You know. Yes, but I want to hear you say it.
[page 67]
[From draft Portrait of an Abstract Man]
Dear nn
As we come closer, I desire closely to tell you my scheme of life, of love, of being, of the cosmos. Knowledge is our joy, knowledge in love ecstasy. No time does vision shine as it shines in the light of love. So beautiful such an illusion. Such is the nature of the Universe that we people are purpose built creatures, manipulated by that purpose - animals like any other, we live to pass on our genes. No gentle god forsaw our existence of guides us on our way. We are here alone on the midst of being that is not conscious of our existence except through us. Each of our conscious lives is but the stage on which the forces of biology play out their survival strategies.
But this is not a source of fear or sadness. Every mind, as our mind, must know how it gre to be, and knowing that growing, know the Universe in which it gres and seeing itself as real. Our mind is, and partakes genuinely in the nature of being. It operates as all things must operate by the laws of information processing, self organising systems, creativity and growth. Thus is the nature of our mind determined.
[page 68]
So here I am a human, part of the Universe, part of life, part of being, surveying the infinite panorama of life and being around me. Reflection in myself reflected in all the things around me. And I seek the laws of information that determine me, that determine it. When I know these laws I will be able to predict further consequences.
We discovered these laws. [To be is to be part of it all, to be linked to it cf Teilhard de Chardin] Must all form information by relationship.
I love you is subjective. I know you as a whole and good being and therefore my love is justified. Subjectivity may be based on a real knowledge of the facts. As time goes by we get to know our genetic programming - know thyself - and we can adapt our culture to suit.
[page 69]
How do we define good music? It is a subjective feeling with objective correlation. Is ts good because everyone likes it or is there an absolute good - taste despises popular trash? Recognition of wholeness and thoroughness of form. Internal consistency. Realistic in the sense that it fulfills the criteria of existence which make an evolved creature survive or a piece of technology work - bonum ex integro. Aesthetic = practical (poetic).
Realistic = aesthetic. Meaningful in its context. Not just noise.
Wherever we go, whatever we do, we must start with knowledge. Immediately we are bound in a loop. The mind evolved by natural selection to fulfill one role - the perpetuation through survival and reproduction of genetic information. How do we know this?
Knowledge of knowledge is part of knowing and part of knowledge : methodology is initially bound up iwth what we know. Knowledge, including theories of knowledge, is itself subject of natural seelction, since those with the right knowledge for an environment will do well. Every scientist looks for the discovery
[page 70]
that will bring him wealth and fame; the warrior for the technique that will bring him victory; the poet for the happy words that will win fair lady; the novelist for the secret of the best seller; but on top of this there is genius.
Every one of us has a private genius. Natural selection works with long times and large numbers; it is not too much concerned with the odd fantastic chance. Yet the very mechanics of sexual reproduction guarantee a spectrum of individuals, most near average in all qualitites, some very far from it. Some, indeed, whose drive to know and see and to express their knowledge and vision exceeds all the requisites of survival, in fact prejudices their survival by driving them to poverty and ridicule, sickness and death. The human mind is a result of natural selection: your mind and my mind are particular human minds with partiuclar parents and a particular history.
The individuality conferred by sexual reproduction is critical to the coherence of our society - we stick together because we are similar, but also because we are different. Our diverse talents
[page 71]
coalesce to give a group of people powers and qualities that can be matched by no individual.
Knowledge confers selective advantage on the evolutionary stage. This is true for the earthworm and the clam. These animals arrive in the world equipped with instinctive knowledge, a program that gradually unfolds to guide the animal through the changing demands of its lifetime as it moves from youth to old age.
Freud: . .. a man like me cannot live without a hobby horse, a consuming passion - in Schillers words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. Freud 1895 - Letter to William Fliess. Moussaieff (editor)
Higher animals are not simply programmed automatons. Instead they are programmed to learn, to devlop new ways of dealing with their environment, not just by natural selection acting on their genes, but by natural selection acting on knowledge. And the mechanism of mental creativity as the same as the mechanism of
[page 72]
sexual creativity: chance introduces the new; selection chooses what will survive. Here we come to one of the great paradoxes of existence: it is the blind force of uncontrolled randomness that introduces all that is new. Logic, mathematics, computers can do naught but elaborate the consequences of a particular set of facts. Only chance error,malfunction, mistakes, can usher in the new. Mostly the new is detrimental but that is of no consequence. One genuinely beneficial discovery is worth endless failures, since there is no other way that it can come.
My work has taken me deep into the human mind. To subvert it we need to know it. In the process I became a convert, my vision was strengthened and the accidental of my birth have led the whole world to a new vision.
In the primordial, untold molecules jostles in ceasless motion, formning and reforming into endless combinations. Each new combination had a certrain probability of forming, a certian probability of disintegrating, a certain population balanced by birth and death. If a molecules has a selective advantage, its population
[page 73]
increased at the expense of the others - formed easily, destroyed with difficulty, long life and big numbers
Then came the molecule that could catalyze its own formation. The beginning of life we might say. Now one could help others to become its own image. Perhaps another trick too: the molecule that could destroy others around it: eating had begun.
Is the mind any different. Deep in an enormous subconscious sea a lifetime of sensations, perceptions, ideas, feelings, words and theories seethes is continual motion, endlessly falling into new relationships. And everynow and then a combination that draws others to it, and one that seem to fit the situation, one that breaks through into consciousness as an idea, an insight, a piece of intuitive knowledge, comes to its possessor from the dark, from the muse, from the ceasless workings of chance.
A bright idea, like a newborn creature, has no inherent right to live. It has gone onto the stage to be tested like every other.
[page 74]
For millennia philosophers and people who sought knowledge relied on ideas for knowledge and did not realise the importance of testing them. The invention of testing was the beginning of science. Two effects: firm knowledge; and ruled out untestable ideas, which may in themselves be just as valid and interesting. The natural selection of ideas gave science the field because is produced solid concepts that could be made to work by technology - the dividing line is very thin.
Ideas and intuitions are cheap: every armchair philosopher may have them. Testing them is difficult and expensive. The labour lies not in theory, but in experimentation, the constructing and testing of ever more complicated apparatus.
[see PMAM II p 16]
[page 75]
Human evolutionary potential / human intellectual potential - tabula rasa.
Outlines to the form of the Universe - conservation of energy, momentum, parity. Statistical process/information. Theory/uncertainty - details.
Form no more made of its outlines than an object of pencil lines. Every detail is important.
These ideas, like all, are subject to test, to selection. They have guided my life's work. If I am remembered, it may be because they have helped me. But, like the religion that inspired Newton, they may be a side track, another stumble on the way to the future of the species.
Nowehere is the strength conferred by knowledge more clearly demonstrated than in the search to design and build more weapons. I have searched heaven and earth for the laws of nature that can be utilised by military technology. [Abstract Man]
Thursday 17 June 1982
[page 76]
Friday 18 June 1982
Dreams are back. In an old hotel - lattice lifts, marble and polished woodwork. Third floor room. Q painting ceiling, she covered, plastered in paint, makes her rough to touch. We lying together in bed. Z (school friend) comes in with instrument to restring - calls it half size cello or some such. Looks like guitar, but wood colour very dark.
Something about plumbing.
I go out. Have [two children]. Coming home got in lift - choice of two - pick the wrong one which moves horizontally to end of block, which is big construction site with temporary buildings all along above the footpath. We end up at end of block instead of up at rooms. Chatting to driver and other passengers. Try to get [children] back in for return journey, but after we set out, see [one child] playing with another kid in a drain about 50 metres away. Nightmarish but calm. Tell driver who says we will stop soon. Get off, and can't remember any more.
Wilson theory dreams formed by random readout of cortex.
. . . Reference to painting darkroom - was going to do that last evening. . . . Plastered in paint, rought to touch? - bagged brick wall; unrequited love; rich allusion as you might expect from a dump of a discrete spatial section of memory.
