Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
OK, it's time
I want to start posting in this blog again, but before I feel OK doing that I need to rename it. Please help?
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The Evolution of Dimensions
At dinner today, someone brought up string theory and how mathematicians/physicists think humans possess a major cognitive deficit because of their inability to grasp multiple dimensions.
This provoked me to remark that Luhmann would predict the constitutive reduction of experience to three dimensions to be an constitutive simplification, necessary to eventually open back out again to more dimensions. I speculated that perhaps humans would be able to, in the future, start representing more dimensions to themselves as they worked their way back up the complexity gradient of the system-environment boundary.
Upon reflection (in the shower, just now) Luhmann is even more right than I thought. We can also understand what I'm about to talk about in the topological/physiological/Deleuzian terms of symmetry-breaking transitions.
Life originates, functionally, not with three dimensions, but with one. A surface membrane distinguishes it from its environment and operates with homogenized rules with respect to the outside. (If we want to be precise, we could say that the origins of life lie in the transition from zero to one dimensions... the difference between any molecule and a molecule that complicates the relationship with itself.)
Gradually, the dimensions we think of as the standard three evolve as the organism evolves the power/need to break symmetries. E.g., the difference between air and water, greater or lesser pressure, on the ground or in the burrow, in the trees or on the savanna.
Ability to interact with the time dimension also grows gradually, as the passive syntheses of time enable more and more modes of engaging in an active synthesis. Expectations, memories, history, history books, the stock market... etc. Treating time as a fourth dimension reveals that experiencing the world in terms of dimensions is hardly a binary affair; we experience them through articulation.
I would argue that humanity has only relatively recently been able to operate in a fifth dimension of counter-factual space times--time branching off at the point of decisions. It is at a unique point in human developmental history that Borges can write "The Garden of Forking Paths."
At this point, though, it becomes quite unclear what the difference between a natural and a constructed dimension is. Constructed virtual spaces create relationships that have to come to produce meaning back in our familiar dimensions, but we cannot identify them with the other dimensions which we treat as natural/physical laws.
In conclusion, I didn't really plan a conclusion or endpoint when I decided to write this thing. I mean, I literally just got out of the shower. So... basically, it seems like physics would be an interesting thing to learn about. Probably no physicists read my blog, right? Probably no one reads my blog. OK. Bye.
This provoked me to remark that Luhmann would predict the constitutive reduction of experience to three dimensions to be an constitutive simplification, necessary to eventually open back out again to more dimensions. I speculated that perhaps humans would be able to, in the future, start representing more dimensions to themselves as they worked their way back up the complexity gradient of the system-environment boundary.
Upon reflection (in the shower, just now) Luhmann is even more right than I thought. We can also understand what I'm about to talk about in the topological/physiological/Deleuzian terms of symmetry-breaking transitions.
Life originates, functionally, not with three dimensions, but with one. A surface membrane distinguishes it from its environment and operates with homogenized rules with respect to the outside. (If we want to be precise, we could say that the origins of life lie in the transition from zero to one dimensions... the difference between any molecule and a molecule that complicates the relationship with itself.)
Gradually, the dimensions we think of as the standard three evolve as the organism evolves the power/need to break symmetries. E.g., the difference between air and water, greater or lesser pressure, on the ground or in the burrow, in the trees or on the savanna.
Ability to interact with the time dimension also grows gradually, as the passive syntheses of time enable more and more modes of engaging in an active synthesis. Expectations, memories, history, history books, the stock market... etc. Treating time as a fourth dimension reveals that experiencing the world in terms of dimensions is hardly a binary affair; we experience them through articulation.
I would argue that humanity has only relatively recently been able to operate in a fifth dimension of counter-factual space times--time branching off at the point of decisions. It is at a unique point in human developmental history that Borges can write "The Garden of Forking Paths."
At this point, though, it becomes quite unclear what the difference between a natural and a constructed dimension is. Constructed virtual spaces create relationships that have to come to produce meaning back in our familiar dimensions, but we cannot identify them with the other dimensions which we treat as natural/physical laws.
In conclusion, I didn't really plan a conclusion or endpoint when I decided to write this thing. I mean, I literally just got out of the shower. So... basically, it seems like physics would be an interesting thing to learn about. Probably no physicists read my blog, right? Probably no one reads my blog. OK. Bye.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Music Online
After listening to Pandora and last.fm for a while, I've realized that there's a pretty serious distinction in my frame of mind when listening to music I do and don't own. This difference is interesting, because it's becoming less and less important due to internet music... yet also it's highlighted more and more by the prevalence of this music.
To me, the difference really highlights the Adorno "exchange value" argument. I get antsy about music I don't own because I feel less control over it, even though upon reflection I realize that I can have a really enjoyable experience (probably more enjoyable) simply listening to the things that come over my stream.
Hopefully, continuing to listen to last.fm a lot will revise my relationship to the music itself; make me more open to the uniqueness and contingency of the listening experienced, as opposed to a little bit neurotic about managing my collection of music and my style of listening to it. To those of you that don't listen to aleatory streaming music online: do it.
To me, the difference really highlights the Adorno "exchange value" argument. I get antsy about music I don't own because I feel less control over it, even though upon reflection I realize that I can have a really enjoyable experience (probably more enjoyable) simply listening to the things that come over my stream.
Hopefully, continuing to listen to last.fm a lot will revise my relationship to the music itself; make me more open to the uniqueness and contingency of the listening experienced, as opposed to a little bit neurotic about managing my collection of music and my style of listening to it. To those of you that don't listen to aleatory streaming music online: do it.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Sweeney Todd
[Some spoilers. If they're spoilers for you, that's too bad. You should see the musical, or the movie.]
Sweeney Todd has always been my favorite musical. Now it's a movie. The people in the movie might not be able to sing as well as the people in the musical. I can deal with that. They made the "beggar" less crazy and not a prostitute, which is sort of sad. They took out the main theme. Disappointing for someone who has certain expectations for the music. But! Seeing the movie did
remind me how awesome the thing is... and they definitely didn't cut out the majority of the gruesome stuff.
Things that are awesome:
1. They short-circuit capitalism by selling people the flesh of other people baked into pies. "It's man devouring man out there; who are we to deny it in here?" Lust appears to drive this whole process; it's how Sweeney attracts people to his barbershop and it's manifested in the "Pretty Women" sung both times Sweeney is shaving Judge Turpin. (The movie does these scenes quite well, by the way...)
2. Massively perverted Oedipal drama: Tobias gets concerned and wants to protect his adoptive mother Ms. Lovett from scary Sweeney Todd, whom he begins to suspect of doing something potentially bad. She appears to be touched by his song and sinks into his harms. She then offers to take him to the bakeroom, where it seems for a moment like she might be initiating him into the family secret. But here, the scene of the family's secret production isn't sex in the bedroom (they don't have a bedroom) but a machine room where bodies fall from the ceiling and get extruded from the meat grinder. He is forced into the sewer with the blood and shit--waste products of the whole operation... only to rise at the end and finish wiping out the older generation.
Not to mention the "children" in bedlam being turned on the ward (probably eating him?)
3. The "By The Sea" sequence is very good in the film... maybe the best part, relative to the musical, because of all the stuff it can do. The continual joke is that the the obsessed Sweeney can't enjoy the vacation, but the sub-joke is that the whole thing is ridiculous and awful...
Mm, cannibalism.
Sweeney Todd has always been my favorite musical. Now it's a movie. The people in the movie might not be able to sing as well as the people in the musical. I can deal with that. They made the "beggar" less crazy and not a prostitute, which is sort of sad. They took out the main theme. Disappointing for someone who has certain expectations for the music. But! Seeing the movie did
remind me how awesome the thing is... and they definitely didn't cut out the majority of the gruesome stuff.
Things that are awesome:
1. They short-circuit capitalism by selling people the flesh of other people baked into pies. "It's man devouring man out there; who are we to deny it in here?" Lust appears to drive this whole process; it's how Sweeney attracts people to his barbershop and it's manifested in the "Pretty Women" sung both times Sweeney is shaving Judge Turpin. (The movie does these scenes quite well, by the way...)
2. Massively perverted Oedipal drama: Tobias gets concerned and wants to protect his adoptive mother Ms. Lovett from scary Sweeney Todd, whom he begins to suspect of doing something potentially bad. She appears to be touched by his song and sinks into his harms. She then offers to take him to the bakeroom, where it seems for a moment like she might be initiating him into the family secret. But here, the scene of the family's secret production isn't sex in the bedroom (they don't have a bedroom) but a machine room where bodies fall from the ceiling and get extruded from the meat grinder. He is forced into the sewer with the blood and shit--waste products of the whole operation... only to rise at the end and finish wiping out the older generation.
Not to mention the "children" in bedlam being turned on the ward (probably eating him?)
3. The "By The Sea" sequence is very good in the film... maybe the best part, relative to the musical, because of all the stuff it can do. The continual joke is that the the obsessed Sweeney can't enjoy the vacation, but the sub-joke is that the whole thing is ridiculous and awful...
Mm, cannibalism.
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