Understanding Psychopathy For the Future

Psychopathy is probably the most misunderstood, misconstrued, yet most widely used term for a concept in psychology which is at the center of a very vast and somewhat hidden reality that heavily affects just about everything in the immediate world of what humanity has constructed and what humanity has come from. Its definition isn't a simple one, muddled even further as the word often goes beyond its technical definition and general nature of incidence into popular misunderstandings from the term's semantic quality, involving connotations of the occurrence of symptoms such as delirium, mania, hysteria, and psychosis, symptoms which in their pure meanings simply are not at all a part of being a psychopath. To define psychopathy is to define a disorder which has only been defined in not so cohesive medical criteria during the past 60 or so years, a certain kind of medical category, which ranges from conflicting specifications including "antisocial personality disorder" and dissocial personality disorder with confusing subtypes in between like sociopaths and asocial personalities. However, the focus of this article will be on those who fit the term psychopath due to lack of remorse, mercy, honesty, and the ability to get away without anybody noticing for the most part; Those who get into power for the sake of being empowered and not to get into power to use it for empowering the lives of humans in general, and are therefore those who compose the vast majority of persons in positions of power from presidents to policemen, ploying possessive and passive-aggressive pain to the populace by pounding out only partially true paradigms. They manipulate reality in the minds of many by setting up straight lies, by misappropriating and misrepresenting ideals, and suppressing those who stand against them without flinching once.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." -Lord Acton

This famous phrase was realized in a scientific study called "Power and Perspectives Not Taken". Here's a summary, and the skinny so you don't get distracted by all these links:

Abstract:

Four experiments and a correlational study explored the relationship between power and perspective taking. In Experiment 1, participants primed with high power were more likely than those primed with low power to draw an E on their forehead in a self-oriented direction, demonstrating less of an inclination to spontaneously adopt another person's visual perspective. In Experiments 2a and 2b, high-power participants were less likely than low-power participants to take into account that other people did not possess their privileged knowledge, a result suggesting that power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others' perspectives. In Experiment 3, high-power participants were less accurate than control participants in determining other people's emotion expressions; these results suggest a power-induced impediment to experiencing empathy. An additional study found a negative relationship between individual difference measures of power and perspective taking. Across these studies, power was associated with a reduced tendency to comprehend how other people see, think, and feel.

There's some words whose definitions are starting to become very apparent within the popular consciousness.

From here:

Hegemony: Most simply, hegemony is a state of leadership where a large group of people are dominated by an individual or by a smaller group of people. In this class, it refers more specifically to the ideologies which control the thoughts and behaviors of most people in a large social group. In classical Marxist theory, hegemony is the dominance of the upper class over the working class, and hegemonic ideologies are those ideologies which support this dominance. In contemporary theories, it is emphasized that hegemony is maintained not only by force, but also by popular consensus. In other words, people tend to internalize and willingly embrace those ideologies which are in fact controlling and limiting them. See also ideology.

From wikipedia:
Oligarchy (Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, Oligarkhía) is a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society (whether distinguished by wealth, family or military powers). The word oligarchy is from the Greek words for "few" (ὀλίγον óligon) and "rule" (ἄρχω arkho). Compare with autocracy (rule by one person) and democracy (rule by the majority).

Also from wikipedia:

A hierarchy (in Greek: Ἱεραρχία, derived from ἱερός — hieros, 'sacred', and ἄρχω — arkho, 'rule') is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is a subordinate to a single other element.

Social stratification is the processes and systems surrounding the ordering of individuals in a society into social strata (Caste, class, "kind of person"), by means including but not limited to religious and/or social, educational, legal, cultural, informational, and even simply clandestine.

Huffameg points out in the excellent work "On the Revolution" if "redoing, the revolutionary act, necessarily implies destruction" and about the need to look back in history and realize the need for solving the problem of perpetuating "the revolutionary movement that is the will to resistance and prevent it from ever stopping, even in the achieving of the revolutionary goals".

Hate.

Can you hate hate?

Once you realize that it's futile to hate hate, you negate the hate
and replace it with creativity. There really isn't any better option.

If the issue is something that when it comes down to it can be boiled down to a medical condition, we realize that psychopathy is the #1 leading cause of death in the world. Because of psychopathy, we have the many things that are products of the decisions made by psychopathic leadership. The cause of death may have been attributed to a bullet during a war, it may be said to be cancer, it may be credited to diabetes, perhaps the postmortem is malnutrition. However, when you consider a deeper autopsy, it's not these things alone at all. That bullet was commanded by a psychopathic leader, the cancer resultant from mutagenic pollution that wouldn't be there if someone wasn't trying too hard to make more scrilla, the diabetes from someone being convinced by psychopathy-driven advertisement to drink 30 times more pop than water, and the malnutrition as a result of desertification destroying growing land in the case of psychopathy letting climate change expand. In order to find a cure so we can use prevention as the best medicine, I think that our psychopathy-tainted ways of life is the major issue which needs to be considered by the medical establishment.



However, we run into another problem, with the fact that a lot of advancement in the medical establishment seem to be driven by institutions whose leadership indicates psychopathic traits. For a recent example amongst many pertaining to the pharmaceutical industry, evaluate the resignation of Merck's now former CEO Raymond V. Gilmartin over the controversy surrounding Vioxx, an anti-arthritis drug which used an incredibly misleading marketing doctrine which managed to state that the drug was beneficial to the heart while it was known by the company to cause heart attacks and strokes, posing itself as neutral education for doctors while it really was a trained-for-aggressiveness marketing team of 3000; And, as a cherry on top of this dessert, the campaign even managed to name-drop Martin Luther King Jr. and his "I have a dream" speech. How can we trust those who fund the research to find a cure for psychopathy if the ones funding the research are psychopathic themselves?

With this we can infer that much of the things in this world we have developed have developed to serve those who can be labeled psychopathic. Our current system of abstraction of worth is one example. Corporate structure is another, and corporations (as legal persons) have been related to humans with psychopathic traits. You don't blame a person's body for their actions, as the bad behavior comes from the head, yet even in the face of enormous amounts of deaths and misfortunes we're blaming an abstraction of a person while the brains behind it get to skitter off into their giant piles of money. Where is Raymond V. Gilmartin now?



Well, besides not being the chairman of "The United Negro College Fund" (Who Martin Luther King Jr. was aided by, ironically enough) and the "Council on Competitiveness" anymore, he's living pretty nicely doing such fine jobs as being the Professor of Management Practice at Harvard, holds co-chair for the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, is on the board of General Mills, Inc and Microsoft, and many other things that seem a little off when you consider that he left his former company in the middle of the controversy of letting people die in the name of gathering power through money.

Much of the research that has been done is important yet inconclusive due to many factors. The work surrounding defining and diagnosing psychopathy has mainly been lead by Dr. Hare, who came up with the PCL-R checklist for diagnosis of psychopathy (A test which sneaky snakes are often aware enough of to lie on) which is used in applications from in jails to in research. However, important research into the issue has been done extensively and has been published by a less known researcher by the name of Dr. Andrew M. Łobaczewski. Łobaczewski is a polish man who lived through the nazi occupation fighting with the "Armia Krajowa" underground resistance movement, and began research with a team of others working behind the back of the soviet regime on the subject he terms "Ponerology" from the greek word "Poneros" meaning evil. At one point around 60 years ago he and his team had to destroy the manuscripts to avoid their discovery by the soviet government they were analyzing critically under significant danger, with a second manuscript sent to the Vatican never to be replied to. The complete work hasn't even been publicly available until quite recently. This comprehensive work can be found in the book Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes". The book examines "evil" from a psychological and sociological perspective, describing the processes involved in how "evil" takes hold its power, keeping it shut with an iron fist. I'll take a selection of some of his more tangible writings found on this extensive page:

Lobaczewski writes:

The psychological features of each such crisis are unique to the culture and the time, but one common denominator that exists at the beginning of all such “bad times” is an exacerbation of society’s hysterical condition. The emotionalism dominating in individual, collective, and political life, combined with the subconscious selection and substitution of data in reasoning, lead to individual and national egotism. The mania for taking offense at the drop of a hat provokes constant retaliation, taking advantage of hyperirritability and hypocriticality on the part of others. It is this feature, this hystericization of society, that enables pathological plotters, snake charmers, and other primitive deviants to act as essential factors in the processes of the origination of evil on a macro-social scale.

Who, exactly, are the “pathological plotters,” and what can motivate such individuals during times that are generally understood by others as “good?” If times are “good,” why does anyone want to plot and generate evil?

Well, certainly, the current US administration has come up with an answer: “They hate us because of our freedoms.” This is a prime example of “selection and substitution of data in reasoning” which is willingly and gladly accepted as an explanation by the public because of their deficits of psychological skills and moral criticism.

Where does this leave the rest of us who aren't enacting such plots upon everyone they can fool? Some of us show resistance, if only incredibly passively, however a lot of this passive resistance transpires into apathy and avolition towards the entire situation where cynicism and lethargy creating a void of action and therefore change on the issue. This is just another way of control: The suction of the idea that anything can be done about things into a black hole of doubt, through a vacuum created by the growing lack of action on the matter.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" - Edmund Burke

So, what can be done?

Action on the matter really just boils down to people telling each other how things really are. If this is an illness, there most certainly isn't a cure, but this brings to mind another quote found through folkert:

The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.
—William S Burroughs

There's not really any cures for when it comes to virii, but there is immunization. This is exactly what I propose that the world really needs to solve : Inoculation against the viral, lingual force which has persisted throughout most of human history as the dominant entity driving human action which has ultimately led to pathocracy. We wouldn't have half the problems plaguing humanity (And the rest of the world) if we never learned to talk, and it's this "sub-lingual inner organism" which is the catalyst for everything bad (and good), to the voice saying "kill yourself" to the voice saying "take over the world". Language really is an emergent system with a level of power even higher than any DNA-based organism, which has evolved into multiple branches of ideology and "schools of thought". A heavy thought in the Buddhist philosophy goes like this:

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.

Taking control of our thoughts, which means learning, is the best thing that can be done for keeping yourself from becoming a tool. It's a matter of learning about the methods of how they control and how to counteract to make those methods inviable. Don't just learn, teach. The inner voice telling people to kill themselves and be done with being shitty in a shitty world, the voice telling them to take over the world and control these shitty people, could just as easily be a voice telling them how to change shit for the better and to get that done or else.

I'll wrap this up now to keep things from becoming tl;dr, but that's another thing that needs to be done: These ideas presented in a more appealing format to the masses, digestible yet delicious. Sjef brought up a quote in reply to huffameg's entry and a quote from Aldous Huxley which gives something of a diving board for us to contemplate.

"Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from dictates of governments and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds — sometimes only a little bit.

Some of the changes have amounted to profound transformations — for instance the transition from the Roman Empire to Medieval Europe, or from the Middle Ages to modern times. Others have been more specific, such as the constitution of democratic governments in England and America, or the termination of slavery as an accepted institution. In the latter cases, it is largely a matter of people recalling that no matter how powerful the economic or political or even military institution, it persists because it has legitimacy, and that legitimacy comes from the perceptions of people. People give legitimacy and they can take it away. A challenge to legitimacy is probably the most powerful force for change to be found in history.

To the empowering principle that the people can withhold legitimacy, and thus change the world, we now add another: By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world. Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in. "

- Willis Harman

"It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free -
to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive,
compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national
state, or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think,
feel and act.

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under
constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own
initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a
victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes
himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people.
His servitude is strictly objective."

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, 1958

Wed, Apr 2, 2008  Permanent link

Improving the Neighborhood
Project: The Total Library

I came across this story by the late great Arthur C. Clarke. I'm not going to reproduce it here because it's probably copyrighted to his estate or something like that, but if you're interested in reading a very short story about the fictional fate of a certain species, which just might be applicable to our own, I suggest you do so by clicking the following link:

 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v402/n6757/full/402019a0.html 

Fri, Mar 28, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The Total Library

Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, Blind Materialism, and Delicious Cake

If you consider the ingredient aspect of making good food, as individual parts making up a whole, you can understand that adding too much or too little of one ingredient can completely mess up the food's taste and does nothing that benefits the food's purpose of being scrumptious and/or nutritious (Ideally "and", not "or"). You can overcook or undercook it and that messes up the cake, as well. Do you prefer crappy cake that tastes like angel's food butt or do you want a delicious cake? Do you want a tasty cake that makes you feel like you ate some poison because it's way too rich or do you want a tasty cake that's actually free of stuff that's bad for you? (Try making brownies with equivalent amounts of olive oil and honey instead of butter and sugar, it's way too good!)



If you consider humans as a certain balance of ingredients made from a recipe, then you can see the analogy here that I'm getting at. Too much refined sugar demanded by the recipe, for example, and the hapless, hungry human becomes lethargic and fat. If the human is underexercised or overstressed then it probably becomes a loser just like the badly cooked cake. An imbalance of ingredients and process of preparation will end up causing the human problems, and like the shitty cake nobody wants to eat, the fat lethargic human becomes rotten and forgotten. This, of course, does nothing that benefits the humans' purpose of living a happy life that lets all other life be happy too.



With cake, there's all sorts of great stuff you can put on it that don't really taste like anything yet improve its value in a way that they're catalysts to making things tastier as a sort of placebo effect, or perhaps they add to the structure which effects the overall taste of the product. Baking soda, vital to a nice cake, isn't very yummy at all but typical cake isn't that great with too much in it. Photo transfered images, that glazed icing you use to write "happy birthday", candles, sparklers, and all that stuff are all completely bland but definitely are an asset to making the cake more delicious. Of course, if the cake itself tastes like ass, then nobody really gives two shits about the food anymore. As an extreme example, there's Pièce montée, which may look pretty cool but ultimately is part of the kind of sketchy deal surrounding food in our world that I'm going to illustrate with these two contrasting images; one being a decorative, inedible cactus made of nougat and the other pretty much self-explanatory.



So, what the hell does this all have to do with pharma-whatever? Well, defining them very simply here by copying and pasting from wikipedia: pharmacodynamics is often summarized as the study of what a drug does to the body, whereas pharmacokinetics is the study of what the body does to a drug. Drugs are those catalytic ingredients in humans that when used properly can either benefit or when used improperly can detriment. Virtually everyone does drugs, but for the purposes of this article I'm going to focus on psychoactive ones. British people used to drink tea to a point where they decided that in order to get it cheaper they'd get everyone they could in china opium addictions. Binge drinking of alcohol is a cultural and regional problem that's existed in epidemic form for a substantial part of human history. People regularly smoke way too much of today's really quite strong weed and then become burnt-out, sleepy, and ineffective. People drink 4 coffees a day and wonder why they have sleep and anxiety problems. Pharmaceutical companies will pass drugs while trying to stifle their own internal memos indicating that the drug does more damage than healing. Last summer I saw too many kids smoking ecstasy tablets without realizing that they weren't smoking E in the caps but most likely methamphetamine - MDMA, MDA, and MDEA which constitute ecstasy in the purest sense of the drug aren't psychoactive after being combusted, and they were smoking specific caps that they knew would work without knowing why they did and what was in them, and of course some deny that they were smoking up jib because it came in a cute little pill, however most don't buy the truth and willingly believe that there's heroin and cocaine in them instead of what's really there; Adding adulterants like coke and dope is a complete economic fuckup that drug manufacturers are keen enough to not pull. As anyone with a clue would know, you would get zero if any profit doing that and therefore it's extremely rare to find caps with those expensive substances in them because someone thought they might get people addicted and therefore more profit out of it. In any case, every single one of these problems with drugs are not due to the drugs themselves but due to the manner in which the drugs are considered and treated. People in western culture apply their materialistic ideals to powerful psychotropics and treat them like a kid at their halloween candy - Large, thoughtlessly consumed volumes of these things is not the way to go, and if you want to prove this, go bake a cake with 4 times the amount of vanilla extract or something like that and see how good it is.

Just because there is so much crappy cake going around these days definitely is not a reason to stop dealing with cake altogether. It's all a matter of making sure the recipes are done right. When it comes to human beings, whom are vastly more valuable than cake yet essentially related, it's a pretty vital thing for us to get our recipes of self together. A happy life through a positive look on the world, a healthy diet, in addition to releasing your body's endegenous neurochemicals with regular exercise, can be improved (although not replaced) with alien chemical supplementation. There's plenty of examples of this happening that most people don't get to hear about. We would not be in the same place in terms of scientific knowledge if it wasn't for the existence of psychedelics. While a lot of people go a bit wayside on drugs and end up blowing a lot of mistruths out of their asses, it's not the drug's fault, and a lot of these falsifications are just the product of nothing good coming out of not thinking critically and taking drug-induced free-associated thought at face value. It's really a matter of uncommon sense, but this uncommon sense is something that should become common someday if we hope to survive as a species. As such, I don't currently advocate the outright legalization of all drugs because that will lead directly to the outright consumption of these drugs in today's broken consumption methods. Drug legalization would only work if the entire system was reworked to fix the problems of rampant destructive materialistic actions, however, this touches pretty heavily on a heavy idea: The majority of the human race has become an emergent system from life which is rampantly destroying everything including itself through its materialistically driven actions, yet scientific action and thought is another emergent system from life which is possibly the only hope to counteract this. To conclude this post, here's a somewhat incomplete list of links showing doctors, researchers, famous and well-regarded thinkers in favour of the usage of substances deemed by society and law as something explicitly wrong and punishable by either law or mental illness:

(painting by shardcore)


Co-discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick, who was a co-founder of the cannabis legalization group SOMA and credited LSD to catalyzing the thoughts leading to the discovery of DNA.

Dr.Kary Banks Mullis, who credits his use of LSD towards the discovery of polymerase chain reaction, the revolutionary nobel prize winning technique of analyzing DNA.

Carl Sagan, regular marijuana smoker, who advocated its use and legalization under an alias.

Paul Erdős, who helped develop many mathematical theories from combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory, credited caffeine, amphetamine, and methylphenidate to accelerating his discoveries.

Aldous Huxley, writer of the classic novel Brave New World, and also the writer of the must-read essay "The Doors of Perception". (Check out "Heaven and Hell" too if you can find it)

Robert Louis Stevenson, writer of The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, pumped that book out on a binge of Pope, Edison, and Queen Victoria-endorsed vin mariani cocaine wine (Not nasty nose candy or crack, Vin Mariani, there's a pretty hardcore difference, these drugs are examples of western materialistic dumbfuckery - Watch this documentary for more on this subject)

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which is an organization dedicated to scientifically proving beneficial uses for demonized drugs.

Wed, Mar 19, 2008  Permanent link

The Lost Library of Alexandria
Project: The Total Library

The Library of Alexandria was an enormous repository of ancient wisdom situated in Egypt. Due to one reason or another, however, it became destroyed. The exact reason is disputed but it can certainly be chalked up to something broadly specific I'll write about and pop a link on right after I write about it.

This is a pretty good indication in history of the importance of everyone having to think for themselves and never submit to fully trusting the flow of the masses as a proper mode of action through life. The library is also really quite a good comparasion to the ethereal nature of the internet: It's totally dependent on the constant functioning of machines. Everything could be completely wiped out with a certain amount of electromagnetic pulse emissions, unless it was all contained in faraday cages or whatever, and even then it's still a fairly vulnerable system. All the important information contained is completely fragile. Nothing is permanent, and that alone should teach you to be careful with everything if you want to keep it around.

From Carl Sagan's PBS television series Cosmos:



Also read:

http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hypatia.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_of_Alexandria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/Students/Ellen/Museum.html

Wed, Feb 13, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The Total Library

"If you don't like something, change it."

I always had my seniors tell me as a kid when anyone said that something wasn't fair:

"LIFE ISN'T FAIR".

I was always pretty pissed off when people told me that, not because I was being an entitled little brat who wanted some stupid lollipop (Although maybe I was in one instance, who knows), I think, but because of the fact that nobody before me in what was obviously a big domino-chain of falling, formerly failured, free of fairness folks saying this ubiquitous phrase never seemed to stop and think and especially act upon the following:

"Well, why don't we make life fair?"

Which is what I like to reply with, as I have since I was a kid. It tended to elicit a facial reaction of jaded insecurity and a depressing verbal reply that made not a lick of sense to me back then. It only started to make sense when I started to study psychology and sociology.

I think that a big problem we have is that "Life isn't fair" is absolutely proverbial while something like "Why don't we make life fair?" whenever anyone brings up the so-called unfairness of life really isn't proverbial... Yet.

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
Maya Angelou
US author & poet (1928 - )

Mon, Feb 11, 2008  Permanent link

Blue and sunset

The ocean is blue because it reflects the sky.

The sky is blue because the matter in it refracts the sunlight in the atmosphere in a way that brings us the blue wavelength.

You can see the ocean looking down at earth from space, but what of the sky?



It's a reflection from something invisible when viewed at that angle. You're looking right through what's being reflected. Yet another example of how our perception never catches so much that's out there and how language constructing science patches these holes.

The sunsets are pink, orange, yellow, green, and purple because of other refraction indexes. I got curious a bit ago due to thinking of the previous question as to what a sunset from space looks like. I felt it'd be cool to share what I found.



Poke through these links if you feel like it (More pictures, math, etc)

http://chamorrobible.org/gpw/gpw-20061021.htm
http://merganser.math.gvsu.edu/david/reed05/projects/sekar-taylor/taylor/webpage.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000115.html
and a widely bought fake: http://www.snopes.com/photos/space/sunset.asp 

Tue, Jan 29, 2008  Permanent link

Always remember that your perception of reality doesn't follow time or distance.

(from http://www.andrewlipson.com/escher/relativity.html  which weirdly enough got me thinking to the point of writing the following)

Think back to all those times you've woken up in the middle of the night not in your usual place of sleep. Your mind was conditioned into through force of repetition of the experience of waking up in the same place day after day, yet often you wake up in a different place, like this new place you just moved into, or after a party at a friend's place on the couch at 4 in the morning still feeling alcoholized, or in a foreign country on the opposite hemisphere of the world, or in someone else's bed with them cuddled up next to you. At least a few of those times if not the majority, I'd be willing to bet that in the dark with no perception of your surroundings that you thought you were in your bed at home, in the home that you used to live in, or possibly you were thinking that you were cuddled up not to who you really were but perhaps with an ex of 4 months past. You turn on the light or let your eyes focus and adjust to take in more of whats actually around and all of the sudden it hits you like a ton of bricks. I've asked a few elderly folk about this kind of event which they all agreed happens yet never in their long lives thought about except in the moment right after this phenomenon happens and they doze right back off to sleep, and one of them even thinks often when this kind of thing happens that he's in his bed that he lied dormant in from 40 years past across the world.

Try another one. Go outside, take a look at the moon when it's near the horizon. You know how it looks a lot bigger when it's near there, right? Like, you can even perceive more details, picking out more craters and other features, as if you're looking at it through a weakly magnifying telescope. Now try looking at it upside-down, just forget about looking like a dork for a second and look at the moon by facing away from it and dropping your head to look at it between your legs. It's amazing.



It's not any bigger, closer, or magnified through some trick of the earth's atmosphere, but just through the power of how your sensations developed to perceive reality from birth until now walking on the hard part of the surface of the earth, always seeing that horizon. Your mind actually perceives it as larger and with more detail when it's near the horizon due to it telling your eye to focus on the celestial object in a way that actually magnifies it slightly, your eyes acting like a sort of weak pair of binoculars based on what it's looking at.

Your sense of reality is not based on completely solid grounding. It's also not completely fluid - Some of it is crystallized. Maybe like chunks of long-term memory ice floating in a sea of unsure yet abundant waters.

If you don't do this already, chronically and habitually consider on a very, very regular basis that your sense of reality is based more upon conditioning through relation and connotation to all that external stimuli than what you think you are choosing it to be. It can be pretty intense when you realize that you're not in complete control of it, but even more intense when the realization of the nature of the reality of your sense of reality over time, time after time, seems to yield a certain special kind of degree of control over the icy waters of your mind that you probably did not have before. I won't bother describing this sense of control, it's one of those things that you have to try for yourself to fully appreciate it. Telling you how it is would be as rude as spoiling plot elements in a movie or book which doesn't follow a straight timeline.

Fri, Jan 18, 2008  Permanent link

Schizophrenic fractalcats of the early 20th century.

There's this man named Louis Wain, who lived back in a time before computers, before mathematical fractal art, and in a time where postcards were tip-top twenty three skidoo and stuff like that. In the late 1800's/early 1900's, Wain became famous for his whimsical pictures of cats on postcards. He started drawing them for his dying wife and it soon became a way of life for him, becoming fairly famous in his time.

However, Wain also was not very good with interacting with commonly-agreed upon perceptions of reality due to a slow, late-in-life onset of schizophrenia. Later in life he landed in Bedlam, the famous mental institution of London. His art is often used as an example in university psychology classes of how people's perceptions (As reflected in his art) change through some forms of the mental illness, and to show the possible link between toxoplasmosis infections (Worms in cat poop that you probably have breathed in/contracted at one point in your life) and schizophrenia. His images post-onset of mental illness are fairly resemblant of the fractals, dharmic religious art, and psychedelic art of the past and future of his time. Here I'll assemble a bit of a gallery of this wonderful artist's works, and some links explaining more of the story of Louis Wain.

"I wonder whether fractal images are not touching the very structure of our brains. Is there a clue in the infinitely regressing character of such images that illuminates our perception of art? Could it be that a fractal image is of such extraordinary richness, that it is bound to resonate with our neuronal circuits and stimulate the pleasure I infer we all feel?" (P. W. Atkins)

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/nbb421/student2003/epl8/Blank%20Page%202.htm
http://www.lilitu.com/catland/
 http://aura-archangemaudit.blogspot.com/2005/12/mad-about-cats-louis-wain.html  [en español, yo visitar chile y argentina por uno y media meses ahora :) ]
http://www.cerebromente.org.br/gallery/gall_leonardo/fig1-a.htm
http://facweb.furman.edu/~einstein/general/disorderdemo/paintings.htm

Innocent enough.

"Entrenched" but "Safe from match-making maniacs—Hull o you Girls!





Things start to get more interesting around here...And then things start kicking in full-force.



And a montage video to wrap it up.

Fri, Jan 11, 2008  Permanent link

Chance, language, hate, creation.

This all is out of something I wrote to myself and forgot about. I've had sitting around for ages in some file called notes.txt that I just rediscovered recently. I added a bit just now for clarity, and a couple more quotes, but other than that here it is:

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Chance gave us humans the chance to have the ability to conciously,
procedurally, critically, and with what makes us, language, to
think about how to change our chances. Perhaps most importantly,
it has allowed us to know why that changing our chances at enjoying
life might chance at being an important thing.

Why isn't this fact working on something larger than the individual level,
for only certain individuals, and why do some people fuck up their
chances by not knowing or perhaps even ignoring the facts that are
the most apparent, distincitive part of our existence then taking
action to decide upon things in a way that takes advantage of their
advantages?

The people who know this fact tend to decide that they'd enjoy it more in
their individual, short lifetime if they changed their chances for
themselves rather than working for others to change the chances for
absolutely everyone else. There's colliquial names for them... The
ruling class; The king and clergy; The Powers That Be.

The people who simply don't know the finer details of this most important
fact are the tools of the people who do and don't teach them how to change
chances. These are what are the working class; The vassals; The sheep.

The ones who have heard the fact but don't care, ignore the fine truths,
or would otherwise try to form their own simply unfounded or unaccepted
ideas around this most essential fact in order to change what others think
of reality are considered the insane; The drunken jesters; The compromised.

Changing the chances for the better for everyone isn't as hard as it
seems. We just need to stop thinking that we can only change our own
chances with knowledge of the fact.

Our thoughts are only words. Your thoughts reading these words were borne
from words heard long past and what happened when you heard them. Besides
you being just pure instinct and physical action, you are only your words
thought inside to yourself and the ones that get spoken out to others.
You are only the collected words that correlate to things perceived in the
outside world, which collect over time and change themselves in their own
frame which is nothing but your brain, what happens to get processed through
it, and how those words and their assignments decide to arrange themselves.
You're a collection of connotation and assignment tossed through a filter
that has evolved over time to create your physical self. Your physical self returns
in some sense to the rest of the giant and infinite amount of interacting systems
on this chunk of complexity flying through space, everything else is ethereal
beyond your lifetime unless you act with it in order to spread it. This is
the closest thing we have to immortality in the sense of living forever.

However, that's a completely egotistical notion borne from the fact that
we see ourselves powerful only as one each. In reality there isn't really much of
a one. One is a human construct that does not really mean much besides "one
system". One system doesn't mean much. One system is one bacterium, one
language, one cell, one network of smaller yet no less complex interacting and
nested systems of a whole that change, spawn, and overtake each other over time.

The more that singular human organisms realize that they the singular
organisms are able to become much more cohese, much more of a one, it could
be as important of a change as when the DNA that was in single celled organisms
realized that it did things better when it became multicellular.

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Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in
fact language remains the master of man.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), German philosopher. "Building Dwelling
Thinking," lecture, 5 Aug. 1951 (published in Poetry, Language,
Thought, 1971).

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints-the rules that run
us. Language is using us to talk-we think we're using the language,
but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.
Harry Mathews (b. 1930), U.S. novelist. City Limits (London, 26 May
1988).

Language is aprocess of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed,
but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and
infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process
of free creation.
Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), U.S. linguist, political analyst. "Language and
Freedom," lecture, Jan. 1970, delivered at Loyola University, Chicago (published
in For Reasons of State, 1973).

Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated
than it.
Published in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sct. 4:002 (1921; tr. 1922)

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Hate.

Can you hate hate?

Once you realize that it's futile to hate hate, you negate the hate
and replace it with creativity. There really isn't any better option.

Thu, Jan 10, 2008  Permanent link

A future without sleep?

I've seen a lot of people all over the internet responding to this article, with the title of "Snorting a brain chemical could replace sleep".

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/sleep_deprivation

I don't believe this is the case. The function of sleep, which comprises at least half of most our lives yet isn't even fully understood scientifically, seems to be a lot of theories. Most of these theories involve the process of sleep and dreaming in the formation of long-term memory, which gets disrupted along with sleep disruption. I'm sure anyone can relate here - Try doing anything that you need your long-term memory for, like school, with very little sleep. Good luck! Long-term memory, dreaming, and keeping all these things constant and regular are all part of keeping our sense of reality constant and regular.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_learning



To conclude this post, here's something else I posted on a forum where somebody posted the link:

"We have these other precedents, and it's not clear that you can't use orexin A temporarily to reduce sleep," said Siegel. "On the other hand, you'd have to be a fool to advocate taking this and reducing sleep as much as possible."

Okay, try this. Set your alarm clock to wake you up at, say, 3:00 in the morning every night, to interrupt your REM sleep and drop your sweet dreams.

Guess what eventually happens? That's right, psychosis! This is half of the reason that people with amphetamine problems develop psychosis, and I'm sure you can all think of at least one person in your life that ended up like that at least for a short period of time with speed or coke (If it were true that speed -> psychosis by itself we'd have tons of people being treated for "adhd" really quite fucked up all the time and it wouldn't be a med for that). As far as I can tell, dreaming (And, of course, sleep which you need for dreaming) has a LOT to do with how we develop our own sense of reality. I remember reading in this berenstein bears book [I think that's what it was] when I was a little kid, and mama bear said something like "our memories of the past day are in our heads like a scrambled jigsaw puzzle, and when we dream it's like putting the jigsaw puzzle back together". Makes sense, right?

Wake me up to sleep replacement when we find a way to also replace the functions of sleep ;)

Wed, Jan 2, 2008  Permanent link