Glen -
This is twitchin awesome! But for some unexplained reason, I feel
pithed about it. (lame puns intended, punning being one of *my* twitches).
I'm still enjoying my illusion of free-will and get a little skitchy
around overstated pre-determination (or a fully mechanistic model of the
universe?). This is probably just a twitch itself?
I do think that a great deal of what we (think we) do consciously is
some level of "twitch" as you call it. Coupled dynamical systems, all
of us in one great grand ensemble of twitching frog-legs all wired
together... or in Stephenson's Diamond Age like the "Drummers" (sorry
Carl). I also accept the idea that *much* of what we think we
understand or control is just a post-hoc rationalization of what
happened without even our involvement much less understanding.
You have referred to yourself in the past as a "simulant" which I took
to mean that you are a professional creator of "simulations" (simulation
scientist?) despite the fact that it was too close to "Replicant" from
Blade Runner and sounded more like you were claiming that "you" were
just a somewhat modularized region in a giant simulation.
This of course wanders me into Fredkin/Wolfram/Chaitin land where their
digitally updated version of Leibnitz' Monist Metaphysics is expressed
variously as Digital Philosophy or Digital Physics.
In some circles it is a truism the "we are what we eat"... which
suggests that someone who "eats simulations" for a living is likely to
"become a simulation" at least in their own mind. Or perhaps it is your
twitch that you *are* a simulation scientist *because* you see the world
as one grande simulation and the ones you create and execute are just
modularized simulations within the simulation?
In my offline conversations with Rich Murray, it is becoming apparent
that we (he and I) share the feeling that by giving over to
"consciousness" being *at best* the unique ability to observe (but maybe
not to effect) the unfolding universe. It is why I am entertained by
such as Bohm's Rheomode and of course Digital Physics/Philosophy... the
possibility that even if "I" am mostly an illusion, "I" am also not
completely an illusion.
Oh Ego, twitch on you surly beast!
- Steve
Steve Smith wrote at 03/19/2013 01:20 PM:
I am glad that you *also* appreciate the list's freewheeling style and
seek more engagement in a broader sense (if I read you correctly).
Maybe this discussion will help encourage a broadening in the
participation...
I don't think of it so much as freewheeling. I think of it more as a
compulsion. Owen's persistent attempts to find a homunculus inside
Google is a better example than brain farts for a better definition of
time. And it goes back to what I was trying to say in the last e-mail.
We (humans, actors, initiators of causal chains of events) have only a
SINGLE effector available to us: twitch. We spastically twitch about
because that's the only thing we can do.
The resulting patterns are NOT caused by any intelligence, plan, goal,
objective, belief, intention, etc. within the actor. The resulting
patterns are an artifact of the collection of actors twitching about in
the open universe surrounding us.
It's only in hindsight ... or with an epiphenomenal or finitely limited
attention span that we "recognize" patterns and, post-hoc, impute
intelligence, plans, objectives, etc. onto some arbitrarily sliced out
kernel of the pattern.
----
Given that, I explain running forward with our own reality-disconnected
systems of assumptions as life's imperative: we twitch and we just keep
twitching. We just wiggle and squirm about in our own juices until some
other wiggling squirming process changes the juices in some happenstance
way.
So, when you're quaffing pints with that guy who just won't shut up
about, say, football, then you can see him for what he is: a twitch with
few degrees of freedom. He must twitch and football is all he has to
twitch about!
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