Sun, Jun 20, 2010 Permanent linkThanks for listening
I like the idea you play with here that the mind is not a thing, or even a location for things, but is in fact a relation in the process of relating things. I think that particular network paradigm might well just be the mechanism of our times.
By that I mean that because we currently live in a world of interconnectivity - of codes exchanging, winding, coiling and relating with one another - we have begun to see the world by its relations and not by its object-ness or subject-ness. Michel Serres says it well:
Words, bread, and wine are between us, beings or relations. We appear to exchange them between us though we are connected at the same table or with the same language. They are breast-fed by the same mother. Parasitic exchange, crossed between the logical and the material, can now be explained… Do we ever eat anything else together than the flesh of the word?
[...]
Mediations, relations – one can make believe one is lost in this fractal cascade… Everything has changed; nothing is constant; the chain has been mutilated beyond all possible recognition of the message. Victory is in the hands of the powers of noise… History in general as it is written or told is a network of bifurcations where parasites move about.
Michel Serres, The Parasite (1982)
The parasite is an univited guest who feeds alongside their host. The mind is like noise in a system of exchanges, an emergent symptom of codes in their relating.
A very interesting thread indeed, thanks for sharing this.
I particularly loved the way you used the term ‘exchange’ instead of passing something on, though I missed an extended explication here.
Wouldn’t you say that in the context of the hyperinfosphere the experience of the mind involved *is* the virtual artifact that is co-extensively reformulated in the exchange?