Glen, et al -
Here is a response from a friend/colleague (some of you knew him when he
was at BIOS) who attempted to CC FRIAM and I'm sure it bounced as he is
not a subscriber.
- Steve
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The nature of Discussion Fora
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:56:16 -0700
From: David R. Thompson <david.thomp...@storyresolution.org>
To: Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com>
CC: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Steve,
Thank you for forwarding this twitching message. I realize that this
thread is probably long past its prime, though I wanted to mention my
appreciation. The term "twitching" bugged me at first, and this was a
good thing. My pejorative interpretation poked at me, probably because
its connotation rings with some important truth for me.
My interest in our storied lives is parallel with my interest in the
Buddhist notion of our "conditioned" lives, our lives wherein we break
the world world down into - this vs. that -, and see our arbitrary
ontologies as real, and see the entities in our arbitrary ontologies as
containing their own (self generated) essence. Though the entities of
our conditioned views are powerfully useful fictions of individuality,
when mistaken as "real" they (and we) become unwitting actors in
unquestionable stories (people, trees, cars, chairs ...).
Put another way, if I connect this with my understanding of the radical
and 2500 year old Buddhist view, the twitching (and the ensuing dukkha
driving the twitching) arise from seeing our useful fictions, our
conditioned worlds and the stories we weave about them, as hard reality.
When our stories are hard reality, rather than a way of attempting to
negotiate our infinite ignorance in the world, we act from them as the
"subject" of our doing. When lost in stories as the subject from which
we act, we cannot see or question them, their relative nature is
unthinkable, so we twitch and dance to our stories.
My understanding is that, when we wake up to see the practicality of our
stories and ontologies, that they are useful fictions and partial
understandings, and that essence is only in the dance of the broader
interaction, we can make our "subject" views and stories into "objects".
We can act directly on our operational stories and become authors. And,
as evinced by the discipline required to retain authorship ("the path"),
it is hard to be in authorship in a world where so many forces tell us
that we must act in someone elses' stories to be safe. Creating and
maintaining these roles and perceptions of ourselves is the core of the
pain pointed to in anatta (not self, or no self).
Thank you for the insightful "twitching" term Glen! It has stuck in my
mind for a couple of weeks.
David
______________________________________________________
David R. Thompson -- Problem Resolution Advocate
Blog : http://storyresolution.org/
Email: david.thomp...@storyresolution.org
home : 509.624.1018
cell : 509.263.0792
Clumsy is the dance of one brain clapping
______________________________________________________
On 3/19/2013 3:08 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
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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