Beyond The Roots Of Coincidence

In the post titled "Edge Science" , I mentioned an interesting essay on precognitive dreams, which leads back to the foundations of PSI Theory, specifically to Arthur Koestler, a name you may or not be familiar with. I thought some may be interested in a short series highlighting a few of the pioneering theoreticians and scientists who have nothing in common with the interests of the great unwashed of popular culture when it comes to the current spate of paranormal programming aka infotainment that has little or no grounding in much beyond archaic superstition in the 21st Century. Perhaps not surprisingly, if you are familiar with this blog, these are gentlemen whom I admire for their courage of exploration. Many of the regular subscribers to this blog as well as myself are haunted by visions of what we do not know regarding our own existence, as temporal as this situation may be, and this was also a chief feature of Koestler's personality, and he was one of the handful of pioneers and theoreticians of possible conceptual models to pin anomalies for further exploration by creating a path rather than an explanation. An accurate summary of Koestler's conceptual modeling is found here:

"A holon (Greek: ὅλον, holon neuter form of ὅλος, holos "whole") is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The word was coined by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967, p. 48). Koestler was compelled by two observations in proposing the notion of the holon. The first observation was influenced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert A. Simon's parable of the two watchmakers, wherein Simon concludes that complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms present in that evolutionary process than if they are not present. The second observation was made by Koestler himself in his analysis of hierarchies and stable intermediate forms in both living organisms and social organizations. He concluded that, although it is easy to identify sub-wholes or parts, wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere. Koestler proposed the word holon to describe the hybrid nature of sub-wholes and parts within in vivo systems. From this perspective, holons exist simultaneously as self-contained wholes in relation to their sub-ordinate parts, and dependent parts when considered from the inverse direction.

Koestler also says holons are autonomous, self-reliant units that possess a degree of independence and handle contingencies without asking higher authorities for instructions. These holons are also simultaneously subject to control from one or more of these higher authorities. The first property ensures that holons are stable forms that are able to withstand disturbances, while the latter property signifies that they are intermediate forms, providing a context for the proper functionality for the larger whole.

Finally, Koestler defines a holarchy as a hierarchy of self-regulating holons that function first as autonomous wholes in supra-ordination to their parts, secondly as dependent parts in sub-ordination to controls on higher levels, and thirdly in coordination with their local environment."

A short biography of Koestler is to be found here: http://www.forteantimes.com/features/profiles/118/arthur_koestler.html

If you read the biography of Koestler and his theories of the paranormal, you may want to visit  http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/index.html wherein a research group based in the Psychology Department at the University of Edinburgh.that continues his work. 

The Frameworks of The Incommensurable

"The study of human psychology is the study of abnormal psychology"
-G.I Gurdjieff

This insightful essay by Jasun Horsley published in Reality Sandwich ( link below) tackles the subject of anomalous experiential realities and the crucial difference between focusing on what was experienced versus the how and why of such experiences, which has been the subject of many a post here, using the platform of theoretical conceptual realities to explore them.
Jasun details the dangers of a common phenomenon in our culture, which, of course, is something Plato would refute, that is, to take experiential realities of the anomalous kind, at face value, into a series blind alleys of a psychological nature that are all based on a vested interest, a weakness of human psychology that cannot accept the incommensurable, and, as a result, imposes an imaginal framework to, feed their own quasi participation in which by the second hand nature of such reports, they are voyeurs.

This is something for some that is difficult to accept. I highly recommend this essay as a thought provoking, good read.
The only qualifier to this essay I would add is an observation from yours truly, that once again, many of these insights relate also to prosaic belief systems in general and once again I suggest without the normal there would be no para added in the ways that have been superimposed in the past, such as Demons, Greys Fairies and the like. As Jim Morrison noted, this imaginal framing leads to "weird scenes in the gold mine", that, taken to extremes, takes the Everyman into the netherworld of denial and role playing, each with their appropriate costumes, psychological or material..a sort of existential stance based on denial that, as I mentioned in a previous post we fail often to notice our dictionary is full of holes and that referential language is a world apart from what is being described..and yet the imaginal psychology materializes before as us a  costume ball, or worse...

http://www.realitysandwich.com/exploding_ufo_bottle

Edge Science

Another great issue is available for download from The Society For Scientific Exploration. "The Porosity of Dreams" is a fascinating article among many. I thought many of the regular visitors here would enjoy this series of high quality explorations of the many realities we inhabit..
http://www.scientificexploration.org/edgescience/edgescience_14.pdf

The Differentiation of Local and Non Local PSI Phenomenon.

Wheels Within Wheels: The Wave Energy Behind Molecules
The correlations between the phenomenon of a physics of information and the human biology of sensory systems which are in effect, simulations of both internal and external environments has seemingly led to distinct states of an ecology likened to local weather conditions compared to the larger systems of dynamics in the atmospheric environment that can blanket the entire continent and then , going to a larger scale, to the entire planet. Consider the purposefully enigmatic photograph at the top of the post as a study in probability and coherence. This being a study of the visual language of superimposition by way of our processing thought originated in the system language we share...how many see this photograph as either A, B, C as a possible defining organisation of one's individuated creation of a intermediate state..that is neither true or not true if one does not have other sources of input to collaborate into a consensus, another word for coherency?   Is there a tipping point where this energy as information changes it's state into a intermediate transient system that is neither molecule or wave?

Consider this analogous to the nightly weather report and perhaps the next time you watch the local weather forecast, consider that while we have no current means of predicting the anomalous, the phenomenon of local ghosts and national, even international ghost phenomenon may be similarly linked by the chaotic being prone to self organizing fields of distribution that form proverbial fronts, where, if conditions are ripe, states can transition into transient phenomenon, a storm being analogous to a wave of UFO reports based on principles of the cellular self organisation where information and energy are one in the same and will be manifested in what lies between a wave, and it's transitioning into a molecule..we could say much like many ghost information states, it is neither material nor non material.

Going deeper into this strange parallelism, one considers the physics of information in another metaphor superimposed on that of weather systems, which is a local haunting is comparable to seeing the information displayed on a laptop computer in a specific locality with an individual editorial prerogative, and now  let's elevate our comparative positioning to allow our observation of a local network comprised of laptops let's say..in the state of Connecticut..some coherence between the information between individual computers may show up that comprise local conditions, and then elevating ourselves up further in the physics of information we have the local networks melded into a national network, that further distills coherence between the individual, the local and the national, and we could take this to the global level.

Intermediate Fields of Transient Coherency  

Then we find transient spikes of UFO ghost activity, and at the local level, hauntings of ghost information keyed to specific local, individual information fields. The superimposition of entangled fields in the physics of information as the representation of information and energy being one and the same.

Both exhibit PSI chief features. Of course when we speak of information as a series of superimposition of energy fields much like the study of energy made material in the natural world made materialized to our senses, it brings forth the issue of our own nature within a larger nature, ghosts in situ related to the larger field of various states in the system within a physics of information as well as the virtual memory of a proverbial information stream much like a genome in adaptation as well as mutation..

Indeterminate Here Versus There

In this, it is not a matter of divisions as it is multipliers. Instead of this ghost bias projection on a energy field as an intermediate state hat is either uploading or downloading, all of this is occurring spontaneously at a velocity that exceeds the processing of the mind's biological neural net. The transient spikes that are notorious as waves, in UFO phenomenon follow an equally transience of coherence in this networked system

, and the ontology of an intermediate state of information mixes inner and outer in it's transformation between states of storage, transmission and transformation  just as the natural world is observed ...whether it is digestive systems turning this into that, or our turning sensory data into language, or simple eating and being eaten..nothing stands still, hence repeatably as an arbiter of evidence for the anomalous phenomenon around us is a search in the form of a joke we play on ourselves, all the while thinking we are severely separated from this environment as objective observers. The distinctions that lie between a photograph and what is photographed, between representation and it's materialization, between the creation of meaning as a visual language underpinned by our programming language, and thought versus the images that thought construes based on the visual language of these symbols that I am typing and what you read are all provincial qualifiers in relation to  wherein, none apply. Add probability to transient spikes of a keyed coherency that comes and goes according to shared bias projections and you have all the differentiation of the UFO phenomenon as a wave phenomenon that imprints molecular structures.

The Stuff Of Dreams

Are these relationships of transient states of information that link the immaterial to the material, in effect comparable to the Tibetan Buddhist concept of Bardos? In the next post, I will share my own tale of wrangling with the ghouls and hungry creatures of a nightmare, and some observations on our inadvertent and
seemingly illogical expression of emotional states made  manifest in a perverse rationality. A challenging environment of confronting one's own creation of totemic demons...Eating and Being Eaten..where wrong can be right and right can be wrong..a venturing into the emotional states of my "own" neural net. A confrontation within one's Self.

A Consensual Enslavement of Metadata

“When you combine the ability to share evidence of a crime unrelated to foreign intelligence with the … bulk acquisition of every American’s records, you have obvious potential for the use of this to circumvent even ordinary safeguards applying to criminal investigations,” says Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the Cato Institute. “It becomes a completely different story if you’re saying that everyone’s records are in the pool now, and you still have the ability to share information….”

As we are experiencing the impression of moving along toward a porosity of mind lacking rumination the diversity once abloom in the natural world is like a boiling pot left on the stove and the steam rising back into the intangible root of it's origin is a telltale sign of a major extinction event we are participating in, as they say. What is the discernment between a weed and the landscaping? What is left in the pot after we have sterilized the planet for our own genetically modified hot house varieties with a copyright inherent in their DNA? Perhaps we move along to the fortress like planetary seed banks whose assets sleep in suspension..neither living nor dead, which may be a metaphor for a once and future human species, stillborn in the extensions of their tool making, in effect enslaving themselves into a curse of consensus.So, it said, such is the bland and seemingly harmless appearance of that which eats itself and by which, destroys what it loves. Instead of a Brave New World, we have an advanced productivity and efficiency as seen in any society whose operative motive is fear entangled with a pathology of control is a Coward's refuge.

I was recently contemplating just how quickly the covert surveillance program targeting the participants in a theoretical democracy vanished without a trace, like a puddle in Death Valley..slipping beneath the public's increasingly shrinking attention span when I found this insightful article in Wired Magazine by Matt Blaze,
who directs the Distributed Systems Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies cryptography and secure systems. Prior to joining Penn, Blaze was a distinguished member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Labs. Where is this strand of technological DNA heading..? An excellent probe into the potential future is here... http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/20/194513/obamas-crackdown-views-leaks-as.html#.UchNITs3uSo
One observation is that the literally hundreds of conspiracy fantasies have completely dulled the public's discernment to the extent that few can analyse the difference between the projected scenarios conjured in free association and the hard (albeit deeply buried) twine being wrapped around our legs.
In many ways I think this situation is very analogous to the general popular cultures capability to analyse the anomalous to the point where there is no point, all roads lead to a relativity without any demarcations to tell dog poo from floor polish. Dr Blaze adds his observations..
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/phew-it-was-just-metadata-not-think-again/

What Is Yours Is Mine and What Is Mine Is Not Yours

Update: 

I watched the mass media take a page from Noam Chomsky in their hand picking of the usual expert suspects who were either former intelligence experts or politicos in a herd instinct to wrap themselves up in the flag, and of course the President who had a hand picked media outlet to provide a well rehearsed and studied ambivalence on the subject when it came to our pockets being surreptitiously picked.... There is no Edward R Murrow to make the case as he did with McCarthy to say enough of this paranoia as a fulcrum is enough. 

The President citing balancing threats and freedom with secrecy,in perfect doublespeak as his own best apologist wanly defended his secretive mandate utilizing future unnamed threats in  their blanket of garden variety intentionally covert deception that defies the illusions of ....individual liberty as a given... This was done without anyone even indirectly mentioning the more trenchant future threat of domestic intelligence and the dangerous precedent it is setting by secret courts weighing evidence which we have no legal access to. Who is the defense team? We are not "allowed" to know.

We will have brighter teeth and smell like a rose and live to be 120..and that's the point of freedom... isn't it?


“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” 
― George Orwell, 1984

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” 
― Franz Kafka

The last two posts concerned the melding of A Clockwork Orange and Fahrenheit 451, now Orwell can join the conversation along with Bradbury and Burgess...You are in the care (whether you endorse it or not) seemingly benevolent Big Brother who has your best interests at heart, keeping the wolf of Chaos from the door. As Gregory Bateson observed, "The concept of control is a pathology"
A case of lopsided transparency. We see you and you cannot see us. As simple as that and as clear as a one way mirror. Or, is it a house of mirrors? It as if we had accidentally arose from a torpor and found ourselves on stage, and wandering behind what appears to be our living room, and are dumbfounded to find stage hands rigging the lighting, technicians adjusting the sound, actors practicing their lines..all in the service of a sociological scrim. A scam by a self legislated mafioso in a protection racket with taxation.
 Throughout most of modern history, revolutionaries carried guns, now perhaps they blow virtual whistles.
I remember a review of Marshall McLuhan.s first book, and the critic said it was if he were witnessing someone furiously knocking on a sleeping neighbors front door at 3am, attempting to tell them that their house was on fire.
.Bradbury's flat screen televisions that beckon the voyeur to one's own life participating in a cafeteria style menu of fantasies, over a thousand channels in high definition beckon the dangerous proclivities of idle minds that seek solace in a metaphysical WalMart in a corporatism of the mind.. within a hive.
He took a long drag on his cigarette, and mumbled to no one in particular, "It's the illusion of freedom..You are free as long as it fulfills our illusions and your own illusions are your own concern as long as we can pick your pocket."

 Indeed.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-prism-verizon-surveillance/

The Human Aliens Among Us

“If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.” 
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange


Social Fantasies, The Dispossessed, Mass Murder and The Aliens Among Us

Some of you know I have Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, and looking over what I wrote several years ago ( before I taught myself how to curb my overuse of language) some of what I wrote is nearly unintelligible, as it seems I had a obsession with language in of itself as a subject of dissection. Growing up with this disorder , which I learned later is somewhat related to OCD in terms of becoming locked on a subject until every detail is mined and yet if there is a even a hint of chaotic, or unruly ordering  in a social setting or in a convergence of unplanned events, I would retreat, and\ or misinterpret occurrences as what normally constitutes a cue with a normality of responses in most, I was often in varying states of ceaseless guessing as to other's aims if I were from another planet. In some ways this was a disguised gift, being able to see through the demarcation between what individuals say and the sort of illogical entanglements that are present in the human condition, sort of resembling a a befuddled Dr Spock, who remains and is prone to another genetic aspect of my host which is chronic depression, for which medication has largely smoothed over.
It made for a strange childhood.  In school sports, I was flummoxed to the consternation of my peers and gym teachers equally. In high school, I ditched every class, and yet....while in grade school, I was reading at a college level.  I was bored by the curriculum beginning in third grade, and this led to a downward descent into a larger alienation, that culminated in my leaving high school and home at the age of seventeen.
There is more to my own story and as regular readers know, I very seldom make myself the subject of this blog, and the reason for this diversion is to recognize the socially dispossessed and the lack of role models that these individuals can relate to. Especially in light of the mass murders that have become a societal normalcy, that, more often than not, are perpetrated and planned by young men  whose motives seem alien to us. However, I have had my taste of wearing but a small portion of their alienation and I suppose, in varying degrees, we all have.
In the last post, I wanted to express the increasing abstractions of our culture that are built largely upon fantasies, which then also afflicts darker cells of various synthetic play acting, such as "shooter games" or brighter teeth, corporate promotion of psychoactive social drugs, that reminds me, at times of a cross between Fahrenheit 451 and a Clockwork Orange.

" Experts" can cannot recognize the embedding of  the social deniability of ritualized and the accompanying glorification of violence, the demonizing of our political "enemies" the language sublimated in the "wars" against drug use ( other than caffeine, alcohol and tobacco), wars against poverty, wars against illegal immigration and the corresponding rise in gang activity that takes these role models as a channeling form of suggestion and places them in a mode of self empowerment, much like capitalism run a muck in a sociopathic form of Darwinism, much like the sublimated desires of some multinationals. The superimposition of these common traits of normality reminds me of Gurdjieff's observation the the study of human psychology is the study of abnormal psychology.

All of this brings me to the story of Temple Grandin, who recently has been a fulcrum for my ruminations on the loss of human life, the loss of social recognition, the loss of the gifts that the dispossessied have, all of which seem to indicate a judgement upon appearances alone, re: the brighter teeth, the more youthful appearances, the alienation that those that are different in their behavior often face either humiliation at the pleasure of others, or worse, out right torture.
For those of you who are curious as to the insights Temple offers, follow this link. You may be surprised.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-temple-grandin-20130611-dto,0,2848012.htmlstory

The Pun of Realities and Good Enough

"With the swipe of an airbrush, I command thee"

The Bane of Consensus 

As I age, I notice the rise in the velocity of ritualized sociopathic behavior in the aggregate sum as evidenced by play acting as a sort of withering mind balm that has sharp teeth that can tear flesh and yet the anesthesia of misdirecting attention as a antidote has proved effective against feeling the repercussions of self mutilation.

While reality as formulated by the language we use to describe our experiential realm might be a series of puns, one could take the opposite approach and recognize language as a formulator of conceptual realities...that in of itself  informs us that our terms are good enough as good enough is as good as good gets and is this the highest bar of our curiosity?
Then one considers if language itself has stopped evolving in the experiential range of descriptions in terms of accuracy, outside of the shortcuts we term "slang"
Perhaps literacy is not literacy at all. At the lowest rung, we could say that the most literate among us can use language to utter complete nonsense, that the good enough crowd nod their heads to in a complete state of possession. While we certainly do not live in a world of bobble heads, it is discomforting to ruminate on the mandates of stricture set as writ by the lowest common denominator. The error of making no distinction between a descriptive word and what is being described as if we would not know our elbow if it were not attached to our torso. Perhaps the literal and the literate are one in the same as far as a tunnel vision of experiential cognizance as R.A Wilson suggested.

Fahrenheit 451 Revisited

Burroughs describing language as a control system, more accurately as " a virus." Of course, Burroughs had a highly developed sense of sardonic irony. Perhaps as our society becomes more "productive and efficient" without knowing or having any compelling reason to utilize the same skepticism applied to the paranormal to the subtle and deeper slide into sociological control systems like a  blind watchmaker who considers order as coherence as applied to stabilizing behaviors into predictable patterns, but we know this coherence can also describe psychotic behavior, when the audience is comprised of the compromised in abeyance to going along to get along which in of itself is a chaotic system of pretense and drift.

The most ardent atheist and among the most spiritual such as Krishnamurti recognized that theology and warfare are joined at the hip, and both suggest a pathless path is best advised in terms of avoiding entanglement. Which brings us to Lao Tze and the science fiction author, Ursula LeGuinn,.whose superlative interpretation of The Way should be required reading for high school students, who don't require rote memorization but perhaps in a deeper sense, need to learn how to learn.by discernment rather than follow the dots.

It strikes me that the indoctrination of synthetic semiotics and reality as blurring fantasy with interpretation has increased steadily as a form of narcotic balm against the increasing slings and arrows of racing over the cliff while newscasters are largely lifestyle councilors. No news is good news. The editorial purview of consensus mixed with deniability, boiled with fantasy makes a elixir for the ills  it creates, students as mass murderers in a computer game, psychologically dismembered veterans, that are met by sociological narcissism as a creed.
Look younger, feel better, whiter teeth, smell better..Why clean the outside of the cup when you are not worried about what it contains?
And so it goes...The disparity between Knowledge and Being is striking and it seems none of us are immune from being struck whether you are in kindergarten or in dotage.

Note:
The illustrations for this piece are by John Padlo