Story idea.
Following reading The Symbolic Species where Deacon talks about two kinds of reference process in the brain. We generalise experience by association (a particular instance of the sense of a dog is associated with the sense of a more general dog). The remembered objects are also icons for the actual objects, and this is where our association meshwork maps onto the real world.
The association meshwork in our brains is like spacetime for gravity. Just as there’s a graviton wavefront that expands outwards from the source (or a dent in the fabric, you might say), the associations are strongest near the source and then dilute further they spread out.
Associations leak, unfortunately. Again it’s like gravity: We live on a 3 dimensional fracture in an 11 dimensional universe. Gravitons mostly travel along the 3 dimensional plane, but occassionally they leak out into the greater, wider cosmos.
The brain is a flattened slice of the conceptual world. Associations ripple through it, but sometimes they leak out into the higher dimensional, complex world. We do this ourselves of course, by jumping the association across an icon boundary. That’s how we recognise objects in the physical world, and of course the association meshwork isn’t space-limited by the skull – there’s extelligence too. But I’m talking about an accidental leak.
The association cursor (firefly!) travels from the sensory object to associated sensory objects, to symbols etc in the brain, but very occassionally and accidentally makes the jump to physical world objects and continues propagating there. Assocations, now divorced from conscious control, flow through real world associations, down karmic channels – a leaked association to a letterbox will propagate into postal workers, french letters, anything red.
Leaked charge. Charge separation. A circulation.
There are whirlpools because the associations fall out at strange angles and carry momentum (recognition is a force, with magnitude and direction and pushback, it’s not passive) and that gives the flow current. There are strange attractors and citadels. I could spend a hundred years on the complex topology of the association current leaked into the first, physical, world.
But all I really want to say is that the semiotical charge builds up in whales. Hey, there has to be some object or another at the centre of the attractor, why shouldn’t it accumulate here?
It builds up and builds up. It feels like a storm, like charge separation across the atmosphere, between the land and the clouds. Whales are plum-black clouds most of the time. If you swim with them, you can feel the world fizzing.
When it builds up too much, the whales become hyperreal. The water around them becomes vivid, a lemonade of naming, sparks of recognition leaping off them and discharging.
And then of course, the semiotical charge arcs, lightning, the whale earths: the built-up recognition comes out as whale song, a superdense, superstrong, deafening condensation of naming, a torrential downpour of symbols and nouns and ontological entities, the combined effect of humanity’s leaky associations.
The whale deflates; the song is over; the naming is done. Somewhere, something that wasn’t delimited before has been objectified.
Story idea.
Following reading The Symbolic Species where Deacon talks about two kinds of reference process in the brain. We generalise experience by association (a particular instance of the sense of a dog is associated with the sense of a more general dog). The remembered objects are also icons for the actual objects, and this is where our association meshwork maps onto the real world.
The association meshwork in our brains is like spacetime for gravity. Just as there’s a graviton wavefront that expands outwards from the source (or a dent in the fabric, you might say), the associations are strongest near the source and then dilute further they spread out.
Associations leak, unfortunately. Again it’s like gravity: We live on a 3 dimensional fracture in an 11 dimensional universe. Gravitons mostly travel along the 3 dimensional plane, but occassionally they leak out into the greater, wider cosmos.
The brain is a flattened slice of the conceptual world. Associations ripple through it, but sometimes they leak out into the higher dimensional, complex world. We do this ourselves of course, by jumping the association across an icon boundary. That’s how we recognise objects in the physical world, and of course the association meshwork isn’t space-limited by the skull – there’s extelligence too. But I’m talking about an accidental leak.
The association cursor (firefly!) travels from the sensory object to associated sensory objects, to symbols etc in the brain, but very occassionally and accidentally makes the jump to physical world objects and continues propagating there. Assocations, now divorced from conscious control, flow through real world associations, down karmic channels – a leaked association to a letterbox will propagate into postal workers, french letters, anything red.
Leaked charge. Charge separation. A circulation.
There are whirlpools because the associations fall out at strange angles and carry momentum (recognition is a force, with magnitude and direction and pushback, it’s not passive) and that gives the flow current. There are strange attractors and citadels. I could spend a hundred years on the complex topology of the association current leaked into the first, physical, world.
But all I really want to say is that the semiotical charge builds up in whales. Hey, there has to be some object or another at the centre of the attractor, why shouldn’t it accumulate here?
It builds up and builds up. It feels like a storm, like charge separation across the atmosphere, between the land and the clouds. Whales are plum-black clouds most of the time. If you swim with them, you can feel the world fizzing.
When it builds up too much, the whales become hyperreal. The water around them becomes vivid, a lemonade of naming, sparks of recognition leaping off them and discharging.
And then of course, the semiotical charge arcs, lightning, the whale earths: the built-up recognition comes out as whale song, a superdense, superstrong, deafening condensation of naming, a torrential downpour of symbols and nouns and ontological entities, the combined effect of humanity’s leaky associations.
The whale deflates; the song is over; the naming is done. Somewhere, something that wasn’t delimited before has been objectified.