2003-07-12

Cyber_Reader notes, roads, rooms and misc


things i didn't mention, in What is real? (Upsideclown), but would like to have
done:

the local/global thing

there is no global, perhaps

putting out social tendrils of "do i know you" or rather "how local are you"


that what irreducible means is if i cut off your head and imitate your body
with a computer, that is the input/output is *identical* then the only way of
figuring out what the output/input of the body would be is to use the body
itself. it cannot be calculated, no way no how. as important as the
configuration of the cells is the facts that the body runs on the universal
substrate, not inside a computer.

the minimal calculation engine to calculate a body is the body itself.

so it is for: the universe

so it is for: my consciousness

so it is for: the universe, my consciousness, and this particular point of view
that i occupy (by pov i mean 'the entire relationship between the two',
although really what i'm saying is that all three are indisguishable so they
words are meaningless)

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popper: p67 "Thus in the evolution of the eye, even its earliest predecessor
had to become a <i>controller of the movement of the cell</i>." The two are
inseperable: the sense that increases the range of evitability, and the
organisms response to that information. They are one and the same.

Philip K Dick, Cyber_Reader p193: "For Dick, decoding is more than reading; it
is being infected by code." You can't just read, it affects your responses
(maybe not at the same time), it is an experience, a complex-sense (a slice
across your brain: it touches every level of you at once. You merge/bound with
reading: it is the words and you and the relationship between the two, you
cannot reduce from that: there is no decoding, there is just experience).

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so it turns out the earth is hollow, but filled with a vacuum that turns to
matter on contact with the air.

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the made up etymology of a made up new word construction:

real life -> realife [from cyber reader chapter on synners] -> rea-life, a kind
of reified life.

rea-what_else?

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what would be a more rhizomic way of navigating the nodes-and-arcs connections
of the weblog links (they're two way, incidentally), of slicing them? is there
someway to show traces through the network, see where local attractors are,
where water pools?

you can use inward links to a weblog for recommendations. if people like
reading you and someone else, then the 'someone elses' are similar. then if you
want to have recommendations based on what you read: take the someone elses
that correspond to those, and expand the set.

you can use outbound links to pool water. if people navigate out from you,
where does the water head out, and where is the rate of change (with
iterations) of the amount of water on each node the slowest? those are the
pools.

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cyber_reader p233
Ever since Ur, doorways and passageways have joined together the rooms of
buildings, webs and grids of streets have connected buildings to each other,
and roads have linked cities.

okay, so here's the problem: the web doesn't have roads. all it has are rooms
with doorways which open into other rooms. more like an anthill than a city.
roads are mediated doorways, they abstract entrances/exits which on the web are
inseparable. they are conductors that make transition easier (you're not just
local to your neighbours in other words, they're wormholes through the anthill
the city could be but isn't), but more than that, they're locations in
themselves and have their own locality: it's still hard to travel a long
distance on a road, but not as hard as if you had to traverse every door on the
way.

so how could you have roads on the www -- i'm thinking here of the wood between
the worlds in the magician's nephew. you should exit a webpage and come to a
place where you see a list of other local places, and other places where you
can get lists. or rather, you exit a webpage a get a list. the list comprises
entrances to other pages, and other lists.

dirk was just roads, but roads without locality, and because of this lack of
distinction, they collapse back into webpages again: the anthill, roads become
rooms. that's a distinction, by the way: rooms do not have distance inside
themselves, a room has no dimensions. a collection of connection rooms without
roads, that collection has distance within itself. roads have distance within
themselves. but a collection of roads without any rooms to speak of (like dirk)
because just like a collection of rooms.

a rhizome has distance, and it has all kinds of structures. it is maximally
complex. just roads, or just rooms, those systems aren't complex enough.

but maybe a mixture could be, or at least get there a little. you'd still need
to slice across and let that be talked about (which, on the web, means it has
to have a URI. only things with URIs exist online). this is psychogeography in
the real world.

roads online? hyperlinks that aren't wormholes (at least some of them?). this
is what the music network wants to be, what google isn't, what blogrolls are
trying to be. once again we build in what we see from the real world, without
noticing. are roads and rooms intrinsic to humanity (i think so: or rather, the
generalised case is intrinsic, and the simplified version is roads and rooms.
the anthill is simplified more and more. and so we recomplexify, bring the
simpler systems closer to expectations: it happens the same in cities, where
roads get inside rooms, and rooms become roads. airports.) or are they just
something at this present point in history?

making hyperlinks no longer be an exit and an entrance. or rather, in a way,
and only sometimes. in real life we have rooms connected directly to other
rooms, we have corridors (rooms with two exits), we have atriums, there's a
continuum. we need that continuum online. how to build it?

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cyber_reader p240: do you abandon your body when you enter cyberspace? the
masculine version is to try to abandon (like religions, ethical systems). but
you don't really: the brain is still there, social expectation-givens still
too.

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cyber_reader p251: nice drumming home: "It has been emphasized about that DNA
does not describe the phenotype, but constitutes <i>instruction that describe
the process of building the phenotype</i>"

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cyber_reader p180: good story about how to make redundant code in computers for
a-life. dig this out online.
p264: good transhuman stuff. the body as an output device to other people's
minds.
p267: same article. "The self becomes situated beyond the skin; this is not a
discontinuation or a split but an extruding of awareness."

i'd been thinking of two things life does: sense (input cursor) and reach
(output cursor), both of which increase. but there's the second order effect
too (of which sense/reach are the first order): extelligence. all of this
combines to awareness? maybe not. but there are these three things, they're all
important, together.

p272: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. ("talk in slogans!")

p281:
- Erik Davis argues that *self* isn't just the brain, it's also the 'visceral
body': the emotions, the structures themselves
- they refer to VR as potentially being the 'Fourth Discontinuity': the first
three discontinuities are Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, disjunctures in
epistemology.

p283: nice words: "Yet, viewed from a distance, robot expansion into the cosmos
will be a vigorous physical affair, a wavefront that converts raw inanimate
matter into mechanisms for further expansion. It will leave in its ever-growing
wake a more subtle world, with less action and more thought."

288:  cyberspace as tea party, void

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music/radio as a device to striate time, to cause more movement through time?
if time is smooth, you don't move, you're a nomad in time.

there's almost an obligation to make it as complex as possible (climax state
radio) in order to maximally striate time, so people can feel themselves moving
through it (the speed, objective speed, is constant, but the rate of movement
is dependent on the density of striations). if it's silent, then you're a
nomad, moving but not moving [through the milieu]. except there's also the
internal radio (thought feedback, which is just first person feedback. think
about it in game terms: your thoughts are like you choosing to move within the
rules. everyone else's moves are just a second-order effect of the rules: what
happens when people operate in them. given the physical constants of the brains
of humanity - rules - and how those rules are interpreted - the variation of
the brains of humanity - that's first and second order effects of what makes us
human: ie, self and society, internal and external radio.)