Whenever There Is A Decline In Righteousness And An Increase In Sinfulness, O Arjun, At That Time I Manifest Myself On Earth. To Protect The Righteous, To Annihilate The Wicked, And To Reestablish The Principles Of Dharma I Appear On This Earth, Age After Age. - SBD 4:8:7
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you â Friedrich Nietzsche
Kill them wherever you come upon them and drive them out of the places from which they have driven you out.
For persecution is far worse than killing. - Quran 2:191
phenomenology (phenomenological reduction as an intermediate (psychological) representation, a temporary tool) can help turn this around by helping us see beyond the folly of instrumental reason in everyday life regardless of culture.
there is twfold risk in this enterprise. firstly, that it can seem to to claim more than its worth, in that it can, to certain persuasions appear to imply a metaphysics, if that of meaning alone. the second is that it creates an ontology. we equip against these risks with the âmapâ metaphor, the concept of emergence, and other arguments logically irrefutable.
while remaining within uncertainties of uncertainty and bounded rationlityâ this unfortunately boils down to a new spiritual, scientific, emancipatory language-and-grammar-agnostic, contextless ontology for holistic human upliftment into the next millennias.
â
âAs if one could escape it by turning a switch. Thatâs why I say you canât turn off TV. It can turn you off, but you canât turn it off. You canât make it disappear, but it can make you disappear.â - [Rick Roderick]
âhistory breaks down into images, not storiesâ - [[Walter Benjamin]]
State sponsored broadcasting was never a glamourous enterprise, rather an undertaking born out of a necessity. Governments had to do it, not as a means of revenue generation but mostly as outreach (especially during wartime when it was imperative that news of the troops reached their families).
Thus was technology pressed into the service of war but it wasnât without peacetime utility, human capacity to communicate was set to grow by leaps and bounds, and it did.
To justify the peacetime uses of radio and later television in the pre cable-tv era, states had to present the technology as benign. For one thing it made capitalism more viable, by cutting the alienation and loneliness of modern industrial life with 11 seconds of entertainment so improbable, no human could resist getting addicted forever. This obviously opened up avenues for business the very least of which was adverstising.
but advertising was not the summum bonnum, though it was incentive for those with the means to ensure at least one TV ends up in every home (until Nixon gets elected). Whatever had been the motives of the powers that be, it was an idea whose time had come.
But it is certainly worth the curiosity as to what the policymakers thought of it at the time.
It helped the case that in the US the radio was popularised in a grassroot-academic manner and given the war, was possibly not enquired into in detail before being launched
But television, where there has been a lot of intellectual enquiry, despite the sparse enlightened rebuke has managed to spread and morph mimetically, within a few decades, into screens of all sizes which now also respond to feedback.
The âprogress in the world of bitsâ is quite nascent compared to the matured technology of signal broadcast, but the crossroads at which AI stands forces us to take a pause and observe the road travelled in this direction.
It was a Hideggerian miracle to see TV grow up and to grow up with it - in that it connected being with itself, by putting both being and itself at great risk. No doubt the TV screen was the first inanimate object to get smashed at the instantiation of every revolution since.
But there is a negative edge to the technology, which is seldom discussed - broadcast itself is a kind of artificial general intelligence - and it is born out of a void (the void in vaccum tubes, in CRTs, and in fiber optic cables etc). It would be no stretch of imagination to say that the TV and the screens it spwned have become the very essence of negation (in a Hegelian sense) propelling history for the past few decades.
Lack is the mother of all invention perhaps ecause the desire of DNA to push forward is simply a void, for the Gutenberg press, the dye can be seen as the lack representative.
Last I checked, DNA wasnât motivated by a positive reason, it evolves out of a very lack of reason to evolve and this is reflected in all human endeavor. Any logically positivist argument for why the state of afairs is the way it is can only have ultimate utility as a criticism of existence.
The âBlack Mirrorâ aspect of the screen, should have been known at the time of radio went global, however, perhaps the screen was just an extension of radio yet to be consciously discovered. It seems obvious to state that today, man is better is equiped with the perils and pitfalls communicating through screens brings. Yet, it is unable to move forward in the direction of the next stage in the life of this AGI. Where the rate of progress should have hastened it has stalled. Progress got substituted with âgrowthâ but that is quite another book, perhaps for someone else. Lest one assume that what I seek to propose here is the real reason interest rates went negative or the yield curve started inverting with creasing frequency.
I was compelled to inquire into the history of (consequently the philosophy behind) broadcast in general and broadcast systems in particular because any truly global AGI that connects the homo sapien in a greater manner has to be a kind of a broadcast, nevermind the âAIâ bit. For what will any AI that becomes the âmeasure of all thingsâ ultimately do but broadcast its measurements?
I often joke that a truly sentient AI will commit suicide the very moment it gains sentience but sentience isnât the same as being âgenerally intelligentâ. General intelligence is a logically positive entity while sentience isnât.
That to broadcast is to control, was well understood by the time, hence the state chose to be the first mover in the space, but what was perhaps less understood was that conversely, to be broadcasted to is also a measure of control.
Perhaps these things were marketed as harmless because they had proved their utility in war and had obvious entertainment and educative value, but maybe more importantly, nobody was sure how things may pan out as a result of greater long distance communication over decades.
It isnât that big a span of time from the first radio broadcast to today. However, the story of the genesis of electronic means and mediums of communication, and how the masses were expected to perceive them in a civil setting is fossilised quite transparently in the history of the evolution of the insignias of various state broadcasters.
Since this volume, and the story of being it purports to present treats substance largely as a medium for spirit (in a strongly Hegelian interpretation), it is ideal to scaffold the idea on the very primitives of how the very act of perception has been treated in recent history.
It is only natural to begin a new ontological endeavour by telling the story of how (state) broadcasting - a metaphor for perception freshly turned inside out - was itself perceived in the early days and how that understanding led us to this moment.
Our aim is to first understand precisely how broadcasting is a pathological symptom of an evolving consciousness, thereby reducing to a minimum, the prescriptive aspect of our ontological claims.
| Service | Year | logo depicts |
|---|---|---|
| BBC | 19XX | Word |
| NHK | 19XX | Word |
| PBS | 19XX | Community |
| DD | 19XX | Feedback |
| CT-USSR | 19XX | Science |
if television delivers people, the internet delivers gods
If Control over broadcasting is an excercise in controlling society1, then it stands to reason that with the internet, the control returns back to the society. If then, it is true that âtelevision delivers people to the advertisersâ, the internet may be said to deliver people unto themselves, making everyone an advertiser.
This naturally delivers the existing power and control structures into an uncanny valley and renders the screen a mephistophelian agent creating a narcissistic double-bind outside of which exists only a vacuous, primordial existence - fertile grounds for war, revolution and other regressive ideas diametrically opposite to status-quo.
in 2011 I wrote about the futility of taking a plurality of metaphysics a-la Latour et al to mean . Today, it appears that a âsplitâ in metaphysics is but one end of a dilectic (not only because mind tends to think in thirds so you cannot reduce it to psych 101 but also because thirds seem to be a universal pattern, think golden ratio, pi etc) â is metaphysics reducible to a philosophy of mind? largely, yes.
this mind-created dialectial of metaphysics informs much of our everyday lives. the trinity emerges as images of âyesâ, ânoâ, âmaybeâ choices to attend across each waking moment.
at the maybe end of things is Latours plurality, where it all fizzles out in relativistic frequencies of matter touching (or appearing to touch) matter, maybe is the realm of the second law of thermodynamics, the synthesis of our metaphyics generating machine of a mind. maybe is the land of the multiplexed.
i donât mean to endorse any ideas about the ingesion and digestion of events by time, but the order in which causality pierces through the three parts of any system seems to be of some significance. the usual filler about yes/no
the fact that all 3 parts of fruedian psych can be talked about in the first place brings forth the unfalsifiability of any brain-in-a-vat or other such homonculus, zenoâs paradox etc. these are now essentially philosopy by analogy ad-infinitum. i.e. once it is conscious that there is a sbconscious and things that lurk even benetah that, any modeling by conscious design is bound to be incomplete. it also makes metaphysics a useless appendage of the history of philosophical thought. epistemic failures of the post truth era illustrate with grand precision how the altar of metaphysics is all but a ruin.
so if not the narrative, surely the substance must be the holy grail.
see the moment one is able to accept the futility of the packaging, reality unboxed - reality as in history with a capital H, the symbolic real that hurts - one can indulge in unraveling all sorts of human plight,
beyond this recrsive phenomenological redction lie ontic questions and the curious may find that those ontic curiosities share a long and old border with theological itches like the problem of evil etc, at which point the search loops back to language, language games and other signifier/signifed interpretations where Habermas and Chomsky and Derrida have covered most of whatâs there to cover.
there is an openned to accept as this reduction to be a metaphysics in itâs own right, but the shift is paradigmatic. which isnât the point, the point is an synthesis-as-an-abstraction, sense data as feedback, however prophylactic.
shankracharyaâs nondualism will lead to an understanding of layers of unreal or hyperreal that combines to construct reality, but it is easy to skip how the oberserver is part of this nondual lasagna they behold.
which brings us to the impossibility of private language-games, although such games are not improbable to come about. think marksonâs wittgensteinâs mistressâŚtime out of mindâŚ
but layers/waves are again one half of the picture, consider the standard model of particle physics where the constituents are in some sense irreducible further, and are not waves, but are immutable primitives appearing in time, there could be no dearth of such primitives.
the whole triptych is the uncertainty principle where observation falls and consciousness becomes largely a juggling act, educated guesswork - stopping just short of precarious survival.
modern life is by and large an act of automated signal processing, any real decision-making happens on cue, triggered by money, lust, hunger, or other ancient motives.
scientific management (taylor) and the industrial revolution brought forward the baby boombers to believe in the power of instrumental reason, until the instrument took over with the internet.
as man melts yet futher into machine, he is bound for some spiritual awakening, as thoughts become machine logs, ontology becomes transparent. one would be, as it were, able to inquire into the reasons stuff exists. however, to communicate back such findings to ones with opaque ontologies would be another story. at the bottom of all such endeavors one finds such recursive definitions of truth such as deterministic ideologies of will, compulsion, right, might, even money.
while the things that tide us over are important, perhaps exactly how they are moored into our lives deserves some attention.
in studies of willpower, we find the metaphor of the boy riding an elephant. the boy intends to control the elephant but the beast is too strong so the boy has to strategizeâŚ. all strategy is maybe âŚin other words a top-down view of control over consciousness, more centralisation etc⌠moreover this model of consiousness doesnât lend well to democratic ideals⌠more like fascism by two parties ⌠the whole human has to control himself, the elephant, and the boy- in this case signifying conscious. in the normal course of things, this happens on autopiliot, societal stuctures take over at an early age and commandeer lives into neat little cubicles and retirement homes.
but determinism is also a metaphysics which is also capable of being seen as a plurality (eg death is a determined marker, but there are plurality of modes), in which case one could argue for reality sutured along the lines of wave functions collapsing, many worlds etc. which conveniently ignores the here and now.
deterministic metaphysics also subsumes process oriented philosophies as processes are inherently plural and tend to be on the maybe side of our trinity. after all, the difference between coal and diamond is one of process.
if it is self-evident then that the source of the multiplexed is a singular baud of information acting upon the many senses at any given moment, why do we end up shipwrecked and washed ashore the maybe beach so often throughout the day? it has to do with the modem itself, which in our case, is called the human body - an eternally negating principle. the human body (our collective no) is so thoroughly a negating principle that it negates itself into naught over time.
consider the rhizome that is human body devoid of any motive, would a motiveless state not resemble some sort of an enlightened state? however measured. in other symbols, how would one differentiate between a motiveless bag of skin and bones from a soul?
the rhizome is amoral, amorphous, objectiveless piece of timeâs intestines swimming in space.. no amount of indoctrination can bring morality to it, in fact most of modern life is perparation to keep morality at bay. no amount of gym can shape a soul, no hand-me-down objectives germinates into a mission. before you know it, itâs the next quarter or the taxes are due again.
surely, if the highest purpose of body devoid of metaphysics is negation, any measure of success attributed to it in this regard - of having served its essence - must come from measuring the quality and quantity of its throughput.
time is the only throughput of body. time is inscrutable in a manner everything that happens in it, or is layered on top of it (however you choose to dress causality), every human narrative is scrutable almost to its roots if you look. it does not take a synesthete to detect trails of oil in the shadows of the Google Chrome icon. most modern narratives, including war have outrun the very basis of their existence. time isnât one of those, if indeed it is a ânarrativeâ - which is to say a product of consciousness.
to assume a time apriori is erroneous not only because the subjective perception of history varies between people and Kantian antinomies go only so far in mapping sense data to causality, but also because to assume it in a value-neutral theoretical framework is untenable. firstly because time aposteriori offers a more stable handle on events that follow time, and a limited liability on the obeserver in case of time-symmetry since this implies self-caused time as opposed to space-caused time. secondly, time aposteriori leaves no room for any the flying spaghetti monster type of conspiracy theories. the paradox here is an observation of time cannot occur outside of time, so to spare yourselves a few lifetimes of inquiry: time is always already aposteriori.
What the Kantian antinomies do get right, is this sort of disjointed plurality of the units of apparent causality. The idea being that time can be and is sliced differently by different sense organs. But where the antinomies fall short is in explaining how this disjointed sense data is demultiplexed back into a unity called awareness.
kant was doing the same thing as chatgpt, generalising from available rationality - but the available rationality is perhaps more preoccupied with space on account of extension.
time is the sublime substance, the context for space or even spirit if you consider it as a extension / shadow duality. extension is dual as it casts a shadow. shadows, as a by product of light, for example, are at the fag end of the supply chain of photons
here is the longest epistemological journey anyone can ever take between slices of realities in the adwaita sandwich - or from the synthesis back to the thesis. from the vibration of an ear drum to a distant schooltime memory. Which isnt so much an invocation of Proust as it is an invitation into an area of inquiry not often touched by academic philosophers.
Barring intentionally reductive approaches such as process philosphies and excluding impractical, extremist ideas from Hume to Wittgenstein, could phenomenology lead to a better understanding of the causal landscape?
perhaps, but the Cartesian chokehold on our understanding becomes a bottleneck. i can doubt the fact that iâm thinking - there are indeed situations where a brainwashed personâs testimonial ownership of thoughts can be proved to be more transitory than an ordinary citizenâs. in other words, âje penseâ but there are situations where the âjeâ cannot be clearly defined. most clearly, for example, in the event of mental illnesses.
[[in any case, modern life is an excercise of swimming in ads, who isnât brainwashed? capitalism seems to run on psychological trauma, however scitzophrenia as a symptom of late capitalism is another band in the maybe spectrum. perhaps, a gateway drug leading to greater empires.]] context?
to balance things out, reason affords beings an acceptance of the positivism and cacophony as part of the adwait, achieving a comfortable compromise between matter and spirit.
spirit does not have parts. it is always in motion as a whole bubbling towards the higher echelons of awareness, it is the case that this motion is thwarted by inattention.
inattention, more than anything drives most causality, making history just a random sequence of alternatingly creative and destructive forces at play.
fukuyamaâs epitaph was a botched job, but âthe beginning of historyâ would not have sold books. today, we are at yet another crossroads. whether to begin the history of gods, shedding the skin of mortality and arriving inches closer to the ultimate goal of spirit, to be indistinct. OR to keep the status quo alive, war, famine, and disease on a looping newsreel and not budge an inch from the past. essentially, people will continue to mistakenly identify the past as history, but history is not simply the past.
causal inference between two distinct events is simply habit of perception. this can be attested by the insistence of several therapy techniques like emdr, cbt etc. to bring attention back between the recesses of cause and effect. effectively pausing the subvocalised anguish, a psychic coalition dressed up as language and the conditions necessary for language.
what binds a moment to the next is a kind of meeting. an ancounter arranged in indeterminacy by a âmaxwellâs demonâ, a finite state machine generator of time as perceived, the substrate or substance of greek and later philosophy. more precisely, even the process of mitosis attests to this kind of spooky action at a distance. described hereforth as a thermodynamic exception, this ex-machina is an assumption i must make to allow for my own ignorance and give structure to my theory.
âthe world (continuity and distinction) is an outright fiction of the imaginationâ - Deleuze
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univocity_of_being#Gilles_Deleuze
â does this tie into the mathematical concept of limits?
kantâs antinomies also hold true in the regard hat they imply somes sort of a filter somewhere at the interface of noumenon and phenomenon of time that, passing on only the by-product to the senses, while the source, the âyesâ of this trinity, is on the other end of the filter.
my requiem to causality cannot come from within it.
but any spiritual awakening is by any definition of spirituality, supposed to be a hellish rideâŚ
epistemic judgement by faith alone. a kind of a postscript to hegel that kierkegaard was too churlish to write.
ref : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6581757-prince-of-networks?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=yUqUYn0ZZa&rank=1
to live in old tales is to die there, and most die there, to wake up is to start a new one
why is age measured in years? it ought to be measured in the smallest unit of time possible, nothing inherently special about surviving a revolution on a spinning rock, âhereâs charlie at 12 thousand seconds oldâ, what is so symbolic or significant about a revolution around the sun that we have to cling emotionally to it and make our calendars around it? if its just abount having sth to count, one can never count anything more precious than a single draw of air, exhaled with the total awareness of the bodyâs situation at a plantary level. compassion is the only thing i am competitive about, so if i get shot over it, how can i help?
to invent a unit is to measure
[1] [Richard Serra - Television Delivers People], 1973
[2] Dakshinamurti Stotra