I’ve not been sleeping well recently. Tonight I woke from dozing at 1:30am, convinced I needed to organise the donation of a three-piece suite of lounge furniture to a youth centre. It took about twenty minutes for the conviction to die down, and during that time I was convinced that I’d been obsessed by this fictional furniture for about 18 months.

Lashed to the grille of a cultural juggernaut careening towards the grill of an entropic meatgrinder.

Chill out in our heated garden!

18kW of heating for three cunts smoking fags outside the pub.

If I sit near an air conditioner, I crisp up. They burn my skin. Cold, dry death pours from them. 3kW pumped into the atmosphere to cool the Firetrap concession in the men’s clothing department of House of Fraser.

The resource wars of the 2020s were hilarious: they were fought definitionally because we were running out of exactly the things we needed to build technologically advanced weapons, it was decreed by those in social strata high above the melee that the fighting should be fought with rusty old crowbars and blunt knives. And as we had plenty of people, but little energy, the dwindling spoils would go to the side with the largest army, the most aggressive warriors. The solution was personnel-intensive and exciting to watch, if you could afford not to fight and to own a television.

A group of schoolchildren young enough to wear that “disproportionately large brain casing” look flow past the window of the cafe, onto the pavement of St Johns Hill, mingling with passers by, walking past newspaper hordings: Joesf Fritzl pleads guilty; Jade Goody’s mother breaks down in tears outside her daughter’s house; Jade Goody’s eyes sink into their sockets. This is the age of high-definition, high-speed data that hoses continuity of thought, washes the wisdom from our collective mind.

We’ve been pumping entropy out of our stupid boat, and we’re about to be broadsided by a huge wave.

The ego is a self-perpetuating, self-defending language-tornado, an autopoetic complex of ideas about What You Are – although the ideas aren’t really about You qua You at all, they’re about each other. Self-supporting threads of illusion from which a straw man self-weaves. The ego is a spinning-together of an ecosystem of linguistic thoughts. Our raw, animal consciousness/awareness is infected, and often obscured, by the linguistic ego: we bocome aware of ideas, not of the present moment. Perhaps a major part of the responsibility of a parent is to ease a child through the development of the ego: to help it deal with the suffering that can so easily result from linguistic identification of self with ego, with ideas.

“You are so naughty,” says a mum to her daughter, dragging her by her arm away from the sugar station.

It’s us or the air conditioning. Destroy air conditioning.

Components don’t make sense outside the context of a Whole. And the Whole is a persistent network that persists because of the way its components interact.  There’s probably a discussion here somewhere about a bench, which is nothing more than the ongoing interaction between nuts, bolts, washers, planks and bars.

And if there isn’t a clumsy dumbing-down of Gerald Edelman’s ideas about consciousness as a beautifully structured and complex re-entrant tumble of activity in neural pathways in this blog already, then that’s a glaring omission which I’m sure will be corrected before too long.

And obviously, this project is literally all about the string: seeing the world as emerging from the spinning together and the unravelling or fraying of… entities which themselves emerge from the spinning together and unravelling of other entities…

So tonight I was at a Buddhism discussion session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre. The session focussed on Ethics. There was a quote in the reading material for the previous week about ethical living tending to generate conditions which help improve the quality of meditation, and ease the path to the gaining of wisdom. I was reminded of it tonight, and it felt quite powerful, and I had a quick mental image of ethical progress feeding into progress in meditation, which then led to wisdom and conditions which made ethical decisions easier in the future.

The vision was quite abstract: slightly like a celtic knot, but always in motion. Like porpoise acrobatics, three dolphins tumbling around each other. But… it was saying that progress towards a Buddhist style of improvement emerges from the interaction of ethics, meditation, and insight. Each drives the other on. I’m very tempted to call it a virtuous cycle but that would be to impoverish this vision of how the process flows, because I think it might be exactly the same process that Edelman describes when he talks about the spinning-together of consciousness from recursively stimulating, pseudo-cyclic, tumbling, rolling neural activity. And if we accept the claims of atomist chemists and physicists – that interactions between objects are based on interactions between atoms, between electrons in orbit around atomic nuclei – then, at a sub-atomic level, the relationships that hold a bench or a chair together are also mediated by tumbling, intertwining electrons and nuclei.

Which means that, when you study one aspect of a whole Thing, or topic, you’re probably studying a thread which tumbles around and facilitates or hinders or becomes other threads; and that it’s the total interaction of those threads that spins the whole Thing together.

I did some work in the morning, honest. Then I went for a meditation session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre.

Metta Bhavana (development of loving-kindness) today, and the first time I’ve been to a Centre session for a couple of years. New faces, but on the way in I experienced an interesting feeling of something like “You should definitely be doing this.”

The session leader was talking about imagining the various people we were visualising throughout the various stages of the meditation, then noting our response to them, and sitting with the response, whether positive or negative, for a while before gently trying to suggest a more positive response.

I thought that was very interesting – I had a quick chat with her afterwards and she was saying that she’d struggled herself with “wishing people well,” chanting to the visualised characters, “may you be happy,” because she eventually felt that she was missing her own, genuine response to them. I’ve got a feeling I’m so left-brain that it’ll be years before I even connect with my genuine responses to the people I visualise during a Metta Bhavana meditation, but that idea of separating the wishes you’re chanting from your own emotional responses, then responding to the response with loving-kindness, struck a chord.

Just thought I’d note it here, so I can mull it again later.

For years I’ve read articles and discussions about what it is that magically separates human beings from other animals; I suppose sister-faith religious traditions make it difficult for us to accept fully that we simply are animals, and that in fact nothing marks us out as being different… and that there’s nothing wrong in that.

Ten to fifteen years ago, one of these mantras seemed to hold that language marked us out as being amazing: we can discover, and share with each other, the nature of the world, the truth about the universe. But subsequent experience and different channels of reading have left me thinking that language’s descriptive aspect is actually quite patchy – possibly so patchy that, the more you examine it, the more you find that any meaningful truth is either (1) not really meaningful, (2) false, or (3) inexpressible in language.

Which leaves us viewing language as a medium in which a species of animal coordinates its social, tribal interactions. From the inside, it feels meaningful; from the outside (and this would mean outside the realm of human affairs), it looks like social coordination.

Ants communicate in a chemical medium: hormones and gastric exchange. Bluntly stated, ants sick up on each other to “tell each other [things like] that the nest needs patching” – or, viewed from the outside, to coordinate processes like nest-patching behaviour. Our anthropomorphic tendency to attribute perceived meaning to the antpuke (”my regurgitated fishcakes mean mend the roof“) stems from the way we feel meaning ourselves. When we look at ants, it’s easy to see through the illusion: it makes sense that the puked-on ant isn’t really thinking, “Crikey, really? A hole in the nest? The rain will get in, we can’t have that. I should do my duty and go to help.”

But… to what extent is the meaning that we ourselves feel really, really meaningful? Ants don’t coordinate their behaviour in language, but then we’re not very good at coordinating our behaviours by throwing up on each other. “Look, it must be human beings’ way of coordinating vomit-cleaning behaviours.”

This is quite good – I like the contrast between Robert Wright’s polite chat with Steven Pinker and his grim slugfest with Dan Dennett…

So anyway, I’m walking down the passage that runs through Allders, connecting George Street to North End. A primitive retail intestine, splattered with symbiont bacterial concession stalls that facilitate the absorption of cash into Allders’ corporate self. Continue Reading »

These days I’m trying to fight the tendency to project my feelings out onto aspects of what I call “the world outside”. Continue Reading »

A while ago I read Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am A Strange Loop (out in paperback this June!) which contains a description of Hofstadter’s earliest memory of being conscious: looking at his reflection in a mirror, and realising that there was – or perhaps more accurately, generating – a conscious entity inside the head of the person reflected. Continue Reading »